When We Were Real (Author's Preferred Edition) (3 page)

Things like that.

And one day, I stumbled across a box of old albums, spending long hours pouring over them, fascinated by what I saw. The one on top was full of familiar things, the things of the life around me, beginning with recent views that would spring to life in the air above its surface.

Fascinating to see my last birthday party, hear my own voice from just a few months gone, already seeming fantastically childish to a months-older me. Below it, a family picnic. Below that...

I watched with dull astonishment as my mother gave birth to Lenahr, smiling, naked, in a tub of bloody water as she strained and pushed and extruded him from the hair between her legs. Deeper in the album, beyond the part where I was a naked baby running about the yard, I saw myself so extruded, then Rannvi, then...

The album began with my mother’s wedding to Father, Mother looking precisely as she did now, though dressed in... well, dressed in clothing I’d already found in one trunk or another.

 The other albums held only mystery. My mother in an unfamiliar house, with an unfamiliar sky, sky apparently made of dark brown stone, hanging low overhead. She shared the unfamiliar house with an unfamiliar man and three unfamiliar adolescent children, two girls and a boy, all with stark, coppery hair. In time, deeper in the album, the children grew young, and I watched as, one by one, my mother gave bloody birth to strangers.

There were three albums like that, each beginning with a wedding.

The two middle ones were on the world with the brown sky. The oldest of the three seemed set on a skeletal habitat where the sky was always black, from which you could always see the stars. In that one there was a woman my mother called Mother, prominently featured in almost every scene.

Of course, you knew.

Audumla’s not the only world the Mothersbairn own. You knew that. Out in the dark between the stars there must be a million little worlds. Since no one living on those worlds willingly dies, the worlds quickly grow full. And when they grow full, there’s a call for volunteers: Go out, found a new world, start a new life.

When there aren’t enough volunteers, they hold a lottery.

As I put the albums away, I wondered just who those men had been, wondered about the children. What became of them? Were they my brothers and sisters then?

I wonder if I would have liked them.

I was afraid to ask, knowing what’d happen to me if I was discovered to have been in the attic, messing among my mother’s things.

Just a story, that’s all. Put it with the Baedeker of wonder and move on.

o0o

I finished my Thesis, bored as hell with the whole business of the rest of my life, turned it in, got my grades and that was that. In a couple of weeks we’d have our ridiculous little graduation ceremony, proud parents comparing notes, not-so-proud parents pretending it didn’t matter. In between we had a week off, and the members of my graduation cohort had a party, a little daytrip to Mimir’s Well, an old reduction transformer orbiting just outside Ygg’s roche lobe that’s been turned into a sort of park.

Ygg is huge in the sky here, and the park’s main interpretive center is just at the tidally locked moonlet’s subplaneton, infrastar hanging right over our heads, taking up almost a third of the sky, a frighteningly three-dimensional sphere more than two-hundred-thousand kems in diameter, holding maybe twenty jovian masses, well into the brown dwarf range.

Just a dull red disk seen from Audumla, a million kems out, lit by starlight, most of that from close-by Alpha Cee, ruddy from its own fading heat, hardly visible at all but for the greater blackness of the sky. There’s a nightside, an umbra, the side away from Alpha, but that distinction’s hard to make. Shadow. Something.

From here though, just a few score thousand kem... band after band of swirling storm. Deep holes into the clear hydrogen air below, letting out light from Ygg’s firehell within. Upwelling places that’d be sunspots on a real star, places where Ygg’s magnetosphere was twisted...

“That’s a fuck of a sight, eh, Murph?” Styrbjörn, skinny, blond, squinty-eyed, always smiling, the perfect Mother’s Son. So long as the Mothers weren’t around. So long as there was no one who would tell. Just not the son they thought they’d made.

“Yeah. Sort of makes you wish... kidstuff wishes. All that bullshit.”

He shrugged. Grinned. “I dunno. I been on a few cloudskimmer runs with my dad. I guess it’s not for me.” A long silence, while I thought about his father, a silent, frowning, black-bearded man who spent most of him time away from home, away from Audumla, away from his startlingly voluptuous blond wife and their six blond kids, Styrbjörn the youngest, flying an atmospheric ramscoop, bringing home the helium-3 bacon. “I’ve qualified for an apprenticeship with the Mother’s Trust, Murph. Information Sideband Specialist Trainee.”

“And?”

Another long silence, then he said, “Sieglindë Smillasdottir.”

We were standing on the brow of a low hill, looking down at the interpretive center, broad greensward, oak trees and tall swaying pines, gaggle of graduates milling together around the pool and fountain, fountain water moving in low-gee slow motion, catching an oily twinkle of domelight. You could hear them talking from here, voices blending together, the crowd like a single entity, dominated by the high, sharp voices of the girls. “When?”

“Harvest Moon.”

“That’s a little soon, isn’t it?” Most people wait for Yule, even more for a traditional Beltane wedding. Gives the boys a chance to get on their economic feet.

Girlvoices yapping ever louder from down below, punctuated by the occasional inarticulate male grunt. Girls telling each other all about their wedding gowns, who was marrying who and, whisper, whisper, who was not. Whose boyfriend’s got a hot job lined up and whose does not...

Styrbjörn said, “We couldn’t wait.”

“No?” I looked back up at the sky, not wanting to see his face. A small blue spot had just come around Ygg’s limb, climbing steadily toward us, swept along in the Midsouth Band’s eight-hour rotation.

He said, “Whatcha gonna
do
, Murph?”

I shrugged. “Go into business with my dad.”

A slow nod. “He spends a lot of time down in the bayou, I hear.”

Right.

Long silence, then, “And?”

I looked at him. “And nothing.”

He said, “Shit. Good luck, Murph.” And then he grinned a sleazy little grin that made me want to poke him one. Good luck, haw, haw. Yer fulla shit, Murph. Tell me another one. “I, ah, got a couple of weeks before I have to start with the Trust, Murph. You wanna, ah, make one last, um, hunting trip?” He looked at me earnestly. “
You
know. Before, ah...”

I smirked at him. “Before we have to go be grownups? Sure, pal. That’ll be... fun.” Right.

A little later, after Styrbjörn’d gone back to fawn over his girl and strut for her jealous friends, friends with short, pudgy boyfriends, girls who’d be jealous ‘til the fat boys started bringing home that famous bacon, while Styrbjörn was still only pretty, I found a flat, shadowy place on the backside of the hill where I could sit looking out over the old dump.

Lot of old stuff here. Crusty, long-dead industrial machines, things that’d never really been alive in the first place. Dinosaurs. Pieces of machines whose original form and function I couldn’t quite conjure from a blend of imagination and technical knowledge. This place must’ve been something in its heyday.

In the shadow of the dinosaurs there were other, more familiar pieces of dead hardware. Over there, one of the goose-neck lamp things, sprawled motionless, glass eyes open on nothingness, empty, some of them smashed, become bits of glitter, mangled shards. A dead welder, just like old Beebee, limbs missing, featureless cylinder lying not far from the burst-open box of a smashed incubator. No sign of any meat inside, just bare metal walls, tangles of plumbing, feeder tubes and circulatory conduits.

Mrs. Trinket loves her kits, loves her fifteen husbands with a heart as spacious as anything the likes of me could ever imagine. These ones here...

“So. Here you are.”

I didn’t turn at the sound of Ludmilla Nellisdottir’s voice, just kept looking out over the ruin, picking out familiar shapes among the strange, wishing I could somehow will them all back to life. Thinking about death’s a funny thing. Stupid. Like wondering where you were before you were born. “Hello, Luddy.”

I could see her shadow on the ground beside me, most of the light that cast it coming from the interpretive center’s little microstem, a bit offset, another shadow, tinted with indigo, apparently cast by the combined vector from Ygg and Alpha Cee. When you looked closely, you could see the second shadow was... fuzzy.

“What are you doing, Daggy? I wanted to talk to you.”

Daggy. Her main shadow, gray-black, showed the shape of a slim, pretty girl, graceful arms and shoulders, slim waist flaring to hips shaped just so, hips you could see would one day be just right for their main job. Long, sleek legs. “So talk.” Not really interested in why I’m sitting here looking at dead robots, just an opening gambit, followed immediately by her stated desire.

“Could you look at me? Murph?”

Murph? I turned and looked up at her. Smiled my good-boy smile. Ludmilla Nellisdottir, not quite breathtaking, but close enough, wearing a silk party dress woven from a thousand colors that clung to those just-so hips, looking down at me with something of a frown, but with a shine in her pretty blue eyes.

Silence then, the two of us just fucking staring.

Finally, she said, “We’ve been seeing a lot of each other this past year, Murph.”

Murph again. I felt a slight burning in the pit of my stomach, remembering those dozen or so dates, especially the one to the senior prom, three weeks back. Not the only girl I’d been dating. Sure as hell not among the ones I’d gotten closest to, but... memories of laughter. Of having fun. Just a date. Just a date, Murph. Doesn’t mean a thing.

She said, “I think we’d make a... pretty good team, Murph. You and me, I mean.”

Why didn’t I see this coming? Hell. Maybe I did.

“I heard you were going into business with Dr. Goshtasp.”

I nodded. “My dad and I always got along. I like robots.” Sure as fuck better than being a Mother’s Trust sidebander, anyway.

She said, “You know my family controls a lot of big contracts, Murph. Even some government contracts. If you wanted to, you could be a lot more than just a... tinker. A few years of hard work, maybe you wouldn’t have to do any of the work yourself anymore. You’d hire people and...” She nodded toward the dump, with its pathetic dead sprawled all around, “spend as much time as you wanted to... helping them.”

Helping. I felt my heart go crunch in my chest. Imagined careful, oh-so-clever Ludmilla Nellisdottir watching me, trying to... understand. What does Mr. Murphy
want
? Well, he loves the little robot trash, wants to
help
them you see, and he’s not
really
a Timeliner, just half a Timeliner’s son... Maybe I would have said something bad then, but...

Ludmilla smiled, a bright gleam of perfect white teeth, stretched, seemed to work up her courage. Then she reached down, oh so slowly, and pulled up the silky hem of her dress. Nothing on underneath but her own lovely brown fur, fur just the same color as her long, lustrous hair. She smiled and said, “I know how you like to play gatesie, Murph. Girls can’t keep a secret.”

A pulse of horrid dismay filled my breast, imagining all the girls who’d opened their gates for me the last couple of years, just for fun.
Just for fun
. Whispering together, telling jokes, in the girls’ steamroom, in long nighttime vidfests and slumber parties and... That Murph. Christ, he’ll do... anything. Anything you want.

And coming into a pretty good job, besides.

Luddy moved her hips, striking a pose, showing me Goddess’ Altar and Child’s Gate all rolled into one, and said, “You... want to take me for a test drive, Murph?”

Test drive. That’s what girls call it when they whisper. Rannvi told you that, years and years ago. Rannvi’s the one who told you all their secrets, giving you an... edge.

And Ludmilla Nellisdottir standing before you now with her gate exposed, inviting you in, giving it her all, thinking that she’s figured you out. I think if I could’ve spoken just then, I would’ve taken the Orb’s Secret Name in vain. Women aren’t supposed to humiliate themselves like this, not in front of a man.

She said, “I’m asking you to marry me, Darius Murphy.”

Did my heart stop? I couldn’t tell, heart flooded with an image of Ludmilla Nellisdottir following me around, getting me to go on all those fun, friendly dates. Making friends with all the girls with whom I’d played gatesie so she could figure me out, figure out what I wanted, paint me into a corner where what she had to offer was so good that... the silence stretched on too long, Luddy letting go, letting the hem of her skirt fall, closing the gate.

I said, “This is a hard time for me, Luddy. I mean, my whole future, the rest of my life, however long...” Her face seemed to crumble, eyes filling with a horrible shine of tears. “Wait. I’m not telling you no, Luddy.” How could I say
no
, after what she’d just done?

Maybe that was the point of doing it.

I said, “I just need time to... think.”

She said, “Oh.”

That’s it. Time to think. I need time to think.

But I could see I’d spoiled it for her, maybe ruined everything forever. All the work she put into this moment, all the planning, standing there with her dress pulled up, making her proposal of marriage. You’ll be a rich man, Murph. You won’t have to work. All your spare time, all the time I’m willing to let you have, can be spent with your beloved robots, Murph.

Imagine that.

How the hell do I tell her she got it wrong?

Dr. Goshtasp loves the robots, Luddy.

Me?

I don’t fucking know.

In a voice faint with despair, she said, “Can I... sit with you, Murph?”

“Sure.”

She sank down at my side, getting as close as she dared. Sat silent for a moment, looking out over the dump. Then she whispered, “Who were they, Murph? Tell me. Please.”