When We Were Real (Author's Preferred Edition)

by William Barton

  When I glanced at Porphyry, I could see she’d already started to darken, skin equipped with much newer, much more expensive pumps than my own.

  Over on the far horizon, far out to sea, there was something, some kind of surface vessel, with a low, dark body and great white wings, heeling over before the wind. Ships. They called them ships. In the sea off the coast of California. California. America. Earth.

  You have to be rich indeed to live on Earth, whose general population was forcibly evacuated to Piazzi, Kuiper, and Oort more than eight hundred years ago.

  “Why’d they leave?”

  Sprawling in a soft chaise longue, Porphyry said, “Taxes.”

  I sat down gingerly in another chair, across a little wooden table from her, carefully leaning back until it caught me in its embrace, looking at her body anew. Realizing how it’d gotten like that, why it was so different from my own.

  Chimpanzee? I felt a little fuse of anger light, sputter, and go out again.

  She said, “They went back after a while and took my parents with them. No taste for frontier life, I guess.”

  Now, a couple of servants came out, a slim blonde girl and a slim blond man, each dressed in a short white linen robe, barefoot, each bearing a loaded silver tray. They knelt, beginning to put out what I supposed was breakfast food, uncovering hot dishes that wafted steam, liberating strong smells. Coffee I recognized. Glasses of thick red juice. A selection of raw vegetables with little bowls of varicolored dip. A plate that smelled of cooked meat. Little link sausages. Flat strips that seemed to consist mostly of wrinkled, burnt fat.

  Odor a little bit like what you smell when a careless technician burns off his fingers in an electrical accident.

  Finished with their task, the man and woman stood back, waiting, eyes downcast, side by side.

  Porphyry leaned forward, breasts dangling so that her nipples brushed across the surface of the table, picked up one of the strips of burnt fat, bit, chewed, smacking her lips as she crunched. “Ah, the bacon is excellent, Sheelah.”

  Bacon. I remembered the stuff we called bacon in Audumla, thick strips of rich red meat sizzling and popping in the fryer. Odd. The woman, Sheelah, dipped in a curtsy that made her robe ride up, almost to the top of her thighs.

  Porphyry’s eyes were on me, amused. “You like Sheelah, do you, Murph?”

  Embarrassed, I shrugged and said, “Well. Things are... very different here.”

  She said, “What d’you think of my new toy, Sheelah?”

  The woman raised her eyes to my face, staring, expressionless. “Very nice, ma’m.” The man beside her, still nameless, continued to look at the wooden surface of the deck.

  “Pull up your skirt, Sheelah. Show Murph what you’ve got.”

  She turned, handed the tray to the man, who clasped it to his own, posed just so, and lifted the hem of her robe, one leg extended forward and to the side. Light blonde pubic hair, hardly there at all. Pink-skinned vulva, small and flat, lips parted to show a hint of structure.

  “Very nice.” She glanced at me. “Isn’t that so, Murph?”

  I nodded, wondering if there was any way I could just get up and run away. Not bloody likely. You’re down the rabbit hole now, Mr. Murphy.

  Porphyry said, “Let’s see you get wet for him now, Sheelah.”

  To my astonishment, beads of clear moisture started to form back where I knew the introitus of her vagina must lie hidden. Beads that grew, collected into larger droplets, started, one by one, to run down the insides of her thighs, leaving shiny trails behind.

  She said, “Ah, operant conditioning’s a many-splendored thing...”

  I looked at Porphyry, aghast.

  She laughed, reaching over to ruffle my hair. “God, it’s so much fun having you here, Murph! You’re a babe in the fucking woods!”

  o0o

  A woman’s laughter can charm a man out of his senses. And Porphyry’s laughter seemed, I don’t know, keyed to my moods, perhaps, lifting me out of those moods like some kind of psychiatric drug, as if she could sense the depths of my despair and knew just what to do. Add to that the fact that Melina’s Nest, whoever Melina may have been, was a playland of considerable sophistication, also just right to counter what ailed me.

  Perhaps I came to the worlds of this dim sun hoping for ice and darkness, hoping for soul-numbing cold to match how I felt, had felt for so long.

  What I found in Porphyry’s artificial paradise was a landscape of sunshine and splendor, blue skies, skies without clouds other than those decorative few, high and white against a manhome friendly sun, a land of mountains, mountain streams, fields of green grass dotted with myriad gay flowers, drifting honeybees, butterflies, colorful songbirds, beaches by a sea warm enough to welcome, cool enough to refresh...

  And all of it peopled by lovely folk with downcast eyes whose only purpose was to please, real human beings, as human as me, more human than many I’d called friend, all trained to serve and only serve, as if without needs of their own, as if...

  Maybe I would have abused them cruelly, flying from whim to selfish whim, again I don’t know. Porphyry never afforded me the opportunity, monopolizing my time, intercepting my desire. I made love to her by the sea, in sun-dappled forest glades, in her bed of aerogel foam, in public streets walked only by her servants, in the dining room, rolling about on our dinner.

  Time passes, as they say, and now it passed in a haze of requited want.

  One day, she dressed me up in a fine brocade robe studded with jewels she swore were real, rubies and emeralds, diamonds and sapphires, bundled me into her space-going flitter and took me to a place called Norman’s Hole. A party, she said. We’re going to a party.

  And so, in a ballroom thronged with people, flat-footed men and women dressed in extravagant costumes, vast room a riot of color, threaded through with white-robed servants, people with downcast eyes who did as they were bid, carrying trays of viands, trays of drinks, lighting smokes for master and mistress and...

  I’d already been introduced to dozens, so many people I’d forgotten their names already, flatfeet rendered all the same by their overblown garb, when Porphyry, towing me by the hand, called out, “Ah, there you are!”

  A tall, round man, artificial sunlight glinting from a bald head so polished I suspected furniture wax, whose broad back hid people clustered beyond him, turned and held his arms out. “Porphyry! Where the fuck’ve you been? We were starting without you!”

  I wondered how the hell they’d gotten his teeth like that, teeth like irregular bits of rock crystal, implants perhaps, but looking razor-edged, making me think about the safety of his tongue.

  Porphyry said, “Silly Gorgo! What good is it without the pièce de resistance?”

  Gorgo smirked, and said, “Well. You know.”

  She sighed. “I guess so. I sure know how stupid you can be, dear Gorgo. Come on, let’s see what we’ve got here.”

  He moved and Porphyry pushed through a mixed group of flat-footed men and women, some of them dressed in their nonsensical finery, other prancing around buck naked, as if they’d been up to Orb knows what. Me? Dazed, just the way I’d been for days and days. Then Porphyry said, “Ah, Sheelah. They have got you started, haven’t they?”

  They had her on a thigh-high table, flat on her back and naked, the same serving girl who’d made herself wet for me on command, slid to just the right position, buttocks even with the table’s edge, legs held apart by two other servants, a man and a woman still in their white robes, eyes down cast, holding her legs as far apart, I figured, as they could go without breaking.

  I imagined the crackle-pop of breaking gristle.

  Sheelah’s eyes were open but slitted, glassy with something I imagined must be pain, lips set in a flat line. Thin, watery blood was seeping from her vulva, trickling down across her buttocks, and it was spattered on the floor below her, soaking into fine white carpet.

  I felt my daze lift, haze carried away by horror and looked up from
Sheelah’s battered crotch, looking around at Porphyry’s grinning, expectant friends. Opened my mouth to speak...

  Pop.

  A prickle of pain in the back of my right shoulder, a spreading numbness, tingling down my right arm, diffusing through my back, emerging in my chest, descending swiftly across my belly. There was a sharp, bitter smell in my nose, odor making me think of the color purple, then just a hint of some odd taste on the back of my tongue.

  And there I stood, mouth hanging open, looking at people who smiled and waited.

  There was something I wanted to do here. Something I wanted to say. What was it?

  I can hardly seem to catch my breath.

  Something happening down below. Bizarre, faraway sensation of heaviness at the bottom of my belly, erection flexing upward, lifting the weight of my brocade robe.

  Porphyry’s voice, sweet with amusement, said, “Well, turn around Mr. Murphy.”

  My feet made all the movements necessary for me to turn, slowly, swaying just a bit, until I was facing her, looking down at her, seeing her smile. She was holding up a military grade injector, waving it in my face like a glassy finger.

  “So. What d’you think, boy?”

  My mouth opened, tongue flexing articulately, and it said, “I think you gave me a drug.”

  She grinned. “Smart boy!” Then she held the injector up, close to her face, squinting at the little words I knew these autoampules always had printed on the barrel. There’d be some milspec stuff, then... she read, “ParteeTyme Brand Yohimbine-Rohypnol Injection.”

  Gorgo’s voice said, “Ah, what would we do without it?” I felt his hands on my shoulders, pulling gently as Porphyry tossed the injector aside and started undoing my fasteners. The robe slid to the floor suddenly, as if I were a statue being unveiled.

  “My, my. Look at that!” A woman’s voice, which went on, “Give him another shot. Let’s see how big it can get!”

  Porphyry, frowning, looked up into my eyes. “No. I think he’s just right.”

  Someone said, “Come on! Let’s get saddled up! This’ll be cool!”

  They turned me around, got me lined up with Sheelah, still laid out on her table, got my prick aimed and pushed me forward, so I slid right in. The pain in Sheelah’s eyes seemed to deepen, but I thought I saw forgiveness there as well. Knowledge. Resignation. I saw she was biting her lip now, denting it deeply with strong white teeth.

  Porphyry said, “OK. Start fucking her, Murph.”

  My hips started to pulse. In. Out. In again.

  Orb, this feels good, Sheelah strongly ridged inside, a sign of deep arousal and... Something still alive within me remembered my own startling erection, come from nowhere at all.

  Porphyry said, “Longer strokes, Murph. And slower.”

  That other woman said, “Yeah! And lean a little, so we can see better!”

  Like this? Am I doing it right, my friends?

  Porphyry: “OK, who’s first?”

  Silence, save for the soft liquid sounds my prick was making as it slipped in and out of Sheelah’s bleeding cunt. Then Gorgo said, “Well, it was my idea...”

  “Be my guest.”

  I thought, for just a second, that it was my voice that’d spoken.

  Then I felt his hands on my shoulders again, felt that big belly billowing against my back.

  He felt like a medical probe going in, erratic at first, then matching his thrust to mine. When he was done, another man took his place. After a while, a quiet voice, hardly my voice at all, something far down beyond the reach of the drug, began to pray, first to Orb, then to the larger vessel of Uncreated Time, humbly asking only that I be permitted to survive.

  Eight. Sirius is far away

  Sirius is far away.

  I remember that song, with its eerie, echoed chorus, from some datatrack I loved as a child. Something about an athletic contest, about honor and decency, about first contact with some fanciful extraterrestrial intelligence.

  We’ve journeyed to the Milky Way.

  I can’t remember any more.

  Now, from the forward obdeck of the little tramp starship Sign of the Labrys, Sirius A was a white hole in the sky, fantastically bright even from a hundred AUs out. Two-point three Solar masses, one-point-eight Solar radii. Twenty-three times Solar luminosity. Meaningless numbers, given definition by this thing that erased all the stars from half the sky.

  All but the tiny fleck of Sirius B over there, climbing steeply toward aphelion, a glimmer of hard white light in the washed-out black sky. Just shy of one Solar mass. Just over thirty-five thousand kems in diameter. No more than half the size of Wolf 359.

  And yet, five hundred times as bright.

  I couldn’t remember how I came aboard this little ship, cobbled together from leftovers of larger, older ships, cavernous holds, yes, but only that, not entire worlds in darkness. I couldn’t remember for the longest time, though Captain Lee told me, more than once, how she found me lying, naked, frozen, still breathing, by the muddy shores of the Sea of Green, not far from the foothills of the Sunrise Mountains.

  Can’t remember how I got there. Why’d they let me go? Common decency? Some legalism I never heard of?

  I never knew who they were.

  Never knew who they thought they were, what they stood for, by their own lights.

  All a dream?

  I thought so.

  Wished it so.

  I still don’t know what made her bring me back to her ship, with its crew of women in gray.

  But I remember her telling me, amused now that all this time has gone by, how she and her crewwomen argued about bringing me aboard, about what was the right thing to do.

  The innocent are innocent, she told me. An innocent man is just as innocent as an innocent woman.

  I remember trying to tell her about my lack of innocence. Remember her laughter.

  And, of course, she told me how their own innocence came to be called into question, how they almost decided to put me ashore, alone, bewildered, lost, at their next port of call, a little, almost-deserted refueling depot on the long line between Wolf 359 and Sirius.

  Some of us, Captain Lee said grimly, were not so committed to their vows as they thought.

  And then she’d laughed again.

  Not your fault, bright angel, she’d said. Not your fault at all.

  Alone among the stars with each other, all we had to control was our desire for each other. In port, all we had to control were those little spasms of desire, soon over, for anything else we... wanted.

  Keeping you with us...

  A long, sorrowing frown.

  Some wanted to... sin with you. Others, imagining themselves pure, merely wanted... someone to care for.

  Maybe that’s a sin too.

  In time, I understood. A man wants a submissive woman, granting joy only he can know. A woman wants a submissive child, granting joy only she can know. Where’s the sin there?

  Ask those who submit.

  In those days, donning Labrys gray, working among the crewwomen as though I were one of them, I thought often of my father. Time passed, starship stopping at one place and then another, habitat worlds hanging between the stars, as varied as anything the old fabulists dreamed. We’d stay for a day or a week, sometimes more, doing what was needed to support the ship.

  I’d go ashore, sometimes with crewwomen, sometimes alone, an anomaly either way. In time, memory coalesced, and with it forgetfulness. I found myself accepting whatever submissions were offered, unthinking, unafraid, and so found myself growing away from the refuge that’d found me.

  Until, one day, in the stellar deep off Sirius, I watched the infrastar Wernickë grow in our sky, a flattened, ruddy ball so very much like Ygg, just now making a slow hyperbolic pass through the outer reaches of Sirius A’s ecosphere, her moons fuzzy white balls shrouded in water vapor, outgassing wealth.

  Captain Lee watched with me, admiring the way the blue light of our modulus exhaust reflected, flicke
ring, off the clouds of one nearby moon, Suzdal Habitat a gleaming scintilla of green and gold, orbiting nearby.

  She said, “Another century and all this will be gone, back out into the cold and dark again.”

  Silence, while we turned about the moon’s center of mass, while our ship bore down on the mottled sheen of Suzdal.

  She said, “I wish you’d reconsider, Murph. There’s so much trouble here. Rebellion. Change. The Mobilitzyn fleets are well on their way, coming to reclaim what’s theirs.”

  I remembered the Glow-Ice Worlds, not quite against my will.

  She sighed. “We’ll miss you.”

  I looked at her and smiled. “No you won’t. You’ll be glad to get rid of me at last.” And I must go, if I’m... ever to be myself again. You know that, for I’ve told you so.

  She looked hurt for a moment, but then grinned herself, shook her head ruefully. “We’ll be lucky if some of the crew don’t get off with you. Poor Nettie.”

  Childless mothers. A loveless yearning for home and hearth, husband and family. I don’t know whether it’s true, this genetic determinant, or just the trap they wove for themselves when they invented a celibate sisterhood that would go roving the stars.

  And I suppose it doesn’t matter.

  Time changes everything.

  And nothing.

  o0o

  Suzdal was a beautiful world, as different from the others as they’d been from each other. People living on the outside, beneath the sheltering wings of a eutropic shield, on the model of Telemachus Major, rather than within a scooped-out shell, as in Audumla, a warren of tunnels like... well. No sense remembering that one.

  Call it a little bit of Telemachus Major. Telemachus Major without the unending cityscape.

  Sitting in a little rooftop cafe, sipping sweet, red Altopashtûn coffee, rented freeze-frame on the table before me, I could look out over the red-tile rooftops of a little village called Sereniál, out over the sharp curve of Suzdal’s horizon, nearer trees already leaning away, rolling, grassy hills, dotted with grazing cattle, oddly twisted, sense of perspective failing. Half a nearby forest was sunk below the horizon like a fleet of faraway ships...