When We Were Real (Author's Preferred Edition)

by William Barton

  “Hang on.”

  Violet started fishing around in her shoulderbag, obviously looking for something. “God damn it... oh. Here.” She pulled out a silvery wafer, a common ID disk, and handed it to Elcano.

  “Hmh. You surprise me, Miss Violet.”

  He slipped the thing into a readerslot mounted on his toolbelt, was silent for a second, then said, “Well, well.” He extruded the disk and gave it back. “You all take what you need. Marines’ll make the final determination. Bring it back when you’re done.”

  We turned away, starting to load up the ATV with junk Elcano was lugging over, and I said, “It’s been a long time since Standard ARM was stupid enough to use expensive optimod devices for cannon fodder.”

  Nothing. Violet climbed into the ATV, sliding behind the driver’s seat, while I got in the other.

  Elcano put the combat kits in back, then clipped a couple of long, thin rifles to a gunmount behind the front seats. “OK. Have a nice time, kids. I’ll see you later.”

  As we drove out of the service bay, out into bright, sunless light, back out under that same leaky blue sky, I said, “When were you in the combat infantry, Violet?”

  “When?” Very distant, troubled, reluctant look, deep shadows behind her eyes. “I don’t know Murph. It was a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.”

  I knew not to ask any more.

  She’d tell me when, if she wanted me to know.

  I wasted a few more seconds wondering about it as we bounced over rough ground, headed for the gate. If Violet was one of the very first optimods, she’d’ve experienced every sort of misuse, back in the days when the corporations wasted expensive machines and biotechnology in a misguided attempt to save the hides of useless human beings.

  The guards at the gate gave us no trouble at all. Checked our kits, checked Violet’s badge, saluted her, ignored me, sent us on our way. We drove down a ruined street, went round several corners and...

  Violet pulled up, slowing to a stop, and we sat staring, unable, at first, to understand what we were seeing. Damaged cityscape stopped here, level ground going on to the horizon. Level ground covered with square boulders, a regolith of dust, bright places where liquid rock had flowed, however briefly.

  I wanted to have Orb’s name to take in vain. All I could do was say, “I guess this is one of the areas we firehazed a few days ago.”

  Guess so.

  Yup.

  Finally, Violet whispered, “A billion people lived here.”

  After a while, we drove on. I punched up the local mapping system on the dashboard freeze-frame, and said, “It’ll take us about ten minutes to get to that reservoir I saw.”

  Ten minutes. Hell, if it’s still there, maybe we can go for a swim.

  The air is so nice and warm here.

  o0o

  The reservoir was still there, though there was no telling what it’d originally looked like. Maybe the ravine’d been built up a little bit, for there were still signs, here and there, up near the top of the broken rock walls, of piers and yacht basins and... hell. Everything here is artificial anyway, including the ravine. It looked the way they wanted it to look.

  The bright white concrete dam bridging the opening at the bottom of the ravine had fallen, breaking off most of the way down, toppling to lie like a broken shield across the river below. I guess the water must have all rushed out at once, scouring away whatever lay below the dam, leaving mudscape behind, the sinuous trickle of a little creek winding away down in the riverbottom.

  There was a boat of some kind stuck nose down in the mud a couple of kems away, shining bright yellow and white, looking like a lost toy, from this distance, though, it must’ve been fifty ems long.

  I tried to imagine the interesting ride its crew and passengers would’ve had, once the dam gave way.

  Funny how people’ll go out on a pleasure cruise when there’s a battle going on in the sky. Maybe they thought it’d be fun, watching the war from their boat.

  Maybe they brought a picnic lunch.

  We parked the ATV down in the bottom of the ravine, down where there was a fair-sized pool of clear, clean bright water left behind. It was tempting to imagine that this was a natural lake, the lake that would’ve been here had the dam never been built, but... right. When was that?

  We got out and Violet leaned against the fender of the jeep, watching me get undressed, dropping my clothes on the ground. I’ve seen optimods wear clothes from time to time, but not Violet. It’s not common, anyway. Most of them don’t want to be like us.

  Her eyes brightened as I became more naked.

  Something else I’ve never asked about.

  Maybe someday.

  So we went for a swim, laughing, fooling around, doing the things you usually do when you go swimming in private with a woman. I remember, from a long time ago, groping some girlfriend in a public pool, children frolicking all around. Interesting and titillating, feeling her crotch through the thin material of a polka-dot bikini bottom, feeling her shy hand on my prick, maybe imagining no one could see us, under the water.

  She’d whispered in my ear, “I wish we were alone...”

  At the time, I’d been remembering an earlier swim, myself as a child, swimming along under water, seeing some guy with his hand down the front of a girl’s swimsuit. Sure enough, when I looked around, there was a boy chin-deep in the pool, with dark hair streaming water down into his eyes, grinning at us from a few ems away.

  Up in the now-world of realtime, Violet and I crawled out of the water, up onto the bare stone beside the remains of the lake, sprawled ourselves under the bright and featureless sky of lost Ogygeia, sat and talked about nothing at all, looking at each other. After a while, we moved closer together and started doing familiar things to one another. Not long after that, our empty talk faded away.

  In time, good time, I found myself lying face down between her legs, doing what I knew I was supposed to do, listening to her breathe out those familiar, pleasure-scented sighs, sighs making a lovely tingle crawl right down my spine.

  Even animals have this.

  Dogs and cats. Mice.

  Even god-damned bugs.

  So what the hell does it mean to be a sentient being, a creature with a mind.

  Nothing.

  Nothing at all.

  I want my purple fox lady to be happy.

  Even if it’s only for ten minutes.

  Even if it’s only this.

  o0o

  Time passes, even when nothing changes. We lay under the blue sky, unable to detect Ogygeia’s fatal leak, ate our lunches and made love again, this time slightly uncomfortable, our stomachs too full.

  I remember how Violet put her arms around me, holding me close as I curled my hips under, pushing as far into her as I could, waiting while my orgasm finished itself off, then, as I relaxed, as I let my weight settle fully on top of her, like a man relaxing atop a balled-up rug.

  “Sometimes,” she whispered in my ear, “this is the best part.”

  Sometimes it is. Nothing for me to say. No easy way for me to agree.

  I could recall being with women who didn’t understand that.

  Told myself I’d have to figure out some way to tell Violet how much I appreciated the fact that she did.

  After a while, we went swimming again, washing away the mess of sex. Got out and dried ourselves under bright skylight, ate the desserts we’d packed, heating wedges of apple pie in the ATV’s campstove, getting them hot enough to melt little wads of stark white ice cream.

  When it was time to go, I started putting my clothes on, Violet watching me, eyes full of some pale, washed-out regret.

  “Funny,” I said, “how the sky’s stayed bright for so long. Don’t they have night here?”

  Violet said, “Maybe the timer’s broken.”

  Maybe so.

  We got in the ATV then and let it climb back up to the rim of the ravine, following the same track by which we’d gotten in, driving up
the almost-empty bed of the feeder-stream. Somewhere, the mountains that gave rise to the stream were gone, no way for them to skim out rain. Or maybe they never were. Maybe the pumps that fed the rivers of Ogygeia are broken.

  Doesn’t matter.

  When the eutropic shield goes, the atmosphere will go. When the air’s gone, the water will boil away to nothing. Ogygeia will be dead as the natural cometary source-core it must once have been, and that will be that.

  We parked at the top of the ravine, standing by a collapsed building of some sort, standing at the foot of a broken-off pier, looking down across the ruined landscape for one last time. Someday, a long time from now, I’ll be thinking of something entirely different. Something will remind me of this vista, and this one lost moment will live again. I’ll remember standing here with Violet, will remember how it felt to have my arm around her furry shoulders, and remember how I felt when...

  She said, “What’s that?”

  “Hm?”

  She got out from under my arm, cocking her head, turning around, ears erect, obviously listening. “What...”

  “Sh.”

  Then she reached into the back of the ATV and took one of the positronic rifles from the gunmount. “Take yours.”

  Um. “Violet, I don’t know how to operate this.”

  She said, “Push the black button on the thumb side of your trigger guard. A bayonet’ll pop out.”

  Great. I guess I can look menacing and scare the living shit out of whatever she hears.

  I followed her around the side of the collapsed building, watching her tip her head this way and that, erect purple ears like dish antennae, trying not to make any noise, thinking how damned alien this made her look. Like the product of some other evolutionary scheme. She stopped at the back of the foundation, by what looked like a flight of concrete stairs, over which the lintel had collapsed, looking down into dusty darkness.

  “Vi...”

  “Sh.”

  Still listening.

  And, suddenly, I began to hear something too. Faint. Distant. Muffled. Soft whimpering, like a crying child. Violet turned and looked at me with the most incredible alarm in her eyes and I nodded slowly. Yes. I hear it too.

  So now what?

  She said, “Well, we really ought to...” A longing look in the direction of our ATV. I nodded. Right. That’s what we ought to do. This is no business of ours.

  But.

  Yeah.

  I think Violet could read these thoughts, plain as you please in my eyes.

  She turned away and kneeled by the hole, then slowly crawled inside. Just before her feet disappeared, a light came on down there, flooding back past her body. I heard somebody say something too, not Violet, real words, though nothing I could understand.

  I looked at my rifle, trying to figure out how to make it light up, gave up quickly for fear that I might make it explode somehow. I kneeled to crawl after her, pausing to retract the bayonet so I wouldn’t accidentally stick it up Violet’s pretty ass and ruin my next few days.

  She was lying at the bottom of the stairs, looking down over the edge of a broken ledge into a dark, dusty space below. I crawled beside her and looked myself. Maybe it was a basement or something, but the ceiling had fallen in, fallen under the whole weight of the collapsed building above. Probably just a storeroom, there seemed to be all sorts of crushed junk down here. Broken-open barrels with dark puddles around them. Other things solid enough they were probably all that was holding the space open.

  In a weary voice, Violet said, “Oh, Murph...”

  Down in the dusty shadows, as I lay staring, I could make out the half-naked form of a woman, obviously a woman, white skin, large, saggy breasts, a dark thatch of pubic hair between her spread legs... I flinched away from looking at where her left leg flattened, disappearing under a fallen beam. Her other leg was cocked up at a sharp angle, still covered with blue denim.

  Probably the other one was too. Probably she’d ripped open her pants to see what she could do. Probably...

  There was a long knife, some kind of cooking knife, lying beside her. There was what looked like a nice, straight cut on her thigh, not far from where it disappeared under the beam. Not a very deep cut.

  And there was a little boy, covered with grime, kneeling beside her, one hand under her head, the other holding a cup from which we could see the reflected shine of some liquid.

  Something moved in the shadows beyond. It crept forward, and seemed to be a little girl, naked from the waist up, clad from the waist down in what might have been the tattered remains of a sundress. Her left arm was gone halfway between shoulder and elbow, stump sealed with a tourniquet, skin above it nicely blackened by gangrene.

  Artificial worlds are seeded with the regular microbial biome from natural worlds. From the natural world. And gangrene organisms also have their regular place in nature.

  The woman on the floor, looking up at us, said something in an anguished voice, Ogygeian words no more than a babble of phonemes.

  The little boy, fear in his face, stood up, putting down the cup, and took a step backward. When he did, he accidentally bumped against his sister’s stump. The little girl grunted and began to cry. It was her voice we’d heard from above.

  When I looked back at Violet, she was looking at me, eyes bright with... something.

  “What’ll we do?”

  She tried to looked back at the people in the hole, turned her head aside, turning to look back up at the little patch of blue sky at the top of the stairs. I wondered if they could see it down below, wondered how many times the boy might have climbed up here, climbed up the stairs, and waited for somebody to come.

  “Well,” she said, “I guess we could just head on back and... report this.”

  “Nobody’ll come. Once the fleet leaves, Ogygeia will be abandoned.” Yes. The shield will fail and... long before then, these people... The woman was shouting up to us, desperate words, transcending language.

  Violet said, “We can take them with us. We were in medevac. You can get her leg off easily enough.”

  True.

  “And then?”

  Violet bit her lip, looking back down in the hole again, obviously forcing herself to look. “Marine’s won’t let us bring her through the gate of course. I guess... those people we saw, maybe they would...”

  I thought about the little band of looters. Sure, we could... “Violet, everyone left alive on Ogygeia’s going to die shortly.”

  The woman below had fallen silent, was listening to us talk. Does she understand us? We’re talking in one of the more widely known languages, so... so maybe she knows. Maybe that’s why she’s silent.

  I said, “So we can put her through the agony of a field amputation, done with a first-aid kit, take her and her kids back to the city and abandon them to die.”

  Silence. Then Violet said, “Or we can leave them here to die in this hole.”

  Yeah.

  Or we can do the right thing.

  I sat looking at Violet, who sat looking at me.

  Finally, without a word, she rolled onto her belly and lifted the rifle, pointing it over the ledge, down into the hole. When she thumbed something on the stock, the rifle’s business end began to sparkle a lovely emerald green.

  Below, the trapped woman suddenly screamed, voice vibrant with horror, full of renewed life.

  We lay there for a long, long moment, listening to those screams, which drowned out the crying of the children, then Violet thumbed the stock again and the tip of her rifle went dark. When she lowered the gun and looked back at me, I felt a pale, awful pang of horror, seeing the triangles of dark, matted fur that had formed so suddenly under her eyes.

  I never saw you cry before, Violet.

  Very softly, she whispered, “I feel like I’m killing my own puppies, Murph. Mine.”

  What does it take to make a man’s heart stop beating?

  Maybe listening to Violet talk about the children she could never have. Ma
ybe that’s enough.

  She said, “I don’t want to leave them here.”

  Looking into the bright shine of her eyes, I said, “There’s no place we can take them. Nothing we can do.”

  When I looked down at my useless rifle, Violet said, “The red button over there, that’s the safety. Press that, then all you have to do is aim it and pull the trigger.”

  Right.

  I rolled onto my belly, looking down over the ledge at those three helpless people. I thumbed the red button, the tip of my rifle began its deadly green sparkle, and this time the woman didn’t scream. Through the rangefinder, I could see her face, plain as day, dark eyes looking up at me hopelessly. Her lips seemed to be moving, though I could hear nothing.

  No point in looking at the two kids. No point in seeing that.

  I said, “I don’t think I can do this.”

  Violet said, “Then we’d better just leave them here.”

  Yeah. Maybe someone else will come and do what we can’t. Or maybe a miracle will happen. Maybe Orb will reach down from the foggy depths of Uncreated Time and lift them straight on up to Heaven.

  Violet said, “Murph?”

  I shut my eyes and pulled the trigger.

  After a while, Violet took the gun out of my hands and locked the safety, then helped me crawl back up into bright blue daylight.

  o0o

  We had a long damned drive back to the base, much longer, it seemed to me, than the nice little drive we’d had coming out. We just rode along in silence, following the directions of the inertial guidance system, bumping over uneven ground under a flat blue sky, going from nowhere to nowhere.

  Every now and again, Violet would reach out and pat me on the arm, touch my thigh, whatever.

  It seemed to take forever for the leftover cityscape to reappear, but eventually it came over the close horizon, growing out of the ground like a shambles of off-white vegetation. Violet pulled to a stop, near one edge, in something that looked like it might once have been a park. Dangerous to stop here, what with all the looters in what was left of the city. No reason to stop here.

  Violet sat looking over at me, pathetically hollow-eyed. Finally, she said, “I’m sorry, Murph. You shouldn’t have had to do that.”