When We Were Real (Author's Preferred Edition)

by William Barton

  Violet said, “Murph.”

  I knew what I was going to see, even before I looked up.

  Audumla was hanging motionless between us and the backdrop of stars. Dark, motionless, looking like some discarded oxygen cylinder, cast off from the ruin of an exploded starship. One of the lightpanels between the habitats was blown out, huge triangular shards clinging to its frame, though the other one we could see seemed intact.

  No light from within.

  Night time?

  Surely that’s all it is.

  The stemshine’s been put out so the people and plants and animals and things can have a good rest.

  Violet, voice quiet, said, “Maybe we should just leave. Go on to Earth.”

  Go on to Earth, where we’d be part of the new universe abuilding, the new future for humanity, for mankind and all its children. Children that now included everything we, in our arrogance, in our arrogant innocence, had made.

  I said, “No. See if you can dock to the axial port. There are... standard manual emergency procedures we can follow.”

  o0o

  From the hub, Audumla was an empty black cave, Violet and I standing side by side in a vacuole made from the faint glow of our skinshields, standing at the edge of the abyss. For just a moment, it was as if the universe itself had disappeared, leaving just the two of us, all the matter still in existence, as a seed for the new cycle of being to come.

  I felt Violet put her hand in mine, appreciated her silence.

  There it is. There’s my whole world, darkness giving way before my senses. Now I can make out the dim shadow of the dead stemshine, stretching away to infinity. Below, I can make out the faint mass of the south endcap mountains, blackness blotting out the lesser darkness beyond.

  Directly below where we stood was a lightless habitat panel, but to either side, and directly above, beyond the long, narrow bulk of the stemshine... that’s it. Stars. Only stars. Pallid little dots barely able to pass through murky... this one over here. Brighter. Cleaner. That’s the one from which the integument is gone.

  We could jump that way, jump right out into the space between the stars.

  As I watched, the dim leading edge of Ygg appeared, seeming to light the landscape around us with a pale imitation of sunlight.

  Violet said, “You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to. We can just go on back to the ship and.”

  I shook my head. “No. If I don’t see, I’ll always wonder.”

  She said, “I... guess I understand.”

  And maybe she did. Who knows?

  On our way to the elevator portal, which turned out to be dead as the rest of Audumla, we stumbled over a body lying quietly in the middle of the walkway, not decayed at all, of course, only withered from its long exposure to vacuum.

  Natura abhoret a vacuo.

  Not far from the body, which appeared to be that of a man, it was a little hard to tell, were others, grouped together, all sprawled on their faces in various grotesque postures. “As if,” Violet said, “they were killed as they ran.”

  Ran. Running from the elevator toward the south axial docking port, where there may or may not have been a waiting ship. I suppose, if I wanted to, I could look up the records for the Battle of Ygg. Seized corporate archives. The internal histories of Ultima Thule. Even records from my own HDL. My own. Mine. Maybe they’d even mention somewhere the unfortunate destruction of the Audumla habitat.

  The Mother’s Children of Audumla are gone.

  I can’t quite make myself understand that.

  Violet said, “It must have been a hell of a sight. Big explosion outside, not far from the broken lightpanel, maybe a starship getting it. The blast would have come in and flattened everything, then, the backdraft—” She stopped suddenly, looking at me. “Sorry.”

  I patted her on the arm. “The exciting parts were always so tempting, weren’t they?”

  Tempting us to the excitement of participation. Exciting to be the destroyer of whole worlds. And all those pitiful billions of ants who lived down there? What difference does it make?

  They were only ants.

  When we got to the elevator stage, we found three elevator cars lifted off their tracks and flung up against the back wall of the platform, a fourth car hanging at an odd angle from its mount maybe a dozen ems below the platform rim. There were more bodies here, scattered like so many life-size black dolls, no longer worth our attention.

  The other six tracks were empty.

  Violet tried to talk me into going back to the ship one last time, then, when I was adamant, put her arm around my shoulders. Just one small, quiet squeeze, then we went on down the cliff face using our skinshield impellers, dropping silently downward, our globe of blue pastel light making a moving disk on the endcap mountain wall, as though we were being followed by a wan spotlight.

  On stage.

  Always on stage.

  Performing for the invisible masses.

  My mother’s house looked like a giant fist had punched it in, collapsed to flinders and splinters and shards of walls, very little left of its interior volume. There was a corpse in the front yard, obviously human, but when I turned the thing over, light and stiff and waterless, the distorted face was unrecognizable, no one, I suppose, I’d ever known. A neighbor perhaps.

  The face had an expression of sorts, recognizable through all the leathery wrinkles, white teeth glimmering past downturned lips.

  Dismay.

  We walked around the side and climbed over the rubble to where my room had been, to the balcony where I used to do my homework while looking out over the interior of Audumla, looking down on the bayou country, thinking about Himerans and allomorph whores when I should have been thinking about my future life, soon to come. It’d fallen an em or two, and the room behind, my old room, was collapsed.

  Among the debris, we could pick out distinct artifacts, homely things. A man’s faux-leather cordovan shoe. An athletic sock. Something that looked like it might once have been a portable freeze-frame.

  This might be my brother’s stuff. Lenahr always seemed like the sort of boy who’d stay home with his mother forever.

  Maybe if I dug through the rubble long enough, I’d find them now, huddled together in the atrium perhaps, cowering in fear, just as they died.

  Violet touched my arm and, when I turned, looked into my eyes. “I keep expecting you to cry,” she said, “but you don’t.”

  No. I said, “It was a long time ago.”

  She looked away, out into the darkness. “I keep trying to imagine how I’d feel if it was me, but...”

  Right. Violet, optimod, daughter of the vat.

  We left the balcony, going around back, walking through the rubble-strewn yard. The grass was still neatly in place, all dead of course, like a dry carpet under our feet. Here and there, the antler-like remains of rosebushes poked up, still surrounded by their neat circles of bare earth.

  All the care that went into this place.

  All the imitation love.

  To my surprise, the storeroom outbuilding was still standing, its door, gaping open, still attached to the hinges. Last stop, I thought, stepping inside.

  How odd.

  Some fluke of physics had kept the blast and reflux from reaching in here. Everything was still in its place, mostly potting tools, bags of soil, the organic fertilizers my mother lavished on her gardens. And there, over in the corner, just as I’d left it, after my last visit, was my father’s abandoned skiff.

  Huddled beneath it, propped up in the room’s corner, arms wrapped around her knees, head down, was one of my mother’s silvergirl slaves. Stone cold.

  Violet kneeled beside the thing, making a quick inspection, then she said, “We really should take this back to the ship. If we can power her up again...”

  Right. The newly promulgated code of ethics regarding the disposition of artificial life forms... I said, “There would’ve been a pretty bad radiation pulse in here. I’m sure her programming�
��s long erased.”

  Violet nodded slowly, slowly coming to her feet, still looking down at the silvergirl. A trillion dead, maybe? What difference can one more possibly make?

  She said, “Can we go back to the ship now?”

  As we came back out through the storeroom’s door, I looked up at the sky, toward the blown-out lightpanel, filled now with round Ygg’s red light. “No reason,” I said, “why we couldn’t fly the ship around and land it down on the bottom land of the bayou country.”

  Violet looked at me for a long time. Then she said, “Maybe I do understand.”

  o0o

  Seen from above, lit by the waste light of an interstellar drive running at dead idle, the bayou country looked like nothing at all, like a dead lawn, flakes and stalks and swatches of dry forest, the sinuous rilles of empty riverbeds curling between the flat black knobs of the denuded hills... nothingness. Just bits, reflecting back the guttering blue light of our exhaust, catching it for a moment, then gone.

  It seemed almost as though we were drifting, or hanging motionless in space while the dark inner surface of Audumla turned underneath us. Going nowhere. Nowhere at all, but... there was silent Violet purposefully piloting, driving our ship toward the destination I’d specified, slowing, slowing... there.

  The Timeliner Firehall still stood, though the old, abandoned apartment blocks beyond were leveled, nothing left of them but a field of stony rubble, no pile more than a few ems high. The Firehall had been made of solid granite, shipped in from elsewhere at some expense, at the whim of some religious dictate I couldn’t remember.

  Authentic, my father called it.

  Just as if it were real.

  Just as if we were real.

  Real man. Real boy.

  When Violet landed us in the parking lot, drivelight flickering and swirling, lighting up the facade for just a moment before winking out, I imagined I could hear the crunch of gravel under our landing skids. There weren’t any cars here today. Maybe there had been when... I imagined them blowing away on quick winds of plasma fire, or being sucked back out through the broken lightpanel, out into the black of space, where they’d presently join Ygg’s orbiting ring of debris.

  We got out of the ship, walking down its shallow ramp and across the parking lot, surrounded by skinshield glow, like two sprites dancing in the corner of someone else’s eye, like two young ghosts, showing up for their job of house-haunting.

  Somehow, it was darker inside, starlight snuffed by the walls, alcoves and altars highlit by shieldlight, casting stark, impenetrable shadows beyond. I wanted to show things to Violet, tell her all about my boyhood dreams, illustrate the things I’d already told her during long nights between the stars, idle moments between terrifying battles.

  Useless.

  All of it useless.

  I led her quickly down the long corridor, just as quickly found the niche.

  My father’s urn was on its side, lid missing, empty.

  I picked it up in one glowing hand and peered down inside, looking at the shiny bottom, then put it back on its base in the niche and stood for a moment, staring, not knowing what to do.

  There’s dust all over the place in here.

  Some of it must be him.

  Violet said, “When we get to Earth, there are some places I want to go too.”

  I turned and held her in my arms for just a minute, or maybe she held me. Then we turned and walked away, walked away just as quickly as we’d come.

  I turned back just once, looking over my shoulder just before we went through the crooked remains of the empty doorframe, looking back into the black, empty shadows of the Firehall, wondering what Orb himself might have made of it all.

  o0o

  Back aboard our deadly little ship, warship drifting over what little remained of the Audumlan landscape once again, I told Violet I wanted to make just one more stop, or maybe two. Then we can be on our way, on our way to Earth and the beginning of all those dreams we’ve waited so long to dream.

  Violet took her eyes off the landscape, off the controls, knowing the ship could look after itself, as needed. The expression on her familiar face was serious, but... something of a smile there as well, faint, hardly visible at all.

  “Take as long as you need,” she said. “Close all the doors. Lock them. Walk away when you’re ready.”

  Somewhere, some time, she’d have doors that needed closing too. Then I’ll be waiting, standing by to give whatever help I can.

  That’s all you ever ask of a friend, isn’t it?

  All you can ever ask of anyone.

  I pulled out the freeze-frame, switched it over to radar light, and watched the underlying structure of the inside-out landscape map itself in front of me. Familiar hills. Rivers and valleys... I remembered motoring our little skiff up a river just like that one, my father, back toward me, head bent over his toolkit, working steadily away between the thwarts, whispering softly to himself, seldom speaking to me.

  A composite memory, perhaps, standing in for the real events of my childhood.

  Those years were so few in comparison to the ones I’ve had since, but they stand out in stark relief, fantastically detailed, as if they are the only real things that ever happened, as if everything since then has come out of a dream.

  A dream that I’ll soon forget.

  Sometimes you meet people who say that, for them, it’s just the other way round. I can’t imagine what that would be like. I stole a quick glance at Violet, bent over her controls, looking from instrument to instrument and back again. Can’t imagine what her sense of having lived is like either.

  “There,” I said, marking a certain hill, half surrounded by the curve of a small, empty river, marking it with a brief pip of green light in the global display.

  Violet brought the ship in low over the tall, bare sticks that were all that was left of the trees, brought it in toward the crest of the hill almost as if she were gliding in air, setting it down not far from what appeared to be a low pile of rubbish, a scattering of debris.

  For just a moment, I thought I was going to be too afraid to go out, but... You’re here to close doors, I told myself. So close them and move on.

  There was a soft whir as Violet extruded the ship’s ramp, blue light of the skinshields spilling softly as the life support system put our environmental air back in storage. The world grew still then, no more sounds.

  I got out of my seat, went down the ramp and stood in the darkness outside. There was just enough light from the stars, combined with the localized, weaker light from my shield, I could make out the shadows of my surroundings. The remains of the old “house,” made so lovingly from boxes and scraps, packing crates, whatever else they could find.

  Here were the trees, bare sticks standing up, many more lying flat on the ground, all singed, short of the leaves. Here was the long, once muddy slope of hill, leading down to a bare sand beach, leading down to the hollow curve of what had once been a river.

  I imagined myself waiting on the shore, waiting for him to come, listening for the soft whir of the outboard motor.

  No more.

  Gone into the shadows, never to return.

  Is that all I have left?

  Shadows?

  There were shadows on the ground around my feet, bits and pieces of things, unrecognizable. I turned one over with the softly glowing toe of my boot and saw that it was part of a small robot. A kit. This is one of Mrs. Trinket’s kits.

  I wonder where she is now? If I search the rubble will I find her there, the battered, empty shell of a refrigerator, nothing left inside but fragments of gears and dry lengths of old plastic tubing? Worse still, I might find her intact, lying there, mind erased, fluids evaporated, no expression at all on her little doll face.

  Violet had come out of the ship as well, was standing by my side, looking down into the darkness, silent, pensive. I wonder what she makes of all this nonsense?

  She said, “There’s something moving over the
re.” A slight gesture, secretive. “Over there, by the edge of the forest.”

  I looked, careless, and saw quick movement, the movement of a greater shadow, occluding the lesser darkness beyond.

  The shadow stood taller and began lurching unsteadily toward us. If there’d been air to carry the sound, I imagine I would have heard sound effects from some romance horror fantasy, something from the corroded depths of the net. The unsteady thump of the crippled monster’s heavy boot.

  It came into the circle of light cast by our skinshields, a tall, bent cylinder with two short legs positioned at two points of an equilateral tripod, walking with the aid of its one long arm. We waited.

  Finally, a soft radio voice was in our ears: “Yes. Dr. Darrayush. Thank God you’ve come at last.”

  God.

  I said, “Hello, Beebee. I’m, uh... glad... are there...” Words failing, as usual.

  He staggered forward like a cripple on a crutch, coming close to me, and said, “Only a few, Darrayush. Only a very few indeed.” Something like the tinge of pride in that radio voice. “I was an outside welder, you see. My makers thought I might need to survive an industrial accident of... considerable magnitude.”

  Violet said, “Radiation hardened.”

  Beebee looked at her. “Yes, ma’m. Ah, I see you’re a very fine optimod indeed. They used to make optimods here.”

  They.

  He said, “But it was a long time ago.”

  “Trinket?”

  He stood absolutely still. Then, “Nothing much that wasn’t meant for hull work survived, Dr. Darrayush. We found a couple of baby incubators in cold storage, buried under the wreck of an old warehouse upcountry. Just unused leftovers from the good old days.”

  I remembered Mrs. Trinket’s kit, what was her name? Maxine. That’s it. I remember her watching Mrs. Trinket giving birth, big eyed, to that baby welder, so long ago. She must have lived long enough to have kits of her own, for those kits to have kits, but...

  Beebee said, “We’ve managed to put up a pressurized habitat down by what’s left of the industrial monoblock, so when they get old enough...”

  Beebee and the other hull machines can breed more hull machines, which will also be able to live without warmth, without air. And, of course, every once in a while, a new baby incubator will be born.