Acts of Conscience

by William Barton

  Movement in the distance, catching my eye. People? No. Small chatter of alarm, curiosity inside. Not people at all, a group of... things? Animals. Well, sort of. Familiar sight from the zoo, from the Green Heaven pavilion, but not in the cages. A party of Arousian stick-bug people walking together, heading in toward the terminal building from one of the other little ships.

  Footsteps on the ramp coming out of the ship. Leah, standing in front of me, small valise dangling from one hand, looking at me, face expressionless. So. I said, “Well, we’ve got four months to hang around before we have to take them back. Maybe you and I could...” a feeble gesture toward the terminal building.

  A look of surprise seeming to crystallize on her face. “You can’t possibly be that stupid, Gae. I’m quitting now. You understand?”

  “Quitting?” I reached out a hand toward her, felt a slight sting on my skin as she slapped it away.

  “What, is there a fucking echo out here? Christ.” Shaking her head, turning away, striding away toward the terminal building, back narrow and straight, hips moving in her trim black slacks so...

  Just standing there, watching her go, wanting to call out, something, anything. Coming up with nothing worth the effort. What will you do now, Leah? Where will you go?

  Well, of course you know. Four months from now you’ll find some way to take those passengers back home, and ISTA will want to know what became of command pilot Leah Strachan, and you’ll tell them. Goodbye fifteen-hundred livre repatriation fee, at least.

  And Leah will... know people here. Five visits over two hundred years? She’ll know families, over generations. She’ll visit lovers grown elderly, sleep with the sons of nice young men she dandled on her knee the last time she was here... Go home somehow, by slow boat, or wait for an FTL ship to happen by, I...

  I put my hands in my pockets and started walking toward the Orikhalkos terminal, where landfall paperwork would be waiting. I’m not really a fish out of water here, or anywhere else. It’s just that... sometimes things get away from you.

  o0o

  Passengers secured, paperwork done, ramp rental fee paid for months in advance... Converting from the local currency, drakhmai, surprised, only one livre, fifty dismes a month? My God. Distant glimpse of Leah standing at a counter, talking to some young man. Yes, that’s the ISTA representative, manning his lonely cosmodrome kiosk. I expected them both to turn suddenly, turn and see me walking in the distance across the sparsely-populated main concourse floor, but...

  Not the center of my own little drama, I guess. A bit player even in my own universe.

  I went back out to button up Random Walk, buoyed by a bit of good news. Green Heaven, you see, as you should have seen all along, has no central government. Vrij Veldteboeren don’t care what you do with your starship. Hinterlings don’t care. French Islanders won’t give it a thought... And as for the local jurisdictions of the Seven Cities of the Compact...

  Well, Mr. du Cheyne, so long as your pay your ramp fees and pay for anything you happen to damage... So, what then? There’s a whole star system here. Won’t cost me much to fly her around, go sightseeing and... Well. Whole world here, too.

  I packed a small case with clothes, casual stuff, all I’d happened to bring with me anyway, my... regular clothes, not expecting I’d be going to any fancy dress... Christ. Old imaginings.

  Up in the control room, I took off my spacesuit and reassembled it empty, draped it across the back of the flight engineer’s chair, powered up and hooked into the ship’s operating system. Look after things while I’m gone, old friend. I’ll be back in a while and we’ll see what we can think of to do next. Meanwhile...

  As I turned away, the little pang of gratitude I’d felt from the hardware matrix was already fading, masked by a rising rumble of conversation between my suit and the various AI nodes that made Random Walk a living thing.

  Not really necessary to leave any of it turned on of course. Shut down the ship. Take the suit apart, fold it up and put it in a drawer until I need it again. I...

  Hell. How would you feel if it was you being put to sleep, unneeded?

  Six: Parked by the curb

  Parked by the curb outside the cosmodrome terminal building were a few yellow ground cars, bench seats inside, each with a lone pilot at its controls. Taxi. I’ve seen them in hundreds of old films. But old films, whether colorized or in the original grayscale, don’t show you the dirt. Not like this. I walked over to the nearest one, opened the rear door of the cabin the way I new was proper from the movies, and got in.

  The pilot, a swarthy, sweaty-looking fellow with uncombed hair and a bristling moustache, turned, grinning, showing the most peculiar stuff, like green algae clinging to his teeth, and said a long sentence in what sounded exactly like Spanish, but wasn’t, not a single recognizable word.

  Great. “I don’t suppose you speak English?”

  He seemed taken aback. “Adrianíkoi? You, ah...” scratching his head, “Reggie në Robbie?” Look on his face like a man smelling a particularly unusual fart, half disgust, half amusement.

  I pointed at the sky and said, “Earth.” Whatever the hell it’d be in Greek. Kosmopolis? Gaia?

  Sunny brightening. “Oh! I, ah...” A helpless shrug. “Nihongo?” Brief wait, then, “No? ‘Arabiyyah?”

  “Nope.” I opened my suitcase on the back seat and started rummaging around it, the cabbie, if I was remembering the right word, looking suddenly impatient, drumming his fingers on a black box with a sideways metal flag on it. There. Picked up the comclip and slid the barrette into my hair, just above my left ear, as close to Wernicke’s area as I could manage.

  The look on the cabbie’s face... nervous? I wonder why? I thought, Open ship to shore.

  The spacesuit’s voice whispered in my head: Channel open. Ready.

  Link to library AI. Standard spool. Languages and literature.

  Linking. Spool 45, maximum transmission rate secured.

  Why the hell didn’t I put this thing on back at the ship? I looked at the cabbie, who was silent and wide-eyed. What the hell does he think is going on here? “Come on pal. You have to say something to get it started.”

  Puzzled look, followed by a quick, bubbly phrase in Pseudospanish.

  The library’s soft, gender-neutral voice said, Romaïkos, descended from the post-Helladian demotikí of southeastern Cyprus, late twenty-second century.

  A quick echo, as if the cabbie had spoken again: “Look, if you’re not going to go someplace, get the fuck out of my cab, you fucking jerkoff!” A little aftershock as well, deep connection being made, as a part of my brain automatically memorized the translation of vrea malaka as “you fucking jerkoff.” I opened my mouth to speak, felt the AI take possession of the verbal stream content as it passed through my arcuate fasciculus, felt it operate Broca’s region, felt the muscles of my mouth tighten up strangely, lips pursing... A cascade of nonsense words came out, apparently meaning, “Take it easy, buddy. I need for you to find me a good hotel.”

  Suspicious then: “I thought you couldn’t speak Greek.”

  “I can’t.” I tapped the barrette. “Nobody ever show you a translator before?” I pulled the thing out of my hair, leaned forward and stuck it behind his ear, hoping I had the right side, since I hadn’t noticed whether he was right of left handed. “What d’you think?”

  Startled look, snatching it out of his hair, turning it over in his fingers, muttering something incomprehensible. When I got it back on, the library AI told me he’d said something like, “Unbelievable,” noting that the word he’d used conveyed a bit of superstitious dread.

  I learned how to speak Spanish with a clip like this, hooked to the school library, when I lived on Mars. It kept telling me what to say, until I didn’t need it any more. I said, “Sure. Weird as hell. Let’s get going, huh?”

  o0o

  The hotel, located somewhere near the center of Orikhalkos, was a seven or eight story concrete tower, a tall tan box with more window
than wall, whose two-word name the translator kept insisting was something like “A Really Good Hotel.” Something about the form of the name kept being snatched away by the translation process, and when I moved the barrette around to the back of my head so it could do a visual filter, all I could see was that the name on the front of the building was some foreign phrase transliterated into Greek letters.

  Pay the cabbie, pay the hotel bill for a few days in advance, up the elevator and into my room...

  Bed. Primitive bathroom. Antique holodeck table. No kitchen devices whatsoever. Warm green-gold light flooding in through the big window, Tau Ceti now sliding along the far horizon, outlining the black silhouettes of buildings, dipping behind distant mountains...

  Sun sets in the west, by definition. If a planet rotates backwards, it must be upside-down. Venus, for example. I slid the glass doors open, warm air with an odd... scent, almost like chemicals flooding in, wiping away the slightly stale smell of the room, stepped outside into the golden light. Stood leaning into the wind, eyes half shut, hands on the railing.

  That odor. That’s the faint aftertaste of groundcar exhaust I’m smelling. Eighty million people in an entire world? They can run internal combustion engines, burn all the fossil fuels they want.

  Cityscape below. Lots of featureless boxy buildings, most of them smaller than the Really Good Hotel, windows here and there lighting up now, glass in buildings at certain angles reflecting the light of Tau Ceti like pools of molten metal caught in their walls.

  Parks here and there, vegetation maybe green, maybe not, darkened by shadows, looking blue-gray-brown, larger park in the distance with small irregular lakes, a little bit of Old New York clipped from history, plunked down here... Maybe Edith Wharton once stood on such a balcony and saw a cityscape like this one.

  Beyond the city, I could see that the sun had gotten beyond the mountains, was bisected by a flat horizon now, rays reddening as they swept across a flat, glossy, glistening surface that I knew must be the sea. When I leaned out over the railing, craning my neck, peering toward the north, I could see more of it, going on forever, right over the edge of the world.

  All right. This is it. Here you are where you longed to be, Gaetan du Cheyne. Now what? Now nothing. Go back inside, put on the holodeck, let the drink mixer anticipate your... no. Have to think of everything myself, call... room service, I guess, tell them what to send up. I...

  Pale spark of emotion: anger, resentment, self-pity, something like that, all of them mixing together in the shadows beneath my heart. What did you expect, Gaetan du Cheyne? That woman down in the lobby, sitting with luggage piled round her feet, looking the part of a maiden all forlorn, is she one of your safari ladies? Will she come to you in the night, unbidden, strip for you and dance for you and suck your dick for you until your walls fall down and the passion they know you possess is somehow provoked?

  As I watched, the sky turned a burnished red-gold, Tau Ceti disappearing behind the sea, leaving, for a while, a band of pale green light shining over the horizon, then it got dark, the sky turning black, the stars coming out.

  Maybe the most interesting sunset I ever saw, sun going so far south, so very slowly, before being extinguished by the edge of the world. I glanced into the library, exiting the language spool, going to the factoid elicitor. Orikhalkos, it told me, lies on the northwest-facing shore of a large peninsula, at approximately 54 south latitude.

  The library whispered, Green Heaven is a literal translation of the Groentans word Groentehemmel. The word groente would be better translated into English as “greens,” as in “spinach and kale,” and is most usually seen in the word groenteboer, meaning “greengrocer.”

  I pulled the barrette out of my hair and dropped it on the nightstand beside the lamp and a little box that appeared to be a vidicom transceiver.

  So here I am lying here in the bed with a hard-on in my pants, nowhere to go and nothing to do, embedded in the land of my dreams. What was it the cabbie had called me? Vrea malaka, you fucking jerkoff...

  Here I am on Salad Heaven, doubtless having my salad days.

  After a while, I must have fallen asleep.

  o0o

  When the morning sunshine floods your eyes, it’s a new day and anything seems possible. I got up early, Tau Ceti in the far southeast, scraping along behind the low buildings of the inner city’s skyline, got myself washed and dressed and got going, down the elevator and out the door, concierge giving me an odd look as I crossed the lobby and went out the doors.

  Walking along a deserted street under a vast, cloudless sky of turquoise tinted with pale gold. Not a soul out here. Soft breeze. A little cool. Greenies late risers are they, not starting the day until...

  Library whispering inside my head, whispering in the spacesuit’s familiar voice now: It’s late spring in the southern hemisphere of Tau Ceti 2 just now. Green Heaven rotates on its axis in 150,120 seconds, compared to a standard terrestrial day of 86,400 seconds.

  Some part of my brain, used to doing rudimentary calculations translating that to a more usable 41.7 hours...

  Vague visual image forming in my imagination, the barrette reaching out for my visual cortex, near the limits of what it could do from its perch over my left temporal lobe. Planet here, sun there, axial tilt, Orikhalkos here, sunrise... So I’m doing the equivalent of walking down the street at three a.m. Typical.

  By the time the sun was relatively high in the sky, maybe two thirds of the way to what the library pointed out was its forty degree zenith, the streets were full of Greenies, dark-haired men and women in rustic-looking costume, lots of blue denim and leather, babbling to each other in their ancient Greek, words and phrases snatched out of context by the translator and stuck into my head.

  Going places. Doing things.

  Why the hell do these people have so many dogs? They’re common enough on Mars and Luna, popular anyplace you can have a pet less tidy than a cat, but...

  Standing at a street corner, waiting for the light to change, watching bolder souls make broken-field runs through traffic, dodging cars, automobile pilots making loud blatting noises with their signaling devices...

  “...what the fuck is wrong with you, you fucking putz, get the fuck out of the fucking street...”

  Library commenting quietly that Orikhalkoïné seemed to have adopted a certain pejorative, meaning penis, from the once widespread Jüdische dialect of Middle High German, possibly by way of the English that had once been the official language of the original PCI bases on Kalyx, still spoken by the Hinterling nomads of the...

  Running man grabbing himself by the throat, holding his left elbow in his right hand, making a wigwag motion at the driver who cursed him, calling him a “pitiful little snakeling” as he ran... Filthy city, full of cars and trash, pedestrians not seeming to notice as they stepped around and over all the neat little piles of dogshit.

  I found a place to have my lunch in a restaurant atop the highest building anywhere around, sitting alone at a table near a railing, barrette transferred to the back of my head so the translator could have a stab a reading the menu. I wouldn’t need to do that much longer; I was already starting to learn the Greek letters, re-learn most of them from childhood astronomy lessons, with new romaïka names, ahl-fah, beetah, ghummah, dheel-tah...

  When they brought the lunch the library told me to order, it proved to be hollow disks of bread, stuffed with raw vegetables, some of it, bok choy and sweet red peppers, recognizable, other withered green things like nothing I’d ever seen before, drenched in a peppery white sauce that made me choke as I tried to swallow.

  Christ. Tried to put the fire out with the alcoholic beverage I’d ordered, a soapy wine that tasted like it’d been mixed with some of the asphalt they used to pave the streets of Orikhalkos. Useless. Waiter looked at me like I was an idiot when I asked for water, finally brought me a glass of lukewarm tea, a fully saturated sugar solution apparently, which appeared to do the job.

  Sitting alo
ne then, almost alone in the restaurant, Greenie lunch hour long since ended, drinking my too-sweet tea and working on a flaky almond-flavored pastry, looking out at the still cloudless deep blue-green sky, sun slowly declining in the west as I dawdled, too slowly, the only natural days I’d ever gotten used to being the earthlike days of Mars.

  Brilliant spark of light, pale behind the blue of the sky, but bright nonetheless, sliding rapidly along, west to east, on the northern horizon, far out over the sea...

  Green Heaven’s inner moon, Hope, running the racetrack of its prograde equatorial orbit, some eighteen thousand kilometers out, circling the world three times in a “day,” best use the local word iméra, the way the Martians always said sol.

  Background chatter from the library made me look toward the west, out over the ocean, spread out like a blanket of cold, dark steel from this height. A small, pale crescent, yellowish, pastel, hanging over the sea, far, far away. The outer moon Wan, said the library. Four million kilometers away, slightly larger than Mars, with a thin atmosphere all its own, all carbon dioxide and nitrogen, a few shallow seas, no life of its own, other than a bit of terragenic contamination.

  In the early days, it was thought people would settle on Wan as well, but... what would the point have been?

  I stood, putting my hands on the railing, looking out over the city, empty of... pretty much everything. To the east, where the sky was a deeper blue, between the city and those vast, faraway white mountains, Thisbÿs Bergketen, said the library, unasked, was a broad, almost featureless yellow-brown-gold landscape, flat, humped up here and there with low, rolling hills, an occasional metallic glint shimmering, there and gone again in the blink of an eye.

  Koperveldt, the Plains of Brass whose name alone had been sufficient to provoke my dreams, not so terribly long ago. What’s out there now? Anything at all from those dreams, or will it simply be more... A look down at the dirty city. More of this.