Acts of Conscience (50 page)

o0o

I awoke to pale darkness, face bathed in a hot sweat, lying in my bed aboard
Random Walk
, heart pounding in my chest. Diffuse shadows here and there, cast by the angles of the furniture in the dim radiance of the wall panels. No more ghosts. No one here but me.

I’m used to being alone. More used to it than I ever realized. Still, I wish there were someone here now. Even a dollie to comfort me. Even that.

Afterechoes of our grim conversation, back in the ruins of what the Kapellmeister told us had once been a StruldBug military nest, nest most likely destroyed by covert action in the days right before the war. Or perhaps a nest of survivors, beings who were somehow missed, just as Salieri was somehow missed, taken out later on by some wandering, vengeful ship, some lone Adversary scout perhaps...

Plenty of evidence, the Kapellmeister had said, that there
were
survivors, though we never found anyone. Not that we looked for long.

Images from my dream, magic weapons reaching out to infinity, snuffing out bits of the universe, incidental explosions no more than a tiny side effect, emblematic of the real destruction. Martínez puzzling over it, wondering if the old missing matter question, long ago solved, he thought, had anything to do with...

Dreamtime more revealing. Pockets of nothing engulfing lifeforms as far as the StruldBugs and their Adversaries could reach, carrying them off to... somewhere else.

Destruction, the library had whispered. Complete destruction. Correct, the Kapellmeister had said.

And what will you do now?

Will you destroy the teleport bomb?

Will you go home to Salieri and say it is no more?

The Kapellmeister had said, No. Where there’s one, there will be many. Best we face this now.

Kapellmeisters chittering and snapping at each other, scissor-speech untranslated, coming to no useful conclusion, nothing they could... say.

Me? A brief, cold wondering, a terrible wish that there was something... anything I could do. Save humanity? No. Humanity doesn’t deserve to be saved, myself least of all.

Innocent bystanders.

So many innocent bystanders...

I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to will sleep, but the images from the dream wouldn’t fade. Finally, I got up, got dressed, went out into the hall and up to the control room, thinking I’d sit in the pilot’s chair and look out over the lovely landscapes of Snow and brood about... nothing. Brood about nothing.

From its place in flight engineer’s chair, the Kapellmeister turned blue eyes my way, and said, “I am not surprised to see you, Gaetan.”

I plunked down in the pilot’s seat,
my
seat, God damn it, looking out at spacecraft, at domes and hills, faraway mountains and flat orange Six in the starless black sky. Almost enough to make me forget, it’s so beautiful. Why isn’t beauty
enough
? No answer. I said, “I forget whether you guys sleep or not.”

The Kapellmeister said, “If we did, I would be unable.”

I turned to stare at it, wishing I was able to read more from it than I could. Not wishing for a human face, just for... something like a friend. “
Are
we so similar, you and I?”

Silence.

Then it said, “It would seem so.”

“You and I? Not just our two species.”

Silence. Then, “Our similarities as individuals transcend the evolutionary gulf that lies between us. At times, in your company, though we can hardly communicate at all, I feel less... alone.”

I felt a little squirm of embarrassment, a desire to turn away. Like having some comrade suddenly declare his undying love or something. Some terrible playground
faux pas
. Shit. All this and I can’t escape my own idiocy? I said, “I... guess I understand.”

Silence.

Then it said, “Gaetan, what should I do?”

Christ. I said, “You’re asking the wrong guy. I’ve never been able to do... whatever the hell the right thing is. Find yourself a hero. Ask him.”

“Do you know any heroes?”

“No.”

More silence, then, “If it were up to you, what would you... want?”

Me? Personally? What would I do with the teleport bomb? Hell, shove it up my own ass and pull the trigger? I watched the Kapellmeister’s eyes float expectantly, waiting for me to speak, and wondered what it’d make of a statement like that? Nothing, probably. Maybe just play it safe, tell the truth, tell it that I’d never known what I wanted, didn’t have any ideas now. Except... you
do
know, don’t you Gaetan?

I said, “I always wanted a fair shake for myself, back when I thought I was... innocent. If there are innocent people in the world, beings in the universe, that’s all I’d want for them.”

“Whom?”

“I don’t know. Wolfen. Dollies. Arousians. Guys living in cardboard boxes because some people think all the things they can steal actually belong to them.”

Silence. Then it said, “Your answer is larger than my question, Gaetan.”

No shit. I said, “Everything would have to... change.”

The Kapellmeister said, “Why do you think you don’t have the courage to be an agent of change?”

I felt a slight pang of resentment at this... thing, menacing me and all my kind with incomprehensible destruction. Who are you to be calling me a coward? I said, “Courage is for people who think they’ve got something to lose.”

The Kapellmeister said, “Perhaps you’ve got more than you realize, Gaetan du Cheyne.”

More what? More courage, or merely more to lose?

Why don’t I know?

Twenty: A day and a night

A day and a night, then Green Heaven hung in space before us once again, a majestic, frosted blue jewel. Vast, indigo oceans. The antarctic landmass, looking so small, with its pale tan deserts, dark green jungles, shining, metallic plains, bare-sloped mountains. Koudloft, glittering brilliant white in the summer sun.

I can imagine myself down there even now, standing on the brow of some forlorn hill, warm zephyr carrying the sweet scent of life, Tau Ceti floating low in the sky like the eye of some vast, blind god. If there’s poetry anywhere, it’s the poetry of nature.

I looked over at the Kapellmeister. It sat silent, legs curled under, seven eyes apparently focused on the rapidly swelling world. I had a spare, stark realization that now, whatever we did, whatever happened, the consequences, for me, were immaterial. Let them destroy the human race, all the races. I’ll survive because this one will protect me.

Comforting? No. Because it doesn’t matter, and neither do I.

The Kapellmeister said, “Sometimes, I have an urge to take one of the old ships and run away, flee into the cosmos, see all the worlds, and never again deal with anything but beauty.”

I said, “I wonder how long it’d take to tire of splendor.”

Silence from the Kapellmeister, then, “Not long, perhaps.”

When death is inevitable, you don’t need a reason to die, and therefore, no reason to live. Time passes and, in the end, you are consumed. Life makes dollies of us all. As we bit into the air, pink plasma flaring outside, I said, “If you had a reason to, would you live forever?”

The Kapellmeister seemed fascinated by the way the landscape below grew and flattened, mountains suddenly humping up, sky overhead changing from black to indigo to turquoise blue. It said, “There is no forever, Gaetan.”

No, I suppose not.

The Koudloft was sweeping by below us now, barren white hills catching the shadow of the ship, reflecting the pastel light of its drive energies, mirroring the color of the sky. Suddenly, the hills came to an end. We crossed a short stretch of bare tundra, a little belt of dull, gray-green taiga, then the ship flared, hovering over the edge of the Koperveldt, and sank to the ground, blue light swirling briefly around us.

Contact, whispered the navigation subsystem. Drive suspend.

Gravity’s vector suddenly changed, metadynamic forces releasing me, Green Heaven’s mass seizing all my atoms at once. I stood, stretched, looking out the window at familiar territory, and said, “I feel like I’ve made a decision.” Unusual feeling, in a life where all my decisions were made for me, by other people, or simply by default. The Kapellmeister hopped to the floor. “We both have,” it said.

o0o

Outside, on a grassy Koperveldt hillside, the wind was very sweet indeed, carrying with it a thousand unidentifiable Rock Candy Mountain smells, almost masking the burnt-toast odor
Random Walk
’s drive had left behind on a little patch of fried ground. We walked away from the shadow of the ship, angling up toward the ridge, stopping where we could look down into the little valley where the Arousians had made camp.

Tau Ceti hung in the blue-green sky, just the way I remembered it, throwing warm golden rays over pale, rolling hills, casting deep blue shadows down among the crags of the remote, towering mountains. I took a deep breath, trying to shake off unexpected euphoria. “Christ. I feel like somebody made this just for me.”

The Kapellmeister said, “Sometimes, when I come unexpectedly on some valley full of mist and shadow, something which reminds me of a childhood scene on Salieri, or even just a dream, remembered from someone else’s childhood, I experience that feeling too.”

Is that all it is? I don’t want to believe that. Not now; not ever.

Down below, down in the valley, there are the Arousians’ clustered tents, familiar tripods of camera equipment already set up by the stream. And there are the Arousians themselves, stick-bug men already walking this way, walking up the hill to greet us.

Over there? Yes, there in the shadows of a baarbij bush, a small cluster of dollies, kneeling in the shade, waiting, without the slightest inkling of things to come. The dollies merely waiting, under the watchful eyes of their wolfen, wolfen I see lurking in the grass nearby. Just one more empty dollie day, waiting to die in the jaws of the gods, no matter that the world is filled with crazy aliens, crazy aliens and their incomprehensible doings. No matter that the world is full of beauty.

When I imagine myself a dollie, I wonder how they feel about the way human hunters kill their gods with lightning called down from the sky. Perhaps, just the way Moloch’s babies felt, with the coming of
YHWH
and his doppelgänger, Allah.

Over by the river, to my slight surprise, were three vast, dark womfrogs, apparently having been drinking, heads now raised, looking in our direction. I want to fancy I can feel their fear. Human being up there, they think. To us, a human being is only death. How does it feel to be Death Incarnate, I wonder. I don’t like the feeling at all.

Every now and again you hear a news story, story of how some simple wage-slave, fired, disciplined, cast aside, abandoned, returns armed to the scene of his disgrace. On that day, bosses die, and the rest of us feel a smug satisfaction, knowing they probably deserved it.

I imagine myself a boss, riven by the thunderbolts of vengeance, crying out: It wasn’t my fault. There are other greater bosses above me. Don’t kill me please. I was only following orders.

This feeling I have now is just like that.

Then the Arousians were standing in front of us, looking at me with their stick-bug eyes, looking down at the Kapellmeister. Perhaps they have some inkling of why we’ve come again. The nearest of them,
Rustmold-on-Pale-Snow
I was pleased to remember, moved his arms in some kind of Arousian body language and said,
Greekeegreekee
...

The translator box clipped to its harness made a sound like a rhinoceros ramming a truck, followed by the sound of that same truck tumbling end over end down a long, rocky defile.

Arousian consternation? Merely my interpretation of the pose it makes.

Greekee?

Sledgehammer pounding on galvanized tin.

Rustmold-on-Pale-Snow plucked the thing from its clip, holding it above its head by two spindly hands, shaking it, punching buttons, screaming,
Greekeegreekeegreekeegreekee
!

The box whispered,
Whappawhappawhackwhack
...

The Arousian threw it on the ground, started trampling the thing with all of its several little feet, until its case burst open and the insides popped out. The other Arousians started making a series of bird-like twittering noises while this was going on.

“What are they saying?”

The Kapellmeister said, “They are laughing, Gaetan.”

I stepped forward, one hand on what I supposed was Rustmold’s shoulder, putting a stop to its little dance, Arousian’s flesh like dry, dead reeds to my touch. It recoiled, startled, and the others stopped laughing.

“Take it easy, pal.”

I knelt then, gathering up the bits of its translation machine, taking a good look. Stuff like wet, crumpled toilet paper, pieces of dead grass, little blue leaves and strips of tinsel. For Christ’s sake. Autoprogramming mechanical nanocircuitry? “This piece of shit must be three hundred years old.”

The Kapellmeister said, “The Arousians are permitted to take what they wish from MEI’s recycling bins.”

“So their lords and masters supply them with whatever junk they want, but...” I gestured around the camp, “are willing to have them come here and...”

The Kapellmeister said, “The remarkable thing is not what a talking dog
says
, Gaetan, but that he speaks at all.”

A slight jolt at what that implied.

The Kapellmeister said, “Can you fix it, Gaetan?”

I looked at the worthless crap in my hands, and said, “Oh, I suppose so. But it won’t work any better than it did before. Why bother?” I dropped it on the ground.

The Arousian stepped closer, seeming to peer into my eyes, though what good that would do it, I couldn’t imagine. Its compound eyes looked like bits of fabric to me.

It said, “I wish I could talk to you.”

I blinked stupidly, and said, “What?”

Then both of us recoiled, turning to face the Kapellmeister simultaneously.

The library AI whispered, The pod software has established a direct link with our internal communication subsystem, Gaetan. It has begun spooling out a copy of its linguistic algorithms, which are so surpassingly... so wonderfully...