Acts of Conscience (17 page)

Didn’t take long to find a hospital, and I’d enjoyed the excitement when I dumped my cargo out on the check-in desk, receptionist leaping to his feet, rearing back and screaming,
What the fuck is
that
thing
?

Patiently explaining to him that it was a sentient nonhuman being, denizen of the planet
Salieri
, 82 Eridani 3, you see, a species with whom humanity had
formal
relations, you see, and hadn’t they better get busy seeing if it was still alive?

One eyestalk bearing a featureless sky blue ping-pong ball of an eye, presumably looking at me, claws making a feeble
chitterclack
, third hand, hand made of boneless tentacles reaching out to make a juicy slapping noise on the desktop.

Thanks, pal?

Who knows.

Maybe warning me that
Gort
would soon be on the march, that I’d better be about my Klaatu-barada-niktoing, if I knew what was good for me.

Seven: Next day, on my way

Next day, on my way. On my way to something the travel agent had called the
Vrouwvenarts Bandwinkel
, Greek woman looking up at me oddly when I framed my question, gesturing at her crude network display terminal, snapping
romaïka
that the translation algorithm claimed meant something like, “How the hell should
I
know what it means?”

Library AI nodes arguing with each other then,
Groentans
not a
formal
language, you see, full of unrecorded slang, and no it can’t
possibly
be a gynecological supplies store... then how
do
you say “dude ranch” in Orikhalkoïné?

But it made me feel warm inside somehow, hearing them bicker like that. Warm just the way the bus made me feel when I saw it. Warm the way I felt just now, riding along a dusty road on the bus’s open upper deck, open to the wind, warm wind in my hair under a clear, empty,
immense
blue sky, Tau Ceti hanging, like some huge, golden, impossibly bright Christmas ornament, low on the northern horizon as we drove more or less southwards across the Plains of Brass, low skyline of the city sinking away behind us, disappearing below the horizon as if swallowed up by the ground.

In the distance, in the direction of our travel, there were low, white mountains, more like rolling hills, barely clearing the tan-gold-gray grassiness covering this almost flat world.
Koudloft
then, still very far away, surmounted by pale, silvery, sunlit ghost clouds. Whisper in my head, soft, familiar voice,
kowt-lufft
, meaning “cold attic,” the high, glaciated plateau country of approximately two million square kilometers extent surrounding Green Heaven’s south pole, separating the
Koperveldt
plains from the much larger
Opveldt
country of the eastern hemisphere...

Bus rocking gently under me as I lay back, closed my eyes, let the warm, slanting rays of an already familiar sun warm my face, soft, indefinite smells of Brass in my nostrils, fighting to overcome the burnt organics of the engine’s exhaust.

Soft growl of the engine in my ears, mechanical marvel. If you’d asked me, a year ago, if I thought there might be a functioning gas turbine drive anywhere in the known universe, I might have said no. Or, perhaps, guessed that some museum or another might possess one.

Now this. Were gas turbine drives still in use four centuries ago, when humans first set foot on Tau Ceti 2? I don’t think so. Reinventing the wheel, as the saying goes, because... No. Reinventing something else. Gas turbine growling as it drove big ducted fans, puffing up the air cushion’s rubbery skirt, bus sweeping along a dusty
Koperveldt
trail, hardly track enough to be called a road, blowing up dust, old dirt, dry grass, a faint odor of what must almost certainly be dried herbivore dung. “Look, Joop! There. Look at the sons of bitches.”

Two tall, ruddy cheeked, heavyset men with hay-colored hair sharing the bench seat directly in front of me. Men dressed in rustic garb, what must be a working man’s costume, blue serge pants, heavy brown boots coming just above the ankle, brown suede vests over what appeared to be canvas shirts... Sitting up now, bolt upright, looking into the distance with their identical cornflower eyes, shading their eyes against the sun, pointing.

I looked, looked that way, keeping my head lolled back against the seat’s headrest, rolling my head to the side, as if drowsy. Low hills that way, superimposed against remote, craggy mountains, the same mountains I’d stared at from my hotel room in Orikhalkos.

Something loping along there, something white or perhaps pale gray, almost invisible against the snowy slopes of the mountains. Can’t quite make them out. Like shaggy shetland ponies, perhaps? Maybe a pack of enormous dogs or... useless. No way to get at my luggage, stored below, get out those expensive antique binoculars I’d bought in the safari shop next to the travel agency.

Joop, speaking in his thick, spitty-sounding
Groentans
dialect, said, “
Ja
, Gerrit. Fucking white wolfen...” Squinting at them, shaking his head.

Distant memory, ancient memory, standing in the zoo, looking at an alien animal, silent animal, motionless but for soft breathing, animal staring back at me with unreadable alien eyes, eyes like bits of mottled marble... What are you doing just now, Rua Mater? Has your luck changed?

Gerrit laughed and said, “Hell, if we had some decent rifles along we could pick them off from here.”

Silence, the three of us watching the wolfen run. Decent rifles. I wonder if the wolfen know?

Joop said, “
De smartinaass blank-wolfens in beslag gedoopt en in de oven gebakken
.”

Another laugh: “
Ja, en toost met gesmolten kaas
!”

Sure thing Gerrit. They’d be real good with toast and melted cheese, wouldn’t they... I looked back at the horizon, but the white wolfen were gone. Maybe they’d been listening too.

o0o

Our destination lay in a broad, flat, vaguely wok-shaped valley, hardly more than a dent in the endless, rippling Plains of Brass, an unplanned-looking hodge-podge of low buildings, extended log cabins under dry thatch roofing beside a small, silver-watered lake, lake itself hardly more than a pond. The bus parked, settling with a breathy wheeze of dying compressors in a billow of pale dust beside an unfinished wooden sign, gray lumber into which had been burned the legend
Vrouwvenarts Bandwinkel, Hansel en Gretel Blondinkruis, Eigenaars
.

Listening to the AIs chatter, I had to wonder at the translation depth setting. Our proprietors, Hansel and Gretel, with the flavor of blondness about them? Hell, if I wondered about it hard enough, some subroutine or another would pop up and offer me a translation of
du Cheyne
, no doubt.

Only a few passengers got off the bus, stolid pilot retrieving our luggage, making a row of sturdy bundles on the ground by the sign, a handful of Greek-speakers from Orikhalkos, atwitter with excitement, gawking at the little lake, at the rambling, rustic buildings; a swarthy, pretty young couple, small, thin folk, heads close together, whispering to one another in a nasal romance language the library identified as French. Joop and Gerrit stayed aboard, then the bus pilot went up, door chuffing shut behind him. A soft, grinding whine as the turbines wound up, air cushion inflating, blowing dust and loose grass over us, then the bus was on its way, sliding up the hill, back up to the road on the
Koperveldt
and gone.

The woman had been there by the sign all along I suppose, tall, slim, blond as her name, with bright blue eyes and an improbably friendly smile, white teeth exposed, a little rim of pink gum, arms folded across her chest, beginning, “Welcome, friends, to
Blondinkruis Boerderij
...”

Not looking at her face, not looking at the muscular forearms exposed by sleeves rolled up to the elbow, crossed over obvious breasts. Looking at the front of her blue jeans, where men’s clothing was pouched to cup a man’s genitals, here folded and empty, startlingly suggestive.

Beside me, the two dark French people were whispering, mostly the man, translator making a double echo as it revealed their words, a reprise of Gretel Blondinkruis’ speech, translator pointing out his mistakes, translating
eigenaar
not as
propriétaire
, which, the precise words of the library informed me, had come to mean “a well-behaved little girl” in
les Iles des Français
, but as
propraetrix
. A female lieutenant-general? Or merely an assistant governess?

Frenchman, I note, addressing Frenchwoman by a word that had once meant sister. Does it still? Eyes distracted from Gretel’s presumably blond crotch to dark-haired girl’s slim, equally-suggestive hips.

Gretel Blondinkruis finished her speech and turned, leading us up the flagstone walkway and through the main entrance of her inn. All I could see, of course, walking in a shadow of my own making, was the moving, muscular swell of her buttocks.

o0o

In the morning, Tau Ceti was an enormous red-orange ball rising through a layer of low-hanging mist.
Juvrouw
Blondinkruis and her staff took the guests out for their first ride.
Juvrouw
rather than
vrouw
, an unmarried woman, you see. Hadn’t taken long for that to come out, as we’d gathered at the long table in a room with a big, crackling firehearth, shadows leaping from the flames.

And where is
mijnheer
Blondinkruis, this Hansel fellow?

Ah, my brother has taken an
omganger
hunting party up into the mountains and won’t be back from almost two weeks. Sorry you’ll have missed him.

I couldn’t take my eyes off her all during dinner, eating steadily, unaware of what the hell I was putting in my mouth, watching her eat and talk, knowing from her occasional amused glance that she was aware of my rapt attention.

Christ. I must have been staring like a
zombi
, other guests giving me troubled, sidelong looks as fair Gretel laughed and told them all about this word
omganger
, twinkle in her eyes as she explained that in old Groentans,
omgang
usually referred to
trade
,
business
, what have you,
Omgangers
, you see, being the traders and businessmen
Groenteboers
had to deal with, and, generally-speaking, all the folk who’d come to inhabit the Seven Cities of the Compact in centuries past.

Traders, then. Except
omgang
had also come to refer, in a pleasant, slangy sort of way, to the act of sexual intercourse. General laughter, men and women tittering. Calling us
fuckers
? How droll, Miss Blondinkruis!

Frenchwoman’s dark eyes so very serious, little Évie asking, through handsome little Claude, translator having figured out
les Français
said brother and sister when they meant husband and wife, “Even
us
?”

Even you
Frankenvolk
—over time, an Omganger was everyone not of the
Groenteboer
kind. Then, glittering eyes on me. Everyone of you here’s a Fucker except
mijnheer
du Cheyne.

Tart little pang, down low in my belly, wondering if she knew how that would sound to
me
. A little mean streak in you, then, my fair lady?

Mr. du Cheyne, you see, is what we call a
vreemdeling
.

Translator whispering, It only means foreigner, but...

Yes?

Vreemd
: Strange. Odd. Queer.

Paranoic imaginings creating threads between cultures that cannot possibly exist. I found voice enough to ask, “And what would you call a sentient nonhuman being? A Salieran Kapellmeister, say?”

Startled astonishment in her eyes. “That’s very good, Mr. du Cheyne. Perhaps you will speak in Greek, so the others may understand?”

I hadn’t even been aware the translator made me speak in Groentans.

She said, “We say
smartinaass
, Mr. du Cheyne.”

o0o

Lunch, Tau Ceti as high as it would ever get in that clear blue-green sky, trail leading us now into scrubby woodland country a dozen kilometers from the
boerderij
, Miss Blondinkruis, sliding a slim rifle from her saddle holster, swinging it quickly, hardly seeming to aim, zzzip-
pop
! Spindly gray-green-brown thing the size of big dog falling from one of the low, shrub-like trees, struggling briefly on the ground, making of soft, agonized sort of a coo, then still.

Gretel said, “We call this thing a
hoekker
. They’re pretty good eating.”

Thing on the ground like a fat, hairy monkey, with wide open, brilliant green eyes staring at us, panicky
oh-no
! expression frozen on its dead, humanoid face, translator whispering in my head that
hoekker
meant scavenger, but was also cognate with a common Medieval English expression for whore.

It sizzled over the open fire she built, hair burning away in a puff of sweet-smelling blue smoke, scent of roasted peanuts filling the air, liquid fat popping out on its now naked flesh like so much sweat, face retaining its comically terrified look until the green eyes burst and ran like clarified butter.

o0o

We rode on through the afternoon, making camp on toward dusk, setting up our little tents in a copse of trees around some kind of natural spring, clear, slightly sulfur-smelling water welling up from a little pile of rocks, forming a little clear pool where it evidently soaked back into the ground, back down to the water table, since there was no evidence of a stream flowing away.

Gretel and her assistant, called DenArrie I think, pale skinned, more or less bald, who’d been in the background all day, went out together, came back a while later with a dead brown hexapod thing not much smaller than a grown man, something they called a
fokkbok
, butchered it in front of us, throwing the entrails back into the woods a ways, cut it up, cooked it over the open fire, served us steaks that tasted rather too much like chocolate.