When We Were Real (Author's Preferred Edition) (29 page)

Palafox: “Landing Stage 33. Welcome home, boys and girls.”

We spiraled down into a haze of white light like so many silent, deadly hornets returning to their hive.

o0o

Life, perhaps, is made up mainly of those moments from which our memories are made. The rest of it really happens, I guess, but it goes away, slinks on back to the gray mist of Uncreated Time, becomes unmemory, waits in the quiet darkness for you to join it.

Maybe that’s what the between times are like, after you die, before you’re born, waiting in a welter of lost memories, an undifferentiated smear of unmemorable events, while you wait for Orb to call you forth, extrude you back into the Universe of the Living.

And the moments that make memories once again.

So Violet and I carried our duffel bags down a long blue corridor, carpet and walls alike clad in Standard ARM blue, until we found the door with our names on it. Our names. Darius Murphy. Violet... just Violet. Our names. Serial numbers. Beyond the door, our room.

When I put out my hand, the door slid open and the room lights came on, dark plastic furniture visible within. Dressers, desks, two little beds neatly made up with coverlets of Standard ARM blue...

Why are we hesitating?

When I looked at Violet she was grinning, and had dropped her duffel on the hallway floor.

Right.

I dropped mine beside it, picked her up and carried her feather-light over the threshold, door sliding shut behind us. It was a while before we realized we’d left our luggage out in the hall.

o0o

Details. Details. You move into a new situation, you get to know the people, the places the things. In some matters, we were lucky. Usual practice in the Standard ARM Aerospace Guard is to keep the new chums together for a season or two, keep them under the wing of archangel Palafox until you see whether they work out or not.

If you’re smart, you poke around, see what’s what, get to know the seasoned fliers, see what you can learn from them, get to know the admins and dog-robbers, who’re the only people who can
really
get whatever it is you need at any given time. Most especially, get to know the mechanics.

Our unit’s maintenance chief was a very small, roly-poly woman with yellow-brown skin, slanty eyes, and black hair so tightly coiled it formed little island tufts all over her scalp. A roly-poly woman, name of Gordil, with incongruously thin arms who eyed me up and down, and said, “Hell, you Saggies are all alike. Every damn one of you wants special treatment...” She threw her arms up in mock alarm and, in a rather gruff voice, said, “My ship! My ship!”

Then she grinned as if she’d said something unusually clever, as if waiting for a reaction. Well, um... She said, “Course, if you got anything to
trade
...” Looking at me pointedly, an awfully familiar look, bringing back memories I thought were gone for good.

I did have a moment in which I tried picturing what she might look like under those baggy coveralls, but...

She laughed at me, and said, “Naah. That fuckin’ oppie you’re with’d take fuckin’ big bites outa my sorry fat ass...” Still, just talking to her was enough—she seemed to appreciate that I’d once been in training for a job like hers. And, who knows, maybe she secretly wanted to fly herself.

Mostly, in the days and weeks that followed, flying is what we did, going out on maneuvers just as we had back on Saad al’Zuhr, only now with the entire squadron all around us as we worked our way into the complex mesh of the command network, getting used to our... comrades in arms, I’d guess you say, learning our jobs better and better while the need of their doing grew stronger.

Out on maneuvers, back to base, then on out again.

And, of course, things back at base, back on our little Nulliterra worldlet, continued to evolve as well.

We were coming back from a pretend escort mission that had taken us days from the Swarm, skirting the edge of a space where Jet forces actually made a pretense of patrol, packet-destroyers they’d bought who knows where shadowing our operation at a distance. I was down in my module, reviewing my engineering checklists, when the hatch to the pilot’s nest opened.

I craned my head back, looking at Violet, upside-down in the hatch, and smiled. For some reason, she wasn’t smiling back, just looking down at me, face very serious, rather odd look in her eyes. “Something wrong?”

She said, “Well. I, uh...” Uncharacteristically shy. And not the same kind of shyness as when she first handed me her brush, first turned her back for currying. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you, Murph.”

Like we needed to make an appointment or something? I flipped over in the module’s cramped space so I could see her more normally. “What is it?” An uneasy crawling in my stomach. What’s going on that I should already have noticed? What’ve I done that I shouldn’t have? Orb knows, but never tells.

She said, “Well. Santry came to me just before we left. She, uh, she said she’d like us to swap for a while.”

“Swap?”

“Swap you for Regis.”

“As flight crew?
Why
?”

That brought out a shadow of exasperated amusement, “Idiot. For a fuck!”

“Oh.”

And then I sat there, staring at Violet while I pictured Santry. Since the day we met her, she’d been notoriously careless about herself and I’d seen her buck naked more times than I could count, emerging from the mist of the shower room, seen dressing through the open door of her room.

And then I sat there imagining her in my bed, imagined her smooth, hairless human skin, sleek and slick against my own, very different from Violet’s silkily tickling fur. Like in the olden days, playing gatesie with real human girls, shallow human mouths working hard to do their job, wiry human pubic hair in your face, tits you could
see
as well as feel...

“Murph? I’ll do it if you want. I mean, it’ll be all right if... for a while...” The alarm on her face was almost comical, the agony in her eyes like an endearing fist, clutching me deep in the chest.

I grinned; put out my hand to touch her. “Hey. Let’s not accidentally talk ourselves into something neither of us wants, hm?”

o0o

Back in the Swarm, huddled in the darkness of our dorm room, squeezed together into one of the little beds, Violet and I lay, post-coital, quiet, curled up together, form matching form.

I had one hand on her breast, human shape beneath the fur, and could feel the beating of her heart. I imagined she could feel my heart, beating against her back.

What a strange interlude, as if it could go on forever...

I felt myself grow hazy, mind drifting far away, vaguely conscious of the way Violet’s heart slowed under my hand, as her breathing grew shallow.

As if it’s already gone on forever...

Sometimes, making love to my optimod girl, it seems like there’s been no other, just she and I, since the dawn of time.

No Audumla, with its Mothersbairn and gatesie girls.

No Reese.

No... I still shied away from those brief days at Wolf 359.

Then... no Sirius?

Abruptly, right on the edge of a dream, I remembered crouching in the ruins with Jade, Jade kneeling before me, shrugging out of her grimy coverall, clinging to me and...

All of a sudden, I remembered how she cried after we made love, clinging to me, shaking, so afraid...

I came back to consciousness, clutching Violet, Jade’s terror ringing in my ears, then...
bang
.

Violet murmured, “Murph... ?”

I whispered, “Nothing. Bad dream. Sorry.”

She reached back and patted me gently on the thigh. Snuggled closer against my chest, settling back toward sleep.

It was a while before I could relax again.

o0o

About a dozen kems from the SAAG base where Squadron 33 was billeted there was a little patch of woods, a swatch of field with a winding stream where some of us used to go during off duty time. Not quite a park, overgrown, weedy, kept up mainly by the action of trampling feet—plainly artificial, like everything else.

Violet and I had our picnic blanket spread on yellow-green grass by the side of the stream, which bubbled softly in the background, a flow of pale, yellow-brown water, the reason the place was called Runnymead. Because of it, because someone once wondered about the name and had the commissary place a special order, we were drinking mead now, honey-scented stuff so different from beer and wine it was in a class of its own. Drinking mead, eating little sandwiches, fatty gooseliver paté, almond butter with marshmallow, some sliced stuff they call dachshundsarsch synthesized in a habitat I’d never heard of before, nodding to Santry’s portable freeze-frame while we watched her play in the water with Regis.

He looks silly with all that dense black hair pasted flat to his skin, fat pecker bouncing into view from time to time. Santry, though... I tried hard not to watch her too much, too closely, water streaming from her long, shiny black hair, making her skin glisten in the sunless light of the bright yellow sky.

All the same, Violet put out her hand, reclaiming me with a touch.

Political news on the freeze-frame. A lot of it, focused through the spin filters of Standard ARM, all about what was going on in the Jet. Negotiation. Endless negotiation. Standard and seven or eight other really big companies leading a legal challenge to the Althing’s blizzard of new regulations, its horde of new regulatory agencies.

Governments have no
right
, the freeze-frame said...

I looked back at the stream. Santry and Regis were standing belly to belly in waist deep water, faces pressed together. Violet had her head down on the blanket now, just touching my side, arm thrown over me in a protective curl. I wondered for just a moment what she was thinking; wondered if I was supposed to ask.

All around us, little blue flying things buzzed from flower to flower, little things Santry insisted were called hummingbirds, though I couldn’t see them well enough to know if they were truly avian, or something else. Big blue bugs, maybe. Bees. Or just completely man-made doohickies, left over from when this place had been something else.

Special program coming up in the freeze-frame, transmitted broad-band across all local channels, straight from the Standard ARM news center. I felt Violet stir by my side, lifting her head slightly. Out in the stream, Regis and Santry were grinding gently against each other, and I realized they might actually be fucking under the water.

Beyond them, beyond the stream, beyond the far field and a rim of woods made up of raggedy yellow trees from which thin plumes of pale blue smoke seemed to rise, a dome of glittery white ice stuck up straight through the yellow sky, poking through the habitat’s eutropic shield into airless space.

While I watched, a vic of turretfighters rose from the base beyond the hill, friends of ours, I supposed, banked hard, sparkled blue exhaust, accelerated and was gone.

Odd.

Not your usual sort of maneuver, this wasteful use of emergency thrust. More a livefire combat sort of thing...

Then the freeze-frame chimed, much louder than the volume setting should have allowed, the same noise it’s supposed to make when they announce some sort of civil emergency in a populated habitat. You hear that chime, then somebody tells you to run for your life.

Out in the stream, Regis and Santry went suddenly still, holding each other close. Maybe Regis is having his orgasm now, pulsing softly away inside her. But then they pulled apart, with evident reluctance, heads turning to face the shore.

And then the freeze-frame told us, in so many words, that the Government and Althing of the United Habitats of the Centauri Jet had withdrawn from all negotiations, had then nationalized corporate operations on all member worlds. Ours, and everyone else’s.

And then the freeze-frame said, All Standard ARM personnel will report to their duty station immediately.

Beyond the glitter-ice hill, another vic of fighters lifted off from the base, banked hard, sparkled blue, and was gone.

We got up, slowly, silently, while Regis and Santry waded to shore. Slowly folded our blanket, put away our food, slowly walked back to the flyer we’d borrowed for the afternoon. And Violet held my hand more than usual.

o0o

War, they say, is just business conducted through other means.

No time flat and we were aboard the 331, Violet and I, out in the dark between the stars with the entire squadron, escorting three LSTs full of Standard ARM AstroMarines, Sammies they’re called, from the base complex at the Nulliterrae Swarm to a piece of Standard real estate called Morgan’s Round. Standard’s until just the other day.

I could look out through my biggest freeze-frame, see the boxy LSTs surrounded by a swarm of little turretfighters. And, off to one side, our unmanned companion, a bulbous, matte black Smoky Rose Gun Platform.

Unmanned but for a laconic AI who knew it might be expended like so much ammunition.

Do your job, it seemed to say. I’ll do mine.

The connecting hatch to the pilot’s nest slid open and Violet popped her head and shoulder’s through, filling the module with her faint lavender scent. Looked around for a second, then slid on down, squirming in beside me.

Not supposed to do this. Technically we’re in combat right now, but what the hell. Morgan’s Round is still a hundred hours away.

We’d made love in this little vacuole from time to time, giggling away at our naughty little transgression, but not now. Violet just seemed to want to hold me close, snuggle beneath my arm and look out at the stars. After a while, she whispered, “Just like it was before...”

Before?

Before a hundred years of solitude. A hundred years in which Violet the Optimod went to a hundred little wars all by herself. A hundred years in which I wandered, loved and lost, fought and was defeated...

An abrupt memory of Jade surfaced.

Nothing left of her inside me now but a memory of a dead woman’s body sprawled headless in some bloody grass. All the good parts went away, poisoned by that last.