then guided me through the streets to Linter's
place.Even so it was a slightly traumatic
experience because the whole city seemed snarled
up with some cycle race, so when I eventually
arrived in the courtyard just off the Boulevard St
Germain, where Linter had an apartment, I was in
no mood to find that he wasn't there.
'Well where the hell is he?' I demanded, standing on the balcony outside the apartment, hands on
hips, glaring at the locked door.It was a sunny day,
getting hot.
'I don't know,' the ship said through the brooch.
I looked down at the thing, for all the good that did.
' What ?'
'Dervley has taken to leaving his terminal in his
apartment when he goes out.'
'He -' I stopped there, took a few deep breaths, and
sat down on the steps.I switched my terminal off.
Something was going on.Linter was still here in
Paris, despite the fact that this was where he'd
been sent originally; his stay here shouldn't have
been any longer than mine in London.Nobody on
the ship had seen him since we'd first arrived; it
looked like he hadn't been back to the ship at
all.All the rest of us had.Why was he staying on
here?And what was he thinking of, going out
without taking his terminal?It was the act of a
madman; what if something happened to him?What
if he got knocked down in the street? (This seemed
quite likely, judging from the standard of Parisian
driving I'd encountered.) Or beaten up in a fight?
And why was the ship treating all this so matter-of-
factly?Going out without your terminal was
acceptable enough on some cosy Orbital, and
positively commonplace in a Rock or onboard
ship, but here ? Like taking a stroll through a game park without a gun and just because the natives did
it all the time didn't make it any less crazy.
I was quite certain now there was much more to
this little jaunt to Paris than the ship had led me to
believe.I tried to get some more information out of
the beast, but it stuck to its ignorant act and so I
gave up and left the car in the courtyard while I
went for a walk.
I walked down the St Germain until I came to the
St Michel, then headed for the Seine.The weather
was bright and warm, the shops busy, the people as
cosmopolitan as they were in London, if a little
more stylishly dressed, on average.I think I was
disappointed at first; the place wasn't that
different.You saw the same products, the same
signs; Mercedes-Benz, Westing-house, American
Express, De Beers, and so on but gradually a more
animated flavour of the city came through.A little
more of Miller's Paris (I'd zipped through the
Tropics the previous evening, as well as crossing them that morning), even if it was a little tamed
with the passing of the years.
It was a different mix, another blend of the same
ingredients; the traditional, the commercial, the
nationalist I rather liked the language.I could just
about make myself understood, at a fairly low
level (my accent was formidable , the ship had
assured me), and could more or less read all the
signs and advertisements but spoken at the standard
rate I couldn't make out more than one word in
ten.So the language in the mouths of those
Parisiens was like music, one unbroken flow of
sound.
On the other hand, the populace seemed very
reluctant to use any other language save their own
even when they were technically able to, and if
anything there seemed to be even fewer people in
Paris willing and able to speak English than there
were Londoners likewise equipped to tackle
French.Post-Imperial snobbishness, perhaps.
In the shadow of Notre Dame I stood, thinking hard
as I looked at that dull froth of brown stone which
is the façade (I didn't go in; I was fed up with
cathedrals, and by that time even my interest in
castles was flagging).The ship wanted me to talk
with Linter, for reasons I couldn't understand and it
wasn't prepared to explain.Nobody had seen the
guy, nobody had been able to call him, and nobody
had received a message from him all the time we'd
been over Earth.What had happened to him?And
what was I supposed to do about it?
I walked along the banks of the Seine with all that
cluttered, heavy architecture around me, and
wondered.
I remembered the smell of roasting coffee (coffee
was soaring in price at the time; them and their
Commodities!), and the light that struck off the
cobbles as little men turned on taps inside the
sidewalks to wash the streets.They used old rags
slung in front of the kerbs to divert the water this
way and that.
For all my fruitless pondering, it was still
wonderful to be there; there was something
different about the city, something that really did
make you feel glad to be alive.
Somehow I found my way to the upstream end of
the Ile de Cité, although I'd meant to head towards