Acts of Conscience (12 page)

She said, “You got the money to just wander forever?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know that I’ve got the temperament to just... explore, I guess. Maybe...” Maybe nothing, Maybe I just don’t know what I... maybe they call this cold feet? Christ, am I
afraid
of what comes next?

Maybe so.

She said, “Then what? And
why
?”

How many shrugs does it take to constitute a definitive answer? “I’m... hoping I’ll find out, I guess.”

She said, “Hmh.”

Then silence.

But she didn’t leave, either, lying there quietly beside me.

A gradual creeping sense of consciousness between my legs, just forward of my asshole? Is that what this is all about? Is that what’s going to happen? Is that what I
want
to have happen? Christ. Finally, I said, “I guess I’ve been thinking about flying passengers and cargo, once I’ve gotten used to...”

“Prosaic,” she said.

Ordinary. Mundane. Boring.

Gaetan du Cheyne, hero of the spaceways, vanishing in a puff of... dullness. Leah Strachan’s loose, moist vagina drying up on me, closing up, going away, I laughed. “Guess having my own damn starship is exotic enough for now.”

Her head cocked to one side and I thought I could see those blue eyes brighten, making my nuts tighten up, like hopeful idiot dogs. “I guess so.” More silence, as if considering, then: “
Torus X-3
’s Not much of a name for humanity’s first faster-than-light interstellar yacht.”

No. I... “I’ve been thinking about changing it, I guess.”

“Any ideas?”

I said, “I dunno.
Random Walk
, maybe.”

She twisted around, resting the back of her head on my shoulder for a second, touching me the way workers always end up touching when they labor together in these confined spaces, reaching up to twiddle her fingers in the mechanical complexity hanging over us. “That’s pretty good.”

Whisper from the suit’s operating system then: She’s had her gear for a long time, to the point where its AI is well integrated, very much interested in looking after her interests and privacy. But it seems as though she may be interested in you.

Small, crystalline particle of surprise. Does the spacesuit actually have some grasp of the needs of my dick? Does it care?

Machinery all around me now,
Do thus and we will do such
.
Always and forever
. Machines doing as we made them to do. Maybe we are better gods than the older gods who made us. Our creatures betray us only as we instruct them to. Kill us only when we wish, on some level, to die.

Comforting thought.

I said, “Time for a break. You want to go for coffee?”

She said, “Sure.”

o0o

Time passes, and we pass within it, swept along by evolving entropy’s immaterial stream. School, work, tearing down
Torus X-3
, rebuilding her as
Random Walk
. A few things that might be called dates with Leah Strachan, lots of friendly talk but nothing that got me any closer to her pussy than I’d been as we sprawled alone together in the starship’s technology-clogged guts. Other men and women that I got to know during those few brief weeks, weeks evolving to a couple of months, no one worth remembering, worth carrying forward into that unknowable future that I...

Three weeks along, cutting through the external caisson storage bay in the rear of the toolcrib dome, I came out of the shadows to find Leah with her arms around Gordy Lassiter, their faces pressed together, eyes shut... she had one leg raised, cocked over his hip. If they’d had nothing on, it would’ve been easy for him to...

Backed into the shadows, went to my destination a different way.

Soft shrug to myself. What the fuck? If it meant something to me, anything at all you see, I’d be more proactive about it.

Sure. Right.

o0o

Three weeks after that, I was back in the vicinity of Earth, sitting in one of the tourist observation decks of a huge old LEO platform, looking downward through empty space at the world, blue-white-red-brown Earth, turning slowly below. Dull blue-green Atlantic just now, evolving into the dark deserts of northwest Africa. That must be Morocco down there, those dry-looking wrinkles the Atlas Mountains.

Seething with anger, remembering voices.

I’m sorry, Mr. du Cheyne. This office can issue you a registration certificate for your ship, what is it, Registry FTL000001? Congratulations, sir! But we can’t issue you a permit to move it anywhere in the solar system. You have to have a commercial FTL pilot’s license for that.

Well, sir, I know you plan to leave the solar system with it, but you have to move
through
the solar system to leave and...

Could I hire a harbor pilot, just to see me off? Don’t know. Why don’t you go down to the Union Hall and see?

Ah, yes. And so off to the Interplanetary Space Transport Association, the pilot’s guild.

Well, sir, as it happens there are no registered harbor pilots rated to guide an FTL-equipped starship out of the system.

We wouldn’t be leaving the system exactly. I’d have to light the hyperdrive at some predetermined point inside the Sun’s gravity well and...

Be that as it may, there are none. We do have a few applicants who’ve applied for an FTL endorsement on their commercial licenses, regular pilots, most of them with quite a bit of interstellar flight experience already. Of course, you’d have to hire one of those as command pilot for your ship and...

No sir, we can’t issue you a pilot’s license. You’d have to go through the ISTA apprenticeship program, then take the regular Trade Regency licensing examinations. Takes about six years.

Yes sir. That’s true sir. Have a nice day sir.

o0o

Back to Callisto then, with no solution in hand other than the one in the old joke. Interesting how the folks in our apprentice class have paired off so quickly. Boys and girls together, with the usual scattering of boys and boys, girls and girls. And a couple of sulky old peckerheads like me.

A lot of them will be staying on at B-VEI, of course, going to work as new mechanics under Gordy Lassiter’s direction, settling into the new shipbuilding ways, from which the great liners and fast freighters will flow.

Leah Strachan?

Mostly things were just the same. Every now and again I’d see the two of them walking together, hand in hand, heads pressed together, or grappling in some dark corner, as if they couldn’t wait ‘til off shift, as if they didn’t have damn-all forever to get sick of each other.

Working together then, alone in some odd corner of
Random Walk
’s now wonderfully familiar insides, crammed into some small space together. Me head down in the work, Leah pointing the other way, up by where we’d parked our tool arrays, practically straddling my face.

Work getting done, I guess. Me imagining all sorts of idiocy in various fleeting instants. “Leah? What’re you going to do when the program’s over?”

Working down there, talking, with her practically sitting on my face, thinking endlessly, caught in some inescapable loop, about... Tried to ask her for it once. One day when I ran into her back in the recesses of the half-built ways, found her sitting in a bubble, helmet off, odd, flushed look on her face, trying to sort out a toolbelt array that’d gotten tangled somehow...

Me popping my question/suggestion, bringing up an odd, ugly glint in her eyes. Gae, I was fucking Gordy less than an hour ago. Did you think this would be a good time to slip one in? Like there was some kind of lingering...

Me shrugging, making my little excuses. Hell, did you think I could
tell
? Sorry.

She seemed to forget about it, move on to the evolving business at hand. I’ve known a lot of women who just let it slide like that. Maybe those are the ones for whom it’s a constant part of life’s background stench. Something like that. Now...

“I don’t know, Gae. I’ve got a contract with Nomiura Transport, and they’ve got dibs on the first five production run freighters here. I’m supposed to go back and start teaching maintenance blocks to our front line techies. “That’s starting to seem a little... dull. You know?”

So. Gordon Lassiter doing his endless, adventureless job right here on Callisto. Leah gone back to wherever Nomiura has its roundhouse. Probably out in one of the Kuiper densities. Will they visit back and forth? Of course not. Casual encounters no more than static in the greater void of modern life.

Come on. All you have to do is lean forward, nuzzle your face into the soft space between her legs. Its just a dozen centimeters or so. She’ll get the message and...

I leaned back, got as far away from her as I could in the confining hollow of our little workspace. Took my hands out of the machinery I’d been buttoning up. Folded my hands across my chest, quelling a nervousness so idiotic I couldn’t imagine where it was coming from. Open your mouth. Speak, God damn it.

Silence.

Then Leah said, “Is something wrong, Gae?”

Something in her voice? Does she imagine I’m down here smelling her, maybe smelling some remnant Lassiter’s left behind? In another minute will I open my mouth and ask for her pussy again?

I told her about my visit to ISTA then.

Another silence, then, “Jesus, Gae, I could have told you that! Somebody should have.”

Sure, but nobody did.

“What’re you going to do?”

I said, “Hire a pilot, I guess.”

She said, “Oh. That’s... not what you wanted, is it?”

“No.”

Longer silence.

“I could recommen—”

Abrupt halt.

Obviously pregnant silence.

My turn? Apparently. I said, “Would you be interested in the job?”

I could feel her tighten up, maybe move a little closer to me. “I don’t know. Jesus, Gae. I’ll have to think.”

“No hurry. Three more weeks ‘til the program ends and I have to start paying storage fees.” Out of what little I’ve got left.

Stillness and silence.

“You know, I’d have to charge you union scale.”

Has the pilot’s union already decided on an FTL fee schedule? Most likely. Mouth dry, I said, “Sure.”

Fucking heart pounding away in here, making me sway in the low gee. Tension twisting up so tight it was making me feel nauseous. I said, “I guess we better get this done. It’s almost lunchtime.”

Lassiter would be waiting for her of course, and they’d disappear for their usual noontide tryst. But if I’ve got her with me, out among the fixed stars, you see...

o0o

Graduation day comes and then the day after, and then I’m sitting in
Random Walk
’s command-pilot chair, up in the propulsion control room under the top of the central bulge, hands resting on smooth, plasticky controls, looking out through video display segments that mimicked real windows, down the silvery expanse of hull, across white concrete, twirling orange light on a little pole nearby, warning people away, across white concrete to the flat black ice landscapes of Callisto, low, rolling hills beyond, barely silhouetted against a flat black sky.

Punch these buttons, flip a few switches, middle finger on the appropriate slider and...

Leah came up from below, dropping the hatch shut behind her, came and stood behind me, one hand on my shoulder. Finally, “It’s about time to go, Gae. We’d better switch seats now.” Pause. Then, “Sorry.”

Sorry. Yep. Leah with my three-thousand-livre fee already in her bank account, fifteen hundred livres repatriation deposit in escrow with ISTA, in case our contract broke and she had to walk home.

I bounced out of her seat, settling in at the flight engineer’s station, lighting up my panels, looking the hardware over, making sure I’d done everything right. No problems, except... my ship. Her seat. Childish annoyance bottled up inside me. A hard-bitten feeling that once, just this once maybe, I’d like to have things all my own way.

A brief vision of all the helplessly enslaved billions glaring at me from all their little social and economic and psychological traps.
Just this once
? Fucking asshole, they’d say. People with bad jobs, menial jobs, demeaning jobs, Hell, no jobs at all, eyes brimming over with jealousy and hate for a man who’s had a decent life poured all over him like so much maple syrup. Rich man now, bitter because he can’t play with his rich man’s toy right away.

Leah muttering to her suit, suit muttering to the ship, ship muttering to the B-VEI control tower, B-VEI’s AIs dancing down through the net to Jovian System Central, getting the necessary permissions, filing our flight plan with Space Traffic Control,
Random Walk
, Leah Strachan, command pilot, Regency license number so-and-so, Callisto to Luna, four hours, fourteen minutes in transit.

She moved her hands over my controls, eyes bright, full of fire, and we lifted, no sense of motion at all, surface of Callisto merely dropping sharply, tilting under us, abruptly curving, whirling round us, turning to a sunlit crescent, suddenly pasted on the flat black sky, right next to crescent orange Jupiter, the two of them in matched phase turning to full, bright disks, almost the same size now, as our trajectory twisted insystem. Shrinking away to brilliant little balls and...

Sharp, tingling realization that, despite everything, everything I’d seen and done over the years, I’d never seen a planetary liftoff like that. Never watched from a control room seat, numbers spinning and rolling in my eyes.

The universe before me then, touched by the fragile hands of beauty.

o0o

Looking up at the Earth from the nearside surface of the Moon, good, old Tranquility Cosmodrome, where ships have been coming and going for six-hundred-thirty-five years, I could see that it must be late afternoon in the ruins of New York City, the fuzzy terminator already lying across the tip of Cape Cod, deep dusk coloring the ocean around the eastern end of Long Island.

Mr. Jenkins-Lafferty from the All Worlds Travel Agency shook my hand, standing in front of his little group of tourists. My tourists now. Passengers. Shook my hand, grinning a pasted-on grin. Pleased to meet you, Captain du Cheyne.