keeping you waiting so long.Included herewith - at
last! - is the information you asked me for all that
time ago.My personal well-being, after which you
so kindly enquired, is all I could hope for.As you
will probably have been told, and doubtless
observed from my location (or rather lack of it)
above, I am no longer in Contact ordinaire, and my position in Special Circumstances is such that I
occasionally have to leave my present address for
considerable periods of time, often with only a few
hours notice during which to attend personally to
any outstanding business.Apart from these sporadic
jaunts, my life is one of lazy luxury on a
sophisticated stage three-four (uncontacted) where
I enjoy all the benefits of an interestingly, if not
exotically, foreign planet sufficiently developed to
possess a reasonably civilized demeanour without
suffering overmuch the global sameness which so
often accompanies such progress.
A pleasant life, then, and when I am called away it
usually feels more like a holiday than an
unwelcome interruption.
In fact, the only grit in the eye is a rather self-
important Offensive-model drone whose
exaggerated concern for my physical safety, if not
my peace of mind, frequently becomes more
exasperating than it is comforting (my theory is that
SC finds drones whose robust pugnacity has led
them to some overly-violent act in the past and then
tells these pathological devices to guard their
human Special Circumstancer successfully, or be
componented.But that is by the bye).
Anyway, what with the remoteness of my
habitation and the fact I've been off-planet for the
past hundred days or so (with drone, of course),
and the delay while I consulted my notes and tried
to dig from my memory what scraps of
conversation and 'atmosphere' I could, and then
fretting over the best way to present the resulting
data well, all this has taken rather a long time, and
to be honest the sedate mode of my present life has
not helped me to be as brisk as I would have liked
in the execution of this task.
I am glad to hear that you are only one of many
scholars specializing in Earth; I always did think
the place well worth studying, and perhaps even
learning from.Thankfully, then, you will have all
the information that could possibly qualify as
background, and I apologize in advance if anything
I include doubles on this; but while I have stuck as
strictly as memory (machine and human) will
allow to what actually happened those hundred and
fifteen years ago, I have nevertheless tried to make
the presentation of the following events and
impressions as general and self-contained as
possible, believing this to be the best way of
attempting to conform with your request to
describe what it really felt like to be there at the
time.I trust this combination of fact and sensation
does not unduly affect the utility of either when you
come to process the result in the course of your
studies, but in the event that it does, and also if you
have any other questions about Earth at that time
which you think I might be able to help answer,
please do not hesitate to get in touch with me; I am
only too happy to shed what light I can on a place
that affected everyone who was there both
profoundly and - in the main, I suspect -
permanently.
What follows, then, is as much as I and my bank
can remember.The conversations I have had to
reconstruct, as a rule; I did not then practise full-
record, it being a minor piece of the ship's (frankly
tediously) eccentric etiquette not to 'over-observe'
(its words) life on board.Some dialogue, mostly
on-planet, was recorded, however, and I have
placed these sections between the following two
symbols: .They have undergone a degree of tidying
up - removing the usual 'umms' and 'ahs' and so on
- but the original recordings are available to you
from my bank without further authorization, should
you feel you require them.For the sake of brevity I
have reduced all Full Names to one or two parts,
and done my best to anglicize them.All the times
and dates are Earth-relative/local (Christian
calendar).
Incidentally, I was most pleased to receive your
news about the Arbitrary and its escapades over
these last few decades; I confess to having been
rather out of touch recently, and became quite
nostalgic on hearing again of that misfit machine.
But back to Earth, and back all those years ago,
and by the way my English has suffered over the
past century of neglect; the drone is translating all
this, and any mistakes are bound to be its.
Diziet Sma
2: Stranger Here Myself
2.1: Well I Was In The Neighborhood
By the spring of the year 1977 AD, the General
Contact Unit Arbitrary had been stationed above
the planet Earth for the best part of six months.The