The Death of Sleep

"You've very neatly sidestepped the question several times, but I won't allow you to do that any more. How long was I asleep? Tell me."

The others glanced nervously at each other. The tall doctor cleared his throat and sighed. "A long time," Stev said, casually, though Lunzie could tell it was forced. "Lunzie, it will do you no good to have me deceive you. I should have told you as you were waking up, to allow your mind to assimilate the information. I erred, and I apologise. It is just such an unusual case that I'm afraid my normal training failed me." Stev took a deep breath. "You've been in cryogenic sleep for sixty-two years."

Sixty-two -- Lunzie's brain spun. She was prepared to be told that she had slept for a year, or two or three, even twelve, as Jilet had done, but sixty-two. She stared at the wall, trying to summon up even the image of a dream, anything that would prove to her that amount of time had passed. Nothing. She hadn't dreamed in cold sleep. No one did. She felt numb inside, trying to contain the shock. "That's impossible. I feel as though the collision occurred only a few minutes ago. I closed my eyes there. I opened them here. There is no gap in my perception between then and now."

"You see why I found it so difficult to tell you, Lunzie," Stev said gently. "It isn't so hard when the gap is under two years, as you know. That's generally the interval we have here on the Platform, when a miner has an accident in the field and has to send for help. The sleeper falls a little behind in the news of the day, but there's rarely a problem in assimilation. Working cryogenic technology is slightly over a hundred and forty years old. Your… er, interval is the longest I've ever been involved in. In fact, the longest I've ever heard of. We will help you in any way we can. You have but to ask."

Lunzie's mind would still not translate sixty-two years into a perception of reality. "But that means my daughter…" Her throat closed up, refusing to voice her astonished thoughts. Fumbling, her hand reached for the hologram sitting on the pull-out shelf next to the bed. She could have accepted a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old Fiona instead of the youth she left, but a woman of seventy-six, an old woman, more than twice her own age? "I'm only thirty-four, you know," she said.

Satia seated herself on the edge of the bed next to Lunzie and put a hand sympathetically on her arm. "I know."

"That means my daughter… grew up without me," Lunzie finished brokenly. "Had a career, boy-friends, children…" The smile in the Tri-D image beamed out at her, touching off memories of Fiona's laughter in her ears, the unconscious grace of a leggy girl who would become a tall, elegant woman.

"Almost certainly," the female doctor agreed.

Lunzie put her face in her hands and cried. Satia gathered her in her arms and patted her hair with a gentle hand.

"Perhaps we should give you a sedative and let you relax," Stev suggested, after Lunzie's sobs had softened and died away.

"No!" Lunzie glared at him, red-eyed. "I don't want to go to sleep again."

What am I saying? she thought, pulling herself together. It's just like Jilet described to me. Resentment. Fear of sleep. Fear of never waking again. "Perhaps someone could show me around the Platform until I get my bearings?" She smiled hopefully at the others. "I've just had too much relaxation."

"I will," Satia volunteered. "I am free this shift. We can send a query to Tau Ceti about your daughter."

The Communications Center was near the administrative offices in Cylinder One. Satia and Lunzie walked through the miles of domed corridors from the Medical Center in Cylinder Two. Lunzie was taking in the sights with her eyes wide open. According to Satia, the population of the Platform numbered over eight hundred adult beings. Humans made up about eighty-five percent, with heavyworlders, Wefts and the birdlike Ryxi, along with a few other races Lunzie didn't recognise, making up the rest.

Heavyworlders were human beings, too, but they were a genetically altered strain, bred to inhabit high-gravity planets that were otherwise suitable for colonisation, but had inhospitable conditions for "light-weight" normal humans. The males started at about seven feet in height, and went upward from there. Their facial features were thick and heavy, almost Neanderthal in character, and their hands, even those with proportionately slender fingers, were huge. The females were brawny. Lightweight women looked like dolls next to them. They made Lunzie nervous, as if they were an oversize carnival attraction. She had an uncomfortable feeling that they might fall over on her. Their pronounced brow ridges made many of the heavyworlders look perpetually angry, even when they smiled. She warily kept her distance from them.