Acts of Conscience (2 page)

I like Stardock better.

Stardock stretching away in all directions, a regular, three-dimensional array of pale yellow girders, dotted here and there with little buildings, habitats, work centers, many-armed cranes crawling about like so many spiders, vast spiders, spiders the size of small asteroids.

I could look out in any direction. See square after yellow-lined square, each smaller one set within the larger square that surrounded it. Some squares blocked by broken-down, half-dismantled ships. Others empty. Empty right through to... black sky. Stars blotted out by the brilliant lights of the work teams. By the light of the cranes. By the light of the brilliant sun, Old Sol hanging right over there... the suit whispered 134,702,092.8 kilometers in my head. In the other direction, one tenth as far away, Earth was a tiny, bright blue-white circle, Luna a much smaller, very much dimmer reddish-gray spot by its side, almost invisible.

I couldn’t really see well enough to know, but from her position relative to Earth it might be nighttime over the farside, darkness long fallen over crater Volterra and the Meadows of Dan. Maybe some little boy was lying on a hillside, cool wind ruffling his uncombed hair, looking up at the stars.

I can’t have been the only one.

Rossignol, like a ghost in my head, ghost in everyone’s head just now: “Let’s go, boys and girls. Clock’s ticking.”

I let the suit read my mind, let it pass my wishes on to the equilibrimotor’s little brain, felt that distant pulse start to throb against my chest, harder and harder, like the strengthening beat of powerful wings, wings of fire, sculpted from impalpable lines of force, and we began to move out into space, out into a maze of struts and girders and broken-down ships, hanging between Earth and Sun, hanging in a void that surely pervades all of Creation.

o0o

Almost noon. Jimmy Haas squirming beside me, while the two of us floated on air down in the D-1’s propulsion segment, ship’s guts hanging open before us.

When you look down into a live field well converter, it feels like the thing wants to pull your eyes out. No sense of the energies contained there. No feeling that if this thing got away from you, Stardock would be vaporized in an instant, the L1(SE) industrial complex blown to bits a fraction of a second later by an expanding fireball far, far brighter than the Sun.

Funny to think of it that way. I could reach in with my tools, pop the safeties on this thing. Somewhere in Work Control, alarms would start to scream, but, of course, it’d be much too late. Vidnet would link to my suit, start shutting down my tools, command my suit limbs to freeze solid. Too late. By then I’d’ve opened the converter’s artificial event horizon, the accumulator core would wake up, surprised, and make a run for freedom.

Down on Earth, the pale, wonderful, impossibly lovely blue skies would flicker and rich men would look up, surprised, at a momentarily violet Sun, wondering,
What the fuck
...

Jimmy fidgeted and said, “Five ‘til, Gae.”

Little shit’s been calling me that all morning. I glanced at him, then looked back down into the well. Hardly anything there at all. A hollow plastic shell, composite osmiridium and berylodiamond whiskers holding a net of weak boron filaments. Almost-invisible lines of turquoise light, streaking through a dusty-looking mist, aiming down to some infinitesimal center.

The suit’d been nagging me all morning about the way the engineering space around us was flooded with hard x-rays. Someone was going to have to come in here later and clean up after us, cost the Eighth Ray Scientific-Industrial Enterprise a certain amount of money and... fuck it. Let Temporary Services deal with the matter. It’s their job.

Down in there, where my eyes couldn’t see, something not at all like a black hole was gathering vacuum energy, skimming it right off the surface of the plenum, adding to the store its manufacturers had given it in the first place. Somewhere down there a region of Planck sockets, charged with Kaluza-Klein entities of a specific configuration, kept a little bit of the universe sequestered, kept increasing its imaginary mass...

“
Gaetan
.”

The suit whispered
1158
in my head.

“Sure, Jimmy. Let’s just slide the cover back on and get out of here.”

Jimmy said, “What about our tools?”

I put mine in
park
and unhooked the belt, complete with power-pack, from my harness, letting it float free, bobbing gently beside the open mouth of the converter. “They’ll be all right without us.”

My suit whispered, Mr. Haas’s hardware matrix respectfully submits that it is the property of ERSIE-5. Mr. Haas is holding a personal responsibility marker in the core memory of the tool dispensary.

Right. These are
my
tools. If something happens to them, it’s between me and the insurance underwriters of the Metal Founders, Machinists, and Aerospace Workers Interplanetary. Jimmy loses the tools he’s borrowed from Stardock and they’ll dock him a thousand points, bust him all the way back to Wage Grade Eight.

I said, “Noted and logged. I’ll pull your dispensary marker onto my tab. Go get lunch, Jimmy.” A long, dark stare, then he was gone. Shit. Little bastard didn’t even slide the cover back on.

I slid up through the long access tunnel from the propulsion segment to the command module, slipping through the hatch into a small, cool dark room, control boards lit by a twinkle of amber lights. I floated up over the backs of the seats, turning feet first, let myself slide down into the command pilot’s seat. Maybe flight engineer would’ve been more appropriate, but still... I put my hand on the throttle and just sat there. Sat. Waited.

How is it this longing still grips my heart, after all these hollow years? I said, “Is the navigation subsystem up?”

My suit whispered, The software is still loaded and processing. Command subsystem uplink revision won’t be started until after propulsion and power are done. “Is it locked?”

Not locked.

“Monitored?”

Not monitored.

Hmh. Sloppy. Very, very sloppy. “Will you tell on me?”

The suit said, This particular hardware matrix does not have a rule-sieve cluster to that effect.

What a nice little space suit you are. Better not ask if it wants to go for a little joyride. “Bring up nav displays please.”

The whole undersurface of the display dome flickered, very dim yellowish light, letting me know the subsystems were very badly in need of renormalization, nothing to worry about, not my job, then the stars came out.

It was as if we were floating free in space. This way the Sun, that way Earth and Moon. There. Red fleck Mars. White spark Venus. Yellow dot Mercury. Bright, orangish Jupiter. Yellow-white Saturn. Pale blue Uranus. Royal blue Neptune. Picked out like rich jewels, strung along the necklace of the ecliptic.

A little swarm of dust motes, a flattened ring reaching around the whole sky. Piazzi’s Belt between Mars and Jupiter. A thicker, more diffuse swarm out beyond Uranus, beginning to fill the sky beyond Neptune, Kuyper’s Belt, Pluto-Charon a fat double-dot out there, no more than first among its kin.

Hundreds of little green wedges all around the sky, concentrated along the ecliptic plane. Interplanetary shipping in transit, as reported by Space Traffic Control. The suit whispered, Vidnet link is down. This display is more than three weeks old.

I could feel the throttle under my hand.

Light the field modulus device then. Pale blue fire flickering around this half-dismantled D-1 prime mover. Work Control calling over the link,
What the hell do you think you’re playing at
?

Shove the throttle forward. Ship sliding from its berth, falling down into the planetary deeps.

Reasonable, I suppose. This ship’s main purpose is to haul heavy cargoes around the solar system. They gave it big, strong legs with which to do that job, but I could use them to run, faster, faster than any conceivable wind, fiery wind from the Sun, out beyond the Oort, out to the fixed stars. Out where the big ships go.

Of course, I’d starve to death and/or suffocate in just a couple of weeks, but what the hell.

1220
.

Better go get a little snack now, while I’ve got the chance.

o0o

Shop messhall. A three-tiered, mezzanine-style dining room under about one-tenth standard gee. Just enough so you can sit and eat, not enough to stop you from flying an equilibrimotor. Self service. Food just sitting in steamtable piles. Most of it already gone. Caesar salad, wilted and slimy under its dressing, croutons getting soft. A cold bottle of grape-tinged ice tea. I looked at the big bowl of banana pudding, cookies crumbled, bananas turning dark, custard starting to weep some kind of clear stuff.

I flew up to the table where I usually sit, set my tray down, unhooked my equilibrimotor harness and leaned it against the wall, near some others. Sat down with the people I usually sit with. Looked at the crap in my tray. Why did I think I was going to eat this shit?

Across and diagonal from me, Layla Garstang looked up from her tray. “Hey, Gaetan, you still coming with us next week? We need to know for sure. Zell’s got to sign out the camping permits tonight.”

I lifted off my diadem, pulled the space helmet from my head, dropped them beside my tray. “Sure. Already turned in my vacation voucher.”

Garstang grinning, a nondescript woman with an open, boxy face. Blue eyes. Pale pink lips. Freckles on light, neutral Caucasian skin. “All right, that makes six.”

Zell Benson, tall, heavily built, bullet-headed, dark brown face more or less empty, said “OK. You and Phil. Me and Millie. Rua Mater... and du Cheyne.”

I used to wonder about these people. I always thought they didn’t want me here, but then... Hell, before she took up with Phil Hendrickx, I even fucked Garstang a few times. Maybe enough times to think we’d gotten something... started. How long’s it been? Six years? Something like that. Maybe I fucked her five or six times, and it seemed all right to me. Worth continuing, anyway. Not worth it to her, apparently. I still have a distinct memory of things from those few nights. The way she smelled. The way she felt, on my fingers, on my prick.

She said, “I’m glad you’re coming along this time, Gaetan.” Blue eyes on me. Curious, perhaps. What does
she
remember about those few times we were together, way back when? Maybe those mysterious feelings that made her decide we weren’t
right
for one another?

“Yeah. Sure. It’ll be fun.”

She smiled, then looked down toward the other end of the table, where Rua Mater, small and dark, face shadowed by her long black hair, was sitting. No lunch. Just sitting there, eyes closed, readerclip stuck in her hair like a child’s barrette.

o0o

End of shift. Go on home. Home to my little hole-in-the-wall dorm room. Trudge up the half-gee corridor with a faceless horde of nameless gray men and women, close the door on a murmur of tired voices. Sprawl in my favorite gray recliner, sit back. Stare.

Plenty of stuff in the refrigerator. I could winkle a steak, maybe. Too much trouble? Go down to the plaza level then, get some gourmet ethnic crap... definitely too much trouble. I glanced at the vidnet link monitor over the door, felt it reach out for my thoughts. Not that the apartment appliances could make up my mind for me... at least the monitor might guess.

I heard the bartender go through its setting up routines. I pictured myself swilling a black Russian, then a second, maybe a third, heard the ice tinkle and the nozzles hiss. Shit. Now I’ll have to get up and reach for the glass. Whatever idiot laid out this apartment... maybe I should just move all my furniture over to the breakfast nook.

By the time I got back to my seat the infolink was up, colors swirling over half the room... falling away, as if the walls were turning to vapor... nodepopping through my standard-interest filter... thirty channels of precanned news, each with its own political slant, a couple of dozen relatively specialized “educational” channels, fluff, mostly, but... I stopped it on
Planets and Animals and You
.

Long shot across some craggy gray and brown badlands, tumbled rocks and towering cliffs shot through with streaks of dark vermilion and bright jade green. Sullen red-orange sky, through which peered a fat brown sun, cloudscape around it brightly backlit. Flat, murky, gray-brown sea reaching out toward the far horizon. Near the edge of the world, between cliffscape and sea, a dun-colored forest, narrow, towering trees, brought closer now by a telephoto zoom. In the distance, projecting above the horizon, the smoky gray cone of an active volcano.

We jumped into the forest, came face-to-face with something that looked like a cross between a centipede and the sorts of monsters little kids like to make with their tinkertoy robots. The monster roared and snarled and reared, showing serrated, bright yellow fangs.

A dinosaur show for the kiddies. Monsters from deep space, educating them, you see, all about the faraway world of
God
, Delta Pavonis 2, just a little more than eighteen-point-six light-years from our safe, tame solar system. God, called home by a few hundred thousand human colonists. Home that was, by fast starship, almost twenty years’ travel from Earth and Moon and Mars and all the other little places where all but the tiniest fraction of humanity lived.

I let the monitor move on.
Other Worlds, Other Cultures
. A more recent favorite, sort of an extraterrestrial archaeology presentation. Little domes under a sullen, blue-black sky. Little white fleck of a faraway sun peering down, barely illuminating a pristine white snowscape; snow broken here and there by crags of white ice, long lines of blue escarpment.

A tiny world named
Snow
. Ancient ruins, more or less intact. Things built by nobody knew who or what, a long, long time ago, on the fourth ice-moon of a huge, red-orange, pale-ringed gas giant. Yes, there it was, bisecting the horizon, rings sticking up in the sky, obscured by the ice-moon’s thin blue clouds, gas giant sixth out from a low-K star named Groombridge 1618, just shy of fifteen-point-three light-years from Sol.