Acts of Conscience Read online




  Acts of Conscience

  a tale of the

  Hephaistos

  in the borderland

  between the

  Starover and Silvergirl

  Universes

  by

  William Barton

  author’s preferred edition

  131,000 words

  Copyright © 1997, 2011 William Barton

  Public Domain Cover Photo:

  “Montage of Neptune and Triton,” courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech.

  If a man hasn’t discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.

  —Martin Luther King, Jr.

  23 June, 1963.

  Dedication:

  to

  H. Beam Piper

  Fuzzy Logic, of a sort

  Previous Books by

  by William Barton

  Hunting On Kunderer

  A Plague of All Cowards

  Dark Sky Legion

  Radio Silence

  Yellow Matter

  When Heaven Fell

  The Transmigration of Souls

  Acts of Conscience

  When We Were Real

  Moments of Inertia

  Collaborations by

  William Barton and

  Michael Capobianco

  Iris

  Fellow Traveler

  Alpha Centauri

  White Light

  For more information visit:

  williambarton.com

  website active Sept. 2011

  Table of Contents

  Foreword

  One: I have always

  Two: When you come down

  Three: By mid-morning

  Four: I awoke the next morning, still sitting

  Five: I opened my eyes and looked at the ceiling

  Six: Parked by the curb

  Seven: Next day, on my way

  Eight: Somehow, I got through the rest

  Nine: Another bright and sunshiny morning

  Ten: I think I stood there

  Eleven: We set out under the rising sun

  Twelve: Sunlight in my face, butter-yellow

  Thirteen: I awoke with a start

  Fourteen: Standing on my bald stone hilltop

  Fifteen: Just at sunrise

  Sixteen: When I got up

  Seventeen: Late the next day, I sat alone

  Eighteen: Jump

  Nineteen: Late the next day, Prometheus

  Twenty: A day and a night

  Appendices

  eBooks to Come

  Foreword

  There is a general consensus out there in readerland that Acts of Conscience is, perhaps, my best novel. I don’t know I agree with that, but I can see the arguments in its favor. One critic called it “a major literary achievement,” and I heard a fan say reading it was a “life-changing experience.” I guess I can see those things too, at least for the people who said them.

  For me, it’s the story of a man much like me, intended to be read by men much like me. There are millions of us out there, standing in Gaetan du Cheyne’s shoes. We all make the choices we must, and make the right ones when we can. Few people respect us, fewer still understand us.

  But I understand.

  And so do you.

  Do women read Acts of Conscience? More important, do they understand it? I think so. The agent who helped me sell the book to its original publisher was a woman, the editor she sold it to was a woman. They both said they liked the book, and seemed to understand it, at least in some way. But they were both pretty and sociable women, and I had my doubts, at the time.

  There are women very much like Gaetan du Cheyne. I’ve met quite few of them. Maybe someday one of them with a talent for it will sit down and write that story. Maybe one already has and I missed seeing it. So many books, not much lifetime...

  I’ve done my job.

  Done it the best I know how.

  I dreamed up Acts of Conscience in the waning days of the 1970s, after I’d written Hunting On Kunderer and A Plague of All Cowards, and seen them both published, after I’d written This Dog/Rat World and Under Twilight and seen them both fail. I dreamed it up in the waning days of my first marriage, when I’d done some things and had some thoughts I haven’t dared write about yet.

  I wrote a little outline about a wretched little man just like me, maybe even a little worse? Or, more likely, a little better, which is probably why his whole life is as bad as mine was on the very worst of those long-ago days.

  A man like that has one thing that redeems him, and so I called my outline Acts of Conscience, and put it aside. It was fifteen years before I managed to sit down and write it. Some years later I wrote a companion tale called The Man Who Counts, published on-line at SciFiction, interestingly enough also edited by a woman, because Gaetan du Cheyne isn’t the worst sort of man who can have that one redeeming virtue.

  In the end, it may be the only virtue that matters, and all the others are merely stage dressing.

  If you read this book, and that virtue becomes yours, or if you already have it and realize once and for all that you’re the very best a human being can be, the book and I have done our job.

  I once told an audience of fans about all the wonderful moments I’d had, reading all the thousands of books that had passed my way over the years. I said if I could give just one reader one such moment, then my career as a writer would have been worthwhile.

  That’s what this book is about.

  —William Barton

  September 2011, at the

  Barking Spider Ranch

  One: I have always

  I have... always loved the stars.

  When I was a boy, in a time almost thirty years ago, when my life was hardly begun, I loved to wander the remoter parts of Martyred Sasha’s Wilderness, to lie on my back on a favorite hillside in the night. Lie there for hours, looking up at the sky, soft wind in my face, on my bare skin, in my hair, full of wonder.

  There on my hillside, I could look out over the whole world, beyond my feet the long slope of a dark lawn, daylight’s green grass hardly illuminated by the wan light of the faraway stars, the dim, splotchy shadows of the trees, beyond them the black outlines of the recreational center’s lightless buildings. Other buildings farther away, equally dark, were the unlit entryways to the underground, to the human-dense warrens of the Meadows of Dan, and the black plains of Volterra’s dusty floor beyond, flooded by the hard light of a sun so bright it was like a hole in the sky.

  I remember lying there at midnight, when the darkness was already a week old, cool, very cool breeze on the bare skin of my chest, making me wonder if Maintenance had screwed up the temperature coupling on the city’s eutrophic atmosphere shield. Irrelevant to a boy looking up at thousands of hard dots, like motionless, steely pinpricks in the flat black background of the sky, most of them empty white, a few tinged with some pastel hue or another.

  Bright, colorless Polaris hanging in the heavens, just above the top of my head, always high because crater Volterra and the Meadows of Dan lie just shy of sixty degrees north, not so terribly far from the north pole of the Moon. Pale blue Regulus off to my left. Yellow-tinted Procyon suspended over my belly button. Orangish Aldebaran just off the sky’s centerline, to one side of the Milky Way’s pale, irregular starry road.

  I’d lay and stare at some sky feature or another, look at the jewel box of the Pleiades, staring and staring, waiting for just one more pale violet star to pop out of the absorbent background, waiting for the cluster’s nebulosity to take on it’s famous, rarely-seen streaky appearance...

  “Du Cheyne.” Sharp. Snapping me back to the here and now. Rossignol’s voice: “You going to put your stuff on or not?”

  Me, hanging wei
ghtless in the air in my undershorts, holding onto the open door of my locker, half-naked men and women bobbing all around, soaring back and forth as they got ready for change of shift. “Sorry.” Me, grinning a grin that, for some reason I could never quite understand, seemed to make people angry.

  Rossignol, holding a corner of the locker bank, gold line-supervisor’s belt in the other hand, shaking it at me, mouth set in a characteristically crooked smile. “I swear, Gae. Sometimes... well.” A shrug. “I sure as hell am glad you don’t pull that shit when we’re outside. You looked like you were in some kind of trance.”

  I reached into my locker and unhooked my soft gray suitliner coverall, started pulling it on, making sure the footies were straight, that my fingers went all the way down to the tips of the gloves, before zipping up the front. “Sure. The job’s the job.”

  Rossignol’s smile fading. Dark brown eyes looking me over. He said, “Yeah.” Eyes measuring me. “Gae, I’d like you to step in on the D-1 prime mover Jimmy Haas’s been working. There’s something fishy about the power screen.”

  “You let a Nine work on a drive modulus connected to a live field well converter?”

  A quick look around. “Jimmy’s a Nine step Twelve. He’ll have enough points to make Ten Step Zero in a few weeks.”

  “He will if you don’t fuck him up, Ross. And don’t call me Gae.”

  “Sure. Sorry.”

  “Are there bonus points on this?”

  A slightly sour look. “Standard seven.”

  Seven. Thirty more and I could jump to Wage Grade Ten step Nine and a few more livres in my paycheck. Thirteen hundred more and I could have Rossignol’s gold belt for the asking. Ten thousand more and I could apply for a white belt and conversion from wage to salary grade. “Make it ten.”

  Mouth set in a flat line. “OK, Gaetan. Ten.” He turned away, and I went back to putting on my suit.

  Suit pants, made of something that looked like a fine, chrome-plated chain mail of mirror-bright links, cinched in tight. Tunic of the same stuff. Helmet like a balaklava hat, covering everything but my eyes. Thin black boots made of something like flexible plastic, coming up to mid calf. Black plastic gauntlets covering my already-gloved hands. Blue belt around my waist, the blue of our shop and trade, Outside Machinists and Spatial Machinery Mechanics.

  Muffled by the helmet, coming from the other side of the locker bank, I heard an angry mutter: “God damn it, Ross, why the hell did you assign the D-1 to that asshole?”

  I slipped into the equilibrimotor harness and started hooking it up. Wrapped my toolbelt around that. Clipped on the inertially heavy battery pack. Rossignol, that same shushing tone in his voice, said, “It needs to be done right, Todd. Jimmy...”

  Todd Sanchez said, “Why the fuck him? Why not me? Jimmy and I could...”

  “I’m sorry, Todd. I... Hell, you’re a good mechanic. But du Cheyne...”

  I slid the comlink diadem over the outside of the helmet, settled it carefully around my temples, and thought, Netlink on. Autocheck.

  The suit thought, All systems nominal.

  Sanchez said, “I’ve been in this business just as long as du Cheyne, Ross. I’m better than any damn shithead who...”

  Rossignol: “And you’re still only a Ten step Four, Todd.”

  Long silence.

  Sanchez said, “You’re a fucking asshole too.”

  Another long silence, then a sigh: “Let’s get outside, Todd. The job’s waiting.”

  I flooded the suit’s limbs with power and life, watched my pale shadow, cast on the front of the locker bank, fill up with pastel sparkles, with tiny moving rainbows. Felt the suit harden against my body, molding itself to my form. Felt it fill up with its own awareness, felt it flutter against my chest, like the beating of some distant, impersonal heart. Outside then. Outside with all the others, slipping through the shop’s airscreen, metadynamic force field reaching through the suit to tickle on my skin, a soft feather touch.

  They call this place Stardock, romantic name, I’ve heard, from some old story. Prosaically: Alpha-Five Shipyard, Chromoelectric Starship Division of the Eighth Ray Scientific-Industrial Enterprise. ERSIE-5 to her intimates.

  I like Stardock better.

  Stardock stretching away in all directions, a regular, three-dimensional array of pale yellow girders, dotted here and there with little buildings, habitats, work centers, many-armed cranes crawling about like so many spiders, vast spiders, spiders the size of small asteroids.

  I could look out in any direction. See square after yellow-lined square, each smaller one set within the larger square that surrounded it. Some squares blocked by broken-down, half-dismantled ships. Others empty. Empty right through to... black sky. Stars blotted out by the brilliant lights of the work teams. By the light of the cranes. By the light of the brilliant sun, Old Sol hanging right over there... the suit whispered 134,702,092.8 kilometers in my head. In the other direction, one tenth as far away, Earth was a tiny, bright blue-white circle, Luna a much smaller, very much dimmer reddish-gray spot by its side, almost invisible.

  I couldn’t really see well enough to know, but from her position relative to Earth it might be nighttime over the farside, darkness long fallen over crater Volterra and the Meadows of Dan. Maybe some little boy was lying on a hillside, cool wind ruffling his uncombed hair, looking up at the stars.

  I can’t have been the only one.

  Rossignol, like a ghost in my head, ghost in everyone’s head just now: “Let’s go, boys and girls. Clock’s ticking.”

  I let the suit read my mind, let it pass my wishes on to the equilibrimotor’s little brain, felt that distant pulse start to throb against my chest, harder and harder, like the strengthening beat of powerful wings, wings of fire, sculpted from impalpable lines of force, and we began to move out into space, out into a maze of struts and girders and broken-down ships, hanging between Earth and Sun, hanging in a void that surely pervades all of Creation.

  o0o

  Almost noon. Jimmy Haas squirming beside me, while the two of us floated on air down in the D-1’s propulsion segment, ship’s guts hanging open before us.

  When you look down into a live field well converter, it feels like the thing wants to pull your eyes out. No sense of the energies contained there. No feeling that if this thing got away from you, Stardock would be vaporized in an instant, the L1(SE) industrial complex blown to bits a fraction of a second later by an expanding fireball far, far brighter than the Sun.

  Funny to think of it that way. I could reach in with my tools, pop the safeties on this thing. Somewhere in Work Control, alarms would start to scream, but, of course, it’d be much too late. Vidnet would link to my suit, start shutting down my tools, command my suit limbs to freeze solid. Too late. By then I’d’ve opened the converter’s artificial event horizon, the accumulator core would wake up, surprised, and make a run for freedom.

  Down on Earth, the pale, wonderful, impossibly lovely blue skies would flicker and rich men would look up, surprised, at a momentarily violet Sun, wondering, What the fuck...

  Jimmy fidgeted and said, “Five ‘til, Gae.”

  Little shit’s been calling me that all morning. I glanced at him, then looked back down into the well. Hardly anything there at all. A hollow plastic shell, composite osmiridium and berylodiamond whiskers holding a net of weak boron filaments. Almost-invisible lines of turquoise light, streaking through a dusty-looking mist, aiming down to some infinitesimal center.

  The suit’d been nagging me all morning about the way the engineering space around us was flooded with hard x-rays. Someone was going to have to come in here later and clean up after us, cost the Eighth Ray Scientific-Industrial Enterprise a certain amount of money and... fuck it. Let Temporary Services deal with the matter. It’s their job.

  Down in there, where my eyes couldn’t see, something not at all like a black hole was gathering vacuum energy, skimming it right off the surface of the plenum, adding to the store its manufact
urers had given it in the first place. Somewhere down there a region of Planck sockets, charged with Kaluza-Klein entities of a specific configuration, kept a little bit of the universe sequestered, kept increasing its imaginary mass...

  “Gaetan.”

  The suit whispered 1158 in my head.

  “Sure, Jimmy. Let’s just slide the cover back on and get out of here.”

  Jimmy said, “What about our tools?”

  I put mine in park and unhooked the belt, complete with power-pack, from my harness, letting it float free, bobbing gently beside the open mouth of the converter. “They’ll be all right without us.”

  My suit whispered, Mr. Haas’s hardware matrix respectfully submits that it is the property of ERSIE-5. Mr. Haas is holding a personal responsibility marker in the core memory of the tool dispensary.

  Right. These are my tools. If something happens to them, it’s between me and the insurance underwriters of the Metal Founders, Machinists, and Aerospace Workers Interplanetary. Jimmy loses the tools he’s borrowed from Stardock and they’ll dock him a thousand points, bust him all the way back to Wage Grade Eight.

  I said, “Noted and logged. I’ll pull your dispensary marker onto my tab. Go get lunch, Jimmy.” A long, dark stare, then he was gone. Shit. Little bastard didn’t even slide the cover back on.

  I slid up through the long access tunnel from the propulsion segment to the command module, slipping through the hatch into a small, cool dark room, control boards lit by a twinkle of amber lights. I floated up over the backs of the seats, turning feet first, let myself slide down into the command pilot’s seat. Maybe flight engineer would’ve been more appropriate, but still... I put my hand on the throttle and just sat there. Sat. Waited.

  How is it this longing still grips my heart, after all these hollow years? I said, “Is the navigation subsystem up?”

  My suit whispered, The software is still loaded and processing. Command subsystem uplink revision won’t be started until after propulsion and power are done. “Is it locked?”