The State of the Art(69)

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