When We Were Real (Author's Preferred Edition) (19 page)

 I tried to picture that reunion, but could not.

Another day and a night found me bobbing in low gee as I walked across the surface of an external platform, slow breeze ruffling my hair, walking toward a waiting insystem transport. We’re not far from a
star
here. Why can’t I pick it out of the sky?

The flat surface of the exoplatform came to an abrupt edge, dark sky beyond, sky cluttered with stars, all white, untwinkling hard points of light. All around the edge were workcraft, transports, people and things doing the business of Wolf 359. My transport, the crude paper boarding pass said Psillum Skytrails Flight 227, crouched on its tripod beside the abyss, her barrel-shaped fuselage lined with a hundred tiny windows, bracketed by two fat engines. Old fashioned engines, I saw, thermonuclear resistojets, and those two other pods, spherical, one fore, one aft, would be condensed hydrogen sponge matrices for the working fluid.

Funny how we can’t stop being interested in the world’s petty details, even when the rest of life has gone grainy and gray.

I got aboard and found the inside nothing but row on row of seats, most of them already taken by men and women, tired looking men and women dressed in a variety of gray and brown uniforms, none of them interested in me. Men. Women. A soft rumble of voices. I found a window seat down near the bottom of the cabin, in what was apparently the most unpopular section.

It took another hour for the thing to fill up completely, more men and women, all the same, a few families with squirmy, whiny children. Once, a couple dressed in flame-colored finery, flowing, silky stuff, came through the hatch and stood blocking the entrance, looking down at us, man poker faced, woman with a look like she smelled something unusual. A crewman in teal green came through the forward hatch and led them away to somewhere else.

Finally, a big fat guy who smelled a bit like fresh brie threw himself wheezing down beside me, grumbling under his breath. He gave me one long, suspicious look, then turned away, busying himself with the contents of a dusty tan duffel he carried in his lap.

Outside, ground crew bustled about, mostly human beings in leatherette work clothes, a big turquoise robot that seemed to handle all the refueling tasks, covered with frosty condensation, shrouded in fog. The fat guy said, “You better stop looking out the window, pal.”

Something pulsed hard through the structure of the ship, then blue-violet light blossomed outside, making me close my eyes and flinch away. Beside me, I heard the fat guy snicker and mutter, “Fuckhead,” as gentle acceleration pushed me into the seat.

After the engines stopped firing, after I’d blinked the pale yellow shadows out of my eyes, the view outside was... shifting. White stars turning this way and that, exostation swiftly growing tiny, vanishing into the nothingness. Every now and again the engines would burp, fire raging beyond my window, ullage pulse warning me just in time.

People all around me talking—I could hear seven or eight different languages. With a ship like this, it will be a voyage of no more than a few hours...

Looking out the window as the minutes slid by, I watched the star system of Wolf 359 grow. All of it. A star system whose ecliptic diameter, edge to edge across the orbit of its most distant “major object” was seventy million kems, hardly more than the width of Sinope’s orbit around Jupiter. No planets to speak of here. Ransacking dusty school memories, I could recall something called Hardraade, an irregular ice mass some four hundred kems across.

There: Wolf 359 itself, already showing a disk through brilliant pinkish glare. Not so brilliant you couldn’t look right at it for a good long while, Wolf more like a luminous world than a star, off-white light shining from the surface of the Disk, a system of silver rings more glorious by far than Saturn’s, platter of rings around a sun only 63,000 kems in diameter, a little larger than Uranus, about half the size of Saturn.

The fat guy beside me said, “Hey. You a fuckin’ tourist or something?”

I glanced over at him and shrugged. “I guess so.”

“Man, you gotta be fuckin’
stupid
to come here.”

I looked back out the window and saw that Wolf had grown gigantic in no time at all, our transport orbiting obliquely in toward the edge of the rings. You could make them out now as a whirlwind of orbiting masses, large, small, in between, shimmering like metallic glitter, whipped around and around by the star’s mass, a little more than four percent that of the Sun.

Call it forty Jupiters, crushed into a thing so small, crushed until its fusion phoenix lit, flooding the sky with pearlescent fire.

o0o

A day, a night, another day, wandering around nearly weightless in the deep tunnels of a solid body called Holger’s Heaven, hanging out at a crummy worker’s hostel while I tried to find the authorities, any authorities at all, finally stumbling on a hole-in-the-wall office where a gray-bearded man with shiny yellow eyes scratched his whiskers and tried to figure out what regulation applied.

OK, young fellow. Go ahead and... do whatever you want, I guess.

A few days after that, after renting an antique freeze-frame at some kind of public library deep within the rock and ice, I found a place to go, found a way to get there, and I was off.

Call them the Sunrise Mountains.

Everyone else does.

Everyone who comes to Wolf 359.

Comes and visits a place called the Sea of Green.

Cold here. Vistas like Antarctica, distant white hills, shadowy black crags knife-edge sharp under a deep, starless mauve sky, Wolf 359 huge in that sky, brilliant red-gold light making your eyes ache, making them leak tears that threatened to freeze on your cheeks.

When you stand on the edge of the world like this, bundled up against the cold, you can look back away from the sun, look down the tunnel of your shadow toward darkness... there, beyond the mountains, the dim, twinkling stars, feeble, barely able to force their way through the cold mist.

Or you can look the other way, down across the Sea of Green itself, toward this little body’s substellar point, where the meltwater comes to a boil, column of water vapor rising up into an almost-transparent mushroom cloud that does nothing to hide a too big, too bright, too close star.

Something skritched near my feet, seemed to duck away when I looked. There, over by that little black rock, bit of meteoritic flotsam undamaged by its slow fall through Green’s epeiric atmosphere, something. I knelt, feeling cold through the kneepads of my rented hotsuit, pulled the rock gently out of the way... It was a little pink thing, like a bit of molten putty, cowering in the snow, seeming to shiver.

I reaching out, thinking to pick it up, cradle it in my gloved hands, maybe warm it some to stop that unseemly shiver... stopped myself just in time as the stuff shrank from my touch, starting to flow slowly away.

It stopped when I did, seeming to wait. A little pseudopod grew from the upper surface, paused for a second, then blinked open a tiny green eye, faceted, like a flake of emerald fresh from the jeweler’s wheel.

I said, “Hi, there.” Nothing. Little green eye staring at me, motionless. After a while, a second pseudopod grew, off to one side, blinked open a blue sapphire eye that stretched away, bobbing and weaving.

I started to reach out again, not intending to touch it, knowing its fragile substance would splash and burn if I did, but the thing flattened abruptly, seemed to sink into the snow, and was gone, not even a stain left behind.

Not even a fare thee well.

I straightened up and started to walk, UVless rays from Wolf 359 without substance on my face, walking down a long, icy hill toward the sea. Wet ice here. Careful not to slip. Harmless in the low gee that makes you bob and sway like this, but still...

When I accidentally stepped on a little green crust, it popped and snapped like frying bacon, smoking and curling as it burned away to black flakes. Sorry. Whoever you were.

I remember reading once how surprised the first expedition to Wolf was when they found life here, the most complex life found anywhere up to that time. No planets? How could you have life around a dim little M8e like that, a cold red star whose only activity was an occasional deadly burp of starfire, prominences licking up in periodic fury, every time the magnetic field lines reversed.

And yet, over the long, long eons... well the inner ring system, you see, lies within Wolf 359’s ecosphere, a million whirling little worlds made of wet ice and carbonaceous chondrules.

Down by the edge of the steaming sea, the air actually begins to seem warm, water vapor swirling about in little puffs, like ragged, miniature clouds, wreathing suddenly about your head, appearing and disappearing like magic.

By the time I got close, could hear the sharp slopping sounds of little wavelets bouncing off the ice-shelf, I was walking ankle deep in what I imagined was freezing water, glad for my nice, waterproof rental boots. Up ahead was a broad crescent of something that looked like shiny black mud, parked on it, a lozenge-shaped vehicle finished in bright red enamel, forward end bracketed with windows, interior dark.

A flitter, perhaps, fancier model than the one we’d had back home.

The sudden surge of remembering myself in Audumla came like a tiny electric shock, quickly suppressed.

The black stuff was indeed mud, sticking to my boots like soft shit, every footfall liberating a puff of ripe organic stench, making me remember an unpleasant night when I’d helped my father repair the failing digestive system of a decrepit CHON processor, poor old thing living all by itself, trapped in a clearing of its own design, deep in the feral forests of Audumla.

Nobody in the car. A trail of footprints, full of muddy water now, like a chain of little lakes, making a trail to the sea. I followed them down to the water and, shading my eyes from Wolflight, scanned the choppy green surface.

There. A few hundred ems out, a little black dot, the head of a swimmer. Every now and again, you could see the flail of an arm as it rose above the surface.

I remembered a thousand old dramas, stories of people deciding to end it all by swimming out to sea until they drowned. Every now and again, one of those would provoke a suicide in Audumla, where we had lakes, if not seas.

I remembered a girl from school who pulled that one, was dead for hours before someone missed her and went looking for the carcass, was in the hospital for weeks afterward, because some scavenger’d eaten away part of her guts.

No one said much about it after she came back to school; she still had few friends, fewer still after that. Watching the swimmer, I wondered briefly if I should make an effort to... what, swim on out after this one now? I pictured myself drowning in an icy Sea of Green and wondered what the medical facilities were like here.

The black dot began moving closer to the muddy beach, leaving a little white vee behind it in the water. I guess this gravity would facilitate swimming, and, as it got closer, I could see the shape of a human form, outlined in pale flesh and green shadow, stretched out, more or less on the surface of the water.

Finally, close to shore, she stood, the two of us looking at one another, and I marveled that Uncreated Time would bring me all the way to Wolf 359, only to be confronted by yet another naked woman, when all I really wanted, here and now, was to find a wilderness in which to be alone.

“Who the hell are you?” she said, standard English, in a voice hard with the habits of command, harder than any voice I remember Violet using. Harder even than my mother’s voice.

She was a bizarre sight, even after all I’d gotten used to, pasty white skin netted with blue veins, splotched with pink here and there, skin covering up a banding of stark musculature, long, ropy black hair hanging about her shoulders, runneling icewater. Flat face, almost featureless but for the pale blue eyes of a fantasy ghost.

“Speak up boy!” She put her hands on her hips, showing big tufts of black axial hair, matching a bigger swatch spread at the base of her belly. When she walked out of the water, squelching up into the sticky mud, I saw she had broad, spatulate feet ending in stubby little toes, the feet of a human bred for high gee.

I’d never studied adaptive physiology, but guessed her features added up to somewhere between nine and ten ems per square second.

I held out my hand and said, “Hello. My name’s, um, Murph.”

A flash of anger in her pale blue eyes, eyes looking at my hand like I was offering her a fistful of mud. “So? What the fuck’re you doing
here
?”

I’d not given much thought to the social structure of Wolf 359, but was beginning to guess a few details. So: “I’m a, uh, tourist. From near the Centauri Jet.”

Anger fading suddenly, replaced by interest. She scratched herself under one heavy breast, and said, “Traveling in style?”

I shook my head, then, seeing my body language meant little to her, said, “Company deadhead. Standard ARM.”

She shrugged. “We don’t get many of either out here.”

I remembered the smelly fat guy on the transport.

She turned away, facing back out to sea, arching her back, taking a deep breath of dank, shit-scented air, startling me with the way the muscles shifted and flexed under the skin of her back. She said, “You swim?”

I pictured myself in the green sea, bumping up against little ice floes. “Well. I, um... I guess I’m not used to the weather here.”

She looked back at me, face crinkled with amusement. “Idiot. Wade out a little and feel the water with your hand.”

I sloshed out until it was up to mid-calf, thankful for the waterproof suit, bent down and... Hmh. Warm as a tub.

She said, “Water’s boiling a few hundred meters out, you know. It stays warm on the surface because fresh meltwater sinks to the bottom and flows out under the substell.”

Which made perfect sense, now that I thought about it.

She grinned, fingering red nipples puckered into stiff little raspberries, and said, “Warmer than the fuckin’ air, anyway!” Held out her hand to me and said, “My name’s Porphyry. Porphyry Campobello, of Melina’s Nest.”