Stumbling Towards the Dawn - Part 19
Title: Stumbling Towards the Dawn - Part 19
Word Count: 3,180
Rating: M
Disclaimer: Not mine ... just playing.
Spoilers: To LDYB Part II - Everything is definitely AU from the moment the Cylons flew over.
Summary: When Cloud Nine is destroyed, it attracted the attention of not only the Cylons.
Author's Note: This is a crossover fic, with David Weber's Mutineer's Moon - Fifth Imperium universe, but I don't think that you need to know the universe of this trilogy of novels to get it. Hopefully, it's explained well enough in the story.
“In these sessions, we’ll only go as far and as fast as you want to go,” Audra Keyes said.
Laura nodded, but didn’t reply. She studied the other woman as she settled in the chair opposite Laura’s own comfortable arm-chair. Audra Keyes was a small, blonde woman with piercing blue eyes, but she was one of the few Imperials close to Laura’s age. Most of Herdan’s crew seemed ridiculously young.
“Then why don’t we get started.”
A bitter, hacked-off laugh escaped Laura before she could stop it.
Get started? she wanted to shout. How the frak am I supposed to do that?
“Just talk for now,” the other woman said gently. “Tell me about your home, for example.”
“You want to know about Caprica?”
Audra smiled. “Or teaching, your job as Secretary of Education--” Laura pulled a face and she laughed. “Or not. You can talk about your dog if you want; just open a dialogue, Laura.”
“Dog?” Laura asked.
“A pet--a domesticated canid,” she said. “Many people keep dogs or cats, which are domesticated felines, or birds, fish … we keep lots of things as pets.
“I know what a dog is,” Laura said, and suddenly wondered if there were dogs on Caprica anymore. Perhaps some wild ones had survived, but would they survive the nuclear fallout. She rather hoped they would … that despite the Cylons, life would still flourish in the Twelve Colonies.
She met the psychiatrist’s steady gaze. “I've never had a pet,” she said at last. “My parents didn’t believe in keeping another lifeform captive just for our amusement or comfort.”
“What about you?” Audra asked shrewdly.
Laura shrugged. “I’ve never needed one.”
Audra chuckled softly. “But I bet you wanted one,” she said.
“When I was very young I did,” Laura admitted after a moment of silence. “All my friends had pets--I envied them sometimes.” She smiled to herself. “I remember when my best friend, Rhea, got a silver-spotted kitten from her father for her eighth birthday. Its eyes were barely open and it was so tiny that it would curl up in the palm of her hand to sleep when she first got it--it was the softest thing I’d ever touched. I think that outside of school, I spent almost every waking hour at Rhea’s house playing with her and Starbright. And I teased my father mercilessly for a kitten for weeks afterwards.”
“Your father--not your mother?”
Laura laughed. “No,” she said, “not that Mama wasn’t great, but I think that like a lot of men, Papa couldn’t be the disciplinarian when it came to his girls. So it fell to my mother to be the one who said “no” most of the time--though, I must credit my father, once she said no, he backed her up. But like all kids, my sisters and I knew that we had a better chance of getting what we wanted if we could get him to say “yes” before she could say “no”. And it didn’t take me long to learn that I needed to wheedle Papa into giving me what I wanted before Mama even knew that the question was there to be asked.”
Audra laughed heartily. “I just bet you did. What about when you got older?”
Laura felt a familiar tightening in her chest. “There was no playing Papa off against Mama then,” she replied looking down at her hands. “He and my sisters died in an aircar accident when I was fourteen.”
“I’m sorry. What happened?”
“I think that it was one of the few times he’d ever said no to me,” she said after a long silence. “I guess it was the last time he ever said no to me. My mother wasn’t even home at the time … she was still at school--science fair projects I think. He’d asked me a number of times to clean up the kitchen … do some laundry, but I was too interested in some book to be bothered. They were both tired and I usually got home at least an hour or two before they did, and I knew I should help, but I was pissed off that day. It was stupid. Then he had to go pick up Kiera and Jihane--they were coming home from university for the winter solstice break. Kiera was going to be starting her teaching internship the following semester, while Jihane had just started university that semester. I begged Papa to let me go for the ride, and he told me no.”
Laura’s throat closed around her voice and there was a long silence before she could continue. Tears pricked at the corner of her eyes.
“He told me that until I could start taking some responsibility around the house, I was going to be hearing “no” a lot more from him. He looked so disappointed … said he was afraid that he’d spoiled me too much because I was the youngest. And I remember being so furious with him, yelling that he didn’t want a daughter, but a slave.”
Laura rose and went to the window gazing out at the park; Audra’s office was on the same level as the park grounds and it looked even more real up close. “Isn’t it curious how often the last things we say to the ones we love are words of anger,” she said hoarsely, no longer able to hold back the tears.
“Because we don’t know that it will be the last time,” Audra said gently.
“Yes.” Again the silence stretched out between them. “I was up in my room sulking when the authorities came--then all I remember were my mother’s screams and suddenly I was downstairs clinging to her … trying to make sense of what the policemen were saying. Trying to understand how it could be that my father and sisters were never coming home again.”
“It must have been difficult.”
“Our lives fell apart,” Laura replied. “And I got a crash course in responsibility.”
“How do you mean?”
“My mother barely made it through the funerals and the aftermath--” Laura laid her head against the window and watched a young man swing a tow-headed toddler up on his shoulders. Though the glass blotted out all noise from the park, she could see the pure, unadulterated glee on the child’s innocent face. “On top of everything, that’s when I first learned that she was fighting cancer; she’d been diagnosed a couple of months before and had had a lumpectomy. She and my father hadn’t wanted us kids to worry, but she was starting chemotherapy, so they were going to tell us when Kiera and Jihane came home.
“Anyway, Mother started treatment the week after the funerals … and I watched her grow weak and frail. She wasn’t able to work for a long time, so things got tight for us. My father had left some savings and insurance, and we owned our house in Caprica City, thank the Gods, but even with social assistance, cancer therapy is expensive and with no money coming in … I did what I could, but tutoring … babysitting--those kinds of things don’t bring much in and I couldn’t legally get a job until I was seventeen. I did manage to lie myself into a secretarial job at a small architectural firm when I was sixteen and things were getting desperate enough for Mother to consider selling the house. I used Jihane’s citizen identity number. For some reason the government bureaucracy never got its various departments looking in the same direction, so over two years after she’d died, we received her Colonial citizen card, which replaced her Caprica student identity card and proclaimed that since she was nineteen, she was a full citizen of the Colonies with the right to vote, own property in her own name and enter into legally binding contracts.”
“So you became the sole breadwinner for your family.”
“Only for two years,” she replied. “My employer was a good man, and now when I think of the trouble I could have gotten him into for breaking the child labour laws when he finally found out, I know I was incredibly lucky to have met him. He could have fired me then and there, but instead he took me down to the Department of Labour and got it all straightened out. He arranged it so that I could keep working for him under my own name during evenings and off-days even though I was still a few months short of my seventeenth birthday, and I could go back to school. By the time I finished high school, my mother was well enough to start teaching again part-time for a few hours each day. I won a scholarship to the university and then went on to do a teaching degree, and later my doctorate.”
“Even with that hiatus from high school, you still won a scholarship,” Audra said in quiet admiration.
Laura laughed and met the other woman’s gaze. She made her way back to her chair and sat down. “If I was anything, I was a very good student,” she said, “and I was especially good at math and science. When I went back, I made my mind up to win my school’s math or science awards, because I knew that wining either of those awards would guarantee me a letter of recommendation from my Headmaster to the Colonial Scholarship Funding Committee. And the hiatus turned out to work in my favour--I ended up being a year older than most of the students in my senior year, and there’s something to be said for the edge you get from being a little more mature than your classmates. I ended up winning both awards that year, which pretty much guaranteed that I would get a fairly substantial scholarship, especially since I’d expressed interest in becoming a mathematician or perhaps a research scientist.”
Audra studied her curiously for a moment. “Why do I get the feeling that you had no intention of pursuing either of those careers?”
“Probably because I didn’t,” she replied.
“That’s rather single-minded for a seventeen year-old.”
“I’ve always been a rather single-minded person.” Laura chuckled quietly again. “Don’t get me wrong, I loved those subjects--in fact, I took undergraduate degrees in Mathematics and Science. But in university, everyone expects you to mature and your interests to change, so it came as no surprise that I added Literature to my areas of study or that the field of science I became interested in was early cognitive development and learning in children. As long as I kept up the good grades that were the requirement for my scholarship, I think that the only ones who cared that I didn’t become a doctor or research scientist were my mother and perhaps my old Headmaster, who had told me when I graduated that he expected great things of me. I don’t think that having me show up at his school five years later, when my intern teacher rotation brought me back to my old high school for a couple of months, was exactly what he’d had in mind.” She was silent for a few moments and then shrugged. “I think he was relieved when I chose to specialize in teaching at the elementary level and left his school for good.”
“What about your mother?”
“Oh, she was definitely disappointed when she realised that I had no intention of pursuing the rarefied heights of academia or scientific research. I think she felt that I’d wasted my opportunities … didn’t live up to my potential.” Laura cleared the lump in her throat that formed as she remembered her mother’s disappointment.
“But she was a teacher herself,” Audra said.
“A science teacher who had wanted to be a research scientist,” Laura replied sadly. “My father loved teaching--I don’t think he’d ever really wanted to be anything else. But my mother had taken up teaching as a way to get money to pursue a doctorate. Then she met my father, they got married and had Kiera soon afterwards. It was only after she’d died and I was going through her things that I realised my mother had been planning to start her doctorate once Kiera was in school full-time. But by the time Kiera was four, Mother was already pregnant again, and I came along three years after Jihane.”
Laura lapsed into silence again. "When we're children, we don't consider that our parents might have had hopes and dreams of their own," she said at last. "I suppose that I always knew it--intellectually you know, but my mother died before I truly understood it--it should not have taken me so long to finally understand."
"Understanding happens when it happens," the psychiatrist said. "Knowledge means little without context. Understanding the lives of others, even those we're closest to, cannot happen if we don't have the life experience to put those lives into context."
"I just wish I'd had that epiphany before she died," Laura said wistfully.
“Was it the cancer again?”
Laura nodded. “She’d been in remission for nearly ten years,” she said at last. “Then it came back with vengeance. She tried everything--even a radical double mastectomy. And the drugs were so much worse this time around. Five years--she fought for five years. Towards the end, she lost her mind on diloxin ..."
Her voice gave out and she lapsed into the silence again; her mother's wild-eyed agony haunted her still.
"All right, Laura," Audra said, startling Laura out of her thoughts. "That's enough for today."
"But I didn't talk about-about--" The words were blurted out before she had time to censor them. And she hated that she couldn't even bring herself to say the word.
Audra took her trembling hands and squeezed them gently as Laura met her gaze. "When you're ready, you'll talk about it," she said. "Give yourself time, Laura, to learn trust again, and to learn to trust me enough to talk about it."
"It's not so hard to talk to William," Laura admitted quietly.
"Good," Audra replied letting go of her hands. "I'm glad you haven't lost that trust in him and that he's easy to talk to."
"I don't want to burden him."
"Why don't you let him be the judge of that," Audra said. "I highly doubt that he would ever see your confidences as a burden; an honour perhaps--that you would choose to trust him--but never a burden." Laura nodded, grateful for the reassurance. "Now, how are you sleeping?"
"Not well; I have nightmares and wake up screaming--then I can’t get back to sleep," she whispered after a moment.
"That's normal. It's your mind working through the trauma you experienced. Now, you indicated that you didn't want to use drugs if we could help it." Laura nodded; she hated the thought of being drugged ... being unable to control her own body again. "Therefore, I'm going to prescribe a mechanical sleep aid. It won't be as effective as pills, but it will help ensure you get enough sleep; your mind needs the rest to heal as much as your body does."
She moved over to her desk and picked up a small pouch. Returning to her seat, she opened it to show Laura the small rectangular device and a pair of thin bronze metal disks about two centimetres in diameter. Laura stared at the device; she hated it already.
“You’ll just need to apply these two electrodes to your temples and turn it on,” Audra explained. “I’ve already programmed it for mild sleep induction.” After a few moments when Laura didn’t say anything, she continued. “I know that you would rather not--that you hate to be dependent on anything, but I need you to trust me to know right now what is good for your health. A sleep aid is just that Laura--an aid. If you find that you can fall asleep without it, then that’s good. It’s the waking up and being unable to go back to sleep that is concerning. When that happens, I’d like you to use the aid. It will help you get a healthy amount of sleep.”
Laura nodded knowing intellectually what Audra was saying, but hating it nonetheless because it meant yet another thing out of her control. Tears pricked at her eyelids and then she felt a gentle hand take hers. The other woman sat on the edge of the low coffee table as Laura met her steady gaze. “Please,” Audra said. “Please trust me to know what you need at the right time. I promise that you won’t need the aid for any longer than is necessary.”
Laura took a deep, juddering breath. “I do ... trust you,” she said.
Audra smiled and picked up the device. It was very thin and had a small screen. “Now, when you’re not using it as a sleep aid, it can be used to access our audio libraries.”
“Audio libraries?” Laura asked looking at the device with more interest now.
Audra opened a small zippered compartment in the case and poured two small objects into the palm of her hand. “These are earbuds,” she said, “for listening to music or books ... whatever you like from our library of recorded audio files. I’ve programmed the player function to automatically translate all text into standard Caprican for you.” Laura looked at her in surprised gratitude and she chuckled softly. “Don’t thank me yet,” she continued. “Basic devices like this tend to make a hash of poetry and song lyrics--even literature--because the translation is often very literal and a lot the nuance may get lost, but as we get to know each other’s languages and cultures better, the translations will get better. In fact, I often find that it’s better to listen to music in the original language, and it’s easy enough to flip between Caprican and whatever language the text was originally in.”
She handed Laura the device and showed her how to activate both the sleep aid and the audio functions. Then taking her over to her computer terminal, she showed her how to download music and literature from the ship’s library. Laura listened in rapt attention as she explained how Earth’s vast audio libraries had evolved from various early computerized music-sharing sites and simple abridged recordings of books for the blind and visually impaired.
“Even now, music and entertainment vids make up the largest portion of our digital libraries,” she said. “But that’s changing. One of the Emperor’s mandates is to have libraries of all scientific, artistic, educational and all other endeavours throughout the Empire that are accessible to everyone.”
“Can I get another one?” Laura asked eagerly; Audra looked at her in mild confusion. “For Bill,” she continued feeling unaccountably shy all of a sudden. She felt her face heat up when Audra smiled knowingly.
“I’ll have one programmed and sent up,” she replied.
“Thank you.”
Part 20
Word Count: 3,180
Rating: M
Disclaimer: Not mine ... just playing.
Spoilers: To LDYB Part II - Everything is definitely AU from the moment the Cylons flew over.
Summary: When Cloud Nine is destroyed, it attracted the attention of not only the Cylons.
Author's Note: This is a crossover fic, with David Weber's Mutineer's Moon - Fifth Imperium universe, but I don't think that you need to know the universe of this trilogy of novels to get it. Hopefully, it's explained well enough in the story.
“In these sessions, we’ll only go as far and as fast as you want to go,” Audra Keyes said.
Laura nodded, but didn’t reply. She studied the other woman as she settled in the chair opposite Laura’s own comfortable arm-chair. Audra Keyes was a small, blonde woman with piercing blue eyes, but she was one of the few Imperials close to Laura’s age. Most of Herdan’s crew seemed ridiculously young.
“Then why don’t we get started.”
A bitter, hacked-off laugh escaped Laura before she could stop it.
Get started? she wanted to shout. How the frak am I supposed to do that?
“Just talk for now,” the other woman said gently. “Tell me about your home, for example.”
“You want to know about Caprica?”
Audra smiled. “Or teaching, your job as Secretary of Education--” Laura pulled a face and she laughed. “Or not. You can talk about your dog if you want; just open a dialogue, Laura.”
“Dog?” Laura asked.
“A pet--a domesticated canid,” she said. “Many people keep dogs or cats, which are domesticated felines, or birds, fish … we keep lots of things as pets.
“I know what a dog is,” Laura said, and suddenly wondered if there were dogs on Caprica anymore. Perhaps some wild ones had survived, but would they survive the nuclear fallout. She rather hoped they would … that despite the Cylons, life would still flourish in the Twelve Colonies.
She met the psychiatrist’s steady gaze. “I've never had a pet,” she said at last. “My parents didn’t believe in keeping another lifeform captive just for our amusement or comfort.”
“What about you?” Audra asked shrewdly.
Laura shrugged. “I’ve never needed one.”
Audra chuckled softly. “But I bet you wanted one,” she said.
“When I was very young I did,” Laura admitted after a moment of silence. “All my friends had pets--I envied them sometimes.” She smiled to herself. “I remember when my best friend, Rhea, got a silver-spotted kitten from her father for her eighth birthday. Its eyes were barely open and it was so tiny that it would curl up in the palm of her hand to sleep when she first got it--it was the softest thing I’d ever touched. I think that outside of school, I spent almost every waking hour at Rhea’s house playing with her and Starbright. And I teased my father mercilessly for a kitten for weeks afterwards.”
“Your father--not your mother?”
Laura laughed. “No,” she said, “not that Mama wasn’t great, but I think that like a lot of men, Papa couldn’t be the disciplinarian when it came to his girls. So it fell to my mother to be the one who said “no” most of the time--though, I must credit my father, once she said no, he backed her up. But like all kids, my sisters and I knew that we had a better chance of getting what we wanted if we could get him to say “yes” before she could say “no”. And it didn’t take me long to learn that I needed to wheedle Papa into giving me what I wanted before Mama even knew that the question was there to be asked.”
Audra laughed heartily. “I just bet you did. What about when you got older?”
Laura felt a familiar tightening in her chest. “There was no playing Papa off against Mama then,” she replied looking down at her hands. “He and my sisters died in an aircar accident when I was fourteen.”
“I’m sorry. What happened?”
“I think that it was one of the few times he’d ever said no to me,” she said after a long silence. “I guess it was the last time he ever said no to me. My mother wasn’t even home at the time … she was still at school--science fair projects I think. He’d asked me a number of times to clean up the kitchen … do some laundry, but I was too interested in some book to be bothered. They were both tired and I usually got home at least an hour or two before they did, and I knew I should help, but I was pissed off that day. It was stupid. Then he had to go pick up Kiera and Jihane--they were coming home from university for the winter solstice break. Kiera was going to be starting her teaching internship the following semester, while Jihane had just started university that semester. I begged Papa to let me go for the ride, and he told me no.”
Laura’s throat closed around her voice and there was a long silence before she could continue. Tears pricked at the corner of her eyes.
“He told me that until I could start taking some responsibility around the house, I was going to be hearing “no” a lot more from him. He looked so disappointed … said he was afraid that he’d spoiled me too much because I was the youngest. And I remember being so furious with him, yelling that he didn’t want a daughter, but a slave.”
Laura rose and went to the window gazing out at the park; Audra’s office was on the same level as the park grounds and it looked even more real up close. “Isn’t it curious how often the last things we say to the ones we love are words of anger,” she said hoarsely, no longer able to hold back the tears.
“Because we don’t know that it will be the last time,” Audra said gently.
“Yes.” Again the silence stretched out between them. “I was up in my room sulking when the authorities came--then all I remember were my mother’s screams and suddenly I was downstairs clinging to her … trying to make sense of what the policemen were saying. Trying to understand how it could be that my father and sisters were never coming home again.”
“It must have been difficult.”
“Our lives fell apart,” Laura replied. “And I got a crash course in responsibility.”
“How do you mean?”
“My mother barely made it through the funerals and the aftermath--” Laura laid her head against the window and watched a young man swing a tow-headed toddler up on his shoulders. Though the glass blotted out all noise from the park, she could see the pure, unadulterated glee on the child’s innocent face. “On top of everything, that’s when I first learned that she was fighting cancer; she’d been diagnosed a couple of months before and had had a lumpectomy. She and my father hadn’t wanted us kids to worry, but she was starting chemotherapy, so they were going to tell us when Kiera and Jihane came home.
“Anyway, Mother started treatment the week after the funerals … and I watched her grow weak and frail. She wasn’t able to work for a long time, so things got tight for us. My father had left some savings and insurance, and we owned our house in Caprica City, thank the Gods, but even with social assistance, cancer therapy is expensive and with no money coming in … I did what I could, but tutoring … babysitting--those kinds of things don’t bring much in and I couldn’t legally get a job until I was seventeen. I did manage to lie myself into a secretarial job at a small architectural firm when I was sixteen and things were getting desperate enough for Mother to consider selling the house. I used Jihane’s citizen identity number. For some reason the government bureaucracy never got its various departments looking in the same direction, so over two years after she’d died, we received her Colonial citizen card, which replaced her Caprica student identity card and proclaimed that since she was nineteen, she was a full citizen of the Colonies with the right to vote, own property in her own name and enter into legally binding contracts.”
“So you became the sole breadwinner for your family.”
“Only for two years,” she replied. “My employer was a good man, and now when I think of the trouble I could have gotten him into for breaking the child labour laws when he finally found out, I know I was incredibly lucky to have met him. He could have fired me then and there, but instead he took me down to the Department of Labour and got it all straightened out. He arranged it so that I could keep working for him under my own name during evenings and off-days even though I was still a few months short of my seventeenth birthday, and I could go back to school. By the time I finished high school, my mother was well enough to start teaching again part-time for a few hours each day. I won a scholarship to the university and then went on to do a teaching degree, and later my doctorate.”
“Even with that hiatus from high school, you still won a scholarship,” Audra said in quiet admiration.
Laura laughed and met the other woman’s gaze. She made her way back to her chair and sat down. “If I was anything, I was a very good student,” she said, “and I was especially good at math and science. When I went back, I made my mind up to win my school’s math or science awards, because I knew that wining either of those awards would guarantee me a letter of recommendation from my Headmaster to the Colonial Scholarship Funding Committee. And the hiatus turned out to work in my favour--I ended up being a year older than most of the students in my senior year, and there’s something to be said for the edge you get from being a little more mature than your classmates. I ended up winning both awards that year, which pretty much guaranteed that I would get a fairly substantial scholarship, especially since I’d expressed interest in becoming a mathematician or perhaps a research scientist.”
Audra studied her curiously for a moment. “Why do I get the feeling that you had no intention of pursuing either of those careers?”
“Probably because I didn’t,” she replied.
“That’s rather single-minded for a seventeen year-old.”
“I’ve always been a rather single-minded person.” Laura chuckled quietly again. “Don’t get me wrong, I loved those subjects--in fact, I took undergraduate degrees in Mathematics and Science. But in university, everyone expects you to mature and your interests to change, so it came as no surprise that I added Literature to my areas of study or that the field of science I became interested in was early cognitive development and learning in children. As long as I kept up the good grades that were the requirement for my scholarship, I think that the only ones who cared that I didn’t become a doctor or research scientist were my mother and perhaps my old Headmaster, who had told me when I graduated that he expected great things of me. I don’t think that having me show up at his school five years later, when my intern teacher rotation brought me back to my old high school for a couple of months, was exactly what he’d had in mind.” She was silent for a few moments and then shrugged. “I think he was relieved when I chose to specialize in teaching at the elementary level and left his school for good.”
“What about your mother?”
“Oh, she was definitely disappointed when she realised that I had no intention of pursuing the rarefied heights of academia or scientific research. I think she felt that I’d wasted my opportunities … didn’t live up to my potential.” Laura cleared the lump in her throat that formed as she remembered her mother’s disappointment.
“But she was a teacher herself,” Audra said.
“A science teacher who had wanted to be a research scientist,” Laura replied sadly. “My father loved teaching--I don’t think he’d ever really wanted to be anything else. But my mother had taken up teaching as a way to get money to pursue a doctorate. Then she met my father, they got married and had Kiera soon afterwards. It was only after she’d died and I was going through her things that I realised my mother had been planning to start her doctorate once Kiera was in school full-time. But by the time Kiera was four, Mother was already pregnant again, and I came along three years after Jihane.”
Laura lapsed into silence again. "When we're children, we don't consider that our parents might have had hopes and dreams of their own," she said at last. "I suppose that I always knew it--intellectually you know, but my mother died before I truly understood it--it should not have taken me so long to finally understand."
"Understanding happens when it happens," the psychiatrist said. "Knowledge means little without context. Understanding the lives of others, even those we're closest to, cannot happen if we don't have the life experience to put those lives into context."
"I just wish I'd had that epiphany before she died," Laura said wistfully.
“Was it the cancer again?”
Laura nodded. “She’d been in remission for nearly ten years,” she said at last. “Then it came back with vengeance. She tried everything--even a radical double mastectomy. And the drugs were so much worse this time around. Five years--she fought for five years. Towards the end, she lost her mind on diloxin ..."
Her voice gave out and she lapsed into the silence again; her mother's wild-eyed agony haunted her still.
"All right, Laura," Audra said, startling Laura out of her thoughts. "That's enough for today."
"But I didn't talk about-about--" The words were blurted out before she had time to censor them. And she hated that she couldn't even bring herself to say the word.
Audra took her trembling hands and squeezed them gently as Laura met her gaze. "When you're ready, you'll talk about it," she said. "Give yourself time, Laura, to learn trust again, and to learn to trust me enough to talk about it."
"It's not so hard to talk to William," Laura admitted quietly.
"Good," Audra replied letting go of her hands. "I'm glad you haven't lost that trust in him and that he's easy to talk to."
"I don't want to burden him."
"Why don't you let him be the judge of that," Audra said. "I highly doubt that he would ever see your confidences as a burden; an honour perhaps--that you would choose to trust him--but never a burden." Laura nodded, grateful for the reassurance. "Now, how are you sleeping?"
"Not well; I have nightmares and wake up screaming--then I can’t get back to sleep," she whispered after a moment.
"That's normal. It's your mind working through the trauma you experienced. Now, you indicated that you didn't want to use drugs if we could help it." Laura nodded; she hated the thought of being drugged ... being unable to control her own body again. "Therefore, I'm going to prescribe a mechanical sleep aid. It won't be as effective as pills, but it will help ensure you get enough sleep; your mind needs the rest to heal as much as your body does."
She moved over to her desk and picked up a small pouch. Returning to her seat, she opened it to show Laura the small rectangular device and a pair of thin bronze metal disks about two centimetres in diameter. Laura stared at the device; she hated it already.
“You’ll just need to apply these two electrodes to your temples and turn it on,” Audra explained. “I’ve already programmed it for mild sleep induction.” After a few moments when Laura didn’t say anything, she continued. “I know that you would rather not--that you hate to be dependent on anything, but I need you to trust me to know right now what is good for your health. A sleep aid is just that Laura--an aid. If you find that you can fall asleep without it, then that’s good. It’s the waking up and being unable to go back to sleep that is concerning. When that happens, I’d like you to use the aid. It will help you get a healthy amount of sleep.”
Laura nodded knowing intellectually what Audra was saying, but hating it nonetheless because it meant yet another thing out of her control. Tears pricked at her eyelids and then she felt a gentle hand take hers. The other woman sat on the edge of the low coffee table as Laura met her steady gaze. “Please,” Audra said. “Please trust me to know what you need at the right time. I promise that you won’t need the aid for any longer than is necessary.”
Laura took a deep, juddering breath. “I do ... trust you,” she said.
Audra smiled and picked up the device. It was very thin and had a small screen. “Now, when you’re not using it as a sleep aid, it can be used to access our audio libraries.”
“Audio libraries?” Laura asked looking at the device with more interest now.
Audra opened a small zippered compartment in the case and poured two small objects into the palm of her hand. “These are earbuds,” she said, “for listening to music or books ... whatever you like from our library of recorded audio files. I’ve programmed the player function to automatically translate all text into standard Caprican for you.” Laura looked at her in surprised gratitude and she chuckled softly. “Don’t thank me yet,” she continued. “Basic devices like this tend to make a hash of poetry and song lyrics--even literature--because the translation is often very literal and a lot the nuance may get lost, but as we get to know each other’s languages and cultures better, the translations will get better. In fact, I often find that it’s better to listen to music in the original language, and it’s easy enough to flip between Caprican and whatever language the text was originally in.”
She handed Laura the device and showed her how to activate both the sleep aid and the audio functions. Then taking her over to her computer terminal, she showed her how to download music and literature from the ship’s library. Laura listened in rapt attention as she explained how Earth’s vast audio libraries had evolved from various early computerized music-sharing sites and simple abridged recordings of books for the blind and visually impaired.
“Even now, music and entertainment vids make up the largest portion of our digital libraries,” she said. “But that’s changing. One of the Emperor’s mandates is to have libraries of all scientific, artistic, educational and all other endeavours throughout the Empire that are accessible to everyone.”
“Can I get another one?” Laura asked eagerly; Audra looked at her in mild confusion. “For Bill,” she continued feeling unaccountably shy all of a sudden. She felt her face heat up when Audra smiled knowingly.
“I’ll have one programmed and sent up,” she replied.
“Thank you.”
Part 20