Acts of Conscience (3 page)

Move on. News shows. Union bullshit. Legislative bullshit. Commercial bullshit. Corporate bullshit. A voiceover was saying, “...therefore, representatives of Berens-Vataro Enterprises Interplanetary were permitted to land their experimental spacecraft,
Torus X-1
, at a private spaceport servicing the Board of Trade Regency Building in Kiev, where a special plenipotentiary hearing was called into session, expected to meet shortly with members of this so-called Kentish embassy...”

Long shot across a half-empty plain dotted with old ruins, undemolished buildings from a few centuries back, when Earth’s population was topping out close to forty billion, buildings left standing, I suppose, because of their “historical significance.”

Odd-looking disk-shaped spacecraft, falling out of the pale blue sky, surrounded by a nimbus of opalescent light, decelerating hard, just before it hit the ground, settling in a cloud of dust.

Close up shot. Hatch opening in the saucer’s ventral surface, metallic ramp extruding to the ground, men and women walking down, looking around. Some of them dressed in pretty much standard solar system fashions, others wearing rather baggy, colorful outfits. Costumes I’d seen before. Similar to, though not identical with, the sort of clothing you saw in newsreels from Kent, the big, old colony on Alpha Centauri A4.

Cold lump forming in the pit of my stomach. Once upon a time I bought a hundred-twenty shares of Berens-Vataro stock for my little portfolio, money I’ve been piddling with on and off ever since my income grew big enough that I had money to waste. The last time I’d checked, months ago, I think, the B-VEI stock was worth just shy of two hundred livres, a little more than twice what I’d paid for it.

It’d been a very nice little spec-tech company, headquartered on Callisto, a startup venture whose prospectus discussed raising capital for the investigation of technologies leading to fully inertialess spacecraft. Included were a couple of research papers, published stuff of course, no trade secrets, detailing the work of the company’s founders, physicists Roald Berens and Ntanë Vataro.

Hell. ERSIE has had the market in space drives sewed up for close to five hundred years. Still, I knew enough about the matter, working with the technology every day, to know they had a shot at it. A hundred livres? That’s just the size of the pay voucher ERSIE downloads into my account every month. Just about a tenth of my portfolio, these days.

Then the announcer said, “Spokesmen for the Eighth Ray Scientific-Industrial Enterprise state categorically that faster-than-light travel is technically impossible, violating physical laws established more than six hundred years ago. ERSIE representatives on the Board of Trade Regents have called for a full investigation of what they suggest is a ‘cruel hoax,’ possibly intended to divert investors from the failure of Berens-Vataro researchers to develop a commercially viable non-CESD space drive.”

Not much more detail in the news. Shots of the little ship, under guard at the BTR landing field outside Kiev. The fact that the flight crew of
Torus X-1
had been placed under arrest, along with the supposed embassy... Then a shot of baffled-looking members of the regular Kentish trade legation to Earth showing up at the prison, identifying the men and women in colorful, baggy costumes as actual, prominent Kentish citizens, including an infuriated man who was supposed to be the Kentish minister for interstellar trade.

I took direct control of the monitor and hustled off to the stock trading nexus, quickly looked up my B-VEI accounts. I don’t know what the hell I was expecting. Maybe they’d be zeroed out already. Or maybe, with enough suckers falling for the hoax, which appeared to be very well planned indeed, I might be able to scoop a few thousand livres out of the mess and...

My, my, what a busy little bee that stock-trading AI had been. Just looking at the numbers made me reach for that third drink. Dividends traded out, bought back in, rolled over by the autoreinvestor routine. Doubled. Split. Doubled again. Scraps. Margins. All sorts of odd slang terms I’d never seen before. Just now, my account appeared to hold twelve thousand shares of Berens-Vataro Enterprises Interplanetary.

Value?

Zero.

Big red flag flapping from the node:
Trading in B-VEI stock issues has been suspended
. By the Board of Trade Regents of the Earth and Solar Space.

A little side-note popped up, generated by my tracking module. At original investment value, the stock would be worth something like twenty thousand livres. Conservative estimate. About what I’d make with sixteen years’ paychecks. Other estimates, based on what’d already gone down, assuming the immediate resumption of programmed trading, showed a wild array of higher values, some of them just shy of a million livres.

For Christ’s sake.

Right now, though, the official value of the stock was nothing. And, apparently, warrants were being sought for the arrest of the company’s principal officers.

I let it pop back to the news. Sat and stared. Ordered up a fourth drink, feeling myself start to grow dizzy as the alcohol rolled through my system, started diffusing into my brain.

What the fuck would it be like to be worth a million livres? That’s a hell of a lot of money, isn’t it? I could buy myself an interplanetary yacht. Or a mansion on Mars. Hell, I could afford a nice little dacha down on Earth. Maybe even a cabin in the Adirondacks, if prices hadn’t gone up too much...

With my attention directed elsewhere, the monitor started to nodepop again, going, very slowly, through the various newsnodes, stopping for extra-long pauses at the various financial channels, being careful to service my most recently exhibited interests, gradually speeding up and widening its airplay.

I found myself watching one of my favorite pornodes, an hour-long show called
Crotchmate of the Day
, on a channel that did nothing but show that same hour, over and over again, all day and all night. Maybe today’s crotchmate would help defuse the anger I could feel sputtering away beneath a drunken buzz. Faster than light travel. God damn it. Maybe the oh-so-nice little quasi-imaginary girl would help.

o0o

New day. New shift. New tasks to perform. Black of space filling half the sky. The repair and refit of starship
Aardwolf
, leasehold of Harmattan Transport, was almost complete, vast cylindrical body, close to a kilometer long, floating free in Stardock’s exobay six, hull patches closed at last, turrets in place, radiator vanes for the field modulus device a shiny black star aft.

Floating next to me, anonymous in his glitter-sparkly silver spacesuit, Phil Hendrickx, who’d stolen Garstang’s sleek ass right out from under me all those years ago, said, “Hey, du Cheyne. You see that shit about the FTL hoax last night?”

“Sure.”

“What d’you think?”

Garstang was hanging in space beyond him, one hand on his arm, body well-outlined by the form-fitting silver links of her suit. I could remember touching those breasts any time I wanted to. I shrugged, staring at
Aardwolf
. Rossignol, floating behind me, said, “What if it were
true
?”

What if? In only a few more days we’d be done with
Aardwolf
. Her crew would come back from rest and recreation, climb aboard. Start the machinery. Put her through local paces in the space around Stardock and the L1(SE) space station complex. Take her out on space trials, out to Pluto and back maybe. Inspectors would declare her fit for deep space.

From close beside me, Rua Mater’s soft voice said, “God. That’d change
everything
.”

Everything? What would change? The fact that rich men and their rich cargoes could go back and forth between the stars in a hurry?
Aardwolf
here would be heading out in a few months, headed for Mimir’s Well, Eta Cassiopeiae A4ii, the farthest shore of the long-halted interstellar colonization movement, a round trip that would consume forty years worth of stay-at-homes’ time, though the crew would show up here again one day just a couple of years older.

Would I still be here then? Sure I would. Probably wearing a white belt, maybe even be the poor bastard who had to sign off on her next repair and refit, personally responsible if anything should happen to her after the fact.

Still. Wouldn’t it be something if... Cold hand in my chest. Sure. It’d be cool. But my B-VEI accounts were locked up and set to zero value already. Policemen were looking for Doctors Berens and Vataro. I’d be lucky to get back my original hundred livres.

Finally, Rossignol sighed and said, “Well, let’s get to it, boys and girls. The work’s waiting.”

Someone snickered and said, “Yeah, right. The job is the job.”

Is the job is the job. One day and another, and week and a month and a year and a decade and century and a lifetime. Better than nothing? Sure it is.

We stooped,
en masse
, and fell upon the starship out of a flat, Stygian sky, leaving our dreams behind.

Two: When you come down

When you come down out of the Virginia hills, riding a tramway suspended above the bed of some old turn-of-the-millennium superhighway, you can see the well-preserved remains of Washington DeeCee, once upon a time the national capital of Earth’s last great federative superpower.

You can see that little cluster of shining white buildings from a long way off. The faux-Egyptian obelisk of George Washington’s Monument, the vertically-exaggerated white dome of the U.S. Capitol Building, ridiculously tiny statue on top, old square buildings with their Greco-Roman columns. A few featureless Postfunctionalist boxes, left in place because they once meant something to someone.

We hadn’t planned to spend much time in Washington, just stop by to see the old buildings because it was so close by the spaceport, because we had to come here to Union Station anyway and get our tram to the campground. Just stop for a few hours. Go up the famous Monument. Stand at the feet of Lincoln’s statue and read his famous words.

I talked them into a trip to the zoo. Talked them into it, though Zell and Millie had already been and hated it, though Phil and Garstang didn’t have the slightest interest, because Rua Mater said, “Yes, let’s. That’d be interesting.” I saw Garstang poke Millie in the ribs, saw them look sharply at Phil and Zell. Phil rolled his eyes and grimaced. Zell let out an exasperated sigh, and we went.

The zoo, the Greater North American Zoological Garden, was set up in a part of the old city called Anacostia in the early twenty-second century. It was divided into segments representing the various continents of Earth, various parklands labeled Africa and Asia and the like. Eventually, they started bringing in things from other star systems, exhibits supposedly representing the habitats of interesting animals and certain plant-like things that more or less acted like animals. They say it’s degenerated since then, and so the place eventually began taking on some of the characteristics of a second millennium zoo. Things in cages.

Zell and Millie dropped out first, stopping at an outdoor cafe in the European Pavilion, telling us to come back and get them when we were done, they’d seen it all before, ho-hum. Then Phil and Garstang decided they’d sit in some big park we found, a green hillside looking out over something called the Serengeti, a pale grassland sparsely dotted with grazing herbivores and slinky predators. We left them lying under a tree, arms around each other, nuzzling and cooing.

Rua Mater followed me on and on, silent, looking at whatever I looked at, dark eyes conveying nothing, a pair of glassy brown sponges, soaking up the world’s light.

Alpha Centauri A4. Kent. First colony. Pretty much like Earth, a big surprise to the planetologists, a fully habitable world, ready for humanity to move right in, most interesting because it was right at the termination point of its geochemical cycle. In twenty million years, it’s ecology would be gone. Not much native life on land. Some interesting things like big arthropods. A thing like a crab made of molten gold, sitting on a flat red rock, looking at us through a hundred molten silver eyes, droplets of shiny metal on the end of long stalks.

A section on the iceworms of Sundown, Epsilon Indi 1, which mostly did nothing but sit there, looking like so many piles of steaming black refuse.

We came to the Green Heaven pavilion, representing the habitable planet of Tau Ceti. When I was a teenager, I went through a phase where I was crazy about this stuff. A time when I was particularly interested in Green Heaven itself. I can remember thinking about what it would be like to be living in the open cities of Green Heaven, just like the now extinct cities of Old Earth. I used to imagine myself walking the streets of places with names like
Midori’iro
and
Azraq Azará
and
Relàmpago
. Used to see myself trekking the yellow sand ergs of the Adrianis Desert, climbing the craggy immensity of the Pÿramis Range, wandering through the dank, dark Mistibos Forest.

Ultimately, before I gave it up, I settled on a fantasy of myself as a great white hunter, ranging the tawny grasslands of the wide Koperveldt wilderness, the magically named Plains of Brass, of going on up into the cloudy antarctic highlands of the Koudloft where I would exterminate dangerous packs of white wolfen, Green Heaven’s splendidly weird, intelligent predators.

And, because I was just the right age for that sort of thing, I saw myself taking parties of rich terrestrial tourists into the vast green outback of the Opveldt, taking them out on hunting safaris where we could bring down those mightiest of Greenie herbivores, the great brown womfrogs.

Bang-bang
. Heavy rifles kicking against our shoulders. Womfrogs howling in agony, falling like thunder on the ground.

And, because I was just the right age for that sort of thing, I saw tourist women coming to me in the tropical night, drawn, fascinated, by my incredible masculinity. As time went on, the fantasies stopped being about the slaughter of animals; became pleasant masturbation exercises in which I saw myself mainly as the fucker of rich tourist ladies.