Acts of Conscience

by William Barton

  She nodded. “Sure. But right now, we don’t even have a personnel office. Up to this point, we’ve been hiring on the specific recommendation of existing employees. Friends of friends.”

  “But...”

  She looked at me impatiently. “Mr. du Cheyne, Berens-Vataro hyperdrive engineering is very different from chromoelectronics. Now, we will be establishing an apprenticeship program and...”

  “I’d like to apply for that.”

  “All right. The first three apprentice classes will be filled by recommendation from our existing mechanics, so we can sort of get a running start. If you want to come back in four years and take the entrance examination we’ll likely have worked out by then...”

  Four years. I said, “If I haven’t found another job by then, I’ll have had to have my tools put to sleep. They’ll never be the same after that.”

  A blank look. “So? Sell your tools and buy new ones in three years. You’ll need a major upgrade anyway.”

  “Miss Tallentire... Um, Xenia. You ever have a pet?”

  She said, “No.” Long silence. Then she smiled and said, “Look, I’m sorry Mr. du Cheyne, but that’s just the way things are. I really do feel badly for you, but there’s nothing I can do. Let me take you on a nice tour of the facility, introduce you to a few people... You really do have the qualifications we need. Maybe in a year... two...”

  o0o

  Not much of a place, really. Insulating platforms under heavy-duty eutrophic shields, keeping the Callistan environment at bay. A few admin centers. A landing stage with a variety of commercial spacecraft. Machine shops. A couple of medium-sized cranes. A lot of it clearly antique equipment bought from a discounter.

  If I didn’t know the story, I’d turn my nose up at this place. Me? Work here? You’ve got to be kidding. I’d just as soon work at the bus depot. But, over there, sat the cracked and blackened remains of Torus X-4, surrounded by what looked like armed guards. Company cops? Rental forces?

  Seeing me stare, Miss Tallentire said, “Those are Regents’ Security. We’ve been having a, um, little trouble with the media.”

  Closer to us, Torus X-1 was a bright disk, shiny and new, hull patches opened, swarmed over by working men and women. Look at that. Toolpacks and testrigs. All the right stuff. I tried to peer inside, past strings of temporary lighting, into...

  Tallentire said, “Mr. du Cheyne, this is Gordon Lassiter, shift supervisor for the turnaround refit on X-1. She’ll be going to Salieri next week, carrying the embassy team home with the news.”

  Tall, skinny man, smiling at me, offering his hand. Wary eyes, probing, looking me up and down. I said, “Hi.” He took my hand in his, gave it a quick shake.

  Tallentire said, “Mr. du Cheyne is one of our small stockholders, Gordy, he...”

  He said, “You sure don’t look like a richbitch, Mr. du Cheyne.”

  So.

  Tallentire laughed, and said, “Gordy! He’s a class ten mechanic. Formerly with ERSIE.”

  “Yeah? Me too. But I’ve been with B-VEI for almost ten years now.”

  “Mr. du Cheyne would like to come work with us. I’ve explained to him about the timeline on the apprenticeship program.”

  Silence. Watching me stare at the bustling workers. Finally, Lassiter said, “So what do you think of our little ships?”

  I said, “They’re... very nice. Could I go aboard?”

  A quick look between the two, then Tallentire said, “We have pretty strong regulations against that, Mr. du Cheyne. Sorry.”

  Lassiter said, “If you make the grade, you’ll see soon enough. I can’t wait to get started on the big new ships! I...” Sudden halt, oops forming in his eyes. “Well, I guess I better get back to work. Nice meeting you, du Cheyne.”

  Nothing more than a quickly receding back, a sense of loose lips sink ships. Tallentire said, “Shall we go?”

  I stood still, quietly watching them work. “I expected you’d begin commercialization as soon as you could. When? If it’s all right for me to know. As a stockholder.”

  She said, “It’s not really a secret, Mr. du Cheyne. We begin construction on the new shipbuilding ways next week. We’ll begin with a line of interstellar luxury liners and class A manifest cargo carriers, for which we already have some tentative commitments. We expect to have the first deliverables in about six years.”

  Six years. “That’s a long time.”

  “Yes. And we can’t legally issue contracts until the new ways are completed and we have a certain amount of new financing in place. It’s a pinch.”

  “Do you mind telling me how much those ships will be going for?”

  She put one hand thoughtfully to her chin, a very pretty gesture, eyes far away. “Um. I guess, since we’ll be publicizing in just a few more days... well, market analysis and preliminary customer contact indicates we can get about twenty-three million livres for the luxury liners. Maybe two-thirds that for a stripped down freighter.”

  So. No matter how rich you are... “That’s a fuck of a lot of money. Not many companies going to be able to scrape together that much cash.”

  She said, “They will if they want to stay competitive, Mr. du Cheyne.”

  “I wonder what’ll happen to the stock market?” Wondering just what my AI could do with the 3.2 million I’ve got already. Not that, for sure. What the fuck am I dreaming about this for? Twenty million livres? Why the hell don’t I just buy a fucking ERSIE slowboat and go crawling slug-like off into the cosmos?

  She said, “Look at it this way. In a few years, if you decide you don’t want to work for us, you’ll be able to plan on some very nice vacation tours.”

  Vacation tours. Right. I said, “So what happens to these little ones? Going to keep sending them out?”

  Silence. Then she said, “I shouldn’t be telling you this, but... Mr. du Cheyne, the company is quite strapped for cash right now. We’ve shut down the experimental production facility and we’ll be selling these ships for whatever we can get. Regents’ Security has logged a preemptive bid for the hulk of X-4; we’ll be advertising the other three in about a month.”

  I thought about that. Surely a company in B-VEI’s position would be able to float just about any loan it wanted. Wouldn’t it? Or maybe some big bad wolf was floating out there in the economic void, stopping... What the hell. Can’t hurt to ask. All she can do is laugh. Then you’ll go your merry way, get ready to move. Think about what you want to fucking do for the next few years. I said, “What would you take for X-3 here?”

  Long, long silence. Then she said, “Um. Mr. du Cheyne? I think maybe we’d better go chat with Dr. Vataro.”

  Vataro. As in Berens-Vataro. “What for?”

  She said, “Um. The company’s in a tighter squeeze than I may have suggested, Mr. du Cheyne. Dr. Vataro will be meeting with some investment bankers in a little less than one hour, trying to arrange a small cash infusion so we can make it through to our first contract signing without selling any more of our company-held stock. He’ll be signing one of those 18% notes.”

  Interesting.

  She said, “After that we’ll be able to get the usual fully-secured 4% commercial loans, but... we need the money now and it’s going to cost us.”

  “So? What does this have to do with...”

  She beamed at me, a flash of pretty eyes and a sexually suggestive smile, most likely all in my imagination. “I was thinking you might be able to help us out here. The company holds precisely 50.07% of the voting stock. What we were thinking of borrowing was something on the order of three million livres.”

  It took me a minute to realize just what the hell she was talking about.

  Five: I opened my eyes and looked at the ceiling

  I opened my eyes and looked at the ceiling, naked, pressed to my narrow bed by Callisto’s absurd point-oh-five gee, dorm room air cool on slightly night-sweaty skin and... Wind of cold wonder striking my back just then, smarmy cramp of unresolvable horniness abruptly forgotten. I’m
here.

  When my feet hit the thin, velvety carpet, I heard the shower start up, dorm AI setting it for the temperature it knew I liked, numbers picked from my memory, I suppose, or maybe even cross-loaded from L1(SE). A friendly voice, a familiar feel to the thing. A lot like the old apartment AI. Flatter affect, of course, it not having had time to grow accustomed to my ways...

  Chatter from the stock ticker, already comfortable in its new compspace, updating me on how it was handling the measly 278,413 livres of my diminished account. Angry at me, little one? Is that possible? Probability table spawning, showing me the very low likelihood it would ever be able to build me another three-million-livre fortune...

  After breakfast, full orange Jupiter high in a black, moon-pocked sky, Sun somewhere below Callisto’s dark gray horizon, Gordy Lassiter had the sense to be quiet while I stood on the edge of the drydock platform and looked at my ship.

  Torus X-3.

  Well. No. I... I’ll think of something when the time comes.

  Finally: “Might as well go inside, Gae.”

  I turned and looked at him. No urge to tell him my name wasn’t Gae? No. I cold see the fire of naked envy in his eyes. My ship. I smiled and said, “I guess so.”

  Nothing before us now but a shining silver disk, the mirror brightness of chrome rather than the duller burnish of real silver. A flattish silver disk with the cross section of a spiral galaxy, complete with spherical hub. At a guess, I thought the thing measured a hundred meters across the plane of the disk, maybe twenty meters through the central bulge. For a starship, an itty bitty thing. As we walked closer, I could see the silver finish was faintly tarnished here and there, irregular blotches of faint bronze, gold, bits of rainbow glimmer. Tarnished by the energies of hyperspace? I don’t know.

  We went under the rim, into shadow, where four stubby landing legs, unfolded from pods attached to the southern hemisphere of the ship’s central bulge stood spraddle-legged on the pavement. Lassiter said, “We haven’t really started pulling her down yet, so when we get inside, you won’t see much at first besides her public face.” We walked around the curve of the hull to where a long ramp of stairs had dropped down on two curved supports from its recess against the underside of the disk, leading up to an open door in the side of the sphere.

  He said, “Central bulge is all pressurized habitable space, control rooms, staterooms, whatnot.” A gesture overhead. “Since our modified gravity polarizer and the new hyperdrive components had to be toroidal, we built the life support system into the doughnut hole, then hung the rest of the flight hardware, avionics and whatnot, around the rim. This is the main gangway, of course, and there’s an airlock door on the bottom, between the landing legs, an escape trunk hatch on top, mounted in the upper bulkhead of the control room...”

  Listening, of course, listening to his blather, as I put my hand on the gangway railing, put my feet on the risers, which some idiot had engineered for one-gee... Even on Earth, I’d’ve taken them two-at-a-time, I think. As it was...

  “Watch your head,” said Lassiter.

  Me, powering up the stairs, toes barely touching, mainly just hauling myself up the handrail, excitement a tight nervousness in my chest, touched by a matching flutter of joy from the spacesuit.

  o0o

  Then school days. Taking me back, I suppose, to my mother’s useless architectural school on Luna, much more to Syrtis Major, which I chose for myself and loved after a fashion. Strange way to look at it. Loved? I suppose so. If it’s true that I actually...

  These new friends were a mixed bag, the first class made up for the in-house apprentice school of B-VEI, expected to be much like the apprentice schools at other industrial concerns, teaching those special things that companies need their technical personnel to know. I’d had to spend a few weeks at the ERSIE apprentice school—just so you’ll know the ropes—but those years at Syrtis Major, my years of prior experience...

  Different here.

  Classes taught by our predecessors on the line—this is the way we do things here—startling to find Roald Berens himself teaching theory, Ntanë Vataro showing us the guts of the machines, showing us how things really worked.

  Do I remember things like that from before? No. The president of the Eighth Ray Scientific-Industrial Enterprise is a red-faced politician. Saw him on the netvid only days ago...

  So how does the Berens-Vataro faster-than-light overdrive really work, Dr. Berens? Small, nordic sort of man with pale blue eyes, what they call mulberry eyes, and thin, flat, mouse-brown hair. Small man with a secretive smile and a rather hapless shrug.

  You’ll have to ask Dr. Vataro about that. Me, I only figured out a way it could work. That little smile and shrug again. Most of you came out of the ERSIE apprentice school—a gesture at me—Mr. du Cheyne, I believe, went to good, old Syrtis Major...

  Anyway, you were taught how Kerechenko and her team worked out the basic principles of the field well converter, using Mace Electrodynamics money; how they then separated themselves from the company and got government loans to extend this technology to the field of gravity control, among other things...

  At Syrtis Major the history-of-technology course spent some time on the way ERSIE, Mace and the government of the Mitteleuropa went round and round over who owned the patents on antigravity. Gravity control is one of those magical technologies that simply changes everything. Like agriculture, like writing, like steam, nuclear energy... hyperdrive too, I suppose.

  Dr. Berens: “For my scholar magestral dialogue at Pantech, I did an exhaustive numerical run on the mathematics of Kerechenko Analysis. You know, it’s funny. I would’ve thought Madame Kerechenko would’ve done that herself, right at the outset, but...”

  Some woman in the back of the room, a pretty dark-haired girl with a long nose and oddly-colored tan skin, sort of a funny sallow-brick hue, said, “Didn’t have the computing power in those days.”

  Berens squinted at her and shrugged. “Right. Ms... Strachan is it? They didn’t do it because they couldn’t, and in the ensuing centuries, as Kerechenko’s discoveries turned into money, money and more money... Anyway, it looked like a good project to me, so I ran the arrays through TPI’s Skylark analogue-numerical sieve, then started doing a statistical analysis. All sorts of interesting bullshit came popping out, graduate school research topics for a thousand years to come.” He laughed. “I considered taking out a loan right then and there, so I could go into business as a professional thesis adviser. That would’ve been fun...”

  Long silence, while we watched him reminisce about his own good, old days. Then, in a pale, faraway voice: “So you put a field well converter inside the system event horizon of a gravity polarizer, link to a power load, charge up the well, run the polarizer to full throttle and head out. That was the theory behind the starships we’ve been using for so many years.” Another silence, then: “What do you suppose happens if you open the loaded well’s event horizon just then?”

  Leah Strachan said, “Bang.”

  “You’re a pilot, aren’t you Ms. Strachan? Always a good idea for a pilot to know how her machinery works, isn’t it?”

  She said, “You never know what might happen.”

  “I suppose not. That’s why I went into mathematics, Ms. Strachan. I wanted to know what would happen.”

  Then: “You know what? After I linked up with Ntanë, we had a hell of a time getting permission to test our experimental apparatus. It was so damned little, we figured we could fire it off in one of the desert wastelands on the farside of Crater. Hell, it’s just like the Moon was in the early days, when there were hardly any colonists...”

  Only sort of like the Moon of course. Maybe halfway between the Moon and Mars? But colder than both.

  He said, “We figured it’d just be a little bang, you know? Fifty, maybe sixty kilotons... Guy in charge of authorizing potentially-destructive experiments made me read up on something called Castle Bravo, the first test of a lithium-deuteride-fueled thermonu
clear bomb, back in the 1950s. Seems the scientists who put that one together didn’t know about the lithium-6 reaction. Maybe they knew about it and just failed to take it into account. Scientists are always forgetting crucial numbers. That’s why they call them experiments... Anyway, they were surprised as hell when their nice little five-megaton bomb made a fifteen-megaton bang.”

  He said, “They made us do a space test, which of course led us to build a much bigger test apparatus. Our engineering test models suggested we develop a prototype toroidal gravity polarizer, one that could fly the ship as well as test my suspicions about event horizon canceling in a massively accelerated inertial reference frame. People thought we were nuts.

  “You know, those paranoid bastards not only made us test the ship in the outer system, they made us go to a point in space that placed 61 Cygni A in the line of sight between our test site and Earth. I guess they were afraid if we made a big enough bang, somebody might notice and come asking questions.

  “Made us wait ‘til Crater itself was behind 61 Cygni C relative to our position as well. Paranoid. Silly...we went to our appointed position, ran it up to full throttle, accelerating directly toward 61 Cygni A...”

  Strachan said, “What the hell for?”

  “Funny you should ask that. I wanted to accelerate away from the system’s barycenter. Just in case, you know?” He shrugged. “Ntanë insisted we aim for something that could catch our debris cone, if worse came to worst...

  “So we fired the test apparatus and discovered ourselves on the opposite node of our orbit around 61 Cygni, at the center of an expanding energy shell that appeared to have originated in the experimental device, basically a soft gamma ray burst in the few hundred megaton range. As if the ship had exploded or something.”

  As if. Or something. His calm amusement wasn’t the way I was imagining the scene.

  “You know, if we’d done it my way, pointed the damned thing straight up, the apparatus would have carried us to a point... oh, I think we calculated it was something like 219,000 parsecs from here in the direction of the classical constellation of Cygnus, as seen from Earth.”