When We Were Real (Author's Preferred Edition) (35 page)

She’d whispered in my ear, “I wish we were alone...”

At the time, I’d been remembering an earlier swim, myself as a child, swimming along under water, seeing some guy with his hand down the front of a girl’s swimsuit. Sure enough, when I looked around, there was a boy chin-deep in the pool, with dark hair streaming water down into his eyes, grinning at us from a few ems away.

Up in the now-world of realtime, Violet and I crawled out of the water, up onto the bare stone beside the remains of the lake, sprawled ourselves under the bright and featureless sky of lost Ogygeia, sat and talked about nothing at all, looking at each other. After a while, we moved closer together and started doing familiar things to one another. Not long after that, our empty talk faded away.

In time, good time, I found myself lying face down between her legs, doing what I knew I was supposed to do, listening to her breathe out those familiar, pleasure-scented sighs, sighs making a lovely tingle crawl right down my spine.

Even animals have this.

Dogs and cats. Mice.

Even god-damned bugs.

So what the hell does it mean to be a sentient being, a creature with a mind.

Nothing.

Nothing at all.

I want my purple fox lady to be happy.

Even if it’s only for ten minutes.

Even if it’s only this.

o0o

Time passes, even when nothing changes. We lay under the blue sky, unable to detect Ogygeia’s fatal leak, ate our lunches and made love again, this time slightly uncomfortable, our stomachs too full.

I remember how Violet put her arms around me, holding me close as I curled my hips under, pushing as far into her as I could, waiting while my orgasm finished itself off, then, as I relaxed, as I let my weight settle fully on top of her, like a man relaxing atop a balled-up rug.

“Sometimes,” she whispered in my ear, “this is the best part.”

Sometimes it is. Nothing for me to say. No easy way for me to agree.

I could recall being with women who didn’t understand that.

Told myself I’d have to figure out some way to tell Violet how much I appreciated the fact that she did.

After a while, we went swimming again, washing away the mess of sex. Got out and dried ourselves under bright skylight, ate the desserts we’d packed, heating wedges of apple pie in the ATV’s campstove, getting them hot enough to melt little wads of stark white ice cream.

When it was time to go, I started putting my clothes on, Violet watching me, eyes full of some pale, washed-out regret.

“Funny,” I said, “how the sky’s stayed bright for so long. Don’t they have night here?”

Violet said, “Maybe the timer’s broken.”

Maybe so.

We got in the ATV then and let it climb back up to the rim of the ravine, following the same track by which we’d gotten in, driving up the almost-empty bed of the feeder-stream. Somewhere, the mountains that gave rise to the stream were gone, no way for them to skim out rain. Or maybe they never were. Maybe the pumps that fed the rivers of Ogygeia are broken.

Doesn’t matter.

When the eutropic shield goes, the atmosphere will go. When the air’s gone, the water will boil away to nothing. Ogygeia will be dead as the natural cometary source-core it must once have been, and that will be that.

We parked at the top of the ravine, standing by a collapsed building of some sort, standing at the foot of a broken-off pier, looking down across the ruined landscape for one last time. Someday, a long time from now, I’ll be thinking of something entirely different. Something will remind me of this vista, and this one lost moment will live again. I’ll remember standing here with Violet, will remember how it felt to have my arm around her furry shoulders, and remember how I felt when...

She said, “What’s that?”

“Hm?”

She got out from under my arm, cocking her head, turning around, ears erect, obviously listening. “What...”

“Sh.”

Then she reached into the back of the ATV and took one of the positronic rifles from the gunmount. “Take yours.”

Um. “Violet, I don’t know how to operate this.”

She said, “Push the black button on the thumb side of your trigger guard. A bayonet’ll pop out.”

Great. I guess I can look menacing and scare the living shit out of whatever she hears.

I followed her around the side of the collapsed building, watching her tip her head this way and that, erect purple ears like dish antennae, trying not to make any noise, thinking how damned
alien
this made her look. Like the product of some other evolutionary scheme. She stopped at the back of the foundation, by what looked like a flight of concrete stairs, over which the lintel had collapsed, looking down into dusty darkness.

“Vi...”

“Sh.”

Still listening.

And, suddenly, I began to hear something too. Faint. Distant. Muffled. Soft whimpering, like a crying child. Violet turned and looked at me with the most incredible alarm in her eyes and I nodded slowly. Yes. I hear it too.

So now what?

She said, “Well, we really ought to...” A longing look in the direction of our ATV. I nodded. Right. That’s what we ought to do. This is no business of ours.

But.

Yeah.

I think Violet could read these thoughts, plain as you please in my eyes.

She turned away and kneeled by the hole, then slowly crawled inside. Just before her feet disappeared, a light came on down there, flooding back past her body. I heard somebody say something too, not Violet, real words, though nothing I could understand.

I looked at my rifle, trying to figure out how to make it light up, gave up quickly for fear that I might make it explode somehow. I kneeled to crawl after her, pausing to retract the bayonet so I wouldn’t accidentally stick it up Violet’s pretty ass and ruin my next few days.

She was lying at the bottom of the stairs, looking down over the edge of a broken ledge into a dark, dusty space below. I crawled beside her and looked myself. Maybe it was a basement or something, but the ceiling had fallen in, fallen under the whole weight of the collapsed building above. Probably just a storeroom, there seemed to be all sorts of crushed junk down here. Broken-open barrels with dark puddles around them. Other things solid enough they were probably all that was holding the space open.

In a weary voice, Violet said, “Oh, Murph...”

Down in the dusty shadows, as I lay staring, I could make out the half-naked form of a woman, obviously a woman, white skin, large, saggy breasts, a dark thatch of pubic hair between her spread legs... I flinched away from looking at where her left leg flattened, disappearing under a fallen beam. Her other leg was cocked up at a sharp angle, still covered with blue denim.

Probably the other one was too. Probably she’d ripped open her pants to see what she could do. Probably...

There was a long knife, some kind of cooking knife, lying beside her. There was what looked like a nice, straight cut on her thigh, not far from where it disappeared under the beam. Not a very deep cut.

And there was a little boy, covered with grime, kneeling beside her, one hand under her head, the other holding a cup from which we could see the reflected shine of some liquid.

Something moved in the shadows beyond. It crept forward, and seemed to be a little girl, naked from the waist up, clad from the waist down in what might have been the tattered remains of a sundress. Her left arm was gone halfway between shoulder and elbow, stump sealed with a tourniquet, skin above it nicely blackened by gangrene.

Artificial worlds are seeded with the regular microbial biome from natural worlds. From
the
natural world. And gangrene organisms also have their regular place in nature.

The woman on the floor, looking up at us, said something in an anguished voice, Ogygeian words no more than a babble of phonemes.

The little boy, fear in his face, stood up, putting down the cup, and took a step backward. When he did, he accidentally bumped against his sister’s stump. The little girl grunted and began to cry. It was her voice we’d heard from above.

When I looked back at Violet, she was looking at me, eyes bright with... something.

“What’ll we do?”

She tried to looked back at the people in the hole, turned her head aside, turning to look back up at the little patch of blue sky at the top of the stairs. I wondered if they could see it down below, wondered how many times the boy might have climbed up here, climbed up the stairs, and waited for somebody to come.

“Well,” she said, “I guess we could just head on back and... report this.”

“Nobody’ll come. Once the fleet leaves, Ogygeia will be abandoned.” Yes. The shield will fail and... long before then, these people... The woman was shouting up to us, desperate words, transcending language.

Violet said, “We can take them with us. We were in medevac. You can get her leg off easily enough.”

True.

“And then?”

Violet bit her lip, looking back down in the hole again, obviously forcing herself to look. “Marine’s won’t let us bring her through the gate of course. I guess... those people we saw, maybe they would...”

I thought about the little band of looters. Sure, we could... “Violet, everyone left alive on Ogygeia’s going to die shortly.”

The woman below had fallen silent, was listening to us talk. Does she understand us? We’re talking in one of the more widely known languages, so... so maybe she knows. Maybe that’s why she’s silent.

I said, “So we can put her through the agony of a field amputation, done with a first-aid kit, take her and her kids back to the city and abandon them to die.”

 Silence. Then Violet said, “Or we can leave them here to die in this hole.”

Yeah.

Or we can do the right thing.

I sat looking at Violet, who sat looking at me.

Finally, without a word, she rolled onto her belly and lifted the rifle, pointing it over the ledge, down into the hole. When she thumbed something on the stock, the rifle’s business end began to sparkle a lovely emerald green.

Below, the trapped woman suddenly screamed, voice vibrant with horror, full of renewed life.

We lay there for a long, long moment, listening to those screams, which drowned out the crying of the children, then Violet thumbed the stock again and the tip of her rifle went dark. When she lowered the gun and looked back at me, I felt a pale, awful pang of horror, seeing the triangles of dark, matted fur that had formed so suddenly under her eyes.

I never saw you cry before, Violet.

Very softly, she whispered, “I feel like I’m killing my own puppies, Murph. Mine.”

What does it take to make a man’s heart stop beating?

Maybe listening to Violet talk about the children she could never have. Maybe that’s enough.

She said, “I don’t want to leave them here.”

Looking into the bright shine of her eyes, I said, “There’s no place we can take them. Nothing we can do.”

When I looked down at my useless rifle, Violet said, “The red button over there, that’s the safety. Press that, then all you have to do is aim it and pull the trigger.”

Right.

I rolled onto my belly, looking down over the ledge at those three helpless people. I thumbed the red button, the tip of my rifle began its deadly green sparkle, and this time the woman didn’t scream. Through the rangefinder, I could see her face, plain as day, dark eyes looking up at me hopelessly. Her lips seemed to be moving, though I could hear nothing.

No point in looking at the two kids. No point in seeing that.

I said, “I don’t think I can do this.”

Violet said, “Then we’d better just leave them here.”

Yeah. Maybe someone else will come and do what we can’t. Or maybe a miracle will happen. Maybe Orb will reach down from the foggy depths of Uncreated Time and lift them straight on up to Heaven.

Violet said, “Murph?”

I shut my eyes and pulled the trigger.

After a while, Violet took the gun out of my hands and locked the safety, then helped me crawl back up into bright blue daylight.

o0o

We had a long damned drive back to the base, much longer, it seemed to me, than the nice little drive we’d had coming out. We just rode along in silence, following the directions of the inertial guidance system, bumping over uneven ground under a flat blue sky, going from nowhere to nowhere.

Every now and again, Violet would reach out and pat me on the arm, touch my thigh, whatever.

It seemed to take forever for the leftover cityscape to reappear, but eventually it came over the close horizon, growing out of the ground like a shambles of off-white vegetation. Violet pulled to a stop, near one edge, in something that looked like it might once have been a park. Dangerous to stop here, what with all the looters in what was left of the city. No reason to stop here.

Violet sat looking over at me, pathetically hollow-eyed. Finally, she said, “I’m sorry, Murph. You shouldn’t have had to do that.”

Did
I have to? What
was
the right thing? I said, “I’m glad I could do it for you, Vi. I didn’t know how you felt about...”

She looked away for a second. “I guess I didn’t know either. Not ‘til right then.”

Brief flash of memory. I remembered Dûmnahn talking about what it’d been like, being the self-aware software of a strapped-down robot arm. What was it she’d said then?
Bastards
.

When I said it aloud, here and now, she looked over at me and said, “Who? Us or them?”

No answer.

We got out of the ATV and stretched, looking around at what was left of the Ogygeian park. It’d been right on the edge of the firehaze crunch and represented a damage cline, showing the precision of this new munitions technology, which some smily-faced Standard ARM boffin had probably dug out of the Solar System research archives. Standard probably paid a premium price to buy these patents from whatever rich man owned the rights.

On one side was the broken city, on the other the flat, half-melted, dusty white ground that’d been under the crunch. In between were scattered artifacts, trees, benches, fountains, flowerbeds, more or less destroyed depending on how far they’d been from the edge of the pressure zone.