by Far Freedom
After lunch Jessie and I took the baby for a stroll around the ship. When we first started this part of the routine we hardly saw anyone, but every day the route became more popular with other people. They wanted to see Jessie and the baby. It helped that Jessie was delighted to meet everyone, and word spread that she was approachable. I humbly understood how privileged I was to belong to Jessie. I proudly appreciated how beautiful and magical Jessie and Nameless were. I promised myself I would rein in my pride someday.
After our usual long stroll I spent two hours pouring facts into my brain with a machine that bypassed the natural resistance of a human to accept education. It scared me to open myself to such unfiltered input, but I was hungry for current knowledge. I felt dismally ignorant when I imagined what someone like Aylis knew.
Education and knowledge were different in this future time. If, for instance, I wanted to be a physicist, my gray matter only needed a certain amount of organizational knowledge. The vast details of theory, formulae, and computation would be installed as a data augment in my body where it would function like a very smart part of my brain. It seemed like cheating. I liked it.
Every afternoon I learned and retained what would have required a semester at college when I was a young man. After the cram session I had to lie down and peruse my new mental assets, or else I would fall down and peruse them. How much more data could my poor old brain accept? I was ready for a data augment or two, maybe genius-grade models.
Jessie and I ate supper. Then, like old times in the 20th century, we looked for entertainment before bedtime. The old flat movies were interesting for awhile, especially since many were in English and could be viewed as holographic reproductions. We got a tip from Wingren that we should check out a production called the Mother Earth Opera. I tried to stay conscious through all of it but Jessie had to keep punching me awake. I vaguely remembered music was important to me early in my life - but opera? It wasn’t classical opera. Old opera was really over the top: plays about people suffering tragedy and singing like vocal gymnasts. It took powerful lungs to reach forty rows back in an opera hall without audio amplification. The Mother Earth Opera was more about poetry set to music. I liked it and knew I would eventually need to invest in the language skills (more augments) to fully appreciate its art. But it was still too long to stay inside my 20th-century attention span.
Our day usually began with “A” for Aylis and ended with “Z” for Zakiya. She looked in on us late in the evening. This particular evening we were watching our third night of the Mother Earth Opera. I don’t know why Jessie wanted to experience the entire production. Maybe it helped her release her milk to Nameless. Zakiya came in through the patio door just as a woman who looked like her was walking onto the stage in Florida in a yellow dress I’d seen Zakiya wear numerous times. That woke me up. Zakiya saw the hologram and turned to leave.
“No, wait,” I said. “That’s you!”
Zakiya waved and departed. Nothing could make her stay. Jessie pulled me down beside her.
“Zakiya sings.”
“Yes. But how…”
“When we were in the hospital she sang a lullaby to the baby. Remember?”
That I remembered. I was touched by her concern, surprised at the care with which she sang the lullaby. I remembered Wingren had some strange connection to Zakiya that was always a kind of joke to people, and since she recommended the show, I paid close attention to what we were seeing. There she was. It was her! Zakiya was talking to the host of the Opera as though she knew him.
Zakiya sang - to make a monstrous understatement! She made the hair on the back of my neck stand up, sent chills through me. She closed the Mother Earth Opera with a performance that was astounding. When she began to sing that set of complex songs - five songs, five different languages - I thought she made a wrong turn. The preceding blues ballad was so simple and beautiful. The audience clearly dismissed her as an overreaching amateur. But by the time she slipped into the second of the difficult songs, I knew she had impressed everyone. At the third song’s middle, people were starting to stand up, as though that would help them hear better. What they heard was a voice without limits. Every note was easy, precise, and rich, no matter where it rose and fell on the tone scale. Every syllable and every word could be heard clearly. Every phrase seemed to carry the weight of meaning it needed to convey. I spoke none of the five languages but I could believe Zakiya knew exactly what she was saying in song. It was a clear and intimate sound. Even the highest notes were a pleasure to hear and not an assault on an altitude record. By the time she started the last song, everyone in the audience was standing. Then, before she was quite finished with the last song, Zakiya did the completely unexpected. Even her accompanist was surprised. She took those five songs and deconstructed them into an amazingly melodic jazz and blues composition. The accompanist had finally got the feel of the piece and they were getting ready to make it fly, when they abruptly stopped. The accompanist pointed to something. Zakiya ran and the camera followed her. For several moments I couldn’t see exactly what she was doing, although I could see how emotional she was. When she turned around with the child in her arms I could finally see who it was.
My days of blissful recuperation ended. Now I remembered - as if I had wanted to forget it - that Zakiya had told me I was already a father. I remembered the poor little boy in the hospital morgue. I remembered they spoke the name Milly to me.
I watched the recording as Zakiya brought Samson onto the stage. It was as though I saw them in slow motion, able to notice every detail: the joy of both, the look of love between them, the injury to his leg. Zakiya sang Un Bel Di, the cameras staying mainly on Sammy, catching every expression, presenting the tragic mystery of his existence to most of humanity - especially to me.
Samson looked like Milly. I was shocked that I could still remember how Milly looked. I was upset I didn’t tell Jessie about Samson. I was so upset I couldn’t speak
“What’s wrong?” Jessie asked me when the show was over. I could only point to Sammy. “Who is he? Is he on the ship? Why was he so terribly injured?”
Jessie was already upset at seeing the injured child. Now I had to tell her he was dead. He was dead… How was he ever alive? Why did Zakiya have him, seven hundred years after I last saw Milly? Milly who was his mother. Milly? I had seen his body when I was not in a sane state of mind, its meaning lost to me. Now I saw it again, and the importance of it thundered into me and laid me low. I was devastated. Jessie actually tried to get up from the floater, carrying Nameless, and that broke me out of my tears and melancholy. I went to Jessie and urged her to sit down. Her legs were quickly regaining their use but it was not a smooth progress. She could still lose her balance or stumble.
“Please, sit down,” I asked. “Give me a little time. I’ll be alright.” But I would not be alright, not ever. If the dead child was my son, then he had to be Milly’s son. That meant she was pregnant when I last saw her. That raised the enormity of my losing her another order of magnitude. I would never be able to reconcile the opposite polarities of my emotions: being joyous for having Jessie and Nameless, being grieved for losing Milly and Sammy.
When I got Jessie to sit back down, I collapsed on the floor at her feet. Jessie couldn’t get a clear word out of me and she hit the “panic button,” a priority signal that would alert Aylis to any medical problem we might develop. Alex and Zakiya arrived first and urged me off the floor and onto the sofa. Aylis came next and looked into my face as her fingertips pressed into my neck and chest. Jessie had joined me on the floor and she was helped up by Nori, with Mai holding Nameless. In a few more minutes I would glimpse a number of other people standing outside on our patio in the moonlight.
When she had heard from Jessie and Zakiya about what had transpired this evening because of the Mother Earth Opera, Aylis made her diagnosis. “Grief,” she said. “You haven’t told him everything, have you?” She was looking at Zakiya.
“We were waiting,
Aylis,” Alex answered for his wife, as Zakiya was too
454 Far Freedom unhappy to talk.
“And now the waiting is over!” Aylis decreed. She was clearly upset but I didn’t have the mental faculties at the moment to assess her mood or anyone else’s. Aylis tried to get my attention, tried to look into my eyes and see if I was at home. “Look at me, Sam. Look at me! Listen to what I say. There is something of Sammy that survived. It’s like a living copy of his personality and memories. It may be possible to eventually restore him to life in a partially cloned body.”
I must have reacted with apparent skepticism. One never wants to build up hopes to where they can come crashing down.
“I see you’re going to be just as hard to convince as Zakiya. All she wants to do is feel guilty. Just give me time and find a certain monster named Shorty and I think we can have Sammy asking us questions again, and again. As for Milly… ” Aylis grabbed my head between her two hands and pulled me almost against her nose, so we were looking cross-eyed at each other. “… Milly is still alive! Do you understand my words? Milly is still alive!” She released me, looked over at Jessie, then back at me. “Got any questions?”
I was speechless; not so Jessie. “Where is she?” Jessie asked. “When can we see her? Why did she lose Sammy?”
“It’s a long story. But I think we need to begin with your story, Jessie, yours and Sam’s and Milly’s. Because it’s all tied together. Can you tell us about Sam and Milly first? I don’t think Sam is very talkative right now. Maybe he can help in a little while.”
Jessie gave a very detailed narration of my life with Milly, the explosion of ideas we had, culminating in the Hole Project and my teleportation far across the universe. I probably told the story to her a hundred times, and she remembered it better than I did. I listened with good attention, all the while also thinking about Milly and wondering how Aylis knew she was still alive. When Jessie described the teleportation and the “Easter egg,” I thought we were going to spend the rest of the night discussing physics theory. I was no longer interested in physics theory. Aylis put a halt to it.
“Let me summarize,” Aylis said, “and then let us move on. If I have it wrong, well, too bad! Sam and Milly built two identical gates and operated them simultaneously, which had the effect of turning on a universe-spanning signal which Jessie’s people intercepted. They sent a device through that Sam described as an Easter egg and that we know as a cryptikon. When Sam went to retrieve it, it was teleported with him to Jessie’s world, but it was supposed to stay on Earth to open a permanent communications link. Also, one gate on Earth was damaged and was not repaired, thus keeping Sam from being teleported back to Earth. However, there was a mysterious number, called the One-Time Basement Vector, that could have been tried as a last resort to send Sam home. Jessie felt it was too risky, being an unproven theory that also implied time travel. Sam would have arrived back on Earth at the same moment in time that he left it. End of science discussion. We can say right now that Mister and Missus Lee do not exist in any histories or databases we have aboard the Freedom. There are inconclusive references to a Samuel Lee and a Millicent DuPont that at least place their names in the proper era and locations. The Hole Project was obviously kept completely secret forever.
“Now I would ask Zakiya,” Aylis continued, “to give Sam and Jessie a condensed version of our story, perhaps beginning with our early problems with the Navy.”
I began to pay even better attention as Zakiya talked about barbarians invading the Union Navy, and she and her Deep Space crewmates launching a plan to do something about it. Then, just as the final phase began, she found Sammy wandering alone in Africa. As often as she must have told the story, people still had questions to ask. Aylis tried to limit the questions and keep Zakiya focused on the main elements of the story. The voice of Milly, the Lady in the Mirror, and the Golden Ones convinced me that it was not pure chance that brought Jessie and me aboard the Freedom . And I was convinced Milly could still be alive. Aylis studied me, trying to assess my mental state and whether I understood most of the facts and implications.
“Can we do anything about Milly and the Golden Ones?” I asked.
“Can your ship help us?” Alex asked.
Jessie and I looked at each other. She shook her head. “It isn’t a ship,” I said. “I’m sorry we haven’t told you much about it. It’s called the Protector. It has protected the Servants for as long as they can remember. It has never helped them do anything. It has never spoken to them. It consented to help Jessie and me find Earth, and that is the only special thing it has ever done. It made accommodations inside itself for Jessie and me and it seemed to respond to our requests for furnishings and some other matters. Obviously it took it upon itself to contact you because Jessie’s life was threatened by her pregnancy. It’s very doubtful we could get it to cooperate with us, although it must be considering some further interaction with us, since it hasn’t left us and gone back to Jessie’s world.”
“Iggy wants to know if we can go inside it and look around,” Aylis said.
“We can but try,” I replied. Mai and Nori loaded Jessie and Nameless into the floater and I took control of the chair from behind it, just like an old-fashioned wheelchair. We had just got everybody out the porch door to join the others, when the Protector appeared next to the patio. The Protector must have been listening to us, and its appearance might be anticipation of - and tacit acceptance of - our request to board it. Everyone moved aside and let me guide Jessie to the middle of the dumbbell. The Protector was a rather eerie sight, floating in the night and glimmering in the artificial moonlight. Then it opened the portal and stuck out its golden tongue of a ramp.
“Oh, hell!” Aylis declared, seeing how small the portal was. “I just knew it was going to shrink us!”
“Welcome to the Magic Kingdom,” I said. I started pushing Jessie onto the pool of gold at the bottom of the ramp, and the people behind us instantly swelled to giants.
“It didn’t do this when we brought Jessie out from the black cube,” Aylis complained, but I think it was her hand that seized my shoulder as she followed behind me.
I thought the Protector was overdoing it a bit, for as we all transitioned to the slope of the ramp, it looked like the interstate version of the yellow brick road. We could walk ten abreast easily, and the distant portal looked cavernous. Looking back at our porch and patio behind our apartment was like leaving the land of the giants. I was amazed as well, as the Protector had never done anything like this before. For a brief moment I thought I remembered Jessie and me spending years working on theories of how the Protector did its magic. We had produced a very spooky hypothesis. I felt spooked myself as I led the way into an infinity of universes.
456 Far Freedom
The narration of Samuel Lee pauses here.
Section 005 Melvin
Fred was inquisitive. He didn’t know if he acquired that trait from Baby - probably - but he was grateful for it as it sometimes gave him a few moments of distraction. Distraction, it seemed, was the constant goal of most human beings; it allowed them to ignore the basic questions about life that always pointed toward life being meaningless. Pan was often distracted by memories of a long life that were only now becoming accessible. Fred would listen to Pan describe his memories and he would feel happy to know more about Pan. But for a person such as himself, a sentient being housed within a machine, it was also a lesson in how different Pan’s life must be, having relatives and all the other complications caused by biology. These, too, were distractions away from meaningless existence.
As Pan slept, Fred explored the surrounding landscape, usually in the dark, looking for anything that would affect their journey. It was a journey toward destruction, Fred was sure. It was just as well; he could hardly bear the burden of sentient existence. He must be missing some trick of logic that made thoughts more entertaining and less stark and existential. This particular night Fred was able to shunt some of the repet
itious reasoning to a lower priority and focus on a sound he knew did not fit into the nocturnal chorus of wildlife. He was surprised he had the capacity to filter out the normal sounds. It was an interesting process, a useful entertainment and diversion. Perhaps this foreign sound was simply an animal new to Fred’s experience. He determined what he needed to do to track the sound without disturbing his target. He had all night to make his discovery. The result would probably be of no importance, but the small chance it was a useful task allowed Fred to ignore everything he wanted to ignore.
Fred deduced it was a medium-size animal from the volume of sound, and then it got quieter. Fred raised his audio gain, tightened his filters, and stood silently, his machinery making no sound. It was a bipedal creature Fred decided after listening for about an hour. It was also aware of him, circling him but remaining in the vicinity. Fred could catch intermittent glimpses in the infrared through the ground foliage of this forested terrain. Fred was building a composite description from the fragmentary visual data. It was becoming an even more interesting exercise. He thought about Samson as he considered the possible entities that could be walking the night on the empty Earth. The creature was larger than Samson but there was something strange about how the infrared came and went, as though it was shuttered.
“Are you going to hurt me?” a small voice called softly across the dark.
“No,” Fred answered. He was surprised and could think of nothing to add to his response. He simply waited, and soon the sounds of friction with the undergrowth indicated the creature approached. Even in the obscuring darkness Fred could see well enough to be startled by the alien appearance of the being. It came right up to him, stood there, and looked up at him. Fred lowered himself so as not to emphasize the difference in stature. The little person smiled a human smile and grew taller, one leg at a time, as its legs unfolded and locked a third segment in place. It now stood slightly taller than Fred but Fred chose to remain kneeling.