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

turned to look at me, focusing on my face somehow. “Do you like pretty things?”
    She glanced back at the butterflies, watched another one fly about for a while, following it with bits of crystalline glitter. Then she looked at me again, and said, “Who do you want me to be?”
    Who, rather than what. You read me well, little allomorph. “I don’t know.”
    She undid the tie of her robe and shrugged it off her shoulders, so that it fell in a pool around her slippered feet, stood still, watching me watch her. Maybe this is what they make for men who know nothing of themselves? That tender, innocent, barely-formed face. Those budding little breasts. Narrow hips barely flaring from a slim, flat-bellied waist.
    Featureless slit of a vulva, furred just enough to let me know her machinery understood I wasn’t here to rape a child.
    Nothing here of the Goddess, though. Nothing threatening at all.
    Behind her, a whole section of butterflies lifted off in unison, whirling off the ground, spiraling upward like autumn leaves in a sudden wind, and my allomorph turned away, murmuring softly, as if to herself, a gentle whisper of delight. Nothing threatening about the flight of yellow butterflies. About yellow leaves helpless before the wind.
    Nothing threatening in an allomorph’s private joy at a nature to which she does not belong.
    She turned toward me again, taking my two hands in hers, looking up into my face, standing close to me, so close my senses would fill with the pheromones she made just for me.
    All at once, all around us, the butterflies flew, for no reason we could know, for no reason that could matter, blizzarding into the sky. I looked deeply into her fathomless, forever-empty eyes of glass, and then, fragile insects swirling round us like a storm of buttercups shining in stemlight, imitation light of a sun that was to me only a dream, I laid her down in the cool green grass and did what a man will always do with a compliant man-made whore.
    o0o
    Home again, finished, I thought, with boyhood things. Oh, yes, I know I can go see the nice little allomorphs anytime I want, just like all those other men, but... whose dream is that? Not mine, certainly. A young man may have a vision of what his life will be like, or he may not. I didn’t, but hated to imagine myself married and dull, working, coming home, paying to see my children raised, sneaking away every now and then for a hopeless frolic with a thing.
    Better than boyhood things, of course.
    Keep telling yourself that.
    Better than the household servants, the... silvergirls. Silvergirls those almost silent, will-less, liquid metal humanoid things that serve in Mothersbairn households, humanoids on the feminine verge of androgyny, naked and sleek, nothing between there legs but a vaguely suggestive shaping of curves.
    You see them all your childhood, as they dress and bathe and feed you, play with them after a fashion as they play with you. When you grow just old enough, it doesn’t take a particularly clever boy to alter that play, discovering they’ll more or less... do what you tell them.
    Do what you say and not tell Mother.
    If you’re not clever enough, some other boy will snicker and tell you. You’ll be horrified, of course, but then you’ll start to think about it, lying alone in your bed at night and, sooner or later...
    I used to have a favorite silvergirl, one I came to regard as my personal toy, but, one day, Mother came to watch as the thing gave me my evening bath, got a stony look on her face, and told me I’d have to bathe myself after that, ordering the silvergirl away.
    Maybe I was eleven years old, by then.
    Just old enough, as they say.
    When I was home, showered and dressed again, I checked my mail and found a note from Mother on my freeze-frame interface. It told me to dress for dinner guests, specified my powder blue semiformal dinner jacket, white ruffled shirt and little blue bow tie. Dress, my boy, and be there on time. No