The Last Hour of Gann by R. Lee Smith Read Free Book Online Page A

asleep when Scott held his middle finger up to the glass plate before her face and called her a bitch. She was asleep when her tube wormed its umbilicus under her tight shirt, asleep when it punctured her navel and began the painful process of rendering her dormant for the flight. She slept through the next four days as the rest of the colonists were processed and the ship steadily filled. She slept through the historic speech of Manifest Destiny’s charismatic leader as the Pioneer ’s mighty engines fired up behind him on the video screen in the press room where he was still standing, very much on Earth. She slept through thirteen routine medical scans and six hundred thirty-three automatic maintenance cycles before she slept through the asteroid field that pierced the hull and pulled the active crew out into space through approximately seven thousand coin-sized holes. She slept through two hundred sixty-six years of Tunneling as the speakers above her bed blatted a polite, unheard alarm. She slept through the crash. In the last eleven minutes, as her umbilicus began to retract its countless filaments and her Sleeper gently reanimated her long-static cells, Amber dreamed of the beach and her mother was there, smoking one of her endless cigarettes, and they stood hand in hand together to watch the sun set so red over the ocean, and all the gulls were screaming…
     
    4
     
    A mber woke up on her side, which she knew only because she could sort of feel the hard mat under her cheek and the cold, curved glass panel of the Sleeper’s lid pressing on her nose and forehead. She tried to roll over, but couldn’t. Her limbs were dead; she was beginning to register the discomfort of her arms crossed and crushed against the Sleeper’s wall, but she still couldn’t do anything about it. God, how annoying.
    She had always been a light sleeper and was used to coming up and alert at a moment’s provocation, but she couldn’t do it this time. The Sleeper’ s computer had complete control and seemed far more concerned with talking about the process of waking her up than actually doing it. She could hear it through the speakers in its pleasantly androgynous, vaguely British-sounding voice: “—is estimated to complete in…five minutes seventeen seconds. Please remain calm. Your movements have been inhibited during Sleep. This condition is temporary and will be restored upon removal of the umbilicus.”
    Right. She remembered now. The orientation seminar had explained all this. Although she couldn’t move, she could feel herself twitching as the computer systematically tested her muscles. She could also feel it where the vent was gently blowing on her ear. Why the hell was she on her side, anyway? The seminar had assured all of them that Sleep wasn’t really sleep and there wouldn’t be any dreams, but she’d had a real whopper. She didn’t understand how she could have thrashed around when she was supposed to have been paralyzed, but maybe that was just for the landing, not the whole flight.
    And what had the big nightmare been? Why, a trip to the beach with her mother . Bizarre. Bo Peep Bierce did not take her babies on outings. Oh, they’d gone to the courthouse a couple of times, and when they were very young, they used to walk down to the childcare place together until Bo Peep failed a drug test and got kicked out of all the state programs. Other than that, Amber couldn’t think of a single trip they’d taken together, unless it was to get drugs.
    ‘Maybe that’s why you dream about it,’ she thought to herself, and would have rolled her eyes except that they were still kept shut and paralyzed.
    It had been such a vivid dream, though. So vivid that she could still imagine the smell of her mom’s cigarettes. So vivid that she could still hear…
    What…What was she hearing? Was that…people?
    She was on her side…but she wasn’t really on her side, was she? The vent was blowing on her ear and the glass