When We Were Real (Author's Preferred Edition) (20 page)

Her hand, when I took it, was hard and strong.

o0o

We swam for a while in the bath-warm waters of the Sea of Green, then Porphyry led me, shivering and naked, to her flitter, pulling me inside, dripping icewater, reeking of metallic salts, to sit on the car’s furry upholstery, throwing my hotsuit in the back with her own.

“There now,” she said, “let’s get some heat cranked up and...” Something in the flitter controlbox must have been listening, for little lights came on and dry, warm air started blowing around my ankles. After a while, I stopped shivering.

“Well, let’s get the hell out of here.” I felt a soft vibration start up somewhere in the car, then she put her hands on the steering pads and we lifted off.

For some reason it didn’t surprise me when the thing turned out to be a little more than just a flitter, angling sharply upward across the Sea of Green, cutting straight through the vapor jet, craft shuddering softly as it punched through turbulence, mauve sky turning deep purple, then black, spackled with a few bright stars, the rest of it washed away by Wolf’s bright light.

Below us, stretching away in all directions, the ring plane was like an ocean of molten metal, Sea of Green hanging suspended above it like a flattened eyeball, quickly growing smaller.

“Where’re we going?”

She looked over at me, and said, “Home. You
do
want to come with me, don’t you?”

Home. Just a word. 

I said, “Sure.”

o0o

Soon, there came a moment when I was lying beside Porphyry in her huge, magically soft bed, bed made from aerogel and silk and who knows what, deep in the folds of Melina’s Nest. Waiting, I guess, for her to say something.

This is that terribly familiar time, when the squirmy getting-to-know-you preliminaries are over with, when the heart-pounding excitement of new-partner sex has come and gone, when you wait to see just whose depths you’ve plumbed.

Easy preliminaries, sturdy Porphyry in command of her emotions and body, doing something so obviously a familiar part of her life. Good sex, after a quick, muscular fashion, Porphyry greasily lubricious, targeting her pleasure like some gamepark quarry.

And plenty of adaptive skill in there so I could find what I wanted, as well.

Now, she stretched, making a sound that was almost a purr, arching her back, nuzzling silk pillowslips full of spongy gel, then curled on one side, looking at me, face set in something that was not quite a smile. Should I say something? No. This is just a moment in time. Tomorrow you’ll be somewhere else.

She edged closer, reached out one hard, blunt-fingered hand, ran it across the damp surface of my chest, down onto my belly, ran her fingers through wet-matted pubic hair, curled them round the flaccid, shrunken mass of my prick.

Somewhere inside, I felt a pang of renewed desire, as though from a ghost not part of me at all. And with it, a desire to be elsewhere. Something about this woman. Something very different from Reese... and I thought of Violet.

Porphyry said, “You look so funny, so... I don’t know.” She was massaging me now, blood-sponge tissues struggling to reëngorge. “Sort of... half way between a contract worker, a bondservant, and... one of us.”

Plenty of people bustling about Melina’s nest, doing things, busy, busy. People, real people, men and women, but behaving, maybe, just a bit like my mother’s silvergirls.

She snickered at my renewed erection. “A real man wouldn’t want this. He’d get up and leave, go do something... manly.”

I didn’t have the slightest idea what she was talking about.

She said, “Damn. Look at those little round feet of yours. Long toes. Long, skinny arms. You look like a fucking chimpanzee.”

I sorted through remembered images of various extinct apes, trying to remember which ones had been chimpanzees. The middle-sized ones, I thought, not the big gray critters or the funny-looking redheads.

She said, “You’re not a runaway optimod, are you?”

Stupid. There must not be very many optimods out here or she’d know the difference. I said, “Racial adaptation. This is... what we look like around Centauri Jet, these days.”

She grinned, then rolled away, sprawling onto her back, flexing her knees so they pointed in opposite directions, feet pressed together, cocking her pelvis back so her vulva opened like a black-petaled flower. “Come on, Superman,” she said, “Let’s get that big old thing inside me some more. Let’s see what you can do.”

Orb knows what a man can do. He doesn’t tell us what women really want, realizing we don’t need to know.

For a moment, I remembered the things Dûmnahn had tried to tell me, once upon a time, time that seemed long ago now.

I climbed in her saddle as directed, wondering at the cultural referent in her remark. Superman? English term translated from a keyword,
übermensch
, in some centuries-old racialistic doctrine. To what master race does she think I belong?

Certainly not hers.

o0o

Afterward, she led me to a shower stall the size of any decent human’s bedroom, larger than whole apartments you see in the slumcrawl dramas of the DataWarren, washed me with her own hands, dried me off with impossibly soft, ridiculously fluffy white towels.

Hard to know what to think, standing there with this bizarre woman kneeling on the wet tile before me, nuzzling my genitals with her face.

She grinned up at me and said, “Kind of fun, doing it without servants or anything...”

I couldn’t even guess. Somewhere on some datatrack or another, I could have found stories about this world and all its people, but I never had. In the volume of space inhabited by humans, a couple of dozen cubic parsecs, there are a handful of stars, a few hundred planets... millions of comets, hundreds of millions of planetoids, billions of lesser bodies, trillions of people in uncounted habitats.

She led me, still naked, out of the bedroom, whose door we’d never closed, out into the byways of Melina’s Nest, where men and women bustled about, part of the background, not quite invisible.

Not quite.

The sun deck, when she led me through broad, folding glass doors, was so improbable as to be unexpected, a wide expanse of lacquered red wood, a rough hewn railing, beyond, a sheer drop, hundreds of ems to crashing surf below, sparkling blue ocean under a wide blue sky, striated by just a hint of wispy white cloud.

Porphyry said, “You like?”

I nodded.

She said, “It’s California. My grandparents used to live here!”

Here on this deck or... California. Now where... I tipped my head back, staring up at that tiny, absurdly bright white sun until my eyes started to ache and tear, feeling a flood of hard UV prickling on my skin. In a little while, long-unused melanin pumps would start to work, and soon I’d be tan.

When I glanced at Porphyry, I could see she’d already started to darken, skin equipped with much newer, much more expensive pumps than my own.

Over on the far horizon, far out to sea, there was something, some kind of surface vessel, with a low, dark body and great white wings, heeling over before the wind. Ships. They called them ships. In the sea off the coast of California. California. America. Earth.

You have to be rich indeed to live on Earth, whose general population was forcibly evacuated to Piazzi, Kuiper, and Oort more than eight hundred years ago.

“Why’d they leave?”

Sprawling in a soft chaise longue, Porphyry said, “Taxes.”

I sat down gingerly in another chair, across a little wooden table from her, carefully leaning back until it caught me in its embrace, looking at her body anew. Realizing how it’d gotten like that, why it was so different from my own.

Chimpanzee? I felt a little fuse of anger light, sputter, and go out again.

She said, “They went back after a while and took my parents with them. No taste for frontier life, I guess.”

Now, a couple of servants came out, a slim blonde girl and a slim blond man, each dressed in a short white linen robe, barefoot, each bearing a loaded silver tray. They knelt, beginning to put out what I supposed was breakfast food, uncovering hot dishes that wafted steam, liberating strong smells. Coffee I recognized. Glasses of thick red juice. A selection of raw vegetables with little bowls of varicolored dip. A plate that smelled of cooked meat. Little link sausages. Flat strips that seemed to consist mostly of wrinkled, burnt fat.

Odor a little bit like what you smell when a careless technician burns off his fingers in an electrical accident.

Finished with their task, the man and woman stood back, waiting, eyes downcast, side by side.

 Porphyry leaned forward, breasts dangling so that her nipples brushed across the surface of the table, picked up one of the strips of burnt fat, bit, chewed, smacking her lips as she crunched. “Ah, the bacon is
excellent
, Sheelah.”

Bacon
. I remembered the stuff we called bacon in Audumla, thick strips of rich red meat sizzling and popping in the fryer. Odd. The woman, Sheelah, dipped in a curtsy that made her robe ride up, almost to the top of her thighs.

Porphyry’s eyes were on me, amused. “You like Sheelah, do you, Murph?”

Embarrassed, I shrugged and said, “Well. Things are... very different here.”

She said, “What d’
you
think of my new toy, Sheelah?”

The woman raised her eyes to my face, staring, expressionless. “Very nice, ma’m.” The man beside her, still nameless, continued to look at the wooden surface of the deck.

“Pull up your skirt, Sheelah. Show Murph what you’ve got.”

She turned, handed the tray to the man, who clasped it to his own, posed just so, and lifted the hem of her robe, one leg extended forward and to the side. Light blonde pubic hair, hardly there at all. Pink-skinned vulva, small and flat, lips parted to show a hint of structure.

“Very nice.” She glanced at me. “Isn’t that so, Murph?”

I nodded, wondering if there was any way I could just get up and run away. Not bloody likely. You’re down the rabbit hole now, Mr. Murphy.

Porphyry said, “Let’s see you get wet for him now, Sheelah.”

To my astonishment, beads of clear moisture started to form back where I knew the introitus of her vagina must lie hidden. Beads that grew, collected into larger droplets, started, one by one, to run down the insides of her thighs, leaving shiny trails behind.

She said, “Ah, operant conditioning’s a many-splendored thing...”

I looked at Porphyry, aghast.

She laughed, reaching over to ruffle my hair. “God, it’s so much
fun
having you here, Murph! You’re a babe in the fucking woods!”

o0o

A woman’s laughter can charm a man out of his senses. And Porphyry’s laughter seemed, I don’t know, keyed to my moods, perhaps, lifting me out of those moods like some kind of psychiatric drug, as if she could sense the depths of my despair and knew just what to do. Add to that the fact that Melina’s Nest, whoever Melina may have been, was a playland of considerable sophistication, also just right to counter what ailed me.

Perhaps I came to the worlds of this dim sun hoping for ice and darkness, hoping for soul-numbing cold to match how I felt, had felt for so long.

What I found in Porphyry’s artificial paradise was a landscape of sunshine and splendor, blue skies, skies without clouds other than those decorative few, high and white against a manhome friendly sun, a land of mountains, mountain streams, fields of green grass dotted with myriad gay flowers, drifting honeybees, butterflies, colorful songbirds, beaches by a sea warm enough to welcome, cool enough to refresh...

And all of it peopled by lovely folk with downcast eyes whose only purpose was to please, real human beings, as human as me, more human than many I’d called friend, all trained to serve and only serve, as if without needs of their own, as if...

Maybe I would have abused them cruelly, flying from whim to selfish whim, again I don’t know. Porphyry never afforded me the opportunity, monopolizing my time, intercepting my desire. I made love to her by the sea, in sun-dappled forest glades, in her bed of aerogel foam, in public streets walked only by her servants, in the dining room, rolling about on our dinner.

Time passes, as they say, and now it passed in a haze of requited want.

One day, she dressed me up in a fine brocade robe studded with jewels she swore were real, rubies and emeralds, diamonds and sapphires, bundled me into her space-going flitter and took me to a place called Norman’s Hole. A party, she said. We’re going to a party.

And so, in a ballroom thronged with people, flat-footed men and women dressed in extravagant costumes, vast room a riot of color, threaded through with white-robed servants, people with downcast eyes who did as they were bid, carrying trays of viands, trays of drinks, lighting smokes for master and mistress and...

I’d already been introduced to dozens, so many people I’d forgotten their names already, flatfeet rendered all the same by their overblown garb, when Porphyry, towing me by the hand, called out, “Ah,
there
you are!”

A tall, round man, artificial sunlight glinting from a bald head so polished I suspected furniture wax, whose broad back hid people clustered beyond him, turned and held his arms out. “Porphyry! Where the fuck’ve you
been
? We were starting without you!”

I wondered how the hell they’d gotten his teeth like that, teeth like irregular bits of rock crystal, implants perhaps, but looking razor-edged, making me think about the safety of his tongue.

Porphyry said, “Silly Gorgo! What good is it without the
pièce de resistance
?”

Gorgo smirked, and said, “Well.
You
know.”

She sighed. “I guess so. I sure know how stupid
you
can be, dear Gorgo. Come on, let’s see what we’ve got here.”

He moved and Porphyry pushed through a mixed group of flat-footed men and women, some of them dressed in their nonsensical finery, other prancing around buck naked, as if they’d been up to Orb knows what. Me? Dazed, just the way I’d been for days and days. Then Porphyry said, “Ah, Sheelah. They
have
got you started, haven’t they?”