The State of The Art c-4

by Iain M. Banks

  'Yes. I thought everybody did.'

  'Ha, well… anyway… in some ways these people would consider us backward, you know that? I know it might sound dumb, but it isn’t. Look at transport; the aircraft I had on my home plate was on its third or fourth generation, nearly a thousand years old! These people change their automobiles every year! They have throw-away containers and disposable clothes and fashions that mean changing your clothes every year, every season!—'

  'Dervley—'

  'Compared to them, the Culture moves at a snail’s pace!'

  'Dervley, what was it you wanted to talk about?'

  'Huh? Talk about?' Linter looked confused. We turned left onto Fifth Avenue. 'Oh, nothing in particular, I guess. I just thought it'd be nice to see you before you left; wish you bon voyage. I hope you don’t mind. You don’t mind, do you? The ship said you might not want to come, but you don’t mind, do you?'

  'No, I don’t mind.'

  'Good. Good, I didn’t think… ' his voice trailed off. We walked on in our own silence, in the midst of the city’s continuous coughing and spitting and wheezing.

  I wanted to go. I wanted to get out of this city and off this continent and up from this planet and onto the ship and out of this system… but something kept me walking with him, walking and stopping, stepping down and out, across and up, like another obedient part of the machine, designed to move, to function, to keep going regardless, to keep pressing on and plugging away, warming up or falling down but always always moving, down to the drug store or up to company president or just to stay a moving target, hugging the rails on a course you hardly needed to see so could stay blinkered on, missing the fallers and the lame around you and the trampled ones behind. Perhaps he was right and any one of us could stay here with him, just vanish into the city-space and disappear forever and never be thought of again, never think again, just obey orders and ordinances and do what the place demands, start falling and never stop, never find any other purchase, and our twistings and turnings and writhings as we fall, exactly what the city expects, just what the doctor ordered…

  Linter stopped. He was looking through an iron grille at a shop selling religious statues, holy water containers, Bibles and commentaries, crosses and rosaries and crib and manger scenes. He stared down at it all, and I watched him. He nodded at the window display. 'That’s what we’ve lost, you know. What you’ve lost; all of you. A sense of wonder and awe and… sin. These people know there are still things they don’t know, things that can still go wrong, things they can still do wrong. They still have the hope because the possibility is there. Without the possibility of failure, you can’t have hope. They have hope. The Culture has statistics. We — it; the Culture — is too certain, too organized and stifled. We’ve choked the life out of life; nothing’s left to chance. Take the chance of things going wrong out of life and it stops being life, don’t you see?' His pinched, dark-browed face looked frustrated.

  'No, I don’t see,' I told him.

  He ran one hand through his hair, shook his head. 'Look; let’s eat, huh? I’m really hungry.'

  'Okay; lead on. Where?'

  'This way; somewhere really special.' We started off in the same direction again, came to the corner of 48th Street and turned up that. A cold wind blew around us, scattering papers. 'What I mean is, you have to have that potential for wrongness there or you can’t live… or you can but it doesn’t mean anything. You can’t have the peak without the trough, or light without shade… it’s not that you must have evil to have good, but you must have the possibility for evil. That’s what the Church teaches, you know. That’s the choice that Man has; he can choose to be good or evil; God doesn’t force him to be evil any more than He forces him to be good. The choice is left to Man now as it was to Adam. Only in God is there any real chance of understanding and appreciating Free Will.'

  He pushed my elbow, steering me down an alley. A white and red sign glowed at the far end. I could smell food.

  'You have to see that. The Culture gives us so much, but in fact it’s only taking things away from us, lobotomizing everybody in it, taking away their choices, their potential for being really good or even slightly bad. But God, who is in all of us; yes, in you too, Diziet… perhaps even in the ship for all I know… God, who sees and knows all, who is all-powerful, all-knowing, in a way that no ship, no mere Mind can ever be; infinitely knowing, still allows us; poor, pathetic, fallible humanity — and by extension, pan-humanity… allows even us; the, the—'

  It was dark in the alley, but I should still have seen them. I wasn’t even listening properly to Linter, I was just letting him witter on, not concentrating. So I should have seen them, but I didn’t, not until it was too late.

  They moved out from behind us, knocking over a dustcan, shouting, crashing into us. Linter spun around, letting go of my elbow, I turned quickly. Linter held up one hand and said — did not shout — something I didn’t catch. A figure rushed at me, half crouched. Somehow, without seeing it, I knew there was a knife.

  It all remains so clear, so measured. I suppose some secretion had taken over the instant my midbrain realized what was happening. It seemed very light in the alley, and everybody else was moving slowly, along lines like laser beams or cross-hairs, casting weighted shadows in front of them along those lines in the direction they were moving.

  I stepped to one side, letting the boy and the knife spin past. A right-foot trip and a little pressure on his wrist as he went by and he had to let the knife go. He stumbled and fell. I had the knife, and threw it far away down the alley before turning back to Linter.

  Two of them had him on the ground, kicking and struggling. I heard him cry out once as I moved towards them, but I recall no other sound. Whether it was really as silent as I remember it, or whether I was simply concentrating on the sense that yielded the most information, I don’t know. I caught the heels of one of them, and pulled, heaving him out and up, cracking his face against one boot where I’d stuck it out to meet him. I threw him out of the way. The other one was already up. Lines seemed to be bunching up at the side of my vision, and throbbing, making me think about how much time the first one had had to regain his balance if not his knife. I realized I wasn’t doing this the way you were meant to. The one in front of me lunged. I stepped out of the way, turning again. I hit him on the head while I looked back at the first one, who was on his feet, coming forward, but hesitating at the side of the one I’d hit second, who was struggling up against the wall, holding his face; dark blood on pale skin.

  They ran, as one, like a school of fish turning.

  Linter was staggering, trying to stand. I caught him and he clutched at me, gripping my arm tightly, breath wheezing. He stumbled and sagged as we got to the red and white light outside the little restaurant. A man with a napkin stuffed in the top of his vest opened the door and looked out at us.

  Linter fell at the doorstep. It was only then I thought of the terminal, and realized that Linter was gripping the top of my coat, where the terminal brooch was. The smells of cooking came out of the open door. The man with the napkin looked cautiously up and down the alley. I tried to prise Linter’s fingers free.

  'No,' he said. 'No.'

  'Dervley, let go. Let me get the ship.'

  'No.' He shook his head. There was sweat on his brow, blood on his lips. A huge dark stain was spreading over the fawn coat. 'Let me.'

  'What?'

  'Lady?'

  'No. Don’t.'

  'Lady? Want me to call the cops?'

  'Linter? Linter?'

  'Lady?'

  'Linter!'

  When his eyes closed his grip loosened.

  There were more people at the restaurant door. Somebody said, 'Jesus.' I stayed there, kneeling on the cold ground with Linter’s face close to mine, thinking: How many films? (The guns quieten, the battle stops.) How often do they do this, in their commercial dreams? (Look after Karen for me… that’s an order, mister… you know I always loved you… K
illing of Georgie… Ici resté un deporté inconnu…) What am I doing here? Come on lady.

  'Come on lady. Come on, lady… ' Somebody tried to lift me.

  Then he was lying beside Linter looking hurt and surprised and somebody was screaming and people were backing off.

  I started running. I jabbed the terminal brooch and shouted.

  I stopped at the far end of the alley, near the street, and rested against a wall, looking at the dark bricks opposite.

  A noise like a pop, and a drone sinking slowly down in front of me; a business-like black-body drone, the inky lengths of two knife missiles hovering on either side above eye level, twitchy for action.

  I took a deep breath. 'There’s been a slight accident,' I said calmly.

  6.3: Halation Effect

  I looked at Earth. It was shown, in-holo'd, on one wall of my cabin; brilliant and blue, solid and white-whorled.

  'Then it was more like suicide,' Tagm said, stretching out on my bed. 'I didn’t think Catholics—'

  'But I cooperated,' I said, still pacing up and down. 'I let him do it. I could have called the ship. After he lost consciousness there was time; we could still have saved him.'

  'But he’d been altered back, Dizzy, and they’re dead when their heart stops, aren’t they?'

  'No; there’s two or three minutes after the heart stops. It was enough time. I had enough time.'

  'Well then so did the ship. It must have been watching; it was bound to have had a missile on the case.' Tagm snorted. 'Linter was probably the most over-observed man on the planet. The ship must have known too; it could have done something. The ship had the control, it had the real-time grasp; it isn’t your responsibility, Dizzy.'

  I wished I could accept Tagm’s moral subtraction. I sat down on the end of the bed, head in my hands, staring at the holo of the planet in the wall. Tagm came over, hugged me, hands on my shoulders, head on mine. 'Dizzy; you have to stop thinking about it. Let’s go do something. You can’t sit watching that damn holo all day.'

  I stroked one of Tagm’s hands, gazed again at the slowly revolving planet, my gaze flicking in one glance from pole to equator. 'You know, when I was in Paris, seeing Linter for the first time, I was standing at the top of some steps in the courtyard where Linter’s place was, and I looked across it and there was a little notice on the wall saying it was forbidden to take photographs of the courtyard without the man’s permission.' I turned to Tagm. 'They want to own the light!'

  6.4: Dramatic Exit, Or, Thank You And Goodnight

  At five minutes and three seconds past three AM, GMT, on the morning of January the second, 1978, the General Contact Unit Arbitrary broke orbit above the planet Earth. It left behind an octet of Main Observation Satellites — six of them in near-GS orbits — a scattering of drones and minor missiles, and a small plantation of young oaks on a bluff near Elk Creek, California.

  The ship had brought Linter’s body back up, displacing it from its freezer in a New York City morgue. But when we left, Linter stayed, in a fashion. I argued he ought to be buried on-planet, but the ship disagreed. Linter’s last instructions regarding the disposal of his remains had been issued fifteen years earlier, when he first joined Contact, and were quite conventional; his corpse was to be displaced into the centre of the nearest star. So the sun gained a bodyweight, courtesy of Culture tradition, and in a million years, maybe, a little of the light from Linter’s body would shine upon the planet he had loved.

  The Arbitrary held its darkfield for a few minutes, then dropped it just past Mars (so there was just a chance it left an image on an Earth telescope). Meanwhile it was snapping all its various remote drones and sats away from the other planets in the system. It stayed in real space right up till the last moment (making it possible that its rapidly increasing mass produced a blip on a terrestrial gravity-wave experiment, deep in some mountain-mine), then totalled as it dispatched Linter’s body into the stellar core, sucked a last few drones of Pluto and a couple of outlying comets, and slung Li’s diamond at Neptune (where it’s probably still in orbit).

  I’d decided to leave the Arbitrary after the R&R, but after I’d relaxed on Svanrayt Orbital for a few weeks I changed my mind. I had too many friends on the ship, and anyway it seemed genuinely upset when it found out I was thinking of transferring. It charmed me into staying. But it never did tell me whether it had been watching Linter and me that night in New York.

  So, did I really believe I was to blame, or was I kidding even myself? I don’t know. I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now.

  There was guilt, I recall, but it was an odd sort of guilt. What really annoyed me, what I did find hard to take, was my complicity not in what Linter was trying to do, and not in his own half-willed death, but in the generality of transferred myth those people accepted as reality.

  It strikes me that although we occasionally carp about Having To Suffer, and moan about never producing real Art, and become despondent or try too hard to compensate, we are indulging in our usual trick of synthesizing something to worry about, and should really be thanking ourselves that we live the life we do. We may think ourselves parasites, complain about Mind-generated tales, and long for 'genuine' feelings, 'real' emotion, but we are missing the point, and indeed making a work of art ourselves in imagining such an uncomplicated existence is even possible. We have the best of it. The alternative is something like Earth, where as much as they suffer, for all that they burn with pain and confused, bewildered angst, they produce more dross than anything else; soap operas and quiz programmes, junk papers and pulp romances.

  Worse than that, there is an osmosis from fiction to reality, a constant contamination which distorts the truth behind both and fuzzes the telling distinctions in life itself, categorizing real situations and feelings by a set of rules largely culled from the most hoary fictional clichés, the most familiar and received nonsense. Hence the soap operas, and those who try to live their lives as soap operas, while believing the stories to be true; hence the quizzes where the ideal is to think as close to the mean as possible, and the one who conforms utterly is the one who stands above the rest; the Winner…

  They always had too many stories, I believe; they were too free with their acclaim and their loyalty, too easily impressed by simple strength or a cunning word. They worshipped at too many altars.

  Well, there’s your story.

  Perhaps it’s as well I haven’t changed very much over the years; I doubt that it’s much different from what I’d have written a year or a decade later, rather than a century. [15]

  It’s funny the images that stay with you though. Over the years one thing has haunted me, one dream recurred. It really has nothing to do with me in a sense, because it was something I never saw… yet it stays there, nevertheless.

  I didn’t want to be displaced, that night, nor did I want to travel out to somewhere remote enough for a module to pick me up without being seen. I got the black-body drone to lift me from the city; right up, darkfielded, into the sky in the midst of Manhattan, rising above all that light and noise into the darkness, quiet as any falling feather. I sat on the Drone’s back, still in shock I suppose, and don’t even remember transferring to the dark module a few kilometres above the grid of urban light. I saw but didn’t watch, and thought not of my own flight, but about the other drones the ship might be using on the planet at the time; where they might be, what doing.

  I mentioned the Arbitrary collected snowflakes. Actually it was searching for a pair of identical ice crystals. It had — has — a collection; not holes or figure break-downs, but actual samples of ice crystals from every part of the galaxy it has ever visited where it found frozen water.

  It only ever collects a few flakes each time, of course; a saturation pick-up would be… inelegant.

  I suppose it must still be looking. What it will do if it ever does find two identical crystals, it has never said. I don’t know that it really wants to find them, anyway.

  But I thought of t
hat, as I left the glittering, grumbling city beneath me. I thought — and I still dream about this, maybe once or twice a year — of some drone, its flat back star-dappled, quietly in the steppes or at the edge of a polynya off Antarctica, gently lifting a single flake of snow, teasing it away from the rest, and hesitating perhaps, before going, displaced or rising, taking its tiny, perfect cargo to the orbiting starship, and leaving the frozen plains, or the waste of ice, once more at peace.

  7: Perfidy, Or, A Few Words From 'The Drone'

  Well, thank goodness that’s over. I don’t mind telling you this has been an extremely difficult translation, not helped at all by Sma’s intransigent and at times obstructive attitude. She frequently used Marain expressions it would be impossible to render accurately into English without at least a three-dimensional diagram, and consistently refused to redraft or revise the text to facilitate its translation. I have done my best, but I can take no responsibility for any misunderstanding caused by any part of this communication.

  I suppose I had better note here that the chapter titles (including that for Sma’s covering letter, and this) and sub-titles are my own additions. Sma wrote the above as one continuous document (can you imagine?), but I thought it better to split the thing up. The chapter titles and sub-titles are, incidentally, also all names of General Contact Units produced by the Infracaninophile manufactury in Yinang Orbital which Sma refers to (without naming) in Chapter Three.

  Another thing; you will notice that Sma has the gall to refer to me simply as 'The Drone' in her letter. I have humoured her matronizing whim quite long enough, and now wish to make clear that my name is, in fact, Fohristi-whirl Skaffen-Amtiskaw Handrahen Dran Easpyou. I am not self-important and it is irresponsible of Sma to suggest that my duties in Special Circumstances are some sort of atonement for past misdeeds. My conscience is clear.

  Skaffen-Amtiskaw.

  (Drone, Offensive)

  PS: I have met the Arbitrary, and it is a much more pleasant and engaging machine than Sma would have you believe.