be hallucinating if I thought we'd met before.A fine
way to greet a friend and admirer, claiming he'd
been going about whispering cryptic messages
So; one moonless, November night, darkside over
the Tarim Basin
Li was giving a dinner party.
He was still trying to become captain of the
Arbitrary, but he seemed to have his ideas about
rank and democracy mixed up, because he thought
the best way to become 'skipper' was to get us all
to vote for him.So this was going to be a campaign
dinner.
We sat in the lower hangar space, surrounded by
our hardware.There were about two hundred
people gathered in the hangar; everybody still on
the ship was present, and many had come back off-
planet just for the occasion.Li had us all sit
ourselves round three giant tables, each two metres
broad and at least ten times that in length.He'd
insisted they should be proper tables, and complete
with chairs and place settings and all the rest, and
the ship had reluctantly filched a small Sequoia
and done all the carving and turning and whatever
to produce the tables and everything that went with
them.To compensate, it had planted several
hundred oaks in its upper hangar, using its own
stored biomass as a growing medium; it would
plant the saplings on Earth before it left.
When we were all seated, and had started talking
amongst ourselves - I was sitting between Roghres
and Ghemada - the lights around us dimmed, and a
spotlight picked out Li, walking out of the
darkness.We all sat back or craned forward,
watching him.
There was much laughter.Li had greenish skin,
pointed ears, and wore a 2001 -style _spacesuit
with a zig-zag silver flash added across the chest
(held on by micro-rivets, he told me later).He
sported a long red cape which flowed out behind
from his shoulders.He held the suit helmet in the
crook of his left arm.In his right hand he gripped a
Star Wars light sword.Of course, the ship had
made him a real one.
Li walked purposefully to the head of the middle
table, tramped on an empty seat at its head and
strode onto the table top, clumping down the
brightly polished surface between the glittering
place settings (the cutlery had been borrowed from
a locked and forgotten storeroom in a palace on a
lake in India; it hadn't been used for fifty years, and
would be returned, cleaned, the next day as would
the dinner service itself, borrowed for the night
from the Sultan of Brunei - without his
permission), past the starched white napkins (from
the Titanic; they'd be cleaned too and put back on
the floor of the Atlantic), in the midst of the
glittering glassware (Edinburgh Crystal, removed
for a few hours from packing cases stowed deep in
the hold of a freighter in the South China Sea,
bound for Yokohama) and the candelabra (from a
cache of loot lying under a lake near Kiev, sunk
there by retreating Nazis judging from the sacks;
also due to be replaced after their bizarre orbital
excursion) until he stood in the centre of the middle
table, maybe two metres from where I, Roghres
and Ghemada sat.
'Ladies and gentlemen!' Li shouted, arms
outstretched, helmet in one hand, sword humming
brightly in the other.'The food of Earth!Eat!'
He assumed a dramatic pose, pointing the sword
back up the table, gazing heroically along its green
glowing length, and leaning forward, one knee
bending.The ship either manipulated its gravity
field or Li had an AG harness under the suit,
because he rose silently from the table and drifted
along above it (holding the pose) to the far end,
where he dropped gracefully and sat in the seat
he'd used earlier as a step.There was scattered
applause and some hooting.
Meanwhile, dozens of drones and slaved trays had
made their way out of the elevator shaft and
approached the tables, bringing food.
We ate.It was all ethnic food, though not actually
brought up from the planet; vat-grown ship food,
though not a gourmet on Earth could have spotted
any difference between our stuff and the real
thing.From what I could see, Li had used the
Guinness Book of Records as his wine list.The
ship's copies of the wines involved were so good -
we were told - that the ship itself couldn't have
told them apart from the real thing.
We chomped and gurgled our way through an
eclectic but relatively orthodox series of courses,
chatting and fooling, and wondering whether Li
had anything else planned; this all seemed
disappointingly conventional.Li came round,
asking how we were enjoying the meal, refilling
our glasses, suggesting we try different dishes,
saying he hoped he could count on our vote on
election day, and sidestepping awkward questions
about the Prime Directive.
Finally, much later, maybe a dozen courses later,
when we were all sitting there bloated and content