When We Were Real (Author's Preferred Edition)
Page 6
Address rescinded.
Felt a little crackle of anger.
Made another connection to Goshtasp.HelgaBiz.Audumla and...
Address rescinded.
HytaspesMurphy.Audumla.TimeLine.Universal...
Audumla.TimeLine link severed.
An impossible gulf seemed to open. One runaway boy and...
I connected to RannviHelgasdottir.Helgashall.Audumla.
The freeze-frame filled with light, then a ghostvoice said, This address has been sequestered against certain external links in accordance with DataWarren Policy Issue 400.1. Further connection attempts will result in a fine levy at account Murphy.TelemachusMajor.TimeLine.Universal.
I switched to annonymous mode and got the standard message about the address not accepting anonymous calls.
Then the light went out.
Numb, I withdrew my hands from the freeze-frame, pulled my chit and watched the interface die.
o0o
What I did, with my little snippet of time on Telemachus Major, on those days and days between meetings with Cyraxidon, between trips to various entities called Human Resources and Personnel and Employment Security, between shadow trips to rich, fat Timeliners with something called contacts, was explore. Picture a rube from the provinces, rustic with bits of straw protruding from his clothes, rubbernecking the skyscrapers, ogling the crowds, wondering where the hell all these people, all these buildings, all of this had come from.
At some point, regenerated or remembered, I considered the datum that five billion human beings lived here on this little world. Little. Hell. I could pick any direction. Any direction at all. Walk for 3,141.59 kems, and here I’d be, right back where I started. But, all the while, the crowds made me realize what five billion people meant.
It was a beautiful world, with its endless cityscape of marble and granite, classical buildings with tall, fluted columns, domes of alabaster, silver and gold... faraway mountains, blue in twilight, though there wasn’t a trace of either stemshine or natural sun in the sky, stars washed away, but for the barely perceptible twinkle of Alpha Cee, A and B, one almost bright, the other quite dim. Broad white beaches, beaches of shallow tide and gentle surf, thronged with naked men and women, at once familiar and strange.
I saw a man like an elephant.
A woman who looked like some kind of huge, upright black spider.
One day, not long after I’d taken the entrance examination battery for employment with Standard ARM, I found a complex of beautiful old buildings, red brick, white trim, plain cylindrical columns like pillars of iron, something called the Museum of Natural History, maintained by the Telemachus Major Chamber of Commerce.
Went inside. Wandered for a while, as if lost. Saw a real elephant. real but stuffed, dead since the days, a thousand years gone, when there were no spaceships and humans lived only on manhome Earth. Saw a model of a something called a blue whale, leviathan from the terrestrial deeps hanging like a vast ghost from the ceiling, thirty ems long if it was a cem, extinct.
After a while, I found a pretty blond girl named Cindy, an average model human dressed in white shorts and halter top, barefoot, toes so straight and flat, so unprehensile, I wondered how she could walk. She smiled and chatted me up, found out who I was and where I was from, told me she was a museum docent and took me on the tour.
For some reason, I felt very comfortable with her. Maybe just the fact that she talked to me, smiled at me, sought me out, instead of wait for me to act in her stead.
That felt familiar, among all the strange new things of this strange new world.
Comfortable.
She showed me a burnt little ball with a puppet man inside, Vostok 1 and Yuri Gagarin. Made me imagine his awe as he looked out his tiny porthole at rolling Earth below. Showed me a spidery, gold-foil spaceship so fragile it made my heart rise in my throat, two clumsily spacesuited men on simulated Luna before it, Buzz and Neil, coming in peace for all mankind.
Let me look through a dramatized sampler of the popular fiction of those long-gone days. Could they really have expected to go from Apollo on the Moon to Discovery at Saturn in only thirty-two short years?
The movie seemed so agreeably stupid.
Naive in an unfamiliar way.
Showed me the statue of Lydia Brentano, PhD, standing on red-rock desert before the debarking ramp of Hope’s lander, a lifetime late, and made me wonder again at the long gap between Luna and Mars. Showed me the tall, elegant statue of Gem Dragovich, who, one fine day not quite five hundred years ago, hijacked Standard ARM Cargo Engine #164, dumped its payload and accelerated in the direction of Alpha Centauri. Accelerated until he was out of fuel.
Historians agree that, without him, we might have stayed home forever.
And still argue about whether that might not have been a Good Thing.
The statue looped out Gem’s final message, masered back from a distance of almost sixteen light years, reporting on a few new objects he’d spied as he drifted away from Sol and humanity’s little sphere, noting that his medprobes could do no more, that they were letting him die, and now it was up to the rest of us, now that he’d shown the way. After he was dead, they renamed his ship Forerunner, and the exhibit has a live radio link, so you can listen to its faithful telemetry song, whispering back across the gulf between the stars, 120 light years and counting.
That same day, I went to a public freeze-frame and pushed in my chit, made the link to Standard ARM Human Resources Division, feeling a slight, warm prickle of alarm as my test scores slid up. Stood for a long, hollow second looking at the contract they offered. Flight engineer. All right, I know what that is, know why I’m qualified. But what can a Deep Space Rescue Vehicle be?
I took a deep breath, then eased my hand down into the frame, pressed my fingers into the contract’s data record, and gave my assent.
Tomorrow morning. 0830.
I pulled my chit and watched the freeze-frame wink out.
o0o
In quicktime, I went through Standard ARM Aerospace Paramilitia basic training, earning a couple of badges for my nice new powder-blue uniform while the DIs made damned sure I knew my shit, made sure not only could I do the job I’d been hired for, but would do it as well.
The work we did was hard, the learning forced and swift, but not beyond the fathoming of anyone properly prepared. The tests, I suppose, made sure no one who couldn’t pass would begin the course.
Academics made me grateful I’d spent so much time with the freeze-frame, studying things I knew I’d never need to know, indulging, first my father’s whims, then my own.
Gauge-control theory proved important after all.
Physical training was harder still, and here I was no more than lucky, having walked through the forests and rowed my father’s small boat, when we went places unsuited to the electric. I did the calisthenics and went through the obstacle course, glad I wasn’t one of the softer men and women who labored by my side.
Strange people.
All of them strange.
Not so much the physical strangeness, the... what of them, as the who. Men who stood snarling in your face. Women who seemed like nothing so much as shadows in the background.
I could see those women looking at me. See them wanting me, but... this is a different place, I kept telling myself. Different customs. I’ll get used to it, by and by.
Or else move on.
One day, they made us climbed a nearly sheer granite face, sleek stone that must surely have been imported from a geothermally active terrestrial world deep in the gravity well of a large star. Certainly, there’s no such stone out here.
They partnered me with a chunky, scowling, spiky-haired man named Zamba who I’d known from the barracks. Known, perhaps, no less shallowly than any of the others. We placed our lines, rigged our hardware, and started up the rock, doing things just the way we’d been shown.
Not so hard, really, if you do it right. If you accept that what you’ve been told i
s right. Zamba kept trying to do things some other way, from something he said he’d seen in a text on mountaineering, though he, like me, was from the purlieus of the Centauri Jet and had never been within a thousand AUs of a natural mountain.
He kept slipping, kept falling, scraping himself on the rock face, getting angrier and angrier. Madder still when I made a suggestion or two. I found myself wishing I could detach the safety line between us and go off on my own. But they’d told us not to, and I imagined that was part of the test, part of the training.
Finally, he fell hard, slapping chest-first into the rock face, bleeding from a cut over one eyebrow, blood trickling prettily down the side of his head, curling under his chin, like the work of a dramatics makeup expert.
When I reached out to help, smiling, he slapped my hand away. “God damn it, I don’t need no help from the likes of you!” Then he detached the safety line and climbed away.
Tempting to just go on up to the top then, forget about this asshole, but I stayed close, climbing just behind and below him all the way to the top. If he slipped and started to slide, maybe I could grab the tag end of his line. Though, if he toppled and dropped, all I’d be able to do would be duck to one side and hope not to be swept along with him.
When we got to the top, the instructor penalized Zamba for being a fool, then added points to my score for keeping with my partner, despite our... “personal problem.” All the while, the instructor kept glancing at me with some odd shadow in his eyes, even after Zamba stalked away, furious, not looking back.
Some of the others seemed to avoid me as well.
That was the way it seemed to go for me during those few short weeks. Unable to make anything like a friend among the men whose lives I now shared, though I’d had no shortage of friends, back in Audumla, the memory of whom made me ache inside and... maybe regret what I’d done.
On the other hand, the women seemed to like me well enough, some of them bothering to sneak to my bed in the night, sneaking of course not unnoticed by the other men, making them scowl at me all the more.
And a few of the men were homosexuals, who seemed to like coming round to my bunk in the evenings for a chat. Nothing more than that.
Basic training was soon over, and I was glad for that brevity.
o0o
On a fine morning under a brilliant, cloudless blue sky, emanation from the eutropic shield prickling antiseptic UV on the exposed skin of my face, I found myself walking across the blond plastic landing slab of Standard ARM Cosmodrome 227TM, order packet in my breast pocket, exhilarated and more than a little scared.
There before me, all around me, dwarfing the crowds of little men and little women, all of us dressed in that same powder blue, were rows and columns of spacecraft, like so many burnished bugs of chrome steel and brilliant brass, eyes of crystal and bright red glass, squatting on their landing legs, all turrets and thruster nozzles, field modulus antennae, exhaust manifolds... snappy little fighters, with their guns and beamer grids; attack vehicles covered with missile racks and rotary cannon; bulbous buddypack tankers; boxy mechanized assault force troop transports...
Somewhere back here among the hexes—hectares they told us to say in military jargon school—somewhere among all the hexes of spaceships great and small, I’d find the DSRV squadron, somewhere among those, Deep Space Rescue Vehicle Athena 7.
There. Athena squatted on eight widespread legs, low and flat, a glitter of fresh-looking silver and gold, longer than she was wide, short and squat, with a sphere-shaped universal docking adaptor on one end, service pod with folded arms and grapples and torches on the other, medevac bay in the middle. Up on top, I could see the pilot’s turret, down on the bottom, the engineering pod, my own bailiwick from now until... whenever.
“This your ship, pal?”
Soft, male voice, the voice of a mature man, a kind man, speaking the English they told us we had to use when on duty.
“Um. Yeah.” I walked closer to the thing standing, no, more like sitting, between two of Athena’s landing legs, at the foot of the embarkation ladder.
It said, “You must be Darius Murphy, then.”
Interesting that it pronounced my name right. Dar-eye-us. “Yeah.”
Hard to describe what I was talking to, no real sense of gestalt. A seven foot long antique beer barrel lying on its side, with tarnished bronze hoops, staves made of old oak, golden brown, streaked with black. Six fat, scaly green tortoise legs, barely able to hold it off the pavement. Complex clusters of arms at the barrel ends, sensors, manipulators, things I’d never seen before. No face. No eyes, no nose, no mouth.
It extended a skinny arm from one end, the end nearest me, arm with a hand like some kind of anorexic metal bug, and said, “I’m the ship’s cyberdoc. Name’s Dûmnahn.”
I hesitated, boggling a bit, then took the warm hand in my own, and said, “Uh. Pleased to meet you. Darius Murphy, flight engineer.”
It said, “I read your file, Murph. They say you’re real good with robots.”
“Oh. Are you a robot?”
Dûmnahn laughed, a really nice, friendly laugh, ironic and self-deprecating, that made me feel unexpectedly warm inside. “Less of a robot than the things you’re used to, I guess. I’m an old-style cyborg, part of a manufacturing cycle initiated in the Piazzi Belt back in the late twenty-first century.”
A long time ago. “Human?”
“No. My nervous system was genengineered from preserved DNA stock, from several lines of extinct pongidae.” It wiggled one leg, making itself rock back and forth gently. “Muscle structure’s from reverse-engineered reptiloavian stock. Very tough.”
“How old are you, Dûmnahn?”
“Me? Don’t know. I guess this carapace might be about forty standard, but...”
I remembered then that these sorts of cyborg were cloned rather than bred like modern robots, realized that Dûmnahn would have been budded from some earlier version of itself, going all the way back to some original laboratory stock, all those long centuries ago.
It said, “I’ve got some fragmentary memories of the Piazzi, of working on the original Thetis structure. That’s all.”
A woman’s voice, contralto, said, “Athena 7.”
I turned. Gaped.
Picture a naked woman.
Well, no. Not a naked woman. Picture a woman dressed up in a tight fur costume. Fluffy, red-violet fur. Picture a woman with a fox’s face. Slanting, foxy yellow eyes. Pointed ears midway between terrier and pixy. Picture a naked furry woman with a long, bushy tail, powder blue bag slung over one shoulder by a long sash spangled with campaign badges.
She said, “Hullo, Dûmnahn. Told you I’d get us the same ship again.” Then the eyes looked me up and down, very slowly. “You must be Murphy, then.”
“Um. I guess I’m the only one hasn’t read someone else’s file.”
She grinned, showing fine white teeth not at all human. “Newbies don’t know how. You’ll learn.”
Newbie.
She stuck out her hand, a human hand for all the fur, and said, “My name’s Violet...”
“No shit.”
I heard Dûmnahn cough behind me.
She cocked her head to one side and looked me in the eye. “Violet. Standard ARM Optimod 4044-XVII. Command Pilot.”
“Optimod...?” I tried to swallow the word before it came out, but failed, seeing a little sizzle start up in those yellow eyes. Orb knows what she may have been made of—human genes for sure, but what else? Dog, squirrel, bits of extinct wolf, fox, fragments of apes and whatnot... Offhand, I couldn’t recall ever seeing an animal that color though, not in any bestiary on any damned datatrack.
Seeming exasperated, she said, “Ruricolae.”
“Uh. Sorry. I just... hell, I guess you must be my boss.”
“Correct.”
She swept past me, past Dûmnahn, went on up the ladder with swift efficiency while I watched, half mesmerized by her sleek form and wonderfully fluid movements.
“I guess I’ve gotten off to a bad start, huh?”
He laughed that nice warm laugh again, and said, “Maybe not. We’ll see.”
And so we flew, cyborg Dûmnahn, optimod Violet, backward, human little me, Athena 7 lifting in a splash of blue fury, lifting with her DSRV squadron, lifting sedately through the eutropic atmosphere shield, then making formation, tearing away from Telemachus Major and its little green moon, down into the starry deep.
Somehow, when I lay my hands on the machines, felt the subtle pulse of their cybernetic hearts, felt the energies gather at my fingertips, I felt all my fears subside, fade away as if they’d never been. Violet flying the ship with her hands and mind, Dûmnahn lurking in his medical lair, monitoring us now, seeing that we were up to our task, and I... down in my own dark hole, making sure all the pieces worked together, as one.
I knew it. I knew it all along.
All those years of pointless study, of learning all those things a robot technician on Audumla wouldn’t need to know. All the things a husband wouldn’t need to know. I knew, someday, somehow...
Memory of my father, looking over my shoulder as I went through the school catalog, pointing out this course and that one, suggesting, Hey, let’s learn this stuff. Just for fun, you know? And so I did, just to please him, just for fun.
I’ll come back for you, I thought then. I’ll come back for you. I swear I will.
o0o
In no more than a few days’ time, I began to feel like an old timer myself, bantering with my fellows, playing billiards, swimming in the great, shimmering globule of the zero-gee pool Standard maintained in orbit around the park, going to the park itself, a stunning experience, so much more... real than anything I’d ever done with Styrbjörn inside Audumla.
You never know how much your heart can pound until you come on a big wild animal minding its own business.
Mostly though we worked and worked, getting to know Athena, getting to know each other, getting to know ourselves, understanding how important it is not only to know you can count on your mates, on your hardware, but also that you can count on yourself. Get to know at what point you’ll turn tail and run. Make sure the others know it too.