When We Were Real (Author's Preferred Edition) (8 page)

I took a deep breath, then eased my hand down into the frame, pressed my fingers into the contract’s data record, and gave my assent.

Tomorrow morning. 0830.

I pulled my chit and watched the freeze-frame wink out.

o0o

In quicktime, I went through Standard ARM Aerospace Paramilitia basic training, earning a couple of badges for my nice new powder-blue uniform while the DIs made damned sure I knew my shit, made sure not only could I do the job I’d been hired for, but
would
do it as well.

 The work we did was hard, the learning forced and swift, but not beyond the fathoming of anyone properly prepared. The tests, I suppose, made sure no one who couldn’t pass would begin the course.

Academics made me grateful I’d spent so much time with the freeze-frame, studying things I knew I’d never need to know, indulging, first my father’s whims, then my own.

Gauge-control theory proved important after all.

Physical training was harder still, and here I was no more than lucky, having walked through the forests and rowed my father’s small boat, when we went places unsuited to the electric. I did the calisthenics and went through the obstacle course, glad I wasn’t one of the softer men and women who labored by my side.

Strange people.

All of them strange.

Not so much the physical strangeness, the...
what
of them, as the
who
. Men who stood snarling in your face. Women who seemed like nothing so much as shadows in the background.

I could see those women looking at me. See them wanting me, but... this is a different place, I kept telling myself. Different customs. I’ll get used to it, by and by.

Or else move on.

One day, they made us climbed a nearly sheer granite face, sleek stone that must surely have been imported from a geothermally active terrestrial world deep in the gravity well of a large star. Certainly, there’s no such stone out here.

They partnered me with a chunky, scowling, spiky-haired man named Zamba who I’d known from the barracks. Known, perhaps, no less shallowly than any of the others. We placed our lines, rigged our hardware, and started up the rock, doing things just the way we’d been shown.

Not so hard, really, if you do it right. If you accept that what you’ve been told
is
right. Zamba kept trying to do things some other way, from something he said he’d seen in a text on mountaineering, though he, like me, was from the purlieus of the Centauri Jet and had never been within a thousand AUs of a natural mountain.

He kept slipping, kept falling, scraping himself on the rock face, getting angrier and angrier. Madder still when I made a suggestion or two. I found myself wishing I could detach the safety line between us and go off on my own. But they’d told us not to, and I imagined that was part of the test, part of the training.

Finally, he fell hard, slapping chest-first into the rock face, bleeding from a cut over one eyebrow, blood trickling prettily down the side of his head, curling under his chin, like the work of a dramatics makeup expert.

When I reached out to help, smiling, he slapped my hand away. “God damn it, I don’t need no help from the likes of
you
!” Then he detached the safety line and climbed away.

Tempting to just go on up to the top then, forget about this asshole, but I stayed close, climbing just behind and below him all the way to the top. If he slipped and started to slide, maybe I could grab the tag end of his line. Though, if he toppled and dropped, all I’d be able to do would be duck to one side and hope not to be swept along with him.

When we got to the top, the instructor penalized Zamba for being a fool, then added points to my score for keeping with my partner, despite our... “personal problem.” All the while, the instructor kept glancing at me with some odd shadow in his eyes, even after Zamba stalked away, furious, not looking back.

Some of the others seemed to avoid me as well.

That was the way it seemed to go for me during those few short weeks. Unable to make anything like a friend among the men whose lives I now shared, though I’d had no shortage of friends, back in Audumla, the memory of whom made me ache inside and... maybe regret what I’d done.

On the other hand, the women seemed to like me well enough, some of them bothering to sneak to my bed in the night, sneaking of course not unnoticed by the other men, making them scowl at me all the more.

And a few of the men were homosexuals, who seemed to like coming round to my bunk in the evenings for a chat. Nothing more than that.

Basic training was soon over, and I was glad for that brevity.

o0o

On a fine morning under a brilliant, cloudless blue sky, emanation from the eutropic shield prickling antiseptic UV on the exposed skin of my face, I found myself walking across the blond plastic landing slab of Standard ARM Cosmodrome 227TM, order packet in my breast pocket, exhilarated and more than a little scared.

There before me, all around me, dwarfing the crowds of little men and little women, all of us dressed in that same powder blue, were rows and columns of spacecraft, like so many burnished bugs of chrome steel and brilliant brass, eyes of crystal and bright red glass, squatting on their landing legs, all turrets and thruster nozzles, field modulus antennae, exhaust manifolds... snappy little fighters, with their guns and beamer grids; attack vehicles covered with missile racks and rotary cannon; bulbous buddypack tankers; boxy mechanized assault force troop transports...

Somewhere back here among the hexes—hectares they told us to say in military jargon school—somewhere among all the hexes of spaceships great and small, I’d find the DSRV squadron, somewhere among those, Deep Space Rescue Vehicle
Athena 7
.

There.
Athena
squatted on eight widespread legs, low and flat, a glitter of fresh-looking silver and gold, longer than she was wide, short and squat, with a sphere-shaped universal docking adaptor on one end, service pod with folded arms and grapples and torches on the other, medevac bay in the middle. Up on top, I could see the pilot’s turret, down on the bottom, the engineering pod, my own bailiwick from now until... whenever.

“This your ship, pal?”

Soft, male voice, the voice of a mature man, a kind man, speaking the English they told us we had to use when on duty.

“Um. Yeah.” I walked closer to the thing standing, no, more like sitting, between two of
Athena
’s landing legs, at the foot of the embarkation ladder.

It said, “You must be Darius Murphy, then.”

Interesting that it pronounced my name right. Dar-eye-us. “Yeah.”

Hard to describe what I was talking to, no real sense of gestalt. A seven foot long antique beer barrel lying on its side, with tarnished bronze hoops, staves made of old oak, golden brown, streaked with black. Six fat, scaly green tortoise legs, barely able to hold it off the pavement. Complex clusters of arms at the barrel ends, sensors, manipulators, things I’d never seen before. No face. No eyes, no nose, no mouth.

It extended a skinny arm from one end, the end nearest me, arm with a hand like some kind of anorexic metal bug, and said, “I’m the ship’s cyberdoc. Name’s Dûmnahn.”

I hesitated, boggling a bit, then took the warm hand in my own, and said, “Uh. Pleased to meet you. Darius Murphy, flight engineer.”

It said, “I read your file, Murph. They say you’re real good with robots.”

“Oh. Are you a robot?”

Dûmnahn laughed, a really nice, friendly laugh, ironic and self-deprecating, that made me feel unexpectedly warm inside. “Less of a robot than the things you’re used to, I guess. I’m an old-style cyborg, part of a manufacturing cycle initiated in the Piazzi Belt back in the late twenty-first century.”

A long time ago. “Human?”

“No. My nervous system was genengineered from preserved DNA stock, from several lines of extinct pongidae.” It wiggled one leg, making itself rock back and forth gently. “Muscle structure’s from reverse-engineered reptiloavian stock. Very tough.”

“How old are you, Dûmnahn?”

“Me? Don’t know. I guess this carapace might be about forty standard, but...”

I remembered then that these sorts of cyborg were cloned rather than bred like modern robots, realized that Dûmnahn would have been budded from some earlier version of itself, going all the way back to some original laboratory stock, all those long centuries ago.

It said, “I’ve got some fragmentary memories of the Piazzi, of working on the original Thetis structure. That’s all.”

A woman’s voice, contralto, said, “
Athena 7
.”

I turned. Gaped.

Picture a naked woman.

Well, no. Not a naked woman. Picture a woman dressed up in a tight fur costume. Fluffy, red-violet fur. Picture a woman with a fox’s face. Slanting, foxy yellow eyes. Pointed ears midway between terrier and pixy. Picture a naked furry woman with a long, bushy tail, powder blue bag slung over one shoulder by a long sash spangled with campaign badges.

She said, “Hullo, Dûmnahn. Told you I’d get us the same ship again.” Then the eyes looked me up and down, very slowly. “You must be Murphy, then.”

“Um. I guess I’m the only one
hasn’t
read someone else’s file.”

She grinned, showing fine white teeth not at all human. “Newbies don’t know how. You’ll learn.”

Newbie.

She stuck out her hand, a human hand for all the fur, and said, “My name’s Violet...”

“No shit.”

I heard Dûmnahn cough behind me.

 She cocked her head to one side and looked me in the eye. “Violet. Standard ARM Optimod 4044-XVII. Command Pilot.”

“Optimod...?” I tried to swallow the word before it came out, but failed, seeing a little sizzle start up in those yellow eyes. Orb knows what she may have been made of—human genes for sure, but what else? Dog, squirrel, bits of extinct wolf, fox, fragments of apes and whatnot... Offhand, I couldn’t recall ever seeing an animal that color though, not in any bestiary on any damned datatrack.

Seeming exasperated, she said, “
Ruricolae
.”

“Uh. Sorry. I just... hell, I guess you must be my boss.”

“Correct.”

She swept past me, past Dûmnahn, went on up the ladder with swift efficiency while I watched, half mesmerized by her sleek form and wonderfully fluid movements.

Dûmnahn said, “Well. Let’s go.”

“I guess I’ve gotten off to a bad start, huh?”

He laughed that nice warm laugh again, and said, “Maybe not. We’ll see.”

And so we flew, cyborg Dûmnahn, optimod Violet, backward, human little me,
Athena 7
lifting in a splash of blue fury, lifting with her DSRV squadron, lifting sedately through the eutropic atmosphere shield, then making formation, tearing away from Telemachus Major and its little green moon, down into the starry deep.

Somehow, when I lay my hands on the machines, felt the subtle pulse of their cybernetic hearts, felt the energies gather at my fingertips, I felt all my fears subside, fade away as if they’d never been. Violet flying the ship with her hands and mind, Dûmnahn lurking in his medical lair, monitoring us now, seeing that we were up to our task, and I... down in my own dark hole, making sure all the pieces worked together, as one.

I
knew
it. I knew it all along.

All those years of pointless study, of learning all those things a robot technician on Audumla wouldn’t need to know. All the things a husband wouldn’t need to know. I knew, someday, somehow...

Memory of my father, looking over my shoulder as I went through the school catalog, pointing out this course and that one, suggesting, Hey, let’s learn
this
stuff. Just for fun, you know? And so I did, just to please him, just for fun.

I’ll come back for you, I thought then. I’ll come back for you. I swear I will.

o0o

In no more than a few days’ time, I began to feel like an old timer myself, bantering with my fellows, playing billiards, swimming in the great, shimmering globule of the zero-gee pool Standard maintained in orbit around the park, going to the park itself, a stunning experience, so much more...
real
than anything I’d ever done with Styrbjörn inside Audumla.

You never know how much your heart can pound until you come on a big wild animal minding its own business.

Mostly though we worked and worked, getting to know
Athena
, getting to know each other, getting to know ourselves, understanding how important it is not only to know you can count on your mates, on your hardware, but also that you can count on yourself. Get to know at what point you’ll turn tail and run. Make sure the others know it too.

There’s always a moment of transition for you, that one moment when you turn from outsider to in, when you leave your past behind and suddenly mesh with the new life you’ve joined. Mine came one morning at breakfast, while I sat eating with Dûmnahn, whose biologic components lived off food, same as mine, the two of us chatting about nothing in particular, while, all around us, the room filled with the bustling fliers of Standard ARM.

As I sat looking into the middle distance, thinking about the day to come, Violet came in through the big double doors at the far end of the cafeteria, doors opening on a corridor leading to the optimod barracks. Watching her walk, I remember thinking that if you looked closely, you could see she
was
a woman, that you could so easily imagine her without all that lustrous fur, just the same way you imagine a
real
woman without her clothes. Yes, there’d be breasts here, nipped waist there, just above flaring hips, long, muscular thighs.

I could imagine the place between her legs without any difficulty at all, imagine myself lying with a girl who had a generous helping of stark violet pubic hair as stage dressing for Goddess’ Altar and Child’s Gate.

Not far from there to imagining myself worshiping at the altar, opening the gate.

And then I felt that same stark tingle of anticipation I felt every time I settled on a new girl, told myself, with a little care and dedication she’d...