When We Were Real (Author's Preferred Edition) (38 page)

I turned and held her in my arms for just a minute, or maybe she held me. Then we turned and walked away, walked away just as quickly as we’d come.

I turned back just once, looking over my shoulder just before we went through the crooked remains of the empty doorframe, looking back into the black, empty shadows of the Firehall, wondering what Orb himself might have made of it all.

o0o

Back aboard our deadly little ship, warship drifting over what little remained of the Audumlan landscape once again, I told Violet I wanted to make just one more stop, or maybe two. Then we can be on our way, on our way to Earth and the beginning of all those dreams we’ve waited so long to dream.

Violet took her eyes off the landscape, off the controls, knowing the ship could look after itself, as needed. The expression on her familiar face was serious, but... something of a smile there as well, faint, hardly visible at all.

“Take as long as you need,” she said. “Close all the doors. Lock them. Walk away when you’re ready.”

Somewhere, some time, she’d have doors that needed closing too. Then I’ll be waiting, standing by to give whatever help I can.

That’s all you ever ask of a friend, isn’t it?

All you can ever ask of anyone.

I pulled out the freeze-frame, switched it over to radar light, and watched the underlying structure of the inside-out landscape map itself in front of me. Familiar hills. Rivers and valleys... I remembered motoring our little skiff up a river just like that one, my father, back toward me, head bent over his toolkit, working steadily away between the thwarts, whispering softly to himself, seldom speaking to me.

A composite memory, perhaps, standing in for the real events of my childhood.

Those years were so few in comparison to the ones I’ve had since, but they stand out in stark relief, fantastically detailed, as if they are the only real things that ever happened, as if everything since then has come out of a dream.

A dream that I’ll soon forget.

Sometimes you meet people who say that, for them, it’s just the other way round. I can’t imagine what that would be like. I stole a quick glance at Violet, bent over her controls, looking from instrument to instrument and back again. Can’t imagine what her sense of having lived is like either.

“There,” I said, marking a certain hill, half surrounded by the curve of a small, empty river, marking it with a brief pip of green light in the global display.

Violet brought the ship in low over the tall, bare sticks that were all that was left of the trees, brought it in toward the crest of the hill almost as if she were gliding in air, setting it down not far from what appeared to be a low pile of rubbish, a scattering of debris.

For just a moment, I thought I was going to be too afraid to go out, but... You’re here to close doors, I told myself. So close them and move on.

There was a soft whir as Violet extruded the ship’s ramp, blue light of the skinshields spilling softly as the life support system put our environmental air back in storage. The world grew still then, no more sounds.

I got out of my seat, went down the ramp and stood in the darkness outside. There was just enough light from the stars, combined with the localized, weaker light from my shield, I could make out the shadows of my surroundings. The remains of the old “house,” made so lovingly from boxes and scraps, packing crates, whatever else they could find.

Here were the trees, bare sticks standing up, many more lying flat on the ground, all singed, short of the leaves. Here was the long, once muddy slope of hill, leading down to a bare sand beach, leading down to the hollow curve of what had once been a river.

I imagined myself waiting on the shore, waiting for him to come, listening for the soft whir of the outboard motor.

No more.

Gone into the shadows, never to return.

Is that all I have left?

Shadows?

There were shadows on the ground around my feet, bits and pieces of things, unrecognizable. I turned one over with the softly glowing toe of my boot and saw that it was part of a small robot. A kit. This is one of Mrs. Trinket’s kits.

I wonder where she is now? If I search the rubble will I find her there, the battered, empty shell of a refrigerator, nothing left inside but fragments of gears and dry lengths of old plastic tubing? Worse still, I might find her intact, lying there, mind erased, fluids evaporated, no expression at all on her little doll face.

Violet had come out of the ship as well, was standing by my side, looking down into the darkness, silent, pensive. I wonder what she makes of all this nonsense?

She said, “There’s something moving over there.” A slight gesture, secretive. “Over there, by the edge of the forest.”

I looked, careless, and saw quick movement, the movement of a greater shadow, occluding the lesser darkness beyond.

The shadow stood taller and began lurching unsteadily toward us. If there’d been air to carry the sound, I imagine I would have heard sound effects from some romance horror fantasy, something from the corroded depths of the net. The unsteady thump of the crippled monster’s heavy boot.

It came into the circle of light cast by our skinshields, a tall, bent cylinder with two short legs positioned at two points of an equilateral tripod, walking with the aid of its one long arm. We waited.

Finally, a soft radio voice was in our ears: “Yes. Dr. Darrayush. Thank God you’ve come at last.”

God.

I said, “Hello, Beebee. I’m, uh... glad... are there...” Words failing, as usual.

He staggered forward like a cripple on a crutch, coming close to me, and said, “Only a few, Darrayush. Only a very few indeed.” Something like the tinge of pride in that radio voice. “I was an outside welder, you see. My makers thought I might need to survive an industrial accident of... considerable magnitude.”

Violet said, “Radiation hardened.”

Beebee looked at her. “Yes, ma’m. Ah, I see you’re a very fine optimod indeed. They used to make optimods here.”

They.

He said, “But it was a long time ago.”

“Trinket?”

He stood absolutely still. Then, “Nothing much that wasn’t meant for hull work survived, Dr. Darrayush. We found a couple of baby incubators in cold storage, buried under the wreck of an old warehouse upcountry. Just unused leftovers from the good old days.”

I remembered Mrs. Trinket’s kit, what was her name? Maxine. That’s it. I remember her watching Mrs. Trinket giving birth, big eyed, to that baby welder, so long ago. She must have lived long enough to have kits of her own, for those kits to have kits, but...

Beebee said, “We’ve managed to put up a pressurized habitat down by what’s left of the industrial monoblock, so when they get old enough...”

Beebee and the other hull machines can breed more hull machines, which will also be able to live without warmth, without air. And, of course, every once in a while, a new baby incubator will be born.

“Is there anything you need?” Stupid. Stupid words popping out of my mouth, unbidden, as always.

They need everything.

He tipped back to rest on the crooked base of his cylinder, balanced teetering as he lifted up that one remaining arm. “Spare parts would be nice.”

I said, “All sorts of things laying around in the big dump on Mimir’s Well.”

“We know that. It’ll take us a while to build a spaceship, though. There aren’t any left here. Except for bits and pieces.”

I looked toward our attack bomber.

Well.

Hardly a cargo hull, but...

Violet put her hand on my shoulder and said, “We could put in a call to the Reconstruction Authority. There are several programs for helping damaged habitats get back on their feet. And, of course, you’d qualify for any number of low-interest loans from the Manumitted Intelligences Welfare Agency. I...”

The tattered sensor pack at Beebee’s crumpled waist turned toward her, solid-state sensors gleaming in our light. “We’d... like to do it on our own, if we could.” A silence, then, “An optimod should understand that.”

Violet said, “Yes.”

I said, “I’m not sure if there are any Audumlan Mother’s Children left alive besides me. I’ll do what I can to see a proper quitclaim’s been filed. Audumla’s yours now.”

“Himera. We called it Himera before the Mother’s Children came.”

Himera, then.

o0o

On the way out, floating over the wan and shadowy bayou country, drifting toward the smashed lightpanel and the hard white stars beyond, I stopped us at a place I hadn’t thought I wanted to visit, Violet swinging the ship up the course of a wide, flat riverbed, full of dry sandbars, banks well trenched by anomalous erosion.

I remember how seeing this, seeing it when the world was alive, made me realize how far Audumla had gone down hill over the years. I remember imagining that some day the ruin would be complete. Someday, the Mother’s Children would evacuate Audumla, leave it to suffocate and die, too expensive, too complex for them to maintain.

Now it lies dead anyway, hard frozen in time.

There. There’s the little village I remember so well, little white houses smashed to splinters and scattered across the bristling, dead remnants of the green. Maybe Styrbjörn’s dead down there as well, crushed flat atop one last mechanical whore.

Stupid.

I picture him dead like that because it pleases me to imagine his last moments, thrusting away, feeling his orgasm build, then the final white light, painless and swift.

But he probably died hunched over his desk, doing the job he was so proud to have, auditing one last account.

Still, the white light would have come.

I remember how I always imagined Violet and I would die in combat, facing the white light together.

Flash
.

Then gone to some impalpably serene eternity.

Beyond the river, beyond the crushed town, beyond hills littered with the ruins of dead trees, Violet set our spacecraft down in a splash of blue haze at the top of an exposed slope, the remains of an open field.

We got out, and I stood still, stood quietly, looking across my grassy knoll at nothing. Not even shadows here. What the hell? Did I expect to find my long-lost allomorph whore lying here, waiting for me, empty eyes turned up toward the darkened heavens, legs spread just so?

Don’t know what I expected.

Maybe only this.

Violet said, “Why are we here?”

She’d come to expect my relics, expect their physical reality.

So I told her about my field of butterflies. Told her about my formless, featureless, nameless allomorph whore, whore with eyes of glass who lay underneath me one day, a long time ago.

There was a silence. Then she said, “We remember funny things, don’t we?”

Idle relics of the past. Things that let us imagine we’ve lived, when nothing else remains.

She said, “I have a memory too. I can’t remember where it comes from, or when it happened. Can’t be sure it really happened at all. I’m lying under a man. He’s finished with me. The night is damp and still and quiet as I feel him recede. And I imagine that... just this once... somehow...”

It’s the same memory as mine.

I knelt on the ground, deep in the shadows, trying to call up memory of my past, trying to see those ancient perspectives, imagine that
this
is the spot where... something on the ground in front of me, a tiny, flat, dark shape on the dry dead grass.

Maybe it’s a yellow butterfly, like a buttercup shining in the stemlight, preserved for me, the relic I seek.

When I tried to pick it up, it crumbled away to nothing like a flake of dry ash.

I stood. We turned away and walked back to the ship, walking slowly to the ramp, which rose up behind us.

o0o

The sun, the real Sun, grew before us in rectified stereotaxis as we flew onward, as we braked our speed, slaking the interstellar drive, dropping into the controlled flight patterns of old, established commercial lanes, passing among all the inhabited worlds.

The war never came here, though it ended here, in some very real sense.

And, as we passed among the worlds, Violet grew increasingly quiet, increasingly pensive, wrapped in herself, not quite closing me out.

My turn now to stand by, ready to hold on, ready simply to
be
as she went about the business of closing doors, of making room in her heart for all our tomorrows.

I found myself imagining us standing together, holding hands in a room full of stainless steel vats. This is where I was born, she’d say. From this tub right here. Patting it on a chipped white enamel rim, looking down into its shiny depths, like a child adoring its mother.

That would make us the same, wouldn’t it?

The old habitat, when we finally got to it, was hanging by itself in Mars’s barely-stable leading co-orbital libration center, an immense, silver-gray wheel, turning oh-so-slowly against the motionless backdrop of faraway stars. Stars that, once upon a time, were no more than meaningless flecks painted on a black velvet canvass.

How wonderful, I remember thinking, that they one day became real.

How terrible, what they became.

I picked out bright Sirius, and had a stark memory of Porphyry’s bedroom, of lying on her too-willing flesh, lying on demand, at her command.

In all my wondering about all the unknown dead, I never once wondered about her, wondered about her fate.

Sitting with Violet, waiting for her to decide, I realized I hoped Porphyry was all right, making a new life somewhere for herself.

Forgive her, after what she’d done to me, to that poor girl, to so many others, known and unknown?

Well.

Forgiveness is mine to give.

Violet said, “When I was young, it was bright chrome silver. Shining silver, like a mirror.”

She reached out for her controls and slid us toward the axial docking port.

o0o

In bare minutes, we stood in a dusty, dimly-lit gray corridor, looking into a room full of old, dented stainless steel vats, whisked through the almost empty, almost lightless, almost lifeless habitat by its still-functioning system of conveyors.