we meet again? The memory inside a memory stopped and its parent continued.
"It's so very difficult, Aylis! The memories aren't faded by time! They hit me hard and fresh and I'm terribly wounded! All I ever wanted was simply to be a good mother!"
"And who would you tell Jamie was her father? How would you describe him to her? How would Alex ever share Jamie's childhood with you? It isn't fair either to Alex or to Jamie. Don't you think that's selfish of you, Zakiya?"
She sat down under the apricot tree and hugged her knees. She knew the truth when she heard it. She was selfish. She looked up at the crescent Earth which shone above the rim of the crater. She looked over at the best friend she had ever had. At least Aylis had never abandoned her, as Alex had.
Alex! How many times in her long life had she heard that name and never knew it belonged to her husband? The momentary joy of this knowledge took away some of the pain, but not for long.
"I'm just tired and lonely, Aylis. I don't know how you go on, although at least you have your son."
"Don't you remember?" Aylis replied. "I went to sleep. I'm not here any longer, just this imitation of me. That's how I can be so cruel, although it still isn't easy. Aylis loves you very much. Never forget that."
"But I will forget, won't I? What's that?"
Aylis was holding some piece of fabric, twisting it and pulling it between her hands. She held it by the edge in her fingers, showing it was a container. She opened the silvery bag and pulled forth two objects and placed them on the ground next to Zakiya. They were spectacular artifacts of deep color purity, small as hen's eggs, mysterious beyond understanding. She picked one up and instantly verified what her eyes had already told her. The object lacked mass and weight, yet it felt absolutely solid in her hand.
"I remember them!" She was assaulted by a memory that rushed into her from very far in the past: a memory within a memory within a memory, gaining strength with each nested iteration. These pieces of magic came into her possession the final time she touched him. Alex!
"You take one," Aylis said.
"Yes, that would be logical," Zakiya said.
"Why did you stop?" Freddy inquired.
/
Horss had given up hope of further enlightenment. He was still trying to fit his imagination around the wild tale Fred - Freddy - told him, of gatekeepers and barbarians in black uniforms, and a woman in a mirror who disintegrated people and anything she touched.
The admiral didn't respond for several minutes, standing with her eyes closed. Horss could almost feel the pressure of emotions she struggled to contain. He now understood how strongly she was suffering from intense flashbacks, similar to what Pan had experienced.
She finally turned away from them and held her face in her hands. They waited. Freddy put a hand lightly on her shoulder. She turned around then and put her arms around Freddy. Freddy encircled her with Fred's arms and gently held her. Horss was sympathetic, perhaps embarrassed, and impatient for the sentiment to end.
"I just remembered why I came to Earth," she said. "I just remembered something that has made me very emotional. I'm so tired I can't control myself."
"Is control necessary, Mother? If you had control, would I be deprived of the joy of embracing you?"
She laughed and wiped her face. "It feels so strange to hear you call me mother!"
"Feels pretty weird to me, too," Horss muttered.
He received a squeeze of his arm from the admiral and suppressed an urge to react, not knowing how he should react. He tried to understand what the small but important gesture meant to him. If what Freddy told him about the fantastic space city was real and true, then everything had to change yet again. His life was spinning and spinning, with no hope of a steady direction.
/
Fidelity recovered her dignity and some of her control. She resumed her search. The corrupted map was a clue, perhaps a guide. She had guessed at a starting point on the map that was nearby and led Horss and Freddy there. Street signs and building numbers were incorrect, even though this map position seemed intact. After several more trials she began to see a pattern, even though the logic of it remained opaque. She just knew - or remembered - what the map was trying to tell her. The obviously corrupted areas were a guide to some part of the not-obviously corrupted urban features. Somewhere on the map would be a single location that was actually where it was supposed to be.
Finally, after two hours of walking in the heat and humidity, Fidelity stopped in the middle of a wide avenue. She backed away from the center of the broken pavement and came to stand on a weed-invaded sidewalk. She looked across the boulevard at a building whose slick marble face and grimy windows had escaped much of the flora that sprouted on other structures.
She was exhausted.
The number on the building matched that of the map in her head. She had no idea how she had found it, unless she had been working the puzzle on a subconscious level.
She could picture the glorious artifact in her mind and, this close to it, she could feel where it might be.
"A bank," Freddy said.
"How did you know?" she wondered, starting across the avenue.
"Old Fred is in here with me and he knows a lot."
/
Horss followed Fidelity and Freddy to the entrance. The admiral pushed on the glass door, which resisted but wasn't locked. Freddy pushed it open far enough for them to enter. The dusty lobby was bare of furnishings. The admiral led them to the back of the lobby. They passed through a vault-like doorway. Beyond lay a dim hallway with several doorways on one side along its length. The doorways with missing doors disclosed small rooms, each with a built-in desk. On the opposite side of the dark hallway was a larger doorway with a massive steel frame. She led them down the hallway and through the larger doorway.
The room was dark but Horss had a handlight and all of them had augmented vision. The metal rectangles of thousands of small doors, most of them open, filled two walls of the room. Small compartments rose to a person's height, while large ones formed rows down to the floor. Dust and cobwebs filled every opening in the walls.
"That one," she said thoughtfully.
"Which one?" Freddy asked.
She pointed to one of the largest floor-level doors.
"One of the few that appear locked. Shall I open it?"
"Please."
Freddy ripped an open door from another box. He used the door as a hammer to loosen the admiral's door. Horss had never seen an android apply such force. As an expression of will, it gave him pause to understand what a spontaneous AMI represented. Freddy bullied the door open and pulled out the metal box from within. It was empty.
"Beneath the floor," the admiral suggested.
Freddy stuck his hand into the opening and rapped with his knuckles. It sounded hollow beneath the metal floor of the chamber. He struck the floor plate hard enough to raise a warped edge, then pried up the edge. He groped in the cavity beneath the metal and pulled forth a sack made of a silver fabric. He handed it to the admiral. She looked inside the bag, her hands trembling.
"It's all true!" she declared with a sigh. "They're real memories and I'm so many different people!"
"What's in the bag, Admiral?" Horss asked.
Light leaked between her fingers as she pulled forth an object that just filled her hand. She opened her fingers and held it on her palm for Horss and Freddy to see. Its surface patterns of pure color suggested purpose beyond imagining. Its beauty and mystery all but enslaved the senses, casting the rest of reality into darkness. It appeared to dance upon her shaky palm as if gravity could not pull it firmly to her hand.
"It looks like the cryptikon!" Horss declared. He had never seen the cryptikon in the Essiin Museum - the only one believed to exist. He had studied images of it and they had barely hinted at what he now experienced. The device seemed made of solidified light, with no hint of how it was assembled. He suffered this almost ecstatic revelation for only an instant, before another impossibility as
saulted his senses.
Behind them - and between them and the only exit - a rectangle of blazing-white light emerged from nothingness, banishing the darkness of the bank vault, even dimming the beautiful glow of the cryptikon. The sharply-delineated plane, so impossibly thin it appeared to exist two-dimensionally, rotated slowly with a hissing noise. Powerful, low-frequency sound waves shook dust from the ceiling and walls. It was so close to them that Horss could feel it. Waves of power modulated the dust in the air and sent rude fingers of pressure through his clothing and across his body. A young woman's image, hyper-real in sharpness and in color, appeared as though embossed deeply in the silvery plane.
Horss could not believe this was a mere image. He knew it was deadly without knowing how it could even exist. He knew the Lady in the Mirror from Freddy's description, and he knew Freddy hadn't used nearly enough adjectives.
"YOU CANNOT HIDE FROM ME!" the Lady roared at them, then moderated her volume. "WHAT IS THIS PLACE? WHY ARE YOU HERE?"
The admiral raised the cryptikon above her head, holding it between the tips of her thumb and one finger. The black and silver eyes of the Lady in the Mirror blinked as though they could see but not believe what they saw. Torturous pain deformed the pale face. The red lips parted, and an almost lethal wail of agony erupted from the image.
"THAT'S HOW IT ALL BEGAN!" the Lady cried, nearly deafening them.
The mirror resumed rotation, pivoting at its center. To one side it ate through rows