Acts of Conscience (22 page)

OK.

It’s OK.

Really it is.

I withdrew, as far as I could without falling out of her, hearing my own faint gasp at the sensation. Hasn’t been that long. Hasn’t been that long. Remember Camilla? Remember what that was like?

But it seems like forever.

Seems like...

I slid back into her, out again without pausing, then in, finding an old, old, too-familiar rhythm, nameless street girl snugged up against me, smooth face pressed tight and warm against my cheek, my face in her hair, which was full of some flowery sent, lilac maybe, or lavender.

Just now, I want this to go on forever.

Just now, I feel like I’m in love.

Feel like this... woman... I...

Felt my dick suddenly swell, felt the girl clutch me tight with her arms and cunt, slid in as far as I could go, one hard crackle of regret as I felt a surge that... what do they call it in all the silly books?
Rising tide of inevitability
. That’s it.

Felt the ring of muscle at the base of my pelvis clench hard, once, twice, like dry heaves when you’re sick and empty, then the first thready sear of semen on its way, then...

Hollow ache of pleasure, deep in my belly.

Warmth in my face, a flush of warmth, not at all like a blush, brief, tingling thrill running right up my spine, up into the base of my skull, flooding my eyes with... I relaxed against her, pressing her against the wall, feeling a flood of relief, a slight scald of nausea. That’s it then.

The girl took her legs from around me, rocked her pelvis back so my wet, quickly softening dick popped out, flapping against the top of my thigh, smoothed down the front of her skirt, looking up at me, watching as I pulled up my pants, buttoning, zipping, buckling...

Well.

I turned and started to walk away...

Angry voice: “Wait!”

Turning back.

Angry girl, hand outstretched, palm up. “Asshole!”

Oh. I took out my money clip, handed her a thousand
drakhmai
note, and walked away, quickly, before she could react.

o0o

I awoke the next morning, sprawled naked on my hotel room bed in a warm pool of butter-yellow sunshine, looking down the length of my torso at a nice, fat, solidly-erect prick, and grinning. Hell, maybe I’d been grinning in my sleep too.

Whisper from an inner voice, Is that all it takes, you little shit?

A quick glance at the table. The transceiver barrette was lying there, next to the dusty television remote, so the voice was only me. I reached down and curled my fingers around it, warm palm on warm dick, Cetian infrared a pleasure on my face, and wondered.
Is
it?

Maybe.

Anything
really
wrong with that?

Maybe.

But all I wanted to do, just then, was send for that nameless, faceless, neatly-shaven whore, throw her naked in my bed, lay her across this wonderful patch of sunshine and screw the hell out her, until I’d forgotten all about the last few weeks, the months before that, then all the years, all the...

Forget about Rua Mater, lost in dreams. Forget about Leah Strachan, about Garstang, about Jayanne and her discarded baby. Forget about Lara Nobisky, who’d been mine only in the short-lived realization of a boy’s fantasy, even before concerned adults had had her... cured.

The head of my dick was turning purple, skin shiny and tight, from the strangle-hold I had on it.

I let the damned thing go and lay back on the bed, hands behind my head, staring at the ceiling, and thought, There aren’t many people who would not laugh at me now, laugh at the notion that a man’s spirit could be so elevated by a paid-for fuck that lasted all of two minutes. Maybe it doesn’t matter.

After a while, when answers, the will to action, failed to emerge from the ceiling, I picked up the remote and hit the power button. There was a sizzle of static, a smell of dusty burning, and the instrument in the corner came to life, shimmering color image leaning forward out of the glass screen. Great. Three-hundred year old holodeck technology...

Fuck
. I sat up in bed, heart pounding, staring at a view from the spaceport, view of the landing field, in the middle of which sat the silver disk of
Random Walk
, surrounded by what looked like armed, uniformed police, hatches open, people coming down the ramp, while a deep voiced announcer babbled in rapid, fluid Greek from which I could pick out nothing but the few conjunctions I’d subconsciously memorized.

I grabbed for the barrette and shoved it into my hair. Almost panicky: Ship? Suit? What the Hell... The library AI’s voice whispered, Here, Gaetan. All is well.

Well
? What the hell are those people doing in my ship? Jesus fucking...

The suit’s voice whispered, No one’s in here, Gaetan.
Random Walk
is secure. A second FTL ship landed during the night—we’ve been waiting for you to log on.

Library: We were seriously considering attempting to ring your hotel phone through the InfoNet gateway we’ve established. It’s late and we were worried.

Announcer’s voice, translated now: “...this ship,
Torus X-2
, which carried a special legation from Orikhalkos to Earth several months ago, under the corporate aegis of Berens-Vataro Enterprises, has now returned that delegation. As we mentioned earlier, the ship now appears to be under the command of the Earth’s Board of Trade Regents, who have sent a delegation of their own to Green Heaven. The
basileïos
of Orikhalkos has arranged for a special conference call to the mayors of the other Compact Cities, with the object of creating a planetary agency for dealing with these new developments...”

A sigh of relief, then. Nothing really the matter. Just... the beginning of the next phase. I... The library whispered, Gaetan, there’s something else you should know.

The holodeck image began to pan away from
Torus X-2
, making a longer shot across the concrete wasteland of the cosmodrome, where dozens of ships, large and small, of endlessly varied design, lay waiting, until it focus on yet another small, shiny silver disk.

Uh-oh
.

That’s what we wanted to tell you, said the ship.

The announcer’s small, monkey-like face came up, floating disembodied in the upper right-hand corner of the image. “When
Torus X-2
landed last night, with great fanfare, we sent crews to cover the event. And we began to wonder: to whom does
this
ship, so obviously of the same design, belong?”

Fucking great.

“When we attempted to approach, we were turned away by spaceport security. Authorities would only tell us that the ship landed a few weeks ago and discharged its passengers, tourists apparently. The crew then paid for a slip rental of three months and disappeared.”

The man’s face enlarged, so the audience could see how serious his expression was, face wreathed in a wrinkling frown, eyes dark and flashing. “This reporter is
outraged
to find that a faster-than-light ship can appear in our star system, land at our largest spaceport unannounced, and sit there for
weeks
, apparently unnoticed!”

I flopped back on the bed, warm sunshine spoiled, erection gone wherever the hell it is erections go when they’re gone, and thought, Great. What next? And what the hell happens when I try to go get my ship?

On the holodeck, the image had shifted away from
Random Walk
, was now focused on a scene of the dark-faced reporter, who was posing angry questions to a slim, neatly-dressed bald fellow, under whom floated a luminous placard that said,
Zeïos Keimannon, Spaceport Manager
. Just now, he was saying, “You understand me correctly, Mr. Demókissas. So long as the landing fees are paid, it’s none of our
business
who these ships belong to,
or
where they come from!”

I found myself wondering, briefly, what he’d say if the starfish-shaped warship
X-4
’d met at Regulus turned up, wanting to rent out a landing slip.

o0o

Washed and dressed, hair combed and teeth brushed, I walked across the hotel lobby, headed for the sunshine-flooded street, thinking I might get breakfast while I tried to figure out what I might want to do next. Go the spaceport and try to sneak aboard my ship? Unlikely, with these media dogs watching and... right, Leah Strachan will have seen this too, will be coming in to contact the crew of
X-2
, looking to cash her repatriation ticket.

Maybe, somewhere deep down, I was figuring she’d come crawling back to me, looking for a ride home so she could take up her contract with Nomiura. Maybe I was imagining what I’d do then.

The library AI said, Right now, if you can get aboard
Random Walk
, the spaceport authorities of Orikhalkos will let you go, It seems unlikely, of course, that any laws will change in the
immediate
future, but...

So. And did you have any ideas about
where
I should go, dear starship persona. I mean...

“Mr. du Cheyne?”

Greek voice in translation, pulling me up short, making me look around. A woman’s voice, after all... Young woman, standing behind the concierge’s desk in the corner of the lobby, looking at me, hand raised.

“Mr. du Cheyne, you have a message waiting for you.”

Leah Strachan, perhaps? There was an inappropriate, icy dread. I’ve got the starship. There are more worlds than this one. More than just Earth. What could happen that...

Library AI: You can refuel anywhere there’s a cosmodrome, but the ship will need repairs, refitting every now and again. Shipyards with that capacity are to be found on Earth and Kent, where you’ll need some sort of legitimate pilot’s licence. Not to mention the economics of the thing. I keep avoiding that. Just don’t think about it. Maybe the whole business will go away?

The message she handed me was written by some sort of stylus on a little paper message pad, technology so old I almost didn’t know what it was, at first. Greek letters in blue on pink paper. I stared, puzzled, waiting... finally shifted the barrette to the back of my head so it could rest over my visual cortex. Watched with interest as the letters squirmed, changed from Greek to Roman, Watched as the words rearranged themselves, watched as they changed from transliterated Greek to colloquial English.

Gaetan du Cheyne: I have a business proposition for you
.
I will have a luncheon table at “Kalikanzáros,” 1330 this afternoon, if you’re interested
.
Santos Delakroë
.

Hmh. Business? No prickle of foreboding. No sense of... shit. What do my
feelings
have to do with reality? Nothing, of course. I thanked the concierge, who smiled like a pretty girl, turned and headed for the street.

o0o

Kalikanzáros turned out to be a classic-style Greek restaurant, like the ones you’d find somewhere in a big orbital mall, back in the Solar System, at the interface between the main downtown business complex and the waterfront warehouse district where I’d done so much of my recent wandering. A lot of stuff down here. Plenty of deserted blocks, big, empty buildings where an enterprise can be... enterprising, I guess.

Inside the frosted glass doors, I told the
maitre d’
I was joining a Mr. Delakroë, was led to a table near the back wall of a big, gloomy dining room with slowly wheeling paddle fans on the ceiling, feeling ever more intensely like a character in some cheap vidnet show. Maybe that’s what atmosphere is all about, feedback between life’s original archetype and the simplified ectypes of fiction.

Santos Delakroë was a tall, thin man, extraordinarily pale-skinned despite his dark eyes, with a long, narrow face under salt-and-pepper hair, gray-streaked goatee framing lips that looked almost white in this light. He stood, and took my hand, “Mr. du Cheyne?” Gestured to another man, sitting at the table. “My associate, Andrész van Rijn.”

This one was short and fat, with dark, shiny skin and long, oily-looking black hair that fell in sticky ringlets down the sides of his flabby neck. When he shook my hand, murmuring, “Duquesne...” I noticed he had a heavy ring on every thick finger, gold and silver intermingled, some with gemstones, red, green, yellow, the rings on his thumbs plain, like old-fashioned wedding bands.

As I sat, Delakroë muttered, “Du Cheyne.”

Van Rijn said, “Mph. Of course.” They let me order a drink, one of those resinous beers is what I asked for, let it come and watched me take a long pull before starting in. Delakroë said, “Mr. du Cheyne, we’d, um... like to discuss a charter with you.
Random Walk
will be here for another ten weeks before your passengers go on to their next destination, wherever...”

A little pang at that, but... I held up my hand. “How did you...”

Van Rijn: “We do, um, a
lot
of business at the cosmodrome, Mr. du Cheyne. Your ship was noticed and, um... well it was a simple matter to get into All Worlds’ office computer system and...” His wide, thin leer showed small, widely-spaced yellow teeth.

A quirk of irritation on Delakroë’s face. “Andrész,
please
.” Then he said, “Mr. du Cheyne. Gaetan. The fact is, we know more or less everything about your visit to Green Heaven. We’ve... talked to Captain Strachan as well and...”

I had a sense of cringing inside, imagining the sort of thing she might have said, but. Well, these are men here. Mere men. I imagined myself taking Santos Delakroë by his long, spindly neck. Smacking him face first into the side of van Rijn’s nice, round head. I put my hands together on the table, fingers neatly interlaced, and said, “I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t interested in hearing about your... proposal.”

Men glancing at each other, maybe a little taken aback, probably not. Delakroë said, “All right. Simple enough. We’d like you to carry a cargo from here to Epimetheus. With your ship, we think we can get a good price for our... product. And we can pay a prime rate for the haul.”