Keshona Far Freedom Part 1

by Warren Merkey

situation that now seemed much further out of control.

  It was a child! Or it appeared to be a child! He concentrated, tuned his ocular augments, refined his auditory filters and increased their gain. The figure on the ground was long-haired but perhaps it was male. It must be an android, but there were negative psychological issues for possessing a child android. Thermal emissions were inconclusive, and comparative data were impossible to retrieve. Why was it lying on the ground? Why would an admiral - or anyone - have one? Why would it be here? Where was here? The questions spun around in his mind, almost occluding his personal concerns. Where was his patience to examine the problem and his logic to unravel the dilemma?

  Horss watched the thing sit up, close one eye, look out the other, then switch eyes. It pulled its feet under itself and pushed up. It teetered as it favored one foot. The admiral grasped its upper arm to help it. It started at the touch and almost fell down. The actions seemed peculiar to Horss. Why was this such a clumsy android?

  "I've already questioned you," the admiral said to it, "but you won't remember that."

  The voice came softly to his analyzing aural augments. She spoke Twenglish! It almost shifted Horss's mood into a different mental dimension. He was forced into the Navy procedure for determining what was real, and it hurt. Once the pain was gone, he let his augments run the rest of the diagnostics in the background. He was awake. The scene was real. He could now let fascination command his attention as events unfolded.

  It squinted in the glare under the yacht to see her. Horss never saw an android squint. He saw it was Eurasian. The admiral was neither of those component Earthian flavors. Why would she want a child of that type? Why did the admiral speak Twenglish to it?

  "You're an African?" it asked - in Twenglish.

  One question answered, another created. Why would it speak that ancient branch of modern English? Only actors bothered to speak it fluently. A large fraction of the population could understand the old dialect. It was certainly possible that a child could use the language, perhaps influenced by seeing too much entertainment media from that era of history.

  Samson - she called it Samson - looked from the admiral to the ship above. It began to sway, perhaps simulating vertigo. The admiral offered a hand on its shoulder to steady it. It reached for her hand. She allowed it to touch her hand. They each reacted, it trying to hold onto her hand, she trying to pull the hand gently away. Horss noted the detail with detachment, unwilling to assign significance to the effect he observed in the admiral. She must know there was no physical threat from the thing's touch. She seemed able to react as a person, not as an admiral!

  Samson looked down at its feet and let its eyes and hands explore the clothing it wore, as though unaccustomed to such attire. Then it noticed Horss and turned to him. Regardless of what it was, Horss felt special in its gaze. As Horss rose, Samson apparently saw the insignia on the collar of his dark blue uniform.

  "If you're Navy then you're a captain," Samson said. "That's your ship! I'm saved!"

  Saved from what? Horss wondered, marveling at the detail of manufacture, the flawless human mimicry. This was a very expensive android. Was it an android? It simply could not be a real child! How could the presence of a real child be explained?

  "How do you feel?" the admiral asked Samson. "You needed several hours of treatment in the medical cocoon."

  Samson's eyes abandoned Horss, returned to the dark female admiral. The eyes seemed organic to Horss, their expressiveness perfect. Every visual datum argued for human, every point of logic demanded nonhuman.

  "I feel wonderful!" it said with gratitude.

  "You may feel good now," the admiral said, "but the treatment didn't correct everything. You shouldn't exert yourself too much."

  She was trying to convince Horss this entity was a real little boy, freshly discovered on this planet, somehow sick or injured, and now restored to health by the kindly Navy admiral. That was an impossible break in the flow of events leading up to this moment. The boy android could have nothing to do with Navy politics and any plans the admiral had for Horss's future.

  Samson rubbed his fingers across the fabric of his clothes, wiggled his toes in the shoes on his feet. He looked up in wonder at the belly of the ship under which they stood.

  "Is it a starship?" Samson inquired, seeming full of innocent wonder.

  "A small one," the admiral replied. "It nearly squashed you. It never saw you. It should have. I apologize. I know it was painful."

  She landed the yacht on top of him? Why would she claim to find him on this planet? What planet was this? It looks like Earth. It can't be - it's illegal to be here! Horss should have checked for a shiplink immediately but overlooked it in his rush to be out of his prison. He found the link available and hated to take the time to verify its factual integrity while the scene progressed before him.

  "I always wondered why no one could see me down here," Samson said, reading his script with almost casual facility. "There are people up there, aren't there? Don't people look at Earth anymore?"

  Earth! Horss should have deduced the location based on the transit time from Headquarters and the rarity of habitable planets. There are people up there, yes, billions, and they do look at Earth. There were probably millions of imagers flying, crawling, and perched all across empty lands, providing landscape views for everyone's wallpaper up there in orbit. Earth was the most heavily observed planet in the Union, the probable Mother World of all known sentient life. The android raised the best question against its own existence, an even better argument against it being a real child. The entire galaxy would raise a cry for a real child lost on the surface of the Forbidden Planet!

  Horss held his questions, suffered ignorance unhappily, and tried to meter his discomfort into a reservoir of fuel for later action. The android was part of a test. Horss was supposed to react in some way to it. In which way? Android or not, he wasn't so desensitized by Navy life that he could ignore this marvelous being. He should assume it was human, a real little boy. The admiral obviously wanted him to believe it. She certainly should not want to be suspected of possessing an android child.

  "Did Milly hide you?" the admiral asked.

  Who was Milly? Horss wondered, greeted by yet another strange item.

  "Why would she do that?" Samson asked. "Did you talk to her? She's been very strange lately. I think she was upset that I was close to dying."

  "This is Milly?" The admiral held forth a small gray tube.

  "I thought it was." Samson took the tube and rubbed its surface. Horss assumed it was an external information device, a data interface of obsolete design. His telemetric augment found no electromagnetic signal that emanated from it, however.

  "No, I didn't talk to Milly," the admiral said. "Perhaps you can talk to her."

  Samson unrolled the device, then spoke to it. "Milly? Milly, can you hear me? It isn't damaged, is it?"

  "It didn't seem damaged," she replied. "I inspected it, but was unable to get a response from Milly."

  The boy and the admiral still spoke Twenglish. Horss could follow the words easily because it was close to the version of English that was his native language. Further, he could tell that the boy spoke the language too well. No one of his young age should speak Twenglish that well, unless he was intensively trained to do so, but why would that be? It was no use trying to reason it out. He should just ask.

  "Admiral," Horss said, ready to pose his questions, unwilling to suffer in silence any longer.

  "Jon, this is Samson," the admiral said, interrupting him. "Samson, this is Jon. My name is Fidelity."

  She used first names and no ranks. Perhaps she did it for the boy's benefit, to lessen the fear he might have of the Navy. The admiral didn't turn to face Horss as she spoke: a datum that continued to raise alarms in his tactical analysis.

  "When I landed the yacht near the African Space Elevator," the admiral said, "he was directly beneath. Yet the yacht's sensors didn't see him. The gravionics re
ported an anomaly in its pressor skirt and forced a change in landing zone. Samson's health was very poor and the yacht further aggravated his condition. I winked him into isolation and put him in the medical cocoon. I questioned him after he was repaired, while he was semiconscious."

  The admiral spoke Twenglish almost as well as Samson. Horss wondered if she had added it to her repertoire for his benefit. How could the android and the Twenglish language work for the admiral in whatever plans she had made for Horss? And she had used the verb repaired in describing what the medical cocoon had done, even though the word more often meant fixing a machine.

  "Why is he here, Admiral?" Horss asked in Standard. "How could he be here?"

  "He couldn't tell me, Jon," she replied, also switching to Standard.

  "Why did you bring him outside the yacht?"

  "For his protection."

  "Protection?" Horss couldn't push past the existence of the boy android. Samson was stuck between him and his escape from this predicament. All he could do was let the scenario play out and try not to let ignorance kill him.

  "Samson must stay away from us," the admiral said. It was an explanation that needed its own explanation.

  "Why can't you leave him on the yacht?" Horss asked.

  "Because Baby - the young AMI you met - will be too interested in having a playmate."

  Baby was today's first surprise for Horss. Baby had unlocked his