A. Warren Merkey

by Far Freedom

  “Sammy!” Jamie jumped up and ran to him - all of three strides - and scooped him up. She hugged him, turning around and around. Everyone crowded around her, wanting to be near the boy. For people of such advanced age they seemed extremely unaccustomed to joy. I never saw them like this before.

  “Aylis! Why didn’t you tell us?”

  “I wasn’t sure, until the last day, that Sammy would be Sammy. Shorty and his child made it possible to rebuild Sammy’s mind.”

  Jamie set the boy down in front of me. He looked at me with his half-Asian eyes, curious and - hopeful? He smiled shyly. I remembered what Aylis said about Samson’s invisible friend, what Admiral Horss further described. Samson was now looking at his invisible friend in her visible state. What must he think? I tried to think of what I could say or do but nothing would come to mind. I couldn’t even guess why Jamie set him down in front of me. This child suffered so terribly! I only wanted him to finally find safety and happiness. Perhaps I made him uncomfortable. Samson turned his gaze away from me.

  “Hi,” he said to Sunny. “Is she your mother?” He meant the image of Jessie.

  “This is my mother.” Sunny meant me. Sunny held more tightly to me. How could I feel both wonderful and terrified at once?

  “Sammy,” Aylis said, “remember what I told you about touching her.”

  “I remember. I’m scared.” He looked back at me then. I was still staring at him, still lost in a chaos of answers to which I forgot the questions. I kept blinking to clear my eyes. Mai dabbed at my face with a tissue. Aylis squeezed me to where I could hardly breathe. There was something special about Samson and it was obvious to everyone but me. I knew all the facts were before me. I had missed something. I just could not think.

  “Milly, this is your son. Sammy.”

  My son. A great pregnant silence from everyone. My son. All eyes on me. No place to hide. Silence from my brain. While I was paralyzed, my son reached out and touched me.

  I remembered!

  My little world of Sunny-and-me exploded into a huge alien universe of fantastic mental images. They came at me from all sides and from within. It made little sense to me and frightened me beyond endurance. I had to stop. I had to turn me off.

  I awoke and found myself lying on a sofa. The back of two heads - one with soft, golden, feather-like curls, one with dark, straight hair - met my blurred gaze. How strange. I listened to them talk for awhile. It was pleasant. I couldn’t understand a lot of what they were saying but I could interpret the tone of their voices. They were friends. They must have heard me stir. They both turned around and put their hands on the edge of the sofa, their chins between their hands.

  “Areyou okay, Mom?”

  I was ‘Mom.’ Yes, I was! I shivered in delight. I smiled. I had two sons now.

  Sammy got up and dashed out of the room. He came back with Aylis and Mai.

  “How do you feel, Milly?” Aylis smiled at me as though she was trying to make me smile. It wasn’t a real smile. Mai had the correct expression: hopefulness and dread.

  “Blessed,” I replied. “Damned,” I added.

  “Doyou remember?” Aylis asked anxiously.

  “Yes.”

  “Let us examine you,” Mai said, apparently trying to forestall Aylis’s curiosity.

  They could read my vital signs with their fingertips. I knew that, but it came to me from a new perspective. I was a 20th-century woman. These were 27th-century physicians. They were my friends, without my understanding how amazing they were. I took them and their giant spacecraft for granted.

  I inhaled sharply. Mai jerked her hand away from my chest. I was a divided personality again, hopefully not a sick divided personality. There was the Old Me who was Sunny’s mother. There was the New Me who was Sammy’s mother. There was the Ancient Me who was Sam’s wife. And there was the Evil Me who was insane. One or more of them was startled to be here. “How did I get here?”

  “We carried you.”

  “I mean, from the 20th century. I died. I was trying to find Sam. It was so cold. I saw the damage to the south circuit. I couldn’t move. Sam was gone. Sam was gone!”

  “Tell us, Milly,” Aylis urged.

  I tried to tell them. I wanted to tell the story. It hurt me to remember it. It was difficult to organize the information. Several more people joined us. I struggled to fit pieces of memory together and to understand what they meant. With each face I remembered - Jon, Koji, Nori, Patrick, Phuti, Setek, Iggy, Wingren, Jamie, Direk - the New Me found more strength. I fumbled with my facts for awhile but their questions helped bring some coherence to my story.

  “It’s much the same as Sam told us,” Setek said.

  “Do you remember what you did as the Lady in the Mirror?” Aylis asked.

  “No. Not yet. I hope never!”

  “We know what happened to our friends and family who tried to rescue you,” Aylis said. “We don’t know why. We don’t know why the Golden Ones killed Jessie. We don’t know how the Lady in the Mirror came into existence. How the Golden Ones became what they were. Why the Black Fleet’s hidden empire was born. Why Sammy was forced to survive alone in Africa. We don’t know what happened to Sam. All of the remains but his were identified.”

  All of those people I just heard eulogized. There was an underlying horror to Aylis’s strained voice. I did remember the Evil Me, the Insane Me. My mind was too full of a too lengthy and too brutal and too bizarre life. I was grateful I could keep from vomiting it on everyone else. “You couldn’t save any of them?” I was stalling, batting away images of stinging pain, like an attack of wasps backing me toward a precipice. Ancient Me didn’t want me to ask that question. I didn’t want the grief of knowing Sam was really dead.

  “There was nothing that remained of who they were,” Aylis said. “Only scraps of flesh.”

  I didn’t want to educate everyone in the horror I experienced, in the evil I did. Nor did I want to leave my guilt to the imaginations of children. Which would be worse: the real or the imagined? I wanted to run and hide.

  “Milly, we know it wasn’t you - not the whole you - who was the Lady in the Mirror,” Mai said, frowning at my distress. “Your brain was damaged, your psyche shattered into different personalities. We don’t blame you that a bad part of you dominated your access to the machinery they connected to you. We know that other personalities manifested themselves less often, including one or more who called herself Milly.”

  I shook my head violently. If I was losing my mind, I didn’t want to lose it in front of my sons.

  “Leave her alone!” Nori pleaded. “This is hurting her!”

  Sunny and Sammy were staring at me in some flavor of awe. I imagined the worst. I felt unbearable guilt, despite any intellectual explanations. Where was the joy I might have earned by surviving what I survived, in being alive in this distant future, in being a mother to two extraordinary boys? I couldn’t face these people any longer.

  I bolted to the door, ran outside into the dark, and kept going. They would know where I was, but perhaps they would leave me alone for awhile.

  It was quiet in the trees. The birds were settled down for the night. I sat in one of my favorite places: a bench by a stream that fed the lake. The gibbous moon peeked out from behind a cloud. I was so overloaded with the stuff ofpain and joy that I was numb, until something touched my hand. Sunny. He sat down beside me. The absolute magic of him struck me for the first time, as I must have just stepped out of the 20th century. Then the absolute despair of his situation hit me even harder. He was tired from following me, but he wanted to be with me. I held him and cried until I was exhausted. It had been a hell of a day.

  “Where is Sammy?” I asked, trying to keep what was important in proper order.

  “He went the wrong way. I knew you were here.”

  Sammy. Another miracle. Another tragedy. I hoped there would be enough left of me to be a good parent for him. He would always remind me of Sam.

  Sam was gone. I was
so close to having him back! It had been impossible to even think of him in my insane state. The Servants and I had put our pasts behind us, in order to become rulers of the universe. In order to survive.

  Memories. The memories of insanity played upon the stage of my mind. Played? No, they assaulted me, like big hairy barbarians punching me in the gut. The answers to Aylis’s questions were all there, jumbled, nearly incoherent, but understandable in the light of information already provided me.

  I sat frozen solid in my wheelchair under the Kansas plain for more than a century, until someone developed the technology to safely thaw me. The United States Air Force? No. Another government agency? Maybe. But not people you would ever want as friends. By that time the Hole Project was so secret that it was lost to all but a group of fanatical revolutionaries who felt pushed to extremes by the population pressures of the late 21st century. They would stop at nothing to learn the ultimate secrets promised by the tantalizing evidence of Sam’s last experiment. I was the key, I had the mathematics to make the Big Circuits work again. Unfortunately, they were a bit premature in bringing me back to life. They had to resort to developing an electronic interface with my damaged brain. Then they had to deal with facets of my personality which were quite ruthless and distrustful. I never gave them anything they could continue to use without my help.

  Contact was made with the Servants and they were lured to Earth under false pretenses. Once enough of them teleported to provide adequate technical expertise, they could have pulled the plug on me, let me die. These future barbarians made the strategic mistake of forgetting about me. They enslaved the Servants and coerced them into opening up the universe for their personal use. They bootstrapped themselves and their families and descendants into the far reaches of space, using technology forced from the Servants. I eventually came to the attention of the Servants and I played my own game with them. I made myself as interesting and as educational as I could, trying to explain to them how to deal with humans. They learned the facts of human deviousness from me. We became partners, to take care of each other. They gave me connections to every piece of machinery they built for me, always with the purpose of gaining power and independence from the thugs who took over the Hole. The Lady in the Mirror was born out of desperation. She was born to protect the Servants and me. She was born to give me wings and eyes and weapons.

  We built the Gatekeepers as a temporary concession to the far-flung barbarians - android helpers to make it easy for them to use gate technology. I eventually subverted the Gatekeepers by making them sentient, amorphous, and dangerous. Neither I nor the barbarians could make them do anything they didn’t want to do.

  I remained barely alive as far as my body was concerned, slowing the pace of my aging to a crawl. After another hundred years it became apparent that I was pregnant. By then, the Servants and I were in control. My fetus was of little interest to my fractured self, but the Servants were curious about it. They found a way to accelerate its growth and then extract it. The relationship between my various personalities and the Servants was complex, and the baby made it even more complex.

  The baby profoundly affected many of the Servants, particularly those who stayed closest to me. It profoundly affected some of my personalities. A state of civil war arose and maintained among my separate personalities and the different Servants. The Servants were almost a reflection of my own condition, as they seemed to adapt themselves to every situation. They were as insane as I was. Only the balancing terror of the barbarians and the Lady in the Mirror held us together.

  Parts of me experienced the invasion of my stronghold by Sam’s group through the security cameras scattered throughout the underground complex. I also had images gathered by the Lady in the Mirror, as she roamed the premises, trying to catch the last surviving invader. I saw all the bodies. I saw the mirror sweep though them, perhaps vengefully or in despair. It was upsetting to me in the extreme. Even as I fought down the urge to vomit, there came a brief but violently shocking scene, a scene viewed from multiple angles, multiple times, as though the viewer was trapped for the benefit ofpunishment. I was the viewer. I saw it from the cameras. I saw myself drifting in the blue tank, looking like an extinct fish. I saw myself in the mirror, looking at myself in the blue tank. I saw myself looking out from the mirror, seeing reality as a nightmare. I saw the man whose face was so distorted by tragedy that I would never have recognized Sam.

  I saw him jump at me and vaporize himself in the plane of the mirror. Then I died.

  I was locked in mortal combat with that sequence of images for unknown minutes. I wanted to react in some way, to rage against the terror and scream at the injustice and weep at the great loss of what could have been. I don’t know how I survived that memory. It should have killed me. The presence of Sunny and the arrival of Sammy reinforced my will to survive. I had someone to live for, someone to balance against the tragedy.

  I wondered how Sammy could possibly have any good feelings for me. He didn’t realize what we did to him. He was damaged; I was certain of it. How he retained his sweet disposition in the wake of such treatment was a miracle. We put him out into the harsh world how many times? He suffered terribly how many times? We poorly repaired him and stored him away how many times? For four hundred years some of my splinter personalities used him as a lure or perhaps as a signal for help. Or maybe we just wanted him to find someone like Zakiya who would protect him and raise him.

  I reached for Samson and held him. I would do my best for him.

  {Please don’t be afraid.}

  I nearly fell off the park bench! “Who is it?”

  {I’m Sunny’s imaginary friend. You wouldn’t know me but some call me Protector.}

  “Who are you talking to, Mom?” Sammy asked.

  “It’s him,” Sunny said.

  “You ‘re called Protector? Who do you protect? “

  {I protect Sunny. Once I protected fools and dreamers, but that was too difficult.}

  “Why do you speak to us now? “

  {Because Sunny is dying and that must not happen.}

  “He won’t die! Aylis won’t let him.”

  {Perhaps that is so. I won’t take that chance.}

  “You can save him?”

  {I’ve seen Aylis Mnro and the Gatekeeper restore Samson to life. I have a question. When a dead organism is repaired, how does it resume life and selfawareness?}

  “I’m only a mathematician.” I felt a wonderful swelling of hope in my chest. “Life is a mystery to me.”

  {Would Samson know?}

  “Maybe you only need someone to love you.”

  {Do you concur, Milly?}

  “Sammy should know better than any of us. Perhaps God is the one who must love us.”

  {We shall see if He does. Please ask your friends to call forth the Marines with their weapons.}

  “The Marines?”

  There was no reply.

  The scene shifted. Sunny and Sammy now stood with me on the patio where the wake occurred. Everyone was gone and I could only see the inert bodies of Freddy and Fred in their chairs at the corner of the patio. Then I saw people inside, sitting around, mostly silent. Aylis was comforted by Setek and she appeared to need comforting.

  Aylis looked up, as though she knew exactly where we were. She pulled free of Setek, startling him and the others. She rushed to the doorway, onto the patio, paused, then walked slowly toward me, composing herself and trying to smile. She didn’t succeed with composure and the smile fell apart. She embraced me fiercely and I knew that Aylis loved me.

  “Call out the Marines, Aylis.” I managed to squeeze the words out and into her ear. I pounded her on the back. She was almost suffocating me.

  “Yes! So they can arrest me for abusing you!” She released me and I could

  594 Far Freedom finally take a deep breath.

  “No, Aylis! I’m serious! You tell her, boys.”

  “Call out the Marines,” Sammy said.

  “Fully armed,�
�� Sunny added.

  I saw Admiral Horss and repeated the request to him. I saw Jamie and said it again.

  “Why?”

  “Protector requests it.”

  “The Protector?”

  “Sunny’s invisible friend.”

  Aylis looked down at Sunny and Sammy. Both of them nodded vigorously at her. They were my boys. They knew their mother wasn’t crazy, not this time.

  Aylis turned to Horss and Jamie. “Do it!”

  The silent order went out, and immediately the klaxons of a ship-wide military alert warning blared. Sammy grabbed my hand at a disturbing sound he remembered too well. The light level of the biosphere area increased gradually without the effect of the simulated sun.

  I had never seen Koji with a weapon. I saw him now. He wore several weapons. He carried a samurai sword unsheathed.

  {Explain to the first one. She will inform the others.}

  She appeared in our midst: tall, lithe, beautiful, and frightened. Everyone stepped back in shock, except Koji. Koji moved behind the Golden One, sword held so that it could be used quickly. The Golden One sensed him but couldn’t look away from me. She dropped to one knee before me and bowed her head.

  “Mistress, it’s you!”

  “You know me?” I was surprised Constant recognized me. I was surprised I knew her. Perhaps I saw some of her when I saw the image of Jessie. Perhaps she was the reason I reacted as I did. I loved her. How could I not have loved Sunny at my first sight of him ?

  “Milly! I’m your servant!”

  “You’re no longer my servant, Constant. Do you wish to harm anyone?”

  “Only in your defense, Milly. I’ll always want to protect you. Are you safe, Milly? Are you happy? Why are you here? How are you here? Why am I here? Why am I alive? Where are we?”

  “Too many questions, Constant! I’m safe. I’m happier than I deserve. You see my sons. We’ll answer all of your questions soon. And you will answer ours.”