Acts of Conscience

by William Barton

  Oh, hell. I don’t know. Like I was back home, walking into the breakroom at Stardock just before change of shift, getting ready to... go to work. I thought briefly about them all, about Garstang, about Phil Hendrickx and Zell Benson, Millie Ai-chang and Rua Mater... I got up, took a shower. Got dressed. Went outside.

  Under a brass-tinted blue sky, the Arousians were already well along in the task of breaking camp, tents taken down, folded, packed in ridiculously tiny containers, for the most part already stowed in the pickup truck’s side boxes. Other equipment... It looked like the Arousians would get it all in the boxes as well.

  Off to one side, Limbcracker and her... well. Not fellows. Not brethren. Not comrades, though that comes closer. No word in English for a band of sisters? Sorority? Maybe, though the connotations I knew were centuries old and had to do with social clubs. Maybe the anthropologists... The library AI was unaccountably silent.

  Beyond where the wolfen were sprawled, the dollies kneeled in a little group, facing toward the east. Kneeling, seeming to bend slightly forward every now and again, almost but not quite in unison. Whispering. Again, almost but not quite in unison.

  The Kapellmeister was nearby, sitting atop its horse, halfway up its neck, in fact, tentacle-hand sprawled over the back of the horse’s head. The horse was imposingly still, its eyes, from where I stood, appearing to stare, more or less, in opposite directions.

  “What’re you doing?” Nothing. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see one of the wolfen raise its head and look at me. I stood watching for another minute, waiting, then gave up, started gathering my trash, packing away my junk. I even managed to remember to take the garbage, bits of organic tissue inside and feed it down the disposal, even though, thrown on the ground, I’m sure it would have decayed nicely and...

  The library whispered, Not the garum, Gaetan. In relation to the Cetian ecology, it’s comparable to a puddle of spilled gasoline.

  The Kapellmeister suddenly slid down from its horse, landed with a soft plop-thud on the ground. The horse seemed to take a very deep breath, then another, like a man who can’t quite get enough oxygen in his lungs. The Kapellmeister reached out with one chela and poked the horse in the flank. It jumped slightly, snorted, made some sort of faint whickering sound, then turned, very purposefully, head held high, and trotted away, up the hill onto the trail by which we’d come. It paused once, struck a pose at the top of the hill, looking down on us all. I felt a sharp thrill run down my spine. Perhaps I was expecting it to rear like some fantasy stallion and... It just turned away. Turned, went into the forest, and was gone, not even the sound of hoofbeats left behind.

  The Kapellmeister came trotting over to where I was standing, legs flexing in order as it walked, as though under the control of some ancient mechanical distributor unit, blue eyes floating atop their stalks, looking up at me. It said, “I programmed Graysplotch to go to the Takkor Boerderij and turn himself in. They’ll recognize the brand and see he gets where he belongs.”

  Hmh. “Um. Won’t someone...”

  “I told the stable something like this would happen, that there was no one to notify. They... had quite an argument about whether they wanted to rent me a horse, but... sufficient application of money...”

  The translator AI whispered, The software inhabiting the Kapellmeister’s pod seems to have a most excellent grasp of human language nuance.

  Quite. I said, “So... you’ll be riding with...” I glanced over at the Arousian’s truck, was startled to see they’d extruded a ramp, that the dollies were arrayed in a solid phalanx at its foot, like so many little cowgirl soldiers. Just then, one of the wolfen made a little woof and the dollies began marching up the ramp.

  The Kapellmeister said, “I thought I might ride with you, Gaetan.”

  “Oh. All right. Be my guest.” I gestured at the camper’s cab.

  The Kapellmeister turned, went over to the door, reached up with one clumsy-looking lobster claw, worked the latch and opened it, clambered in without difficulty. I took a deep breath, turning to look just as the wolfen scrambled up into the pickup bed with their dollies. Looked up at the sun for a second, then went around to the driver’s side door and got in.

  Sat and looked at the Kapellmeister. Finally, it said, “We’re headed for a place on the other side of the Koudloft, near the headwaters of the Somber River. I’ve already passed the coordinates to your transponder unit via the satellite link.”

  I realized with a slight start that in the little time I’d dawdled outside, the Kapellmeister had gotten my black box off the seat and set it on the floor. “OK. Then... we’re off.” I hit the starter, listened to the electric motors whine, then punched the popup button, looking back over my shoulder as the living space folded itself away.

  o0o

  Midday and Tau Ceti was as high as it was going to get, hanging low over the northern horizon because we were so far south now, sliding through long-shadowed badlands country that looked like something from the Old West, only cold, ground streaked here and there with patches of persistent ice the Kapellmeister told me would evaporate only at high summer, those few weeks when the sun never set.

  Lots of craggy red rocks, fractured from weathering—this place, I was assured, would be under ten meters of snow come winter. Open, dry mud flats, covered with a crazy pattern of cracks like the surface of Europa. Low, gullied hills. Pillars of rock, like lava tubes, but...

  I said, “Those things almost look artificial.” A little bit, in fact, like the mysterious ruins I’d seen over by the mountains.

  The Kapellmeister’s eyestalks floated above the instrument panel, looking out through the cab dome, little blue moons that seemed to sway this way and that, almost circling each other... “It is possible. Those would not be StruldBug ruins, of course, nor those of any Adversary Instrumentality, which would have survived almost intact, it having been only four hundred million years or so since the Shock War.” It paused, seeming to consider. “Possibly something left by my own people, but I have no recollection...”

  Its voice seemed to fade, translator pod emitting a faint, low-pitched growl before going silent. Seemed to drift away, as though into a dream, eyestalks retracting until its eyes were resting on its back.

  What the Hell.

  What the hell are StruldBugs?

  Silence. Then the translator AI whispered, Have we your permission to query the Kapellmeister’s translator pod operating system?

  Um. Sure.

  The translator whispered, StruldBug is a term the pod created to convey, in English, the Salieran conceptual sequence for a species that exists in no database we’ve ever indexed.

  Which would be a lot. I paid for a pretty good library installation on Random Walk, after all...

  Struld, of course, is from the Laputa episode of Swift. Bug is a reference to their physical appearance. A sort of pseudo-exoskeleton like the Arousians. Not related, though. The image received is reminiscent of a large, golden cockroach with half-molten skin. About the size of an Airedale terrier.

  What about the rest of it?

  Long wait, then: No answer. The pod will only answer procedural queries relating to the task of translation. Nothing to do with the underlying information. The pod further states it would prefer not to have to interrupt the Kapellmeister’s meditation. It notes we’ve been asked already not to transgress in the pod’s operational space.

  I sat back, looking out at the landscape, at those towers that might or might not be ruins. Tall towers with fluted sides? I remembered suddenly that structures like that held some place in the Saucer People cargo cult, but I couldn’t remember what, quickly blocked my thought from the library so it wouldn’t go digging for useless references.

  Too late. It made a series of musical tones, then shut up.

  So. StruldBugs. Adversary Instrumentality. Shock War. Four hundred million years. And... I have no recollection.

  o0o

  Nightfall, camper parked and popped under cold, bril
liant antarctic stars. Not so many stars, though, for the sky seemed a good deal lighter here, as though the blackness were tainted by a faint touch of indigo, the waxing midnight sun a few degrees closer to the horizon. The library informed me it was still five weeks to the last sunset of the season at this latitude.

  I had a brief flash of memory, standing outside the Valley Dor habitat in the Martian antarctic, white night pale and peculiar overhead, standing on some crispy surface of residual water ice during a summer vacation away from Syrtis Major.

  Can’t remember if Jayanne was with me then.

  I cooked and ate a quick prefab dinner inside the camper habitat, no flavor, no texture, then went back out into the cold, drawn by the ruddy fires that had bloomed among the Arousians’ tents, by shadows moving in the darkness. Went and sat on the chilly rear ramp structure of the pickup truck, sat and watched.

  The white wolfen were drawn up on level ground in two short rows, facing each other several meters apart, one isolated wolfen sat facing inward on each open end, as though guarding the interior of the square thus formed. Guarding the dollies within. The dollies were facing each other, holding hands, marching in place very gently, hardly lifting their little feet at all, chanting softly, long chest fur bouncing like a cowgirl’s tassels with each footfall.

  Virginia reel, suggested the library, reading a half-formed thought, completing it.

  Yeah. Sort of. One dollie from the opposite end of each line suddenly let go, began dancing in to the center of the square, spinning... the isolated wolfen on the open ends of the square started to bark, metallic sounds, like sledge-hammers on cold metal, in alternation, slightly different intonations, clang-clink, clang-clink...

  The two dollies got to the middle, whirled around each other, danced back the way... The library noted, Not back the way they came. They’ve exchanged position.

  I couldn’t differentiate dollies well enough to tell them apart, of course. Another pair of dollies, the next set in their respective rows, began dancing out, little cowgirl hips swiveling as they spun, tassel-fur lifting, exposing swatches of pale undercoat. Dancing very well, not like little girls, more like tiny women, like...

  Probably explains why they’re so easy to train for the dollhouse, hmh?

  The library AI whispered, A reasonable hypothesis.

  Dark shape, shape of a crab, ambling nimbly out of the night, pausing by the back of the truck, then bunching suddenly and leaping up into the bed, pickup rock steady under a small weight. I stretched gently, and said, “What’s going on here?” Gesturing at the dollies’ dance, the yipping wolfen.

  The Kapellmeister said, “Drilling them, apparently. Practice makes perfect.”

  Drilling them? For what? For... Another brief snatch of memory, something... A twenty-fifth century metonymepic, Flashmanssaga, which I’d loved when I was a boy, maybe ten years old, an episode called “The General Danced at Dawn.”

  The Kapellmeister said, “The translator pod software complains that the artificial intelligences aboard your spaceship attempted to gain entry to its databases again. I thought we’d agreed that wouldn’t happen anymore.”

  Hmh. Well. I said, “Sorry. The... things you talked about this morning caused considerable difficulty in translation. The AIs were attempting to gain a clarification for certain terms.” I paused, wonder how, even if, to proceed. Finally I said, “StruldBugs. Adversary Instrumentality. The, um, Shock War. Though my library has a fairly good set of indexes, it could find no referents for any of these items.”

  The Kapellmeister sat silent, watching the dollies dance. “In response to the query about StruldBugs, your pod did provide an image of something like a big, golden cockroach.”

  More silence, then the Kapellmeister said, “I think your own translation software should have used the word scarab. That seems like a better approximation.”

  Scarab? The library ran a brief clip of something pretty much like a cockroach, rolling some kind of shaggy clay ball over dry ground. I felt additional data patch in and... Really? A shitball? It showed me the egg within. Well. Clever. But why the hell would the ancient Egyptians worship a shitball bug?

  Voice of the spacesuit AI, crackling with alarm: We have just experienced a high-speed data probe. Though the software filters were triggered, they did not process before the probe structure logged off. No trace was possible. We are unable to determine what, if any, data was accessed.

  I turned to stare at the Kapellmeister, sitting quietly beside me in the ruddy, firelit darkness, dim eyes floating above its back, apparently still watching the dollies, whose dance, some part of me notes, was slowly drowning more complicated, from two dollies to three, now four dancing simultaneously in the square.

  Nothing.

  What was I expecting, to be able to read the, uh... facial expression on something whose evolutionary history was more remote from mine than your average terrestrial rock?

  The Kapellmeister said, “Given the political realities on my homeworld, it seems unlikely that data structures exist for these referents within any human database.”

  Then more silence, the two of us sitting side by side, watching the long shadows of the dancers crisscross on the open ground. Something, I thought, is going on here. I... Moment of self-directed mirth. No shit, Mycroft Fucking Holmes. The sentence that just came out of that black box held a great deal of information. This Kapellmeister has just said it told me something it thinks no other human knows.

  So? Fucking why?

  Loose lips sink ships?

  Christ.

  It said, “There has been a great and rancorous debate among my kind about what is appropriate information for release to your kind. The general consensus is that we wish you hadn’t come. We’ve been content, sitting home, these last four hundred million years.”

  Sharp prickle in my chest. Well. There’s that number again. An unlikely number. Four hundred million years ago... origin of the vertebrates, perhaps?

  The library whispered, Transition between the Devonian and Mississippian periods of the Paleozoic era. The climate was warm and humid, following a more arid period with some glaciation. With lands plants well established, the first forests evolved in the Devonian. These were inhabited by the first amphibians, at the beginning of what is commonly known as the Carboniferous.

  So. Have I just been told the... Salierans have been... sitting home, was it? Sitting home, warm and cozy, on 82 Eridani 3, since before the coal swamps formed? The Kapellmeister said, “In the days following the Shock War, we were... frightened. Afraid some remnant of the Instrumentality would come, looking for StruldBugs to kill, and would kill us instead. It was a long time before we found out the StruldBugs had won the war, that there were no remnants of the Instrumentality. Nor much left at all of the StruldBugs themselves.”

  I wait in silence for more. Nothing. Finally: “You know, of course, I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about?”

  Silence. Then, “Yes. I realize that.”

  In the firelight before us, all of the dollies were dancing now, a very complicated pattern that I couldn’t follow at all. I said, “Then why the hell tell me?”

  Silence. Then, “I have a decision to make. It’s one I’ve been trying to make for a long time, but...” The eyestalks seemed to wave, beginning to retract, then they extended again to full length, seeming to inspect the stars overhead. There was a sound from the black box on its back, something I could swear sounded like a sigh, though, of course, it was only a soft ruffle of static. It said, “Among my kind, solitary decisions and individual initiative have been long discouraged. This makes the decision making process rather... difficult.”

  I can imagine.

  I waited patiently for more, watching the dollies dance, but that was it. Thought about opening my mouth and asking the obvious questions, try to encourage this little beanbag of a creature to go on, but... I just sat. Eventually the dollies stopped dancing, and the wolfen, somehow, seemed pleased.

&nb
sp; o0o

  The next day, following the sun as we skirted the edge of a big, flat glacier near the center of the Koudloft, we made good time, thundering along in tandem, throwing up twin plumes of dust, and glittery bits of ice, Kapellmeister riding beside me in silence. Toward midday we crested a long, low, snow-covered ridge and began driving down a shallow slope, seeming to head back toward the north.

  Gone around the south pole now, pole itself somewhere back in that glacier, direction changed even though we haven’t made a meaningful turn.

  In the middle distance, the white hills of the Koudloft turned gray, then gave out, turning into a broad green plain that soon disappeared over the horizon. Mountains sticking up, almost invisible, like phantasms in the blue beyond, continuations of the Pÿramis and Thisbÿs, seeming to float above the end of the world, like icebergs in the fog.

  There, a faint bolt of silver lightning, rimming the green world. The beginnings of the Somber River, perhaps? One of its tributaries, the beginnings of a drainage system with the length and volume of the Amazon and Mississippi combined. There, by the river’s bend, a low, ramshackle affair, like a fairy castle gone to seed, brown buildings threatening to become towers, never quite making the grade.

  The library whispered, Vapaa, smallest of the Compact Cities, inhabited by the last genetically distinct descendants of the Saami folk, whom other Scandinavian people referred to as Ljappa.

  Some imitation of Orikhalkos then, smaller, shabbier, if such a thing was possible... memories of those empty, fallen down warehouse districts, with their wolfen killpits and dollhouses and streetwalking whores and... I thought about my Orikhalkan whore, brief memory of being... transported. As simple as that. Felt a pang of desire, an urge to visit this Vapaa.

  The spacesuit said, Contemporary news reports indicate a great deal of gang violence on the streets of Vapaa these days. Few people from the other Cities will visit, or come to do business. A commission once discussed breaking up Vapaa and absorbing its population into the other Cities, but no city officials were willing to have them.