When We Were Real (Author's Preferred Edition) (31 page)

Someone said it’s like they’re already dead, but that’s silly. Everyone dies, sooner or later. What difference does it make, if sooner’s the one for you? Still, Violet and I stuck mainly with each other, you know? Because if we die, when we die, it’ll be in a blinding flash of light, ending as a lovely flower of nuclear fire outlined against the deep black sky. And, of course, we’ll be together when it happens.

So it went on, battles, landings among ruins, where we’d see those same scenes over and over, of people led away for re-education of one sort or another or, valueless, shot and buried, later on, for efficiency’s sake, buried alive, just like those remembered scenes from the Glow-Ice Rebellion, so long ago.

Furlough times, too, as the war dragged on, Violet and I going away alone together, making love in some quiet garden spot or another, on mountain tops above rolling amber plains, by the shores of some nameless, ersatz blue sea, making believe we were on vacation, that we had some other life we could go back to, other than the one stark life we’d made.

After a while, I stopped trying to imagine what that life might be like. No images available, other than false ones from millennia-old stories, the white picket fence, the dog, the children, the flat blue skies of Earth.

Honey, I’m home.

There’d never been a world in which Violet and I could have coexisted, could have known and loved each other, except this one real world, here and now.

The furloughs always ended, real world waiting.

Always more of the same, until one day, one fine, sunless, black-sky day, we backtracked, corporate fleets streaming homeward from the havoc they’d wrought in the heart of the Centauri Jet, back toward Telemachus Major, where the forces of Finn mac Eye, under the direct command of Sector Marshall Meyer Sonn-Atem, having snuck past us somehow, were attacking.

Attacking the corporations at their heart, on their headquarters world, hoping against hope...

Even from a distance, you could see it happening, Violet whispering to herself as she worked her controls, looking out through her viewscreens at black space, I with my head down in the gunnery interface, my best view, tuned to the forward-looking optical rangefinder.

Telemachus Major was no more than a distant glitter of blue light, tinted green off to one side, just as I’d first seen her so long ago, from the forward obdeck of
Sans Peur
, epeiric friend Hórhe by my side... and, I guess, imagining my father back on Audumla, imagining him imagining my new life with envy and pride.

I’ll come back for you. Is that what I said?

I guess, by then, he was already in his urn.

Wish I could picture him now, ghostly spirit one with Uncreated Time, waiting among his dreams, waiting to be reborn.

Things were twinkling in the sky around Telemachus Major, things brighter than the background stars, things that flashed blue-white, grew to yellow sparks, grew red as they faded. I cocked my guns, took off the safeties, alerted my AIs, and watched Telemachus Major grow, scanning through the soft, frightened, frightening babble of voices on the fleet command circuit.

At some point, the connecting door to Violet hissed shut, pressure a momentary pulse in my ears, then the ship, the fourth turretfighter we’d flown together, this one a mk. XII, began to shudder and shift as she brought us down from interstellar flight status to the combat regime.

Ships appeared in the sky around us, enemy ships sweeping in, while voices howled in the freeze-frame universe, the same voices you hear in every old war story. I put my hands to the guns, latched my AIs, and started killing them.

o0o

Conformal time passes of its own accord.

When it does, I almost can’t remember I once believed its passage was driven by the pressure of newly created time, time freshly emerged from the universal forge, fed by the infinitely deep reservoir of Uncreated Time, extruder of souls.

With the greater battle over, Thulian fleets destroyed or in ragtag remnants fleeing back toward the temporary safety of the inner Centauri Jet, we swept down on Telemachus Major itself, Violet and I in our brand spanking new mk. XXII, surrounded by our comrades, those who survived, watching a familiar little world swell in the skies, familiar and yet strange.

 Things were afire down on the surface, atmosphere englobed by the eutropic shield no longer blue, holding instead a sky full of haze and smoke, partly hiding what’d been done in freedom’s name. There, beside a beach I may once have visited, a bowl of liquid fire, burning blue beside a steaming sea. And over there, a cityscape made of broken toys, plumes of gray smoke rising swiftly from a hundred places, swiftly flattening against the underside of the sky, lit from underneath, dull orange.

The world grew flat below us, changing from planet to landscape, and I felt a curious pulse of amazement, of disbelief, as we passed over what had once been a range of mountains, mountains stripped of their pretty green trees, of their snow-capped, ski-trail white peaks. Mountains reduced to low hills of mud, somehow crushed.

I remember seeing those mountains from a window once, remember thinking how nice it’d be to go there, for Violet and I to go there, ski on the trails, climb among the pine-scented green trees, sit drinking cocoa, snuggled together before an open fire in some woody chalet...

We punched through the eutropic shield, wind suddenly moaning outside, turretfighter swimming through haze, billows of smoke, clouds of steam.

Below us was a cityscape that’d been swept away by some godlike hand. You could see the roads, flat surfaces unchanged, and because of them, you could see where the city blocks had been, thousands of square kems of rectangular places, empty space, exposed basements, foundations full of rubble.

There. That must have been a little park. See the holes where the trees used to be?

Sharp voice in the freeze-frame now, calling out vectors.

Ground support role.

Mopping up.

I leaned into the gun interface oncemore and watched the world’s surface slant and twist close below. Watched the sighting rings converge on a cluster of still-standing buildings. Flicker-flash of groundfire coming our way. The pale white trail of a single pathetic missile lifting off.

Now.

Seven or eight of us opened up together, not the entire squadron, just enough, and I watched the cluster of buildings burst, fire and smoke gouting, pieces flying off this way and that. When we passed on by, there was nothing much left.

I could hear Violet’s soft breathing in my ears, transmitted through the open intercom. No words. Nothing for her to say.

More vectors from the freeze-frame, fleet command circuit sending us to the next target, ground twisting and turning below. Wonder why they don’t surrender, these last, trapped Thulians?

No one’s asked them.

One lone surface-effect vehicle rushing across the ground below, raising a cloud of dust as it flew low over the rubble. It turned its turret skyward and the rotary cannon began pelting us with armor-piercing rounds. Violet stooped on it out of the hazy sky, I picked a suitable weapon, fired just once, and the tank turned to a ball of red fire, spilling to a stop among the ruins, flattening out, made, all at once, into a pool of burning slag.

 That’s it.

Violet pulled up, skimming low over the fiery ruins that’d once been a whole world, aiming us toward the pale gray sky. Looking back through the freeze-frame, I couldn’t remember how many billions had once lived here, only that one of them had once been me.

A whisper from Violet.

In front of us, Telemachus’ green garden moon was rising out of the haze, clearing the horizon like a golden dream.

Not quite the same, I saw, patches stripped bare of forest, holes gouged in her integument, bits of scorch here and there... I sat back and watched it grow huge while I waited.

o0o

Violet brought the turretfighter in low over a forest of broken trees, empty gray toothpick trunks reaching for a pale gray sky, brought it to a stop, slowing over a brown oval lake, dropping us to the ground with a soft crunch, as of gravel, on our landing tripod. I sat still for a bit, listening to the pops and pings of the relaxing hull, feeling the tug of the moon’s low gravity.

There was a faint mechanical grunt, followed by a soft, hissing whine, the sound of Violet’s canopy rising. I popped the ventral hatch, looking between my legs as it dropped open. Disheveled sand, a lone, broken seashell. Sharp shadows, as of sunlight, warm breeze swirling in.

Faint, fishy smell, as of the seashore.

I pulled my feet out of their stirrups, unfastening the crash net, and slid through the hatch, dropping to a crouch, ducking under the curve of the hull and standing upright, staggering just slightly, looking around, squinting.

Violet was standing just beyond the turretfighter’s nose, looking toward the muddy lake, arms folded tight to her chest, as if she were cold.

Is this the one? Is this the lake we came to, up on Telemachus’ moon, that last real vacation? Is this the sand on which I lay, befuddled by software updates, while Violet sucked my dick ‘til I came in her mouth?

She knows. She picked this spot on which to land. Why else?

There was a soft, dry rustling sound in the distance, coming from everywhere, all at once, the sound of the warm wind blowing through the ruined trees. Violet unfolded her arms and straightened her back, began walking across the scuffed sand toward a pile of boulders at the water’s edge.

I followed her, catching up.

There was nothing at all inviting about the muddy water, unconnected in memory with the cool blue lake water where I’d swum not that long ago, cool water somehow easing my confusion.

Violet turned and looked at me, looked into my face, eyes darting nervously from one eye to the other and back again, maybe looking for some sign of the man with whom she’d come here once before.

I tried to smile for her; felt it turn into something like a shrug.

She turned away then, and we started to walk along the shore, skirting the pile of rocks. I looked down. Stopped abruptly, Violet turning back, coming to stand beside me.

In the shadow beneath one tawny broken rock was a small animal, something the size of a big mouse. I knelt, looking closely, and saw a brown tarantula spider, alive, black dot eyes oriented toward me, middle legs shifting slowly as it worked its booklungs. When I reached out, as if to touch it, the spider’s two front legs lifted and its back arched, exposing black fangs.

Violet touched my shoulder gently. “Better let it be. No telling what it’s been through.”

I tried to imagine the spider cowering here, bewildered, as the world blew up all around it, roaring fire and smoke, hot wind and cascading debris.

I withdrew my hand, looking up at Violet, nodding, then stood, brushing sand from my knees. Why had I wanted to pet the spider? Tarantulas are covered with soft, brown velvet fur, have eight little cat feet with two little cat claws on each one... maybe for the same reason I liked to pet Violet, on whose arm my hand rested now.

We walked on, not saying anything, headed along the shore toward what appeared to be the ruins of a small building, a collapsed, shapeless pile of wood and stone. I tried to remember what it might have been. The bath house, maybe.

I remembered getting Violet to come into the shower with me, of her fur matting down in the steam, flat against her skin, making her look like a naked, purple-skinned woman. I remembered the two of us laughing as I braced her in the corner, legs up, as I fucked her with quick, jerky thrusts, hot water needling on my bare back.

Down in the water was a half-collapsed pier, gray wooden structure that’d almost survived whatever had happened here. Not far away, half buried in sand at the base of a small, humped up dune, was a dead naked woman. The dune, I realized, had been caused by her presence on the beach, warm wind piling up sand beside her as the sunless sunlight beat down, day after day.

Violet leaned down and, seizing one thin ankle, pulled her free of the sand, turning her over. The woman, covered in wrinkly brown skin, was stuck in an odd position, arms and legs poking out in peculiar ways, blonde hair like a stiff old mop on her head, flattened and matted where it’d been lying on the ground.

The expression frozen on her face seemed one of mild, poignant regret, half-open eyes clouded over so you could barely make out the blue of the iris, teeth bright white between half-open lips. Between her partly-spread legs, her vulva wasn’t hidden at all by her short blond pubic hair. Looking at it, pads of flesh partly spread, shrinking as their moisture fled, inner folds protruding slightly, I could feel a slight stir of arousal.

Could feel Violet’s eyes on me now.

When I didn’t look up, look away from the dead woman’s pretty crotch, she turned from me, walking slowly toward the ruined pier, head cast down, looking at the sand, as if deep in thought. I followed her then, and we took our seats on the surviving part of the dock, leaning back against wooden posts, facing each other, an em or two apart.

The way she was sitting... legs apart, arms resting on knees... I could look between her thighs, was forced by nature to look between her thighs rather than up at her face, at her level, questioning gaze. Her own vulva, swathed in purple fur, was popped open by the spread of her legs, gleam of delicate flesh beyond all that long, soft hair.

I could feel my splinter of arousal deepen.

Is that all it takes?

Yes.

Take away a male’s power to be aroused by the mere
suggestion
of a woman, by a smell, an idle thought, a 2D photograph... take away that and you’ve taken away the male.

Is that all we are?

Violet said, “Do you miss naked women, Murph?”

That made me look at her face and, for a moment, my familiar Violet, whose expressions and moods I thought I knew so well, was swept away, replaced by a stranger, just one more dog-faced optimod.

The eyes, though. Demanding an answer.

Do I have one?