Acts of Conscience (13 page)

I stood looking over his shoulder at them, feeling odd. Not Captain, you see. Master and Owner. Twenty rich little earthlings, as alike as so many peas in a dinnerpack despite their colorful rich folks’ clothing... Not really rich. Not rich at all; merely well to do. Folks able to pay All Worlds a fee that came to something like twice my old annual salary apiece for an FTL ride out to one of the colony worlds, much,
much
better, you see, than some old vidnet tour.

A trip to Green Heaven, three months vacation, with me getting fifteen hundred livres a head to ferry them over, a deal I’d worked out with a glitter-eyed rep from the travel agency. Yes sir, Mr. du Cheyne. Yessiree! Rubbing his hands together...

So. That makes thirty-six thousand livres gross from the agency, which will make whatever it makes for itself. Now, it will cost me 26,250 livres, give or take a few, to operate
Random Walk
for the round trip to Tau Ceti. And, of course, there’s the 4500 livres for the privilege of having Leah, plus the gating fees at Luna and Green Heaven... Slim. And once the big liners start coming on line, my profit margins will go down to nothing and I’ll have to think of something else. Doing something wrong here, but I don’t know what.

Leah nudged me in the side, “Time and tide, boss...”

Boss. Right. But I am staring at the passengers, one young-looking woman in particular, very thin black-haired woman with small, yet somehow prominent breasts, woman seeming to look me right in the eye with an impossibly private grin.

I glanced at Leah, who seemed to roll her eyes. “If we don’t get moving,” she said, “I’ll have to reset the countdown clock and renegotiate our place in the ramping schedule.”

o0o

At the maximum Regency-legal transit velocity, it took us forty-nine hours plus to reach the calculated jump-point for Tau Ceti, boosting in the direction of Boötes, a spot in the outer reaches of the Kuiper disk, some seventeen light-hours from Sol in a patch of sky just opposite Cetus, making a long, high-velocity turn back toward the Sun, accelerating back in toward the jump-point.

Now I sat in the flight-engineer’s seat, heart running a little fast, alternately watching Leah fly my ship and monitoring my instruments. Concentration in her face, jaw set just so, as we accelerated at just under eight-hundred gees, feeling nothing, maybe the occasional odd kinesthetic tug, maybe not, compensators working almost perfectly, a testament to my newly polished skills as a drive mechanic.

Theory says we hit 0.866502 cee just as we cross the calculated jump-point, drop the ship’s event horizon structure, and go. Honest. It’s been done several hundred times already, you know that.

Even though we’d set the panels for “natural view,” the stars in the direction of flight were starting to look a little blue; twisting my head to look over my shoulder, I could imagine those other stars might be stained slightly red. Maybe not, I...

Leah said, “I didn’t think much of the way you acted during dinner last night.”

A quick glance at my instruments, before looking up at her. Three-minutes, forty seconds and counting, 0.6774 cee. “What’re you talking about?”

“Look, just cut the bullshit, Gae. These are your paying customers. Mine too, after a fashion. If they lodge a complaint with ISTA, it’ll be against me too.”

So. Sitting at the “captain’s table,” maybe getting a little bit farther in my cups than I’d intended, leering at some sweet thing or another, making some peculiarly pointed remark or another, pretty girl glancing at a frowning pretty boy and rolling her eyes...

I shrugged. Little tug inside my head there. Looking at numbers. Hmh. Let’s adjust compensator a5 -67ß. Numbers scrolling as the ship’s command circuits went in the direction I indicated. “I don’t think it did any harm, Leah, besides...”

Irritation. “For Christ’s sake...”

You could hear the word
asshole
in her voice, of course. You always can. They’ve perfected that methodology, they have, or evolution, in its infinite wisdom, has perfected it for them. “Look, I’m sorry Leah. But I haven’t gotten...”

“Whose fault is that?”

Blinking, looking down at my console. I’d intended to say she couldn’t blame me for wanting to
try
, and what the hell harm would it do to... right. 0.77948 cee.

Leah turned toward the intercom. “This is the captain speaking. Interstellar jump will be in ninety seconds.” Dry, flat, somehow friendly voice. This is your omnicompetent captain speaking... She said, “Safety regulations require that you take a seat in the observation lounge.” So you’ll be warm and comfy if we go
boom
? “This should be quite a show, ladies and gentlemen.”

Quite a show
. Aren’t you the least little bit excited, Leah superwoman Strachan? When you’ve seen one hyperdrive jump, you’ve seen them all, so why get excited about the first time?

When I glanced up, she was looking over at me, grinning. Thumbs up. “Ready? Here we go, Gae...”

Down below, my little gaggle of paying passengers would be getting in their seats, looking out at vaguely colored stars. We are just not going fast enough to create that fabled starbow effect, and I could imagine that journalist jerkoff, what was his name? Luigi Montoni, I think, grumbling about it, just the way he’d grumbled about our not having serving staff aboard
Random Walk
. Imagine, having to retrieve your own tray from the servitron and...

Time on target.

I looked at the Berens-Vataro Drive monitor and thought,
Now
.

The monitor blinked assent.

Some almighty cold ghost reached right up my asshole and grabbed me by the heart.

The universe outside flashed a pure, brilliant, sparkling turquoise, then the stars came back, stars against a flat black sky, seemingly unchanged.

Leah gasped, “Holy
shit
!”

My face was covered with a warm, smarmy sweat, an odd smell rising like fog from my armpits. A feeling that I’d somehow become... greasy all over. Swiftly drying now, sensations fading...

Leah said, “We’re climbing against a much weaker gravity well than the one at Sol.”

At...
Sol
. Right. That’s still Cetus I’m looking at. With one star missing. One minor star. And back over my shoulder, there would be Boötes, you see, with one extra...

Instruments. Yes. Safe and sound.
Random Walk
at the center of its expanding spherical shell, soft gamma pulse spreading in all directions at the speed of light. “Well.” Some historical words to say? No. “I guess we better start getting turned around then.” That bright spot back there, one of
two
extra stars in Boötes...

Leah glanced at the intercom and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Tau Ceti star system. You are now more than eleven light-years from home.”

We made a long, slow turn through the outer reaches of the Tau Ceti system, killing velocity as we went, spooling kinetic energy back into spacetime, dumping the equivalent waste heat down the field well converter’s event horizon, watching the starfield turn around us, watching that bright star turn to a sun as we dropped into the system, twisting around to a prograde ecliptic orbit.

Leah had gotten out of her pilot’s chair, was standing at the big manual circuit control panel at the rear of the cockpit, leaning on her arms, looking out at a bright Milky Way streaming behind us, beside us, all around the sky.

I was sitting on the back of my seat then, leaning in the oh-point-nine gee internal field we’d settled on as best for our earthborn passengers. A little less than Earth’s surface gravity, so they’d be feeling light and airy now, a little more than Green Heaven’s, so they’d feel lighter still when we arrived.

Sitting, watching Leah watch the stars, a million suns visible beyond the long, lean shape of her back, the compelling dark waves of her hair. What, I wonder, draws my eyes to her? The seductive, reproductive shape of her hips, understandable, long, dark hair, falling just so...

She said, “Where do you think we’ll wind up, Gae? What’s it like out...” A gesture at the fat part of the Milky Way, where it cut through Sagittarius, in the direction of the galactic core.
Out there
. Way out there.

Where’ll
we
wind up? You and I, dear Leah? No. That’s not what you mean, no matter how much I wish... I said, “Long trip.” 30,000 light years? “I guess it’d take
Random Walk
about seventy-five years to reach the Core Spindle.”

“That’d be a hell of a thing to see, wouldn’t it?” Voice so terribly wistful now, full of longing.

I walked up behind her, visualizing what we’d see, down by the Core. Big black hole, tiny, invisible, mantled by its glowing disk of infalling star stuff, great jets of energy to north and south, reaching for the intergalactic wasteland... Hell. Seventy-five years? That’d be... doable.

I put my hands on her shoulders, looking out over the top of her head at a star-cluttered universe. If you looked closely, you could see between the stars, look deep into black space and... here and there, little oblong smudges of light, other galaxies, so far away, what they used to call “island universes.”

Andromeda then, M-31, a hand’s breadth and more of remote, misty white light. Two-point-eight million light years? At four hundred times the speed of light, it’d take us seven thousand years to... My God!
Not
seven thousand years... no time at all! We could go, Leah, you and I, go see all the universe has to offer, jumping forward through time, and never come home again. We...

Leah turned in my arms, looking up at me, eyes soft, and said, “This isn’t what I want, Gae. Please...”

I tried to pull her closer, felt her hand against my chest, shoving me away. “Leah...”

She broke free, went over to her pilot’s chair and turned, facing me. “Look, Gae, I’m sorry you’re having a hard time, but...”

All sorts of vignettes, things I’ve said, things I’ve done. What harm would it do? I could ask. It’ll only take a few minutes, Hell, maybe you’ll enjoy it too! Even if you don’t, you can take a nice, hot shower afterward, and forget it ever... no. Hell. Come on, be a sport, Leah! Do a good deed.

What I said was, “You know, I’ve still got a lot of money left, Leah. I could...”

Saw her face harden right up, cold eyes looking into mine, asking some question I couldn’t quite fathom. Right. Fucking boob. You just asked if you could pay for the brief use of her cunt, didn’t you?

She said, “Um. No. Sorry.” Went down the cockpit hatch, down into passenger country.

I went back to look at the stars, alone now, suddenly quite numb. What the hell good does it do me to try? Why
don’t
I just stick with whores, who give an honest fuck for an honest livre? Is there something I want
other
than a periodic dose of pussy on my prick? Is there something I want that I don’t even fucking
know
about?

o0o

Green Heaven began in our sky as a blue spark, a rather dim star, swiftly brightening, that made me wonder why they’d called it Green Heaven. Much bluer than the Earth itself looks from deep space, with kind of an off-center shine to it.

Little voice inside, me as a child chattering away to myself: Shallow, deep blue ocean almost worldwide, covering more than eighty percent of the surface. Nice, even, water-mediated climate, no arctic icecap, antarctic limited to some high plateau country with winter snow and a few broad, permanent mountain glaciers. Land limited to that one antarctic continent, Panviridia, total area about the size of Eurasia, with Australia stuck on somewhere for good measure...

Sitting in my flight engineer’s seat, watching the numbers whirl and change, while Green Heaven the world bloomed against the starry sky, a brilliant blue leftward-facing crescent from our angle of attack, Leah silent, piloting, staring out the window.

Does it feel odd to her? Odd and new? Or has she done these things so many times... Well. I got to look in her ISTA service record when I hired her. She’s been here five times before. Five times in two hundred years.

We were decelerating heavily and I knew the ship’s drive would be a pale, pastel blue-white glow to anyone looking up into Green Heaven’s nighttime sky. Do starships come here often? A familiar sight perhaps. Radar and mass proximeter data told me there was quite a lot of crap in planetary orbit, the world a fat, respectable globe before us now. Lots of little shit, metsats and the like. Six or seven big hunks of metal. Freighters, most likely dealing with in-system mining operations, bringing home the steel, you see. But one or two of them would be interstellar haulers.

What happens to those ships and crews now? Sit and wait? Or do they take the slow road home, home or to wherever they’d been going next, sliding out of some other black sky to another world, another time, five, ten, twenty years on?

Leah said, “Ladies and gentlemen, this is the captain speaking. We are approaching Green Heaven landfall, please take your seats in the observation lounge...”

Somehow, the thing in our sky, almost too large now to see as a whole object, was more breathtaking than Earth had ever been. Brilliant blue ocean under a banded layering of sharp white clouds. Antarctic continent coming at us now, sliding over the horizon, two long ranges of tall, white-capped mountains, mountains so tall you could
see
them sticking up, reaching for the tropopause and the tenuous beginnings of outer space.

Islands surrounding little bays at the coast. Broad amber plains. The lesser one would be
Koperveldt
, the Plains of Brass; greater one
Opveldt
, land of the
Vrij Veldteboeren
folk. That snow colored landscape between them, that would be the
Koudloft
, frozen hill country surrounding the south pole. Long, silvery lightning bolt of The Somber River right there, flowing through the Opveldt, then on down through a dark, somehow electric green patch of landscape that must be the
Mistibos
forest...