‘But in the end, it’s still just cleaning a table.’
‘And therefore does not really signify on the cosmic scale of events?’ the man suggested.
He smiled in response to the man’s grin, ‘Well, yes.’
‘But then, what does signify? My other work? Is that really important, either? I could try composing wonderful musical works, or day-long entertainment epics, but what would that do? Give people pleasure? My wiping this table gives me pleasure. And people come to a clean table, which gives them pleasure. And anyway,’ the man laughed, ‘people die; stars die; universes die. What is any achievement, however great it was, once time itself is dead? Of course, if all I did was wipe tables, then of course it would seem a mean and despicable waste of my huge intellectual potential. But because I choose to do it, it gives me pleasure. And,’ the man said with a smile, ‘it’s a good way of meeting people. So; where are you from, anyway?’
He talked to people all the time; in bars and cafes, mostly. The GSV’s accommodation seemed to be divided into various different types of lay-out; valleys (or ziggurats, if you wanted to look at them like that) seemed to be the most common, though there were different configurations.
He ate when he was hungry and drank when he was thirsty, every time trying a different dish or drink from the stunningly complicated menus, and when he wanted to sleep – as the whole vessel gradually cycled into a red-tinged dusk, the ceiling light-bars dimming – he just asked a drone, and was directed to the nearest unoccupied room. The rooms were all roughly the same size, and yet all slightly different; some were very plain, some were highly decorated. The basics were always there; bed – sometimes a real, physical bed, sometimes one of their weird field-beds – somewhere to wash and defaecate, cupboards, places for personal effects, a fake window, a holo screen of some sort, and a link up to the rest of the communications net, both aboard and off-ship. The first night away, he linked into one of their direct-link sensory entertainments, lying on the bed with some sort of device activated under the pillow.
He did not actually sleep that night; instead he was a bold pirate prince who’d renounced his nobility to lead a brave crew against the slaver ships of a terrible empire amongst the spice and treasure isles; their quick little ships darted amongst the lumbering galleons, picking away the rigging with chain shot. They came ashore on moonless nights, attacking the great prison castles, releasing joyous captives; he personally fought the wicked governor’s chief torturer, sword against sword; the man finally fell from a high tower. An alliance with a beautiful lady pirate begot a more personal liaison, and a daring rescue from a mountain monastery when she was captured…
He pulled away from it, after what had been weeks of compressed time. He knew (somewhere at the back of his mind) even as it happened that none of it was real, but that seemed like the least important property of the adventure. When he came out of it – surprised to discover that he had not actually ejaculated during some of the profoundly convincing erotic episodes – he discovered that only a night had passed, and it was morning, and he had, somehow, shared the strange story with others; it had been a game, apparently. People had left messages for him to get in touch, they had enjoyed playing the game with him so much. He felt oddly ashamed, and did not reply.
The rooms he slept in always contained places to sit; field extensions, mouldable wall units, real couches, and – sometimes – ordinary chairs. Whenever the rooms held chairs, he moved them outside, into the corridor or onto the terrace.
It was all he could do to keep the memories at bay.
‘Na,’ the woman said in the Mainbay. ‘It doesn’t really work that way.’ They stood on a half-constructed starship, on what would eventually be the middle of the engines, watching a huge field-unit swing through the air, out of the engineering space behind the bay proper and up towards the skeletal body of the General Contact Unit. Little lifter tugs manoeuvred the field unit down towards them.
‘You mean it makes no difference?’
‘Not much,’ the woman said. She pressed on a little studded lanyard she held in one hand, spoke as though to her shoulder. ‘I’ll take it.’ The field-unit put them in shadow as it hovered above them. Just another solid slab, as far as he could see. It was red; a different colour from the black slickness of the starboard Main Engine Block Lower under their feet. She manipulated the lanyard, guiding the huge red block down; two other people standing twenty metres away watched the far end of the unit.
‘The trouble is,’ the woman said, watching the vast red building-brick come slowly down, ‘that even when people do get sick and die young, they’re always surprised when they get sick. How many healthy people do you think actually say to themselves, “Hey, I’m healthy today!”, unless they’ve just had a serious illness?’ She shrugged, pressed the lanyard again as the field-unit lowered to a couple of centimetres off the engine surface. ‘Stop,’ she said quietly. ‘Inertia down five. Check.’ A line of light flashed on the surface of the engine block. She put one hand on the block, and pressed it again. It moved. ‘Down dead slow,’ she said. She pressed the block into place. ‘Sorzh; all right?’ she asked. He didn’t hear the reply, but the woman obviously did.
‘Okay; positioned; all clear.’ She looked up as the lifter tugs sailed back towards the engineering space, then back at him. ‘All that’s happened is that reality has caught up with the way people always did behave anyway. So, no, you don’t feel any wonderful release from debilitating illnesses.’ She scratched one ear. ‘Except maybe when you think about it.’ She grinned. ‘I guess in school, when you’re seeing how people used to live… how aliens still do live… then it hits home, and I suppose you never really lose that entirely, but you don’t spend much time thinking about it.’
They walked across the black expanse of thoroughly featureless material (‘Ah,’ the woman had said, when he’d mentioned this, ‘you take a look at it under a microscope; it’s beautiful! What did you expect, anyway? Cranks? Gears? Tanks full of chemicals?’)
‘Can’t machines build these faster?’ he asked the woman, looking around the starship shell.
‘Why, of course!’ she laughed.
‘Then why do you do it?’
‘It’s fun. You see one of these big mothers sail out those doors for the first time, heading for deep space, three hundred people on board, everything working, the Mind quite happy, and you think; I helped build that. The fact a machine could have done it faster doesn’t alter the fact that it was you who actually did it.’
‘Hmm,’ he said.
(Learn woodwork; metalwork; they will not make you a carpenter or a blacksmith any more than mastering writing will make you a clerk.)
‘Well, you may “hmm” as you wish,’ the woman said, approaching a translucent hologram of the half-completed ship, where a few other construction workers were standing, pointing inside the model and talking. ‘But have you ever been gliding, or swum underwater?’
‘Yes,’ he agreed.
The woman shrugged. ‘Yet birds fly better than we do, and fish swim better. Do we stop gliding or swimming because of this?’
He smiled. ‘I suppose not.’
‘You suppose correctly,’ the woman said. ‘And why?’ she looked at him, grinning. ‘Because it’s fun.’ She looked at the holo model of the ship to one side. One of the other workers called to her, pointing at something in the model. She looked at him. ‘Excuse me, will you?’
He nodded, as he backed off. ‘Build well.’
‘Thank you. I trust we shall.’
‘Oh,’ he asked. ‘What’s this ship to be called?’
‘Its Mind wishes it to be called the Sweet and Full of Grace,’ the woman laughed. Then she was deep in discussion with the others.
He watched their many sports; tried a few. Most of them he just didn’t understand. He swam quite a lot; they seemed to like pools and water complexes. Mostly they swam naked, which he found a little embarrassing. Later he discovered there were whole sections – villages? areas? districts? he wasn’t sure how to think of them – where people never wore clothes, just body ornaments. He was surprised how quickly he got used to this behaviour, but never fully joined in.
It took him a while to realise that all the drones he saw – even more various in their design than humans were in their physiology – didn’t all belong to the ship. Hardly any did, in fact; they had their own artificial brains (he still tended to think of them as computers). They seemed to have their own personalities, too, though he remained sceptical.