When We Were Real (Author's Preferred Edition) (21 page)

They had her on a thigh-high table, flat on her back and naked, the same serving girl who’d made herself wet for me on command, slid to just the right position, buttocks even with the table’s edge, legs held apart by two other servants, a man and a woman still in their white robes, eyes down cast, holding her legs as far apart, I figured, as they could go without breaking.

I imagined the crackle-pop of breaking gristle.

Sheelah’s eyes were open but slitted, glassy with something I imagined must be pain, lips set in a flat line. Thin, watery blood was seeping from her vulva, trickling down across her buttocks, and it was spattered on the floor below her, soaking into fine white carpet.

I felt my daze lift, haze carried away by horror and looked up from Sheelah’s battered crotch, looking around at Porphyry’s grinning, expectant friends. Opened my mouth to speak...

Pop
.

A prickle of pain in the back of my right shoulder, a spreading numbness, tingling down my right arm, diffusing through my back, emerging in my chest, descending swiftly across my belly. There was a sharp, bitter smell in my nose, odor making me think of the color purple, then just a hint of some odd taste on the back of my tongue.

And there I stood, mouth hanging open, looking at people who smiled and waited.

There was something I wanted to do here. Something I wanted to say. What was it?

I can hardly seem to catch my breath.

Something happening down below. Bizarre, faraway sensation of heaviness at the bottom of my belly, erection flexing upward, lifting the weight of my brocade robe.

Porphyry’s voice, sweet with amusement, said, “Well, turn around Mr. Murphy.”

My feet made all the movements necessary for me to turn, slowly, swaying just a bit, until I was facing her, looking down at her, seeing her smile. She was holding up a military grade injector, waving it in my face like a glassy finger.

“So. What d’you think, boy?”

My mouth opened, tongue flexing articulately, and it said, “I think you gave me a drug.”

She grinned. “Smart boy!” Then she held the injector up, close to her face, squinting at the little words I knew these autoampules always had printed on the barrel. There’d be some milspec stuff, then... she read, “ParteeTyme Brand Yohimbine-Rohypnol Injection.”

Gorgo’s voice said, “Ah, what
would
we do without it?” I felt his hands on my shoulders, pulling gently as Porphyry tossed the injector aside and started undoing my fasteners. The robe slid to the floor suddenly, as if I were a statue being unveiled.

“My, my. Look at that!” A woman’s voice, which went on, “Give him another shot. Let’s see how big it
can
get!”

Porphyry, frowning, looked up into my eyes. “No. I think he’s just right.”

Someone said, “Come on! Let’s get saddled up! This’ll be
cool
!”

They turned me around, got me lined up with Sheelah, still laid out on her table, got my prick aimed and pushed me forward, so I slid right in. The pain in Sheelah’s eyes seemed to deepen, but I thought I saw forgiveness there as well. Knowledge. Resignation. I saw she was biting her lip now, denting it deeply with strong white teeth.

Porphyry said, “OK. Start fucking her, Murph.”

My hips started to pulse. In. Out. In again.

Orb, this feels good, Sheelah strongly ridged inside, a sign of deep arousal and... Something still alive within me remembered my own startling erection, come from nowhere at all.

Porphyry said, “Longer strokes, Murph. And slower.”

That other woman said, “Yeah! And lean a little, so we can
see
better!”

Like this? Am I doing it right, my friends?

Porphyry: “OK, who’s first?”

Silence, save for the soft liquid sounds my prick was making as it slipped in and out of Sheelah’s bleeding cunt. Then Gorgo said, “Well, it was
my
idea...”

“Be my guest.”

I thought, for just a second, that it was my voice that’d spoken.

Then I felt his hands on my shoulders again, felt that big belly billowing against my back.

He felt like a medical probe going in, erratic at first, then matching his thrust to mine. When he was done, another man took his place. After a while, a quiet voice, hardly my voice at all, something far down beyond the reach of the drug, began to pray, first to Orb, then to the larger vessel of Uncreated Time, humbly asking only that I be permitted to survive.

Eight. Sirius is far away

Sirius is far away.

I remember that song, with its eerie, echoed chorus, from some datatrack I loved as a child. Something about an athletic contest, about honor and decency, about first contact with some fanciful extraterrestrial intelligence.

We’ve journeyed to the Milky Way.

I can’t remember any more.

Now, from the forward obdeck of the little tramp starship
Sign of the Labrys
, Sirius A was a white hole in the sky, fantastically bright even from a hundred AUs out. Two-point three Solar masses, one-point-eight Solar radii. Twenty-three times Solar luminosity. Meaningless numbers, given definition by this thing that erased all the stars from half the sky.

All but the tiny fleck of Sirius B over there, climbing steeply toward aphelion, a glimmer of hard white light in the washed-out black sky. Just shy of one Solar mass. Just over thirty-five thousand kems in diameter. No more than half the size of Wolf 359.

And yet, five hundred times as bright.

I couldn’t remember how I came aboard this little ship, cobbled together from leftovers of larger, older ships, cavernous holds, yes, but only that, not entire worlds in darkness. I couldn’t remember for the longest time, though Captain Lee told me, more than once, how she found me lying, naked, frozen, still breathing, by the muddy shores of the Sea of Green, not far from the foothills of the Sunrise Mountains.

Can’t remember how I got there. Why’d they let me go? Common decency? Some legalism I never heard of?

I never knew who they were.

Never knew who they thought they were, what they stood for, by their own lights.

All a dream?

I thought so.

Wished it so.

I still don’t know what made her bring me back to her ship, with its crew of women in gray.

But I remember her telling me, amused now that all this time has gone by, how she and her crewwomen argued about bringing me aboard, about what was the right thing to do.

The innocent are innocent, she told me. An innocent man is just as innocent as an innocent woman.

I remember trying to tell her about my lack of innocence. Remember her laughter.

And, of course, she told me how their own innocence came to be called into question, how they almost decided to put me ashore, alone, bewildered, lost, at their next port of call, a little, almost-deserted refueling depot on the long line between Wolf 359 and Sirius.

Some of us, Captain Lee said grimly, were not so committed to their vows as they thought.

And then she’d laughed again.

Not your fault, bright angel, she’d said. Not your fault at all.

Alone among the stars with each other, all we had to control was our desire
for
each other. In port, all we had to control were those little spasms of desire, soon over, for anything else we... wanted.

Keeping you with us...

A long, sorrowing frown.

Some wanted to... sin with you. Others, imagining themselves pure, merely wanted... someone to care for.

Maybe that’s a sin too.

In time, I understood. A man wants a submissive woman, granting joy only he can know. A woman wants a submissive child, granting joy only she can know. Where’s the sin there?

Ask those who submit.

In those days, donning
Labrys
gray, working among the crewwomen as though I were one of them, I thought often of my father. Time passed, starship stopping at one place and then another, habitat worlds hanging between the stars, as varied as anything the old fabulists dreamed. We’d stay for a day or a week, sometimes more, doing what was needed to support the ship.

I’d go ashore, sometimes with crewwomen, sometimes alone, an anomaly either way. In time, memory coalesced, and with it forgetfulness. I found myself accepting whatever submissions were offered, unthinking, unafraid, and so found myself growing away from the refuge that’d found me.

Until, one day, in the stellar deep off Sirius, I watched the infrastar Wernickë grow in our sky, a flattened, ruddy ball so very much like Ygg, just now making a slow hyperbolic pass through the outer reaches of Sirius A’s ecosphere, her moons fuzzy white balls shrouded in water vapor, outgassing wealth.

Captain Lee watched with me, admiring the way the blue light of our modulus exhaust reflected, flickering, off the clouds of one nearby moon, Suzdal Habitat a gleaming scintilla of green and gold, orbiting nearby.

She said, “Another century and all this will be gone, back out into the cold and dark again.”

Silence, while we turned about the moon’s center of mass, while our ship bore down on the mottled sheen of Suzdal.

She said, “I wish you’d reconsider, Murph. There’s so much trouble here. Rebellion. Change. The Mobilitzyn fleets are well on their way, coming to reclaim what’s theirs.”

I remembered the Glow-Ice Worlds, not quite against my will.

She sighed. “We’ll miss you.”

I looked at her and smiled. “No you won’t. You’ll be glad to get rid of me at last.” And I must go, if I’m... ever to be myself again. You know that, for I’ve told you so.

She looked hurt for a moment, but then grinned herself, shook her head ruefully. “We’ll be lucky if some of the crew don’t get off with you. Poor Nettie.”

Childless mothers. A loveless yearning for home and hearth, husband and family. I don’t know whether it’s true, this genetic determinant, or just the trap they wove for themselves when they invented a celibate sisterhood that would go roving the stars.

And I suppose it doesn’t matter.

Time changes everything.

And nothing.

o0o

Suzdal was a beautiful world, as different from the others as they’d been from each other. People living on the outside, beneath the sheltering wings of a eutropic shield, on the model of Telemachus Major, rather than within a scooped-out shell, as in Audumla, a warren of tunnels like... well. No sense remembering that one.

Call it a little bit of Telemachus Major. Telemachus Major without the unending cityscape.

Sitting in a little rooftop cafe, sipping sweet, red Altopashtûn coffee, rented freeze-frame on the table before me, I could look out over the red-tile rooftops of a little village called Sereniál, out over the sharp curve of Suzdal’s horizon, nearer trees already leaning away, rolling, grassy hills, dotted with grazing cattle, oddly twisted, sense of perspective failing. Half a nearby forest was sunk below the horizon like a fleet of faraway ships...

Faint, ancient, grainy fear. Those images, images of a terrestrial sea. The diorama sea I admired from Porphyry’s sundeck.

... only the crowns of the forest giants were visible, and only the nearest of those.

In the distance, against the cloudless backdrop of a cornflower sky, the flat vee-shape of a buzzard circled. Familiar. We had them in Audumla, didn’t we?

The attempt to remember mad a faint, barely-perceptible constriction of fear, deep in my chest, back by my spine.

Beyond the sky, eerily, I could see the half-faded crescent of reddish-brown Wernickë, and, there, the sparkle of Sirius B. No sense looking at A, blinding even through the shield. I suppose, if I looked away, down by the far horizon, I might even make out a few bright stars.

When I looked, I was startled to see the tiny shape of a starship,
Sign of the Labrys
rising in her orbit, which I knew was, technically, west to east. Just now, Captain Lee will be on her bridge, making sure Goddess is in her heaven and all’s right with the machinery. And, down in the engineering spaces, Nettie will be looking at the post I made my own, occupied by one of her sisters just now.

I looked away, down into the freeze-frame.

Well. Here are my accounts, transferred from
Labrys
’ node, just as they were when Captain Lee uploaded them from the master DataTrack at Wolf 359. Sometimes, I wonder why Porphyry troubled herself to put money against my name.

Hell, maybe that made it a business deal, rather than a crime. Only Orb knows, and he’s not telling.

Material at the Sirius node belied the peaceful world around me, waiters quietly bringing me what I asked for, all too human men and women passing quietly about their business in the bucolic streets of Sereniál.

There. The data placard of the Wernickan People’s Independence Party. Tall, dark, handsome man explaining the reasons he and his comrades had for separating themselves from the service of Mobilitzyn Associates, world, habitats, and all.

Some nonsense about lives, fortunes, and sacred honor.

When I looked up, away from the depths of the freeze-frame,
Labrys
was halfway up the vault of the sky, thrusters twinkling now, turning the mass of the ship, positioning her just so. I wonder if Captain Lee is looking down on Suzdal, thinking of me.

Probably not. Too busy with her job.

Back in the freeze-frame, I called up fresh news from the heartland of humanity, news only a few years old, the business of
plus ça change
. Something called the Historical Humanity Movement big in the Solar Oort right now. Standard ARM advertising its big new mining venture out by the twin red suns of Krüger 60, ten million corporate colonist positions opening today, come one, come all. Bring your skills. Pay is great. Opportunities boundless.

Down in the Centauri Jet there’d been some kind of political trouble, a mass movement sweeping the democratic habitats, just now deep in the grip of icy economic failure. Something called the Ultima Thule Society had induced a few of the more important habitats to band together, the Progressive Union they called it, and begin regulating the inter-habitat activities of the smaller corporations.