When We Were Real (Author's Preferred Edition) (34 page)

Every now and then, you’d see a little ship come and go from the carrier.

Or see some smaller ship accelerating away from Ogygeia, heading back into the starry deep.

They’d set up a mobile garage here, bringing ships down from the carrier, emptying it of all but its own defensive squadrons. When that was done, the carrier task force would head back to reload, take on new ships, new men, new machines. And we, here, would marshal ourselves, would mount the next attack from Ogygeia, using it as a non-mobile carrier, striking deep into the heart of the Centauri Jet itself, striking at the heart of Ultima Thule.

When people under assault haven’t got a chance, why don’t they just give up? What’s the point of going on, when you can’t win?

If they give up now, we won’t kill them all, just the leaders. The workforce of the Centauri Jet is too valuable a resource to be so utterly destroyed. That’s just what the corporate heads have said.

Don’t they believe us?

Walking with Violet, away from the landing stage, toward the pilot’s cantina, toward the little row of huts we’d call home for the next few weeks, thinking these thoughts, I smiled to myself.

Not believe us? Not believe the proud, self-made men who enticed their ancestors out here with lies and more lies? Not believe their bosses, the men and women they dealt with day after day after day, long before the war ever came, long before Ultima Thule?

Violet said, “I like it when you smile, Murph. What’s so funny?”

I shrugged. “I was thinking about the Thulians.”

She gave me an odd look, didn’t say anything else as we walked on.

Near the edge of our impromptu base, beside the forcefence grounds maintenance had set up, there was a little footpath, path made in the last day or two, being walked over and over again by heavy-footed aeromarine guards. Walking along it, you can look out through the pale purple glimmer of the fence at the ruins of the city beyond.

This area hadn’t been firehazed, so there was plenty left to see. Most of the buildings were intact, low buildings typical of the architecture used on Ogygeia, the faux-Greek cityscape so popular on your older sort of habitat, from back in the early days of the eutropic shields, around the time they stopped building inside-out worlds like Audumla.

Funny how I still think of Audumla as normal, how these places that mimic
real
worlds are the new-fangled oddities.

Maybe they are. There’s only
one
natural world, where people walk around under an open sky, sky that thins all the way up to open space, where there’s no eutropic shield, a world where, if civilization fell, men and women could live on until the end of time.

Think of that.

Think of our technology failed, of all the people on all the colony worlds dying, one by one.

I wonder how many people are left living on Earth?

I wonder how many of us could get home again, if it came to that?

Enough?

Too many?

Meaningless words.

Maybe someday I’ll ask Violet about Earth. Maybe she’ll tell me something different from the things I learned about in Porphyry’s diorama. Or maybe she’ll just tell me Porphyry’s world is the one true Earth. Maybe someday. Not today. Maybe never.

You hate to kill a dream on purpose, however faded it’s become.

I thought about walking through the back country of Audumla, Styrbjörn at my side, pretending I was some old-time man in an old-time forest on Earth. Funny how that fantasy’s no longer so comforting.

On the other side of the forcefence, we could see some people on the marble steps of a nearby building, standing in the shadows of its faux-marble colonnade, trying to pick the lock on its bright and dented brass door. They had the electronics access plate open, and were fooling with the control structures, obviously having no luck.

It isn’t possible to guess how something like that works. If I was over there, I could show them how to do it.

When they saw us walking along, saw me looking at them, they stopped, stood back in the shadows and stared. Three grown men. A little boy, maybe five or six years old. A rather attractive young woman, so young she had something of the child about her.

Afraid we’ll do something about them, call the... authorities?

I realized with slight surprise they were merely staring at Violet.

After all, what more can we do to them?

We walked on, went on into the pilots’ cantina, where we sat with our friends, all of us so happy to be alive, to have survived another battle, marveling that not one single ATAC vessel had even been damaged, much less destroyed, either by accident or by enemy action.

And praying with all our might that our luck would hold.

I felt like praying, though there’s nothing left to hear my prayer.

I miss old Orb.

He was all I had.

So we drank our beer and ate our pretzels, laughed with our temporary comrades, and watched a freeze-frame documentary sequence about ongoing negotiations between the leadership of the Human Defense League, the councils of Ultima Thule, and the chief executive officers of the allied corporations.

Thulians now saying they’d be willing to take a look at outside binding arbitration.

The corporations let some spokesman from Standard ARM do their talking: Nonsense, he said. We can win the war with no help from you or anyone else. Win it no matter how many Thulians have to die. Three words, he said:

Surrender.

Restoration.

Reparations.

In that order.

Later, in our quarters, when we were holding each other close, Violet told me she thought there was something funny about this HDL business, about these negotiations. Like they’re not really
trying
to stop the war, to... resolve the parties’ differences. Like they don’t really
care
what happens next. Like something’s... up.

But what
can
they do? I’d asked.

What can they
really
do?

o0o

Let’s go on a picnic.

Just the two of us.

The sun-no-sun is shining, the sky is blue, the air is warm, the winds are soft.

I liked seeing the shine in Violet’s eyes when I said those things to her as we lolled about in our room, week’s work done, wondering what useless, dull thing we could do with our day off.

Her voice was very soft when she told me what a great idea she thought that was.

Just like in the olden days. Just like before...

Three more days.

Then we mount our steeds and ride hard for battle.

Maybe there’ll never be another chance like this.

Maybe that’s what made her eyes shine so, though I confess all I imagined was getting her out under a featureless blue sky, getting her down on the warm ground, sprawling myself naked on top of all her welcoming softness, and dreaming there was no tomorrow, only today.

It’s OK to pretend isn’t it?

Just for now?

We got our stuff together, pulling the blue blanket off our bed, going on down to the cantina and picking up a big bag of carryout food, sandwiches, drinks, little hotboxes of this and that. Headed on down to the motor pool, marshaling our arguments. It’s not against the
rules
is it? Of course not.

We imagined ourselves wheedling so well.

When we got there, the motor pool sergeant proved to be an old mechanic we’d known for years, a sturdy cyborg named Elcano, designed somewhat along the same lines as Dûmnahn, a gleaming, upright cylinder almost two meters tall, with eight sturdy black legs arranged around the bottom end, six long, spindly robot arms around the top, belt of extensible sensors and replaceable toolmounts girdling his waist.

Very pleasant baritone, the soft voice of an attractive man.

Well, no, it’s
not
against the rules, and a picnic
did
seem like a great idea, but... Well, the Ogygeian eutropic shield is damaged, you see, leaking air—it’ll all be gone in a month or two—could blow out unexpectedly, any time now...

Violet rapped her furry knuckles on his bright chrome chest, bringing out a hollow, almost musical sound. “So what? Throw a couple of space kits in the back of that little ATV over there. We’ll know what to do.”

There were kits, compact, packaged vacuum emergency suits stacked in their familiar blue cartons, over by the back wall, next to a pile of old nuclear batteries.

A couple of his sensors extended, one looking at the boxed-up spacesuits, the other at the jeep. “Well, sure. I know that. But the truth is, there are still plenty of survivors out there, people who don’t know about the leak.”

People who imagine they’ll somehow survive.

Violet: “So?”

“Marines’re gonna stop you at the gate, Vi. Nobody’s gets outside the perimeter without a full combat kit.”

Violet, sounding exasperated now, said, “All right. Hand ‘em over.”

Elcano’s voice, which seemed to come from nowhere, not even his insides, sounded mournful. “I’m sorry, Vi. I can’t issue a positronic rifle to anyone who doesn’t have a combat infantry badge. You know that.”

And so much for picnic day. I started to bend down and pick up our blanket and bag of food, wondering if we could find some secluded corner somewhere... somewhere where we could just god damned well
pretend
we...

“Hang on.”

Violet started fishing around in her shoulderbag, obviously looking for something. “God damn it... oh. Here.” She pulled out a silvery wafer, a common ID disk, and handed it to Elcano.

“Hmh. You surprise me, Miss Violet.”

He slipped the thing into a readerslot mounted on his toolbelt, was silent for a second, then said, “Well, well.” He extruded the disk and gave it back. “You all take what you need. Marines’ll make the final determination. Bring it back when you’re done.”

We turned away, starting to load up the ATV with junk Elcano was lugging over, and I said, “It’s been a long time since Standard ARM was stupid enough to use expensive optimod devices for cannon fodder.”

Nothing. Violet climbed into the ATV, sliding behind the driver’s seat, while I got in the other.

Elcano put the combat kits in back, then clipped a couple of long, thin rifles to a gunmount behind the front seats. “OK. Have a nice time, kids. I’ll see you later.”

As we drove out of the service bay, out into bright, sunless light, back out under that same leaky blue sky, I said, “When were you in the combat infantry, Violet?”

“When?” Very distant, troubled, reluctant look, deep shadows behind her eyes. “I don’t know Murph. It was a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.”

I knew not to ask any more.

She’d tell me when, if she wanted me to know.

I wasted a few more seconds wondering about it as we bounced over rough ground, headed for the gate. If Violet was one of the very first optimods, she’d’ve experienced every sort of misuse, back in the days when the corporations wasted expensive machines and biotechnology in a misguided attempt to save the hides of useless human beings.

The guards at the gate gave us no trouble at all. Checked our kits, checked Violet’s badge, saluted her, ignored me, sent us on our way. We drove down a ruined street, went round several corners and...

Violet pulled up, slowing to a stop, and we sat staring, unable, at first, to understand what we were seeing. Damaged cityscape stopped here, level ground going on to the horizon. Level ground covered with square boulders, a regolith of dust, bright places where liquid rock had flowed, however briefly.

I wanted to have Orb’s name to take in vain. All I could do was say, “I guess this is one of the areas we firehazed a few days ago.”

Guess so.

Yup.

Finally, Violet whispered, “A billion people lived here.”

After a while, we drove on. I punched up the local mapping system on the dashboard freeze-frame, and said, “It’ll take us about ten minutes to get to that reservoir I saw.”

Ten minutes. Hell, if it’s still there, maybe we can go for a swim.

The air is so nice and warm here.

o0o

The reservoir was still there, though there was no telling what it’d originally looked like. Maybe the ravine’d been built up a little bit, for there were still signs, here and there, up near the top of the broken rock walls, of piers and yacht basins and... hell. Everything here is artificial anyway, including the ravine. It looked the way they wanted it to look.

The bright white concrete dam bridging the opening at the bottom of the ravine had fallen, breaking off most of the way down, toppling to lie like a broken shield across the river below. I guess the water must have all rushed out at once, scouring away whatever lay below the dam, leaving mudscape behind, the sinuous trickle of a little creek winding away down in the riverbottom.

There was a boat of some kind stuck nose down in the mud a couple of kems away, shining bright yellow and white, looking like a lost toy, from this distance, though, it must’ve been fifty ems long.

I tried to imagine the interesting ride its crew and passengers would’ve had, once the dam gave way.

Funny how people’ll go out on a pleasure cruise when there’s a battle going on in the sky. Maybe they thought it’d be fun, watching the war from their boat.

Maybe they brought a picnic lunch.

We parked the ATV down in the bottom of the ravine, down where there was a fair-sized pool of clear, clean bright water left behind. It was tempting to imagine that this was a natural lake, the lake that would’ve been here had the dam never been built, but... right. When was that?

We got out and Violet leaned against the fender of the jeep, watching me get undressed, dropping my clothes on the ground. I’ve seen optimods wear clothes from time to time, but not Violet. It’s not common, anyway. Most of them don’t want to be like us.

Her eyes brightened as I became more naked.

Something else I’ve never asked about.

Maybe someday.

So we went for a swim, laughing, fooling around, doing the things you usually do when you go swimming in private with a woman. I remember, from a long time ago, groping some girlfriend in a public pool, children frolicking all around. Interesting and titillating, feeling her crotch through the thin material of a polka-dot bikini bottom, feeling her shy hand on my prick, maybe imagining no one could see us, under the water.