When We Were Real (Author's Preferred Edition)

by William Barton

  After the engines stopped firing, after I’d blinked the pale yellow shadows out of my eyes, the view outside was... shifting. White stars turning this way and that, exostation swiftly growing tiny, vanishing into the nothingness. Every now and again the engines would burp, fire raging beyond my window, ullage pulse warning me just in time.

  People all around me talking—I could hear seven or eight different languages. With a ship like this, it will be a voyage of no more than a few hours...

  Looking out the window as the minutes slid by, I watched the star system of Wolf 359 grow. All of it. A star system whose ecliptic diameter, edge to edge across the orbit of its most distant “major object” was seventy million kems, hardly more than the width of Sinope’s orbit around Jupiter. No planets to speak of here. Ransacking dusty school memories, I could recall something called Hardraade, an irregular ice mass some four hundred kems across.

  There: Wolf 359 itself, already showing a disk through brilliant pinkish glare. Not so brilliant you couldn’t look right at it for a good long while, Wolf more like a luminous world than a star, off-white light shining from the surface of the Disk, a system of silver rings more glorious by far than Saturn’s, platter of rings around a sun only 63,000 kems in diameter, a little larger than Uranus, about half the size of Saturn.

  The fat guy beside me said, “Hey. You a fuckin’ tourist or something?”

  I glanced over at him and shrugged. “I guess so.”

  “Man, you gotta be fuckin’ stupid to come here.”

  I looked back out the window and saw that Wolf had grown gigantic in no time at all, our transport orbiting obliquely in toward the edge of the rings. You could make them out now as a whirlwind of orbiting masses, large, small, in between, shimmering like metallic glitter, whipped around and around by the star’s mass, a little more than four percent that of the Sun.

  Call it forty Jupiters, crushed into a thing so small, crushed until its fusion phoenix lit, flooding the sky with pearlescent fire.

  o0o

  A day, a night, another day, wandering around nearly weightless in the deep tunnels of a solid body called Holger’s Heaven, hanging out at a crummy worker’s hostel while I tried to find the authorities, any authorities at all, finally stumbling on a hole-in-the-wall office where a gray-bearded man with shiny yellow eyes scratched his whiskers and tried to figure out what regulation applied.

  OK, young fellow. Go ahead and... do whatever you want, I guess.

  A few days after that, after renting an antique freeze-frame at some kind of public library deep within the rock and ice, I found a place to go, found a way to get there, and I was off.

  Call them the Sunrise Mountains.

  Everyone else does.

  Everyone who comes to Wolf 359.

  Comes and visits a place called the Sea of Green.

  Cold here. Vistas like Antarctica, distant white hills, shadowy black crags knife-edge sharp under a deep, starless mauve sky, Wolf 359 huge in that sky, brilliant red-gold light making your eyes ache, making them leak tears that threatened to freeze on your cheeks.

  When you stand on the edge of the world like this, bundled up against the cold, you can look back away from the sun, look down the tunnel of your shadow toward darkness... there, beyond the mountains, the dim, twinkling stars, feeble, barely able to force their way through the cold mist.

  Or you can look the other way, down across the Sea of Green itself, toward this little body’s substellar point, where the meltwater comes to a boil, column of water vapor rising up into an almost-transparent mushroom cloud that does nothing to hide a too big, too bright, too close star.

  Something skritched near my feet, seemed to duck away when I looked. There, over by that little black rock, bit of meteoritic flotsam undamaged by its slow fall through Green’s epeiric atmosphere, something. I knelt, feeling cold through the kneepads of my rented hotsuit, pulled the rock gently out of the way... It was a little pink thing, like a bit of molten putty, cowering in the snow, seeming to shiver.

  I reaching out, thinking to pick it up, cradle it in my gloved hands, maybe warm it some to stop that unseemly shiver... stopped myself just in time as the stuff shrank from my touch, starting to flow slowly away.

  It stopped when I did, seeming to wait. A little pseudopod grew from the upper surface, paused for a second, then blinked open a tiny green eye, faceted, like a flake of emerald fresh from the jeweler’s wheel.

  I said, “Hi, there.” Nothing. Little green eye staring at me, motionless. After a while, a second pseudopod grew, off to one side, blinked open a blue sapphire eye that stretched away, bobbing and weaving.

  I started to reach out again, not intending to touch it, knowing its fragile substance would splash and burn if I did, but the thing flattened abruptly, seemed to sink into the snow, and was gone, not even a stain left behind.

  Not even a fare thee well.

  I straightened up and started to walk, UVless rays from Wolf 359 without substance on my face, walking down a long, icy hill toward the sea. Wet ice here. Careful not to slip. Harmless in the low gee that makes you bob and sway like this, but still...

  When I accidentally stepped on a little green crust, it popped and snapped like frying bacon, smoking and curling as it burned away to black flakes. Sorry. Whoever you were.

  I remember reading once how surprised the first expedition to Wolf was when they found life here, the most complex life found anywhere up to that time. No planets? How could you have life around a dim little M8e like that, a cold red star whose only activity was an occasional deadly burp of starfire, prominences licking up in periodic fury, every time the magnetic field lines reversed.

  And yet, over the long, long eons... well the inner ring system, you see, lies within Wolf 359’s ecosphere, a million whirling little worlds made of wet ice and carbonaceous chondrules.

  Down by the edge of the steaming sea, the air actually begins to seem warm, water vapor swirling about in little puffs, like ragged, miniature clouds, wreathing suddenly about your head, appearing and disappearing like magic.

  By the time I got close, could hear the sharp slopping sounds of little wavelets bouncing off the ice-shelf, I was walking ankle deep in what I imagined was freezing water, glad for my nice, waterproof rental boots. Up ahead was a broad crescent of something that looked like shiny black mud, parked on it, a lozenge-shaped vehicle finished in bright red enamel, forward end bracketed with windows, interior dark.

  A flitter, perhaps, fancier model than the one we’d had back home.

  The sudden surge of remembering myself in Audumla came like a tiny electric shock, quickly suppressed.

  The black stuff was indeed mud, sticking to my boots like soft shit, every footfall liberating a puff of ripe organic stench, making me remember an unpleasant night when I’d helped my father repair the failing digestive system of a decrepit CHON processor, poor old thing living all by itself, trapped in a clearing of its own design, deep in the feral forests of Audumla.

  Nobody in the car. A trail of footprints, full of muddy water now, like a chain of little lakes, making a trail to the sea. I followed them down to the water and, shading my eyes from Wolflight, scanned the choppy green surface.

  There. A few hundred ems out, a little black dot, the head of a swimmer. Every now and again, you could see the flail of an arm as it rose above the surface.

  I remembered a thousand old dramas, stories of people deciding to end it all by swimming out to sea until they drowned. Every now and again, one of those would provoke a suicide in Audumla, where we had lakes, if not seas.

  I remembered a girl from school who pulled that one, was dead for hours before someone missed her and went looking for the carcass, was in the hospital for weeks afterward, because some scavenger’d eaten away part of her guts.

  No one said much about it after she came back to school; she still had few friends, fewer still after that. Watching the swimmer, I wondered briefly if I should make an effort to... what, swim
on out after this one now? I pictured myself drowning in an icy Sea of Green and wondered what the medical facilities were like here.

  The black dot began moving closer to the muddy beach, leaving a little white vee behind it in the water. I guess this gravity would facilitate swimming, and, as it got closer, I could see the shape of a human form, outlined in pale flesh and green shadow, stretched out, more or less on the surface of the water.

  Finally, close to shore, she stood, the two of us looking at one another, and I marveled that Uncreated Time would bring me all the way to Wolf 359, only to be confronted by yet another naked woman, when all I really wanted, here and now, was to find a wilderness in which to be alone.

  “Who the hell are you?” she said, standard English, in a voice hard with the habits of command, harder than any voice I remember Violet using. Harder even than my mother’s voice.

  She was a bizarre sight, even after all I’d gotten used to, pasty white skin netted with blue veins, splotched with pink here and there, skin covering up a banding of stark musculature, long, ropy black hair hanging about her shoulders, runneling icewater. Flat face, almost featureless but for the pale blue eyes of a fantasy ghost.

  “Speak up boy!” She put her hands on her hips, showing big tufts of black axial hair, matching a bigger swatch spread at the base of her belly. When she walked out of the water, squelching up into the sticky mud, I saw she had broad, spatulate feet ending in stubby little toes, the feet of a human bred for high gee.

  I’d never studied adaptive physiology, but guessed her features added up to somewhere between nine and ten ems per square second.

  I held out my hand and said, “Hello. My name’s, um, Murph.”

  A flash of anger in her pale blue eyes, eyes looking at my hand like I was offering her a fistful of mud. “So? What the fuck’re you doing here?”

  I’d not given much thought to the social structure of Wolf 359, but was beginning to guess a few details. So: “I’m a, uh, tourist. From near the Centauri Jet.”

  Anger fading suddenly, replaced by interest. She scratched herself under one heavy breast, and said, “Traveling in style?”

  I shook my head, then, seeing my body language meant little to her, said, “Company deadhead. Standard ARM.”

  She shrugged. “We don’t get many of either out here.”

  I remembered the smelly fat guy on the transport.

  She turned away, facing back out to sea, arching her back, taking a deep breath of dank, shit-scented air, startling me with the way the muscles shifted and flexed under the skin of her back. She said, “You swim?”

  I pictured myself in the green sea, bumping up against little ice floes. “Well. I, um... I guess I’m not used to the weather here.”

  She looked back at me, face crinkled with amusement. “Idiot. Wade out a little and feel the water with your hand.”

  I sloshed out until it was up to mid-calf, thankful for the waterproof suit, bent down and... Hmh. Warm as a tub.

  She said, “Water’s boiling a few hundred meters out, you know. It stays warm on the surface because fresh meltwater sinks to the bottom and flows out under the substell.”

  Which made perfect sense, now that I thought about it.

  She grinned, fingering red nipples puckered into stiff little raspberries, and said, “Warmer than the fuckin’ air, anyway!” Held out her hand to me and said, “My name’s Porphyry. Porphyry Campobello, of Melina’s Nest.”

  Her hand, when I took it, was hard and strong.

  o0o

  We swam for a while in the bath-warm waters of the Sea of Green, then Porphyry led me, shivering and naked, to her flitter, pulling me inside, dripping icewater, reeking of metallic salts, to sit on the car’s furry upholstery, throwing my hotsuit in the back with her own.

  “There now,” she said, “let’s get some heat cranked up and...” Something in the flitter controlbox must have been listening, for little lights came on and dry, warm air started blowing around my ankles. After a while, I stopped shivering.

  “Well, let’s get the hell out of here.” I felt a soft vibration start up somewhere in the car, then she put her hands on the steering pads and we lifted off.

  For some reason it didn’t surprise me when the thing turned out to be a little more than just a flitter, angling sharply upward across the Sea of Green, cutting straight through the vapor jet, craft shuddering softly as it punched through turbulence, mauve sky turning deep purple, then black, spackled with a few bright stars, the rest of it washed away by Wolf’s bright light.

  Below us, stretching away in all directions, the ring plane was like an ocean of molten metal, Sea of Green hanging suspended above it like a flattened eyeball, quickly growing smaller.

  “Where’re we going?”

  She looked over at me, and said, “Home. You do want to come with me, don’t you?”

  Home. Just a word.

  I said, “Sure.”

  o0o

  Soon, there came a moment when I was lying beside Porphyry in her huge, magically soft bed, bed made from aerogel and silk and who knows what, deep in the folds of Melina’s Nest. Waiting, I guess, for her to say something.

  This is that terribly familiar time, when the squirmy getting-to-know-you preliminaries are over with, when the heart-pounding excitement of new-partner sex has come and gone, when you wait to see just whose depths you’ve plumbed.

  Easy preliminaries, sturdy Porphyry in command of her emotions and body, doing something so obviously a familiar part of her life. Good sex, after a quick, muscular fashion, Porphyry greasily lubricious, targeting her pleasure like some gamepark quarry.

  And plenty of adaptive skill in there so I could find what I wanted, as well.

  Now, she stretched, making a sound that was almost a purr, arching her back, nuzzling silk pillowslips full of spongy gel, then curled on one side, looking at me, face set in something that was not quite a smile. Should I say something? No. This is just a moment in time. Tomorrow you’ll be somewhere else.

  She edged closer, reached out one hard, blunt-fingered hand, ran it across the damp surface of my chest, down onto my belly, ran her fingers through wet-matted pubic hair, curled them round the flaccid, shrunken mass of my prick.

  Somewhere inside, I felt a pang of renewed desire, as though from a ghost not part of me at all. And with it, a desire to be elsewhere. Something about this woman. Something very different from Reese... and I thought of Violet.

  Porphyry said, “You look so funny, so... I don’t know.” She was massaging me now, blood-sponge tissues struggling to reëngorge. “Sort of... half way between a contract worker, a bondservant, and... one of us.”

  Plenty of people bustling about Melina’s nest, doing things, busy, busy. People, real people, men and women, but behaving, maybe, just a bit like my mother’s silvergirls.

  She snickered at my renewed erection. “A real man wouldn’t want this. He’d get up and leave, go do something... manly.”

  I didn’t have the slightest idea what she was talking about.

  She said, “Damn. Look at those little round feet of yours. Long toes. Long, skinny arms. You look like a fucking chimpanzee.”

  I sorted through remembered images of various extinct apes, trying to remember which ones had been chimpanzees. The middle-sized ones, I thought, not the big gray critters or the funny-looking redheads.

  She said, “You’re not a runaway optimod, are you?”

  Stupid. There must not be very many optimods out here or she’d know the difference. I said, “Racial adaptation. This is... what we look like around Centauri Jet, these days.”

  She grinned, then rolled away, sprawling onto her back, flexing her knees so they pointed in opposite directions, feet pressed together, cocking her pelvis back so her vulva opened like a black-petaled flower. “Come on, Superman,” she said, “Let’s get that big old thing inside me some more. Let’s see what you can do.”

  Orb knows what a man can do. He doesn’t tell us what women
really want, realizing we don’t need to know.

  For a moment, I remembered the things Dûmnahn had tried to tell me, once upon a time, time that seemed long ago now.

  I climbed in her saddle as directed, wondering at the cultural referent in her remark. Superman? English term translated from a keyword, übermensch, in some centuries-old racialistic doctrine. To what master race does she think I belong?

  Certainly not hers.

  o0o

  Afterward, she led me to a shower stall the size of any decent human’s bedroom, larger than whole apartments you see in the slumcrawl dramas of the DataWarren, washed me with her own hands, dried me off with impossibly soft, ridiculously fluffy white towels.

  Hard to know what to think, standing there with this bizarre woman kneeling on the wet tile before me, nuzzling my genitals with her face.

  She grinned up at me and said, “Kind of fun, doing it without servants or anything...”

  I couldn’t even guess. Somewhere on some datatrack or another, I could have found stories about this world and all its people, but I never had. In the volume of space inhabited by humans, a couple of dozen cubic parsecs, there are a handful of stars, a few hundred planets... millions of comets, hundreds of millions of planetoids, billions of lesser bodies, trillions of people in uncounted habitats.

  She led me, still naked, out of the bedroom, whose door we’d never closed, out into the byways of Melina’s Nest, where men and women bustled about, part of the background, not quite invisible.

  Not quite.

  The sun deck, when she led me through broad, folding glass doors, was so improbable as to be unexpected, a wide expanse of lacquered red wood, a rough hewn railing, beyond, a sheer drop, hundreds of ems to crashing surf below, sparkling blue ocean under a wide blue sky, striated by just a hint of wispy white cloud.

  Porphyry said, “You like?”

  I nodded.

  She said, “It’s California. My grandparents used to live here!”

  Here on this deck or... California. Now where... I tipped my head back, staring up at that tiny, absurdly bright white sun until my eyes started to ache and tear, feeling a flood of hard UV prickling on my skin. In a little while, long-unused melanin pumps would start to work, and soon I’d be tan.