Acts of Conscience (14 page)

There on our left now, a big peninsula stretching out into the sea beyond the Himalaya-class Pÿramis Range, the gray gravel bleds and blinding, waterless white gypsum erglands of the Adrianis Desert, home to the fabled Hinterling nomads, I...

All the sexy-romantic places I dreamed about as a child, as an adolescent, suddenly become a whole world, a real world, incomprehensibly vast... Outside, the sky lit up hot, fiery pink as
Random Walk
skidded into Green Heaven’s ionosphere.

o0o

Finally, I stood at the foot of
Random Walk
’s debarkation ramp, light on my feet in the local point-eight-four gee, nodding kind of absently as my passengers got off and walked away, across the concrete to the cosmodrome’s terminal building... I can’t remember the name of this place, if I ever new it. Not much to see here, broad expanse of conventional cement, with various antique spacecraft sitting around, mostly lighters from the orbiting freighters, terminal building looking like a concrete tent.

Flat land here, of course, and I could see buildings, few of them more than a dozen stories high, sticking up in all directions. That would be the western suburbs of Orikhalkos, where the All Worlds Travel Agency had its local offices. There’d be somebody in the terminal, bored, manning a desk, not expecting anyone, much less
my
passengers, but knowing when a ship touched down someone might come toddling out, baffled by an alien sun, looking for the All Worlds agent you see and... Hard to miss that alien sun, hanging up there in the metallic blue-green vault of Green Heaven’s sky, cloudless hereabouts, today. Looking up, I felt a sudden crawling inside. Big. Big sky, with a huge, sunsetty-looking sun, pendulous orb, not quite halfway between horizon and zenith, blanketing the runway with some kind of warm, golden light.

Maybe they called it Green Heaven because of the sky? Child voice, almost the voice my suit used when talking to me, commenting that the original colonists, twenty-second century research personnel from the Planetary Commerce Institute, had called it
Kalyx
, after their ship. Did I know, even as a child, that a calyx is that whorl of leaves, usually green, that surrounds a flower while it’s still in the bud? I must have, since I know it now, another green word for a world seeming greener with each passing minute.

Passengers gone now, me standing alone at the foot of the ramp, looking around at nothing much. If it weren’t for the warm sky and that fat sun... another quick glance. Rather more than twice as wide in this sky than Sol seen from Earth, maybe? What does that mean? Something like eighteen times as much surface area to shed that golden light on us?

The rest of it, though... dirty concrete, small buildings, shoddy old spaceships, as if this were the recovery ramp of some twenty-fourth century terrestrial junkyard rather than the premier spaceport of a civilized world.

Movement in the distance, catching my eye. People? No. Small chatter of alarm, curiosity inside. Not people at all, a group of... things? Animals. Well, sort of. Familiar sight from the zoo, from the Green Heaven pavilion, but not in the cages. A party of Arousian stick-bug people walking together, heading in toward the terminal building from one of the other little ships.

Footsteps on the ramp coming out of the ship. Leah, standing in front of me, small valise dangling from one hand, looking at me, face expressionless. So. I said, “Well, we’ve got four months to hang around before we have to take them back. Maybe you and I could...” a feeble gesture toward the terminal building.

A look of surprise seeming to crystallize on her face. “You can’t possibly be that stupid, Gae. I’m quitting now. You understand?”

“Quitting?” I reached out a hand toward her, felt a slight sting on my skin as she slapped it away.

“What, is there a fucking echo out here?
Christ
.” Shaking her head, turning away, striding away toward the terminal building, back narrow and straight, hips moving in her trim black slacks so...

Just standing there, watching her go, wanting to call out, something, anything. Coming up with nothing worth the effort. What will you do now, Leah? Where will you go?

Well, of course you know. Four months from now you’ll find some way to take those passengers back home, and ISTA will want to know what became of command pilot Leah Strachan, and you’ll tell them. Goodbye fifteen-hundred livre repatriation fee, at least.

And Leah will... know people here. Five visits over two hundred years? She’ll know families, over generations. She’ll visit lovers grown elderly, sleep with the sons of nice young men she dandled on her knee the last time she was here... Go home somehow, by slow boat, or wait for an FTL ship to happen by, I...

I put my hands in my pockets and started walking toward the Orikhalkos terminal, where landfall paperwork would be waiting. I’m not really a fish out of water here, or anywhere else. It’s just that... sometimes things get away from you.

o0o

Passengers secured, paperwork done, ramp rental fee paid for months in advance... Converting from the local currency,
drakhmai
, surprised, only one livre, fifty dismes a month? My God. Distant glimpse of Leah standing at a counter, talking to some young man. Yes, that’s the ISTA representative, manning his lonely cosmodrome kiosk. I expected them both to turn suddenly, turn and see me walking in the distance across the sparsely-populated main concourse floor, but...

Not the center of my own little drama, I guess. A bit player even in my own universe.

I went back out to button up
Random Walk
, buoyed by a bit of good news. Green Heaven, you see, as you should have seen all along,
has
no central government. Vrij Veldteboeren don’t care what you do with your starship. Hinterlings don’t care. French Islanders won’t give it a thought... And as for the local jurisdictions of the Seven Cities of the Compact...

Well, Mr. du Cheyne, so long as your pay your ramp fees and pay for anything you happen to damage... So, what then? There’s a whole star system here. Won’t cost me much to fly her around, go sightseeing and... Well. Whole
world
here, too.

I packed a small case with clothes, casual stuff, all I’d happened to bring with me anyway, my... regular clothes, not expecting I’d be going to any fancy dress... Christ. Old imaginings.

Up in the control room, I took off my spacesuit and reassembled it empty, draped it across the back of the flight engineer’s chair, powered up and hooked into the ship’s operating system. Look after things while I’m gone, old friend. I’ll be back in a while and we’ll see what we can think of to do next. Meanwhile...

As I turned away, the little pang of gratitude I’d felt from the hardware matrix was already fading, masked by a rising rumble of conversation between my suit and the various AI nodes that made
Random Walk
a living thing.

Not really necessary to leave any of it turned on of course. Shut down the ship. Take the suit apart, fold it up and put it in a drawer until I need it again. I...

Hell. How would you feel if it was
you
being put to sleep, unneeded?

Six: Parked by the curb

Parked by the curb outside the cosmodrome terminal building were a few yellow ground cars, bench seats inside, each with a lone pilot at its controls.
Taxi
. I’ve seen them in hundreds of old films. But old films, whether colorized or in the original grayscale, don’t show you the dirt. Not like this. I walked over to the nearest one, opened the rear door of the cabin the way I new was proper from the movies, and got in.

The pilot, a swarthy, sweaty-looking fellow with uncombed hair and a bristling moustache, turned, grinning, showing the most peculiar stuff, like green algae clinging to his teeth, and said a long sentence in what sounded exactly like Spanish, but wasn’t, not a single recognizable word.

Great. “I don’t suppose you speak English?”

He seemed taken aback. “
Adrianíkoi
? You, ah...” scratching his head, “Reggie
në
Robbie?” Look on his face like a man smelling a particularly unusual fart, half disgust, half amusement.

I pointed at the sky and said, “Earth.” Whatever the hell it’d be in Greek.
Kosmopolis
?
Gaia
?

Sunny brightening. “Oh! I, ah...” A helpless shrug. “
Nihongo
?” Brief wait, then, “No? ‘
Arabiyyah
?”

“Nope.” I opened my suitcase on the back seat and started rummaging around it, the cabbie, if I was remembering the right word, looking suddenly impatient, drumming his fingers on a black box with a sideways metal flag on it. There. Picked up the comclip and slid the barrette into my hair, just above my left ear, as close to Wernicke’s area as I could manage.

The look on the cabbie’s face... nervous? I wonder why? I thought, Open ship to shore.

The spacesuit’s voice whispered in my head: Channel open. Ready.

Link to library AI. Standard spool. Languages and literature.

Linking. Spool 45, maximum transmission rate secured.

Why the hell didn’t I put this thing on back at the ship? I looked at the cabbie, who was silent and wide-eyed. What the hell does he think is going on here? “Come on pal. You have to
say
something to get it started.”

Puzzled look, followed by a quick, bubbly phrase in Pseudospanish.

The library’s soft, gender-neutral voice said,
Romaïkos
, descended from the post-Helladian
demotikí
of southeastern Cyprus, late twenty-second century.

A quick echo, as if the cabbie had spoken again: “Look, if you’re not going to go someplace, get the fuck out of my cab, you fucking jerkoff!” A little aftershock as well, deep connection being made, as a part of my brain automatically memorized the translation of
vrea malaka
as “you fucking jerkoff.” I opened my mouth to speak, felt the AI take possession of the verbal stream content as it passed through my arcuate fasciculus, felt it operate Broca’s region, felt the muscles of my mouth tighten up strangely, lips pursing... A cascade of nonsense words came out, apparently meaning, “Take it easy, buddy. I need for you to find me a good hotel.”

Suspicious then: “I thought you couldn’t speak Greek.”

“I can’t.” I tapped the barrette. “Nobody ever show you a translator before?” I pulled the thing out of my hair, leaned forward and stuck it behind his ear, hoping I had the right side, since I hadn’t noticed whether he was right of left handed. “What d’you think?”

Startled look, snatching it out of his hair, turning it over in his fingers, muttering something incomprehensible. When I got it back on, the library AI told me he’d said something like, “Unbelievable,” noting that the word he’d used conveyed a bit of superstitious dread.

I learned how to speak Spanish with a clip like this, hooked to the school library, when I lived on Mars. It kept telling me what to say, until I didn’t need it any more. I said, “Sure. Weird as hell. Let’s get going, huh?”

o0o

The hotel, located somewhere near the center of Orikhalkos, was a seven or eight story concrete tower, a tall tan box with more window than wall, whose two-word name the translator kept insisting was something like “A Really Good Hotel.” Something about the form of the name kept being snatched away by the translation process, and when I moved the barrette around to the back of my head so it could do a visual filter, all I could see was that the name on the front of the building was some foreign phrase transliterated into Greek letters.

Pay the cabbie, pay the hotel bill for a few days in advance, up the elevator and into my room...

Bed. Primitive bathroom. Antique holodeck table. No kitchen devices whatsoever. Warm green-gold light flooding in through the big window, Tau Ceti now sliding along the far horizon, outlining the black silhouettes of buildings, dipping behind distant mountains...

Sun sets in the west, by definition. If a planet rotates backwards, it must be upside-down. Venus, for example. I slid the glass doors open, warm air with an odd... scent, almost like chemicals flooding in, wiping away the slightly stale smell of the room, stepped outside into the golden light. Stood leaning into the wind, eyes half shut, hands on the railing.

That odor. That’s the faint aftertaste of groundcar exhaust I’m smelling. Eighty million people in an entire world? They can run internal combustion engines, burn all the fossil fuels they want.

Cityscape below. Lots of featureless boxy buildings, most of them smaller than the Really Good Hotel, windows here and there lighting up now, glass in buildings at certain angles reflecting the light of Tau Ceti like pools of molten metal caught in their walls.

Parks here and there, vegetation maybe green, maybe not, darkened by shadows, looking blue-gray-brown, larger park in the distance with small irregular lakes, a little bit of Old New York clipped from history, plunked down here... Maybe Edith Wharton once stood on such a balcony and saw a cityscape like this one.

Beyond the city, I could see that the sun had gotten beyond the mountains, was bisected by a flat horizon now, rays reddening as they swept across a flat, glossy, glistening surface that I knew must be the sea. When I leaned out over the railing, craning my neck, peering toward the north, I could see more of it, going on forever, right over the edge of the world.

All right. This is it. Here you are where you longed to be, Gaetan du Cheyne. Now what? Now nothing. Go back inside, put on the holodeck, let the drink mixer anticipate your... no. Have to think of everything myself, call... room service, I guess, tell them what to send up. I...

Pale spark of emotion: anger, resentment, self-pity, something like that, all of them mixing together in the shadows beneath my heart. What did you expect, Gaetan du Cheyne? That woman down in the lobby, sitting with luggage piled round her feet, looking the part of a maiden all forlorn, is she one of your safari ladies? Will she come to you in the night, unbidden, strip for you and dance for you and suck your dick for you until your walls fall down and the passion they know you possess is somehow provoked?