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

partner, despite our... “personal problem.” All the while, the instructor kept glancing at me with some odd shadow in his eyes, even after Zamba stalked away, furious, not looking back.
    Some of the others seemed to avoid me as well.
    That was the way it seemed to go for me during those few short weeks. Unable to make anything like a friend among the men whose lives I now shared, though I’d had no shortage of friends, back in Audumla, the memory of whom made me ache inside and... maybe regret what I’d done.
    On the other hand, the women seemed to like me well enough, some of them bothering to sneak to my bed in the night, sneaking of course not unnoticed by the other men, making them scowl at me all the more.
    And a few of the men were homosexuals, who seemed to like coming round to my bunk in the evenings for a chat. Nothing more than that.
    Basic training was soon over, and I was glad for that brevity.
    o0o
    On a fine morning under a brilliant, cloudless blue sky, emanation from the eutropic shield prickling antiseptic UV on the exposed skin of my face, I found myself walking across the blond plastic landing slab of Standard ARM Cosmodrome 227TM, order packet in my breast pocket, exhilarated and more than a little scared.
    There before me, all around me, dwarfing the crowds of little men and little women, all of us dressed in that same powder blue, were rows and columns of spacecraft, like so many burnished bugs of chrome steel and brilliant brass, eyes of crystal and bright red glass, squatting on their landing legs, all turrets and thruster nozzles, field modulus antennae, exhaust manifolds... snappy little fighters, with their guns and beamer grids; attack vehicles covered with missile racks and rotary cannon; bulbous buddypack tankers; boxy mechanized assault force troop transports...
    Somewhere back here among the hexes—hectares they told us to say in military jargon school—somewhere among all the hexes of spaceships great and small, I’d find the DSRV squadron, somewhere among those, Deep Space Rescue Vehicle Athena 7 .
    There. Athena squatted on eight widespread legs, low and flat, a glitter of fresh-looking silver and gold, longer than she was wide, short and squat, with a sphere-shaped universal docking adaptor on one end, service pod with folded arms and grapples and torches on the other, medevac bay in the middle. Up on top, I could see the pilot’s turret, down on the bottom, the engineering pod, my own bailiwick from now until... whenever.
    “This your ship, pal?”
    Soft, male voice, the voice of a mature man, a kind man, speaking the English they told us we had to use when on duty.
    “Um. Yeah.” I walked closer to the thing standing, no, more like sitting, between two of Athena ’s landing legs, at the foot of the embarkation ladder.
    It said, “You must be Darius Murphy, then.”
    Interesting that it pronounced my name right. Dar-eye-us. “Yeah.”
    Hard to describe what I was talking to, no real sense of gestalt. A seven foot long antique beer barrel lying on its side, with tarnished bronze hoops, staves made of old oak, golden brown, streaked with black. Six fat, scaly green tortoise legs, barely able to hold it off the pavement. Complex clusters of arms at the barrel ends, sensors, manipulators, things I’d never seen before. No face. No eyes, no nose, no mouth.
    It extended a skinny arm from one end, the end nearest me, arm with a hand like some kind of anorexic metal bug, and said, “I’m the ship’s cyberdoc. Name’s Dûmnahn.”
    I hesitated, boggling a bit, then took the warm hand in my own, and said, “Uh. Pleased to meet you. Darius Murphy, flight engineer.”
    It said, “I read your file, Murph. They say you’re real good with robots.”
    “Oh. Are you a robot?”
    Dûmnahn laughed, a really nice, friendly laugh, ironic and self-deprecating, that made me feel unexpectedly warm inside. “Less of a robot than the things you’re used to, I guess. I’m an old-style