Acts of Conscience (36 page)

The ship’s navigation system whispered, Satellite imagery shows you are coming up on a very large womfrog herd. There is... activity.

I looked. There, a dark mass similar to the one I’d seen earlier, perhaps a bit larger. Herd of dark shapes, moving slowly and... there. Something else. A glint, as of metal.

I took manual control of the camper, holding the wheel, depressing it forward so that we nosed down toward the rolling plains, sliding the throttle back, reducing our speed until I was cruising along just above the grass, separated from the womfrog herd by a low ridge covered with scruffy, stunted-looking silver-green trees.

The Kapellmeister said. “It would appear we’re opposite the technogenic activity evidenced in the tracking satellite imagery.”

I wondered what the Compact Cities wanted with detailed realtime video of what the wildlife and Groenteboeren were up to the middle of this immense, empty plain. Slowed up, nosed the camper into the trees, parking it just under the crest of the ridge, and shut down the engine.

We got out and walked up the hill until we got to a point where we could look out over the veldt beyond, rolling, brassy landscape stretching away to the horizon, pale blue gray mountains rising beyond that, reaching for the sky. Rolling, brassy landscape covered with a moving, irregular sheet of womfrogs, womfrogs stretching away to...

“Son of a bitch,” I whispered.

There it is then, Gaetan du Cheyne.
This
is the landscape of your dreams. This is where you came, mighty white hunter, with your gangs of tourist ladies, to shoot the great womfrogs, shoot them dead, help the pretty ladies shoot them dead, ladies squealing with delight, enclosed in the circle of your strong arms, heads resting back against your chest or shoulder, so you could help them aim that gun, holding them close, feeling the tight clench of their rounded buttocks against the front of your abdomen, knowing, when night fell, they would come to your tent and...

There. In the near distance, between my vantage point and the edge of the womfrog herd, something moving. Two somethings. Trucks, Biggish trucks, five axles visible on each, tractors pulling things that looked like flat cargo beds with low retaining walls. The trucks’ cargo... Human beings. About fifty in each truck, I’d guess. Each one holding a long, thin rifle, all of them, just now, aimed at the sky.

The Kapellmeister said, “It would appear we’ve found a party of... sportsmen.”

As I watched, the near edge of the womfrog herd started to flow a little faster, trucks speeding up to keep pace. Trying to run away? Do they know what’s coming? They must. Nearest womfrogs obviously trying to press back into the herd, distance themselves from the men in the trucks, but they were blocked by the bodies of their fellows.

Faint, distant whistle being blown, the signal:
Now
.

Skinny blacks sticks of the rifles being leveled, people jockeying for position by the cargo bed’s rail. The whistle again,
tweet-tweet
. And, faraway, I heard the rapid
zizpzipzipzip
of the first shots, whispered violences overlapping.

Pockpockpockpock
.

Explosive rounds flashing.

Womfrog hides popping open, spilling blood, tossing bits of internal organ, flying shrapnel of bone tumbling in the air.

I thought I heard a thin, high scream, the scream of a scalded child. Watched the front row of giant womfrogs tumble as they fell. You could see their forelegs breaking as they went down, breaking from the inertial force of the fall.

Zipzipzipzipzip
.

Inserting itself into the now steady
pockpockpock
of exploding bullets, another row, deeper in the heard, mowed down, womfrogs screaming, shouting, calling to each other, recoiling, nowhere to flee, in each others’ way. Ahead and behind you could see womfrogs break from the herd, turning toward the ridge. Can they get up here, finding safety among the trees, flee out on the plains beyond? I thought about the womfrogs we’d hunted in the forest, back on the Koperveldt side of the Koudloft, and felt a little uneasy. Time, perhaps, to creep back to the safety of the camper, the safety of the sky, just drive away and...

Lone womfrogs running, running,
zip
...
pock
! Falling as hunters tracked them with rifles. Tracked them and brought them down.

“Sportsmen,” I muttered. “Great.”

For some reason, I kept expecting them to stop. Every single person on both of those trucks has killed at least two womfrogs now. Enough meat to feed a large family for a whole year. Enough hide to carpet all the rooms in a fair-sized lodge, or make warm winter coats for an entire town the size of Tegenzinstad.

Zippockzippockzippock
! Womfrogs tumbling and rolling, joining a long, long line of motionless dead.

What the hell, then, a commercial hunt?

The library AI whispered, As near as can be determined, there is no commercial market for womfrog products on Green Heaven. The Compact Cities raise terragenic livestock for their own consumption, and most Groenteboer settlements can easily provide for their own limited needs.

So I waited.

Listened to the guns. Watched the womfrogs die, watched the pile of corpses grow larger and larger, blood staining the bright metallic grass, making it grow dull, herd beginning to thin from the combined effects of the killing, the fact that the farther parts had figured out what was going on, were beginning to turn away.

Watched, while the sun rose high in the sky. Watched as it sank toward the west.

At some point, I realized the Kapellmeister had wandered off and come back with a living snack, snipping off its head, sucking away contentedly at the sweet blood. None for me, thank you. I’ll just... watch.

In the end, though I would’ve liked to have camped up on the ridge, where we somehow seemed closer to the stars, up where the fresh breezes blow, we had to move on, for the Groenteboeren stayed down below, even after the surviving womfrogs had escaped, doing... whatever the hell it was they needed to do with all those huge dead bodies.

By nightfall, even from our vantage point, it was starting to smell, wind out of the west carrying a bizarre taint, the cloying scent of spoiled fruit. I backed the camper out of the trees and flew on, following the ridge until it petered out, a hundred kilometers or so to the north, moving off above a level plain, curiously empty by the mottled light of the moving moons. A wasteland, I found myself thinking. The landscape for which that word was made.

Eventually, we came upon a small, isolated highland of low, rolling, denuded hills, rising like soap bubbles of stone from the surrounding flat land. I landed the camper atop the highest hill, and we got out to find we’d gotten so far north, two thirds of the way across the Opveldt to the edge of the Mistibos Forest, that the night air was balmy, verging on hot.

Beautiful night, stars rising and falling in orderly progression, antarctic pole stars low in the south, not so many of them now, wheeling in a great circuit round half the sky, as before. This is the sort of night you dreamed about, when you dreamed about the soft women, coming to you out of a jasmine night. Where did that dream come from? Genetically determined hormones? Or merely the netvid?

Where did the netvid dramatists get it, then? Their own hormones, or merely some earlier tradition? Is there any point at which it was... real? No answers, of course. Only a desire, renewed, paved over and renewed again: somewhere, somehow, somewhen, that world will return to me, return to me and be real.

What’s the difference, I wonder, between fucking those dream women, back in that dream time, and fucking a helpless dollie, here and now?
Was
it only their cunts I wanted, as I’ve supposed for so long? Or was it their... imagined desire for me that... I had a crisp memory of the dollie’s eyes looking up at me, shining in the starlight as I fucked it. Hell, I don’t even know if it was a male or female, much less...

To my irritation, I found I had an erection now, sitting here all alone, looking out over the empty plains, gray by moonlight, from my hard stone perch, all alone, but for the bizarre shadow of the Kapellmeister cast on the ledge by my side, robot legs and fat, formless body, eyes on stalks floating above its back.

It said, “There is a special nobility in the accidental beauty of nature.”

I turned and looked at it, wondering what the hell had prompted the statement. Nothing to read, I think, in the Kapellmeister’s form, the empty colored shapes of its eyes, the...

It stood, motionless, poised, outlined against the sky, eyes drifting slowly above its back, as though driven by the soft, warm night breeze, so obviously looking up at the stars. With, I thought, that same innocent nobility you see in a poised stallion, in one of those old, old nature shows.
Misty of Chincoteague
, or something equally stupid.
Lassie, Come Home
.

The translator AI whispered, The pod software’s grasp of human idiom is splendid, but unlikely to be perfect. Nobility, perhaps, is not quite the term.

The Kapellmeister said, “I feel so alone, standing amid this great, dark landscape. From here, it looks like this one little world goes on forever and ever.”

Alone? Snide voice within going, Welcome to the club, fuckhead.

The Kapellmeister said, “This sense of aloneness, which I know now you share, impells my trust.”

Impells, not quite compells? I turned away, staring out at the dark, empty plain, and could see just what it’d meant about this one
little
world going on and on forever. Even if it does go on forever, above there are still the infinite stars, the infinitely deep sky. I whispered, “You never did say what you wanted trust me with.”

Said it almost to myself.

The Kapellmeiter’s shadow moved across the rock, rippling, flowing to fill all the hollows, ride over the bulges. When it was close to me, I watched that middle hand extrude, tentacles flaring, like an octopus about to engulf my head.

“Can’t you just... tell me?”

“It would take too long.” The hand settled on my scalp, tentacles reaching down and around to engulf my face, permission unasked. No need, in fact, to be granted.
Trust
, I thought. What a peculiar notion...

Click
.

The sky was a subtle blend of gray and gold, more like a high mist than a sky, stars visible right through its substance, like bits of tarnished silver, hardly bright at all.

The two of us standing there, on the black beach sand, standing  at the end of our complex trails of footsteps, dark water lapping nearby, like molten tar, but cold, fizzing like foam on the beach, leaving bits of dark ice behind as rime.

Being before me, posing in mirror display, chelae raised, glittering in pale sunshine. Beyond this image of self-not-self, I could see faraway mountains, beyond that, only sky.

I put out my speaking hand, just as that other being did the same. We touched. Our tentacles intertwined. Thoughts, thoughts of another, like whispers, my own whispers reaching out. Familiar, comfortable touch, this other, one I’d merged with so often before. Friend. Lover. Sibling. All those things that one discrete biological unit can be to another.

The other’s thoughts whispered, This is a terrible thing you are doing, you and Those Others Who Would Trust.

I and my comrades, going on out into the void. Void abandoned so long ago, in the Aftermath. I whispered, What else can I do? Merge with the Ones Who Would Hide?

My friend whispered, As Hidden Ones, at least we would not be responsible for...

Inaction, I said, is action enough.

That’s what They say. Believe it if you will.

Join the Rectification Group, then? Go out and Do What Must Be Done?

My friend whispered, I’m sorry for you. This decision must have been hard.

I showed this old lover the fresh scent of my pain, felt a wincing, a drawing away. I said, It’s time for me to go. Released my grip on the other’s tendrils, feeling those old labels, lover, sibling, most of all, friend, start to slip away.

Turned and walked away, following the complex trails of my own footsteps back up the black sand beach, cold wind slipping between my extended eyestalks. When I reached the crest of the dunes, where the dead sand gave way to the complex, interlocking strands of the ground cover, I felt an irresistible urge to look back. I did so, with just one eye, limiting my commitment to only that, and saw the flat image of my old friend standing still, down on the beach, label unshed, watching me go away.

And urge to go back?

Yes.

But I went back to where the groundskimmers were parked anyway. Got aboard mine, started the little electric engine and drove slowly away, up the old coast road toward the industrial complex where the little ships were waiting.

It’d been so hard, had taken us so long, to restore them, get them back to full operating capacity, for they sat in that old underground storage facility for so many tens of millions of years, most of them much longer than that. Perhaps we wouldn’t have been able to do it, even at need, but the Rectifiers wanted them too, and there are so many more of Them than there are of Us.

Fear.

This is fear I feel.

I’m going to be alone soon.

Unfamiliar.

Full of dread.

But something must be done, and I am one of the very few willing to do it.

Click
.

No fear at all now of being alone.

I lie huddled with a thousand friends, siblings, lovers, comrades, mated beings, huddled in a great, seething mass in some underground chamber, embedded in each other, lives held in common, huddled in the midst of a technology so old we have,
somehow
, incredibly, forgotten when it began.

No, it’s a new fear I feel.

And a very, very old one.

Old. Recalled from the most ancient memories of all.

Image, from some primitive, insensate machine, a bit of optical software whose job was merely to watch the sky, ignoring the stars, planets, asteroids, comets, industrial spacecraft, everything that
belonged
out there, well regulated and serene. Just watch the sky, see that nothing sneaks up on us from the cold interstellar deeps. No sense letting some bit of flotsam disrupt the orderly progression of our eons.