Acts of Conscience (40 page)

I suddenly fell asleep.

Awoke into sunset.

Lay clasped in the reverberations of a dying dream.

Hot, tacky sweat on my face, inside my clothes. An uncomfortable sense of entrapment in my pants, tightness, gluey itch making me realize the dream had called forth an erection, which had gone about its business of spewing.

I grabbed at the dream then, looking for the afterecho, trying to recapture its substance. A woman. Young. Slim. Not quite faceless. Dark hair on her head rather more nebulous than the woolly black hair on her crotch. Pale eyes, maybe blue. Maybe some other color.

In the dream, I loved her, heart and soul, no name, no body other than those disconnected parts. No voice. Nothing but an essence that left its residue in my underwear. I sighed and let go. Just a dream.

The spacesuit whispered, It’s a dream you dream often, Gaetan.

Funny. I never looked at it that way before. They listen to my dreams. Somewhere in a memory matrix on
Random Walk
... I wonder if they could...

The library whispered, Yes.

I tried to imagine watching my dreams, exactly as I’d dreamed them, rather than softened by the quick veil of forgetfulness, and felt a horrid chill steal down my spine.

The library whispered, Dream recall was once considered a primary form of noninterventionist therapy. Modern psychiatric engineers, however, prefer normative modal streaming technology.

The quick fix, as they say. Quick memory of my father arguing for just that fix. Equally quick memory of my mother, furious with him, flatly stating that I would be “remedied” by the Grace of Kali Meitner, or by nothing at all.

My God, how I hated Remedial Grace!

To my father’s credit, when he found out about the whippings, he put an end to it, effectively ending his marriage, but I hated him anyway.

I got up then, feeling ravenous, got a bottle of orange juice out of the refrigerator, some kind of chewy pastry covered with tart black jelly. Outside, in the growing darkness, the Arousians had their cooking fires going again. The wolfen were shadows nearby and... there. The dollies stood together near the tall grass, a pale, compact, orderly mass.

Maybe if I had a dollie in here, I wouldn’t have those dreams.

Silly ass.

I got out of my foetid clothing and got into the shower.

o0o

I went outside, only to find the stars had filled the sky once again. There are moments, nighttime moments, when I wish I could look up and see something different, something other than Orion and the Pleiades, something other than the golden stream of the Milky Way and Magellan’s pale ghost clouds.

Maybe if I got on board
Random Walk
and went far enough...

The library whispered, You’d have to get in toward the core, or go outside the galaxy entirely for the sky’s aspect, as seen from the surface of a truly terrestrial world, to change.

Oh, sure, I could get away from these
particular
constellations, but it’d still be a sky full of stars, strewn in meaningless patterns my brain’s edge-recognition driver would transform to familiar shapes.

Look around. That tree over there, branches and leaves forming suggestive shadows against the sky. That’s a wizard, isn’t it? Gandalf the Gray come to save you? Or shall we run screaming from some creature of Chthulhu?

I found a rock to sit on, just where the fires’ crawling light seemed to end. Maybe no one will be aware of me here. The Arousians will go about their zoological business. The wolfen will do whatever it is... I felt my attention focusing on the dollies, standing together, turned just so, as if... watching me.

Pheromones on the wind?

Or does that stirring within come from me alone?

There was a rustling in the darkness and the Kapellmeister was at my side. Long silence, then it said, “How are you doing, Gaetan?”

I felt a sudden warmth, sitting out under the familiar stars, sitting with my friend, being asked... I said, “Well.” Realized abruptly that I had no idea how I was doing, could only look down helplessly at the Kapellmeister.

It said, “Everyone who, for whatever reason, wishes to... change things, must try the simplest path first.”

Is that what I was up to, talking to a rooted bureaucrat, being laughed off the stage by a bunch of grange-hall ranchers? And what did I want to change? The lot of the wolfen and dollies? It’s far too late to save the wolfen, who’ll march down the quick path to extinction now whether the City folk use them as entertainment or not. And the dollies? What difference does it make whether they’re fucked for sport by sick human males or merely fucked, killed and eaten by the wolfen?

I said, “I always walk away in the end.”

The Kapellmeister said, “Not always, Gaetan du Cheyne.”

No. Not always. “If those men hadn’t threatened me, I might not have saved your life, back in Orikhalkos.”

“But you did save me.”

So? Did I incur come obligation thereby? Did you?

The Kapellmeister said, “Ultimately, the change must come from within.”

Heady bullshit, when you’re sitting, depressed, under too-familiar stars. I said, “That’s what they say. But one person never matters, even if that person turns out to be Jesus, or Kali Meitner, or something.”

“You have a sense of history in your head, Gaetan du Cheyne. A fascinating human history of isolates interacting.”

I almost didn’t hear its words, muttering, “Not to mention Hitler and  Napoleon, Temujin and Attila, Wang Mang, Sargon the so-called Great...”

Across the way, the wolfen were whispering and grinning together, facing the dollies, dollies on their knees, whispering prayers like some flock of ancient Christians facing... By God, Brother Flavius. I think that beast has
my
name on it!

The Kapellmeister said, “Members of a eusocial species are never alone.”

One of the dollies got up, walked slowly, reluctantly, over to the wolfen. Stood before them, silent for a moment, then kneeled. A male, no doubt. Males, almost by definition, are the ones who die for the good of the group.

I said, “That dollie’s mighty alone, just now.”

“As you are alone. And I.” The foremost wolfen made a little guttural cough, leaned forward and neatly nipped off the dollie’s right arm. It made a high, frightened scream and fell bleeding in the dust, drowning out the other dollies’ whispered prayers.

Sudden memory of images from Salieri, of what a Kapellmeister’s life was like, life in a world of listening, talking hands. I said, “Why are
you
alone?”

Another wolfen stepped forward and took off the dollie’s left leg, chewing slowly as the image of a little cowgirl howled and struggled on the ground. What do the dollies say in their prayers?

The Kapellmeister said, “Because I... chose a solitary path.”

A third wolfen came forward and took the left arm, leaving the dollie to circle crabwise on the ground, pushing with its remaining leg, gasping, sobbing, no longer able to scream.

“Why? Why are you here?”

A fourth wolfen came and took the leg, drawing one last shriek from the dollie as its teeth sheared through the structure of its hip. The bite was a little high, carrying away part of the pelvic girdle, and the dollie’s colon, if that’s what they have, bulged out through the hole, dragging in the dirt.

The Kapellmeister said, “Though it should not have, the arrival of human beings in the Salieran system came as a bit of a shock. After four hundred million years, we thought perhaps no star-faring civilization would ever arise again in this galaxy.”

A fifth wolfen took its share now, biting off the rest of the pelvis, internal organs streaming out, quickly licked up, while the dying dollie made its last horrible little mewling noises, over which we could hear the soft whisper of the other dollies, chanting in unison.

The Kapellmeister said, “Some greeted the appearance of you humans with pleasure, for we long missed the heady days of old. Others were afraid, imagining that what had happened before not only could, but
would
happen again. It caused the first... uproar we’d had, amongst ourselves, since the time of deep memory.”

A sixth wolfen came and ate the dollie’s chest, leaving only the head behind, a silent round thing, covered in shadows, resting in a small pool of black blood.

I said, “What does all this have to do with your being... alone?”

A seventh wolfen snapped up the head,
crunch
. The instant it vanished the dollies’ prayers ceased. In the silence that followed, the crackling of the Arousians’ cooking fires seemed awfully loud.

The Kapellmeister said, “As you know, by the time the first human fleet decelerated into our star system, we’d had time to find our old fleet of warships, dust them off, and send a few out to greet you.”

“The ships were four hundred million years old? And still in working order?”

“More or less.”

“Why warships?”

“With your coming, two... call them political parties, formed. The larger of the two factions, currently in the ascendant, wishes to, let things go for now, watch and listen, intervene where possible, behind the scenes, risking nothing. Their ascendancy is jeopardized because all attempts to prevent humanity from acquiring faster-than-light travel have failed. Bribing of researchers and corporate officials. The introduction of incorrect scientific data. All useless. Berens and Vataro escaped our notice and now you have it.”

“Why would you want to keep us from FTL travel?”

“Without it, you can only go so far. Without it, in time your civilization would have turned on itself and, most likely, been destroyed, eventually reviving the
status quo ante
.”

“Jesus.”

The Kapellmeister said, “The smaller faction, now rapidly gaining adherents, believes the danger to be acute. It wishes to launch a quick strike against your worlds, using the safest of the old weapons. We estimate a fleet of no more than two dozen scoutcraft could sterilize the Earth and all its colonies.”

Holy shit. “We do have weapons of our own.”

The Kapellmeister said, “Gaetan du Cheyne, you have no idea what energies were deployed during the Shock War. If the fleet were launched tonight, by sunrise tomorrow you would be the only terrestrial organism to survive. You and your commensal bacteria.”

“Me?”

“You are the only human being who has one of us for a friend.”

o0o

I was standing by the tall grass, not far from the dollies’ baarbij bush, pissing when they came. Holding my dick and feeling the faint vibration of the urine’s passage transmitted through a spongy wall of tissue, incredibly, thinking not about what the Kapellmeister had just said, but about the dollies nearby, dollies huddled for night.

You want them now, don’t you Gaetan? You’d like to grab a dollie or two, hustle them away into the darkness, lay them out on the warm, soft grass and fuck the living shit out of them, wouldn’t you Gaetan? No idea why I’d want to hustle them away from the light. Nobody here who could really judge me. Kapellmeister? Wolfen? Arousians? Not a one of them even remotely human. If I don’t care how the dollies feel about being raped by an alien monster, why should I care about how some other alien monsters feel about it?

No one cares how whores feel about being fucked for money, do they? Why should they? Whores are being paid, just like anyone who does a job.

Vast shadow reaching toward me from the fire. A stirring from the camp. Dollies not so far from, reeking of wonderful, odorless pheromones, rising up, eyes aglitter in the firelight, turned toward the shadow.

Dollies drawing closer to one another, as though afraid.

One of the dollies abruptly turned, plucked a dark leaf from the baarbij bush, held it to its breast, murmuring softly. Another one did likewise, then another and another.

I put my dick away and started walking back toward the fire, peering at the shapes that made the shadows. Wolfen? Black shapes in silhouette very much like wolfen, but...

The Kapellmeister’s ersatz voice, strangely hushed, as though trying to whisper, “Gaetan. Please be still.” The Kapellmeister, I saw, was crouching beside my warm rock, flattened out to the ground, legs folded away, arms retracted, wandering eyes settled down onto its back.

I stood still, not knowing what to do. Back by the fire, the Arousians were standing still as well, but they’d had their cameras set up, ready and waiting apparently. As I watched, one of them slowly reached out and touched a control, data feed, presumably, beginning to roll.

What the hell
is
going on?

The library said, The Orikhalkan data net contains precious little about wolfen husbandry, but there is some material. These wolfen, as you see, are larger than the others. One of them much larger.

That much was obvious. One very big white wolfen, twice the size of the one’s I’d gotten used to, a maned, toadlike carnivore the size of a small elephant, casting the giant shadow that’d first caught my attention, lurking in the background, completely motionless.

How the hell had that thing crept up on us without making nay noise?

The library whispered, The largest one will be the male. The medium-sized wolfen will be the fertile females. The smallest sort are, of course, the neuter females who make up the bulk of wolfen society.

Like so many God-damned bees?

Library: Not quite. Apparently, the wolfen, like terragenic mammals, have breeding limitations, especially since the fertile females are required to retain lifelong mobility. Thus, the standard “family” setup appears to be one male, who services the fructival needs of several females. Each fertile female lays a clutch of eggs every seven years. Each clutch gives rise to a “pride” of neuter female “sisters,” who live together for the rest of their lives.

Now, the neuter wolfen were creeping forward, bellies close to the ground, making some sort of tiny
glink
-like barks, almost whimpers. They seemed to focus on only one female, sliding under her muzzle, sort of licking upward like so many self-effacing dogs.