Cryptikon Far Freedom Part 2

of his facial muscles, felt his face burning again, and as the idea - This was Aylis Mnro! - crossed his mind again, his goose bumps erupted almost painfully again. He vaguely wondered if he should have his bio-control augments checked.

  "I have the Deep Space Fleet records," Demba said.

  Khalanov struggled to let his breathing help his mind and body calm down. But how could these people make such wild claims? He was embarrassed for them! Khalanov was desperate to win any point in this assault on his sanity.

  "You're a master archivist, Admiral," Khalanov said as calmly as he could. "You must know better than anybody how hopeless is the guaranty of truth. How can you know your records are real ones?"

  "I have all of the records," Demba answered. "Algorithms could have built them but better algorithms can test such a complete set of data for coherence. You're in them, Iggy. You fit in them. You're woven into them, as Aylis and I are, in such a detailed and intricate way that it must reflect true history."

  "How would you have records that were destroyed long ago? You're saying that I - and you and Doctor Mnro - and Direk - are very old. Old! Too old! Fossils! That was before the Age of Immortality!"

  "It's a complicated piece of history," Mnro said, drawing his challenging stare away from Demba. "Trust me. You're almost as old as I am. You have memories of that ancient time stored in nearly undetectable semi-biological memory devices."

  "Why don't I remember?"

  "Your memories are locked away from you. As were ours. We couldn't risk having those memories where others might discover them. We couldn't risk having ourselves discover them."

  "More that I don't understand!" He was helpless to ask anything specific. He was a little calmer but still feeling assaulted and desperately confused. Fortunately, Mnro's hold on his hand was becoming less shocking and more comforting.

  "We lost many friends and family members," Mnro said. "It would have been too painful and too demoralizing to live with such memories for the long time that we needed to wait."

  "Wait for what?"

  "For this ship to be built."

  "I still don't..."

  "You lost Ana," Demba said.

  She watched him with too much concern. He tried to concentrate and see the implications of this name, but he couldn't. All he could do was look away from Demba, look away from all of them, and stare at Aylis Mnro's hand holding his.

  "We especially had to remove Ana's memory from you," Demba said.

  "Ana," Khalanov said, tasting the word. "Who is Ana?"

  Mnro took in a deep, uneven breath, making Khalanov stare at her in apprehension. She wiped tears from her eyes. Khalanov lost his defiance of this barrage of shocking information as he watched Aylis Mnro react. His thought processes were a wreck but he was forced to feel empathy for Mnro. Why was she grief-stricken? Strong emotions should rarely occur to persons of such age. If they did occur, there was less need to show them.

  Demba said nothing. Direk said nothing. They waited for Mnro to speak. "Ana was someone," she finally uttered, "who deserved to be remembered forever and to be loved forever, by all who knew her, and especially by her husband." She looked into Khalanov's eyes through a wash of tears in her own eyes. "I just remembered her. And it hurts!"

  "I had a wife named Ana," Khalanov said, inferring Mnro's meaning. "Who was very special?"

  "Everyone thought so," Mnro confirmed.

  "What happened to her?" he asked.

  "Ana was murdered," Demba answered, when Mnro couldn't.

  "Murdered?" Khalanov repeated. "Because she was special?"

  "Because she was your wife," Demba answered.

  "Why?"

  "When Deep Space was disbanded," Demba said, "some of us joined the Union Navy and discovered that a number of ruthless people were in positions of authority in the Navy. We came into conflict with them. They apparently saw former Deep Space officers as a threat. We believed they thought we would discover their connection to an enemy outside Union space, in areas perhaps familiar to some Deep Space explorers. They murdered and kidnapped and drove us underground. You were younger than most of us and had other plans and ambitions. You tried to distance yourself from us, to find a safe middle ground for you and your wife. You didn't understand how bad these people were. You made an error in judgment. Ana paid for it with her life. You blamed yourself and you blamed us, and you went off to die."

  "And we found you and didn't let you die," Mnro added.

  Khalanov wondered how he could feel compelled to believe this tale of a forgotten life. He looked at Direk and realized he trusted Direk, perhaps even more than Demba, even as Direk's relentlessly logical personality drove him crazy and assaulted Khalanov's feelings of self-worth. If Direk believed everything these women were telling him...

  "If all you tell me is true," Khalanov said, breathing hard, "I've lost so much! I'm not prepared for this! Can you tell me more about Ana?"

  "We think you can remember her," Demba said. "What we would remember might need some study and comparison with each other. You will see the problem when you start to remember. We think you still have most of your important memories."

  "How do I find my memories?"

  "We're not sure," Mnro said. "Your memories were stored in auxiliary memory and erased from your mind."

  "Direk and Aylis invented the auxiliary memory devices," Demba said, "which, in addition to providing secrecy of our important memories, also allowed us to retain much of the skills of the body and the details of expertise that most people lose through rejuvenation. But the auxiliary memories don't play before our conscious mind the way normal memories do. We can't summon them forth at random and at will. When they do come they are unexpected and powerful."

  "I do have these memory devices?" Khalanov asked for reassurance.

  "We know you have them," Mnro said. "We don't know how functional they are or how they can be accessed. We don't remember how we might have keyed them. Usually another person's DNA - or even their proximity - provides the key to unlocking our memories. You wouldn't be likely to meet this key until it was safe to remember. In your case, we don't remember who could be your key."

  "Can you perform some test?" he asked.

  "Don't worry," Mnro said, patting Khalanov's hand and finally releasing it. "Time will erode the lock on your memories. It can't be much longer."

  "Damn! Damn! I feel like I'll explode!"

  "Let me show you one final thing," Demba said, "that will provide some proof of what we say. Hopefully, you will not explode!" She removed a small silvery pouch from a pocket of her uniform. She opened the pouch and removed an object from it, cupping it in her palm so that Khalanov couldn't see it.

  "Hold out your hand, Iggy."

  She placed a solid but weightless object in the upturned palm of his hand and she closed his fingers around it.

  "Once upon a time, you found this, Iggy. Look at it."

  Khalanov opened his fingers and was startled at his first glimpse of the alien glow and deep colors. He nervously manipulated the egg-shaped object until he could see it clearly, mounted between his thumb and first finger. His hand started shaking. It took him several more moments of inner turbulence before he could shout: "You stole the cryptikon?"

  "This is another one," Demba said. "You found it, plus three more! This is one of the two we have aboard the ship, Iggy."

  2-07 What Admiral Ever Wept?

  "Sit down, Jones."

  Jamie sat down, fatigue cap in hand, in the admiral's office. It was a bare office with only a few chairs and a display screen that showed a view of the ship's biosphere. It should have been a comfortable office but Jamie was never comfortable in the presence of admirals, and especially this admiral. She was more than uncomfortable. She could barely contain her anger at the handling of the Mnro Incident. She could barely contain her questions about everything that swirled about Admiral Demba as mystery. She waited with nervous anticipation to hear what Demba would say.

  "I've studied your
record thoroughly," Demba began.

  And I yours, Jamie thought. "I know it's bad," she said, "but I wouldn't have done anything differently, Admiral."

  "I don't judge it as you might think, Jones."

  "How do you judge it?"

  "Never mind. I've also studied the records of the other Marines. I think I would trust all of you to perform your duties faithfully. Would you agree?"

  "Is this a serious question, Admiral? I've already been prevented from performing my duty concerning Aylis Mnro. Other than pomp and ceremony, what use would we Marines be to this mission?"

  "It is a serious question," Demba said, letting her eyes and expression amplify her words.

  "I agree with your analysis," Jamie answered, instantly hopeful she was wrong about her judgment of the mission - and of its commander. She hoped she wasn't being too generous to her squad of Marines in agreeing with the admiral on their sense of duty. She only had a hunch that they could be good Marines. "If we're given moral duties and lawful orders we'll obey them, sir. Every one of us who was court-martialed was only disobeying what we believed were wrongful orders. I'm not saying we were all correct in what we did."

  "I'll accept your statement, assuming you've analyzed the records more thoroughly than I have. Here is my first order. Remove anyone from this ship who doesn't seem right."

  "Remove crew? How will I know who doesn't seem right?"

  "You should already have a notion, because of what happened to Aylis Mnro, that this is an extraordinary situation. We have enemies in the Navy. There could