When We Were Real (Author's Preferred Edition) (2 page)

So Helga Rannsdottir, turning up her nose at the Mother’s Children and their arranged marriages, would show them all just what a
real
woman could do with a husband’s Goddess-given talents.

Even if the wretch did believe his talents came from some silly, alien,
male
deity with the ridiculous name of Orb.

I can hear his tired voice now, remembered from when I was a boy, he never talks about it anymore: Not the Orb, Helga. Orb’s just a symbol. Our souls emerge from Uncreated Time like everything else in the...

Then she’d screech about the Goddess’ Truth. Sometimes throw things at him.

And, of course, one day I stumbled on the actual details, found some inkling of what it means to have an open-ended life, where you just go on and on, no matter what.

There and then, just as here and now, I followed him up the muddy hill, carrying the toolbox. You could see that Beebee, seniormost of Mrs. Trinket’s fifteen husbands, was some kind of welding machine. Hard to say what his kind’s job would have been, back when Audumla was a working industrial center called Standard ARM Decantorium XVII. Something out on the hull, judging from the grippers he had instead of feet. It made him limp, walking around inside, where there was only mud, grass and loose rocks to trip over.

Those must have been good days for them, back before Ygg’s ready resources played out. Bright days full of life and purpose and doing. I sometimes wonder if they miss it all, but they never talk about it, at least not in front of me.

When Ygg was finished off, Standard ARM found no profit in shifting its equipment to some other site—it’s much cheaper to build new machinery
in situ
, so the mining tools were abandoned in place, not even told what was happening. Just one day the supervisors came no more.

After a while, they figured it out for themselves, cooked up some scheme to become an illegal service station, catering to the tramp freighter trade that was springing up in those days. Called the place Himera and let it develop quite a reputation as a den of iniquity. Maybe they’d’ve done all right for themselves, enough to buy all the supplies and spare parts they needed, but then Standard sold the joint to the Mother’s Children, who soon turned the tramp starships away. Not a problem for anyone, what with the Centauri Jet and Telemachus Major being so close and all.

No problem for anyone but the Himerans.

And Mother, always angry because Dr. Goshtasp devoted so much profitless time to helping them stay alive.

Inside the largest packing crate, Mrs. Trinket was a big white enamel box lying on the floor, moaning softly in her best-little-girl voice. She looked something like a refrigerator, a refrigerator with four stumpy legs, four long, spindly arms, face of doll-like blue eyes and pursed pink lips mounted in the upper half of her breastplate, just above the spigots.

Lying on the floor now, she was surrounded by frightened husbands and excited children. Little Tillie the buffer’s daughter, who’d never have reproductive organs of her own. Maxine, a baby incubator just like Trinket, big eyes wide, taking it all in.

Daddy went to her side, obviously concerned about the state she was in, attached his diagnostics and waited for his displays to come up. Hiss of exasperation. “Trinket, you sissy! When the call came, I thought you were dying!”

She whimpered, “Oh, Doctor. It never felt like this before...”

Daddy started plugging in to her other ports, making software disconnects at internal sensors, anesthetizing her. “Well, hang on, kiddo. We’ll have a look and see what’s what.”

When the screwdrivers started to whine, Beebee flinched and averted his eyes.

When her access panel swung open, I felt like backing away, at least getting away from the powerful gust of... I don’t know. Call it the smell of life that came out. I looked anyway, and there in a womb made of bleeding raw steaks and heaving layers of rump roast, lay a collection of metal parts that seemed all angles and spikes and sharp edges.

Daddy said, “Well, shit. There you go.”

One of the other husbands, an incomprehensible thing that seemed to be made mostly of gooseneck lamps, peered over his shoulder, blinked oddly, this way and that, from his seven or eight eyes, then crowed, “Beebee! I didn’t know you had it in you!”

Beebee came forward too, edging nervously past me, and took a look. “My God! A baby welder!”

Trinket squeaked, “
Beebee
?! You told me you ran dry
years
ago.”

“Well... well... I’m sorry, Trinket. I
thought
I did...”

“You lying bastard! You just wait! You
see
if I ever...”

Daddy, laughing, patted her on the side. “Take it easy Trink. We’ll have this critter out of you in five minutes.”

I leaned in, holding my breath against the smell, and tapped him on the shoulder. “Uh, Dad? I think I’ll... wait outside. If you don’t mind.”

He looked up for a second, giving me an odd, somehow disappointed look. Then shrugged and said, “Sure. This won’t take long.”

I stood out on the hillside, air much fresher here despite the surrounding swamp, and watched the children play, a bizarre assortment of kits and boxes and things that looked like they might even be hybrids between more than one sort of machine.

Years ago, back when we first started coming here, I used to play with Himeran kits. Play with them just like they were
real
children, friends and all. Well, the ones I knew grew up, went off to do whatever the hell it is abandoned hardware does when it grows up... maybe I just don’t want to think about it, now that my turn’s come.

I looked away from the river, looked back up into the sky.

You can see the southern endcap from here, it’s not that far. Rugged red hills rising up and up, becoming sheer red cliffs just before they disappear into the deep blue shadows around the axial port. All over the hills were the twinkling cities and towns of the Mother’s Children. Towns, farmland, the gleaming silver of the new monorail lines we’d just put in, replacing the wrecked transport system Standard had left behind.

After a while, Daddy came out of Mrs. Trinket’s crate, wiping bloody hands on some kind of rag, cottony stuff the Himerans always had laying around, came and stood beside me, watching the indigo shadows of dusk just starting to peep around the edges of our platform.

Finally, he said, “I always hate going home.”

I felt a small pang, wishing he’d just fucking shut up. “Then don’t.”

He looked at me, then looked away, maybe wishing that, just this once, I’d sympathize with his bellyaching, and muttered, “So where the fuck else would I go, hmh?”

I shrugged. “Guess we better get started. She’ll be pissed if we’re late for supper.”

Another long look. “Yup.” We went back in to pack up his tools.

o0o

From the roofgarden atop Helgashall, on a grassy knoll some eight kems above the bayou country, you can see a long way down Audumla’s axis, lowlands curving up to the right and left, stretching straight away before you, two hundred kems to the northern endcap, tiny circle drowned in day by a glare of orange stemlight, little halo of bright freckles at night, faraway light from other Mothersbairn cities and towns.

Far below, on the panel where we’d just been, tall purple clouds were billowing up, twisted and sheared by coriolis effects. Beyond, in the void between the panels, as the stemlight began fading away, stars were popping out, but Ygg’s red ball was missing, having transited the nearest void, going behind habitable landscape. It’d be out again in a couple of hours, by the time the night was really black.

Woolgathering doesn’t get anything done. I looked down into the freeze-frame, put my hands in the warm shimmer of the interface, and waited. Nothing. No inspiration. No desire to... finish. Graduation Thesis is the last worthwhile thing you’ll ever do. Why aren’t you interested?

Nothing. The freeze-frame didn’t seem to have any answers. Nobody gives a shit about the stasis-metric analytical conjunctions on gauge-dynamic metacontrols. I scrolled open the hopper and let it play at random, knowing it’d take me even farther from getting the job done, but what the hell? Here, Standard ARM smugly announcing record profits from its big mining operation at Proxima, what they call the Glow-Ice Worlds. Attached adverts for new colonial positions just opening at Glow-Ice. Also at some frontier posting, way the fuck out by Altair.

Stock market surging giddily upward for the fourteenth straight year.

Profits up. Wages down. God’s in his Heaven and all’s right with the economy. Aren’t you glad?

News from the Centauri Jet. News from the Solar System, a full parsec and more from Ygg and Audumla. How’s the refrain go? A billion-trillion datatracks and...

I stopped briefly in my favorite old atlas, a twinkle of jewels in a jet black void. Here, solitary Sol, with its fine, flat Kuiper disk and spherical Oort shell, home to four hundred billion human souls. There, Alpha Centauri A/B, its own cometary cloud distorted into a long, flat stream by the hectomillennia-long hyperbolic passage of Proxima, home to billions more.

And Audumla, just off the ragged terminus of the Centauri Jet, not far from Telemachus Major, headquarters of mighty Standard ARM. Always wanted to go there, a dreamable dream, only four days’ travel from abandoned Ygg. A long look sideways at the pale blue sparkle of manhome Earth, picked out beside yellow Sol. Thirty-seven years by fast commercial starship? No. Never. An impossible dream.

Oh, sure, I’ve got the time, we all do, since things just go on and on, willy-nilly. But the dream of actually
doing
it...

I shut the freeze-frame, got up and walked away. Two weeks before I have to turn in my thesis, go to graduation, and then... then. Well, there is that.

o0o

Downstairs, in the Whitehall boundary of the
kemenatë
, the no-boys-allowed part of Helgashall, I stood in the doorway of my sister Rannvi’s room, watching her, perched naked on the edge of her bed, painting her toenails black and gold. A startling, lovely young woman, incredibly unmarried at the age of twenty-two. Long, straight, golden-blonde hair falling tousled around her shoulders. Deep, dark blue eyes. Rounded breasts with perfectly-shaped pink nipples.

Once, wandering some far recess of humanity’s civilization-wide, lightspeed DataWarren, I came across a small piece of fiction set against Mothersbairn society, obviously written by some ignorant tourist, fascinated by what he saw. All those women doing as they pleased, dressing as they pleased. All those men, seeing them. Seeing them and... the author’s vitals seemed gnawed by what he saw, evidently wanted, and could not have. So his story portrayed a dark side to Audumla, to the society of the Mother’s Children, a world of incest and violence and secret rape and...

Well.

A woman invites you into her body, at her convenience, at her need. A man knows never to ask. In his ignorance, blinded by his own unquenchable need, drowning in bloody fantasy, the author missed the real darkness in which we live.

Rannvi looked up from her pretty toes and smiled. “You can come in, Murph.” She pulled her legs up on the bed, going cross-legged, motioning for me to join her. “Having a hard time, aren’t you?”

I sat at the head of the bed, sprawled among her pillows, still looking at her, sights and visual textures, familiarity breeding no contempt. “I guess. It’s... well. I never wanted this day to come. But it has anyway.”

A slow nod, a pensive frown. “Have you... made your arrangements?”

“No. There’s... no one I can...” What? No one I can fucking stand? Is that it? “I don’t know what to do, Rannvi.”

She said, “She’ll wait for me to make up my mind, getting angrier all the time. She won’t wait for you.”

“Doesn’t she understand you
want
to keep on studying, try for a... well, a
career
?”

“Oh, shit, Murphy. No, she doesn’t understand. ‘A Woman’s Work is Motherhood.’“

And “a Man’s Work is Woman’s Support.” I know the Goddess-damned refrain. Embossed in fucking gold on the surface of my brain. “Why
doesn’t
she understand?
She
broke with Mother’s Children and Goddess. For a while, anyway. I mean, Daddy...” Saying that, knowing by now that we both knew the truth, though we’d never talked about it.

Her voice low, Rannvi said, “It’s still Motherhood, Murph.” She shrugged, breasts bobbing prettily. “I’ll get maybe another year in school, if I’m lucky.”

I’ve always appreciated that I’m Murph to her, not just Dagmar, Mother’s Son. Some sisters are worth having. “Wish I could help.”

“But you’re stuck a lot worse, I know. And I wish
I
could help...”

After a while, she got up and went over to her wardrobe, started picking through her clothes. Time. Time for everything. And nothing.

o0o

Being a middle child, I was left more unsupervised than either Rannvi before me, or Lenahr to follow. Maybe that’s why Daddy got so much of my time, in which to spoil me for the Mothers’ Life. And why I got so much time
to
myself, in which to wonder and explore.

One day, when I was nine years old, I figured out how to unlock the hatchway to one of the household service panels, getting into the crawlspaces between the walls, a wonderland that was, at first, as alluring as anything in the Baedeker I’d imagined from the unfathomable universe beyond Audumla. And, when its novelty paled, I used it to get into other places I wasn’t supposed to go.

Which led, in short order, to the attic.

All sorts of things were stored up there, mostly things that should have been thrown away, recycled, passed on, but people will retain the relics of their lives, just because they
are
relics.

We make a sentimental attachment to artifacts of the past, even as we put them away, knowing we’ll never look at them again.

I spent a lot of time going through my mothers trunks, looking at her old clothes, out of fashion, out of date, though of course nothing was ever stained or frayed. I wondered why she would keep a box of colorful, silky underpants, neither wearing them nor discarding them.