When We Were Real (Author's Preferred Edition) Read online

  When We Were Real

  a tale of the

  Silvergirl Universe

  by

  William Barton

  author’s preferred edition

  94,000 words

  Copyright © 1999, 2011 William Barton

  Public Domain Cover Photo:

  “Mt. Erebus,” by Richard Waitt, 1972,

  courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey

  There’s nothing in life like loving someone... It’s all the difference between being dead or alive.

  — H.G. Wells

  Dedication:

  to

  Anna Kavan

  and

  Cordwainer Smith

  for the

  taxonomy

  of lost souls

  Previous Books by

  by William Barton

  Hunting On Kunderer

  A Plague of All Cowards

  Dark Sky Legion

  Radio Silence

  Yellow Matter

  When Heaven Fell

  The Transmigration of Souls

  Acts of Conscience

  When We Were Real

  Moments of Inertia

  Collaborations by

  William Barton and

  Michael Capobianco

  Iris

  Fellow Traveler

  Alpha Centauri

  White Light

  For more information visit:

  williambarton.com

  website active Sept. 2011

  Table of Contents

  Foreword

  One. Stories, they say

  Two. One last little stemshiny aside

  Three. No one who hasn’t lived

  Four. On our way from Telemachus Major

  Five. I awoke with a hard start

  Six. A couple of months after

  Seven. So

  Eight. Sirius is far away

  Nine. Telemachus Major

  Ten. There are moments

  Eleven. The Nulliterrae Swarm

  Twelve. It’s too easy

  Thirteen. Down on Ogygeia

  Fourteen: The war went on

  eBooks to Come

  Foreword

  How did it happen that a man some critics have harshly labeled “misogynist” came to write a science-fiction romance novel? Funny you should ask, because it happened like this:

  Years earlier, back in the mid-1980s, during the great lacuna between my first and second careers, I decided it was time I created a new background universe. I had been working and reworking story backgrounds, what I have always called “planets” (for something like fantasy) and “universes” (for stuff that was clearly science fiction), that I’d created in the 1960s and early 1970s, up to the time I started writing professionally.

  What I created was something I called “The Galactic Comity,” and I intended it to be the background for a vast tale of interstellar war in which humans were the merest pawns, no more important in the scheme of things than Robert Burns’ “wee mousie.” Michael Capobianco and I had finished up Iris and were making the rounds of the publishers, trying to find a buyer (with little success—it bounced twelve times before Doubleday and Bantam picked it up). I knew if Iris sold I’d be writing more, not just with Capo, but on my own.

  The background languished for a few years, as Iris sold, and we did write more, both together and separately. In addition to novels, I wrote short fiction, and bits of the Galactic Comity background, allomorphs and silvergirls, robots and optimods, crept in here and there. If there’s a “first” Silvergirl story, it’s probably “When a Man’s an Empty Kettle,” the first one to have the look and feel of the whole.

  While all this was going on, science fiction was evolving around me, and things were happening I didn’t necessarily like. Among them, was the fact that Star Trek, Star Wars, and other media-tie novels were beginning to dominate sales. I never really liked Star Trek, right from its “Wagon Train to the Stars” beginnings to the tie-in novels I found essentially unreadable. I liked Star Wars for its visuals and its actors, but not for its extremely derivative background universe.

  Then again, I overheard a conversation between two editors at two different major New York publishers discussing how they were “moving their favorite Romance authors into SF” as quickly as they could manage. Why? I liked the few Romance writers I knew; professional genre writers face a lot of the same problems. But these people already had careers. Why not just get new SF writers from the hordes of newcomers trying to break in?

  Okay. Ready-made audience of readers. Sort of like the way women will follow a hairdresser from one salon to another, right? As good a theory as any?

  And then I began having trouble selling my next novel to my publisher. The editor there kept turning down outlines, with comments that essentially said, “too harsh.”

  Eventually, I had a childish moment of, “I’ll show you,” and turned in an outline for something I wanted to call War No More, basically modeled on some things I knew, not only about Romance writing (because the nice ladies in that genre were just as willing to talk shop as anyone), but things I knew were popular with certain segments of the Star Trek tie-in audience.

  Bingo.

  Everything clicked except the title, which my editor replaced with When We Were Real, a phrase that emerged from a sentence in the book. It seemed a bit hard to pronounce, but what do I know? I’m the idiot who called a book Hunting On Kunderer and was unlucky enough no editor put their foot down.

  When I showed the manuscript to a romance/SF writer I knew well, she was impressed, and told me it would be a best seller, and would get me the recognition I so obviously deserved. Always thrilling when a lovely, intelligent woman tells you something like that, and I’ve always been sorry it didn’t turn out that way.

  Still, there was something unexpected about the book.

  Not the love story.

  Not the war story.

  Something about the machines in the first chapter.

  Something that tied back to the way I’d treated the artificial intelligences in Acts of Conscience, written a couple of years earlier.

  I was dumped by my publisher immediately after that, long before sales figures for When We Were Real could emerge. Then I got divorced (again). Then I lost the job I’d had for the better part of fifteen years. Then I got really, really sick.

  Somewhere in there, I began writing stories about the machine-people that were the main background of When We Were Real, and that’s how the real Silvergirl Universe (which many readers, I’m told, call the Optimods Universe) emerged. There are near-future ones like “Heart of Glass” where the Galactic Comity is nowhere to be seen, and far-future ones like “The Engine of Desire” where humanity has been destroyed and all that’s left are Silvergirls and Optimods, Allomorphs and robots, where the war between the Spinfellows and Starfish has all but run its course.

  There are now enough stories to make up the equivalent of two more novels, almost all of them published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, a few elsewhere. When I’ve written the last few waiting in the wings, I’ll issue two collections of them as well.

  I originally thought, when I dreamed up the Galactic Comity, I’d write a trilogy set there.

  And so I did.

  —William Barton

  September 2011, at the

  Barking Spider Ranch

  One. Stories, they say

  Stories, they say, should always have happy endings. Only life is permitted to sputter out in a diminuendo of misery, dissolving through drab shades of gray before reaching some pointless fade to black.

  When I was a boy, immersed in seemingly
pointless study, I would read the biographies of the ancients and see that shadow hanging over every one of them. A man would be born, full of promise, would lead his famous life, fulfilling that promise, and then...

  Well, you know.

  Every biography is a tragedy.

  The hero always falls.

  The great man is always humbled in the end, no biography ever finishing up with “they lived happily ever after.”

  Those were the days before humanity emerged from its ratty little world, when hope was a word you used with utmost caution, associated with the profound fantasy that life might really be a dream from which you’d one day awaken.

  Here at the other end of history, we know better.

  We know when a boy’s done dreaming about his Baedeker of wonder, he’ll realize those shades of gray can go on and on, waiting for a daybreak that might never come. Sown to the dark between the stars, we live our open-ended lives, freed from the valley of the shadow out on all our ratty little worlds.

  My ratty little world, the place where they made a gray little boy, anticipating a gray little man, where I dreamed a boy’s grand dreams while reading those sad old tales, was called Audumla.

  Down in the bayou country, down in Audumla’s belly, well away from the habitat’s endcaps and the settlements of the Mother’s Children, you can see the decay a century’s neglect has made. My father and I, when we visited the lowlands, would drive our cheap plastic boat down a wide, sluggish stream, tall, gray-green fronds of unnatural swampland blocking the view to either side, I would steer the skiff away from a long, iridescent blue oil slick, feeling the electric motor’s soft vibration through the tiller, while Father sat between the thwarts, fiddling with his tinker’s tools.

  Overhead, you could see a long way, despite the haze. It was only hazy down by the ground anyhow, down where the air had gotten thick, most of the air conditioning returns long ago plugged up, overgrown. The sky was still quite clear, though nothing like I understand it used to be, dark blue up around the brilliant orange stemshine, purple shading off into brown everywhere else. Beyond it, you could see the bare outlines of Audumla’s other two habitat panels, between them, patches of empty sky, where the stars would glimmer at night. Ygg’s ruddy half-disk, almost hidden in the color of the sky, was peeking out from behind the edge of Panel Three like a hill of dull fire.

  My father looked up from his hardware, an agelessly grizzled man with a lean, handsome face, big beak of a nose, pale blue eyes, and said, “Darius. How much farther?”

  I steered the skiff to one side of a big, flat mudbank that hadn’t been here last time, feeling the current surge under us, catching a whiff of organic stink from the shore. “Just a couple of kems, Daddy. A few more minutes.” Have I been down this stream a hundred times? Probably not, but he’s been bringing me here since I was a little kid... sixteen years old now? Maybe a hundred times after all.

  “Good. Mrs. Trinket’s baby won’t wait.”

  Baby. Funny to think of it like that—but I do too, natural I guess, coming out here with him, time and again, despite Mother’s disapproval. He always calls me by my Timeliner name, the one he gave me, pronouncing it the old way, Dar-eye-us. Darius Murphy.

  I like to have my friends call me Murph, and that makes Mother angry too. Dagmar Helgasson. That’s your name. Your only name. The only kind of name a Mothersbairn can have. Mother won’t let him near my brother Lenahr. Not since she found out about the name.

  We came around a bend in the river and there was the Himeran village on a little hill beyond the bank, a sparse collection of packing crates set up where they’d cleared away thicket. Beebee was waiting for us down by the shore, a tall, mirror-finish metal cylinder nearly two ems tall, standing on steel spiderlegs, waving assorted arms. You could hear him shouting, “Dr. Goshtasp! Dr. Goshtasp! Thank God, Dr. Goshtasp!”

  Daddy muttered, “Just in time, I guess.”

  These trips down in the bayou country piss Mother off more than anything else. When I was very young, I supposed that marrying a resident alien, a Timeliner no less, rather than a Mother’s Son, had been her own act of youthful rebellion: Helga Rannsdottir, who hated her own Mother just so, eloping in the night with a hooknose tinker.

  It makes a pretty, romantic story for a boy to tell himself, dreaming in his bed. Something that makes his tale of the wonder years to come more plausible. I imagined them as adolescent lovers, daring the disapproval of the Mother’s Children and...

  So Helga Rannsdottir, turning up her nose at the Mother’s Children and their arranged marriages, would show them all just what a real woman could do with a husband’s Goddess-given talents.

  Even if the wretch did believe his talents came from some silly, alien, male deity with the ridiculous name of Orb.

  I can hear his tired voice now, remembered from when I was a boy, he never talks about it anymore: Not the Orb, Helga. Orb’s just a symbol. Our souls emerge from Uncreated Time like everything else in the...

  Then she’d screech about the Goddess’ Truth. Sometimes throw things at him.

  And, of course, one day I stumbled on the actual details, found some inkling of what it means to have an open-ended life, where you just go on and on, no matter what.

  There and then, just as here and now, I followed him up the muddy hill, carrying the toolbox. You could see that Beebee, seniormost of Mrs. Trinket’s fifteen husbands, was some kind of welding machine. Hard to say what his kind’s job would have been, back when Audumla was a working industrial center called Standard ARM Decantorium XVII. Something out on the hull, judging from the grippers he had instead of feet. It made him limp, walking around inside, where there was only mud, grass and loose rocks to trip over.

  Those must have been good days for them, back before Ygg’s ready resources played out. Bright days full of life and purpose and doing. I sometimes wonder if they miss it all, but they never talk about it, at least not in front of me.

  When Ygg was finished off, Standard ARM found no profit in shifting its equipment to some other site—it’s much cheaper to build new machinery in situ, so the mining tools were abandoned in place, not even told what was happening. Just one day the supervisors came no more.

  After a while, they figured it out for themselves, cooked up some scheme to become an illegal service station, catering to the tramp freighter trade that was springing up in those days. Called the place Himera and let it develop quite a reputation as a den of iniquity. Maybe they’d’ve done all right for themselves, enough to buy all the supplies and spare parts they needed, but then Standard sold the joint to the Mother’s Children, who soon turned the tramp starships away. Not a problem for anyone, what with the Centauri Jet and Telemachus Major being so close and all.

  No problem for anyone but the Himerans.

  And Mother, always angry because Dr. Goshtasp devoted so much profitless time to helping them stay alive.

  Inside the largest packing crate, Mrs. Trinket was a big white enamel box lying on the floor, moaning softly in her best-little-girl voice. She looked something like a refrigerator, a refrigerator with four stumpy legs, four long, spindly arms, face of doll-like blue eyes and pursed pink lips mounted in the upper half of her breastplate, just above the spigots.

  Lying on the floor now, she was surrounded by frightened husbands and excited children. Little Tillie the buffer’s daughter, who’d never have reproductive organs of her own. Maxine, a baby incubator just like Trinket, big eyes wide, taking it all in.

  Daddy went to her side, obviously concerned about the state she was in, attached his diagnostics and waited for his displays to come up. Hiss of exasperation. “Trinket, you sissy! When the call came, I thought you were dying!”

  She whimpered, “Oh, Doctor. It never felt like this before...”

  Daddy started plugging in to her other ports, making software disconnects at internal sensors, anesthetizing her. “Well, hang on, kiddo. We’ll have a look and see what’s what.”

  When the
screwdrivers started to whine, Beebee flinched and averted his eyes.

  When her access panel swung open, I felt like backing away, at least getting away from the powerful gust of... I don’t know. Call it the smell of life that came out. I looked anyway, and there in a womb made of bleeding raw steaks and heaving layers of rump roast, lay a collection of metal parts that seemed all angles and spikes and sharp edges.

  Daddy said, “Well, shit. There you go.”

  One of the other husbands, an incomprehensible thing that seemed to be made mostly of gooseneck lamps, peered over his shoulder, blinked oddly, this way and that, from his seven or eight eyes, then crowed, “Beebee! I didn’t know you had it in you!”

  Beebee came forward too, edging nervously past me, and took a look. “My God! A baby welder!”

  Trinket squeaked, “Beebee?! You told me you ran dry years ago.”

  “Well... well... I’m sorry, Trinket. I thought I did...”

  “You lying bastard! You just wait! You see if I ever...”

  Daddy, laughing, patted her on the side. “Take it easy Trink. We’ll have this critter out of you in five minutes.”

  I leaned in, holding my breath against the smell, and tapped him on the shoulder. “Uh, Dad? I think I’ll... wait outside. If you don’t mind.”

  He looked up for a second, giving me an odd, somehow disappointed look. Then shrugged and said, “Sure. This won’t take long.”

  I stood out on the hillside, air much fresher here despite the surrounding swamp, and watched the children play, a bizarre assortment of kits and boxes and things that looked like they might even be hybrids between more than one sort of machine.

  Years ago, back when we first started coming here, I used to play with Himeran kits. Play with them just like they were real children, friends and all. Well, the ones I knew grew up, went off to do whatever the hell it is abandoned hardware does when it grows up... maybe I just don’t want to think about it, now that my turn’s come.