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the captain, understand?'
'Hmm.' Jhavins was lining up an unlikely cannon on a distant red.
Li made an exasperated noise. 'You're humouring me; I thoughtyou at least would argue.You're just like
everybody else.'
'Ah,' I said.Jhavins hit the red, but just left it hanging over the pocket.I looked at Li. 'An argument?All
right; you - anybody - taking command of the ship is like a flea taking over control of a human maybe
even like a bacteria in their saliva taking them over.'
'But why should it command itself?We made it; it didn't make us.'
'So?And anywaywe didn't make it; other machines made it and even they only started it off; it mostly
made itself.But anyway, you'd have to go back I don't know how many thousand generations of its
ancestors before you found the last computer or spaceship built directly by any of our ancestors.Even if
this mythical we had built it, it's still zillions of times smarter than we are.Would you let an ant tell you
what to do?'
'Bacterium?Flea?Ant?Make up your mind.'
'Oh go away and de-scale a mountain or something, you silly man.'
'But we started all this; if it hadn't been for us -'
'And who started us?Some glop of goo on another rockball?A super-nova?The big bang?What'sstarting
something got to do with it?'
'You don't think I'm serious, do you?'
'More terminal than serious.'
'You wait,' Li said, standing up and wagging a finger at me. 'I'll be captain one day.And you'll be sorry; I
had you down tentatively as science officer, but now you'll be lucky to make nurse in the sickbay.'
'Ah, away and piss on your dilithium crystals.'
5: You Would If You Really Loved Me
5.7:Sacrificial Victim
I stayed on the ship for a few weeks after that.It started talking to me again after a couple of days.I
forgot about Linter for a while; everybody on theArbitrary seemed to be talking about new films or old
films or books, or about what was happening in Kampuchea, or about Lanyares Sodel, who was off
fighting with the Eritreans.Lanyares used to live on a plate where he and some of his pals played games of
soldiers using live kinetic ammunition.I recalled hearing about this and being appalled; even with medical
gear standing by and a full supply of drug glands it sounded slightly perverse, and when I'd found out they
didn't have anything to protect their heads, I'd decided these guys were crazy.You could have your
brains splattered over the landscape!You coulddie !
But they enjoyed the fear, I suppose.I'm told some people do.
Anyway, Lanyares told the ship he wanted to take part in some real fighting.The ship tried to talk him out
of it, but failed, so sent him down to Ethiopia.It tracked him by satellite and tailed him with scout missiles,
ready to zap him back to the ship if he was badly wounded.After some badgering, and having obtained
Lanyares's permission, the ship put the view from the missiles trailing him onto an accessible channel, so
anybody could watch.I thought this was in even more dubious taste.
It didn't last.After about ten days Lanyares got fed up because there wasn't much happening and so he
had himself taken back up to the ship.He didn't mind the discomfort, he said, in fact it was almost
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pleasant in a masochistic sort of way, and certainly made shipboard life seem more attractive.But the rest
had been soboring. Having a good ring-ding battle on a plate landscape designed for the purpose was
much more fun.The ship told him he was silly and packed him back off to Rio de Janeiro to be a properly
behaved culture-vulture again.Anyway, it could have sent him to Kampuchea, I suppose; altered him to
make him look Cambodian and thrown him into the middle of the butchery of Year Zero.Somehow I
don't think that was quite what Lanyares had been looking for though.
I travelled around more of Britain, East Germany and Austria when I wasn't on theArbitrary. The ship
tried me in Pretoria for a few days, but I really couldn't take it; perhaps if it had sent me there first I'd
have been all right, but after nine months of Earth maybe even my Cultured nerves were getting frayed,
and the land of Separate Development was just too much for me.I asked the ship about Linter a few
times, but only received All-Purpose Non-Committal Reply Number 63a, or whatever, so after a bit I
stopped asking.
'What is beauty?'
'Oh ship, really.'
'No, I'm being serious.We have a disagreement here.'
I stood in Frankfurt am Main, on a suspension footbridge over the river, talking to the ship via my
terminal.One or two people looked at me as they walked by, but I wasn't in the mood to care. 'All right,
then.Beauty is something that disappears when you try to define it.'
'I don't think you really believe that.Be serious.'
'Look ship, I already know what the disagreement is.I believe that there is something, however difficult to
define, which is shared by everything beautiful and cannot be signified by any other single word without
obscuring more than is made clear.You think that beauty lies in utility.'
'Well, more or less.'
'So where's Earth's utility?'
'Its utility lies in being a living machine.It forces people to act and react.At that it is close to the theoretical
limits of efficiency for a non-conscious system.'
'You sound like Linter.A living machine, indeed.'
'Linter is not totally wrong, but he is like somebody who has found an injured bird and kept it past the
time it is recovered, out of a protectiveness he would not like to admit is centred on himself, not the
animal.Well, there may be nothing more we can do for Earth, and it's time to let go in this case it's we
who have to fly away, but you see what I mean.'
'But you agree with Linter there is something beautiful about Earth, something aesthetically positive no
Culture environment could match?'
'Yes, I do.Few things are all gain.All we have ever done is maximize what happens to be considered
good at any particular time.Despite what the locals may think, there is nothing intrinsically illogical or
impossible about having a genuine, functioning Utopia, or removing badness without removing goodness,
or pain without pleasure, or suffering without excitement but on the other hand there is nothing to say that
you can always fix things up just the way you want them without running up against the occasional
problem.We have removed almost all the bad in our environment, but we have not quite kept all the
good.Averaged out, we're still way ahead, but we do have to yield to humans in some fields, and in the
end of course theirs is a more interesting environment.Naturally so.'
' May you live in interesting times. '
'Quite.'
'I can't agree.I can't see the utility or the beauty in that.All I'll give you is that it might be a relevant stage
to go through.'
'Might be the same thing.A slight time-problem perhaps.You just happen to be here, now.'
'As are they all.'
I turned round and looked at a few of the people walking by.The autumn sun was low in the sky, a vivid
red disc, dusty and gaseous and the colour of blood, and rubbed into these well-fed Western faces in an
image of a poison-price.I looked them in the eyes, but they looked away; I felt like taking them by the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]