When We Were Real (Author's Preferred Edition) (24 page)

Lovely, hm? Every boy’s dream.

After a while, they stopped returning fire. Maybe we killed them all, maybe some got away, fleeing by ones and twos through the forest, back down the rivers and streams of the Yellow Mountains, back to the safety of civilization.

What difference does it make?

o0o

Days later, a hundred kems to the south, Jade and I sat with our backs to the pebbly trunk of a big old oak tree, cleaning our weapons under a sunny sky. Things seemed almost back to normal now, omnipresent haze fading away, sky slowly losing its green tinge as Wernickë’s magnetosphere bled out excess radiation, as combustion byproducts were absorbed by Suzdal’s ersatz ecology.

Now, Sirius A was a bright flare, high in the sky, the Pup a little sparkle not far away, close to aphelion herself, but almost line of sight with the other star from our perspective. Wernickë itself was nowhere to be scene, back on the other side of the world.

Our world.

Can this go on forever?

What will we become?

 I started reassembling the flit gun, hands working by rote, full of automated skill. Is this what it’s like to be a robot? Lots of old friends I could’ve asked; I remember them all, one after another.

Beside me, Jade was working her own weapon, and I was startlingly conscious of her, form, figure, and presence. We’ve both grown thin, hiding in the hills, eating what we can, when we can. No sign of jasmine perfume anymore, all of that behind us now, part of former lives, half forgotten.

She had the pieces of her gun on the back of a shed jacket, taken apart, resting between her spread legs, beads of sweat on her forehead, brought on by bright sunlight, lips compressed in concentration, listening to the clink and clack, the soft metallic music of her task.

Conscious now of the spread of her thighs, the creased cloth covering the flat place where her legs come together. If I turned my head and leaned forward, leaned a little closer, I could make out some hint of altar and gate... strange, I haven’t thought of it that way in so long.

Part of another life, all right.

I felt a tingle of arousal somewhere deep inside.

Well. It’ll come in good time. You know it will. She knows. Not hard to tell. All the killing and dying, that’s just the life we lead, a life that seems like it’s gone on forever already, stretching infinitely deep into our past. Life has other parts, parts that won’t go away. Our bodies see to that, just as they see to it that we grow hungry every day, that we go on eating, no matter that the killing beckons, no matter that death looms.

I grinned, struck by the silly poetry of my thoughts.

Jade looked up at me briefly, briefly smiled, then went back to the task of her gun.

o0o

In a non-dark night, full Wernickë blazing overhead, backlighting the clouds, adding its light to the light of red fires blooming beyond every horizon, Jade and I sat and ate our light meal, bits of this, scraps of that, in some bombed-out ruin.

We had a roof over our heads, and walls, but the windows were gone, scorched furniture collapsed... no people here. Not bodies. Not remains. Hope they got safely away.

I imagined them living in some Mobilitzyn re-education camp. Mama. Papa. Kiddies and all. Maybe they’ll even get their old jobs back, some day, some time.
They
didn’t make the revolution after all, just us, we few, knowing the masses would go along with it, just the way they go along with everything.

Mobilitzyn won’t waste good workers, surely.

Cost money to import all new.

Explosions flashed far away, strobing our faces pale white.

I could feel the ground surge under me, very faintly.

Sometimes you can feel it jolt like that, even when there’s no distant explosion to see or hear. Some trick of Suzdal’s internal architecture.

There was a faraway rumble, not at all like thunder.

Jade kneeled in front of me now, meal done and forgotten. Kneeled before me, eyes oh-so-serious, and slowly unzipped the front of her dirty coverall, breasts popping out, still full and sleek, though her ribs were striations under the skin, though her belly had grown quite concave.

When the zipper reached the bottom of its track, you could see the tuft of her pubic hair, mounted on a pubic bone that’d grown deliciously prominent.

When I kneeled to face her, she said, “I love you, Murph. You’ve made it... all worthwhile.”

I kissed her then, trying not to think.

o0o

Weeks later, a thousand kems away, down near the Suzdalian south pole, I stood in chains by the side of an open field, waiting with a half-dozen other prisoners. Jade, standing a few ems away, similarly chained, kept looking at me. Trying to smile, I think. Encouragement perhaps, or maybe just working through her own fears.

Over in the middle of the field, next to a landed gunship, one of the new ones they’d just brought in, six bodies lay dead, tattered, spattered with blood, four of them Mobilitzyn troopers, two of them our friends.

More Mobilitzyn troopers hiding around the edges of the clearing, gripping their guns, wide-eyed with fear, nervously alert. No way for them to know they got us all. For all they know, a hundred more guerrillas are creeping nearby, about to attempt our rescue.

The noncom I’d spoken to last came back across the field from the gunship, an officer of some kind at his side. Look at the badges. This is Mobilitzyn Corporate Security, not some temp-agency hireling.

The officer said, “This the one?”

The noncom lifted his face shield and looked at me. Nodded. “Yes, sir. Standard ARM.”

“OK. Checks out just fine. Put him on ice and lets get this business over with.” He turned, started to walk away.

“Um, sir?” My voice was a little high, betraying me.

He looked back. “Murphy, your fucking contract checks out. You’re covered by Standard ARM’s general indemnity policy and you were perfectly within your rights as a half-pay reservist to hire yourself out to these people. I’m sorry you did, but you’ll get your repatriation anyway. Next freighter back toward the Jet, I guess.” He looked at the noncom. “Let’s go.”

The soldier tapped me on the shoulder, “Come on, pal.”

I looked back to where Jade and the others waited, watching the corporate officer approach. She was looking at me, eyes wide, not knowing what was going on. I felt my guts tighten suddenly. Restitutor Orbis, I want you to tell me now, in the name of Uncreated Time, that things will be all right, that she’ll survive prison, survive re-education, that I’ll see her again some sunny day.

As usual, Orb didn’t answer.

The noncom whispered in my ear, “Maybe someday our positions will be reversed. So remember my face, Murphy. Remember the name Benny Wallace. Remember who just fuckin’ saved your ass today. All right?”

Ching
.

The officer was standing beside my friends, had taken out his sidearm, had slid out the clip, checking his load. As I watched, he slid it back in,
snap
.

Like echoes in the forest, hard and empty.

Jade, voice dreadful with panic, cried out, “
Murph
?!”

Then the gun went
bang
, her head exploded, and what was left of her fell down in the cool green grass.

Nine. Telemachus Major

Telemachus Major.

I sat on the balcony outside the resthome room where I was supposed to be recovering from decades of cold sleep, looking out over cityscape and landforms, wondering how it could be a hundred years since the last time I was here.

Telemachus Minor, green forest moon, hung not so far overhead, close enough I could make out its landscapes, make out the distinct shapes of tall green trees, giant redwoods and the like, make out the twisting silver gleam of her wonderful trout streams, lakes where I’d swum with my flyer friends... only yesterday? That’s what it seems like.

Telemachus Minor hung beyond the sky, beyond the eutropic shield’s glimmering ersatz blue, beyond the clouds, far, far away, in just the same way she was close-by.

I wanted to think of her as I thought about my previous life: So close I could see every detail. And yet so remote. Forever out of reach.

Better to pretend I’d died out on Wernickë’s little Suzdal moon. Died and been reborn as someone else. Someone with a whole new life to live. That other man’s bones would be lying back there, far away, lying in the grass with...

I got up and went inside, turning my back on a long, shimmering vista composed mainly of tall, ornate human architecture, architecture superimposed before a horizon of snow-topped artificial mountains, blue sky, green sea, went and got dressed in the plain street clothes the resthome left for us in the closets of every room, trying not to see myself in the mirror.

I’d grown thin while I slept. Thin and pale.

Down the stairs and across the foyer, waving to the smiling receptionist who already new me well, I went out into bright, sourceless sunshine, sunshine without the power to brighten me. Waited on the corner with other thin, pale, silent men and women. Got aboard the tram and went on down to the cityscape world below.

o0o

Walking all alone through the dense crowd filling the bottom of a canyon-like avenue in a part of Telemachus Major’s world-city known as the Blue Hole made me realize my problem quite fully. I could tip my head back and back, look up at the façades of the buildings, see windows of glass, bright and dark, balconies empty or full of people.

Who are they, so tiny, so far above? A man and a woman maybe, holding hands.

Hundreds of ems overhead, the sky was like a long, thin, square-edged river of dark blue, my eyes imagining stars beyond, just on the edge of perception.

Then again, I could see the people all around me, walking, walking. A bustle of voices, constant murmuring, though I couldn’t see anyone actually talking to anyone else. Mostly, it looked as though they were all alone, just like me.

I stopped and stood in front of a restaurant window, looking in at the diners, eating who knows what meal. Since I came out of sleep, time seems to have lost its familiar meaning. Day, night. These are things we manufacture for ourselves, manufacture for all the little worlds we made and hung against the sky, inside gimcrack shields that keep away the real darkness outside.

Darkness and stars. That’s what’s real. The rest of it...

Inside, at the table nearest the window, a tall, blocky-looking man with short silver hair was spooning up a soup that seemed composed of spaghetti and beans. Not talking to the thinner man across from him, skinny boy with long yellow hair who toyed with an unlit smoke of some sort, silently watching his friend eat.

After a while, the gray-haired man stopped eating, put down his spoon and turned to look at me, staring through the glass.

Sullen. Go away, asshole.

I went.

There’s a life story inside the restaurant, two men sitting at a table, two life stories, each one as complex as my own. What about all these other people, thronging all around? In the time I’ve been gone, the population of Telemachus Major has grown from five billion to six.

I picked a random corner and leaned against the grainy, gray, featureless stone wall of a building, watched the crowd spilling past, trying to see if they had lives as well. Nothing. Nothing but the details of my own life suggested themselves. Look at that pretty girl, all too human girl, pale pink dress, white buttons, white patent leather shoes, pink headband confining hair like golden wool. You’d like to fuck her, wouldn’t you?

I imagined myself getting her down, right here in the street, pulling her out of those pink clothes, prying her legs apart as she struggled and screamed.

Why do I imagine she’d struggle and scream?

Maybe for the same reason I imagine people stepping over us as I pin her to the sidewalk and rape myself senseless.

I watched her walk away, striding purposefully, hands clenched at her sides, a woman alone in a dense crowd, presumably going somewhere. But I didn’t imagine her life. All I did was imagine it intersecting with my own. After a while, I walked on too.

Down in the Blue Hole, there’s a store somewhere that sells anything you could possibly imagine. I wonder who buys life-size, semianimated statues of extinct hominids? There was no one in the store, other than a motionless human clerk, who sat behind his counter, staring at the store’s centerpiece, a male
Australopithecus robustus
, standing in the middle of a fountain structure and pissing for all he was worth. Garden art?

I wondered, for just a second, how much intelligence they’d built into the art objects.

Not hard to imagine who buys the wares advertised on the front of the pornography shop. And the place across the street,
Sex Toys ‘n’ Erotica
... this one had a window so you could look in and see a fair number of women, picking over an assortment of doodads and doohickeys. Smirking, nudging each other.

Interesting. Women together in groups, laughing at what they saw. A few women alone, eyes so terribly serious. A few women with embarrassed-looking men in tow. What’s that all about? More life stories for me not to know.

Farther down the street was a live sex show, one of those places where the performers take suggestions from the audience. Lick this. Suck that. OK, now stick this in there and... great. Wonderful. A couple of blocks later, I passed by a place where you could get live sex for yourself, advertised by three-dee posters of men and women whose main selling point seemed to be their exposed, shining wet genitalia.

Makes sense, I guess.

I was tempted to go in, of course, but I kept on walking, heading on down the street, deeper and deeper into the Blue Hole, unable to imagine where I was going, or why.

o0o

One day, the same day, in fact, that the rest home judged me sufficiently rested, I was summoned down to the Standard ARM corporate headquarters, way the hell on the other side of the world. Summoned to the personnel office, where I sat for three hours in a waiting room with a number of other men and women, all of them tired looking, most of them nervous. One by one, we were called to another room.