When We Were Real (Author's Preferred Edition) (10 page)

“Not me, no. Some other me. Long ago. I think I may have died here.”

 Violet: “Do you remember?”

Long silence, then: “No.”

I wondered how hard it was, remembering bits of past lives. Comforting to know, really
know
that you’d lived before? Or just the horror of knowing bits and pieces of what you’d lost?

Dûmnahn said, “This place is somehow tied to one of my oldest memories. Some... bit of code inside me... I remember being in a factory somewhere. Not all of me, just one arm, tied through a processor node to an index table. Mortise A in tenon B. Fastener C in orifice D. Mortise A in tenon B. Fastener C...”

“
Bastards
,” whispered Violet.

I had no idea then what she was talking about.

After landing, we turned our ship over to the base maintenance crew, walked across a darkling field covered with shadows, the shadows of a hundred moving, insensate robot arms and legs, got into the rec center, where we ate messhall food, walked around and stretched and kidded with the other crews, took our seats in the briefing room and waited for Squadron Leader Chamônix to come and tell us what was what.

Rumors flying this way and that.

One guy heard
SOCO XXIII
was bribed, that the war was already over. That, tomorrow, we’d gas up and go on home.

Another heard that the first-in recon fleet was massacred, that the colonists and their SOCO hirelings’d gotten high-energy military weapons from somewhere...

Violet snickered, “Nothing like that this side of Sol.”

...that we’d be thrown into the fray, stopgap, and be massacred as well, while Standard and her allies gathered strength, spent their accumulated wealth, got ready for a second strike.

Chamônix, a tall, thin woman like a walking white skeleton with long black hair, swept into the room with a short fat man in civilian mufti.

“Ah,” muttered Dûmnahn. “Mr. ben Fars. Senior Vice President for the Glow-Ice Mining venture. You’d think he’d be out of a job and standing in some headhunter line by now.”

Well, that happens in fairy tales, doesn’t it? In real life, when a manager fucks up and ruins a million working people’s lives, when he bungles so badly the company loses a decade’s profits, his Christmas bonus turns up a little short. That’s all.

Chamônix and Mr. ben Fars had some things to tell us. Armaments for the warships. Some modernization for the medevac teams. And, oh by the way, said Squadron Leader Chamônix, beaming at us all, Standard ARM has decided not to use Internal Security ground troops for this operation.

No?

No. Too big an action for the police. They’ve hired
l’Armée du SOCO IX
for the job. They’ll be here in a week. We’ll wait for them. Then we’ll head out.

She left the room, leaving silence behind.

o0o

RS67 turned out to have pretty good social facilities compared to what you might expect from a refueling station, probably because it was on the periphery of a major star system, right in the flow of heavy industrial traffic bound out for the Centauri Jet and points Solward.

 Once it transpired we wouldn’t have much to do other than makework training, crews began taking liberty in the squatter town that’d grown up around the main base, buildings made of fused regolith and junk from the station’s boneyard, as interesting an architecture as I’d ever imagined. Dûmnahn, Violet and I joined in without waiting, heading out under a red-tinted black sky, the sure sign of a thin, old-fashioned eutropic shield that couldn’t even color the sky blue, making it look like perpetual night, black sky spangled with familiar bright stars, the bright spark of Proxima, those two dull, irregular red moons, moving slowly but visibly across the heavens.

The first bar we made was a smoky place full of base technicians, overcrowded now with an influx of Security fliers, wait-things scurrying through the crowd dispensing whatever the hell you wanted, a brace of naked drumwiggle dancers up on the stage gyrating to tunes so old I’m sure my grandfather would’ve recognized them.

“You’d think, by now, creech would’ve made it here. I mean, the DataWarren...” Human Space is decades, hell
centuries
across, realtime travel, but it’s only scant years across for the information flow. Some hot new popcraze arises among the densely-populated moons of Jupiter, the news’ll get to the shock-crystal miners at Sirius, way the hell out on the frontier, in under nine years.

I thought about what it’d be like, flying all the way out to Sirius in only one go. Fifty years? You’d be somebody else by then.

Violet: “Fucking Proxima’s always been backward.”

Then Dûmnahn: “Colonials tend to be conservative. Drumwiggle lasted a long time, even back on Earth.”

Up on the stage, the dancers appeared to do no more than bounce, making their breasts seem to dance. Every last one of those women up on the stage a real human woman with a subtle thatch between her legs, dancing shadow of gate and altar that I...

Suddenly, Violet said, “Let’s get the fuck out of here. Must be something, somewhere...”

Dûmnahn said, “Hang on a minute...” Put one of his sensor probes in a tankard of frothy green beer, his fifth full liter counting by the empties on the table, and made the level go down fast.

“How the fuck can you drink so much?”

Dûmnahn, flicking foam, said, “Ahhh! A manly man among manly men!”

Violet: “No reason a cyberdoc
shouldn’t
be able to detox his own blood.”

Outside, Dûmnahn lifted his leg against what looked like the broken-off stub of a lamppost and pissed for a full three minutes, foamy puddle glistening and steaming in Proximal light. I needed to go myself, started to reach for my fly... abruptly grew conscious of Violet standing there, watching Dûmnahn, shaking her head in mock amazement.

“Well,” I said. “Where to?”

Long silence. Then Dûmnahn said, “Ahem. Um. Well, I’ve got some stuff I need to do. Cyberdoc stuff. You two’ll have to toddle on without me.”

“Dûmnahn? You sure you don’t want us to...” A sharp feeling of loss at the prospect of having the evening’s camaraderie diminished.

Violet clapped me on the shoulder and said, “Come on, Murph. Let’s let this old sod go sleep it off. The night is young and so are we!”

 Are we? Hell, I’m not even seventeen yet. No idea how old Violet might be. Until this very second, it never occurred to me to wonder. Just a state of mind, they say. “Sure.”

The next bar was a much quieter place, a cafe really, with tables scattered around the floor, in dark corners, all nooks and crannies. The thing on the stage was a robot of some kind, android in nature but quite obviously not a real person. Plasticky. But it could sing very well, smooth, light baritone crooning slow, soft tunes in a language I’d never heard before.

When I asked, Violet told me the robot was extremely old, as old as Dûmnahn maybe, a style of machine long abandoned, a newton synthesizer, she said, and that the language was probably Swahili.

After a while, sitting quietly, listing to the songs, drinking by her side, I began to notice that many of the other customers were optimods of various sorts. The waiter, who brought us drinks when we asked, just like a machine, was an optimod too, a big purple humanoid with a flat gorilla-face, who gave Violet a long look that seemed to make her angry.

After that, we left again, went on a walk in the darkness.

o0o

Beyond the edge of the squatter town, we climbed a rutted gravel road up a long, low hill that seemed to be covered with shadowy, broken ruins. Things like... I don’t know. Fallen pillars. Collapsed stone walls whose pieces, when I touched them, seemed hand hewn. “What is this place?”

Violet said, “I’m not sure. I’ve been here before, but... well, it’s never daylight on RS67 and there’s nothing about it on the local DataTrack.”

Like the collapsed remnants of some ancient Hellenistic city, some Seleucid Empire town decaying away to nothing on the Anatolian seacoast... impossible. Impossible for them even to be ancient, as human beings have been poking about Proxima for less than five hundred years.

And, of course, there
is
no one else.

At the top of the hill we sat on a precipice overlooking nothingness, sat on a low wall looking out at a dark, starry sky that went down and down, down below where a real world’s horizon would be, down almost to the cliff edge just beyond our feet. RS67 then, an irregular mess of a world, chewed through and through with machine-bitten holes.

Nothing.

On a real world there’d be meteors in the sky. Here, they glance silently off the eutropic shield, are sent silently, lightlessly on their way.

Still. Here is the bright jewel of Proxima, over there, stark and cold from a full 25,000 AUs are the Alphas, brilliant white A, dimmer, slightly orangish B. And over there, first-magnitude Sol. There Sirius. Vega. Fomalhaut...

“Hell of a lot easier to see them, see how they
really
look from a world that’s got an outside.”

Violet said, “You’re from Audumla, hm? What’s that like?”

I glanced over, took in her angular, inhuman profile, silhouetted against black sky and stars, hardly more than a shadow. “Nothing much. Just an old decantorium-style habitat, used up, sold, repurposed.” Nothing much. But then I could have told her, I suppose, about the Mother’s Children and the Timeliners, about Rannvi and Lenahr, Styrbjörn and Ludmilla Nellisdottir, about Beebee and Mrs. Trinket’s lovely little kits.

Could’ve told her about my father, I guess.

She said, “I know what you mean. I was... born in one of those.”

Notice the little hesitation. Is she ashamed she was born in a clean steel tank, like every other optimod who ever lived?

I turned to look at her again, was startled at how close she was, her face only a hand’s breadth of cems from mine. Maybe I jumped. Maybe not. Felt her breath in my face, sweet with a scent like lavender, a smell not so different from her name.

She reached out and touched my arm, ran her hand up to my elbow, seeming to trace the outline of the muscles through my shirt. Touched my chest, then my face, and said, in something of a throaty whisper, rough and raw, very different from her usual voice, “Your skin’s so smooth.”

The fingers on my face were anything but smooth, covered with short, dense fur, something like velvet. I could feel my heart pounding like mad in my chest, feel some kind of emotion coursing through my breast, but nothing that told me what to do.

She said, “Have you ever... been with a nonhuman before?”

There are moments when you want to ask the Orb for help, but he’s never there when you need him. “Yeah. Allomorphs, a few times...”

She made a little sigh, almost like laughter. “Allomorphs. Hardly the same thing at all.”

“No.”

Then she took my face between her palms, soft, velvet palms, leaned in close and, I think, tried to kiss me, but our faces seemed the wrong shape for each other, so it was more like being licked by a dog. Puppy kisses, I remember thinking. Involuntarily, I turned my face away, lifting my sleeve and wiping away the wet.

Violet let me go then, let her hands trail oh-so-reluctantly down my chest, let them fall back into her own lap. Silence. Then, “Sorry. You... want me to stop?”

I stuttered, trying to formulate... something. “Oh, Violet. I, um...” Useless. Too confused.

She leaned in again, hands on my thighs, let them slide up to my hips. Then one hand crept around to the inside of my thigh, palpating the place between my legs, maybe trying to gauge whether I was interested or not, I don’t know. I sat there, paralyzed, and let her do what she wanted. Sat still, hardly breathing, while she unbuttoned my shirt, while she ran her hands over my chest. Plenty of hair there, I remember thinking, but nothing compared to...

Sat still while she pulled my shirt off my shoulders, while she leaned in close, nuzzling the side of my neck, while I felt her long, dense, silky fur on my naked skin. Stood up, no more of my own accord than a robot on a preprogrammed subroutine, stood still while she unbuckled my belt, opened my trousers and slid them down.

She seemed to purr, finding definite evidence that I was interested after all.

Whispered, “Say something, Murph. Say something.”

All I could do was shiver a little. Shiver at the cool breeze on my skin, I guess, reach out tentative hands, run my fingers through the long hair running down her spine. She seemed to like that, stood up, put her arms around me. Pressed me close, and I could feel the woman of her through the fur, feel warm, doughy breasts against my chest, feel erect human nipples pressing through the fur.

Just a minute, I remember thinking. Just a minute and she’ll change. Change like an allomorph. The fur will be gone and she’ll be...

She took one of my hands in hers and made me touch her, pressed it to her breast so I could feel her underlying humanness, slid it down her side until it rested on her hip. Bone structure in there. Familiar bone structure. Tried to kiss me again, not much more successfully than the first time, merely getting my face wet.

We lay together on a smooth hillside of stone, stone warm as blood, and I did with Violet what you always do with a woman. Turned out she wasn’t so different after all. Maybe I wanted to ask her, between one time and the next, if she’d ever been with a human male before, but I couldn’t.

Maybe it would’ve broken the spell, made us human male and optimod female again, and that would’ve been too bad. What we’d become, for just a little while, is the thing you always go looking for, lovers.

o0o

An idyll lasts a day, two days, three, then the real world comes and sweeps it all away, as if it’s never been. Or an idyll lasts for a brief moment in time, but it’s a moment that takes forever to pass. Whichever one it was that I had with Violet, the day came when we mounted our ships and flew on down Proxima’s gravity well to the Glow-Ice Worlds, Proxima growing to a fantastic disk in the sky, an impossible thing, ruddy pale, densely flecked with starspots, like bits of metal shining within a fire, mineral-rich debris ring glittering in our sensor screens, otherwise invisible.