Acts of Conscience (52 page)

Salvation. Christ. Who the hell am
I
to be a savior?

No one at all, and yet...

Wolfen down below as well, sleeping in the cabins where I’d put them. Funny as hell to see that big female try to crawl up into a bunk. This interesting soft stuff, my, my... I’d left them lying on the floor, on pulled apart bedding, marveling at how nice it was, stretched out on all those mattresses.

And, of course, the dollies, taking my word, trusting that I wouldn’t let the wolfen eat them, ever again.

Hard to remember their whispered arguments, even now. Hard to live with their words. But if the wolfen don’t
eat
us, how will we get to heaven?

Clinging tight to that one fierce whisper: I don’t know. I want to live.

All right. So we go to the Kapellmeister’s world, talk to its friends, present our case to its enemies, tell them
we
want to live too. Its
our
universe, you see. Our lives and...

As always, a matter of what belongs to whom.

Will they listen?

No way to know.

Maybe it doesn’t matter.

Soft movement behind me. The head of a dollie poking above the rim of the open hatchway, looking around curiously, eyes big and dark. I’ve given them the run of the ship, you see.

Because the salient thing about friendship is trust?

Perhaps.

Or that other matter, the business of brotherhood and obligation.

It got up on the deck and came padding over, putting its hands on the safely locked controls, leaning close, looking out through the viewscreens at an infinitely deep landscape of stars.

What do you make of that, little dollie? Anything at all?

It turned and looked at me, though I hadn’t said a word, then came over, soft and silent, stared at me, empty-eyed for just a moment, then crawled up in my lap, settling down, nuzzling its head under my chin.

Whose obligation now, Gaetan du Cheyne?

I stroked its soft fur, pretending it was just a big cat purring in my lap. But, you know, this
desire
within me...

Do I really wish it wasn’t there? What would it be like to have that purity of purpose, to know I’ve joined battle in a great cause, that I’m about to fight the good fight people love to talk about? Is there any way I’ll ever know?

Or will I spoil it now by taking this dollie, laying it down on the deck, spreading its legs and...

The dollie looked up at me, reached up and touched my face softly, as if trying to reassure me that...

Oh, hell.

I never amounted to a pile of shit in my life, I know that. Maybe if I can just save these people... maybe then, when my time comes to lie down and die, I won’t feel quite so bad.

Appendices

What follows are some essays I did for myself as I prepared to write the 1990s version of
Acts of Conscience
. I’ll include some material relating to the 1970s version of the book in a planned “nonfiction” volume entitled
Loci of the Starover Universe.
In the early 1990s, when I was finally about to write this story, a lot of history we all, in late 2011, are aware of, had yet to happen. In the 1970s, even more was hanging beyond time’s horizon. Brezhnev was master of the Soviet Union. Jimmy Carter was in the White House, Ronald Reagan still a forgotten bad dream, and most people had never heard of Mikhail Gorbachev.

These essays were the “working model” for
Acts of Conscience
, and I didn’t follow everything here exactly, the material mutating to service the requirements of the story as it unfolded. In addition, some of the material for the 1970s version of the book was also included in a Starover novella,
This Dog/Rat World
, that went unpublished at the time. I still have the manuscript, and will publish alongside
Hunting On Kunderer
and
A Plague of All Cowards
, in the year to come.

The differences between that Starover Universe and this one are subtle and terminological, most of it due to the perspective of the narrator. The Kapellmeisters of Salieri called the principals of the Shock War StruldBugs and the Adversary Instrumentality, reflecting the content of their race memory into human terms. When humans actually met the surviving StruldBugs later on, they wound up calling them Karkovers. Human archeologists made up the name Ganeshans for the creators of the great ruins they were exploring.

In the early 1990s, my lost, lamented Starover Universe was dead and buried, along with its books, and while I had created the Silvergirl Univserse, I hadn’t written any stories yet, just had some private essays, drawings, notes, ideas for books. I thought I might try to bring the Starover Universe back to life, and I had no idea I would sit down to write what would become the first Silvergirl story,
When We Were Real
, only a year or so after finishing up
Acts of Conscience
. Somehow, as I worked to modernize the Starover background, bits of the Silvergirl background got mixed in, and, having written
The Transmigration of Souls,
which mixes together bits from
all
my universes, less than a year earlier, I thought, “Well, why not?”

This book doesn’t quite stand at the historical cusp where the the Starover and Silvergirl Universes went their separate ways, but close. If you know about Mr. Zed, you can probably figure out where he is in this story, albeit offstage...

Oh, and before I forget: Gaetan was the name of Patient Zero, the first man known to have died from AIDS.

The Human Historical Surround: 2000 - 2600

The history of the 21st century is largely extrapolated from forces shaping the late 20th century. International disorder grew steadily, as various large states disintegrated. China followed in the wake of the Soviet Union, which itself further disintegrated, as the RSFSR fell apart into its constituents. This led to a proliferation of “small” wars, many of which saw the limited use of nuclear weapons. Between 2025 and 2075, an average of 5 small-warhead nuclear attacks per year took place around the world, rendering many large cities quasi-uninhabitable (for example, when a 5 KT device exploded in southern Manhattan, only a few large buildings were destroyed, but anyone who could leave New York for good then did so). Ultimately, the US and Canada disintegrated into regional associations.

[Let’s note that when this essay was written, September 11, 2001 was still around seven years in the future, the economic collapse of 2008 seven years beyond that.]

The collapse of the large superstates led inevitably to the rise of powerful, independent supranational organizations, principally from the ranks of multinational companies, thriving and at war with each other in the context of unfettered competition, and of various mafia/tong-like criminal organizations, drug cartels, terrorist groups, etc. However, into this scene also arose international political parties, beginning with the Greens from our own day, and including things like the Republican International Free-Trade Organization (RIFTO). [By the 27th century, the most powerful such group was the International Socialist Workers Party.]

Space exploration and industrial exploitation continued in this milieu, largely because advancing technology made it cheaper and easier with the passage of time. In the 2020s and ‘30s, a small Mars colony was set up by the Society for Space Travel, a SIG funded by and as a front for the major aerospace companies, using one-way heavy-lift vehicles. By 2050, the population of the colony had reached 200, but its self-sufficiency was barely sustainable.

[And somewhere out there, as I wrote those words, Elon Musk was going about this business of making a pile of money. Presumably SpaceX was an inkling somewhere at the back of his mind.]

While the quest for commercial fusion power went on fruitlessly (power reactors were built, but were never cheap enough to go into profitable service), Mace Electrodynamics International (MEI) developed a usable antimatter reactor. In 2043, MEI set up a helium-3 extraction facility on the Moon, using very expensive fusion power to begin producing antimatter in commercial quantities, then used this antimatter to bootstrap a large-scale production facility. In 2055, MEI entered into a partnership with Westinghouse Aerospace to produce antimatter-powered spacecraft, which began opening the asteroids to commercial exploitation.

[N.B.: Westinghouse, merely because I have always loved the name.]

On the downside, antimatter-based weapons proliferated on earth. These included a long-range (10km) rifle (commonly known as a “radgun”) which could fire a “bullet” bearing a 0.1 KT warhead (equivalent to 100 tons of dynamite). This is sufficient to destroy a conventional city block, or to knock down a building larger than the World Trade Center.

[Not prophetic, of course, since the first WTC attack was already in the past.]

The real aim of MEI’s owner was the construction of a starship, which was begun with the erection of a volatiles plant on Callisto in 2061, actually a cover for the building of the ship, with secret Westinghouse cooperation. This craft,
Dream
, departed for Alpha Centauri in 2076, arriving in 2091. The ship was damaged during the flight and unable to return, the crew of 200 remaining on the habitable planet Alpha Centauri A4 (which ultimately came to be known as Kent, from the star’s Medieval name, Rigel Kent [Arabic for “Head of the Centaur”]).

Meanwhile, research into the nature of the physical universe continued. In the early 22nd century, a group of European scientists led by Dominique Kerechenko, using the high energies made available by MEI reactors, laid the foundations for a new physics called Asynchronous Metadynamics (AsMet: detailed in another essay). Rather than publish their findings, the research group decided to pursue commercial exploitation of certain implications of AsMet physics, and set up a company called the Eighth Ray Scientific-Industrial Enterprise to do so.

[Even more common practice now than it was then. Patents are public, trade secrets are... secret.]

One of the most important things AsMet paved the way for was a form of gravity control. This made it possible to create and then reach through a species of “artificial event horizon,” making it possible to bleed energy essentially “out of nowhere,” from a device Eighth Ray marketed as a “Field Well Converter.” The ability to convert matter into energy with 100% efficiency and almost infinitely small localization made it possible to build something analogous to science fiction’s long-cherished “gravity polarizer.”

In 2130, the company set up its Chromo-Electric Starship Division to begin building and marketing spacecraft which could use anything for fuel, converting it with perfect efficiency directly to an inertial impulse. These spacecraft are not inertialess, but their ability to accelerate is limited mainly by the ability of the crew to withstand acceleration. Unmanned probes can accelerate to the limits of the ship’s structure to absorb the stress. The theoretical limit of the vehicle is the gross energy available from matter (e=mc2, of course).

The availability of these craft meant an explosion of population into the Solar System, as well as expanding interstellar colonization. However, these “starships” (for it was a media-hype name) are not magic. While it doesn’t take a lot of energy to let an airliner-sized spacecraft whizz around the Solar System in a matter of days, the interstellar gulfs are huge and the requirements for true colonization are large. CESD starships wound up being self-contained entities the size of small towns which had to expend enormous energies to get close to the speed of light, and to deploy almost equally large energies deflecting the contents of the interstellar medium.

The end result is that over the next couple of centuries, a dozen or so colonies were planted, with populations growing, in a few cases, into the hundreds of millions. Ultimately, of course, Eighth Ray became the dominant economic force in human affairs, able to bring its trading partners into a powerful alliance. By the 27th century, the Unified Planetary Intercorporate Trade Organization (UPITO) was a de-facto Solar System government, with Eighth Ray holding a controlling interest.

Over time, the human population, expanding slowly but steadily, moved off Earth to planetary and deep-space habitats. The Earth became somewhat park-like, with its population reduced to only a few hundred million, mostly on the scattered estates of the wealthy, with their villages of servant employees. The largely empty ruins of great cities decorate this feral landscape, which conceals bands of “bushrangers.”

In the late 26th century, two independent scientists, Roald Berens and Ntane Vataro, researching very high energy gravitational compression physics, discovered a means of providing an inertialess impulse to a physical object. Calculations appeared to indicate that the application of a sufficiently large impulse would project such an object faster than light. While continuing to investigate, Berens and Vataro incorporated as Berens-Vataro Enterprises Interplanetary (B-VEI) and quietly patented their prototype space drive with UPITO. [N.B., obviously the two eggheads didn’t know they shouldn’t patent anything, with consequences noted in the story.] They then acquired funding from Eighth Ray’s major competitors, pretending they’d simply found an alternative to CESD, and built an experimental FTL starship, the Torus X-1. In 2604, they flew this vehicle from Earth to Kent at an apparent velocity of 2000c (i.e., they made the trip in approximately 18 hours), picked up representatives of the Kentish government, and returned them to a plenary session of the UPITO Board of Trade Regents.

The result was sensational, with accusations of fraud rampant. When the claims were verified and the “Kentish Embassy” accepted, all hell broke  loose, as Eighth Ray had Berens and Vataro arrested and tried to have their patents nullified (after all, the “B-V Drive” is based on a highly modified chromo-electric gravity screen, so Eighth Ray can claim the drive is a subset of its own patents). However, all of Eighth Ray’s opponents and competitors acted in concert to prevent this from happening. Torus X-1 brought in embassies from all the colonies, and negotiations began. The colony planets, for their part, would, after all, like to maintain their independence, formerly guaranteed by distance.