When We Were Real (Author's Preferred Edition) (37 page)

“What difference does it make?”

“I don’t know. Maybe none.” Finn mac Eye and Meyer Sonn-Atem weren’t the bad guys here. What happens to them...

Violet said, “You think the corporations got what they deserved?”

I shrugged. Who knows? Not quite the same thing as
who cares
, but... Rules and regulations. Companies broken up into their component parts and turned over to minority stockholder consortia. Principal officers and boards of directors convicted of crimes against... not humanity.

Crimes against us all.

And sentenced. Stripped of their wealth, placed in suspended animation and shoved into a museum exhibit on Earth. Here lies the Chief Executive Officer of Standard ARM, name forgotten, who figured he owned everything he could steal.

Not quite a sentence of death.

They’ll sleep until someone, somewhere, somewhen, wants them to live again.

I said, “Seems fair to me.”

“Time.”

Violet hit the brakes and our PBX-15 relativistic patrol bomber, destroyer of whole worlds, shuddered around us, starbow opening like an accordion, colors fading to monochrome, growing dim, re-evolving to a black sky, full of stars. A hundred thousand AUs from Mireille to the near-empty space just off the Centauri Jet’s distal end. Twenty months of threads pulled from Uncreated Time. Three hours for us.

What would the lost millennium have been like, had these things been available from the time Violet was decanted?

Different.

Wonderful?

Or more horrible than we can possibly imagine?

No use wondering.

History’s what happened.

Ahead of us now, Ygg was a small, sullen globe, unchanged from when I’d seen it last. Try as I might, I couldn’t remember it from my last visit home. Those few pathetic days are smothered under childhood memories of Ygg seen from various vantage points, assorted times. Mostly, I remember it peeking down from the sky, peering over the edges of the habitat panels.

Imagine seeing all that again, just as if my life hadn’t happened.

There.

A pale diamond in the sky, reflecting starlight, Ygglight, the distant glow of the Alpha Centauri suns. It grew larger swiftly as Violet flew us down to the system ecliptic and swung us in toward rendezvous with Audumla.

She said, “I was born on such a world.”

Maybe even the same one. I can’t remember now if Standard ARM Decantorium XVII was built in situ or towed here from far away, long ago. I’ll have to look it up some time.

I extruded the freeze-frame again and started trying to rouse Audumla’s traffic control center. Funny. It should come right up, should already
be
up, challenging us for having entered their vector space at such high velocity, Just who do you think you
are
...

Violet said, “Murph.”

I knew what I was going to see, even before I looked up.

Audumla was hanging motionless between us and the backdrop of stars. Dark, motionless, looking like some discarded oxygen cylinder, cast off from the ruin of an exploded starship. One of the lightpanels between the habitats was blown out, huge triangular shards clinging to its frame, though the other one we could see seemed intact.

No light from within.

Night time?

Surely that’s all it is.

The stemshine’s been put out so the people and plants and animals and things can have a good rest.

Violet, voice quiet, said, “Maybe we should just leave. Go on to Earth.”

Go on to Earth, where we’d be part of the new universe abuilding, the new future for humanity, for mankind and all its children. Children that now included everything we, in our arrogance, in our arrogant innocence, had made.

I said, “No. See if you can dock to the axial port. There are... standard manual emergency procedures we can follow.”

o0o

From the hub, Audumla was an empty black cave, Violet and I standing side by side in a vacuole made from the faint glow of our skinshields, standing at the edge of the abyss. For just a moment, it was as if the universe itself had disappeared, leaving just the two of us, all the matter still in existence, as a seed for the new cycle of being to come.

I felt Violet put her hand in mine, appreciated her silence.

There it is. There’s my whole world, darkness giving way before my senses. Now I can make out the dim shadow of the dead stemshine, stretching away to infinity. Below, I can make out the faint mass of the south endcap mountains, blackness blotting out the lesser darkness beyond.

Directly below where we stood was a lightless habitat panel, but to either side, and directly above, beyond the long, narrow bulk of the stemshine... that’s it. Stars. Only stars. Pallid little dots barely able to pass through murky... this one over here. Brighter. Cleaner. That’s the one from which the integument is gone.

We could jump that way, jump right out into the space between the stars.

As I watched, the dim leading edge of Ygg appeared, seeming to light the landscape around us with a pale imitation of sunlight.

Violet said, “You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to. We can just go on back to the ship and.”

I shook my head. “No. If I don’t
see
, I’ll always wonder.”

She said, “I... guess I understand.”

And maybe she did. Who knows?

On our way to the elevator portal, which turned out to be dead as the rest of Audumla, we stumbled over a body lying quietly in the middle of the walkway, not decayed at all, of course, only withered from its long exposure to vacuum.

Natura abhoret a vacuo
.

Not far from the body, which appeared to be that of a man, it was a little hard to tell, were others, grouped together, all sprawled on their faces in various grotesque postures. “As if,” Violet said, “they were killed as they ran.”

Ran. Running from the elevator toward the south axial docking port, where there may or may not have been a waiting ship. I suppose, if I wanted to, I could look up the records for the Battle of Ygg. Seized corporate archives. The internal histories of Ultima Thule. Even records from my own HDL.
My own
. Mine. Maybe they’d even mention somewhere the unfortunate destruction of the Audumla habitat.

The Mother’s Children of Audumla are gone.

 I can’t quite make myself understand that.

Violet said, “It must have been a hell of a sight. Big explosion outside, not far from the broken lightpanel, maybe a starship getting it. The blast would have come in and flattened everything, then, the backdraft—” She stopped suddenly, looking at me. “Sorry.”

I patted her on the arm. “The exciting parts were always so tempting, weren’t they?”

Tempting us to the excitement of participation. Exciting to be the destroyer of whole worlds. And all those pitiful billions of ants who lived down there? What difference does it make?

They were only ants.

When we got to the elevator stage, we found three elevator cars lifted off their tracks and flung up against the back wall of the platform, a fourth car hanging at an odd angle from its mount maybe a dozen ems below the platform rim. There were more bodies here, scattered like so many life-size black dolls, no longer worth our attention.

The other six tracks were empty.

Violet tried to talk me into going back to the ship one last time, then, when I was adamant, put her arm around my shoulders. Just one small, quiet squeeze, then we went on down the cliff face using our skinshield impellers, dropping silently downward, our globe of blue pastel light making a moving disk on the endcap mountain wall, as though we were being followed by a wan spotlight.

On stage.

Always on stage.

Performing for the invisible masses.

My mother’s house looked like a giant fist had punched it in, collapsed to flinders and splinters and shards of walls, very little left of its interior volume. There was a corpse in the front yard, obviously human, but when I turned the thing over, light and stiff and waterless, the distorted face was unrecognizable, no one, I suppose, I’d ever known. A neighbor perhaps.

The face had an expression of sorts, recognizable through all the leathery wrinkles, white teeth glimmering past downturned lips.

Dismay.

We walked around the side and climbed over the rubble to where my room had been, to the balcony where I used to do my homework while looking out over the interior of Audumla, looking down on the bayou country, thinking about Himerans and allomorph whores when I should have been thinking about my future life, soon to come. It’d fallen an em or two, and the room behind, my old room, was collapsed.

Among the debris, we could pick out distinct artifacts, homely things. A man’s faux-leather cordovan shoe. An athletic sock. Something that looked like it might once have been a portable freeze-frame.

This might be my brother’s stuff. Lenahr always seemed like the sort of boy who’d stay home with his mother forever.

Maybe if I dug through the rubble long enough, I’d find them now, huddled together in the atrium perhaps, cowering in fear, just as they died.

Violet touched my arm and, when I turned, looked into my eyes. “I keep expecting you to cry,” she said, “but you don’t.”

 No. I said, “It was a long time ago.”

She looked away, out into the darkness. “I keep trying to imagine how I’d feel if it was me, but...”

Right. Violet, optimod, daughter of the vat.

We left the balcony, going around back, walking through the rubble-strewn yard. The grass was still neatly in place, all dead of course, like a dry carpet under our feet. Here and there, the antler-like remains of rosebushes poked up, still surrounded by their neat circles of bare earth.

All the care that went into this place.

All the imitation love.

To my surprise, the storeroom outbuilding was still standing, its door, gaping open, still attached to the hinges. Last stop, I thought, stepping inside.

How odd.

Some fluke of physics had kept the blast and reflux from reaching in here. Everything was still in its place, mostly potting tools, bags of soil, the organic fertilizers my mother lavished on her gardens. And there, over in the corner, just as I’d left it, after my last visit, was my father’s abandoned skiff.

Huddled beneath it, propped up in the room’s corner, arms wrapped around her knees, head down, was one of my mother’s silvergirl slaves. Stone cold.

Violet kneeled beside the thing, making a quick inspection, then she said, “We really should take this back to the ship. If we can power her up again...”

Right. The newly promulgated code of ethics regarding the disposition of artificial life forms... I said, “There would’ve been a pretty bad radiation pulse in here. I’m sure her programming’s long erased.”

Violet nodded slowly, slowly coming to her feet, still looking down at the silvergirl. A trillion dead, maybe? What difference can one more possibly make?

She said, “Can we go back to the ship now?”

As we came back out through the storeroom’s door, I looked up at the sky, toward the blown-out lightpanel, filled now with round Ygg’s red light. “No reason,” I said, “why we couldn’t fly the ship around and land it down on the bottom land of the bayou country.”

Violet looked at me for a long time. Then she said, “Maybe I
do
understand.”

o0o

Seen from above, lit by the waste light of an interstellar drive running at dead idle, the bayou country looked like nothing at all, like a dead lawn, flakes and stalks and swatches of dry forest, the sinuous rilles of empty riverbeds curling between the flat black knobs of the denuded hills... nothingness. Just bits, reflecting back the guttering blue light of our exhaust, catching it for a moment, then gone.

It seemed almost as though we were drifting, or hanging motionless in space while the dark inner surface of Audumla turned underneath us. Going nowhere. Nowhere at all, but... there was silent Violet purposefully piloting, driving our ship toward the destination I’d specified, slowing, slowing... there.

The Timeliner Firehall still stood, though the old, abandoned apartment blocks beyond were leveled, nothing left of them but a field of stony rubble, no pile more than a few ems high. The Firehall had been made of solid granite, shipped in from elsewhere at some expense, at the whim of some religious dictate I couldn’t remember.

Authentic, my father called it.

Just as if it were real.

Just as if we were real.

Real man. Real boy.

When Violet landed us in the parking lot, drivelight flickering and swirling, lighting up the facade for just a moment before winking out, I imagined I could hear the crunch of gravel under our landing skids. There weren’t any cars here today. Maybe there
had
been when... I imagined them blowing away on quick winds of plasma fire, or being sucked back out through the broken lightpanel, out into the black of space, where they’d presently join Ygg’s orbiting ring of debris.

We got out of the ship, walking down its shallow ramp and across the parking lot, surrounded by skinshield glow, like two sprites dancing in the corner of someone else’s eye, like two young ghosts, showing up for their job of house-haunting.

Somehow, it was darker inside, starlight snuffed by the walls, alcoves and altars highlit by shieldlight, casting stark, impenetrable shadows beyond. I wanted to show things to Violet, tell her all about my boyhood dreams, illustrate the things I’d already told her during long nights between the stars, idle moments between terrifying battles.

Useless.

All of it useless.

I led her quickly down the long corridor, just as quickly found the niche.

My father’s urn was on its side, lid missing, empty.

I picked it up in one glowing hand and peered down inside, looking at the shiny bottom, then put it back on its base in the niche and stood for a moment, staring, not knowing what to do.

There’s dust all over the place in here.

Some of it must be him.

Violet said, “When we get to Earth, there are some places I want to go too.”