'Dervley Linter is as much a product of our society as I am, and as such, or at least until he can be proved to be in some real sense "mad", he’s perfectly correct in expecting to have his wishes fulfilled. Indeed the very fact he asked for such an alteration — and accepted it from me — may prove his thinking is still more Culture-than Earth-influenced.
'In short, even if I had thought that I had sound tactical reasons for refusing his request, I’d have had just as difficult a job justifying such an action as I would have had I just snapped the guy off-planet the instant I realized what he was thinking. I can only be sure in myself that I am in the right in trying to get Linter to come back if I am positive that my own behaviour — as the most sophisticated entity involved — is beyond reproach, and in as close accord with the basic principles of our society as it is within my power to make it.'
I looked at the drone’s sensing band. I’d stood stock still during all this, unreacting. I sighed.
'Well,' I said, 'I don’t know; that sounds almost… noble.' I folded my arms. 'Only trouble is, ship, that I can never tell when you’re on the level and when you’re talking just for the sake of it.'
The unit stayed where it was for a couple of seconds, then turned and glided off, without saying another word.
4.5: Credibility Problem
The next time I saw Li, he was wearing a uniform just like Captain Kirk’s in Star Trek.
'Well, what on earth,' I laughed.
'Don’t mock, alien,' Li scowled.
I was reading Faust in German and watching two of my friends playing snooker. The gravity in the snooker room was a little less than standard, to make the balls roll right. I’d asked the ship (when it was still talking to me) why it hadn’t reduced its internal G to Earth’s average, as it had done with its day-night cycle. 'Oh, it would have meant too much recalibration,' the ship had said. 'I couldn’t be bothered.' How’s that for Godlike omnipotence?
'You won’t have heard,' Li said, sitting beside me, 'having been on EVA, but I’m intending to become captain of this tub.'
'Are you really? Well that’s fascinating.' I didn’t ask him what or where the hell EVA was. 'And how exactly do you propose attaining this elevated, not to say unlikely position?'
'I’m not sure yet,' Li admitted, 'but I think I have all the qualifications for the post.'
'Consider the liminal cue given; I know you’re going to—'
'Bravery, resourcefulness, intelligence, the ability to handle men — women — ; a razor sharp wit and lightning fast reactions. Also loyalty and the ability to be ruthlessly objective when the safety of my ship and crew are at stake. Except, of course, when the safety of the Universe as we know it is at stake, in which case I would reluctantly have to consider making a brave and noble sacrifice. Naturally, should such a situation ever arise, I’d try to save the officers and crew who serve beneath me. I’d go down with the ship, of course.'
'Of course. Well, that’s—'
'Wait; there’s another quality I haven’t mentioned yet.'
'Are there any left?'
'Certainly. Ambition.'
'Silly of me. Of course.'
'It will not have escaped your attention that until now nobody ever thought of wanting to become captain of the Arb.'
'A perhaps understandable lapse.' Jhavins, one of my friends, brought off a fine cut on the black ball, and I applauded. 'Good shot.'
Li prodded my shoulder. 'Listen properly.'
'I’m listening, I’m listening.'
'The point is that my wanting to become captain, I mean even thinking of the idea, means that I should be the captain, understand?'
'Hmm.' Jhavins was lining up an unlikely cannon on a distant red.
Li made an exasperated noise. 'You’re humouring me; I thought you at least would argue. You’re just like everybody else.'
'Ah,' I said. Jhavins hit the red, but just left it hanging over the pocket. I looked at Li. 'An argument? All right; you — anybody — taking command of the ship is like a flea taking over control of a human… maybe even like a bacteria in their saliva taking them over.'
'But why should it command itself? We made it; it didn’t make us.'
'So? And anyway we didn’t make it; other machines made it… and even they only started it off; it mostly made itself. But anyway, you’d have to go back… I don’t know how many thousand generations of its ancestors before you found the last computer or spaceship built directly by any of our ancestors. Even if this mythical "we" had built it, it’s still zillions of times smarter than we are. Would you let an ant tell you what to do?'
'Bacterium? Flea? Ant? Make up your mind.'
'Oh go away and de-scale a mountain or something, you silly man.'
'But we started all this; if it hadn’t been for us—'
'And who started us? Some glop of goo on another rockball? A super-nova? The big bang? What’s starting something got to do with it?'
'You don’t think I’m serious, do you?'
'More terminal than serious.'
'You wait,' Li said, standing up and wagging a finger at me. 'I’ll be captain one day. And you’ll be sorry; I had you down tentatively as science officer, but now you’ll be lucky to make nurse in the sickbay.'
'Ah, away and piss on your dilithium crystals.'
5. You Would If You Really Loved Me
5.1: Sacrificial Victim
I stayed on the ship for a few weeks after that. It started talking to me again after a couple of days. I forgot about Linter for a while; everybody on the Arbitrary seemed to be talking about new films or old films or books, or about what was happening in Kampuchea, or about Lanyares Sodel, who was off fighting with the Eritreans. Lanyares used to live on a plate where he and some of his pals played games of soldiers using live kinetic ammunition. I recalled hearing about this and being appalled; even with medical gear standing by and a full supply of drug glands it sounded slightly perverse, and when I’d found out they didn’t have anything to protect their heads, I’d decided these guys were crazy. You could have your brains splattered over the landscape! You could die!
But they enjoyed the fear, I suppose. I’m told some people do.
Anyway, Lanyares told the ship he wanted to take part in some real fighting. The ship tried to talk him out of it, but failed, so sent him down to Ethiopia. It tracked him by satellite and tailed him with scout missiles, ready to zap him back to the ship if he was badly wounded. After some badgering, and having obtained Lanyares’s permission, the ship put the view from the missiles trailing him onto an accessible channel, so anybody could watch. I thought this was in even more dubious taste.
It didn’t last. After about ten days Lanyares got fed up because there wasn’t much happening and so he had himself taken back up to the ship. He didn’t mind the discomfort, he said, in fact it was almost pleasant in a masochistic sort of way, and certainly made shipboard life seem more attractive. But the rest had been so boring. Having a good ring-ding battle on a plate landscape designed for the purpose was much more fun. The ship told him he was silly and packed him back off to Rio de Janeiro to be a properly behaved culture-vulture again. Anyway, it could have sent him to Kampuchea, I suppose; altered him to make him look Cambodian and thrown him into the middle of the butchery of Year Zero. Somehow I don’t think that was quite what Lanyares had been looking for though.
I travelled around more of Britain, East Germany and Austria when I wasn’t on the Arbitrary. The ship tried me in Pretoria for a few days, but I really couldn’t take it; perhaps if it had sent me there first I’d have been all right, but after nine months of Earth maybe even my Cultured nerves were getting frayed, and the land of Separate Development was just too much for me. I asked the ship about Linter a few times, but only received All-Purpose Non-Committal Reply Number 63a, or whatever, so after a bit I stopped asking.
'What is beauty?'
'Oh ship, really.'
'No, I’m being serious. We have a disagreement here.'
I stood in Frankfurt am Main, on a suspension footbridge over the river, talking to the ship via my terminal. One or two people looked at me as they walked by, but I wasn’t in the mood to care. 'All right, then. Beauty is something that disappears when you try to define it.'
'I don’t think you really believe that. Be serious.'
'Look ship, I already know what the disagreement is. I believe that there is something, however difficult to define, which is shared by everything beautiful and cannot be signified by any other single word without obscuring more than is made clear. You think that beauty lies in utility.'
'Well, more or less.'
'So where’s Earth’s utility?'
'Its utility lies in being a living machine. It forces people to act and react. At that it is close to the theoretical limits of efficiency for a non-conscious system.'
'You sound like Linter. A living machine, indeed.'
'Linter is not totally wrong, but he is like somebody who has found an injured bird and kept it past the time it is recovered, out of a protectiveness he would not like to admit is centred on himself, not the animal. Well, there may be nothing more we can do for Earth, and it’s time to let go… in this case it’s we who have to fly away, but you see what I mean.'
'But you agree with Linter there is something beautiful about Earth, something aesthetically positive no Culture environment could match?'
'Yes, I do. Few things are all gain. All we have ever done is maximize what happens to be considered "good" at any particular time. Despite what the locals may think, there is nothing intrinsically illogical or impossible about having a genuine, functioning Utopia, or removing badness without removing goodness, or pain without pleasure, or suffering without excitement… but on the other hand there is nothing to say that you can always fix things up just the way you want them without running up against the occasional problem. We have removed almost all the bad in our environment, but we have not quite kept all the good. Averaged out, we’re still way ahead, but we do have to yield to humans in some fields, and in the end of course theirs is a more interesting environment. Naturally so.'
' "May you live in interesting times." '
'Quite.'
'I can’t agree. I can’t see the utility or the beauty in that. All I’ll give you is that it might be a relevant stage to go through.'
'Might be the same thing. A slight time-problem perhaps. You just happen to be here, now.'
'As are they all.'
I turned round and looked at a few of the people walking by. The autumn sun was low in the sky, a vivid red disc, dusty and gaseous and the colour of blood, and rubbed into these well-fed Western faces in an image of a poison-price. I looked them in the eyes, but they looked away; I felt like taking them by the collar and shaking them, screaming at them, telling them what they were doing wrong, telling them what was happening; the plotting militaries, the commercial frauds, the smooth corporate and governmental lies, the holocaust taking place in Kampuchea… and telling them too what was possible, how close they were, what they could do if they just got their planetary act together… but what was the point? I stood and looked at them, and found myself — half involuntarily — glanding slow, so that suddenly they all seemed to be moving in slow-motion, trailing past as though they were actors in a movie, and seen on a dodgy print that kept varying between darkness and graininess. 'What hope for these people, ship?' I heard myself murmur, voice slurred. It must have sounded like a squawk to anybody else. I turned away from them, looking down at the river.
'Their children’s children will die before you even look old, Diziet. Their grandparents are younger than you are now… In your terms, there is no hope for them. In theirs, every hope.'
'And we’re going to use the poor bastards as a control group.'
'We’re probably just going to watch, yes.'
'Sit back and do nothing.'
'Watching is a form of doing. And, we aren’t talking anything away from them. It’ll be as if we were never here.'
'Apart from Linter.'
'Yes,' sighed the ship. 'Apart from Mr Problem.'
'Oh ship, can’t we at least stop them on the brink? If they do press the button, couldn’t we junk the missiles when they’re in flight, once they’ve had their chance to do it their way and blown it… couldn’t we come in then? It would have served its purpose as a control by then.'
'Diziet, you know that’s not true. We’re talking about the next ten thousand years at least, not the lead time to the Third World War. Being able to stop it isn’t the point; it’s whether in the very long result it is the right thing to do.'
'Great,' I whispered to the swirling dark waters of the Main. 'So how many infants have to grow up under the shadow of the mushroom cloud, and just possibly die screaming inside the radioactive rubble, just for us to be sure we’re doing the right thing? How certain do we have to be? How long must we wait? How long must we make them wait? Who elected us God?'
'Diziet,' the ship said, its voice sorrowful, 'that question is being asked all the time, and put in as many different ways as we have the wit to devise… and that moral equation is being re-assessed every nano-second of every day of every year, and every time we find some place like Earth — no matter what way the decision goes — we come closer to knowing the truth. But we can never be absolutely certain. Absolute certainty isn’t even a choice on the menu, most times.' There was a pause. Footsteps came and went behind me on the bridge.
'Sma' the ship said finally, with a hint of what might have been frustration in its voice, 'I’m the smartest thing for a hundred light years radius, and by a factor of about a million… but even I can’t predict where a snooker ball’s going to end up after more than six collisions.'
I snorted, could almost have laughed.
'Well,' the ship said, 'I think you’d better be on your way now.'
'Oh?'
'Yes. A passer-by has reported a woman on the bridge, talking to herself and looking at the water. A policeman is now on his way to investigate, probably already wondering how cold the water is, and so I think you should turn to your left and walk smartly away before he arrives.'
'Right you are,' I said. I shook my head as I walked off in the dusk light. 'Funny old world, isn’t it, ship?' I said, more to myself than to it.
The ship said nothing. The suspended bridge, big as it was, responded to my stepping feet, moving up and down at me like some monstrous and clumsy lover.
5.2: Not Wanted On Voyage
Back on the ship.
For a few hours the Arbitrary had left the world’s snowflakes unmolested, and gone collecting other samples at Li’s request.
The first time Li saw me on the ship he’d come up to me and whispered, 'Take him to see The Man Who Fell To Earth,' and slunk off. The next time I saw him he claimed it was the first time and I must be hallucinating if I thought we’d met before. A fine way to greet a friend and admirer, claiming he’d been going about whispering cryptic messages…
So; one moonless, November night, darkside over the Tarim Basin…
Li was giving a dinner party.
He was still trying to become captain of the Arbitrary, but he seemed to have his ideas about rank and democracy mixed up, because he thought the best way to become 'skipper' was to get us all to vote for him. So this was going to be a campaign dinner.
We sat in the lower hangar space, surrounded by our hardware. There were about two hundred people gathered in the hangar; everybody still on the ship was present, and many had come back off-planet just for the occasion. Li had us all sit ourselves round three giant tables, each two metres broad and at least ten times that in length. He’d insisted they should be proper tables, and complete with chairs and place settings and all the rest, and the ship had reluctantly filched a small Sequoia and done all the carving and turning and whatever to produce the tables and everything that went with them. To compensate, it had planted several hundred oaks in its upper hangar, using its own
stored biomass as a growing medium; it would plant the saplings on Earth before it left.
When we were all seated, and had started talking amongst ourselves — I was sitting between Roghres and Ghemada — the lights around us dimmed, and a spotlight picked out Li, walking out of the darkness. We all sat back or craned forward, watching him.
There was much laughter. Li had greenish skin, pointed ears, and wore a 2001-style spacesuit with a zig-zag silver flash added across the chest (held on by micro-rivets, he told me later). He sported a long red cape which flowed out behind from his shoulders. He held the suit helmet in the crook of his left arm. In his right hand he gripped a Star Wars light sword. Of course, the ship had made him a real one.
Li walked purposefully to the head of the middle table, tramped on an empty seat at its head and strode onto the table top, clumping down the brightly polished surface between the glittering place settings (the cutlery had been borrowed from a locked and forgotten storeroom in a palace on a lake in India; it hadn’t been used for fifty years, and would be returned, cleaned, the next day… as would the dinner service itself, borrowed for the night from the Sultan of Brunei — without his permission), past the starched white napkins (from the Titanic; they’d be cleaned too and put back on the floor of the Atlantic), in the midst of the glittering glassware (Edinburgh Crystal, removed for a few hours from packing cases stowed deep in the hold of a freighter in the South China Sea, bound for Yokohama) and the candelabra (from a cache of loot lying under a lake near Kiev, sunk there by retreating Nazis judging from the sacks; also due to be replaced after their bizarre orbital excursion) until he stood in the centre of the middle table, maybe two metres from where I, Roghres and Ghemada sat.
'Ladies and gentlemen!' Li shouted, arms outstretched, helmet in one hand, sword humming brightly in the other. 'The food of Earth! Eat!'
He assumed a dramatic pose, pointing the sword back up the table, gazing heroically along its green glowing length, and leaning forward, one knee bending. The ship either manipulated its gravity field or Li had an AG harness under the suit, because he rose silently from the table and drifted along above it (holding the pose) to the far end, where he dropped gracefully and sat in the seat he’d used earlier as a step. There was scattered applause and some hooting.
The State of The Art c-4 Page 15