The Death of Sleep (20 page)

"Bad luck comes in threes," a voice said behind her as she went out of the door, but when she turned, no one was looking at her.

"It's my fault. I should have warned you to keep quiet about the other wreck," Sharu apologized when she and Lunzie were alone. Before them were dozens of sealed boxes from the purser's strongroom and a hundred empty security cartons for shipping. "I've been in the Fleet so I remember what it was like. One space accident is within the realm of possibility. Two looks like disastrously bad luck. No one's more superstitious than a sailor."

"Sharu, what is a Jonah?"

"You heard that? Jonah was a character in the Old Earth Bible. Whenever he sailed on a ship, it ran into technical difficulties. Some sank. Some were becalmed. One of the sailors decided Jonah had offended Yahweh, their God, so he was being visited with bad luck that was endangering the whole ship. They threw him overboard into the sea to save themselves. He was swallowed by a sea leviathan."

"Ulp!" Lunzie swallowed nervously, pouring a string of priceless glow pearls into a bubblepack envelope. "But they wouldn't throw me overboard? Space me?"

"I doubt it," Sharu frowned as she sorted jewelry. "But they won't go out of their way to rub elbows with you, either. Don't mention it again, and maybe it'll pass."

Lunzie put the bubblepack into a carton and sealed it, labeling the carton F
RAGILE
—D
O
N
OT
E
XPOSE
T
O
E
XTREMES
OF
T
EMPERATURE
, which made her think of Illin Romsey, the Descartes crystal miner who rescued her, and the Thek that accompanied him. She hadn't thought of that Thek in months. It was still a mystery to Lunzie why a Thek should take an interest in her.

"Of course, Sharu. I never knowingly stick my head into a lion's mouth. You can't tell when it might sneeze."

Among the jewels and other fragile valuables, she found her translucent hologram of Fiona. Lunzie was shocked to find that she was now used to the image of the grown woman Fiona, and this dear, smiling child was a stranger, a long-ago memory. With deliberate care, she sealed it in a bubblepack and put it aside.

Three days later, Lunzie waited outside the bridge until the silver door slid noiselessly aside into its niche. Captain Aelock had left word for her in her cabin that he wished to speak with her. Before she stepped over the threshold, she heard her name, and stopped.

". . . She'll bring bad luck to the ship, sir. We ought to put her planetside long before Alpha Centauri. We might never make it if we don't." The voice was Ensign Riaman's. The young officer had been ignoring her pointedly at mealtimes and muttering behind her back when they passed in the corridors.

"Nonsense," Captain Aelock snapped. It sounded as though this was the end of a lengthy argument, and his patience had been worn thin. "Besides, we've got orders, and we will obey them. You don't have to associate with her if she makes you nervous, but for myself I find her charming company. Is that all?"

"Yes, sir," Riaman replied in a submissive murmur that did nothing to disguise his resentment.

"Dismiss, then."

Riaman threw the captain a snappy salute, but by then Aelock had already turned back toward the viewscreen. Smarting from the reproach, the ensign marched off the bridge past Lunzie, who had decided that she'd rather be obvious than be caught eavesdropping. When their eyes met, he turned scarlet to his collar, and shot out of the room as if he'd been launched. Lunzie straightened her shoulders defiantly and approached the captain. He met her with a friendly smile, and offered her a seat near the command chair in the rear center of the bridge.

"This Jonah nonsense is a lot of spacedust, of course," Aelock told Lunzie firmly. "You're to pay no attention to it."

"I understand, sir," Lunzie said. The captain appeared to be embarrassed that she had been affected by the opinion of one of his officers, so she gave him a sincere smile to put him at his ease. He nodded.

"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 hear 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."