Acts of Conscience

by William Barton

  Something else. Walking up in the woods beyond the defile, a flash of white. Wolfen? Before I could get a good look, it seemed to notice me, freeze for a moment, then melt away. Down in the valley, the dollies kept walking along, unconcerned.

  How do they survive, oblivious like that? If I had a gun, I could pick them right off, back to front. As for the wolfen... I stood rooted, waiting to see them rush out, pounce on the dollies, kill them and eat them, but...

  Nothing.

  Nothing but me standing out in the wind, remembering the dollie dancers of Orikhalkos.

  Eleven: We set out under the rising sun

  We set out under the rising sun, Tau Ceti’s yellow-white ball seeming to grow smaller as it rose, sky losing its brassy color, wispy clouds on the horizon gradually melting away. At first, I tried driving along, following the Kapellmeister’s horse, fighting the tedium, trying to tell myself it was like being at work, but...

  Right. Real work’s not boring. Only those nasty little makework jobs, where you stand someplace conspicuous, trying to look... serviceable. Finally, I got out and walked, letting the spaceship navigation system drive the camper, knowing it could memorize whatever it saw of the trail through my eyes, transmitted through the barrette. With the transponder nearby, the system was getting enough bandwidth it could cover my entire neurostructure from its perch over my left ear... I could put the God damned thing in my pocket if I wanted, or lodge it up my ass. Still, I’d gotten used to wearing it in my hair.

  “Is this a womfrog trail?”

  The Kapellmeister didn’t answer immediately, riding on Graysplotch, who seemed restored to his natural horse behavior. I wondered what it felt like to the horse, being... linked to the Salieran through the powers of those wet-looking tentacles, even now splayed on its back. “Once, I think it must have been, though there are too few of them now to keep it so well maintained.”

  It was shaping up into a beautiful day, blue-green sky taking on an enameled look, trees rustling softly in a gentle breeze, almost masking the distant shush of the camper’s electric turbine. “People? Is it maintained by staff from the Takkor Boerderij?”

  “Possibly. I doubt it. More likely this track is maintained by the wolfen for their own purposes.”

  Their own purposes. That slight shock again, the realization that the wolfen were not as they’d been portrayed in all those netvid shows.

  The Kapellmeister said, “It’s possible this is a dollie-track, though this close to an active Groenteboer estate, that would be dangerous to the point of foolhardiness.”

  Dollie-track.

  The Kapellmeister said, “The wolfen aren’t stupid, of course, especially these white wolfen. They’ve been quite decimated by human activity on the Koperveldt the last few centuries. Still, their need to participate in the natural ecology is quite strong; possibly too strong to overcome.”

  I walked on, silent, thinking about the wolfen and their possible relationship with the dollies, thinking about questions I might want to ask. All right. An intelligent predator might want to begin something like animal husbandry. And you did see that line of dollies walking along this morning, wolfen apparently watching from the woods... Something about another netvid show. Anthropology. Humans of the Upper Paleolithic kept horses, kept them penned up to the point where the horses would go nuts, would lift themselves off the ground by biting down on the corral rails. I’ve got the memory all mixed up with some other story, about how the Aurignacian hunters came to Europe just long enough the wipe out the Neanderthal, then headed on east across Beringia to become the first Amerinds. Something about a valley of horses. Yes. So did dear little Ayla ride her horses, girlfantasy of almighty powerful meat surging between her legs? Heh. Most likely, all she did was eat the poor bastards. Horsemeat stew. Yum.

  We went up a low rise and suddenly burst out of the forest, pausing on the rim of a broad, treeless, caldera-like valley, an open, grassy bowl with forest visible all around the rim. Down in the bottom, among scattered copses of smaller trees, some of them no more than large bushes, there was a little stream, beside it a group of large white tents and a vehicle pretty much like my camper, now sighing to a stop behind us.

  Bubble cabin in front, median power bay, antennae just the same. The popup back was missing, replaced by an open cargo box with a corrugated bed. I’d seen things like this before, mostly for use on the unprotected surface of worlds like Luna and Mars. Pickup truck, I think, is the common term.

  The Kapellmeister said, “I think you’ll like these people, Gaetan. let’s go on down.”

  People, I thought. It never occurred to me to give the term such a wide definition, but... We started down the hill, and things began coming out of the tents.

  I remembered Rua Mater’s reaction when she’d turned and unexpectedly beheld those Arousian tourists at the Washington Zoo, big, burnished stickbugs looking like something out of just about every alien-monsters-are-upon-us movie ever made. Especially the bit with the faceted eyes. Makes you realize the term “bug-eyed monster” doesn’t refer to exophthalmia.

  As we came to a stop in front of them, camper wheezing to a halt, settling in the tall yellow grass, Kapellmeister hopping off its horse and standing beside me, the Arousians fanned out in front of their tents, almost as if guarding their equipment. Some sort of... tension in the air here, as if... Odd. If any sentient extraterrestrial species is... used to us, it’s this one.

  The Kapellmeister’s translator pod made a single, faint greekee, and one of the Arousians stepped forward, seeming to skirt round some imaginary line defining my personal space, going on the other side of the Salieran, as if its tiny, black hassock of a body could somehow...

  Christ. This thing is scared to death of me.

  The Kapellmeister reached out with its third arm and wrapped its tentacles around the lower reaches of one of the Arousian’s forelegs. Pretty tableau then, Arousian suddenly motionless, head cocked just so, eyes seeming to peer at me, eyes like glittering bits of ice, expressionless, emotionless, as empty as so much glass, and yet...

  The Kapellmeister’s translator pod said, “Mr. du Cheyne, this is my friend, Rustmold-on-Pale-Snow.”

  The Arousian clattered its limbs together, a bizarre parody, as of some craggy noncom in one of those old British Raj dramas that were so popular in the twenty-fourth century, as if its name might be Sarn’t-Major, Sah!, but its translator said, “Rustmold-on-Pale-Snow, line of the White-Crystal-Star Foragers, under the sponsorship of Jimmy MacCray and the engineering staff at Research Base Four-alpha, MEI-at-SD3.”

  Absurdly, I found myself reaching out, as if to shake hands with the thing, as if... it reached out and took my hand in a cluster of little claws and sticklike fingers on the end of one of its... appendages, chinitous skin cool to the touch, just a hair above air temperature. I said, “Uh. Pleased to, uh...” Tongue-tied before a thing.

  The other Arousians started coming forward, doing things like little curtsies, limbs clattering, introducing themselves with complex, nonsensical names, every one of which seemed to have a human sponsor embedded in it. Other data bubbling up, useless bits of memory: You know, of course, that the human population of Sigma Draconis is in the neighborhood of seventy-five million, something like eight times the native population, employees of Mace Electrodynamics, mostly living on Arous’s airless moon and in the system’s dense asteroid belt, where...

  Horseshit. Why is it everything I seem to know is composed of horseshit?

  I looked helplessly at the Kapellmeister, standing off to one side now, then beyond, to a... and froze. In the shadow of some big, silver-green bushes, under branches covered with broad leaves and whorls of small, bright, no-color flowers, lolling on the ground like so many big, weird-looking dogs, were a group of white wolfen. Staring at me, teeth showing, mottled eyes generally attentive.

  I think I took a step back, then stopped. Of course. They’re here to be... interviewed. Something like that.

  But then be
yond the wolfen, kneeling in the deeper shadows, like children in cowgirl suits, wearing teddybear masks, a double row of dollies. Kneeling, impassive, unmoving, heads bowed, tiny hands clasped on their breasts. Like... children saying their prayers.

  Faint, faded, faraway memory. Saying my prayers, saying the litany of the Laïty of Kali Meitner under the watchful eye of my mother, before I lay me down to sleep and put my soul at risk. I...

  Christ. That... not quite smell in the air, prickling at the underside of my brain, like small, scratching fingers. Suddenly, it felt like the dollies were watching me, dark, almost-human eyes, hidden but there nonetheless, looking at me from under shaggy brows.

  Stop it. Nothing more than an overactive imagination. But, for some reason, I kept thinking about the dollie sex show back in Orikhalkos. Besides which, that’s money on the hoof you’re looking at, boy. Fat, horny old men on Epimetheus will pay good money for those things. Probably a lot better money than old van Rijn was willing to let on.

  o0o

  As Tau Ceti slowly declined, angling down through the northwestern sky, I set up camp next to the Arousians’ little tent village, parking my camper by the stream, next to their pickup truck, opening the pop-up section and puttering around inside, looking into the storage bay underneath, seeing just what...

  Right. Dawdling. Because if I’m outside, I get to see those great big white wolfen eying me hungrily, or, worse still, walking around with nothing to do, too conscious of my dick, pretending I don’t know the dollies are there. Even inside, I can sort of smell... Remember the dollhouse back in Orikhalkos. I thought that miasma was, somehow, provoked by all those aroused men, coming off them, evaporating with their sickly sweat...

  The library AI whispered, It’s within the realm of possibility that the dollies exude a pheromone that triggers some sexual response in the human male vomeronasal organ. It is a characteristic of Cetian life-forms that they use the same underlying biochemical structures as terragenic life, but for different purposes, resulting in some confusion when end-products of the two evolutionary schemes meet.

  Right. Womfrog guts smelling like fresh apple pie. Womfrog steaks with a distinct tang of semisweet chocolate. Dollies able to provoke... well, why not provoke a response in the human female vomeronasal organ? Why were there only men in the dollhouse. Just biochemical coincidence? Or is it true, as so many wish to believe, that women are... superior?

  The library whispered, The most widely accepted theory would have us believe that human males are evolutionarily provoked to impregnate every female they can. Hence the ease with which they are tricked into mating with other mammalian species. Unbidden, a brief image of a sheep appeared in my head. Unbidden, I suppose, because I couldn’t quite make myself believe the library AI had put it there, despite its newfound bandwidth.

  It went on, As males are provoked simply to impregnate, females are provoked to become pregnant, with the expectation of offspring, hence their reproductive biochemistry is much more finely tuned and correspondingly harder to misdirect.

  Meaning a man who’ll screw a dead cat is much less deranged than a woman who has a meaningful relationship with an appropriately shaped power tool? Right. And if you believe that, there’s a very nice bridge spanning Valles Marineris I’ve been meaning to put on the market.

  So I puttered around my camper, periodically castigating myself, and watched the goings on edgewise. The Arousians seemed unafraid of the wolfen, moving easily among them, accompanied much of the time, though not always, by the Kapellmeister. Unafraid? Well, maybe the Arousians are no more edible to the wolfen than your average pile of kindling wood. Then again, the wolfen aren’t mad at them, either. One of the Arousians...

  Rustmold-on-Pale-Snow, whispered the translator.

  Going from wolfen to wolfen. Talking to it through its human-made interpreter gizmo? No. If humans don’t think wolfen can talk... The Kapellmeister would touch the wolfen, which would stiffen, mottled eyes visibly rolling. Wolfen clearly unnerved by what was happening here. Then I’d hear an exchange of words between translator pods. In English? Yes.

  The library whispered, English is the technical working language of MEI, and has become the formal human language of the colonies at Sigma Draconis.

  Every now and again, after a prolonged exchange, the Kapellmeister would reach out and touch the Arousian. Momentary freezeframe, then you’d hear Rustmold-on-Pale-Snow say, “Ah, yes. Now I understand.”

  I wonder what it feels like?

  The spacesuit’s voice whispered, Quite likely, similar to our own communication modalities.

  But the Arousians, Kapellmeisters and wolfen are extremely different sorts of... Um. I’m so used to talking with hardware, I forget what it is that’s whispering in my head. The translator said, Of course, artificial intelligences of human manufacture are optimized for communication with human neural structures.

  Our things. Loving us. Belovèd.

  Finally, when I got hungry, I decided to take the plunge. Instead of timidly staying in my camper, I broke out the charcoal gas-grill I’d found in the storage bay, set it up on a flat place by the river, fired it up and, while the coal bed was settling in, got out my chair, a little table, picked out a nice womfrog steak, put together a vinaigrette salad, a couple of neatly wrapped ears of corn, butter, garum, put the steaks on and listened to them sizzle.

  I sat in the chair, determined to enjoy myself, looking up at a sky that was starting to streak with vermilion... what the fuck is that smell?

  The Arousians were gathered among their tents, more or less ignoring me, gathered round some squat apparatus that made long jets of blue flame. Each stick-bug-person had a skewer on which was impaled some kind of dark lump, taking turns rolling the lumps in their blue flames, pulling them out, on fire, watching them burn, emitting long plumes of pale gray smoke.

  A distinct smell of burning polybutadiene.

  The Kapellmeister came toward me, carrying a little thing that look like a greenish kangaroo—konijn, whispered the translator—holding it helpless in its claws, octopus draped over its little head. You could see beady red eyes peering between the tentacles. Sorry, critter...

  Snip. The konijn’s head fell to the grass. Slurp.

  “Ah. This one is quite good.” The Kapellmeister said, “One of the problems the Arousians have, when they travel, is a biochemistry that is much different from what we find on other human colonial worlds.”

  “Mace couldn’t help them out with that?”

  “Well, there are limits to human technology. The Arousians are provided with blood symbionts which allow them to survive allergic reactions to alien tissues. This permits them to travel without bioisolation garments on planets with an appropriate atmosphere, but it can’t overcome the fact that most Terrestrial and Cetian life forms, if consumed, would interfere with certain aspects of the Arousian cellular metabolism.”

  Poisonous, in other words. I turned away, intending to flip my steak... found myself gripping the fork rather... firmly.

  The Kapellmeister said, “I think Limbcracker would like some womfrog steak. She’s gotten rather hungry, hanging around here all day.”

  Limbcracker. Great. The wolfen was sitting on its haunches beside the barbecue, eying the meat on the grill with evident interest. Leaning forward, in fact, seeming to sniff... I said, “Terrific. Well.” I went in and got a fresh steak, brought it out... Hell. Put it on the end of the fork and held it out to... Limbcracker. The wolfen gave it a short glance, a sniff. Turned away, back to the grill.

  The Kapellmeister said, “I believe Limbcracker would like to sample some cooked meat. Please try to scrape off some of the garum you’ve added. It will only make her sick.”

  I turned to stare at the Kapellmeister. It sat there, sucking on its dead konijn, looking like... God damn it, I’m trying to make eye contact with a footstool and pingpong balls, I...

  “Please, Gaetan. Limbcracker is being very friendly, considering your species.” Shit. I pu
t the raw steak on the grill, transferred the cooked one to my plate and set it on the ground, hoping I was out of reach of any quick grab... Limbcracker edged forward, leaning down, sniffing. Snap. Only half a steak left in the plate. In fact, a couple of chips missing from the edge of the plate as well. The steak made sticky sounds as Limbcracker chewed and...

  She looked back toward the trees, where the other wolfen, hungry wolfen most likely, were lolling, watching. “Oooooom.” Long pause in which the long grunt sort of echoed, then a quick, “Phh!” The other wolfen started getting up, walking our way.

  The Kapellmeister said, “I think they like you, Gaetan. This is most unusual.”

  Like me? Six, no seven, white wolfen sitting in a semicircle around the grill, looking at me expectantly, long, pointed black tongues coming out, licking around their muzzles, nostrils dilating as they... “I’ll bet.” I went in a got the rest of my steaks, the seventy or eighty pounds I’d cut from the injured womfrog after I shot it dead.

  In a while, the Arousians came over, finished with their stinky lumps of whatever, set up what appeared to be stereo cameras, and started filming the goings on. At some point, as I sat in my chair, Limbcracker came over and threw herself on the ground beside me, purring like a God damned cat.

  o0o

  Later, I sat alone under an infinitely deep nighttime sky, kind of looking up at nothing, smell of dying fires in my nose, faint aftertang of cooked and eaten food, the dry-as-dust scent of the Arousians beneath that, along with the sweet oil and caramel smell of the wolfen... I could see them over there, pale shadows sprawled under a copse of alien trees, wind softly rustling alien leaves.

  I suppose I should be getting to bed as well. These antarctic nights are so short, hardly long enough to get enough sleep, to make up for the long, long day.

  And yet. All of it. Everything. Stirring my mind to go on and on, thinking about what I’d seen, refusing to let go, let me creep away to a soft bunk and settle down through dream to memory. Memory of the Arousians talking to the white wolfen, through one interpreter pod to another, through the mind of the Kapellmeister, whatever it may be like, through neural tendrils that can, apparently, bridge an immense evolutionary gap...