A. Warren Merkey

by Far Freedom

  Pan found his voice. “A woman?”

  “Perhaps you would care to see.”

  The view of crescent Earth vanished, replaced by a terrestrial scene illuminated by firelight. The perspective rushed toward distant human figures standing between burning buildings. The flight of the probe halted, the picture stabilized, and the field of view adjusted to include the appearance of another person from around the side of one blazing structure.

  “Rafael,” Pan said, seeing his old friend hobble into the scene carrying a stick of wood.

  The scene froze as all participants became visible: Rafael poised to attack, Denna with her back to him, Demba starting to rush toward Denna, Gator collapsed on the ground, Samson standing on one leg, Daidaunkh trapped on the ground with some kind of injury, the flames paused in their feast of home and art, the night forest illuminated by the inferno into a backdrop for this scene of violence.

  “This is the woman who will die.” Etrhnk pointed to Denna in her sparkling dress. “Do you know her?”

  “Yes.”

  “If you don’t wish to see what happens, we can stop here.”

  “Stop.”

  “I overheard a conversation in which the artist said his wife wouldn’t want to be restored to life.”

  “You didn’t interfere.”

  ” You would have?”

  ” She was my daughter.”

  “Then I have erred.”

  ” You may add your error to the end of the long list concerning Denna.” Pan felt the ache of grief enter his throat. The death of Denna ended an era. He would mourn her with less restraint when he had the necessary privacy, but it would be difficult to wait.

  Etrhnk allowed some time to pass before he spoke again. “I analyzed the action and I believe the death was accidental. Admiral Demba attempted to disarm the woman. The artist was apparently trying to distract the woman by striking her on the back. Unfortunately, the artist stumbled and the woman moved the wrong way. The blow broke her neck. Your daughter was the wife of Rafael de LaGuardia. Some of the most famous paintings in Earthian culture bear her likeness. But she was African.”

  “Denna suffered a great personal tragedy.” The effort to force words around the grief was hurting his throat. ” She was never African again.”

  ” You sent Admiral Demba to the artist because she is African, as was his wife.”

  “Do the Essiin in any way appreciate the emotional content of life?”

  “Are we not all human in the deepest analysis?” Etrhnk asked. “Perhaps we who starve ourselves of it appreciate emotion more than do Earthians and Rhyans. When dealing with such humans, it’s a vital type of data to analyze, yet I do it poorly.”

  “Why is this vital?” Pan wanted the meeting with Etrhnk to end.

  “Things are happening. I understand little of it. I need to understand all of it.”

  “I suspect the boy is more important than Demba,” Pan said. “Have you learned anything about Samson?”

  “I’ve not even learned anything about you, sir. Except that your resistance to interrogation seems a little beyond the state of the art.”

  “The gaps in my consciousness have been busy times for your staff?”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “Would I want to?”

  “I think not. I don’t do this out of idle curiosity or perversion. For a person in my position, ignorance is fatal.”

  “I no longer know how it is with Essiin,” Pan said, “but other humans want more and more from life, so something is always missing, even though they may not know what it is. We place a high value on continued existence, as though the wanting of things and a long life in which to want them are a single logical force. But we should know it’s wrong to harm others simply as a matter of insurance toward those goals.”

  “To place my actions in ethical perspective,” Etrhnk said, “you have to know many things I can’t tell you. I didn’t mean to imply that my own life is more sacred than any others. It isn’t. To even begin an ethical evaluation of our circumstances we have to find common ground at the root of our beliefs about life and existence.”

  “It isn’t that complicated for me, Admiral. Treat others as you would want to be treated.”

  “A perfect and simple rule with which I completely agree, but too few of us live by it. It’s always more complicated than we can manage. Compromise is inevitable.”

  “I used to believe in an algebra of ethics,” Pan said, “even though it seems too much like politics. I killed my mother because I thought ethics was more complicated than the Golden Rule. One trouble with complex ethics is that you can’t predict whether ethically questionable actions will produce an ethical outcome.”

  Admiral Etrhnk didn’t respond for several moments. Finally he spoke. “I presume you didn’t mean you intentionally killed your mother.”

  “It feels the same.”

  “You’re a good person,” Etrhnk said. “I believe there are very many good people in the universe. But I also believe there are many more evil people, people simply too selfish to be ethical. I’ll do what logic dictates I must.”

  When the Marines removed him from Etrhnk’s presence, Pan realized he didn’t inquire of Etrhnk’s “experiment.” He knew it must include Demba as its main subject.

  Etrhnk remained in front of the frozen image of impending tragedy. Only two of the figures mattered to him. He was sure he could identify the boy, if he dared ask Constant. Fidelity Demba was a mystery beyond his ability to tolerate. Before she caused his death, he had to know who she really was. Unfortunately, Pan was his best possible source for that knowledge, and to wrest it from his mind would kill him. Should a doomed man be concerned with ethics?

  Section 018 Dreams of Funerals

  She couldn’t turn to face him but she could feel him. She held his arm and felt the tremors of emotion within him, the grieffinally surfacing after so many months of denying the loss of his wife and daughter. He leaned against her and she put an arm around his waist. She sensed the presence of the others but their names and faces wouldn’t come to her. Even so, she knew them all for decades. Their lives defined each other, and they shared the grief. Finally, he took a deep breath and let it slowly out. He cleared his throat. He spoke.

  “At great risk Zakiya brought us her recording of the death of the Titanic. I’m terrified to imagine how close she may have been to sharing the fate of Fidelity and Susan. My wife and daughter sailed on a ship much like an ancient, unescorted, Spanish treasure galleon. This was a gift to these pirates. We ‘re at war with an enemy whose faces we’ve yet to see, and with an enemy whose faces are all too familiar.”

  The sound of his voice! She had forgot the sound of his voice, and now she wept at rediscovering it. Another of her friends spoke and she thrilled at the familiarity of his voice; and so it went with each of their group, until she fairly burst with the joy ofpseudo-remembrance. Then she felt ashamed to feel joy at such a sad moment in their history.

  She found herself standing before them, eulogizing the lost, saying names she couldn’t hear, looking at dear faces obscured by a veil of tears.

  She said: “Some of us will seek out the enemy, find his lair, discover his weaknesses. The rest of us will stay and do what we can to prepare for the day when we are together again and we can do something about this menace to civilization.”

  She heard her name again - Fidelity - and the name Susan. She also heard an unfamiliar name, and the perspective of the internal narrative seemed to assign it to herself. The name was already lost to her. There was also a man, a hidden man, and the tactile impressions of him were monumentally important to her mental avatar. She ached to plunge back into that deep well of emotional images and sensations and words, but the wind was blowing it all away, along with the tears on her cheeks.

  The white banners fluttered in the wind at the edge of the island. The sunlight on white clothing, white trimmings, and white banners washed out the details of faces in the eye-bur
ning glare. She could feel him next to her, touching her, bowing his head with her. The funeral urn passed by them: another wife lost to the enemy. She looked up at a passing figure and saw the face of a young Japanese woman and recognized her in an instant of illogical joy. She remembered the daughter who had just lost her mother.

  They began walking, taking their places in the funeral procession behind father and daughter. The man next to her took her hand and spoke to her quietly. It was his voice, the man who meant so much to her! His presence both exalted her and terrified her. He shouldn’t have come to this funeral! They sought to kill him! She turned to squint at his face, hoping to remember his features. She saw his face. She didn’t know him! He was in disguise.

  She let go of his hand. She knew they could tie her to him. She fell back a step but he also fell back and took her hand again. He squeezed it and pulled it against his stomach where he held it with both of his hands. She started to say his name, started to speak a warning to him, started to break the silence of the procession up to the temple, and realized she couldn’t say his name because she couldn’t remember it, WHICH WAS ABSURD! She choked back frustration. More than anything in her entire life, she wanted to remember him. She loved him, she had always loved him, she would always love him: he had to know that, she had to tell him. She wept.

  The daughter turned to look at her as they mounted the steps to the temple. The daughter placed a hand on her arm and drew her… into the future… where she didn’t want to go…

  Now she knew she had lost someone of ultimate importance to her. A man. She was devastated by the loss in these few seconds before losing even the reason for her devastation. Only her heart remembered the pain, until that, too, eased from existence with the next breath of fresh salt air.

  Nori placed a hand on her forearm and waited for her to look at her. That other person she never wanted to see - that thief - stood next to her, looking sad and beautiful and affectionate. She hugged Nori and she hugged the thief and she loved them both dearly, but why should she love the thief?

  “I’m sorry I’m late.” It took little time to remember. It took too long to survive remembering. And she didn’t survive. She died. She was reborn a stranger. She wasn’t supposed to be here now. She was in limbo. But she remembered. It was easy to remember Nori. It was difficult to remember this other woman, difficult as in painful. She was a thief. She stole her memories. She stole her daughter. She made her remember people she should not want to remember, because she loved them too much, because they were dead or dying. She would soon push her into a future where there was no one left to give meaning to life. This was an interlude ofpain, with only slight joy at remembering these two friends.

  Nori took her hand and led her through the doorway and into the world of mountains. She and the other woman took places on either side of Nori behind the mule-drawn hearse. They walked behind the hearse along a narrow dirt road where quartz crystals sparkled in the sunlight. People stood along the side of the road with bowed heads, many of them weeping. They passed through a village where more people waited beside the way, all activity stopped for the passing of the funeral procession. They walked another country road and came to another village with more people waiting for them. They ascended through sloping mountain meadows and green forests, across bridges over rushing streams. Birds sang in the air. Butterflies visited wildflowers beside the winding road. A breeze whispered up the slopes. More villages thronged with people came and went. They ascended into the clouds and through a forest of giant trees dripping with moisture. Finally they walked beyond the clouds and into sunshine. Above them a snow-capped peak loomed. Far away in the purple haze of the zenith another mountaintop dangled through a layer of dark clouds on the other side of the sealed world. She looked back along the last long leg of their journey and saw thousands of people following, the line stretching back into the clouds below. They took a branch of the road which climbed steeply for a short distance into flowers.

  A wooden cottage with a high-pitched roof stood in a garden offlowers and ornamental shrubs. The cottage and garden nestled within a bowl on the side of the mountain. The river of people which flowed up the mountain filed into the bowl. Mourners took places on the slopes overlooking the cottage and garden. Hundreds, then thousands, silently filled every available position. Pallbearers brought the coffin out of the hearse and carried it to the grave site: a small mound in front of the cottage. She saw him for the first time through the transparent sides of the coffin, and the fact of his death struck her like a dagger to the heart. A surge of joy at remembering him mixed bitterly with the grief of her loss. Their friend had died. He would never see them again. They would never see him. And the others… gone… as good as dead. They would never know. It crushed her spirit, dropped her to her knees.

  Nori and the other woman knelt beside her and held her. Bagpipes in the distance sang farewell with their haunting melancholy wail. “We’re all alone,” she said. “They’ve all left us.”

  “They’ll be back,” Nori said. “Our old friend is just resting. He was tired. Now he waits.”

  “And now it’s time for you to sing,” the other woman said, pulling her back to her feet.

  “Sing?”

  “‘Amazing Grace.’”

  “I can’t. I don’t know how.”

  “You can and you do. You always liked to sing. Stick out your tongue.”

  “What?”

  The other woman, the thief, wiped a tear from her own cheek, collected it on her fingertip. “Stick out your tongue,” she repeated.

  A salty fingertip touched her tongue.

  She remembered how to sing.

  She wanted to sing.

  She needed to sing.

  She couldn’t understand how she could live without singing.

  He was her best audience. She would sing for him a last time.

  Nori. She had a name she could keep, but it meant nothing to her. There were other people. She couldn’t remember them. She could only remember remembering them. She could only remember that the memories were powerful, vivid, vital. And forbidden.

  “Admiral!”

  Fidelity awoke from the dream of having memories. Samson lay beside her with his head on her leg. Rafael sat with head bowed, the setting sun illuminating his white hair around the rim of his silhouette. She looked to the broken Rhyan who had called to her. He lay nearby, his good arm flexing in the air, fist clenched, as though that would ease the pain. Great masses of cumulonimbus clouds formed a wall above the blue ocean and lightning flashed through their decks and tiers. Whitecaps washed upon the black sand near Daidaunk’s feet. The coconut palms rattled in the rising wind. She put Samson’s head out of her lap and stood to get circulation back in her legs. She gathered up the materials she had prepared. She walked back to the Rhyan. Samson cried out, holding out his hand for the admiral to come get him. She hardly noticed him, whichever part of her was responsible for him.

  The memory of having unbearable memories was itself unbearable. No matter how hard she tried, the people and places would not come back to her. Only the pain of loss remained. They couldn’t be normal memories, but whatever they were they belonged to her, even if she didn’t know how or why. They must also still be inside her, hiding. Something was awakening within her, frightening her, yet demanding her curiosity, her acceptance, and her death. She was no longer Fidelity Demba. Her strong component, that warrior among the personalities coalescing into the person she might become, fought down the eruption of emotion, and ignored the questions without answers. “Rafael! I need your help. I’m ready to set Daidaunkh’s broken bones.”

  It was a harrowing affair for Rafael and her to do what they had to do for Daidaunkh. The Rhyan tried valiantly to refrain from voicing his pain but the arm was too much for him. His wail sent Samson hopping on one leg and holding hands over his ears. The Rhyan’s leg had a simple fracture and swelling and only needed protection and stabilization. When it was over, Rafael retired to the sh
ade of a palm tree, sat with his back against it, and let his head nod forward as though he would take a nap. Fidelity made Daidaunkh as comfortable as she could, then went to get Samson where he had fallen. He was curled up on the black sand and he pushed her hand away as she touched his shoulder. She could not have been a good mother; for nothing made her want to console Samson. She went to where Rafael sat and took her place on the other side of the palm.

  It had been evening in Florida. Here in the Pacific it was daytime. She knew Rafael would be tired. He had labored at the easel almost constantly, working on her portrait. She didn’t have to sit in the rattan chair all the time and he would often go find her and stare at her, then go back to the easel. She was amazed at how much detail he put on the big canvas in so short a time. Now the miraculous portrait was gone forever, consumed by fire. “Your art.” She spoke quietly, not expecting Rafael to hear her above the thrash of waves upon the beach, the wind in the palms.

  “My finest painting,” Rafael said mournfully.

  “Your wife. Your home. Your friend Gator. I’m terribly sorry I brought this upon you, Rafael.”

  “You simply brought the wind, Fidelity. Everything was already set to be swept away.”

  She stopped speaking to him as part of her realized she was only reminding him of tragedy. Or did emotions work that way? Would more words accelerate the closing of the wound? But she was out of words for Rafael. Her thoughts scattered to all points of her spinning compass but for a moment settled on the translation to this location from Rafael’s destroyed home. She knew Etrhnk had winked them here, but why all four of them? Why do it at all? Was he simply not ready to mete out his final punishment for her? She would settle for that explanation. It hardly mattered. She had no control over anything but the comfort of her companions. And sometimes she could find some control of herself.

  Section 019 Tundra in Pink Tile