The State of the Art(58)

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