When We Were Real (Author's Preferred Edition)

by William Barton

  More Mobilitzyn troopers hiding around the edges of the clearing, gripping their guns, wide-eyed with fear, nervously alert. No way for them to know they got us all. For all they know, a hundred more guerrillas are creeping nearby, about to attempt our rescue.

  The noncom I’d spoken to last came back across the field from the gunship, an officer of some kind at his side. Look at the badges. This is Mobilitzyn Corporate Security, not some temp-agency hireling.

  The officer said, “This the one?”

  The noncom lifted his face shield and looked at me. Nodded. “Yes, sir. Standard ARM.”

  “OK. Checks out just fine. Put him on ice and lets get this business over with.” He turned, started to walk away.

  “Um, sir?” My voice was a little high, betraying me.

  He looked back. “Murphy, your fucking contract checks out. You’re covered by Standard ARM’s general indemnity policy and you were perfectly within your rights as a half-pay reservist to hire yourself out to these people. I’m sorry you did, but you’ll get your repatriation anyway. Next freighter back toward the Jet, I guess.” He looked at the noncom. “Let’s go.”

  The soldier tapped me on the shoulder, “Come on, pal.”

  I looked back to where Jade and the others waited, watching the corporate officer approach. She was looking at me, eyes wide, not knowing what was going on. I felt my guts tighten suddenly. Restitutor Orbis, I want you to tell me now, in the name of Uncreated Time, that things will be all right, that she’ll survive prison, survive re-education, that I’ll see her again some sunny day.

  As usual, Orb didn’t answer.

  The noncom whispered in my ear, “Maybe someday our positions will be reversed. So remember my face, Murphy. Remember the name Benny Wallace. Remember who just fuckin’ saved your ass today. All right?”

  Ching.

  The officer was standing beside my friends, had taken out his sidearm, had slid out the clip, checking his load. As I watched, he slid it back in, snap.

  Like echoes in the forest, hard and empty.

  Jade, voice dreadful with panic, cried out, “Murph?!”

  Then the gun went bang, her head exploded, and what was left of her fell down in the cool green grass.

  Nine. Telemachus Major

  Telemachus Major.

  I sat on the balcony outside the resthome room where I was supposed to be recovering from decades of cold sleep, looking out over cityscape and landforms, wondering how it could be a hundred years since the last time I was here.

  Telemachus Minor, green forest moon, hung not so far overhead, close enough I could make out its landscapes, make out the distinct shapes of tall green trees, giant redwoods and the like, make out the twisting silver gleam of her wonderful trout streams, lakes where I’d swum with my flyer friends... only yesterday? That’s what it seems like.

  Telemachus Minor hung beyond the sky, beyond the eutropic shield’s glimmering ersatz blue, beyond the clouds, far, far away, in just the same way she was close-by.

  I wanted to think of her as I thought about my previous life: So close I could see every detail. And yet so remote. Forever out of reach.

  Better to pretend I’d died out on Wernickë’s little Suzdal moon. Died and been reborn as someone else. Someone with a whole new life to live. That other man’s bones would be lying back there, far away, lying in the grass with...

  I got up and went inside, turning my back on a long, shimmering vista composed mainly of tall, ornate human architecture, architecture superimposed before a horizon of snow-topped artificial mountains, blue sky, green sea, went and got dressed in the plain street clothes the resthome left for us in the closets of every room, trying not to see myself in the mirror.

  I’d grown thin while I slept. Thin and pale.

  Down the stairs and across the foyer, waving to the smiling receptionist who already new me well, I went out into bright, sourceless sunshine, sunshine without the power to brighten me. Waited on the corner with other thin, pale, silent men and women. Got aboard the tram and went on down to the cityscape world below.

  o0o

  Walking all alone through the dense crowd filling the bottom of a canyon-like avenue in a part of Telemachus Major’s world-city known as the Blue Hole made me realize my problem quite fully. I could tip my head back and back, look up at the façades of the buildings, see windows of glass, bright and dark, balconies empty or full of people.

  Who are they, so tiny, so far above? A man and a woman maybe, holding hands.

  Hundreds of ems overhead, the sky was like a long, thin, square-edged river of dark blue, my eyes imagining stars beyond, just on the edge of perception.

  Then again, I could see the people all around me, walking, walking. A bustle of voices, constant murmuring, though I couldn’t see anyone actually talking to anyone else. Mostly, it looked as though they were all alone, just like me.

  I stopped and stood in front of a restaurant window, looking in at the diners, eating who knows what meal. Since I came out of sleep, time seems to have lost its familiar meaning. Day, night. These are things we manufacture for ourselves, manufacture for all the little worlds we made and hung against the sky, inside gimcrack shields that keep away the real darkness outside.

  Darkness and stars. That’s what’s real. The rest of it...

  Inside, at the table nearest the window, a tall, blocky-looking man with short silver hair was spooning up a soup that seemed composed of spaghetti and beans. Not talking to the thinner man across from him, skinny boy with long yellow hair who toyed with an unlit smoke of some sort, silently watching his friend eat.

  After a while, the gray-haired man stopped eating, put down his spoon and turned to look at me, staring through the glass.

  Sullen. Go away, asshole.

  I went.

  There’s a life story inside the restaurant, two men sitting at a table, two life stories, each one as complex as my own. What about all these other people, thronging all around? In the time I’ve been gone, the population of Telemachus Major has grown from five billion to six.

  I picked a random corner and leaned against the grainy, gray, featureless stone wall of a building, watched the crowd spilling past, trying to see if they had lives as well. Nothing. Nothing but the details of my own life suggested themselves. Look at that pretty girl, all too human girl, pale pink dress, white buttons, white patent leather shoes, pink headband confining hair like golden wool. You’d like to fuck her, wouldn’t you?

  I imagined myself getting her down, right here in the street, pulling her out of those pink clothes, prying her legs apart as she struggled and screamed.

  Why do I imagine she’d struggle and scream?

  Maybe for the same reason I imagine people stepping over us as I pin her to the sidewalk and rape myself senseless.

  I watched her walk away, striding purposefully, hands clenched at her sides, a woman alone in a dense crowd, presumably going somewhere. But I didn’t imagine her life. All I did was imagine it intersecting with my own. After a while, I walked on too.

  Down in the Blue Hole, there’s a store somewhere that sells anything you could possibly imagine. I wonder who buys life-size, semianimated statues of extinct hominids? There was no one in the store, other than a motionless human clerk, who sat behind his counter, staring at the store’s centerpiece, a male Australopithecus robustus, standing in the middle of a fountain structure and pissing for all he was worth. Garden art?

  I wondered, for just a second, how much intelligence they’d built into the art objects.

  Not hard to imagine who buys the wares advertised on the front of the pornography shop. And the place across the street, Sex Toys ‘n’ Erotica... this one had a window so you could look in and see a fair number of women, picking over an assortment of doodads and doohickeys. Smirking, nudging each other.

  Interesting. Women together in groups, laughing at what they saw. A few women alone, eyes so terribly serious. A few women with embarrassed-looking men in tow. What’
s that all about? More life stories for me not to know.

  Farther down the street was a live sex show, one of those places where the performers take suggestions from the audience. Lick this. Suck that. OK, now stick this in there and... great. Wonderful. A couple of blocks later, I passed by a place where you could get live sex for yourself, advertised by three-dee posters of men and women whose main selling point seemed to be their exposed, shining wet genitalia.

  Makes sense, I guess.

  I was tempted to go in, of course, but I kept on walking, heading on down the street, deeper and deeper into the Blue Hole, unable to imagine where I was going, or why.

  o0o

  One day, the same day, in fact, that the rest home judged me sufficiently rested, I was summoned down to the Standard ARM corporate headquarters, way the hell on the other side of the world. Summoned to the personnel office, where I sat for three hours in a waiting room with a number of other men and women, all of them tired looking, most of them nervous. One by one, we were called to another room.

  One by one, ‘til they got to me.

  The guy in the room, fiddling intently with a freeze-frame embedded in the top of his desk, dressed in a variant of the powder-blue Standard active duty uniform, though without any badges of rank or insignia, motioned me to a chair.

  Finally, after I’d been sitting, watching him fiddle for about fifteen minutes, he said, “All right, I guess that’s it.”

  Great. Now what?

  He sat back, looking at me expressionlessly. “Well. You know why you’re here, don’t you, Murphy?”

  I crossed my legs and said, “Since you’re a personnel auditor, I assume I’m in trouble over what happened out on Wernickë.”

  He smiled. “Not exactly.”

  “Exactly what then?”

  “Mobilitzyn Associates went bankrupt partly as a result of your actions. Standard ARM picked up all their Sirian properties for a song, including some extremely valuable mineral rights involving the Wernickë infrastar and associated bodies.”

  I sat and waited.

  “On the other hand, Standard ARM can’t be seen as encouraging independent action against the interests of other corporate entities. These are... not the best of times for us to be seen in an unflattering light.”

  “So?”

  He said, “Well, if you read your contract, you’ll find that the insurance policies covering you as a Standard ARM retainee have a restitution rider.” He poked inside the freeze-frame again. “Historically, of course, those riders have never been activated. But these are... difficult times.”

  “So what’re you saying... restitution. I mean...”

  He smiled. “No way anyone could pay back the amount of the judgment against Standard, of course, not to mention the cost of your freeze-down and transport. And, of course, we had to pay more for the Sirian properties that we might have had there been no... questionable involvements.”

  “Of course.”

  He shrugged. “So. You go get yourself a little apartment and we’ll come up with a modest lifestyle budget for you, Mr. Murphy. Then the rest of your reserve pay will be docked as restitution.”

  Um. “For how long?”

  He smiled. “Forever, I guess.”

  I imagined myself stuck in some slummy section of Telemachus Major for... How long is forever? I said, “So what if I just quit? Go work for someone else?”

  He said, “Then we’ll send you a bill for the full amount, Mr. Murphy. You don’t want to know how much.”

  Nor, I guess, was I supposed to imagine how or from whom they might collect.

  Then he said, “Of course, you could re-up, Mr. Murphy. Active agents of Standard ARM are not subject to the restitution clauses of the reservist insurance policies, even on an ex post facto basis. And there are lots more openings these days, Mr. Murphy.” A very broad smile. “There’s a great deal of work to be done.”

  These days... I kept trying to remind myself just how long I’d been gone, how long I’d been asleep. “So you’re saying if I go back on active duty, my restitution is...”

  “Suspended. For so long as you are on active duty.”

  “And... if I went back on reserve status later on? Maybe retired some day?”

  Still smiling, he shook his head.

  I sat back in my chair and said, “Oh.” And thought for just a second about the pension fund contribution every active duty Standard ARM employee must make, five percent of every duty pay cycle.

  “Look at it this way,” he said. “At least you’ll have something to do.”

  o0o

  I didn’t go back to the resthome that day, though I suppose they’d’ve let me hang around. No reason to go there. No friends. No possessions. It’s an odd way to feel, almost like feeling nothing at all, my head not really spinning, not really empty as I wandered away from Standard HQ in a business district of Telemachus Major whose name I hadn’t bothered to look up.

  Sky just as blue overhead, striated with those same remote, diaphanous clouds, though the green forest moon was elsewhere I suppose, somewhere below the horizon. Tall buildings, in much better shape, architecturally more profound than those of the Blue Hole, but...

  I stopped on the sidewalk in front of a gizmo store, same faceless crowd sliding around me, not noticing me at all it seemed, and stood looking in through the window at a display of brand new freeze-frames. The one nearest the window had its isogloss tuned to an unnatural height, so passers by could look through into wonderland and see what was what. Maybe they have a lot of walk-in business, businessfolk who just can’t wait to pick up the new model freeze-frame so they can use this pointless feature or that one...

  There was a random trackslider going, threading its way through the data intelligently, picking up nodes the latest demographic surveys indicated would catch and hold the interest of any random citizen who...

  The election results from Tant’Athool, one of the more populous bodies deep inside the Centauri Jet, tall fat man with a flat, pasty-white face, wearing a woolen cap and a bizarrely plain military-style uniform, waving his hands overhead.

  When I pressed my hands and face close to the glass, I was close enough to the field surface I could catch the sound of his words, speaking in some fluid language that had a lot of words in common with the various dialects of Spanish I knew, but not enough for me to catch their drift.

  Go inside, get close enough so the translator can reach inside your head.

  I stayed pasted to the glass instead, watching the trackslider do its job, wondering if I was close enough to influence its choices. Well. More politics. Another world, another politician giving a speech, waving his arms in victory, barking out his triumph. Other men on the platform with him, arms folded behind their backs, faces impassive, eyes gleaming.

  I recognized Meyer Sonn-Atem first, then realized who the speaker was, and wondered just when and how Finn mac Eye had managed to get himself out of stasis-prison.

  After a while, I got tired of watching the slider blink through various politicians, politics of the Centauri Jet a long-dead issue for me, as dead as anything I could imagine. I walked away, walked on down the street to a tram station where I waited patiently for a train, heading for the other side of the world.

  Maybe I’ll go on back to the Blue Hole. Maybe I’ll find that sex-for-hire store I passed by, go on in, pick out one of those fine, wet, athletic-looking women, pay my fee and take it all out on...

  Take it out on what? Or who?

  Well.

  A man would understand.

  Any man.

  Any male.

  I got on the next tram instead, which turned out to be headed for the seashore. There was a fine vista, as we passed from pole to pole, hanging more than a kem above the varied skylines of Telemachus Major, mountains and forests here and there, some faraway, others embedded in unending town.

  Once, we passed over the middle of an immense green park that was hazed with a thin layer of pale blue smoke. Lo
oking straight down, I could make out huge crowds of milling people, thousands, maybe millions of dots, like little black ants.

  Flash. Flash. Twinkles of firelight from the edges of the crowd. Men firing guns? Police? No way to know from all the way up here. The twinkling, dots of red going on and off, seemed to give definition to the swarms of milling antmen.

  In the seat behind me, a man riding with a woman, both of them dressed in beachwear, carrying armloads of towels and umbrellas, a hamper that smelled like fresh food of some kind, very spicy, with a strong odor of grease, whispered, “Look. Thulian rioters.”

  The woman craned her neck to see, and said, “Bastards. Why the hell can’t they stay back in the Jet and leave us the hell alone? We’ve got work to do.”

  Work to do.

  At the beach, where the sourceless sunshine was brighter than ever, the sky clear blue, sea reflecting it like flat, waveless, tideless blue steel, I stood on the platform for a while, watching the man and woman walk down across white sand to the edge of the sea, disappearing into a mass of a hundred thousand other people, every one of them just the same as his neighbor. And when the next tram came I got on it, heading right on back to the business center and Standard ARM HQ.

  You damned well knew this could happen, Darius Murphy. People that get in a fix like this are called 16-tonners by their mates. Like it was a joke. Like it was their own fault.

  So why the hell don’t you care?

  Maybe because it doesn’t make any difference at all.

  I found the aerospace service guild hall hard beside the Standard ARM Human Resources departmental office tower, and was walking across the a broad, black marble floor thronged with employees, both active and reserve, headed for the Assignments Bureau, when a hand tapped me on the shoulder.

  I turned and beheld a tall, slim female optimod, fox-like woman covered with long, glossy, well-brushed lavender fur.

  She stared at me for a long moment, foxy eyes wide, almost frightened looking, then she said, “Don’t you remember me, Murph?” Voice unnerved, as if fearing that I might not.