When We Were Real (Author's Preferred Edition) (12 page)

Meyer snickered softly.

And Finn said, “We’ll put an end to this someday.”

I looked back at the floor, where Violet was sitting astride the SOCO woman’s middle, holding her by all that long blond hair, telling her what was what. Put an end to...

Finn put his little hand on my forearm, and said, “They think they’re the ones who count, but they aren’t. It’s us.” Fire in his eyes now, filling the emptiness with passion.

And, somehow, without any more being said, I knew just what the hell he was talking about. They. All the men and women, holding the reins of power and wealth, believing themselves to be like so many self-made Atlases, supporting the world, maintaining the existence of the universe, and so deserving its rewards.

Foolish stuff.

Primitive stuff.

Unbelievably primitive stuff, the stuff a children’s dreams that I...

One day, he said, we’ll all be free. Free to have... capitalism, yes, just like now, only it’ll be capitalism with a human face... Freedom.

Freedom from companies, from corporations.

Freedom from unions, from all these little bands of so-called brethren.

Freedom from all our tongs of power, from phalangist mafii, from... organizations of
any
sort, I tell you, which exist independent of the popular will.

Popular will
?

Imagine that.

Meyer said, “When he speaks, I believe.”

What an odd pair, I thought, then bought them bottles of beer while Violet finished up with her opponent, got off the floor to polite applause and came stalking back to me. Stood still for a long moment, looking back and forth between Meyer and Finn.

So we sat and talked to them for a long time. Well. Didn’t really talk—mostly listened while Finn mac Eye talked, told us how he felt about the world and everyone in it. After a while, I noticed other people gathering round, listening as well, eyes wide. Fascinating. Beyond my experience. In the background, there was his big friend, Meyer Sonn-Atem, silent, smiling slightly. Something odd there. Some kind of... calculation.

Meyer understands something, I remember thinking. Understands something the rest of us do not.

It got late and we left, all of us, going on home to sleep.

o0o

On the datatracks, in all the old romances, all the old melodramas. war is hell, or it’s glorious; but war is even dull in scripts focusing on the “long stretches of deadly boredom separated by moments of sheer terror.” What they never tell you is, even the moments of sheer terror are always the same.

Starships swinging through space, driven by the modulus’ blue glow.

Streaks of the tracking missiles.

Lovely fireflower of exoatmospheric thermonuclear explosions.

Crackle of debris on your hull, evoking those brief moments of terror.

On the netlink, you hear the fighter jocks breathing hard, screaming out their rage and terror.

Missile away. Missile away.

And somebody dies, now and again ours, more often theirs.

And we in the rescue ships go down and down, cut their burning bodies from the crushed hulls of burning ships, put out their flames, extinguish their agony, packing them away for salvation or disposal.

Crystalline, setpiece memories.

No whole to grasp in my thoughts.

Habitats afire. Glow-Ice colonists abandoned to die. Begging us. Begging for their lives. Begging for their children’s lives.

Plenty more where these came from.

Worthless meat.

Then the call for help. SOCO IX transport
Hephaestus
, troops lined up at the drop shafts, ready to go, blasted from the sky over some little world, blasted by desperate colonists using a souped-up core-cracker, one of those things miners use to break open an ice-moon’s shell, get at the mineral meat inside.

Save us.

Save our souls.

Violet’s the one who recognizes the raw, horrid voice on a static-shaded radio link. Isn’t that your friend, Corporal Sonn-Atem?

Maybe so.

Please, he calls out, save us. Save my friend Finn.

We go down.

Down to the world below.

Then, only this:

Skimming low over red ice, I felt the ship, our precious little
Athena 7
, surge, felt my comlinks sever, saw my emergency boards light up, all amber and gold, not much green, very little blue.

Orb in Unformed Heaven...

Restitutor Orbis
, Savior of the World...

World tilting so erratically outside my one little portal.

Violet screaming something. Something about...

Yes. Me.

I remember reaching out, taking hold of the system breakdown lever. Pull. Twist. Our cabins breaking free, solid fuel rockets driving us spaceward...

Too late.

I felt the inertial fields go down, whirling force grab my arms and legs, slamming them hard, helpless against the walls.

Felt my head bounce and crack on the end of my neck, felt my pelvis twist hard around, legs suddenly going numb.

The crash net snapped open, surrounding me, inflating.

Thought I heard Violet call my name as I watched the red ground come up.

Sound of a door slamming hard, then darkness.

Long, long hovering in pain.

Everything gone but me.

Even the pain so very far away.

Opened my eyes on fire, feeling so stupid, so tired... Oh, the crash net’s deflated somehow, let me go, let me fall on the floor. I’m just lying here, all tangled up with myself. Everything tingling, tingling all at once.

I lifted one hand so I could wipe simmering sweat from my eyes.

Look at my hand. Ring finger. Thumb. Something’s bitten the rest of it away, leaving what looks like a half-eaten ortolan behind. Where’s my other hand? Can’t figure it out. Seems to have disappeared. No feeling at all. Not even a phantom left behind.

I twisted, pushed. Screamed when feeling suddenly came alive in my back.

From the mouth of the connecting tunnel, I could see into the medevac module. Something big moving there, Something big, dancing in bright orange fire. It’s Dûmnahn dancing, dancing in a little circle, six green legs, black now, drumming on the deck, drumming out a little rhythm as he dances.

I can’t tell whether that high pitched sound he makes is an endless scream, or just the boil of his juices, steam jetting from cracks in his shell, like a crab at a feast...

Twist. Push. Scream.

Then I could see up toward the pilot’s nest.

There was Violet, hanging in her harness, arms reaching out, eyes open, staring at me so oddly.

No.

Not staring at all.

Below her on the deck was a long, brilliant smear of lilac blood.

Those things hanging from her. Not limbs. Internal organs, dangling from a long rip in her fur.

I looked away. Saw a curled-up length of bedraggled fur, possibly her tail.

I’d gotten to like that tail, liked the way it curled round my body, the way it stroked my back as we made love.

Vivid blue sparks crackled from the hull, then a square of metal and plastic curled away and familiar faces looked in. “Christ. Look at that...” A familiar voice. Gray smoke jetted, blowing out the flames. People came in and gathered me up.

And that was that.

Five. I awoke with a hard start

I awoke with a hard start, afraid to open my eyes, feeling various pieces of myself come alive, as if I were some old machine experiencing a cold boot after long term storage. Twinges here and there, like power surges flooding limbs that’d been too long still.

Memories. Childhood me over there, school, playing gatsie with the girls, sharp memory of looking down at myself in half-light after that first time, looking down at my glistening skin, half repelled, half full of joy, remembered boarding
Sans Peur
. Never did get through on the link.

On and on. Friends, war, love, death. All the usual things of life.

Something important happened to me. Something terrible. Can’t remember, quite. Then I opened my eyes.

The room was pale green, and here I was, floating naked between two field-plates, wires reaching out to me from terminal posts nearby, a young woman, brown hair, brown eyes, pale brown skin, looking in at me, smiling.

Why is she smiling?

I moved feebly, looking around, saw myself whole, hale and hearty, stiff little erection poking up out of my middle, waving in the air. Well. That probably explains the smile. I’ve known more than one girl thinks an erection’s the funniest thing about a man.

Especially one not aimed at her.

I had a brief fantasy of pulling off my wires, getting out from between the plates and grabbing the pretty brown girl, getting her down on the deck, pulling up her green skirt, getting at the meat of her and...

I heard her chuckle softly, saw the little smirk on her face, looking not at me but at a tiny freeze-frame panel by my bedside. “Glad you’re feeling better, Mr. Murphy,” she said. “Here, let’s get some of this mess cleared away.”

Mr. Murphy.

She did something to the interface and wires started sucking out of my flesh, sliding away into their terminals. When they were gone, the field pushed me to one side, dumping me toward the floor, tilting me upright. I staggered, fantastically dizzy, while the green-clad, brown-eyed girl touched me with a warm hand, helping me stay on my feet, standing close enough my erection poked her in the side, just above one nice, round hip.

She looked up at me, bright eyed and bushy...

Something inside my head shied violently away.

She said, “There’s a bathroom over there, and scrub suits in the closet. When you’re ready, come on out to the nurses’ station and we’ll get you assigned to a dorm.” Then she left.

I stood still for a little while, not at all at home in my body, looking around the room. Rows and stacks of suspension plates, men, women, things, floating asleep in between them. Nearest to me, a man with no arms, no legs, not much of a head.

But still alive, I guess.

Over there, a woman. I can tell it’s a woman from the face and the little flat breasts. Nothing else. The rest of her snipped away, at the waist and elbows. She’ll sleep a long time, growing her bottom half back.

Felt my erection stir, firming up a bit, and wondered how the half-woman would feel when she awoke to discover herself virgin again.

I went into the bathroom, intending to masturbate, just so I could be rid of this thing, found myself staring, crystallized with astonishment, at the face in the mirror. Nothing at all like the boy who’d... gone to sleep? Is that what I...

Man in the mirror with a hard and empty face. Maybe a little bit like my father. Not much. I leaned close, looking into the hard man’s eyes, empty eyes staring back at me. Remembered staring into other eyes, eyes staring back into mine, and, just like that, I remembered Violet. Remembered her and started to cry, watching tears trickle down the hard man’s cheeks and drip off his chin into the sink.

He cried for a long time, but no one ever came to comfort him.

o0o

So. Scrubsuit. Nurses’ station. Dorm room. Dark and quiet, dim blue light and me all alone. I think I sat there for a long time, waiting for something, anything, waiting for other feelings to come, but nothing ever did. Or maybe those feelings came and went while I wasn’t paying attention.

After a while, I thought, You know what this is, old Murph. You’re just like all the burnt-up, torn-to-bits warriors you gathered from the frozen, bloody plains on all the war worlds of Proxima. You’ll get over it—numbness’ll go away, the world’ll come closer and closer... might as well start getting over it now.

Yeah. But.

Easier dead than son.

Then that commonest of brainfarts made me smile, just a bit, at myself, and got me rolling again. I sat up, just like that, put on the freeze-frame by my bed, and started.

Three years packed on ice, while the Glow-Ice War went on without me until it came to an end. Why? Screens scrolled and shifted, answers coming my way: Because it was simply easier for the corporate armies to ship in new troops than hurriedly repair the old ones. New troops, because we could afford new troops, against the Glow-Ice worlds’ expending all they had, until there were no more.

I watched that part for a long time.

SOCO mercenaries capturing a Glow-Ice habitat, marching its people out onto the ice, buck naked men, women, children, screaming their lungs out in the razor-cold air, walking on bare feet that froze, cracked, bled, broke right off.

Quite a memorable scene: pretty young girl staggering on white bone stumps, falling on her face, pretty girl shrieking as a SOCO soldier pulled her to her feet, well, to the stub ends of her legs, anyway, parts of her face, face and tits, ripping off because they’d stuck fast to the ice.

SOCO soldiers marching Glow-Ice rebels into pits gouged in the ground; corporate maintenance men bulldozing ice-chips over the whole wriggling mass, and that was that.

That segment ended on an advert, Standard ARM logo boasting jobs, jobs, jobs. Thousands and thousands of vacant, well-paid positions out here on the Glow-Ice worlds, just waiting for you techies to come fill them. I wondered why a free technician, having seen this whole business from afar, would come work for Standard ARM now. Then I remembered who I was, where I was, and why.

Risk meaningless death at the hands of a soulless Corporate Entity?

Hmmm. How much are they paying?

Little prickle in the back of my neck.

I’m alive, against all odds.

So I ran the search engines, deeper and deeper still, looking for all my friends. Sure. People still alive. People I hardly knew, from barroom and bunkroom and... Finally stumbled over my own military maintenance records, was startled at the extent of the damage they’d had to repair. Lucky thing Standard is loyal to its own. Some companies would’ve left me behind, buried in one little icepit or another.

Lucky all right.

Links from there directly to Incident 5153, Glow-Ice War, Week Sixteen, Day 3: Downing of DSRV
Athena 7
due to friendly fire.