Acts of Conscience (46 page)

I said, “No wonder you were able to manage a war on the scale you’ve talked about.”

The Kapellmeister said, “Oh, no, Gaetan. The warships were never used. They proved to be a complete waste of our resources. Unless, of course, we decide to use them now.”

Still. That’d put the stars as close to each other as terrestrial cities were at the end of the second millennium. A giddy moment, then I went through the rest of the calculation. Let’s see... Something like seventeen months to the galactic core. A half century to Andromeda. How about the Virgo Cluster, floating out there like a cloud of gnats, some fifteen megaparsecs away?

The navigator whispered, A little more than twelve centuries.

So. How about a
real
voyage? How about a billion light years?

Just under twenty-five thousand years.

By then you’d be lost as lost can be, looking back into a cosmic stew so deep our own vast home would be just one more pale white fleck, dusted against the infinite dark... I said, “I don’t think I ever really realized quite how big the universe is.”

The Kapellmeister said, “There were faster ships, back then. Much faster. But the universe never seemed to get any smaller.”

Van Rijn said, “What the hell are you talking about?”

I glanced at the Kapellmeister, shrugged, said, “Nothing.”

“Nothing that concerns the likes of me, hm?”

Maybe not. In the background I could feel the AIs, suddenly fearful, willing my silence. Just get on with the business at hand, Gaetan du Cheyne. So be it. In concert, we turned the ship, beginning the long, slow process of deceleration, running down the shallow outer slope of the 40 Eridani star system’s gravity well.

o0o

A little less than a day later, we swept in along the plane of Epimetheus’ orbit around Prometheus, our hyperbola tilted almost eighty degrees from Prometheus’ orbit around 40 Eridani A, the planet’s ellipse itself tilted twelve degrees from the local ecliptic, still decelerating hard, a blue fire in Promethean skies as I cut by the primary planet, just outside its thin atmosphere.

Earthlike world hurrying by below. Not too Earthlike. Small blue seas surrounded by patches of dull green. No oceans. Rugged highlands between them, dark brown and gray, gullied and weathered because it
could
rain, though it seldom did. Vast deserts of windsculpted sand.

If I looked hard, I could make out a few signs of human habitation. Nothing like cities, of course. Open pit mines. Immense placer operations. Dark brown sludge staining an embayment on the southern end of one of the larger seas. Long plumes of smoke marking the prevailing winds here and there.

Thirty million people down there, working hard at their jobs.

Used to be, there was quite a bit of scientific interest in the 40 Eridani system. Once upon a time, there were three stars here, A brilliant, white, short-lived A, A bright orange K0, one-tenth Sol’s mass and one-third its luminosity. An M4, dull as slag furnace coals and blotched with starspots. The scientific oddity is that life developed on the second planet of the K0. Advanced, multicellular, macroscopic life. Things like plants and animals... no one knows how, for the lives of class-A stars are measured in millions, rather than billions of years, and the A and K
must
have been born together, if we understand the life-cycles of stars at all. There simply wasn’t
time
before the A’s core, fuel exhausted, exploded, as old stars will so often explode, outer envelope expanding through the star system, obliterating the ecosphere of the neighboring K’s second planet.

A few things survived. An ecosphere of bacteria, things like mosses, evolution marching on, trying to recover, adaptive radiation never quite doing the job. Curiously, the same vestigial life exists on Prometheus’ large moon Epimetheus, though it could never have evolved there on its own.

Watching the planet recede, van Rijn said, “Home sweet home.”

“What do you mean?”

A heavy sigh. “Well, I hope I like it here. I’ll be staying. Worn out my welcome on Green Heaven, I guess.”

I looked at him. “You figure you’ll be... any more welcome here?” Thinking about the dollies down below. There
is
a government here, whole system rigidly controlled by some kind of oligarchy on Epimetheus, after all, and...

He smiled, “We’ve got big accounts here, Mr. du Cheyne. Money walks.”

“I thought the expression was, ‘money talks.’“

“Your innocence is charming.”

o0o

Four million kilometers, just a few light-seconds, and Epimetheus was filling our viewscreens, a mottled silver and brown disk with smudges of pale green here and there, while the navigation software tried to make contact with traffic control. Tried unsuccessfully.

Plenty of electromagnetic transmission, as if they use a broadcast radiotelevision system for their main internal communications system. Probably do. How many people down there? Six, seven hundred thousand? Something like that.

Soft chirp, then a chatter in response, some crude AI down on the surface finally having gotten its interrupt and come awake, asking us what we wanted here, who we wanted to see.

I turned and looked at van Rijn, who obviously had no inkling what was going on. “Where’re we headed? My navigation system doesn’t have any data on cities and cosmodromes for Epimetheus, only industrial centers on Prometheus and out around the gas giants circling C.”

“Hmm? Oh. We should set down at the Pasardeng estate. Giou-Ao Pasardeng is supposed to be our factor here, though we haven’t heard from him in a while...” He looked at the expression on my face, then said, “These aren’t the sort of people who’d have patience with spaceports, du Cheyne. Our previous canisters of dollies were always drop-shipped by freighters on their way to Prometheus.”

Meaning they’d just be unloaded, fall straight down through the atmosphere and go
thump
when they hit the ground. “Must lose a lot of cargo that way.”

He shrugged again. “No rules about interstellar shipment of live animals, other than the system quarantines at Sol and Alpha Cee. I think we always packed them in with frozen tanks of lobster and whatnot. Nobody cares.”

I turned back to my controls, watching out the viewscreen as Epimetheus grew until it was a whole world, then more than a world, losing its edges, becoming a
down
rather than an
over there
, listening while the navigator got directions to Pasardeng. Mountains. Narrow, winding rivers. A few hazy high clouds. A huge lake or maybe a small sea. Pink fire whiffling around us as we breached the atmosphere, moaning our way to the ground, until we settled in a vast brown bowl of a valley, valley surrounded by jagged silver-gray mountains, drive’s blue light flickering for just a moment on the facade of a colonnaded mansion at the top of a long slope of manicured lawn beyond a pretty little lake surrounded by flowers.

“Welcome to Epimetheus,” I said.

“Welcome to Pasardeng,” van Rijn replied. In the distance, we could see people coming toward us across the lawn, the tiny figures of human beings, carrying what would most likely turn out to be guns.

o0o

I stood at the foot of the ramp, waiting, Kapellmeister silent beside me while van Rijn walked out, hands held up, palms forward, to greet our welcoming committee. Men, mostly, dressed in rough khaki and blue denim, a few women dressed just the same, dark blue plastic helmets on their heads, glittery pink goggles over their eyes.

Ultraviolet filters, suggested the library AI.

I looked up. Dark blue-violet sky, reddish just above the mountains, which cut off our view of the horizon. Sun too bright to look at, of course, but noticeably dimmer than Sol, much smaller in the sky than Tau Ceti had been, seen from Green Heaven. Can’t be a hell of a lot of ultraviolet here.

The library whispered, No. Their eyes will have adapted to the local ambient light long ago.

Spacesuit: Some of those weapons appear to be devices for directing high energy laser light. Others are standard solid propellant weapons, perhaps firing self-propelled butadiene, perchlorate, and aluminum dust-fueled projectiles.

Muzzle flash from those’d be fairly painful, inducing flash-blindness in someone who’d gotten used to this light, which must resemble the spectral range of an antique incandescent lamp.

Hands still raised, van Rijn was talking to the man who appeared to be in charge, who spoke in turn to a wrist communicator of some kind, all the while eying me through his goggles. The other men and women held their positions, most of the guns trained on me. When I listened closely, I realized van Rijn was speaking heavily-accented English.

Library: The ruling class here on Epimetheus is mostly of old American stock. Promethean colonials are of diverse origin, of course, and hundreds of languages are spoken there, many of them now extinct in the Solar System.

I could feel a long list lurking in the background, flavored by a superficial sampling algorithm: Guanché, Tÿrki, Tungus? Never heard of them.

Van Rijn put his hands down, turned and called out in Greek: “Du Cheyne? Everything’s straightened out. Let’s start unloading cargo.”

All set are we?

He trotted over to where I was standing, pulling an envelope out of his pocket, handing it to me. “Your fee.”

I fingered the thing, so thin it might be empty, opened the flap and looked inside.

“You know what that is, don’t you?”

“Some kind of negotiable bearer bond.”

“Warranted, you notice, by the Board of Trade Regents on Earth.”

Good as gold. Better. Not so heavy. “What about the license?”

He looked back over his shoulder at the mansion. “Giou-Ao Pasardeng seems to have died since the last time we had communication with him. Assassinated, I think. His son Timur-Lengk is looking into it.”

“I’m wearing a sidearm, you notice.”

He grinned. “Hazards of the time-lagged businessman, my friend. They probably won’t pay to watch you shoot me, but they might very well applaud warmly when you do it.”

Not a touch of anything in those bright eyes, other than, maybe, a bit of amusement. I turned to walk up the stairs, and thought, Open the passenger cabins.

A dollie stepped out of the nearest door, stood looking around cautiously, stood looking up at me. Is it one of the same ones I got to know last night? No way to tell, and the memory alone was enough to make me feel grainy eyed, very tired indeed.

What the hell am I doing to myself?

Van Rijn shouted, “Get your little asses moving! Come on!” He went clattering and banging down the corridor, pounding on the bulkhead, going into the rooms and rousting the dollies out. They began streaming past me, by ones and twos and then little bunches, headed for the open door, down the gangway and into the light.

And every time one of them brushed up against me I felt unrequited desire.

Back outside, I found the dollies standing together in a little group, over by the lake, clustered just the way they would have been back on Green Heaven, waiting for the wolfen to do whatever it was the wolfen would do next. Looking around, though. Looking up at the alien sky, the mountains, down at the flower-bordered lake. Up at the mansion.

What do they make of it all? Do they understand this is the closest they’ll ever come to anything like freedom? Do they have a concept of something like freedom? Dollies can’t breed without the wolfen and probably know it. Does that matter to them? What a choice. Die as individuals or die as a race. Do they think about that? Do they know how to choose?

The armed men and women seemed more relaxed now, guns slung over their shoulders on straps, looking curiously at the dollies, walking around them, goggles put up on their helmets. What do
they
make of this? Are the men feeling a little... odd, just now?

Dammit, Cindy. I suddenly feel so... horny.

Cindy, with a sneer: Don’t look at
me
, asshole.

I said, “Van Rijn.”

He looked up from some paperwork he was fiddling with, little corner of my mind marveling that a smuggler would have a cargo manifest. Makes sense though. Business is business. “What?”

“These guys know what’s going on here? They know about dollies?”

He glanced at the guards and shrugged. “Who gives a shit?” Not you, I guess. He turned away and shouted, “Come on, you fuckers! Let’s get moving!”

The dollies looked around nervously, then, as he began prodding at them with some little stick he’d picked up, began moving off in the direction of the mansion. One of the dollies hung back for just a moment, seeming to turn and stare at me, then it turned and trotted after its comrades.

That’s it, pal. No one wants to be left behind, left alone in the face of an unknown world.

Still, maybe that’s one of the ones I... played with. What could it be thinking? Does it imagine itself staying behind with me aboard the ship, free to roam, to see all sorts of wonders, all for the price of a place in my bed?

I remembered an old movie I’d once seen, dramatization of a story written long before the dawn of space travel, when the Earth was all there was, a world of endless, rolling blue seas. Remembered the story of a girl who hated the fate in store for her as a wife. Girl who dreamed of escaping it all, becoming a sea captain’s wife so she could see the world and...

The Kapellmeister said, “What are you laughing about, Gaetan du Cheyne?”

I said, “I don’t know.”

o0o

Later, inside the mansion, van Rijn and I sat together in Pasardeng’s drawing room, a big, plush, book-lined room like some old Victorian library, waiting while his people brought in trays of finger food, fine terragenic vegetables, little pots of mayonnaise and sour cream-based dipping sauces, filled icy glasses with some pale, aromatic liquor I couldn’t identify by smell alone.

Pasardeng said, “Ah! Here’s my little Reiko now!”

I turned, expecting a woman, maybe a little girl, translator AI whispering a reminder that
rei-ko
meant “polite child” in Japanese, a very popular female name among the American colonials who’d built this world.