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.'
4.2:Happy Idiot Talk
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 usNo, 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