When We Were Real (Author's Preferred Edition) Page 10

  He cried for a long time, but no one ever came to comfort him.

  o0o

  So. Scrubsuit. Nurses’ station. Dorm room. Dark and quiet, dim blue light and me all alone. I think I sat there for a long time, waiting for something, anything, waiting for other feelings to come, but nothing ever did. Or maybe those feelings came and went while I wasn’t paying attention.

  After a while, I thought, You know what this is, old Murph. You’re just like all the burnt-up, torn-to-bits warriors you gathered from the frozen, bloody plains on all the war worlds of Proxima. You’ll get over it—numbness’ll go away, the world’ll come closer and closer... might as well start getting over it now.

  Yeah. But.

  Easier dead than son.

  Then that commonest of brainfarts made me smile, just a bit, at myself, and got me rolling again. I sat up, just like that, put on the freeze-frame by my bed, and started.

  Three years packed on ice, while the Glow-Ice War went on without me until it came to an end. Why? Screens scrolled and shifted, answers coming my way: Because it was simply easier for the corporate armies to ship in new troops than hurriedly repair the old ones. New troops, because we could afford new troops, against the Glow-Ice worlds’ expending all they had, until there were no more.

  I watched that part for a long time.

  SOCO mercenaries capturing a Glow-Ice habitat, marching its people out onto the ice, buck naked men, women, children, screaming their lungs out in the razor-cold air, walking on bare feet that froze, cracked, bled, broke right off.

  Quite a memorable scene: pretty young girl staggering on white bone stumps, falling on her face, pretty girl shrieking as a SOCO soldier pulled her to her feet, well, to the stub ends of her legs, anyway, parts of her face, face and tits, ripping off because they’d stuck fast to the ice.

  SOCO soldiers marching Glow-Ice rebels into pits gouged in the ground; corporate maintenance men bulldozing ice-chips over the whole wriggling mass, and that was that.

  That segment ended on an advert, Standard ARM logo boasting jobs, jobs, jobs. Thousands and thousands of vacant, well-paid positions out here on the Glow-Ice worlds, just waiting for you techies to come fill them. I wondered why a free technician, having seen this whole business from afar, would come work for Standard ARM now. Then I remembered who I was, where I was, and why.

  Risk meaningless death at the hands of a soulless Corporate Entity?

  Hmmm. How much are they paying?

  Little prickle in the back of my neck.

  I’m alive, against all odds.

  So I ran the search engines, deeper and deeper still, looking for all my friends. Sure. People still alive. People I hardly knew, from barroom and bunkroom and... Finally stumbled over my own military maintenance records, was startled at the extent of the damage they’d had to repair. Lucky thing Standard is loyal to its own. Some companies would’ve left me behind, buried in one little icepit or another.

  Lucky all right.

  Links from there directly to Incident 5153, Glow-Ice War, Week Sixteen, Day 3: Downing of DSRV Athena 7 due to friendly fire.

  Saw the face of the Standard ARM fighter pilot who’d mistaken my ass for a hole in the ground.

  Read a brief synopsis of the radiation flare that’d wiped Athena’s computer systems. Lots of shielding in the engineering pod. Not much up in the pilot’s nest.

  Medical report on Darius Murphy, contract employee. Salvage report on biocybernetic unit Dûmnahn. No links at all for optimod Violet, wholly-owned chattel of the Standard ARM corporation, just a note to the effect that she’d been removed from the vessel’s shell pending final hardware salvage.

  Removed and taken away.

  I briefly pictured her torn-off, curled-up tail lying at the bottom of some ice pit, lying atop a shuddering, shivering mass of Glow-Ice rebels, just before the bulldozers covered them up for good.

  Would they do that to a loyal company optimod? Fucking Orb they would. This is business.

  I shut the free-frame interface, forgetting for a while that I wanted to call my father, try to, anyway. Maybe later. Right now... I got up and got out of there, going nowhere, anywhere.

  o0o

  Outside the main hospital building there’s a balcony and a garden, garden full of trees under a wide blue sky, sky full of pale white clouds, outlining faraway mountains. Sometimes, Telemachus Major’s green garden moon hangs like an irregular, mossy boulder over the mountains, moving ponderously through the sky, sometimes drifting parallel to the mountains, barely skimming their tops, other times traversing the sky, climbing toward zenith, falling to one horizon or another, depending on which way the world is turned.

  Down in the garden you can see soldiers being rehabilitated, mostly learning how to walk again, walk and run, not because they’re so physically damaged, that stuff’s easy to repair, but because they’ve forgotten how. Or why.

  I went for a lot of walks out there, under rehab myself, I guess, and sometimes the little brown nurse who’d been by my bedside when I awoke from that long, deep sleep, came with me. She seemed to like my company, though I couldn’t really imagine why... well, maybe I can. She kept walking too close to me, bumping me with her hip sometimes. Talking to me when I was silent, listening intently when I managed to say anything at all, laughing softly at things I hadn’t realized were jokes.

  Gatesie, isn’t that what we called our game?

  Found myself wanting little brown nursie badly enough that it was her I pictured as I masturbated alone in my dorm room.

  After a while, she started walking with me less and less, until finally I wound up walking all alone, which, I guess, was what I’d wanted in the first place.

  o0o

  Dûmnahn.

  I didn’t stumble on the room where they kept him, here in the hospital with all the other meat animals because he was more org than cyb, just followed the historical links hitherward, terminating on a little flash of surprise. Surprise they weren’t done with him yet.

  Surprise at my little flash of hope.

  By then they’d let me have a Standard ARM uniform, powder blue, with service and rank insignia, that one lone campaign badge right next to the little purple pin telling everyone I’d been wounded in combat. My engineer’s blazon meant I got to walk right on through the cyborg wing, hospital staff assuming I must be here on company business, come to work some machine part or another back into its rightful place.

  I found him easily; stood in the open doorway to his room, speechless.

  Finally, that warm old voice said, “Hullo, Murph. It’s good to see you again.” That was what... one of him said.

  Then another one said, “Hell. Thought I never would.”

  A hundred of him in here, row on row, column on column, tarnished beer barrels on six hundred green legs, standing together, tethered to the ceiling by a swaying mass of cables, power, data, telemetry stuff...

  The Dûmnahn closest to me said, “Wasn’t enough left of me to repair in one piece, Murph. Put me through the shredder, they did.”

  Some bizarre sorrow in that voice, evoking a feeling I couldn’t identify. “Which... which...” Shit. I can’t say it.

  Someone back in the mass of beer barrels said, “None of us. Sorry.”

  None of you? Or all of you?

  Softly, “A complete shredding bud-out leaves the end product without a sense of continuity, Murph.”

  A faraway voice, from somewhere in the back row, said. “But we remember you, Murph. You and Violet.”

  “Do you... know anything?” About her, something I was afraid to say out loud.

  “No. Sorry.”

  Both of them dead then?

  I started to turn away, run back into the hallway, run away and...

  Stopped myself. Turned back to look at the silent, swaying mass of Dûmnahns, every one of which was, apparently, genuinely glad to see me. Sighed. Rubbed a hand on my face, which had such an odd, greasy feel to it. Then I dragged a chair forward from
one corner of the room and sat down with all my old friends. Sat and talked with them while the hours slid by.

  “We remember so many things,” one of him said.

  “So many damned things,” said another.

  “Remember them as if they happened to someone else,” said a third.

  Silence.

  Then a voice far back in the mass chuckled, rueful, self-deprecating: “Remember things just the way you’d remember something in a drama you once saw, read, heard. Nothing you actually...”

  “I remember being something else,” said one.

  Another: “Me too.”

  Soft whispers from here and there in the room. Comparing notes. What did you used to be, my brother.

  Can’t remember, bro. Something, somewhere, some time...

  The Dûmnahn nearest me said, “I could swear I was once a man. I think I remember making love to a woman once, lying slim, sleek, sweaty between her legs, feel that... sensation you feel as you plunge all the way in, that... moment of utter contact.”

  I wanted to run screaming from the room. Didn’t. This is your friend. Maybe the only friend you ever had. Maybe he just wants you to listen.

  “Fat chance,” said the Dûmnahn nearest the first. “That was just a dream.”

  “Just a dream...” it sighed. “Yes. Of course. Do you still remember being nothing more than a robot arm?”

  Flat: “Yes.”

  Maybe they were still angry about that.

  Bastards, Violet had said.

  My stomach clenched as I struggled not to remember lying between her legs, struggled to get clear of that same moment of utter contact. Everyman’s moment. Maybe so.

  One of the Dûmnahn’s said, “I remember being a disembodied eye, floating in geosynchronous orbit, Earth’s weather far, far below. Anybody else?”

  A chorus of ayes.

  What the hell are they remembering? And why?

  Trying to... convince themselves?

  Maybe.

  It’s all real, you see.

  All real after all.

  It said, “It seems I loved being a weather satellite. Can’t remember when I ever had a nicer dream. The blue world, day and night coming and going, round and round the motionless continents, continents by day, blaze of human light when darkness falls...”

  Another: “Remember the clouds, the storms, hurricanes sweeping across the face of those eternal seas.”

  Remember these things.

  Make them your own again.

  From back in the crowd, a being swaying in its repair wires said, “Part of us must once have been a deep-space comsat. Remember? Humans talking, always talking. Politicians plotting war. Businessmen plotting theft...”

  The Dûmnahn nearest me said, “I remember the lovers, telling their secrets, whispers on the void...”

  They were silent for a while after that.

  I waited.

  It’s what you do for a friend in need.

  If you’re a friend.

  Maybe someday...

  o0o

  Time passed, and one day I stood at the forward obdeck rail of commercial liner Hélàs, watching Audumla swim out of the interstellar deep, first the ruddy, banded ball of Ygg, slightly squashed, rotational flattening, then the not quite smooth silver-gray cylinder of the Motherworld itself, navigation lights flashing red, white, green, portals gaping, flooded with warm yellow worklight.

  When we got close enough, I could see the little tugs moving out to greet us, thrusters twinkling, little flecks of white stuttering here and there. Closer still, and there were the spacesuited longshoremen, waiting at their stations.

  In due course, Audumla grew huge, filling the sky, Hélàs shuddered softly and was still, and they opened all the doors, announcing our destination like the robot brain of an automatic elevator car in one of those immense self-serve stores they have on Telemachus Major.

  I kept standing by the rail, feeling frozen, inside and out, wondering over and over again, why the hell I’d come. Well. Because Standard ARM put me on a year’s full-salary furlough as a reward for service well done...

  Orb. Getting your ass killed and put on ice is a job well done?

  Beyond that, the specter of a half-pay reservist’s position if I wanted it. The company has plenty of pilots and flight engineers just now, flooded with new hires from the war. We’ll keep anybody who wants to stay, of course, that’s what they said. You work for Standard ARM, you’ve got a job for life, no matter how long that life may be.

  But there won’t be deeds for everyone to do. Not all at once, you see. And, of course, there were all those Dûmnahns, every damned one of whom knew me better than I’d ever know myself. Times change, they said. We all change. Go home now. Go see your father. Go see if...

  When the Dûmnahns were finished, disconnected from the healing engines, when they were packed into crates and shipped away to new jobs where Standard might need a freshly cloned cyberdoc, I packed myself up and went away too.

  Finally, I let go of the rail, went down through the ship and out into the world, reversing that last voyage I made with my father at my side, striding up the loading ramp where I’d hugged him, told him good by, turned my back and left him behind. Flashed my Standard ID at the customs station, nothing to declare, no baggage at all, no reason for them to know me as a Mother’s Son gone wrong, just some stolid Company Man, come here on a company mission, or maybe just come to see the sights.

  I stood for a long time at the elevator station, while cars came and went, taking people away, delivering new, looking out over Audumla’s vastness, orange stemshine, habitat panels, dusky sky, feeling old memories well up, spill back into the topmost layers of my life.

  This is where you lived. The rest of it’s... just a dream.

  Funny how it seemed just the opposite, not so long ago.

  So. Down the cliff wall elevator, through the town, down across red hills, riding the monorail line, everything so Orb-damned familiar it made me wonder about the reality of Uncreated Time. As if this places exists someplace, somewhen, outside of time.

  Inside my head maybe. Nowhere else.

  Then I stood in my mother’s gateway, looking through the torii at Helgashall. There. The window to my old room, the little balcony where I sat so often, freeze-frame on the rail, doing my useless homework, studying subjects just because my father thought they might be interesting. Rannvi’s room over there, at the edge of kemenatë. Broad red sandstone stairs leading up to the atrium, double doors behind, leading to the ballroom...

  One of my mother’s silvergirl servants appeared, cooled eyed, so patently, manifestly artificial, and said, “Welcome home, Dagmar Helgasson. I’ve alerted the mistress to your arrival. She’ll be so happy to see you again at last.”

  Felt my fists clench, my bowels twist at the sound of my own name.

  Happy to see me?

  Well. It was one of the Dûmnahns reminded me I belonged to Standard ARM now, far beyond the power of the Mother’s Children, beyond the reach of any mother, no matter how bold. As I walked up the stairs, I felt like a man going to the gallows.

  And felt ridiculous as well.

  Coming here’s turning you back into a child, that’s all. You’ll do what you’ve come to do, then you’ll go away, and the hard man will come back, ready to guide you through the rest of your life. It’s a yawning void, right now, but... something will come of it, you’ll see.

  Stepped through the door, down the long atrium carpet, past the spiral staircase, feeling almost myself again, ready to smile and greet them all, prodigal son, proud man, free man, come home again at last.

  And there they were.

  Mother, lovely and ageless, almost like a silvergirl herself.

  Lenahr, grown fantastically into a handsome young man, face sleek and dark, looking more like Father than I ever did, black hair combed back, shiny, eyes bright, smiling at me as though genuinely glad...

  Mother said, “Dagmar.”

  I ga
ve her a little hug, just enough, not too much, pulled back and looked around. “Is Rannvi home?” Something peculiar here. I’ve been gone for a very long time and...

  My mother said, “Married. I’ve put in a call to her, invited her for dinner. Maybe an hour...”

  And... “Father?”

  Just a bare hint of a shadow in her eyes. Then she said, “Your father has passed away.”

  Just like that.

  Then Lenahr smiled and said, “Killed himself, Daggy. About three weeks after you left.”

  o0o

  It’d been dark for hours by the time I got to the Timeliner Firehall down beyond the bayou country, back by the abandoned city of empty apartment buildings. Long hours, standing outside on my old balcony, watching the night form while Mother fumed inside, while the others ate dinner, while Lenahr sniped because I’d had to go through his room to get to the balcony, his balcony, his...

  Rannvi telling her silent, pale husband, Vadim I think she called him, to make his own way home, that she’d be needing the flitter for a while, then driving through the night, down a path I hadn’t even known she knew about, parking the flitter, its landing legs going crunch on the parking lot’s old, dusty gravel. Then just sitting there, looking at me. As if waiting.

  Finally: “I’m sorry Murph. He was... my father too.” As if she felt I was... accusing her of something.

  “Why didn’t you call?”

  “Mother.”

  “Even after you were married?” A married Mother is among the free-est of the free.

  “By that time, he’d been... gone a long time. I guess I thought the Timeliners told you. I guess...” A bit of silence. “And then, Vadim thought we should... stay on good terms with her. You know.”

  Yes, I did know. I wondered, mind wandering, if Vadim was a decent husband, wondered... even had a momentary flash of picturing them in bed together, colorless man on my goldengirl sister. Useless. I said, “You coming in?”

  She looked up at me briefly, then down again into the shadows under the dashboard, where her feet lay hidden. “I’m not a Timeliner.”