The Death of Sleep (10 page)

Lunzie wisely remained silent. Introspection, personal evaluation, was an important part of the healing process. Muhlah knew she'd spent enough of her time doing just that. She just waited and watched Tee think, wondering what pictures were going through his mind. When the server approached, Lunzie caught his eye and signaled for more cordial to be poured. The ring of ceramic on crystal awoke Tee from his reverie. He reached over and pressed her fingers.

"Forgive me, lovely Lunzie. I invite you to dine with me, not to watch me sulk."

"Believe me, I understand completely. I don't always brood in private, myself. It's been so frustrating hearing nothing from the EEC that I tell everybody my troubles, hoping somebody will help me."

"You will have no trouble in future, not with Teodor Janos making the search on your behalf. You must have guessed that assignment to a caseworker such as I is only made if they cannot make you go away."

Lunzie nodded firmly. "I guessed it. Oh, how I loathe bureaucrats. I'm proud of the stubborn streak in my family. Fiona has it, too—I'm sorry. I didn't mean to bring up business. I've had such a splendid time with you."

"As have I." Tee consulted his sleeve chronometer. "It grows late, and you have classes early tomorrow. I will escort you home in a private shuttle. No, no. It is my pleasure. You may treat next time, if you choose. Or apply your prodigious and discerning skills to prepare some of the delightful-sounding recipes you have hoarded in your family memory banks."

Lunzie was met at the door to the apartment by Pomayla, Shof, and half the Gang, who, by the look of things, had been studying together with the concerted assistance of processed carbohydrates and synthesized beer.

"Well, who was it, and what was he, she, or it like?" Pomayla demanded.

"Who was who?"

"Tee, of course. We've been wondering all evening."

"How do you know about him?"

"I told you it'd be a he," Shof called out, tauntingly, from his seat on the floor. He and Bordlin, a Gurnsan student, were working on an engineering project that had something to do with lasers. There was a new burn mark in the wall over their heads. "Ask Mr. Data, that's me." Bordlin shook his horned head, and searched the ceiling with long-suffering bovine eyes.

"You forgot to erase the message on the board down in the foyer," Pomayla explained. "Everyone read it as they came in. Our curiosity's been running out of control."

"Let it run," Lunzie said loftily. "It's good for you to wonder. I'm going to bed."

"True love!" Shof crowed as Lunzie closed her cubicle door on them. For once she did not have trouble relaxing into sleep. She remembered the gentle pressure of Tee's fingers on hers and smiled.

As Tee had promised, Lunzie began to get results from the EEC much more quickly with his help. Fiona's virology work for the FSP was largely classified. Her official rank was Civilian Specialist, and the grade had increased steadily over the years. Her pay records showed several bonuses for hazardous duty. She had worked for the EEC for several years before her marriage in positions of increasing responsibility. She took a furlough for eight years, and resumed field work afterward. Tee still hoped to track down her service record.

This quantity of news would have seemed small to her roommates, but Lunzie was overjoyed to have it. Her mood was lighter, and not only because the barrier between herself and her daughter was falling away. She was also seeing a lot more of Tee.

He changed his viewing time to coincide with hers. They sat together on the padded bench, drinking in the news of the day, saving up their observations to discuss later over synth-lunch. Tee was amused by Lunzie's economies, but acknowledged that the fees for remote retrieval of old documents and records were steep.

When Lunzie's classes or labs didn't interfere, they would meet for an evening meal. Tee's quarters were larger than hers, a quarter of a floor in an elderly former residence of higher-level civil servants. Besides the food synthesizer, there were actual cooking facilities. "An opulent conceit," Tee admitted, "but they work. When I have time, I like to create."

They tried to set aside one day a week for a real-meal, cooked with local ingredients. Lunzie retraced her steps to the Astris combine farms she had patronized decades before, and chose vegetables from the roadside stands and pick-it-yourself crops. Tee marveled at the healthy produce, far cheaper than it was in the population centers. How clever she was to know where to find such things, he told her over and over, and so surprisingly close to the campus!

"City boy," Lunzie teased him. A part of her that had been neglected reasserted itself and began to blossom again in the warmth of his devoted admiration. She was not unattractive, vanity forced her to admit, and she started to take more pleasure in caring for herself, choosing garments that were flattering to her figure instead of ones that just preserved modesty and protected her from atmospheric exposure. Pomayla was delighted to have Lunzie join her on restday shopping expeditions. Lunzie found she was also rediscovering the simple pleasures which gave life its texture.

After a good deal of friendly teasing and many unsubtle hints from her young roommates, Lunzie was persuaded to bring Tee back to the apartment to meet them.

"You can't keep him out of the Gang's way for long," Pomayla remarked. "He might as well join now and face the music."

Though he was eager to please Lunzie, Tee was reluctant to encounter her young suitemates. From the moment he entered the apartment, he felt nervous, and wondered if he would lose too much face if he decided to bolt.

"You live such a distance from town center I have had too much time to worry," he complained, straightening his tunic again as they swept upward in the turbovator.

"Come now, they're only children. Be a man, my son."

"You don't understand. I like youngsters. Ten years ago, I may have felt no discomfort, but. . . oh, you'll see. It has not happened to you yet."

Shof, Pomayla and Pomayla's boyfriend Laren were waiting for them in their common living room. The apartment was clean. They had done a commendable job in making the place look neat, but Lunzie was uncomfortably aware for the first time how scholastically plain the apartment was. Though she knew Tee would understand why she chose to live in such cheap quarters, she wished illogically that it looked more sophisticated.

Tee, bless him, reacted in exactly the right way to make her feel comfortable once more. "This looks like a place where things are done," he cried, stretching his arms out, feeling the atmosphere. "A good room to work." He gave them a wide grin, encompassing them all in its sunshine.

"You're never at a loss anywhere you go, are you?" she asked, a small, cynical smile tweaking up the corner of her mouth.

"I mean it," Tee replied. "Some quarters are merely to sleep in. Some, you can sleep and eat in. This, you can live in."

"Sort of," Shof said grudgingly. "But there's no storage space to speak of, and Krim knows, you can't bring a date here."

"It would be easier to get around in if you didn't have models hanging everywhere," Pomayla told him.

"I've been in worse on shipboard, believe me," Tee said. "In which every bunk belongs to three crew, who use it in turn for a shift apiece. No sleeping late. No lingering in the morning to get to know one another all over again." He glanced at Lunzie through his eyelashes with an exaggerated look of longing, and she laughed.

"My lad, you should simply have gotten to know someone on the next shift, so then you could move on to her bunk."

Pomayla, who was shy about personal relations, promptly got up to serve drinks.

"Were you in the FSP?" Shof asked Tee.

"Only as a contractor. I helped to develop a new star navigations system. My specialty was computer-driven laser technology."

"Stellar, citizen," Shof said, enthusiastically. "Me, too. I built my first laser beam calculator out of spare parts when I was four." He held up his right hand. "Cauterized this index finger clean off. I've generally had bad luck with this finger. It's been regenerated twice now. But I've learned to use a laser director better since then."

"Laser director?" Tee asked. "You don't use a laser director to create the synapse links."

"I do."

"No wonder you burned off your finger, little man. Why didn't you simply recalculate the angles before trying to connect power?"

They began to argue research and technique, going immediately from lay explanation, which the other three could understand, into the most involved technical lingo. It sounded like gibberish to Lunzie and Pomayla, and probably did to Laren, who sat politely nodding and smiling whenever anyone met his eyes. Lunzie remembered that he was an economics major.

"So," asked Shof, stopping for breath, "what's the new system based on? Ion propulsion with laser memory's faulty; they've figured that out now. Gravity well drives are still science fiction. Laser technology's too delicate by itself to stand up against the new matter-antimatter drives."

"But why not?" Tee began, looking lost. "That was new when I was working for the FSP. The laser system was supposed to revolutionize space travel. It should have lasted for two hundred years."

"Yeah. Went in and out of fashion like plaid knickers, " Shof said, deprecatingly. "Doppler shift, you know. Well, you've got to start somewhere."

"Somewhere?" Tee echoed, indignantly, "Our technology was the very newest, the most promising. . . ."

Shof spread out his hands and said reasonably, "I'm not saying that the current system wasn't based on LT. Where have you been for the last decade, Earth?"

Tee's face, once open and animated, had closed up into tight lines. His mouth twisted, fighting back some sour retort. His involuntary passage with cold sleep was still a sore point with him. Lunzie suddenly understood why he was reluctant to talk about his past experiences with anyone. The experiential gap between the people who experienced time at its normal pace and the cold sleepers was real and troubling to the sleepers. Tee felt caught out of time, and Shof didn't understand. "Peace!" Lunzie cried over Shof s exposition of modern intergalactic propulsion. "That's enough. I declare Hatha's peace of the watering hole. I will permit no more disputes in this place."

Shof opened his mouth to say something, but stopped. He stared at Tee, then looked to Lunzie for help. "Have I said something wrong?"

"Shof, you can behave yourself or make yourself scarce," Pomayla declared.

"What'd I do?" With a wounded expression, Shof withdrew to arrange dinner from the synthesizer. Pomayla and Laren went to the worktable, and peeled and cut up a selection of fresh vegetables to supplement the meal. Tee watched them work, looking lost.

Lunzie rose to her feet. "Now that we have a natural break in the conversation, I'll give Tee the tenth-credit tour." She twined her arm with Tee's and led him away.

Once the door to Lunzie's cubicle had shut behind them, Tee let his shoulders sag. "I am sorry. But you see? It might have been a hundred years. I have been left far behind. Everything I knew, all the complicated technology I developed, is now toys for children."

"I must apologize. I tossed you into the middle of it. You seemed to be holding your own very well," Lunzie said, contritely.

Tee shook his head, precipitating a fall of black hair into his eyes. "When a child can blithely reel off what a hundred of us worked on for eight years—for which some of us lost our lives!—and refute it, with logic, I feel old and stupid." Lunzie started a hand to smooth the unsettled forelock, but stopped to let him do it himself.

"I feel the same way, you know," she said. "Young people, much younger than I am, at any rate, who understand the new medical technology to a fare-thee-well, when I have to be shown where the on-off switch is! I should have realized that I'm not alone in what I'm going through. It was most inconsiderate of me." Lunzie kneaded the muscles at the back of Tee's neck with her strong fingers. Tee seized her hand and kissed it.

"Ah, but you have the healing touch." He glanced at the console set and smiled at the hologram prism with the image of a lovely young girl beaming out at him. "Fiona?"

"Yes." Lunzie stroked the edge of the hologram with pride.

"She is not very like you in coloring, but in character, ah!"

"What? You can see the stubborn streak from there?" Lunzie said mockingly.

"It runs right here, along your back;" His fingers traced her spine, and she shivered delightedly. "Fiona is beautiful, just as you are. May I take this?" Tee asked, turning it in his hands and admiring the clarity of the portrait. "If I can feed an image to the computers, it may stir some memory bank that has not yet responded to my queries."

Lunzie felt a
wrench at giving up her only physical tie to her daughter, but had to concede the logic. "All right," she agreed reluctantly.

"I promise you, nothing will happen to it, and much good may result."

She stood on tiptoe to kiss him. "I trust you. Are you ready to rejoin the others?"

Shof had clearly been chastised in Lunzie's absence. During dinner around the worktable, he questioned Tee respectfully about the details of his research. The others joined in, and the conversation turned to several subjects. Laren proved also to be a Tri-D viewer. Lunzie and he compared their impressions of fashion trends, amidst hilarious laughter from the other two males. Blushing red for making her opinions known, Pomayla tried to defend the fashion industry.

"Well, you practically support them," Shof said, wickedly, baiting her as he would a sister.

"What's wrong with garb that makes you look good?" she replied, taking up the challenge.

"If it isn't comfortable, why wear it?" Lunzie asked, reasonably, joining the fray on Shof s side.

"For the style—" Pomayla explained, desperately.

Lunzie raised an eyebrow humorously. " 'We must suffer to be beautiful'? And you call me old fashioned!"

"I don't know where they get the ideas for these new frocks," Laren said. After a quick glance at Pomayla, "No offense, sweetheart, but some of the fads are so weird."