Acts of Conscience (28 page)

Horseshit. Why is it everything I seem to know is composed of horseshit?

I looked helplessly at the Kapellmeister, standing off to one side now, then beyond, to a... and froze. In the shadow of some big, silver-green bushes, under branches covered with broad leaves and whorls of small, bright, no-color flowers, lolling on the ground like so many big, weird-looking dogs, were a group of white wolfen. Staring at me, teeth showing, mottled eyes generally attentive.

I think I took a step back, then stopped. Of course. They’re here to be... interviewed. Something like that.

But then beyond the wolfen, kneeling in the deeper shadows, like children in cowgirl suits, wearing teddybear masks, a double row of dollies. Kneeling, impassive, unmoving, heads bowed, tiny hands clasped on their breasts. Like... children saying their prayers.

Faint, faded, faraway memory. Saying my prayers, saying the litany of the Laïty of Kali Meitner under the watchful eye of my mother, before I lay me down to sleep and put my soul at risk. I...

Christ. That... not quite smell in the air, prickling at the underside of my brain, like small, scratching fingers. Suddenly, it felt like the dollies were watching me, dark, almost-human eyes, hidden but there nonetheless, looking at me from under shaggy brows.

Stop it. Nothing more than an overactive imagination. But, for some reason, I kept thinking about the dollie sex show back in Orikhalkos. Besides which, that’s money on the hoof you’re looking at, boy. Fat, horny old men on Epimetheus will pay good money for those things. Probably a lot better money than old van Rijn was willing to let on.

o0o

As Tau Ceti slowly declined, angling down through the northwestern sky, I set up camp next to the Arousians’ little tent village, parking my camper by the stream, next to their pickup truck, opening the pop-up section and puttering around inside, looking into the storage bay underneath, seeing just what...

Right. Dawdling. Because if I’m outside, I get to see those great big white wolfen eying me hungrily, or, worse still, walking around with nothing to do, too conscious of my dick, pretending I don’t know the dollies are there. Even inside, I can sort of smell... Remember the dollhouse back in Orikhalkos. I thought that miasma was, somehow, provoked by all those aroused men, coming off them, evaporating with their sickly sweat...

The library AI whispered, It’s within the realm of possibility that the dollies exude a pheromone that triggers some sexual response in the human male vomeronasal organ. It is a characteristic of Cetian life-forms that they use the same underlying biochemical structures as terragenic life, but for different purposes, resulting in some confusion when end-products of the two evolutionary schemes meet.

Right. Womfrog guts smelling like fresh apple pie. Womfrog steaks with a distinct tang of semisweet chocolate. Dollies able to provoke... well, why not provoke a response in the human female vomeronasal organ? Why were there only men in the dollhouse. Just biochemical coincidence? Or is it true, as so many wish to believe, that women are... superior?

The library whispered, The most widely accepted theory would have us believe that human males are evolutionarily provoked to impregnate every female they can. Hence the ease with which they are tricked into mating with other mammalian species. Unbidden, a brief image of a sheep appeared in my head. Unbidden, I suppose, because I couldn’t quite make myself believe the library AI had put it there, despite its newfound bandwidth.

It went on, As males are provoked simply to impregnate, females are provoked to become pregnant, with the expectation of offspring, hence their reproductive biochemistry is much more finely tuned and correspondingly harder to misdirect.

Meaning a man who’ll screw a dead cat is much less deranged than a woman who has a meaningful relationship with an appropriately shaped power tool? Right. And if you believe that, there’s a very nice bridge spanning Valles Marineris I’ve been meaning to put on the market.

So I puttered around my camper, periodically castigating myself, and watched the goings on edgewise. The Arousians seemed unafraid of the wolfen, moving easily among them, accompanied much of the time, though not always, by the Kapellmeister. Unafraid? Well, maybe the Arousians are no more edible to the wolfen than your average pile of kindling wood. Then again, the wolfen aren’t mad at them, either. One of the Arousians...

Rustmold-on-Pale-Snow, whispered the translator.

Going from wolfen to wolfen. Talking to it through its human-made interpreter gizmo? No. If humans don’t think wolfen can talk... The Kapellmeister would touch the wolfen, which would stiffen, mottled eyes visibly rolling. Wolfen clearly unnerved by what was happening here. Then I’d hear an exchange of words between translator pods. In English? Yes.

The library whispered, English is the technical working language of MEI, and has become the formal human language of the colonies at Sigma Draconis.

Every now and again, after a prolonged exchange, the Kapellmeister would reach out and touch the Arousian. Momentary freezeframe, then you’d hear Rustmold-on-Pale-Snow say, “Ah, yes. Now I understand.”

I wonder what it feels like?

The spacesuit’s voice whispered, Quite likely, similar to our own communication modalities.

But the Arousians, Kapellmeisters and wolfen are
extremely
different sorts of... Um. I’m so used to talking with hardware, I forget what it is that’s whispering in my head. The translator said, Of course, artificial intelligences of human manufacture are optimized for communication with human neural structures.

Our things. Loving us. Belovèd.

Finally, when I got hungry, I decided to take the plunge. Instead of timidly staying in my camper, I broke out the charcoal gas-grill I’d found in the storage bay, set it up on a flat place by the river, fired it up and, while the coal bed was settling in, got out my chair, a little table, picked out a nice womfrog steak, put together a vinaigrette salad, a couple of neatly wrapped ears of corn, butter,
garum
, put the steaks on and listened to them sizzle.

I sat in the chair, determined to enjoy myself, looking up at a sky that was starting to streak with vermilion... what the fuck is that
smell
?

The Arousians were gathered among their tents, more or less ignoring me, gathered round some squat apparatus that made long jets of blue flame. Each stick-bug-person had a skewer on which was impaled some kind of dark lump, taking turns rolling the lumps in their blue flames, pulling them out, on fire, watching them burn, emitting long plumes of pale gray smoke.

A distinct smell of burning polybutadiene.

The Kapellmeister came toward me, carrying a little thing that look like a greenish kangaroo—
konijn
, whispered the translator—holding it helpless in its claws, octopus draped over its little head. You could see beady red eyes peering between the tentacles. Sorry, critter...

Snip
. The konijn’s head fell to the grass.
Slurp
.

“Ah. This one is quite good.” The Kapellmeister said, “One of the problems the Arousians have, when they travel, is a biochemistry that is much different from what we find on other human colonial worlds.”

“Mace couldn’t help them out with that?”

“Well, there are limits to human technology. The Arousians are provided with blood symbionts which allow them to survive allergic reactions to alien tissues. This permits them to travel without bioisolation garments on planets with an appropriate atmosphere, but it can’t overcome the fact that most Terrestrial and Cetian life forms, if consumed, would interfere with certain aspects of the Arousian cellular metabolism.”

Poisonous, in other words. I turned away, intending to flip my steak... found myself gripping the fork rather... firmly.

The Kapellmeister said, “I think
Limbcracker
would like some womfrog steak. She’s gotten rather hungry, hanging around here all day.”

Limbcracker. Great. The wolfen was sitting on its haunches beside the barbecue, eying the meat on the grill with evident interest. Leaning forward, in fact, seeming to sniff... I said, “Terrific. Well.” I went in and got a fresh steak, brought it out... Hell. Put it on the end of the fork and held it out to... Limbcracker. The wolfen gave it a short glance, a sniff. Turned away, back to the grill.

The Kapellmeister said, “I believe Limbcracker would like to sample some cooked meat. Please try to scrape off some of the
garum
you’ve added. It will only make her sick.”

I turned to stare at the Kapellmeister. It sat there, sucking on its dead konijn, looking like... God damn it, I’m trying to make eye contact with a footstool and pingpong balls, I...

“Please, Gaetan. Limbcracker is being very friendly, considering your species.” Shit. I put the raw steak on the grill, transferred the cooked one to my plate and set it on the ground, hoping I was out of reach of any quick grab... Limbcracker edged forward, leaning down, sniffing.
Snap
. Only half a steak left in the plate. In fact, a couple of chips missing from the edge of the plate as well. The steak made sticky sounds as Limbcracker chewed and...

She looked back toward the trees, where the other wolfen, hungry wolfen most likely, were lolling, watching. “
Oooooom
.” Long pause in which the long grunt sort of echoed, then a quick, “
Phh
!” The other wolfen started getting up, walking our way.

The Kapellmeister said, “I think they like you, Gaetan. This is most unusual.”

Like
me? Six, no seven, white wolfen sitting in a semicircle around the grill, looking at me expectantly, long, pointed black tongues coming out, licking around their muzzles, nostrils dilating as they... “I’ll bet.” I went in a got the rest of my steaks, the seventy or eighty pounds I’d cut from the injured womfrog after I shot it dead.

In a while, the Arousians came over, finished with their stinky lumps of whatever, set up what appeared to be stereo cameras, and started filming the goings on. At some point, as I sat in my chair, Limbcracker came over and threw herself on the ground beside me, purring like a God damned cat.

o0o

Later, I sat alone under an infinitely deep nighttime sky, kind of looking up at nothing, smell of dying fires in my nose, faint aftertang of cooked and eaten food, the dry-as-dust scent of the Arousians beneath that, along with the sweet oil and caramel smell of the wolfen... I could see them over there, pale shadows sprawled under a copse of alien trees, wind softly rustling alien leaves.

I suppose I should be getting to bed as well. These antarctic nights are so short, hardly long enough to get enough sleep, to make up for the long, long day.

And yet. All of it. Everything. Stirring my mind to go on and on, thinking about what I’d seen, refusing to let go, let me creep away to a soft bunk and settle down through dream to memory. Memory of the Arousians talking to the white wolfen, through one interpreter pod to another, through the mind of the Kapellmeister, whatever
it
may be like, through neural tendrils that can, apparently, bridge an immense evolutionary gap...

Memory of Limbcracker lying enormous at my feet, licking her muzzle like a dog, licking her paws like a cat and then cleaning behind her ears. Her... Memory of the Kapellmeister, explaining just a little bit of the wolfen’s apparent eusocial order to me, these free-roving wolfen bands groups of sisters, all from the same litter, loosely tied to other such bands in a kinship group, all descended from a common foremother, reaching back for many generations.

And the males?

The Kapellmeister said, There are other aspects of the wolfen social order. Finding these things out is part of the Arousian study. Local humans apparently never cared.

Something reticent about the way it was said, probably no more than an artifact of the translator pod. But... a sense, from nowhere, that, perhaps, the Kapellmeister doesn’t quite trust me yet. Why does that trust seem so important just now? I never wanted anyone’s trust before.

Soft noise in the distance, like a faraway crying child. Some chance animal sound, some little animal or another, like a konijn, or... The crying again, a little louder, as if nearer. One of the wolfen raised its head briefly, listened, then settled back. Maybe the distant cry is some small predator, like a hunting owl or...

A sudden realization that I hadn’t seen many flying things in the air of Green Heaven. Certainly nothing like birds.

I stood, stretching under the stars, intending to go in and sleep. Stood still, frozen in place, listening to that mewling cry. Not so far away at all, is it? No. A tiny whimpering, as if close by. That’s it. Nearby, and not very loud at all. I turned away from the encampment and started walking, in the direction I thought the sound was coming from.

Plenty of light here, though both the moons are gone. Plenty of light from the stars, from the Milky Way’s dense, irregular band of golden dust. Creepy shadows everywhere, trees frozen against the sky.

Momentary pause. Am I being an idiot? There could be... just about anything... I remembered how I’d felt, looking up from my campfire... only yesterday? Remembered that hard pang of terror when I saw the wolfen looking at me. Well. Here’s the comforting lump of my little dartgun, full of potent anesthetic. Not so good against wolfen, to be sure, but... I thought about going back and getting a rifle, but the crying drew me on, back of my neck prickling, hair threatening to stand on end.

There.

Down in the shadows.

Dollies.

Grouped together around one of their number, dollie squatting over what looked in the darkness like a nest made of grass, something dark runneling down the insides of its legs. I walked closer, slowly, quietly. One of the dollies looked up and saw me. Froze for a second, then looked away, as if dismissing me.

The squatting dollie suddenly squeaked, a little mouse-cry of dismay, grunted softly, seemed to strain. A pale ovoid appeared between its legs, started to fall...