problems to them? Didn't admirals make the problems, never bothering to make things easier for anyone but themselves?
Direk was Jamie's main distraction. In the brief interval since Khalanov and the engineers gained access to the asteroid they had not found Direk. She knew he was here. She hoped he would be here! Yet, she almost dreaded meeting him. She had somehow survived finding her mother, although she had not really survived; she had become someone else. Direk could be the emotional bomb that finished the demolition of her psyche: a process that was already accelerated by her auxiliary memory. Her emotions would be even more highly exercised, and she might not understand what she was feeling or why she should still feel that way. It wasn't only that Direk was always false with her, hiding the Great Plan from her, and hiding what else she didn't know. Direk was whatever he was and he always would be. But Jamie was not anyone even close to who she was when she had lived a life with him. He was now more than a lifetime away from her, on the other side of a mountain of experience and all but lost to memory, or should be lost. Her auxiliary memory had made him more real to her than the person she had been. She was now a stranger to herself, a stranger who was in love with a too-real memory.
She could also anticipate the pressure of expectations from her mother and Aylis Mnro. Aylis Mnro, especially, would want every good thing for her son. She was not sure she could be any good thing for him. She was also unsure of her response to any man who wanted emotional or physical intimacy with her.
When Jamie and Zakiya transmatted to the control room in the asteroid, she discovered she could be nervous. After a long career in the Marines it seemed strange and improbable to have feelings a normal woman might have.
"Did the Malay damage anything?" Zakiya asked Khalanov.
"I don't think so." Khalanov was distracted by Wingren who was pointing to a certain control on the console at which Khalanov was seated. He touched the control. A virtual window appeared on the wall in front of them. It displayed a vast, dimly-lit cavern within the asteroid. Everyone's eyes focused on the leafless forest of black columns on the ceiling, on the floor, and on the walls of the cavern, each of them mounted on identical hexagonal bases.
"That's our new hardware," Zakiya said. "I recognize it now. We need to get the ship inside as fast as possible. It's too naked and reflective."
"All of that mess?" Khalanov jumped up to get a closer look at the individual components.
A team of civilian scientists and engineers working at an adjacent console found an instructional program which taught them how to activate many functions, including opening the space door to the cavern. In a few more moments the Freedom, cleaned of much of its passive shielding, gleamed in the slowly widening gap of a door that was more than three kilometers wide and over a kilometer tall. It would be several hours before the ship was moored inside the cavern.
Zakiya grabbed Jamie by the arm and squeezed hard, startling her. She pulled her away from the others, over to a clear area of the control room. "Important message!" she told Jamie. She called for a transmat and winked them to another place in the asteroid.
= = =
"What are you waiting for?" Demba asked Aylis Mnro and Sugai Mai, who stood on either side of a machine familiar to anyone who had been treated for aging by a Mnro Clinic.
Jamie stared at the large box in the small room in the asteroid. It was a container whose thick walls were packed with the factory that applied chemicals and signals through thousands of connections to the body within. It was often called a coffin, although the effects of rebirth were supposed to outweigh the losses of memory that were a kind of death. This far away from a Mnro Clinic, memory retention procedures might be nonexistent. Jamie was concerned for the person who was inside the coffin. She also wondered how Doctor Mende would be affected by the machine in which he had been stored at death in the Five Worlds. These machines must be different in some way. Then she realized the person in the coffin had to be Direk - the real Direk!
For an instant she was calm, rational, a bit irritated, and more than amazed that a man from her past could claim such overpowering meaning for her, that all the life she had lived since that time seemed ready to be dumped into the trash, its meaning all but erased.
"Waiting for the princess," Doctor Mnro was saying, touching Jamie, "so she can kiss the prince and wake him."
Jamie touched the coffin with a trembling hand, helpless to stifle the symptoms of conflicting emotions. A small image display on the top of the rejuvenation machine showed a sleeping face. A light red beard covered the cheeks and surrounded the slightly opened mouth. Blond hair floated in the clear liquid in a halo around his head. Direk. He looked so innocent and so handsome. Was this the cold-eyed Navy captain who could murder four men to avenge her rape? Was it the blind old man who said he loved her? He was too young and too perfect. She was too old and too damaged. Her emotions cooled. Her nerves remained unsettled. Marine-grade augments adjusted her chemistry.
"He does look youthful," Sugai Mai commented to Aylis Mnro, staring at the image from the other side, then Mai gasped as she looked up and behind Jamie.
They all turned to see what Mai saw. A stranger stood in the doorway looking down at the floor. He started to turn away.
"Son!" Mnro called, moving toward him.
The man paused but still did not look up at them.
Jamie took a longer look, not because she didn't recognize the old man, but because he made her auxiliary memory erupt with some of her fonder images of Direk at the end of their past life together. Like her Direk, this Direk had used his body long and hard, was scarred and scabbed, his hands thickened and gnarled, his hair turned white and thin. She loved the way he looked.
"I'm not your son," he said, stepping backward. "You know that."
Mnro continued toward him but Sugai Mai rushed around the coffin to hold her back.
"Yes, don't approach me," the old Direk said, pausing. "I thought I needed to see you again. I was lonely. It was a mistake. I'm terribly sorry." He stepped backward and turned away.
Mnro pulled free of Sugai Mai and rushed to him. She stopped him, wrapped her arms around him.
"You are my son! Don't leave us!"
"I became selfish," he muttered, not responding to the embrace. "I was living in borrowed memories. I dreamed of this moment, when I would see real people again. When I would see you. When I would see her." Jamie realized he referred to herself. "Never did I imagine how my heart would break, even though it shouldn't."
His words shocked Jamie. It was a shock of warmth that made her feel strangely apprehensive. Direk would never... but he did... say such things. But only when he was so old and worn out?
"Don't!" Mnro demanded, hitting him kindly as she hugged him. "See me! See her! Stay with us! Live! You are a real person, not just a convenient replacement for a weak human!"
He turned his head a little and saw the face of his mother pressed tightly against his shoulder. He touched her face. She looked up at him and smiled at what she saw.
"Jamie is here!" Aylis declared. "Look at her!"
His face rose farther and his eyes found Jamie. A century of time melted away and Jamie was an old woman feeling loved and secure in partnership with a kind old man. Perhaps she did know who Direk was in at least one important way. Son and mother paused to see what Jamie would do.
Jamie walked to Direk, placed a hand on the back of his neck, and pulled his mouth against hers. Memory flooded her mind, all but incoherent in detail, yet so powerful in emotion she could barely stay standing. The man pulled away, the moment of near-oblivion ceased, her augments forced counter-measures into her limbic system.
"I feel better now," the old Direk said, when both women released him.
He walked past them into the room and over to the coffin. He opened a compartment in the side of the coffin, withdrew a sealed package, unsealed the package, pulled a signal cable from it, and connected it to a port in the coffin. He sat down on the floor, removed the package from aro
und a flexible device and positioned it like a cap on his head. Unseen transducer filaments burrowed into his scalp and neck, pulling the cap tightly to his skin and hair.
Aylis Mnro came and knelt beside Direk and put a hand on his shoulder, her expression sad and resigned. Jamie started to join Mnro on the floor but her mother put an arm around her waist, as if to comfort her. Sugai Mai put a hand on Aylis Mnro's shoulder. The memory transfer process began. It did not take very long.
"There wasn't much worth giving him," the old Direk said, "but I gave him me." He smiled up at Zakiya and at Jamie. He pulled the memory transfer device from his head. He got to his feet, his age only a slight weakness in the light artificial gravity. "Please don't follow me," he said. He walked to the doorway, and then out of sight.
The coffin began to awaken the other Direk. Jamie couldn't stay! She couldn't understand who she had just become! She was actually afraid of the person awakening in that coffin! Too much had happened to her in too short a time.
2-20 Ship in a Bottle
Admiral Igor Khalanov hesitated before reaching the doorway. Hesitation was to him a valuable engineering protocol but he hardly ever applied it to personal affairs. The new Direk was there, beyond that doorway to which he was headed. In one sense, this was like visiting a ghost or a dead man. In another sense, it was