When We Were Real (Author's Preferred Edition) (25 page)

One by one, ‘til they got to me.

The guy in the room, fiddling intently with a freeze-frame embedded in the top of his desk, dressed in a variant of the powder-blue Standard active duty uniform, though without any badges of rank or insignia, motioned me to a chair.

Finally, after I’d been sitting, watching him fiddle for about fifteen minutes, he said, “All right, I guess that’s it.”

Great. Now what?

He sat back, looking at me expressionlessly. “Well. You know why you’re here, don’t you, Murphy?”

I crossed my legs and said, “Since you’re a personnel auditor, I assume I’m in trouble over what happened out on Wernickë.”

He smiled. “Not exactly.”

“Exactly what then?”

“Mobilitzyn Associates went bankrupt partly as a result of your actions. Standard ARM picked up all their Sirian properties for a song, including some extremely valuable mineral rights involving the Wernickë infrastar and associated bodies.”

I sat and waited.

“On the other hand, Standard ARM can’t be seen as encouraging independent action against the interests of other corporate entities. These are... not the best of times for us to be seen in an unflattering light.”

“So?”

He said, “Well, if you read your contract, you’ll find that the insurance policies covering you as a Standard ARM retainee have a restitution rider.” He poked inside the freeze-frame again. “Historically, of course, those riders have never been activated. But these are... difficult times.”

“So what’re you saying... restitution. I mean...”

He smiled. “No way anyone could pay back the amount of the judgment against Standard, of course, not to mention the cost of your freeze-down and transport. And, of course, we had to pay more for the Sirian properties that we might have had there been no... questionable involvements.”

“Of course.”

He shrugged. “So. You go get yourself a little apartment and we’ll come up with a modest lifestyle budget for you, Mr. Murphy. Then the rest of your reserve pay will be docked as restitution.”

Um. “For how long?”

He smiled. “Forever, I guess.”

I imagined myself stuck in some slummy section of Telemachus Major for... How long
is
forever? I said, “So what if I just quit? Go work for someone else?”

He said, “Then we’ll send you a bill for the full amount, Mr. Murphy. You don’t want to know how much.”

Nor, I guess, was I supposed to imagine how or from whom they might collect.

Then he said, “Of course, you
could
re-up, Mr. Murphy. Active agents of Standard ARM are not subject to the restitution clauses of the reservist insurance policies, even on an
ex post facto
basis. And there are
lots
more openings these days, Mr. Murphy.” A very broad smile. “There’s a great deal of work to be done.”

These days
... I kept trying to remind myself just how long I’d been gone, how long I’d been asleep. “So you’re saying if I go back on active duty, my restitution is...”

“Suspended. For so long as you
are
on active duty.”

“And... if I went back on reserve status later on? Maybe retired some day?”

Still smiling, he shook his head.

I sat back in my chair and said, “Oh.” And thought for just a second about the pension fund contribution every active duty Standard ARM employee must make, five percent of every duty pay cycle.

“Look at it this way,” he said. “At least you’ll have something to do.”

o0o

I didn’t go back to the resthome that day, though I suppose they’d’ve let me hang around. No reason to go there. No friends. No possessions. It’s an odd way to feel, almost like feeling nothing at all, my head not really spinning, not really empty as I wandered away from Standard HQ in a business district of Telemachus Major whose name I hadn’t bothered to look up.

Sky just as blue overhead, striated with those same remote, diaphanous clouds, though the green forest moon was elsewhere I suppose, somewhere below the horizon. Tall buildings, in much better shape, architecturally more profound than those of the Blue Hole, but...

I stopped on the sidewalk in front of a gizmo store, same faceless crowd sliding around me, not noticing me at all it seemed, and stood looking in through the window at a display of brand new freeze-frames. The one nearest the window had its isogloss tuned to an unnatural height, so passers by could look through into wonderland and see what was what. Maybe they have a lot of walk-in business, businessfolk who just can’t wait to pick up the new model freeze-frame so they can use this pointless feature or that one...

There was a random trackslider going, threading its way through the data intelligently, picking up nodes the latest demographic surveys indicated would catch and hold the interest of any random citizen who...

The election results from Tant’Athool, one of the more populous bodies deep inside the Centauri Jet, tall fat man with a flat, pasty-white face, wearing a woolen cap and a bizarrely plain military-style uniform, waving his hands overhead.

When I pressed my hands and face close to the glass, I was close enough to the field surface I could catch the sound of his words, speaking in some fluid language that had a lot of words in common with the various dialects of Spanish I knew, but not enough for me to catch their drift.

Go inside, get close enough so the translator can reach inside your head.

I stayed pasted to the glass instead, watching the trackslider do its job, wondering if I was close enough to influence its choices. Well. More politics. Another world, another politician giving a speech, waving his arms in victory, barking out his triumph. Other men on the platform with him, arms folded behind their backs, faces impassive, eyes gleaming.

I recognized Meyer Sonn-Atem first, then realized who the speaker was, and wondered just when and how Finn mac Eye had managed to get himself out of stasis-prison.

After a while, I got tired of watching the slider blink through various politicians, politics of the Centauri Jet a long-dead issue for me, as dead as anything I could imagine. I walked away, walked on down the street to a tram station where I waited patiently for a train, heading for the other side of the world.

Maybe I’ll go on back to the Blue Hole. Maybe I’ll find that sex-for-hire store I passed by, go on in, pick out one of those fine, wet, athletic-looking women, pay my fee and take it all out on...

Take it out on what? Or who?

Well.

A man would understand.

Any man.

Any male.

I got on the next tram instead, which turned out to be headed for the seashore. There was a fine vista, as we passed from pole to pole, hanging more than a kem above the varied skylines of Telemachus Major, mountains and forests here and there, some faraway, others embedded in unending town.

Once, we passed over the middle of an immense green park that was hazed with a thin layer of pale blue smoke. Looking straight down, I could make out huge crowds of milling people, thousands, maybe millions of dots, like little black ants.

Flash. Flash. Twinkles of firelight from the edges of the crowd. Men firing guns? Police? No way to know from all the way up here. The twinkling, dots of red going on and off, seemed to give definition to the swarms of milling antmen.

In the seat behind me, a man riding with a woman, both of them dressed in beachwear, carrying armloads of towels and umbrellas, a hamper that smelled like fresh food of some kind, very spicy, with a strong odor of grease, whispered, “Look. Thulian rioters.”

The woman craned her neck to see, and said, “Bastards. Why the hell can’t they stay back in the Jet and leave us the hell alone? We’ve got work to do.”

Work to do.

At the beach, where the sourceless sunshine was brighter than ever, the sky clear blue, sea reflecting it like flat, waveless, tideless blue steel, I stood on the platform for a while, watching the man and woman walk down across white sand to the edge of the sea, disappearing into a mass of a hundred thousand other people, every one of them just the same as his neighbor. And when the next tram came I got on it, heading right on back to the business center and Standard ARM HQ.

You damned well
knew
this could happen, Darius Murphy. People that get in a fix like this are called 16-tonners by their mates. Like it was a joke. Like it was their own fault.

So why the hell don’t you
care
?

Maybe because it doesn’t make any difference at all.

I found the aerospace service guild hall hard beside the Standard ARM Human Resources departmental office tower, and was walking across the a broad, black marble floor thronged with employees, both active and reserve, headed for the Assignments Bureau, when a hand tapped me on the shoulder.

I turned and beheld a tall, slim female optimod, fox-like woman covered with long, glossy, well-brushed lavender fur.

She stared at me for a long moment, foxy eyes wide, almost frightened looking, then she said, “Don’t you remember me, Murph?” Voice unnerved, as if fearing that I might not.

All I could do was stand, speechless, mouth hanging open, until she laughed a wonderful laugh, threw her arms around me and hugged me like a long-lost friend.

Life holds miracles. It really does.

Standing there in the middle of a crowded concourse with my arms around Violet, re-emerged from the substance of Uncreated Time, dragged bodily from beneath the pall of Orb’s long shadow, I wondered who to thank for my fortune, if fortune it was.

No one.

No one at all.

Finally, finding words: “I thought you were dead.”

Violet held my face between her hands, just the way she used to, eyes softening fast as they looked into mine. “Dead...” A wan, familiar smile. Familiar despite the passage of years. “Well, I went the rest of the war without a tail, carried around a set of scars instead of belly fur, but...”

“I saw you,” I said. “Saw you dead. Looked for you later.”

Deepening shadow in her eyes. A slow nod. “I didn’t lose any important parts. Wasn’t burned. Didn’t take much to patch me up.”

Still, that memory, Violet hanging torn and lifeless in her pilot’s nest, while Dûmnahn, sundered into thousands by now, danced in the flames, while I crawled broken across the deck.

She said, “They let me look in on you just once. I talked a tech into opening your capsule for me and saw...” Her eyes closed for just a moment. “They took you away, sent you back home, and...” A little shrug. Life goes on.

And why couldn’t I find you, Miss Violet?

Demure look, not quite brooding.

Because I’m... not a...

Not a person. Right. If I’d been looking for a particular monkey wrench, I wouldn’t have found
its
personnel file either.

Stupid.

My expression made her laugh.

Her laugh made me smile.

A little while later and we’d walked, holding hands, out of the concourse, down some long street in that same nameless, lifeless business district, Violet leading me to a favorite restaurant, high on the side of an ivory tower, building reaching high above the Telemachan cityscape, reaching almost to the clouds, so high the eutropic sky itself seemed flat, a flat surface not so far overhead.

We took a table near the railing, placed our orders, and I looked away from her, frightened now, so uncertain I felt weak, looking out over the spires of the city, farther ones tilting subtly, then dramatically away, as they marched over the near horizon. Look at those mountains. From here, you can see the dark undersides of the white clouds that shroud their peaks.

And the sea. The surface of the sea looks round.

Softly, Violet said, “Murph?”

Some part of me didn’t want to look. So much safer just to keep my eyes out on the world beyond the railing. So much easier to hold myself close inside, to...

I felt her hand, gentle on mine, and looked, despite myself.

There was absolute terror in her eyes.

Just holding my hand and looking at me, so afraid.

Tension inside my chest. Like something straining in there, threatening to explode.

She said, “Murphy, I...”

Look at her. You’ve got to speak. Say something, before... The words popped out, not even close to the words I was trying to plan: “I never stopped missing you, Violet.”

Her hand tightened on mine for a moment, making me afraid for just a second... she looked away, letting her head fall, gazing down at the table, exhaled a long breath, and when she looked up at me again, whatever was in her had dissolved, dissolved utterly, eyes beginning to shine.

I’d slept for a hundred years.

Violet had... worked for that same hundred years.

A hundred years of no tomorrows.

Now this.

o0o

The beach at sunset, if sunset’s the word to use.

No sun here on Telemachus Major, but the light goes dim, fading to black overhead, colors banding outward in subtle concentric rings, as though there were a nearby G-class star just gone down below every horizon.

When the dimming’s about halfway done, you can see that famous flash of green out over the sea, no matter what direction you look. You can even run backwards up the dune face and prolong the effect, just as if this were a real world.

Neat trick.

I wonder why they bothered.

I found myself running with Violet, following her along the sunset sand, while soft breakers rolled in with a gentle crush and hiss, water fizzing like seltzer as it slid up the beach.

You could stand still with the water quieting around your ankles, look down at your feet as the water retreated back out to sea, and watch the mole crabs emerge from the sand like so many bubbles, like so much turbulence.

Standing beside me, Violet said, “The first time I saw that, I couldn’t believe it was animals. Silty sand, I thought. Like dust in the water.” She laughed. “Then I thought about sitting naked in that same sand, about these things finding their way into various...” She laughed again.

Gentle, self-deprecating laughter. If the fur were swept away, would I see her blush?