‘ 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 snow-flakes 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.
Meanwhile, dozens of drones and slaved trays had made their way out of the elevator shaft and approached the tables, bringing food.