When We Were Real (Author's Preferred Edition)

by William Barton

  No?

  No. Too big an action for the police. They’ve hired l’Armée du SOCO IX for the job. They’ll be here in a week. We’ll wait for them. Then we’ll head out.

  She left the room, leaving silence behind.

  o0o

  RS67 turned out to have pretty good social facilities compared to what you might expect from a refueling station, probably because it was on the periphery of a major star system, right in the flow of heavy industrial traffic bound out for the Centauri Jet and points Solward.

  Once it transpired we wouldn’t have much to do other than makework training, crews began taking liberty in the squatter town that’d grown up around the main base, buildings made of fused regolith and junk from the station’s boneyard, as interesting an architecture as I’d ever imagined. Dûmnahn, Violet and I joined in without waiting, heading out under a red-tinted black sky, the sure sign of a thin, old-fashioned eutropic shield that couldn’t even color the sky blue, making it look like perpetual night, black sky spangled with familiar bright stars, the bright spark of Proxima, those two dull, irregular red moons, moving slowly but visibly across the heavens.

  The first bar we made was a smoky place full of base technicians, overcrowded now with an influx of Security fliers, wait-things scurrying through the crowd dispensing whatever the hell you wanted, a brace of naked drumwiggle dancers up on the stage gyrating to tunes so old I’m sure my grandfather would’ve recognized them.

  “You’d think, by now, creech would’ve made it here. I mean, the DataWarren...” Human Space is decades, hell centuries across, realtime travel, but it’s only scant years across for the information flow. Some hot new popcraze arises among the densely-populated moons of Jupiter, the news’ll get to the shock-crystal miners at Sirius, way the hell out on the frontier, in under nine years.

  I thought about what it’d be like, flying all the way out to Sirius in only one go. Fifty years? You’d be somebody else by then.

  Violet: “Fucking Proxima’s always been backward.”

  Then Dûmnahn: “Colonials tend to be conservative. Drumwiggle lasted a long time, even back on Earth.”

  Up on the stage, the dancers appeared to do no more than bounce, making their breasts seem to dance. Every last one of those women up on the stage a real human woman with a subtle thatch between her legs, dancing shadow of gate and altar that I...

  Suddenly, Violet said, “Let’s get the fuck out of here. Must be something, somewhere...”

  Dûmnahn said, “Hang on a minute...” Put one of his sensor probes in a tankard of frothy green beer, his fifth full liter counting by the empties on the table, and made the level go down fast.

  “How the fuck can you drink so much?”

  Dûmnahn, flicking foam, said, “Ahhh! A manly man among manly men!”

  Violet: “No reason a cyberdoc shouldn’t be able to detox his own blood.”

  Outside, Dûmnahn lifted his leg against what looked like the broken-off stub of a lamppost and pissed for a full three minutes, foamy puddle glistening and steaming in Proximal light. I needed to go myself, started to reach for my fly... abruptly grew conscious of Violet standing there, watching Dûmnahn, shaking her head in mock amazement.

  “Well,” I said. “Where to?”

  Long silence. Then Dûmnahn said, “Ahem. Um. Well, I’ve got some stuff I need to do. Cyberdoc stuff. You two’ll have to toddle on without me.”

  “Dûmnahn? You sure you don’t want us to...” A sharp feeling of loss at the prospect of having the evening’s camaraderie diminished.

  Violet clapped me on the shoulder and said, “Come on, Murph. Let’s let this old sod go sleep it off. The night is young and so are we!”

  Are we? Hell, I’m not even seventeen yet. No idea how old Violet might be. Until this very second, it never occurred to me to wonder. Just a state of mind, they say. “Sure.”

  The next bar was a much quieter place, a cafe really, with tables scattered around the floor, in dark corners, all nooks and crannies. The thing on the stage was a robot of some kind, android in nature but quite obviously not a real person. Plasticky. But it could sing very well, smooth, light baritone crooning slow, soft tunes in a language I’d never heard before.

  When I asked, Violet told me the robot was extremely old, as old as Dûmnahn maybe, a style of machine long abandoned, a newton synthesizer, she said, and that the language was probably Swahili.

  After a while, sitting quietly, listing to the songs, drinking by her side, I began to notice that many of the other customers were optimods of various sorts. The waiter, who brought us drinks when we asked, just like a machine, was an optimod too, a big purple humanoid with a flat gorilla-face, who gave Violet a long look that seemed to make her angry.

  After that, we left again, went on a walk in the darkness.

  o0o

  Beyond the edge of the squatter town, we climbed a rutted gravel road up a long, low hill that seemed to be covered with shadowy, broken ruins. Things like... I don’t know. Fallen pillars. Collapsed stone walls whose pieces, when I touched them, seemed hand hewn. “What is this place?”

  Violet said, “I’m not sure. I’ve been here before, but... well, it’s never daylight on RS67 and there’s nothing about it on the local DataTrack.”

  Like the collapsed remnants of some ancient Hellenistic city, some Seleucid Empire town decaying away to nothing on the Anatolian seacoast... impossible. Impossible for them even to be ancient, as human beings have been poking about Proxima for less than five hundred years.

  And, of course, there is no one else.

  At the top of the hill we sat on a precipice overlooking nothingness, sat on a low wall looking out at a dark, starry sky that went down and down, down below where a real world’s horizon would be, down almost to the cliff edge just beyond our feet. RS67 then, an irregular mess of a world, chewed through and through with machine-bitten holes.

  Nothing.

  On a real world there’d be meteors in the sky. Here, they glance silently off the eutropic shield, are sent silently, lightlessly on their way.

  Still. Here is the bright jewel of Proxima, over there, stark and cold from a full 25,000 AUs are the Alphas, brilliant white A, dimmer, slightly orangish B. And over there, first-magnitude Sol. There Sirius. Vega. Fomalhaut...

  “Hell of a lot easier to see them, see how they really look from a world that’s got an outside.”

  Violet said, “You’re from Audumla, hm? What’s that like?”

  I glanced over, took in her angular, inhuman profile, silhouetted against black sky and stars, hardly more than a shadow. “Nothing much. Just an old decantorium-style habitat, used up, sold, repurposed.” Nothing much. But then I could have told her, I suppose, about the Mother’s Children and the Timeliners, about Rannvi and Lenahr, Styrbjörn and Ludmilla Nellisdottir, about Beebee and Mrs. Trinket’s lovely little kits.

  Could’ve told her about my father, I guess.

  She said, “I know what you mean. I was... born in one of those.”

  Notice the little hesitation. Is she ashamed she was born in a clean steel tank, like every other optimod who ever lived?

  I turned to look at her again, was startled at how close she was, her face only a hand’s breadth of cems from mine. Maybe I jumped. Maybe not. Felt her breath in my face, sweet with a scent like lavender, a smell not so different from her name.

  She reached out and touched my arm, ran her hand up to my elbow, seeming to trace the outline of the muscles through my shirt. Touched my chest, then my face, and said, in something of a throaty whisper, rough and raw, very different from her usual voice, “Your skin’s so smooth.”

  The fingers on my face were anything but smooth, covered with short, dense fur, something like velvet. I could feel my heart pounding like mad in my chest, feel some kind of emotion coursing through my breast, but nothing that told me what to do.

  She said, “Have you ever... been with a nonhuman before?”

  There are moments when you w
ant to ask the Orb for help, but he’s never there when you need him. “Yeah. Allomorphs, a few times...”

  She made a little sigh, almost like laughter. “Allomorphs. Hardly the same thing at all.”

  “No.”

  Then she took my face between her palms, soft, velvet palms, leaned in close and, I think, tried to kiss me, but our faces seemed the wrong shape for each other, so it was more like being licked by a dog. Puppy kisses, I remember thinking. Involuntarily, I turned my face away, lifting my sleeve and wiping away the wet.

  Violet let me go then, let her hands trail oh-so-reluctantly down my chest, let them fall back into her own lap. Silence. Then, “Sorry. You... want me to stop?”

  I stuttered, trying to formulate... something. “Oh, Violet. I, um...” Useless. Too confused.

  She leaned in again, hands on my thighs, let them slide up to my hips. Then one hand crept around to the inside of my thigh, palpating the place between my legs, maybe trying to gauge whether I was interested or not, I don’t know. I sat there, paralyzed, and let her do what she wanted. Sat still, hardly breathing, while she unbuttoned my shirt, while she ran her hands over my chest. Plenty of hair there, I remember thinking, but nothing compared to...

  Sat still while she pulled my shirt off my shoulders, while she leaned in close, nuzzling the side of my neck, while I felt her long, dense, silky fur on my naked skin. Stood up, no more of my own accord than a robot on a preprogrammed subroutine, stood still while she unbuckled my belt, opened my trousers and slid them down.

  She seemed to purr, finding definite evidence that I was interested after all.

  Whispered, “Say something, Murph. Say something.”

  All I could do was shiver a little. Shiver at the cool breeze on my skin, I guess, reach out tentative hands, run my fingers through the long hair running down her spine. She seemed to like that, stood up, put her arms around me. Pressed me close, and I could feel the woman of her through the fur, feel warm, doughy breasts against my chest, feel erect human nipples pressing through the fur.

  Just a minute, I remember thinking. Just a minute and she’ll change. Change like an allomorph. The fur will be gone and she’ll be...

  She took one of my hands in hers and made me touch her, pressed it to her breast so I could feel her underlying humanness, slid it down her side until it rested on her hip. Bone structure in there. Familiar bone structure. Tried to kiss me again, not much more successfully than the first time, merely getting my face wet.

  We lay together on a smooth hillside of stone, stone warm as blood, and I did with Violet what you always do with a woman. Turned out she wasn’t so different after all. Maybe I wanted to ask her, between one time and the next, if she’d ever been with a human male before, but I couldn’t.

  Maybe it would’ve broken the spell, made us human male and optimod female again, and that would’ve been too bad. What we’d become, for just a little while, is the thing you always go looking for, lovers.

  o0o

  An idyll lasts a day, two days, three, then the real world comes and sweeps it all away, as if it’s never been. Or an idyll lasts for a brief moment in time, but it’s a moment that takes forever to pass. Whichever one it was that I had with Violet, the day came when we mounted our ships and flew on down Proxima’s gravity well to the Glow-Ice Worlds, Proxima growing to a fantastic disk in the sky, an impossible thing, ruddy pale, densely flecked with starspots, like bits of metal shining within a fire, mineral-rich debris ring glittering in our sensor screens, otherwise invisible.

  A real star, I remember thinking, looking out through the one little porthole my engineering space possessed, looking ever so much like pictures of manhome’s Sun, original giver of life.

  Another conversation, far in the background, “I envy you having been there, seeing the real thing.”

  Dûmnahn’s reply: “It’s not so different, really. Bigger, brighter, hotter, but then you see it from so much farther away.”

  I suddenly realized Dûmnahn might actually have memories source-coded on the surface of Earth itself. That’d be... a wonderful thing. I wanted to ask, I really did, when I talked to him alone, when the two of us seemed like no more than... men together: How much of you began as a man? Just an idea, in the mind of a man?

  I wish I had, but it seemed so rude.

  And what if all he remembers of Earth is the inside of some construction node, deep in bowels of rock, occluded from the Sun? You don’t want to carry a friend back to bitter memories do you? Not when there are so many happy memories to...

  o0o

  Glow-Ice 9 was no more than a faraway twinkle in the sky when it began, a long streak of red here, then another one there. Two. Three. Ten. A hundred. Chatter of voices on the fleet’s secure DataTrack.

  Tally-Ho.

  Hard blue stars suddenly winking on all around us as the fleet’s battlecraft lit off their moduli in unison, drives so much more technically advanced than the cheap insystem fusion rockets that were all the colonists had to work with.

  Where are the SOCO troopers? I remember wondering. They’ll have... real ships, real weapons, real...

  Flash.

  Orange globe, momentarily blinding, then a dull, small sphere of pale fire fading, fading. Gone.

  Flash. Flash. Flash.

  More pale, fading orange fire. People and machines turned so suddenly to vapor, souls gone Orb knows where. Reabsorbed by Uncreated Time.

  There was a sudden rattle on the hull, Enemy fire? Violet’s quiet voice: No. I flew through a debris field. Harmless bits that used to be... something.

  I checked my sensors anxiously, did my job, making sure everything was as it should be.

  Hard flare of brilliant yellow light gouting in space not so far away, shockwave rocking our ship just a little bit, then more debris, like a cheap drum inches from my ears. Enemy fire? I looked in the DataTrack. Yes, a hit on one of the troop transports, a big SOCO ship bringing the soldiers of IX down to mix it up with their friends from XXIII.

  No damage at all. Missile deflected. Exploded. Little dings and cracks on our hull healing themselves as bits of missile hardware ricocheted and were gone.

  Hard voice from nowhere: “Athena 7, flyer down! Sector 823-five-Alpha. Your baby.”

  The ship tipped hard under my back, inertial force tickling right through the shields as Violet sent us plunging through the battlesky, lights flaring and popping all around us now. My job. My job. Orb. I held on, adjusting this field, poking at that one, working my control systems, making the modulus do what Violet wanted. Sure. Sure. Easy as hell.

  I could imagine her complimenting my work later.

  Felt a sharp little sexual thrill.

  And, outside my window, Glow-Ice 9 grew from faraway glitter to circular world, to a flat, red ice landscape, flying by below.

  “There! There!” shouted Dûmnahn. “Got ‘im! Go down! Down!”

  As the ship heeled over, stooping out of the sky, something went wang on the hull, groundfire, smallarms projectile, suggested the hull computer, then we were down, skimming behind a long, low ridge of pale, crystalline hills, coming up fast on a dull blue glow, hovering above some kind of mess from which long plumes of vapor jetted like so many frantic old ghosts.

  Down.

  The ship fell, landing legs extended, rattled on the ground, and was still. Silence for a long, empty moment, then the world groaned softly in my ears as Dûmnahn opened the medbay ramp. There was a machine-gun rattle, the sound of his feet as he ran down the ramp and...

  Go. Get up. Do your fucking job!

  I unharnessed, slid out of my hole into the medevac bay, brilliant red light pouring in through the open door. There was Violet, meshed in her pilot’s nest, doing her own job and... yes, looking up briefly, seeing me as I ran out the hatch. I imagined warmth in her bright yellow eyes and...

  Orb.

  Ice 9 was a crystalline mirror under a hard pink sky, ringed by hills and mountains of metal and glass. The most beautiful
thing I’d ever seen, this fantastic Glow-Ice world. Dûmnahn was already beside the crashed and burning warship, not waiting for me, arms extended, extended right through a plume that must be burning his sensors terribly, cutting. Cutting.

  Somewhere inside, I realized, grabbing the antifire gun from its socket on Athena’s hull, somewhere inside that tangled mess, there are living men, men like me, women like Violet. Broken, torn men and women, men and women praying for salvation, praying otherwise for immediate death, praying as they burned.

  I clicked on the sensors, let the gun figure out what was actually burning, opened fire. Flames winked out, like that and that, the jetting plumes fell away, and Dûmnahn’s voice burbled in my ear, “Christ! Thanks! So fucking hot...”

  Twin spears of brilliant blue fire suddenly jetted from the side of his carapace and described a quick square on one reasonably intact face of the warship’s hull. Metal and plastic fell away with a faint, tinny clatterclang to the red ice ground, sounds propagated through knife-thin alien air, barely transmitted through my skinshield.

  And there they were.

  Soft voice, a man’s voice, from somewhere in the tangled ruin, “Oh. Oh my God.” Soft liquid coughing. Then silence.

  Dûmnahn sighed, “Well. Let’s see if we can get them out of here.”

  I can’t remember the rest of it.

  Sorry.

  o0o

  A little while later, survivors and dead and all the bits and scraps of the warship’s crew we could find in our fragment of allotted time safe in Dûmnahn’s medevac lockers, I hung in my harness down in the engineering pod, worked my controls and watched my sensors and tried to think of nothing but the welfare of my machines as Athena scurried low over the landscape, heading for the battlefield.

  Impossible not to think about... oh, not the horrible things I’d seen, so unexpectedly stark, so different from the homely little horrors of my father’s practice. Thought about the men and women stowed away above me. Some of them whole, merely asleep, awaiting repair. Others quite dead, awaiting hope of resurrection.