When We Were Real (Author's Preferred Edition)

by William Barton

  I looked around the room.

  Let out a gusty breath.

  These people aren’t all people, are they?

  No.

  Look closely.

  Most of the couples are... mixed. Man and optimod. Woman and optimod. A few human couples. Even few optimod couples.

  At the far end of the room was a little stage, with a group of... beings on it, men, women, various sorts of optimods, fiddling with musical instruments, mostly percussion and metalwinds, one or two reeds.

  Violet said, “I told you we’d have fun.” She reached out and took my hand, started leading me through the sea of tables.

  Up on the stage, the drummer, a thick-waisted human with arms bulked-up like an extinct gorilla, started drumming, a quick, heavy beat, staccato bass throbs that suggested a particular sort of dance rhythm.

  Before us on the dance floor was another couple, a tall, heavy, bear-like optimod, a slim brown woman with close-cropped hair, dressed in a short, clingy, fringed, charcoal-gray dress with a square neckline that emphasized the relative flatness of her chest, the clean line of her waist and hips.

  The horns blare, squealing into the body of the number, and the black woman began to shimmy, arms held down by her sides. The bear-man didn’t really dance, but... the way he watched. Performance enough.

  Violet grabbed my hand again and spun me around to face her. Grinning. So happy. She said, “You know how this goes?”

  I didn’t but... with a rush, I felt the old skills flooding back into me. Audumla. Gatesie. Parties and friends. Yes, I can imagine how it goes.

  I started to dance, and it turned out I did know.

  In short order, Violet was laughing, real world fading away, and then I was laughing too.

  o0o

  Hours later, she and I and a group of friends who’d turned up at the club, walked under the vaulting sky of the Telemachan night, going from Au Pair to another club a short distance away, a different sort of club called Iles d’Essenses.

  Violet and I walked hand in hand, and I felt a thousand ems tall, vibrant, blood flushed with the oxygen of vigorous dancing, head expanded almost to infinity by the liquor I’d drunk.

  What a wonderful night, this little bit of fun.

  Hardly anything at all, just dancing, music, newfound friends who, for now, seemed just like me, but...

  For some reason, as we walked, I found myself remembering Reese and her curiously circumscribed life in the dark between the suns. Reese who was always looking for things to do, locked in the black bowels of a starship’s hold, ways to fill the empty days, to lighten the... darkness.

  Reese, always looking for fun.

  I wonder where she is now.

  Still with Mr. Zed, I hope, looking after him while he looked after her. When I asked, Violet had never heard of Mr. Zed, though he was the most famous bum who ever lived.

  Iles d’Essenses was nothing like Au Pair, built up from an old cafe, looking a lot like the dinner theaters of Audumla, favored by my mother and her friends. The floor was full of little round tables, audience more human than optimod, but still well-mixed, and there was a stage, really just a platform raised from the floor, at the one well-lit end of the room.

  We found a table, where we ordered cocktails and bee, and, at the time we arrived, there was a cyborg up on the stage, something that looked like a cross between crocodile and a drilling machine, telling jokes based on cultural referents that I didn’t get. The human component of the audience seemed to find it very amusing indeed.

  When he finished, the sleek, blonde human emcee led a round of applause, then introduced the next act.

  There was a handsome, muscular, swarthily virile-looking Caucasian human male, who slowly undressed while a a slim, very small optimod female, covered with short gray fur, watched every movement. When he was naked, the woman carefully shaved off every bit of his relatively dense black body hair, then they made love.

  The optimods around us, the ones at our table, watched this in rapt silence.

  When it was over, Violet reached out to stroke my forearm, very softly, with the velvet-furred pads of her fingertips.

  o0o

  A week went by, and then we were lying together on a white sand beach by the shores of a still blue lake, lake ringed with tall, dark green trees under an empty pale blue sky.

  I was exhausted, enervated and bewildered by a quick series of hypnopaedic updates, from days and nights strapped into a learning chair while miniature freeze-frames force-fed me new knowledge, all of it now whirling, useless, round and round in my head.

  Why the hell would anyone have wanted to change the indexing language through which control structures are programmed? Tactical Dissonance Type Sixteen had been good enough for generations before I came along—and programmers had been decades waiting skeptically for the promised land of Type Seventeen. Now all of that had been swept away by something called the Motor Cortex Imaging Toolkit.

  Better? Faster? Apparently not, but here it was.

  So I lay there, stunned to silence, while the light of a nonexistent sun prickled on my skin, while Violet the Optimod made love to me, equally silent, soft-furred hands like velvet gloves wandering over me, here and there for a while, then merely there.

  Over the distant trees beyond the lake, a rim of clear, deep blue began to show, the edge of a world, Telemachus Major rising. First the edge of the atmosphere, bound in by its eutropic shield, then the horizon, a bit of curved azure sea, then land, a wriggle of beachscape. Then city, seen from above, looking a little like a map, a little more like a model miniature, little buildings, little streets, the flecks of tiny aircraft dodging about among tiny white clouds.

  Violet moved down my body, patient with me, knowing my needs, knowing how I felt, knowing how the abuse of my nervous system by a not-quite-insensate machine had... laid me low.

  All those little differences between us, some mental, most merely physical, some inconvenient, others convenient indeed. Her mouth so warm, so much deeper than a human woman’s would be, tongue longer, thinner, so much more supple.

  Someone sighed. Must have been me.

  Silly, but...

  Well, you know how these things are. How they seem... magical when they’re happening to you, rather than merely vulgar.

  Telemachus Major broke free of the horizon’s trees, became a vast blue-green-brown-white dish floating up in the sky. City. Sea. Mountains. Clouds. There: I could make out Spyridion Cosmodrome, foreshortened by the limb. Just as I looked, a bright blue spark rose and disappeared behind the sky, the blue flare of a modulus exhaust, some little starship getting under way.

  The sky seemed to brighten and I gasped, Violet holding her mouth still, one hand grasping my thigh, the other slid under the small of my back.

  There. There now.

  She let me go, warm, gentle breeze seeming cool where I was wet, put one hand on my chest, rested her head on my shoulder, and began waiting again. Knowing full well, I suppose, that, in time, I’d snap out of this prolonged updaze, would give as good as I got and... I held her close, watching Telemachus Major pass overhead, unable to fathom my own good fortune.

  Wishing like hell I could articulate it now.

  Violet knows. Knows how you feel.

  And you’re damned lucky to have that, Mr. Murphy.

  o0o

  And, finally, the fifteenth day.

  We were in the little apartment, the one Violet had rented for her furlough, where we’d lived the last few weeks... strange. Seems like an eternity since we stumbled upon each other, crossing the concourse at Standard HQ.

  Endless days and nights of Violet, like a haze covering my world, wrapping me in a delicate mist of happiness.

  Violet was packing her kit bag and duffel, making sure she had those few possessions accumulated over decades... centuries? Orb tells me it’s so, though I can’t really feel the weight of years. That’s what Uncreated Time is all about. It comes from nowhere... goes to... ? No one
knows. And so, I’ve lived for more than a century, fifty years and more of that in cold, unhealing sleep.

  Violet? I never ask. The years, decades, centuries, seem to mean little to her. We live our lives, she says. Nothing ever changes. And yet, I see the light in her eyes when she looks at me.

  Is that change?

  Maybe not.

  Maybe it’s just the living of life.

  I sat at the foot of the bed with nothing to pack, knowing I’d just pick up an active-duty kit on the way to the transport, watching our rented freeze-frame autosurf one last time, interface cranked tall so we could see it, interact with it, even while lying in bed. We didn’t use it much, absorbed as we were in each other, though Violet startled me with a liking for the crudest sort of pornography, watching median-format men and women doing things to each other, the seeing of it exciting her.

  A certain charm to that, pushing aside the long-held lies of the old Occidental culture that had, willy-nilly, pushed all of humanity spaceward.

  I had a stark memory of Violet and I making love, oh so sweetly, while perfect strangers fucked, growling, in the background.

  And I wondered, briefly, uneasily, if Porphyry and her friends had recorded their last little... party, with me.

  The freeze-frame caught my attention, and halted its cruise, seeing my interest. “Shit.”

  Violet looked up from her careful folding and packing, getting as much as she could into as little space as possible. “Something?”

  I gestured at the interface, which double-shifted so she could see it straight on as well. The Centauri Jet elections, over and done with. Riots. People marching in the streets. Ultima Thule victorious on a thousand little worlds. Finn mac Eye, First Counselor-elect of the incoming CrossJet Althing, tall, handsome Meyer Sonn-Atem smiling silently behind him.

  There was a pale, strikingly pretty blond woman there too, Princess Karin, the freeze-frame marked her, Sonn-Atem’s wife of many years. Something so ethereal about her. So strange.

  Like a being from another universe, grown here by mistake.

  The freeze-frame showed us riots on some worlds, suppressed by local police, told us how the Intercorporate Board had met on Telemachus Major and set aside its local elections, decreeing that it was external to the Jet and would not participate in any interworld politicking.

  Meanwhile, Fin mac Eye told us all that he’d see to it, now, that justice would be done. Justice for all, not just the few. Billions cheered, I suppose. That’s the way it always goes.

  Violet sat down beside me, watching quietly, one hand resting on the small of my back. Finally, she whispered, “Nothing good can come of this.”

  I said, “You remember meeting him?”

  She rested her head on my shoulder, and said, “Something about him, even then.”

  I could still remember the things he’d said that night in the barroom, things coming to fruition now. And then I remembered rescuing him, remembered the call from an anguished Meyer Sonn-Atem: Save our souls. Save my friend Finn mac Eye.

  Because of them, Violet and I lost each other for a hundred years.

  She said, “Well. It’s none of our affair. We’ve got work to do.”

  So we gathered our few things, shut down the freeze-frame, and were on our way.

  o0o

  The big training center at Saad al’Zuhr lies one-hundred-fifty AUs from Telemachus Major, a mere week’s travel time as the starship flies.

  Violet and I spent some of that time, as much of it as we could stand, holed up in our tiny stateroom, continuing to suffocate one another like newlyweds, but the ship was full of beings, our comrades in arms, men and women, human, optimod, machine-like robot, faux-life android, ultimately drawing us out, pulling us from each other’s clutches before we could do any real harm.

  And so, bantering in the dining hall, a turn or two at the poker table, time spent sweating and panting in the transport’s pathetic little gymnasium. Exploring, I recognized the ship as a converted insystem ferry, probably flown out from the Solar System hundreds of years ago, hardly suitable for the transport of so many living souls, doing it nonetheless. Nowhere to go, nothing to do, but then, not much time to do it in.

  One day, the last day, we stood in the forward obdeck of the transport, watching Saad al’Zuhr grow from nothingness in the company of a couple whose society we’d fallen into, fellow Harbinger mk. VI trainees headed for our base. They were an odd couple, though Violet laughed when I called them that in private, Santry a tall, severely thin, voluble human woman of Old Caucasoid format, with black hair and flashing black eyes, who tended to run around the transport barefoot, clad only in her white linen underwear, material so thin you could see the shadow of pubic hair and nipples right through it. She seemed utterly incongruous in the company of her sidekick Regis Gosseyn, a short, rather broad man with beetling brows and a flat, chinless head.

  Seeing him for the first time, walking across the messhall with his characteristic rolling waddle, Violet whispered to me about old pre-optimod genetic experiments that had been aimed at resurrecting certain characteristics of Archaic Homo sapiens, people who would, with their sturdier bones, be a dozen times stronger than unmod humans.

  I guess, she said, they thought they’d make better soldiers.

  Foolishness.

  Experiments given up, moving on to the ones that gave rise to the optimod strains, but the lines survived, continued of their own accord.

  Now, Santry said, “There. Right there.” Pointing at a spot in the black sky forward, at an indistinct wad of pale yellow light. That would be Saad al’Zuhr, and the transport’s modulus exhaust was flaring around us, staining the sky dim blue, right on schedule, dropping us from 0.125 cee to zero in as few hours as it could manage.

  Most of it was canceled by the ship’s fields, but you could still feel the deck surge and shift, ever so slightly, underfoot. Regis looked down, scuffled his boot softly on the rubber flooring, and muttered, “Old junk.”

  In only a little while, as we watched, Violet and I holding hands, Saad al’Zuhr grew to an irregular yellow mass, like an iron-heavy rock glittering with pyrite flakes, superimposed against the starry sky, somehow shining, as though in sunlight, all alone in the heavens.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Santry standing with her back against Regis, squat man barely able to see over her shoulder, watching the world grow huge as we swept in for a landing. He had his arms around her, black hair on his arms making him look more like an animal or an optimod than a human man, clasped near the bottom of her belly, holding her tight against him.

  Like us, I thought. Just like us.

  o0o

  Soon, all too soon, we stood on the ground of Saad al’Zuhr, sky blazing pale yellow overhead, flooding us with classic butter-yellow skyshine, standing flat-footed in better than one-half gee, not quite standing at attention on the glassy surface of Landing Domain Ax3, while an immense fat man in Standard ARM blue, Bustamonte Palafox his improbable name, bid us welcome.

  I’m here, he said, hands clasped behind his back, thrusting his big belly forward, jackbooted feet planted wide, to show you the ropes, get you used to your ships, move you on to Squadron 33 and the Nulliterrae Swarm.

  Patience. No time for this. No will to listen. Behind the fat man, a dozen sleek, spindle-shaped Harbinger mk. VI high-energy turretfighters were lined up in one long row, mechanics of various sorts still poking at them through open service-bay doors.

  I could feel Violet’s tension beside me, her desire to be aboard, to begin... while Palafox droned on, telling us there was no time to waste, that the... work was waiting for us.

  I reached in my pocket and surreptitiously fingered my orders tab, tiny consciousness in that bit of crystal directing my eyes to... yes, that one. Harbinger mk. VI serial no. R1080.331, ventral service door open, two men who looked like yellow-limbed automatons poking away at something inside, pilot’s canopy cranked open, sticking up like the beak of a bird, partially
hiding the dorsal power turret behind it.

  Count ‘em. Dorsal and ventral turrets. Side sponson missile launchers. After-firing long-range particle beam device mounted between twin modulus exhausts. Imagine that. Two exhausts... little voice in my head, some not-quite-internalized bit of hypnopaedic update murmuring, in case one should be damaged...

  In front of us, fat Palafox had fallen silent, was merely grinning at us. “OK, boys and girls. I give up. You can go play with your toys now.” Hell. Maybe they pick beings his size for the job just so they won’t be trampled by the rush of eager trainees.

  I ran between the legs of 331’s landing tripod and slid through the belly hatch while Violet swarmed over the side, got the hatch secured, bringing up the interior lighting system as I listened to the whine of electromechanicals bringing down the canopy, high, then dropping, ending on a soft growl, filling my ears with just a second of overpressure.

  Just a momentary pang of terror, looking around at a capsule barely large enough to accommodate me, feet in stirrups, butt in bucket, head resting on its little pad... the hypnopaedics kicked in, making me look, here and there, at control systems mostly based on freeze-frame technology, patches of mist that’d became whatever they needed to be, when I needed them, overhead and down by my sides, emergency panels of brute-force solid state switching, circuit breaker resets, a rotational controller that I could switch from gun to gun, helping out A-semi-Eyes that...

  Pale, soft shock, difficult to fathom. Still a flight engineer, yes, just like in the old days, those dimly remembered sweet days so long ago, but only during cruise mode, and only if... something goes wrong.

  Combat Systems Officer.

  CSO is the real reason this ship exists, Violet merely the taxi driver who carries you to your...

  Pressure in my ears changed again as Violet opened the little connecting hatch between us, stuck her head through, grinning, and said, “This is better than anything we had at Mezzandrée!”

  Better than anything. Behind her, through the mesh of the pilot’s nest, I could see she already had her external panels lit up, showing a vista of the landing stage, the bright yellow dome of Saad al’Zuhr’s ridiculously artificial-looking sky.