Acts of Conscience (27 page)

An image of my own. Image of the dying womfrog falling down a long tunnel of light, falling into a mist of light in which womfrog-shaped shadows moved, the waiting spirits of those who’d gone on before. The library AI whispered, Like all Cetian land-living forms, the womfrogs are oviparous. In consequence, it seems psychologically unlikely that a womfrog’s death-dream would take that form.

So. The walls of the life-shell burst open and the light of heaven floods in, welcoming the womfrog to rebirth? I shot him in the
brain
, for Christ’s sake!

I tugged on the arms of my camp chair until the fasteners let go, backrest sliding into its semi-reclined position, letting me look up at the sky. Lots of stars out tonight, better than before because I’d had the foresight to put out the camper’s cabin lighting. With the fire gone down to orange embers, I imagined I was seeing as many stars as you could see from the surface of a planet with the unaided human eye.

I glanced over at the Kapellmeister. It was sitting on a big rock nearby, legs collapsed and pulled underneath, arms tucked in, which made it look all the more like an enormous black bean. But all seven eyestalks were extended. Extended toward the sky.

I said, “You have to wonder what’s really out there.” Out there, beyond humanity’s little pale. Out there, where the starfish-warship people must be waiting for us, even now.

The Kapellmeister said, “Wondering must be commonplace among star-faring folk.”

Supposedly, the Kapellmeisters of Salieri, though they’d gone to space, out into their own star system in search of needed resources to support their industrial civilization, had otherwise stayed home. “Do you never wonder?”

Silence. Then it said, “Personally? Perhaps. But I was never a tabula-rasa-minded infant, as you were.”

The library AI whispered, It has been speculated by some terrestrial zoopsychologists that the Kapellmeisters are imbued with knowledge and sentience at birth, via autologous nerve induction from their parents, at a special hatching ceremony.

I started to think about that, but the Kapellmeister said, “Gaetan, there is a great deal of electrical activity going on in my translator pod just now. Are your artificial personalities attempting to query the on-board language databases?”

Are you?

The translator AI whispered, Yes. Linguistic unspooling could allow us to surmise a great deal about Salieran culture.

“I’m afraid so.”

“Please ask them to stop.”

I said, “All right. Sorry, Kapellmeister.”

Silence. Then it said, “Please don’t call me that, Gaetan. The notion of possessing a name is... offensive to me.”

“Sure. Sorry.”

Silence.

Finally, I sat back in the chair and resumed looking at the sky, trying to pick out the stars of inhabited worlds. A good many of them were below the horizon, but many weren’t. This one here, that one there...
Snow
? Groombridge 1618’s too dim to see from here, isn’t it?

The spacesuit whispered, According to the navigation subsystem, it is well below the local horizon in any case.

Great. After a while, I said, “I’d like to know what’s out there anyway.”

The Kapellmeister said, “With the coming of faster-than-light travel and the possession of a private starship, it seems likely you’ll find out.”

A felt a warm flush of pleasure. Will I? Why the hell else am I
here
? I said, “I’ve been thinking about that. Thinking about maybe going on to Snow when I get the chance, and take a look at all those famous ruins. I wish the hell we knew where they came from.”

Silence.

Then the Kapellmeister said, “When news of the existence of these ruins was reported on Salieri, some authorities had difficulty accepting the authenticity of the find, given their apparent age of four hundred million years.”

“I hadn’t heard that anyone had successfully dated the ruins on Snow. I mean, that place is a
real
deep-freeze...” It was a large ice-moon, close to Titan-class, orbiting a remote gas giant of a small, cool star.

“Perhaps the news isn’t widely discussed on human worlds. Or perhaps no one’s bothered to tell human authorities. History is long, and you’ve only been here a short while.”

I opened my mouth to speak, but stopped. Hadn’t bothered to tell us? I sat back, looking up at the sky. Look here. You’re talking to this thing as if it were a person, which it’s not. There’s a personality, but... how much of that’s just an artifact of the translation algorithm?

The library AI whispered, There appears to be an artificial intelligence of nonhuman manufacture in the backpack. Without knowledge of the Salieran language system, we have no way of interpolating data.

Sure. But stay out of its business. I meant to ask a few more questions, but, after a while, I apparently fell asleep.

o0o

When I awoke the next morning, stiff and a little cold from sleeping in the chair, Tau Ceti just starting to flood the sky with orange and gold, I was alone, the Kapellmeister missing from his rock, though Graysplotch was still standing where I’d seen him last, motionless but for a faint swaying, eyes shut, apparently still asleep.

Maybe not. I could call up an image of the Kapellmeister on the horse’s back last night, after it’d crawled down from taking off the feedbag, taking just a moment to touch Graysplotch between the shoulderblades with its third hand. After that, the horse hadn’t moved again. If I were a horse, that’d piss me off.

I decided to go for a nice morning walk, climb up this tall hill over here and watch the rest of sunrise. Interesting how I’ve gotten used to these short nights and long, long days. I wonder what it’d be like on Green Heaven in the winter, when things would be just the reverse?

There was a cool breeze at the summit, wind coming out of the south almost cold, not quite enough to raise goosebumps on my arms. We’ve been headed southward, headed up into the foothills of the Koudloft, visible as always, low, white, misty mountains on the horizon. I...

Movement down below, in the open, grassy defile beyond my hill. I suddenly crouched, flinching at the unexpected appearance of... people? Crouched behind some low yellow brush, staring. Little white people, people dressed up in white fur, covered head to toe...

I stood again, got up on a boulder and shaded my eyes with one palm, trying to see. OK. Not people at all. Dollies, walking along single file, apparently unaware of my presence. I...

Something else. Walking up in the woods beyond the defile, a flash of white.
Wolfen
? Before I could get a good look, it seemed to notice me, freeze for a moment, then melt away. Down in the valley, the dollies kept walking along, unconcerned.

How do they survive, oblivious like that? If I had a gun, I could pick them right off, back to front. As for the wolfen... I stood rooted, waiting to see them rush out, pounce on the dollies, kill them and eat them, but...

Nothing.

Nothing but me standing out in the wind, remembering the dollie dancers of Orikhalkos.

Eleven: We set out under the rising sun

We set out under the rising sun, Tau Ceti’s yellow-white ball seeming to grow smaller as it rose, sky losing its brassy color, wispy clouds on the horizon gradually melting away. At first, I tried driving along, following the Kapellmeister’s horse, fighting the tedium, trying to tell myself it was like being at work, but...

Right.
Real
work’s not boring. Only those nasty little makework jobs, where you stand someplace conspicuous, trying to look...
serviceable
. Finally, I got out and walked, letting the spaceship navigation system drive the camper, knowing it could memorize whatever it saw of the trail through my eyes, transmitted through the barrette. With the transponder nearby, the system was getting enough bandwidth it could cover my entire neurostructure from its perch over my left ear... I could put the God damned thing in my pocket if I wanted, or lodge it up my ass. Still, I’d gotten used to wearing it in my hair.

“Is this a womfrog trail?”

The Kapellmeister didn’t answer immediately, riding on Graysplotch, who seemed restored to his natural horse behavior. I wondered what it felt like to the horse, being... linked to the Salieran through the powers of those wet-looking tentacles, even now splayed on its back. “Once, I think it must have been, though there are too few of them now to keep it so well maintained.”

It was shaping up into a beautiful day, blue-green sky taking on an enameled look, trees rustling softly in a gentle breeze, almost masking the distant shush of the camper’s electric turbine. “People? Is it maintained by staff from the Takkor Boerderij?”

“Possibly. I doubt it. More likely this track is maintained by the wolfen for their own purposes.”

Their own purposes. That slight shock again, the realization that the wolfen were not as they’d been portrayed in all those netvid shows.

The Kapellmeister said, “It’s possible this is a dollie-track, though this close to an active Groenteboer estate, that would be dangerous to the point of foolhardiness.”

Dollie-track.

The Kapellmeister said, “The wolfen aren’t stupid, of course, especially these white wolfen. They’ve been quite decimated by human activity on the Koperveldt the last few centuries. Still, their need to participate in the natural ecology is quite strong; possibly too strong to overcome.”

I walked on, silent, thinking about the wolfen and their possible relationship with the dollies, thinking about questions I might want to ask. All right. An intelligent predator might want to begin something like animal husbandry. And you
did
see that line of dollies walking along this morning, wolfen apparently watching from the woods... Something about another netvid show. Anthropology. Humans of the Upper Paleolithic kept horses, kept them penned up to the point where the horses would go nuts, would lift themselves off the ground by biting down on the corral rails. I’ve got the memory all mixed up with some other story, about how the Aurignacian hunters came to Europe just long enough the wipe out the Neanderthal, then headed on east across Beringia to become the first Amerinds. Something about a valley of horses. Yes. So did dear little Ayla ride her horses, girlfantasy of almighty powerful meat surging between her legs? Heh. Most likely, all she did was eat the poor bastards. Horsemeat stew. Yum.

We went up a low rise and suddenly burst out of the forest, pausing on the rim of a broad, treeless, caldera-like valley, an open, grassy bowl with forest visible all around the rim. Down in the bottom, among scattered copses of smaller trees, some of them no more than large bushes, there was a little stream, beside it a group of large white tents and a vehicle pretty much like my camper, now sighing to a stop behind us.

Bubble cabin in front, median power bay, antennae just the same. The popup back was missing, replaced by an open cargo box with a corrugated bed. I’d seen things like this before, mostly for use on the unprotected surface of worlds like Luna and Mars. Pickup truck, I think, is the common term.

The Kapellmeister said, “I think you’ll like these people, Gaetan. let’s go on down.”

People, I thought. It never occurred to me to give the term such a wide definition, but... We started down the hill, and things began coming out of the tents.

I remembered Rua Mater’s reaction when she’d turned and unexpectedly beheld those Arousian tourists at the Washington Zoo, big, burnished stickbugs looking like something out of just about every alien-monsters-are-upon-us movie ever made. Especially the bit with the faceted eyes. Makes you realize the term “bug-eyed monster” doesn’t refer to exophthalmia.

As we came to a stop in front of them, camper wheezing to a halt, settling in the tall yellow grass, Kapellmeister hopping off its horse and standing beside me, the Arousians fanned out in front of their tents, almost as if guarding their equipment. Some sort of... tension in the air here, as if... Odd. If any sentient extraterrestrial species is... used to us, it’s this one.

The Kapellmeister’s translator pod made a single, faint
greekee
, and one of the Arousians stepped forward, seeming to skirt round some imaginary line defining my personal space, going on the other side of the Salieran, as if its tiny, black hassock of a body could somehow...

Christ. This thing is scared to death of me.

The Kapellmeister reached out with its third arm and wrapped its tentacles around the lower reaches of one of the Arousian’s forelegs. Pretty tableau then, Arousian suddenly motionless, head cocked just so, eyes seeming to peer at me, eyes like glittering bits of ice, expressionless, emotionless, as empty as so much glass, and yet...

The Kapellmeister’s translator pod said, “Mr. du Cheyne, this is my friend, Rustmold-on-Pale-Snow.”

The Arousian clattered its limbs together, a bizarre parody, as of some craggy noncom in one of those old British Raj dramas that were so popular in the twenty-fourth century, as if its name might be
Sarn’t-Major, Sah!
, but its translator said, “Rustmold-on-Pale-Snow, line of the White-Crystal-Star Foragers, under the sponsorship of Jimmy MacCray and the engineering staff at Research Base Four-alpha, MEI-at-SD3.”

Absurdly, I found myself reaching out, as if to shake hands with the thing, as if... it reached out and took my hand in a cluster of little claws and sticklike fingers on the end of one of its... appendages, chinitous skin cool to the touch, just a hair above air temperature. I said, “Uh. Pleased to, uh...” Tongue-tied before a thing.

The other Arousians started coming forward, doing things like little curtsies, limbs clattering, introducing themselves with complex, nonsensical names, every one of which seemed to have a human sponsor embedded in it. Other data bubbling up, useless bits of memory: You know, of course, that the human population of Sigma Draconis is in the neighborhood of seventy-five million, something like eight times the native population, employees of Mace Electrodynamics, mostly living on Arous’s airless moon and in the system’s dense asteroid belt, where...