Acts of Conscience by William Barton

Author:William Barton
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: starships, Love, Starover, aliens, sex, General, Science Fiction, Fiction, animal rights, vitue
ISBN: 9780446605113
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 1997-01-02T08:00:00+00:00

Twelve: Sunlight in my face, butter-yellow

Sunlight in my face; butter-yellow Cetian sunshine streaming in the camper’s little window, making a nice warm square on my pillow, bracketing my face. Sounds from outside. Voices. Not human voices, not speaking human words, but somehow, while I slept, they’d become voices all the same, the Arousians’ cricket-screeching welcome, as warming as the sunshine, making me feel like I was...

Oh, hell. I don’t know. Like I was back home, walking into the breakroom at Stardock just before change of shift, getting ready to... go to work. I thought briefly about them all, about Garstang, about Phil Hendrickx and Zell Benson, Millie Ai-chang and Rua Mater... I got up, took a shower. Got dressed. Went outside.

Under a brass-tinted blue sky, the Arousians were already well along in the task of breaking camp, tents taken down, folded, packed in ridiculously tiny containers, for the most part already stowed in the pickup truck’s side boxes. Other equipment... It looked like the Arousians would get it all in the boxes as well.

Off to one side, Limbcracker and her... well. Not fellows. Not brethren. Not comrades, though that comes closer. No word in English for a band of sisters? Sorority? Maybe, though the connotations I knew were centuries old and had to do with social clubs. Maybe the anthropologists... The library AI was unaccountably silent.

Beyond where the wolfen were sprawled, the dollies kneeled in a little group, facing toward the east. Kneeling, seeming to bend slightly forward every now and again, almost but not quite in unison. Whispering. Again, almost but not quite in unison.

The Kapellmeister was nearby, sitting atop its horse, halfway up its neck, in fact, tentacle-hand sprawled over the back of the horse’s head. The horse was imposingly still, its eyes, from where I stood, appearing to stare, more or less, in opposite directions.

“What’re you doing?” Nothing. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see one of the wolfen raise its head and look at me. I stood watching for another minute, waiting, then gave up, started gathering my trash, packing away my junk. I even managed to remember to take the garbage, bits of organic tissue inside and feed it down the disposal, even though, thrown on the ground, I’m sure it would have decayed nicely and...

The library whispered, Not the garum, Gaetan. In relation to the Cetian ecology, it’s comparable to a puddle of spilled gasoline.

The Kapellmeister suddenly slid down from its horse, landed with a soft plop-thud on the ground. The horse seemed to take a very deep breath, then another, like a man who can’t quite get enough oxygen in his lungs. The Kapellmeister reached out with one chela and poked the horse in the flank. It jumped slightly, snorted, made some sort of faint whickering sound, then turned, very purposefully, head held high, and trotted away, up the hill onto the trail by which we’d come. It paused once, struck a pose at the top of the hill, looking down on us all.

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