back on-planet, to Berlin, when the ship wanted to
talk to me again.Things were going on as usual; the
Arbitrary spent its time making detailed maps of
everything within sight and without, dodging
American and Soviet satellites and manufacturing
and then sending down to the planet hundreds upon
thousands of bugs to watch printing works and
magazine stalls and libraries, to scan museums,
workshops, studios and shops, to look into
windows, gardens and forests, and to track buses,
trains, cars, seaships and planes.Meanwhile its
effectors, and those on its main satellites, probed
every computer, monitored every landline, tapped
every microwave link, and listened to every radio
transmission on Earth.
All Contact craft are natural raiders.They're made
to love to be busy, to enjoy sticking their big noses
into other people's business, and the Arbitrary, for all its eccentricities, was no different.I doubt if it
was, or is, ever happier than when doing that
vacuum-cleaner act above a sophisticated
planet.By the time we were ready to leave the ship
would have contained in its memory - and would
have onward-transmitted to other vessels - every
bit of data ever stored in the history of the planet
that hadn't been subsequently obliterated.Every 1
and 0, every letter, every pixel, every sound, every
subtlety of line and texture ever fashioned.It would
know where every mineral deposit was buried,
where all the treasure as yet undiscovered lay,
where every sunken ship was, where every secret
grave had been dug; and it would know the secrets
of the Pentagon, the Kremlin, the Vatican
On Earth, of course, they were quite oblivious to
the fact they had a million tonnes of highly
inquisitive and outrageously powerful alien
spaceship orbiting around them, and - sure enough
- the locals were doing all the things they normally did; murdering and starving and dying and maiming
and torturing and lying and so on.Pretty much
business as usual in fact, and it bothered the hell
out of me, but I was still hoping we'd decide to
interfere and stop most of that shit.It was about this
time two Boeing 747s collided on the ground in a
Spanish island colony.
I was reading Lear for the second time, sitting
underneath a full-size palm tree.The ship had found
the tree in the Dominican Republic, marked to be
bulldozed to make way for a new hotel.Thinking it
might be nice to have some plants about the place,
the Arbitrary dug the palm up one night and
brought it aboard, complete with its root system
and several tens of cubic metres of sandy soil, and
planted it in the centre of our accommodation
section.This required quite a lot of rearranging,
and a few people who'd happened to be asleep
while all this was going on woke to be confronted
with a twenty-metre high tree when they opened
their cabin doors, rising up in what had become a
great central well in the acc section.Contact people
are used to putting up with this sort of thing from
their ships, however, and so everybody took it in
their stride.Anyway, on any sensible calibrated
scale of GCU eccentricity, such a harmless, even
benign prank would scarcely register.
I was sitting within sight of the door to Li'ndane's
cabin.He came out, chatting to Tel Ghemada.Li
was flicking Brazil nuts into the air and running
forward or bending over backwards to catch them
with his mouth, while trying to carry on his side of
the conversation.Tel was amused.Li flicked one
nut particularly far and had to dive and twist under
its trajectory, crashing into the floor and sliding
into the stool I had my feet up on (and yes, I do
always loaf a lot onboard ships; no idea why).Li
rolled over on his back, making a show of looking
around him for the Brazil nut.He looked
mystified.Tel shook her head, smiling, then waved
goodbye.She was one of the unfortunates trying to
get some sort of human grasp of Earth's economics,
and deserved all the light relief she could get.I
recall that all through that year you could tell the
economists by their distraught look and slightly
glazed-looking eyes.Li well, Li was just a wierdo,
and forever conducting a running battle with the
finer sensibilities of the ship.
'Thank you, Li,' I said, putting my feet back on the
upended stool.Li lay breathing heavily on the floor
and looking up at me, then his lips parted in a grin
to reveal the nut caught between his teeth.He
swallowed, stood, pulled his pants half-way down,
and proceeded to relieve himself against the trunk
of the tree.
'Good for the growth,' he said when he saw me
frowning at him.'
'Won't be any good for your growth if the ship
catches you and sends a knife missile to sort you
out.'
'I can see what Mr 'ndane is doing and I wasn't
going to dignify his actions with as much as a