by Far Freedom
“I thought you guys had all the time in the world - in the universe?” I put it on autopilot and let my diminished capacity speak for me. I was terribly hurt that Zakiya seemed poised to betray my trust. She was the only one I trusted. I didn’t even trust myself. I was a stranger to myself. Why trust a stranger?
“You don’t have all the time in the universe, Sam,” Alex said.
“Why?” Maybe this was good news. I had a lot more time than I wanted to have.
“Something is killing you.” I heard real concern in Alex’s voice.
” Yeah, and I wish it would hurry up!”
“We’re serious, Sam,” Zakiya said gravely.
” So am I!” And I was.
The tear in the corner of one of her eyes caught the light, and caught a rock in my throat. How did I find the means to hurt her? How could I lose it? “Aylis - ” she started to say.
” - isn’t a patient woman!” autopilot rudely interrupted. My brain became a family of frightened rats running around in my skull, trying to escape. “I’m okay!”
“Not even close to okay,” Alex said.
“You have immortality but you still can’t fix a broken brain.”
“I’m an example of that,” Alex said.
“You seem fine to me!” I didn’t want to hear such a thing. If Alex wasn’t right in the head, what chance did I have? When Alex made no reply, I opened my big mouth again, hesitated, and finally squeezed out: “What are we going to do, Zakiya?”
She took a deep breath. I took one with her. I was shaking. She could see my trembling. When she wiped the tears that suddenly glistened on her smooth brown cheeks, I had to turn away.
“We’re going to see your dead son.”
I looked back at Zakiya in disbelief. Did I hear her clearly? Dead son? How did she know its sex? How did she know… what? I saw the pain in her eyes, perhaps even fear. My fragility became calamitous. My terror tapped me on the shoulder, daring me to turn around and see it. “How can we possibly be going to see my…? I have no… I have no… I…” I began hyperventilating. “It isn’t even human!” I screamed, staring at my clean hands like a madman.
They got me, Aylis and Mai. Back in the hospital. Put a little dope in me. Good stuff, as Patrick would say. I’d rather be out killing a bottle of scotch with him. I deserved a bad hangover. Alex got the hell out of the way and the women took over: Zakiya, Aylis, Mai, Nori. The SWAT team.
“Women in your condition shouldn’t be doing psychiatric outpatient torture,” I said dopily, almost getting the syllables into correct sequence. “What if your fetuses hear me screaming?”
“Don’t scream,” Aylis said reasonably. “You wouldn’t want prenatal assault on your conscience.”
“I don’t like this! Do you and Mai have to be here? I don’t want you to be hurt!”
“He’s worse today,” Mai said. “I thought he was getting better.”
“He never has liked me,” Aylis complained. “I should let another physician work with him.”
I was sweating and breathing hard. I was not only worse, I was worst.
“You’re pregnant,” Nori said to A and M. “We know that’s what makes him nervous and upset. You both should leave him.”
“But I wanted to be here,” Aylis said. “For Zakiya.”
“I’ll be fine,” Zakiya lied. “Nori’s correct.”
“Keep an eye on for me?” Aylis requested. These future people had cameras in their eyes, do you know? I learned early on they could do amazing things
without lifting a finger. They were all a bunch of networked computer terminals. The entire length and breadth of human culture and science was instantly available to them, just by focusing their attention on an image projected inside their eyeballs.
Zakiya, Nori, and I walked down to the bottom of the hospital, and you know what they keep in the bottom of a hospital: bodies and parts of bodies. It wasn’t much of a morgue but I had to remember how long people lived. Like, forever. Zakiya held my hand and that made me feel better. If you’ve got Zakiya for a friend, you have something truly valuable, and that was before I knew she was The Boss. I did well until her grip tightened and I felt her despair jump the gap to my neurons.
Nori opened the vault. I saw the body. I was strangely relieved but also ignoring some greater implication. The kid looked good. I could barely tell he had severe trauma to the head. He wasn’t Korean, not completely. He had some white in him. I pondered the meaning of that. I pointed out the racial mix. I didn’t know who was running my body at the moment but I was glad to let him. All of this was impossible and impossibly frightening. I was hiding. I didn’t belong here, not anywhere near here, unless they had room for me on a cold slab.
“Yes, his mother was of mostly European ancestry, not Asian,” Nori said. “You’re his father. Genetic analysis is conclusive. He was born a long time ago on Earth.”
“But he’s only about nine years old! Did he get frozen or something?”
“We don’t know. We have a process called stasis that can preserve a live person indefinitely but the process was not perfected until three hundred years ago.”
“Were you married?” Zakiya asked, never looking directly at the body of the poor little kid. She began pulling me away, anxious to leave. How could they let him get killed? I couldn’t speak. I was grateful to be leaving that cold little room in the bottom of the hospital. “Does the name Milly mean anything to you?”
I shook my head, shook it too hard. I squeezed Zakiya’s hand, I squeezed it too hard. Why? What? Who? No! I didn’t want to know! No questions! No answers! No past! No future!
No me!
“I believe Milly was his mother,” Zakiya said gently. Minutes later I was still walking between Zakiya and Nori and I had no idea what happened during the walk. “You were no longer with us. Where are you now, Sam?”
“I can’t…!”
“Can’t do what?” We stopped walking. The rest of the SWAT team met us. I couldn’t look at them. “Can’t do what?” Zakiya repeated. She was holding both of my hands and trying to find me.
“Music. Can’t face the music.”
“It has something to do with pregnant women,” Nori offered. I wished Nori would find another theme! I wished she was wrong. I wished I was dead. Put me in there next to the kid. Please! Rest me in peace!
“I want you to take a walk with Aylis,” Zakiya said, shaking my hands. “Please.”
“No!”
“Please,” Zakiya repeated. “Do it for me. I loved Samson. I don’t want to lose his father, too.”
I couldn’t say yes. I couldn’t say no. I just held my breath and hoped to pass
out on the spot. Take a walk? With Aylis?
They turned me over to the most famous woman in the history of the human races. I didn’t know that, of course. To me, Aylis was just a mean pregnant doctor who seemed to be in charge of the medical people in this sci-fi movie. We walked - or somehow got there - to the orchard on the agriculture deck. I don’t know why she picked that place, unless it was the isolation and leafy quiet acoustics that would swallow up any bad noises I might make. I don’t remember anything she said while walking. I said nothing. I avoided looking at the bulge of her abdomen. She took my hand but it wasn’t Zakiya’s hand. I tried to break free. Aylis held tight and I almost pulled her down. She stumbled. I grabbed her to prevent a fall. The tactile sensations jolted memories my body possessed, and my brain was tricked into supplying a fragment of an image. She was blonde, like Aylis. No, not exactly. Milly wasn’t blonde! How did I know that? Who was blonde? Who was Milly? When my train of thought got back on the tracks, I found myself sitting on the ground under a plum tree next to Aylis. She was still holding my hand. I realized that she was a very caring mean person, and that she was going to hurt me. A lot.
” You saw her.”
“Who?” I looked at how close my hand was to her baby.
“It has to be a woman. A pregnant woman. Something bad happ
ened. Something very bad. Why did you have blood on your hands, Sam? It looked like it had been on your hands for a long time.”
It was like the image was sliding past any critical faculties I should have, staying just out of focus and around a corner. When Aylis said it, it was a slap in my face and an icepick up my nose. It was suddenly such a concrete and vivid image that I couldn’t avoid its horror and its promised tragedy. I could see where my hands had been and I could feel what they had tried to do and I could remember the horror! The horror! Have you ever cried so hard that everything leaks out of your head: tears, snot, saliva, sweat? I still didn’t remember who, but I was so close to remembering that I could scream at the loss I knew was coming. Now Aylis was holding me and rocking me like a baby while she wiped my face with the hem of her hospital smock.
“Did she die?”
I didn’t yet know who, but I knew she did. I nodded weakly. There was something wrong with my brain. Yes, yes, of course! But I mean my brain was not just broken-wrong - it was wrong-wrong. Broken or not, it was not supposed to work this way. It was doing something I didn’t understand.
We got up and we began walking again. I had no legs; I could as well be floating. I led the way, not quite understanding that was what I was doing. We walked all the way back to the main biosphere, the village, the commons, the lake. The golden dumbbell floating above the green grass. I could see it again, a big golden blur, the end of happiness, the doom of love. I was trembling so hard I could barely approach the portal that opened for us.
“This is a medical emergency. This is a medical emergency! The Protector doesn’t know biology!” I wanted to scream again but was stunned to silence. Pieces of nightmare flashed through my conscious. Blood! More blood! I couldn’t move. The portal dilated and the golden corridor awaited, but my legs threatened to dump me on the grass.
Mai, Nori, and Zakiya appeared. They surrounded me and helped me forward, into the portal.
“Which way?” Aylis asked, as though the corridor offered more than one
route. It didn’t matter. The Protector would take us there.
I opened my eyes when we came to a stop. The big black cube lay before us in the matrix.
“What is it?” Mai asked.
“Where time stops! This is a medical emergency! THIS IS A MEDICAL EMERGENCY!”
The black cube became transparent. I screamed.
Section 003 If We Were a Family
They just magically appeared: four women, the most perfectly suited people in the universe to help me. I thanked the Protector. He found them for me. How did I know two were physicians? And where did the blood on my hands go? The moment of sanity fled. “She’s dead!”
“How long ago?” Aylis demanded.
I fought for composure; I wouldn’t have it for more than a few seconds. Jessie’s life depended on it! My life depended on it! It seemed like eons since Jessie’s breathing stopped. Tell them a lie! Make them try to save her! Did I remember performing CPR? I shook my head, trying to clear it, trying to see into the past, hoping the truth was not too far from what I would tell them. “Not long! Maybe a minute or two! I tried to make her breathe again, and then I just knew there was not enough blood. And the baby! The baby!”
“Can we transmat from here?” Mai asked.
Instantly all of us were in a place I remembered, a corridor of the hospital. In a few moments more, other people arrived in a hurry as we pushed the … pushed the… body… on its bloody bed… into an empty room. This was an emergency room? A trauma center? Where were all the instruments, all the machines with wiggly lines and life-or-death beeps? A bright light beamed down upon… upon… the body, the quiet and unmoving body, and the beautiful shimmer of gold, and the closed eyes. And the blood. And the swollen abdomen, and the stillness within. The stillness…
“She is one of the Golden Ones,” the one I knew as Aylis said with a ferocity that reached me through the thick miasma of my emotions.
“A Servant!” I understood nothing about “Golden Ones.” Why did Aylis hate them? How could I prove to her that Jessie was a Servant? But she was golden… but… “They aren’t supposed to have babies!” As if that would deny everything or prove anything. “They aren’t even male and female! Jessie was with me for such a long time, and I came to think of her as a female, because she was smaller than me, and…” They didn’t seem in any hurry, and Jessie wasn’t breathing!
“She is pregnant? She was in labor? You impregnated her?” Such embarrassing and unnecessary questions! “How long ago?” What is the gestation period for a species which has never produced offspring? If she’s gone, will they let me go with her?
“My wife is dead!” It was a stupid defense for my infidelity. “Jessie is all I have. Was… was all… My wife is dead. My wife is dead!”
“Get him out of here,” Aylis ordered. “He can’t help us.”
Zakiya pulled me out of the emergency room, just as I saw all the machinery magically appear. Jessie was at the center of massive medical technology and only that kept me from fighting Zakiya.
She and Alex sat with me in a waiting room. Memories were flooding back through my wavering channel of consciousness. I wept; I couldn’t stop, couldn’t classify the tears as joy or despair but perhaps fear, perhaps hope. My imagination abused my little ego with glimpses of a future without Jessie. It was more than I could handle. I looked around to see a blurry room full of blurry people: so many of the men and women who offered friendship to me over the last few days and weeks. They had rushed to the hospital to lend their emotional support. It did help, if only for a brief moment. I made my eyes communicate my recognition of them, but it was terribly difficult. I knew something was wrong because Jessie was a “Golden One.” They couldn’t be my friends if they disapproved of Jessie. Why would they think that way? Was there another race of beings similar to the Servants, with a bad reputation? I thought I trusted my new friends. They were all mental giants compared to me, all having mechanical and electronic augmentations, in-body computers and expert systems, and often multiple lifetimes of experience. They could all go to hell before I would turn my back on Jessie! They didn’t understand who she was: that was obvious.
“She’s a Golden One,” Alex said, for no reason I could imagine, joining Aylis’s condemnation.
“No! She’s a Servant! That’s what her people call themselves.”
“Jessie is her name?” Zakiya asked. She seemed neutral in her attitude, but even that made me feel betrayed again by the one person I trusted. She seemed to sense her innocent mistake and tried to comfort me with hands on my hands.
“Jessie is what I renamed her.” I took deep breaths, trying to ease a rising pain in my chest. “She’s a wonderful person! She doesn’t deserve to die! Give her a chance to be your friend!”
“Calm yourself,” Alex said gently. “We are your true friends and we all want Jessie to live. Why would you think otherwise?”
I wanted to believe Alex. Why else go on living if there’s no one to trust, no one who will tell you the truth? But my brain was jumping back and forth between the horror of a childbirth that killed Jessie and the possibility that she might be saved. I was stuck between two lives: my eternal companionship with Jessie which ended in bloody tragedy sealed in a black cube; and the two short pieces of my lifespan that occurred before and after Jessie. I had to put the pieces together, but I couldn’t contain the amplitude of my emotions. A few moments ago a sentence spoken by Aylis triggered a new fear that I would lose Jessie forever, for a second time. I tried to put this fear into words, even as I felt ashamed to voice such suspicions.
“Aylis won’t let her die,” Setek said with conviction. “She knew there was a medical problem with someone much like a Golden One. She analyzed the stains on your hands. She prepared a synthetic blood for her. I believe it was a shock to her that Jessie was frozen at the moment of her death in labor. If she said something or did something to disturb you, I’m certain it wasn’t intentional.”
“Forgive me! I can’t think! All I can do is react! You don’t understand how important Jessie is to me!”
“But that’s all we understood about you,” Zakiya said. “Your amnesia suggested how important this person was to you. We debated the meaning of the blood but could never convince ourselves that it signified conflict. You were obviously heartbroken, not murderous, when we first saw you. And then we could get nothing out of you.”
“In fact,” Alex said, “we’ve had a problem keeping you alive. We still fear for your health, which is why Aylis monitors you so thoroughly. It could be why Aylis may have sounded unfriendly about Jessie.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Your health is precarious,” Setek said, “and Aylis believed it was because of the person whose blood was on your hands. By genetic analysis of the blood, Aylis knew it was a very remarkable alien being. She was desperate to see and to examine her! That doesn’t mean she places blame on Jessie. It’s simply a problem that has vexed her terribly for the period she’s known you.”
I tried to understand Setek’s words. I tried damned hard. I’d lived too long a time not to know how valuable understanding between people was. It was easy for me to understand how the loss of Jessie would make me want to die, but they were implying it was more than just the emotional destruction.
“How long has Jessie been your wife?” Zakiya asked. She was curious and was trying to calm me and to keep me in the same reality as everyone else. But it was a hurtful question.
“My wife.” I had to remember Milly. It was my duty, my horror, and my shame to remember her. Even at this agonizing moment. Especially now. “My wife. My wife!” I rocked back and forth, my eyes squeezed shut. Nobody said anything, asked anything, or tried to prompt me to continue. They were all being kind and sensitive, and I had a tiny presence of mind to understand and be grateful. How many decades did I live with the certainty that my wife - my human wife - was dead? Now I had to reestablish that fact in my mind, to let the freshness of it hurt me deeply. I was not feeling very well at all. “I had a wife in 1986. She’s dead. She’s dead! Jessie was my friend for all the years from then to now. She was more than a friend. I thought of Jessie as my wife. But Milly was my first wife. I loved her!”
