Acts of Conscience (37 page)

There!

High-energy objects moving against the anisotropic background of infinitely deep space.

Activity centered around
that
star, a nice, middle-aged main sequence G2, just over twenty light-years away.

Someone is abroad again, after all these years
.

What do we do now, other than fear?

Click
.

Friend, lover, sibling, mine, being without a name. Being with... yes. Identity. Identity with
it
self, not with
my
self, but... just the two of us now, facing one another, poised on a rounded, windswept crag under that same old sky of infinite gray and gold, sun a dull shield down by the horizon...

82 Eridani
, whispered a friendly alien inclusion.

Ah, yes.

I reached out with my speaking hand, my listening hand, my loving hand, friendly hand, relating hand. reached out and touched my sibling-friend-lover.

Felt its thoughts flow into me. Felt its memories merge with mine. Felt matching memories pair up, merge, as though we
were
one.

One for now.

For only now.

Felt raw new memories search for mates, Felt them fail. Saw the memories stand up in mirror array. This one similar to that one. But different. Here. There. Yon...

Felt the raw new memories begin to duplicate.

Soon, there will be enough memories for both of us. Soon...

When we separated, the sun had gone down, the sky misty black, stars like bright bits of silver now, each little fleck surround by a nimbus of high cloud.

I looked at the being looking at me; knew a mirror mind looked back.

Ten thousand years. Times two. And more.

Our lineages... similar, a little different.

All those, old, older, oldest memories, waiting for me to sift through them, waiting for me to make them mine, as I’ve made so many other memories mine. I...

Click
.

Gaetan, whispered a machine voice, unrecognized, unreal. This is, perhaps, not safe. We think...

First, do no harm
.

Who said that?

Is that you?

Me.

Vague image of looking out through my own eyes at a warm Green Heaven night. Out past cool, not cold black tentacles, out across a truly darkling plain and...

Click
.

Childhood.

Whose?

One of many.

After ten thousand years, I remember many childhoods, the childhood of every friend-lover-sibling I’ve ever had.

Fat little being, crawling over the rocks by the seashore, playing, playing, secure, knowing its mother was near.

Other children near, calling out in their high, piping, childish voices, voices wet with the dew of the egg. I-am-here! I-am-here!

Dark shadow.

I-am-here?

Child recoiling, recoiling at the adult looming out of the shadows, shadows of the forest by the sea. Mother? Mother, where are you? Mother!
Mother
!

Turning to run.

No use.

The adult’s black hand engulfs me.

Memories flow.

Its memories, into me, for I have no memories of my own.

When the hand lets go, only two adults stand by the seashore, listening to the familiar boil and hiss of the waves, surf on crushed stone.

Old adult satisfied.

New adult bitter.

I wasn’t ready yet.

Ah. Well, no one ever
is
, fiend, sibling, lover, mine...

Click
.

Well. Well, yes, I
do
have a memory!

Red, red darkness, ovoidal darkness, slick, ovoidal darkness closing me in. Far away sounds. A sense of movement. Piping cries.

I’ve been here for... ever so long. Quite. Drowsing in my fluid home. The universe is... circumscribed. Nothing but me. Warm. Happy. Alone forever in the warm, red-lit universe.

Crawling sensation in my legs. Legs ‘til now curled motionless beneath me. An itchy urge to move my seven eyes. I rock back and forth in my red-lit darkness, warm, eternal darkness. Rasp my keel tooth against the cosmic event horizon, as I’ve done more and more lately.

Rock back and forth, harder and harder, listing to the little
chip
of sound each impact makes, my keel tooth against the edge of the world.

Why am I doing this?

I don’t know.

Rock.
Chip
. Rock.
Chip
.

Crack
!

Light! Blinding light!

Eyes recoil, trying to hide, trying not to see... the things, horrible things, things beyond...

Oh. Ohhhh.

I am born!

Click
.

Ten thousand years.

Birth.

No memory of death.

No memory of infinity, before, after...

But...

That other mist.

That far away time.

Time before the egg.

Where do those memories come from?

I...

Opened my eyes. Blinked. Blinked away a memory I knew was my own. Memory of myself lying not long ago on a wet bluff, in a forest in the borderland between Koperveldt and Koudloft, standing in the dank night beside Gretel Blondinkruis, wishing for her crotch, looking down at a ravine densely packed with womfrogs. Womfrogs looking back at me.

I wonder. Did they know they were about to die?

Of course they did.

The Kapellmeister said, “How do you feel, Gaetan?”

“I don’t know. I...” I took a deep breath as the tentacles fell away, releasing me back into the night air. “Are you really ten thousand years old?”

Silence. Then it said, “Yes. I suppose so.”

Fourteen: Standing on my bald stone hilltop

Standing on my bald stone hilltop, I watched Tau Ceti rise like an apparition over the empty plains of the Opveldt. Eastward, hanging in banded layers above the plains, was a pattern of low clouds, morning fog perhaps, created by some temperature/pressure differential, coating the landscape like haze. Above that, reaching beyond the horizon, I could see the pale gray peaks of Thisbÿs Bergketen, eighteen hundred kilometers away, not quite rimming the world, broken,
there
, by a patch of tawny morning sky.

That would be Aardlands Bergpas, then, the saddle, dipping down through the tropopause, that was the only way through those mountains available to... beings without technology.

Beyond it would be the Adrianis peninsula, with it vast, blinding gypsum deserts, dryer than anything the Earth had ever produced. Home of the Hinterlings, descended from the original colonists of Green Heaven, scientific base technical personal left behind when their organization had folded.

The library AI whispered, A yellow wolfen species inhabits the southeastern part of the peninsula, now on the verge of extinction. Planetary records indicate the northern coast of the peninsula, just beyond the equator, is being settled by the families of professional boombanger guides.

Boombangers. Something from the netvid, barely recalled. People who went out on the high seas of Green Heaven, the vast Panviridis Ocean of the northern hemisphere, taking parties of tourists out to kill boomers, as though they were participants in some old sea epic or another. Ahab. That sort of crap.

I remember hearing about boomers, sort of halfway between whales and giant squid in appearance, sometimes growing up to a hundred meters in length. Smart bastards. I had a brief recollection of seeing a hunt, of seeing a boomer pull the mast off a cleverly made sailing ship, try to use it as a weapon until the boombanger safety officer killed it with some kind of electric cannon.

Never fantasized about that.

Not quite personal enough.

Unless, like Ahab, you went down with the whale.

I turned away from the rising sun, stood looking down at my friend the Kapellmeister. “What now?”

It stood still for a moment, then said, “We have another day before I must return to the Arousians’ camp. Let’s just... go on.”

Not that long before I have to get back to Orikhalkos. Get back to Delakroë and van Rijn and... do what I agreed to do. “All right.”

o0o

Lunchtime, atop another low ridge, camper parked in the shadows. I sat on a nice warm rock I’d found, shadows from the small leaves of a spreading baarbij bush making a mottled pattern on my skin. I sat alone, looking out over the empty plain at nothing in particular.

Odd. The absence of large flying creatures on Green Heaven makes it look like there’s something terribly wrong out there. No vultures means there’s nothing dead. Nothing dead means there’s nothing alive. There are always vultures. Or is that just one more netvid fantasy?

After a while, I finished my sandwich, finished my lemon cookies, swigged the last of a beer-like beverage that was distinctly out of sync with the sweet cookie filling. No sign of the Kapellmeister, who I’d expected would turn up at any second with a living lunch relaxed in its grasp. Relaxed and waiting to die. Is there something out there that could take on and kill a Kapellmeister? I have no idea how tough they really are. What would I do then?

Something far out on the plain, many kilometers away, caught my eye. A tiny sparkle of light. After a long time, I heard a faint echo, hardly a sound at all.

The library said, Technogenic.

I got up and went back in the camper, disposing of my empty bottle and getting a pair of binoculars. Went back outside, stood on my rock, and looked.

Little things moving, reddish splotches against the dun and green grass of the Opveldt, blotches scattering in all directions. More flashes, followed a long time later by that faint echo of technogenic sound. I turned up the gain on the binoculars as far as it would go. Yes. Those are human hunters, moving in to inspect the now motionless red blotches. Dead wolfen.

I looked around, carefully panning the binoculars. A truck with cages on the back. Another truck with a flat bed. And... there. Huddled, waiting, motionless. A band of dollies.

Wolfen always have dollies with them.

The men took their time, gathering up the wolfen, throwing them in the back of the truck. Some of the wolfen weren’t dead, merely wounded, helpless, baring teeth, tiny with distance, trying to fight back. I watched the men beat them with what looked like baseball bats, tie them up, throw them on the truck with the dead ones.

Is that how they get to the killpits? Maybe so.

Something else was going on, too.

When the men finished with the wolfen, they went over to the huddled mass of waiting dollies. Why didn’t they run? Afraid they’d be killed? Hell, that’s their fate anyway. The wolfen kill them too. Kill them and eat them.

I watched the men pick dollies from the group and drag them aside. Watched the men take down their pants and lie on top of the dollies they’d selected.

OK, Gaetan du Cheyne. Would you like to be down there now, helping them out? Is that what you want? Maybe some part of me did. I don’t know anymore.

After a while, they were all done. Will they kill the dollies now? How do
those
men feel about what they’ve just done? What they did was gather the dollies, fucked and pristine alike, put them in the cages, get in the trucks, and drive away.

I took the binoculars away from my eyes and stood staring at the scene, now so far away it really didn’t exist anymore. After a while, there was a soft almost-noise behind me, and there was the Kapellmeister, holding some little green rabbit-like thing.

It said, “There’s very little game around here.”

o0o

Come sunset, I dropped the camper atop a low, grassy hill just west of the main course of the Somber River, here more than five kilometers wide, changed from a pleasant little stream to a vast, dark, placid thing, waters laden with silt from the Opveldt making their way northward to the endless sea.

After triggering the popup and getting my dinner started, I walked a little bit away, surroundings new yet nearly unchanged. The Opveldt gradually widens as you go north toward the equator, at the point where it meets the Mistibos, stretching approximately 8500 kilometers east to west, so there are areas in the middle where you can see neither mountain range.

Southward: Nothing but Opveldt as far as the eye can see, rolling brassy-gray-green plains, a dark, metallic landscape as featureless as the void of space. Somewhere out there... dollies, wolfen, womfrogs, Groenteboeren, omganger hunters and vreemdeling tourists...
smartinaassen
? I turned toward the east and watched the Kapellmeister picking its way down hill to the bank of the river.

I hardly remember Gretel Blondinkruis at all now. A fantasy abandoned.

Eastward, beyond the flat, oily, almost-black waters of the river, more Opveldt stretched to the horizon, above it a purplish-green sky in which a few bright stars showed up as pale white dots. No more mountains. Too far away at last. In the north...

Beyond the plains, at the edge of the world, an indigo shadow capped by a thin rime of dark cloud, narrow band marking the boundary between earth and sky like a long muddy smear of paint. That would be the Mistibos Forest, with its dwarf womfrogs and primitive green wolfen. Go there tomorrow? Perhaps. Maybe we can meet some of these green wolfen. Maybe they’ll have nice little dollies of their own, and... and...

Westward, long-shadowed plains reaching to the horizon, then the thick, jagged peaks of the Pÿramis Bergketen in black silhouette against the sunset, Tau Ceti already hidden, long bands of golden light streaming up from all the valleys and passes, fanned out across a dark red sky, the hand of some impossible god reaching out to engulf the world.

I looked for a long time, feeling short of breath.

Think of all the reasons you came, Gaetan du Cheyne. Maybe this is the only valid one.

I went back then and got my dinner off the grill, some frozen sausages I’d found in the camper, weiswurst cooked brown now, striated with black, a plate of ice-cold canned sauerkraut, a bottle of some peculiarly sweet red ale, flavored with nutmeg.