A. Warren Merkey

by Far Freedom

  Section 024 Remembering Dick, Visiting Patrick

  “I’m sorry. I’m not very good at this.”

  Jamie hurt her mother, and she was trying not to hurt her! Was there nothing she could do correctly in her mother’s presence? What kind of relationship could she ever hope to have with this woman? Would she always need to depend on her mother’s guilt for having abandoned her, to keep her love?

  “I don’t understand. You’re fast - faster than me - but you aren’t really aggressive and sneaky. Is it because I’m your daughter and you don’t want to hurt me?”

  “Yes. That’s my excuse.” The admiral picked herself up from the training mat and dabbed at a cut on her face.

  “I’m sorry,” Jamie repeated. She put her arm around her mother and walked her toward the locker room. “I shouldn’t have forced you to practice with me. Sammy has told me some disturbing stories. I was curious about your skills.”

  “Please, don’t encourage him to recall such things.”

  “I told him he shouldn’t be proud of you for what you did. You only did what you had to do. Who were the two soldiers you killed? Where was that? I almost accused him of fabricating the incident.”

  Why couldn’t she relax and feel normal around Jamie? Zakiya asked herself. What was normal? How were they, in any practical sense, mother and daughter? “I’ve always disliked personal combat.”

  ” So, naturally, I picked that activity as my excuse for meeting with you.”

  Zakiya laughed, pleased that Jamie simply wanted to be with her. Why did she need to make of her daughter such a problem? Jamie had a tragic history but she was a survivor. It was the future they would share that was important. “I should explain that I’m a product of the Mnro Clinic’s secret research labs. I’m augmented in ways I never thought possible. My skill level only rises in response to the perceived threat, and I can’t imagine you wanting to hurt or kill me. What did you really want to talk about?”

  “Oh, nothing. I just wanted to be with you for a little while.”

  “That’s nice. That’s perfect. I won’t violate Jon’s orders by asking the wrong questions. I won’t strain our relationship by trying to be the mother I never was. I’ll close my mouth now.”

  Jamie laughed, relieved her mother was almost as nervous as she was, and probably just as anxious to establish a good relationship. They entered the locker room. Her mother began to undress. Jamie hesitated, feeling selfconscious.

  “Not showering?”

  “I seem to have an inhibition to be naked in the presence of my parent.” Jamie decided to strip anyway.

  They showered and dressed, then walked down to the lake and sat on a bench. Jamie had sensed her mother noticing her scars when they were naked. It didn’t bother her. She assumed her mother knew Marines collected scars - a silly tradition but anything to set them apart from saner individuals. “I’ve got a good collection of scars.” She felt relaxed. She just wanted to hear the wonderful tone of her mother’s voice.

  “You were a Marine.” Her mother sat next to her with her head back, her eyes closed, and the warmth of the fake sun on her brown face.

  “I should have them removed.”

  “I was trying not to look.”

  “I don’t think you like them.”

  “Is what I think that important to you? No, I didn’t say that! I want so much for you to like me. Scars are a trademark of the Black Fleet, Jamie. When I saw them on you I had that unpleasant association.”

  “The Black Fleet? What is that?”

  “I realize now that Sammy has probably talked to a great many people on the ship. He’s extremely intelligent but I forget what a child is like. He may have caused too many incorrect rumors.”

  “You promised me a fantastic story that would justify your bringing Sammy on this mission.”

  “So I did.” Her mother told a fascinating and terrifying story, one Jamie wouldn’t have believed until recently. It gave her a greater understanding of her mother. It gave her a feeling of rapport with the woman. She ached to ask her about her former lives and the man she married - Jamie’s father. How did she and Aylis remain focused on a plan that spanned more than two centuries and required them to forget the most important reasons for even having the plan? How did they survive both physically and mentally, to reach this point in their saga? There was too much to talk about in one quiet afternoon that was soon interrupted.

  “Aylis?” her mother said.

  Jamie turned her head to look behind the bench where they sat. Aylis lay on the green grass in the shade of a sycamore. Zakiya was almost relieved to see Aylis relaxing so well, even if her presence might be a symptom of her continuing anxiety. Dressed in white pants and a loose gray pullover, her position on the ground gave no preview yet of the expansion of pregnancy to come.

  “How is Iggy?” Zakiya asked Aylis.

  “Physically good, mentally enraptured.”

  “I’m glad to see you, Aylis. I think you’ve been avoiding me.”

  Aylis rolled onto her side in the green grass and took a deep breath.

  “Is it the baby?” Zakiya asked her. “Do you need a hug?”

  “No and no. Direk has already taken care of that. I’m just… nothing. I’m sorry to bother you.”

  “What do you mean,” Jamie asked, “about Direk taking care of your hug?”

  “Sorry. That was a violation of my orders.” Aylis lay quietly, wishing now she had not come, ashamed of her desire for forgiveness by Zakiya, ashamed of her lack of courage to ask for it. She forced her thoughts back to Direk, her only hope for joy, and wondered in a quiet whisper: “Was he really happy?”

  Zakiya knew to listen carefully to Aylis, to catch any clue to how she felt, to find any sign she was healing from Etrhnk’s assault. Zakiya deduced she referred to Direk. Aylis would not speak with Zakiya as a friend, as though their friendship ended after the rape. Zakiya had questioned Mai and only learned enough to share Mai’s grave concern for her emotional slide. Only Direk kept her from being committed by Mai to medical treatment.

  Zakiya chose to answer Aylis’s question, assuming Direk had not yet told her about his brief life as a musician. She could not resist disobeying Jon’s order concerning Jamie’s relationship to Direk. “Harry and Ruby only had him for a few years, Aylis. And Ruby wasn’t in the best era of her life. She remembers him as a wickedly funny guy, willing to try anything and always eager to help. I know he was happy. He told me he was.”

  “Who is Harry?” Jamie asked. “You were Ruby. Who are you talking about?”

  Zakiya ignored her daughter’s questions, but her smile probably told her everything. “Alcoholism was easily curable but Ruby was an alcoholic. She was confused and depressed. She was having a bad night. Too much liquor and one too many leaks in her auxiliary memory unit. It was all Harry could do to get her dressed and out to the stage. There was Dick, standing by his bass, plunking a little tune to accompany himself as he entertained the audience until Ruby could show up. He was telling jokes and little stories, ‘deadpan’ as they said in Twenglish, and the audience loved him. Harry and Ruby had to let him finish, and then had to perform their best to follow his act. I remember Ruby being astonished that Dick could do that kind of thing. I don’t know why; she never knew who he really was. Maybe that was who he really was.”

  “If my duplicate ever knew about him, she didn’t remember it for me,” Aylis said sadly.

  “Who are you talking about?” Jamie demanded.

  “I think we’re talking about Dick,” Zakiya said.

  “Dick who?”

  “His stage name was Dick Jones,” Zakiya answered, then returned her attention to Aylis. “What is your real reason for stopping by to see us?”

  Dick Jones, Jamie wondered. They were talking about Direk, trying to make her change her mind about him. It was true, then: Direk was a completely different person from who Jamie thought he was. How did that affect her feelings for him? It didn’t. She was born to love
him, as though the bond between Aylis and Zakiya was somehow genetically involved with Jamie and Direk. It did not, however, make her feelings about herself any better. It didn’t make it any easier to approach defining a new relationship between her and Direk. He was so perfect for so long a time, hiding himself from her. How could she ever trust him? Did she even care that she couldn’t know who he was? Wasn’t that part of his - charm - that he was unpredictable?

  They searched the cottage. It was a brief search.

  “No,” he said. “No other bed. No other reasonable substitute. Did you find anything? “

  “No,” she replied, feeling a little thrill at what this might cause. “Do you want to go back?”

  Stop the movie! Let me examine his reaction closely. Damn, he’s good! Not a flicker of guilt, not a hint of desire.

  “Do you want to go back? ” he asked, not answering her question.

  Was that a logical response? Wouldn’t he have denied her that choice, if for no other reason than to save himself the strain of surviving the biological comedy to come?

  She could feel herself wanting him and making herself believe that he might actually want to stay in the cottage and share the bed with her.

  “It’s a long walk back,” she said. “And it’s snowing. And it’s getting dark.”

  “There is transmat service in the Five Worlds,” he pointed out.

  “Do you want to tell Phuti and Nori that we aren’t lovers?”

  “Would it disappoint them that much?”

  He could have said almost anything else to end the discussion and end their use of the cottage. Was he able to sense her desire to be alone with him, perhaps even to be intimate with him? How possible was that?

  “I don’t mind sharing the bed with you, Direk. It’s a big bed. It has a goose-down mattress. When will I ever again get a chance to sleep on such a bed? Does sharing the bed bother you too much?”

  “If that is what you want, I believe I can behave myself.”

  Did he say that? No! He said: “I believe I can sleep without disturbing you.”

  A couple of nights later she would make it clear to him that she wouldn’t mind being disturbed.

  “What are you remembering?” Zakiya asked. Jamie didn’t respond. “Hello, Jamie?”

  She clawed her way out of the pungent reverie. The way her mother was looking at her, she imagined she knew what memory she was accessing. She blushed almost painfully, before realizing she couldn’t possibly know the embarrassing details.

  “Hello, Mother! Well, someday I’ll tell you what I remembered but you know who I remembered.” She turned to look at Aylis Mnro still lying on the grass and not responding to them. She looked wrong. Jamie was concerned. “Isn’t she getting any better?”

  She wore the peasant wedding costume from ancient times. She wore it humbly, with little decoration and almost no jewelry. Yet it only emphasized how precious she was, what a gift she was, and she was giving herself to him!

  He wore his Deep Space uniform, not his Navy uniform. He wore his medals. He wore his smile of joy so large it made his cheeks ache. Alex put a big hand on his shoulder and shook him, as if trying to wake him from this beautiful dream. They both waited at the altar for Ana.

  He saw all his shipmates in the pews, even Patrick who showed him his fist, as though upset with Iggy for taking Ana from him. But in the next instant Patrick gave him a thumbs-up and a genuine smile of congratulations.

  Someone was shaking his shoulder and it wasn’t Alexandros Gerakis.

  “Remember me?” Phuti asked.

  Yes! Yes! Yes! He tried to stifle the memory seizure but was lost for a few moments in a random but sharp recollection of Phuti and himself exploring an anomalous gray asteroid and seeing the first signs of possible precursor artifacts. “I do remember you!” Iggy lapsed into yet another memory of Phuti.

  “What did you see?” Phuti asked, his question barely audible to Iggy through the sounds of clarinet and balalaika in the memory.

  “I saw you at my wedding, Phuti.” Iggy was overwhelmed by a memory he had already recalled several times. Iggy put his head in his hands, his elbows resting on his knees. He sat on a step of the access platform that overlooked farmland. In the distance, a gray cloud rained on a rectangle of green. Phuti sat down next to him and put an arm across his shoulders.

  “Sometimes I can’t believe any of this is happening to me,” Phuti said. “I never really believed I would be revived. But I remember your wedding as if it were yesterday. I almost wish I didn’t.”

  “I remember you and Alex dancing a Greek dance, the tall Alex and the short Phuti. You two started it. Then Zakiya joined you. You put her next to Alex, so that she would be holding his hand. I remember them looking at each other, and I knew right then they loved each other. I always suspected it and wanted it. It made me even happier, and I was already impossibly happy. Do I remember it correctly, Phuti?”

  “Yes, you do!” Phuti patted his shoulder, dropped his arm from Iggy. “It was a wonderful interlude in a terrible time.”

  “I’m fortunate I don’t remember the evil as well as I do the good. I’m fortunate the auxiliary memory isn’t so easy to open, or else I’m afraid I would dwell on those moments that hurt me the most. It’s such a powerful experience, far clearer than what I would have stored in my own brain cells.”

  “Don’t let me pull you back into the past, Iggy. You seem well to me but I know you can be hurt by some of your memories.” Phuti paused at a change in his friend’s expression. “Is something wrong?”

  “You brought it. I can feel it. It’s already active. Did you know you could activate it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I didn’t activate it. You must have. You have a cryptikon. We share the job of using the cryptikons. That’s why Zakiya needed to fetch you from the Five Worlds. Besides knowing you belonged with us.”

  Phuti removed the cryptikon from his pocket and looked at it with shock on his round face. “I borrowed it from Zakiya. I wanted to bring it to you, to urge you to make it work. I wondered what was bothering me!”

  “You and I, we found them. I have the other one with me. Aylis made me keep it. Because we found them, the Old Ones found us. You don’t remember, do you?”

  “No, not clearly. Did something happen to us, Iggy?”

  “I don’t remember, either. We must have been assigned to the cryptikons in some way. Can you feel what you should do?” Phuti frowned and stared at the thing in his hand. “Did the others warn you about the experience?” Iggy asked.

  “They were upset by it,” Phuti answered. “Even Direk.”

  “I’m warning you again. It’s a great shock. Go ahead. Make it work.”

  Phuti started when the cryptikon produced its interface and he almost threw the egg into the nearby lettuce plot. The cryptikon drifted back to him and floated in the moist air of the farmland just within his reach. “Oh, my!” was all that Phuti could utter for several moments.

  Iggy gazed at the impossible view of color and curvature and worlds down rabbit holes. He was relieved that it didn’t upset him as much this time. It still broke all the laws of human science and forced him into a universe that was far stranger than the one he thought he knew. “I’ve been trying to find the courage to use the cryptikon in my pocket. I know everyone is anxious to believe it’s real and to find our lost friends. Perhaps together you and I will have the courage to do that.”

  “What do I do?” Phuti finally asked. “I feel the urge to point at what interests me.”

  “Try it.”

  Phuti pointed. The sunlit fields of crops and orchards dimmed from view, replaced by a small round room filled with soft light and a large number of people. “Oh, my!”

  A person turned to glance at him, turned away, then turned back in startlement. In a few seconds everyone in the room was looking at them and beyond them and in front of them. Iggy turned to see what was so interesting and only saw the bulkhead and doorway of
the access landing to the farmland. Phuti’s cryptikon floated just in front of them.

  “I believe this is the Essiin Museum of Science and Technology,” Iggy said. “There is the cryptikon that’s on display.”

  “They see us!”

  “Do you want to converse with them? I used to speak Deshoii.”

  “Let’s do it! Will someone tell me where we are?” Two or three Essiin called out the name of the museum. “What is the date in Union Standard Time?”

  A woman in a service uniform came through the crowd and approached the floating cryptikon. She looked from it to the cryptikon on display in the center of the room. She reached out to touch Phuti’s cryptikon and her hand passed through it. She looked at the parts of the ship visible to her and scuffed her feet where the deck of the ship met the floor of the museum. “What kind of information projection are you?” the woman asked.

  “I don’t know,” Iggy replied. “What kind are you? Will you tell us the Union Standard Time?” The Essiin woman checked her data implant and answered. Iggy checked his and said, “Damn! That’s what I have.” The cryptikons were, indeed, capable of real-time communications across the vastness of intergalactic space.

  “You are the Doctor Mende image,” the museum worker said to Phuti. “You aren’t supposed to be here.”

  “What does she mean?” Phuti asked Iggy.

  “I think you’re exhibited in another part of the museum.”

  “Why?”

  “Not too many people have ever done what you did, Phuti. The Five Worlds. And they don’t even know how much you helped Aylis. You’re a part of Union history.”

  Several museum guards entered the chamber and confronted them.

  “They are only images,” the woman in the museum uniform said to the guards.

  “They look real to me,” a guard argued. “They have no entrance passes. They are a security violation.”

  “Perhaps we should leave,” Phuti said, reaching forward to retrieve the cryptikon. A guard was trying to grasp the cryptikon at the same time and their hands touched.