A. Warren Merkey

by Far Freedom

  The Navy captain politely introduced himself and politely demanded she do the same. She ignored his demand. “You don’t command the Eclipse?” she asked.

  “No. This is the destroyer Fury. Identify yourself.”

  “Let me speak to the captain of the Eclipse. I know it’s out there.”

  “You’re in no position to make such a demand. Tell me who you are.”

  She wanted to make him say please but the risk was getting heavy. She knew they knew she was stalling for time. As far as they could imagine, the Freedom was hiding in this piece of rock while it armed itself. If they waited too long, they could be caught off guard. “Captain Jones here. I will presume the Eclipse is listening.”

  “Insufficient information, Jones. Wait. Marine lieutenant Jamie Jones. Are you she?”

  “I was promoted.”

  “Where is Captain Horss?”

  “He’s getting married.”

  There was a pause. She didn’t know if they could analyze her vocalizations for veracity, or if they could trust what they found. In any case, it was a bonus delay. She glanced at Freddy and saw him give her a thumbs-up signal. “Ready for jump,” Freddy spoke by shiplink.

  She was almost disappointed she couldn’t continue this game. It was exciting for a few moments, when there was concern the jump-shell connection tests would take too long. Now that she could jump at any moment, she was tempted to prolong the dialog.

  She glanced back at the wedding scene and saw Sammy dispensing the wedding rings to the bride and groom. Just a few more moments of happiness for everyone… She tried not to think about what would happen. She had no doubt that something would happen. Maybe she didn’t yet believe the Freedom would vanish from inside the rock and reappear far away. But she believed the Navy would never touch them.

  “May I have your attention, Captain?”

  “You can’t have all of it. I’m watching the wedding.”

  “Prepare to be boarded! Be advised that resistance will be met with lethal force.”

  “How well I know. Be advised that anyone who comes aboard my ship stays aboard my ship. I could use a few more Marines, preferably live ones.” She looked at Freddy for some signal that he detected boarding signatures. He seemed to understand what she wanted. He turned his head to signal a negative response. She glanced again at the wedding scene and saw Jon taking hold of his future and putting his lips on her. ” Sorry. We can’t wait any longer.”

  Section 023 Journey by Cryptikon

  The sunlight in the ship’s biosphere weakened. The clouds turned pink. More rapidly than a sunset on Earth, the sky darkened. Wind swept the clouds away. As the light dimmed to deep night, the full panoply of the Milky Way galaxy spread across the heavens. The hundreds who attended the wedding and the thousands more who came to the lake park to share the anticipation of the great jump across space understood the meaning of what they saw and they raised a cheer. The ship had jumped into the gulf between galaxies. They were looking back from where they came.

  “I haven’t seen you for a long time, Iggy.” He had thoughtfully made this appointment with her but Aylis still felt surprised at his presence. Perhaps she also felt apprehensive. Of all the people she worried about - which was everybody - she worried about Iggy the most. It wasn’t because she thought him unstable or depressed, but because Aylis felt he deserved a better life. She felt he suffered a great hole in his life, because he had still not recovered his lost memories. She hoped his memories - when they did return to him - would not harm him. She was shocked at how deeply the memory of his dead wife Ana affected her, and it would be far worse for Iggy.

  “I was writing.” Iggy sat down in a chair opposite Aylis’s desk. He wore his khaki engineering fatigues with their multitude of pockets, most of which he seemed to have filled. She felt a small urge to rummage through his pockets and see what they contained.

  “Another of your space adventures?” Jon had told her about Iggy’s admission of authoring books of genre fiction. She was still trying to locate some of his titles but he wouldn’t tell anyone his pseudonym.

  “Almost. A diary. So I won’t forget this time. It has been an adventure.”

  “I wish we could verify the status of your auxiliary memory. Unfortunately, Direk and I would need to do difficult retraining to qualify to inspect your memory. Also, it’s possible we could damage it.”

  “It’s a great disappointment.”

  “Don’t give up. Let’s wait a little longer.” He was quiet for a few moments and didn’t look at her. “Why did you want to see me, Iggy?”

  “We’re in a period where my services aren’t in great demand. It will be some months before we dive back into the galaxy and do dangerous things. I thought I would ask to be rejuvenated.” He sounded to her as though he might have rehearsed his words.

  “A full rejuvenation?” Iggy shrugged in response. She recognized this as a sign of ambivalence and seized upon it. She didn’t want to get back into the full rejuvenation business on the Freedom, and especially not with Iggy. Nori was taking most of the rejuvenation resources she had aboard the Freedom. “You know what comes next.”

  “Not really. I don’t remember the last time you made me young.”

  “A lot of questions. The first one is: Why?”

  “Look at me. I’m aged. See these wrinkles? These spots and bumps that don’t go away?”

  “We can take care of that without full rejuvenation, Iggy. Your general health is good. You know rejuvenation is a drastic procedure. In many ways you die. You’ll become someone else, despite the improved memory technology.”

  “Exactly what I want! This version of me isn’t anything I want.”

  “I like ‘this version’ of you, Iggy. I admire what you’ve done. I worry that you’ll lose something nobody knows you have, and that it will be important to you, and to us.”

  Iggy leaned back in his chair and sighed. “I confess. It’s the vanity of an old man who is interested in a younger woman.”

  “I’m dying to know who!”

  “I don’t know what I’m doing! I suppose I’m caught up in the adventure. Did you put something in the public water supply? It seems like everyone is… Never mind.”

  “You’re not going to tell me.”

  “Engineers never get the girl in my adventure stories.” Iggy turned away from Aylis and looked toward the bay window of her office. He could see the English garden below, the lake beyond. He must have seen the artifact on the sill behind the cushioned window seats. The sunlight loved its colors. “You leave it lying around for anyone to see?”

  “It isn’t mine. It belongs to all of us. It may as well be an ornament, for lack of any better use. If anyone should have it, it should be you. You discovered the first one. Zakiya always said you were her lucky charm on a dig.”

  Iggy went to the window. He sat down next to the precious artifact. He stared at it. He turned away from it and rubbed his eyes. Something in his actions or expression concerned Aylis. She rose from her desk and approached to stand in front of Iggy. “It has another existence,” he said. “Can you see it?”

  ” See what? What do you mean?”

  “Here.” He pointed to a place in the air above the cryptikon. He moved his hand to another spot. “There.”

  “Where? Iggy, I thought I saw something! Just for an instant I saw something!”

  The cryptikon rose into the air from its cradle and met the tip of Iggy’s first finger. He moved the finger, almost as if writing in the air. “How very strange!” He frowned deeply and tried to still his trembling.

  “What do you see? Why is it attached to your finger?”

  He seemed to notice the cryptikon at the tip of his finger. He paused to stare at it. In a moment it detached itself and became fixed in the air. He continued to point at invisible things in front of him. He appeared fascinated but also disturbed, even alarmed.

  “What do you see?”

  “Many people here. They’re all staring
at me but I don’t think they see me. It’s like a hole I could fall into, where everything is just as real as it is here. A lot of darkness over here. Here some light. Dim. Too close. Pull back. How did I do that? A coffin? A stasis coffin.” Iggy yanked his hand away, retreated from his seat by the bay window. The cryptikon remained in the air. He snatched at it. He closed his trembling fist on the artifact. He shut his eyes tightly. He breathed hard, and when he opened his eyes he seemed relieved.

  “What’s wrong? What happened?” She was concerned enough that she measured his vital signs with her fingertips on his neck. He tried to put the cryptikon into her hands and she resisted. She could see the patterns were changed somehow on the little egg-like piece of magic. “Let me call Direk and Zakiya.” She pushed the cryptikon back into his hands. “Sit down and try to be calm.”

  Iggy turned to the window and put the cryptikon back in its display cradle. He sat and stared out at the lake and the hospital gardens. In a few minutes Zakiya arrived, followed by Direk. Aylis told them what happened. They tried to ask questions of Iggy but he didn’t want to talk. Zakiya sat with him for awhile, until he finally spoke. “I feel strange!”

  “In what way?”

  ” Something in me changed.”

  “What changed, Iggy?”

  “I don’t know! Perhaps it was the universe that changed and I stayed the same.” Iggy tried to speak quietly now, and that disturbed Aylis more than if he raised his voice in his usual impatient shout. Zakiya didn’t ask another question but simply sat beside him and held his hand. “I thought I knew how the universe works. I thought I knew how my mind works. I don’t know anything anymore.”

  ” You made the cryptikon work, Iggy.”

  “It knew me. All I did was say ‘hello.’ And it changed everything. When you first put a cryptikon in my hand, I felt strange, but there were other, stronger emotions at work on me at that time. Then Jamie gave it to me while you were captive to Etrhnk, and I had what could have been a message. I never understood what was happening. I only see it now.”

  “You saw a person in a stasis coffin,” Zakiya suggested.

  He nodded, then shuddered. “I didn’t just see it, I was there!” Iggy spoke in a loud whisper. “I could smell it, hear it, feel it! It was real !”

  After a few moments of respectful silence, waiting for Iggy to recover, Direk chose to speak. “There is a difference between knowing something is real and being convinced it is real. Which do you feel it was?”

  “How would I know? My senses are dulled by age. I would have to guess that it is tricking me, because it can get into my mind. It makes me assume what is impossible is not impossible. It wants me to believe that what I experienced is not only real but new. New! It exists now. Right now!”

  “I assumed the cryptikon was a communications device,” Zakiya said. “I assumed it was special. But this…”

  “How can it show us something that is at least twelve thousand parsecs away?” Iggy asked. “The Essiin Museum, where the cryptikon resides. I’m sure that was what I saw first. All the Essiin staring at me. Even if we could modulate starlight there isn’t enough gravitational bandwidth to transmit even the simplest information that distance. And the propagation delay would be forever. The signal would be lost amid the cross currents.”

  “Would you try it again, Iggy?” Zakiya pleaded.

  He struggled to make a decision. He plucked the cryptikon from its cradle and squeezed it until he grew calm enough to open his fingers and let the device sit in the air. “Please tell me if you see the impossible as I see it.”

  Zakiya inhaled sharply. “Oh, my God!” Zakiya grabbed Iggy’s arm with her free hand.

  “What is it?” Aylis demanded, still denied sight of what Zakiya and Iggy saw.

  “You can’t see it?” Zakiya asked.

  “Privacy mode,” Iggy said thoughtfully. “If I change this…” He made a gesture in the air.

  “Oh!” Aylis gasped. The space in front of Iggy filled with patterns of pure color that reminded Aylis of the cryptikon itself, and were just as cryptic. Iggy obviously understood what the patterns did, as though the device coached him by telepathy. In the volume surrounding the control patterns lay a field of light and dark, with vague shapes that connected the light to the dark. The geometry didn’t fit into normal space and it defied sharp focus, yet it commanded Aylis to believe in an addendum to reality that changed her notion of what the universe was.

  Iggy touched one of the dimmer areas. Everyone felt vertigo as a very real environment superseded that of Aylis’s hospital office. He pushed them back from the giant image of a stasis coffin. He caused the view to expand, matching scale between realities. Two other coffins came into view. Aylis could not even imagine what Iggy was doing to make the image change. Image: she had to keep telling herself it was only an image, not a real thing. Then she realized she could feel the reality of what she saw, as if it was wrapping itself around her.

  Zakiya rose slowly and approached the zone of impossibility. Aylis followed her as she crept into the image. Zakiya put her trembling hand out and touched the glass portal of the first coffin. “Oh, God!” She jerked her hand away, then put it back.

  Aylis turned around to see Direk and Iggy behind her, and her office beyond them. She felt dizzy, disconnected from the rest of the universe.

  Zakiya rubbed the surface of the stasis coffin as she leaned over it to see who was within. She moaned. Aylis put her hand on Zakiya’s shoulder, her face next to Zakiya’s, and saw what she saw. Alexandros Gerakis! She couldn’t imagine what Zakiya felt. If her own shock and dismay and exhilaration was this huge… Zakiya’s trembling beneath her hand could only hint at the magnitude of her emotions. Aylis pulled herself out of the fountain of bright memories this moment set loose, pulled herself away from the grim mask of death within the stasis coffin. She pulled Zakiya away from the coffin. She found herself leaning on another coffin, and it supported her as if it was real.

  The four of them stood in a cold, dim chamber that smelled of spilled substances that were aged into a miasma of unpleasant odors. Quiet noises emanated from indistinct locations, suggesting machinery with ancient moving parts, pipes with not enough fluids, thermal chatter of metal expanding and contracting. Point sources of the dim light gave them shadows that draped over the surfaces of this other reality and moved when they moved. Aylis wanted to scream to release her fear and tension, to shatter the illusion.

  “Koji,” Zakiya said, seeing the face in the coffin on which Aylis leaned.

  Aylis willed herself to look. “He doesn’t look as bad as Alex but he looks much older.”

  They came to the third and last coffin. Aylis stood over it and peered through the clear portal. She crossed her arms and held herself. She could say nothing. Setek-Ren was as dead as Alex, and the pain of his death just as perfectly recorded in his face.

  “My father,” Direk said, taking his turn to look upon death.

  Aylis made herself function again. She made herself check the operational values of the stasis coffins. She did it as carefully as she could, repeating steps as many times as she needed. “The stasis coffins are all in good working order. If this is real, we can revive them.”

  They heard a scream from somewhere in the distance. It frightened Aylis.

  “Is that here in the hospital?” Zakiya asked. “Or there?”

  “There,” Iggy said, pointing to a hatch that stood open, showing a dim passageway. He made the view move into the passageway, until it could go no

  350 Far Freedom farther.

  “There is a limiting radius from the cryptikon in Setek’s coffin,” Direk theorized.

  “There was another cryptikon,” Iggy said. He turned back to the reality of Aylis’s office in the hospital and selected another location. A new image made a dizzying reduction to match scale. Close walls became gently tangible and pushed them closer together. Aylis’s office now lay beyond a doorway, appearing less real than the small ship’s quarters
they now crowded within. They could see only by the light coming from Aylis’s office.

  A man lay on a bunk, several shiny tubes or wires connected to his body. He moved as though in a restless sleep. He uttered pitiful sounds, word fragments, pseudo sentences. He screamed again.

  “Patrick!” Zakiya shouted. “Pat! Wake up!”

  The man’s fitful sleep altered, as though he heard Zakiya and he started to wake up. A light shone on his face.

  “Incredible!” Iggy held a handlight he used for engineering inspections. The beam illuminated the sleeping man. The man awoke and opened one eye. He squinted at the light, put a hand up to block the beam.

  “Patrick, can you see us?” Aylis asked.

  “Who are you?” the man asked. “What are you? Am I dreaming?”

  “Pat, this is me,” Zakiya said. “And Aylis. And her son Direk. And Iggy.”

  “Who?”

  “People you once knew, Pat. We’ve found you at last!”

  “You’re ghosts! It’s not enough that Alex has to stomp up and down the hallway every night! Now I have to deal with you! Go away!”

  “Damn!” Iggy swore. “You’re more aged than I am, Pat.” He put his hand out, reached toward the man in the bed, who drew back from him. “Do you remember me? You were at my wedding. You gave my bride a most friendly kiss. Too friendly!”

  The man looked again at Iggy and slowly reached toward his hand. Their fingers seemed to touch. The man jerked his hand at the contact, then returned and took Iggy’s hand in his. “Are you really here?” Patrick Jenkins asked, shaking Iggy’s hand.

  “We aren’t here,” Zakiya said, “but we will be soon.”

  “But I can feel you!” Jenkins said.

  “It’s the cryptikon,” Iggy started to explain. “We’re very far away. We’ll come for you. We…” Iggy stopped talking and started shaking.

  Aylis was staring at the joined hands of Iggy and Pat, fascinated beyond words by this miracle, hardly aware of Iggy’s distress, until Pat’s hand vanished. The entire alternate reality, including the odors, vanished as well. She was standing in shock in her own office, while Direk and Zakiya tried to catch the collapsing Iggy.