Dimly through the hull I could feel little jolts, like the slamming of tiny doors, then, through Violet’s imaginary windows, I could see flight-line mechanics scurry away, going down little rabbit holes in the planetary integument, getting out of the way.
Over the command circuit, Palafox’s voice: “OK, boys and girls. Listen up.”
I lay back on my couch while Violet sealed the connecting hatch. Yes. Crashfield fittings here and here. If and when. When and if. I remembered the Glow-Ice Worlds. Remembered Wernickë. And thought: When. That’s all. Just when.
Put my hands into side-saddle freeze-frames and brought my new world to life.
o0o
The little ships were everything we dreamed of, now, everything we lived for, Violet twisting and turning, keeping 331 in formation, living her role with the squadron, dodging imaginary debris, imaginary attackers’ weapons, while I dry fired my guns and launched imaginary missiles at imaginary foes.
Once, we accompanied a vic of mobile ASM launch platforms, headed out weeks to attack an imaginary habitat cluster, were suddenly, days from our goal, set upon by a flotilla of software-generated defenders whose only aim was to destroy the things coming to wreck their world, coming in from all angles, at speeds so high the interstellar dust was visibly eroding their hulls, leaving long contrails of sparkling plasma dissipating behind them.
And outgunning us ten to one.
People shouting over the intercom. Generated fear becoming real. Shouts of dismay, turning into rage at controls locked up and front-line, cutting edge Harbinger mk. VI turretfighters began drifting helplessly.
They lost every one of their ships in seventy-nine seconds of combat. But then they took out all three of the launchers and killed half the fighters as well, people pissing and moaning as their controls came back up and the simulated battle came to an end.
Where the hell, demanded Santry, aboard 976, are we going to run into an enemy who outguns us ten to fucking one? Hm? Tell me that?
Palafox’s face floating disembodied in my little room: “And you, you fucking idiot. You put that last shot of yours right through one of the goddam launch platforms!”
Oops.
And then, on we went, pretending to be a new squadron, unattacked, undestroyed, simulating our bombing run against a simulated group of helpless little worlds, ASM launchers sweeping in from the dead black sky, laying down fire against targets visible only in our freeze-frames... well. Just the way they’d be if this ever turned real.
If it ever did.
In my monitors, I watched simulated habitats explode, gouting nuclear fire. All of them were very old-fashioned habitats, inside-out worlds pretty much like Audumla had been.
Had been.
Is.
Not thinking much about Audumla and Ygg any more. My mother and her robot silvergirls. Rannvi and Lenahr. Ludmilla Nellisdottir... Orb letting me know her kids must be grown and gone, maybe even gone on to new Mothersbairn colonies, with children and grandchildren of their own. I had a brief memory of my father, resting quietly in his urn all these years.
Then the long trip back, all the way back to Saad al’Zuhr, Violet and I talking through the open hatch, whiling away the empty hours, me crawling through to be with her, the two of us packed together in the pilot’s nest, quiet together, looking out at the motionless stars, she crawling down to be with me, down in the gunner’s hole, where we had a little room to squirm.
We were down there one evening, evening as the clock flies, not saying anything, not doing anything, quiet together in our private womb, when Violet, with uncharacteristic shyness in her manner, reached up through the hatch and retrieved a stiff little brush, something from her kit bag, hesitantly handed it to me, then, with almost an air of embarrassment, turned her back.
Something here I don’t quite understand. Something... with meaning only to another optimod.
She waited a long time for this.
Not saying a word.
Just waiting.
I started brushing her long, lustrous fur, finding tangles, making them smooth, and heard her sigh, an oddly contented sound, not a human sound at all, felt her relax under the brush, under the gentle touch of my hands.
o0o
Graduation day was only a week off, marking the end of a period I knew we’d remember almost like a honeymoon. Whirlwind of training, punctuated by nights of... just us, that’s all. Nights and days of us, spaces in between filled with people we were beginning to think of as friends.
Curious friendships forming. People and optimods, robots and whatnot. Life here in this confined little world so different from what it’s like elsewhere. I could think back. Think back all those years and remember fucking an allomorph whore, allomorph really just one more sort of robot, helpless before human will.
Remembering, I tried to imagine myself wanting to marry one.
Sure as hell would’ve made marital gatesie a breeze, hm?
My pecker’s up, honey. Lie down over there. This’ll only take a minute.
Tried to superimpose that fantasy over some other life I never had, life with Ludmilla, plenty of gatesie, sure. Plenty of worshiping at the Goddess’s Altar.
Sitting in the messhall, Violet grabbed my chin with her soft velvet hand and turned my face so she could look into my eyes. Violet smiling a doggy smile as she said, “Where the fuck are you? You look like you’re a million AUs away.”
I shrugged, put my arm around her, and said, “I dunno. I get... a little lost sometimes. You know?”
Brief, somber look, that familiar headcock she used for a nod. “Sure.”
The flightcrew messhall was brimming with trainees just now, people so much like us they’d never think to question closeness between a human man and an optimod woman, people milling around, eating, drinking, making noise, whole front wall of the room taken up by a multilayer freeze-frame that could serve a hundred minds at once. Not quite that many people in here now.
People.
Orb knows they’re people.
I remember Violet and I, during our brief time on Telemachus Major, knew to avoid certain kinds of establishments. Remembered back further, back to Glow-Ice, to unpleasant looks we’d gotten one night in an optimod bar.
Remembered Violet putting her hand on my arm, restraining me, just weeks ago, when, when, in a tavern on TM, I’d turned to see just who might’ve whispered, “...takin’ his bitch for a walk. Hope she doesn’t squat on the carpet...”
Not worth it. Forget it. Let’s get out of here.
Glad to.
Forgotten. All forgotten now.
Santry, looking overdressed in Standard blue, plopped down opposite us, followed by Regis, waddling up with fists sprouting bouquets of bottled beer, brown bottles held by their long, thin necks.
I looked at the label as I popped the lid. “Where the hell is Mexico?” Thousands of AUs away, at least, if I didn’t know its name. Nowhere near the Centauri Jet, anyway.
Santry said, “Earth.”
I looked at the bottle again, then stuck the neck in my mouth and took a long pull, bittersweet stuff foaming in my throat as it went on down. “Hmh. Earth.” Beer’s free here, a perk of employment, but I couldn’t imagine...
Regis finished his own bottle in one long swallow, thumped it down on the table and burped. “Well. Not bad. I’ve had better.”
Santry said, “You know Standard owns Mexico?”
“No.” I tried to picture the map of Earth and discovered it was long gone. “Still don’t know where it is, either.”
Violet said, “Just south of California.”
“Oh.” I sat back and put my arm around Violet’s shoulders again, looking up at the free-frame, and remembered Porphyry’s diorama deck. Remembered those two servants; remembered the girl who could make her cunt drip on command. Couldn’t remember her name. Or if I’d even known it.
The freeze-frame suddenly clicked into hard focus, a hundred fuzzy layers falling together, all at once, people
all over the room suddenly seeming to sit forward, look up, beer forgotten, each other forgotten. Santry craned around in her seat, murmuring, “What th’ fuck...” and I felt Violet stiffen under my arm.
Political news, that’s all, but...
Scene from the Jet Althing, Finn mac Eye sitting on the daïs, Meyer Sonn-Atem standing just behind him, as the delegates voted, one by one, transmitting instructions from their home habitats. We surrender our sovereignty. We abrogate our treaties and contracts. We join together in forming a new nation, nation of the Centauri Jet. One people, who will deal with outsiders as a group, and...
Again and again and again, Mr. mac Eye, Mr. Sonn-Atem.
Heroes.
Of the people. For the people. By the people.
Freedom and dignity.
Bratska i swoboda.
All that rot that kills us dead.
Rot from the... popular will.
Violet said, “Oh, hell. I guess the shit and the fan are in sight of each other now.”
Eleven. The Nulliterrae Swarm
The Nulliterrae Swarm floats within the physical confines, if you can call them that, of the diffuse distal end of the Centauri Jet, just over two hundred AUs from Saad al’Zuhr, not quite so far from Telemachus Major in the deep black sky.
“Actually,” Violet said, as we watched the Swarm form up, from tiny freckles all but hidden among the dense background of Milky Way stars to a fistful of pale beads that drew apart as they grew larger, as the Swarm took on depth, “this area’s inside the Jet’s no-fly zone.”
As if they could enforce that.
Santry’s voice, chipper over the comlink, her face blinking on briefly in one of my freeze-frames: “And so appropriately named.”
Nulliterrae. Italian? No, Latin. Not so different from various Hispanic dialects I’d known. No man’s worlds? Something like that. I said, “Think the Jetties’ll come for ‘em?”
Regis Gosseyn’s voice said, “Hope so,” while his face came and went between me and my imaginary controls.
Violet muttered. “Idiot...” Just to me, to herself, comlink suppressed. Regis doesn’t mind being called names, but it’d make Santry mad.
I had a brief memory of glimpsing the two of them together in a little park somewhere near the training ground on Saad al’Zuhr, during the darktime, when Grounds Maintenance turned off the skyshine so the garden plants could have the nighttime they needed. Slim, classic human girl dwarfed by the raw, hairy bulk of Regis the Pseudo-Neanderthaler, the two of them with their faces pushed together, he with one paw groping between her legs.
Violet had giggled softly, nudged me in the ribs, then dragged me off to a private corner of the garden where we could bill and coo for ourselves alone.
All around us in the sky the planetesimal worlds of the Nulliterrae Swarm grew, first seeming huge, then smaller as they receded from one another, our little fleet, Squadron 33 Replacement Unit 5, bunched together, singling out one little white world, an angular bit that looked like it might be freshly broken quartz, maybe even ice.
Palafox: “Landing Stage 33. Welcome home, boys and girls.”
We spiraled down into a haze of white light like so many silent, deadly hornets returning to their hive.
o0o
Life, perhaps, is made up mainly of those moments from which our memories are made. The rest of it really happens, I guess, but it goes away, slinks on back to the gray mist of Uncreated Time, becomes unmemory, waits in the quiet darkness for you to join it.
Maybe that’s what the between times are like, after you die, before you’re born, waiting in a welter of lost memories, an undifferentiated smear of unmemorable events, while you wait for Orb to call you forth, extrude you back into the Universe of the Living.
And the moments that make memories once again.
So Violet and I carried our duffel bags down a long blue corridor, carpet and walls alike clad in Standard ARM blue, until we found the door with our names on it. Our names. Darius Murphy. Violet... just Violet. Our names. Serial numbers. Beyond the door, our room.
When I put out my hand, the door slid open and the room lights came on, dark plastic furniture visible within. Dressers, desks, two little beds neatly made up with coverlets of Standard ARM blue...
Why are we hesitating?
When I looked at Violet she was grinning, and had dropped her duffel on the hallway floor.
Right.
I dropped mine beside it, picked her up and carried her feather-light over the threshold, door sliding shut behind us. It was a while before we realized we’d left our luggage out in the hall.
o0o
Details. Details. You move into a new situation, you get to know the people, the places the things. In some matters, we were lucky. Usual practice in the Standard ARM Aerospace Guard is to keep the new chums together for a season or two, keep them under the wing of archangel Palafox until you see whether they work out or not.
If you’re smart, you poke around, see what’s what, get to know the seasoned fliers, see what you can learn from them, get to know the admins and dog-robbers, who’re the only people who can really get whatever it is you need at any given time. Most especially, get to know the mechanics.
Our unit’s maintenance chief was a very small, roly-poly woman with yellow-brown skin, slanty eyes, and black hair so tightly coiled it formed little island tufts all over her scalp. A roly-poly woman, name of Gordil, with incongruously thin arms who eyed me up and down, and said, “Hell, you Saggies are all alike. Every damn one of you wants special treatment...” She threw her arms up in mock alarm and, in a rather gruff voice, said, “My ship! My ship!”
Then she grinned as if she’d said something unusually clever, as if waiting for a reaction. Well, um... She said, “Course, if you got anything to trade...” Looking at me pointedly, an awfully familiar look, bringing back memories I thought were gone for good.
I did have a moment in which I tried picturing what she might look like under those baggy coveralls, but...
She laughed at me, and said, “Naah. That fuckin’ oppie you’re with’d take fuckin’ big bites outa my sorry fat ass...” Still, just talking to her was enough—she seemed to appreciate that I’d once been in training for a job like hers. And, who knows, maybe she secretly wanted to fly herself.
Mostly, in the days and weeks that followed, flying is what we did, going out on maneuvers just as we had back on Saad al’Zuhr, only now with the entire squadron all around us as we worked our way into the complex mesh of the command network, getting used to our... comrades in arms, I’d guess you say, learning our jobs better and better while the need of their doing grew stronger.
Out on maneuvers, back to base, then on out again.
And, of course, things back at base, back on our little Nulliterra worldlet, continued to evolve as well.
We were coming back from a pretend escort mission that had taken us days from the Swarm, skirting the edge of a space where Jet forces actually made a pretense of patrol, packet-destroyers they’d bought who knows where shadowing our operation at a distance. I was down in my module, reviewing my engineering checklists, when the hatch to the pilot’s nest opened.
I craned my head back, looking at Violet, upside-down in the hatch, and smiled. For some reason, she wasn’t smiling back, just looking down at me, face very serious, rather odd look in her eyes. “Something wrong?”
She said, “Well. I, uh...” Uncharacteristically shy. And not the same kind of shyness as when she first handed me her brush, first turned her back for currying. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you, Murph.”
Like we needed to make an appointment or something? I flipped over in the module’s cramped space so I could see her more normally. “What is it?” An uneasy crawling in my stomach. What’s going on that I should already have noticed? What’ve I done that I shouldn’t have? Orb knows, but never tells.
She said, “Well. Santry came to me just before we left. She, uh, she said she’d like us to swap
for a while.”
“Swap?”
“Swap you for Regis.”
“As flight crew? Why?”
That brought out a shadow of exasperated amusement, “Idiot. For a fuck!”
“Oh.”
And then I sat there, staring at Violet while I pictured Santry. Since the day we met her, she’d been notoriously careless about herself and I’d seen her buck naked more times than I could count, emerging from the mist of the shower room, seen dressing through the open door of her room.
And then I sat there imagining her in my bed, imagined her smooth, hairless human skin, sleek and slick against my own, very different from Violet’s silkily tickling fur. Like in the olden days, playing gatesie with real human girls, shallow human mouths working hard to do their job, wiry human pubic hair in your face, tits you could see as well as feel...
“Murph? I’ll do it if you want. I mean, it’ll be all right if... for a while...” The alarm on her face was almost comical, the agony in her eyes like an endearing fist, clutching me deep in the chest.
I grinned; put out my hand to touch her. “Hey. Let’s not accidentally talk ourselves into something neither of us wants, hm?”
o0o
Back in the Swarm, huddled in the darkness of our dorm room, squeezed together into one of the little beds, Violet and I lay, post-coital, quiet, curled up together, form matching form.
I had one hand on her breast, human shape beneath the fur, and could feel the beating of her heart. I imagined she could feel my heart, beating against her back.
What a strange interlude, as if it could go on forever...
I felt myself grow hazy, mind drifting far away, vaguely conscious of the way Violet’s heart slowed under my hand, as her breathing grew shallow.
As if it’s already gone on forever...
Sometimes, making love to my optimod girl, it seems like there’s been no other, just she and I, since the dawn of time.
No Audumla, with its Mothersbairn and gatesie girls.
No Reese.
No... I still shied away from those brief days at Wolf 359.
When We Were Real (Author's Preferred Edition) Page 22