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

  “I’m sorry, Murph. I’m... not interested in that stuff. You can look if you want.”

  Slipped out of the underpants, crawled into her blankets and turned away from me, muttering a soft something to the bulkhead.

  I said, “What?”

  “Turn out the light when you’re done.”

  o0o

  One day, maybe a week after I started hanging with Reese and her friends, Trellis came home from a scavenging trip, breathless, eyes bright, dumping a frosty load of flash-frozen steaks on the truck workbench, and said, “Something you’ve just got to see! Put aboard at Pasargadae 3, I guess. Marvelous!”

  Nothing any of us could say would pry it out of him, so into the darkness we went, winding our way aft and outward, dodging corridors when we could, transiting bulkheads through emergency hatches that should’ve been sealed and codelocked, but weren’t. If this’d been a Standard ship, they would’ve been. And there’d’ve been no bums, company deadheads riding in steerage at worst, instead of down in holdspace.

  Just as well.

  Imagine a decade flying in some sightseer’s lounge.

  I’d gotten used to walking around in the dark, keeping my little penlight pocketed other than when I needed it to read a label or pick a lock. That impressed Reese no end, her eyes widening with delight when she saw I could open a two-layer slidegate by reprogramming the button panel.

  “No shit!” she’d said, watching the first such gate pop open, both layers at once. “Now why doesn’t anyone else know that?”

  Well. Manufacturers of the locking system don’t publicize it. Not many people have a Timeliner daddy making them take techie courses seemingly at random. I remembered the look on his face the last time I saw it and wondered, for the thousandth time, if this had been his dream.

  And Reese’s innocent, childlike delight kept me hoping she’d change her tune, slip out of her clothes one night with something other than sleep in mind.

  Keep impressing her, boy. That’s how it’s done, remember?

  She was getting careless and comfortable around me too, parading around bareass as we prepared to doss out, ignoring my obvious physical reaction. I’d lay in the darkness afterward, wondering what the hell. Pure innocence, “not interested in that stuff?” Not bloody likely. Your typical, mean-spirited, man-hating cocktease? Maybe. And yet, a delight to be with. Though I knew she had to be at least fifty years old, she was every cem the image of your classic happy young girl, sparkle in her eye, cooing with pleasure over the least little thing.

  Or, hell, like the nine-year-old boy I’d once been.

  It made me remember standing in that open field, far down in the back country of Audumla. Made me remember an allomorph whore’s simple joy, watching the butterflies float in bright stemshine.

  Maybe she’d continued to watch them fly, continued to feel that joy, looking over my shoulder as I fucked her.

  It took hours to get where we were going, the better part of what would have been our evening, before we finally slid through a bulkhead hatch and into the space beyond.

  Reese, stock still, said, “Christ.” Unmistakable awe.

  We were standing at the edge of a double hold, practically a full-sized wedge, and in distant shadows we could see the gleaming stubs of cut stanchions, where a permanent bulkhead had been removed. Look there. You can see the internal bracing frames of the hull. Two windows. Stars outside.

  And much of this open space was occupied by a big, soft-looking sphere, baggy material of its integument glowing gently in pale pastel lavender.

  Trellis crowed, “Wait ‘til you see!”

  As we walked toward the thing’s flattened base, I said, “I’ve heard of these. Never saw one before.”

  Reese, impressed again: “What is it?”

  “It’s a portable ecologarium.”

  “And... ?”

  Why spoil Trellis’s fun? And hers. “Wait ‘til you see.”

  Down by the bottom of the dome, on the side facing the hull, was the opening of an airlock, zippered shut with a sturdy plastic slider that worked with the barest whisper of sound, moving easily on silicone-greased rails. We crowded into a space so small we were touching one another and I found it difficult to shut the zipper, finally stretching up so Reese could slide between my legs and do the job crouching.

  Brief, humid silence, then Hibi snickered, “All together now: fart.”

  Trellis said, “Jeez. Think that might inflate the place and give us more room?”

  Reese: “Where the hell’s the inner door?”

  Hibi said, “Um. Here. I’ve got it.” She peeled the thing open, pink light spilling in on us, and, “Oh, my God...”

  Trellis said, “Told you you’d like it.”

  When my turn came to crawl out through the airlock flap, I stood, looking around in disbelief. Gently rolling hills under a soft pink sky, sky patched with a few pale lavender clouds, hills covered with yellow-green grass, pink and gray heather, stretching as far as the eye could see.

  No, not quite. Horizon line, several kems away... I tried to do simple spherical geometry in my head, finally just guessed. “It’s like we’re standing on a world maybe ten, twelve thousand kilometers in diameter.”

  Trellis muttered, “You notice the gravity?”

  I flexed my knees gently. “Point-eight gee?”

  Standing by my side, voice hushed, Reese said, “Where the hell is this supposed to be?”

  I watched the clouds drifting slowly overhead, coming over the trees behind us, floating toward a faraway horizon. “I’m not sure. Maybe the Illimitor World.”

  Hibi said, “Where?”

  Reese: “Never heard of it.”

  I said, “Nowhere. It’s from a story I downloaded once. Pre-interstellar, more than a thousand years old, I think.” In the distance, far beyond the horizon, I thought I could make out the faint blue outlines of a mountain, things gleaming at its peak, as if it were topped by buildings rather than snow and clouds.

  We started walking, going nowhere, and I filled with pleasure realizing this place had butterflies, little blue ones like tiny flowers, drifting ever so slowly over the heather, light here, there, everywhere, then flying again, like so many gentle, colored bees.

  o0o

  We could see the plume of pale smoke rising straight up, almost disappearing against the pink sky, from about a kem off, maybe a little more, after we’d been walking for a couple of hours, wondering how the hell they’d managed the illusion of space, Trellis fussing about it, “God damn, we saw this thing from outside! What, maybe twelve hundred meters? Don’t give me any shit about it being done with fucking mirrors, for Christ’s sake!”

  I’d heard about this technology, run across mention of it in trade journals, but it was something Dad and I just... never got around to. Mirrors? As good a word as any. Dioramae. Focused projection techniques. Some aspects of old-fashioned VR, I suppose. Just guessing. What it really felt like was simply that we’d stepped through a gate between dimensions, out onto the surface of another world.

  A world where you really could see that plume of smoke over there, rising just beyond those trees.

  We hurried a little bit, curious, went up a rise and through some little bit of forest, trees with waxy leaves so perfectly real... stood on the hilltop, looking down at a silver bright stream, and a group of men and women gathered round their campfire. Someone pointed, then a big man stood, hands on hips, looking our way.

  Trellis cupped his hands and yelled, “Shelly!”

  The figure waved one long, thick arm, and called, “Hiya, Trell! Come on down!”

  We went down the hill, stumbling a bit as our feet caught in the long grass, disturbing squadrons of little blue butterflies, stopping by the campfire, by the stream, where Trellis and Shelly threw their arms around each other, slapping each other’s backs, Shelly lifting Trellis right off his feet while Hibi stood and smiled.

  “Shell, my God it’s good to see you! Did you come aboard
at Pasargadae 3?”

  Shelly was a tall, strapping woman, it turned out, but so broad shouldered and muscular that, from a distance, I’d mistaken her solid, compact breasts for the pectorals of a strongman. She wrung his hand, squeezed Hibi half to death, and said, “Sure did! Me and my bund here...” Waving her arms at the others, a mixed bag of men and women, all sizes, shapes, colors and cultures.

  Count quickly now. Yes. An extra woman or two...

  Shelly said, “You know Españalta, don’t you?”

  “Sure! Been fuck-all years!” Hibi hugging a plump, blue-haired woman, whose name seemed vaguely familiar, possibly from one of Trellis’ fanciful sex stories.

  “And, of course, Mr. Jimberjaw and his wife Sally, and did you ever meet Bartolomeu? He’s...”

  Trellis gasped, “Why it’s Mr. Zed!”

  Sitting cross-legged on the ground, quietly spooning up a hot emrie, the old man seemed to flinch. Old. Like something from an ancient drama. Sparse white hair. Washed out yellow eyes. Spindly arms and legs. Mottled skin hanging in folds. Face almost... nonhuman. Like a badly-made android, some antique model that should’ve been discarded as a factory reject.

  Now, he looked up at Trellis, and said, “Oh, dear. Do I know you?”

  Trellis kneeled, taking the man’s hand, grasping it gently, as if he were afraid it might shatter. “Oh, no sir. It’s an honor to meet you!”

  I glanced at Reese, puzzled, but she didn’t look back, was instead focused on the old man, eyes alight with interest. I nudged her and said, “Who...”

  Trellis looked up at me and smiled. “Mr. Zed, this is our newbie friend, Murph.” Then, to me: “Mr. Zed is the most famous bum who ever lived.”

  Mr. Zed seemed disgusted.

  o0o

  Gradually, the ecologarium’s day waned, sky drifting from pink to lavender, purple, indigo, then black, colored stars spangling the sky like so much metallic glitter. Impossible, like the false-color mesh headers that adorn most astronomical studytracks. If you looked carefully, you could see it all up there. Stars colored in spectral order, oh, be a fine... swatches of nebula, blue, red, green, black coalsacks thrown in for good measure, golden stardust of the Milky Way, blotchy glow of the Nebeculae, the dim, wide oval of Andromeda. And, everywhere, in the dark between the stars, distant blue spirals, ragged white irregulars, the mother-of-pearl glow of dying ellipticals...

  Shelly and her friends stoked their fire, cooked a meal made of fish fresh caught from the ecologarium’s stream and, as the smoke thickened, I felt a lovely breeze spring up, not quite enough to bring on gooseflesh, the bubble’s air conditioning system working on high.

  We ate the fish together, laughed, talked, told who we were in fits and snatches. I swigged sour liquor from a bottle Shelly passed around, strange, milky-looking stuff one of Shelly’s bund made from the raw potatoes you found in a certain kind of emrie. Proud of it. Proud as hell.

  I sat looking into the fire, sitting between Reese and the old man, who apparently had nothing to say, whatever the basis of his fame, every now and again... yes, that woman over there, looking like a girl, lanky and lean, long black hair and eyes like holes into nothing, looking over at me, gaze lingering.

  Mr. Zed turned to me in the flickering shadowlight, put his bony fingers on my forearm and stroked softly. “So very young...” Long pause, then he said, “You are young, aren’t you? I mean, really young.”

  I shrugged. “Yeah. I guess so.”

  “How old?”

  “Well... I was in hospital stasis for a long time, I...”

  Mr. Zed muttered. “Shit. I know what that’s like.”

  I’m sure you do. All this damage... poor maintenance? Or... hell, nothing lasts forever, and Mr. Zed looks... what? Old as the hills? Older than any hills I’d ever seen. Certainly older than Audumla’s hills. I said, “I’ve had about twenty years of consciousness, I guess. And you?” Seemed like a polite enough question, but I saw Reese flinch out of the corner of my eye.

  Mr. Zed shook his head sadly, “I don’t know.” Then he smiled. “Wish I did, Murph.” Another long silence, Mr. Zed’s eyes far away, slitted, almost as if he were falling asleep, then: “I used to know a guy named Murphy once...”

  All the other conversations round the campfire were stopped, bringing out the soft wheezing of the wind, the popping of wood in the fire.

  “He was my best friend, I think.” He peered at me, leaning close, inspecting the lines of my face. “Maybe an ancestor of yours, a long time ago.”

  Long, long silence, Mr. Zed dreaming again. I asked, “How long? Can you guess?”

  The silence from the others hardened at my rudeness, but Mr. Zed smiled. “That’s a nice, polite way to put it, Murph. I still know my history, still remember it all, I think. I just can’t put it in order anymore.”

  The mythology of Old Age, left over from the Dark Ages. Old people reminiscing over a campfire, while young bucks and children listen, amazed. No one really gets old anymore. After a long, long time, a variable time, impossible to predict, wear out. Go to the hospital. Die. Sooner or later. I guess in Mr. Zed’s case, it turned out to be later.

  Much later.

  “Murph and me left Earth together, oh, I don’t know, right around the time when it first got to be possible to really leave, on your own. Back when the big companies were first opening up the Belt and all. Took me twenty years of hard work to save up the application fee. More years to buy all the stuff you were supposed to need...” Soft laugh. “All bullshit. Companies feeding off a mythology they helped create. Company store and all that buttfuck.”

  This is just a fairy story, I told myself. It’s... unlikely he’s really that old.

  He said, “Murphy was a lot younger than me, of course. Never knew any different. Couldn’t remember a time when it seemed things might come out different.”

  Silence. Wind. Fire. A soft splashing from the creek. Finally, I said, “Different how?”

  Mr. Zed looked at me, almost surprised, as if he’d forgotten anyone was here listening to his tale. Just an old man, dreaming his dreams. He said, “I remember how I felt, sitting with all my friends in a dive down on fifty-second street, uncertain and afraid, watching Armstrong’s ghost walk out on the Moon.”

  Reese whispered, “Armstrong? What moon?”

  Mr. Zed turned to look at her. Then he said, “All forgotten. It shouldn’t be a surprise. He wasn’t Columbus, after all, nor even Bjarni Herjolfsson.”

  I remembered the museum on Telemachus major. These people might not visit such a museum, visit such a world, surely wouldn’t have wasted so much time freeze-framing the DataWarren.

  He said, “Who remembers the names of the Chinese sailors who left their rock carvings on the stones of New Zealand, before even the Maori came?”

  Maoris and New Zealand. Ancient history with a wealth of detail all its own. I saw a nice drama once about the first Maoris, so much like spacefarers themselves, stepping ashore on uninhabited New Zealand, maybe fifteen centuries ago. There was a really horrific scene, impressed me as a kid, six guys standing in awe, watching the moas graze. Then this huge, ugly thing called a harpy eagle stoops out of the sky, not knowing a six foot man from a six foot bird...

  Mr. Zed said, “Me and Murphy went out to Callisto, worked for fifteen years at the fuel volatiles plant Case-Western was building there.” Then, faraway again, “I used to love working out on the surface, Jupiter a fat, featureless orange ball in the sky, like a dying sun. Murph used to tease me, laugh like hell when I’d pretend it was Proxima, Wolf 359, one of those places.”

  Reese said, “Is this your first time going to Wolf, Mr. Zed?”

  He laughed. “Oh, no. I made my way out to Wolf as soon as it was possible...” He made an old-man sigh, high and sharp. “Disappointed at first. But... hell. I always loved reality more than my dreams. Worth it, every time.”

  Colonists got to Wolf 359 more than four centuries back. Wonder if it’s changed any since then?
<
br />   Mr. Zed said, “Murphy and me finally got better jobs, jobs for your more experienced sort of worker, went on out to the oil refineries Royal Nihon was building in the Fore Trojans... That’s where old Murphy got killed, of course. Pressure blowout when we tried to tap a fracture zone... stupid. I don’t know what the hell he was doing down at the wellhead that day. Don’t know why the worksite AI didn’t track him and stop the operation...” He turned away, toward the fire, seemed to rub his chin on his arm for a while. “By the time we got to him, he was frozen solid in a hunk of black asphalt ice. Docs thawed him out, but there wasn’t anything left but mush. Nothing left to resuscitate.”

  That made me shy away from my own memories, quickly dumping fragmentary images of Violet, of Glow-Ice worlders, SOCO soldiers... people. Just people.

  These are the kind of memories Orb makes you keep.

  He said, “I married his wife the day after that, just so she could stay on and work. Adopted his kids and took care of ‘em ‘til they grew up. By that time they were opening up the Kuiper Belt, so I moved on when I could.”

  A whole life in a few words. Maybe not a fairy story after all. Orb knows. Who are we to judge?

  He sighed again. “That Melissa. Christ, she sure was hot in bed...” A slow shake of the head, eyes a distant glimmer, looking pastward. “I thought she was being disrespectful to poor, old Murphy at first, me his best friend and all, but... hell. He was dead and we weren’t. That’s the way it goes.”

  Then he turned and looked at me. “You look just like her youngest. Jenny. Jenny Murphy, that was her name.”

  “Did you have any kids with her?”

  “Oh, no. I was... too old. And too young. You... don’t know?”

  “No.”

  “I was a hundred years old before I ever got off Earth. What they called a geezer in those days. I was working out in the Oort, working for Standard when they... made me young again. Funny. Looking in the mirror after waking up in the rehab center, it made me think about my own kids. Made me wonder what’d become of them.”

  Reese whispered, “Where are they now, Mr. Zed?”