Acts of Conscience Read Online Free PDF Page A

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    It leaned forward, face coming close to the bars, closer to us, and made a whispery sort of mutter, a succession of guttural noises that sounded like, Wooroowah. Werrawaghroo wahghwaooghaahhh ... trailing off in a breathy snort. There was a faintly sweet odor, a bit like caramel, coming from it as it spoke.
    We turned away, and Rua Mater abruptly jumped and squeaked, grabbing onto me, bumping into my side, trying to get behind me by going right through me. I felt a hard pang myself, though not enough to completely mask the feel of her breasts mashing against me, the bony thud of her hip on my side.
    Things standing behind us, looking past us at the animal in the cage.
    Imagine one of those pale brown walking stick bugs children on the Moon like to keep for pets. Imagine it crossbred with the praying mantis your mother wouldn’t let you buy at the pet store. The one that was advertised as being able to clear your warren of roaches and spiders and flies, clear it completely clean, in just a couple of months.
    Now imagine it being two meters tall.
    Rua Mater gasped, “Oh God. I thought the animals were loose!”
    One of the things unclipped a box from its harness, poked at some buttons. Held it up beside its head, shook it a bit. Poked it again. Then held it against the side of its chest. Sharp, high, raspy sound: “ Greekeegreekee greekeegreekeegreekee !”
    The box said, “I’m terribly sorry. We didn’t mean to startle you.”
    Tourists from Arous, Sigma Draconis 3, just under eighteen-point-three light-years from the Sun. I’d heard there were increasing numbers of them traveling to the solar system, parties of students sponsored by Mace Electrodynamics, the big interstellar conglomerate that owns the patents on the field well converter technology and controls access to the Sigma Draconis star system. A couple of years ago there was an incident in which an Arousian wandered off from its tour group on the Moon, wound up lost in one of the deep underwarrens of Eratosthenes City. Some kids running one of the downdeep “parks” came across this poor bastard, thought it was something from a vidnet horrorshow come to life, and killed it.
    Turned out that not one of those little boys and girls had heard the were real starships, real extraterrestrial beings, real anything beyond the underwarrens of the Moon and some myth about an aboriginal human homeland called Earth. Kept babbling about their favorite episodes of Star Battlers and how they’d just shot themselves a real, live Swoogenbork killranger.
    I smiled at the Arousians, wondering if a smile meant anything to them. Probably not, but the translator box made faint greekeegreekee noises as we walked on. Probably telling them all about it.
    Another cage, great big brown thing inside, some guy in a park ranger suit unloading what looked like cubic-meter blocks of frozen spinach from a floating forklift onto the ground before it.
    Rua Mater, hand gentle on my arm, said, “ Womfrog .”
    Yes, indeed. The fearsome womfrogs of Green Heaven, womfrogs that I’d killed and killed as a teenage boy. Killed and killed, so pretty, wealthy women my mother’s general age and appearance would come to my tent in the middle of the night and suck my dick.
    It was about the size of a schoolbus, covered with long, shaggy brown hair. Six legs, the rearmost two of which were outsized and facing the wrong direction, like the hopping legs of a cricket. High-domed head that looked a lot like a mammoth’s head if you thought about it. Bulging eyes the size of basketballs, set close together in front, defying the received wisdom that only predators get to have binocular vision.
    Human-like mouth with big, yellow, flat-crowned buck teeth. Long, elephantine trunks on the sides of its head, where a terrestrial animal’s ears would have been. Trunks ending in bony, fist-like knobs, each adorned with little pink pads of what appeared to be scar tissue...
    I looked over at the guy unloading