Acts of Conscience Read Free Page A

said, “I’m glad you’re coming along this time, Gaetan.” Blue eyes on me. Curious, perhaps. What does she remember about those few times we were together, way back when? Maybe those mysterious feelings that made her decide we weren’t right for one another?
    “Yeah. Sure. It’ll be fun.”
    She smiled, then looked down toward the other end of the table, where Rua Mater, small and dark, face shadowed by her long black hair, was sitting. No lunch. Just sitting there, eyes closed, readerclip stuck in her hair like a child’s barrette.
    o0o
    End of shift. Go on home. Home to my little hole-in-the-wall dorm room. Trudge up the half-gee corridor with a faceless horde of nameless gray men and women, close the door on a murmur of tired voices. Sprawl in my favorite gray recliner, sit back. Stare.
    Plenty of stuff in the refrigerator. I could winkle a steak, maybe. Too much trouble? Go down to the plaza level then, get some gourmet ethnic crap... definitely too much trouble. I glanced at the vidnet link monitor over the door, felt it reach out for my thoughts. Not that the apartment appliances could make up my mind for me... at least the monitor might guess.
    I heard the bartender go through its setting up routines. I pictured myself swilling a black Russian, then a second, maybe a third, heard the ice tinkle and the nozzles hiss. Shit. Now I’ll have to get up and reach for the glass. Whatever idiot laid out this apartment... maybe I should just move all my furniture over to the breakfast nook.
    By the time I got back to my seat the infolink was up, colors swirling over half the room... falling away, as if the walls were turning to vapor... nodepopping through my standard-interest filter... thirty channels of precanned news, each with its own political slant, a couple of dozen relatively specialized “educational” channels, fluff, mostly, but... I stopped it on Planets and Animals and You .
    Long shot across some craggy gray and brown badlands, tumbled rocks and towering cliffs shot through with streaks of dark vermilion and bright jade green. Sullen red-orange sky, through which peered a fat brown sun, cloudscape around it brightly backlit. Flat, murky, gray-brown sea reaching out toward the far horizon. Near the edge of the world, between cliffscape and sea, a dun-colored forest, narrow, towering trees, brought closer now by a telephoto zoom. In the distance, projecting above the horizon, the smoky gray cone of an active volcano.
    We jumped into the forest, came face-to-face with something that looked like a cross between a centipede and the sorts of monsters little kids like to make with their tinkertoy robots. The monster roared and snarled and reared, showing serrated, bright yellow fangs.
    A dinosaur show for the kiddies. Monsters from deep space, educating them, you see, all about the faraway world of God , Delta Pavonis 2, just a little more than eighteen-point-six light-years from our safe, tame solar system. God, called home by a few hundred thousand human colonists. Home that was, by fast starship, almost twenty years’ travel from Earth and Moon and Mars and all the other little places where all but the tiniest fraction of humanity lived.
    I let the monitor move on. Other Worlds, Other Cultures . A more recent favorite, sort of an extraterrestrial archaeology presentation. Little domes under a sullen, blue-black sky. Little white fleck of a faraway sun peering down, barely illuminating a pristine white snowscape; snow broken here and there by crags of white ice, long lines of blue escarpment.
    A tiny world named Snow . Ancient ruins, more or less intact. Things built by nobody knew who or what, a long, long time ago, on the fourth ice-moon of a huge, red-orange, pale-ringed gas giant. Yes, there it was, bisecting the horizon, rings sticking up in the sky, obscured by the ice-moon’s thin blue clouds, gas giant sixth out from a low-K star named Groombridge 1618, just shy of fifteen-point-three light-years