It stood, motionless, poised, outlined against the sky, eyes drifting slowly above its back, as though driven by the soft, warm night breeze, so obviously looking up at the stars. With, I thought, that same innocent nobility you see in a poised stallion, in one of those old, old nature shows. Misty of Chincoteague, or something equally stupid. Lassie, Come Home.
The translator AI whispered, The pod software’s grasp of human idiom is splendid, but unlikely to be perfect. Nobility, perhaps, is not quite the term.
The Kapellmeister said, “I feel so alone, standing amid this great, dark landscape. From here, it looks like this one little world goes on forever and ever.”
Alone? Snide voice within going, Welcome to the club, fuckhead.
The Kapellmeister said, “This sense of aloneness, which I know now you share, impells my trust.”
Impells, not quite compells? I turned away, staring out at the dark, empty plain, and could see just what it’d meant about this one little world going on and on forever. Even if it does go on forever, above there are still the infinite stars, the infinitely deep sky. I whispered, “You never did say what you wanted trust me with.”
Said it almost to myself.
The Kapellmeiter’s shadow moved across the rock, rippling, flowing to fill all the hollows, ride over the bulges. When it was close to me, I watched that middle hand extrude, tentacles flaring, like an octopus about to engulf my head.
“Can’t you just... tell me?”
“It would take too long.” The hand settled on my scalp, tentacles reaching down and around to engulf my face, permission unasked. No need, in fact, to be granted. Trust, I thought. What a peculiar notion...
Click.
The sky was a subtle blend of gray and gold, more like a high mist than a sky, stars visible right through its substance, like bits of tarnished silver, hardly bright at all.
The two of us standing there, on the black beach sand, standing at the end of our complex trails of footsteps, dark water lapping nearby, like molten tar, but cold, fizzing like foam on the beach, leaving bits of dark ice behind as rime.
Being before me, posing in mirror display, chelae raised, glittering in pale sunshine. Beyond this image of self-not-self, I could see faraway mountains, beyond that, only sky.
I put out my speaking hand, just as that other being did the same. We touched. Our tentacles intertwined. Thoughts, thoughts of another, like whispers, my own whispers reaching out. Familiar, comfortable touch, this other, one I’d merged with so often before. Friend. Lover. Sibling. All those things that one discrete biological unit can be to another.
The other’s thoughts whispered, This is a terrible thing you are doing, you and Those Others Who Would Trust.
I and my comrades, going on out into the void. Void abandoned so long ago, in the Aftermath. I whispered, What else can I do? Merge with the Ones Who Would Hide?
My friend whispered, As Hidden Ones, at least we would not be responsible for...
Inaction, I said, is action enough.
That’s what They say. Believe it if you will.
Join the Rectification Group, then? Go out and Do What Must Be Done?
My friend whispered, I’m sorry for you. This decision must have been hard.
I showed this old lover the fresh scent of my pain, felt a wincing, a drawing away. I said, It’s time for me to go. Released my grip on the other’s tendrils, feeling those old labels, lover, sibling, most of all, friend, start to slip away.
Turned and walked away, following the complex trails of my own footsteps back up the black sand beach, cold wind slipping between my extended eyestalks. When I reached the crest of the dunes, where the dead sand gave way to the complex, interlocking strands of the ground cover, I felt an irresistible urge to look back. I did so, with just one eye, limiting my commitment to only that, and saw the flat image of my old friend standing still, down on the beach, label unshed, watching me go away.
And urge to go back?
Yes.
But I went back to where the groundskimmers were parked anyway. Got aboard mine, started the little electric engine and drove slowly away, up the old coast road toward the industrial complex where the little ships were waiting.
It’d been so hard, had taken us so long, to restore them, get them back to full operating capacity, for they sat in that old underground storage facility for so many tens of millions of years, most of them much longer than that. Perhaps we wouldn’t have been able to do it, even at need, but the Rectifiers wanted them too, and there are so many more of Them than there are of Us.
Fear.
This is fear I feel.
I’m going to be alone soon.
Unfamiliar.
Full of dread.
But something must be done, and I am one of the very few willing to do it.
Click.
No fear at all now of being alone.
I lie huddled with a thousand friends, siblings, lovers, comrades, mated beings, huddled in a great, seething mass in some underground chamber, embedded in each other, lives held in common, huddled in the midst of a technology so old we have, somehow, incredibly, forgotten when it began.
No, it’s a new fear I feel.
And a very, very old one.
Old. Recalled from the most ancient memories of all.
Image, from some primitive, insensate machine, a bit of optical software whose job was merely to watch the sky, ignoring the stars, planets, asteroids, comets, industrial spacecraft, everything that belonged out there, well regulated and serene. Just watch the sky, see that nothing sneaks up on us from the cold interstellar deeps. No sense letting some bit of flotsam disrupt the orderly progression of our eons.
There!
High-energy objects moving against the anisotropic background of infinitely deep space.
Activity centered around that star, a nice, middle-aged main sequence G2, just over twenty light-years away.
Someone is abroad again, after all these years.
What do we do now, other than fear?
Click.
Friend, lover, sibling, mine, being without a name. Being with... yes. Identity. Identity with itself, not with myself, but... just the two of us now, facing one another, poised on a rounded, windswept crag under that same old sky of infinite gray and gold, sun a dull shield down by the horizon...
82 Eridani, whispered a friendly alien inclusion.
Ah, yes.
I reached out with my speaking hand, my listening hand, my loving hand, friendly hand, relating hand. reached out and touched my sibling-friend-lover.
Felt its thoughts flow into me. Felt its memories merge with mine. Felt matching memories pair up, merge, as though we were one.
One for now.
For only now.
Felt raw new memories search for mates, Felt them fail. Saw the memories stand up in mirror array. This one similar to that one. But different. Here. There. Yon...
Felt the raw new memories begin to duplicate.
Soon, there will be enough memories for both of us. Soon...
When we separated, the sun had gone down, the sky misty black, stars like bright bits of silver now, each little fleck surround by a nimbus of high cloud.
I looked at the being looking at me; knew a mirror mind looked back.
Ten thousand years. Times two. And more.
Our lineages... similar, a little different.
All those, old, older, oldest memories, waiting for me to sift through them, waiting for me to make them mine, as I’ve made so many other memories mine. I...
Click.
Gaetan, whispered a machine voice, unrecognized, unreal. This is, perhaps, not safe. We think...
First, do no harm.
Who said that?
Is that you?
Me.
Vague image of looking out through my own eyes at a warm Green Heaven night. Out past cool, not cold black tentacles, out across a truly darkling plain and...
Click.
Childhood.
Whose?
One of many.
After ten thousand years, I remember many childhoods, the childhood of every friend-lover-sibling I’ve ever had.
Fat little being, crawling over the rocks by the seashore, playing, playing, secure, knowing its mother was near.
Other children near, calling out in their high, piping, childish voices, voices wet with the dew of the egg. I-am-here! I-am-here!
Dark shadow.
I-am-here?
Child recoiling, recoiling at the adult looming out of the shadows, shadows of the forest by the sea. Mother? Mother, where are you? Mother! Mother!
Turning to run.
No use.
The adult’s black hand engulfs me.
Memories flow.
Its memories, into me, for I have no memories of my own.
When the hand lets go, only two adults stand by the seashore, listening to the familiar boil and hiss of the waves, surf on crushed stone.
Old adult satisfied.
New adult bitter.
I wasn’t ready yet.
Ah. Well, no one ever is, fiend, sibling, lover, mine...
Click.
Well. Well, yes, I do have a memory!
Red, red darkness, ovoidal darkness, slick, ovoidal darkness closing me in. Far away sounds. A sense of movement. Piping cries.
I’ve been here for... ever so long. Quite. Drowsing in my fluid home. The universe is... circumscribed. Nothing but me. Warm. Happy. Alone forever in the warm, red-lit universe.
Crawling sensation in my legs. Legs ‘til now curled motionless beneath me. An itchy urge to move my seven eyes. I rock back and forth in my red-lit darkness, warm, eternal darkness. Rasp my keel tooth against the cosmic event horizon, as I’ve done more and more lately.
Rock back and forth, harder and harder, listing to the little chip of sound each impact makes, my keel tooth against the edge of the world.
Why am I doing this?
I don’t know.
Rock. Chip. Rock. Chip.
Crack!
Light! Blinding light!
Eyes recoil, trying to hide, trying not to see... the things, horrible things, things beyond...
Oh. Ohhhh.
I am born!
Click.
Ten thousand years.
Birth.
No memory of death.
No memory of infinity, before, after...
But...
That other mist.
That far away time.
Time before the egg.
Where do those memories come from?
I...
Opened my eyes. Blinked. Blinked away a memory I knew was my own. Memory of myself lying not long ago on a wet bluff, in a forest in the borderland between Koperveldt and Koudloft, standing in the dank night beside Gretel Blondinkruis, wishing for her crotch, looking down at a ravine densely packed with womfrogs. Womfrogs looking back at me.
I wonder. Did they know they were about to die?
Of course they did.
The Kapellmeister said, “How do you feel, Gaetan?”
“I don’t know. I...” I took a deep breath as the tentacles fell away, releasing me back into the night air. “Are you really ten thousand years old?”
Silence. Then it said, “Yes. I suppose so.”
Fourteen: Standing on my bald stone hilltop
Standing on my bald stone hilltop, I watched Tau Ceti rise like an apparition over the empty plains of the Opveldt. Eastward, hanging in banded layers above the plains, was a pattern of low clouds, morning fog perhaps, created by some temperature/pressure differential, coating the landscape like haze. Above that, reaching beyond the horizon, I could see the pale gray peaks of Thisbÿs Bergketen, eighteen hundred kilometers away, not quite rimming the world, broken, there, by a patch of tawny morning sky.
That would be Aardlands Bergpas, then, the saddle, dipping down through the tropopause, that was the only way through those mountains available to... beings without technology.
Beyond it would be the Adrianis peninsula, with it vast, blinding gypsum deserts, dryer than anything the Earth had ever produced. Home of the Hinterlings, descended from the original colonists of Green Heaven, scientific base technical personal left behind when their organization had folded.
The library AI whispered, A yellow wolfen species inhabits the southeastern part of the peninsula, now on the verge of extinction. Planetary records indicate the northern coast of the peninsula, just beyond the equator, is being settled by the families of professional boombanger guides.
Boombangers. Something from the netvid, barely recalled. People who went out on the high seas of Green Heaven, the vast Panviridis Ocean of the northern hemisphere, taking parties of tourists out to kill boomers, as though they were participants in some old sea epic or another. Ahab. That sort of crap.
I remember hearing about boomers, sort of halfway between whales and giant squid in appearance, sometimes growing up to a hundred meters in length. Smart bastards. I had a brief recollection of seeing a hunt, of seeing a boomer pull the mast off a cleverly made sailing ship, try to use it as a weapon until the boombanger safety officer killed it with some kind of electric cannon.
Never fantasized about that.
Not quite personal enough.
Unless, like Ahab, you went down with the whale.
I turned away from the rising sun, stood looking down at my friend the Kapellmeister. “What now?”
It stood still for a moment, then said, “We have another day before I must return to the Arousians’ camp. Let’s just... go on.”
Not that long before I have to get back to Orikhalkos. Get back to Delakroë and van Rijn and... do what I agreed to do. “All right.”
o0o
Lunchtime, atop another low ridge, camper parked in the shadows. I sat on a nice warm rock I’d found, shadows from the small leaves of a spreading baarbij bush making a mottled pattern on my skin. I sat alone, looking out over the empty plain at nothing in particular.
Odd. The absence of large flying creatures on Green Heaven makes it look like there’s something terribly wrong out there. No vultures means there’s nothing dead. Nothing dead means there’s nothing alive. There are always vultures. Or is that just one more netvid fantasy?
After a while, I finished my sandwich, finished my lemon cookies, swigged the last of a beer-like beverage that was distinctly out of sync with the sweet cookie filling. No sign of the Kapellmeister, who I’d expected would turn up at any second with a living lunch relaxed in its grasp. Relaxed and waiting to die. Is there something out there that could take on and kill a Kapellmeister? I have no idea how tough they really are. What would I do then?
Something far out on the plain, many kilometers away, caught my eye. A tiny sparkle of light. After a long time, I heard a faint echo, hardly a sound at all.
The library said, Technogenic.
I got up and went back in the camper, disposing of my empty bottle and getting a pair of binoculars. Went back outside, stood on my rock, and looked.
Little things moving, reddish splotches against the dun and green grass of the Opveldt, blotches scattering in all directions. More flashes, followed a long time later by that faint echo of technogenic sound. I turned up the gain on the binoculars as far as it would go. Yes. Those are human hunters, moving in to inspect the now motionless red blotches. Dead wolfen.
I looked around, carefully panning the binoculars. A truck with cages on the back. Another truck with a flat bed. And... there. Huddled, waiting, motionless. A band of dollies.
Wolfen always have dollies with them.
The men took their time, gathering up the wolfen, throwing them in the back of the truck. Some of the wolfen weren’t dead, merely wounded, helpless, baring teeth, tiny with distance, trying to fight back. I watched the men beat them with what looked like baseball bats, tie them up, throw them on the truck with the dead ones.
Is that how they get to the killpits? Maybe so.
Somethin
g else was going on, too.
When the men finished with the wolfen, they went over to the huddled mass of waiting dollies. Why didn’t they run? Afraid they’d be killed? Hell, that’s their fate anyway. The wolfen kill them too. Kill them and eat them.
I watched the men pick dollies from the group and drag them aside. Watched the men take down their pants and lie on top of the dollies they’d selected.
OK, Gaetan du Cheyne. Would you like to be down there now, helping them out? Is that what you want? Maybe some part of me did. I don’t know anymore.
After a while, they were all done. Will they kill the dollies now? How do those men feel about what they’ve just done? What they did was gather the dollies, fucked and pristine alike, put them in the cages, get in the trucks, and drive away.
I took the binoculars away from my eyes and stood staring at the scene, now so far away it really didn’t exist anymore. After a while, there was a soft almost-noise behind me, and there was the Kapellmeister, holding some little green rabbit-like thing.
It said, “There’s very little game around here.”
o0o
Come sunset, I dropped the camper atop a low, grassy hill just west of the main course of the Somber River, here more than five kilometers wide, changed from a pleasant little stream to a vast, dark, placid thing, waters laden with silt from the Opveldt making their way northward to the endless sea.
After triggering the popup and getting my dinner started, I walked a little bit away, surroundings new yet nearly unchanged. The Opveldt gradually widens as you go north toward the equator, at the point where it meets the Mistibos, stretching approximately 8500 kilometers east to west, so there are areas in the middle where you can see neither mountain range.
Southward: Nothing but Opveldt as far as the eye can see, rolling brassy-gray-green plains, a dark, metallic landscape as featureless as the void of space. Somewhere out there... dollies, wolfen, womfrogs, Groenteboeren, omganger hunters and vreemdeling tourists... smartinaassen? I turned toward the east and watched the Kapellmeister picking its way down hill to the bank of the river.
I hardly remember Gretel Blondinkruis at all now. A fantasy abandoned.
Eastward, beyond the flat, oily, almost-black waters of the river, more Opveldt stretched to the horizon, above it a purplish-green sky in which a few bright stars showed up as pale white dots. No more mountains. Too far away at last. In the north...
Acts of Conscience Page 28