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Anne McCaffrey - Planet Pirates 2 Death of Sleep

BOOK ONE

CHAPTER One

The single engaged engine of the empty spherical ore carrier thrummed hollowly through the hull. It set the decks and bulkheads of the personnel quarters vibrating at a frequency which at first, depending on one's mood, could be soothing or irritating. After four weeks aboard the Tau Ceti registered mining vessel Nellie Mine, Lunzie Mespil had to think about it to remember that the hum was there at all. When she first boarded, as the newly hired doctor for the Descartes Mining Platform Number 6, the sound drove her halfway to distraction. There wasn't much to do except read and sleep and listen, or rather, feel the engine noise. Later, she discovered that the sound was conducive to easy sleep and relaxation, like being aboard a gently swaying monorail passenger carrier. Whether her fellow employees knew it or not, one of the chief reasons that the Descartes Mining Corporation had so few duels and mutinies on delivery runs was due to the peace-inducing hum of the engines.

The first few days she spent in the tiny, plain-walled cubicle which doubled as her sleeping quarters and office were a trifle lonely. Lunzie had too many hours to think of her daughter Fiona. Fiona, fourteen, lovely and precocious in Lunzie's unbiased opinion, had been left behind in the care of a friend who was the chief medical officer on the newly colonized planet of Tau Ceti. The settlement was surprisingly comfortable for one so recently established. It had a good climate, a biosphere reasonably friendly toward humankind, marked seasons, and plenty of arable land that allowed both Earth-type and hybrid seeds to prosper. Lunzie hoped to settle down there herself when she finished her tour of duty on the Platform, but she wasn't independently wealthy. Even a commodity as precious as medical expertise wasn't sufficient to buy into the Tau Ceti association. She needed to earn a stake, and there was little call on an atmosphere-and-gravity world for her to practice her specialty of psychological space-incurred trauma. There was no help for it: she was compelled to go off-planet to earn money. To her great dismay, all of the posts which were best suited to her profession and experience - and paid the most - were on isolated facilities. She would not be able to take Fiona with her. After much negotiation, Lunzie signed on with Descartes for a stint on a remote mining platform.

Fiona had been angry that she couldn't accompany her mother to the Descartes Platform, and had refused to accept the fact. In the last days before Lunzie's departure, Fiona had avoided speaking to her, and stubbornly unpacked Lunzie's two five-kilo duffels as often as her mother filled them up. It was an adolescent prank, but one that showed Lunzie how hurt Fiona felt to be abandoned. Since she was born, they had never been apart more than a day or so. Lunzie herself was aching at the impending separation, but she understood, as Fiona would not, the economic necessity that caused her to take a medical berth so far away and leave Fiona behind.

Their spacefare to Tau Ceti had been paid on speculation by the science council, who were testing the viability of a clone breeding center on the newly colonized planet. Lunzie had been approached by the ethics council to join them, their interest stemming from her involvement as the student advisor on a similar panel during her days in medical school which had resulted in an experimental colony. Surprisingly, the data on that earlier effort was unavailable even to the participants on the panel. Her former term-husband Sion had also given her his recommendation. He was becoming very well known and respected in genetic studies, mainly involved in working on controlling the heavyworld human mutations.

There were four or five meetings of the ethics council, which quickly determined that even so altruistic a project as fostering a survival-oriented genome was self-defeating in just a few generations, and no further action was taken. Lunzie was out of work in a colony that didn't need her. Because of the classified nature of the study, she was unable even to explain to her daughter why she wasn't employed in the job which they had traveled to Tau Ceti to take.

After the fifth or sixth time she had to repack her case, Lunzie knew by heart the few possessions she was taking with her, and locked her luggage up in the poisons cabinet in the Tau Ceti medical center to keep Fiona away from it.

By then, the protests had degenerated into a mere sulk. With love, Lunzie watched Fiona patiently, waiting for her to accept their parting, placing herself where she would be available to the troubled youngster when she decided she was ready to talk. Lunzie knew from experience that it was no good chasing Fiona down. She had to let Fiona come to her in her own time. They were too much alike. To force an early confrontation would be like forcing a nuclear pile to overload. She went about her business in the medical center, assisting other medical personnel with ongoing research which the colony had approved. At last, Fiona met her coming out of the medical center one sunny day after work, and presented her with a small wrapped package. It was a hard triangular cylinder. Lunzie smiled, recognizing the shape. Under the paper was a brand new studio hologram of Fiona, dressed in her feastday best, an outfit in the latest style for which she had begged and plagued her mother to supplement the amount she'd saved to buy it from her allowance on their last planetary home. Lunzie could see how much of her own looks were reflected in Fiona: the prominent cheekbones, the high forehead, the warm mouth. The waves of smooth hair were much darker than hers, nearer black than Lunzie's golden brown. Fiona had long, sleepy eyes and a strong chin she inherited from her father that made her look determined, if not downright stubborn, even as a baby. The ruby-colored frock enhanced the girl's light skin, making her exotic and lovely as a flower. The translucent flowing cape which fell from between the shoulders was in the very height of fashion, a field of stars in pinpoint lights which swirled like a comet's tail around Fiona's calves. Lunzie looked up from the gift into her daughter's eyes, which were watching her warily, wondering what she would say. "I love it, darling," Lunzie told her, gathering her close and tucking the hologram safely into her zip pouch. "I'll miss you so much."

"Don't forget me." A broken whimper was muffled against Lunzie's tunic front.

Lunzie drew back and took her daughter's tear-stained face between her hands, studying it, learning it by heart. "I never could," Lunzie promised her. "I never will. And I'll be back before you know it."

During her remaining days planetside, she had turned over her laboratory work to a co-worker so she could spend all her time with Fiona. They visited favorite spots, and together moved Fiona's belongings and the rest of her own from their temporary quarters to the home of the friend who would be fostering the girl. They asked each other, 'Do you remember this? Do you remember that?', sharing precious memories as they had shared the events themselves. It was a glowing, warm time for both of them, too soon over for Lunzie's taste.

A silent Fiona walked her to the landing bay where the shuttle waited to transport her to the Nellie Mine. Tau Ceti's pale lavender-blue sky was over-cast. When the sky was clear, Lunzie could often see the sun glint off the sides of visiting ships high above Tau Ceti in parking orbit, but she was just as happy that she could not now. She was holding back on her emotions. If there was any way to spare Fiona her own misery, she would do it. Lunzie promised herself a really good cry once she was shipside. For one moment, she felt like ripping up her contract and running away, telling Descartes to chuck it, and pleading with the Tau Ceti authorities that she would work at any job, however menial, to stay here with Fiona. But then, good sense took over. Lunzie remembered crude financial matters like making a living, and assured herself that it wouldn't be that long before she could return, and they would have a comfortable life thereafter with what she'd earned.

"I'll negotiate for an asteroid miner as soon as I can afford it," Lunzie offered, breaking the silence. "Maybe I'll stake a few." Her words echoed among the corrugated metal walls of the spaceport. There seemed to be no one there but themselves. "We'll strike it rich, you'll see. You'll be able to go to any university you like, or go for officer training in Fleet, like my brother. Whatever you want."

"Mm," was Fiona's only comment. Her face was drawn into a mask so tragic that Lunzie wanted to laugh and cry. Fiona hadn't used any makeup that morning, so she looked more childlike than her usual careful teenaged self.

It's manipulation, I know it, Lunzie told herself severely. I've got to make a living, or where's our future? I know she's grieving, but I'll only be gone two years, five at the most! The girl's nose was turning red, and her lips were white and pressed tightly closed. Lunzie started to offer another pleasantry, and then realized that she was trying to manipulate her daughter into foregoing her legitimate feelings. I don't want to make a scene, so I'm trying to keep her from acting unhappy. She pressed her own lips shut. We're too much alike, that's the trouble, Lunzie decided, shaking her head. She squeezed Fiona's hand tighter. They walked in silence to the landing bay.

Landing Bay Six contained a big cargo shuttle of the type used by shippers who hauled more freight than passengers. This craft, once nattily painted white with a broad red band from its nose to tail, was dinged and dented. The ceramic coating along the nose showed scorching from making descents through planetary atmospheres, but the vehicle seemed otherwise in good shape and well cared for. A broad-shouldered man with black curly hair stood in the middle of the bay, waving a clipboard and dispensing orders to a handful of coveralled workers. Sealed containers were being forklifted into the open top hatch of the shuttle.

The black-haired man noticed them and came over, hand out in greeting.

"You're the new doctor?" he asked, seizing Lunzie's free hand and wringing it companionably. "Captain Cosimo, Descartes Mining. Glad to have you with us. Hello, little lady," Cosimo ducked his head to Fiona, a cross between a nod and a bow. "Are those your bags. Doctor? Marcus! Take the doctor's bags on board!" Lunzie offered Cosimo the small cube containing her contract and orders, which he slotted into the clipboard. "All's well," he said, scanning the readout on his screen. "We've got about twenty minutes before we lift off. Hatch shuts at T-minus two. Until then, your time's your own." With another smile for Fiona, he went back to shouting at one of his employees. "See here, Nelhen, that's a forklift, not a wee little toy!"

Lunzie turned to Fiona. Her throat began to tighten. All the things she wanted to say seemed so trivial when compared to what she felt. She cleared her throat, trying not to cry. Fiona's eyes were aswim with tears. "There's not much time."

"Oh, Mama," Fiona burst out in a huge sob. "I'll miss you so!" The almost-grown Fiona, who eschewed all juvenile things and had called her mother Lunzie since early childhood, reverted all at once to the baby name she hadn't used in years. "I'll miss you, too. Fee," Lunzie admitted, more touched than she realized. They clutched each other close and shed honest tears. Lunzie let it all out, and felt better for it. In the end, neither Lunzie nor any member of her family could be dishonest.

When the klaxon sounded, Fiona let her go with one more moist kiss, and stood back to watch the launch. Lunzie felt closer to her than she ever had. She kept Fiona in her mind, picturing her waving as the shuttle lifted and swept away through the violet- blue sky of Tau Ceti.

Now, with the exception of today's uniform, one music disk, and the hologram, her baggage was secured in the small storage chamber behind the shower unit with everyone else's. Lunzie had cropped her hair practically short as most crew members did. She missed the warm, fresh wind, cooking her own food from the indigenous plant life, and Fiona.

Without other set duties to occupy her, Lunzie spent the days studying the medical files of her future co-workers and medical texts on the typical injuries and ailments that befall asteroid miners. She was looking forward to her new post. Space-incurred traumas interested her. Agoraphobia and claustrophobia were the most common in space-station life, followed by paranoid disorders. Strangely enough, frequently more than one occurred in the same patient at the same time. She was curious about the causes, and wanted to amass field research to prove or disprove her professors' statements about the possibility of cures.

She'd used her observations from the medical files to facilitate getting to know her fifteen shipmates. Miners were a hearty lot, sharing genuine good fellowship among themselves, but they took slowly to most strangers. Tragedy, suffered on the job and in personal lives, kept them clannish. But Lunzie wasn't a stranger long. They soon discovered that she cared deeply about the well-being of each of them, and that she was a good listener. After that, each of the others claimed time with her in the common dining recreation room, and filtered through her office, to pass the time between shifts, making her feel very welcome. With time, they began to open up to her. Lunzie heard about this crewman's broken romance, and that crewwoman's plan to open a satellite-based saloon with her savings, and the impending eggs of a mated pair of avians called Ryxi, who were specialists temporarily employed by the Platform. And they learned about her early life, her medical training, and her daughter.

The triangular hologram of Fiona was in her hand as she sat behind the desk in her office and listened to a human miner named Jilet. According to his file, Jilet had spent twelve years in cryogenic deepsleep after asteroids destroyed the drive on an ore carrier on which he and four other crewmen had been travelling. They'd been forced to evacuate from their posts, Jilet in one escape capsule near the cargo hold, the others in a second by the engine section. The other four men were recovered quickly, but Jilet was not found for over a decade more because of a malfunction in the signal beacon on his capsule. Not surprisingly, he was angry, afraid, and resentful. Three of the other crew presently on the Nellie Mine had been in cold sleep at least once, but Jilet's stint had been the longest. Lunzie sympathized with him.

"The truth is that I know those years passed while I was in cold sleep. Doctor, but it is killing me that I can't remember them. I've lost so much - my friends, my family. The world's gone round without me, and I don't know how to take up where I've left off." The burly, black-haired miner shifted in the deep impact lounger which Lunzie used as a psychoanalyst's couch. "I feel I've lost parts of myself as well."

"Well, you know that's not true, Jilet," Lunzie corrected him, leaning forward on her elbows attentively. "The brain is very protective of its memory centers. What you know is still locked up in there." She tapped his forehead with a slender, square-tipped finger. "Research has proved that there is no degeneration of memory over the time spent in cold sleep. You have to rely upon what you are, who you are, not what your surroundings tell you you are. I know it's disorienting - no, I've never been through it myself, but I've taken care of many patients who have, What you must do is accept that you've suffered a trauma, and learn to live your life again."

Jilet grimaced. "When I was younger, my mates and I wanted to live in space, away from all the crowds and noise. Hah! Catch me saying that now. All I want to do is settle down on one of the permanent colonies and maybe fix jets or industrial robots for a living. Can't do that yet without my Oh-Two money, not even including the extra if I want to have a family - a new family - so I've got to keep mining. It's all I know."

Lunzie nodded. Oh-Two was the cant term for the set-up costs it took to add each person to the biosphere of an ongoing oxygen-breathing colony on a non-atmosphered site. It was expensive: the containment domes had to be expanded, and studies needed to be done to determine whether the other support systems could handle the presence of another life. Besides air, a human being needed water, sanitary facilities, a certain amount of space for living quarters and food synthesis or farming acreage to support him. She had considered one herself, but the safety margins were not yet acceptable, to her way of thinking, for the raising of a child.

"What about a planetside community?" Lunzie asked. "My daughter's happy on Tau Ceti. It has a healthy atmosphere, and community centers or farmland available, whichever you prefer to inhabit. I want to buy in on an asteroid strike, so that Fiona and I can have a comfortable home." It was a common practice for the mining companies to allow freelancing by non-competitive consortia from their own platforms, so long as it didn't interfere with their primary business. Lunzie calculated that two or three years worth of her disposable income would be enough for a tidy share of a miner's time.

"Well, with apologies. Doctor Mespil, it's too settled and set on a domeless world. They're too - complacent; there, that's the word. Things is too easy for 'em. I'd rather be poor in a place where they understand the real pioneering spirit than rich on Earth itself. If I should have a daughter, I'd want her to grow up with some ambition... and some guts, not like her old man... With respect. Doctor," Jilet said, giving her an anxious look.

Lunzie waved away the thought that he had insulted her courage. She suspected that he was unwilling to expose himself to the undomed surface of a planet. Agoraphobia was an insidious complaint. The free atmosphere would remind him too much of free space. He needed to be reassured that, like his memories, his courage was still there, and intact. "Never mind. But please, call me Lunzie. When you say 'Doctor Mespil,' I start to look around for my husband. And that contract ended years ago. Friendly parting, of course."

The miner laughed, at his ease. Lunzie examined the flush-set desk computer screen, which displayed Jilet's medical file. His anger would have to be talked out. The escape capsule in which he'd cold-slept had had another minor malfunction that left him staring drugged and half conscious through the port glass at open space for two days before the cryogenic process had kicked in. Not surprisingly, that would contribute to the agoraphobia. There was a pathetic air of desperation about this big strong human, whose palpable dread was crippling him, impairing his usefulness. She wondered if teaching him rudimentary Discipline would help him, then decided against it. He didn't need to know how to control an adrenaline rush; he needed to learn how to keep them from happening. "Tell me how the fears start."

"It's not so bad in the morning," Jilet began. "I'm too busy with my job. Ever been on the mining platform?" Lunzie shook her head. The corners of Jilet's dark eyes crinkled merrily. "You've a lot to look forward to, then, haven't you? I hope you can take a joke or two. The boys are full of them. Don't get to liking this big office too much. Space is tight in the living quarters, so everyone gets to be tolerant of everyone else real fast. Oh, it's not like we're all mates right away," he added sadly. "A lot of the young ones first coming along die quickly. It only takes one mistake... and there you are, frozen or suffocated, or worse. A lot of them leave young families, too."

Lunzie gulped, thinking of Fiona, and felt her heart twist in her body. She knew the seals and panels of her atmosphere suit were whole and taut, but she vowed to scrutinize them carefully as soon as Jilet left. "What are your specific duties?"

"We all take turns at whatever needs doing, ma'am. I've got a knack for finding lucky strikes when I'm on scout duty, so I try to draw that one a lot. There's a bonus for a good find."

"Maybe you're the one I'll pay to make my daughter's fortune for her," Lunzie smiled.

"I'd be proud to have your trust, D-Lunzie, only why don't you see if I can cut it, eh? Well, every asteroid's got ore, large and small, but you don't waste your time on everything you see. The sensors in a scout are unidirectional. Once you've eyeballed something you like the look of, either on visual or in the navigational scanning net, you can get a detailed readout of the asteroid's makeup. Scouts aren't big. They're fit for one man only, so he'd better like being by himself for days or weeks, even months, at a time. It's not easy. You've got to be able to wake up cold-eyed if the scanner net alarm goes off to avoid collisions. When you find a potential strike, you lay claim to it on behalf of the company, pending computer search for other claims of ownership. If it's small, like a crystal mass, you can haul it back behind you to the platform - and you'll want to: there's always a bonus on crystals. You don't want anyone jumping claim behind you. The mediums can be brought in by a tug. The big ones a crew comes out to mine on the spot, I don't mind being in a scout, because I'm looking straight down the 'corridor' between fields in the net, and the inside of the ship is small enough to be comfortable. It starts to bug me when I'm fixing one of the rotating tumbling shafts, or something like that out in free-fall." Jilet finished with his brows drawn down and his arms folded tightly across his chest.

"Focus on the equipment, Jilet. Don't catch yourself staring off into space. It was always there before. You just didn't pay attention to it then. Don't let it haunt you now. What matters is what you are working on at the moment." Lunzie hastened to calm him. She wanted him to verbalize the good facets of his job. It was impossible to heal the mind without giving it something positive to hang on to, a reason for healing. Half the battle was won, whether Jilet knew it or not. He had the guts to go back to his post on the Mining Platform. Getting back on the horse that threw him. "What do you look for when you're scouting?"

Jilet's body gradually relaxed, and he studied the ceiling through his wiry black eyebrows. "What I can find. Depending on what's claiming a good price dirtside, you'll see 'em breaking down space rock into everything from diamonds to cobalt to iron. If the handling don't matter, they slag it apart with lasers and shove it into the tumbling chutes for processing. If how it's handled makes a difference, a prize crew'll strip it down. As much as possible is done in vacuum, for safety, conservation of oxygen, and to keep the material from expanding and contracting from exposure to too many temperatures. Makes the ore tough to ship if it has been thawed once. It'll split up, explode into a million shards if it warms too quickly. I've seen mates of mine killed that way. It's ugly, ma'am. I don't want to die in bed, but I'd rather not go that way, either."

With a rueful smile for her precise clinical imagination, Lunzie dismissed thoughts of trying to reconstruct a splintered miner's body. This was the life she was moving toward, at just under the speed of light. You won't be able to save every patient, you idealist. Help the ones you can. "What's a crystal strike look like? How do you find one?"

"Think I'd give all my secrets away, even to a friendly mindbrowser like you?" Jilet tilted one eye-brow toward her. Lunzie gave him an affable grin. "Well, I'll give you one clue. They're lighter than the others on the inside. Sounding gives you a cross-section that seems to be nearly hollow, bounces your scan around its interior. Sometimes it is. Why, I had one that split my beam up in a hundred different directions. The crew found it was rutilated with filaments of metal when they cut it apart. Worthless for communications, but some rich senator had it used for the walls of his house." Jilet spat in the direction of the nameless statesman.

They were getting off the track. Regretfully, for Jilet was really relaxing with her, Lunzie set them back on it. "You've also complained of sleeplessness. Tell me about it."

Jilet fidgeted, bent forward and squeezed his forehead with both hands. "It's not that I can't sleep. I - just don't want to fall asleep. I'm afraid that if I do, I won't wake up."

" 'Sleep, the brother of Death,' " Lunzie quoted. "Homer, or more recently, Daniel."

"Yes, that's it. I wish - I wish that if I wasn't going to die they'd've left me asleep for a hundred years or more, so that I'd come back a complete stranger, instead of everything seeming the same," Jilet exploded in a sudden passionate outburst that surprised even him. "After only a dozen years I'm out of step. I remember things my friends have forgotten long since, that they laugh at me for, but it's all I've got to hang on to. They've had a decade to go on without me. They're older now. I'm a freak to them, being younger. I almost wish I had died."

"Now, now. Death is never as good as its press would have you believe. You've begun making new friends in your profession, you're heading toward a job right now that makes the best use of your talents, and you can learn some new techniques that didn't exist when you started out mining. Give the positive aspects a chance. Don't think of space while you're trying to sleep. Let your mind turn inward, possibly to a memory of your childhood that you enjoyed." A chime sounded, indicating Jilet's personal time was at an end, and he needed to get back to his duties. Lunzie stood up, waited for Jilet to rise. He towered easily a third of a meter over her. "Come back and talk to me again next rest period," Lunzie insisted. "I want to hear more about crystal mining."

"You and half the youngsters that come out to the Platforms," Jilet complained good-naturedly. "But, Doctor, I mean Lunzie, how can I get to sleep without having this eating away at me? We're still so far out, but the feelings are keeping me awake all over again."

"I'd rather not give you drugs, though I will if you insist after you try it my way first. For now, concentrate on what is here, close by and around you. When you're in the rec area, never look out the window, always at the wall beside it," Lunzie smiled, reaching out to press Jilet's hand warmly. "In no time, you'll be so bored with the wall that mere yearning for something new will set you to gazing at the stars again."

After Jilet left, Lunzie got a carafe of fresh hot coffee for herself from a synthesiser hatch in the corridor, and returned to her office. While her observations on Jilet's case were still fresh in her mind, she sat down at her desk to key in data to her confidential files. She believed that in time he would recover completely. He'd obviously been counselled by experts when he first came out of cold sleep. Whoever the psychology team was that had worked with him, they were right on the ball when it came to rehabilitation counselling.

Jilet's agoraphobia had been triggered by an occupational hazard. Lunzie wondered uneasily how many latent agoraphobics there were in space who simply hadn't been exposed to the correct stimuli yet that would cause it to manifest. Others in the crew could be on the edge of a breakout. Had anyone else shown symptoms?

Immediately, Lunzie put the thought away. Wryly, she decided she was frightening herself. "I'll have to treat myself for paranoia soon, if I'm not careful." But the feeling of uneasiness persisted. Not for the first time, Lunzie wished that Fiona was here to talk to. She had always discussed things with Fiona, even when she was an infant. Lunzie turned the hologram in her hands. The girl was growing and changing. She was already as tall as her mother. "She'll be a woman when I get back." Lunzie decided that her dissatisfaction was because she was spoiling for a good chat with someone. Her remote cubicle was too lonely. Since "office hours" were over, she would run down the corridor to the rec area and see if anyone else was on break.

Abruptly, Lunzie realized that the ever present hum of the engine had changed, sped up. Instead of the usual purr, the sound had an edge of panic to it. Two more growling notes coughed to life, increasing the vibration so much Lunzie's teeth were chattering. They were trying to fire up the dorsal and ventral engines!

"Attention, all personnel," Captain Cosimo's voice blared. "This is an emergency alert. We are in danger of collision with unknown objects. Be prepared to evacuate. Do not panic. Proceed in an orderly fashion to your stations. We are attempting to evade, but we might not make it. This is not a drill." Lunzie's eyes widened, and she turned to her desk screen. On the computer pickup, the automatic cut-off devolved to forward control video, and showed what the pilot on the bridge saw: half a dozen irregularly shaped asteroids. Two that appeared to be the size of the ship were closing in from either side like pincers, or hammer and anvil, with more fragments heading directly for them. There wasn't room for the giant ship, running on only one of its three engines, to manoeuvre and avoid them all. Normally, asteroid routes could be charted. The ship's flight plan took into account all the space-borne debris to be avoided. At the last check, the route had been clear. These must have just crashed into one another, changing their course abruptly into the path of the Nellie Mine. The huge freighter was incapable of making swift turns, and there was no way to get out of the path of all the fragments. Collision with the tumbling rocks was imminent.

One of the asteroids slipped out of view of the remote cameras, and Lunzie was thrown out of her chair as the huge ship fired all its starboard boosters, attempting to avoid collision. Crashing sounds reverberated through the corridor, and the floor shook. Some of the smaller fragments must have struck the ship.

The red alert beacons in the corridor went off. "Evacuate!" the captain's voice shouted. "We can't get the engines firing. All personnel, evacuate!"

As the klaxon sounded, Lunzie's mind reached for Discipline. She willed herself to be calm, recalling all her training on what to do in a red alert. The list scrolled up in her mind as clearly as it would do on a computer screen. Make sure all who are disabled or too young to look after themselves are safe, then secure yourself - but most importantly, waste no time! Lunzie paused only long enough to grab Fiona's hologram off the desk and stow it in a pocket before she dashed out into the corridor, heading for her section's escape capsule.

The crew section was a curved strip one level high across the equator of the spherical freighter. When the ship was making a delivery run, she could carry as many as eighty crew in the twenty small sleeping cubicles, ten on either side of the common rooms. At intervals along the corridor, round hatchways opened onto permanently moored escape capsules. Lunzie's office was at the far left end of the crew section.

The ship rocked. They'd been struck again, this time by a big fragment. There was a gasp of life support fans and compressors speeding up to move the air in spite of a hull breach. All the lights in the corridor went out, and in the center of one wall, a circle of bright red LEDs chased around the hatch of the escape capsule, which irised open as Lunzie ran toward it.

She waited at the hatch, staring down the long corridor toward the center of the crew section to see if anyone was coming to board this escape shuttle with her. Her heart hammered with fear and impatience. The capsule iris would close and launch automatically thirty seconds after a body entered the hatchway, so she forced herself to wait. Lunzie wanted to be certain that there was no one else in this section that she would be abandoning if she took off alone in the capsule.

There was a deafening bang, and then a roar like thunder echoed in the corridor. A section of rock the size of her head burst through the bulkhead less than a hundred feet down the passage, cutting her off from the rest of the crew. Lunzie ducked the splinters, and grabbed with both hands at the edge of the hatchway, as the vacuum of space dragged the ship's atmosphere out through the tear in the hull. Gritting her teeth tightly, she clung to the metal lip, and watched furniture, clothing, coffee cups, atmosphere suits fly through the air toward the gap. The air dropped to near freezing, and frost formed swiftly on her rings and sleeve fasteners, and on her eyelashes, cheeks and lips. Her hands were growing numb with cold. Lunzie wasn't sure how long she could hang on before she, too, was sucked out into space through that hole. This was death, she knew. Then: a miracle.

She heard a rending sound, and her desk and chair flew out of her office door, ricocheted off the opposite corridor wall with individual bangs, and collided in the tear in the hull. The tornadic winds died momentarily, blocked by her office furniture. Lunzie grabbed the opportunity to save herself. She dove through the hatchway headfirst, tucking and rolling to land unhurt between the rows of impact seats. She arched up from the floor to punch the manual door control with her fist, then crawled to the steering controls, not bothering to right herself before sending the pod hurtling into space.

The capsule spun away from the side of the Nellie Mine. Lunzie was flung about in the tiny cabin. She caught hold of the handloops, yanked herself into the pilot's seat and strapped in.

The lumpy shape of the mining ship looked like another asteroid against the curtain of stars. The brief strip of living space raised across a 60 degree arc of the ship's midsection bloomed with other pin-points of light as the rest of the crew evacuated in vessels like hers. She regretted that there hadn't been opportunity for anyone else to join her in the escape pod, company until rescue could reach them, but Space! when the alarm sounds, you go, or you die.

She could see where the gigantic asteroid had struck the Nellie. It had torn away a large section of the crew quarters at the opposite end of the strip from hers, creased the hull deeply, and sailed away on a tangential course. The second asteroid, the size of a moon, would do far more damage. The ship, still on automatic pilot, was slowly turning toward her, firing on all the steering thrusters down one side, so the jagged rock would take it broadside instead of a direct strike. She watched, fascinated and horrified, as the two immense bodies met, and melded.

Her little pod hurtled outward at ever-increasing speed, but much faster still came the explosion, the overtaxed inner engine kicking through the plating behind the living quarters, imploding the shells and then kicking the debris forward of the directionless hulk. Pieces of red-hot hull plating shot past her, some missing her small boat by mere yards. The planetoid deflected away, its course changed only slightly.

Lunzie let go of the breath she had been holding. The disaster had happened so quickly. Only minutes had gone by since the alert was broadcast. Her Discipline had served her well - she had acted swiftly and decisively. She was considered by her masters a natural Candidate, who had already achieved much on her own. Basic training in Discipline was recommended for medics and Fleet officers of command rank and above, especially those who would be going into hazardous situations - much like this. Over the years, Lunzie had achieved Adept status. It was a pity she hadn't been able to go on with her lessons since reaching Tau Ceti. Lunzie was grateful for the instruction, which had probably saved her life, but she realized that her capsule was still at least two weeks travel away from the Mining Platform. She switched on the communication set and leaned over the audio pickup.

"Mayday, Mayday. This is Nellie Mine Shuttle, registration number NM-EC-02. I repeat, Mayday."

A wave of static poured out of the speaker. Underneath it, she could hear a voice. The static gradually died, and a man's voice spoke clearly. "I hear you, EC-02. This is Captain Cosimo, in EC-04. Is that you, Lunzie?"

"Yes, sir. Is everyone else all right?"

"Yes, dammit. All present and accounted for but you. We thought we'd lost you when Damage Control reported a punch through in your wing. That was one hell of a bang. I knew it would happen one day. Poor old Nellie. Are you all right?"

"I'm fine."

"Good. We've been signalling, but there's no one in immediate range. Before the blast, we sent off a message to Descartes 6 advising them to send someone out for us. Lock in your beacon to 34.8 and activate."

Lunzie found the controls and punched in the command. "How long will it take for them to reach us, Cosimo?"

There was more static, and the captain's voice broke through it, fainter than before. "... flaming asteroid interference. It'll be at least two weeks before the message reaches them, and I'd estimate it'll take them four more weeks to find us. I am ordering cold sleep. Doctor. Any comments or objections?"

"No, sir. I concur. It would be an emotional strain for so many people to spend six weeks awake in such close quarters, even providing the synthesisers and recyclers hold out."

"That's for certain. There are two crew on this shuttle, including the Ryxi, who're squawking about their damned eggs and claustrophobia. I wish you were here to oversee the deepsleep process. Doctor. Hypodermic compressors make me nervous." Cosimo didn't sound in the least distressed, but Lunzie was grateful to him for keeping the mood light.

"Nothing to it," she said. "Just remember, pointed end down."

With a hearty laugh, the captain signed off. Inside the shuttle's medical supply locker were several vials containing medicines: depressants, restoratives, and the cold sleep preservative formula alongside its antidote. Lunzie removed the spraygun from its niche and loaded in a vial of the cryogenic. She would have only moments before the formula took effect, so she prepared a cradling pad from stored thermal blankets, and wadded up a few more under her head as a pillow. She fed instructions to the ship's computer, giving details of her identity, allergies, next of kin, and planet of origin for use by her rescuers. When all was prepared, Lunzie lowered herself to the padded deck. She could feel the adrenaline of the Discipline state wearing off. In moments, she was drained and exhausted, her strength swept away. In one hand she held the spraygun. In the other, Lunzie clutched the hologram of her daughter.

"Computer," she commanded. "Monitor vital signs and initiate cold sleep process when my heart rate reaches zero."

"Working," the metallic voice responded. "Acknowledged."

Her order was unnecessary, since the module was programmed to complete the cold sleep process on its own, but Lunzie needed to hear another Standard-speaking voice. She wished someone had been close enough in the corridors of the damaged carrier to have boarded the pod with her. For all her theoretical training, this was the first time she would experience the cryogenic process. Lunzie gazed into the lucite block, smiled into the image of Fiona's eyes. "What an adventure I'll have to tell you about when I see you, my darling." She pressed the nozzle of the spray against her thigh. It hissed as the drug dispersed swiftly through her body. Where it passed, her tissues became leaden, and her skin felt hot. Though the sensation was uncomfortable, Lunzie knew the process was safe. "Initiating," she told the computer indistinctly. Her jaw and tongue were already out of her control. Lunzie could sense her pulse slowing down, and her nervous responses became lethargic. Even her lungs were growing too heavy to drag air in or push it out.

Her last conscious thoughts were of Fiona, and she hoped that the rescue shuttle wouldn't take too long to answer the Mayday.

All lights on the shuttle except the exterior running lights and beacon went down. Inside, cold cryogenic vapour filled the tiny cabin, swirling around Lunzie's still form.

BOOK TWO

CHAPTER Two

When his scout ship was just two days flight out of Descartes Mining Platform 6, Illin Romsey began to pick up hopeful signs of radioactivity. He was prospecting for potential strikes along what his researches told him was a nearly untapped vector leading away from Platform 6. He was aware that in the seventy years since the Platform became operational, the thick asteroid stream around the complex had had time to shift, bringing new rock closer and sweeping played-out space rock away. Still, the explorer's blood in his veins urged him to follow a path no one else had ever tried.

His father and grandfather had worked for Descartes. He didn't mind following in the family tradition. The company treated its employees well, even generously. Its insurance plan and pension plan alone made Descartes a desirable employer, but the bonus system for successful prospectors kept him pushing the limits of his skills. He was proud to work for Descartes.

His flight plan nearly paralleled a well-used approach run to the Platform, which maintained its position in the cosmos by focusing on six fixed remote beacons and adjusting accordingly. Otherwise, even a complex that huge would become lost in the swirling pattern of rock and ice. It was believed that the asteroid belt had originated as a uranian-sized planet, destroyed in a natural cataclysm of some kind. Some held that a planet had never been formed in this system. The sun around which the belt revolved had no other planets. Even after seven decades of exploration, the jury was still out on it, and everyone had his own idea.

Illin held a fix on the vector between Alpha Beacon and the Platform. It was his lifeline. Ships had been known to get lost within kilometers of their destination because of the confusion thrown into their sensors by the asteroid belt. Illin felt that he was different: he had an instinct for finding his way back home. In more than eight years prospecting, he'd never spent more than a day lost. He never talked about his instinct, because he felt it would break his luck. The senior miners never twitted him about it; they had their own superstitions. The new ones called it blind luck, or suggested the Others were looking after him. Still, he wasn't cocky, whatever they might think, and he was never less than careful.

The clatter of the radiation counter grew louder and more frenzied. Illin crossed his fingers eagerly. A strike of transuranic ore heretofore undiscovered by the busy Mining Platform - and so close by - would be worth a bonus and maybe a promotion. Need for other minerals might come and go, but radioactive elements were always sought after, and they fetched Descartes a good price, too. What terrifically good luck! He adjusted his direction slightly to follow the signal, weaving deftly between participants in the great stately waltz like a waiter at a grand ball.

He was close enough now to pick up the asteroids he wanted on his scanner net. Suddenly, the mass on his scope split into two, an irregular mass that drifted gently away portside, and a four-meter-long pyramidal lump that sped straight toward him. Asteroids didn't behave that way! Spooked, Illin quickly changed course, but the pyramid angled to meet him. His rad counter went wild. He tried to evade it, firing thrusters to turn the nippy little scout out of its path. It was chasing him! In a moment, he had the smaller mass on visual. It was a Thek capsule.

Theks were a silicate life-form that was the closest thing in the galaxy to immortals. They ranged from about a meter to dozens of meters high, and were pyramidal in shape, just like their spacecraft. Illin's jaw dropped open. Theks were slow talking and of few words, but their terse statements usually held more information than hundreds of pages of human rhetoric. Not much else was known about them, except their inexplicable penchant for aiding the more ephemeral races to explore and colonise new planetary systems. A Thek rode every mothership that the Exploratory and Evaluatory Corps sent out. What was a Thek doing way out here? He cut thrust and waited for it to catch up with him.

He was suddenly resentful. Oh, Krims! Illin thought. Did I come all this way just for a Thek? The other miners were going to have a laugh at his expense. He tapped his rad counter and aimed the sensor this way and that. It continued to chatter out a high-pitched whirr, obviously responding to a strong signal nearby. Were Theks radioactive? He'd never heard that from anyone before. Had he discovered a new bit of interesting gossip about the mysterious Theks to share with the other miners? Yes, it would seem so. But to his delight, the signal from the asteroid he'd spotted continued. A strike! And a concentrated one, too. Should be worth a goodly handful of bonus credits.

In a few minutes, the Thek was alongside him. The pyramidal shape behind the plas-shield was featureless, resembling nothing so much as a lump of plain gray granite. It eased one of its ship's sides against the scout with a gentle bump, and adhered to the hull like a flexible magnet. The cabin was filled then with a low rumbling sound which rose and fell very, very slowly. The Thek was talking to him.

"Rrrrreeeeeee... ttrrrrrrrrriieeeeevvvve... ssssshhhhuuuuuutttt... ttttlllleee."

"Shuttle? What shuttle?" Illin asked, not bothering to wonder how the Thek was talking to him through the hull of his scout.

For answer, the Thek moved forward, dragging his ship with it.

"Hey!" Illin yelled. "I'm tracking an ore strike! I've got a job to do. Would you release my ship?"

"liiiimmmm... perrrrrrr... aaaa... ttttiiiiivvvvvveee."

He shrugged. "Imperative, huh?" He waited a long time to see if there was any more information forthcoming. Well, you didn't argue with a Thek. Resigned but unhappy, he allowed himself to be towed along at a surprising speed through a patch of tiny asteroids that bounced off the Thek craft and embedded themselves into the nose of his ship. The outermost metal layer of a scout's nose was soft, backed by a double layer of superhard titanium sandwiching more soft metal, to absorb and stop small meteorites or slow and deflect bigger ones. Illin had only just stripped the soft layer and ground out the gouge marks in the hard core a week ago. It would have to be done all over again when he got back from rescuing this shuttle for the Thek - would anyone believe him when he told them about it? He scarcely believed it himself.

Behind him the star-field disappeared. They were moving into the thickest part of the asteroid belt. The Thek obviously knew where it was going; it didn't slow down at all, though the hammering of tiny pebbles on the hull became more insistent. Illin switched on the video pickup and rolled the protective lid up to protect the forward port.

A tremendous rock shot through with the red of iron oxide rolled up behind them and somersaulted gracefully to the left as the Thek veered around it, a tiny arrowhead against its mass. Illin's analyser showed that most of the debris in this immediate vicinity was ferric, and a lot of it was magnetic. He had to recalibrate continually to keep his readings accurate. They looped around a ring of boulders approximately all the same size revolving around a planetoid that was almost regular in shape except for three huge impact craters near its "equator."

Nestled in one of the craters was a kernel-shaped object that Illin recognized immediately. It was an escape pod. As they drew closer, he could read the markings along its dusty white hull: NM-EC-02.

"Well, boy, you're a hero," he said to himself. Those pods were never jettisoned empty; there must be sleepers aboard. The beacon apparatus, both beam and transmitter, was missing, probably knocked off by the meteor that had shoved the pod into the cradle it now occupied. He didn't recognise the registry code, but then, he wasn't personally familiar with any vessels large enough to be carrying pods.

The Thek disengaged and floated a few meters away from his scout. It hadn't extruded eyes, or anything like that, but Illin felt it was watching him. He angled his ship away from the escape pod. The magnetic line shot out of the scout's stern and looped around the pod. The tiny dark ship twisted in his wake, showing that the net had engaged correctly.

Moving slowly and carefully, Illin applied ventral thrusters and steered his ship upward, over the ring of dancing giants. The Thek floated next to him.

He followed the small pyramid out of the thick of the field and back to his vector point. As soon as they were clear, he bounced messages to the beacons: Scout coming in, towing escape pod NM-EC-02, intact, beacon damaged. Thek involved. He grinned jauntily to himself. That short message would have them fluttering on the Platform all right. He couldn't wait to see what a fuss he was stirring up.

Descartes Mining Platform 6 had changed a great deal in the many years since the first modular cylinders had been towed into the midst of the asteroid field and assembled. While the early employees had had to make do with barrackslike communal quarters, families could now claim small suites of their own. Amenities, which were once sold practically out of the backpacks of itinerant traders, could be found in a knot of shops in the heart of the corridors joining the cylinder complex near the entertainment center. With the completion date for the residential containment dome only five years away, Descartes 6 could almost claim colony status. And would.

Ore trains consisting of five to eight sealed containers strung behind a drone crossed back and forth between the ships ranged out along the docking piers. Some carried raw rock from the mining vessels to the slaggers and tumblers whose chutes bristled from the side of the Platform. Some carried processed minerals to the gigantic three-engine ore carriers that were shaped like vast hollow spheres belted top to bottom by thruster points. Those big slow-moving spheres did most of the hauling between the Platform and civilisation. In spite of their dowdy appearance and obvious unwieldiness, the Company had never come up with anything better with which to replace them.

Ships belonging to merchants from the Federated Sentient Planet worlds were easily distinguished from the Mining Company's own vessels by their gaudy paint jobs. They were here to trade household goods, food, and textiles for small and large parcels of minerals that weren't available on their own planets, hoping to get a better price than they would get from a distributor. As Illin watched, one moved away from its bay with four containers in tow, turning toward the beacon that would help guide it toward Alpha Centauri, many months travel from here even at FTL. A personal shuttle with the colours of a Company executive shot out of an airlock and flew purposefully toward a large Paraden Company carrier that lay in a remote docking orbit somewhere over Illin's left shoulder.

Illin transmitted his scout's recognition code as he approached the Platform. The acknowledgment tone tweetled shrilly in his headphones.

"Good day, Romsey. That your Thek behind you there at.05?" Flight Deck Coordinator Mavorna said cheerfully from Illin's video pickup, now tuned to the communications network. She was a heavyset woman with midnight skin and clear green eyes.

"It's not my Thek," Illin said peevishly. "It just followed me home."

"That's what they all say, pumpkin. You've hooked yourself a geode, I hear."

"That's so," Illin admitted. A "geode" was a crystal strike that was seemed promising but couldn't be cracked in the field. Some of them panned out well, others proved to be deeply disappointing to the hopeful miner who found one. "I don't know who's in it. The Thek didn't say. It's still sealed."

"The Thek didn't say-ha, ha! When do they ever? I've got a crew and medics on the way down to the enclosed deck to meet you. Set down gently, now. The floor has just been polished. Remember, wait until the airlock siren shuts off before you unseal."

"Have I got a tri-vid team waiting to talk to me, too?" Illin asked hopefully.

"Sonny, there's more news than you happening today. Wait and see. You'll get the whole picture when you're down and in. I haven't got time to gossip."

With a throaty chuckle, Mavorna signed off. Her image was replaced on the screen with the day's designated frequency for the landing beacon. Illin tuned in and steered up toward the opening doors through which bright simulated daylight spilled. The Thek sailed silently behind him.

Tiny gnats were buzzing near her ears. "Lnz. Lnz. Dtr Mspw."

She ignored them, refusing to open her eyes. Her skin hurt, especially her ears and lips. Gingerly, she put out her tongue and licked her lips. They were very dry. Suddenly, something cold and wet touched her mouth. She startled, and cold stuff ran across her cheek and into her ear. The gnats began whining again, but their voices grew slower and more distinct. "Lunz. Lunzie. Dr. Mespil. That is your name, isn't it?"

Lunzie opened her eyes. She was lying on an infirmary bed, in a white room without windows. Three humans stood beside her, two in white medic tunics, and one in a miner's jumpsuit. And there was a Thek. She was so curious about why a Thek should be in her infirmary ward that she just stared at it, ignoring the others. The tall male human in medical whites leaned over her.

"Can you speak? I'm Dr. Stev Banus. You're on Descartes Platform 6, and I am the hospital administrator. Are you all right?"

Lunzie drew a deep breath, and let out a sigh of relief. "Yes, I'm fine. I'm very stiff, and my head is full of sawdust, but I'm all right."

"Iiiiinnnnnn-taaaaaaaaccct?" the Thek rumbled. The others listened carefully and respectfully, and then turned to Lunzie. It must have been a query directed at her. She wished that she had more personal experience with the Theks, but none had ever spoken to her before. The others seemed to know what it was asking.

"Yes, I'm intact," she announced. She wished it had a face, or any attribute that she could relate to, but there was nothing. It looked like a hunk of building stone. She waited for a response.

The Thek said nothing more. As the humans watched it, the featureless pyramid rolled swiftly toward the door and out of the room.

"What was that Thek doing here?" Lunzie asked.

"I don't know," Stev explained, puzzled. "I'm not sure what it was looking for out there in the asteroid field. They're not easy to communicate with. This one is clearly friendly, but that's all we know. It was instrumental in finding you. It pointed you out to young Miner Romsey."

"I'm sorry I didn't thank it," Lunzie said flippantly. She pulled herself up into a sitting position. The human in white tunics rushed forward to support her as she settled against the head of the bed. She waved them away. "Where am I? This is the Mining Platform?"

"It is." The female medic smiled at her. She had perfectly smooth skin the colour of coffee with cream, and deep brown eyes. Her thick black hair was in a long braid down her back. "My name is Satia Somileaux. I was born here."

Lunzie looked at her curiously. "Really? I thought the living quarters on the Platform were less than fifteen years old. You must be at least twenty."

"Twenty-four," Satia confessed, with a friendly and amused expression.

"How long was I asleep?"

The two doctors looked at each other, trying to decide what to say. Lunzie stared at them sharply. The dark-haired young man in the coverall shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other and cleared his throat. Banus shot him a sly, knowing look out of the corner of his eye and turned to face him. "I haven't forgotten you, Illin Romsey. There's a substantial finder's fee for bringing a pod in, you know that."

"Well," the young man grinned, squinting thoughtfully. "It'll make up for losing that strike. Just. But I'd'a brought her in anyway. If I was shiplost, I sure hope someone would feel the same about bringing me home."

"Everyone is not so altruistic as you, young man. Self interest is more prevalent than your enlightened attitude. Computer, record Miner Romsey's fee for retrieving escape pod... ?" The tall doctor looked to Lunzie for assistance.

"NM-EC-02," she said.

"... and verify by my voice code. If a check is necessary, refer requests to me."

"Acknowledged," said the flat voice of the computer.

"There you go. Miner," Stev said. "There's no security classification, so if you want to beat the rumour mill with your news..."

Illin Romsey grinned. "Thanks. I hope all's well for you, Dr. Mespil." The young man dropped a courteous bow and left the room.

Stev returned to Lunzie's side. "Of course, the fee is nothing compared to the back salary that is owing to you. Doctor Mespil. You were in the Company's employ at the time you underwent deepsleep. Descartes is honest about paying its debts. Come and talk to me later about your credit balance."

"How long have I been asleep?" Lunzie demanded.

"You must understand where the miner found you. Your capsule was not recovered when the other two pods from the, er, 'Nellie Mine' were brought in. Even they were difficult to locate. The search took more than three months."

"Is everyone else all right?" she asked quickly, immediately concerned for the other fourteen members of the Nellie's crew. Jilet had been so frightened of going into deepsleep again. She regretted not having ordered a sedative for him before he took the cryogenic.

Dr. Banus swivelled the computer screen on the table toward him and drew his finger down the glass face. "Oh, yes, everyone else was just fine. There are normally no ill effects from properly induced cryogenic sleep. You should be feeling 'all go and on green' yourself."

"Yes, I do. May I make use of the communications center? I assume you notified my daughter, Fiona, when we escaped from the Nellie Mine. I'd like to communicate with her that I've been found. She's probably been worried sick about me. Unless, of course, there is an FTL shuttle going towards Tau Ceti soon? I must send her a message."

"Do you think she's still there?" Satia asked, frowning at Stev.

Lunzie watched the exchange between the two. "It's where I left her, in the care of a friend, another medical practitioner. She was only fourteen..." Lunzie paused. The way the doctors were talking, it must have been a couple of years before they found the shuttle. Well, that was one of the risks of space travel. Lunzie tried to see Fiona as she might be now, if she continued to grow into her long legs. The adolescent curves must be more mature now. Lunzie hoped her daughter's mentor would have had the clothes-sense to guide the girl into becoming fashions instead of the radical leanings of teenagers. Then she noticed the overwhelming silence from the others, who were clearly growing more uncomfortable by the minute. Her intuition insisted something was wrong. Lunzie looked suspiciously at the pair. When an FTL trip between star systems alone could take two or three years, a cold sleep stint at that length would hardly provoke worry in modem psychologists. More? Five years? Ten?

"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.

Satia kept up a cheerful chatter as they walked along, pointing out people she knew, and talking about life on the Platform. "We're a small community," she commented cheerfully, "but it's harder to get away when you're feuding with someone. Privacy centres are absolutely inviolable on a deepspace platform. They help at most times, but Descartes really does detailed personality analyses to weed out the people who won't be able to get along on the Platform. There are community games and events every rest period, and we have a substantial library of both video and text. Boredom is one of the worst things that can happen in a closed community. I get to know everyone because I organise most of their children's events." Numbly, Lunzie kept pace with her, murmuring and smiling to Satia's friends without retaining a single name once the face was out of sight.

"Lep! Domman Lepke! Wait up!" Satia ran to intercept a tall, tan-skinned man in a high-collared tunic who was just disappearing between the automatic sliding doors. He peered around for the hailing voice, and smiled broadly when Satia waved.

"Lep, I want you to meet a new friend. This is Lunzie Mespil. She was just rescued from deepsleep. She's been lost for over sixty years."

"Oh, another deadtimer," Lepke said disapprovingly, shaking hands. "How do you do? Are you a 'nothing's changed' or an 'everything's changed'? Everyone is one or the other. That's nothing. Listen, Satia, have you heard the latest from the Delta beacon? Heavyworlders have claimed Phoenix. It must have been pirated!"

Satia, her mouth open to rebuke Lep for his insensitivity, stopped, her eyes widening with horror. "But that was initiated as an inhabited human colony, over six years ago."

"They claim not; that the planet was empty of intelligent life when they got there, but there should be lightweights on that planet right now. No sign of them, or their settlement, or any clue as to what happened to them. Wiped clean off the surface, if they ever made it there in the first place. The FSP are releasing a list of settlers - the usual: 'anyone knowing the last whereabouts,' and so on." Lepke seemed pleased to have been first to pass along the news. "Possession and viability make a colony, so no one can deny their claim if there's no evidence the planet was inhabited before they got there. The Others only know who's telling the truth."

"Oh, sweet Muhlah! It must have been pirated! Come on, Lunzie. We'll hear the latest." Pulling Lunzie behind her, the slim paediatrician raced toward the communications center.

When they arrived, there was already a large group of people gathered around the Tri-D field, talking and waving arms, tentacles, or paws.

"They had no right to take over that world. It was designated for lightweight humans. They're adapted to the high-gee planets. Let them take those, and leave the light worlds to us!" a man with red hair expostulated angrily.

"It is not the first planet to be stripped and abandoned," said a young female with the near-perfect humanoid features a Weft shapechanger usually assumed when living among humans. Lunzie looked around quickly to find the Weft's co-mates. They always travelled in threes. "There was the rumour of Epsilon Indi not long ago. All its satellites were attacked at once. Phoenix is just the most recent dead planet brought to light."

"What happened to the colonists assigned to Phoenix?" a blond woman asked.

"No one knows," the communications tech said, manipulating the controls at the base of the holofield. "Maybe they never made it there. Maybe the Others got 'em. Here, I'll run the 'cast again for those of you who missed it. I'm patching down files as quickly as I can strip them off the beacon." The crowd shifted, as viewers who had already seen the report went away, and others pressed closer.

Squeezing between a broad-shouldered man in coveralls and a lizardlike Seti in an Administrator's tunic, Lunzie watched the report, which featured computer imaging of the new colony's living quarters and their industrial complex. What had happened to the other colonists? They must have relatives who would want to know. Humans weren't raised in vacuum. Each of these was somebody's son. Or somebody's daughter.

"The FSP's official report was cool, but you could listen between the lines. They are horribly upset. Something's breaking down in their system. The FSP is supposed to protect nascent colonies," the blond woman complained to the man standing beside her.

"Only if they prove to be viable," the Weft corrected her. "There is always a period when the settlement must learn to stand on its own."

"It was their gamble," the Seti said, complacently, tucking its claws into the pouch pockets on the front of its tunic. "They lost."

"See here, citizens, if the heavyworlders can make a go of it, let them have the planet." This suggestion was promptly shouted down, to the astonishment of the speaker, a florid-faced human male in coveralls.

"It's a good thing the FSP don't have an attitude like yours," another growled. "Or your children won't have anywhere to live."

"There are plenty of new worlds for all out there," the coveralled man insisted. "It's a big galaxy."

"Look at us, we're all acting like this is news," the red-haired man grumbled. "Everything we get is months or years old. There's got to be a faster way to get information from the rest of civilisation."

"Speed of light's all I've got," the tech smiled wryly, "unless you want to pay for a regular FTL mail run. Or talk the Fleet into letting us install an FTL link booster on the transmitter. Even that's not much faster."

Lunzie peered into the tank at the triumphant face of the Phoenix colony's leader, a broad-faced male with thickly branching eyebrows that shadowed his eyes. He was talking about agreements made for trade between Phoenix and the Paraden Company. All that was needed for a colony to be approved by the FSP was a viable population pool and proof that the colony could support itself in the galactic community. "... although this planet appears to be poor in the most valuable minerals, transuranics, there are still sufficient ores to be of interest. We have begun manufacture of..."

"The heavyworlders shouldn't claim that planet, even if the first colonists didn't survive," Satia declared. "There are many more planets with a high gravity than there are ones which fall within the narrow parameters that normal humans can bear."

"In my day," Lunzie began, then stopped, realising how ridiculous she must sound, using an elder's phrase at her apparent physical age. "I mean, when I left Tau Ceti, the heavyworlders had just begun colonising. They were mostly still on Diplo, except for the ones in the FSP corps."

"You know, there must be a connection there somewhere, " the red-haired man mused. 'There was never planet-pirating before the heavyworlders started colonising."

A huge hand seized the man's shoulder and spun him around. "That is a lie," boomed the voice of a heavyworld-born man in a technician's tunic. "Planets have been found stripped and empty long hundreds of years before we existed. You want to blame someone, blame the Others. They're responsible for the dead worlds. Don't blame us." The heavyworlder glared down from his full seven feet of height at the man, and included Lunzie and Satia in his scorn. Lunzie shrank away from him. With a heavyworlder in its midst, the lightweight crowd began to disperse. None of the grumblers wanted to discuss Phoenix personally with one of the heavyweight humans.

The Others. A mysterious force in the galaxy. No one knew who they were, if indeed a race of Others, and not natural cataclysm, had caused destruction of those planets. Lunzie suddenly had a cold feeling between her shoulder blades, as if someone was watching her. She turned around. To her surprise, she saw the Thek that had rescued her waiting on the other side of the corridor. It had no features, no expression, but it drew her to it. She felt that it wanted to talk to her.

"Ccccccooooooouuuurrrrr... aaaaaaaaggggggeee.... Ssssuurrrrrr..... vvvviiiiiiiivvvveee...."it said, when she approached.

"Courage? Survive? What does that mean?" she demanded, but the pyramid of stone said nothing more. It glided slowly away. She wanted to run after it and ask it to clarify the cryptic speech. Theks were known for never wasting a word, especially not on explanation to simple ephemerals such as human beings.

"I suppose it meant that to be comforting," Lunzie decided. "After all, it saved my life, leading that young miner to where my capsule was lodged. But why in the Galaxy didn't it rescue me sooner, if it knew where I was?"

In her assigned room, Lunzie made herself comfortable in the deep, cushiony chair before the cubicle's computer screen. She glanced occasionally at the bunk, freshly made up with sweet-smelling bedding, but avoided touching it as if it was her dreaded enemy. Lunzie wasn't in the least sleepy, and there was still that nagging fear at the back of her mind that she would never wake up again if she succumbed.

Better to clear her brain with some useful input. Once she had run through the user's tutorial, she began systematically to go through the medical journals in Descartes's library. She made a database of all the articles on new topics she wanted to read about. As she pored over her choices, she felt more and more lost. Everything in her field had advanced beyond her training.

As promised, Stev Banus had sat down with her and discussed the credits owed to her by Descartes. It amounted to a substantial balance, well over a million. He recommended that she take it and go back to school. Stev told Lunzie that a position with Descartes was still open, if she wanted to take it. Even without up-to-date training, he felt that Lunzie would be an asset to his staff. With refresher courses under her belt, she could be promoted to department head under Stev's administration.

"We can't restore the years to you, but we can try to make you happy now you're here," he offered.

Lunzie was flattered, but she wasn't certain what to do. She resented having her life interrupted so brutally. She needed to come to terms with her feelings before she could make a decision. Stev's suggestion to seek further education made sense, but Lunzie couldn't make a move until she knew what had happened to Fiona. She went back to the file of medical abstracts and tried to drive away her doubts.

CHAPTER Three

"Did you sleep well?" Satia asked Lunzie the next morning. The intern leaned in through the door to Lunzie's cubicle and waved to get her attention.

Lunzie turned away from the computer screen and smiled. "No. I didn't sleep at all. I spent half the night worrying about Fiona, and the other half trying to get the synthesiser unit to pour me a cup of coffee. It didn't understand the command. How can I get the unit fixed?"

Satia laughed. "Oh, coffee! My grandmother told me about coffee when I was off-platform, visiting her on Inigo. It's very rare, isn't it?"

Lunzie frowned. "No. Where, or rather when, I come from it's as common as mud. And sometimes has a similar taste.... Do you mean to say you've never heard of coffee?" She felt her heart sink. So much had changed over the lost decades, but it was the little things that bothered her most, especially when they affected a lifelong habit. "I usually need something to help me wake up in the morning."

"Oh, I've heard of coffee. No one drinks it any more. There were studies decrying the effects of the heavy oils and caffeine on the nervous and digestive systems. We have peppers now." "Peppers?" Lunzie wrinkled her nose in distaste. "As in capsicum?"

"Oh, no. Restorative. It's a mild stimulant, completely harmless. I drink some nearly every morning. You'll like it." Satia stepped to the synth unit in the wall of Lunzie's quarters, and came back with a full mug. "Try this."

Lunzie sipped the liquid and felt a pervasive tingle race through her tissues. Her body abruptly forgot that it had just spent an entire shift cramped in one position. She gasped. "That's very effective."

"Mm-. Sometimes nothing else will get me out of bed. And it leaves behind none of the sour aftertaste my grandmother claimed from coffee."

"Well, here's to my becoming acclimated to the future." Lunzie raised her cup to Satia. "Oh, that reminds me. The gizmos in the lavatory have me stumped. I figured out which one was the waste-disposer unit, but I haven't the faintest idea what the others are."

Satia laughed again. "Very well. I ought to have thought of it before. I will give you the quarter-credit tour."

Once Lunzie had been shown how to work the various conveniences, Satia punched up a cup of herbal tea for them both.

"I don't understand these newfangled things perfectly yet, but at least I know what they do," Lunzie said, wryly self-deprecating.

Satia sipped tea. "Well, it's all part of the future, designed to make life easier. So the advertisements tell us. My friend, what are you going to do with your future?"

"The way I see it, I have two choices. I can search for Fiona, or I can take refresher courses to fit me to practice medicine in this century, and then try to find her. I had the computer research information for me on discoveries that were just breaking when I went into cold sleep. Progress has certainly been made. Those breakthroughs are now old hat! I feel like a primitive thrust into a city without even the vocabulary to ask for help."

"Perhaps you can stay and study with me. I am completing my internship here with Dr. Banus. I may do my residency off-platform, so as to give me a different perspective in the field of medicine. Specifically, I am studying paediatrics, a field that is becoming ever so important recently - we're having quite a population explosion on the Platform. Of course, that would mean leaving my children behind, and that I do not wish to do. Nonya's three, and Omi is only five months old, They're such a joy, I don't want to miss any of their childhood."

Lunzie nodded sadly. "I did the very same thing, you know. I'm not sure what I want to do, yet. I must work out where to begin."

"Well, come with me first." Satia rose and placed her cup in the disposer hatch for the food processor. "Aiden, the Tri-D technician, told me he wanted to talk to you." Lunzie put her cup aside and hastened after Satia.

"I sent your query to Tau Ceti last shift. Doctor," the technician said, when they located him at the Communications Center. "It'll take several weeks to get a reply out here in the rockies. But I wanted to tell you-" The young man tapped a finger on the console top, impatiently trying to stir his memory. "I think I've seen your surname before. I noticed it, I forget where... in one of the news articles we've received recently. Maybe it's one of your descendants?"

"Really?" Lunzie asked with interest. "Please, show me. I'm sure I have great-nieces and -nephews all over the galaxy by now."

Aiden keyed in an All-Search for the day's input from all six beacons. "Here it comes. Watch the field." The word "Mespil" in a very clear, official- looking typestyle, coalesced in the Tri-D forum, followed by ", Fiona, MD, DV." Other words in the same font formed around it, above and below.

"My daughter! That's her name. Satia, look! Where is she, Aiden? What's this list?" Lunzie demanded, searching the names. "Is there video to go with it?"

The technician looked up from his console, and his expression turned to one of horror. "Oh, Krims, I'm sorry. Doctor, that's the FSP list. The people who were reported missing from the pirated Phoenix colony."

"No!" Satia breathed. She moved to support Lunzie, whose knees had gone momentarily weak. Lunzie gave her a grateful look, but waved her away, steady once again.

"What happens to people who were on planets that have been pirated?" she asked, badly shaken, trying not to let her mind form images of disaster. Fiona!

The young man swallowed. Bearing bad news was not something he enjoyed, and he desperately wanted to give this nice woman encouragement. She had been through so much already. He regretted that he hadn't checked out his information before sending for her. "Sometimes they turn up with no memory of what happened to them. Sometimes they are found working in other places, no problems, but their messages home just went astray. It happens a lot in galactic distant communications; nothing's perfect. Mostly, though, the people are never heard from again."

"Fiona can't be dead. How do I find out what became of her? I must find her."

The technician looked thoughtful. "I'll call Security Chief Wilkins for you. He'll know what you can do."

Chief Wilkins was a short man with a thin gray moustache that obscured his upper lip, and black eyes that wore a guarded expression. He invited her to sit down in his small office, a clean and tidy cubicle that said much about the mind of the man who occupied it. Lunzie explained her situation to him, but judged from his knowing nods that he knew all about her already.

"So what are you going to do?" he asked.

"I'm going to go look for her, of course," she said firmly.

"Fine, fine." He smiled. "Where? You've got your back pay. You have enough money to charge off anywhere in the galaxy you wish and back again. Where will you begin?"

"Where?" Lunzie blinked. "I... I don't know. I suppose I could start at Phoenix, where she was last seen...."

Wilkins shook his head, and made a deprecatory clicking sound with his tongue'. "We don't know that for certain, Lunzie. She was expected there, along with the rest of the colonists."

"Well, the EEC should know if they arrived on Phoenix or not."

"Good, good. There's a start. But it's many light years away from here. What if you don't find her there? Where next?"

"Oh." Lunzie sank back into the chair, which moulded comfortably around her spine. "You're quite right. I wasn't thinking about how I would find her. All her life, I was able to walk to any place she might be. Nothing was too far away." In her mind, she saw a star map of the civilised galaxy. Each point represented at least one inhabited world. It took weeks, months, or even years to pass between some of those star systems, and searching each planet, questioning each person in every city.... She hugged her elbows, feeling very small and helpless.

Wilkins nodded approvingly. "You have ascertained the first difficulty in a search of this kind - distance. The second is time. Time has passed since that report was news. It will take more time to send out inquiries and receive replies. You must begin at the other end of history, and find out where she's been. Her childhood home, records of marriage or other alliances. And she must have had an employer at one time or another in her life. That will give you clues to where she is now.

"For example, why was she on that planetary expedition? As a settler? As a specialist? An observer? The EEC has records. You may have noticed" - here Wilkins activated the viewscreen on his desk and swivelled the monitor toward Lunzie - "that her name is followed by the initials MD and DV."

Lunzie confronted the FSP list once more, trying to ignore the connotation of disaster. "MD. She's a doctor. DV-" Lunzie searched her memory. "That denotes a specialty in virology."

"So she must have gone to University somewhere, too. Good. You would have wanted her to opt for Higher Education, I am sure. What did she do with her schooling? You have a great many clues to work with, but it will take many months, even years, for answers to come back to you. The best thing for you to do is to establish a permanent base of operations, and send out your queries."

"Stev Banus suggested I go back to school and update myself."

"A valid suggestion. While you're doing that, you'll also be accomplishing your search. If one line of questioning becomes fruitless, start others. Ask for help from any agency you think might be of use to you. Never mind if they duplicate your efforts. It is easier to have something you might have missed noticed by a fresh, non-involved mind. And it will be less expensive than running out to investigate prospects by yourself. It will be a costly search in any case, but you won't be in the thick of it, trying to make sense out of your incoming information without the perspective to consider it."

"I do need perspective. I've never had to deal on such a vast basis before. Her father and I corresponded regularly while she was growing up. It simply never occurred to me to think about the transit time between letters, and it was a long time! It's faster to fly FTL, but for me to think of travelling all that distance to a place, when I might not find her at the end of the journey... Fiona is too precious to me to allow me to think clearly. Thank you for your clear sight." Lunzie stood up. "And, Wilkins? Thank you for not assuming that she's dead."

"You don't believe she is. One of your other clues is your own insight. Trust it." The edges of the thin moustache lifted in an encouraging smile. "Good luck, Lunzie."

The child-care centre was full of joyful chaos. Small humans chased other youngsters around the padded floor, shouting, careening off foam-core furniture, and narrowly missing the two adults who crouched in one of the conversation rings, trying to stay out of the way.

"Vigul!" Satia cried. "Let go of Tlink's tentacle and he will let go of your hair. Now!" She clapped her hands sharply, ignoring the disappointed "Awwwwww" from both children. She relaxed, but kept a sharp eye on the combatants. "They are normally good, but occasionally things get out of hand."

"They're probably acting up in the presence of a stranger - me!" Lunzie said, smiling.

Satia sighed. "I'm glad the Weft parents weren't around to see that. He's so young, he doesn't know yet that it's considered bad manners by his people to shape-shift in public. I'd rather that he learn to be himself with other children. It shows that he trusts them. That's good." Beside Lunzie in his cot, Satia's infant son Omi twisted and stretched restlessly in his sleep. She picked up the infant and cradled him gently against her chest, his head resting on her shoulder. He subsided, sucking one tiny fist stuffed halfway into his mouth. Lunzie smiled down at him. She remembered Fiona at that age. She'd been in medical school, and every day carried the baby with her to class. Lunzie joyed in the closeness of the infant cradled in the snuggle pack, heartbeat to heartbeat with her. That perfect little life, like an exotic flower, that she'd created. The teachers made smiling reference to the youngest class member, who was often the first example of young humankind that an alien student ever encountered. Fiona was so good. She never cried during lectures, though she fretted occasionally in exams, seeming to sense Lunzie's own apprehension. Harshly, Lunzie put those thoughts from her mind. Those days were gone. Fiona was an adult. Lunzie must learn to think of her that way.

Omi snuggled in, removing the fist from his mouth for a tiny yawn and popping it back again. Lunzie hugged him, and shook her head aggressively. "I refuse to believe that Fiona is dead. I cannot, will not give up hope." She sighed. "But Wilkins is right. I've got to be patient, but it'll be the hardest thing I've ever done." Lunzie grinned ruefully. "None of my family is good at being patient. It's why we all become doctors. I have a lot to learn, and unlearn, too. Schoolwork will help me keep my mind in order."

"I'll miss you," Satia said. "We have become friends, I think. You'll always have a home here, if you want one."

"I don't think I'll ever have a home again," Lunzie said sadly, thinking of the vastness of the star map. "But thank you for the offer. It means a great deal to me." Gently, she laid the baby back in his cot. "You know, I went to see Jilet, the miner I was treating for agoraphobia before the Nellie Mine crashed. He's still hale and healthy, at ninety-two, good for another thirty years at least. His hair is white, and his chest has slipped into his belly, but I still recognized him on sight. Illin Romsey is his grandson. He prospected for some fifty years after his shuttle was rescued, and now he's working as a deck supervisor. I was glad to see him looking so well." Her lips twitched in a mirthless smile. "He didn't remember me. Not at all."

Astris Alexandria University was delighted to accept an application for continuing education from one of their alumna, but they were obviously taken aback when Lunzie, dressed very casually and carrying her own luggage, arrived in the administration office to enroll for classes. Lunzie caught the admissions secretary surreptitiously running her identification to verify her identity.

"I'm sorry for the abrupt reception, Doctor Mespil, but frankly, considering your age, we were expecting someone rather more mature in appearance. We only wanted to make sure. May I ask, have you been taking radical rejuvenative therapy?"

"My age? I'm thirty-four," Lunzie stated briskly. "I've been in cold sleep."

"Oh, I see. But for our records, ninety-six years have passed since your birth. I'm afraid your I.D. code bracelet and transcripts will reflect that," the registrar offered with concern. "I will make a note for the files regarding your circumstances and physical age, if you request."

Lunzie held up a hand. "No, thank you. I'm not that vain. If it doesn't confuse anyone, I can live without a footnote. There's another matter with which you can help me. What sort of student housing, bed and board, can the University provide? I'm looking for quarters as inexpensive as I can get, so long as it still has communication capability and library access and storage. I'll even share sanitary facilities, if needed. I have few personal possessions, and I'm easy enough to get along with."

The registrar seemed puzzled. "I would have thought... your own apartment, or a private domicile..."

"Unfortunately, no. I need to leave as much of my capital resources as possible free to cope with a personal matter. I'm cutting back on all non-essentials."

Clearly, the woman's sense of outrage regarding the dignity and priorities of Astris Alexandria alumni was kindled against Lunzie. She was too casual, too careless of her person. Her only luggage was the pair of small and dowdy synth-fabric duffel's slung across the back of the opulent office chair in which she sat. Not at all what one would expect of a senior graduate of this elite seat of learning.

To Lunzie's relief, her cases had been kept in vacuum temperatures in remote storage on the Mining Platform, so that none of her good fibre-fabric clothes were perished or parasite-eaten. She didn't care what sort of state the University wanted her to keep. Now that she had acknowledged her goals, she could once more take command of her own life as she had been accustomed to doing. Austerity didn't bother her. She preferred a spare environment. She had felt helpless on the Descartes platform, in spite of everyone's kindness. This was a familiar venue. Here she knew just exactly how much power the authorities had, and how much was empty protest. She kept her expression neutral and waited patiently.

"Well," the woman allowed, at last. "There is a quad dormitory with only a Weft trio sharing it at present. There is a double room with one space opening up. The tenant is being graduated, and the room will be clear within two weeks, when the new term begins. One room of a six-room suite in a mixed-species residence hall...."

"Which is the cheapest?" Lunzie asked, abruptly cutting short the registrar's recitation. She smiled sweetly at the woman's scowl.

With a look of utter disapproval, the registrar put her screen on Search. The screen blurred, then stopped scrolling as one entry centred itself and flashed. "A third share of a University-owned apartment. The other two current tenants are human. But it is rather far away from campus."

"I don't mind. As long as it has a roof and a cot, I'll be happy."

Juggling an armful of document cubes and plas-sheet evaluation forms as well as her bags, Lunzie let herself into the small foyer of her new home. The building was old, predating Lunzie's previous University term. It made her feel at home to see something that hadn't changed appreciably. The old-fashioned textboard in the building's entryhall flashed with personal messages for the students who lived there, and a new line had already appeared at the bottom, adding her name and a message of welcome, followed by a typical bureaucratic admonishment to turn in her equivalency tests as soon as possible. The building was fairly quiet. Most of the inhabitants would have day classes or jobs to attend to.

Her unit was on the ninth level of the fifty-story hall. The turbovator whooshed satisfyingly to its destination, finishing up on her doorstep with a slight jerk and a noisy rattle, not silently as the unnerving lifts aboard the Platform had. Neither of her room-mates was home. The apartment was of reasonably good size, clean, though typically untidy. The shelves were cluttered with the typical impedimenta of teenagers. It made her feel almost as if she were living with Fiona again. One of the tenants enjoyed building scale models. Several were hung from the ceiling, low enough that Lunzie was glad she wasn't five inches taller.

A little searching revealed that the vacant sleeping chamber was the smallest one closest to the food synthesiser. She unpacked and took off her travel-soiled clothes. The weather, one of the things that Lunzie had always loved about Astris Alexandria, was mild and warm most of the year in the University province, so she happily shed the heavier trousers she had worn on the transport, and laid out a light skirt.

The trousers were badly creased, and could use cleaning. Lunzie felt she would be the better for a good wash, too. She assumed that all the standard cleaning machinery would be available in the lavatory. She gathered up toiletries, laundry, and her dusty boots.

In the lavatory, Lunzie stared with dismay at the amenities. Instead of being comfortably familiar, they were spankingly brand new. The building's facilities had been very recently updated, even newer and stranger than the ones Descartes furnished to its living quarters. If it hadn't been for Satia's patient help on the Platform, she would not now have the faintest idea what she was looking at. There were enough similarities between them for her to figure out how to use these without causing a minor disaster.

While her clothes were being processed, she slipped on fresh garments and sat down at the console in her bedroom. She logged on to the library system, and requested an I.D. number which would give her access to the library from any console on the planet. Automatically, she applied for an increase in the standard student's allotment of long-term memory storage from 320K to 2048K, and opened an account in the Looking-GLASS program. If there was any stored data about Fiona anywhere, the Galactic Library All-Search System, GLASS, as it was fondly known, would find it. As an icon to luck, she set Fiona's hologram on top of the console.

LOOKING-GLASS LOG-ON (2851.0917 Standard) scrolled up on her screen.

She typed in.Query Missing Person. NAME.Fiona Mespil. DOB/RACE/SEX/S,PO.2775.0903/ human/female/Astris Alexandria. She had been born right here at the University, so that was her planet of origin..Current location requested.. LOCATION SUBJECT LAST SEEN? Lunzie paused for a moment, then entered:.Last verifiable location, Tau Ceti colony, 2789.1215. Last presumed location. Phoenix colony, 2851.0421.. The screen went blank for a moment as GLASS digested her request. Lunzie entered a command for the program to dump its findings into her assigned memory storage and pre- pared to log off.

Suddenly, the screen chimed and scrolled up a display of dates and entries, with the heading;

MESPIL, FIONA TRANSCRIPT OF EDUCATION (REVERSE CHRONOLOGICAL)

2802 GRANTED DEGREE CERTIFICATE IN BIOTECHNOLOGY, ASTRIS ALEXANDRIA UNIVERSITY

2797 GRANTED DEGREE CERTIFICATE IN VIROLOGY, ASTRIS ALEXANDRIA UNIVERSITY

2795 ASTRIS ALEXANDRIA UNIVERSITY, GRADUATED WITH HONORS, M.D. [GENERAL]

2792 GRADUATED MARSBASE SECONDARY SCHOOL EDUCATION SYSTEM, GRADUATED GENERAL CERTIFICATE

2791 TAU CETI EDUCATION SYSTEM, TRANSFERRED

2787 CAPELLA PRIMARY SCHOOL EDUCATION SYSTEM, GRADUATED

Following was a list of courses and grades. Lunzie let out a shout of joy. Records existed right here on Astris Alexandria! She hadn't expected to see anything come up yet. She was only laying the groundwork for her information search. The search was beginning to bear fruit already..Save., she commanded the computer.

"I should have known," she said, shaking her head. "I might have known she'd come here to Astris, after all the hype I'd given the place." The first successful step in her search! For the first time, Lunzie truly felt confident. A celebration was in order. She surveyed the apartment, and advanced smiling on the food synthesiser. One success deserved another.

"Now," she said, rubbing her hands together. "I am going to teach you how to make coffee."

An hour or so later, she had a potful of murky brew that somewhat resembled coffee, though it was so bitter she had to program a healthy dose of a mellowing sweetener with which to dilute it. There was caffeine in the stuff, at any rate. She was satisfied, though still disappointed that the formula for coffee had disappeared from use over the last sixty years. Still, there was a School of Nutrition in the University. Someone must still have coffee on record. She considered ordering a meal, but decided against it. If the food was anything like she remembered it, she wasn't that hungry. Synthesised food always tasted flat to her, and the school synth machines were notoriously bad. She had no reason to believe that their reputation - or performance - had improved in her absence.

When time permitted, Lunzie planned to treat herself to some real planet-grown food. Astris Alexandria had always produced tasty legumes and greens, and perhaps, she thought hopefully, the farm community had even branched out into coffee bushes. Like all civilised citizens of the FSP, Lunzie ate only foods of vegetable origin, disdaining meats as a vestige of barbaric history. She hoped neither of her roommates was a throwback, though the Housing Committee would undoubtedly have seen to it that such students would be isolated, out of consideration to others.

Following the instructions of the plas-sheets, she logged into the University's computer system and signed up for a battery of tests designed to evaluate her skills and potential. The keyboard had a well-used feel, and Lunzie quickly found herself rattling along at a clip. One of the regulations which had not existed in her time was registration qualification: enrolment for certain classes was restricted to those who qualified through the examinations. Lunzie noted with irritation that several of the courses which she wanted to take fell into that category. The rationale, translated from the bureaucratese, was that space was so limited in these courses that the University wanted to guarantee that the students who signed up for them would be the ones who would get the most out of them. Even if she passed the exams, there was no guarantee that she could get in immediately. Lunzie gave a resigned shrug. Until she had a good lead on finding Fiona, she was filed here. There was no hurry. She started to punch in a request for the first exam.

"Hello?" a tentative voice called from the door.

"Come?" Lunzie answered, peering over the edge of the console.

"Peace, citizen. We're your roommates." The speaker was a slender boy with straight, silky black hair and round blue eyes. He didn't look more than fifteen Standard years old. Behind him was a smiling girl with soft brown hair gathered up in a puffy coil on top other head. "I'm Shof Scotny, from Demarkis. This is Pomayla Esglar."

"Welcome," Pomayla said, warmly, offering her hand. "You didn't have the privacy seal on the door, so we thought it would be all right to come in and greet you."

"Thank you," Lunzie replied, rising and extending hers. Pomayla covered it with her free hand. "It's nice to meet you. I'm Lunzie Mespil. Call me Lunzie. Ah... is something wrong?" she asked, catching a curious look that passed between Shof and Pomayla.

"Nothing," Shof answered lightly. "You know, you don't look ninety-six. I expected you to look like my grandmother."

"Well, thank you so much. You don't look old enough to be in college, my lad," Lunzie retorted, amused. She reconsidered asking the registrar to put an explanation on her records.

Shof sighed long-sufferingly. He'd obviously heard that before. "I can't help it that I'm brilliant at such a tender age." Lunzie grinned at him. He was hopelessly cute and likely accustomed to getting away with murder.

Pomayla elbowed Shof in the midriff, and he let out an outraged oof!. "Forgive Mr. Modesty. They don't bother teaching tact to the Computer Science majors, since the machines don't take offense at bad manners. I'm in the Interplanetary Law program, What's your field of study?"

"Medicine. I'm back for some refresher courses. I've been... rather out of touch the last few years."

"I'll bet. Well, come on, granny," the boy offered, slinging a long forelock of hair out of his eyes. "We'll start getting you up to date this millisecond."

"Shof!" Pomayla shoved her outrageous roommate through the door. "Tact?"

"Did I say something wrong already?" Shof asked with all the ingenuousness he could muster as he was propelled out into the turbovator.

Lunzie followed, chuckling.

Looking-GLASS turned up nothing of note over the next several weeks. Lunzie submerged herself in her new classes. Her roommates were gregarious and friendly, and insisted that she participate in everything that interested them. She found herself hauled along to student events and concerts with them and their "Gang," as they called themselves, a loose conglomeration of thirty or so of all ages and races from across the University. There seemed to be nothing the group had in common but good spirits and curiosity. She found their outings to be a refreshing change from the long hours of study.

No topic was sacred to the Gang, not physical appearance, nor habits, age, or custom. Lunzie soon got tired of being called granny by beings whose ages surely equalled her own thirty-four Standard years. The subject of her cold sleep and subsequent search for her daughter was still too painful to discuss, so she lightly urged the conversation away from personal matters. She wondered if Shof knew about her search, seeing as he had already unlocked her admissions records. If he did, he was being unusually reticent in not bringing it up. Perhaps she had managed to lock her GLASS file tightly enough away from his prying gaze. Or perhaps he just didn't feel it was interesting enough. In most cases when someone started a query, she would carefully reverse the flow and launch a personal probe into the life of her inquisitor, to the amusement of the Gang, who loved watching Lunzie go into action.

"You ought to have taken up Criminal Justice," Pomayla insisted. "I'd hate to be on the witness stand, hiding anything from you."

"No, thank you. I'd rather be Doctor McCoy than Rumpole of the Bailey."

"Who?" demanded Cosir, one of their classmates, a simian Brachian with handsome purple fur and reflective white pupils. "What is this Rompul?"

"Something on Tri-D," Shof speculated.

"Ancient history," complained Frega, another of the Gang, polishing her ebony-painted nails on her tunic sleeve.

"Nothing I've ever heard of," Cosir insisted. "That's got to have been off the Forum for a hundred Standard years."

"At least that," Lunzie agreed gravely. "You could say I'm a bit of an antiquarian."

"And at your age, too!" chortled Shof. He clutched his hands over his narrow belly. He tapped a fist on it and pretended to listen for the echo. "Hmm. I've gone hollow. Let's go eat."

Lectures were, on the whole, as dull as Lunzie remembered them. Only two courses kept her interest piqued. Her practicum in Diagnostic Science was interesting, as was the required course in Discipline.

Diagnostic science had changed enormously since she had practiced medicine. The computerised tests to which incoming patients were subjected were less intrusive and more comprehensive than she would have believed possible. Her mother, from whom Lunzie had inherited the "healing hands," had always felt that to be a good doctor, one needed only a thoroughgoing grasp of diagnostic science and an excellent bedside manner. Her mother would have been as pleased as she was to know that Fiona had followed in the family tradition and pursued a medical career.

Diagnostic instruments were no longer so cumbersome as they had been in her day. Most units could be carried two or three in a pouch, saving time and space in case of an emergency. Lunzie's favourite was the "bod bird," a small medical scanner that required no hands-on use. Using new anti-gravity technology, it would hover at any point around a patient and display its readings. It was especially good for use in zero-gee. The unit was very popular among physicians who specialised in patients much larger than themselves, and non-humanoid doctors who considered extending manipulative digits too close to another being as an impolite intrusion. Lunzie liked it because it left her hands free for patient care. She made a note of the "bod bird" as one of the instruments she would buy for herself when she went back into practice. It was expensive, but not completely out of her range.

Once data had been gathered on a subject's condition, the modern doctor had at her command such tools as computer analysis to suggest treatment. The program was sophisticated enough that it gave a physician a range of choices. In extreme but not immediately life-threatening cases, recombinant gene-splicing, chemical treatment, or intrusive or non-intrusive surgery might be suggested. It was up to the physician to decide which would be best in the case. Types of progressive therapy now in use made unnecessary many treatments that would formerly have been considered mandatory to save a patient's life.

Lunzie admired her new tools, but she was not happy with the way attitudes toward medical treatment had altered in the last six decades. Too much of the real work of the physician had been taken out of the hands of the practitioner and placed in the "hands" of cold, impersonal machines. She openly disagreed with her professors that the new way was better for patients because there was less chance of physician error or infection.

"Many more will give up the will to live for lack of a little personal care," Lunzie pointed out to the professor of Cardiovascular Mechanics, speaking privately with him in his office. "The method for repairing the tissues of a damaged heart is technically perfect, yes, but what about a patient's feelings? The mood and mental condition of your patient are as important as the scientific treatment available for his ailment."

"You're behind the times. Doctor Mespil. This is the best possible treatment for cardiac patients suffering from weak artery walls that are in danger of aneurysm. The robot technician can send microscopic machines through the patient's very bloodstream to stimulate regrowth of damaged tissue. He need never be worried by knowing what is going on inside him."

Lunzie crossed her arms and fixed a disapproving eye on him. "So they're not troubled by asking what's happening to them? Of course, there are some patients who have never known anything but unresponsive doctors. I suppose in your case it wouldn't make any difference."

"That's unjust. Doctor. I want what is best for my patients."

"And I want to do more than tending the machines tending the patient," Lunzie shot back. "I'm a doctor, not a mechanic."

"And I am a surgeon, not a psychologist."

"Well! It doesn't surprise me in the least that the psychology professor disagrees with your principles one hundred percent! You're not improving your patient's chances for survival by working on him as if he was an unaware piece of technological scrap that needs repair."

"Doctor Mespil," the cardiologist said, tightly. "As you so rightly point out, the patient's mental condition is responsible for a significant part of his recovery. It is his choice whether to live or die after receiving quality medical care. I refuse to interfere with free will."

"That is a ridiculous cop-out."

"I assume from your antiquated slang that you think I am shirking my duties. I am aware that you have published in respected scientific journals and have a background in medical ethics. Commendable. I have even read your abstracts in back issues of Bioethics Quarterly. But may I remind you of your status? You are my student, and I am your teacher. While you are in my class, you will learn from me. And I would appreciate it if you would cease to harangue me in front of your fellows. However many hands you wish to hold sympathetically when you leave my course is entirely up to you. Good afternoon."

After ending that unsatisfying interview, Lunzie stormed into the gymnasium for a good workout with her Discipline exercises.

Discipline was a required study for high-level physicians, medical technicians, and those who wanted to pursue deepspace explorations. The tests she'd taken showed her natural aptitude for it but she dreaded having to set aside the hours necessary to complete the course. She had moved from the basic studies to Adept training years ago. Discipline was time-consuming but more than that, it was exhausting. She was dismayed to discover that her new teacher insisted that at least six hours every day be devoted to exercises, meditation, and practice of concentration. It left little time for any other activity. The short months since she had practiced Discipline showed in softened muscles and a shortened attention span.

After a few weeks, she was pleased to notice that the exercises had put more of a spring back in her walk and lessened her dependency on her ersatz coffee. She could wake up effortlessly most mornings, even after little sleep. She had forgotten how good it felt to be in shape. Meditation techniques made that sleep more refreshing, since it was possible to subsume her worries about Fiona by an act of will, banishing her concerns temporarily to the back of her mind.

Her memory retention improved markedly. She found it easier to assimilate new data, such as the current political leanings and policies as well as the new styles and colloquialisms, besides the data from her schoolwork. It was clear, too, that she was in better physical shape than she had been in years. Her bottom had shrunk one trouser size and her belly muscles had tightened up. She mentioned her observations to Pomayla, who promptly pounced on her and dragged her out to the stores to buy new clothes.

"It's a terrific excuse. I didn't want to mention it before, Lunzie, but your garb is dated. We weren't sure if that was the way fashions are on your homeworld, or if you couldn't afford new clothes."

"What makes you think I can now?" Lunzie asked calmly.

Pomayla, embarrassed, struggled to get her confession out. "It's Shof. He says you have plenty of credits. He really is brilliant with computers, you know. Um." She turned away to the synth unit for a pepper. With her face hidden from Lunzie, she admitted, "He opened your personal records. He wanted to know why you look so young at your age. Were you truly in cold sleep for sixty years?"

Lunzie refused to be shocked. She'd suspected something of the kind would happen eventually. "I don't remember anything about it, to be honest, but I find it difficult to argue with the facts. Drat Shof. Those records were sealed!"

"You can't keep him out of anything. I bet he knows how many fastenings you've got in your underthings, too. We get along as roommates because I treat him the same way I treat my little brother: respect for his abilities, and none for his ego. It's a good thing he has a healthy moral infrastructure, or he'd be rolling in credits with a straight A average. Oh, come on, let go of a little money. All you ever use it for is your mysterious research. Fashions have changed since you bought that outfit. No one wears trousers tight about the calves any more. You'll feel better about yourself. I promise."

"Well..." Shof must not have found her GLASS file yet. Thank goodness. There were other things in her records which she didn't want to have found, such as her involvement as a student on a clone colony ethics panel. Surely by now the laundered details of the aborted project had been made public, but she couldn't be sure how they would feel about her involvement in it. Clone technology was anathema to most people. Lunzie weighed the price of a few new garments against the cost of data search. Perhaps she had been keeping too tight a hand on the credit balance. Even though she hated the flatness of synth food she had even been eating it exclusively to save the cost of real-meals. Every fraction of a credit must be available for the search for Fiona. Perhaps she was allowing her obsession to run her life. It wouldn't make all that much difference, with the interest her credits were earning, to spend a little on herself.

"All right. We can shop for a while, and you can drop me off at the Tri-D Forum afterward. I want to see today's news."

Lunzie had taken to heart Security Chief Wilkins's advice to make use of every source of information she could. At the EEC office, she filled out hundreds of forms requesting access to any documents they had on Fiona, and asking how she was involved in the doomed Phoenix colony.

For doomed it was. In the interval since she had seen the first report about Phoenix, an independent merchant ship had made planetfall there to trade with the colonists and had sold its story to the Tri-D. The merchant brought back vid-cubes of the terrain, which showed the "smoking hole" where the light-weight camp had been. The merchant had also affirmed that the heavyweight humans now living there were possessed of no weapons of that magnitude and could not possibly have caused the colony's destruction. Lunzie, who had conceived a dislike for heavyworlders that surprised her, mistrusted such a blanket assurance, but the colonists had gone under oath and sworn the planet was vacant when they landed. In any case, they had proved the viability of their own settlement, and were now entitled to FSP privileges and protection. Looking-GLASS told her much the same thing.

The heavyworlders had their own disappointments, too. The original EEC prospect report, made twelve years before the original colony was launched, had stated that Phoenix had copious radioactive ores that could be easily mined because upthrust folds in the planet's surface had brought much of it in reach. Their rad counters didn't so much as murmur. The planet's crust had been swept clean of transuranics. If the Phoenix settlers were hoping to become a trading power in the FSP with a new source of the ever-scarce ores, they were frustrated. Rather than chalk the omission off to the unknown Others, as the Tri-D chat-show presenters were doing, the FSP was suggesting that the original report had been in error. Lunzie doubted it. Her resentment for the unknown planet pirates redoubled. Her hopes of finding Fiona alive were slipping away.

The University's Tri-D Forum was a public facility for use free of charge by any individual. Cheap entertainment on Astris was fairly limited beyond out-door concerts and Tri-D, and Tri-D was the only one which was held in all weathers. The display field hovered several feet above the ground in a lofty hexagonal chamber lined with tiered benches. The Forum was seldom filled to capacity, except during reception of important sports events, but it was never completely empty. News broadcasts and reports of interest were received throughout the day and night, the facts recited in FSP Basic, with Basic subtitling over the videos of local language events. Astris University authorities tried to keep it from becoming a haven for the homeless, preferring to divert those luckless beings to shelters, but even at night there were usually a few citizens watching the broadcast: insomniacs, natural nocturnals, a few passing the time between night classes, or just those who were unwilling to let the day end. Lunzie noted that most of those who used the facility were older and more mature than the average. Entertainment Fora were available to the younger set who weren't interested in the current news.

Lunzie went there whenever sleep eluded her, but her usual time to view Tri-D was late morning, just before the midday meal. A dozen or so regulars smiled at her or otherwise acknowledged her presence when she came in after shopping with Pomayla. She kept her head down as she found her accustomed seat. Though she hated to admit it to herself, she was becoming addicted to Tri-D. Lunzie watched all the news, human interest stories as well as hard fact documentation. Nothing much had changed but the names in the sixty-two years since she was in the stream. Piracy, politics, disaster, joy, tears, life. New discoveries, new science, new prejudices to replace the old ones. New names for old things. The hardest thing to get used to was how old the world leaders and public figures of her day were now. So many of them were dead of old age, and she was still thirty-four. It made her feel as though there was something immoral in her, watching them, secure in her extended youth. She promised herself that when she was sufficiently familiarised with the news events of her lost years, she would quit stopping in to the Forum every morning, but she didn't count on keeping that promise.

The round-the-clock headline retrospective aired at midday. Lunzie always waited through that to see if there was any story that might relate to Fiona, and then went on with her day. She had arrived at the Forum later than usual. The headline portion was just ending as she entered the dim arena. "There is nothing new since yesterday," one of the regulars, a human man, whispered as he stood up to leave.

"Thanks," Lunzie murmured back. The Tri-D field filled the room with light as another text file appeared, and she met his eyes. He smiled down at her, and eased his way out along the bench toward the exit. Lunzie settled in among her parcels. Watching repeats of earlier broadcasts didn't bore her. She considered Tri-D in the light of an extracurricular course in the interaction of living beings. She was instantly absorbed in the unfolding story in the hovering field.

CHAPTER Four

Lunzie had no classes that afternoon, so following her visit to the Forum, she decided to stop in at the EEC office. It had been nearly a Standard year since she filled out the forms requesting Fiona's records. So far, she hadn't been told anything, but every time she came in there were more forms to fill out. She was becoming frustrated with the bureaucratic jumble, smelling a delaying technique, and an irritating one at that. Her temper had reached the fraying point.

"You're just giving me more paperwork so you don't have to tell me you don't know anything," Lunzie accused a thin-faced clerk over the ceramic-topped counter between them. "I don't believe you've even advanced my query to the FSP databanks."

"Really, Citizen, such an accusation. These things take time...." the man began, patiently, glancing nervously at the other clerks.

Lunzie held on to her temper with all of her will. "I have given you time. Citizen. I am Dr. Mespil's next of kin, and I want to know what she was doing on that expedition and where she is now."

"This information will be sent to you by comlink. There is no need to come into this facility every time you have questions."

"Nothing ever gets answered anyway. I've never had information passed on to me even when I do come here in person. Have you sent my queries on to the FSP databank?"

"Your caseworker should be keeping you posted on details."

"I don't have a caseworker," Lunzie's voice rose up the scale from a growl to a shriek. "I've never been assigned one. I've never been told I needed one."

"Ah. Well, if you'll just fill out these forms requesting official assistance, I will see who has room in their caseload for you." The clerk blithely fanned a sheaf of plas-sheets before her, and disappeared through the swinging partitions before she could fire off an angry retort.

Muttering furiously to herself, Lunzie picked up the stylus and pulled the forms over. More of the same nonsense. Heartless bureaucratic muckshovelers....

Some days later, she was back filling out yet another form.

"Excuse me. Dr. Mespil." Lunzie looked up to find a tall man standing over her. "My name is Teodor Janos. I'll be your caseworker. I... haven't we met?" He sat down across from her and peered at her closely. His straight black brows wrinkled together.

"No, I don't think so - Wait a milli." She blinked at him, trying to place him, then smiled. "Never formally, I'm afraid. I've seen you at the Tri-D."

Teodor threw his head back and laughed. "Of course. A fellow viewer. Yes. You leave before I do most days, I think. I saw you, only a short time ago, on my way out. Good, then we have something in common. I am supposed to relate to you as closely as I can. But not too much. Officially." His smile was warm, and slightly mischievous.

"You're new at this," Lunzie guessed. "Very. I've only been in this position since the beginning of the year. Would you prefer a case-worker with more experience? I can find one for you."

"No. You'll do just fine. You're the first person with any life in you I've seen in this office."

That set him laughing again. "Some would say that is a disadvantage," Teodor admitted humorously, showing even, white teeth. "Let us see. You wish information on your daughter, also a doctor, whose name is Fiona, and who was involved in the Phoenix expedition, which ended in failure."

"That's right."

He consulted an electronic clipboard. "And the last time you had contact with her was when she was fourteen? And she is how old now?"

"Seventy-seven," Lunzie confessed, and braced herself for a jibing remark. "An accident to my space transport forced me into cold sleep."

To her surprise, Teodor only nodded. "Ah. So the dates in this record are accurate. Another thing which we have in common, Lunzie. May I call you Lunzie? Such an unusual name."

"Certainly, citizen Janos."

"I am Tee. Teodor to my parents and my employer, only."

"Thank you. Tee."

"So, let us go over your questions, please, if you don't mind. I promise you, it is the last time."

With a deep sigh, Lunzie started from the top of her now-familiar recitation. "When I disappeared, Fiona was sent from Tau Ceti to my brother Edgard on MarsBase. She finished school there, and came here to study medicine. Her first employer was Dr. Clora, affiliated with Didomaki Hospital. She went into private practice and got married. According to transmissions found for me by Looking-GLASS, she applied to the FSP a few years after that. And that is the last I've been able to discover. Everything else about her is locked up in the databanks of the FSP, and no one will tell me anything."

Tee frowned sympathetically. "I will get information for you, Lunzie," he promised. "Is your communications code here? I'll notify you whenever I find something."

With greater hope than she had felt in weeks, Lunzie walked out into the warm air. She was in such good spirits she decided to go back to her quarters on foot. It was a long walk, but the day was fine and clear. Her parcels bumped forgotten against her back.

She checked the message board automatically on her way into the residence hall. Beneath the school's notices and invitations for the three roommates from the Gang was a small, frantically flashing message:

"Lunzie, call Tee," and a code number. Lunzie hurried up to the apartment, tossed her parcels onto her bed, and flew over to the communications center. She danced impatiently from one foot to the other, waiting for the connection to go through.

"Tee, I got your message. What is it?" she demanded of the image on the comset breathlessly. "What is it? What have you found?"

"Nothing, nothing but you, lovely lady," Tee replied.

"What?" Lunzie shrieked, disbelievingly. She couldn't have heard him correctly. "Say that again? No, don't - What has this to do with my investigation?"

"Only my eagerness to know the querent better: you. It occurred to me only when you had gone, that I would enjoy escorting you to dinner this evening. But it was too late to ask. You had already departed. So I called and left a message. You do not mind?" he inquired, his voice a soothing purr.

One part of Lunzie felt extremely let down, but the rest of her was flattered by the attention. "I don't mind, I suppose, though you could have been less cryptic in your message."

"Ah, but the mystery made you react more quickly." Tee smiled wickedly. "I finish work very soon. Shall I come by for you?"

"It's a long way out here. I'm at the tail end of the '15' Transportation Line. Why don't we meet?"

"Why not? Where?" Tee asked.

"Where else?" Lunzie answered, hand over the cutoff control. "The Tri-D Forum."

In spite of his audacity. Tee proved otherwise to be a courteous and charming companion. He chose the restaurant, one of Astris's finest, and stated unequivocally that he would pay for both their meals, but he insisted that Lunzie choose from the menu for both of them.

Lunzie, fond of good food and wine, and weary of student synth-swill, went down the list with a critical eye. The selection was very good, and she was pleased by the variety, exclaiming over a few of her old favourites which the restaurant offered. To the human server's obvious approval, she selected a well-orchestrated dinner in every detail from appetizers to dessert. "I have a heirloom recipe from my great-granny for the potatoes Vesuvio. If their dish is anything like hers, this meal will be worth eating."

"But you must also choose wines," Tee offered, temptingly.

"Oh, I couldn't," Lunzie said. "This will already cost the wide blue sky."

"Then I shall." And he did, choosing a wine Lunzie loved, one which wouldn't be overpowered by the garlic in the main course; and finishing up for dessert with a fine vintage blue Altairian cordial, the price of which he would not let Lunzie see.

Lunzie enjoyed her meal wholeheartedly, both the food and the company. Because of their common interest in Tri-D, she and Tee were able to converse almost infinitely on a range of subjects, including galactic politics and trends. Their opinions were dissimilar, but to her relief, not mutually exclusive. Beyond the outrageous compliments he paid her throughout the meal, which Lunzie saw as camouflage fireworks for a sensitive nature that had been wounded in the past. Tee was otherwise an interesting and intelligent companion. They talked about cooking and compared various ethnic cuisines they had tried. Tee loved his food as much as she did, though his frame was the ectomorphic sort that would never wear excess weight for long. Lunzie looked down cautiously at the shimmering, teal tissue sheath that she had purchased that afternoon at Pomayla's urging. It was gorgeous, but outlined every curve. That wouldn't fit long if she indulged like this too frequently.

Tee was a man of expansive physical gestures. He waved his hands to underscore the importance of a point he was making, nearly to the destruction of the meals for the next table, being delivered at that moment by a server. Lunzie always noticed hands. His were long-boned but very broad in the palm, and the fingers were square at the tips. Capable hands. His thick dark brown hair fell often into his eyes, tangling in his eyelashes, which were shamefully long for a man's. Lunzie wished hers would look so good without enhancement. He was a handsome man. She wondered why it had taken her so long to notice that fact. It struck her too that it had been a long time since she'd been out for an evening with an admirer, not since she and Sion Mespil were courting. She rather missed the experience.

Tee caught her staring at him, and caught her hand up in his. "You haven't heard what I just said," he accused her lightly. He kissed her fingertips.

"No," she admitted. "I was thinking. Tee, what did you mean when you said in the EEC office that we had something more in common?"

"Ah, so that's it. We have in common lost time. I don't know whether cryogenics is a boon to the galaxy at large or not. It is not to me. I almost rather that I had died, or remained awake, then being closed away from the world. At least I would know what went on in my absence, instead of finding it out in a single moment when I returned."

Lunzie nodded sympathetically. "How long?"

Tee grimaced dramatically. "Eleven years. When my spacecraft was becalmed because of fuel-source failure, I was the leading engineer on the FSP project to perfect laser technology in space drive navigation systems and FTL communications. On the very cutting edge, you will pardon the joke. Light beams to send information more quickly and accurately among components than ion impulse or electron could. When I awoke two years ago, the process was not only old, but obsolete! I was the most highly trained man in the FSP for a skill that was no longer needed. They offered to retire me at full salary plus my back pay, but I could not stand to feel useless. I wanted to work. It would take too long to retrain me for space technology as it has evolved - so fast!" His hands described the flight of spacecraft. "So I took any job they offered me as soon as I could. They said I wasn't over the trauma yet, so I couldn't have a space-borne post."

"It's for your own safety. It takes on the average of three to five years to recover," Lunzie pointed out, thinking of her own days of therapy on the Descartes Platform and thereafter. Through the University clinic, she still had psychologists running her through periodic tests to check her progress. "It will be even longer for me, because I have more to assimilate than you did. I'm an extreme case in point. My own medical knowledge is as archaic as trepanning to these new people. The researchers consider me fascinating because of my 'quaint notions.' It's lucky that bodies haven't changed radically. But, there are more subgroups than before. There's so much that it might have been better if I'd started from scratch."

"Yes, but you can still practice your craft! I can not. I worked in Supply for a year, pushing paper for replacement drive parts though I had no idea what they did. They called that an 'extension' of my previous job, but it was their way of keeping me safely out of trouble. The therapists pretended they were doing it for my sake. In the end, I transferred to Research, where I would be around people who did not pity me. Besides casework, I can also fix the laser computers. It saves a call to Maintenance when something breaks." Tee drummed moodily on the table. The diners next to them gave him a wary glance as they inserted their credit medallions into the table till and left.

Lunzie wisely remained silent. Introspection, personal evaluation, was an important part of the healing process. Muhlah knew she'd spent enough other 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 signalled 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 synthesised 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," Shot 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 synthesiser, 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 patronised decades before, and chose vegetables from the roadside stands and pick-it-yourself crops. Tee marvelled at the healthy produce, far cheaper than it was in the population centres. 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 centre 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 other 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 navigation's 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. "Cauterised 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 revolutionise space travel. It should have lasted for two hundred years."

"Yeah. Went in and out of fashion like plaid knickers," Shot 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 synthesiser. 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 apologise. 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 realised 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 colouring, 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."

"Do you really want to know?" Lunzie asked. "To stay in style for the rest of your life, never throw out any of your clothes. The latest style for next season - I saw it in the Tri-D - is the very same tunic I wore to my primary-school graduation. It probably came around once while I was in cold sleep, and here it is again. Completely new to you youngsters, and too youthful a fashion to be worn by anyone who can remember the last time it was in vogue."

"Can I look through your family holos?" Pomayla asked, conceding the battle with an impish gleam in her eye. "I want to see what's coming next year. I'll be seasons ahead of the whole Gang."

The remains of the meal went into the disposer, and Tee rose, stretching his arms over his head and producing a series of cracks down his spine. "Ah. That was just as I remember school food."

"Terrible, right?" Pomayla inquired, with a twinkle.

"Terrible. I hate to end the evening now, but I must go. As Lunzie said so truly, you are at the outer end of nowhere, and it will take me time to get home."

Lunzie ran for her textcubes. "I think I'll come in with you. My shift at the hospital begins in just four hours. Sanitary collection units won't wait. I might as well travel while I can still see. Perhaps I'll nap at your place."

Tee swept her a bow. "I should be glad for your company." He expanded the salute to include the others. "Thank you for a pleasant evening. Good night."

Pomayla and Laren called their goodnights to him from the worn freeform couch in the far corner of the room. Shof ran to catch up with them at the door. "Hey," he called softly, as they stepped into the turbovator foyer. "Good luck finding Lunzie's daughter, huh?"

Lunzie goggled at him. "Why, you imp. You know?"

Shot gave them his elfin smile. "Sure I know. I don't tell everything I find out." He winked at Lunzie as the door slid between them. Lunzie's studies progressed well throughout the rest of the term. To their mutual satisfaction, she and the cardiology professor declared a truce. She toned down her open criticism of his bedside manner, and he overlooked what he termed her "bleeding heart," openly approving her grasp of his instruction. His personal evaluation of her at the end of term was flattering, for him, according to students who had had him before. Lunzie thought she had never seen a harsher dressing down ever committed to plas-sheet, but the grade noted below the diatribe showed that he was pleased with her.

The new term began. The Discipline course continued straight through vacation, since it was not a traditional format class. No grade was issued to the University computer for Discipline. Either a student kept up with the art, or he dropped out. It was still eating up a large part of Lunzie's day, which was now busier than ever.

Her new courses included supervised practical experience at the University Hospital. The practicum was worth twice the credits of other classes, but the hours involved were flexible according to need, and invariably ran long. Lunzie and her fellows followed a senior resident on his rounds for the first few weeks, observing his techniques of diagnosis and treatment, and then worked under him in the hospital clinic. Lunzie liked Dr. Root, a Human man of sixty honest Standard years, whose plump pink cheeks and broad hands always looked freshly scrubbed.

Many patients who came to the clinics were of species that Lunzie had seen before only in text-books, and some of them only recently. Under the admiring gaze of his eight apprentices, Root removed from the nucleus of a five-foot protoplasmic entity a single chromosome the size of Lunzie's finger, altered and replaced it, with deft motions suggesting he did this kind of thing every day. Even before he finished sealing the purple cell wall, the creature was quivering.

"Conscious already?" Dr. Root transmitted through the voice-synthesizer the giant cell wore around the base of a long cilium.

"... good... is good... divide now... good...."

"No, absolutely not. You may not induce mitosis until we are sure that your nucleus can successfully replicate itself."

"... rest... good...."

Root wrinkled his nose cheerfully at Lunzie. "Nice when a patient takes a doctor's advice, isn't it?"

Whenever Root held clinic, his students did the preliminary examinations, and, if it was within their capabilities, the treatment as well. Like Lunzie, the others were advanced year students. Most would be taking internships next year in whichever of the University-approved hospitals and medical centres through-out the FSP would take them. Lunzie's own plan was to apply to the University Hospital each term for residency, until they took her, or the search for Fiona led off-planet at last. Her advisor reminded her that she didn't need to follow the curriculum as if she was a new student. Lunzie argued that she needed as much refreshment as she could get to regain her skills. The gruelling pace of internship was the quickest way to be exposed to the most facets of new medicine.

The clinic's com-unit chirped during Dr. Root's demonstration of how to treat a suppurating wound on a shelled creature. The tortoiselike alien lay patiently on the examination table with probes hanging in the air around it and any number of tubes and scopes poked under the edge of its shell. With the help of a longhandled clamp and two self-motivated cautery units. Root was gently fitting a layer of new plas-skin over the freshly cleaned site, and watching his progress on a hovering Tri-D field. He handed the clamp over to one of the students. "Close up, please."

"Emergency code," Root announced mildly to the roomful of students after taking the call. "Construction workers from the spaceport. They are airlifting them in to the roof. Some nasty wounds, a lot of blood, patients likely to be in shock. To your stations, doctors."

Lunzie and her Brachian lab partner, Rik-ik-it, fled to treatment room C, scrubbed, and helped each other put on fresh surgical gear. They had just enough time to do a check on supplies and power before they heard the screaming.

"Muhlah, what are they?"

"I can scream louder than that," Rik scoffed.

"Don't," ordered Lunzie, listening. "Shh."

The door to their treatment room slid open, and two enormous men staggered in, one supporting the other. Heavyworlders. Lunzie looked up at them in dismay.

"Help me," Rik chittered, springing forward to help the more badly wounded man to the canted table. His tremendous strength supplemented that of the other heavyworlder, and together they got the man settled on the gurney. Lunzie started to move toward him, when the other man brushed her away, and assisted Rik in laying his friend face down onto the padded surface.

It was amazing that the prone heavyworlder had made it to the clinic on his feet. There was a tremendous tear through the muscles on his back. One calf was split down the middle, probably sliced by the same falling object. Blood was flowing and spurting from both wounds.

"What happened?" she demanded, pushing past the other two. She cut away the heavy cloth of the prone man's trouser leg and began cleaning the wound with sterile cleanser. By main strength, Rik tore open the slit in his tunic and began to search the wound with a microscopic device. Lunzie tossed the scraps of cloth to one side and put pressure on the pumping blood vessel. When the spurting stopped, she applied a quicksplint to it with an electronically directed clamp. Its edges forced together under the flexible tubeform splint, the tear would heal now by itself.

"Runway extension buckled, fell down on us," the other man said, clutching his arm. "Sarn it, I knew those struts were faulty. Trust Plasteel Corporation, the crew boss told us. Gum shit! The machines'll tell us if any of the extrusions won't hold up. Uh-huh."

"I can handle this one now," Rik told Lunzie.

With a comprehending nod, Lunzie turned away from the table to the other man. By the heavens, he was tall! He ground his teeth together, rasping them audibly. Lunzie knew that he was in tremendous pain.

"Sit down," she said, quickly, swallowing her nervousness. Her stomach rolled. She knew she was going to have to touch him, and she was afraid. These angry giants seemed more than human to her: larger, louder, more emphatic. They frightened her. In the depths of her soul, she still associated heavy-worlders with the loss of Fiona, and she was surprised how much it affected her. She had to remind herself of her duty.

"It's my arm," the heavyworlder said, starting to unfasten the front closure of his tunic. Lunzie quelled her feelings and unsealed the magnetic seam running the length of his sleeve. She eased the fabric down, trying to avoid touching the swelling in the upper arm, and helped him ease the sleeve down over the injured limb. His hand, gigantic next to hers, clenched and twitched as she undid the wrist fastening, and the plas-canvas fabric flapped free against the man's ribs.

A quick glance told her that the right humerus was broken, and the shoulder was badly dislocated. "Let me give you something for the pain," Lunzie said, signalling for the hypo-arm. The servomechanism swung the multiple injector-head down to her, and the LED's on its control glowed into life. "Why not?" she demanded when the heavyworlder shook his head.

"You're not gonna knock me out. I don't trust bonecrackers. I want to see what you do."

"As you wish," Lunzie said, adjusting the setting. "How about a local? It won't make you drowsy, but it will kill the pain."

"Yeah. All right." He stuck his arm out toward her suddenly, and Lunzie jumped back, startled. The heavyworlder frowned at her, lowering his eyebrows suspiciously.

Made more nervous by his disapproving scrutiny, Lunzie stammered as she spoke to the hypo-arm control. "A-analyse for allergies and in-incompatibilities. Local only, right upper arm and shoulder. Implement." The head moved purposefully forward and touched the man's skin. The air gauge hissed briefly, then the unit rotated and withdrew. Lunzie felt the arm tentatively, examining the break. That bone was going to be difficult to set through the thick layers of muscle.

"Get on with it, dammit!" the man roared.

"Does something else hurt?" Lunzie asked, jerking her hands away.

"No, but the way you mince around makes me crazy. Put a rocket in it, lady!"

Stung, Lunzie paused for a moment to gather the resources of Discipline deep within her, as much for strength enough to set the arm as for mental insulation from her feelings against the heavyworlder. She would not allow herself to react in an adverse fashion. Her breathing slowed down until it was even and slow. She was a doctor. Many people were afraid of doctors. It was not unnatural. He was traumatised because of the accident and the pain; no need to take his behaviour personally. But Lunzie kept seeing the newsvideo of Phoenix, the bare hollow where the human camp used to be....

The burst of adrenaline characteristic of Discipline raced through her system, blanketing her normal responses, shoring up her weaknesses, and strengthening her sinews far beyond their unenhanced capability. Her hands braced against the heavyworlder's bunched muscle, spread out, and grasped.

The heavyworlder screamed and flailed at her with his free hand, knocking her backwards against the wall. "Suffering burnout, let go! Dammit, get me a doctor who's gonna treat me like a human being, for Krim's sake!" he howled. He clenched his hand around the wounded shoulder, and sweat poured down his face, which was white with shock.

"Is there a problem here?" Rik-ik-it asked, peering shortsightedly down on Lunzie. His silver-pupilled eyes blinked quizzically as he helped her up.

Furiously, the heavyworlder angled his chin toward Lunzie. "This fem is a klondiking butcher. She's torn my arm apart!"

Still held in Discipline trance, Lunzie backed away. She hadn't been hurt. The man's anger held no terror for her as long as she held her feelings in check under the curtain of iron control. What had gone wrong? She reviewed her actions with the perfect recall at her command. Two quick twists, one front to back, the other, in a leftward arc. She knew, as if an ultrasonic image had been projected before her, that the shoulder was once again in place and that the broken bone had been realigned. Discipline also increased the sensitivity of her five senses.

Rik examined the arm carefully, then read the indicators on the hypo-arm. "There is nothing wrong here," he said calmly. "The doctor has set your arm correctly. It will heal well now. It is just that the anaesthetic had not yet taken effect." He glanced at the clock on the wall. "It should be starting to work right now."

"I should have checked the time factor," Lunzie chided herself later when she and Tee were alone together. "But all I could think of was fixing him up and getting him out of there. It was a stupid mistake, stupid and embarrassing." She waved her hands helplessly as she paced, unable to light anywhere for long. "Rik says that I'm overreacting. He thinks that I have a phobia of heavyworlders, otherwise I would have remembered the time factor." Miserably, she programmed herself a cup of ersatz coffee from the food synthesiser. "Look. I'm reverting. Maybe I should get therapy. I was in Discipline trance; I might have torn the man's arm off." She swallowed the coffee and made a wry face.

"But you didn't," Tee said, sympathetically, guiding her to sit close to him on the wide couch in the center room of his quarters. She looked away as he clasped her hand in both of his. She couldn't stand the pity in his eyes.

"I should quit. Perhaps I can go into research, where I can keep away from any life larger than a microbe." Her mouth quivered, trying to hold up the comers of a feeble little grin, though she still stared at Tee's knees. "I never suffer fools gladly, especially when one of them is myself."

"That doesn't sound like my Lunzie. She who is taking hold with both hands in this new world. And she who persuades me not to be discouraged when small boys know more than I do about my hard-learned craft."

Her self-pity shot down, Lunzie had to smile. She met Tee's eyes for the first time. "That poor man kept shouting to me to hurry up, to fix his arm and be done with it. I knew he was scared of me because I am a doctor, but I was more scared of him! How- ever Brobdignagian in dimension, he was just another human being! My daughter's father was involved in the genetic evolution of heavyworlders. I used to get intersystem mail from Sion, long after we parted, talking about the steps he and the other researchers were taking to better adapt their subjects to the high-grav worlds. I know a lot about their technical development, and nothing about their society. It's funny that humanity is the only species making fundamental changes on itself. Catch the Ryxi altering one feather of their makeup."

"Never. It must be our curiosity: what we can do with any raw material, including ourselves," Tee suggested. "You must not blame yourself so much. It is so pointless."

Lunzie wiped the corners of her eyes with a sleeve. "It isn't. I misused my training, and I can't forget that - mustn't forget it. I'm not used to thinking of myself as a bigot. I'm a throwback. I don't belong in this century."

"Ah, but you're wrong," Tee said, removing the ignored, half-empty cup from her hand and setting it down on the hovering disk at the end of the couch. "It was an accident and you are sorry. You don't rejoice in his pain. You are a good doctor, and a good person. For who else would have been so loving and patient with me as you have been? You have much you can teach these poor ignorant people of the future." Gently, his arms stole around her, and hugged her tightly. Between soft kisses, he whispered to her. "You belong here. You belong with me."

Lunzie wrapped her arms around his ribs and rested her head on his shoulder. She closed her eyes, feeling warm and wanted. The tension of the day melted out of her neck and shoulders like a shower of petals falling from an apple tree as his tiny kisses travelled up the side of her throat, touched her ear. Tee kneaded the muscles in her lower back with his strong fingers, and she sighed with pleasure. His hands encircled her waist, swept upward, still stroking, putting aside fastenings and folds of cloth until they touched bare skin. Lunzie followed suit, admiring the line of shadows that dappled the strong muscles of his shoulders. The springy band of dark hair across his chest pleased her with its silky texture.

One of Tee's hands drifted up to touch her chin. He raised her face. His deep-set, dark eyes were solemn and caring. "Stay with me always, Lunzie. I love you. Please stay." Tilting his head forward, he brushed his lips tenderly against hers, again and again.

"I will," she murmured, easing back with him into the deep cushions. "I'll stay as long as I can."

CHAPTER Five

The hologram of Fiona held pride of place on the hovering disk table in the main room of Lunzie's and Tee's shared living quarters. Lunzie glanced up at it from time to time while she studied patient records. Fiona's beaming, never-fading smile beckoned her mother. Find me, it said. Sunlight shone through the image, sending lights of ruby and crystal dancing along the soft white walls of the room. Lunzie was coming to the end of her second full year on Astris. It was difficult to keep her promise to Chief Wilkins to be patient when she felt she ought to be out in the galaxy, looking for her daughter. In spite of the time Lunzie devoted to her many other activities and Discipline exercises, she never failed to check in with Looking-GLASS and her other sources of information in hopes of finding a trace of Fiona. She was spending a lot of money, but it had been a long time since she had learned anything new. It was frustrating.

It had been several months since she and Tee decided to live together, which decision coincided almost perfectly with Pomayla's timid request that her steady boyfriend be allowed to move into the apartment with her. Pomayla was overly shy about normal behaviour between consenting adult beings. There was no stigma in present-day culture against "sharing warmth," as it was called, nor had there been for centuries. Students - in fact, all citizens - who participated in an open sex lifestyle were responsible for ensuring they were disease- and vermin-free or honestly stating that there was a problem, so there was no risk, just joy. Lovers who lied about their conditions soon found that they were left strictly alone: the word spread, and no one would trust them. Medical students especially were aware of what horrible things could happen if care was not taken to stay "clean," so they were scrupulous about it. Otherwise, one of their own number would eventually rake them over the philosophical coals later on when treatment was sought. Lunzie liked Laren, so she ceded him her own bedroom without a qualm, and moved her few belongings to Tee's.

Tee was a considerate, even deferential, suitemate. He behaved from the first day as if he considered it a favour bestowed by Lunzie that she had chosen to move in with him. Without offering his opinions first, so as not to prejudice her to his choices, he begged her to look around the roomy apartment and decide if she felt anything ought to be moved or changed to make her comfort greater. Everything was to be done for her pleasure. Lunzie was a little overwhelmed by his enthusiasm; she was used to the laissez faire style of her roommates, or the privacy-craving nature characteristic of those who lived in space. Tee had few possessions of his own, except for a number of books on plaque and cube, and a great quantity of music disks. All of the furniture was secondhand, a commodity plentiful on a university world. Most of his belongings, he explained, had been divided up according to his previous will, automatically probated when he had remained out of touch with any FSP command post for ten years. It was a stupid policy, he argued, since one could be out of touch much longer than that in a large galaxy, and still be awake!

Careful to consider his feelings, and perhaps out of her naturally stubborn reaction to his insistence, Lunzie changed as little as possible in his quarters. She liked the spare decor. It helped her to concentrate more than the homey clutter of the student apartment did. When Tee complained that she was behaving like a visitor instead of a resident, she had taken him out shopping. They chose a two-dimensional painting by a university artist and a couple of handsome holograph prints that they both liked, and Lunzie purchased them, refusing to let Tee see the prices. Together, they arranged the pieces of art in the room where they spent the most time.

"Now that is Lunzie's touch," Tee had exclaimed, satisfied, admiring the way the colour picked up the moon in the predominantly white room. "Now it is our home."

Lunzie put down the last datacube. She loved Tee's apartment. It was spacious, ostentatiously so for a single person's quarters, and it had wide window panels extending clear around two walls of the main room. Lunzie reached up for a tendon-crackling stretch that dragged the cuffs of her loose knit exercise pants up over her ankles, and dropped wide sweatshirt sleeves onto the top of her head, mussing her hair, and stalked over to open the casements to let the warm afternoon breezes through. The irising controls of the window panels were adjusted to let in the maximum sunlight on the soft white carpeting. At that time of the afternoon, both walls were full of light. A pot of fragrant herbal tea was warming on the element in the cooking area, which was visible through a doorway. The food synthesiser, a much better model than she'd had in the University-owned apartment, was disguised behind an ornamental panel in the cooking room wall, making it easy to ignore. She and Tee still preferred cooking for one another when they had time. Lunzie was becoming happily spoiled by the small luxuries which were rarely available to students or spacefarers.

During this school term, Lunzie had been assigned as Dr. Root's assistant in the walk-in clinic. After she shamefacedly admitted having been upset by her heavyworlder patient, and voiced her concerns about its effect on her treatment to him. Root had counselled her and interviewed Rik-ik-it. It was his determination that there was nothing wrong with her that a little more exposure to the subjects wouldn't dispel. He dismissed her fears that she was a xenophobe. "An angry heavyworlder," he assured her, "could easily intimidate a normal human. You may fear one with impunity."

She was grateful that he hadn't seen it as a major departure from normalcy, and vowed to keep a cooler head in the future. So far, she hadn't had to test her new resolve, as few heavyworlders made use of the medical facility.

The University Hospital clinic treated all students free of charge, and assessed only a nominal fee from outsiders. Accident victims, too, like the heavyworlder construction workers, were frequently brought directly to the University Hospital because the wait time for treatment was usually shorter than it was at the private facilities. Most of the Astris students Lunzie saw were of human derivation, not because non-humans were less interested in advanced education or were discriminated against, but because most species were capable of passing on knowledge to infants in utero or in ova, and only one University education per subject was required per family tree. Humans required education after birth, which some other member races of the FSP, particularly the Seti and the Weft, saw as a terrible waste of time. Lunzie felt the crowing over race memory and other characteristics to be a sort of inferiority complex in itself, and let the comments pass without reply. Race memory was only useful when it dealt with situations that one's ancestors had experienced before. She treated numerous Weft engineering students for dehydration, especially during their first semesters on Astris. Young Seti, on Astris to study interplanetary diplomacy, tended toward digestive ailments, and had to be trained as to which native Astrian foods to avoid.

It had been a slow day in the office. None of her case histories demanded immediate action, so she pushed them into a heap on the side of the couch and sat down with a cup of tea. There was time to relax a bit before she needed to report back to Dr. Root. He was a good and patient teacher, who only smiled at her need to circumvent the healing machines instead of chiding her for her ancient ideals. Lunzie felt confident again in her skills. She still fought to maintain personal interaction with the patient, but there was less and less for the healer to do. Lunzie sensed it was a mistake to learn to rely too heavily on mechanical aids. A healer was not just another technician, in her strongly maintained opinion. She was alone in her views.

The band of sunshine crept across the room and settled at her feet like a contented pet. Lunzie looked longingly across at her portable personal reader, which had been a thirty-sixth birthday gift from Tee, and the small rack of ancient classical book plaques she had purchased from used book stores. An unabridged Works of Rudyard Kipling, replacement for her own lost, much-loved copy, sat at the front of the book-rack, beckoning. Though there wasn't time to page through her favourites before she needed to go in to work, there was, coincidentally, just enough to perform her daily Discipline exercises. With a sigh, she put aside the empty cup and began limbering up. "Duty before pleasure. Kip," Lunzie said, regretfully. "You'd understand that."

The tight Achilles tendons between her hips and heels had been stretched so well that she could bend over and lay her hands flat on the floor and relax her elbows without bowing her knees. Muscular stiffness melted away as she moved gracefully through the series of dancelike fighting positions. Lunzie was careful to avoid the computer console and the art pedestals as she sprang lightly around the room, sparring with an invisible opponent. Discipline taught control and enhancement of the capability of muscle and sinew. Each pose not only exercised her limbs, but left her feeling more energetic than when she began the drills. Under her conscious control, her footfalls made no sound. She was as silent as the black shadows limned on the light walls by the sun. She moved in balance, every motion a reaction, an answer to one that came before.

Holding her back beam-straight, she settled down into a meditation pose sitting on her crossed feet in front of the couch with the sunshine washing across her lap. She held her arms out before her, turned her hands palms up, and let them drop slowly to the floor on either side of her knees.

Lunzie closed her eyes, and drew in the wings of her consciousness, until she was aware only of her body, the muscles holding her back straight, the pressure of her buttocks into the arches of her feet, the heat of the sun on her legs, the rough-smooth rasp of the carpet on the tops of her hands and feet.

Tighter in. At the base of her sinuses, she tasted the last savour of the tea that she had swallowed, and felt the faint distension of her stomach around the warm liquid. Lunzie studied every muscle which worked to draw in breath and release it, felt the relief of each part of her body as fresh oxygen reached it, displacing tired, used carbon dioxide. The flesh of her cheeks and forehead hung heavily against her facial bones. She let her jaw relax.

She began to picture the organs and blood vessels of her body as passages, and sent her thought along them, checking their functions. All was well. Finally she allowed her consciousness to return to her centre. It was time to travel inward toward the peace which was the Disciple's greatest source of strength and the goal toward which her soul strove.

Lunzie emerged from her trance state just in time to hear the whirr of the turbovator as it stopped outside the door. Her body was relaxed and loose, her inner self calm. She looked up as Tee burst into the room, his good-natured face beaming.

"The best of news, my Lunzie! The very best! I have found your Fiona! She is alive!"

Lunzie's hands clenched where they lay on the ground, and her heart felt as if it had stopped beating. The calm dispersed in a wash of hope and fear and excitement. Could it be true? She wanted to share the joy she saw in his eyes, but she did not dare.

"Oh, Tee," she whispered, her throat suddenly tight. Her hands were shaking as she extended them to Tee, who fell to his knees in front of her. He clasped her wrists and kissed the tips of her fingers. "What have you found?" All of her anxieties came back in a rush. She could not yet allow herself to feel that it might be true.

Tee slipped a small ceramic information brick from his pocket and placed it in her palms. "It is all here. I have proof in three dimensions. Grade One Med Tech Fiona Mespil was retrieved off-planet by the EEC shortly before the colony vanished. She was needed urgently on another assignment," Tee explained. "It was an emergency, and the ship which picked her up was not FSP - a nearby merchant voyager - so her name was not removed from the rolls of poor Phoenix. She is alive!"

"Alive..." Lunzie made no attempt to hold back the flood of joyful tears which spilled from her eyes. Tee wiped them, then dabbed at his own bright eyes. "Oh, Tee, thank you! I'm so happy."

"I am happy, too - for you. It is a secret I have held many weeks now, waiting for a reply to my inquiries. I couldn't be sure. I did not want to torture you with hope only to have bad news later on. But now, I am glad to reveal all!"

"Two years I've waited. A few weeks more couldn't hurt," Lunzie said, casting around for a handkerchief. Tee plucked his out of his sleeve and offered it to her. She wiped her eyes and nose, and blew loudly. "Where is she, Tee?"

"Dr. Fiona has been working for five years on Glamorgan, many light years out toward Vega, to stem a plague virus that threatened the colony's survival. Her work there is done. She is en route to her home on Alpha Centauri for a reunion with her family. It is a multiple-jump trip even with FTL capabilities, and will take her probably two years to arrive home. I did not make contact with her directly." Tee grinned his most implike grin, obviously saving the best for last. "But your three grandchildren, five great-grandchildren, and nine great-great-grandchildren say they are delighted that they will get to meet their illustrious ancestress. I have holograms of all of them there in this cube."

Lunzie listened with growing excitement to his recitation, and threw her arms around him as he produced the cube with a flourish. "Oh! Grandchildren. I never thought of grandchildren. Let me see them."

"This is downloaded from the post brick brought from Alpha Centauri by the purser aboard the merchant ship Prospero," Tee explained as he tucked the cube into the computer console reader. Lunzie scrambled up onto the couch and watched the platform with shining eyes as an image began to coalesce. "There is only sketchy family information on all of these. The message is short. I think your grandson Lars must be a tightwad. It is his voice narrating."

The holographic image of a black-haired human man in his early fifties appeared on the console platform. Lunzie leaned in to have a closer look. The image spoke. "Greetings, Lunzie. My name is Lars, Fiona's son. Since I don't know when this will reach you, I will give the names and Standard birthdates for all family members instead of the current date. First, myself. I'm the eldest of the family. I was born in 2801.

"Here is Mother, the last image I have of her before she blasted off last time." The voice was reproving. "She is very busy in her career, as I guess you know."

And before Lunzie was the image of a middle-aged woman. It was clearly a studio picture taken by a professional, sharp and clear. Her dark hair, stroked only here and there with a gentle brushing of silver, was piled up on top of her head in a plaited bun. Standing at her ease, she was dressed in a spotless uniform tunic which in contrast to her stance was formal and correct to the last crease. There were fine, crinkly lines at the comers of her eyes and underscoring her lashes, and smile lines had etched themselves deeply between her nose and the corners of her mouth, but the smile was the wonderful, happy grin that Lunzie remembered best. She closed her eyes, and for a moment was back on Tau Ceti in the sunshine, that last day before she left for the Descartes Platform.

"Oh, my baby," Lunzie murmured, overcome with longing and regret. She pressed her hand to her mouth as she looked from the holo of Fiona as a teenager to the image she saw now. "She's so different. I missed all her growing up."

"She is fine," Tee said, halting the playback. "She was happy, see? Wouldn't you like to see the rest of your family?"

Shortly, Lunzie nodded and opened her eyes. Tee passed his hand over the solenoid switch, and the image of Fiona disappeared. It was followed by a very slim young man in Fleet uniform. "My brother Dougal, born 2807," stated Lars's voice. "Unmarried, no attachments to speak of outside his career. He's not home much, as he is commissioned in the FSP Fleet as a captain. Sometimes transports Mother and her germ dogs from place to place. It's often the only time one of us gets to see her.

"My wife's camera shy, and won't stand still for an image." In the background, Lunzie could hear a high-pitched shriek. "Oh, Lars! Really!"

Lunzie grinned. "He has the family sense of humour anyway."

The image changed. "My daughter Dierdre, born 2825. Her husband Moykol, and their three girls. I call them the Fates. Here we have Rudi, born 2843, Capella, 2844, and Anthea Rose, 2845.

"My other girl, Georgia, 2828. One son, Gordon, 2846. Smart lad, if his own grandfather does have to say so.

"Melanie, daughter of Fiona, born Standard year 2803." This was a stunningly lovely woman with medium brown hair like Lunzie's own, and Fiona's jaw and eyes. She had a comfortably motherly figure, soft in outline without seeming overweight for her slender bones. She stood with one arm firmly around the waist of a very tall man with a sharp, narrow, hawklike face which looked incongruous under his mop of soft blond hair. "Husband, Dalton Ingrich."

"Their third son. Drew, 2827. Drew has two boys, who are away at Centauri Institute of Technology. I don't have a current holo.

"Melanie's older boys Jai and Thad are identical twins, born 2821. Thad, and daughter Cassia, born 2842.

"This is Jai and his wife and two imps, Deram, 2842, and Lona, 2847."

There was an interruption of Lars's narration as the image of Melanie reappeared. She stepped forward in the holofield to speak, extending her hands welcomingly. "We'll be delighted to meet you, ancestress. Please come."

The image faded. Lunzie sat staring at the empty console-head as the computer whirred and expelled the datacube.

Lunzie let out her breath in a rush. "Well. A moment ago I was an orphan in the great galaxy. Now I'm the mother of a population explosion!" She shook her head is disbelief. "Do you know, I believe I've missed having a family to belong to."

"You must go," Tee said softly. He was watching her tenderly, careful not to touch her before she needed him to.

"Why didn't they tell me where she is?" Lunzie asked. Tee didn't have to ask which "she."

"They can't. They don't know. Because her assignments deal with planet-decimating disease, who knows when a curiosity seeker might land, perhaps to get a story to sell to Tri-D."

Lunzie recalled the holo-story about Phoenix. "That is so true. He might spread the plague farther than his story might ever reach. But it is just so frustrating!"

"Well, you will see her now. She will arrive home from the distant edge of the galaxy within two years." Tee looked pleased with himself. "You can be there waiting for her, to celebrate your reunion, and her new appointment, which, was made public. That is how I found her at last, I confess, though it was because I was looking that I noticed the articles of commission. For long and meritorious service to the FSP, Dr. Fiona is appointed Surgeon General of the Eridani system. A great honour."

"Did you notice? A couple of the children look just like her." Lunzie chuckled. "One or two of them look like me. Not that these looks bear repeating."

"You insult yourself, my Lunzie. You are beautiful." Tee smiled warmly at her. "Your face is not what cosmetic models have, but what they wish they had."

Lunzie wasn't listening. "To think that all this... this frustration could have been avoided, if Phoenix could simply have transmitted word that Fiona'd left when she did. It was the one blocked path I couldn't find my way around, no matter what I did. The planet pirates are responsible for that, for two, almost three years I've spent - in anger, never knowing if I was hunting for a... a ghost. I think - I think if I had someone I knew was a pirate on my examination table with a bullet near his heart that only I could remove.... Well, I might just forget my Hippocratic oath." Lunzie set her jaw, furiously contemplating revenge.

"But you wouldn't," Tee said, firmly, squeezing her hand. "I know you."

"I wouldn't," she agreed, resignedly, letting the hot images fade. "But I'd have to wrangle it out with the devil. And I'll never forget the sorrow or the frustration. Or the loneliness." She shot Tee a look of gratitude and love. "Though I'm not alone now."

Tee persisted. "But you will go, of course? To Alpha Centauri."

"It would cost a planetary ransom!"

"What is money? You have spent money only seeking Fiona over the last many months, even though you are well off. You have saved every hundredth credit else. What else is it for?" Lunzie bit her lip and stared at a comer of the room, thinking. She was almost afraid to see Fiona after all this time, because what would she say to her? All the time when she'd been searching for her, she played many scenes in her mind, of happy, tearful reconciliations. But now it was a reality: she was going to see Fiona again. What would the real one say to her? Fiona had told her when she left that she feared her mother would never come back. Once resentment faded, she must long ago have given up hope, believing her mother dead. Lunzie worried about the hurt she had caused Fiona. She imagined an angry Fiona, her jaw locked and nose red as they had been the last. morning on Tau Ceti. Lunzie blanched defensively. It wasn't her fault that the space carrier had met with an accident, but did she have to leave Fiona at all? She could have taken a less distant post, one that was less dangerous though it paid less. But, no: for all her self-doubts and newly acquired hindsight, she had to admit that at the time she left Tau Ceti, the job with Descartes seemed the best possible path for her to take. She couldn't have foreseen what would happen.

She missed Fiona, but for her the separation had only been a matter of a few years. She tried to imagine how it would feel if it had been most of a lifetime, as it had for her daughter. She'd be a stranger after all these years. They'd have to become acquainted all over again. Would she like the new Fiona? Would Fiona like her, with the experience of her years behind her? She would just have to wait and see.

"Lunzie?" Tee's soft voice brought her back to herself. When she blinked the dryness from her eyes, she found Tee watching her with his dark eyes full of concern.

"What are you thinking of, my Lunzie? You are always so controlled. I would prefer it if you cry, or laugh, or shout. Your private thoughts are too private. I can never tell what it is you're thinking. Have I not brought you good news?"

She took a deep breath, and then hesitated. "What - what if she doesn't want to see me? After all these years, she probably hates me."

"She will love you, and forgive you. It was not your fault. You began to search for her as soon as it was possible to do so," he stated reasonably.

Lunzie sighed. "I should never have left her."

Tee grabbed both of her arms and turned her so that he could look into her eyes. "You did the right thing. You needed to support your child. You wanted to make her very comfortable, instead of merely to subsist. She was left in the best of care. Blame the fates. Blame whatever you must, but not yourself. Now. Are you going? Will you meet with your daughter and your grandchildren?"

Lunzie nodded at last. "I'm going. I have to."

"Good. Then this is a celebration!" He swept back to the parcel he had carried home with him, and removed from it a bottle of rare Cetian wine and a pair of long-stemmed glasses. "It is my triumph and yours, and I want you to drink to it with me. You should at least look like you want to celebrate."

"But I do," Lunzie protested.

"Then wash that worried look from your face and come with me!" Switching the glasses to the hand that held the wine. Tee bent over, and with one effort, threw Lunzie across his shoulders. Lunzie shrieked like a schoolgirl as he carried her into their bedchamber and dumped her onto the double-width bed.

"I can't! Root is expecting me." She flipped over and looked at the digital clock in the headboard. "Oh, Muhlah, now I'm late!" She started to get up, but he forestalled her.

"I will take care of that." Tee stalked out. The com-unit chimed as he made a connection. Lunzie had to stifle a giggle as he asked for Dr. Root and solemnly requested that she be allowed to miss a shift. "... for a family emergency," he said, in a sepulchral voice that made her bury a hoot of laughter in the bedclothes.

"There," Tee said, as he returned, shucking his tunic off into a corner of the room and kicking off his boots. "You are clear and on green, and he sends his concern and regards."

"I don't know why I'm letting you do that. I shouldn't play hooky," Lunzie chided, a little ashamed of herself. "I usually take my responsibilities more seriously than that."

"Could you honestly have stood and taken blood pressures with this knowledge dancing in your brain?" Tee asked, incredulously. "Fiona is found!"

"Well, no..."

"Then enjoy it," Tee encouraged her. "Allow me." He knelt before her and grabbed one of her feet, and started to ease the exercise pants down her leg. When her legs were free, he started a trail of kisses beginning at her toes and skimming gently upward along her bare skin. His hands reached around to squeeze and caress her thighs and buttocks, and upward, thumbs stroking the hollows inside her hip-bones, as his lips reached her belly. His warm breath sent tingles of excitement racing through her loins. Lunzie lay back on the bed, sighing with pleasure. Her hands played with Tee's hair, running the backs of her nails gently through his hair and along the delicate lines of his ears. She closed her eyes and allowed the pleasure to carry her, moaning softly, until the waves of ecstasy ebbed.

He raised his head and crept further up, poised, hovering over her. Lunzie opened her eyes to smile at him, and met an impish glance.

"Oh, no, you don't," she warned, as he descended, pinioning her, and dipping his tongue into her navel to tickle. "Agh! Unfair!"

He captured her arms as they flailed frantically at his head. "Now, now. All is fair in love, my Lunzie, and I love you."

"Then come up here and fight like a man, damn you." Lunzie freed her hands and pulled at his shoulders. Tee crawled up and settled on his hip beside her. She undid the magnetic seams of his trousers as he lifted himself up, and threw them into the corner after his tunic.

He was already fully aroused. Lunzie stroked him gently with her fingertips as they melted together along the lengths of their bodies for a deep kiss. He bent to run his tongue around the tips of her breasts, cupping them, and spreading his fingers to run his hands down her rib cage. Their hands joined, intertwined, parted, trailing along the other's arm to draw sensual patterns on the skin of throat and chest and belly. Tee rolled onto his back, taking Lunzie on top of him so he could caress her. She spread her palms along his chest, massaging the flesh with her fingers, and reached behind her to brace against the long, hard muscles of his thighs. She arched up, straddling him, moving so that their bodies joined and rocked together in a rhythm of increasing tempo.

At last. Tee dragged her torso down, and they locked their arms around one another, kissing ears and neck and parted lips as passion overcame them.

Lunzie held tightly to Tee until her heart slowed down to its normal pace. She rubbed her cheek against his jaw, and felt the answering pressure of his arms around her shoulders. Through the joy at having found the object of her search, she was sad at the thought of having to leave Tee. Not only was there a physical compatibility, but they were comfortable with one another. She and Tee were familiar with one another's likes and desires and feelings, like two people who had been together all their lives. She was torn between completing a quest she had set herself years ago, and staying with a man who loved her. If there was only a way that he could come with her - He wasn't denying her her chance to rebuild her life after her experiences with cold sleep; she mustn't deny him his. He had worked too hard and had lost so much. Lunzie felt guilty at even thinking of asking him to come with her. But she loved him too, and knew how much she was going to miss him.

She shifted to take her weight off his arm, and rolled into a hard obstruction in the tangled folds of the coverlet. Curiously, she spread out the edge of the cloth and uncovered the bottle of wine.

"Ah, yes. Cetus, 2755. Your year of birth, I believe. The vintage is only fit to drink after eighty years or more."

"Where are the glasses?" Lunzie asked. "This worthy wine deserves crystal."

"We will share from the bottle," answered Tee, gathering Lunzie close again. "I am not leaving this spot until I get up from here to cook you a marvellous celebratory dinner, for which I bought all the ingredients on the way home."

He fell back among the pillows, tracing the lines of her jaw with one finger. Lunzie lay dreamily enjoying the sensation. Abruptly, a thought struck her. "You know," she said, raising herself on one elbow, "maybe I should travel to Alpha as a staff doctor. That way I could save a good part of the spacefare."

Tee pretended to be shocked. "At this moment you can think of money? Woman, you have no soul, no romance."

Lunzie narrowed one eye at him. "Oh, yes, I have." She sighed. "Tee, I'll miss you so. It might be years before I come back."

"I will be here, awaiting you with all my heart," he said. "I love you, did you not know that?" He opened the bottle and offered her the first sip. Then he drank, and leaned over to give her a wine-flavoured kiss.

They made love again, but slowly and with more care. To Lunzie, every movement was now more precious and important. She was committing to memory the feeling of Tee's gentle touch along her body, the growing urgency of his caresses, his hot strength meeting hers.

"I'm sorry we didn't meet under other circumstances," Lunzie said, sadly, when they lay quietly together afterward. The wine was gone.