When We Were Real (Author's Preferred Edition)

by William Barton

  It’d been a long, quiet time, not a healing time I suppose, but at least a time for me to get used to myself again, as I floated in my bare little room, staring silently out a tiny porthole of dense, metallized glass at motionless, familiar bright stars, pointless flecks of light floating against the empty backdrop of the sky. Nothing much happens when you’re flying at one-eighth cee. Every now and again a big rock will go by, but it’s always too far away to see with the naked eye—passing that close to a macro-object would get the commander who permitted it cashiered.

  If you turn out the cabin light, press your nose to the glass, every now and again you can just barely catch the glimmer of the deflector field turning away swarms of charged particles, shoving the dust aside. Just once, while I was looking, I saw the pathfinder laser flash, deep purple, vaporizing a speck in our path.

  Toward the end, tiring of the sky at last, I came out of my cocoon, hung around with crew until they started letting me help out in the engineering spaces. Had dinner with Arunachal in her quarters and saw her looking at me that way, was glad when we got to Pasargadae at last. Much longer and it would’ve been rude not to notice her desire.

  Seen from space, Pasargadae 3 is a vast, irregular black clinker three hundred kems across that’d be invisible against black space but for the twinkle of her civilizing lights. Once upon a time, it’d been a fat ball of ice and carbonaceous rock, one of a number of such bodies that’d accumulated in the temporary trailing trojan point Proxima formed during her long, slow hyperbolic swing around the Alpha Centauri barycenter, more or less spherical, symmetrical, mottled. But people came, back in the same era that made Audumla, back when the Jet was first being settled, and pretty soon all the ice was gone, leaving black rock behind. Black rock that’d be black, stinking mud if it weren’t so cold out here.

  Pasargadae 3 and her sisters were convenient for the trade routes that formed back then, remain so for the trade routes that persist, huge, full of people and machines, starships clustering round, putting in for repair, refueling, refit, trading cargo and passengers, coming and going through the infinite night.

  I found myself standing one day, after a good night’s sleep in a cheap transients’ hostel, down at place called Portal 771, watching the stevedores transship material from a longliner called Sky Blue Eyes. Nice, big ship, ten kems long maybe, resting in her berth, front end gaping open like the mouth of a baleen whale, rear end sticking right on out into the starry sky beyond.

  Soft, steady breeze blowing that way, out of Pasargadae 3, toward the open docking portal. I stood and watched men and machines labor, thinking about the captive air technologies of a big port like this. Mingy fields that let the air seep away, because air is cheaper to make than the power to keep it.

  Armed guards here and there. Not enough of them, though. From my vantage point up on a grassy knoll, leaning back against the cool trunk of a gnarly old olive tree, looking down into the valley of the portal, I could see people sneaking through the woods, keeping as far as they could from the armed men, from the rumbling machines.

  Smugglers? Sky Blue Eyes’ yawning cargo hatch, all complex doors and shields, shifting cranes, patches of shadow and light, is fifteen hundred ems across, maybe more. Not much a few dozen security sloggers can do with that.

  Pap.

  Shipyard bull firing his airgun at something in the woods, light weight charge bursting among the trees, bringing down a few leaves. I saw a group of men hurry away from the ship toward a dark tunnel mouth, staggering under a burden of fat, lumpy rucksacks.

  There were more men at the tunnel, motioning them onward, one of them holding a long, slim rifle of his own.

  I took a minute to imagine pitched battles, yardbulls pinned down, hiding behind this forklift and that, defending their turf, dying like good soldiers in defense of the cash, then I stood, picked up my own little backpack, all my worldly goods and chattels coming to fifteen kays, maybe a little less, dusted off my backside and started on the down the hill.

  Armed men and women turning to watch as I approached.

  When I got to the dockmaster’s station and got her attention, she took my credentials and looked them over, identifying me as a half-pay reservist on furlough from Standard ARM. Handsome red-eyed woman with long silver hair, red eyes holding something that seemed like a glint of jealousy. Maybe just my imagination.

  “So?”

  “I’d like to deadhead on whatever Standard pallets are aboard.”

  “Hmh.” Something like disgust in those eyes now, but she turned and pushed into her freeze-frame. “Well, you’re in luck, bucko. There’s a six-pallet rack of macrotome repair kits on deck 67, radial 5. Plenty of room for you to doss out. Here.” She put a boarding chit in my hand, then said, “Make sure you stay in the Standard ARM hold space; don’t mess with anyone else’s cargo—there’s a brig on this ship with a per-kilogram storage fee won’t make your bosses too happy. You can go in the axial corridor if you want; there’s a crew cafeteria at the hub where you can eat.”

  “Corporate charge?”

  “If it’s on your ID. We button up in six hours.”

  I turned away, holding up my pass so the guards could see, took a step toward the mouth of the whale, then turned back. “Ma’m?”

  “What the fuck you want? I’m busy.”

  “Where’s she going?”

  “Wolf 359. Nonstop.”

  “Thanks.”

  I walked toward the ship, feeling my insides crawl a bit. Six hours and they button things up, then your decision’s made, bucko. Wolf 359’s more than a parsec away... Ludmilla’s girls’ll be grown women with babes of their own before you ever come home again.

  But I kept on walking, threading a deadly path among the rumbling machines, kem after kem up the axial corridor to deck 67, then on down radial five to where Standard ARM’s shit was waiting, my home for... sharp bolt of terror inside me then: quite possibly home for more years to come than I’ve already been alive.

  Bits of me wanted to turn tail and run, but... I found a nice, spacious engineering station, neatly buttoned up until some worker out on Wolf would be needing it. Opened it up with my company ID. Threw my stuff in a corner, kicked off my shoes, lay down on a brown leather couch where workers would one day break from their labor, fell asleep waiting.

  By the time I awoke, we were on our way.

  o0o

  I spent the first few weeks sticking to my expected routine, walking up and down the radial corridor, paced fore and aft along the axial from the sealed loading doors to the locked engineering access hatches and back, down to the hull where I could look out a big crystal window at motionless white stars. Back up to the hub cafeteria, where I took sparse, tasteless meals with crew, some of whom where disposed to socialize, with other deadhead passengers, most of whom were not.

  Spent a lot of time sitting alone in almost darkness on my island of pallets, alone with my thoughts. Thoughts which turned out to be a lot less interesting than I’d hoped.

  Couldn’t really think much about Violet, receding to a dream, then less than a dream, despite the persistent intensity of my feelings of loss. Began to realize the magnitude of the mistake I may have made as I sat there in the silence, alone on my nice brown couch, trying to reconstruct the vulval details of a girl whose name I couldn’t remember, trying to bring her alive in memory so I could...

  Well. Female crew. Female passengers. And you’ll have damn-all years to...

  I began to notice things out in the darkness, distant lights and small humanoid shapes moving through the endless landscape of cargo pallets, vast, sealed containers... Everything out there. Far away, well beyond my reach, restricted as I was to these two long corridors, I could see what looked like a fleet of halftrack trucks, shapes of men moving among them, flashlights glinting.

  Other deadheads, I thought, but I never met them at the cafeteria.

  Once, nearby, I saw a small group, two men and a woman, just a few tiers back in the ma
ss, men working with prybars at a container hatch while the woman, a tall, gracile blonde, kept watch. Looking at me, from time to time. What’s going on there? They got inside, came out with some small packages, pulled the door shut so it looked unopened, vanished into the darkness.

  Somewhere on Sky Blue Eyes there’s a cargomaster and small security force. Somewhere a brig, the portmaster said.

  One... day, I guess is as good a word as any, I was sitting on a corner of one of my silent machines, staring at nothing, wondering what the hell, if anything, would come next, when a slim figure clad in black patent leather melted out of the darkness and stood looking up at me.

  Small, barely up to my shoulder, thin and soft looking, with a pale, pixyish face, heart-shaped under short black hair not quite cropped to the point of being a black velvet skullcap. Finally... he? She? “Reese.”

  I said, “What?” Voice a little rusty, thick with phlegm.

  “My name’s Reese.”

  “Oh. Call me Murph.”

  “You a company guard?”

  “Deadhead.”

  Reese grinned, a friendly flash of white teeth that made my heart jump unexpectedly, stepped up on the pallet and swung beside me, folding his/her legs up into tailor’s seat. “You kinda new at this game, ain’tcha?”

  “You a boy or a girl?”

  Reese smirked and said, “Asshole.”

  Meaning boy? Maybe not. I tried to steal a quick glance at the tight crotch of those black leatherette pants, but the shadows were too deep to give a clue. Still, something about this creature... And something like life inside me, stirring, very far away.

  Reese pulled a small packet from inside his/her jacket and held it out. “Want a bite?”

  I took the thing, opened the wrapper, snapped off a crispy hunk. Chocolate sponge, foaming luxuriously around my teeth, flowing lavalike over my tongue, seeming to evaporate as it avalanched down my throat. “Orb. That’s good.”

  He/she took it back, took a little bite, put the rest away.

  Long silence, Reese just looking at me, smiling. Why the hell can’t I think of anything to say? Tell me you’re a girl, Reese? Pull down your pants and prove it please? Finally, I said, “Getting kind of hungry. You, ah, want to come to the cafeteria? I mean...” Hell. I wasn’t this inarticulate with my first girl, much less...

  Reese said, “Um. I don’t...”

  “My treat.”

  He/she grinned. “I’m a bum, Murph.”

  “What?”

  “Christ! You really are a newbie! I’m a fucking stowaway!”

  “Oh.” Brilliant, Murph. “Well.”

  “Yeah. Right.” Reese shrugged, unfolded his/her legs and hopped to the deck. “Be seein’ ya, Murph.” Turned and walked away, not up the corridor but toward the gap between two racks of industrial pallets, already dissolving into the darkness.

  Something, Uncreated Time maybe, put a bolt through my head, making me feel a sudden, awful yawning loneliness. I scrambled to my feet, feet thumping on the deck, and ran into the darkness in the same direction, only to find that Reese had stopped just out of sight, was waiting for me, grinning.

  o0o

  I can’t say why Reese picked me up. There’re people who do that sort of thing, just as there’re people who invite its being done. I never thought of myself as being one of the latter before. He/she led me through the narrow lanes between sealed cargoes, leading me on deeper into trespass-space, qualifying me for that brig.

  Reese laughed when I asked. “Boy, those cargojacks are assholes. I suppose there’s a brig someplace, probably stuffed full of the crew’s own little smuggling ventures.”

  “So... where the hell’s ship’s security?”

  “Here and there. You have to... keep a sharp eye sometimes.”

  Reese, it seems, had been traveling the starways for free all his/her life, bum, child of bums, had been aboard Sky Blue Eyes for almost thirty years, come from someplace on the periphery of the Solar Oort, where those parents had finally decided to settle down.

  “Oh, I stayed at Caledon XXVIII for a while. Nice place, but...” A shrug, a gesture at the darkness.

  “So. Where do you think... uh, where’re you going?”

  “Everywhere, man.”

  “After Wolf?”

  “I don’t know for sure. I heard you could hop from Wolf 359 directly to GJ-eleven-eleven.”

  I thought about that. “Yeah, you could. Standard ARM has a big depot at GJ and... Hell, you could reach the minus-fifteen frontier from there.”

  Reese stood still, looking up at me, eyes aglint in the darkness. “You know the Standard ARM routes?”

  “Well. Sort of. I mean, I had a comp key to the flight log archives.” Saw the look on his/her face. “I was a flight engineer. DSRV.”

  Long silence. “Oh. Were you at Glow-Ice?”

  For some reason, I thought that little war was already forgotten. Maybe just wishful thinking for myself. “Yeah.”

  “Oh.” After a while, we walked on.

  Eventually, we came to a big, dark moonbus, six tracktrucks, fully independent suspension and propulsion on each truck, articulated at two points—the kind of thing you’d use on a large, geologically active body, something with volcanoes, mountains, live glaciers. I tried to think about Wolf 359, about what I knew of its planetary system. Couldn’t remember much. Someplace like Mars, maybe? Or the Glow-Ice Worlds?

  Wolf 359 is a lot smaller, dimmer and older than Proxima Centauri.

  Reese rapped softly on the maintenance access hatch, a quick, antichaotic pattern. Something familiar there. The backbeat from an old song.

  The door slid open, round, obviously female face freezing in a half-grin as she saw me. “What the fuck, Reese.” A throaty voice, classically sexy.

  “New chum, Hibi. Let’s get inside.”

  The face receded and we crawled through, sliding the hatch shut behind us, snuffing what little light there was. I could hear more than one person breathing. Reese’s voice said, “Trell?”

  A man’s voice, thin and reedy, but definitely male: “Sure. Hang on.” Then the light came up, rising slowly as a dimmer was twisted. It was a battery-powered camp lantern, the sort of thing my father and I used down in the bayou, just now plugged into the truck’s charger tap, running off the engine’s storage plates.

  The man, who was a head taller than me and half as wide, face as pale as pink pastel chalk, sparse hair silver-gray, said, “So. What stray cat is this?” The woman, Hibi, half his height and twice my width, her own dark hair shining bronze in the lamplight, came and stood by his side.

  Reese smiled and said, “Murph? My friends Trellis and Hibi.”

  There was a long silence while the two of them looked me up and down, taking in the cut of my clothes, the newness of my boots. Then Trellis said, “Welcome to our humble abode, Mr. Murph.” He gestured at a campstove nearby, also plugged into the charger tap. “We were about to take our evening repast. Won’t you join us?”

  Something inside me melted on the spot. “I’d be pleased to, Mr. Trellis. Ms., um, Hibi?” I slid the little pack off my shoulder, zipped it open and pulled out a two-liter coolbottle of fortified kvass I’d brought back from the cafeteria, intending to drink myself to sleep later on.

  Trellis seemed to jump when he saw what I was holding, gave me a broad grin, and said, “Well. You can pick ‘em, Reesie!”

  o0o

  The supper wasn’t much, some of the better components of emries they’d pilfered from the bus’s larder, not much different from the things we’d eaten aboard Athena, but well-washed-down by sharp, narky-tasting kvass. Afterward, I sat and listened while Trellis talked, Hibi curled up, almost asleep in his arms, zoned out by unaccustomed liquor.

  Improbable adventures of a man who’d run away from his robotic job a half century ago, running away, to nowhere at all, never looking back, Hibi awakening to giggle when he told about his sexual conquests, Trellis growing somber as he mentioned men and women, dead
now, long ago done in by this yardbull squadron or that.

  A long tale about the six years he’d spent working for GalactoFed Mining, out by Lalande 21185, having fallen afoul of a pressgang during a stopover at the Tralgiansk Nexus Habitat Cluster.

  Don’t know whether any of it was true or not, but it brought back any number of childhood dreams: all about a life out among the stars.

  Is that what I’ve done to myself?

  Later, as Trellis and Hibi snored on the floor, I followed Reese down the truck’s maintenance corridor to the rear access space, a little room right under the battery, a space quite warm and comfortably dry. He/she had a doss made up here, quite a lot off stuff beside a rather big rucksack, pillows, blankets...

  He/she turned and looked at me, face expressionless. Finally: “You got a blanket and stuff in that little thing?” Nodding at my backpack.

  I nodded.

  “OK, you can doss here if you want.” A softening look, for just a moment, then, “Provided you don’t snore.”

  When I zipped open the pack and pulled out the cammo, shaking it apart into a full-sized mummybag, Reese said, “Christ. That must’ve set you back some.”

  I shrugged, unable to remember whether it had or not. Money’s meaningless, when you’ve got it.

  Reese shrugged out of the leather jacket, then quickly pulled a pale gray, silky-looking shirt off over... well. Flat, smooth chest with little dark nipples. No indication one way or another. He/she stood bare chested, seeing my stare, motionless, hands on an ornate silver belt buckle.

  “Christ, you are kind of an asshole, you know pal?”

  I nodded, waiting.

  A soft sigh. “OK, you win, Murph. I am a, um, female I guess you’d want to say...” She undid the belt, unzipped her pants, toed off her boots, slid everything to the floor and stood there in scant, pale green underwear. Saw me still looking at her, looked away for a moment, frowning, then looked back.

  I really can’t imagine what the expression on my face must have been. Something troubling, perhaps.