When We Were Real (Author's Preferred Edition)

by William Barton

  I looked away from the river, looked back up into the sky.

  You can see the southern endcap from here, it’s not that far. Rugged red hills rising up and up, becoming sheer red cliffs just before they disappear into the deep blue shadows around the axial port. All over the hills were the twinkling cities and towns of the Mother’s Children. Towns, farmland, the gleaming silver of the new monorail lines we’d just put in, replacing the wrecked transport system Standard had left behind.

  After a while, Daddy came out of Mrs. Trinket’s crate, wiping bloody hands on some kind of rag, cottony stuff the Himerans always had laying around, came and stood beside me, watching the indigo shadows of dusk just starting to peep around the edges of our platform.

  Finally, he said, “I always hate going home.”

  I felt a small pang, wishing he’d just fucking shut up. “Then don’t.”

  He looked at me, then looked away, maybe wishing that, just this once, I’d sympathize with his bellyaching, and muttered, “So where the fuck else would I go, hmh?”

  I shrugged. “Guess we better get started. She’ll be pissed if we’re late for supper.”

  Another long look. “Yup.” We went back in to pack up his tools.

  o0o

  From the roofgarden atop Helgashall, on a grassy knoll some eight kems above the bayou country, you can see a long way down Audumla’s axis, lowlands curving up to the right and left, stretching straight away before you, two hundred kems to the northern endcap, tiny circle drowned in day by a glare of orange stemlight, little halo of bright freckles at night, faraway light from other Mothersbairn cities and towns.

  Far below, on the panel where we’d just been, tall purple clouds were billowing up, twisted and sheared by coriolis effects. Beyond, in the void between the panels, as the stemlight began fading away, stars were popping out, but Ygg’s red ball was missing, having transited the nearest void, going behind habitable landscape. It’d be out again in a couple of hours, by the time the night was really black.

  Woolgathering doesn’t get anything done. I looked down into the freeze-frame, put my hands in the warm shimmer of the interface, and waited. Nothing. No inspiration. No desire to... finish. Graduation Thesis is the last worthwhile thing you’ll ever do. Why aren’t you interested?

  Nothing. The freeze-frame didn’t seem to have any answers. Nobody gives a shit about the stasis-metric analytical conjunctions on gauge-dynamic metacontrols. I scrolled open the hopper and let it play at random, knowing it’d take me even farther from getting the job done, but what the hell? Here, Standard ARM smugly announcing record profits from its big mining operation at Proxima, what they call the Glow-Ice Worlds. Attached adverts for new colonial positions just opening at Glow-Ice. Also at some frontier posting, way the fuck out by Altair.

  Stock market surging giddily upward for the fourteenth straight year.

  Profits up. Wages down. God’s in his Heaven and all’s right with the economy. Aren’t you glad?

  News from the Centauri Jet. News from the Solar System, a full parsec and more from Ygg and Audumla. How’s the refrain go? A billion-trillion datatracks and...

  I stopped briefly in my favorite old atlas, a twinkle of jewels in a jet black void. Here, solitary Sol, with its fine, flat Kuiper disk and spherical Oort shell, home to four hundred billion human souls. There, Alpha Centauri A/B, its own cometary cloud distorted into a long, flat stream by the hectomillennia-long hyperbolic passage of Proxima, home to billions more.

  And Audumla, just off the ragged terminus of the Centauri Jet, not far from Telemachus Major, headquarters of mighty Standard ARM. Always wanted to go there, a dreamable dream, only four days’ travel from abandoned Ygg. A long look sideways at the pale blue sparkle of manhome Earth, picked out beside yellow Sol. Thirty-seven years by fast commercial starship? No. Never. An impossible dream.

  Oh, sure, I’ve got the time, we all do, since things just go on and on, willy-nilly. But the dream of actually doing it...

  I shut the freeze-frame, got up and walked away. Two weeks before I have to turn in my thesis, go to graduation, and then... then. Well, there is that.

  o0o

  Downstairs, in the Whitehall boundary of the kemenatë, the no-boys-allowed part of Helgashall, I stood in the doorway of my sister Rannvi’s room, watching her, perched naked on the edge of her bed, painting her toenails black and gold. A startling, lovely young woman, incredibly unmarried at the age of twenty-two. Long, straight, golden-blonde hair falling tousled around her shoulders. Deep, dark blue eyes. Rounded breasts with perfectly-shaped pink nipples.

  Once, wandering some far recess of humanity’s civilization-wide, lightspeed DataWarren, I came across a small piece of fiction set against Mothersbairn society, obviously written by some ignorant tourist, fascinated by what he saw. All those women doing as they pleased, dressing as they pleased. All those men, seeing them. Seeing them and... the author’s vitals seemed gnawed by what he saw, evidently wanted, and could not have. So his story portrayed a dark side to Audumla, to the society of the Mother’s Children, a world of incest and violence and secret rape and...

  Well.

  A woman invites you into her body, at her convenience, at her need. A man knows never to ask. In his ignorance, blinded by his own unquenchable need, drowning in bloody fantasy, the author missed the real darkness in which we live.

  Rannvi looked up from her pretty toes and smiled. “You can come in, Murph.” She pulled her legs up on the bed, going cross-legged, motioning for me to join her. “Having a hard time, aren’t you?”

  I sat at the head of the bed, sprawled among her pillows, still looking at her, sights and visual textures, familiarity breeding no contempt. “I guess. It’s... well. I never wanted this day to come. But it has anyway.”

  A slow nod, a pensive frown. “Have you... made your arrangements?”

  “No. There’s... no one I can...” What? No one I can fucking stand? Is that it? “I don’t know what to do, Rannvi.”

  She said, “She’ll wait for me to make up my mind, getting angrier all the time. She won’t wait for you.”

  “Doesn’t she understand you want to keep on studying, try for a... well, a career?”

  “Oh, shit, Murphy. No, she doesn’t understand. ‘A Woman’s Work is Motherhood.’“

  And “a Man’s Work is Woman’s Support.” I know the Goddess-damned refrain. Embossed in fucking gold on the surface of my brain. “Why doesn’t she understand? She broke with Mother’s Children and Goddess. For a while, anyway. I mean, Daddy...” Saying that, knowing by now that we both knew the truth, though we’d never talked about it.

  Her voice low, Rannvi said, “It’s still Motherhood, Murph.” She shrugged, breasts bobbing prettily. “I’ll get maybe another year in school, if I’m lucky.”

  I’ve always appreciated that I’m Murph to her, not just Dagmar, Mother’s Son. Some sisters are worth having. “Wish I could help.”

  “But you’re stuck a lot worse, I know. And I wish I could help...”

  After a while, she got up and went over to her wardrobe, started picking through her clothes. Time. Time for everything. And nothing.

  o0o

  Being a middle child, I was left more unsupervised than either Rannvi before me, or Lenahr to follow. Maybe that’s why Daddy got so much of my time, in which to spoil me for the Mothers’ Life. And why I got so much time to myself, in which to wonder and explore.

  One day, when I was nine years old, I figured out how to unlock the hatchway to one of the household service panels, getting into the crawlspaces between the walls, a wonderland that was, at first, as alluring as anything in the Baedeker I’d imagined from the unfathomable universe beyond Audumla. And, when its novelty paled, I used it to get into other places I wasn’t supposed to go.

  Which led, in short order, to the attic.

  All sorts of things were stored up there, mostly things that should have been thrown away, recycled, passed on, but people will retain the relics o
f their lives, just because they are relics.

  We make a sentimental attachment to artifacts of the past, even as we put them away, knowing we’ll never look at them again.

  I spent a lot of time going through my mothers trunks, looking at her old clothes, out of fashion, out of date, though of course nothing was ever stained or frayed. I wondered why she would keep a box of colorful, silky underpants, neither wearing them nor discarding them.

  Things like that.

  And one day, I stumbled across a box of old albums, spending long hours pouring over them, fascinated by what I saw. The one on top was full of familiar things, the things of the life around me, beginning with recent views that would spring to life in the air above its surface.

  Fascinating to see my last birthday party, hear my own voice from just a few months gone, already seeming fantastically childish to a months-older me. Below it, a family picnic. Below that...

  I watched with dull astonishment as my mother gave birth to Lenahr, smiling, naked, in a tub of bloody water as she strained and pushed and extruded him from the hair between her legs. Deeper in the album, beyond the part where I was a naked baby running about the yard, I saw myself so extruded, then Rannvi, then...

  The album began with my mother’s wedding to Father, Mother looking precisely as she did now, though dressed in... well, dressed in clothing I’d already found in one trunk or another.

  The other albums held only mystery. My mother in an unfamiliar house, with an unfamiliar sky, sky apparently made of dark brown stone, hanging low overhead. She shared the unfamiliar house with an unfamiliar man and three unfamiliar adolescent children, two girls and a boy, all with stark, coppery hair. In time, deeper in the album, the children grew young, and I watched as, one by one, my mother gave bloody birth to strangers.

  There were three albums like that, each beginning with a wedding.

  The two middle ones were on the world with the brown sky. The oldest of the three seemed set on a skeletal habitat where the sky was always black, from which you could always see the stars. In that one there was a woman my mother called Mother, prominently featured in almost every scene.

  Of course, you knew.

  Audumla’s not the only world the Mothersbairn own. You knew that. Out in the dark between the stars there must be a million little worlds. Since no one living on those worlds willingly dies, the worlds quickly grow full. And when they grow full, there’s a call for volunteers: Go out, found a new world, start a new life.

  When there aren’t enough volunteers, they hold a lottery.

  As I put the albums away, I wondered just who those men had been, wondered about the children. What became of them? Were they my brothers and sisters then?

  I wonder if I would have liked them.

  I was afraid to ask, knowing what’d happen to me if I was discovered to have been in the attic, messing among my mother’s things.

  Just a story, that’s all. Put it with the Baedeker of wonder and move on.

  o0o

  I finished my Thesis, bored as hell with the whole business of the rest of my life, turned it in, got my grades and that was that. In a couple of weeks we’d have our ridiculous little graduation ceremony, proud parents comparing notes, not-so-proud parents pretending it didn’t matter. In between we had a week off, and the members of my graduation cohort had a party, a little daytrip to Mimir’s Well, an old reduction transformer orbiting just outside Ygg’s roche lobe that’s been turned into a sort of park.

  Ygg is huge in the sky here, and the park’s main interpretive center is just at the tidally locked moonlet’s subplaneton, infrastar hanging right over our heads, taking up almost a third of the sky, a frighteningly three-dimensional sphere more than two-hundred-thousand kems in diameter, holding maybe twenty jovian masses, well into the brown dwarf range.

  Just a dull red disk seen from Audumla, a million kems out, lit by starlight, most of that from close-by Alpha Cee, ruddy from its own fading heat, hardly visible at all but for the greater blackness of the sky. There’s a nightside, an umbra, the side away from Alpha, but that distinction’s hard to make. Shadow. Something.

  From here though, just a few score thousand kem... band after band of swirling storm. Deep holes into the clear hydrogen air below, letting out light from Ygg’s firehell within. Upwelling places that’d be sunspots on a real star, places where Ygg’s magnetosphere was twisted...

  “That’s a fuck of a sight, eh, Murph?” Styrbjörn, skinny, blond, squinty-eyed, always smiling, the perfect Mother’s Son. So long as the Mothers weren’t around. So long as there was no one who would tell. Just not the son they thought they’d made.

  “Yeah. Sort of makes you wish... kidstuff wishes. All that bullshit.”

  He shrugged. Grinned. “I dunno. I been on a few cloudskimmer runs with my dad. I guess it’s not for me.” A long silence, while I thought about his father, a silent, frowning, black-bearded man who spent most of him time away from home, away from Audumla, away from his startlingly voluptuous blond wife and their six blond kids, Styrbjörn the youngest, flying an atmospheric ramscoop, bringing home the helium-3 bacon. “I’ve qualified for an apprenticeship with the Mother’s Trust, Murph. Information Sideband Specialist Trainee.”

  “And?”

  Another long silence, then he said, “Sieglindë Smillasdottir.”

  We were standing on the brow of a low hill, looking down at the interpretive center, broad greensward, oak trees and tall swaying pines, gaggle of graduates milling together around the pool and fountain, fountain water moving in low-gee slow motion, catching an oily twinkle of domelight. You could hear them talking from here, voices blending together, the crowd like a single entity, dominated by the high, sharp voices of the girls. “When?”

  “Harvest Moon.”

  “That’s a little soon, isn’t it?” Most people wait for Yule, even more for a traditional Beltane wedding. Gives the boys a chance to get on their economic feet.

  Girlvoices yapping ever louder from down below, punctuated by the occasional inarticulate male grunt. Girls telling each other all about their wedding gowns, who was marrying who and, whisper, whisper, who was not. Whose boyfriend’s got a hot job lined up and whose does not...

  Styrbjörn said, “We couldn’t wait.”

  “No?” I looked back up at the sky, not wanting to see his face. A small blue spot had just come around Ygg’s limb, climbing steadily toward us, swept along in the Midsouth Band’s eight-hour rotation.

  He said, “Whatcha gonna do, Murph?”

  I shrugged. “Go into business with my dad.”

  A slow nod. “He spends a lot of time down in the bayou, I hear.”

  Right.

  Long silence, then, “And?”

  I looked at him. “And nothing.”

  He said, “Shit. Good luck, Murph.” And then he grinned a sleazy little grin that made me want to poke him one. Good luck, haw, haw. Yer fulla shit, Murph. Tell me another one. “I, ah, got a couple of weeks before I have to start with the Trust, Murph. You wanna, ah, make one last, um, hunting trip?” He looked at me earnestly. “You know. Before, ah...”

  I smirked at him. “Before we have to go be grownups? Sure, pal. That’ll be... fun.” Right.

  A little later, after Styrbjörn’d gone back to fawn over his girl and strut for her jealous friends, friends with short, pudgy boyfriends, girls who’d be jealous ‘til the fat boys started bringing home that famous bacon, while Styrbjörn was still only pretty, I found a flat, shadowy place on the backside of the hill where I could sit looking out over the old dump.

  Lot of old stuff here. Crusty, long-dead industrial machines, things that’d never really been alive in the first place. Dinosaurs. Pieces of machines whose original form and function I couldn’t quite conjure from a blend of imagination and technical knowledge. This place must’ve been something in its heyday.

  In the shadow of the dinosaurs there were other, more familiar pieces of dead hardware. Over there, one of the goos
e-neck lamp things, sprawled motionless, glass eyes open on nothingness, empty, some of them smashed, become bits of glitter, mangled shards. A dead welder, just like old Beebee, limbs missing, featureless cylinder lying not far from the burst-open box of a smashed incubator. No sign of any meat inside, just bare metal walls, tangles of plumbing, feeder tubes and circulatory conduits.

  Mrs. Trinket loves her kits, loves her fifteen husbands with a heart as spacious as anything the likes of me could ever imagine. These ones here...

  “So. Here you are.”

  I didn’t turn at the sound of Ludmilla Nellisdottir’s voice, just kept looking out over the ruin, picking out familiar shapes among the strange, wishing I could somehow will them all back to life. Thinking about death’s a funny thing. Stupid. Like wondering where you were before you were born. “Hello, Luddy.”

  I could see her shadow on the ground beside me, most of the light that cast it coming from the interpretive center’s little microstem, a bit offset, another shadow, tinted with indigo, apparently cast by the combined vector from Ygg and Alpha Cee. When you looked closely, you could see the second shadow was... fuzzy.

  “What are you doing, Daggy? I wanted to talk to you.”

  Daggy. Her main shadow, gray-black, showed the shape of a slim, pretty girl, graceful arms and shoulders, slim waist flaring to hips shaped just so, hips you could see would one day be just right for their main job. Long, sleek legs. “So talk.” Not really interested in why I’m sitting here looking at dead robots, just an opening gambit, followed immediately by her stated desire.

  “Could you look at me? Murph?”

  Murph? I turned and looked up at her. Smiled my good-boy smile. Ludmilla Nellisdottir, not quite breathtaking, but close enough, wearing a silk party dress woven from a thousand colors that clung to those just-so hips, looking down at me with something of a frown, but with a shine in her pretty blue eyes.

  Silence then, the two of us just fucking staring.

  Finally, she said, “We’ve been seeing a lot of each other this past year, Murph.”