Keshona Far Freedom Part 1

before Etrhnk decided to find it. The flagship must have some capability for sensing a stealthy yacht. It didn't seem worthwhile to even care. Who knew what search capabilities the Lady in the Mirror possessed, when death could be summoned by simply speaking a Twenglish phrase.

  An irrational urge to walk immediately tugged at her. Walk? She was too tired to walk, yet some part of her needed to walk! She was too tired to think, yet she needed to think! She was too tired to feel, but she could not stop feeling! She felt a measure of rage, that she could do nothing at all to save Samson and Rafael. And now, out of nowhere, had come perhaps another of those buried memory-bombs, waiting to explode and reveal yet more mystery to confound her and to further redefine who she was.

  "I'm sorry," she apologized, "but something is happening inside me now and I need to walk and I need to think. Perhaps Old Fred can tell you what has been happening. I have to go." She headed for the door of Daidaunkh's apartment.

  "Why is this happening to you?" Horss wondered, hurrying to follow her..

  "I don't know!" she answered.

  "Business as usual, then," Horss said. "I'll tag along. You coming, Freddy?"

  "Damn right!" Freddy replied.

  Her memory explosion was anticlimactic when it came, for it was merely an old but obviously corrupted map of the nearby area in her data augment that was strangely brought to her attention, as though someone else had performed a search in her data. The corruption seemed arbitrary, like a child had scribbled on the map, obscuring certain places and many labels. She checked her data augment for another map of the same area but found none; yet there were maps of other nearby areas of similar age. Those maps appeared free of obvious errors. Why was this one damaged?

  She was irritated. All she really wanted to do was cry herself to sleep worrying about Samson and Rafael, and even Daidaunkh. She looked at Jon Horss. She looked at Old Fred. Maybe she needed to stop thinking about maps for a moment and let her subconscious play with the problem.

  "We're waiting," Jon said.

  "It's hot!" she complained. "I really don't want to perspire again in this dress. But it seems I must."

  They exited Daidaunkh's apartment and headed for the stairwell.

  "Where have you been?" Jon asked. "We found your note. Then I heard that Freddy and the monster from the space elevator had disappeared, taking quite a few pistols with them."

  "We've all been to a place called Oz," she answered. "Why were you here in Daidaunkh's apartment?"

  "Just a hunch you might come back here, since I think you came here by a gate from somewhere in the Arctic. Am I crazy to think it was a gate? Where is Oz? Why is that name familiar?"

  "It is the name of a city in early American fantasy literature. Except for the color green, it wasn't a suitable name for the place. They also called it the Big Ball. Its most important and most terrible feature was a military force called the Fleet. No, its most important feature was an entity called the Lady in the Mirror. Oh!" She stopped talking as a piece of the puzzle in her mind had just fallen into place.

 

  Horss and Freddy followed the admiral down stairs and out of the building, where she began walking fast, without complaint of the heat. After some minutes of quiet, and with no immediate progress in the admiral's quest becoming apparent, Horss questioned Freddy about Oz.

  "The Lady in the Mirror was a bright plane of destructive energy of some kind," Freddy explained, "upon which was the image of a woman. The plane of energy could disintegrate anything it touched, and it tried to kill Mother, I mean Admiral Demba. But she leaped over it and found us in the hallway. Then it jumped into the hallway and came after us and Shorty had to bring us to Earth to escape. Admiral Demba had to stay on Earth because there were too many of us for Shorty to transport, and I stayed here, too. Shorty said he would try to find Samson and Rafael. Daidaunkh and Percival went back with Shorty to help. But they were still trying to keep away from the Lady in the Mirror, so it may take a while for them to find Samson and Rafael."

  Horss shook his head after the barrage of information and began his attempt to question Freddy to clarify what he had said, and also to talk of other recent developments while they accompanied the admiral.

  /

  Fidelity slowed her pace, starting to feel frustrated by the tedious use of the map, still unsure if the slow progress was actually progress. She caught the word mother that Old Fred had spoken, and after a few more moments it made her lose concentration. She tried to reset her mind while walking slower and slower.

  The afternoon sun pushed waves of heat off broken windows and ancient façades covered with grime and tenacious plant life. The sea breeze barely penetrated the empty urban canyons to lift the heat from time to time.

  She listened to Jon and Old Fred talk, becoming suspicious of how human-like the android spoke. She must not have paid enough attention to the android in her brief time with it at Pan's apartment, because now it seemed different.

  Then she learned of Pan's release from Etrhnk and of the appearance of Aylis Mnro.

  Aylis Mnro! The sad dream of the dark woman in the New Orleans L4 park, the band music, the daughter she had lost! Now she realized who the dark woman in the park was, the woman in more than one of her strange visions, the woman who took Jamie away from her! The woman who made her sing at a funeral. Aylis Mnro? Really? The woman... the friend... the friend of yet some other person she once was? How long ago? She almost began another vision from that hidden place within her but Fred's next sentence stopped her. She had already stopped walking, frozen in place by simple and powerful thoughts.

  "I'm sure Daidaunkh and Shorty will be successful, Mother. They will find Samson!"

  Fidelity wiped tears, along with perspiration, from her face, and looked up at Fred's face with a questioning frown. "Fred? What are you saying?"

  "Shorty is very good at gates. And-"

  "You called me mother, didn't you?"

  "I'm Baby, Admiral! I'm here, inside Fred! We're sharing a great adventure!"

  Fidelity knew without further proof the android was Baby, or contained Baby. She remained shocked, and was now also worried. "How did you do that?"

  "There was a disembodied voice who talked to me when I tried to leave the ship. It was Samson's Milly. She was very peculiar, but she helped me."

  It was Baby who risked his life to rescue her from Oz! She lost Samson. She lost Rafael. Did she have the capacity to suffer the loss of Baby? How could she protect everyone she loved? Yes, she did love them! How could she presume to command a mission that would jeopardize the lives of thousands of people? All of this responsibility was piled upon her while she tried to make sense of painful reports from possible - maybe probable - previous lives, while she was blown apart by powerful dreams or memories, while she tried to pull herself back together as one new, rational person!

  "Do you have redundancy, Baby?" she asked worriedly.

  "I knew you would ask me that."

  "Do you?"

  "Some."

  She shook her head, stopped, and put a hand on the android's arm. "I don't want to lose you, Baby! You probably don't understand how miraculous you are and how wonderful you have made me feel. You can't know how precious you are to me. If this android dies with you inside him, what do you lose?"

  "I should retain at least the germ of sentience if I lose this part of me. I can rebuild myself. I just won't remember much of this."

  "In other words, you committed most of your personality to this android! You left little more than a template in the ship! You didn't do a backup? Baby, please be careful!"

  "Call me Freddy, Mother. I'll call you Admiral when we're not alone. I'll try to be careful, but we spontaneous AMI's don't live very long anyway, do we?"

  "Don't think about statistics! Think about living!" She stopped and regarded him intently, with both worry and warmth. "I'm sorry. I've got to stop talking. I've got something to do, before Etrhnk discovers I'm back. Apparently there was a second reason why I
brought Captain Horss to Earth."

  Fidelity resumed her almost aimless trek, while also urging her mind to discover why she knew Aylis Mnro. The idea itself was too much distraction to let the memory free. How could she possibly know Aylis Mnro? That person was probably the single most important person in human history!

  "Is something wrong, Admiral?" Horss asked.

  "I don't know," she responded tiredly, "but there usually is!"

  How could she protect... everyone she loved? Even Aylis Mnro?

  Aylis Mnro...

  And finally the memory came.

  "Do you remember, Zakiya?"

  "I remember," Fidelity replied.

  She was speaking to this woman as an equal, and this woman was the most famous and most honored person who had ever lived! Aylis Mnro had brought practical immortality to the average person. But now Fidelity remembered who she really was, who they both were, and it was like the universe had turned inside-out!

  "Please, don't hate me!" Aylis begged. "We have so little time together in full knowledge of who we are and who we were! God willing, we'll meet again and know who we are again, but this could also be the last time we see each other!"

  She could see herself remembering: memories within memories, dreams within dreams. She was sure Aylis spoke those words before. How many times? How many years ago? The images of the past escaped and burned into her mind, and killed her. The person she once was, long ago, waved at her from across the abyss of time: farewell, or until