Acts of Conscience

Copyright © 1997, 2011 William Barton

Public Domain Cover Photo:

“Montage of Neptune and Triton,” courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech.

If a man hasn’t discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.

—Martin Luther King, Jr.

23 June, 1963.

Dedication
:

to

H. Beam Piper

Fuzzy Logic, of a sort

Previous Books by

by William Barton

Hunting On Kunderer

A Plague of All Cowards

Dark Sky Legion

Radio Silence

Yellow Matter

When Heaven Fell

The Transmigration of Souls

Acts of Conscience

When We Were Real

Moments of Inertia

Collaborations by

William Barton and

Michael Capobianco

Iris

Fellow Traveler

Alpha Centauri

White Light

For more information visit:

williambarton.com

website active Sept. 2011

Table of Contents

Foreword

One: I have always

Two: When you come down

Three: By mid-morning

Four: I awoke the next morning, still sitting

Five: I opened my eyes and looked at the ceiling

Six: Parked by the curb

Seven: Next day, on my way

Eight: Somehow, I got through the rest

Nine: Another bright and sunshiny morning

Ten: I think I stood there

Eleven: We set out under the rising sun

Twelve: Sunlight in my face, butter-yellow

Thirteen: I awoke with a start

Fourteen: Standing on my bald stone hilltop

Fifteen: Just at sunrise

Sixteen: When I got up

Seventeen: Late the next day, I sat alone

Eighteen: Jump

Nineteen: Late the next day, Prometheus

Twenty: A day and a night

Appendices

eBooks to Come

Foreword

There is a general consensus out there in readerland that
Acts of Conscience
is, perhaps, my best novel. I don’t know I agree with that, but I can see the arguments in its favor. One critic called it “a major literary achievement,” and I heard a fan say reading it was a “life-changing experience.”  I guess I can see those things too, at least for the people who said them.

For me, it’s the story of a man much like me, intended to be read by men much like me. There are millions of us out there, standing in Gaetan du Cheyne’s shoes. We all make the choices we must, and make the right ones when we can. Few people respect us, fewer still understand us.

But I understand.

And so do you.

Do women read
Acts of Conscience?
More important, do they understand it? I think so. The agent who helped me sell the book to its original publisher was a woman, the editor she sold it to was a woman. They both said they liked the book, and seemed to understand it, at least in some way. But they were both pretty and sociable women, and I had my doubts, at the time.

There are women very much like Gaetan du Cheyne. I’ve met quite few of them. Maybe someday one of them with a talent for it will sit down and write that story. Maybe one already has and I missed seeing it. So many books, not much lifetime...

I’ve done my job.

Done it the best I know how.

I dreamed up
Acts of Conscience
in the waning days of the 1970s, after I’d written
Hunting On Kunderer
and
A Plague of All Cowards
, and seen them both published, after I’d written
This Dog/Rat World
and
Under Twilight
and seen them both fail. I dreamed it up in the waning days of my first marriage, when I’d done some things and had some thoughts I haven’t dared write about yet.

I wrote a little outline about a wretched little man just like me, maybe even a little worse? Or, more likely, a little better, which is probably why his whole life is as bad as mine was on the very worst of those long-ago days.

A man like that has one thing that redeems him, and so I called my outline
Acts of Conscience,
and put it aside. It was fifteen years before I managed to sit down and write it. Some years later I wrote a companion tale called
The Man Who Counts
, published on-line at
SciFiction
, interestingly enough also edited by a woman, because Gaetan du Cheyne isn’t the worst sort of man who can have that one redeeming virtue.

In the end, it may be the only virtue that matters, and all the others are merely stage dressing.

If you read this book, and that virtue becomes yours, or if you already have it and realize once and for all that you’re the very best a human being can be, the book and I have done our job.

I once told an audience of fans about all the wonderful moments I’d had, reading all the thousands of books that had passed my way over the years. I said if I could give just one reader one such moment, then my career as a writer would have been worthwhile.

That’s what this book is about.

—William Barton

September 2011, at the

Barking Spider Ranch

One: I have always

I have... always loved the stars.

When I was a boy, in a time almost thirty years ago, when my life was hardly begun, I loved to wander the remoter parts of Martyred Sasha’s Wilderness, to lie on my back on a favorite hillside in the night. Lie there for hours, looking up at the sky, soft wind in my face, on my bare skin, in my hair, full of wonder.

There on my hillside, I could look out over the whole world, beyond my feet the long slope of a dark lawn, daylight’s green grass hardly illuminated by the wan light of the faraway stars, the dim, splotchy shadows of the trees, beyond them the black outlines of the recreational center’s lightless buildings. Other buildings farther away, equally dark, were the unlit entryways to the underground, to the human-dense warrens of the Meadows of Dan, and the black plains of Volterra’s dusty floor beyond, flooded by the hard light of a sun so bright it was like a hole in the sky.

I remember lying there at midnight, when the darkness was already a week old, cool, very cool breeze on the bare skin of my chest, making me wonder if Maintenance had screwed up the temperature coupling on the city’s eutrophic atmosphere shield. Irrelevant to a boy looking up at thousands of hard dots, like motionless, steely pinpricks in the flat black background of the sky, most of them empty white, a few tinged with some pastel hue or another.

Bright, colorless Polaris hanging in the heavens, just above the top of my head, always high because crater Volterra and the Meadows of Dan lie just shy of sixty degrees north, not so terribly far from the north pole of the Moon. Pale blue Regulus off to my left. Yellow-tinted Procyon suspended over my belly button. Orangish Aldebaran just off the sky’s centerline, to one side of the Milky Way’s pale, irregular starry road.

I’d lay and stare at some sky feature or another, look at the jewel box of the Pleiades, staring and staring, waiting for just one more pale violet star to pop out of the absorbent background, waiting for the cluster’s nebulosity to take on it’s famous, rarely-seen streaky appearance...

“Du Cheyne.” Sharp. Snapping me back to the here and now. Rossignol’s voice: “You going to put your stuff on or not?”

Me, hanging weightless in the air in my undershorts, holding onto the open door of my locker, half-naked men and women bobbing all around, soaring back and forth as they got ready for change of shift. “Sorry.” Me, grinning a grin that, for some reason I could never quite understand, seemed to make people angry.

Rossignol, holding a corner of the locker bank, gold line-supervisor’s belt in the other hand, shaking it at me, mouth set in a characteristically crooked smile. “I swear, Gae. Sometimes... well.” A shrug. “I sure as hell am glad you don’t pull that shit when we’re outside. You looked like you were in some kind of trance.”

I reached into my locker and unhooked my soft gray suitliner coverall, started pulling it on, making sure the footies were straight, that my fingers went all the way down to the tips of the gloves, before zipping up the front. “Sure. The job’s the job.”

Rossignol’s smile fading. Dark brown eyes looking me over. He said, “Yeah.” Eyes measuring me. “Gae, I’d like you to step in on the D-1 prime mover Jimmy Haas’s been working. There’s something fishy about the power screen.”

“You let a Nine work on a drive modulus connected to a live field well converter?”

A quick look around. “Jimmy’s a Nine step Twelve. He’ll have enough points to make Ten Step Zero in a few weeks.”

“He will if you don’t fuck him up, Ross. And don’t call me Gae.”

“Sure. Sorry.”

“Are there bonus points on this?”

A slightly sour look. “Standard seven.”

Seven. Thirty more and I could jump to Wage Grade Ten step Nine and a few more livres in my paycheck. Thirteen hundred more and I could have Rossignol’s gold belt for the asking. Ten thousand more and I could apply for a white belt and conversion from wage to salary grade. “Make it ten.”

Mouth set in a flat line. “OK, Gaetan. Ten.” He turned away, and I went back to putting on my suit.

Suit pants, made of something that looked like a fine, chrome-plated chain mail of mirror-bright links, cinched in tight. Tunic of the same stuff. Helmet like a balaklava hat, covering everything but my eyes. Thin black boots made of something like flexible plastic, coming up to mid calf. Black plastic gauntlets covering my already-gloved hands. Blue belt around my waist, the blue of our shop and trade, Outside Machinists and Spatial Machinery Mechanics.

Muffled by the helmet, coming from the other side of the locker bank, I heard an angry mutter: “God damn it, Ross, why the hell did you assign the D-1 to
that
asshole?”

I slipped into the equilibrimotor harness and started hooking it up. Wrapped my toolbelt around that. Clipped on the inertially heavy battery pack. Rossignol, that same shushing tone in his voice, said, “It needs to be done right, Todd. Jimmy...”

Todd Sanchez said, “Why the fuck
him
? Why not me? Jimmy and I could...”

“I’m sorry, Todd. I... Hell, you’re a good mechanic. But du Cheyne...”

I slid the comlink diadem over the outside of the helmet, settled it carefully around my temples, and thought, Netlink on. Autocheck.

The suit thought, All systems nominal.

Sanchez said, “I’ve been in this business just as long as du Cheyne, Ross. I’m
better
than any damn shithead who...”

Rossignol: “And you’re still only a Ten step Four, Todd.”

Long silence.

Sanchez said, “You’re a fucking asshole too.”

Another long silence, then a sigh: “Let’s get outside, Todd. The job’s waiting.”

I flooded the suit’s limbs with power and life, watched my pale shadow, cast on the front of the locker bank, fill up with pastel sparkles, with tiny moving rainbows. Felt the suit harden against my body, molding itself to my form. Felt it fill up with its own awareness, felt it flutter against my chest, like the beating of some distant, impersonal heart. Outside then. Outside with all the others, slipping through the shop’s airscreen, metadynamic force field reaching through the suit to tickle on my skin, a soft feather touch.

They call this place Stardock, romantic name, I’ve heard, from some old story. Prosaically: Alpha-Five Shipyard, Chromoelectric Starship Division of the Eighth Ray Scientific-Industrial Enterprise. ERSIE-5 to her intimates.