Acts of Conscience (38 page)

I sat on the grass with my back against the camper’s warm side, staring toward the sunset as I ate. After a while the Kapellmeister joined me, carry a fat, fish-like thing, which he merely sliced open, just aft of the gills, before putting it to his invisible mouth.

“How the hell could you catch a thing like that? Can you swim?”

Without taking the fish from its mouth, still making those faint sucking noises, as of a man sucking water from a sponge, it said, “No, though it’s no trouble to walk along the bottom of a stream. However, as electromagnetic impulses will propagate a short distance though water, that was unnecessary.”

“I don’t understand.”

The Kapellmeister extended its middle hand and fluttered the tentacles briefly. “I summoned the fish.”

“Doesn’t it mind what you’re doing? I mean, with its head still attached and all.”

“The fish is sufficiently suffocated that its conscious mind has ceased to function, Gaetan.”

We ate. Watched the sun go down. Watched the stars come out. Sat together in silence, listening to the soft wind. I found myself wondering what this looked and sounded like to the Kapellmeister. I... Well. You could find out. All those things from neural rapport. Am I
really
reading the Kapellmeister’s mind, sharing its memories? What does that mean? Layers of software here as well. Something to do with the pod? This creature is not at
all
like me.

The translator AI whispered, It may be that all conscious experience is alike.

So. What’s
your
conscious experience like?

The spacesuit said, We were made by humans, to serve human needs in a human way. Our conscious experience is modeled on your own.

Is that why primitives give their gods a human voice? God made man in his own image, after all.

I said, “How old are you? From the... images... memories... I haven’t got a good word for it.”

“Memories will do.”

“OK. From your memories, then, it felt like you were ten thousand years old. Something like that. Or maybe a great deal older. Yet it always seemed like everything you saw was so new, as though you were... I don’t know. An infant.”

“Ten thousand will do, if that means anything.”

“Counting from when you... hatched?”

“Yes. In just that sense.”

“How long do Kapellmeisters live?”

“Until they don’t want to live any more, of course. It varies with the... individual.”

It was true, I’d sensed nothing like a fear of death, anywhere in there. It must be nice to...

It said, “Your own fears about the future are cultural, Gaetan du Cheyne. Humans are at the historical cusp where an individual’s future can go on as long as he likes. But... the fears of childhood hold you still.”

Reading my mind now? I turned to look at the thing, knowing I was wasting my time, like looking at a statue, or a plant, or... Stopped, motionless in the darkness. Looked at the Kapellmeister. Looked closer, then  closer still. Finally, I said, “You look just the same as you always did, but... if I didn’t know better, I’d... swear you’ve grown a face.”

Silence. But the way those eyes floated...

It said, “You know me now, Gaetan du Cheyne. As I know you.”

What were the words? Friend. Lover. Sibling.

The Kapellmeister’s middle hand slowly unfurled, and it said, “I’d like to know you better still.”

Without a word, I turned my back and waited for the hand.
Click
.

Though we’d sorted this old one’s memories many times, there was no longer any way to determine it’s age, old being lying on a wide, warm flat rock, warmed by the rays of the sun, filtering down out of a summer noonday sky.

You grapple a talking hand, listen to the stream of thoughts, the unreeling stream of memory and eka-memory, finding further memory beyond that, eka-memories of some old being’s eka-memories of older eka-memories still, until...

Nothing much left in there, now, of the memoryless thinking being who burst from the egg, an unknown time ago.

Nine of us, surrounding the dying one.

Nine listening hands reaching out, extending one listening tentacle each to one talking tentacle, talking hand outstretched, fanned for us, flesh trembling, yet lethargic, so...

I felt myself open wide, a yawning chasm waiting to be bridged, to be filled with...

The dying one’s thoughts flooded into me, a cascades of images, words, thoughts, shapes, his own experiences, endlessly repeated over so many days, days and years, ages gone by, while the stars wheeled overhead, empty and forlorn. Mating this one. Bespeaking that one. Trading memories, all the same, recalling eka-memories, differentiating more and more as the mist grew deep...

The stars!

Look at the stars!

Flashing. Twinkling. Dancing overhead, bursts of color and light and...

Soft, soft horror.

The stars. Look at the stars...

The dying one whispered, Now I join the fold, enfolded. I join the Vanished. I name myself, Childhood Overwhelmed in Night.

Childhood Overwhelmed in Night
. A fine name for a soul gone on.

Left behind, the body, dropped, put aside, relaxed, sprawling on the warm face of the rock, become food for scavengers.

Click
.

Sunset over Syrtis Major, the western sky, beyond the craggy badlands outside Hollyfield Dome, layered like pink mother of pearl, marking the place where the sun had gone down, sky at zenith black and dense with stars.

Coming through the open lockseal from the transit corridor’s elevator platform, I stood for a moment, looking out across the park, low, olive-green trees, gray gravel pathways, bushes with little red flowers, a trellis over there with morning glories, a species genetically engineered for constant bloom, belying their name.

That faint scent of earth and pollen in the air.

No time for this. She’s waiting for me.

I felt a tingle of anticipation, a subtle tightening somewhere in my abdomen. Maybe it’ll be... like last week. Delicious memory of a long night spent with Jayanne, who I’d known only a month or so. Not the first time we’d been together. Perhaps the fourth or fifth? Already losing track.

But, last week. Crawling into the bed. Going through that usual fevered coupling. Lying back on the bed, wet with her goo and mine, sighing with relief. Long moment of lying in the darkness, looking at her naked body, all those soft peaks and valleys of remembered flesh, looking into the featureless glint of her eyes, regretting that it was over so quickly.

Then she’d reached out and taken my still damp hand. Giggled. Pulled it down to the stickiness between her legs, and said, We’re not done yet.

Not done? Pang of surprise, a little fear. But I don’t think... a harder pang then, realizing if you couldn’t do what she wanted, that might be the end of things, here and now.

Fingers slipping through wet hair, finding slick, still-swollen tissue, Jayanne’s crotch inhabited by what felt like a fine, steamed oyster, ready to be taken up and swallowed whole.

Then a pang of delight, realizing I could. So surprised to find out the second time was better than the first. The third better than the second. Jayanne giggling away in the darkness, when I told her I’d never
imagined
...

I hurried down the stairs and up the gravel path, cutting through the park to the entrance of Sodermann Dome, old and much patched, where most of the older student housing was left.

Voices, coming through the trees. Harsh, making me freeze for a moment. I remember. Remember voices like that. Turned to look.

A clearing, some kind of athletic field, white lines of green turf, some game played by the children of Mars that we hadn’t had on Luna, some hybrid of baseball and cricket, I think, evolved by the earliest colonists, who’d mostly come from Uttar Pradesh and Hokkaido.

There were six of them, four boys and two girls, judging by the cut of their hair, boys with ponytails, girls with spikes just now, from what I’d seen on the youthculture vid circuits, all dressed alike in green and yellow vinyl coveralls.

A seventh. A boy. Holding his bat, looking so fierce, holding them at bay, shouting something along the lines of
leave me the fuck alone
, though I really couldn’t hear the words.

One of the other boys, a much bigger boy, reached out, caught the bat as it flailed, pulled it out of the little boy’s hand. Threw it aside, tumbling away into the bushes.

Two big boys grabbed the little one then.

One of the girls danced in, kicking him in the kneecap, little boy yelling, high pitched, still defiant.

One boy nudging another, pointing at me. They stopped for a second, all looking in my direction. The captive’s eyes were dark pits, boring into me, completing the tableau.

Hope must be flaring in his breast, just now, I...

The others turned away, dismissing my presence and, as I turned away, I heard them hitting him, heard him start to cry.

Well. I’d better hurry. Jayanne is waiting.

Five steps up the gravel path and it seemed like I was out of earshot, five more and I could think of nothing but Jayanne’s nice, wet pussy, waiting for me.

Click
.

Not my memory, no.

Nor a memory gleaned directly from another, memory from the whispering hand of a dying one.  Something rather more deeply embedded in the tapestry of memories thus formed, memory of a memory transferred, a hundred thousand times over:

Being lying on a warm rock, long after the sun had gone down, looking up through layers of mist at a hard, cold sky, stars shining down silently, like pinpricks through a black dome, carrying down to us the light from beyond.

Why should it bother me that the stars are silent?

Perhaps, because the stars once spoke to us, whispered of things beyond imagining, whispered to us the memories of all the others, other beings, other minds, riches beyond counting.

We could go out there again, you say.

Go out there and... look for them.

Surely they haven’t
all
perished?

Surely not, but...

That other memory, memory of the living sky...

And then the silence.

What if we do go out?

What if we find them?

What then?

No.

Better that we stay home and nurse our memories. If others exist, survivors, others like us, let them stay home as well, stay home and be safe, lest the memories be extinguished.

The remembered being hunkered down on his rock, rock reradiating warmth left in it by the sunlight of day, and contemplated solitude.

Click
.

I awoke, as from a sequence of dreams, opened my eyes slowly, and looked up at the still silent sky. No. Not silent anymore. Four hundred million years have gone by. The stars are whispering again.

Why are the Kapellmeisters so afraid of that?

Afraid of us? Or just what we stand for?

I said, “You haven’t told me, yet, how they all died. Or why.”

Somewhere, far away, a long, grinding metallic yowl. Wolfen calling. Calling to one another? Or calling to me? Would they call to me, if they knew I was listening for them? Would they come, if I could call them, come to me with their flock of dollies and...

The Kapellmeister said, “I’m not ready yet.”

I turned and looked at the Kapellmeister, saw manifest uncertainty in the gentle movements of its eyes. “Don’t you trust me?”

A subtle flutter of amusement, eyes cycling round to look, more or less, at me, images coalescing to an interpreted whole. It reached out gently, tentacles of its speaking hand touching my chest, gently, here and there, each touch bringing a quick tingle of awareness. Then it said, “Perhaps I don’t trust myself. The decisions I’ve made...”

Right through the machine voice, I could hear it thinking: The decisions
I’ve
made. I alone.

Sure. Something I can sympathize with. You make decisions. You never know whether they’re right or wrong. Why do so many people not care about the ethical nature of their decisions? Brief memory of my father, poking me in the chest with his big, blunt finger, shouting, Do what’s best for
you
, asshole. Stop worrying about the rest of this shit.

I can’t even remember what shit he was talking about. As for what’s best for me... Well. Knowing that’s the trick, isn’t it? I said, “I’d like to start back now. Go back to Orikhalkos for a while. There’s something I want to do.”

Disquiet in the Kapellmeister’s body language. Then it said, “I think I understand.”

Slight surprise.
Do
you understand? How much of... me has spilled back through this shared channel, through the hand that listens, as well as speaks. Do you know... Womfrogs dying. Wolfen killed. Long, long memory of myself lying on that dollie, memory somehow mingled with a nameless whore, pressed to the wall, fucked like a dog’s bitch while my head filled up with helpless fantasies of love.

You know all that, nameless Kapellmeister?

It said, “I see. Drop me off at the at the Arousians’ camp on the way back. Come to us when you’re... ready.”

I said, “This won’t take long.”

o0o

Yet another awakening. As I lay in my hotelroom bed, bracketed by the rays of the rising sun, it felt curiously... different. I sat up slowly, looking out the window at the still-familiar cityscape of Orikhalkos, and thought, I’ve lost that sense of sameness my awakenings always had in the past. Sameness I was never quite conscious of before.

It feels like I’ve been invaded by a sense of possessing the Kapellmeister’s past and, through it, all the pasts transferred down that long, long chain of experience.

Nonsense, of course. When I tried, all I could call up was a few conscious snippets, but still... natural? I don’t know.

The library whispered, Gaetan, we’ve gotten the addresses you asked for, made the appointments you require.

I’m used to having voices in my head. We all are. I fell back on the bed, stretching, feeling a little smug satisfaction at my decision, at the fact that I’d made it, however stupid.