Acts of Conscience Read Online Free PDF

frozen fodder. “Hey, buddy.”
    He straightened up. Took off his cap. Wiped sweat from his brow with the sleeve of his tunic. “Yeah?”
    “What the hell happened to its fingers?”
    He looked at the womfrog. Looked back at me. Shrugged. “Son of a bitch kept figuring out how to work the combination lock, kept guessing the right numbers and getting out of its cage. So we cut ‘em off.”
    Animal standing right behind the bars, looking down at him, flexing its trunks, staring. No real expression in those big, pitted-looking, orangish eyes. I glanced down at Rua Mater. Staring at the womfrog. Nothing written in her face. We walked on.
    o0o
    Once upon a time, there was a little island at the mouth of Henry Hudson’s useless river, property of the Manahatta tribesmen. Once upon a not quite so long ago time, there was a great city here. Towers of stone and metal and glass. Layers of gray-brown smog. Streets full of taxicabs like so many big, shiny yellow bugs. A few million people, maybe ten to a toilet. They call what’s left of Old New York Manhattan Interpretive Park . Close beside me, Garstang put her hand on the tram platform’s guard rail, and said, “That’s quite a sight.”
    Quite. Not really a lone and level plain, of course. Huge island, bracketed by narrow rivers, cloaked in dense green jungle, pretty much like all the wilderness we’d passed over, coming up the east coast of North America. Here, though, the shattered stumps of old buildings jutted from the forest, some coated with vines, others bare and ragged in the hazy noonday sun. Toward the north end of the island, just about on the horizon, you could see the ruins of taller buildings, more intact-looking somehow.
    Rua Mater put her hand on my arm, pointing, “Are those the lakes?”
    Through the screen of trees, not all that far from the tramway terminus, you could see a shine of water. “I think so.”
    Millie said, “Let’s get going. If we’re any later we won’t get a waterfront campsite.”
    Once upon a time, the United States of America was the biggest, richest, most powerful nation of the world, New York its premier city. By the middle of the twenty-first century, all the other great federative superpowers of the world had come apart, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics breaking up into its fifteen constituent states, trying to maintain the fiction of something called the CIS. Siberia breaking free of the Russian Federation, then collapsing into six smaller nations. Sinkiang and Tibet and Mongolia breaking free of the Chinese Republic, then China itself vanishing, Tangish south sundered from Hannese north.
    For a little while, this America ruled the Earth, pretty much did as it pleased, her leaders angry and proud. America locuta, causa finita . One fine spring morning, just about 8:15 AM, on August 6th of the year 2045, a small party from one of her more disgruntled client states, showed up in Manhattan bearing five egg-crates in their luggage. Spotted them on five street corners in the area between Soho and the Trumpville slums. Said their prayers. Stooped and pushed five buttons.
    There were five bright flashes of light, five loud bangs, five little mushroom clouds, five kilotons apiece.
    Five kilotons is not much of a nuclear explosion, about enough to blow up a conventional twenty-first century city block. So a few hundred buildings were knocked down. Maybe a half million people killed. A similar number badly injured. And the other eight million or so living and working on Manhattan island just had to move away.
    City services stayed intact for the other boroughs, of course, and there was talk of restoring the heart of New York, but it never happened. Over the course of the next generation, seventy percent of the thirty million people who’d inhabited Greater New York found reason to go elsewhere.
    We pitched our tents beside the clear, placid waters of a 550-year-old bomb crater, stowed our luggage, built a cooking fire in the