When We Were Real (Author's Preferred Edition) (39 page)

Over in the corner, by a splayed open toolkit, a small, gray-furred, seal-like optimod male was bent over a tangle of old plumbing, muttering softly to himself, whispering, the way a person will while trying to work his way through some complex problem.

He looked up when we stepped into the room, smiling at Violet, though not at me.

“Hello, m’am. Come to see the old place?”

She looked around, wide eyed, seeming bewildered. “I... think I was born here. In this room.”

He put his tools aside and stood up slowly. “I was too. A lot of us were, back in the old days. There’re pretty good records in the habitat’s memory core, if you want to see which exact vat it was.”

I said, “Would it still be here?”

He gave me a look. “Humans often make things and... just leave them to sit.”

Violet put her hand on the edge of one of the vats, looking in at the connectors, which looked like nothing so much as the plumbing you’d see inside a gutted robot incubator. This is the way Mrs. Trinket would’ve looked after the war got through with her.

When she turned away, expression guarded, eyes hooding some kind of pain, Violet looked at the optimod’s toolkit, at the tangle of exposed tubing he’d been sorting through, and said, “What is it you’re doing here?”

He cocked his head to one side, glanced briefly at me, smiled, then said, “Don’t you know, m’am? We’ve won the right to control our own reproduction.”

One long, still moment, then Violet turned and looked at me.

o0o

We got to Earth at last, tourists with nowhere in particular to go.

It was sunset and, not far from the cosmodrome where we landed our little ship, we found a vast park, relic of an era when the only inhabitants of Earth were the richest of the rich, human men and women with wealth so immense it had no meaning.

The park wasn’t a wilderness, but then we had no sense of what a real wilderness ought to be like.

The dark forests of Telemachus Major’s green garden moon? Manufactured, of course. The riotous vegetation, the scummy swamplands in Audumla? Manufactured, then let grow to ruin.

 We stood at the top of a long, low hill, looking down into a broad valley flooded with summery sunset light. There was a little stream down there, carefully kept grass lawn ending at a little white beach, tucked in the crook of the river.

I imagined little boys and girls playing down there, but there was no one.

This is, I remembering thinking, just like the field of butterflies, where I took my nameless allomorph whore. What would she think of it, were she still alive?

I imagined others in quick succession.

Ludmilla? Of course.

And Reese? Would Reese like it here?

How about Jade? Jade died in a place much like this, on a fine day not so different from this one.

Even Porphyry.

Porphyry would like it here.

I turned then and looked at Violet, who took my hand and said, “Let’s go home now.”

When I looked away from her, there was indeed one lone yellow butterfly, lifting off from a little blue flower.

o0o

Happily ever after.

Is that the fairy-tale ending we seek?

If so, then one day I sat by myself at the top of a long, low hill, looking downslope toward another familiar, small winding river. Beyond it, a broad, green, well-mannered forest curved up the side of one of Himera’s habitat panels, growing ever smaller until it disappeared in the blue mist of distance.

Overhead, the stemshine grew dim as night began to fall, and as the blue sky beyond the panel turned dark, the stars began popping out, one by one, just as they did when I was a boy, so very long ago.

How is it that I came to be here?

Is this what I really wanted?

Was there another life I might have lived?

How does
that
story go?

Two dark shadows separated themselves from the hillside not far away, a tall black cylinder with long, spindly arms, one arm reaching out to clasp the hand of a small humanoid figure.

When they resolved themselves, it was Beebee, shiny and new again, the other figure that of a small gray optimod boy, just a few months out of the vat, growing to adulthood with astonishing speed, though nothing abnormal for his kind.

Beebee planted himself firmly on the ground beside my tree, becoming part of the silent landscape.

The boy sat down beside me, snuggling against my side as I put my arm around him.

Overhead, the sky had grown dim enough that Ygg was beginning to show through the habitat portal, like a dull red coal.

Down on the hillside there was a third shadowy figure, Violet making her way up to join us, finished with the deeds of day, moving through blue dusk, surrounded by the moving yellow sparks of a firefly cloud, part of a setpiece I must always have dreamed, dreamed so often it finally became real.

Am I happy?

You know the answer.

Even now I imagine real life can support happy endings that go on and on, while only stories must fade to black.

eBooks to Come

What follows is a list of prospective eBook publications, a mix of reprint and new. The pricing schema for them is simple. Novellas, averaging 100 – 150 pages in length, will be $2.99. Full-length novels (usually more than 400 pages) will typically carry the original mass-market paperback cover price, for reprints, or $9.99 for new ones. Collections of short fiction will be priced according to length, somewhere in between. I intend to stick to that, come Hell or high inflation.

The Starover Universe

Hunting On Kunderer
, 1972 reprint novella.

A Plague of All Cowards,
1976 reprint novella.

This Dog/Rat World,
  unpublished 1978 novella.

Acts of Conscience,
1997 reprint novel.

A Last War for the Oriflamme,
new novella.

Loci of the Starover Universe,
new nonfiction.

The Portmanteau Universe

The Venusians,
with Michael Capobianco, unpublished 1964 novella.

Under Twilight,
with Michael Capobianco, unpublished 1978 novel.

The Silvergirl Universe

When We Were New,
reprint and new collection.

When We Were Real,
1999 reprint novel.

When We Were Lost,
reprint and new collection.

Other Novels

Iris,
with Michael Capobianco, 1990 reprint novel.

Fellow Traveler,
with Michael Capobianco, 1991 reprint novel.

Dark Sky Legion,
1992 reprint novel.

Radio Silence,
unpublished 1992 novel.

When Heaven Fell,
1995 reprint novel.

The Transmigration of Souls,
1996 reprint novel.

Alpha Centauri,
with Michael Capobianco, 1997 reprint novel.

White Light,
with Michael Capobianco, 1998 reprint novel.

Moments of Inertia,
unpublished 2000 novel, parts serialized in
Asimov’s Science Fiction
,
The Urban Hiker,
and
The North Carolina Literary Review,
with a related article, “Gold from Your Novel” in
Writer’s Digest
.

Other Novellas

Almost Forever,
1993 reprint.

Yellow Matter,
1993 reprint.

Age of Aquarius,
1996 reprint.

The Engine of Desire,
2002 reprint.

The Man Who Counts,
2003 reprint.

Off on a Starship,
2003 reprint.

Down to the Earth Below,
2006 reprint.

The Sea of Dreams,
2009 reprint.

In Search of a Lost Age,
2011 new

General Collections

Ambient Light,
complete short fiction from the 1980s and 1990s.

Coronal Light,
complete short fiction from the 2000s.

Zodiacal Light,
short fiction from the 2010s and beyond, should I live so long. We’ll see!

Zed Variations,
tales of Mr. Zed and his going doubles, including his lost-boy selves.

Tales to Dishearten,
short fiction from the 1960s and 1970s, including some Starover stories.

Melting in the Sun,
a collection of memoir stories, true in spirit, if not in fact.

Shambles,
a nonfiction assortment, articles on writing, software design, space exploration, and more.

Roaming in the Gloaming,
with Michael Capobianco. Collaborative fiction and nonfiction.