A. Warren Merkey

by Far Freedom

  “Is something wrong, Admiral?” Horss asked.

  “I don’t know but there usually is!” Everyone she loved. Even Aylis Mnro?

  Aylis Mnro… And the memory came.

  “Doyou remember, Zakiya?”

  “I remember,” Fidelity replied.

  She was speaking to this woman as an equal, and this woman was the most famous and most honored person who ever lived. Aylis Mnro brought practical immortality to the average person. But now Fidelity remembered who she was, who they both were, and it was like the universe turned inside-out.

  “Please, don’t hate me!” Aylis begged. “We have so little time together in full knowledge of who we are and who we were! God willing, we’ll meet again and know who we are again, but this could also be the last time we see each other!”

  She could see herself remembering: memories within memories, dreams within dreams. She was sure Aylis spoke those words before. How many times? How many years ago? The images of the past escaped and burned into her mind, and killed her. The person she was long ago waved at her from across the abyss of time: farewell, or until we meet again? The memory inside a memory stopped and its parent continued.

  “It’s so very difficult, Aylis! The memories aren’t faded by time! They hit me hard and fresh and I’m terribly wounded! All I ever wanted was simply to be a good mother!”

  “And who would you tell her was her father? How would you describe him to her? How would Alex ever share Jamie’s childhood with you? It isn’t fair to either Alex or to Jamie. Don’t you think that’s selfish of you, Zakiya?”

  She sat down under the apricot tree and hugged her knees. She knew the truth when she heard it. She was selfish. She looked up at the crescent Earth which shone above the rim of the crater. She looked over at the best friend she ever had. At least Aylis never abandoned her, as Alex did. Alex. How many times in her long life did she hear that name and never knew it belonged to her husband? The momentary joy of this knowledge took away some of the pain, but not for long. “I’m just tired and lonely, Aylis. I don’t know how you go on, although at least you have your son.”

  “Don’t you remember? I went to sleep. I’m not here any longer, just this imitation of me. That’s how I can be so cruel, although it still isn’t easy. Aylis loves you very much. Never forget that.”

  “But I will, won’t I? What’s that?” Aylis was holding some piece of fabric, twisting it and pulling it between her hands. She held it by the edge in her fingers, showing it was a container. She opened the silvery bag and pulled forth two objects and placed them on the ground next to Zakiya. They were spectacular artifacts of deep color purity, small as hen’s eggs, mysterious beyond understanding. She picked one up and instantly verified what her eyes told her. The object lacked mass and weight, yet it felt absolutely solid in her hand.

  “I remember them!” She was assaulted by a memory that rushed into her from very far in the past: a memory within a memory within a memory, gaining strength with each nested iteration. These pieces of magic came into her possession the final time she touched him. Alex.

  “You take one,” Aylis said.

  “Yes, that would be logical,” Zakiya said.

  “Why did you stop?” Freddy inquired.

  Horss gave up any hope of further enlightenment. He was still trying to fit his imagination around the wild tale Fred - Freddy - told him, of Gatekeepers and barbarians in black uniforms, and a woman in a mirror who disintegrated people and anything she touched. The admiral didn’t respond for several minutes, standing with her eyes closed. Horss could almost feel the pressure of emotions she tried to contain. He understood now how she suffered from intense flashbacks, similar to what Pan experienced. She turned away from them and held her face in her hands. They waited. Freddy put a hand lightly on her shoulder. She turned around then and put her arms around Freddy. Freddy encircled her with his arms and gently held her. Horss was sympathetic, perhaps embarrassed, and impatient for the sentiment to end.

  “I just remembered why I came to Earth. I just remembered something that has made me very emotional. I’m so tired I can’t control myself.”

  “Is control necessary, Mother? If you had control, would I be deprived of the

  202 Far Freedom joy of embracing you?”

  She laughed and wiped her face. “It feels so strange to hear you call me mother.”

  “Feels pretty weird to me, too,” Horss muttered. He received a squeeze of his arm from the admiral and suppressed an urge to react, not knowing how he should react. He tried to understand what the small but important gesture meant to him. If what Freddy told him about the fantastic city-in-the-stars was real and true, then everything had to change yet again. His life was spinning and spinning, with no hope of a steady direction.

  Fidelity recovered her dignity and some of her control. She resumed her search. A vague and puzzle-like memory teased her effort at recollection. She had clues pop into and out of her mind, views of a city that was not this one but had a few identical objects that pointed to a match of route. She had to guess at direction and wait for a matching object to appear on a street and on the map in her data augment. It was almost a game and she imagined it was on purpose. The intermittent images would have been useless if she was not physically walking in this place on Earth. Finally she stopped in the middle of a wide avenue. She backed away from the center of the broken pavement and came to stand on a weedy sidewalk. She looked across the boulevard at a building whose slick marble face and grimy windows escaped much of the flora that sprouted on most other structures. The last clue had evaporated from her mind. Nothing more would reach her conscious. From here onward she was simply groping in the darkness and trying to reason where a certain magic relic might be hidden. There was no reasoning. She could picture the glorious artifact in her mind and she could feel where it might be.

  “A bank?” Freddy guessed.

  Horss followed them to the entrance. The admiral pushed on the glass door, which resisted but wasn’t locked. Freddy pushed it open far enough for them to enter. The dusty lobby was bare of furnishings. The admiral led them to the back of the lobby. They passed through a vault-like doorway. Beyond lay a dim hallway with several doorways on one side along its length. The doorways with missing doors disclosed small rooms, each with a built-in desk. On the opposite side of the dark hallway was a larger doorway with a massive steel frame. The admiral led them down the hallway and through the larger doorway.

  The room was dark but Horss had a handlight and all of them had augmented vision. The metal rectangles of thousands of small doors, most of them open, filled two walls of the room. Small safe-deposit boxes rose to a person’s height, while large ones formed rows down to the floor. Dust and cobwebs filled every opening in the walls.

  “That one,” the admiral said thoughtfully.

  “Which one?” Freddy asked.

  She pointed to one of the largest floor-level boxes.

  “One of the few that appear locked. Shall I open it?”

  “Please.”

  Freddy ripped an open door from another box. He used the door as a hammer to loosen the admiral’s door. Horss never saw an android apply such force. As an expression of will, it gave him pause to understand what a spontaneous AMI represented. Freddy said he killed people to save the admiral. Horss didn’t believe it. Now he did. Freddy bullied the door open and pulled out the metal box. It was empty!

  “Beneath it,” the admiral said.

  Freddy stuck his hand into the opening and rapped with his knuckles. It sounded hollow beneath the floor of the chamber. He struck the floor plate hard enough to raise a warped edge, then pried up the edge. He groped in the cavity beneath the floor and pulled forth a sack made of a silver fabric. He handed it to the admiral. She looked inside the bag.

  “It’s all true!” she declared with a sigh. “They’re real memories and I’m so many different people!”

  “What’s in the bag, Admiral?” Horss asked.

  Light l
eaked between her fingers as she pulled forth an object that just filled her hand. She opened her fingers and held it on her palm for Horss and Freddy to see. Its surface patterns of pure color suggested purpose beyond imagining. Its beauty and mystery all but enslaved the senses, casting the rest of reality into darkness. It appeared to dance upon her palm as if it floated and hardly touched her hand.

  “It looks like the cryptikon!” Horss declared. He had never seen the one in the Essiin Museum - the only one believed to exist. He saw images and they barely hinted at what he now experienced. The device seemed made of solidified light, with no hint of how it was assembled. He suffered this almost ecstatic revelation for only an instant, before another impossibility assaulted his senses.

  Behind them - and between them and the only exit - a rectangle of blue-white light emerged from nothingness, banishing the darkness of the bank vault, even dimming the beautiful glow of the cryptikon. The sharply-delineated plane, so impossibly thin it appeared to exist two-dimensionally, rotated slowly with a hissing noise. Powerful, low-frequency sound waves shook dust from the ceiling and walls. It was so close to them that Horss could feel it. Waves of power modulated the dust in the air and sent rude fingers of pressure through his clothing and across his body. A young woman’s image, hyper-real in sharpness and in color, appeared as though embossed deeply in the silvery plane.

  Horss could not believe this was a mere image. He knew it was deadly without knowing how it could even exist. He knew the Lady in the Mirror from Freddy’s description, and he knew Freddy hadn’t used enough adjectives.

  “You cannot hide from me!” the Lady roared at them. The overtones of the words raised the hairs on Horss’s neck. The Lady in the Mirror extended her plane of destruction horizontally, piercing the walls and boxes, reaching a radius which would sweep through everyone. Then it stopped. “What is this place? Why are you here?”

  The admiral raised the cryptikon above her head, holding it between the tips of her thumb and one finger. The black and silver eyes of the Lady in the Mirror blinked as though they could see but not believe what they saw. Terrible pain deformed the pale face. The red lips parted, and an almost lethal wail of agony erupted from the image. “That’s how it all began!”

  The mirror resumed rotation, pivoting at its center. To one side it ate through rows of metal boxes with a screaming sound and a flare of actinic light. To the other side it disintegrated a wall and collapsed part of the old bank. The crescendo of destruction raged toward them in a blinding glare as the mirror pivoted through its arc. Pieces of ceiling fell around them. Dust swirled and spun into vortices that danced into the plane of death, making sprays of microscopic explosions.

  Horss was too stunned by this nightmare of annihilation to put his final

  thoughts in order. His urge was to pull the admiral behind him, to at least make the gesture to protect her. She prevented that by stepping toward the mirror, even as Horss and Freddy tried to stay away from the mirror’s direction of rotation.

  The admiral held the cryptikon before her in her fingertips. As it touched the advancing wall of blinding death, the cryptikon stuck to it and stopped it.

  The Lady in the Mirror wailed again, the deafening tone fading as the lethal plane of light darkened and vanished.

  The egg floated free and bright in the dusty gloom as the admiral released it and staggered back.

  Freddy retrieved the artifact from the air. He looked at the cryptikon, then surveyed the destruction around them. “I was unprepared to die!”

  Horss almost laughed, his fear having arrived too late to do more than release the trapped air from his lungs. The Lady in the Mirror appeared too briefly to prove him a coward, but he knew he would feel the delayed shock for the rest of his life.

  “Is there a safe place to stay near here?” the admiral asked as though immune to such terror. “I need to rest.”

  “That was very sweet of you, Alex. I hesitate to say it, but it felt romantic to me.”

  “I hesitated to do it, Zakiya. I didn’t know if you would want that.”

  “I did want it! It was wonderful! But also confusing. I don’t understand how you feel about me.”

  “How many times have I held your hand lately? “

  “Like an old friend concerned for my safety?”

  “I love you, Zakiya. Haven’t I said it enough times?”

  “It still feels unreal. I love you. I desperately want to believe you love me.”

  “It’s difficult to explain. When you’re a captain, you’re not wise to allow certain feelings for those under your command. Did I love you anyway? I know I did. I was afraid to approach you, knowing it would change too many things, including the special quality of the crew. I tried to make myself feel about you the way I felt about Koji or Setek. You were someone I could trust completely, someone who saw me as a friend as much as a captain.”

  “How romantic.”

  “I told you it would be difficult to explain.”

  “You’ve explained it well enough.”

  “If you see it as a mistake on my part, I ask forgiveness.”

  “I’m sorry, but I have to know: Fidelity, the woman you married.”

  “I would have married you before Fidelity. But you departed so quickly after the last voyage that I lost confidence in how I thought you felt about me. I learned to love Fidelity with all my heart and almost fell apart when I lost her. Marriage is a sacred commitment. If I find her still alive, we’ll deal with my commitments at that time. I’ve always loved you nobly if not perfectly romantically.”

  “Don’t hang your head that way, Alex. I confess I’ve had a lifetime of longing for you. I’m so proud to be your wife that I can hardly believe it’s true. It was a beautiful wedding, very thoughtfully done. It was the first time I saw Pat cry since he broke that bottle of ancient scotch.”

  They embraced for a long time.

  “Are those your tears or mine?”

  “Ours. I want to change the plan. I want to go with you.”

  “I don’t think I could be effective, knowing a mistake on my part could make me lose you.”

  “All those years on the Frontier, all those impossible situations, you could have lost all of us. I believe in you. You have a magic no one else possesses. I could be useful. Damn it! It’s so unfair, to wait my whole life to be your wife, and then lose you!”

  “Don’t you think I’m coming back? Don’t you really believe in my ‘magic?’”

  Time telescopes cruelly to the end of the dream, to the last kiss salted by tears, to the terrible crushing emotion of loss, the last glimpse of four friends, one of them a husband. “I’ll love you forever,” she said. She turned away from a closed door to face a long, empty future. She had only a silver bag in her hand containing utter magic to make her stand up straight and carry on, yet it was still miserable proof that a future remained to be lived.

  She awoke at the touch on her bare shoulder. Her clenched fist pulled the silver sack from under her as her eyes focused on the face above her: Jon Horss. She saw his concern. She began to react to the powerful memory she just experienced. Tears washed into her eyes and streaked her face. She couldn’t be an admiral, not an admiral Horss would respect. All she could do was be his friend. She forced herself to speak. “How are you, Jon?” She sat up. She wiped her tears without feeling ashamed.

  “Fantastic.” He replied in Twenglish, but his voice had the same quality of concern as his gray eyes. “What’s wrong?”

  She leaned back against the sofa on which she’d slept for six hours and stared at the silver sack in her hand. “Memories of someone I lost a long time ago, Jon. Has Samson returned? Rafael?”

  Horss said a Twenglish word Fidelity knew to be profanity. “No sign of them yet. It isn’t fair. He’s just a child.”

  An East Asian woman entered the room, came to Horss and took his hand. It seemed Horss had wasted no time in her absence. The woman looked at Fidelity gravely and bowed. “Sugai Mai. Mnro
Clinic. Is there no hope of the child’s safe return, Admiral? Rafael? Daidaunkh?”

  “I’m not optimistic.” She tried to stop her tears. She could see she was upsetting the woman. Jon Horss was also made uncomfortable by her lack of control. She suspected she would have little control over her emotions for a long time. The memories were too powerful. “No further visits by the Lady in the Mirror?”

  “No,” Horss answered. “And also no attempt by Etrhnk to take you by transmat.”

  Fidelity leaned forward, elbows on knees, and dangled the silver pouch from its simple drawstring. “Possibly because of this. I seem to recall that it prevents transmat referencing.”

  “A bonus miracle.”

  “Jon, I’m very happy to see you in apparent good health. Please believe me, I never intended to do what I did to you. I didn’t know I could!”

  “Kill me? The news of my death was greatly exaggerated, Admiral. I’m afraid I no longer meet your criteria for a ship captain, but I’m willing to go with you in whatever capacity I can do best.”

  “I wish I hadn’t hurt you. I still need you. How badly were you affected?”

  “I’m strange. I’ll try to be less strange. I’m talking as though we still have a ship to sail. Is it all over? Are we no longer Navy officers?”

  “Etrhnk is waiting to hear you sing,” a different voice spoke.

  She looked beyond Horss and Mai to the bald woman in the doorway to Mai’s office. The woman approached, passing by Horss and touching his arm. Mai stood aside and she also touched her. She looked at each of them but her attention remained on Fidelity. Her blue eyes were filmed with tears and her mouth was straining to contain what might escape gracelessly. “Do you remember me?”

  “I remember.” Fidelity spoke slowly, recognition reaching certainty at the last syllable. “Which one are you?” She still sat, looking up at this creature of myth and legend and seeing an old friend who only wanted that they be friends again. It hurt, that she could call up the memory at will now, of the afternoon in the park, with Jamie playing on the green grass while she and Aylis sat on the bench anguishing over a distant future. She could now look upon the face of her young daughter. She could remember Jamie’s face. She could remember Aylis’s dark face on that terrible day and match it to the pale face she now saw. Even the calamity of emotion was similar in amplitude but perhaps now more positive.