Something so God damned very odd about those little girls. I... Oh, Jesus. Why do I have an erection? I’m not... Little girls conga dancing toward us, dancing down the stairs.
Dancing now between the tables, men muttering and moving, soft moans here and there, my fat neighbor... for Christ’s sake, erect again, jerking off again. Somebody with pretty solid hormones, maybe on some kind of special vitamin regimen, or with his system adjusted to... Why the hell would anybody do that? It’s bad enough having to be just ordinarily horny, I... Note that hard-on, straining at your pants? Like something out of Alice, screaming eat me and... Someone moving through the deeper shadows along the wall, a tall black figure walking along, paralleling the girl’s dancing, moving its arms as if directing an orchestra. See. The little girls are watching that figure and... Fat man holding his swollen dick in one hand, waving a fat handful of Orikhalkan drakhmai in the other. Dark figure by the wall snapping the fingers of a raised hand. Click. Click. And pointing. One of the little girls broke away and began dancing over to the fat man, getting closer and closer and...
I don’t want to see this, but... right. Not looking away.
Little girl in cowgirl costume dancing up to the fat man. I could feel my hair sort of standing on end, sweat trickling under my shirt like thin, cold, crawling snakes. Little girl rubbing herself on him, tickling him with the strands of her costume.
Any minute now, she’ll start to take it off, I...
Instead, she just crawled up in his lap, straddled him, fat man squealing faintly, like a faraway pig in the clutches of the butcher, little girl straddling his lap, already moving in some ineffably coital rhythm.
Look at the men, watching her.
Look at yourself watching her.
Almost a cheat, for the rest of us. Why is she still wearing that costume? Why can’t we see? The little girl straddling the fat man’s lap, so obviously impaled on his dick, turned and briefly looked at me, her animal mask... Dark eyes, wide open, looking at me. Muzzle, wet black nose of a little dog over a dog’s cleft lip, mouth agape, panting, little teeth plainly visible.
Not a mask at all.
A living face.
What the Hell am I seeing here?
Long, empty silence in my head as I watched the fat man convulse, watched the... thing get off his lap, take his money, dab briefly at its crotch with his napkin, then dance away, rejoining the conga line of teddybear cowgirls. Over on the other side of the room, another man was holding up money, and that unidentifiable smell was like mist in the air.
The spacesuit’s voice whispered, We can find nothing in the Orikhalkan InfoNet on this.
I heard the fat man whisper, “Oh. Oh my God...”
Then a voice in my ear, black shadow leaning over me: “Mr. du Cheyne? If you’ll come with me please.”
o0o
My erection persisted, even after I left the room of the dancing... things, as I followed an unknown man down an unknown hall. When I came into the office where van Rijn and Delakroë were waiting, they saw it, saw the front of my pants poking out, and van Rijn laughed. “I guess you liked our little dollies, huh?”
Dollies. I felt scattered memories linking up, falling into place. I sat down, mopping my brow with a slightly less damp palm. “Jesus. I thought they were little girls at first.”
Delakroë looked pained; van Rijn gave a vidshow-class bellow of coarse amusement. “I guess that’s part of it,” he said.
Part of it. My God. Delakroë said, “I suppose you’ve guessed the rest of it then?”
I nodded slowly.
Van Rijn said, “We’ve got a cargo of fifty dollies that will be ready for, ah... shipment. Yes. Ready for shipment to Epimetheus in about four weeks. We normally ship them frozen as S.A. cargo, um, mixed in with... other commodities, accompanied by a factor who... rides as a passenger you see and...”
“And you’ll get a higher price if there’s an unexpected shipment?”
Delakroë: “No one will be expecting us. And the dollies will be in... much better shape if they’re not frozen.”
I can imagine. “How high?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“How much will you get for the... dollies?”
Silence. Then van Rijn, eyes narrow, said, “That’s none of your business, Mr. du Cheyne.”
I looked at him for a long moment. “Sure. How were you expecting me to handle and store fifty live... um. Animals?”
Van Rijn: “We’ll provide appropriate... handlers. And we’ve looked at your ship. We know you can land in pretty rugged territory.”
I nodded. They wouldn’t be expecting to transship their goodies at the cosmodrome.
Delakroë: “We’re offering you a hundred thousand livres to do the job.”
I felt a little spark of surprise at the figure, but... Well. There’s a shadow of the truth in their eyes. “Not enough.”
Silence. Then Delakroë folded his hands on the top of the desk, fingers neatly interlaced, and smiled. “Well, I’m sure we can work this out, Mr. du Cheyne. It’s... always a pleasure to do business with an honest man.”
Right. It only took a few minutes, and I’d run them up to 225,000 livres before van Rijn balked and wouldn’t budge. Wouldn’t budge though I could tell I hadn’t made much of a dent in their profit margin. As for me, I’d be pulling close to eight times what I’d gotten to haul passengers, and... “The license.”
Van Rijn grinned a grin I was already quite sick of, reached into the front of his tunic and pulled out a thick white envelope, tossing it on the desk between us. “There’s a hundred thousand livres in there, Mr. du Cheyne, along with a document for the authorities on Epimetheus. Consider it your down payment. When we get to our destination...”
“We?”
The smile broadened. “I’ve never been to another planet, Mr. du Cheyne. I’m looking forward to this trip.” When we stood, shaking hands, van Rijn looked down at the hump in the front of my pants, and laughed. “You ought to do something about that, Mr. du Cheyne. Why don’t you go on out and enjoy the rest of the show?”
On the way out of the building I went into the restroom, intending to jerk off and be rid of the damned thing, but the stalls were already full of gasping men, including one fellow furtively crouching over the sink.
Outside, the night air was cool and, as I walked through the darkness, I started to feel a little better. Glad, perhaps, that they hadn’t been little girls.
Nine: Another bright and sunshiny morning
Another bright and sunshiny morning, all the stacks and program counters of my soul reset by a good night’s sleep. Sometimes, I wonder if we’re truly the same person from one day to the next, or whether yesterday’s man isn’t gone, a new one formed from nothingness to live for today. Death and resurrection. Metempsychosis. Something like that.
Just now, I followed a rental agent whose name I kept forgetting across a macadam parking lot on the outskirts of Orikhalkos, fresh yellow stripes stark against newly sealed blacktop, Tau Ceti hanging like some great Medusan eye in the turquoise void, turning the landscape of distant mountains over low wooden buildings to impressionist stone.
Four weeks to kill. Four weeks before it’s time to start... my new job. Sharp prickle in the back of my head at the sound of that. It isn’t a job. Not really, but the sense of... something. Something... real that I’ve got to do...
The rental agent said, “I think this is exactly the sort of thing you’ll be wanting, Mr. du Cheyne.” He looked at me, eyes searching, looking for something... “Um. We call this a pop-up.”
A fairly substantial vehicle sitting before me, roughly nine meters stem to stern, by two meters abeam. Nice bubble canopy in the front, two bucket seats and a boxy control panel visible through clean Plexiglas, behind that a flat, vented compartment of some sort under two long, bronze-colored whip antennas, then a larger box, faceted with joint lines, the whole finished off in shiny, lemon-yellow enamel.
The rental agent was
saying, “...and there’s a gun rack behind the cockpit seats, pre-equipped with a standard zipgun, a sparkler, and a compression rifle. We’ll remove them, of course, if you want to substitute your own...”
“They’ll be fine.” I walked back along the machine, trailing my hands across the finish. Some kind of acrylic, soft enough to take fingerprints. “Powerplant under here?”
“Power... oh. You mean the motor and batteries. I suppose so, I...”
There was a legend printed in black near the line of large, flush-set metal screw securing the bonnet, and I suddenly realized I’d learned the Greek alphabet well enough to subvocalize the words. The translator whispered, No User Serviceable Components Inside. Warranty Void if Seal Is Tampered With. Is it grammatically incorrect in Romaic as well? The translator admitted it was.
The rental agent was saying, “...and if you hit the popup button over there on the driver’s left, the living compartment will expand to a full seventeen square meters, easily enough for two adults to camp out in comfort.” No doubt. I fished out my shiny new All Worlds credit card, and said, “Fine. I’ll take it.”
He inspected the thing, seeming to puzzle out the embossed words with interest. “You some kind of travel agent?”
“Something like that.”
“Must be interesting work.”
“I suppose so.”
I’d given the All Worlds staff a few difficult moments this morning when I’d showed up with a hundred thousand livres cash in the form of Compact Reserve Notes drawn on Delakroë’s bank, fine, untraceable money of a sort that hadn’t been used in the Solar System for hundreds of years. At first they told me they couldn’t suffix it to my letter of credit, that I’d have to convert it to commodities if I wanted to take it off planet with me when Ieft. Then, once they admitted it could be done, they wanted a ten percent commission for the privilege of doing it. And when I asked for them to arrange a debit service...
I finally talked them down to a five percent commission on the whole thing and left it at that, took my shiny new credit card and left the office staff to contemplate their cut of the dollies’ misfortune.
I’d loaded my gear into the pop-up, toolbox in the cargo bay under the living compartment, and set up my transponder unit on the passenger’s seat, plugging waveguides into console jacks the rental agent told me he hadn’t known were there. “I guess I thought the antennas were just for TV and telephone service...”
With the box in place, the bandwidth back to the ship was expanded hundreds of times, solving most of the problems I’d been having. So long as I stayed line-of-sight to the camper. I’d had an easy time getting the stuff I needed out of Random Walk, driving unchallenged across the landing field, parking in the shadows under her hull, the Orikhalkan media, apparently, having forgotten all about me.
Toolbox, with the toolbelt inside awakening, full of joy at my touch. You could tell the spacesuit wanted to come along, You’ll be safer if you’re inside me, Gaetan. I left it draped over the seat, still plugged into the ships subsystems, running my hand just once over it’s substance, whispering, “I need you here. Sorry.”
Felt its flush of pleasure at my use of the word need.
The pop-up had lifted off in a whirl of dust and turbine whine, making me think of the rental agent’s ignorance: “Well, no, it doesn’t need refueling. All electric and... what? No sir, I don’t know if the batteries ever need recharging. Sorry I can’t be more help, but...”
Now I was running smoothly over the plains, feeling the seat surge under me every time we went of a little rise, surge and then settle, bobbing slightly, digital meter on the control panel reading 75 and no more whenever the thumb-throttle was set higher than thirty percent, vehicle scraping along less than a meter above the ground no matter how I lifted on the stick.
After about an hour, I shut down and landed, out on the empty plains, got out and stood looking back at Orikhalkos, still visible like a collection of child’s blocks on the horizon, sunlight from Tau Ceti shining on white clouds hanging over the sea. Orikhalkos and all its grimy millions, still less than a hundred kilometers away.
I went back and got my toolbox, set it on the ground and opened the lid, plugged the toolbelt into the transponder box and stood back. All set?
The spacesuit whispered, Boot track liftoff. Autodiagnostics. Warming up... The belt’s main sensor head rose like a snake out of the box, and I could feel it make contact with me through the barrette. I directed it to the middle compartment of camper. The screwdriver head snaked out, bingbingbing, pannier catching screws as they fell, and the bonnet opened, lifted by internal springs that must have put considerable stress on the fasteners. Poor design.
I stepped forward and looked in. Electric turbine, probably derived from twenty-second century airliner engines I remembered studying in my history of technology class. A set of hefty accumulators rigged to a series of AC-cycler batteries, for Christ’s sake. Ingenious stone-age crap, all right, and...
Hmh. Whole mess wired up to the longer of the two whip antennas, only the shorter one going forward to the comdeck in the cockpit. Which means, I suppose, there’s a powersat up in the sky somewhere. Cellular broadcast towers here and there? I didn’t remember seeing any, but that didn’t mean they weren’t around.
All right, so why don’t they use this system for all their cars? No answer. I sighed, and said, “All right, let’s disconnect the God damned governors and get the fuck out of here.”
With the governor modules unplugged, the camper was another sort of vehicle entirely, electric turbine driving the big fan with enough power to lift the underside of the chassis twelve meters or so off the ground, and when I fed in the juice, the two axial flow syphonjets would accelerate her, slowly it was true, but continuously, until, a little above two hundred, the body’s laminar flow surfaces started detaching, making her wallow like a fat duck, and I had to throttle back.
Good enough. I settled back in my seat and powered southwest, toward the distant glow of the Koudloft, watching the metallic yellow grasses of the Koperveldt whip by below, easily clearing the occasional clump of shiny, blue-green trees, skirting clusters of low farmhouses when I saw them in time, just once, because I wasn’t paying attention, having to yank hard on the control yoke to avoid running into some kind of wooden windmill...
Please be careful, Gaetan, the spacesuit’s alarmed whisper.
I ran a quick diagnostic and found a second jack I could use to hook up my transponder box, back to the ship’s navigation system. No radar on this thing, of course, and if I wasn’t looking, no eyes, but there was a nice, fairly recent terrain and obstacles map available through the Orikhalkan InfoNet.
Now, so long as nobody’s put up anything new taller than twelve meters in the past few months...
At dusk, I slowed up, looking for a place to camp, finally settling down by a little pond of some kind, scraping the camper on the ground, landing in a little open grove of trees. Sat there with my thumb on the popup button... Sheesh. Looked over my shoulder, measuring the space among the trees. I can just see myself calling up the rental agent on the camper’s phone: “Well, sir, I’ve got your pop-up wedged among some trees. Well, no. I disconnected all the governors, so it just opened. I guess maybe all the little motors are burned out now and...”
I hit the button and watched the damned thing unfold like some kind of magic box, rising, spreading, little screen windows unfurling from their sockets, appliances visible inside... when it was finished I had a one-room cabin, four and an eighth meters in each direction, two and a half meters high, yellow light glowing cheerily inside as the sky grew dark.
I got out and stood on a rock beside the flat, quiet, clear waters of the little pond, watching Tau Ceti slide away, growing redder as it went, western sky limned with forest green, watching the sky grow dark, the familiar bright stars, stars I’d always loved, pop out one by one, in strict magnitude order. Listened to the faraway, nonhuman sounds of the veldt.
&nbs
p; All right, Gaetan du Cheyne. Here you are where you longed to be, the hunter, still out on the hill, with no intention of ever going home.
In the distance, something howled, more unearthly than anything I’d ever imagined before.
o0o
Sometime after sunset I finally got tired of counting the stars and naming their names, got down off my rock and went through the camper’s rear door into the living compartment.
Well. Nice, I guess. Bunkbeds over here, made up with sheets, blankets and pillows. A little galley over here, with a refrigerator/microwave stack that must uncouple and sink into the floor at foldup time. Sink. A flat rack of cabinets the rental agent had told me was stocked with standard canned goods—when I looked inside it was opaque brown jars labeled with Greek words and pictures of food. Souvláki? Swell. The jar of dolmadesh looked like pickled quadruple-amputee frogs.
Stood looking in through the open refrigerator door at racks of cooled and frozen crap. Plenty of veggies, not much meat, just a few packs of frozen hamburger. I guess, on a hunting trip, you’re supposed to kill and butcher your own meat. Rifles in the cockpit. Are these long skinny things racked under the low ceiling supposed to be finishing poles?
For that matter, are their fish in the little pond? How would I find out?
The library AI, routed to my head through the transponder in the cockpit, whispered, The pond is called Whiplick Spring, technically on the estate of one Borgen Takkor, registered landowner.
Am I trespassing?
Compact property rights do not apply outside the major cities. On the Koperveldt, Groenteboer free-range rules apply.
So Vrijheer Takkor won’t mind my being here.
The Groenteboeren are known for their gastvrijheid.
I snickered, thinking that greengrocers were known for their hospitality. I wish some greengrocer would come and stock the fridge better. I turned and went back outside and stood under the stars again. Look. The Milky Way is like a band of fog striped right across the middle of the sky. What’s it like out there?
Acts of Conscience Page 18
