When We Were Real (Author's Preferred Edition)

by William Barton

  All I could do was stand, speechless, mouth hanging open, until she laughed a wonderful laugh, threw her arms around me and hugged me like a long-lost friend.

  Life holds miracles. It really does.

  Standing there in the middle of a crowded concourse with my arms around Violet, re-emerged from the substance of Uncreated Time, dragged bodily from beneath the pall of Orb’s long shadow, I wondered who to thank for my fortune, if fortune it was.

  No one.

  No one at all.

  Finally, finding words: “I thought you were dead.”

  Violet held my face between her hands, just the way she used to, eyes softening fast as they looked into mine. “Dead...” A wan, familiar smile. Familiar despite the passage of years. “Well, I went the rest of the war without a tail, carried around a set of scars instead of belly fur, but...”

  “I saw you,” I said. “Saw you dead. Looked for you later.”

  Deepening shadow in her eyes. A slow nod. “I didn’t lose any important parts. Wasn’t burned. Didn’t take much to patch me up.”

  Still, that memory, Violet hanging torn and lifeless in her pilot’s nest, while Dûmnahn, sundered into thousands by now, danced in the flames, while I crawled broken across the deck.

  She said, “They let me look in on you just once. I talked a tech into opening your capsule for me and saw...” Her eyes closed for just a moment. “They took you away, sent you back home, and...” A little shrug. Life goes on.

  And why couldn’t I find you, Miss Violet?

  Demure look, not quite brooding.

  Because I’m... not a...

  Not a person. Right. If I’d been looking for a particular monkey wrench, I wouldn’t have found its personnel file either.

  Stupid.

  My expression made her laugh.

  Her laugh made me smile.

  A little while later and we’d walked, holding hands, out of the concourse, down some long street in that same nameless, lifeless business district, Violet leading me to a favorite restaurant, high on the side of an ivory tower, building reaching high above the Telemachan cityscape, reaching almost to the clouds, so high the eutropic sky itself seemed flat, a flat surface not so far overhead.

  We took a table near the railing, placed our orders, and I looked away from her, frightened now, so uncertain I felt weak, looking out over the spires of the city, farther ones tilting subtly, then dramatically away, as they marched over the near horizon. Look at those mountains. From here, you can see the dark undersides of the white clouds that shroud their peaks.

  And the sea. The surface of the sea looks round.

  Softly, Violet said, “Murph?”

  Some part of me didn’t want to look. So much safer just to keep my eyes out on the world beyond the railing. So much easier to hold myself close inside, to...

  I felt her hand, gentle on mine, and looked, despite myself.

  There was absolute terror in her eyes.

  Just holding my hand and looking at me, so afraid.

  Tension inside my chest. Like something straining in there, threatening to explode.

  She said, “Murphy, I...”

  Look at her. You’ve got to speak. Say something, before... The words popped out, not even close to the words I was trying to plan: “I never stopped missing you, Violet.”

  Her hand tightened on mine for a moment, making me afraid for just a second... she looked away, letting her head fall, gazing down at the table, exhaled a long breath, and when she looked up at me again, whatever was in her had dissolved, dissolved utterly, eyes beginning to shine.

  I’d slept for a hundred years.

  Violet had... worked for that same hundred years.

  A hundred years of no tomorrows.

  Now this.

  o0o

  The beach at sunset, if sunset’s the word to use.

  No sun here on Telemachus Major, but the light goes dim, fading to black overhead, colors banding outward in subtle concentric rings, as though there were a nearby G-class star just gone down below every horizon.

  When the dimming’s about halfway done, you can see that famous flash of green out over the sea, no matter what direction you look. You can even run backwards up the dune face and prolong the effect, just as if this were a real world.

  Neat trick.

  I wonder why they bothered.

  I found myself running with Violet, following her along the sunset sand, while soft breakers rolled in with a gentle crush and hiss, water fizzing like seltzer as it slid up the beach.

  You could stand still with the water quieting around your ankles, look down at your feet as the water retreated back out to sea, and watch the mole crabs emerge from the sand like so many bubbles, like so much turbulence.

  Standing beside me, Violet said, “The first time I saw that, I couldn’t believe it was animals. Silty sand, I thought. Like dust in the water.” She laughed. “Then I thought about sitting naked in that same sand, about these things finding their way into various...” She laughed again.

  Gentle, self-deprecating laughter. If the fur were swept away, would I see her blush?

  Would I like that?

  We stood still, looking at each other, the water gradually deepening, rising about our legs, then surging away, back down to our ankles.

  She reached out and took my hand, lifting it away from my body, barely holding onto my fingertips. “I couldn’t forget, no matter how hard I tried.”

  I could only nod, wishing I knew the right words to say. Maybe there are no right words.

  She said, “It was like... losing your first lover. You know what I mean.”

  I realized with an electric shock that I did. My first lover. Not any of those gatesie girls. Nor Reese. Nor Jade.

  She leaned forward, kissing me on the lips, our skin barely contacting, leaned away, then in again, renewing the touch, strenthening the touch, entering me in a way that... made it seem as though the last hundred years, hers and mine alike, had never happened.

  Time gone.

  Just like that.

  Taking with it all those empty tomorrows.

  o0o

  We went to our little beach house, rented beach house straddling the crest of an ersatz dune, and in due course I stood in a furry tan room, looking out at the twilit seascape with my furry lover, watching the night sky evolve.

  Waiting perhaps.

  The green forest moon began to rise, bright against the black and starry sky.

  Then her hands were on me, breaking the barrier of a century that was mostly sleep, sleep and dreams, hard nightmares that couldn’t possibly have been real, one hand on my shoulder, the other trailing slowly down my side, coming to rest on one hip, waiting again, while I hardly breathed at all, bathing in her lavender scent.

  Felt her chin rest on my shoulder, mouth close beside my ear, as she whispered, “Time’s supposed to heal, supposed to make us forget. But I dreamed about you over and over again.”

  I tried to imagine that, imagine my fearless warrior woman, caught between wars, tossing and turning, unable to sleep, thinking of me. Tried to imagine myself worthy of such a thing, while I remembered, all too briefly, Reese and Porphyry, Captain Lee and Jade and all the nameless ones in between.

  Nonsense. Only a dream. That’s all.

  Both her hands were on my hips now, resting still for just a moment, then they stole around until they could clasp in front of me, crushing her breasts flat against my back so I could feel the hard-ridged muscles of her belly. Hard, and yet... so soft, gently curving, downward, around and in... blades of hipbones there and there, down here the definite bump of pubis.

  I turned in the circle of her arms and forgot about the green moon, turning my back on the whole world. World enough for me, just now, in here, in these slanting yellow eyes. I took her head between my hands, leaned in and kissed her, closed my eyes and could not remember a time when our faces hadn’t fit together as perfectly as they did now.

  Maybe those time
s were part of a dream as well, and this is the only real thing that ever happened to me.

  Then we lay together, tousled, matted, wet with each other, snuggled under blanket and sheet at last, looking out our window at an empty, flat blue sky, cityscape and mountains invisible below the sill, green moon gone obliviously on its way while we free-fell a million years, back to our former lives.

  Nothing to say.

  Not even a thought to think.

  Stillness.

  But Violet whispered, “I used to think if I lived long enough these things wouldn’t matter anymore. I guess I haven’t lived that long yet.”

  I thought how silly it was to be made whole by something so crude as this. Then thought how silly it was to think I’d been made whole, that anything could make me whole again. But here was Violet, nestled beneath my arm. And here was my heart, beating quietly in my chest once again.

  So we talked the way lovers will talk, lying in each other’s arms. I told her all about Reese and Mr. Zed, all about the worlds of Wolf 359, about Porphyry and her marvelous friends. Told her all about Wernickë, Jade and Suzdal and... and listened to all her stories about life in the service of Standard ARM, stories of war and peace, life, love, what have you.

  Stories with names that didn’t seem to matter anymore.

  As she dried, her fur grew fluffy and lustrous once again.

  And, inevitably, I talked about what we might do, now that we’d found each other once again, almost forgetting all the problems I’d made for myself, the deals I’d made, been forced to make, with various devils. We can go away you see, you and I, belovéd Violet. We can run from the scenes of our separate pasts, run far far away, until we find some little frontier world, some place where we can...

  She sat staring at me silently, something hard and terrible in her eyes.

  I suddenly remembered who she was: Violet the Optimod, wholly-owned chattel of the Standard ARM Corporation, Violet who would never marry, who would never have children of her own, who would serve at the pleasure of her masters until the day she died, however remote that day might be.

  The rest of it?

  Just a dream.

  I folded her in my arms again, and wondered what we’d have to do.

  Ten. There are moments

  There are moments when you’d swear the sun shines indoors, even on worlds where there’s no sun at all.

  That’s the way it felt as Violet and I walked hand in hand across the broad concourse floor of the Standard ARM guildhall, moving obliviously through a crowd of utter strangers. Did people turn, stop and stare, nondescript human man and naked optimod woman striding together, cocooned? Maybe they did, probably not. People are so wrapped up in themselves, wrapped up in their own lives, their own happinesses and miseries, what other people feel doesn’t seem to matter.

  Maybe just one person noticed us. Maybe that one person saw us, envied us, smiled at our happiness, went on his or her way knowing that, every now and again, life can seem to work out, at least for the moment.

  No shadows.

  No shadows at all.

  None that we wanted to see, at any rate.

  Ultimately, we sat in a little cubbyhole of a room, somewhere deep in the bowels of ARM HQ, across a freeze-frame equipped desk from a short, thick-waisted woman, who did indeed smile at us out of pale green eyes, eyes in a face with coffee-colored skin under feathery white hair and sharp, slanting white eyebrows.

  The woman said, “Good to see you again, Commander Violet. Hope you had a, um... nice vacation.” Eying me then, smirking. “And Mr. Murphy, back from his little, ah, adventure.”

  Violet gave my hand a squeeze, somehow conveying private amusement.

  The woman fished in her freeze-frame, tut-tutting like a movie grandma under her breath, trying to see if she could give us what we wanted. “Ah, me, so much work to be done...”

  Standard ARM doesn’t really care that we want to serve together, but, as Grandma noted, it doesn’t really mind, either. No regulation, you see, stopping two people from serving together, so long as there are slots for both.

  She said, “I see, Violet, that you’ve taken a combat-vehicle certification on your pilot’s license.”

  An optimod in Violet’s form can’t really nod, shape of the head and neck all wrong for it. Still, with her ears pricked up and her head cocked to one side, you got the message.

  Grandma said, “Nice long string of commendations you won during the Mezzandrée Police Action...”

  Not even a hint of that, whatever it was, from Violet, though she’d filled our between times with an endless string of tales.

  Grandma looked at me, frowning, disapproving look buried somewhere in the green. “And you, Mr. Murphy, have been remiss. Your technical education ought to be woefully out of date. Still...” Fishing in the freeze-frame a little more, rubbing her double chin, going, hmmm. “You’re lucky technical progress is so slow these days.”

  These days? Technical progress has been slow for centuries, my dear. It’s not so much that we’re up against the frontiers of physical knowledge, as that we long ago hit the barrier of what’s physically practical. Oh, sure, we could build starships that’d go 0.99 cee. But at what cost?

  And what difference would it make?

  Historians remind us that humanity went from a motorized box kite to supersonic jet aircraft in forty-five years. And what we fly now, more than a thousand years later, are starships recognizably derived from those same early jets.

  Grandma said, “I’ll sign you up for a series of hypnopaedic updates. Should take about a week.”

  I myself could nod without any trouble.

  She turned to Violet, obviously the only one who mattered here. “Harbinger Squadron 33, flying out of Nulliterrae, has openings for several flight crews. All right?”

  Another bright-eyed headcock.

  “Fine. I’ll ship you out for the Harbinger mk. VI training center at Saad al’Zuhr in fifteen days. That’ll give him time to absorb the updata and start some integration.” She looked from Violet to me and back again, smiled slyly, then shook her head, as if amazed at something. “Ah, me. Well. Put your right hands in the freeze-frame...”

  I found Violet’s hand within the interface, felt the datareader’s soft tingle.

  Grandma said, “There you go. Have fun.”

  o0o

  That evening, as the sunless sky turned scarlet and vermilion, light from nowhere flooding the undersides of a flat, decorative cloud deck, Violet and I took a cab into a section of Telemachus I’d never heard of someplace before, a barrio called the Pixsea. The first transport company we called refused to send a car.

  The second did so, cabby giving us an unpleasant look when he saw us step to the curb, holding hands, before saying, “Where to?”

  When Violet gave him a, to me, meaningless set of street coordinates, he sat twisted around in the pilot’s seat for a long moment, looking as if he was going to throw us out. Finally, he said, “That’s Au Pair, isn’t it?”

  A narrow grin showed her teeth, making her look even less human. “Ain’t Bal Musette, pal.”

  “Jesus. Hmh.” He looked at me, with something between amusement and disgust, then revved up and slid away down the street.

  Pixsea was like the Blue Hole, only bluer. Streets that, for a modern, well-maintained artificial world, seemed impossibly dirty. Buildings with broken out windows, as if they’d been made from an inferior grade of industrial glass.

  At one point, as we slid along, I saw a man, definitely a man, almost naked, in tatters, on his knees, vomiting convulsively.

  The cabby muttered, “Nice place to visit, huh, kid?”

  I suppose he meant me, though... how old am I? Do the sleep years count? How about the time I spent getting to Sirius, one day like the next like the next, safe in the Sisters’ starship haven.

  Finally, we got to a warehouse district, where the cabby charged our fares and sped off as soon as we were out the hatchway, raising a c
loud of dust as he vanished back the way we’d come.

  It was cool here, a slight breeze ruffling my hair as I stretched. The sky was full black overhead, the clouds vanished on cue, the heavens black velvet spangled with metallic glitter. Milky way. Pleiades, Hyades recognizable as discrete clusters. Omega Centauri perceptibly fuzzy, belying its false identification as a star. M-31 like a ghost behind the constellations...

  Au Pair was a big, windowless building, long and low-slung, with only a single lamplit door, the rest of it dark, centered in an immense parking lot that was almost, but not quite devoid of cars. Not all that many private vehicles on Telemachus Major, of course, what with the ubiquity of public transport.

  I wonder who the parking lot was originally for.

  Ancient history, lost in time.

  There was a naked optimod standing by the door, a short, squat, black-furred being, male-looking, though you couldn’t really tell since his fur was rather long. Cradled in his thick, stubby arms... I started, took a shortened step that almost made me stumble.

  Violet nudged me, and said, “Sh. He knows its an illegal military weapon.”

  The black optimod was staring at me with dark, beady little eyes. There was a little liquid reflection of starlight and... when I caught them at just the right angle, the eyes seemed to have a faint yellow-green glow.

  Violet stepped close to him, leaned in, almost as if for a kiss, whispered something in his ear. The optimod grunted, not quite a word, and gestured us toward the door, gesture hardly qualifying as movement.

  There were two doors, one right after another, like an airlock, sound baffle, light shield. Inside...

  Huge, open room, dimly lit, small round tables around the periphery, people sitting crouched over them. Large open area, floor of smoothly-polished faux wood, like carefully sanded yellow pine. A rocky altar in the center of the room, bearing a small red fire, flames licking lazily upward, occasionally tinged with a bit of blue, a brief flicker of green.

  Violet was standing there, facing me, looking expectantly into my face.