When We Were Real (Author's Preferred Edition)

by William Barton

  There’s always a moment of transition for you, that one moment when you turn from outsider to in, when you leave your past behind and suddenly mesh with the new life you’ve joined. Mine came one morning at breakfast, while I sat eating with Dûmnahn, whose biologic components lived off food, same as mine, the two of us chatting about nothing in particular, while, all around us, the room filled with the bustling fliers of Standard ARM.

  As I sat looking into the middle distance, thinking about the day to come, Violet came in through the big double doors at the far end of the cafeteria, doors opening on a corridor leading to the optimod barracks. Watching her walk, I remember thinking that if you looked closely, you could see she was a woman, that you could so easily imagine her without all that lustrous fur, just the same way you imagine a real woman without her clothes. Yes, there’d be breasts here, nipped waist there, just above flaring hips, long, muscular thighs.

  I could imagine the place between her legs without any difficulty at all, imagine myself lying with a girl who had a generous helping of stark violet pubic hair as stage dressing for Goddess’ Altar and Child’s Gate.

  Not far from there to imagining myself worshiping at the altar, opening the gate.

  And then I felt that same stark tingle of anticipation I felt every time I settled on a new girl, told myself, with a little care and dedication she’d...

  Dûmnahn whispered in my ear, “It’s not out of the question, you know. Just behave yourself for a little while longer.”

  Violet went and got her tray, movements so fluid I could see they attracted other men’s eyes, optimods, humans, cyborgs with enough male mammal in them for it to matter—only the pure robots among us seemed immune—came and sat with us, eyes staying away from me as she settled down to eat, flickering my way every once in a while, with something I imagined might be a smile.

  After a while, Dûmnahn said to me, “Sometimes, I regret the rigor of my own functional design.”

  Violet looked up and said, “What?”

  Dûmnahn folded his arms up tight to his sides, a habit I’d started thinking of as his poker face, and said, “Never mind. Just the end of a conversation we were having.”

  Violet glanced at me, then made a tight grin back at Dûmnahn: “Stay out of my business, you old fart.”

  o0o

  Snapshot of a moment frozen in time.

  Violet and I got away alone together, during one of our weekends off from the endless round of training, went for a long walk together in some vast park, up by Telemachus Major’s north pole, a huge, round valley where the North Axis Docking Structure had once been, or so she told me, in the days when this was a more conventional habitat.

  I’d fallen behind her a little bit as we walked across a broad, windswept field of dark blue grass, wind rippling the sheaves, stalks reaching up to mid thigh. Fallen behind so I could watch her walk.

  “How long ago was that?” I asked.

  I always liked to walk a little behind women, admiring the sleek lines of their backs, the way their hips would tilt gently back and forth with the shifting of their weight, step by step. Audumlan girls seemed to like this, but Violet kept twisting her supple neck so she could glance at me over her shoulder.

  She said, “Oh, maybe two centuries back. I recall there was a lot of talk about it then, because it was the first big terraforming of a major extrasolar body, though eutropic shields had been in place for Mars and Luna for more than five hundred years.”

  From behind, Violet looked less like a human woman than from the front, tail erasing the central contour of her backside, fur camouflaging the narrowness of her waist. Fascinating, though, to see the way her tail moved, seemingly on its own, flexing slightly, bobbing in time to her footsteps.

  She suddenly stopped, turned around, and said, “You’re driving me crazy, walking behind me like that.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  She reached out and grabbed me by the arm, dragging me forward to walk beside her. “Why the hell do you keep dropping back?”

  I thought about it. No reason to, uh... “I just wanted to watch you walk.”

  She stopped again, giving me an odd look. “You some kind of pervert, wanting to look at something as weird looking as me?”

  I said, “I don’t think you’re weird looking, Violet. I think you’re beautiful.”

  Her eyes became startlingly bright.

  o0o

  Because we had small private rooms, rather than a group barracks, I got used to spending time alone, once again, though the DSRV crews were a friendlier lot than most of the people in Basic had been. A lot of the trainees there had been bucking for fighter pilot, affecting a swagger I couldn’t manage and didn’t like.

  If I’m going to work up a sizzle of testosterone, I’d just as soon reserve it for something better than bluffing other men.

  I said that to the burly lesbian who’d had the bunk above mine in Basic and thoroughly enjoyed her bellow of laughter. She told it to some of the other women, friends of hers I guess, and they all thought it was funny, but it didn’t seem to make me any more popular with the men.

  I was alone in my room, standing at the dresser, staring at myself in the mirror, when Dûmnahn chimed and came through the door, still more machine than anything else in my eyes, two manipulators extended, each holding a two-liter bottle of beer.

  He plunked them down on my little desk, and said, “You’ll like this, boyo. Hardesty’s Black Ale, all the way from the Laagerhavn Stream.” When he popped the caps, a sharp, bitter odor wafted out.

  I took one last look into the mirror, then came and sat down, picked up a bottle, took a sip. There seemed to be some kind of floating debris in the ale, sediment unsettled by his jostling, the flavor at once incredibly creamy and bitter.

  Dûmnahn said, “Why’re you doing that?”

  I looked at him blankly.

  He gestured at the mirror.

  I shrugged. “I guess... I keep wondering what people see when they look at me.”

  I found myself wishing he had recognizable eyes. There was nothing about him that could make a facial expression anyone could read. He said, “I see a boy lonelier than he ought to be.”

  “You’re not...”

  He laughed, a too-human sound. “Not a person? Perceptive of you to notice.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean...”

  He said, “I’ve read up some on your background, Murph.”

  Murph. I’ve been letting people call me Darius lately, but... “That make you see me as a lonely boy?”

  “History’s a funny thing,” he said, “and we all see it through a variety of distorting lenses.”

  Sure. “Personal history or just... all of it?”

  He said, “Back in the Classical Era of Occidental Antiquity, when the Western world was divided between the romantic Hellenes and the practical Romans, a Greek woman would marry for love, would have sex for her own pleasure, while a Roman woman would find herself in an arranged marriage, sometimes premenarcheal, no more than twelve years of age. And then would find herself, on her wedding night, nothing more than a raped child.”

  I nodded, having read that in many a history track. “Must’ve been tough on the little girls.”

  Dûmnahn said, “After marriage, a Greek woman became her husband’s slave, barred from public life in a society where only a whore could be free. A Roman matron, on the other hand, retained her full economic and social rights, almost unheard of in the human society of the time.”

  “So?” The Mothersbairn have their own historical theories, which determines the content of what they teach.

  “For some reason, we despise the pragmatic Romans, and yet we love the romantic Greeks.”

  I said, “Mothersbairn believe the Greeks stole their culture from the Pelasgian aborigines, who were... not of European origin.”

  He seemed to sigh. “Human society begins with what nature makes male and female mammals want from each other.”

/>   Great. “You got any other brilliant observations?”

  I had to imagine what his facial expression might have become. He said, “Men work hard to enslave women, because it seems to be the only way they can preserve their own freedom. In most normal human societies, women are raised to be narcissistic.”

  Ah, the mirror. I started to feel just a little resentful at this bullshit psychobabble.

  He said, “Narcissistic people, by their very nature, look to others for validation, rather than looking within.”

  “Why would men want narcissistic women?” Someone completely self-involved wouldn’t make a very good lover, you’d think.

  He said, “People who look for external validation become passive-aggressive. And once you understand that essential nature, which the individual is unlikely to transcend, she is easily manipulated. A slave must have a collar, after all.”

  “So is that why you think I’m just a lonely boy? Mothersbairn made me into a narcissistic, passive-aggressive little girl?”

  He said, “In the end, the only ones a powerless being can really trust are other, equally powerless beings. Everyone else can exploit you at will.”

  Angry, I said, “It’s pretty transparent what you think.”

  He said, “No it isn’t. The Mothersbairn could not make you wholly into a woman and still keep you as a male mammal.”

  I had to think about it, unsure whether I believed him. “I suppose not.”

  o0o

  Back in my dorm room the night after we’d run our first full-scale simulated operational cycle, the entire DSRV squadron mixing with the combat ships as they played their own simulated war game, weaving about in the silence of empty space, stars infinitely far away in all directions, moving in on a field of little icemoons a couple of light-hours from Telemachus Major.

  You couldn’t see the moons more than one at a time as they floated millions of kems apart, tenuously orbiting a common center of gravity, but it gave a feeling of real rather than simulated danger, knowing what would happen if you ran into something while you were still decelerating, traveling three or four thousand kems per second or more.

  People get killed in training, blown to tiny, irretrievable bits, burnt up into dissociated atoms, earning deaths from which there can be no return.

  I sat in my room, too keyed up to sleep, fooling with the freeze-frame, tapping Standard ARM internal news, running it in parallel with a feed from JetNet, with its pretense of impartiality.

  Who’s to say whether the political goings on in the Centauri Jet have any meaning at all? Elections on democratic habitats, “office politics” on open corporate worlds, mysterious rumors from closed ones. Interservice rivalries from the military aristocracies. War between this tong and that.

  Soldats de l’Organization des Citoyennes Occidentales. SOCO. Soldiers for the Organization of the Citizens of the West. JetNet particularly interested in the movement of SOCO mercenary troops toward Proxima, where there’d been some sort of colonial trouble among the Glow-Ice Worlds. Curiously, nothing about it on the Standard ARM feed, though we had large holdings there, numerous mining concerns tethered to our parent holding company by cords of power and money.

  I wonder when I started thinking of Standard ARM as we?

  Restless, I keyed out of the news and dialed my father’s number for the thousandth time. Dialed Rannvi. Dialed Styrbjörn. In desperation, dialed my mother.

  The transition link is unable to grant access to those addresses. Either they have ceased to exist or the Audumla server has been instructed to deny access from your callback ID.

  Checked my secret DataTrack queue at the Telemachan Firehall node. Nothing.

  Who was it said you can’t go home again? Some old time guy who never got farther than the next big city on a closed world sparsely inhabited by no more than a billion or two...

  The freeze-frame chimed and showed Dûmnahn at my door.

  I shut the fucking thing off and let him in.

  Despite the lack of any visible eyes, I could feel him looking at my face, could feel his concern. Empathy’s something they build into a cyberdoc, I guess. Stock in trade. He said, “Still no luck?”

  I shook my head, laying back in my bunk, folding my arms tight across my chest, staring at nothing.

  “They’ll forgive you someday.”

  Great. “What if they don’t?”

  “Then, one day, when you go home again, you’ll find him there waiting for you, unchanged, I’m sure.”

  Lovely dream. “I wish I could believe that.”

  Dûmnahn slid over to sit on the floor beside me, green legs splayed across a powder-blue carpet displaying parallel the double-lightning bolt of the Standard ARM logo. “What if it never happens, hm? What if you never go home again? Is that what you’re so afraid of?”

  I felt myself bristle at the word afraid. Felt an urge to retort that I wasn’t... shit. “I guess so.”

  “Murphy, my friend, everything in your life seems so big, so important now, because it’s a newborn life you have. Time will pass, and your life will grow large, the past a very deep place. Then, the things that happen now will come to seem... smaller.”

  Cold comfort when you’re feeling you’ve betrayed the only people who ever loved you. I pictured my father, working alone. Pictured Rannvi forced from school, forced into a marriage she wanted no more than I... “Why did you come here tonight? I really...” Hell, stop picking fights. This... thing is trying to be your friend.

  And you’re a lonely little boy, remember?

  Dûmnahn reached out and put a thin, warm hand on my shoulder. “I had a reason, after all: One of the comtechs intercepted a command gatepacket. In just a few hours it will be announced that the Committees of Public Safety of the Glow-Ice Worlds at Proxima Centauri have issued a formal declaration of independence from all outside influences.”

  I think I stared at the wall for just another second, then slowly sat up, turning to stare at Dûmnahn’s featureless shell. “I... guess that means us.”

  Us.

  Dûmnahn said, “And it appears the Glow-Icers have hired l’Armee du SOCO XXIII to defend them against... counterclaims.”

  A full SOCO army. “That must’ve... cost them.”

  “Yes. There’s a lot of money at stake.”

  “So...”

  “It means business, Murphy.”

  The business of war. Which is, after all, why I’m here.

  I felt an awful cold thrill run through me then.

  Four. On our way from Telemachus Major

  On our way from Telemachus Major to Proxima Centauri, a long six weeks’ voyage down the length of the Centauri Jet, we stopped once, at Standard ARM Refueling Station #67, no more than twenty light-hours from Proxima, where we could gas up, charge our weapons, make sure everything was in proper working order, then...

  I don’t know. I don’t think I’d imagined yet what was coming. Until it happens to you, you really can’t imagine.

  From space, RS67 looked like a piece of old black slag, eaten through and through by holes that let in starlight, shiny surfaces lit up dull red by Proxima, a dim, sullen jewel in the sky, white light tinged with some faint, ruddy intimation of color. As it grew in our screens, I could see bits and fragments on the surface, technical installations, landing pads, movement of some kind, here and there, or maybe just shadows cast by the reflected light of two little moons made from orbiting junk.

  From the medical bay, Dûmnahn, voice oh-so-soft, said, “I’ve been here before.” Just that, like a whisper.

  Violet: “You?” A gentle inquiry. As though she knew that he...

  “Not me, no. Some other me. Long ago. I think I may have died here.”

  Violet: “Do you remember?”

  Long silence, then: “No.”

  I wondered how hard it was, remembering bits of past lives. Comforting to know, really know that you’d lived before? Or just the horror of knowing bits and pieces of what you’d lost?


  Dûmnahn said, “This place is somehow tied to one of my oldest memories. Some... bit of code inside me... I remember being in a factory somewhere. Not all of me, just one arm, tied through a processor node to an index table. Mortise A in tenon B. Fastener C in orifice D. Mortise A in tenon B. Fastener C...”

  “Bastards,” whispered Violet.

  I had no idea then what she was talking about.

  After landing, we turned our ship over to the base maintenance crew, walked across a darkling field covered with shadows, the shadows of a hundred moving, insensate robot arms and legs, got into the rec center, where we ate messhall food, walked around and stretched and kidded with the other crews, took our seats in the briefing room and waited for Squadron Leader Chamônix to come and tell us what was what.

  Rumors flying this way and that.

  One guy heard SOCO XXIII was bribed, that the war was already over. That, tomorrow, we’d gas up and go on home.

  Another heard that the first-in recon fleet was massacred, that the colonists and their SOCO hirelings’d gotten high-energy military weapons from somewhere...

  Violet snickered, “Nothing like that this side of Sol.”

  ...that we’d be thrown into the fray, stopgap, and be massacred as well, while Standard and her allies gathered strength, spent their accumulated wealth, got ready for a second strike.

  Chamônix, a tall, thin woman like a walking white skeleton with long black hair, swept into the room with a short fat man in civilian mufti.

  “Ah,” muttered Dûmnahn. “Mr. ben Fars. Senior Vice President for the Glow-Ice Mining venture. You’d think he’d be out of a job and standing in some headhunter line by now.”

  Well, that happens in fairy tales, doesn’t it? In real life, when a manager fucks up and ruins a million working people’s lives, when he bungles so badly the company loses a decade’s profits, his Christmas bonus turns up a little short. That’s all.

  Chamônix and Mr. ben Fars had some things to tell us. Armaments for the warships. Some modernization for the medevac teams. And, oh by the way, said Squadron Leader Chamônix, beaming at us all, Standard ARM has decided not to use Internal Security ground troops for this operation.