Acts of Conscience (24 page)

Outside, the night air was cool and, as I walked through the darkness, I started to feel a little better. Glad, perhaps, that they
hadn’t
been little girls.

Nine: Another bright and sunshiny morning

Another bright and sunshiny morning, all the stacks and program counters of my soul reset by a good night’s sleep. Sometimes, I wonder if we’re truly the same person from one day to the next, or whether yesterday’s man isn’t gone, a new one formed from nothingness to live for today. Death and resurrection.
Metempsychosis
. Something like that.

Just now, I followed a rental agent whose name I kept forgetting across a macadam parking lot on the outskirts of Orikhalkos, fresh yellow stripes stark against newly sealed blacktop, Tau Ceti hanging like some great Medusan eye in the turquoise void, turning the landscape of distant mountains over low wooden buildings to impressionist stone.

Four weeks to kill. Four weeks before it’s time to start... my new job. Sharp prickle in the back of my head at the sound of that. It isn’t a job. Not really, but the sense of... something. Something...
real
that I’ve got to do...

The rental agent said, “I think this is exactly the sort of thing you’ll be wanting, Mr. du Cheyne.” He looked at me, eyes searching, looking for something... “Um. We call this a pop-up.”

A fairly substantial vehicle sitting before me, roughly nine meters stem to stern, by two meters abeam. Nice bubble canopy in the front, two bucket seats and a boxy control panel visible through clean Plexiglas, behind that a flat, vented compartment of some sort under two long, bronze-colored whip antennas, then a larger box, faceted with joint lines, the whole finished off in shiny, lemon-yellow enamel.

The rental agent was saying, “...and there’s a gun rack behind the cockpit seats, pre-equipped with a standard zipgun, a sparkler, and a compression rifle. We’ll remove them, of course, if you want to substitute your own...”

“They’ll be fine.” I walked back along the machine, trailing my hands across the finish. Some kind of acrylic, soft enough to take fingerprints. “Powerplant under here?”

“Power... oh. You mean the motor and batteries. I suppose so, I...”

There was a legend printed in black near the line of large, flush-set metal screw securing the bonnet, and I suddenly realized I’d learned the Greek alphabet well enough to subvocalize the words. The translator whispered,
No User Serviceable Components Inside
.
Warranty Void if Seal Is Tampered With
. Is it grammatically incorrect in Romaic as well? The translator admitted it was.

The rental agent was saying, “...and if you hit the
popup
button over there on the driver’s left, the living compartment will expand to a full seventeen square meters, easily enough for two adults to camp out in comfort.” No doubt. I fished out my shiny new All Worlds credit card, and said, “Fine. I’ll take it.”

He inspected the thing, seeming to puzzle out the embossed words with interest. “You some kind of travel agent?”

“Something like that.”

“Must be interesting work.”

“I suppose so.”

I’d given the All Worlds staff a few difficult moments this morning when I’d showed up with a hundred thousand livres cash in the form of Compact Reserve Notes drawn on Delakroë’s bank, fine, untraceable money of a sort that hadn’t been used in the Solar System for hundreds of years. At first they told me they
couldn’t
suffix it to my letter of credit, that I’d have to convert it to commodities if I wanted to take it off planet with me when Ieft. Then, once they admitted it could be done, they wanted a ten percent commission for the privilege of doing it. And when I asked for them to arrange a debit service...

I finally talked them down to a five percent commission on the whole thing and left it at that, took my shiny new credit card and left the office staff to contemplate their cut of the dollies’ misfortune.

I’d loaded my gear into the pop-up, toolbox in the cargo bay under the living compartment, and set up my transponder unit on the passenger’s seat, plugging waveguides into console jacks the rental agent told me he hadn’t known were there. “I guess I thought the antennas were just for TV and telephone service...”

With the box in place, the bandwidth back to the ship was expanded hundreds of times, solving most of the problems I’d been having. So long as I stayed line-of-sight to the camper. I’d had an easy time getting the stuff I needed out of
Random Walk
, driving unchallenged across the landing field, parking in the shadows under her hull, the Orikhalkan media, apparently, having forgotten all about me.

Toolbox, with the toolbelt inside awakening, full of joy at my touch. You could tell the spacesuit wanted to come along,
You’ll be safer if you’re inside me, Gaetan
. I left it draped over the seat, still plugged into the ships subsystems, running my hand just once over it’s substance, whispering, “I need you here. Sorry.”

Felt its flush of pleasure at my use of the word
need
.

The pop-up had lifted off in a whirl of dust and turbine whine, making me think of the rental agent’s ignorance: “Well, no, it doesn’t need refueling. All electric and... what? No sir, I don’t know if the batteries ever need recharging. Sorry I can’t be more help, but...”

Now I was running smoothly over the plains, feeling the seat surge under me every time we went of a little rise, surge and then settle, bobbing slightly, digital meter on the control panel reading
75
and no more whenever the thumb-throttle was set higher than thirty percent, vehicle scraping along less than a meter above the ground no matter how I lifted on the stick.

After about an hour, I shut down and landed, out on the empty plains, got out and stood looking back at Orikhalkos, still visible like a collection of child’s blocks on the horizon, sunlight from Tau Ceti shining on white clouds hanging over the sea. Orikhalkos and all its grimy millions, still less than a hundred kilometers away.

I went back and got my toolbox, set it on the ground and opened the lid, plugged the toolbelt into the transponder box and stood back. All set?

The spacesuit whispered, Boot track liftoff. Autodiagnostics. Warming up... The belt’s main sensor head rose like a snake out of the box, and I could feel it make contact with me through the barrette. I directed it to the middle compartment of camper. The screwdriver head snaked out, bingbingbing, pannier catching screws as they fell, and the bonnet opened, lifted by internal springs that must have put considerable stress on the fasteners. Poor design.

I stepped forward and looked in. Electric turbine, probably derived from twenty-second century airliner engines I remembered studying in my history of technology class. A set of hefty accumulators rigged to a series of AC-cycler batteries, for Christ’s sake. Ingenious stone-age crap, all right, and...

Hmh. Whole mess wired up to the longer of the two whip antennas, only the shorter one going forward to the comdeck in the cockpit. Which means, I suppose, there’s a powersat up in the sky somewhere. Cellular broadcast towers here and there? I didn’t remember seeing any, but that didn’t mean they weren’t around.

All right, so why don’t they use this system for
all
their cars? No answer. I sighed, and said, “All right, let’s disconnect the God damned governors and get the fuck out of here.”

With the governor modules unplugged, the camper was another sort of vehicle entirely, electric turbine driving the big fan with enough power to lift the underside of the chassis twelve meters or so off the ground, and when I fed in the juice, the two axial flow syphonjets would accelerate her, slowly it was true, but continuously, until, a little above two hundred, the body’s laminar flow surfaces started detaching, making her wallow like a fat duck, and I had to throttle back.

Good enough. I settled back in my seat and powered southwest, toward the distant glow of the Koudloft, watching the metallic yellow grasses of the Koperveldt whip by below, easily clearing the occasional clump of shiny, blue-green trees, skirting clusters of low farmhouses when I saw them in time, just once, because I wasn’t paying attention, having to yank hard on the control yoke to avoid running into some kind of wooden windmill...

Please be careful, Gaetan
, the spacesuit’s alarmed whisper.

I ran a quick diagnostic and found a second jack I could use to hook up my transponder box, back to the ship’s navigation system. No radar on this thing, of course, and if I wasn’t looking, no eyes, but there was a nice, fairly recent terrain and obstacles map available through the Orikhalkan InfoNet.

Now, so long as nobody’s put up anything
new
taller than twelve meters in the past few months...

At dusk, I slowed up, looking for a place to camp, finally settling down by a little pond of some kind, scraping the camper on the ground, landing in a little open grove of trees. Sat there with my thumb on the
popup
button... Sheesh. Looked over my shoulder, measuring the space among the trees. I can just see myself calling up the rental agent on the camper’s phone: “Well, sir, I’ve got your pop-up wedged among some trees. Well, no. I disconnected all the governors, so it just
opened
. I guess maybe all the little motors are burned out now and...”

I hit the button and watched the damned thing unfold like some kind of magic box, rising, spreading, little screen windows unfurling from their sockets, appliances visible inside... when it was finished I had a one-room cabin, four and an eighth meters in each direction, two and a half meters high, yellow light glowing cheerily inside as the sky grew dark.

I got out and stood on a rock beside the flat, quiet, clear waters of the little pond, watching Tau Ceti slide away, growing redder as it went, western sky limned with forest green, watching the sky grow dark, the familiar bright stars, stars I’d always loved, pop out one by one, in strict magnitude order. Listened to the faraway, nonhuman sounds of the veldt.

All right, Gaetan du Cheyne
.
Here you are where you longed to be, the hunter, still out on the hill, with no intention of ever going home
.

In the distance, something howled, more unearthly than anything I’d ever imagined before.

o0o

Sometime after sunset I finally got tired of counting the stars and naming their names, got down off my rock and went through the camper’s rear door into the living compartment.

Well. Nice, I guess. Bunkbeds over here, made up with sheets, blankets and pillows. A little galley over here, with a refrigerator/microwave stack that must uncouple and sink into the floor at foldup time. Sink. A flat rack of cabinets the rental agent had told me was stocked with standard canned goods—when I looked inside it was opaque brown jars labeled with Greek words and pictures of food.
Souvláki
? Swell. The jar of
dolmadesh
looked like pickled quadruple-amputee frogs.

Stood looking in through the open refrigerator door at racks of cooled and frozen crap. Plenty of veggies, not much meat, just a few packs of frozen hamburger. I guess, on a hunting trip, you’re supposed to kill and butcher your own meat. Rifles in the cockpit. Are these long skinny things racked under the low ceiling supposed to be finishing poles?

For that matter, are their fish in the little pond? How would I find out?

The library AI, routed to my head through the transponder in the cockpit, whispered, The pond is called Whiplick Spring, technically on the estate of one Borgen Takkor, registered landowner.

Am I trespassing?

Compact property rights do not apply outside the major cities. On the Koperveldt, Groenteboer free-range rules apply.

So
Vrijheer
Takkor won’t mind my being here.

The Groenteboeren are known for their
gastvrijheid
.

I snickered, thinking that greengrocers were known for their hospitality. I wish some greengrocer would come and stock the fridge better. I turned and went back outside and stood under the stars again. Look. The Milky Way is like a band of fog striped right across the middle of the sky. What’s it like out there?

You could go, you know?

Random Walk
can generate a pseudovelocity of around four hundred cee. Go to just the right point in the far periphery of the Tau Ceti system, where the gravitational lens focus for the galactic center is found. Fire the generators, cut in the drive. Watch the sky sparkle some brilliant, pure, impossible blue, ghostly fingers stroke you soul and...

How far? Fifteen thousand parsecs?

Something like that.

How long?

One-hundred-twenty-two point six-two-five years, said the library AI.

All right. So I’ll get back, assuming I choose to come back, no sooner than the late Spring of 2849.

I went over finally and cleared a patch of bare ground beside the pond, scraping it clean with an entrenching tool I found clipped to the side of the cabin extension. Went around in the dark gathering rocks of a certain size until I’d made a little circle, then went around again, gathering up bits of dead wood, breaking the longer branches to a fairly uniform length, making a little pile just so. Very nice. Now, if only I had a lighter.

There are moments when you feel exceptionally stupid, but then I remembered an old movie I’d seen, a twenty-third century remake of
The Mountain Men
, set on an imaginary future Mars that’d been improbably well terraformed, entirely software generated after the fashion of the times, featuring a faithfully resurrected version of Brian Keith. I went to the cab and got the sparkler, fired it down into the pile at its lowest power setting, and watched with some satisfaction as the wood glowed red and burst into flame.

I went in the camper, got out some frozen hamburger, a pan, a bottle of thick steak sauce,
Alpha-Éna
the label said, found an onion, a bag of frozen potato spheres, a stick of oleomargarine, and set to work. Pretty soon, I had the pan sizzling, some pretty good smells filling up my patch of woods, I...