When We Were Real (Author's Preferred Edition)

by William Barton

  I remember suddenly picking up a hand, a little hand, as though from a child, turning it over and over, looking at long fingernails, painted powder blue. A woman’s hand. I remember a woman from the barracks we shared, a small, pretty, slim woman with small hands, a woman with long red hair and powder blue nails.

  Dûmnahn’s voice: “Get aboard, Murph. We’re all done here.”

  I gave him the hand without a word, got back down in my space, and Athena flew on.

  Fire outside now.

  Habitat 155, Iridium extraction facility, crew of 700, under assault by SOCO IX.

  Brilliant blue fire; something like a pink mushroom cloud.

  Crisp, terrible sound, Dûmnahn whispering, “Like lightning. Like being struck by lightning...” Then we were down, down and out on the surface, doing what we could, filling Athena’s lockers with the meat of the fallen, fallen and slain.

  This one a SOCO soldier, ours or theirs no way to tell, sprawled dead in his armor, surrounded by a hard-frozen puddle of bodily fluids, red ice hardly distinguishable from the substance of the ground beneath him. Dead. Helmet and head nowhere to be found.

  Dûmnahn: “Save him for parts, I guess. Maybe his head’ll turn up someplace else.”

  Save him for parts? But Dûmnahn, this is a man...

  No reply.

  Just pick up the pieces.

  Pick up the pieces and go.

  Later, down inside the habitat among smashed furniture, melted walls, ruins blackened by fire, the command circuit opened and we heard Squadron Leader Chamônix: “We’re falling behind the timeline people, get a move on! Command directive: Pick up anything that looks like it might be part of a Standard employee. Pick up SOCO troops from either side. Leave the colonists.”

  I was looking at a boy when I heard that, boy sprawled in one corner of a habitat room, holding something that might once have been a toy spaceship. How old? Nine? Ten? His eyes opened suddenly, little slits showing pale brown irises, eyes looking at me for just a second, then closing again.

  Dûmnahn’s voice whispered in my ear: “We’ve got to go, Murph. Work to be done.”

  Outside in the hallway lay a SOCO soldier in cracked armor who sighed when I appeared, sighed and said, “Millie Bolduc, SOCO XXIII, yielding parole. Glad to see you, medic...”

  By the time I got her back to the ship, she was unconscious. I peeled her out of the ruined armor, a pretty girl with a hundred broken bones, arms and legs bending in places and ways so unexpected I kept recoiling from her touch. Laid her tenderly down in a meatlocker, took a good look before closing the hatch.

  Pretty, pretty girl. Nice little pink-nippled breasts. Lovely blonde gate that looked like it’d last you all through a long, happy night. I closed the hatch and, when I looked around, Violet was watching me from her pilot’s nest.

  She said, “You’re doing just fine, Murph. Just fine.”

  Dûmnahn came back, bearing the last of them, closed the hatch behind himself, and then we flew away, taking our bloody cargo home.

  o0o

  Final interludes, the usual scenes of war.

  Running toward RS67 with a cargo of dead souls, I lay with Violet in her pilot’s nest, bright stars swirling all around us as we flew, Dûmnahn below, quiet, working in his medevac hold. I know, down there, he is saving lives, but we’re up here, together among the stars, where no lives but our own seem to matter.

  Violet has finished now with telling me tales of other battles, in other wars, is lying half on top of me, leaning out of her harness, holding my face between her hands, the way she always does, something she learned, I think, from an old DataTrack romance, struggling with the aberrant shapes of our faces, so we can learn how to kiss, like proper lovers.

  It does work, too, I think, feeling the strange form of her face on mine, the line of her teeth where no woman’s teeth have ever fallen before.

  They’re human teeth. This is not how I imagine kissing a fox might be.

  There are real humans with faces this shape, dark black women from history tracks about New Guinea, about Ethiopia; women with that fabled hayrick head of hair, as different from my own as Violet’s silky fur.

  Violet backed away from me with a girl’s sigh, looking at me, at my human face, with her lovely yellow eyes. What does she see? Something as alien as me?

  No. Her world’s been full of humans, human men, since the day she was... No, I remind myself. Not born. Violet, like all optimods, was decanted.

  Less human in that regard than Beebee and Mrs. Trinket’s kits.

  Then why, I wonder, did they give her this?

  My hand was between her legs, feeling wet fur, all too human female genital structures, rubbing that familiar swollen knob forward of the gate itself, up on the rounded prominence of her altar-bone.

  Let my finger slip inside, feeling the albuminous ridges of a birth canal no baby would ever transit.

  No way to ask why. No one to ask.

  Maybe it never occurred to her engineers to leave these inessential parts off.

  Violet purred in my face like a contented kitten, straddled my hips, lowered herself onto me, and, down below, I could hear Dûmnahn humming softly to himself as he went about his work.

  o0o

  One night, subsumed in the eternal night of RS67, a transport-load of SOCO mercenaries came in, freighter-like starship looming in our sky, black hulk glowing with fire here and there and it grew larger, then larger still, blue fire from her exhaust baffles, red fire in patches, places on her hull blasted by Glow-Ice weaponry. Soldiers of SOCO IX coming in for a spot of rest.

  And, someone said, picking through our wards for survivors of defeated SOCO XXIII, looking to enroll them.

  Good fight, lads. Come with us and we’ll do you one better.

  Stalwart men, men my brothers, all that historical tommyrot.

  Glorious tommyrot, they say.

  So far, I’d seen only blood and death.

  Blood and death in the service of rich men’s money.

  The bars filled up with SOCO soldiers, big, muscular, tough-looking men and women. We got into fights with them, barroom brawls just like in all the old wartime dramas, until I felt like I’d fallen right into the datatracks, was living back in the days of World War Ten, when Earth was so badly damaged humanity was finally forced to reach for the worlds beyond the sky, reach out or die sitting home.

  Found myself trying to defend Violet against poachers, silly when she could defend herself so well. Had an interesting few minutes watching Violet tear the living shit out of a lanky SOCO blonde who’d taken a shine to me.

  “Interesting woman you’ve got there.”

  I turned to face the voice, a beefy blond man with a lantern jaw and brilliant mulberry eyes, hair neatly combed, dressed in immaculate SOCO fatigues, corporal’s chevrons on his arm, six campaign badges on his breast.

  He held out a big hand and said, “Meyer Sonn-Atem, IXth.” A nod over his shoulder. “My friend, Finn mac Eye.”

  The other man... oh, nothing special, I... Well. Shorter, slimmer, much darker, mustache on upper lip, unkempt hair, uniform just a little bit shabby. Then he looked at me with eyes as empty as... I don’t know, just empty, and I felt a pang shoot through me.

  Meyer snickered softly.

  And Finn said, “We’ll put an end to this someday.”

  I looked back at the floor, where Violet was sitting astride the SOCO woman’s middle, holding her by all that long blond hair, telling her what was what. Put an end to...

  Finn put his little hand on my forearm, and said, “They think they’re the ones who count, but they aren’t. It’s us.” Fire in his eyes now, filling the emptiness with passion.

  And, somehow, without any more being said, I knew just what the hell he was talking about. They. All the men and women, holding the reins of power and wealth, believing themselves to be like so many self-made Atlases, supporting the world, maintaining the existence of the universe, and so deserving its rewards.
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  Foolish stuff.

  Primitive stuff.

  Unbelievably primitive stuff, the stuff a children’s dreams that I...

  One day, he said, we’ll all be free. Free to have... capitalism, yes, just like now, only it’ll be capitalism with a human face... Freedom.

  Freedom from companies, from corporations.

  Freedom from unions, from all these little bands of so-called brethren.

  Freedom from all our tongs of power, from phalangist mafii, from... organizations of any sort, I tell you, which exist independent of the popular will.

  Popular will?

  Imagine that.

  Meyer said, “When he speaks, I believe.”

  What an odd pair, I thought, then bought them bottles of beer while Violet finished up with her opponent, got off the floor to polite applause and came stalking back to me. Stood still for a long moment, looking back and forth between Meyer and Finn.

  So we sat and talked to them for a long time. Well. Didn’t really talk—mostly listened while Finn mac Eye talked, told us how he felt about the world and everyone in it. After a while, I noticed other people gathering round, listening as well, eyes wide. Fascinating. Beyond my experience. In the background, there was his big friend, Meyer Sonn-Atem, silent, smiling slightly. Something odd there. Some kind of... calculation.

  Meyer understands something, I remember thinking. Understands something the rest of us do not.

  It got late and we left, all of us, going on home to sleep.

  o0o

  On the datatracks, in all the old romances, all the old melodramas. war is hell, or it’s glorious; but war is even dull in scripts focusing on the “long stretches of deadly boredom separated by moments of sheer terror.” What they never tell you is, even the moments of sheer terror are always the same.

  Starships swinging through space, driven by the modulus’ blue glow.

  Streaks of the tracking missiles.

  Lovely fireflower of exoatmospheric thermonuclear explosions.

  Crackle of debris on your hull, evoking those brief moments of terror.

  On the netlink, you hear the fighter jocks breathing hard, screaming out their rage and terror.

  Missile away. Missile away.

  And somebody dies, now and again ours, more often theirs.

  And we in the rescue ships go down and down, cut their burning bodies from the crushed hulls of burning ships, put out their flames, extinguish their agony, packing them away for salvation or disposal.

  Crystalline, setpiece memories.

  No whole to grasp in my thoughts.

  Habitats afire. Glow-Ice colonists abandoned to die. Begging us. Begging for their lives. Begging for their children’s lives.

  Plenty more where these came from.

  Worthless meat.

  Then the call for help. SOCO IX transport Hephaestus, troops lined up at the drop shafts, ready to go, blasted from the sky over some little world, blasted by desperate colonists using a souped-up core-cracker, one of those things miners use to break open an ice-moon’s shell, get at the mineral meat inside.

  Save us.

  Save our souls.

  Violet’s the one who recognizes the raw, horrid voice on a static-shaded radio link. Isn’t that your friend, Corporal Sonn-Atem?

  Maybe so.

  Please, he calls out, save us. Save my friend Finn.

  We go down.

  Down to the world below.

  Then, only this:

  Skimming low over red ice, I felt the ship, our precious little Athena 7, surge, felt my comlinks sever, saw my emergency boards light up, all amber and gold, not much green, very little blue.

  Orb in Unformed Heaven...

  Restitutor Orbis, Savior of the World...

  World tilting so erratically outside my one little portal.

  Violet screaming something. Something about...

  Yes. Me.

  I remember reaching out, taking hold of the system breakdown lever. Pull. Twist. Our cabins breaking free, solid fuel rockets driving us spaceward...

  Too late.

  I felt the inertial fields go down, whirling force grab my arms and legs, slamming them hard, helpless against the walls.

  Felt my head bounce and crack on the end of my neck, felt my pelvis twist hard around, legs suddenly going numb.

  The crash net snapped open, surrounding me, inflating.

  Thought I heard Violet call my name as I watched the red ground come up.

  Sound of a door slamming hard, then darkness.

  Long, long hovering in pain.

  Everything gone but me.

  Even the pain so very far away.

  Opened my eyes on fire, feeling so stupid, so tired... Oh, the crash net’s deflated somehow, let me go, let me fall on the floor. I’m just lying here, all tangled up with myself. Everything tingling, tingling all at once.

  I lifted one hand so I could wipe simmering sweat from my eyes.

  Look at my hand. Ring finger. Thumb. Something’s bitten the rest of it away, leaving what looks like a half-eaten ortolan behind. Where’s my other hand? Can’t figure it out. Seems to have disappeared. No feeling at all. Not even a phantom left behind.

  I twisted, pushed. Screamed when feeling suddenly came alive in my back.

  From the mouth of the connecting tunnel, I could see into the medevac module. Something big moving there, Something big, dancing in bright orange fire. It’s Dûmnahn dancing, dancing in a little circle, six green legs, black now, drumming on the deck, drumming out a little rhythm as he dances.

  I can’t tell whether that high pitched sound he makes is an endless scream, or just the boil of his juices, steam jetting from cracks in his shell, like a crab at a feast...

  Twist. Push. Scream.

  Then I could see up toward the pilot’s nest.

  There was Violet, hanging in her harness, arms reaching out, eyes open, staring at me so oddly.

  No.

  Not staring at all.

  Below her on the deck was a long, brilliant smear of lilac blood.

  Those things hanging from her. Not limbs. Internal organs, dangling from a long rip in her fur.

  I looked away. Saw a curled-up length of bedraggled fur, possibly her tail.

  I’d gotten to like that tail, liked the way it curled round my body, the way it stroked my back as we made love.

  Vivid blue sparks crackled from the hull, then a square of metal and plastic curled away and familiar faces looked in. “Christ. Look at that...” A familiar voice. Gray smoke jetted, blowing out the flames. People came in and gathered me up.

  And that was that.

  Five. I awoke with a hard start

  I awoke with a hard start, afraid to open my eyes, feeling various pieces of myself come alive, as if I were some old machine experiencing a cold boot after long term storage. Twinges here and there, like power surges flooding limbs that’d been too long still.

  Memories. Childhood me over there, school, playing gatsie with the girls, sharp memory of looking down at myself in half-light after that first time, looking down at my glistening skin, half repelled, half full of joy, remembered boarding Sans Peur. Never did get through on the link.

  On and on. Friends, war, love, death. All the usual things of life.

  Something important happened to me. Something terrible. Can’t remember, quite. Then I opened my eyes.

  The room was pale green, and here I was, floating naked between two field-plates, wires reaching out to me from terminal posts nearby, a young woman, brown hair, brown eyes, pale brown skin, looking in at me, smiling.

  Why is she smiling?

  I moved feebly, looking around, saw myself whole, hale and hearty, stiff little erection poking up out of my middle, waving in the air. Well. That probably explains the smile. I’ve known more than one girl thinks an erection’s the funniest thing about a man.

  Especially one not aimed at her.

  I had a brief fantasy of pulling off my wires, getting out f
rom between the plates and grabbing the pretty brown girl, getting her down on the deck, pulling up her green skirt, getting at the meat of her and...

  I heard her chuckle softly, saw the little smirk on her face, looking not at me but at a tiny freeze-frame panel by my bedside. “Glad you’re feeling better, Mr. Murphy,” she said. “Here, let’s get some of this mess cleared away.”

  Mr. Murphy.

  She did something to the interface and wires started sucking out of my flesh, sliding away into their terminals. When they were gone, the field pushed me to one side, dumping me toward the floor, tilting me upright. I staggered, fantastically dizzy, while the green-clad, brown-eyed girl touched me with a warm hand, helping me stay on my feet, standing close enough my erection poked her in the side, just above one nice, round hip.

  She looked up at me, bright eyed and bushy...

  Something inside my head shied violently away.

  She said, “There’s a bathroom over there, and scrub suits in the closet. When you’re ready, come on out to the nurses’ station and we’ll get you assigned to a dorm.” Then she left.

  I stood still for a little while, not at all at home in my body, looking around the room. Rows and stacks of suspension plates, men, women, things, floating asleep in between them. Nearest to me, a man with no arms, no legs, not much of a head.

  But still alive, I guess.

  Over there, a woman. I can tell it’s a woman from the face and the little flat breasts. Nothing else. The rest of her snipped away, at the waist and elbows. She’ll sleep a long time, growing her bottom half back.

  Felt my erection stir, firming up a bit, and wondered how the half-woman would feel when she awoke to discover herself virgin again.

  I went into the bathroom, intending to masturbate, just so I could be rid of this thing, found myself staring, crystallized with astonishment, at the face in the mirror. Nothing at all like the boy who’d... gone to sleep? Is that what I...

  Man in the mirror with a hard and empty face. Maybe a little bit like my father. Not much. I leaned close, looking into the hard man’s eyes, empty eyes staring back at me. Remembered staring into other eyes, eyes staring back into mine, and, just like that, I remembered Violet. Remembered her and started to cry, watching tears trickle down the hard man’s cheeks and drip off his chin into the sink.