I was silent for a while, watching the television flip through channels. ‘What about you though?’ I asked eventually. ‘Can you do without it?’
‘Easily,’ Linter laughed. ‘Listen, d’you think I haven’t -‘
‘No; you listen.How long do you think this place is going to stay the way it is now?Ten years?Twenty?Can’t you see how much this place has to alter in just the next century?We’re so used to things staying much the same, to society and technology – at least immediately available technology – hardly changing over our lifetimes that I don’t know any of us could cope for long down here.I think it’ll affect you a lot more than the locals.They’re used to change, used to it all happening fast.All right, you like the way it is now, but what happens later?What if 2077 is as different from now as this is from 1877?This might be the end of a Golden Age, world war or not.What chance do you think the West has of keeping the status quo with the Third World?I’m telling you; end of the century and you’ll feel lonely and afraid and wonder why they’ve deserted you and you’ll be the worst nostalgic they’ve got because you’ll remember it better than they ever will and you won’t remember anything else from before now.’
He just stood looking at me.The TV showed part of a ballet in black and white, then an interview; two white men who looked American somehow (and the fuzzy picture looked US standard), then a quiz show, then a puppet show, again in monochrome.You could see the strings.Linter put his glass down on the granite table and went over to the Hifi, turning on the tape deck.I wondered what little bit of planetary accomplishment I was going to be treated to.
The picture on the screen settled to one programme for a while.It looked vaguely familiar; I was sure I’d seen it.A play; last century American writer, but (Linter went back to his seat, while the music began; the Four Seasons.)
Henry James, The Ambassadors .It was a TV production I’d seen on the BBC while I was in London or maybe the ship had repeated it.I couldn’t recall.What I did recall was the plot and the setting, both of which seemed so apposite to my little scene with Linter that I started to wonder whether the beast upstairs was watching all this.Probably was, come to think of it.And not much point in looking for anything; the ship could produce bugs so small the main problem with camera stability was Brownian motion.Was The Ambassadors a sign from it then?Whatever; the play was replaced by a commercial for Odor-Eaters.
‘I’ve told you,’ Linter brought me back from my musings, speaking quietly, ‘I’m prepared to take my chances.Do you think I haven’t thought it all through before, many times?This isn’t sudden, Sma; I felt like this my first day here, but I waited for months before I said anything, so I’d be sure.It’s what I’ve been looking for all my life, what I’ve always wanted.I always knew I’d know it when I found it, and I have.’ He shook his head; sadly, I thought. ‘I’m staying, Sma.’
I shut up.I suspected that despite what he’d just said he hadn’t thought about how much the planet would change during his long likely lifetime, and there were still other things to be said, but I didn’t want to press too hard too quickly.I made myself relax on the couch and shrugged. ‘Anyway, we don’t know for sure what the ship’s going to do; what they’ll decide.’
He nodded, picked up a paperweight from the granite table and turned it over and over in his hand.The music shimmered through the room, like the sun on water reflected; points producing lines, dancing quietly. ‘I know,’ he said, still gazing at the heavy globe of twisted glass, ‘this must seem like a mad idea but I just just want the place.’ He looked at me – for the first time, I thought – without a challenging scowl or stern coolness.
‘I know what you mean,’ I said. ‘But I can’t understand it perfectly maybe I’m more suspicious than you are; it’s just you tend to be more concerned for other people than for yourself sometimes you assume they haven’t thought things through the way you would have yourself.’ I sighed, almost laughed. ‘I guess I’m assuming you’ll hoping you’ll change your mind.’
Linter was silent for a while, still studying the hemisphere of coloured glass. ‘Maybe I will.’ He shrugged massively. ‘Maybe I will,’ he said, looking at me speculatively.He coughed. ‘Did the ship tell you I’ve been to India?’
‘India?No; no, it didn’t.’
‘I went there for a couple of weeks.I didn’t tell the Arbitrary I was going, though it found out, of course.’
‘Why?I mean why did you want to go?’
‘I wanted to see the place,’ Linter said, sitting forward in the seat, rubbing the paperweight, then replacing it on the granite table and rubbing his palms together. ‘It was beautiful beautiful.If I’d had any second thoughts, they vanished there.’ He looked at me, face suddenly open, intent, his hands outstretched, fingers wide. ‘It’s the contrast, the’ he looked away, apparently made less articulate by the vividness of the impression. ‘ the highlights, the light and shade of it all.The squalor and the muck, the cripples and the swollen bellies; the whole poverty of it makes the beauty stand out a single pretty girl in the crowds of Calcutta seems like an impossibly fragile bloom, like a I mean you can’t believe that the filth and the poverty hasn’t somehow contaminated her it’s like a miracle a revelation.Then you realize that she’ll only be like that for a few years, that she’ll only live a few decades, then she’ll wear and have six kids and wither The feeling, the realization, the staggering’ his voice trailed off and he looked, slightly helplessly, almost vulnerably, at me.It was just the point at which to make my most telling, cutting comment.But also just the point at which I could do no such thing.
So I sat still, saying nothing, and Linter said, ‘I don’t know how to explain it.It’s alive.I’m alive.If I did die tomorrow it would have been worth it just for these last few months.I know I’m taking a risk in staying, but that’s the whole point.I know I might feel lonely and afraid.I expect that’s going to happen, now and again, but it’ll be worth it.The loneliness will make the rest worth it.We expect everything to be set up just as we like it, but these people don’t; they’re used to having good and bad mixed in together.And that gives them an interest in living, it makes them appreciate opportunities these people know what tragedy is, Sma.They live it.We’re just an audience.’
He sat there, looking away from me, while I stared at him.The big-city noise grumbled beyond us, and the sunlight came and went in the room as shadows of clouds passed over us and I thought; you poor bastard, you poor schmuck, they’ve got you.
Here we are with our fabulous GCU, our supreme machine; capable of outgeneraling their entire civilization and taking in Proxima Centauri on a day trip; packed with technology compared to which their citybusters are squibs and their Grays are less than calculators; a vessel casually sublime in its impregnable power and inexhaustible knowledge here we are with our ship and our modules and platforms, satellites and scooters and drones and bugs, sieving their planet for its most precious art, its most sensitive secrets, its finest thoughts and greatest achievements; plundering their civilization more comprehensively than all the invaders in their history put together, giving not a damn for their puny armaments, paying a hundred times more attention to their art and history and philosophy than to their eclipsed science, glancing at their religions and politics the way a doctor would at symptoms and for all that, for all our power and our superiority in scale, science, technology, thought and behaviour, here was this poor sucker, besotted with them when they didn’t even know he existed, spellbound with them, adoring them; and powerless.An immoral victory for the barbarians.
Not that I was in a much better position myself.I may have wanted the exact opposite of Dervley Linter, but I very much doubted I was going to get my way, either.I didn’t want to leave, I didn’t want to keep them safe from us and let them devour themselves; I wanted maximum interference; I wanted to hit the place with a programme Lev Davidovitch would have been proud of.I wanted to see the junta generals fill their pants when they realized that the future is – in Earth terms – bright, bright red.
Naturally the ship thought I was crazy too.Perhaps it imagined Linter and I would cancel each other out somehow, and we’d both be restored to sanity.
So Linter wanted nothing done to the place, and I wanted everything done to it.The ship – along with whatever other Minds were helping it decide what to do – was probably going to come down closer to Linter’s position than mine, but that was the very reason the man couldn’t stay.He’d be a little randomly-set time bomb ticking away in the middle of the uncontaminated experiment that Earth was probably going to become; a parcel of radical contamination ready to Heisenberg the whole deal at any moment.