one of us could stay here with him, just vanish into
the city-space and disappear forever and never be
thought of again, never think again, just obey
orders and ordinances and do what the place
demands, start falling and never stop, never find
any other purchase, and our twistings and turnings
and writhings as we fall, exactly what the city
expects, just what the doctor ordered
Linter stopped.He was looking through an iron
grille at a shop selling religious statues, holy water
containers, Bibles and commentaries, crosses and
rosaries and crib and manger scenes.He stared
down at it all, and I watched him.He nodded at the
window display. 'That's what we've lost, you
know.What you've lost; all of you.A sense of
wonder and awe and sin.These people know there
are still things they don't know, things that can still
go wrong, things they can still do wrong.They still
have the hope because the possibility is
there.Without the possibility of failure, you can't
have hope.They have hope.The Culture has
statistics.We - it; the Culture - is too certain, too
organized and stifled.We've choked the life out of
life; nothing's left to chance.Take the chance of
things going wrong out of life and it stops being
life, don't you see?' His pinched, dark-browed face
looked frustrated.
'No, I don't see,' I told him.
He ran one hand through his hair, shook his head.
'Look; let's eat, huh?I'm really hungry.'
'Okay; lead on.Where?'
'This way; somewhere really special.' We started
off in the same direction again, came to the corner
of 48th Street and turned up that.A cold wind blew
around us, scattering papers. 'What I mean is, you
have to have that potential for wrongness there or
you can't live or you can but it doesn't mean
anything.You can't have the peak without the
trough, or light without shade it's not that you must
have evil to have good, but you must have the
possibility for evil.That's what the Church teaches,
you know.That's the choice that Man has; he can
choose to be good or evil; God doesn't force him
to be evil any more than He forces him to be
good.The choice is left to Man now as it was to
Adam.Only in God is there any real chance of
understanding and appreciating Free Will.'
He pushed my elbow, steering me down an alley.A
white and red sign glowed at the far end.I could
smell food.
'You have to see that.The Culture gives us so much,
but in fact it's only taking things away from us,
lobotomizing everybody in it, taking away their
choices, their potential for being really good or
even slightly bad.But God, who is in all of us; yes,
in you too, Diziet perhaps even in the ship for all I
know God, who sees and knows all, who is all-
powerful, all-knowing, in a way that no ship, no
mere Mind can ever be; infinitely knowing, still
allows us; poor, pathetic, fallible humanity - and
by extension, pan-humanity allows even us; the, the
-'
It was dark in the alley, but I should still have seen
them.I wasn't even listening properly to Linter, I
was just letting him witter on, not concentrating.So
I should have seen them, but I didn't, not until it
was too late.
They moved out from behind us, knocking over a
dustcan, shouting, crashing into us.Linter spun
around, letting go of my elbow, I turned
quickly.Linter held up one hand and said - did not
shout - something I didn't catch.A figure rushed at
me, half crouched.Somehow, without seeing it, I
knew there was a knife.
It all remains so clear, so measured.I suppose
some secretion had taken over the instant my
midbrain realized what was happening.It seemed
very light in the alley, and everybody else was
moving slowly, along lines like laser beams or
cross-hairs, casting weighted shadows in front of
them along those lines in the direction they were
moving.
I stepped to one side, letting the boy and the knife
spin past.A right-foot trip and a little pressure on
his wrist as he went by and he had to let the knife
go.He stumbled and fell.I had the knife, and threw
it far away down the alley before turning back to
Linter.
Two of them had him on the ground, kicking and
struggling.I heard him cry out once as I moved
towards them, but I recall no other sound.Whether
it was really as silent as I remember it, or whether
I was simply concentrating on the sense that
yielded the most information, I don't know.I caught
the heels of one of them, and pulled, heaving him
out and up, cracking his face against one boot
where I'd stuck it out to meet him.I threw him out
of the way.The other one was already up.Lines
seemed to be bunching up at the side of my vision,
and throbbing, making me think about how much
time the first one had had to regain his balance if
not his knife.I realized I wasn't doing this the way