When We Were Real (Author's Preferred Edition)

by William Barton

  Faint, ancient, grainy fear. Those images, images of a terrestrial sea. The diorama sea I admired from Porphyry’s sundeck.

  ... only the crowns of the forest giants were visible, and only the nearest of those.

  In the distance, against the cloudless backdrop of a cornflower sky, the flat vee-shape of a buzzard circled. Familiar. We had them in Audumla, didn’t we?

  The attempt to remember mad a faint, barely-perceptible constriction of fear, deep in my chest, back by my spine.

  Beyond the sky, eerily, I could see the half-faded crescent of reddish-brown Wernickë, and, there, the sparkle of Sirius B. No sense looking at A, blinding even through the shield. I suppose, if I looked away, down by the far horizon, I might even make out a few bright stars.

  When I looked, I was startled to see the tiny shape of a starship, Sign of the Labrys rising in her orbit, which I knew was, technically, west to east. Just now, Captain Lee will be on her bridge, making sure Goddess is in her heaven and all’s right with the machinery. And, down in the engineering spaces, Nettie will be looking at the post I made my own, occupied by one of her sisters just now.

  I looked away, down into the freeze-frame.

  Well. Here are my accounts, transferred from Labrys’ node, just as they were when Captain Lee uploaded them from the master DataTrack at Wolf 359. Sometimes, I wonder why Porphyry troubled herself to put money against my name.

  Hell, maybe that made it a business deal, rather than a crime. Only Orb knows, and he’s not telling.

  Material at the Sirius node belied the peaceful world around me, waiters quietly bringing me what I asked for, all too human men and women passing quietly about their business in the bucolic streets of Sereniál.

  There. The data placard of the Wernickan People’s Independence Party. Tall, dark, handsome man explaining the reasons he and his comrades had for separating themselves from the service of Mobilitzyn Associates, world, habitats, and all.

  Some nonsense about lives, fortunes, and sacred honor.

  When I looked up, away from the depths of the freeze-frame, Labrys was halfway up the vault of the sky, thrusters twinkling now, turning the mass of the ship, positioning her just so. I wonder if Captain Lee is looking down on Suzdal, thinking of me.

  Probably not. Too busy with her job.

  Back in the freeze-frame, I called up fresh news from the heartland of humanity, news only a few years old, the business of plus ça change. Something called the Historical Humanity Movement big in the Solar Oort right now. Standard ARM advertising its big new mining venture out by the twin red suns of Krüger 60, ten million corporate colonist positions opening today, come one, come all. Bring your skills. Pay is great. Opportunities boundless.

  Down in the Centauri Jet there’d been some kind of political trouble, a mass movement sweeping the democratic habitats, just now deep in the grip of icy economic failure. Something called the Ultima Thule Society had induced a few of the more important habitats to band together, the Progressive Union they called it, and begin regulating the inter-habitat activities of the smaller corporations.

  Smaller. I like that. Pick on someone your own size, hm?

  But the big sharks take notice after all.

  The government of the Progressive Union had been overthrown, status quo ante soon restored, then the officers of Ultima Thule had been arrested and put on trial for.... crimes. That’s all the datatrack said. Officers put on trial, rank and file dispersed.

  I found myself looking at the proud face of Mr. Finn mac Eye, executive director of the Ultima Thule Society, as they led him away to prison. There in the background, head cast down, his associate Mr. Sonn-Atem.

  What do I... yes: Freedom, then from any organization that does not reflect the popular will.

  Turned out, I guess, to be unpopular after all.

  Side bar: mac Eye in suspensor imprisonment, cold as ice for an unspecified time, Sonn-Atem and his lovely wife Karinn escaped, fleeing to the safety of her father’s extraplanetary estate, an independent habitat deep in the Alpha Centauri B system.

  Interesting. But no more than that.

  And no news from Audumla, of course.

  The landscape around me was suddenly flooded with pale blue light, and when I looked up, Sign of the Labrys was firing her engines, modulus exhaust flaring like the corona of a variable star, leaving me here, all alone, shrinking away to nothing in no time at all.

  I went back to the data placard of the People’s Independence Party. Listened to the dark man’s speech again. After a while, I dialed up their contact point and told them who I was, told them what I knew.

  I am, you see, a man who knows spaceships, knows weapons, knows all about war. That’s not stretching the truth too far, is it? I was, after all, at the Glow-Ice Worlds...

  Maybe I just wanted somebody to admire me, want me, for something... practical.

  Just this once.

  You know?

  o0o

  When I saw Jade Qasawhár for the first time, I felt a certain atavistic dread, a certain “here we go again” crawling at the bottom of my belly.

  I was standing in the big conference room at WePIP headquarters, the big, glassed-in room atop the old Civitan center that was the major landmark of downtown Clydesbûrh, talking things over with operations director McNelly Broadbent beside the brand new 3vrD tank that turned up among the Mobilizyn property they’d confiscated during the Wernickë takeover. It was a beautiful thing, a little tripod the size of a hibachi you could stick on any handy desktop or even drop on the floor, snap your fingers and the universe would blossom, expanding like a spreading flower of magic indigo paint ‘til you raised your hand whoa.

  We were discussing the job I’d taken on, and Mac was pointing out various obscure features of the Sirian system, including the places around the Pup, white dwarf Sirius B, where gravitational resonances made “phantom planets” a smart pilot could use to his advantage.

  I said, “Be a damn good thing if whoever they send our way doesn’t think of this.”

  He looked at me, flat faced, tired eyed. “You think we should count on that?”

  “No.”

  I’d given them all the advice I could, remembering more than I expected from the Glow-Ice Rebellion. At the time, all I thought of was the excitement of youth, combat, and Violet’s odd, exciting body, of my sense of friendship with Dûmnahn and the others, but... Something, somewhere inside, took note of what was going on, the tactical mistakes made on both sides, and of how the smarter side, our side, had exploited the mistakes of the other.

  Had they not been clueless, the Glow-Ice Worlders might have fought clear of Standard ARM, might have beaten the rental warriors of SOCO. Maybe just the way the Continental Army fought off the British Empire, what? Twelve hundred years ago?

  Something like that.

  I rubbed my chin, staring at the moving lights inside the vr stereo, and said, “Mobilitzyn’s a much smaller company than Standard. Maybe...”

  Maybe a lot of things. And the job I’d taken on, arming and training a little fleet of warcraft WePIP had made up from in-system freighters and what not, mining craft and a small interstellar vessel they were pleased to call their battleship...

  The door dilated and she came through, walking through my peripheral vision, passing behind my back, just as I was wondered, for the thousandth time, if I was really up to the job.

  What if you fail them, Murph? What if there’s someone else hanging around who’d’ve taken the job and done it well if only you hadn’t come here with all your silly tales of combat experience among the Glow-Ice Worlds?

  Fucking ambulance mechanic.

  I turned because of the red dress she had on, and because of the scent of jasmine that suddenly filled the room, overpowering even Broadbent’s excessive wintergreen cologne. I’d gotten used to the Wernickan’s perfume habits quickly, but the constant interplay of scents was a distraction.

  So I turned, and caught her best possible view,
standing before the sideboard coffee service, smooth, long back in clingy red dress, sweeping from broad shoulders shrouded in silky black hair down to a breadth of hip that perfectly matched her form, not too much, not too little. And heels. The women here wear those peculiar high-heeled shoes that make them stand just the least bit swayback, making an outthrust of hip and bosom that...

  I heard Broadbent snicker, then he murmured, “Some things never change, eh, Murph?”

  I guess not.

  Jade looked over her shoulder, showing a delicate profile, somewhere midway between a flat-faced Old Earth Caucasian and some generalized more modern type, smiling. She said, “Hi, Mac.” Finished making her coffee and turned to walk toward us.

  Gravity here, like that on Telemachus Major, is maintained by a generator. Somewhere around a half standard gee. Remarkable that she can walk in those shoes at all, much less be so alluringly graceful. I kept expecting her to teeter, stumble and fall. Instead...

  She came to stand beside us, sipping delicately from her demitasse of mit schlag, little pink tonguetip retrieving a dab of white cream from upper lip as she looked thoughtfully into the 3vrD display, then, finally, up at Mac, up at me.

  Broadbent said, “Jade, this is Darius Murphy. I told you about him last night.” She held out a small, slim-fingered hand, hand surprisingly warm, making me wonder if my own had turned suddenly cold. “Jade Qasowhár was a mining engineer for Mobilityzn, Murph. She heads the team that’s building the fighters you and your group will fly.”

  And she had jade-green eyes.

  Looking at me... that way.

  I realized with a start that, finally, I had no urge to run and hide.

  That famous bit about time healing all wounds.

  What, you didn’t believe it?

  When you’re down and out, seems like that can only go on forever.

  Sunshine’s for other people.

  People not so stupid and useless as you.

  o0o

  In the end, Jade and I had little time for one another, though we worked together every day of the frantic weeks that went by, getting ready for the Mobilitzyn fleet we knew must soon arrive. She proved to be a superb engineer, with a knowledge base deeper than anything I’d ever pretended to, solving problems with a quick decisiveness that sometimes took my breath away.

  And, for my part, it turned out that I knew more about military matters than I thought, taking my team of battlecraft aloft day after day, learning to deal with all the peculiarities of the Sirius System. Guerrilla warfare, I thought, attacking from ambush in the sky.

  Watch for the Hun in the Sun, all that rot.

  Surprising how many important memories we carry, deep implants from this drama and that, every bit as important, every bit as real as anything that ever actually happened.

  Then came a lull, ships honed and armed, fliers and fighters trained to a pitch of perfection, and still the fleet didn’t come. Out there somewhere, monitoring the datatracks, waiting for just the right moment. I tried to help them with that, too, knowing Mobilitzyn would have to be bringing its ships in from a cluster of infrastars about five thousand astronomical units away, off in the direction of Procyon.

  Nothing. Not a peep. Corporate security perfect.

  One night, Jade invited me to have dinner at her apartment, just the two of us, and, as I got dressed to go, I felt a sharp tingle of “this is it” excitement. I could picture the way it would go, from a thousand scripts run over and over again back when I was in school, back when I was an innocent boy caught among Audumla’s women.

  She’d invite me in. We’d have drinks, give each other intriguing looks. There’d be witty chit-chat, then dinner. Candlelight, maybe? They seemed to go in for things like that, hereabouts.

  So the room would be half in darkness, making our pupils grow large, accentuating the interest we would, I dare say, really be feeling, eyes highlit by reflections of candle flame. We’d drink our wine and eat whatever she’d made, food and alcohol lulling us, making us feel comfortable and relaxed.

  Seduction’s so easy when its target had the same object in mind.

  Maybe we’d go out on her balcony and stand side by side, looking up at the nighttime stars, Sirius A’s corona brightening the western sky in Suzdal’s long green sunset, red Wernickë hanging in the heavens like a romantic half moon.

  We’d touch by accident, more than once, would look at each other. Maybe Jade would look away, face slightly flushed, half reticent, half aroused. If she was well versed in these matters, she’d turn toward me, would lean forward, putting her head almost on my shoulder, then turn her face up to be kissed.

  And that was, almost, the way it turned out. We were out on the balcony, kissing under the stars, and I could feel the firmness of her rubbing gently against me, letting me know, in no uncertain terms, that there’d be no girlish reluctance tonight, when her freeze-frame chimed in the background.

  She broke our embrace, looking up into my face, lips parted still, breathing a little raggedly, half smiling, eyes bright, and said, “I’d better answer.”

  I nodded, and watched her walk away. Interruptions are only a problem when you think they might give your quarry a chance to think twice, then run away. Here, I was as much the game as the hunter, the best of all possible worlds.

  I stretched, putting my hands behind my back, turning away from the candlelit room, looking up into the night sky, looking in the direction of Procyon, brightest star in Sirius’ firmament.

  One blue light flickered on, then burned steadily. A second. A third. Ten. Twenty. Fifty. More.

  I felt a hard bitterness spring up in my heart, a deep resentment at whatever cruel being was spooling out my life’s script. Is it you Orb, always playing with me? Or, as the Timeliners believe, just the random havoc wrought by Uncreated Time?

  Jade came back from the freeze-frame, filling the night with her jasmine perfume, put a softly trembling hand on my shoulder, and said, “They’re here.”

  Silent, I put my arm around her and gestured up into the night sky, at a burning constellation of terrible blue stars, surrounding Procyon like so many staring blue eyes.

  o0o

  We rode into the heavens, my comrades and I, in our jerry-built warships, soaring up and away from the little worlds we’d made our own, just like real warriors, real historical men and women out to do battle with the forces of evil that confronted us. They’d wanted me to carry my flag aboard the star-battleship Bakunin, formerly the interstellar light freighter Maurice Sendak, but I demurred, making my place at the comm console of one of the ordinary missile boats, a five-man job without a name, just MS-655, which had once been a rock tug.

  Commodore. Commodore Murphy.

  I still flinch when I remember that.

  Remember Jade laughing at the comic opera uniform they’d found for me in some costume shop, taking snaps “for the history tracks.” Somewhere in the DataWarren I guess you can still find Commodore Darius Murphy even now, in brush epaulets and a cocked hat.

  They found something even sillier for newly-minted Vice President Broadbent, who seemed to like it.

  We relish this business, don’t we?

  Maybe it’s why these things happen.

  Now though, in the realtime of my then-life, I put my face down in the boat’s astrogation frame and looked around. Bakunin over there, accelerating hard, missile launchers gaping, particle beam turrets twisting this way and that, going through their setting up exercises. My little fleet divided into ten squadrons.

  The pilot of 655, voice anxious, said, “Commodore... ?”

  I looked up at him and smiled, trying hard to remember his name, failing. “Hang on.”

  There. Dark shapes approaching, no more than thirty ships, big ships, fanning out into a flat disk, stretched all the fuck over the place, millions of kems between them, like a net sent to engulf us. Just the first wave, sent to deal with our puny little attack, wipe the way clear for the rest of the fleet, hanging back
almost five AUs now, a half-day’s travel time, at least.

  Our little ships, their big ones. I imagined myself Drake facing the Armada. Imagined myself a statue, standing in pompous grace upon a pillar high... hell. That’s Nelson I’m thinking of, isn’t it?

  The pilot said, “Please, Commodore. Bakunin’s got to start her turn if we’re going to...”

  “Patience.” I almost said trust me, buttoned my lip just in time.

  While I watched, the black ships’ thrusters twinkled, rolling them about their long axes. Something about these ships... I leaned deep in the frame and barked, “Operation Nine, startpoint theta.”

  Heard the pilot sigh with relief, felt 655 surge beneath me, surge through her barely adequate shields. They never meant this ship for violent maneuvering, ship whose life should’ve been dedicated to hauling great big boulders around the sky.

  Squadrons Three and Seven swirled like so many swarms of red hornets, twisting along the projected path of blue-streaming Bakunin, making for one edge of the oncoming saucer of the Mobilitzyn fleet. I watched, and remembered walking with Styrbjörn and some friends one bright, stemshiny day, deep in the woods of Audumla. This was in the days before we were ready for the allomorph whores, though no boy is ever really innocent of such desires, and we stumbled on a nest of bald-faced hornets hanging from the thin branch of a peeling old birch tree, stood mesmerized, watching the insects come and go.

  These are the things you see in all the old cartoon dramas. Some talking bear gets one stuck over his head and runs howling to the horizon, furious hornets stinging him on the ass while his betters laugh.

  It was Styrbjörn I think who made a joke that day about getting up a game of touch football with the thing. The rest of us laughed at his wit, remembering our cartoons.

  Big, dark portals on the Mobilitzyn ships gaped open suddenly and swarms of blue fireflies came pouring out, some swinging toward Squadrons Three and Seven, some making for Bakunin, some... well, streaming toward the rest of us.