When We Were Real (Author's Preferred Edition)

by William Barton

  Did I have to? What was the right thing? I said, “I’m glad I could do it for you, Vi. I didn’t know how you felt about...”

  She looked away for a second. “I guess I didn’t know either. Not ‘til right then.”

  Brief flash of memory. I remembered Dûmnahn talking about what it’d been like, being the self-aware software of a strapped-down robot arm. What was it she’d said then? Bastards.

  When I said it aloud, here and now, she looked over at me and said, “Who? Us or them?”

  No answer.

  We got out of the ATV and stretched, looking around at what was left of the Ogygeian park. It’d been right on the edge of the firehaze crunch and represented a damage cline, showing the precision of this new munitions technology, which some smily-faced Standard ARM boffin had probably dug out of the Solar System research archives. Standard probably paid a premium price to buy these patents from whatever rich man owned the rights.

  On one side was the broken city, on the other the flat, half-melted, dusty white ground that’d been under the crunch. In between were scattered artifacts, trees, benches, fountains, flowerbeds, more or less destroyed depending on how far they’d been from the edge of the pressure zone.

  I realized with a slight start that the odd, humped up shapes on the ground were mummified human beings.

  Maybe they’d gotten a nice view of the battle, sitting out her under the open sky.

  Hell, maybe it was night on Ogygeia when the end came.

  That would’ve been pretty, sitting out here in the darkness, looking up at the starry, starry night, watching the flicker-flash-flare of the war pass on by, seeing the purple firehaze curtains rise up and up, like some oh-so-lovely auroral blaze, and then...

  Yes.

  And then.

  I flinched, seeing Violet bend low over one of the smaller forms, fearing it might be the remains of a child, but when I came close, I saw it was only a dead dog, looking like a stuffed toy left to bake and shrivel under the fires of kiln.

  Violet said, “Just a puppy.”

  And then the ATV’s caller started to beep.

  We went back to the jeep and punched up the dashboard freeze-frame, calling forth a demand-page document. Alert. Alert. Combat emergency recall. All crews to battle stations.

  I felt a little flood of relief as we started the engine and drove on in. Stopped me from wondering about Violet’s feelings. Stopped me from wondering if we’d been the ones who’d dropped this particular firehaze.

  o0o

  Back at the base, things were in an uproar, ships lined up on the landing stage, technicians rushing about, getting them ready. Our own Oh-twenty-two had been dragged form its hangar with its service panels still hanging open, trailed by techies and trucks while the sirens wailed and ships lifted for the sky.

  Violet and I, useless, waited beside our ship, waited, watching the technicians hurry, aghast, knowing how dangerous it was to hurry a task like theirs.

  I pictured us lifting for the sky. Pictured us exploding, taking the base with us, because someone had done his job badly, under duress.

  Overhead, hanging like a phantasm in the pale blue sky, the carrier was full of shifting light, turrets going this way and that, projector ports opening and closing as it drank down its fleet of defensive fighters. Pretty soon, it would fly away too, flaring brilliant modulus light, growing smaller, then gone.

  The crew chief, an odd-looking man with tufts of hair on his face, other tufts poking out of his ears, looking like someone somehow cross-bred from an optimod, came up to us, wiping his hands on his tunic. “Almost done, Commander,” he said. “Yours was in good shape anyway. We were done with the rebuild; all we’re really doing now is checking connections and reloading your guns.”

  I said, “What the hell’s going on?”

  He gave me a peculiar look, something in his face that made me feel like an idiot, “You don’t know?” Incredulous. How could anybody not know?

  Violet said, “We were... out of touch, Chief.”

  “Oh. Well.” He shook his head slowly, turning away from us, looking up at all the activity in the sky. “Hope the hell we can get these ships finished in time. Hate like hell to get left behind to fend for ourselves.”

  Surprise. Standard ARM wouldn’t leave it’s techies behind. They’re its stock in trade, its most important...

  Violet said, “Chief?”

  He smiled at her. “Observatories started picking up hard radiation fronts from several points around the periphery of the Centauri Jet a few days ago. Weird stuff, like nothing they’d ever seen before. Yesterday, one of the corporation-controlled observatories on this end of the Jet resolved the wavefront system as the modulus exhaust from a large mass of spacecraft undergoing strong deceleration.”

  I said, “You’d think they might’ve noticed something like that right away.” Modulus exhaust has a rather distinctive spectrum.

  The chief said, “The exhaust cones were blueshifted by about one-half cee. Made them look like an incoming high-energy wave front. Like a pocket supernova or something.”

  Violet said, “You telling me there’s a fleet of ships out there running in on us at half the speed of light?”

  “Yep.”

  Just about four times nominal interstellar transit velocity. “Who the hell...”

  The chief snickered at me. “Who do you think? Space aliens? Hell, technology back in the Solar System’s always been more advanced than what we’ve got out here. All we ever did was buy their fucking research.”

  Violet said, “You think...”

  The chief said, “I heard there’s already been some kind of fucking broadcast. I haven’t seen the full text, though, so I don’t know exactly. I guess this is just the first wave.”

  “First wave of what?”

  “I heard they’re calling it the Human Defense League Arbitration Force. I guess they’ve come to make us behave.” The chief, hands on hips, looking up at the busy sky, seemed to grin. “Think they can?”

  o0o

  We got aloft with no trouble at all, orbiting away from Ogygeia, forming up with our squadron, following an ad hoc carrier task force back into that fabled starry deep. Looking back over my shoulder, I could watch a little blue and white globe recede, looking so much like a whole real world it was hard to believe it was anything else.

  And so unchanged. So undamaged. You’d never know we’d done what we did.

  Just like old times now, Violet riding in the pilot’s seat, I in the CSO’s, stereotaxis hood pulled open so it seemed like we rode our chairs, our little pod of control panels, naked to space, stars all around us, peaceful, far away.

  Our orders came over the freeze-frame, and we moved in response to them, following the squadron forward, taking up our positions in front of the onrushing enemy fleet, fleet come to strike us all down, force a conclusion to our pathetic little war.

  Make us all behave, that’s what the chief said.

  We won’t know about it, though. Out here, without an edge, facing a vastly superior foe. We’re just a tripwire force, here to delay the enemy, a little stumbling block that may delay the assault long enough for Standard ARM’s main battle fleet to arrive and take them on.

  We won’t know how that turns out.

  We’ll all be dead.

  So we took our positions and waited.

  I turned off the stereotaxis hood and we were engulfed in the warm cocoon of our spaceship cabin, cut off from the universe, alone together in a little vacuole of soft, comforting light, Violet and I side by side, with nothing to say, nothing to do.

  When I reached out and touched her arm, not saying anything, she looked at me and smiled a little smile so familiar I’d lost the ability to recall its actual details. Just a smile. Violet’s smile. That’s all.

  She said, “You want to make love one last time, Murph?”

  Ah. One last time.

  But we might survive.

  Isn’t it OK to pretend?


  I don’t think I wanted to, not right then, and I don’t think she wanted to either, but... hell. That’s what it’s all been about, hasn’t it? So we’ll make love one last time, and then we’ll lie together in some quiet, sweet aftermath, and then they’ll sound the battle cry, and then we’ll go die.

  Simple as that.

  There weren’t many more words for us to say. We crawled over the seats and got into the little bunk, made love one last time, just as we said, clumsy, mechanical, unbearably tender. And then I lay quietly on top of her, our passions cooled, feeling that familiar warmth and closeness evolve toward an inevitable aching void.

  Violet said, “I always wondered how a real woman feels, lying here like this, when her man’s spilled his seed inside her and she knows the babies will come.”

  Nothing to say.

  No way for me to know... anything.

  All I could do was hold her close for just a little while longer, then it was time for us to get up and do what had to be done, get back in our seats and watch blue flowers of light form in the sky, separating us from all those faraway stars.

  Violet said, “All of this is for nothing, isn’t it? No matter how things turn out, it’s all for nothing.”

  I nodded, opening the gunnery interface, tuning up my weapons systems, getting ready.

  Violet said, “I keep thinking about those kids we killed, back on Ogygeia.”

  We didn’t kill them, Violet. I did. But thanks for... helping me carry the burden.

  She said, “There were hundreds of millions of children killed on Ogygeia alone.”

  And, probably, an Ogygeia destroyed for every day of the war.

  What am I supposed to say?

  That’s life?

  She said, “I was ashamed I couldn’t kill those children. Couldn’t kill them just because I had to see their faces. I was ashamed I made you do it.”

  Nobody made me do it, Violet. I’m a free man.

  She said, “I’ll be glad when this is over.”

  Glad when we’re dead, Violet? Maybe I will be too, come to think of it. But our deaths won’t bring those children back to life. Or any other children, however invisible, we killed just because we were supposed to.

  I think I might have said something to her then, something about how glad I was to be here with her now, here to die by her side, about how my last thoughts... it seemed so damned stupid, so damned trivial, that I hesitated, wondering if there really was anything I ought to say, anything I needed to say, or if I should remain what I’d always been, mute, inglorious, loyal to a fault and...

  Then, of course, the freeze-frame began to blink, alerting us to the presence of an incoming demand page.

  I started to call it up, hesitated again while I listened to a command circuit override message: Switch all freeze-frame communications to secure coded channel six and...

  I smiled, wondering why the hell they hadn’t thought of that before, as I pulled up the demand page circling in our storage ring.

  Right.

  HDL Arbitration force demands your surrender.

  Right.

  Individual crews surrendering their ships will be spared.

  Well, what did you expect?

  Command circuit was breaking in, reminding us of the corporate Articles of War. No trial, even for those of you who have rights. Just death.

  A footnote on the demand page said, Oh, by the way, Solar System Supreme Court has ruled ownership of sentient biotechnologies illegal. HDL has decided to apply this principle throughout human space.

  I heard Violet gasp, but I don’t think I quite understood what it meant. Not right away.

  I said, “Fuck. Dead is dead. What difference do they think it’s going to make?”

  There was a silence in our ship, then Violet said, “ATACs are the best ships we’ve got right now. Our squadron mates might get us, but nobody else will.”

  I twisted in my seat to stare at her, was astounded by the light of hope in her eyes. “Are you saying you want...” I gestured at the blue lights of the HDL fleet, looming at us out of the sky.

  She said, “It’s been almost a thousand years, Murph, since I was made in a vat. Made in a vat and sent out to do my masters’ work.”

  And what difference does it make if this is just another lie, hm? What if HDL turns out to be just another set of masters? What if there is no freedom for the likes of us?

  I sat back in my chair and watched the lights of the HDL fleet grow larger, brighter, faster, spreading before us, blotting out the stars. It may be that they won’t even win, you see, that, one day, Standard ARM and all the others will stand like giants astride the Earth, masters of all they survey.

  And yet.

  What do I want to say?

  That I’ll follow you, Violet?

  That I’ll follow you to the ends of the Earth?

  I leaned forward and engaged my gunnery interface, tuning the scanners to maximum range, then I glanced at Violet, and said, “Let’s go.”

  Long moment of silence, then Violet brought our field modulus devices up to full power and opened the exhaust grids wide. A few seconds later, one of the other ships followed us, surging away from the line of battle, toward the oncoming enemy fleet. I think, for almost a minute, nobody could believe what we were doing, then the rest of our comrades opened fire.

  The other ship, friends whose names we’d never know, was hit, exploding in a ball of golden fury, just before we got out of range.

  Fourteen: The war went on

  The war went on for another thirty thousand days.

  Here at the other end of history, time kills us statistically, not inevitably, but we die, nonetheless.

  Worlds destroyed, like so many popped soap bubbles. Endless billions dead, lives snuffed as though they never were, yet there were always more billions waiting in the wings, more worlds waiting to be destroyed. And the war, begun with a technology of profitable lassitude, ended with a technology driven by desperation to make up the lag of a thousand years and more.

  Over.

  Over and done with.

  Violet and I rode homeward, threading the center of the starbow’s eye, sitting side by side in naked black space, surrounded by the stereotaxis hood’s descendant, Heaven’s glory crushed flat in the sky but for the pale blue dot of our destination.

  Homeward.

  No home for time’s orphans, of course, but there’s always hope we can make a home for ourselves, somewhere, somewhen. That kind of hope always dies hard.

  Killing time, the same deadly time that’d formerly killed men, I worked with the freeze-frame, trying to extract information from the datawarren’s microwave squeal, but it was useless. We were moving too fast, crossing too many beamlines at too sharp an angle. We have better computers nowadays, better able to process that red- and blue-shifted data, but the transceiver technology is old, reaching its endpoint long before humanity ever tried for the interstellar deep.

  Maybe someday.

  Violet looked over at me, face shadowed, half-lit by the layered coloring of the distorted sky. “Why bother? We’ll be there soon enough.”

  I pushed the freeze-frame back into its mount, watching the swirl of static fade away to nothing, the gray carrier tracks shimmer and go dark. “They were about to put Finn mac Eye on trial when we left Mireille. I keep wondering what happened.”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe none.” Finn mac Eye and Meyer Sonn-Atem weren’t the bad guys here. What happens to them...

  Violet said, “You think the corporations got what they deserved?”

  I shrugged. Who knows? Not quite the same thing as who cares, but... Rules and regulations. Companies broken up into their component parts and turned over to minority stockholder consortia. Principal officers and boards of directors convicted of crimes against... not humanity.

  Crimes against us all.

  And sentenced. Stripped of their wealth, placed in suspended animation and s
hoved into a museum exhibit on Earth. Here lies the Chief Executive Officer of Standard ARM, name forgotten, who figured he owned everything he could steal.

  Not quite a sentence of death.

  They’ll sleep until someone, somewhere, somewhen, wants them to live again.

  I said, “Seems fair to me.”

  “Time.”

  Violet hit the brakes and our PBX-15 relativistic patrol bomber, destroyer of whole worlds, shuddered around us, starbow opening like an accordion, colors fading to monochrome, growing dim, re-evolving to a black sky, full of stars. A hundred thousand AUs from Mireille to the near-empty space just off the Centauri Jet’s distal end. Twenty months of threads pulled from Uncreated Time. Three hours for us.

  What would the lost millennium have been like, had these things been available from the time Violet was decanted?

  Different.

  Wonderful?

  Or more horrible than we can possibly imagine?

  No use wondering.

  History’s what happened.

  Ahead of us now, Ygg was a small, sullen globe, unchanged from when I’d seen it last. Try as I might, I couldn’t remember it from my last visit home. Those few pathetic days are smothered under childhood memories of Ygg seen from various vantage points, assorted times. Mostly, I remember it peeking down from the sky, peering over the edges of the habitat panels.

  Imagine seeing all that again, just as if my life hadn’t happened.

  There.

  A pale diamond in the sky, reflecting starlight, Ygglight, the distant glow of the Alpha Centauri suns. It grew larger swiftly as Violet flew us down to the system ecliptic and swung us in toward rendezvous with Audumla.

  She said, “I was born on such a world.”

  Maybe even the same one. I can’t remember now if Standard ARM Decantorium XVII was built in situ or towed here from far away, long ago. I’ll have to look it up some time.

  I extruded the freeze-frame again and started trying to rouse Audumla’s traffic control center. Funny. It should come right up, should already be up, challenging us for having entered their vector space at such high velocity, Just who do you think you are...