When We Were Real (Author's Preferred Edition) (15 page)

The silvergirl, voice light soprano, said, “Sold.”

“And who repairs you all now?”

Long silence, silver eyes on me. Finally: “No one. When a unit fails, Mother sells it to the scrapman and buys a replacement.”

Orb. “Think the scrapman fixes them up and sells them as secondhand?”

Another long silence, then the silvergirl said, “We hope so.”

I stood looking into the robot’s eyes, wondering what it really meant. Does this thing really feel enough to know hope, or is it just using the word in a preprogrammed way? No way to know. But I imagined it thinking about the alternative, imagining its own precious parts sold off, one by one, as components of some cheap repair kit.

Get your silvergirls working again for half the price.

I’d seen that ad a thousand times as a boy, never once wondered what it cost in... hell. I almost said “human suffering,” didn’t I?

I had the silvergirl get out one of the utility flitters for me, one of the ones they used for hauling plants and dirt around, running errands, going to the grocery and whatnot; had it tie the boat on top and drive me down to the foot of the endhills, then down the long road that led to my father’s favorite stream.

Once the boat was in the water and I in the boat, I told it to come for me again just before darkness. Maybe I’ll be here and maybe I won’t. You just wait. Then I started to row, silvergirl standing on the bank, watching me grow smaller and smaller until I disappeared round the first bend in the river.

By midday I’d been rowing for a couple of hours, stemshine bright on my skin, prickling as though the UV threatened sunburn. Nonsense. Not enough UV here for that—even though we never think of it, Audumla’s quite the artificial world.

Glow-Ice. Those were real worlds, red and cold, small, sullen sun in the sky. Deadly.

I rowed past one last familiar bend, brushing past feral vegetation, rowed toward a clear embankment I knew would be there, let the skiff crunch on the shore, tossing my oars in the bottom with a clatter as I jumped out, bending, pulling my skiff well up onto the muddy beach.

When I turned to look up the hill, nostrils well filled with the scent of organic rot, Beebee was there, looking down at me, motionless. Then, “Master Darrayush?”

Me. The name under which I might have done business. Darrayush and Goshtasp, Son and Father, partners. I took a deep breath, putting all that out of my head, and said, “Hello, Beebee. How you been?”

He began to shout, calling out all those familiar old names. Then the packing crates opened and the trampled down, trash-filled yard around me filled with boxes and kits, machines and whatnot, bright eyed, curious, reaching out to touch me, whisper my name.

They remember me.

And remember him as well.

So I played with Mrs. Trinket’s kits all afternoon, chattered with her husbands, twenty in number now, teasing her about having the fortitude to handle them all. Asked after their health, asked who was caring for them...

Watched the stemshine begin to wane, knowing it was time for me to go.

What if I stayed here?

There’s plenty of room for one more Timeliner tinker in this little world, isn’t there?

Sure there is.

I could stay, sell my services, fixing up silvergirls, visiting Mrs. Trinket and all her kits on the weekend...

Sudden memory of my last “hunting” trip with Styrbjörn. Allomorph whores. Field of butterflies. Violet smirking, saying, “Well, it’s not quite the same thing now, is it?”

I could visit Ludmilla, play with her children, get to know her husband... Orb stirred in my loins, letting me know what would happen if I spent much time at Ludmillashall. She hasn’t forgotten. Nor have you.

After a while I said my goodbyes, little ones clustering round my legs. Beebee helped me get the skiff back in the water, then shook my hand like a man and told me he hoped he’d see me again one day. Stood and watched as I rowed away in waning purple stemlight, growing smaller and smaller until I went round the bend.

The next morning, before anyone else was up, I checked the freeze-frame, looking over freighter schedules. Then I went on up the elevator to the axial port, got aboard some nameless little ship, a tanker loading Helium III, bound for someplace I never heard of, and in only hours I was gone.

It was days before I realized I could’ve stopped by the Firehall and taken Dad away.

Six. A couple of months after

A couple of months after leaving Ygg and Audumla, the helium-III freighter dropped me at its terminus, a deep-space transport nexus called Pasargadae 3. I shook hands with the crew, gave Commander Arunachal a hug for being so nice to me—mostly just for letting me be, turned and walked away through a maze of frosty plumbing that defined the refueling depot, down into the belly of yet another beast.

It’d been a long, quiet time, not a healing time I suppose, but at least a time for me to get used to myself again, as I floated in my bare little room, staring silently out a tiny porthole of dense, metallized glass at motionless, familiar bright stars, pointless flecks of light floating against the empty backdrop of the sky. Nothing much happens when you’re flying at one-eighth cee. Every now and again a big rock will go by, but it’s always too far away to see with the naked eye—passing that close to a macro-object would get the commander who permitted it cashiered.

If you turn out the cabin light, press your nose to the glass, every now and again you can just barely catch the glimmer of the deflector field turning away swarms of charged particles, shoving the dust aside. Just once, while I was looking, I saw the pathfinder laser flash, deep purple, vaporizing a speck in our path.

Toward the end, tiring of the sky at last, I came out of my cocoon, hung around with crew until they started letting me help out in the engineering spaces. Had dinner with Arunachal in her quarters and saw her looking at me that way, was glad when we got to Pasargadae at last. Much longer and it would’ve been rude not to notice her desire.

Seen from space, Pasargadae 3 is a vast, irregular black clinker three hundred kems across that’d be invisible against black space but for the twinkle of her civilizing lights. Once upon a time, it’d been a fat ball of ice and carbonaceous rock, one of a number of such bodies that’d accumulated in the temporary trailing trojan point Proxima formed during her long, slow hyperbolic swing around the Alpha Centauri barycenter, more or less spherical, symmetrical, mottled. But people came, back in the same era that made Audumla, back when the Jet was first being settled, and pretty soon all the ice was gone, leaving black rock behind. Black rock that’d be black, stinking mud if it weren’t so cold out here.

Pasargadae 3 and her sisters were convenient for the trade routes that formed back then, remain so for the trade routes that persist, huge, full of people and machines, starships clustering round, putting in for repair, refueling, refit, trading cargo and passengers, coming and going through the infinite night.

I found myself standing one day, after a good night’s sleep in a cheap transients’ hostel, down at place called Portal 771, watching the stevedores transship material from a longliner called
Sky Blue Eyes
. Nice, big ship, ten kems long maybe, resting in her berth, front end gaping open like the mouth of a baleen whale, rear end sticking right on out into the starry sky beyond.

Soft, steady breeze blowing that way, out of Pasargadae 3, toward the open docking portal. I stood and watched men and machines labor, thinking about the captive air technologies of a big port like this. Mingy fields that let the air seep away, because air is cheaper to make than the power to keep it.

Armed guards here and there. Not enough of them, though. From my vantage point up on a grassy knoll, leaning back against the cool trunk of a gnarly old olive tree, looking down into the valley of the portal, I could see people sneaking through the woods, keeping as far as they could from the armed men, from the rumbling machines.

Smugglers?
Sky Blue Eyes
’ yawning cargo hatch, all complex doors and shields, shifting cranes, patches of shadow and light, is fifteen hundred ems across, maybe more. Not much a few dozen security sloggers can do with that.

Pap
.

Shipyard bull firing his airgun at something in the woods, light weight charge bursting among the trees, bringing down a few leaves. I saw a group of men hurry away from the ship toward a dark tunnel mouth, staggering under a burden of fat, lumpy rucksacks.

There were more men at the tunnel, motioning them onward, one of them holding a long, slim rifle of his own.

I took a minute to imagine pitched battles, yardbulls pinned down, hiding behind this forklift and that, defending their turf, dying like good soldiers in defense of the cash, then I stood, picked up my own little backpack, all my worldly goods and chattels coming to fifteen kays, maybe a little less, dusted off my backside and started on the down the hill.

Armed men and women turning to watch as I approached.

When I got to the dockmaster’s station and got her attention, she took my credentials and looked them over, identifying me as a half-pay reservist on furlough from Standard ARM. Handsome red-eyed woman with long silver hair, red eyes holding something that seemed like a glint of jealousy. Maybe just my imagination.

“So?”

“I’d like to deadhead on whatever Standard pallets are aboard.”

“Hmh.” Something like disgust in those eyes now, but she turned and pushed into her freeze-frame. “Well, you’re in luck, bucko. There’s a six-pallet rack of macrotome repair kits on deck 67, radial 5. Plenty of room for you to doss out. Here.” She put a boarding chit in my hand, then said, “Make sure you stay in the Standard ARM hold space; don’t mess with anyone else’s cargo—there’s a brig on this ship with a per-kilogram storage fee won’t make your bosses too happy. You can go in the axial corridor if you want; there’s a crew cafeteria at the hub where you can eat.”

“Corporate charge?”

“If it’s on your ID. We button up in six hours.”

I turned away, holding up my pass so the guards could see, took a step toward the mouth of the whale, then turned back. “Ma’m?”

“What the fuck you want? I’m busy.”

“Where’s she going?”

“Wolf 359. Nonstop.”

“Thanks.”

I walked toward the ship, feeling my insides crawl a bit. Six hours and they button things up, then your decision’s made, bucko. Wolf 359’s more than a parsec away... Ludmilla’s girls’ll be grown women with babes of their own before you ever come home again.

But I kept on walking, threading a deadly path among the rumbling machines, kem after kem up the axial corridor to deck 67, then on down radial five to where Standard ARM’s shit was waiting, my home for... sharp bolt of terror inside me then: quite possibly home for more years to come than I’ve already been alive.

Bits of me wanted to turn tail and run, but... I found a nice, spacious engineering station, neatly buttoned up until some worker out on Wolf would be needing it. Opened it up with my company ID. Threw my stuff in a corner, kicked off my shoes, lay down on a brown leather couch where workers would one day break from their labor, fell asleep waiting.

By the time I awoke, we were on our way.

o0o

I spent the first few weeks sticking to my expected routine, walking up and down the radial corridor, paced fore and aft along the axial from the sealed loading doors to the locked engineering access hatches and back, down to the hull where I could look out a big crystal window at motionless white stars. Back up to the hub cafeteria, where I took sparse, tasteless meals with crew, some of whom where disposed to socialize, with other deadhead passengers, most of whom were not.

Spent a lot of time sitting alone in almost darkness on my island of pallets, alone with my thoughts. Thoughts which turned out to be a lot less interesting than I’d hoped.

 Couldn’t really think much about Violet, receding to a dream, then less than a dream, despite the persistent intensity of my feelings of loss. Began to realize the magnitude of the mistake I may have made as I sat there in the silence, alone on my nice brown couch, trying to reconstruct the vulval details of a girl whose name I couldn’t remember, trying to bring her alive in memory so I could...

Well. Female crew. Female passengers. And you’ll have damn-all
years
to...

I began to notice things out in the darkness, distant lights and small humanoid shapes moving through the endless landscape of cargo pallets, vast, sealed containers... Everything out there. Far away, well beyond my reach, restricted as I was to these two long corridors, I could see what looked like a fleet of halftrack trucks, shapes of men moving among them, flashlights glinting.

Other deadheads, I thought, but I never met them at the cafeteria.

Once, nearby, I saw a small group, two men and a woman, just a few tiers back in the mass, men working with prybars at a container hatch while the woman, a tall, gracile blonde, kept watch. Looking at me, from time to time. What’s going on there? They got inside, came out with some small packages, pulled the door shut so it looked unopened, vanished into the darkness.

Somewhere on
Sky Blue Eyes
there’s a cargomaster and small security force. Somewhere a brig, the portmaster said.

One... day, I guess is as good a word as any, I was sitting on a corner of one of my silent machines, staring at nothing, wondering what the hell, if anything, would come next, when a slim figure clad in black patent leather melted out of the darkness and stood looking up at me.

Small, barely up to my shoulder, thin and soft looking, with a pale, pixyish face, heart-shaped under short black hair not quite cropped to the point of being a black velvet skullcap. Finally... he? She? “Reese.”

I said, “What?” Voice a little rusty, thick with phlegm.

“My name’s Reese.”

“Oh. Call me Murph.”

“You a company guard?”

“Deadhead.”

Reese grinned, a friendly flash of white teeth that made my heart jump unexpectedly, stepped up on the pallet and swung beside me, folding his/her legs up into tailor’s seat. “You kinda new at this game, ain’tcha?”