A. Warren Merkey

by Far Freedom

  Hospital staff reached us before we reached the hospital. I knew Aylis didn’t like to use discontinuous transport, but I was real close to asking the Protector to move us. I was feeling worse. I didn’t want to walk anymore. The last thing I remembered before waking up in the hospital was someone shouting to catch the baby.

  Where was Sunny? I looked around, searching for him.

  “The baby is fine,” Mai said.

  “Sunny.” I coughed my throat clear. “His name is Sunny. What’s wrong with Jessie? What’s wrong with me?”

  “We have a theory,” Mai answered, reading my vitals with her fingertips. “We think you and Jessie exist in a state of symbiosis. You have some of her DNA. She may also have some of yours. You need each other, probably in many different ways. Neither of you is in immediate danger, but we don’t want this situation to continue. Perhaps you made an unconscious and involuntary decision to start withdrawing from symbiosis. Perhaps neither of you can survive without the other.”

  I felt a mixture of relief and disappointment. There was no question about what I would do. “I can’t go with Alex and Zakiya.”

  “You must.” It was Zakiya’s grave voice I heard. I struggled to sit up. I saw Jessie on the bed across the room. Nori was holding Sunny. Aylis was rubbing her stomach and studying holographic data next to Jessie. I turned to Zakiya.

  “I want to go but I can’t leave her.” I saw Jessie moving a little on her bed. I was determined to go to her side. Mai and Zakiya helped me. Aylis saw us coming and turned off the data with a shake of her head. I bent over Jessie and kissed her feathery cheek. “I’m not going,” I whispered in her ear.

  Jessie inhaled sharply. I felt a ton of weight lift from my body. Aylis reacted to data she still observed through her shiplink. “What did you do?”

  “Told her I wasn’t going.”

  “Good! All her vitals have jumped significantly. So have mine!”

  Zakiya moved to the opposite side of Jessie’s bed and drew her attention. Jessie smiled at her, but I couldn’t imagine why. “Would you consider going with us?” Zakiya asked.

  “No!” Aylis shouted, with a painful, almost pleading tone.

  “She’s a Golden One,” Zakiya said. “The Lady in the Mirror is involved with members of her species. She could be vital in dealing with them.” She clearly didn’t like putting forth this argument but just as clearly felt it had merit.

  ” She is an immortal being! It’s wrong to jeopardize her life!”

  “May we bring Sunny with us?” Jessie asked. Everyone, including me, had a negative vote on that, and we all cast it at once. “Are we going to die on this mission?” Jessie asked Zakiya.

  Aylis made a loud, gasping sigh, reacting to Jessie’s words. The question dismayed Zakiya but she didn’t retreat. “We know of no way to neutralize the Lady in the Mirror. She may recognize Sam. What effect that would have, we don’t know. My feeling is that we might survive if we have Sam with us. If you come, perhaps the Protector will also be involved.”

  “The Protector must guard Sunny and the Freedom, if we leave him behind,” Jessie said.

  “Then you’ll go?”

  “Just a damned minute!” Aylis cried. “We don’t know the baby can survive without its parents!” Aylis looked at Jessie and asked: “How can you even consider leaving your child?”

  “I don’t want to think about it. How long have I lived before I even knew I could be so happy? It’s a terrible choice to face, but Sam is my choice. People will remember us to Sunny if we never return.”

  “What will we say to him? We hardly know you! We want more time with you and Sam! Why does it have to be now? Civilization won’t end this year if you don’t go now. Wait a year. Wait two. Wait ten!”

  “It will only become harder. Harder for us and harder for Sunny.”

  “You could die!”

  “I could have died many times, Aylis. I watched hundreds of my people venture off to the stars. Many of them never returned. They probably died. Every time I wished I was going. Every time I was afraid to go. I’m glad I waited for Sam to come into my life. Sam is right about the perversity of the universe. Now that I’ve found so much to live for, it may have come my time to die.”

  “The entire Union isn’t worth your life, Jessie!”

  “You see me as a miraculous being, Aylis. I’m only me. I’m not the person who lived a million years ago in this body. Not even a thousand years ago. The memories of those times, with only a few exceptions, are overwritten. I’m not special. Sam is worth my life. Milly is worth my life. My people are involved. That’s why I need to go.”

  I thought I knew everything there was to know about Jessie. Some things you can never know until circumstances prove it. I was not surprised with Jessie’s courage, not when I thought about the risk she took having Sunny. I was not surprised that she would risk her life so that I could find Milly. Nevertheless, I felt a great relief now that she confirmed my feelings. And - I’m sorry, Milly - I loved Jessie more than I could quantify.

  “You mentioned a theory Jessie and you developed over the years on the Protector,” Setek said, causing a groan from Koji as we all sat down by the lake. Setek cast his innocent gaze upon us with good humor. “What? Does anyone have anything better to talk about?”

  “Yes!” we all answered.

  “But I’m sure you don’t mind starting off with something light,” Setek said, looking at Koji. “Did one of the Marines get lucky? Or was that not a groan of physical pain?”

  “No and yes,” Koji replied. “Go ahead and theorize. It’s a good time for a nap.”

  Setek gave Koji a friendly shove and started talking. “Here we are - at least here are Direk and I - trying to build a formal description of discontinuous travel, both gate and jumpship, and we go into the Protector and have most of our assumptions about the nature of reality pulled from under us. We saw things I could not even begin to explain. Now I know even less than I always thought I did.”

  “I was as amazed as anyone,” Alex commented, “but I wondered why it showed so much of what it was and what it could do.” As usual, Alex knew the important questions to ask.

  “The Protector seemed to be showing off,” I said. “I don’t remember much of our centuries aboard the Protector but I’m sure it never did anything like that. Jessie said she saw things she never saw before in her entire life.”

  “Well, it’s still with us,” Koji said, eyes closed, “so I think it isn’t finished with us. Maybe the show was an educational warning to us primitives.”

  “The Golden Ones came to us humans,” Patrick said, “and have probably played an important role in our history, unknown to most of us. Maybe the Protector has some continuing responsibility - as a protector.” We all nodded agreement to Patrick’s observation. I hoped the Protector could help the human race. We sure needed help.

  “So, what was your theory or theories about the magic of the Protector?” Setek asked me, returning to his original topic and making Koji groan again and frown.

  “It isn’t a serious hypothesis, just another imagined model of reality. Think of life as viewing a movie - the old kind made of still frames that were flashed on a screen twenty-four times a second, giving our eyes the illusion of movement. Now speed up the frame rate to infinity. Then expand the frame size to encompass the universe. Then set an infinite number of universes in an infinite array inside a super universe.”

  “Wait a minute,” Patrick said. “An infinite number of infinite universes? How do they get projected?”

  “They don’t.” I had to keep smiling as I spoke. I didn’t want them to take me seriously. “The universes are static and fixed in place. Each of us follows a pathway from one universe to the next.”

  “But if each universe is infinite…” Patrick thought aloud. “How do we get from one to the next? That would be an infinite distance.”

  “Infinity seems to be relative and subjective,” I replied. “Bigger than we can measure. If it�
��s beyond what we can see or experience, then whoever is in charge of making universes can save on material and labor. But that isn’t why the pathway is so short. It’s because the super universe has very different laws governing time and distance. The static universes are stacked in a hyperdimensional array, such that points in one universe lie nearly on top of points in another. This also allows three-dimensional vectors to point at locations in an infinite set of similar universes.”

  “And who is it exactly - or what is it - that follows this pathway?” Patrick asked. “If it’s us, what are we?”

  “You could say souls.”

  “I thought the visit to the Protector was a religious experience,” Patrick said. “But our minds are so darned easy to trick.”

  Setek spoke. “Static universes arrayed in a super universe. Then there is purpose or order in the array? They are all unique and follow a sequence of history?”

  “Yes. This model raises many more questions than it proposes answers. For instance, are the static universes eternal or do they become obsolete? Are new ones being made in sequence and how far in advance of now? Can you jump to a far distant universe that may lie in a different sequence of pathways and appear far more exotic to us - like what we saw in the Protector? Do souls travel in groups, or is my soul the only one here by the lake? Are our souls hyperdimensional, living all possible pathways, ending in a grand coalescence of experience? Are we interchangeable - I am you and you are me and we are all God? Had enough, Koji?”

  “Somewhere behind us in our pathway,” Koji said, “the Freedom still sits inside a rock, and our bodies still lie in coffins in an old ship buried in a gravity sink of debris. Where was my soul when I was dead? How did it find me here?”

  “Ah,” Alex said, speaking rarely but often profoundly, “the instant of departure. Death. It seems Setek and I have been jumping to God-knows-where and coming back to our pathway, as if God isn’t finished with us. I like your theory, Sam.”

  “It makes it seem like anything is possible,” Setek said. “Even time travel. Can your soul’s pathways lead backward in time, or jump far forward?”

  “As far as we can imagine,” I replied, “time is completely subjective. It doesn’t exist in a single static universe. The super universe must have laws governing what pathways are allowed. Jessie developed the One-Time Basement Vector from a different model of reality. It doesn’t conflict with the super-universe model but it’s still a special case, requiring a pathway to remain from the past to go forward from there. Are past sequential universes extinguished to make room for the future, or do they always exist and continue to serve souls who don’t know they’re living in the past?”

  We were quiet for a time. I was finished with theory. I washed it from my mind. I was content to watch the birds in the sky, the small sailboats on the lake.

  At times it seemed vital to accept the simple parts of existence, fearing it could all vanish in the next universe in my pathway.

  “Are you making any progress with Nori?” Koji asked Patrick, breaking the silence, startling Patrick and causing Patrick’s green eyes to register alarm.

  “Progress?” Patrick was stalling until he could figure out what Koji intended.

  “My daughter may be getting impatient.” This confused Patrick because Koji always gave him the impression he didn’t approve of anyone taking an interest in Nori and especially Patrick. The truth was opposite that and it was part of Koji’s personality to play games with people - a way of giving them his attention and respect.

  “But I thought… impatient?” Patrick studied Koji’s face, as Koji tried to keep his expression neutral.

  I laughed. I knew everything about Nori and Patrick. I was Nori’s spy on Patrick. Patrick was a lot easier for me to talk to than Alex, Setek, or Koji, and I talked with him regularly. I was a two-way link between Patrick and Nori. Each of them had sworn me to secrecy about who their person of interest was.

  “What have you tried on her?” Koji asked Patrick, winking at me.

  “Oh.” Patrick apparently decided to take the chance on Koji’s good intentions. “Well. Uh, I’ve developed a few ideas about how to…”

  “You’ve done nothing?” Koji said with mock disgust. “Shall I introduce you to her?”

  Patrick composed himself, and with dignity and humility replied: “Yes. Please introduce us.” Then Patrick looked at me with a frown.

  “Who did you dance with at Iggy’s wedding?” I asked Patrick.

  “Ana,” he replied.

  “And every every other female except… ” And I paused to let him fill in the blank.

  “Nori,” he answered sadly. “I told you that! But she was Koji’s daughter and she was young.”

  “But you really wanted to dance with her,” I said. “That’s what you told me and Iggy. And that’s what I told Nori. And would you like to know what Nori told me?”

  “Yes!” Patrick said eagerly.

  “You’ll have to ask her,” I said. “I’m sworn to secrecy.”

  We all chuckled, even Patrick. He looked like a great burden was lifted from his mind, and now he was testing how happiness felt. Patrick was a shy gentleman, with an innocence of character that survived despite his years of service in hell. He was the man who kept Alex and Setek viable in their quest to discover what they could of the barbarians beyond the Union. I was very happy for Patrick.

  We sat in folding chairs at the edge of the lake, me and the guys. It was like a weekend back in the 20th century. We needed a barbecue, a cooler full of beer and soft drinks. Back on the patio of Zakiya’s apartment, about a hundred yards away, the womenfolk were congregated. The “sun” was lowering in the “west” and I could almost forget we were on a huge starship halfway to the Andromeda galaxy. I could see the women were talking a lot. Us guys had become rather quiet. Then Jon Horss arrived.

  “The Fab Four and Doctor Zharkov!” Jon greeted us. Alex, Koji, Patrick, and Setek apparently withdrew to their shiplinks to try to discover Jon’s 20th-century pop culture references - surely a waste of intellect. Jon took a seat, having brought his own folding chair.

  “Hello, Flash,” I greeted. “Or is it Buck?”

  “Beats me,” Jon replied, and took a swig of iced tea. “Things just pop into my head and I’m too lazy to edit them before they reach my mouth. Would you like to meet your son? He’s awake now.”

  “You have him?” I felt the excitement of both anticipation and worry. The small piece of a Gatekeeper seemed to be the intellectual essence of Sammy but I was unable to let myself believe it was a real person and that it might one day become a real little boy. Yet, I felt I needed to quickly take on the role of the father of a son who was not an infant, a son who could possibly see all my internal flaws, a son with the logic to pass judgment on me and on my abandonment of his mother. ” Setek and Direk are giving him a little freedom from the lab? I thought he was too fragile to spend much time in someone’s bloodstream.”

  “You try keeping Sammy where he doesn’t want to be,” Setek said. “He puts out this little red bead and it makes you crazy until you allow him to talk to you.”

  “You talk as if you really believe it’s Sammy,” I commented.

  “Don’t get technical,” Jon said, “get tough. He wants to say hello. Don’t worry, he’s a nice kid. Yeah, yeah, I gotta lie a little bit, Sammy. Here’s another one: your dad’s the best, even if he’s a little chicken. No, he’s cool, man. You’ve seen him. Don’t you chicken out on me, kid. Get ready to wiggle, or whatever it is you do to change horses.”

  Jon took my wrist and placed it on top of his. The captain of the Freedom was wearing a Hawaiian shirt, baggy shorts, and flip-flops. “Are we going to become blood brothers, Chief?” I asked, trying to sound nonchalant.

  “And it won’t hurt a bit,” Jon said, using his other hand to fix our wrists together.

  “Wow!” I remarked, feeling the sting. “That sure doesn’t hurt a bit.”

  “Sometimes you get the v
eins lined up just right, sometimes not,” Jon said. “Tell me when he’s across.”

  “How will I - “

  [Hello, Father. I’m across.]

  “Hello, Sammy.” Jon released our wrists. “Are you alright? I wish I knew what to say to you.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Jon remarked. “The kid’s a talker. Fortunately he has to sleep a lot.”

  “He’s not saying anything. Is something wrong? No, wait. I can feel something. Oh.” The tears were dripping off my chin before I fully realized what happened. I wanted Sammy to like me and I tried to make him feel what I felt. He must have wanted to do the same. It was like a mental embrace, a powerful sensation. If one could directly feel the love another person felt for him, that would push the tears out of him as it did me. Koji and Jon put their arms across my shoulders and waited for me to stop being unmanly.

  “He does that to everyone,” Koji said, “but you’re the first to shed tears.”

  “I’m guessing his dad loves him a lot,” Jon said, thumping me on the back.

  [Could I see my mother?] Sammy finally asked. I tried to organize my thoughts and sort through my ancient memories to find my favorite picture-memory of Milly. I realized it had to be the wedding, when our vows were said and her veil was lifted and we looked at each other. There was truth at that moment and we could both see it, if only for that one moment. We loved each other. Sammy seemed to capture the image and sharpen it, and I think he felt what I felt: the joy, the love, and the sadness after the fact. He didn’t release the image for what seemed like a long time.