The State Of The Art (6 page)

The feeling passed. There was nothing to prove this wasn't just a momentary, and - coming so early - understandable aberration. Their history wasn't so far off the mean track, they were going through what a thousand other civilizations had gone through, and no doubt in the childhood of each of those there had been countless occasions when all any decent, well-balanced, reasonable and humanely concerned observer would have wanted to do was scream in despair.

It was ironic that in this so-called Communist capital they were so interested in money; at least a dozen people came up to me in the East and asked me if I wanted to change some. Would this represent a qualitative or quantitative change? I asked (blank looks, mostly). 'Money implies poverty,' I quoted them. Hell, they should engrave that in stone over the hangar door of every GCU.

I stayed for a month, visiting all the tourist haunts, walking and driving and training and busing through the city, sailing on and swimming in the Havel, and riding through Grunewald and Spandau forests.

I left by the Hamburg corridor, at the ship's suggestion. The road went through villages stuck in the fifties. The eighteen fifties, sometimes; chimney sweeps on bikes wore tall black hats and carried their black-caned brushes over their shoulders like huge sooty daisies stolen from a giant's garden. I felt quite self-conscious and rich in my big red Volvo.

I left the car on a track by the side of the Elbe that night. A module sighed out of the darkness, dark on dark, and took me to the ship, which was over the Pacific at the time, tracking a school of sperm whales directly beneath and plundering their great barrel-brains with its effectors while they sang.

I should have known not to tell Li'ndane about Paris and Berlin, but I did. I was floating in the AG space with a few other people after a dip in the ship's pool. I'd actually been talking to my friends, Roghres Shasapt and Tagm Lokri, but Li was there, eavesdropping avidly.

'Ah,' he said, floating over to wag one finger under my nose. 'That's it.'

'That's what?'

'That monument. I see it now. Think about it.'

'The memorial to the Deportation, in Paris, you mean.'

'Cunt. That's what I mean.'

I shook my head. 'Li, I don't think I know what you're talking about.'

'Ah, he's just lusting,' Roghres said. 'He pined when you left last time.'

'Nonsense,' Li said, and flicked a blob of water at Roghres. 'What I'm talking about is this; most memorials are like pricks; cenotaphs; columns. That monument Sma saw is a cunt; it's even in a divide of the river; very pubic. From this, and Sma's overall attitude, it's obvious that Sma is sublimating her sexuality in all this Contact nonsense.'

'Well I never knew that,' I said.

'Basically, what you want, Diziet, is to be fucked by an entire civilization, an entire planet. I suppose this makes you a good little Contact operative, if that's what you want to be -'

'Li, of course, is only here for the different tan,' Tagm interrupted.

'- but I would say,' Li continued, 'that it's better not to sublimate anything. If what you want is a good screw -' (Li used the English word)'- then a good screw is what you ought to have, not a meaningful confrontation with a backwater rockball infested with slavering death-zealots on a terminal power trip.'

'I still say it's you who wants the good screw,' Roghres said.

'Exactly!' Li exclaimed, throwing his arms wide, scattering more water drops, wobbling in the null G. 'But I don't deny it.'

'Just Mr Natural,' Tagm nodded.

'What's wrong with being natural?' demanded Li.

'But I remember just the other day you were saying that the trouble with humans is that they were too natural, not civilized enough,' Tagm said, then turned to me. 'Mind you, that was then; Li can change his colours faster than a GCU going for a refit record.'

'There's natural and natural,' Li said. 'I'm naturally civilized and they're naturally barbarians, therefore I should be as natural as possible and they should do all they can not to be. But this is getting off the subject. What I say is that Sma has a definite psychological problem and I think that as I'm the only person on this machine interested in Freudian analysis, I should be the one to help her.'

'That's unbelievably kind of you,' I told Li.

'Not at all,' Li waved his hand. He must have scattered most of his water drops towards us, because he was gradually floating away from us, towards the far end of the AG hall.

'Freud!' snorted Roghres derisively, a little high on Jumble.

'You heathen,' said Li, eyes narrowed. 'I suppose your heroes are Marx and Lenin.'

'Hell no; I'm an Adam Smith man myself,' muttered Roghres. She started to tumble head over heels in the air, doing slow foetal-spreadeagle exercises.

'Rubbish,' Li spat (literally, but I saw it coming and doged).

'Li, you really are the horniest [*6*] human on this ship,' Tagm told him. 'You're the one who needs the analyst. This obsession with sex, it's just not -'

'I'm obsessed with sex?' Li said, poking himself in the chest with a thumb, then throwing back his head. 'HA!' He laughed. 'Listen;' he arranged himself in what would have passed for a lotus position on Earth, had there been a floor to sit on, and put one hand on his hip while pointing the other vaguely to his right; 'they're the ones obsessed with sex. Do you know how many words there are for “prick” in English? Or “cunt”? Hundreds; hundreds. How many have we got? One; one for each, for [*7*] usage as well as for anatomical designation. Neither of them swear-words. All I do is readily admit I want to put one in the other. Ready, willing and interested. What's wrong with that?'

'Nothing as such,' I told him. 'But there's a point where interest becomes obsession, and I think most people regard obsession as a bad thing because it makes for less variety, less flexibility.'

Li, still floating slowly away from us, nodded fiercely. 'I'll just say one thing; it's an obsession with flexibility and variety that makes this so-called Culture so boring.'

'Li started a Boredom Society while you were away,' Tagm explained, smiling at me. 'Nobody else joined though.'

'It's going very well,' Li confirmed. 'I've changed the title to the Ennui League, by the way. Yes, boredom is an underrated facet of existence in our pseudo-civilization. While at first I thought it might be interesting, in a boring sense, for people to be together when they were extremely bored, I realize now that it is a profoundly moving and deeply average experience to do nothing whatsoever entirely and completely by yourself.'

'You think Earth has a lot to teach us in this respect?' Tagm said, then turned and said to the nearest wall. 'Ship, put the air on medium, would you?'

'Earth is a deeply boring planet,' Li said gravely, as one end of the hall began to waft the air towards us, and the other turned intake. We began to drift in the breeze.

'Earth? Boring?' I said. The water was drying on my skin.

'What is the point of a planet where you can hardly set foot without tripping over somebody killing somebody else, or painting something or making music or pushing back the frontier of science or being tortured or killing themselves or dying in a car crash or hiding from the police or suffering from some absurd disease or -'

We hit the soft, porous intake wall ('Hey, this wall sucks!' Roghres giggled), and the three of us bounced, and passed Li, a little behind us and travelling in the opposite direction, still heading for the wall. Roghres watched him going by with the studied interest of a bar drunk watching a fly on the rim of a glass. 'Far out.'

'Anyway,' I said, as we passed. 'How does all this make it boring? Surely there's so much going on -'

'That it's deeply boring. An excess of boringness does not make a thing interesting except in the driest academic sense. A place is not boring if you have to look really hard for something which is interesting. If there is absolutely nothing interesting about any particular place, then that is a perfectly interesting and quint-essentially un-boring place.' Li hit the wall and bounced. We had slowed, stopped, and reversed, so were coming back down again. Roghres waved at Li as we passed him. 'But,' I said, 'Earth - let me get this right - Earth, where everything's happening, is so full of interesting things that it's boring.' I squinted at Li. 'Is that what you mean?'

'Something like that.'

'You're crazy.'

'You're boring.'

I'd talked to the ship about Linter the day after I saw him in Paris, and a few times subsequently. I don't think I was able to offer much hope that the man would change his mind; the ship used its Depressed voice when we talked about him.

Of course if the ship wanted to it could have made the whole argument academic by just kidnapping Linter. The more I thought about it, the more certain I became that the ship had bugs or microdrones or something trailing the man; at the first hint that he was thinking about staying the Arbitrary would have made sure that it couldn't lose him, even when he went out without his terminal. For all I knew it watched all of us, though it protested that it didn't when I asked it (about Linter the ship was evasive, and there's nothing more slippery in the galaxy than a GCU being cagey, so a straight answer was out of the question. [*8*] But draw your own conclusions.)

Nothing would have been easier, technically, for the ship to drug Linter, or have a drone stun him, and bundle him into a module. I suppose it could even have displaced him; beamed him up like in Star Trek (which the ship thought was a great hoot). [*9*] But I couldn't see it doing anything like that.

I have yet to meet a ship - and I don't think I'd like to meet a ship - that didn't take far more pride in its mental abilities than its physical power, and for the ship to kidnap Linter would be an admission that it hadn't had the wit to out-think the man. No doubt it would make the best possible job of justifying such an act if it did do it, and it would certainly get away with it - no quorum of other Contact Minds would offer it the choice of exile or restructuring - but boy would it lose face. GCUs can be bitchy as hell, and the Arbitrary would be the laughing-stock of the Contact fleet for months, minimum.

'Would you even think about it?'

'I think of everything,' the ship replied tartly. 'But no, I don't think I'd do it, even as a last resort.'

A whole bunch of us had watched King Kong and now we were sitting by the ship's pool, snacking on kazu and sampling some French wines (all ship-grown, but statistically more authentic than the real thing, it assured us ... No, me neither). I'd been thinking about Linter, and asked a remote drone what contingency plans had been made if it came to the worst. [*10*]

'What is the last resort?'

'I don't know; trail him perhaps, watch for a situation where the locals are about to find out he's not one of them - in a hospital, say - then micronuke the place.'

'What?'

'It'd make a great Mystery Explosion story.'

'Be serious.'

'I'm being serious. What's one more meaningless act of violence on that zoo of a planet? It would be appropriate. When in Rome; burn it.'

'You're not really being serious, are you?'

'Sma! Of course not! Are you on something, or what? Good grief, damn the morality of the thing: it would just be so inelegant. What do you take me for? Really!' The drone left.

I dangled my feet in the pool. The ship was playing us thirties jazz, in untidied-up form; crackles and hisses left in. It had gone on to that and Gregorian chants after a period - when I'd been to Berlin - of trying to make everybody listen to Stockhausen. I wasn't sorry I'd missed that stage in the ship's constantly altering musical taste.

Also while I'd been away, the ship had sent a request on a postcard to the BBC's World Service, asking for 'Mr David Bowie's “Space Oddity” for the good ship Arbitrary and all who sail in her.' (This from a machine that could have swamped Earth's entire electro-magnetic spectrum with whatever the hell it wanted from somewhere beyond Betelgeuse.) It didn't get the request played. The ship thought this was hilarious.

'Here's Dizzy; she'll know.'

I turned round to see Roghres and Djibard Alsahil approaching. They sat down at my side. Djibard had been friendly with Linter in the year between leaving the Bad For Business and finding Earth.

'Hello,' I said. 'Know what?'

'What's happened to Dervley Linter?' Roghres said, trailing one hand in the pool. 'Djib's just back from Tokyo and wanted to see him, but the ship's being awkward; won't say where he is.'

I looked at Djibard, who was sitting cross-legged, looking like a little gnome. She was smiling broadly; she looked stoned.

'What makes you think I know anything?' I said to Roghres.

'I heard a rumour you'd seen him in Paris.'

'Hmm. Well, yes, I did.' I watched the pretty light patterns the ship was making on the far wall; they were slowly appearing brighter as the main lights went rosy with the ship's evening (which it had gradually brought down to a 24-hour cycle).

'So why hasn't he come back to the ship?' Roghres said. 'He went to Paris right at the start. How come he's still there? Isn't going native is he?'

'I only saw him for a day; less, in fact. I wouldn't like to comment on his mental state ... he seemed happy enough.'

'Don't answer then,' Djibard said, a little slurred.

I looked at Djibard for a moment; she was still smiling. I turned back to Roghres. 'Why not contact him yourselves?'

'Tried that,' Roghres said. She nodded at the other woman. 'Djibard tried on- and off-planet. No reply.'

Djibard's eyes were closed now. I looked at Roghres. 'Then he probably doesn't want to talk.'

'You know,' Djibard said, eyes still closed, 'I think it's because we don't mature the way they do. I mean the females have periods, and the men have this machismo thing because they've got to do all the things they're supposed to do and so we don't; I mean we don't have things they do ... what I mean is that there are all sorts of things that do things to them, and we don't have that. Them. We don't have them and so we don't get ground down the way they do. I think that's the secret. Pressures and knocks and disappointments. I think that's what somebody said to me. But I mean it's so unfair ... but I don't know who for yet; I haven't worked that out, you know?'