ship, of the Escarpment class, middle series, had
arrived during the previous November after
clipping the edge of the planet's expanding electro-
magnetic emission shell while on what it claimed
was a random search.How random the search
pattern was I don't know; the ship might well have
had some information it wasn't telling us about,
some scrap of rumour half remembered from
somebody's long-discredited archives,
multitudinously translated and re-transmitted,
vague and uncertain after all that time and
movement and change; just a mention that there
was an intelligent human-ish species there, or at
least the beginnings of one, or the possibility of
one You could ask the ship itself about this easily
enough, but getting an answer might be another
matter (you know what GCUs are like).
Anyway, there we were over an almost classic
sophisticated stage three perfect enough to have
come right out of the book, from a footnote if not a
main chapter.I think everybody, including the ship,
was delighted.We all knew the chances of
stumbling across something like Earth were
remote, even looking in the most likely places
(which we weren't, officially), yet all we had to do
was switch on the nearest screen or our own
terminals and see it hanging there, in real space,
less than a microsecond away, shining blue and
white (or black velvet scattered with light motes),
its wide, innocent face ever changing.I remember
staring at it for hours at a time on occasion,
watching the weather patterns' slow swirl if we
were stationary relative to it, or gazing at its
rolling curve of water, cloud and land mass if we
were moving.It looked at once serene and warm,
implacable and vulnerable.The contradictory
nature of these impressions worried me for reasons
I could not fully articulate, and contributed to a
vague feeling of apprehension I already had that
somehow the place was a little too close to some
perfection, slightly too textbookish for its own
good.
It needed thinking about, of course.Even while the
Arbitrary was still turning and decelerating, and
then running through the old radio waves on its
way to their source, it was both pondering itself
and signalling the General Systems Vehicle Bad
For Business , which was tramping a thousand
years core-ward, and which we had left after a rest
and refit only a year before.What else the Bad
might have contacted to help it mull over the
problem is probably on record somewhere, but I
haven't considered it important enough to search
out.While the Arbitrary described graceful power-
orbits around Earth and the great Minds were
considering whether to contact or not, most of us in
the Arbitrary were in a frenzy of preparation.
For the first few months of its stay the ship acted
like a gigantic sponge, soaking up every scrap,
every bit of information it could find anywhere on
the planet, scouring tape and card and file and disc
and fiche and film and tablet and page and scroll,
recording and filming and photographing,
measuring and charting and mapping, sorting and
collating and analyzing.
A fraction of this avalanche of data (it felt like a
lot but it was actually piffiingly small, the ship
assured us) was stuffed into the heads of those of
us sufficiently close in physique to pass for human
on Earth, after a little alteration (I got a couple of
extra toes, a joint removed from each finger and a
rather generalized ear, nose and cheekbone
job.The ship insisted on teaching me to walk
differently as well), and so by the start of '77 I was
fluent in German and English and probably knew
more about the history and current affairs of the
place than the vast majority of its inhabitants.
I knew Dervley Linter moderately well, but then
one knows everybody on a ship of only three
hundred people.He had been on the Bad for
Business at the same time as I, but we had only met after we both joined the Arbitrary .Both of us had been in Contact for about half the standard stretch,
so neither of us were exactly novices.This, to me,
makes his subsequent course of action doubly
mystifying.
I was based in London for January and February,
spending the time tramping through museums
(viewing exhibits the ship already had perfect 4D
holos of, and not seeing the crated artefacts there
wasn't room to show which were stored in
basements or somewhere else entirely, which the
ship also had perfect holos of), going to movies
(which the ship of course had copies of compiled
from the very best prints), and - more relevantly,
perhaps - attending concerts, plays, sports events
and every sort and type of gathering and meeting
the ship could discover.I spent quite a lot of time
just walking around and looking, getting people
talking.All very dutiful, but not always as easy or