Acts of Conscience (35 page)

Silence. Then, “Every mind makes a contribution to the unending whole. My meals live on, in my body, in my soul.”

How poetic. How fucking poetic.

The Kapellmeister said, “I have never established neural rapport with a human being before. I imagine few of my kind have.”

I tried to picture those black tentacles draped over my head, found I couldn’t imagine that without also imagining those pinking-shear chelae around my neck. Though it was pointless, the image made me shiver. I said, “I’d like you to tell me about the... Shock War, was it? Adversary Instrumentality? Something about golden cockroaches called StruldBugs?”

Silence.

I said, “You keep talking about how you’ve decided to trust me.”

“Perhaps a willingness to... experience rapport would help us get past this barrier.”

I shivered again, wondering what the hell I was getting myself into. But... OK. Maybe this thing saved your life? Sure. And you saved
its
life. Remember? You shot someone that night. Maybe the poor bastard is still lying in a hospital somewhere, paralyzed until the medicomps figure out about advanced biotaxic neurotoxins, or you, you silly bastard, decide to check up on things and maybe
tell
them.

The Kapellmeister said, “Gaetan...”

Dithering. Fucking dithering. I said, “Well. Maybe.”

Long, long silence, punctuated by the rustling of leaves. Finally, the pod on the Kapellmeister’s back made a very human-sounding sigh. It said, “Four hundred million years ago, there was a war.”

Silence.

After a while, I said, “That’s a long damned time ago. What kind of war?”

Silence. Then, “A very bad war. The advanced civilization that occupied the Local Group of galaxies was destroyed. Approximately eighteen million sentient, star-faring species were rendered extinct. Virtually every conscience individual within functional range of the... weapons systems involved died. We do not know what that range was.”

I thought, suddenly, about Fermi’s Paradox, then said, “I guess you have physical evidence for all this, huh? Things like the ruins on Snow?” Four hundred million years ago, there
weren’t
any conscious beings on Earth. Unless you think fish and bugs are conscious. Hell. Maybe they are.

The Kapellmeister said, “Yes. However, my own species existed four hundred million years ago. Through a fluke, we escaped destruction and... we remember.”

Remember
. “You mean you have an intact history stretching back more than four hundred million years?”

“We... remember.”

“What the hell are you telling me? You
personally
remember?”

“Gaetan. The rapport?”

Um. Neural rapport, that bit about meals living on... “Holy shit.”

“Gaetan, I need the rapport in order to feel you will trust me as I have decided to trust you. The nature and consequences of the decisions I have made...
I alone have made
... are very frightening to me.” I sat still for a long moment. Christ, is this the way a woman feels when a man’s got his hand on the waistband of her underpants, tugging gently and murmuring,
Trust me
? I said, “Shit. Um. All right.”

My heart suddenly started to pound, and I heard the library AI whisper, Gaetan, are you certain it’s wise for you...

The spacesuit, in override mode: He must make this decision.
We
can have no part in...

Translator AI: It could be very dangerous. If the software in the pod mechanism can work through the Kapellmeister’s nervous system, it could damage the programming in his artificial immune and autoregenesis systems.

The Kapellmeister said, “It would be easier if you’d sit on the ground.”

I got out of the chair and walked over to the river bank, sat down on the sod with my feet dangling over the water. “That OK?”

“Fine.” It suddenly draped its third hand over my head from behind.

“Jesus. For some reason, I thought your... tentacles would feel cold.”

It said, “We have a form of poikilothermal regulation, as opposed to your own homeostasis, but a high-energy metabolism is the norm for sentients.”

“Oh.”

“Please try to relax.”

“
Relax
? I...”

Click
.

Image in my head like... some kind of painting. What am I thinking? An Impressionist painting, made up of all those little bits and swipes? Remember thinking about that, once, a long time ago. Did they know about digital art, about the technology to come? Monet? When the hell was Monet alive? Just woodcut, or were they starting to do process color? I...

Me. Me, sitting in the chair. Like... what? Like a speckle interferometry image of a star, beginning to coalesce from all those little bits of data. Me, sitting still. Sitting still and waiting for...

Soft, faraway whisper. Hard to focus on. Hard to identify...

Library AI? Yes, whispering, Claude Monet lived from 1840 to 1926...

Thanks. I... realized I was looking at myself. Myself, seen through seven floating eyes, multiple overlapping images coalescing and...

AI, very far away now, whispering, It is probable that the seven globular structures are compound eyes with some kind of omnidirectional vision system. In fact...

Click
.

No facts at all, I...

Naked. Wet. Up against a slimy tile wall. Clouds of steam.

Scott Jurgen, also naked, reddish-brown tentacle of a circumsized dick swinging between his legs, catching my eye, dark blood trickling from one nostril, like a dark fuse that...

He said, “OK, hold the son of a bitch.”

Four other boys present. Grinning. Grinning.

“Jimmy, you keep a look out, see that Mr. Tinsley doesn’t walk in on us.”

“OK, Scott.” One shadow shape moving away through the clammy shower room fog.

I can no longer remember the pain.

Scott hitting me in the gut a few times, punching the breath out of me. Smacking me in the face, laughing at the thump my head made as it hit the wall. Me, falling to the floor, face down, struggling in slow motion to get up, rear end rising as I got up on my hands and knees.

Somebody tittering, way up there in the clouds.

Then Scott Jurgen’s voice: “Hold him down. I thought of something else.”

Silence. Then one of the other boys, sounding a little afraid, “Oh,
Kali
, Scott!”

“Hold him the fuck down, Georgie.”

“I’m getting out of here!”

“Run and you’re next, Georgie.”

I felt their hands on me then, felt myself... receding. Someplace safe and dark, far away from the outside world. Someplace where I could... begin making a... plan.

But hiding didn’t help.

What do they call it?

Dissociation
.

Not for me.

Not for...

Click
.

Standing under an impossibly remote dark green sky, pale at zenith, tending toward black down by the horizon, subtle gradations of color adding to the sky’s sense of depth.

Sky made from a million conflicting bits, made from seven distinct, moving viewpoints. My eyes. Vision... succinct. Stable. Integrated. Mind over body, over mind, over self, over memory, over...

Standing on stalky legs under that deep green sky, chelae clutched to my chest, neural arm splayed across keel. Walking. Walking, down the path, tall, blue green vegetation, a long vista down the hill to a dark brown river, silver-gray crags beyond, frosted with blue-tinted ice. Clouds the color of old lead drifting beyond...

Self: Is
this
worth what you’ve done? Separation from the Stream?

What if you die?

What if your line is lost?

The only real death, you see.

I never really understood that when I was in the fold.

Curious word,
I
. Seemed like it had hardly any use... before.

Stars visible through the deep green sky, not enough light coming from the sun to mask them out. Not enough contrast.

Sun hanging low over the horizon.

A far away voice, intruding voice:
Sigma Draconis

Enough. Not enough. More.

So hard to decide, when you’re all alone.

Down by the dark brown river, groups of tall, thin Arousians were harvesting skinny wisps of silver grass. Near them, watching, impassive, the stocky biped, biped wrapped up in its crisp, shiny white bioisolation garment.

Horror on Homeworld when we noted their activities, while we... awaited them. It’s starting again. What should we do?

Process of group decision beginning. Options? Many. Decision making process long. And... we few, dissenting.

Hard to be alone.

So terribly hard.
Click
.

I remember, plain as day, working by myself in the shop class that day. Word’s gotten around. You know it has. Nobody says anything, but they
know
. Furtive grins. Edgewise looks. Pretty girls smirking and rolling their eyes as they whispered.

And God-damned Scott, coming up to you in the lunchroom, throwing his arm around your shoulders, voice so very loud: “Hey, Gae, old buddy! How’s my little
pal
?”

Those other boys, the one’s who lurk in the shadows, watching you, silent, knowing.
One of us now
. So. Am I? Is that what happens next? I walk into the shadows, head down, and slink along the base of the wall for the rest of my days?

I looked up when Scott Jurgen started to scream.

Scott dancing beside the work pedestal of the tilting arbor laser, fire crawling up his arm, laser beam marked by shimmering purple haze as it tracked his shoulder, cutting, cutting... Scott danced away, but the beam followed him, sensors on the arborhead blinking malevolent red as they watched him.

Teacher shrieking, “Christ! Somebody cut the fucking power!”

Christ
? But Miz Bailey, we worship Kali Meitner here, isn’t that so?

The beam winked out just as Scott stumbled and fell, trailing a plume of greasy, stinking black smoke.

People gathered round, teacher shouting, “My God, how could this have happened? The
safeties
, I mean...”

I heard Georgie whisper, “Fuck, it looked like the God damned thing was
after
him.”

I knelt beside Scott then, gently touching the bit of white bone that protruded from his charred stump, maybe ten centimeters of cracked, oozing black meat all that was left of his arm.

That got his attention. Then I said, “Gee, Scottie. I bet this really hurts.”

In eyes afire with blinding pain, I saw him understand.

Behind me, I heard Georgie whisper, “Oh,
fuck
.”

Yes, Georgie. And Scott? Well, Scott would get out of the hospital in a couple of weeks with his nice new arm, good as new. But he sure as hell wouldn’t forget.

Click
.

Jesus shit. Mouth dry, I croaked, “Did you get what you wanted?”

With evident satisfaction, the Kapellmeister said, “Yes.”

o0o

I awoke, out of a dream of seemingly infinite depth. Awoke, just as, it seemed, I’d awakened for the past, oh... I don’t know. Three, maybe four million days, a steady stream of awakening, one like another, like the one before that and, somehow, blending into a billion trillion
more
misty awakenings, stretching on back...

Little voice, one of my own: Well, no. A man of your age will have slept and awakened fourteen, maybe fifteen thousand times, at most.

But, it seems...

The dream emerged from a fog of fading memory, recalling itself just before it would have been lost forever. Not the entire dream, just a fragment. Me, small, insignificant, lying on dry grass in the darkness, vast alien looming over me, angular head wreathed in stars, gasping softly to itself as it thrust its reproductive tentacle repeatedly into my cloaca, felt the hot spill of its genetic matrix, jetting, jetting...

I dreamed I was the dollie being fucked by me? Christ.

I sat up, stretching, covered with tacky sweat, looking out the camper window at a scarlet dawn, Tau Ceti a misshapen orange ball low in the eastern sky, banded with a few lean black clouds. Down by the river, the Kapellmeister was standing on the bank, all seven eyes craning forward, wide apart, as though...

One of its chelae darted forward, went splash in the water, came back up with a long, thin brown thing, something that looked more or less like an eel, struggling, tail flipping this way and that... the Kapellmeister’s middle arm reached out and grabbed onto the head end. The fish was suddenly still, hanging... contentedly? Well. Hanging in the Kapellmeister’s grip until the other chela went
snip
.

I got out of bed and headed for the shower, struggling to remember my visions from the night before, not quite failing. Jesus. I haven’t thought about that shower room business for years. Didn’t think about it much after I finished up with those boys.

I remembered sitting in front of the principal, her steely eyes boring into mine. Trying to anyway. Remembered her saying: “Nobody can prove anything, Gaetan. There’s no evidence whatsoever that anyone trifled with the shop’s safety system. Or that the automatic door failure that broke Georgie Wessle’s back...”

I’d looked at her wide eyed, had stuttered out my alarm that anyone would
suspect
I was capable of...

She slammed her fist on the desk and scream: “I God damn
know
your type, you little piece of shit!”

Do you, Miz Baldacci?

After a while, the warm shower water unknotted the muscles at the base of my neck, on my shoulders, my upper back. After a while, I stopped replaying those lines, lines from ancient scenes. Still, what the hell if I’d been stupid? What if I’d wanted someone to
know
? No. It was enough for everyone to
imagine
it was me. The results were more than satisfactory.

o0o

We got in the camper cab and flew on, rising above the countryside, drifting to the west of the Somber river now, out over the wide Opveldt plains, steering clear of the little villages, passing over the occasional isolated farmhouse, where some Groenteboer or another was the lord of his lonely keep, passing over hill and forest, empty plain, the silvery sprawl of lesser rivers.