When We Were Real (Author's Preferred Edition)

by William Barton

  “Is there anything you need?” Stupid. Stupid words popping out of my mouth, unbidden, as always.

  They need everything.

  He tipped back to rest on the crooked base of his cylinder, balanced teetering as he lifted up that one remaining arm. “Spare parts would be nice.”

  I said, “All sorts of things laying around in the big dump on Mimir’s Well.”

  “We know that. It’ll take us a while to build a spaceship, though. There aren’t any left here. Except for bits and pieces.”

  I looked toward our attack bomber.

  Well.

  Hardly a cargo hull, but...

  Violet put her hand on my shoulder and said, “We could put in a call to the Reconstruction Authority. There are several programs for helping damaged habitats get back on their feet. And, of course, you’d qualify for any number of low-interest loans from the Manumitted Intelligences Welfare Agency. I...”

  The tattered sensor pack at Beebee’s crumpled waist turned toward her, solid-state sensors gleaming in our light. “We’d... like to do it on our own, if we could.” A silence, then, “An optimod should understand that.”

  Violet said, “Yes.”

  I said, “I’m not sure if there are any Audumlan Mother’s Children left alive besides me. I’ll do what I can to see a proper quitclaim’s been filed. Audumla’s yours now.”

  “Himera. We called it Himera before the Mother’s Children came.”

  Himera, then.

  o0o

  On the way out, floating over the wan and shadowy bayou country, drifting toward the smashed lightpanel and the hard white stars beyond, I stopped us at a place I hadn’t thought I wanted to visit, Violet swinging the ship up the course of a wide, flat riverbed, full of dry sandbars, banks well trenched by anomalous erosion.

  I remember how seeing this, seeing it when the world was alive, made me realize how far Audumla had gone down hill over the years. I remember imagining that some day the ruin would be complete. Someday, the Mother’s Children would evacuate Audumla, leave it to suffocate and die, too expensive, too complex for them to maintain.

  Now it lies dead anyway, hard frozen in time.

  There. There’s the little village I remember so well, little white houses smashed to splinters and scattered across the bristling, dead remnants of the green. Maybe Styrbjörn’s dead down there as well, crushed flat atop one last mechanical whore.

  Stupid.

  I picture him dead like that because it pleases me to imagine his last moments, thrusting away, feeling his orgasm build, then the final white light, painless and swift.

  But he probably died hunched over his desk, doing the job he was so proud to have, auditing one last account.

  Still, the white light would have come.

  I remember how I always imagined Violet and I would die in combat, facing the white light together.

  Flash.

  Then gone to some impalpably serene eternity.

  Beyond the river, beyond the crushed town, beyond hills littered with the ruins of dead trees, Violet set our spacecraft down in a splash of blue haze at the top of an exposed slope, the remains of an open field.

  We got out, and I stood still, stood quietly, looking across my grassy knoll at nothing. Not even shadows here. What the hell? Did I expect to find my long-lost allomorph whore lying here, waiting for me, empty eyes turned up toward the darkened heavens, legs spread just so?

  Don’t know what I expected.

  Maybe only this.

  Violet said, “Why are we here?”

  She’d come to expect my relics, expect their physical reality.

  So I told her about my field of butterflies. Told her about my formless, featureless, nameless allomorph whore, whore with eyes of glass who lay underneath me one day, a long time ago.

  There was a silence. Then she said, “We remember funny things, don’t we?”

  Idle relics of the past. Things that let us imagine we’ve lived, when nothing else remains.

  She said, “I have a memory too. I can’t remember where it comes from, or when it happened. Can’t be sure it really happened at all. I’m lying under a man. He’s finished with me. The night is damp and still and quiet as I feel him recede. And I imagine that... just this once... somehow...”

  It’s the same memory as mine.

  I knelt on the ground, deep in the shadows, trying to call up memory of my past, trying to see those ancient perspectives, imagine that this is the spot where... something on the ground in front of me, a tiny, flat, dark shape on the dry dead grass.

  Maybe it’s a yellow butterfly, like a buttercup shining in the stemlight, preserved for me, the relic I seek.

  When I tried to pick it up, it crumbled away to nothing like a flake of dry ash.

  I stood. We turned away and walked back to the ship, walking slowly to the ramp, which rose up behind us.

  o0o

  The sun, the real Sun, grew before us in rectified stereotaxis as we flew onward, as we braked our speed, slaking the interstellar drive, dropping into the controlled flight patterns of old, established commercial lanes, passing among all the inhabited worlds.

  The war never came here, though it ended here, in some very real sense.

  And, as we passed among the worlds, Violet grew increasingly quiet, increasingly pensive, wrapped in herself, not quite closing me out.

  My turn now to stand by, ready to hold on, ready simply to be as she went about the business of closing doors, of making room in her heart for all our tomorrows.

  I found myself imagining us standing together, holding hands in a room full of stainless steel vats. This is where I was born, she’d say. From this tub right here. Patting it on a chipped white enamel rim, looking down into its shiny depths, like a child adoring its mother.

  That would make us the same, wouldn’t it?

  The old habitat, when we finally got to it, was hanging by itself in Mars’s barely-stable leading co-orbital libration center, an immense, silver-gray wheel, turning oh-so-slowly against the motionless backdrop of faraway stars. Stars that, once upon a time, were no more than meaningless flecks painted on a black velvet canvass.

  How wonderful, I remember thinking, that they one day became real.

  How terrible, what they became.

  I picked out bright Sirius, and had a stark memory of Porphyry’s bedroom, of lying on her too-willing flesh, lying on demand, at her command.

  In all my wondering about all the unknown dead, I never once wondered about her, wondered about her fate.

  Sitting with Violet, waiting for her to decide, I realized I hoped Porphyry was all right, making a new life somewhere for herself.

  Forgive her, after what she’d done to me, to that poor girl, to so many others, known and unknown?

  Well.

  Forgiveness is mine to give.

  Violet said, “When I was young, it was bright chrome silver. Shining silver, like a mirror.”

  She reached out for her controls and slid us toward the axial docking port.

  o0o

  In bare minutes, we stood in a dusty, dimly-lit gray corridor, looking into a room full of old, dented stainless steel vats, whisked through the almost empty, almost lightless, almost lifeless habitat by its still-functioning system of conveyors.

  Over in the corner, by a splayed open toolkit, a small, gray-furred, seal-like optimod male was bent over a tangle of old plumbing, muttering softly to himself, whispering, the way a person will while trying to work his way through some complex problem.

  He looked up when we stepped into the room, smiling at Violet, though not at me.

  “Hello, m’am. Come to see the old place?”

  She looked around, wide eyed, seeming bewildered. “I... think I was born here. In this room.”

  He put his tools aside and stood up slowly. “I was too. A lot of us were, back in the old days. There’re pretty good records in the habitat’s memory core, if you want to see which exact vat it was.”

&n
bsp; I said, “Would it still be here?”

  He gave me a look. “Humans often make things and... just leave them to sit.”

  Violet put her hand on the edge of one of the vats, looking in at the connectors, which looked like nothing so much as the plumbing you’d see inside a gutted robot incubator. This is the way Mrs. Trinket would’ve looked after the war got through with her.

  When she turned away, expression guarded, eyes hooding some kind of pain, Violet looked at the optimod’s toolkit, at the tangle of exposed tubing he’d been sorting through, and said, “What is it you’re doing here?”

  He cocked his head to one side, glanced briefly at me, smiled, then said, “Don’t you know, m’am? We’ve won the right to control our own reproduction.”

  One long, still moment, then Violet turned and looked at me.

  o0o

  We got to Earth at last, tourists with nowhere in particular to go.

  It was sunset and, not far from the cosmodrome where we landed our little ship, we found a vast park, relic of an era when the only inhabitants of Earth were the richest of the rich, human men and women with wealth so immense it had no meaning.

  The park wasn’t a wilderness, but then we had no sense of what a real wilderness ought to be like.

  The dark forests of Telemachus Major’s green garden moon? Manufactured, of course. The riotous vegetation, the scummy swamplands in Audumla? Manufactured, then let grow to ruin.

  We stood at the top of a long, low hill, looking down into a broad valley flooded with summery sunset light. There was a little stream down there, carefully kept grass lawn ending at a little white beach, tucked in the crook of the river.

  I imagined little boys and girls playing down there, but there was no one.

  This is, I remembering thinking, just like the field of butterflies, where I took my nameless allomorph whore. What would she think of it, were she still alive?

  I imagined others in quick succession.

  Ludmilla? Of course.

  And Reese? Would Reese like it here?

  How about Jade? Jade died in a place much like this, on a fine day not so different from this one.

  Even Porphyry.

  Porphyry would like it here.

  I turned then and looked at Violet, who took my hand and said, “Let’s go home now.”

  When I looked away from her, there was indeed one lone yellow butterfly, lifting off from a little blue flower.

  o0o

  Happily ever after.

  Is that the fairy-tale ending we seek?

  If so, then one day I sat by myself at the top of a long, low hill, looking downslope toward another familiar, small winding river. Beyond it, a broad, green, well-mannered forest curved up the side of one of Himera’s habitat panels, growing ever smaller until it disappeared in the blue mist of distance.

  Overhead, the stemshine grew dim as night began to fall, and as the blue sky beyond the panel turned dark, the stars began popping out, one by one, just as they did when I was a boy, so very long ago.

  How is it that I came to be here?

  Is this what I really wanted?

  Was there another life I might have lived?

  How does that story go?

  Two dark shadows separated themselves from the hillside not far away, a tall black cylinder with long, spindly arms, one arm reaching out to clasp the hand of a small humanoid figure.

  When they resolved themselves, it was Beebee, shiny and new again, the other figure that of a small gray optimod boy, just a few months out of the vat, growing to adulthood with astonishing speed, though nothing abnormal for his kind.

  Beebee planted himself firmly on the ground beside my tree, becoming part of the silent landscape.

  The boy sat down beside me, snuggling against my side as I put my arm around him.

  Overhead, the sky had grown dim enough that Ygg was beginning to show through the habitat portal, like a dull red coal.

  Down on the hillside there was a third shadowy figure, Violet making her way up to join us, finished with the deeds of day, moving through blue dusk, surrounded by the moving yellow sparks of a firefly cloud, part of a setpiece I must always have dreamed, dreamed so often it finally became real.

  Am I happy?

  You know the answer.

  Even now I imagine real life can support happy endings that go on and on, while only stories must fade to black.

  eBooks to Come

  What follows is a list of prospective eBook publications, a mix of reprint and new. The pricing schema for them is simple. Novellas, averaging 100 – 150 pages in length, will be $2.99. Full-length novels (usually more than 400 pages) will typically carry the original mass-market paperback cover price, for reprints, or $9.99 for new ones. Collections of short fiction will be priced according to length, somewhere in between. I intend to stick to that, come Hell or high inflation.

  The Starover Universe

  Hunting On Kunderer, 1972 reprint novella.

  A Plague of All Cowards, 1976 reprint novella.

  This Dog/Rat World, unpublished 1978 novella.

  Acts of Conscience, 1997 reprint novel.

  A Last War for the Oriflamme, new novella.

  Loci of the Starover Universe, new nonfiction.

  The Portmanteau Universe

  The Venusians, with Michael Capobianco, unpublished 1964 novella.

  Under Twilight, with Michael Capobianco, unpublished 1978 novel.

  The Silvergirl Universe

  When We Were New, reprint and new collection.

  When We Were Real, 1999 reprint novel.

  When We Were Lost, reprint and new collection.

  Other Novels

  Iris, with Michael Capobianco, 1990 reprint novel.

  Fellow Traveler, with Michael Capobianco, 1991 reprint novel.

  Dark Sky Legion, 1992 reprint novel.

  Radio Silence, unpublished 1992 novel.

  When Heaven Fell, 1995 reprint novel.

  The Transmigration of Souls, 1996 reprint novel.

  Alpha Centauri, with Michael Capobianco, 1997 reprint novel.

  White Light, with Michael Capobianco, 1998 reprint novel.

  Moments of Inertia, unpublished 2000 novel, parts serialized in Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Urban Hiker, and The North Carolina Literary Review, with a related article, “Gold from Your Novel” in Writer’s Digest.

  Other Novellas

  Almost Forever, 1993 reprint.

  Yellow Matter, 1993 reprint.

  Age of Aquarius, 1996 reprint.

  The Engine of Desire, 2002 reprint.

  The Man Who Counts, 2003 reprint.

  Off on a Starship, 2003 reprint.

  Down to the Earth Below, 2006 reprint.

  The Sea of Dreams, 2009 reprint.

  In Search of a Lost Age, 2011 new

  General Collections

  Ambient Light, complete short fiction from the 1980s and 1990s.

  Coronal Light, complete short fiction from the 2000s.

  Zodiacal Light, short fiction from the 2010s and beyond, should I live so long. We’ll see!

  Zed Variations, tales of Mr. Zed and his going doubles, including his lost-boy selves.

  Tales to Dishearten, short fiction from the 1960s and 1970s, including some Starover stories.

  Melting in the Sun, a collection of memoir stories, true in spirit, if not in fact.

  Shambles, a nonfiction assortment, articles on writing, software design, space exploration, and more.

  Roaming in the Gloaming, with Michael Capobianco. Collaborative fiction and nonfiction.

  Table of Contents

  Foreword

  One. Stories, they say

  Two. One last little stemshiny aside

  Three. No one who hasn’t lived

  Four. On our way from Telemachus Major

  Five. I awoke with a hard start

  Six. A couple of months after

  Seven. So

  Eight. Sirius is far away

&nb
sp; Nine. Telemachus Major

  Ten. There are moments

  Eleven. The Nulliterrae Swarm

  Twelve. It’s too easy

  Thirteen. Down on Ogygeia

  Fourteen: The war went on

  eBooks to Come

  Table of Contents

  Foreword

  One. Stories, they say

  Two. One last little stemshiny aside

  Three. No one who hasn’t lived

  Four. On our way from Telemachus Major

  Five. I awoke with a hard start

  Six. A couple of months after

  Seven. So

  Eight. Sirius is far away

  Nine. Telemachus Major

  Ten. There are moments

  Eleven. The Nulliterrae Swarm

  Twelve. It’s too easy

  Thirteen. Down on Ogygeia

  Fourteen: The war went on

  eBooks to Come