"We've been out on maneuvers trying to catch up with planet pirates, and they still haven't come down from the adrenaline high. After a while we were seeing radar shadows behind every asteroid. It was time we had a more pedestrian assignment. Perhaps even a little shore leave." Aelock sighed, shrugging toward the door by which the ensign had just left. "Though Alpha Centauri wouldn't be my first choice. It's a little too industrialized for my tastes. I like to visit the nature preserves of Earth myself, but my lads consider it tame."
"Have the pirates struck again?" Lunzie asked, horrified. "The last raid I heard of was on Phoenix. I once thought my daughter had been killed by the raiders."
"What, Doctor Fiona?" Aelock demanded, smiling, watching Lunzie's mouth drop open. "It may surprise you to know, Dr. Mespil, that we had the pleasure of hosting the lady and her dog act fifteen Standard years ago. As charming as yourself, I must say. I can see the family resemblance."
"The galaxy is shrinking," Lunzie said, shaking her head. "This is too much of a coincidence."
"Not at all, when you consider that she and I serve the same segment of the FSP population. We're both needed chiefly by the new colonies that are just past the threshold of viability, and hence under FSP protection. The emergency medical staff like her use our ships because we're the only kind of vehicle that can convey help there quickly enough."
"Such as against planet pirates?"
Aelock looked troubled. "Well, it's been very quiet lately. Too quiet. There hasn't been a peep out of them in months—almost a year since the last incident. I think they're planning another strike, but I haven't a clue where. By the time we reach Alpha, I'm expecting to hear from one of my contacts, a friend of a friend of a friend of a supplier who sells to the pirates. We still don't know who they are, or who is providing them with bases and repair facilities, drydocks and that kind of thing. I'm hoping that I can make a breakthrough before someone follows the line of inquiry back to me. People who stick their noses into the pirates' business frequently end up dead."
Lunzie gulped, thinking of Jonahs and the airlock. The captain seemed to divine her thoughts and chuckled.
"Ignore the finger-crossers among my crew. They're good souls, and they'll make you comfortable while you're aboard. We'll have you safe and sound, breathing smoggy Alpha Centauri air before you know it."
Chapter Eight
She didn't have time to worry about her new label of Jonah on the brief trip to Alpha Centauri. A number of the crew from the Destiny Calls broke out in raging symptoms of space traumatic stress. There was a lot of fighting and name-calling among them, which the ship's chief medical officer diagnosed as pure reaction to danger. In order to prevent violence, Dr. Harris assigned Lunzie to organize therapy for them. On her records, he had noticed the mention of Lunzie's training in treating space-induced mental disorders and put the patients' care in her hands.
"Now that it's all over, they're remembering to react," Harris noted, privately to Lunzie, during a briefing. "Not uncommon after great efforts. I won't interfere in the sessions. I'll just be an observer. They know and trust you, whereas they would not open up well to me. Perhaps I can pick up pointers on technique from you."
Lunzie held mass encounter sessions with the Destiny crew. Nearly all the survivors attended the daily meetings, where they discussed their feelings of anxiety and resentment toward the company with a good deal of fire. Lunzie listened more than she talked, making notes, and throwing in a question or a statement when the conversation lagged or went off on a tangent; and observed which employees might need private or more extensive therapy.
Lunzie found that the group therapy sessions did her as much good as they did for the other crew members. Her own anxieties and concerns were addressed and discussed thoroughly. To her relief, no one seemed to lose respect for her as a therapist when she talked about her feelings. They sympathized with her, and they appreciated that she cared about their mental well-being, not clinically distant, but as one of them.
The mainframe and drives engineers were the most stressed out, but the worst afflicted with paranoid disorders were the service staff. They complained of helplessness throughout the time they'd spent awake helping to clean up the Destiny Calls, since they could do nothing to better the situation for themselves or anyone else. For the mental health of the crew at large, Captain Wynline had ordered stressed employees to be put into cold sleep. In order to continue working efficiently on the systems which would preserve their lives, the technicians had to be shielded from additional tension.
"But there we were on the job, and all of a sudden, we'd been rescued while we were asleep," Voor, one of the Gurnsan cooks, complained in her gentle voice. "There was no time for us to get used to the new circumstances."
"No interval of adjustment, do you mean?" Lunzie asked.
"That's right," a human chef put in. "To be knocked out and stored like unwanted baggage—it isn't the way to treat sentient beings."
Perkin and the other heads of Engineering defended the captain's actions.
"Not at all. For the sake of general peace of mind, hysteria had to be stifled," Perkin insisted, "I wouldn't have been able to concentrate. At least cryo-sleep isn't fatal."
"It might as well have been! Life and death—my life and death—taken out of my hands."
Lunzie pounced on that remark. "It sounds like you don't resent the cold sleep as much as you do the order to take it."
"Well . . ." The chef pondered the suggestion. "I suppose if the captain had asked for volunteers, I probably would have offered. I like to get along."
Captain Wynline cleared his throat. "In that case, Koberly, I apologize. I'm only human, and I was under a good deal of strain, too. I ask for your forgiveness."
There was a general outburst of protest. Many of the others shouted Koberly down, but a few agreed pugnaciously that Wynline owed them an apology.
"Does that satisfy you, Koberly?" Lunzie asked, encouragingly.
The chef shrugged and looked down at the floor. "I guess so. Next time, let me volunteer first, huh?"
Wynline nodded gravely. "You have my word."
"Now, what's this about our not getting paid for our down time?" Chibor asked the captain.
Wynline was almost automatically on the defensive. "I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but since the ship was treated as lost, the Paraden Company feels that the employees aboard her were needlessly risking their lives. Only the crew who were picked up with the escape pods were given compensatory pay. Our employment was terminated on the day the insurance company paid off the Destiny Calls."
There was a loud outcry over that. "They can't do that to us!" Koberly protested. "We should be getting ten years back pay!"
"Where's justice when you need it?"
Dr. Harris cleared his throat. "The captain is planning to press charges against the Paraden Company to recover the cost of the deepspace search. You can all sign on as co-plaintiffs against them. We'll give statements to the court recorder when we reach Alpha Centauri."
Lunzie and a handful of the Destiny's crew watched from a remote video pickup in the rec room as the Ban Sidhe pulled into a stable orbit around Alpha Centauri. It was the first time that she'd been this close to the center of the settled galaxy. The infrared view of the night side of the planet showed almost continuous heat trace across all the land masses and even some under the seas, indicating population centers. She'd never seen such a crowded planet in her life. And somewhere down on that world was her family. Lunzie couldn't wait to meet them.
Two unimaginably long shifts later, she received permission to go dirtside in the landing shuttle. She took a small duffle with some of her clothes and toiletries and Fiona's hologram. After checking her new short haircut hastily in the lavatory mirror, she hurried to the airlock. Some of the Destiny's kitchen staff were already waiting there for the shuttle, surrounded by all of their belongings.
"I'm staying," Koberly declared, "until I can get the Tribunal to hea
r my case against Destiny Lines. Those unsanctioned progeny of a human union won't get away with shoving me into a freezer for ten years, and then cheating me out of my rights."
"I'm just staying," said Voor, clasping her utensil case to her astounding double bosom. "There are always plenty of jobs on settled worlds for good cooks, I plan to apply to the biggest and best hotels in Alpha City. They'd be eager to snap up a pastry chef who can cook for ten thousand on short notice."
Koberly shook his head pityingly at the Gurnsan's complacent attitude. "Don't be dumb. You're an artist, cowgirl. You shouldn't apply for a job just because you're fast, or because you supply your own milk. Let 'em give you an audition. Once they taste your desserts they will give you anything to keep you from leaving their establishment without saying yes. Anything."
"You're too kind," Voor protested gently, shaking her broad head.
"I agree with him," Lunzie put in sincerely. "Perhaps you should hold an auction and sell your services to the highest bidder."
"If you like, I will handle the business arrangements for you," said a voice behind Lunzie. "May I join you while you wait? It is my turn to go on shore leave as well." It was Tee, glowing like a nova in his white dress uniform. Lunzie and the others greeted him warmly.
"Delighted, Ensign," Voor said. "You saved my life. I will always be happy to see you."
"I haven't seen much of you the last few days," Lunzie told him, hoping it didn't sound like a reproach.
Tee grinned, showing his white teeth. "But I have seen you! Playing the therapy sessions like a master conductor. I have stood in the back of the chamber listening, as first one speaks up, then another speaks up, and you solve all their problems. You are so wise."
Lunzie laughed. "In this case the complaint was easy to diagnose. I'm a sufferer, too."
Behind the burnished steel door came a hissing, and the booming of metal on metal. Around the edge of the doorway, red lights began flashing, and a siren whooped. Lunzie and the others automatically jumped back, alarmed.
"It is only the airlock in use," Tee explained apologetically. "If there had been an actual emergency, we would be too close to it to be safe anyway."
With a hiss, the door slid back, and the shuttle pilot appeared inside the hollow chamber, and gestured the passengers inside. "Ten hundred hours. Is everyone ready?"
"Yes!" The pilot dived aside as his cargo rushed past him eagerly,
"Unrecirculated air!" Lunzie stepped out of the spaceport in Alpha City and felt the caress of a natural wind for the first time since leaving Astris. She held her face up to the sun and took a deep breath of air. And expelled it immediately in a fit of coughing.
"Wha—what's the matter with the air?" she asked, sniffing cautiously and wrinkling her nose at the odor. It was laden with chemical fumes and the smell of spoiling vegetation. She looked up at the sky and saw the sun ringed with a grayish haze that shimmered over the surrounding city.
"Some good news, and some bad news, Doctor Lunzie," a Fleet ensign explained. "The good news is it's natural, and it hasn't been reoxygenated by machines a million times. The bad news is what the humans who live on Alpha have been throwing into it for thousands of years. Airborne garbage."
"Ough! How could they do this to themselves? The very air they breathe!" Lunzie moaned, dabbing her streaming eyes with a handkerchief.
Tee picked up her bags and hailed a groundcar. "It shouldn't be as bad further from the spaceport. Come on." He hurried her down the concrete ramp and into the sealed car.
"Where are you going?" Lunzie demanded when she could speak. She blew her nose loudly into the handkerchief.
"With you. I would not miss your family reunion for the world. I have an invitation from Melanie."
"What is your destination?" the robotic voice of the groundcar demanded. "With or without travel guide?"
Tee reeled off an address. "What do you think, Lunzie? Do you want it to tell you about the sights we pass?"
Lunzie peered through the windows at the unending panorama of gray buildings, gray streets, and gray air. The only color was the clothing of the few pedestrians they passed. "I don't think so. It all looks the same, for kilometers in every direction, and it's so gloomy. I just want to get there and meet them. I wonder how they've all changed in ten years. Do you suppose there are new babies?"
"Why not? No travel guide," Tee ordered.
"Acknowledged."
Tee chatted brightly with her as they sailed along the superhighways toward Melanie's. Once they had disembarked from the Ban Sidhe, he was his old self, expansive and affectionate. Lunzie decided that it must be the military atmosphere of the Fleet ship which squashed his usually sunny nature. She was relieved that he was feeling better.
It was twilight when they finally arrived. The groundcar disgorged them in suburban Shaygo, only two hundred kilometers from Alpha City. Lunzie couldn't tell by watching when one city left off and the second one began. They had obviously grown together over the years. There was no open space, no parks, no havens for vegetation, just intertwining thoroughfares with thousands of similar podlike groundcars hurtling along them. The trail of air transports penned on the gray sky in white between the tall buildings. Lunzie found the sight depressing.
The house, one of an attached row, sat at the top of a small yard with trees on either side of the walk leading to the door. A twinkling bunch of tiny lights next to the door read "Ingrich." Except for the gardens, every house was identical. Melanie's was a riot of colorful flowers and tall herbs spilling out of their beds on the trim lawn, a burst of individuality on a street of bland repetition.
"Muhlah, I'd hate to come home drunk," Lunzie said, looking up and down the endless row. The other side of the street was the same. Three floors of curtained windows stared blankly down on them.
"The robot taxi would get you safely home," Tee assured her.
She heard noises coming from inside the house as they approached, and the door irised open suddenly. A plump woman with soft brown hair bustled out and seized each of them by the hand. Lunzie recognized her instantly. It was her granddaughter.
"You are Lunzie, aren't you?" The woman beamed. "I'm Melanie. Welcome, welcome, at last! And Citizen Janos. I'm so glad to see you at last."
"Tee," Tee insisted, accepting a hug in his turn.
"How wonderful to meet you at last," Lunzie exclaimed. "I'm grateful you wanted to extend the invitation to me, after I stood you up last time."
"Oh, of course. We wanted to meet you. Come in. Everyone has been waiting for you." Melanie wrapped an arm warmly around Lunzie's waist and led her inside. Tee trailed behind, looking amused. "Mother was so disappointed that you didn't come to our last reunion. But when we heard about the accident, we were devastated that she had left with the wrong impression. I sent a message to Eridani to let her know what happened and that you're all right, but it's so far away she may still be on her way there. I just have no idea! Only the gods of chaos know when the message will reach her. There's been a lot of service interruptions lately. And no explanation from the company!"
She led them into a well-lit room with white walls and carpets, decorated with colorful wall hangings in good artistic taste, and set about with cushiony furniture. In the middle of one wall was an electronic hearth, and in the middle of the other was a Tri-D viewing platform, surrounded by teenaged children watching a sports event. Lunzie noticed that the holographic image was purer and sharper than anything she'd ever seen before. There had obviously been strides made in image projection since she went into cold sleep.
Two slightly built men with dark, curly hair, identical twins, and two women, all of early middle age, who had been chatting when Lunzie entered, rose from their seats and came forward.
"Oh, what a lovely home you have," Lunzie said, looking around approvingly. "Is this your mate?"
The tall man sprawled on a couch set aside his personal reader and stood up to offer them a hand. "Now and forever. Dalton is my name. How do yo
u do, ancestress?"
"Very well, thank you," she said, shaking hands. Dalton had a firm, smooth grip, but not at all bonecrushing, as she feared it might be after noticing the prominent tendons on his wrists. "But please, call me Lunzie."
"I'll tell everyone your wishes, but Lars might not comply. He can be very stuffy and proper."
"I communicated with them as soon as you let us know you were here. They'll arrive in a little while," Melanie said busily, urging them into the middle of the common room. "Now, may I get you anything before I show you where you're going to stay? Something to drink?"
"Juice would be welcome. The air is . . . rather thick if you're not used to it," Lunzie said, diplomatically.
"Mmm. There was a smog alert today, I should have said something when you communicated with us. But we're all used to it." Melanie hurried away.
"Just like her to forget the rest of the introductions," Dalton said indulgently as his mate left the room. He embraced Lunzie, and waved a hand at the others in the room. "Everyone! This is Lunzie, here at last!" The children watching the Tri-D stood up to greet her. Lunzie smiled at them in turn, trying to identify them from the ten-year-old holos. She could account for all but two. Dalton explained, "Not all of this crowd is ours, but we get the grandchildren a lot because our house is the largest. Lunzie, please meet my sons Jai and Thad, and their mates, Ionia and Chirli." The women, one with short red tresses and one with shining pale blond hair, smiled at her. "Drew is still at work, but he'll be joining us for dinner."
The twins shook hands gravely. "You look more like a sister to us than what? A great-grandmother?" one of them said.
"You'll have to forgive us if we occasionally slip up and don't show the respect due your age," the other said playfully.
"I'll understand," Lunzie said, hugging them, and pulling the two women closer to include them in the embrace. The children pressed in to take their turns. There were nine of them, four girls and five boys. Lunzie could see resemblances to herself or Fiona in all of them. She was so overwhelmed with joy, she was nearly bursting inside.
The Death of Sleep Page 16