‘Why didn’t you?’ We stopped at another intersection.All the people charged around us, hurrying through the smells of burning petrol and cooking and rotten food.I smelled gas, and sometimes steam wrapped itself around us, damp and fragrant.
‘Why didn’t I?’ Linter mused, watching the DON’T WALK sign. ‘I didn’t think it would do any good.And I was afraid the ship might find a way of keeping me on board.Do you think I was foolish?’
I looked at him, while the steam curled round us and the sign changed to WALK, but I didn’t say anything.An old guy came up to us on the far sidewalk and Linter gave him a quarter.
‘But I’ll be fine by myself anyway.’ We turned down Broadway, heading towards Madison Square, past shops and offices, theatres and hotels, bars and restaurants and apartment blocks.Linter put his arm round my waist, squeezed me. ‘Come on, Dizzy, you aren’t saying much.’
‘No, I’m not, am I?’
‘I guess you still think I’m being stupid.’
‘No more than the locals.’
He smiled. ‘They’re really good people.What you don’t understand is you have to translate behaviour as well as language.Once you do realize that you’ll come to love these people the way I do.Sometimes I think they’ve come to terms with their technology better than we have, you know that?’
‘No.’ No I didn’t know that, here in mincerville, meat-grinder city.Come to terms with it; yeah sure turn off the aiming computer, Luke; play the five tones; close your eyes and concentrate together, that’s the way nobody here but us Clears hand me down that orgone box
‘I’m not getting through to you, Dizzy, am I?You’re all closed up, not really here.You’re half-way out the system already, aren’t you?’
‘I’m just tired,’ I told him. ‘Keep talking.’ I felt like a helpless, twitching, pink-eyed rat caught in a maze in some shining alien laboratory; vast and glittering with some lethal, inhuman purpose.
‘They do so well, considering.I know there’s a lot of horrible things going on, but it only seems so terrible because we pay so much attention to it.The vast majority of good stuff isn’t newsworthy; we don’t notice it.We don’t see what a good time most of these people are having.I’ve met a lot of quite happy people, you know; I have friends.I met them through my work.’
‘You work?’ I was actually interested.
‘Ha ha.I thought the ship might not have told you that.Yes, I’ve had a job for the last couple of months; document translator for a big firm of lawyers.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘What was I saying?Oh yeah; lots of people have a quite acceptable life; they’re pretty comfortable in fact.People can have neat apartments, cars, holidays and people can have children. That’s a good thing, you know; you see a lot more children on a planet like this.I like children.Don’t you?’
‘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.