Acts of Conscience

by William Barton

  Whose obligation now, Gaetan du Cheyne?

  I stroked its soft fur, pretending it was just a big cat purring in my lap. But, you know, this desire within me...

  Do I really wish it wasn’t there? What would it be like to have that purity of purpose, to know I’ve joined battle in a great cause, that I’m about to fight the good fight people love to talk about? Is there any way I’ll ever know?

  Or will I spoil it now by taking this dollie, laying it down on the deck, spreading its legs and...

  The dollie looked up at me, reached up and touched my face softly, as if trying to reassure me that...

  Oh, hell.

  I never amounted to a pile of shit in my life, I know that. Maybe if I can just save these people... maybe then, when my time comes to lie down and die, I won’t feel quite so bad.

  Appendices

  What follows are some essays I did for myself as I prepared to write the 1990s version of Acts of Conscience. I’ll include some material relating to the 1970s version of the book in a planned “nonfiction” volume entitled Loci of the Starover Universe. In the early 1990s, when I was finally about to write this story, a lot of history we all, in late 2011, are aware of, had yet to happen. In the 1970s, even more was hanging beyond time’s horizon. Brezhnev was master of the Soviet Union. Jimmy Carter was in the White House, Ronald Reagan still a forgotten bad dream, and most people had never heard of Mikhail Gorbachev.

  These essays were the “working model” for Acts of Conscience, and I didn’t follow everything here exactly, the material mutating to service the requirements of the story as it unfolded. In addition, some of the material for the 1970s version of the book was also included in a Starover novella, This Dog/Rat World, that went unpublished at the time. I still have the manuscript, and will publish alongside Hunting On Kunderer and A Plague of All Cowards, in the year to come.

  The differences between that Starover Universe and this one are subtle and terminological, most of it due to the perspective of the narrator. The Kapellmeisters of Salieri called the principals of the Shock War StruldBugs and the Adversary Instrumentality, reflecting the content of their race memory into human terms. When humans actually met the surviving StruldBugs later on, they wound up calling them Karkovers. Human archeologists made up the name Ganeshans for the creators of the great ruins they were exploring.

  In the early 1990s, my lost, lamented Starover Universe was dead and buried, along with its books, and while I had created the Silvergirl Univserse, I hadn’t written any stories yet, just had some private essays, drawings, notes, ideas for books. I thought I might try to bring the Starover Universe back to life, and I had no idea I would sit down to write what would become the first Silvergirl story, When We Were Real, only a year or so after finishing up Acts of Conscience. Somehow, as I worked to modernize the Starover background, bits of the Silvergirl background got mixed in, and, having written The Transmigration of Souls, which mixes together bits from all my universes, less than a year earlier, I thought, “Well, why not?”

  This book doesn’t quite stand at the historical cusp where the the Starover and Silvergirl Universes went their separate ways, but close. If you know about Mr. Zed, you can probably figure out where he is in this story, albeit offstage...

  Oh, and before I forget: Gaetan was the name of Patient Zero, the first man known to have died from AIDS.

  The Human Historical Surround: 2000 - 2600

  The history of the 21st century is largely extrapolated from forces shaping the late 20th century. International disorder grew steadily, as various large states disintegrated. China followed in the wake of the Soviet Union, which itself further disintegrated, as the RSFSR fell apart into its constituents. This led to a proliferation of “small” wars, many of which saw the limited use of nuclear weapons. Between 2025 and 2075, an average of 5 small-warhead nuclear attacks per year took place around the world, rendering many large cities quasi-uninhabitable (for example, when a 5 KT device exploded in southern Manhattan, only a few large buildings were destroyed, but anyone who could leave New York for good then did so). Ultimately, the US and Canada disintegrated into regional associations.

  [Let’s note that when this essay was written, September 11, 2001 was still around seven years in the future, the economic collapse of 2008 seven years beyond that.]

  The collapse of the large superstates led inevitably to the rise of powerful, independent supranational organizations, principally from the ranks of multinational companies, thriving and at war with each other in the context of unfettered competition, and of various mafia/tong-like criminal organizations, drug cartels, terrorist groups, etc. However, into this scene also arose international political parties, beginning with the Greens from our own day, and including things like the Republican International Free-Trade Organization (RIFTO). [By the 27th century, the most powerful such group was the International Socialist Workers Party.]

  Space exploration and industrial exploitation continued in this milieu, largely because advancing technology made it cheaper and easier with the passage of time. In the 2020s and ‘30s, a small Mars colony was set up by the Society for Space Travel, a SIG funded by and as a front for the major aerospace companies, using one-way heavy-lift vehicles. By 2050, the population of the colony had reached 200, but its self-sufficiency was barely sustainable.

  [And somewhere out there, as I wrote those words, Elon Musk was going about this business of making a pile of money. Presumably SpaceX was an inkling somewhere at the back of his mind.]

  While the quest for commercial fusion power went on fruitlessly (power reactors were built, but were never cheap enough to go into profitable service), Mace Electrodynamics International (MEI) developed a usable antimatter reactor. In 2043, MEI set up a helium-3 extraction facility on the Moon, using very expensive fusion power to begin producing antimatter in commercial quantities, then used this antimatter to bootstrap a large-scale production facility. In 2055, MEI entered into a partnership with Westinghouse Aerospace to produce antimatter-powered spacecraft, which began opening the asteroids to commercial exploitation.

  [N.B.: Westinghouse, merely because I have always loved the name.]

  On the downside, antimatter-based weapons proliferated on earth. These included a long-range (10km) rifle (commonly known as a “radgun”) which could fire a “bullet” bearing a 0.1 KT warhead (equivalent to 100 tons of dynamite). This is sufficient to destroy a conventional city block, or to knock down a building larger than the World Trade Center.

  [Not prophetic, of course, since the first WTC attack was already in the past.]

  The real aim of MEI’s owner was the construction of a starship, which was begun with the erection of a volatiles plant on Callisto in 2061, actually a cover for the building of the ship, with secret Westinghouse cooperation. This craft, Dream, departed for Alpha Centauri in 2076, arriving in 2091. The ship was damaged during the flight and unable to return, the crew of 200 remaining on the habitable planet Alpha Centauri A4 (which ultimately came to be known as Kent, from the star’s Medieval name, Rigel Kent [Arabic for “Head of the Centaur”]).

  Meanwhile, research into the nature of the physical universe continued. In the early 22nd century, a group of European scientists led by Dominique Kerechenko, using the high energies made available by MEI reactors, laid the foundations for a new physics called Asynchronous Metadynamics (AsMet: detailed in another essay). Rather than publish their findings, the research group decided to pursue commercial exploitation of certain implications of AsMet physics, and set up a company called the Eighth Ray Scientific-Industrial Enterprise to do so.

  [Even more common practice now than it was then. Patents are public, trade secrets are... secret.]

  One of the most important things AsMet paved the way for was a form of gravity control. This made it possible to create and then reach through a species of “artificial event horizon,” making it possible to bleed energy essentially “out of nowhere,” from a device Eighth Ray marketed as a
“Field Well Converter.” The ability to convert matter into energy with 100% efficiency and almost infinitely small localization made it possible to build something analogous to science fiction’s long-cherished “gravity polarizer.”

  In 2130, the company set up its Chromo-Electric Starship Division to begin building and marketing spacecraft which could use anything for fuel, converting it with perfect efficiency directly to an inertial impulse. These spacecraft are not inertialess, but their ability to accelerate is limited mainly by the ability of the crew to withstand acceleration. Unmanned probes can accelerate to the limits of the ship’s structure to absorb the stress. The theoretical limit of the vehicle is the gross energy available from matter (e=mc2, of course).

  The availability of these craft meant an explosion of population into the Solar System, as well as expanding interstellar colonization. However, these “starships” (for it was a media-hype name) are not magic. While it doesn’t take a lot of energy to let an airliner-sized spacecraft whizz around the Solar System in a matter of days, the interstellar gulfs are huge and the requirements for true colonization are large. CESD starships wound up being self-contained entities the size of small towns which had to expend enormous energies to get close to the speed of light, and to deploy almost equally large energies deflecting the contents of the interstellar medium.

  The end result is that over the next couple of centuries, a dozen or so colonies were planted, with populations growing, in a few cases, into the hundreds of millions. Ultimately, of course, Eighth Ray became the dominant economic force in human affairs, able to bring its trading partners into a powerful alliance. By the 27th century, the Unified Planetary Intercorporate Trade Organization (UPITO) was a de-facto Solar System government, with Eighth Ray holding a controlling interest.

  Over time, the human population, expanding slowly but steadily, moved off Earth to planetary and deep-space habitats. The Earth became somewhat park-like, with its population reduced to only a few hundred million, mostly on the scattered estates of the wealthy, with their villages of servant employees. The largely empty ruins of great cities decorate this feral landscape, which conceals bands of “bushrangers.”

  In the late 26th century, two independent scientists, Roald Berens and Ntane Vataro, researching very high energy gravitational compression physics, discovered a means of providing an inertialess impulse to a physical object. Calculations appeared to indicate that the application of a sufficiently large impulse would project such an object faster than light. While continuing to investigate, Berens and Vataro incorporated as Berens-Vataro Enterprises Interplanetary (B-VEI) and quietly patented their prototype space drive with UPITO. [N.B., obviously the two eggheads didn’t know they shouldn’t patent anything, with consequences noted in the story.] They then acquired funding from Eighth Ray’s major competitors, pretending they’d simply found an alternative to CESD, and built an experimental FTL starship, the Torus X-1. In 2604, they flew this vehicle from Earth to Kent at an apparent velocity of 2000c (i.e., they made the trip in approximately 18 hours), picked up representatives of the Kentish government, and returned them to a plenary session of the UPITO Board of Trade Regents.

  The result was sensational, with accusations of fraud rampant. When the claims were verified and the “Kentish Embassy” accepted, all hell broke loose, as Eighth Ray had Berens and Vataro arrested and tried to have their patents nullified (after all, the “B-V Drive” is based on a highly modified chromo-electric gravity screen, so Eighth Ray can claim the drive is a subset of its own patents). However, all of Eighth Ray’s opponents and competitors acted in concert to prevent this from happening. Torus X-1 brought in embassies from all the colonies, and negotiations began. The colony planets, for their part, would, after all, like to maintain their independence, formerly guaranteed by distance.

  As a publicity stunt, Torus X-1 was flown to a star a couple of hundred light-years away [I decided on Regulus as I wrote the story, mainly because I like the name], but returned damaged, having encountered and been fired upon by an unknown starship of apparently similar design. Humans have long known they weren’t alone in the galaxy, for there are intelligent beings on several of the colony worlds, as well as the old and advanced civilization of the Kapellmeisters, natives of the planet humans call Salieri, circling 82 Eridani.

  This is the historical world of Gaetan du Cheyne.

  Notes on The Interstellar Economy:

  Solar System Currency:

  1 livre = 10 dismes

  1 disme = 10 centimes,

  1 centime = 10 milles.

  1 mille (2604-Solar) = $0.07 (1995-USA), thus 1 centime = $0.70; 1 disme = $7.00, 1 livre = $70.00. Abbreviations: livre = £, disme = $, centime = ¢, mille = ¥, placed before the number, thus £1 = $10 = ¢100 = ¥1000. Technically, the words are pronounced leev, deem, sonteem, and meeyuh. [But as I wrote the book, I pronouced the two main ones leever and dime in my head.]

  Employment: Gaetan’s job as a spatial machinery mechanic is a very secure and desirable one, paying about 1250 livres [1995-USA $87,500] a year. He lives about as well as a working man can in the early 27th century and has invested his money wisely, with a diversified stock portfolio. The population of the Solar System has long stabilized at around 200 billion. In this era, the Solar economy, with its steep separations of wealth, divides people into 5 distinctly separate classes:

  1. The wealthy (1% = 2 billion) are people who live off the earnings of their money. These include owner/executives of large corporations.

  2. Professionals (3% = 6 billion) include scientists, engineers, doctors, and the many classes of “information professionals” such as lawyers.

  3. Skilled workers and technicians (9% = 18 billion) such as Gaetan.

  4. The working poor (27% = 54 billion) who included semiskilled information workers such as computer programmers and subproficient mechanics.

  5. The client classes (60% = 120 billion) who are at best day laborers, servants, etc. Most of these people live in “storage habitats” (often referred to as “poorhouses”) and do nothing. Most emigration to Green Heaven is from low-end technicians and high-end working poor who manage to save up the price of passage (see below).

  As a high-end technician, Gaetan could afford passage to Green Heaven, and as a skilled technician could probably get sponsored (i.e., free) passage to Kent. However, he sees Kent as no more than a less interesting version of the Solar System (he would work there just as he does here) and Green Heaven, which has little heavy industry, as most likely a quick route to the poorhouse (since he doesn’t visualize himself as a rancher, he thinks of Green Heaven mostly in the context of his terrestrial vacations).

  Emigration to the other colonies is strictly controlled and no new colonies have been planted in almost 300 years. One of the things that keeps this social order stable is the hope of high-enders that they can rise to the next social class, while low-enders always fear slipping into the next one down. The economy is a stable almost-closed system, controlled from above by the Board of Trade Regents, a cross between a legislature and a labor-union for senior business executives (something like a cartel).

  Travel and Trade Economics: Once he gets his starship, Gaetan is charging 1500 livres [$105,000] for a shared cabin berth, compared to £1200 [$84,000] for a private cabin on a commercial STL interstellar liner. (Note this means, for people of Gaetan’s economic class, that the price of one-way interstellar passage equals approximately one year’s salary.)

  Assuming he can get 24 passengers to occupy the 6 cabins in which he’s had bunkbeds installed, he can gross £36,000 [$2,520,000] on this flight. Since the typical operating cost of this class starship comes to around £1750 [$122,500] per light-year flown [which includes the life-support costs for all aboard], it will cost Gaetan £26,250 to make the flight, plus a £3000 fee for the copilot required by Solar regulations, and a £1500 gating fee from Eratosthenes Cosmodrome on Luna, for a total overhead of £30,750, leaving him with a gross profit of £5,
250 [$367,500]. His net profit will, of course, be somewhat smaller, and he realizes he will not be able to support himself and his starship indefinitely by hauling passengers alone, as market forces will soon come into play. These will, in the end, be far more severe than he imagines. Once a fast-paced interstellar economy evolves, something like a civilization-wide depression will ensue.

  Colony Planets and

  Other Major Extrasolar Worlds:

  Kent: (4.35 light-years from Earth) Alpha Centauri A4. A habitable terrestrial world in early senescence. Although the star system and planet are considerably older than Earth, life evolved later and slower here. Land life consisted of things like stromatolites at the time of the arrival of human colonists. Sea life resembling primitive arthropods had developed and was making some attempt to colonize the land in tidal regions. Human colonization has led to the emergence of a terragenic ecology spreading from major settlement sites (the human population in 2604 exceeds 150 million). The terminal geochemical cycle has led to some interesting effects, including the rise of Doar Scarp (the East Pole), a 90,000 meter, heavily-glaciated plateau lying across the equator, and the reduction of ocean cover to about 40% of the surface. The Hinrad Desert of the western hemisphere now occupies about 20% of the surface area. In another 50 to 100 million years, the planet will be completely uninhabitable. Daytime temperatures in the deep desert approach the boiling point of water. Though the planet once had extensive glaciation, the polar caps persist today only because the axial tilt is less than one degree and the polar regions are mountainous highlands. Kent is slightly smaller and denser than Earth, with a somewhat higher surface gravity.

  Shayol: (10.67 light-years from Earth) Epsilon Eridani 3. This is a world whose physical type is halfway between Mars and Venus, situated far enough from Epsilon Eridani that it has Mars-level illumination. Geochemical processes have produced large, active shield volcanoes, giving rise to a two bar carbon dioxide and nitrogen atmosphere. Greenhouse effects have raised the temperature to tropical Earth levels. Though there are no oceans, about 20% of the planet’s surface is covered with shallow lakes and small seas. There is an active biology of things like sulfur-, iron- and nitrogen-fixing bacteria, but photosynthesis never evolved. The planet was colonized on the same principle that put a colony on every likely planet, with the thought that terraforming would be relatively simple. This never took place, and Shayol is a sort of abandoned corporate colony with a population of around 20 million, mostly in sealed cities at the tops of dormant shield volcanoes. You can go outside on this planet in something like scuba gear.