Keshona Far Freedom Part 1

smallest gesture with her hands, the steel in her failing to stop an emotion, a rise in anxiety. She didn't want to know she could sing. She couldn't afford to be Ruby Reed, not now. "Rafael. Did Pan ask you to do this?"

  "I've known Pan most of my life, Fidelity. He's my best friend. I want to do this for him. But I also want you to sing for me!"

  "It was in another lifetime I might have been this singer. I don't remember her. I shouldn't remember her. How could I retain any trace of her talent?"

  "Before he departed today Pan found recordings in his datasphere. He said they were hidden away! They were performances of Ruby Reed. I'm sorry I let them slip out of my own life! Let me play one of them for you."

  She did not want to hear it, but she said: "That should be... interesting."

  "Pan recommended them to me decades ago. Why would he have forgot them, and forgot Ruby Reed? How could he have ever forgot such a great singer? That has been his life's work! I know I listened to the songs hundreds of times. In a way, you helped me paint many of my best pieces. I can even remember some of those I painted to your music, and I can assure you my art would have been very different - and not as good - without hearing your voice as I painted."

  "Rafael... this is... difficult to... Are you sure? I helped you paint?"

  "You admit you were Ruby Reed?"

  It seemed possible. She was already too many people - why not another? But it frightened her, further diverted her, and further diluted her.

  "I'm confused, Rafael. I don't know who I am! This is a dangerous condition in which to be. But I may not be able to escape it. Perhaps I should try to determine if I was her, and deal with it now, while it's safer."

  "I've just been listening to one of the songs," Rafael said, enthused by his success with her. "Let me sing a little of it, Fidelity. Perhaps you will also remember it." He cleared his throat a couple of times. He smiled and stroked his small white beard, then broke into song with a strong voice. He stopped after a few bars. "I can't remember any more of the words. I used to know at least a dozen of the songs, and I would sing by myself as I painted."

  "Do it again," she asked. She dared, only because she had the steel person inside her to fall back on.

  Rafael sang again, then as the lyrics escaped him he hummed.

  She now knew the lyrics, plucked from her data augment. Why are they stored there? She began to sing, very softly at first, half speaking the words, half singing, and ever more rapidly running through the entire song. Excitement and dread dueled in her chest, her heart racing. She stopped and looked at Rafael who seemed terribly expectant of her. She closed her eyes. She went back to the beginning of the song, started softly, picked her way carefully, listening to the words and understanding their meaning. She willed herself to relax. When she finished, she shook her head, dissatisfied, embarrassed.

  "Bravo!" Rafael applauded. "You're amazing! Another song!"

  "That wasn't good! There's an art to singing. I can output the correct words and notes but I don't know the art. Even art isn't enough. There's something else one needs and I don't know what it is."

  "That isn't important right now! You do sound like Ruby Reed! I kept waiting for you to do the little things with your voice that she did. You're correct - there's something missing - and you knew that without hearing the recordings. I don't know if you can sing like she did, but I think you have the potential."

  "You believe I was Ruby Reed, Rafael?"

  "I do! But why would you forget who you were? Don't those who have full rejuvenation still remember who they were, even though so many memories are lost from both the brain and the body?"

  "I died in the war, Rafael. I believed I had lost all memories. I can't explain what's happening. Do you have another song I can try?"

  "Let me play what was Pan's favorite song. I've just remembered it."

  Rafael called to an information system in his studio and spoke his selection. The admiral took a step backward involuntarily when she heard the first few bars of the instrumental accompaniment - piano and string bass - shocked how familiar and how important the hint of melody seemed. Her hand went to the back of her neck. A feeling of momentary panic solidified into near paralysis. She closed her eyes. She struggled free of the paralysis and turned around several times, as something complex and powerful grew inside her and claimed a large portion of her total being. She put her face in her hands. Then came the voice of Ruby Reed from the recording and the admiral threw open her arms and mouthed the lyrics with her eyes still closed, forced to do it, not wanting to do it. Echoes of a hundred times she might have sung the song reverberated through her mind and body, growing flesh and spirit into a person who loved to sing.

  As she began to sing along with the recording, Rafael reduced the volume of the recording so that Fidelity's voice could not be mistaken. She sang with the recording, her voice alive and rich with timbre and meaning, gliding effortlessly through melody. Something pushed it out of her with a quiet fury and a need for release. She understood the heart of the song and what it meant to convey. She sang without any conscious effort to perform the mechanics of the art. She sang only for herself and for the song. When she finished she wiped her moist eyes and smiled at the beauty in her ability to make music.

  She opened her eyes and saw the big Rhyan standing behind Rafael.

  She closed her eyes and saw...

  1-17 Dinner with Etrhnk

  "It's over. The shadow government has accepted our terms."

  He stood at a glass window that gave a view of an arid plain sloping upward to a far spine of sharp peaks. He didn't respond to her. He didn't want to look at her. He didn't want her to see his face.

  "Where is your mother?" she asked. "She wasn't with the shadow government."

  He handed her a plastic card without turning to look at her. It was the same window from which his gentle mother waved at him for the last time. It was always the "farewell" window.

  "This is her transponder. She isn't here? She left her transponder here and went somewhere?"

  He nodded. He still could not turn to look at her and he still knew her voice, her wonderful voice. So wrong! She was not who she should be, and that was also tearing him apart.

  "When?" she prompted. "Not before The Procedure, I hope."

  The Procedure: what profanity to call it that! Millions of tiny bombs, materializing from orbit, seeking out places and individuals, exploding without regard for the innocent, for the children, for the cultural artifacts. He tried to clear his throat but couldn't. He spoke anyway, knowing what that would reveal to her. "I told her what I thought would happen, the last time I saw her. She was appalled. Even though she felt the need of it, I don't think she could justify any loss of life. We discussed the ethics of it for a long time. Finally, I told her the mismanagement of the Rhyan Empire wasn't the most important threat to the Union. We were, in effect, unwilling instruments of a greater threat. And we would proceed at any cost and at any risk."

  "What greater threat? I don't understand your reference. She left the transponder here, so that you would think her safe at home?"

  Tears filled his eyes, so that when he finally forced himself to look at her, he couldn't see her clearly. Emotion overwhelmed him. He hated that she, of all people, should see it.

  "I suspect she was with the largest group of nobility. My mother probably tried to arrange the meeting in that isolated estate in order to minimize collateral deaths. She intended to die with them, rather than live with the guilt of killing anyone."

  She seemed to ignore his emotion and discount his words, hard as it was to utter them. "We'll begin a search for her," Commodore Keshona said. "We hoped she would lead the new government."

  Time, he knew, would eventually distance him from the pain of this moment. Probably neither of them would be allowed to remember any of it. He could not imagine ever again wanting to hear the voice of Commodore Keshona.

  "I killed my mother," he said to himself, and to God.

 
Pan stumbled, emerging from the scan chamber after he was winked aboard the Navy flagship. Tortured thoughts and blistering emotional residue interfered with his coordination.

  "Is something wrong?" the Navy Commander inquired.

  Nothing is right! I helped Keshona - Demba - annihilate millions of my people! More than Keshona, those Rhyan soldiers such as Jarwekh and Daidaunkh should seek vengeance upon me! This fading indictment led to a question: How, exactly, did he help Keshona? The answer crept into his mind as a vague notion of a vast machine, mauled him with its impossibility, and introduced him to yet another person for whose safety he would now be responsible: his brother. He had a brother. And a dead mother, a different dead mother, not the one he thought he remembered.

  Pan walked unsteadily with Admiral Etrhnk down a passageway in the Navy flagship Eclipse. He willed himself to clear his mind for battle. Etrhnk was the enemy. Any small word or gesture on his part could doom himself and everyone he knew. He had to respond without knowing how to avoid catastrophe.

  "My internal landscape just shifted, Admiral," Pan responded weakly. "I have no control over when I'm subjected to a new memory."

  "Why would this be happening to you?" Etrhnk asked.

  "I don't know." It was almost a lie. He did not know, but he knew there had to be a reason. He and Demba could not have met by accident, could not be suffering similarly by pure coincidence. And the