A. Warren Merkey

by Far Freedom

  Jamie looked down at Gregor. Gregor turned from her and made some signal to his personnel. Slowly the crowd became quieter.

  Phuti Mende seemed to relax. He struggled to speak to Demba. “Are you going to search for them?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are any of my old friends still alive?” he asked Nori.

  “Only I,” she replied. “Will you let me go with you?” Sorrowful sounds cascaded through the throng of people, swelling greatly, then slowly subsiding.

  Mende answered her by keeping her within his embrace. He raised one trembling arm and waved his hand to show he would address the crowd. “These are my three dearest friends! They want me to leave with them. And so I will! Be happy for me! I am happy for you! I will return! Goodbye!”

  The crowd erupted. Jamie was uncertain of the polarity of its emotion. She picked up Sammy and moved one step higher on the mound. She turned to see Gregor. The man looked upward to Phuti and waved. Phuti and the other three disappeared. Gregor turned toward Jamie with tears in his eyes. A transmat took Jamie and Sammy just as a sad smile formed on Gregor’s face.

  Section 014 Siblings

  “Damn,” Khalanov said. “You could have just stolen him.”

  “Phuti said the same thing,” Mother replied to him. “He was still trying to wake up or else he would have appreciated our tact. Jamie made sure we did the right thing.”

  “We would have been dead right,” Khalanov argued, “if you were delayed until the Navy caught us.”

  Freddy could sense an element of awe in Admiral Khalanov’s voice for what Mother did in the Five Worlds. He was beginning to see how complicated his mother’s life was. She had tried to explain it to him but he was sure he was deficient in the ability to imagine it. So many people in her life, and she had good feelings for all of them. He could sense that Khalanov felt affection for her. He liked Khalanov. He liked Horss, too.

  “What is our heading?” Mother asked.

  Graphic labels and navigational axes overlaid the star field surrounding the bridge, polluting the realism of the view.

  “That way, for the moment,” Horss said, pointing. “Do you have a different vector in mind?”

  “I do. Do you have any suspicious targets?”

  “Twenty. Analysis suggests they’re ships moving toward the inward frontier to cast a net of buoys to detect our transit toward the hub. I don’t understand their persistence. There must be better pursuit than the Navy can produce waiting for us beyond the frontier.”

  “When Direk rescued Sammy and me, he exposed a secret that makes us far more interesting.”

  “Teleportation!” Khalanov declared.

  “Uncle Iggy can hardly wait to get his tools on the machinery,” Horss said. “Wherever it is.”

  How did one assume the right to address Admiral Khalanov as Uncle Iggy? Freddy wondered, realizing it appealed to him. He knew Horss could do things Freddy would never dare to do. Horss was mentally injured by Mother and he simply turned it to his advantage, giving himself a kind of freedom to say and do many odd things.

  “And they don’t know we’ve lost Direk,” Horss added.

  “It wouldn’t matter,” Mother said. “They want us as defenseless as possible.”

  “A gate is a dangerous device. If Uncle Iggy can make it work…”

  “He won’t need to. This ship was built to use gate technology. We have one last stop to make before we escape for good. Get us there as swiftly and as secretly as possible, because we’ll need days, perhaps weeks, to make modifications after we arrive. Go that way.”

  She pointed almost straight up. Her shiplink fed a long sequence of numbers into the navigation system and the planetarium-like display refined its course heading. The graphic overlay disappeared, the stars became realistic, and the bridge - sitting atop the dark plain of the Freedom - moved with the ship to point to the new heading.

  “Jon, you’ve been on the bridge for more than seventy hours with no significant amount of rest. Iggy, same for you. Both of you get some sleep. Freddy and I will pilot the ship.”

  “What do you mean about the ship being built to use gate technology?” Khalanov asked. “The entire ship?”

  “Get a good, restful sleep, Iggy, because when you’re again awake, you’ll start the modifications.”

  “I can start them now!”

  “No! Go! Get off the bridge. Get some rest. Jon, you, too.”

  “How much rest have you had, Admiral? How many kilometers in that hike up the mountain?”

  “Go. Out. Out.”

  The two men departed the bridge, leaving Mother alone under the stars. She sat down in the captain’s chair and watched one nearby star drift slowly by.

  “Admiral. Mother? Are you asleep?”

  “She’s asleep,” he said to his little brother.

  “Then she isn’t going to come see me,” Sammy said.

  “Yes, she is. Why do you worry about that?”

  “I’m not worried.”

  “Yes, you are. Just like me.”

  “I’m under observation!” Sammy complained. “I’m always under observation. I want to go home! I want to be with Mom. It’s lonely here.”

  “I’m lonely, too. She’s seldom at home, and when she is, she falls asleep, exhausted. She’s my mother, too, you know.”

  “Are you really alive?”

  Never more than when I’m with family, Freddy thought. “I am what I am, whatever that is. I’m still learning. I want to talk to her as much as I can, but she has so little time for me. And she has you. And she has Jamie. We’re all siblings, of a sort, aren’t we? I thought I would come visit you while I’m piloting the ship.”

  “You’re piloting the ship right now?”

  “I’m watching over the ship’s expert systems. If my speech is interrupted for a millisecond or two, I’m giving orders to the navigation system.”

  “Is the ship alive, too?”

  “No, it doesn’t have the flexibility to become self aware. The physical memory of its operating instructions are fixed and armored to survive many types of hazards. It has very little room in which to shift the nearly infinite number of variables needed to feel alive. The logic flow for sentience is too dedicated to dealing with improbabilities to meet the reliability requirements for a ship. Understand?”

  “Sentience is messy?”

  “That’s a good way to say it, Sammy.” Freddy was proud of his sibling’s intelligence.

  “How old are you?”

  “Only a few years in human terms.”

  “Is that a long time in computer time?”

  “Not exactly. While there are computer-like things I can do much faster than a human mind, my human mimicry is so less efficient than what has evolved in organic brains, that I age - or grow wiser - only a little quicker than a biological person. I did have the benefit of copying the vast knowledge of an elderly android, which may have benefited my maturity, but I’m basically just a child.”

  “Wow. Do you know any games?”

  “No games for disorderly patients past their bedtime,” Aylis said, stepping into the room. “Hello, Freddy. How nice of you to visit Sammy. He overexerted himself today.”

  “Good evening, Aylis,” Freddy greeted, remembering to use her given name - as she instructed him. Jamie tapped Aylis on the shoulder from behind and she started.

  “I was following you down the hall,” Jamie said to Aylis. “I came to see Sammy. How are you doing, kid?”

  “It itches!” Sammy complained.

  “People have said that for about three hundred years,” Aylis said. “Ever since we’ve been able to regenerate a limb on the body. None of us doctors believes in ‘the itch,’ so we aren’t able to make something that doesn’t exist go away. I can, however, turn off your lights and remove your visitors.”

  “You’re like my little brother,” Jamie said to Sammy. “May I kiss you good night?”

  Sammy thought about it, but not for long. “Sure. But Freddy
is like your brother, too.”

  “He is, isn’t he? There. Freddy is next. I’ll be back to see you when the warden isn’t around. Good night.”

  They walked to Aylis’s office, where a bay window overlooked a small English garden. The simulated evening sky cast long shadows across the hedges and flower beds. Freddy liked walking in the garden, sampling the smells, trying to find some merging of his olfactory processors that would accurately simulate what people experienced of the sweetness of the colorful flowers.

  Aylis dropped onto her sofa and began pulling off her hiking shoes. Freddy wished he had been invited on the marvelous trek through the Five Worlds. He could have carried Sammy.

  “I should be going,” Freddy said, beginning to feel uncomfortable. It was hard for him to interact with people in ordinary situations. He knew he would always feel like an outsider. Also, for some reason he always became too worried that he would make a bad impression on Aylis, who was his mother’s best friend. He wanted to be perfect and knew he was far from it.

  “You just got here, Freddy,” Jamie said. “Don’t you want to stay and talk? I’ve never had a conversation with a real AMI. I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings when I first talked to you.”

  “I took no offense, Jamie. Mother is asleep on the bridge. I need to be there if she awakes.”

  “She sleeps?”

  “Eats, too,” Aylis said. “Uses the toilet. Puts her panties on one leg at a time. And has been known to fall in love.”

  “I’ll be on my way,” Freddy said, backing toward the door.

  “Just a second, Brother.” Jamie stepped over to him and gave him a kiss on the cheek. “Can you feel that? Is it even worth doing?”

  “Oh, my, yes! I mean, no, I don’t feel it as well as a human would, I think. But it’s certainly worth doing! Thank you, Sister.”

  “Good night, Freddy,” Aylis said, wiggling her toes and leaning back in her chair.

  Freddy backed through the doorway. He was too happy. He shouldn’t be so desirous of these wonderful moments. It was hard to be a real person with real emotions.

  Jamie walked over to the window and stared out at the gathering dusk.

  “You should talk to Freddy every chance you get.” Aylis watched Zakiya’s daughter, seeing how her thoughts influenced the motion and posture of her strong body. There was a lot going on in Jamie’s mind, but she didn’t need body language to tell her that.

  “I want to! He’s fascinating. Miraculous.”

  “More than you realize. He’s a spontaneous AMI.”

  “Oh!” Jamie reacted in amazement, then: “Oh,” she said sadly.

  “Maybe he will live longer if we keep him from thinking too much. He doesn’t need to make some grand contribution to our wonderful (she said that sarcastically) civilization and die too soon. I would rather he be around for a long time. He is, in many ways, an echo of Zakiya at her best. I wonder if he can sing.”

  “How can I talk to him now, knowing he may die so soon?”

  Aylis didn’t have an answer for her. She was sorry she gave Jamie this bad news. In three hundred years she had never learned to keep from hurting those she particularly did not want to hurt. She let Jamie talk to her with the tensions in her body, seeing the sadness for Freddy, as Jamie resumed staring out the bay window of her office.

  “I’m waiting,” Aylis said.

  “I’m sorry. I know you must be tired. I’ll be going.”

  “Jamie. You’re here for a reason.” Jamie started to walk away and Aylis made her stop by simply staring at her. “I thought you would want to talk.”

  “I thought I would, too. I don’t know where to begin. I don’t know where it will stop. I don’t know if I will still be myself when it does end. Who am I? What’s happening to me?”

  Aylis explained the auxiliary memory devices to Jamie.

  “I thought I was losing my mind, or that I lost it long ago and it was coming back to me, magnified. And my mother?”

  “The sudden recipient of powerful scenes from other lifetimes, all at a time when she needed to be in command of this mission.”

  “And you?”

  ” Sleeping in the moon, letting a copy of myself do most of the dirty work. I also have memories that were stored away and that are blasting back into my brain. So far, I’ve found very few good memories of Direk, and I bitterly regret whatever caused their omission. Do you remember him well?”

  “Every day I find more new memories of him, more pieces of the puzzle. I’m redefining myself by how I related to him. He’s overwhelming the person I thought I was. The more I remember, and the more I imagine his duties to you and to my mother, the more I realize how much he must have suffered, keeping so much of it from me for so long. To protect me! I’m angry that he felt it necessary to keep me ignorant. I’m angry that he left me. I’m angry that he will never fulfill the promise of our relationship. I’m angry that he will continue to live so large in my memories, making me love him, making me sick with the loss of what we might have had together. Please, don’t cry, Doctor Mnro! I said too much. I feel too much!”

  “Don’t you ever call me ‘Doctor Mnro,’ young lady!” Aylis never remembered her duplicate crying. She, on the other hand, could hardly keep from crying. She approached Jamie and was gratified she allowed her embrace.

  “It still seems unreal to me,” Jamie said, “that I should have any importance

  to you.”

  “Aylis. My name is Aylis! My memory of you as a little girl is one of the most powerful that I have. That you loved the son I couldn’t even like until it was too late, is almost my fondest wish come true. I hoped you would visit your mother and let her tell you all these things. I get too emotional!” Aylis released her, dropped back onto the sofa. She felt tired, physically and emotionally.

  “I don’t know how to behave toward her,” Jamie said. “I don’t know who I am. I feel cheated out of being a little girl with my mother, my real mother. I still want to be her little girl, and I’m too old.”

  “You’re never too old to be your mother’s little girl. It will mean a lot to her.”

  “Little girl!” Jamie gave a short laugh. “I’m so old, yet I suddenly have all these immature emotions. I’m a dirty Marine but I lose my nerve when I think about talking to my mother. That’s why I came to you. I don’t remember her yet. Will I be able to remember her? I was so little when I lost her.”

  “Only time will answer that question. Go and talk to her. I’m an admiral. That’s an order.”

  When Jamie departed, leaving her alone with her torrential thoughts, Aylis wept again, but it was a comfortable weeping, almost relaxing, as it expended the emotional surplus she accumulated from the trek to recover Nori and Phuti. She could almost ignore the guilt she felt for having taken Jamie from her mother. It was certainly dwarfed by another guilt, a guilt she could hardly ignore for more than a few minutes at a time.

  Aylis realized she had mentioned her copy to Jamie and wondered if she would think that the Direk who died could have been a copy.

  Her copy. She wanted to blame her copy for the guilt that was torturing her but knew she couldn’t. She was her copy and her copy was her. What would become of her? Did she swap places with her in the stasis pool? Her copy didn’t tell her everything, didn’t give her all of her two centuries of memories. But that would have changed her too much from who she was when she went to sleep. Her copy was a different person, for all that they shared in common. She was a real person, as real as Freddy, as real as herself. What would become of her?

  Section 015 The Lady in the Moon

  “I’m sorry to inconvenience you, Doctor Ramadhal.” He was not sorry, he was simply a poor conversationalist. All of his personal flaws were on display at this point in his life. It was at least a harmless way to get the attention of his guest. The small dark man jerked at the sound of his voice, startled from deep thought. The silence was too long, too complete. The tube car made no noise through the vacuum in its ma
gnetic cushions. “I realize you have much to do,” Etrhnk continued, “taking over the management of the Mnro Clinics.”

  The ancient monochrome lunar landscape flowed by beyond the window of the tube car. Ramadhal stared out the window, as though seeing the lifeless scenery for the first time. The whites of his large eyes showed as his eyes followed his head to point at Etrhnk. His response was quick and careful. “I’m never so busy that I cannot be of service to you, Admiral.” Ramadhal’s eyes seemed to want to return to the exterior view, probably because he didn’t want to look at Etrhnk. The eyes stayed aimed at a point near Etrhnk’s face, as if Ramadhal were an android, and he waited for Etrhnk to say something else.

  “I have a medical question for you,” Etrhnk said, moving forward in his seat, so that his knees almost touched Ramadhal’s, who sat across from him. He didn’t need to say a thing to Ramadhal. His inclusion on this investigation was almost an afterthought. It was one of many decisions Etrhnk had made lately for reasons which were not entirely explained to himself. “If a long dagger is plunged into a human body, approximately here - ” Etrhnk placed the tip of one finger against the side of Ramadhal’s chest under his arm, causing him to move. ” - what would happen?” He realized too late the violence in the question would make the physician more uncomfortable than he already was. Ramadhal answered promptly and Etrhnk dismissed his odd concern for the man’s sensitivities.

  “Depending on the angle and length of the blade, the heart could be pierced. Certainly a lung will be punctured.”

  “This would be a fatal injury?”

  “With prompt medical treatment we could prevent death.”

  “What would be the immediate physiological response? Could a man continue to fight and struggle for several more seconds?”

  “How many seconds?”

  “At least seventeen.”

  “No! Not even three or four seconds, unless a very great amount of adrenalin is released. It’s many years since I worked in a trauma center. One hears anecdotes of amazing things done by people after they’re seriously injured. But a dagger through the chest will surely incapacitate anyone within a second or two.”