When We Were Real (Author's Preferred Edition) (16 page)

“You a boy or a girl?”

Reese smirked and said, “Asshole.”

Meaning boy? Maybe not. I tried to steal a quick glance at the tight crotch of those black leatherette pants, but the shadows were too deep to give a clue. Still, something about this creature... And something like life inside me, stirring, very far away.

Reese pulled a small packet from inside his/her jacket and held it out. “Want a bite?”

I took the thing, opened the wrapper, snapped off a crispy hunk. Chocolate sponge, foaming luxuriously around my teeth, flowing lavalike over my tongue, seeming to evaporate as it avalanched down my throat. “Orb. That’s good.”

He/she took it back, took a little bite, put the rest away.

Long silence, Reese just looking at me, smiling. Why the hell can’t I think of anything to say? Tell me you’re a girl, Reese? Pull down your pants and prove it please? Finally, I said, “Getting kind of hungry. You, ah, want to come to the cafeteria? I mean...” Hell. I wasn’t this inarticulate with my first girl, much less...

Reese said, “Um. I don’t...”

“My treat.”

He/she grinned. “I’m a bum, Murph.”

“What?”

“Christ! You really are a newbie! I’m a fucking stowaway!”

“Oh.” Brilliant, Murph. “Well.”

“Yeah. Right.” Reese shrugged, unfolded his/her legs and hopped to the deck. “Be seein’ ya, Murph.” Turned and walked away, not up the corridor but toward the gap between two racks of industrial pallets, already dissolving into the darkness.

Something, Uncreated Time maybe, put a bolt through my head, making me feel a sudden, awful yawning loneliness. I scrambled to my feet, feet thumping on the deck, and ran into the darkness in the same direction, only to find that Reese had stopped just out of sight, was waiting for me, grinning.

o0o

I can’t say why Reese picked me up. There’re people who do that sort of thing, just as there’re people who invite its being done. I never thought of myself as being one of the latter before. He/she led me through the narrow lanes between sealed cargoes, leading me on deeper into trespass-space, qualifying me for that brig.

 Reese laughed when I asked. “Boy, those cargojacks are assholes. I suppose there’s a brig someplace, probably stuffed full of the crew’s own little smuggling ventures.”

“So... where the hell’s ship’s security?”

“Here and there. You have to... keep a sharp eye sometimes.”

Reese, it seems, had been traveling the starways for free all his/her life, bum, child of bums, had been aboard
Sky Blue Eyes
for almost thirty years, come from someplace on the periphery of the Solar Oort, where those parents had finally decided to settle down.

“Oh, I stayed at Caledon XXVIII for a while. Nice place, but...” A shrug, a gesture at the darkness.

“So. Where do you think... uh, where’re you going?”

“Everywhere, man.”

“After Wolf?”

“I don’t know for sure. I heard you could hop from Wolf 359 directly to GJ-eleven-eleven.”

I thought about that. “Yeah, you could. Standard ARM has a big depot at GJ and... Hell, you could reach the minus-fifteen frontier from there.”

Reese stood still, looking up at me, eyes aglint in the darkness. “You know the Standard ARM routes?”

“Well. Sort of. I mean, I had a comp key to the flight log archives.” Saw the look on his/her face. “I was a flight engineer. DSRV.”

Long silence. “Oh. Were you at Glow-Ice?”

For some reason, I thought that little war was already forgotten. Maybe just wishful thinking for myself. “Yeah.”

“Oh.” After a while, we walked on.

Eventually, we came to a big, dark moonbus, six tracktrucks, fully independent suspension and propulsion on each truck, articulated at two points—the kind of thing you’d use on a large, geologically active body, something with volcanoes, mountains, live glaciers. I tried to think about Wolf 359, about what I knew of its planetary system. Couldn’t remember much. Someplace like Mars, maybe? Or the Glow-Ice Worlds?

Wolf 359 is a lot smaller, dimmer and older than Proxima Centauri.

Reese rapped softly on the maintenance access hatch, a quick, antichaotic pattern. Something familiar there. The backbeat from an old song.

The door slid open, round, obviously female face freezing in a half-grin as she saw me. “What the fuck, Reese.” A throaty voice, classically sexy.

“New chum, Hibi. Let’s get inside.”

The face receded and we crawled through, sliding the hatch shut behind us, snuffing what little light there was. I could hear more than one person breathing. Reese’s voice said, “Trell?”

A man’s voice, thin and reedy, but definitely male: “Sure. Hang on.” Then the light came up, rising slowly as a dimmer was twisted. It was a battery-powered camp lantern, the sort of thing my father and I used down in the bayou, just now plugged into the truck’s charger tap, running off the engine’s storage plates.

The man, who was a head taller than me and half as wide, face as pale as pink pastel chalk, sparse hair silver-gray, said, “So. What stray cat is this?” The woman, Hibi, half his height and twice my width, her own dark hair shining bronze in the lamplight, came and stood by his side.

Reese smiled and said, “Murph? My friends Trellis and Hibi.”

There was a long silence while the two of them looked me up and down, taking in the cut of my clothes, the newness of my boots. Then Trellis said, “Welcome to our humble abode, Mr. Murph.” He gestured at a campstove nearby, also plugged into the charger tap. “We were about to take our evening repast. Won’t you join us?”

Something inside me melted on the spot. “I’d be pleased to, Mr. Trellis. Ms., um, Hibi?” I slid the little pack off my shoulder, zipped it open and pulled out a two-liter coolbottle of fortified kvass I’d brought back from the cafeteria, intending to drink myself to sleep later on.

Trellis seemed to jump when he saw what I was holding, gave me a broad grin, and said, “Well. You can pick ‘em, Reesie!”

o0o

The supper wasn’t much, some of the better components of emries they’d pilfered from the bus’s larder, not much different from the things we’d eaten aboard
Athena
, but well-washed-down by sharp, narky-tasting kvass. Afterward, I sat and listened while Trellis talked, Hibi curled up, almost asleep in his arms, zoned out by unaccustomed liquor.

Improbable adventures of a man who’d run away from his robotic job a half century ago, running away, to nowhere at all, never looking back, Hibi awakening to giggle when he told about his sexual conquests, Trellis growing somber as he mentioned men and women, dead now, long ago done in by this yardbull squadron or that.

 A long tale about the six years he’d spent working for GalactoFed Mining, out by Lalande 21185, having fallen afoul of a pressgang during a stopover at the Tralgiansk Nexus Habitat Cluster.

Don’t know whether any of it was true or not, but it brought back any number of childhood dreams: all about a life out among the stars.

Is
that
what I’ve done to myself?

Later, as Trellis and Hibi snored on the floor, I followed Reese down the truck’s maintenance corridor to the rear access space, a little room right under the battery, a space quite warm and comfortably dry. He/she had a doss made up here, quite a lot off stuff beside a rather big rucksack, pillows, blankets...

He/she turned and looked at me, face expressionless. Finally: “You got a blanket and stuff in that little thing?” Nodding at my backpack.

I nodded.

“OK, you can doss here if you want.” A softening look, for just a moment, then, “Provided you don’t snore.”

When I zipped open the pack and pulled out the cammo, shaking it apart into a full-sized mummybag, Reese said, “Christ. That must’ve set you back some.”

I shrugged, unable to remember whether it had or not. Money’s meaningless, when you’ve got it.

Reese shrugged out of the leather jacket, then quickly pulled a pale gray, silky-looking shirt off over... well. Flat, smooth chest with little dark nipples. No indication one way or another. He/she stood bare chested, seeing my stare, motionless, hands on an ornate silver belt buckle. 

“Christ, you
are
kind of an asshole, you know pal?”

I nodded, waiting.

A soft sigh. “OK, you win, Murph. I
am
a, um, female I guess you’d want to say...” She undid the belt, unzipped her pants, toed off her boots, slid everything to the floor and stood there in scant, pale green underwear. Saw me still looking at her, looked away for a moment, frowning, then looked back.

I really can’t imagine what the expression on my face must have been. Something troubling, perhaps.

“I’m sorry, Murph. I’m... not interested in that stuff. You can look if you want.”

Slipped out of the underpants, crawled into her blankets and turned away from me, muttering a soft something to the bulkhead.

I said, “What?”

“Turn out the light when you’re done.”

o0o

One day, maybe a week after I started hanging with Reese and her friends, Trellis came home from a scavenging trip, breathless, eyes bright, dumping a frosty load of flash-frozen steaks on the truck workbench, and said, “Something you’ve just
got
to see! Put aboard at Pasargadae 3, I guess. Marvelous!”

Nothing any of us could say would pry it out of him, so into the darkness we went, winding our way aft and outward, dodging corridors when we could, transiting bulkheads through emergency hatches that should’ve been sealed and codelocked, but weren’t. If this’d been a Standard ship, they would’ve been. And there’d’ve been no bums, company deadheads riding in steerage at worst, instead of down in holdspace.

Just as well.

Imagine a decade flying in some sightseer’s lounge.

I’d gotten used to walking around in the dark, keeping my little penlight pocketed other than when I needed it to read a label or pick a lock. That impressed Reese no end, her eyes widening with delight when she saw I could open a two-layer slidegate by reprogramming the button panel.

“No shit!” she’d said, watching the first such gate pop open, both layers at once. “Now why doesn’t anyone
else
know that?”

Well. Manufacturers of the locking system don’t publicize it. Not many people have a Timeliner daddy making them take techie courses seemingly at random. I remembered the look on his face the last time I saw it and wondered, for the thousandth time, if this
had
been his dream.

And Reese’s innocent, childlike delight kept me hoping she’d change her tune, slip out of her clothes one night with something other than sleep in mind.

Keep impressing her, boy. That’s how it’s done, remember?

She was getting careless and comfortable around me too, parading around bareass as we prepared to doss out, ignoring my obvious physical reaction. I’d lay in the darkness afterward, wondering what the hell. Pure innocence, “not interested in that stuff?” Not bloody likely. Your typical, mean-spirited, man-hating cocktease? Maybe. And yet, a delight to be with. Though I knew she had to be at least fifty years old, she was every cem the image of your classic happy young girl, sparkle in her eye, cooing with pleasure over the least little thing.

Or, hell, like the nine-year-old boy I’d once been.

It made me remember standing in that open field, far down in the back country of Audumla. Made me remember an allomorph whore’s simple joy, watching the butterflies float in bright stemshine.

Maybe she’d continued to watch them fly, continued to feel that joy, looking over my shoulder as I fucked her.

It took hours to get where we were going, the better part of what would have been our evening, before we finally slid through a bulkhead hatch and into the space beyond.

Reese, stock still, said, “Christ.” Unmistakable awe.

We were standing at the edge of a double hold, practically a full-sized wedge, and in distant shadows we could see the gleaming stubs of cut stanchions, where a permanent bulkhead had been removed. Look there. You can see the internal bracing frames of the hull. Two windows. Stars outside.

And much of this open space was occupied by a big, soft-looking sphere, baggy material of its integument glowing gently in pale pastel lavender.

Trellis crowed, “Wait ‘til you see!”

As we walked toward the thing’s flattened base, I said, “I’ve heard of these. Never saw one before.”

Reese, impressed again: “What is it?”

“It’s a portable ecologarium.”

“And... ?”

Why spoil Trellis’s fun? And hers. “Wait ‘til you see.”

 Down by the bottom of the dome, on the side facing the hull, was the opening of an airlock, zippered shut with a sturdy plastic slider that worked with the barest whisper of sound, moving easily on silicone-greased rails. We crowded into a space so small we were touching one another and I found it difficult to shut the zipper, finally stretching up so Reese could slide between my legs and do the job crouching.

Brief, humid silence, then Hibi snickered, “All together now: fart.”

Trellis said, “Jeez. Think that might inflate the place and give us more room?”

Reese: “Where the hell’s the inner door?”

Hibi said, “Um. Here. I’ve got it.” She peeled the thing open, pink light spilling in on us, and, “Oh, my God...”

Trellis said, “Told you you’d like it.”

When my turn came to crawl out through the airlock flap, I stood, looking around in disbelief. Gently rolling hills under a soft pink sky, sky patched with a few pale lavender clouds, hills covered with yellow-green grass, pink and gray heather, stretching as far as the eye could see.

No, not quite. Horizon line, several kems away... I tried to do simple spherical geometry in my head, finally just guessed. “It’s like we’re standing on a world maybe ten, twelve thousand kilometers in diameter.”

Trellis muttered, “You notice the gravity?”

I flexed my knees gently. “Point-eight gee?”

Standing by my side, voice hushed, Reese said, “Where the hell is this supposed to be?”

I watched the clouds drifting slowly overhead, coming over the trees behind us, floating toward a faraway horizon. “I’m not sure. Maybe the Illimitor World.”