Acts of Conscience Read online

  Not locked.

  “Monitored?”

  Not monitored.

  Hmh. Sloppy. Very, very sloppy. “Will you tell on me?”

  The suit said, This particular hardware matrix does not have a rule-sieve cluster to that effect.

  What a nice little space suit you are. Better not ask if it wants to go for a little joyride. “Bring up nav displays please.”

  The whole undersurface of the display dome flickered, very dim yellowish light, letting me know the subsystems were very badly in need of renormalization, nothing to worry about, not my job, then the stars came out.

  It was as if we were floating free in space. This way the Sun, that way Earth and Moon. There. Red fleck Mars. White spark Venus. Yellow dot Mercury. Bright, orangish Jupiter. Yellow-white Saturn. Pale blue Uranus. Royal blue Neptune. Picked out like rich jewels, strung along the necklace of the ecliptic.

  A little swarm of dust motes, a flattened ring reaching around the whole sky. Piazzi’s Belt between Mars and Jupiter. A thicker, more diffuse swarm out beyond Uranus, beginning to fill the sky beyond Neptune, Kuyper’s Belt, Pluto-Charon a fat double-dot out there, no more than first among its kin.

  Hundreds of little green wedges all around the sky, concentrated along the ecliptic plane. Interplanetary shipping in transit, as reported by Space Traffic Control. The suit whispered, Vidnet link is down. This display is more than three weeks old.

  I could feel the throttle under my hand.

  Light the field modulus device then. Pale blue fire flickering around this half-dismantled D-1 prime mover. Work Control calling over the link, What the hell do you think you’re playing at?

  Shove the throttle forward. Ship sliding from its berth, falling down into the planetary deeps.

  Reasonable, I suppose. This ship’s main purpose is to haul heavy cargoes around the solar system. They gave it big, strong legs with which to do that job, but I could use them to run, faster, faster than any conceivable wind, fiery wind from the Sun, out beyond the Oort, out to the fixed stars. Out where the big ships go.

  Of course, I’d starve to death and/or suffocate in just a couple of weeks, but what the hell.

  1220.

  Better go get a little snack now, while I’ve got the chance.

  o0o

  Shop messhall. A three-tiered, mezzanine-style dining room under about one-tenth standard gee. Just enough so you can sit and eat, not enough to stop you from flying an equilibrimotor. Self service. Food just sitting in steamtable piles. Most of it already gone. Caesar salad, wilted and slimy under its dressing, croutons getting soft. A cold bottle of grape-tinged ice tea. I looked at the big bowl of banana pudding, cookies crumbled, bananas turning dark, custard starting to weep some kind of clear stuff.

  I flew up to the table where I usually sit, set my tray down, unhooked my equilibrimotor harness and leaned it against the wall, near some others. Sat down with the people I usually sit with. Looked at the crap in my tray. Why did I think I was going to eat this shit?

  Across and diagonal from me, Layla Garstang looked up from her tray. “Hey, Gaetan, you still coming with us next week? We need to know for sure. Zell’s got to sign out the camping permits tonight.”

  I lifted off my diadem, pulled the space helmet from my head, dropped them beside my tray. “Sure. Already turned in my vacation voucher.”

  Garstang grinning, a nondescript woman with an open, boxy face. Blue eyes. Pale pink lips. Freckles on light, neutral Caucasian skin. “All right, that makes six.”

  Zell Benson, tall, heavily built, bullet-headed, dark brown face more or less empty, said “OK. You and Phil. Me and Millie. Rua Mater... and du Cheyne.”

  I used to wonder about these people. I always thought they didn’t want me here, but then... Hell, before she took up with Phil Hendrickx, I even fucked Garstang a few times. Maybe enough times to think we’d gotten something... started. How long’s it been? Six years? Something like that. Maybe I fucked her five or six times, and it seemed all right to me. Worth continuing, anyway. Not worth it to her, apparently. I still have a distinct memory of things from those few nights. The way she smelled. The way she felt, on my fingers, on my prick.

  She said, “I’m glad you’re coming along this time, Gaetan.” Blue eyes on me. Curious, perhaps. What does she remember about those few times we were together, way back when? Maybe those mysterious feelings that made her decide we weren’t right for one another?

  “Yeah. Sure. It’ll be fun.”

  She smiled, then looked down toward the other end of the table, where Rua Mater, small and dark, face shadowed by her long black hair, was sitting. No lunch. Just sitting there, eyes closed, readerclip stuck in her hair like a child’s barrette.

  o0o

  End of shift. Go on home. Home to my little hole-in-the-wall dorm room. Trudge up the half-gee corridor with a faceless horde of nameless gray men and women, close the door on a murmur of tired voices. Sprawl in my favorite gray recliner, sit back. Stare.

  Plenty of stuff in the refrigerator. I could winkle a steak, maybe. Too much trouble? Go down to the plaza level then, get some gourmet ethnic crap... definitely too much trouble. I glanced at the vidnet link monitor over the door, felt it reach out for my thoughts. Not that the apartment appliances could make up my mind for me... at least the monitor might guess.

  I heard the bartender go through its setting up routines. I pictured myself swilling a black Russian, then a second, maybe a third, heard the ice tinkle and the nozzles hiss. Shit. Now I’ll have to get up and reach for the glass. Whatever idiot laid out this apartment... maybe I should just move all my furniture over to the breakfast nook.

  By the time I got back to my seat the infolink was up, colors swirling over half the room... falling away, as if the walls were turning to vapor... nodepopping through my standard-interest filter... thirty channels of precanned news, each with its own political slant, a couple of dozen relatively specialized “educational” channels, fluff, mostly, but... I stopped it on Planets and Animals and You.

  Long shot across some craggy gray and brown badlands, tumbled rocks and towering cliffs shot through with streaks of dark vermilion and bright jade green. Sullen red-orange sky, through which peered a fat brown sun, cloudscape around it brightly backlit. Flat, murky, gray-brown sea reaching out toward the far horizon. Near the edge of the world, between cliffscape and sea, a dun-colored forest, narrow, towering trees, brought closer now by a telephoto zoom. In the distance, projecting above the horizon, the smoky gray cone of an active volcano.

  We jumped into the forest, came face-to-face with something that looked like a cross between a centipede and the sorts of monsters little kids like to make with their tinkertoy robots. The monster roared and snarled and reared, showing serrated, bright yellow fangs.

  A dinosaur show for the kiddies. Monsters from deep space, educating them, you see, all about the faraway world of God, Delta Pavonis 2, just a little more than eighteen-point-six light-years from our safe, tame solar system. God, called home by a few hundred thousand human colonists. Home that was, by fast starship, almost twenty years’ travel from Earth and Moon and Mars and all the other little places where all but the tiniest fraction of humanity lived.

  I let the monitor move on. Other Worlds, Other Cultures. A more recent favorite, sort of an extraterrestrial archaeology presentation. Little domes under a sullen, blue-black sky. Little white fleck of a faraway sun peering down, barely illuminating a pristine white snowscape; snow broken here and there by crags of white ice, long lines of blue escarpment.

  A tiny world named Snow. Ancient ruins, more or less intact. Things built by nobody knew who or what, a long, long time ago, on the fourth ice-moon of a huge, red-orange, pale-ringed gas giant. Yes, there it was, bisecting the horizon, rings sticking up in the sky, obscured by the ice-moon’s thin blue clouds, gas giant sixth out from a low-K star named Groombridge 1618, just shy of fifteen-point-three light-years from Sol.

  Move on. News shows. Union b
ullshit. Legislative bullshit. Commercial bullshit. Corporate bullshit. A voiceover was saying, “...therefore, representatives of Berens-Vataro Enterprises Interplanetary were permitted to land their experimental spacecraft, Torus X-1, at a private spaceport servicing the Board of Trade Regency Building in Kiev, where a special plenipotentiary hearing was called into session, expected to meet shortly with members of this so-called Kentish embassy...”

  Long shot across a half-empty plain dotted with old ruins, undemolished buildings from a few centuries back, when Earth’s population was topping out close to forty billion, buildings left standing, I suppose, because of their “historical significance.”

  Odd-looking disk-shaped spacecraft, falling out of the pale blue sky, surrounded by a nimbus of opalescent light, decelerating hard, just before it hit the ground, settling in a cloud of dust.

  Close up shot. Hatch opening in the saucer’s ventral surface, metallic ramp extruding to the ground, men and women walking down, looking around. Some of them dressed in pretty much standard solar system fashions, others wearing rather baggy, colorful outfits. Costumes I’d seen before. Similar to, though not identical with, the sort of clothing you saw in newsreels from Kent, the big, old colony on Alpha Centauri A4.

  Cold lump forming in the pit of my stomach. Once upon a time I bought a hundred-twenty shares of Berens-Vataro stock for my little portfolio, money I’ve been piddling with on and off ever since my income grew big enough that I had money to waste. The last time I’d checked, months ago, I think, the B-VEI stock was worth just shy of two hundred livres, a little more than twice what I’d paid for it.

  It’d been a very nice little spec-tech company, headquartered on Callisto, a startup venture whose prospectus discussed raising capital for the investigation of technologies leading to fully inertialess spacecraft. Included were a couple of research papers, published stuff of course, no trade secrets, detailing the work of the company’s founders, physicists Roald Berens and Ntanë Vataro.

  Hell. ERSIE has had the market in space drives sewed up for close to five hundred years. Still, I knew enough about the matter, working with the technology every day, to know they had a shot at it. A hundred livres? That’s just the size of the pay voucher ERSIE downloads into my account every month. Just about a tenth of my portfolio, these days.

  Then the announcer said, “Spokesmen for the Eighth Ray Scientific-Industrial Enterprise state categorically that faster-than-light travel is technically impossible, violating physical laws established more than six hundred years ago. ERSIE representatives on the Board of Trade Regents have called for a full investigation of what they suggest is a ‘cruel hoax,’ possibly intended to divert investors from the failure of Berens-Vataro researchers to develop a commercially viable non-CESD space drive.”

  Not much more detail in the news. Shots of the little ship, under guard at the BTR landing field outside Kiev. The fact that the flight crew of Torus X-1 had been placed under arrest, along with the supposed embassy... Then a shot of baffled-looking members of the regular Kentish trade legation to Earth showing up at the prison, identifying the men and women in colorful, baggy costumes as actual, prominent Kentish citizens, including an infuriated man who was supposed to be the Kentish minister for interstellar trade.

  I took direct control of the monitor and hustled off to the stock trading nexus, quickly looked up my B-VEI accounts. I don’t know what the hell I was expecting. Maybe they’d be zeroed out already. Or maybe, with enough suckers falling for the hoax, which appeared to be very well planned indeed, I might be able to scoop a few thousand livres out of the mess and...

  My, my, what a busy little bee that stock-trading AI had been. Just looking at the numbers made me reach for that third drink. Dividends traded out, bought back in, rolled over by the autoreinvestor routine. Doubled. Split. Doubled again. Scraps. Margins. All sorts of odd slang terms I’d never seen before. Just now, my account appeared to hold twelve thousand shares of Berens-Vataro Enterprises Interplanetary.

  Value?

  Zero.

  Big red flag flapping from the node: Trading in B-VEI stock issues has been suspended. By the Board of Trade Regents of the Earth and Solar Space.

  A little side-note popped up, generated by my tracking module. At original investment value, the stock would be worth something like twenty thousand livres. Conservative estimate. About what I’d make with sixteen years’ paychecks. Other estimates, based on what’d already gone down, assuming the immediate resumption of programmed trading, showed a wild array of higher values, some of them just shy of a million livres.

  For Christ’s sake.

  Right now, though, the official value of the stock was nothing. And, apparently, warrants were being sought for the arrest of the company’s principal officers.

  I let it pop back to the news. Sat and stared. Ordered up a fourth drink, feeling myself start to grow dizzy as the alcohol rolled through my system, started diffusing into my brain.

  What the fuck would it be like to be worth a million livres? That’s a hell of a lot of money, isn’t it? I could buy myself an interplanetary yacht. Or a mansion on Mars. Hell, I could afford a nice little dacha down on Earth. Maybe even a cabin in the Adirondacks, if prices hadn’t gone up too much...

  With my attention directed elsewhere, the monitor started to nodepop again, going, very slowly, through the various newsnodes, stopping for extra-long pauses at the various financial channels, being careful to service my most recently exhibited interests, gradually speeding up and widening its airplay.

  I found myself watching one of my favorite pornodes, an hour-long show called Crotchmate of the Day, on a channel that did nothing but show that same hour, over and over again, all day and all night. Maybe today’s crotchmate would help defuse the anger I could feel sputtering away beneath a drunken buzz. Faster than light travel. God damn it. Maybe the oh-so-nice little quasi-imaginary girl would help.

  o0o

  New day. New shift. New tasks to perform. Black of space filling half the sky. The repair and refit of starship Aardwolf, leasehold of Harmattan Transport, was almost complete, vast cylindrical body, close to a kilometer long, floating free in Stardock’s exobay six, hull patches closed at last, turrets in place, radiator vanes for the field modulus device a shiny black star aft.

  Floating next to me, anonymous in his glitter-sparkly silver spacesuit, Phil Hendrickx, who’d stolen Garstang’s sleek ass right out from under me all those years ago, said, “Hey, du Cheyne. You see that shit about the FTL hoax last night?”

  “Sure.”

  “What d’you think?”

  Garstang was hanging in space beyond him, one hand on his arm, body well-outlined by the form-fitting silver links of her suit. I could remember touching those breasts any time I wanted to. I shrugged, staring at Aardwolf. Rossignol, floating behind me, said, “What if it were true?”

  What if? In only a few more days we’d be done with Aardwolf. Her crew would come back from rest and recreation, climb aboard. Start the machinery. Put her through local paces in the space around Stardock and the L1(SE) space station complex. Take her out on space trials, out to Pluto and back maybe. Inspectors would declare her fit for deep space.

  From close beside me, Rua Mater’s soft voice said, “God. That’d change everything.”

  Everything? What would change? The fact that rich men and their rich cargoes could go back and forth between the stars in a hurry? Aardwolf here would be heading out in a few months, headed for Mimir’s Well, Eta Cassiopeiae A4ii, the farthest shore of the long-halted interstellar colonization movement, a round trip that would consume forty years worth of stay-at-homes’ time, though the crew would show up here again one day just a couple of years older.

  Would I still be here then? Sure I would. Probably wearing a white belt, maybe even be the poor bastard who had to sign off on her next repair and refit, personally responsible if anything should happen to her after the fact.

  Still. Wouldn’t it be something i
f... Cold hand in my chest. Sure. It’d be cool. But my B-VEI accounts were locked up and set to zero value already. Policemen were looking for Doctors Berens and Vataro. I’d be lucky to get back my original hundred livres.

  Finally, Rossignol sighed and said, “Well, let’s get to it, boys and girls. The work’s waiting.”

  Someone snickered and said, “Yeah, right. The job is the job.”

  Is the job is the job. One day and another, and week and a month and a year and a decade and century and a lifetime. Better than nothing? Sure it is.

  We stooped, en masse, and fell upon the starship out of a flat, Stygian sky, leaving our dreams behind.

  Two: When you come down

  When you come down out of the Virginia hills, riding a tramway suspended above the bed of some old turn-of-the-millennium superhighway, you can see the well-preserved remains of Washington DeeCee, once upon a time the national capital of Earth’s last great federative superpower.

  You can see that little cluster of shining white buildings from a long way off. The faux-Egyptian obelisk of George Washington’s Monument, the vertically-exaggerated white dome of the U.S. Capitol Building, ridiculously tiny statue on top, old square buildings with their Greco-Roman columns. A few featureless Postfunctionalist boxes, left in place because they once meant something to someone.

  We hadn’t planned to spend much time in Washington, just stop by to see the old buildings because it was so close by the spaceport, because we had to come here to Union Station anyway and get our tram to the campground. Just stop for a few hours. Go up the famous Monument. Stand at the feet of Lincoln’s statue and read his famous words.

  I talked them into a trip to the zoo. Talked them into it, though Zell and Millie had already been and hated it, though Phil and Garstang didn’t have the slightest interest, because Rua Mater said, “Yes, let’s. That’d be interesting.” I saw Garstang poke Millie in the ribs, saw them look sharply at Phil and Zell. Phil rolled his eyes and grimaced. Zell let out an exasperated sigh, and we went.