fashion.I argued he ought to be buried on-planet,
but the ship disagreed.Linter's last instructions
regarding the disposal of his remains had been
issued fifteen years earlier, when he first joined
Contact, and were quite conventional; his corpse
was to be displaced into the centre of the nearest
star.So the sun gained a bodyweight, courtesy of
Culture tradition, and in a million years, maybe, a
little of the light from Linter's body would shine
upon the planet he had loved.
The Arbitrary held its darkfield for a few minutes, then dropped it just past Mars (so there was just a
chance it left an image on an Earth
telescope).Meanwhile it was snapping all its
various remote drones and sats away from the
other planets in the system.It stayed in real space
right up till the last moment (making it possible that
its rapidly increasing mass produced a blip on a
terrestrial gravity-wave experiment, deep in some
mountain-mine), then totalled as it dispatched
Linter's body into the stellar core, sucked a last
few drones of Pluto and a couple of outlying
comets, and slung Li's diamond at Neptune (where
it's probably still in orbit).
I'd decided to leave the Arbitrary after the R R, but after I'd relaxed on Svanrayt Orbital for a few
weeks I changed my mind.I had too many friends
on the ship, and anyway it seemed genuinely upset
when it found out I was thinking of transferring.It
charmed me into staying.But it never did tell me
whether it had been watching Linter and me that
night in New York.
So, did I really believe I was to blame, or was I
kidding even myself?I don't know.I didn't know
then, and I don't know now.
There was guilt, I recall, but it was an odd sort of
guilt.What really annoyed me, what I did find hard
to take, was my complicity not in what Linter was
trying to do, and not in his own half-willed death,
but in the generality of transferred myth those
people accepted as reality.
It strikes me that although we occasionally carp
about Having To Suffer, and moan about never
producing real Art, and become despondent or try
too hard to compensate, we are indulging in our
usual trick of synthesizing something to worry
about, and should really be thanking ourselves that
we live the life we do.We may think ourselves
parasites, complain about Mind-generated tales,
and long for 'genuine' feelings, 'real' emotion, but
we are missing the point, and indeed making a
work of art ourselves in imagining such an
uncomplicated existence is even possible.We have
the best of it.The alternative is something like
Earth, where as much as they suffer, for all that
they burn with pain and confused, bewildered
angst , they produce more dross than anything else; soap operas and quiz programmes, junk papers and
pulp romances.
Worse than that, there is an osmosis from fiction to
reality, a constant contamination which distorts the
truth behind both and fuzzes the telling distinctions
in life itself, categorizing real situations and
feelings by a set of rules largely culled from the
most hoary fictional clichés, the most familiar and
received nonsense.Hence the soap operas, and
those who try to live their lives as soap operas,
while believing the stories to be true; hence the
quizzes where the ideal is to think as close to the
mean as possible, and the one who conforms
utterly is the one who stands above the rest; the
Winner
They always had too many stories, I believe; they
were too free with their acclaim and their loyalty,
too easily impressed by simple strength or a
cunning word.They worshipped at too many altars.
Well, there's your story.
Perhaps it's as well I haven't changed very much
over the years; I doubt that it's much different from
what I'd have written a year or a decade later,
rather than a century. [*15*]
It's funny the images that stay with you though.Over
the years one thing has haunted me, one dream
recurred.It really has nothing to do with me in a
sense, because it was something I never saw yet it
stays there, nevertheless.
I didn't want to be displaced, that night, nor did I
want to travel out to somewhere remote enough for
a module to pick me up without being seen.I got the
black-body drone to lift me from the city; right up,
darkfielded, into the sky in the midst of Manhattan,
rising above all that light and noise into the
darkness, quiet as any falling feather.I sat on the
Drone's back, still in shock I suppose, and don't
even remember transferring to the dark module a
few kilometres above the grid of urban light.I saw
but didn't watch, and thought not of my own flight,
but about the other drones the ship might be using
on the planet at the time; where they might be, what
doing.
I mentioned the Arbitrary collected