Acts of Conscience

by William Barton

  “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 forwar
d, 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.

  The ship’s navigation system whispered, Satellite imagery shows you are coming up on a very large womfrog herd. There is... activity.

  I looked. There, a dark mass similar to the one I’d seen earlier, perhaps a bit larger. Herd of dark shapes, moving slowly and... there. Something else. A glint, as of metal.

  I took manual control of the camper, holding the wheel, depressing it forward so that we nosed down toward the rolling plains, sliding the throttle back, reducing our speed until I was cruising along just above the grass, separated from the womfrog herd by a low ridge covered with scruffy, stunted-looking silver-green trees.

  The Kapellmeister said. “It would appear we’re opposite the technogenic activity evidenced in the tracking satellite imagery.”

  I wondered what the Compact Cities wanted with detailed realtime video of what the wildlife and Groenteboeren were up to the middle of this immense, empty plain. Slowed up, nosed the camper into the trees, parking it just under the crest of the ridge, and shut down the engine.

  We got out and walked up the hill until we got to a point where we could look out over the veldt beyond, rolling, brassy landscape stretching away to the horizon, pale blue gray mountains rising beyond that, reaching for the sky. Rolling, brassy landscape covered with a moving, irregular sheet of womfrogs, womfrogs stretching away to...

  “Son of a bitch,” I whispered.

  There it is then, Gaetan du Cheyne. This is the landscape of your dreams. This is where you came, mighty white hunter, with your gangs of tourist ladies, to shoot the great womfrogs, shoot them dead, help the pretty ladies shoot them dead, ladies squealing with delight, enclosed in the circle of your strong arms, heads resting back against your chest or shoulder, so you could help them aim that gun, holding them close, feeling the tight clench of their rounded buttocks against the front of your abdomen, knowing, when night fell, they would come to your tent and...

  There. In the near distance, between my vantage point and the edge of the womfrog herd, something moving. Two somethings. Trucks, Biggish trucks, five axles visible on each, tractors pulling things that looked like flat cargo beds with low retaining walls. The trucks’ cargo... Human beings. About fifty in each truck, I’d guess. Each one holding a long, thin rifle, all of them, just now, aimed at the sky.

  The Kapellmeister said, “It would appear we’ve found a party of... sportsmen.”

  As I watched, the near edge of the womfrog herd started to flow a little faster, trucks speeding up to keep pace. Trying to run away? Do they know what’s coming? They must. Nearest womfrogs obviously trying to press back into the herd, distance themselves from the men in the trucks, but they were blocked by the bodies of their fellows.

  Faint, distant whistle being blown, the signal: Now.

  Skinny blacks sticks of the rifles being leveled, people jockeying for position by the cargo bed’s rail. The whistle again, tweet-tweet. And, faraway, I heard the rapid zizpzipzipzip of the first shots, whispered violences overlapping.

  Pockpockpockpock.

  Explosive rounds flashing.

  Womfrog hides popping open, spilling blood, tossing bits of internal organ, flying shrapnel of bone tumbling in the air.

  I thought I heard a thin, high scream, the scream of a scalded child. Watched the front row of giant womfrogs tumble as they fell. You could see their forelegs breaking as they went down, breaking from the inertial force of the fall.

  Zipzipzipzipzip.

  Inserting itself into the now steady pockpockpock of exploding bullets, another row, deeper in the heard, mowed down, womfrogs screaming, shouting, calling to each other, recoiling, nowhere to flee, in each others’ way. Ahead and behind you could see womfrogs break from the herd, turning toward the ridge. Can they get up here, finding safety among the trees, flee out on the plains beyond? I thought about the womfrogs we’d hunted in the forest, back on the Koperveldt side of the Koudloft, and felt a little uneasy. Time, perhaps, to creep back to the safety of the camper, the safety of the sky, just drive away and...

  Lone womfrogs running, running, zip... pock! Falling as hunters tracked them with rifles. Tracked them and brought them down.

  “Sportsmen,” I muttered. “Great.”

  For some reason, I kept expecting them to stop. Every single person on both of those trucks has killed at least two womfrogs now. Enough meat to feed a large family for a whole year. Enough hide to carpet all the rooms in a fair-sized lodge, or make warm winter coats for an entire town the size of Tegenzinstad.

  Zippockzippockzippock! Womfrogs tumbling and rolling, joining a long, long line of motionless dead.

  What the hell, then, a commercial hunt?

  The library AI whispered, As near as can be determined, there is no commercial market for womfrog products on Green Heaven. The Compact Cities raise terragenic livestock for their own consumption, and most Groenteboer settlements can easily provide for their own limited needs.

  So I waited.

  Listened to the guns. Watched the womfrogs die, watched the pile of corpses grow larger and larger, blood staining the bright metallic grass, making it grow dull, herd beginning to thin from the combined effects of the killing, the fact that the farther parts had figured out what was going on, were beginning to turn away.

  Watched, while the sun rose high in the sky. Watched as it sank toward the west.

  At some point, I realized the Kapellmeister had wandered off and come back with a living snack, snipping off its head, sucking away contentedly at the sweet blood. None for me, thank you. I’ll just... watch.

  In the end, though I would’ve liked to have camped up on the ridge, where we somehow seemed closer to the stars, up where the fresh breezes blow, we had to move on, for the Groenteboeren stayed down below, even after the surviving womfrogs had escaped, doing... whatever the hell it was they needed to do with all those huge dead bodies.

  By nightfall, even from our vantage point, it was starting to smell, wind out of the west carrying a bizarre taint, the cloying scent of spoiled fruit. I backed the camper out of the trees and flew on, following
the ridge until it petered out, a hundred kilometers or so to the north, moving off above a level plain, curiously empty by the mottled light of the moving moons. A wasteland, I found myself thinking. The landscape for which that word was made.

  Eventually, we came upon a small, isolated highland of low, rolling, denuded hills, rising like soap bubbles of stone from the surrounding flat land. I landed the camper atop the highest hill, and we got out to find we’d gotten so far north, two thirds of the way across the Opveldt to the edge of the Mistibos Forest, that the night air was balmy, verging on hot.

  Beautiful night, stars rising and falling in orderly progression, antarctic pole stars low in the south, not so many of them now, wheeling in a great circuit round half the sky, as before. This is the sort of night you dreamed about, when you dreamed about the soft women, coming to you out of a jasmine night. Where did that dream come from? Genetically determined hormones? Or merely the netvid?

  Where did the netvid dramatists get it, then? Their own hormones, or merely some earlier tradition? Is there any point at which it was... real? No answers, of course. Only a desire, renewed, paved over and renewed again: somewhere, somehow, somewhen, that world will return to me, return to me and be real.

  What’s the difference, I wonder, between fucking those dream women, back in that dream time, and fucking a helpless dollie, here and now? Was it only their cunts I wanted, as I’ve supposed for so long? Or was it their... imagined desire for me that... I had a crisp memory of the dollie’s eyes looking up at me, shining in the starlight as I fucked it. Hell, I don’t even know if it was a male or female, much less...

  To my irritation, I found I had an erection now, sitting here all alone, looking out over the empty plains, gray by moonlight, from my hard stone perch, all alone, but for the bizarre shadow of the Kapellmeister cast on the ledge by my side, robot legs and fat, formless body, eyes on stalks floating above its back.

  It said, “There is a special nobility in the accidental beauty of nature.”

  I turned and looked at it, wondering what the hell had prompted the statement. Nothing to read, I think, in the Kapellmeister’s form, the empty colored shapes of its eyes, the...