Read When We Were Real (Author's Preferred Edition) for Free Online

passed by the parking lot, you could hear men laughing, men talking, oddly out of sync with each other, but making up a steady cadence nonetheless. And nowhere in all this, the rapid, high patter of talking women.
    Beyond the clustered flitters, the sounds became more and more subdued, until finally, once we were among the houses, it was almost as if we were back in the woods, hearing the shush of the wind, the deep, liquid gurgle of the river. One or two men on the street that we could see, walking along, almost in a hurry, not looking at each other, not looking at us, sort of behaving the way men do when they’re in a public toilet. You know.
    We picked a house, almost at random, maybe the same house we’d picked, almost at random, the last time we were here, months and months ago. New Year’s Eve, I think. As we came up the walk, the door opened and a man came out, face looking—I don’t know, exhausted maybe. Stopped short when he saw us, flicker of fear in his eyes, Do you know me ? Then, not recognizing us, grinning a nasty little furtive grin. He turned and spoke to the small thing in his shadow before hurrying off, brushing past us, hurrying on up the street and away.
    Where the man had been, a pretty young girl stood in the doorway, slim, top of her head not even reaching as high as my chin, long, tousled light brown hair falling down around her shoulders, face serene and... looking at us with her eyes of glass. She smiled a warm, sincere smile of welcome, and said, “Come in, friends. We’ve been waiting for you.”
    I could feel Styrbjörn tense up at the promise he heard in her voice. She turned away, and we followed her, through the black hole of the open door, on into the dimly-lit red room beyond. We dropped our gear in the corner nearest the door and waited.
    There. A row of them, sitting silently on a red-padded bench by the back wall, nine little girls dressed in clingy silk robes. Not so little of course. Tall. Slim. Featureless. Not so much featureless as... unformed. Not immature, no. Just... waiting.
    They call these things allomorphs. Daddy says they started out a couple of centuries ago as therapeutic tools. Tools to fix the damaged psyches of human men and women. Men and women who were... I don’t know. Not right somehow. Afraid of... each other, I guess. It must have seemed like a good idea at the time, but it’s too much work to fix yourself from the inside out like that. Easier just to submit to the needle, needle and knife, let them shoot you full of soul. Soul and well being.
    So the therapists gave up, Daddy says, threw all their allomorphs away, some of them just wandering off, so much abandoned machinery in the functional habitats of Piazzi, Kuiper and Oort. Some picked up for scrap, most... bought for their entertainment value. These here, they say, are part of a package deal the local Standard ARM management staff got when they first built Decantorium XVII.
    As if on cue, one of the little girls, the one nearest the rightward end of the bench, stood, stepping forward in a whirl of white robe, pirouetting before us, sort of... expanding. As she whirled, her black hair grew longer, flying up in a circle of sheen, disappearing briefly as she pulled out of her robe, white robe flying to one side, crumpling up by the far wall.
    There. There, in the Name of the Orb...
    They say these things can become anything. Anything you want. Anything you could possibly dream. Maybe anything anyone could possibly dream. Certainly it’d have to be that way, if they were once used to... heal those sick old men and women, men and women who might like... anything at all.
    This one, here and now, dancing in the half-darkness before us, grew sleek like a fishpond seal, hips rounding out as she danced, waist nipping in, large breasts with huge dark nipples bulking up on her chest, face almost hidden in masses of lustrous, suddenly curly black hair, hair almost hiding those famous eyes.
    Slick shine, as of