When We Were Real (Author's Preferred Edition) by William Barton

Author:William Barton [William Barton]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: William Barton Enterprises
Published: 2011-09-12T14:00:00+00:00

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.

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