Acts of Conscience (15 page)

As I watched, the sky turned a burnished red-gold, Tau Ceti disappearing behind the sea, leaving, for a while, a band of pale green light shining over the horizon, then it got dark, the sky turning black, the stars coming out.

Maybe the most interesting sunset I ever saw, sun going so far south, so very slowly, before being extinguished by the edge of the world. I glanced into the library, exiting the language spool, going to the factoid elicitor. Orikhalkos, it told me, lies on the northwest-facing shore of a large peninsula, at approximately 54  south latitude.

The library whispered, Green Heaven is a literal translation of the Groentans word
Groentehemmel
. The word
groente
would be better translated into English as “greens,” as in “spinach and kale,” and is most usually seen in the word
groenteboer
, meaning “greengrocer.”

I pulled the barrette out of my hair and dropped it on the nightstand beside the lamp and a little box that appeared to be a vidicom transceiver.

So here I am lying here in the bed with a hard-on in my pants, nowhere to go and nothing to do, embedded in the land of my dreams. What was it the cabbie had called me?
Vrea malaka
, you fucking jerkoff...

Here I am on Salad Heaven, doubtless having my salad days.

After a while, I must have fallen asleep.

o0o

When the morning sunshine floods your eyes, it’s a new day and anything seems possible. I got up early, Tau Ceti in the far southeast, scraping along behind the low buildings of the inner city’s skyline, got myself washed and dressed and got going, down the elevator and out the door, concierge giving me an odd look as I crossed the lobby and went out the doors.

Walking along a deserted street under a vast, cloudless sky of turquoise tinted with pale gold. Not a soul out here. Soft breeze. A little cool. Greenies late risers are they, not starting the day until...

Library whispering inside my head, whispering in the spacesuit’s familiar voice now: It’s late spring in the southern hemisphere of Tau Ceti 2 just now. Green Heaven rotates on its axis in 150,120 seconds, compared to a standard terrestrial day of 86,400 seconds.

Some part of my brain, used to doing rudimentary calculations translating that to a more usable 41.7 hours...

Vague visual image forming in my imagination, the barrette reaching out for my visual cortex, near the limits of what it could do from its perch over my left temporal lobe. Planet here, sun there, axial tilt, Orikhalkos here, sunrise... So I’m doing the equivalent of walking down the street at three a.m. Typical.

By the time the sun was relatively high in the sky, maybe two thirds of the way to what the library pointed out was its forty degree zenith, the streets were full of Greenies, dark-haired men and women in rustic-looking costume, lots of blue denim and leather, babbling to each other in their ancient Greek, words and phrases snatched out of context by the translator and stuck into my head.

Going places. Doing things.

Why the hell do these people have so many dogs? They’re common enough on Mars and Luna, popular anyplace you can have a pet less tidy than a cat, but...

Standing at a street corner, waiting for the light to change, watching bolder souls make broken-field runs through traffic, dodging cars, automobile pilots making loud blatting noises with their signaling devices...

“...what the fuck is wrong with you, you fucking
putz
, get the fuck out of the fucking
street
...”

Library commenting quietly that Orikhalkoïné seemed to have adopted a certain pejorative, meaning
penis
, from the once widespread
Jüdische
dialect of Middle High German, possibly by way of the English that had once been the official language of the original PCI bases on Kalyx, still spoken by the Hinterling nomads of the...

Running man grabbing himself by the throat, holding his left elbow in his right hand, making a wigwag motion at the driver who cursed him, calling him a “pitiful little snakeling” as he ran... Filthy city, full of cars and trash, pedestrians not seeming to notice as they stepped around and over all the neat little piles of dogshit.

I found a place to have my lunch in a restaurant atop the highest building anywhere around, sitting alone at a table near a railing, barrette transferred to the back of my head so the translator could have a stab a reading the menu. I wouldn’t need to do that much longer; I was already starting to learn the Greek letters, re-learn most of them from childhood astronomy lessons, with new
romaïka
names, ahl-fah, beetah, ghummah, dheel-tah...

When they brought the lunch the library told me to order, it proved to be hollow disks of bread, stuffed with raw vegetables, some of it, bok choy and sweet red peppers, recognizable, other withered green things like nothing I’d ever seen before, drenched in a peppery white sauce that made me choke as I tried to swallow.

Christ. Tried to put the fire out with the alcoholic beverage I’d ordered, a soapy wine that tasted like it’d been mixed with some of the asphalt they used to pave the streets of Orikhalkos. Useless. Waiter looked at me like I was an idiot when I asked for water, finally brought me a glass of lukewarm tea, a fully saturated sugar solution apparently, which appeared to do the job.

Sitting alone then, almost alone in the restaurant, Greenie lunch hour long since ended, drinking my too-sweet tea and working on a flaky almond-flavored pastry, looking out at the still cloudless deep blue-green sky, sun slowly declining in the west as I dawdled, too slowly, the only natural days I’d ever gotten used to being the earthlike days of Mars.

Brilliant spark of light, pale behind the blue of the sky, but bright nonetheless, sliding rapidly along, west to east, on the northern horizon, far out over the sea...

Green Heaven’s inner moon,
Hope
, running the racetrack of its prograde equatorial orbit, some eighteen thousand kilometers out, circling the world three times in a “day,” best use the local word
iméra
, the way the Martians always said
sol
.

Background chatter from the library made me look toward the west, out over the ocean, spread out like a blanket of cold, dark steel from this height. A small, pale crescent, yellowish, pastel, hanging over the sea, far, far away. The outer moon
Wan
, said the library. Four million kilometers away, slightly larger than Mars, with a thin atmosphere all its own, all carbon dioxide and nitrogen, a few shallow seas, no life of its own, other than a bit of terragenic contamination.

In the early days, it was thought people would settle on Wan as well, but... what would the point have been?

I stood, putting my hands on the railing, looking out over the city, empty of... pretty much everything. To the east, where the sky was a deeper blue, between the city and those vast, faraway white mountains,
Thisbÿs Bergketen
, said the library, unasked, was a broad, almost featureless yellow-brown-gold landscape, flat, humped up here and there with low, rolling hills, an occasional metallic glint shimmering, there and gone again in the blink of an eye.

Koperveldt
, the Plains of Brass whose name alone had been sufficient to provoke my dreams, not so terribly long ago. What’s out there now? Anything at all from those dreams, or will it simply be more... A look down at the dirty city. More of this.

If I go out there, I risk having those dreams ground away to nothing. And dreams are all I have. All I’ve ever had.

o0o

I went back to my hotel room for a little while, late in the afternoon, sitting on the edge of my bed, watching the sky turn brassy as the sun went down, feeling useless, worthless, whatever. Feeling the way I’d felt for the past thousand years, it seemed, wishing for... something.

What
are
you wishing for, peckerhead? Just wishing for your apartment and job, your netvid and drink mixer and all those old, familiar comforts of home? Wishing, somehow, that you’d been given the grace to win a Garstang for yourself, all those years ago? Or... Well, there won’t be a Camilla Seldane out here in the colonies, but there might be...

I picked up the barrette and shoved it in my hair, heading for the door, maybe an idea in my head, maybe not, maybe nothing, maybe just more dreams, I... Whisper in my head, the voice of the suit, Wait. Gaetan. Image forming in the back of my head, faint and full of shadows. Ah, yes. The little dartgun I’d taken out of
Random Walk
’s small arms locker, almost without impulse, thrown in my suitcase before heading into town. This is Green Heaven. Green Heaven. World of all your dreams. Men are dangerous here. Men carry guns here...

Dangerous men. Women love dangerous men. Only dangerous men. Men who carry guns. Not little putzes who spend their lives playing with mechanical toys, I... The suit AI whispered, Please, Gaetan. Put the gun in your pocket. Very earnest, sincere, ethereal fingers reaching into my head, stirring thought into action. All right. Little thing hardly big enough to cover my palm, not even making a bulge in my jacket pocket as I went out the door.

o0o

Walking in the darkness, bright stars pocking the sky overhead, growing in number as I walked away from the bright heart of the big city, walking into a darker landscape of shadowy buildings, passing by dark doorways, the hollow entrances of forbidding alleyways, a landscape of nightmares, more than mere dreams.

Nobody here. An occasional black, irregular shadow, the outline of a human form, always fleeing. Fetid smells, sewer smells, fresh toilet smells from every beckoning alley. I imagined myself sliding along through the darkness, eyes wide, gun in hand like some adventure hero, some...
private eye
. What would I find?

Rotting garbage and dead cats, perhaps.

Who do I want to be, right now? Travis McGee, following the hot trail of fresh, steaming gold and impossible, honey-scented women? Wrong landscape. Somebody else belongs here. Some sullen Chandler hero, some broken-spirited Hammett man, functioning still because functionality is all he has left.

I turned down a street full of lights, lights and people, tall fellow on the corner, black, curly hair shining in the streetlight, as if freshly oiled, dark eyes on me, watching me pass on by. Hunger a soft twist in my stomach now.

A storefront that had once had windows, glass still in place, covered from the inside by what looked like big sheets of paper, heavy paper that might once have been white, was stained yellow-brown now by airborne dust, by the rays of Green Heaven’s golden sun. Something had been drawn on the paper, once upon a time, very well drawn, in fact, in delicate charcoal shadings. The image of a child’s doll, doll stripped naked. If you looked closely, you could see it had been a very detailed doll, a girl doll, with tiny nipples, a bellybutton, a little slit of baby vulva.

The eyes though. Just a doll. Obviously a doll, not a real child at all. Not even a fancy robot, the sort of thing a certain kind of man...

The door next to the window popped open, banging against the wall by the frame, disgorging a staggering man, a puff of odd-scented air. Peculiar smell, indefinable smell, so quickly come and gone I couldn’t even begin to sketch its... parameters. Just the sense that the hair on the back of my neck began to prickle.

The man reeled in the doorway, staggered down the steps, door closing itself behind him with a muted hiss. Stood there on the sidewalk, dark face upturned, eyes fixed on the sky. Heaved a heavy breath, sucking in the night air.

Rubbed a hand across the back of his neck, hand coming away shiny, wet with sweat. “Jesus!” Muttered, but quite loud enough. “Fucking
dollies
. My God...”

Glancing at me then, eyes rolling, as if terrified, then turning, walking swiftly away into the darkness at the end of the street, tall man on the corner watching him go, nodding slowly, seeming... Maybe that’s a smile on his lips. Maybe a sneer. Maybe something else.

I looked back at the drawing of the doll again, wondering what drama I might be missing, what glimpse into other men’s dirty dreams, then walked on, compelled by a simpler hunger.

o0o

Barroom, neon sign with what the library told me was a rather archaic form of the Greek word for a male cat, underneath it a little placard,
All Girl Staff, Private Counseling Available
. But there was a distinct
food
smell coming from somewhere inside, so I went in, took a booth by the rear wall, waited for the all-girls to come.

Comfortable place of warm, deep, secretive shadows, a place you could huddle if you needed to huddle, by yourself, reduced to nothing more than eyes. Round tables packing the floor between the wall booths and the low stage, a bar with stools and rail off to one side, men lining the bar, bearded bartender tapping beer, so much for the all-girl staff, I...

Young woman in tight shorts and halter top, cloth so tight you could make out the location of her nipples, maybe imagine the architecture of her vulva... eyes on me. Waiting. She said, “Want a menu?”

Defining moment: “Sure.”

She put it in front of me, a flat, laminated sheet with a couple of dozen items, went away without a backward glance.

Plenty of people in here, men at the bar, one woman sitting on a corner stool, sloppy looking woman with big tits inside a loose blouse, sitting turned away from the bar, away from the men, looking toward the stage. People sitting around the tables, clustered toward the stage, mostly men, some women. Shadows of people visible in the other booths.

The waitress passed by again, let me order a nameless beer and something the translator insisted would be a chef salad.

This is a familiar place, warmth flooding out of the walls, getting inside me somehow. Not a clean place. Not well lighted. Familiar. I feel like I know these people.

Skinny man, young, sweaty-looking, hair plastered flat on his scalp, came out on the stage and went to a drum kit set up in the corner, sat down behind it, started fiddling around, people at stageside tables turning so they could face the lights, men at the bar turning around, leaning their elbows on the formica, grinning, muttering to one another.