The State of the Art(67)

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