Acts of Conscience Read online

  The zoo, the Greater North American Zoological Garden, was set up in a part of the old city called Anacostia in the early twenty-second century. It was divided into segments representing the various continents of Earth, various parklands labeled Africa and Asia and the like. Eventually, they started bringing in things from other star systems, exhibits supposedly representing the habitats of interesting animals and certain plant-like things that more or less acted like animals. They say it’s degenerated since then, and so the place eventually began taking on some of the characteristics of a second millennium zoo. Things in cages.

  Zell and Millie dropped out first, stopping at an outdoor cafe in the European Pavilion, telling us to come back and get them when we were done, they’d seen it all before, ho-hum. Then Phil and Garstang decided they’d sit in some big park we found, a green hillside looking out over something called the Serengeti, a pale grassland sparsely dotted with grazing herbivores and slinky predators. We left them lying under a tree, arms around each other, nuzzling and cooing.

  Rua Mater followed me on and on, silent, looking at whatever I looked at, dark eyes conveying nothing, a pair of glassy brown sponges, soaking up the world’s light.

  Alpha Centauri A4. Kent. First colony. Pretty much like Earth, a big surprise to the planetologists, a fully habitable world, ready for humanity to move right in, most interesting because it was right at the termination point of its geochemical cycle. In twenty million years, it’s ecology would be gone. Not much native life on land. Some interesting things like big arthropods. A thing like a crab made of molten gold, sitting on a flat red rock, looking at us through a hundred molten silver eyes, droplets of shiny metal on the end of long stalks.

  A section on the iceworms of Sundown, Epsilon Indi 1, which mostly did nothing but sit there, looking like so many piles of steaming black refuse.

  We came to the Green Heaven pavilion, representing the habitable planet of Tau Ceti. When I was a teenager, I went through a phase where I was crazy about this stuff. A time when I was particularly interested in Green Heaven itself. I can remember thinking about what it would be like to be living in the open cities of Green Heaven, just like the now extinct cities of Old Earth. I used to imagine myself walking the streets of places with names like Midori’iro and Azraq Azará and Relàmpago. Used to see myself trekking the yellow sand ergs of the Adrianis Desert, climbing the craggy immensity of the Pÿramis Range, wandering through the dank, dark Mistibos Forest.

  Ultimately, before I gave it up, I settled on a fantasy of myself as a great white hunter, ranging the tawny grasslands of the wide Koperveldt wilderness, the magically named Plains of Brass, of going on up into the cloudy antarctic highlands of the Koudloft where I would exterminate dangerous packs of white wolfen, Green Heaven’s splendidly weird, intelligent predators.

  And, because I was just the right age for that sort of thing, I saw myself taking parties of rich terrestrial tourists into the vast green outback of the Opveldt, taking them out on hunting safaris where we could bring down those mightiest of Greenie herbivores, the great brown womfrogs.

  Bang-bang. Heavy rifles kicking against our shoulders. Womfrogs howling in agony, falling like thunder on the ground.

  And, because I was just the right age for that sort of thing, I saw tourist women coming to me in the tropical night, drawn, fascinated, by my incredible masculinity. As time went on, the fantasies stopped being about the slaughter of animals; became pleasant masturbation exercises in which I saw myself mainly as the fucker of rich tourist ladies.

  Oh, Gaetan, they’d whisper. Oh, Gaetan.

  Christ.

  Rua Mater and I were standing in front of a plain, unadorned cage. No natural habitat exhibit here. Just a square box, concrete in back, with a little square hole of a door, open on three sides with plain metal bars. Letting you know, I suppose, how really earthlike Green Heaven was.

  The thing inside sat on its haunches like a dog, facing us, motionless but for a soft pulse of breathing, muscles moving its fat sides in an out. A massive, squashed-looking thing, maybe a couple of hundred kilograms in mass, like some sort of huge, flattened-out fairy-tale wolf, covered with shaggy white hair, almost like a polar bear, these superficial resemblances I suppose giving rise to its common name, white wolfen. The travel guides said there were red wolfen and black wolfen and even rare green wolfen as well.

  Not really like a wolf though. Flat head like an alligator, with heavy triangular white teeth that were visible at all times. Squatty build, a bit like an ancient amphibian carnivore I once saw on some paleontology node. Eryops. That’s the one. Six legs, each ending in a fat round paw. A lot of toes. Ten, maybe, on each foot.

  As I watched, one paw clenched, extending slender retractile claws. Long. Curved. White. Translucent like ice. When I looked up, the white wolfen was looking at me, close-together mottled gray eyes giving it fine binocular vision, letting it seem to look right into my eyes.

  Rua Mater took hold of my arm. Seemed to shiver slightly. Maybe it seemed to be looking into her eyes too, Mona Lisa like.

  It leaned forward, face coming close to the bars, closer to us, and made a whispery sort of mutter, a succession of guttural noises that sounded like, Wooroowah. Werrawaghroo wahghwaooghaahhh... trailing off in a breathy snort. There was a faintly sweet odor, a bit like caramel, coming from it as it spoke.

  We turned away, and Rua Mater abruptly jumped and squeaked, grabbing onto me, bumping into my side, trying to get behind me by going right through me. I felt a hard pang myself, though not enough to completely mask the feel of her breasts mashing against me, the bony thud of her hip on my side.

  Things standing behind us, looking past us at the animal in the cage.

  Imagine one of those pale brown walking stick bugs children on the Moon like to keep for pets. Imagine it crossbred with the praying mantis your mother wouldn’t let you buy at the pet store. The one that was advertised as being able to clear your warren of roaches and spiders and flies, clear it completely clean, in just a couple of months.

  Now imagine it being two meters tall.

  Rua Mater gasped, “Oh God. I thought the animals were loose!”

  One of the things unclipped a box from its harness, poked at some buttons. Held it up beside its head, shook it a bit. Poked it again. Then held it against the side of its chest. Sharp, high, raspy sound: “Greekeegreekee greekeegreekeegreekee!”

  The box said, “I’m terribly sorry. We didn’t mean to startle you.”

  Tourists from Arous, Sigma Draconis 3, just under eighteen-point-three light-years from the Sun. I’d heard there were increasing numbers of them traveling to the solar system, parties of students sponsored by Mace Electrodynamics, the big interstellar conglomerate that owns the patents on the field well converter technology and controls access to the Sigma Draconis star system. A couple of years ago there was an incident in which an Arousian wandered off from its tour group on the Moon, wound up lost in one of the deep underwarrens of Eratosthenes City. Some kids running one of the downdeep “parks” came across this poor bastard, thought it was something from a vidnet horrorshow come to life, and killed it.

  Turned out that not one of those little boys and girls had heard the were real starships, real extraterrestrial beings, real anything beyond the underwarrens of the Moon and some myth about an aboriginal human homeland called Earth. Kept babbling about their favorite episodes of Star Battlers and how they’d just shot themselves a real, live Swoogenbork killranger.

  I smiled at the Arousians, wondering if a smile meant anything to them. Probably not, but the translator box made faint greekeegreekee noises as we walked on. Probably telling them all about it.

  Another cage, great big brown thing inside, some guy in a park ranger suit unloading what looked like cubic-meter blocks of frozen spinach from a floating forklift onto the ground before it.

  Rua Mater, hand gentle on my arm, said, “Womfrog.”

  Yes, indeed. The fearsome womfrogs of Green Heaven, wo
mfrogs that I’d killed and killed as a teenage boy. Killed and killed, so pretty, wealthy women my mother’s general age and appearance would come to my tent in the middle of the night and suck my dick.

  It was about the size of a schoolbus, covered with long, shaggy brown hair. Six legs, the rearmost two of which were outsized and facing the wrong direction, like the hopping legs of a cricket. High-domed head that looked a lot like a mammoth’s head if you thought about it. Bulging eyes the size of basketballs, set close together in front, defying the received wisdom that only predators get to have binocular vision.

  Human-like mouth with big, yellow, flat-crowned buck teeth. Long, elephantine trunks on the sides of its head, where a terrestrial animal’s ears would have been. Trunks ending in bony, fist-like knobs, each adorned with little pink pads of what appeared to be scar tissue...

  I looked over at the guy unloading frozen fodder. “Hey, buddy.”

  He straightened up. Took off his cap. Wiped sweat from his brow with the sleeve of his tunic. “Yeah?”

  “What the hell happened to its fingers?”

  He looked at the womfrog. Looked back at me. Shrugged. “Son of a bitch kept figuring out how to work the combination lock, kept guessing the right numbers and getting out of its cage. So we cut ‘em off.”

  Animal standing right behind the bars, looking down at him, flexing its trunks, staring. No real expression in those big, pitted-looking, orangish eyes. I glanced down at Rua Mater. Staring at the womfrog. Nothing written in her face. We walked on.

  o0o

  Once upon a time, there was a little island at the mouth of Henry Hudson’s useless river, property of the Manahatta tribesmen. Once upon a not quite so long ago time, there was a great city here. Towers of stone and metal and glass. Layers of gray-brown smog. Streets full of taxicabs like so many big, shiny yellow bugs. A few million people, maybe ten to a toilet. They call what’s left of Old New York Manhattan Interpretive Park. Close beside me, Garstang put her hand on the tram platform’s guard rail, and said, “That’s quite a sight.”

  Quite. Not really a lone and level plain, of course. Huge island, bracketed by narrow rivers, cloaked in dense green jungle, pretty much like all the wilderness we’d passed over, coming up the east coast of North America. Here, though, the shattered stumps of old buildings jutted from the forest, some coated with vines, others bare and ragged in the hazy noonday sun. Toward the north end of the island, just about on the horizon, you could see the ruins of taller buildings, more intact-looking somehow.

  Rua Mater put her hand on my arm, pointing, “Are those the lakes?”

  Through the screen of trees, not all that far from the tramway terminus, you could see a shine of water. “I think so.”

  Millie said, “Let’s get going. If we’re any later we won’t get a waterfront campsite.”

  Once upon a time, the United States of America was the biggest, richest, most powerful nation of the world, New York its premier city. By the middle of the twenty-first century, all the other great federative superpowers of the world had come apart, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics breaking up into its fifteen constituent states, trying to maintain the fiction of something called the CIS. Siberia breaking free of the Russian Federation, then collapsing into six smaller nations. Sinkiang and Tibet and Mongolia breaking free of the Chinese Republic, then China itself vanishing, Tangish south sundered from Hannese north.

  For a little while, this America ruled the Earth, pretty much did as it pleased, her leaders angry and proud. America locuta, causa finita. One fine spring morning, just about 8:15 AM, on August 6th of the year 2045, a small party from one of her more disgruntled client states, showed up in Manhattan bearing five egg-crates in their luggage. Spotted them on five street corners in the area between Soho and the Trumpville slums. Said their prayers. Stooped and pushed five buttons.

  There were five bright flashes of light, five loud bangs, five little mushroom clouds, five kilotons apiece.

  Five kilotons is not much of a nuclear explosion, about enough to blow up a conventional twenty-first century city block. So a few hundred buildings were knocked down. Maybe a half million people killed. A similar number badly injured. And the other eight million or so living and working on Manhattan island just had to move away.

  City services stayed intact for the other boroughs, of course, and there was talk of restoring the heart of New York, but it never happened. Over the course of the next generation, seventy percent of the thirty million people who’d inhabited Greater New York found reason to go elsewhere.

  We pitched our tents beside the clear, placid waters of a 550-year-old bomb crater, stowed our luggage, built a cooking fire in the campsite’s metal and stone hibachi using firewood from the little pile the park service provided as part of the ten-livre camping fee. Cooked our sausages and meat patties, watched our neighbors swim while the sun went down, watched the stars come out as the sky turned dark.

  If you look sharp, you can sort of see a faint spiderwork of monorail lines on the face of the Moon. The lights on the nightside show up like bright, steady, misplaced stars.

  o0o

  Much later. Fire dying down to embers, soft breeze rustling the leaves of the trees, making a sound not so different from what you hear by the seaside, soft rush of water during an ebb tide. Stars glittering overhead. Twinkling’s the word Earthpeople use, I think.

  I sat dressed only in my shorts, back pressed to some smooth-barked tree, still sun-warm to the touch, bare feet combed into the turf and leaf litter, looking out over Lake A71K’s flat black water, lake named, I think, after the serial number of the bomb that dug the hole. There were stars reflected in the lake, light coming to me from stars hanging over the low treeline beyond the lake, stars sitting over the centuries-old remains of broken buildings.

  I thought about the prayer my parents’d made me say every night when I was a little boy. Now I lay me down to sleep... Remembered arguing with my friend Shelly, whose own version of the prayer began with soon instead of now.

  If I should die before I wake... I used to have nightmares about waking up in the emergency room resuscitation unit, empty inside, emptied of feeling, hardly like a human being at all... Well, Doc, the Lord came and took my soul while I was dead. What am I supposed to do now?

  Soft rustling from the campsite nearby, from inside the nearest tent, the one pitched beside mine. Phil and Garstang. I heard them murmuring, whispering together. No words I could make out, only words I could imagine. Something like a giggle. Rustle of cloth. Sleeping bag zippers.

  Long, trenchant silence. Then the soft shadow of a sigh. Garstang used to make that same sigh for me. I sat, still as a mouse, quiet as a worm, paying careful attention to the sounds.

  Dark shadow suddenly looming over me in the night. Rua Mater coming back from the showerhouse, wrapped in a flimsy robe, dark blue I think, looking down at me, dark hair, dark eyes buried in shadow, no more than a hint of liquid glitter. Standing there with the robe clutched tight around herself, a curved outline of hip and breast superimposed against the lesser shadows of night.

  I heard her make an intake of breath through her nose, short and sharp, and she opened her mouth, about to speak.

  Garstang groaned, “Oh, Phil. Yes.”

  Rua’s mouth hanging open, startled, words halted.

  From inside the tent, rhythmic sounds started up, mostly the sound of cloth rubbing on cloth. Phil’s knees pushing the air mattress around, Garstang’s back moving on the sleeping bag maybe.

  Rua whispered, “Are you...”

  Am I what? Am I going to get my dick out and masturbate while my old girlfriend takes it up the middle? Well, yes, I was thinking about it before you came long.

  Rua Mater standing there, staring at me, while, inside the tent, Garstang’s breath started coming in short gasps. Rua whispered, “Jesus, Gaetan...”

  You could hear Phil’s breathing now, deeper sounds, longer gasps. Rua stood over me, suddenly reached out with
one hand, halfway toward me, stopped, stood stock-still, arm outstretched.

  What now, Rua Mater of the dark hair and eyes and omnipresent vidnet clip? Feeling sorry for me, are you? Pity, then? Or contempt? No way for me to know. Or guess what was going to happen next. Women have their own agendas, driven by a very different sort of reproductive psychology. She might reach for my crotch now, or just kick me in the nuts.

  Rua whispered, “Goodnight, Gae.” Turned and walk away, stooped down and crawled through the fly of her own tent.

  I called out, “Goodnight!”

  The sounds from the tent suddenly stilled.

  o0o

  The next day, we went for a long hike, northward through the forested, ruined streets of New York, on up toward the tangled jungle where Central Park had been. Gloomy trails, old, broken asphalt. Tall trees and fallen buildings. Openings in the ground, the dark mouths of caves, leading down into the ancient, flooded subway system.

  Zell and Millie were in the lead, pretty far ahead, tiny figures dressed in safari gear, white pith helmets, boots laced up their calves, passing from sunlight into shadow and back again. Phil and Garstang were much closer, walking just ahead of me, walking close together, holding hands. Rua... Walking somewhere behind me. Watching my rear end? Hard to imagine, though I’ve heard any number of women swear that’s what they like best about men’s figures. Probably just looking past me, watching Phil and envying Garstang.

  I looked back over my shoulder at her and smiled, watched her eyes brighten and her step quicken.

  We came out into a bright clearing, a place of knee-high brown grass surrounding some kind of marble sculpture. A wide, flat basin, full of trash and muck, statuary in the middle, a conglomeration of leaping fish, their mouths gaping open.

  Zell said, “Well. This seems like as good a place as any to stop for lunch. Rest of you hungry?”

  I looked down at Rua, who smiled up at me and said, “Sure.”