That little plump woman who’d seemed to be eying me earlier in the evening, the one whose name I can’t quite remember, hanging around DenArrie now... Abrupt memory of her riding on the bus, sitting with Mr. Pandazides, the two of them chatting merrily away.
Well. Sorry old boy. Sorry I threw your ass down the hill and made you look like such a putz. No pussy for you tonight, eh?
I found myself imagining the two of them together, perhaps for the first time, plump woman stripped down, confronting him with her nakedness, Mr. Pandazides with an erection perhaps, confronting her with his. There’s always a tension in that moment, when you watch them looking at you, paying so much attention to their reaction you hardly have time to appreciate what you’re seeing.
Brief memory of Jayanne in my bedroom on Mars, that first night we were together, standing there naked in the half light, dorm room in gloom, campus outdoor lighting shining through the blinds, painting us with little yellow-white stripes. Jayanne’s dark eyes, not quite in shadow, obviously afraid. Afraid of what? I couldn’t imagine.
I’d looked at her then, taking my eyes off her face, looking at her small, round breasts with their prominent pink nipples, gently domed belly telling me she wasn’t getting quite enough exercise, but then no one did at Syrtis Major, my own belly rather slack in those days, because we were all so busy studying and...
Long, lingering look at the rust-colored hair of her crotch, eyes trying to penetrate the deeper shadows, wishing I could make her lie back on the bed, turn on the little reading lamp, push her legs apart, lean in close and look and touch, probe with my fingers, smell her and taste her until I knew her as well as a man can ever know...
When I’d looked back at her face, what I saw there was stark terror.
I’d had the wit then to say, Oh Jayanne. You are so incredibly... lovely.
Jayanne closing her eyes, swallowing softly, breath exhaled gently, an astonishing sigh of relief.
Memory of our little life together, relationship passing in a fleeting kaleidoscope that seemed over in an instant, resolving on the image of our last night together, memories collapsing in on one another like so many imploding stars.
The day before, making my decision with a feeling of... horror. Well, yes, Jayanne. I will marry you.
Jayanne’s eyes on me, full of doubt.
Me, wandering around for the better part of a Martian sol, feeling lost, full of regret, imagining myself husband and father and... oh, you know the rest. That trapped story as old as humankind. This is the way that the world ends, etc. I’m sure I did more than my share of whimpering, that day.
And the next night?
Jayanne in my bed, naked, but strangely distant, avoiding my touch.
Come on. What’s wrong?
Urging myself on her, already erect, ready to just climb in the saddle and get it the hell over with. Damn it, Jayanne... Then, eyes on me, eyes in shadow, full of... something, she’d said, Well, Gaetan, I went to the clinic this afternoon and got rid of it.
What? Why? I thought we agreed...
Already, in that moment, even as I spoke my lines, I could feel a terrible flood of relief.
She’d shrugged and said, I just... don’t think you’re what I want for a husband. Afterwards, she went away, and I never saw her again.
Didn’t really mind, because I hadn’t really even liked her, you see, until a couple of days later, when I woke up one morning, alone.
I looked away from the leaping shapes inside the cooking fire, looked across the camp clearing at the tree where Gretel Blondinkruis had been standing. Not there anymore. Pandazides still on his rock, brooding into the fire. Hell, we must have looked like twins. Claude and Évie. DenArrie and the little plump woman...
I got up and walked off, away into the dark.
o0o
Up near the top of a steep hill, I found an exposed ledge, dry gray rock, and sat looking out across the nighttime world, cool wind blowing over me, hugging my knees to my chest. The stars filled the black sky, so bright and hard and untwinkling they seemed close, seemed to bring the sky down to hang right overhead, Milky Way a river of remote golden dust beyond the stars, Hope long set, Wan a pale crescent hanging over the northern horizon, seeming much larger than I knew it really was.
After a while I lay back, staring upward at nothing in particular.
Why the hell am I here?
Is it really because I have nowhere else to go?
I’m not so stupid that I imagined my childhood dreams had any validity. They never do. Maybe I just wanted to see. But it’s so stupid to just sit up here, crushed by a shallow, pointless malaise, wishing for... wishing for... Hell, that thing in your pants is getting hard again. You know what it wants. You know how to get what it wants. Go back down to Orikhalkos, where money will buy whatever there is to be had.
Then get aboard your ship and go back home.
Sell that asinine conglomeration of metal, plastic, and dreams.
Three million livres?
Christ Almighty, that will buy six thousand nights with the likes of Camilla Seldane.
I tried to picture that.
Is that what you want, Gaetan du Cheyne?
Why the fuck don’t you know?
Just then, Gretel’s voice said, “Nice night, hm?”
I didn’t jump, didn’t react, no pang in my chest or anything like that. It felt almost as though I’d been expecting her. Maybe those old dreams run deeper than I know.
She stood still for a while, facing away from me, looking out over the dark, empty lowlands, down into the Plains of Brass, while I stared, idiotically, at the shape of her rear end, wishing and wishing, saying nothing, fantasies growing more foolish with every passing second. The machines are telepathic. Why aren’t we?
The voice of the spacesuit whispered, I’d help you if I could, but she’s not logged on anywhere that I can detect.
I had a momentary spark of wondering just what the AIs made of all my obsessions and useless dreams. They’ve never said, merely done what they could, with the netvid, negotiating with other people’s AIs, with... Brief memory of Rua Mater, always logged on, always sunk in dreams of her own. They could’ve... done something there. I wonder why not. I...
Gretel turned and looked down at me, smiled, turned again and sank down gracefully beside me. You know she must be able to see you’ve got a nice little erection bulging down there in the front of your pants. Does she expect me to... do something? Or should I just wait and see?
Silence in my head.
Wait and see, of course.
She said, “What’s it like out there?”
Out there? Gretel Blondinkruis gesturing at the sky.
I fumbled for words, wanting to tell her how it felt, but nothing would come. What then? Tell her lies? Make something up? Recount whatever I could remember from all the viddies I’d seen, all those old movies and books and... I said, “It’s different.”
Silence. Then a sigh, almost like the women sighing in my dreams. “Different.”
I felt my heart go bump in my chest, suddenly understanding what I’d heard in her voice. This is, I told myself, an open door. Rouse yourself. Walk on through. I actually had my mouth open, formulating lies, getting my story ready. But there was something else in there as well, something reluctant, holding me back. A little voice, so far away and weak: If you buy her with the coin of your dreams, then she’s bought. Just that and nothing more. And you know how that feels.
Sure do.
Why the hell does it matter?
Then it was too late. Gretel Blondinkruis got to her feet, dusting off her shapely backside, looking down at me, smiling. She said, “I’d like to get away from Green Heaven someday. Get out there and... see what there is to see.”
An invitation. For God’s sake, make up your mind asshole. Say something. Tell her who and what you are. Tell her about Random Walk. Tell her... tell her you’ll take her to the stars! She’ll make a deal with you. You know she wil
l.
Wasn’t that one of your oldest dreams, recurring in endless variation? The dream in which you had a little ship, sometimes a sailboat with which to cruise the South Seas. Sometimes a systemic yacht, cruising the moons of Saturn, the Piazzi, the Kuiper, the Oort, the...
Always. There was always a girl. A pretty girl. An innocent girl. A girl who was willing to... do whatever you wanted. Gaetan. Oh, Gaetan...
Idiot.
She said, “Well. We’d better get back down to camp. Mr. DenArrie will start to worry.”
Eight: Somehow, I got through the rest
Somehow, I got through the rest of the trip, simply by not thinking about it anymore perhaps, and went on back to my little hotel room in Orikhalkos, where I could watch the sun rise over a squalid cityscape through the convenient frame of my sliding glass door.
One night, I found something interesting to do. I’d been exploring down by the dockyards, Orikhalkos being a coastal city, and really having a pretty good time. There are probably still ships on the Earth’s oceans, but nothing like these. Big ships of steel and composite, some of them propelled by giant versions of the automobiles’ gas turbine drives, others running on nuclear-thermal steam.
Something I hadn’t noticed before was that all the Compact Cities of Green Heaven, with the sole exception of Vapaa, a small city at the head waters of the Somber River, lie on the ocean. Over the centuries a sea trade has grown up, sea trade, tourism, island hopping in the remote northern hemisphere—I’d heard of Les Iles des Français, but there were others...
I found myself standing in the darkness atop a narrow caisson wall, my back toward the quietly slopping seawater, looking down into a concrete drydock lit by long, dim strings of electric bulbs. The ship, resting on heavy keelblocks, was a dark shadow, rounded, looking at first glance like some old-fashioned spaceship. I could imagine I was on Earth, maybe five hundred years ago, in the days before interstellar travel perhaps. Down there, just maybe, those men and women were repairing a freighter that would one day be bound for red Mars, or faraway Jupiter, where the first volatiles plants were even now being set up.
I could see them down there, little mannequin shadows moving about, backlit by the blue flare of carbon arc torches. Hear distant voices, snatches of Greek words, too indistinct for the translator to pick up. Probably talking about the work. Careful with that coverplate, Basil. Line’s still pressurized and...
I walked away into the darkness, hungry, and went to a little restaurant not far from the dockyard, sat and ate among tired working men and women, and thought about it. I could stay here. I could be part of this.
Or go somewhere else. Somewhere where I’m needed. Hell, there are starship yards on Kent. I could do my familiar work, work among funny double shadows cast by Alpha Centauri’s twin suns, hanging, brilliant, in the sky. That’d be interesting, wouldn’t it?
The library said, In time, the FTL ships will come.
So they will. And I’m trained for that work as well. Should I just go home then? What’s going to happen, when people can get out among the worlds and come home again, to the same world, all the same people that they left behind? Will it make a difference?
I finished my meal, got up and walked on in the darkness, cutting through a very dark, empty-looking part of town, on my way back to the brightly-lit city center, glow on the sky beckoning me back to my hotel. Found myself standing in front of a building that looked like a warehouse.
People coming here, by ones and twos and little groups. Drunken men and women. Laughing men and women. The same sort of men and women who’d decorated my other life. The same sort of men and women I’d left behind me at the midnight diner, at the graveyard shift of the dockyard.
Inside, the place was brightly lit and full of people, concentric tiers of level floors descending to a dirt-lined pit, ceiling high overhead not domed, but rather unfinished girders from which electric lights hung in a mess of wiring. More or less, I thought, like the commonplace small sports stadia you see on Luna, places where you see sumo and pelota, or maybe the little illicit pugildromes of Mars.
Something like that here? Maybe, though the tiered floors were lined with cafe tables rather than inward-facing seats. Dinner theater in the round? Maybe I can get a nice desert here while I watch Aristophanes in the quasi-original. Something about the crowd... unlikely as all hell these boys and girls are here to see Frogs.
I walked down a narrow flight of stairs, cutting through tier-arcs to the lowest level, standing at a brass rail, looking down onto the dirt covered... well, ring is the only appropriate word. Not really common dirt either. More a nice, absorbent sand, like high-class kitty litter. Little doors in the side wall, low and wide. A man would have to stoop to get out, maybe even crawl.
“Kali mera!”
Soft female voice at my elbow, making me jump a bit, making me look. She was small and thin, dark eyes set in a dark, narrow face framed with shiny black curls that fell almost to her shoulders. Narrow smile, no more than a rim of even white teeth, smiling up at me.
I smiled back. “Is it morning already?”
She started to glance at some kind of chronometer strapped to her wrist—yet another reminder of just how antique this world, remote in time and space, could be—when a tall, heavyset, beady-eyed man standing behind her said, “Sunup’s in just under two hours...”
Short nights here.
He held out his hand, took mine firmly, and said, “My name’s Telektasos...” translator whispering softly under the words, This may be a nickname, telektasos means “dilator” in Greek. “My coworkers at Porphyrion Iron Works, Melîna...” a nod at the small woman who’d spoken to me first, then, putting his arm around a short, broad woman at his side, “and my girlfriend Mira.”
Melîna said, “We noticed you standing on the caisson wall at Porphyrion, just as we were coming off shift.”
“And again later, eating by yourself at Spartákili,” said Mira.
Telektasos motioned with a broad hand. “We’ve got a table here. Want to join us?” Grinning, Mira elbowing him in the ribs, translator speculating that he’d made some crude double entendre or another.
I said, “Uh. Sure.”
I told them my name and we sat down. pulling our chairs around to one side of the table, so we were all facing the dirt arena, Mira sitting close beside Telektasos, Melîna squeezing in next to me, her thigh pressed against mine. I could feel my heart starting to go thump in my chest, a little prickle of anticipation in the back of my neck, but... A soft sigh, my own, well concealed. Starting to come out the other side, are we? Maybe so.
Melîna said, “Du Cheyne... You don’t look French. More like some kind of Koromalisto. They all have that pale skin and dark hair. And your eyes are such a light brown they’re almost yellow.”
Right. Especially in certain kinds of spectrum-limited artificial lighting, I look like some kind of spook. People have been telling me that all my life.
Mira said, “We could tell you were some kind of foreigner. The way you were eating.”
“What do you mean?”
Melîna said, “Keeping your fork in your left hand and knife in your right like that. People here only do that to cut up meat, then we put down the knife and hold the fork in our right hands.”
The waiter came then and took our orders, drinks only just now, and I was pleased to realize I’d been here long enough that I knew the brand names of several rather nasty beers. I ordered a retsîna instead.
Telektasos, once the drinks had been served and sipped: “So, where are you from, Gaetan?” His pronunciation made it sound a bit like hhay-tawn.
I sat blinking for a moment, wondering what to tell them, even where to begin, as if it were complicated, but... why not the simple truth? So I said it.
Moment of silence, then Melîna leaned in close, looking right into my face, and said, “Earth? You mean, the Earth?” Wide-eyed astonishment, as if I’d said I was from some other galaxy or something.
Then Telektasos, voice rather gruff, said, “So. What is it you do for a living, Mr. du Cheyne?”
Mr. du Cheyne. Right. “I’m a mechanic. Same as you.”
“Not the same as me, brother. Hell, I can’t even afford a vacation in the islands!”
And here I am, come all the way from some glittery paradise among the stars, huh? I said, “Well, a spaceship mechanic. I’m sort of retired.”
Melîna whispered, “Spaceship mechanic...”
Mira: “When the day comes that I’m good enough, if it comes, I’d like to work at the Géricault-Boeing Aerospaceworks on Malakandra...” translator reminding me Malakandra was the next planet out, Tau Ceti 3, an abiotic juvenile terrestrial icehouse of a world, where, apparently, the Cetian in-system spacecraft were built.
Telektasos said, “I guess every technical worker has that dream.” A long look, then, “Why the hell are you here, Gaetan?”
Good, back to Gaetan again. No pause this time, no dissembling thoughts. This is... yet another open door. So I told them a little bit about those childhood dreams, watched their interested, understanding eyes. And I said, “I was... thinking of settling here.”
Melîna said, “But you’ve got a round-trip ticket home, don’t you?”
I hadn’t gotten around to telling them the rest of it yet, so... I said, “Sure.” Leave it at that. Plenty of time later to...
Telektasos said, “You show up down at the Porphyrion personnel office, they’ll probably put you in charge.”
“Or,” said Mira with palpable envy, “You could go right to Malakandra.” As if I could elect to ascend straight to God in Heaven, no Purgatory in between. What will these people think when the real starships come?
The waiter came again and took our food orders and, as we ate and talked, the lights slowly went down, all but the bright lights lining the inner walls of the little dirt arena, which I’d almost forgotten. Now, in the gloom, Melîna was tight against my side. I could hear her soft breathing, feel the in-out movement of her ribs, sense the rapid beating of her heart.
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