When We Were Real (Author's Preferred Edition)

by William Barton

  Sudden shock of realization: He’s in the Firehall only because the Goddess can’t abide a suicide. Hideous fantasies then, of my father... doing it. I don’t have the courage to ask how... Images of him in a nice, warm bathtub, slitting his wrists with a desplining scalpel, expiring quietly in a scarlet pool, sighing with relief, maybe thinking of me right near the end.

  Well, no. Pretty picture but... they can bring you back from that easily enough.

  I pictured him with the high-powered airgun I knew he hadn’t used since he was a boy, taking it apart so lovingly, oiling all the parts, making sure it worked just right. Kneeling in his room, cocking the chamber, ka-ching, putting the barrel in his mouth... no. No, that’s too obscene, image of my father fellating the gun. No, I see him putting the barrel on the bridge of his big nose, right between the eyes, just below his brow-ridge, where the dark hair of his brows met. Putting his thumb in the trigger guard. A slight tug. Pap.

  Top of his skull bouncing off the ceiling, falling, landing in the doorway, Mother coming to see what the hell all the noise was, finding it there, empty but for a spatter of blood, rocking gently back and forth...

  I got out of the car then and went inside, knelt at the altar and said a prayer for Orb, to help him in his eternal battle, said another prayer to Uncreated Time, which is all the hope any of us ever had. Lit a candle in my father’s name, a little gleam to help him find his way through the cavern of the night.

  Went to the Hall of the Dead, walked down long rows of crystal vases, gleaming by firelight, until I came to him. Just a teacup full of soft gray ash, a little bit of bone. Silver nameplate that said, Hytaspes Murphy. Nothing more. Nothing more needed. Restitutor Orbis knows who he really was. Uncreated Time has taken him back.

  I felt the tears well up in my eyes then, but they couldn’t spill over.

  o0o

  I spent the next few days wandering around my old haunts, checking up on all my old comrades, boys I’d known and hung with for all those years that’d once seemed to mean something. Found most of them hale, hearty, settled to a fare thee well. What the hell do they call it? “Comforts of the marriage bed?” Yeah.

  Stopped by Styrbjörn’s house so I could tell his mother how sorry I’d been to hear about her husband—damned if I could remember his fucking name, Gladulf was what it said in the freeze-frame directory—sorry as hell to hear how he’d been killed, he and his whole crew, by a freak accident on a routine cloudskimming run through Ygg’s helium-laden cloud decks. Something, anything, threw them out of control, plunging deeper and deeper and gunch.

  Well, they said, at least it was quick.

  I had a fantasy of being there myself, of being Gladulf, sitting there, struggling with the controls, listening to the hideous whine from without, listening to the creak and crackle of the hull as is shrank under the pressure, listening to his men, crying out, sobbing away their final prayers...

  Or maybe they just sat in stolid silence, brave men all, waiting for it. Just waiting. You know.

  I imagined sweat gathering, thick and oily, perhaps a little cold despite the growing heat, on Gladulf’s brow. Then the machinegun popping of the hullvalves as they failed, as they imploded, then the shriek of ripping metal, the soft crackle of dying plastic.

  Then a quick wall of deadly, solid air.

  Well at least that part would have been quick.

  But the long fall... that would have been... interesting.

  Her new husband, a much younger man, never did say anything to me the whole time I was there; seemed glad when I rose to go.

  Then Styrbjörn himself, greeting me in the open door of Sieglindëshall, throwing his arms around me like a long lost brother, leading me in to their small but well-appointed parlor. “Oh, Goddess, Murphy! We all missed you!”

  Sieglindë Smillasdottir stood in the entryway to the rest of the house, demure, smiling, waiting for me to notice her. Tall, slim, blonde like her husband, dressed in clingy white shorts that showed the outline of her vulva, a sheer haltertop the let you see the shadow of her nipples.

  OK, Styrbjörn. Got what you wanted.

  When she came forward to give me a hug of her own, I wondered just how the hell I’d missed her, way back when. Orb, inhabiting my balls right now, was letting me know I’d been remiss and... shit. More gates like this one hanging around school than you could ever have opened in a million years, even if you’d had nothing else to do.

  Missed her because the other ones were already queued up, turn and turn about.

  Is that really the way it was? I can’t know. These are only memories, after all. And I slept for a long, cold time.

  Later, in a quiet time, after they’d shown me their little daughter Ylva, after they’d let me know that Sieglindë was pregnant with their second, this one to be a son, a son who’d be named Gladulf, we talked. Old times, new times. Dead fathers whose souls we mourned. I told him a little bit about the things that’d happened to me, about the places I’d been, the terrible things I’d seen, and he clucked his tongue and shook his head, stole glances at a concerned-looking Sieglindë.

  And I asked, “How’d you like to go hunting again some time? You know.”

  He gave me a look like somebody trying to swallow his tongue, looked fearfully at Sieglindë, and said, “Well, ah, you know, Murph. Gee, I’d, ah, like to... um.”

  Sieglindë Smillasdottir smiled and said, “We’ve got a lot to do, Murph. It’s... not like the old days for us.” She jiggled the child in her lap. “Being a grown-up’s harder than we all imagined.”

  Styrbjörn said, “Sorry, Murph. You know.”

  Yeah. Sure.

  Some other time, Murph.

  Some other time.

  o0o

  You’re nothing if you don’t have courage, so, after only a little dithering, I went to see Ludmilla Nellisdottir. Not at her Mother’s, of course, I didn’t have that much courage. Imagined myself standing in the open door of Nellishall and... well, no.

  I walked through the town for a long time, walked through dusty streets flooded with stemshine, passing by the walls and neatly manicured lawns of the Mother’s mansions, smelling familiar old smells under a familiar, dusky sky. Something wrong. Just my being here after all this time? Being here, while my father lies dead?

  No. Something more. Maybe no more than that I’d really liked the blue skies and puffy white clouds of Telemachus Major, liked the brisk feel of that outside-in world so much better.

  Thought about Dûmnahn for a little while, faceless thing of a thousand doppelgängers. Nothing new to him, merely to me, for the Dûmnahn I’d known as a comrade already had thousands of going doubles scattered across all human-inhabited space.

  Then I thought about Violet.

  Memories. You know?

  Bits and pieces of her inside me.

  Found myself on the walkway in front of Ludmillashall.

  Red sandstone stucco, neat white trim, green lawn, dark windows, pale, lacy curtains dimly visible. No movement. No sound. I suppose I could turn and go away, but... right. You owe her this, don’t you?

  I think I stood for a long while, maybe waiting for someone, something, to give me an answer. What did I owe the people of this world, mother, father, brother, sister, the children I’d known and played with, pretended to be one of, the girls whose gates I’d opened? “Taken for a test drive.” Did we really say that? Who the hell did we think we were?

  Then the door opened and there was Ludmilla, unchanged, standing there, staring, face... expressionless. That’s it. No smile, no frown, no anger, no sorrow. She said, “Come inside, Murph. I’m tired of waiting.”

  The freeze-frame told me she’d married about a year after I left, to a boy from some other school district, Sandow Francessson, three esses making me smile, making me think of the way I would have laughed, would have teased him way back when. A Mother should think of that when she names a daughter. “Frances? Why, then my grandsons will all have three esses in their name!”<
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  I went up the walkway, and she stood aside to let me in, closed the door and left us standing, facing each other in the silence of her parlor, in the deeper silence of her house. Freeze-frame said she had two children, daughters, Oddny and Nelli, no sons. For no reason at all, I imagined Nelli Ludmillasdottir was her grandmother’s favorite.

  She said, “The children are in school. When I saw you standing out front, I told Sandy to leave by the back way.”

  I felt a peculiar little pang, found myself remembering the way she’d... proposed. Imagined her throwing her husband out, then slipping off her panties before opening the door to invite me in. If I look behind the couch, will I find some crumpled little scrap of colored cloth?

  “Doesn’t he work?”

  “Of course he does. Night shift.”

  Meaning he won’t be home ‘til tomorrow morning. This is going to be a hard night for you, isn’t it, Sandow Francessson? Doing whatever you do. I pictured him at midnight, doing a robotic job, the same task over and over again, involving so little there was nothing to stand in the way of him picturing me, face down in his wife’s Altar.

  She stood looking at me, beady eyed, waiting for something, I guess.

  Not really the same woman. If you look closely, you can see a hardness around her eyes, in the set of her mouth. This is Ludmilla Nellisdottir, Mother of Children, with a man to call her own, whose love she commands in just the same way she commands a silvergirl’s obedience.

  She said, “Damn you, Murph.”

  I think I expected her to cry then, but she didn’t.

  Finally, I said, “I guess I came over to apologize, Luddy.” Did I? Or did I just come over to say that, because you’re supposed to?

  She turned away, walking toward the couch, and I could see the way her buttocks, curved, smooth, were neatly outlined under her short skirt. Not hard at all to imagine that colored scrap of cloth behind the couch.

  It’s neat as a pin in here, Murph. She’ll have put them in the hamper before coming to the door and summoning you inside.

  She turned to face me again, hands raised slightly, not quite tucked into the waistband of her skirt, making me imagine that she would, in the next second, put them there, would whip the skirt away and stand exposed before me.

  She said, “There’s no reason for you to be sorry, Murph. I backed you into a corner. I shouldn’t have.” A brief, mournful look on her face, quickly displaced with some wry, humorless smile. “I thought I was so damned smart, you know? I thought I could figure you out, plan a strategic campaign, outwit all the other girls, with all their silly, test-driving, gatesie-playing ways.” A somber look at my face, smoothing the front of her skirt against her belly, hands not quite on her crotch. “Then I figured I could do it the Mothers’ way.”

  All those words. I felt... breathless.

  The somber look deepened. “I’m sorry about your dad. No one expected...”

  Brief reimagining of my mother, finding the top of his damned head rocking empty in the doorway. “Why did you think you wanted me?”

  A little shrug. “I don’t know. Maybe just because all the other girls did.” She sat down on the couch, played with the hem of her skirt oh-so-prettily, pulled it up slightly, showing me a few more cems of thigh. Any second now, the skirt’ll come up, her legs will spread, and there’ll be Goddess’ Altar, Child’s Gate, ready, willing, able, and wet.

  She tucked the material between her legs and pressed her knees together. “I’m really sorry, Murph. I’ve always felt responsible for... what happened.”

  And then she started to cry.

  Not long afterward, by the time we’d finished talking things out, her children came home, lovely little girls with long chestnut hair who seemed pleased to have company and didn’t ask where the hell Daddy’d gone. Supper. A long evening chat, playing with two little girls who could’ve been mine and...

  When the shadows were long outside, the stemshine growing dim, I took my leave, and Ludmilla made no effort to have me stay.

  o0o

  The next day, stemshine so bright it seemed almost yellow, I went out to the garden shed, where Lenahr told me he’d once seen the last of my father’s effects. My father, as though he were the son of some other man. Hell, maybe he is. Who’s to say a woman who’ll marry a hooknose tinker won’t then cheat on him later?

  I tried to imagine that. Tried to imagine my mother sucking a lover’s prick. Tried to imagine her groaning under him, conceiving Lenahr... no. Not her style. Not at all. Lenahr? Well, make that Lenahr Helgasson. Forget about all this Murphy bullshit.

  Out in the shed, among barrels of potting soil, bales of peat moss, all the tools the family’s silvergirl servants used to keep our lawns lustrous and green, our gardens fresh with ageless flowers, I looked for his things. Nothing. Tools. Diagnostics. Repair kits. Reference markers... over in one corner, leaning against the wall, stood our old plastic skiff, two oars stacked beside it. When I took it down, the inside was dirty, as though someone had used it as a tub for mixing soils. No sign of the old motor.

  Eyes on me.

  I looked up and found one of the silvergirls standing in the shed’s open doorway, watching me. Nicely shaped, this silver one. Slim arms, strong legs, narrow, rounded hips... Nothing between her legs, of course. They make them that way. “Where are Dr. Goshtasp’s things?”

  The silvergirl, voice light soprano, said, “Sold.”

  “And who repairs you all now?”

  Long silence, silver eyes on me. Finally: “No one. When a unit fails, Mother sells it to the scrapman and buys a replacement.”

  Orb. “Think the scrapman fixes them up and sells them as secondhand?”

  Another long silence, then the silvergirl said, “We hope so.”

  I stood looking into the robot’s eyes, wondering what it really meant. Does this thing really feel enough to know hope, or is it just using the word in a preprogrammed way? No way to know. But I imagined it thinking about the alternative, imagining its own precious parts sold off, one by one, as components of some cheap repair kit.

  Get your silvergirls working again for half the price.

  I’d seen that ad a thousand times as a boy, never once wondered what it cost in... hell. I almost said “human suffering,” didn’t I?

  I had the silvergirl get out one of the utility flitters for me, one of the ones they used for hauling plants and dirt around, running errands, going to the grocery and whatnot; had it tie the boat on top and drive me down to the foot of the endhills, then down the long road that led to my father’s favorite stream.

  Once the boat was in the water and I in the boat, I told it to come for me again just before darkness. Maybe I’ll be here and maybe I won’t. You just wait. Then I started to row, silvergirl standing on the bank, watching me grow smaller and smaller until I disappeared round the first bend in the river.

  By midday I’d been rowing for a couple of hours, stemshine bright on my skin, prickling as though the UV threatened sunburn. Nonsense. Not enough UV here for that—even though we never think of it, Audumla’s quite the artificial world.

  Glow-Ice. Those were real worlds, red and cold, small, sullen sun in the sky. Deadly.

  I rowed past one last familiar bend, brushing past feral vegetation, rowed toward a clear embankment I knew would be there, let the skiff crunch on the shore, tossing my oars in the bottom with a clatter as I jumped out, bending, pulling my skiff well up onto the muddy beach.

  When I turned to look up the hill, nostrils well filled with the scent of organic rot, Beebee was there, looking down at me, motionless. Then, “Master Darrayush?”

  Me. The name under which I might have done business. Darrayush and Goshtasp, Son and Father, partners. I took a deep breath, putting all that out of my head, and said, “Hello, Beebee. How you been?”

  He began to shout, calling out all those familiar old names. Then the packing crates opened and the trampled down, trash-filled yard around me filled with boxes and kits,
machines and whatnot, bright eyed, curious, reaching out to touch me, whisper my name.

  They remember me.

  And remember him as well.

  So I played with Mrs. Trinket’s kits all afternoon, chattered with her husbands, twenty in number now, teasing her about having the fortitude to handle them all. Asked after their health, asked who was caring for them...

  Watched the stemshine begin to wane, knowing it was time for me to go.

  What if I stayed here?

  There’s plenty of room for one more Timeliner tinker in this little world, isn’t there?

  Sure there is.

  I could stay, sell my services, fixing up silvergirls, visiting Mrs. Trinket and all her kits on the weekend...

  Sudden memory of my last “hunting” trip with Styrbjörn. Allomorph whores. Field of butterflies. Violet smirking, saying, “Well, it’s not quite the same thing now, is it?”

  I could visit Ludmilla, play with her children, get to know her husband... Orb stirred in my loins, letting me know what would happen if I spent much time at Ludmillashall. She hasn’t forgotten. Nor have you.

  After a while I said my goodbyes, little ones clustering round my legs. Beebee helped me get the skiff back in the water, then shook my hand like a man and told me he hoped he’d see me again one day. Stood and watched as I rowed away in waning purple stemlight, growing smaller and smaller until I went round the bend.

  The next morning, before anyone else was up, I checked the freeze-frame, looking over freighter schedules. Then I went on up the elevator to the axial port, got aboard some nameless little ship, a tanker loading Helium III, bound for someplace I never heard of, and in only hours I was gone.

  It was days before I realized I could’ve stopped by the Firehall and taken Dad away.

  Six. A couple of months after

  A couple of months after leaving Ygg and Audumla, the helium-III freighter dropped me at its terminus, a deep-space transport nexus called Pasargadae 3. I shook hands with the crew, gave Commander Arunachal a hug for being so nice to me—mostly just for letting me be, turned and walked away through a maze of frosty plumbing that defined the refueling depot, down into the belly of yet another beast.