The State Of The Art (4 page)

But Linter's car was there in the courtyard, parked beside the Volvo. His auto was a Rolls Royce Silver Cloud; the ship believed in indulging us. Anyway, it claimed that making a show was better cover than trying to stay inconspicuous; Western capitalism in particular allowed the rich just about the right amount of behavioural leeway to account for the oddities our alienness might produce.

I went up the steps and pressed the bell. I waited for a short while, hearing noises within the flat. A small notice on the far side of the courtyard caught my attention, and brought a sour smile to my face.

Linter appeared, unsmiling, at the door; he held it open for me, bowing a little.

'Ms Sma. The ship told me you'd be coming.'

'Hello.' I entered.

The apartment was much larger than I'd anticipated. It smelled of leather and new wood; it was light and airy and well decorated and full of books and records, tapes and magazines, paintings and objets d'art, and it didn't look one little bit like the place I'd had in Kensington. It felt lived in.

Linter waved me towards a black leather chair at one end of a Persian carpet covering a teak floor and went over to a drinks cabinet, turning his back to me. 'Do you drink?'

'Whisky,' I said, in English. 'With or without the “e”.' I didn't sit down, but wandered around the room, looking.

'I have Johnny Walker Black Label.'

'Fine.'

I watched him clamp one hand round the square bottle and pour. Dervley Linter was taller than me, and quite muscular. To an experienced eye there was something not quite right - in Earth human terms - about the set of his shoulders. He leaned over the bottles and glasses like a threat, as though he wanted to bully the drink from one to the other.

'Anything in it?'

'No thanks.'

He handed me the glass, bent to a small fridge, extracted a bottle and poured himself a Budweiser (the real stuff, from Czechoslovakia). Finally, this little ceremony over, he sat down. Bahaus chair, and it looked original.

His face was calm, serious. Each feature seemed to demand separate attention; the large, mobile mouth, the flared nose, the bright but deep-set eyes, the stage-villain brows and surprisingly lined forehead. I tried to recall what he'd looked like before, but could only remember vaguely, so it was impossible to tell how much of the way he looked now had been carried over from what would be classed as his 'normal' appearance. He rolled the beer glass around in his large hands.

'The ship seems to think we should talk,' he said. He drank about half the beer in one gulp and placed the glass on a small table made of polished granite. I adjusted my brooch. 'You don't think we should though, no?'

He spread his hands wide, then folded them over his chest. He was dressed in two pieces of an expensive looking black suit; trousers and waistcoat. 'I think it might be pointless.'

'Well ... I don't know ... does there have to be a point to everything? I thought ... the ship suggested we might have a talk, that's -'

'Did it?'

'- all. Yes.' I coughed. 'I don't ... it didn't tell me what's going on.'

Linter looked steadily at me, then down at his feet. Black brogues. I looked around the room as I sipped my whisky, looking for signs of female habitation, or for anything that might indicate there were two people living here. I couldn't tell. The room was crowded with stuff; prints and oils on the walls, most of the former either Breughels or Lowrys; Tiffany lampshades, a Bang and Olafsen Hifi unit, several antique clocks, what looked like a dozen or so Dresden figurines, a Chinese cabinet of black lacquer, a large four-fold screen with peacocks sewn onto it, the myriad feathers like displayed eyes ...

'What did it tell you?' Linter asked.

I shrugged. 'What I said. It said it wanted me to have a talk with you.'

He smiled in an unimpressed sort of way as though the whole conversation was hardly worth the effort, then looked away, through the window. He didn't seem to be going to say anything. A flash of colour caught my eye, and I looked over at a large television, one of those with small doors that close over the screen and make it look like a cabinet when it isn't in use. The doors weren't fully shut, and it was switched on behind them.

'Do you want -?' Linter said.

'No, it's -' I began, but he rose out of the seat, gripping its elegant arms, went to the set and spread its doors open with a dramatic gesture before resuming his seat.

I didn't want to sit and watch television, but the sound was down so it wasn't especially intrusive. 'The control unit's on the table,' Linter said, pointing.

'I wish you - somebody - wish you'd tell me what's going on.'

He looked at me as though this was an obvious lie rather than a genuine plea, and glanced over at the TV. It must have been on one of the ship's own channels, because it was changing all the time, showing different shows and programmes from a variety of countries, using various transmission formats, and waiting for a channel to be selected. A group in bright pink suits danced mechanically to an unheard song. They were replaced with a picture of the Ekofisk platform, spouting a dirty brown fountain of oil and mud. Then the screen changed again, to show the crowded cabin scene from A Night At The Opera.

'So you don't know anything?' Linter lit a Sobranie. This, like the ship's 'Hmm', had to be for effect (unless he liked the taste, which has never been a convincing line). He didn't offer me one.

'No, no, no I don't. Look ... I can see the ship wanted me here for more than this talk ... but don't you play games too. That crazy thing sent me down here in that Volvo; the whole way. I half expected it not to have baffled it either; I was waiting for a pair of Mirages to come to intercept. I've got a long drive to Berlin as well, you know? So ... just tell me, or tell me to go, all right?'

He drew on the cigarette, studying me through the smoke. He crossed his legs and brushed some imaginary fluff off the trouser cuffs and stared at his shoes. 'I've told the ship that when it leaves, I'm staying here on Earth. Regardless of what else might happen.' He shrugged. 'Whether we contact or not.' He looked at me, challenging.

'Any ... particular reason?' I tried to sound unfazed. I still thought it must be a woman.

'Yes. I like the place.' He made a noise between a snort and a laugh. 'I feel alive for a change. I want to stay. I'm going to. I'm going to live here.'

'You want to die here?'

He smiled, looked away from me, then back. 'Yes.' Quite positively. This shut me up for a moment.

I felt uncomfortable. I got up and walked round the room, looking at the bookshelves. He seemed to have read about the same amount as me. I wondered if he'd crammed it all, or read any of it at normal speed: Dostoevsky, Borges, Greene, Swift, Lucretius, Kafka, Austin, Grass, Bellow, Joyce, Confucius, Scott, Mailer, Camus, Hemingway, Dante. 'You probably will die here, then,' I said lightly. 'I suspect the ship wants to observe, not contact. Of course -'

'That'll suit me. Fine.'

'Hmm. Well, it isn't ... official yet, but I ... that's the way it'll go, I suspect.' I turned away from the books. 'It does? You really want to die here? Are you serious? How -'

He was sitting forward in the chair, combing his black hair with one hand, pushing the long, ringed fingers through his curls. A silver stud decorated the lobe of his left ear.

'Fine,' he repeated. 'It'll suit me perfectly. We'll ruin this place if we interfere.'

'They'll ruin it if we don't.'

'Don't be trite, Sma.' He stubbed the cigarette out hard, breaking it in half, mostly unsmoked.

'And if they blow the place up?'

'Mmm.'

'Well?'

'Well what?' he demanded.

A siren sounded on the St Germain, dopplering. 'Might be what they're heading for. Want to see them moth themselves in front of their own -'

'Ah, bullshit.' His face crinkled with annoyance.

'Bullshit yourself,' I told him. 'Even the ship's worried. The only reason they haven't made a final decision yet is because they know how bad it'll look short term if they do.'

'Sma, I don't care. I don't want to leave. I don't want to have any more to do with the ship or the Culture or anything connected with it.'

'You must be crazy. As crazy as they are. They'll kill you; you'll get crushed under a truck or mangled in a plane crash or ... burned up in some fire or something ... '

'So I take my chances.'

'Well ... what about what they'd call the “security” aspect? What if you're only injured and they take you to hospital? You'll never get out again; they'll take one look at your guts or your blood and they'll know you're alien. You'll have the military all over you. They'll dissect you.'

'Not very likely. But if it happens, it happens.'

I sat down again. I was reacting just the way the ship had known I would. I thought Linter was mad just the way the Arbitrary did, and it was using me to try and talk some sense into him. Doubtless the ship had already tried, but equally obviously the nature of Linter's decision was such that the Arbitrary was the last thing that was going to have any influence. Technologically and morally the ship represented the most finely articulated statement the Culture was capable of producing, and that very sophistication had the beast hamstrung, here.

I have to admit I felt a degree of admiration for Linter's stand, even though I still thought he was being stupid. There might or might not be a local involved, but I was already getting the impression it was more complicated - and more difficult to handle - than that. Maybe he had fallen in love, but not with anything as simple as a person. Maybe he'd fallen in love with Earth itself; the whole fucking planet. So much for Contact screening; they were supposed to keep people out who might fall like that. If that was what had happened then the ship had problems indeed. Falling in love with somebody, they say, is a little like getting a tune into your head and not being able to stop whistling it ... except much more so, and - from what I'd heard - going native the way I suspected Linter might be was as far beyond loving another person as that was beyond getting a tune stuck in your head.

I felt suddenly angry, at Linter and the ship.

'I think you're taking a very selfish and stupid risk that's not just bad for you, and bad for the ... for us; for the Culture, but also bad for these people. If you do get caught, if you're discovered ... they are going to get paranoid, and they might feel threatened and hostile in any contact they are involved, in or ex. You could send them ... make them crazy. Insane.'

'You said they were that already.'

'And you do stand a less chance of living your full term. Even if you don't; so you live for centuries. How d'you explain that?'

'They may have anti-geriatrics themselves by that time. Besides, I can always move around.'

'They won't have anti-geriatrics for fifty years or more; centuries if they relapse, even without a Holocaust. Yeah; so move around, make yourself a fugitive, stay alien, stay apart. You'll be as cut off from them as you will be from us. Ah hell, you always will be anyway.' I was talking loudly by now. I waved one arm at the bookshelves. 'Sure read the books and see the films and go to concerts and theatre and opera and all that shit; you can't become them. You'll still have Culture eyes, Culture brain; you can't just ... can't deny all that, pretend it never happened.' I stamped one foot on the floor. 'God dammit, Linter, you're just being ungrateful!'

'Listen, Sma,' he said, rising out of the seat, grabbing his beer and stalking about the room, gazing out of the windows. 'Neither of us owes the Culture anything. You know that ... Owing and being obliged and having duties and responsibilities and everything like that ... that's what these people have to worry about.' He turned round to look at me. 'But not me, not us. You do what you want to do, the ship does what it wants to do. I do what I want to do. All's well. Let's just leave each other alone, yes?' He looked back at the small courtyard, finishing his beer.

'You want to be like them, but you don't want to have their responsibilities.'

'I didn't say I wanted to be like them. To ... to whatever extent I do, I want to have the same sort of responsibilities, and that doesn't include worrying about what a Culture starship thinks. That isn't something any of them normally tend to worry about.'

'What if Contact surprises us both, and does come in?'

'I doubt that.'

'Me too, very much; that's why I think it might happen.'

'I don't think so. Though it is we who need them, not the other way round.' Linter turned and stared at me, but I wasn't going to start arguing on a second front now. 'But,' he said after a pause, 'the Culture can do without me.' He inspected his drained glass. 'It's going to have to.'

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.