The State of The Art

4.5: Credibility Problem

The next time I saw Li, he was wearing a uniform just like Captain Kirk’s in Star Trek.

'Well, what on earth,' I laughed.

'Don’t mock, alien,' Li scowled.

I was reading Faust in German and watching two of my friends playing snooker. The gravity in the snooker room was a little less than standard, to make the balls roll right. I’d asked the ship (when it was still talking to me) why it hadn’t reduced its internal G to Earth’s average, as it had done with its day-night cycle. 'Oh, it would have meant too much recalibration,' the ship had said. 'I couldn’t be bothered.' How’s that for Godlike omnipotence?

'You won’t have heard,' Li said, sitting beside me, 'having been on EVA, but I’m intending to become captain of this tub.'

'Are you really? Well that’s fascinating.' I didn’t ask him what or where the hell EVA was. 'And how exactly do you propose attaining this elevated, not to say unlikely position?'

'I’m not sure yet,' Li admitted, 'but I think I have all the qualifications for the post.'

'Consider the liminal cue given; I know you’re going to—'

'Bravery, resourcefulness, intelligence, the ability to handle men — women — ; a razor sharp wit and lightning fast reactions. Also loyalty and the ability to be ruthlessly objective when the safety of my ship and crew are at stake. Except, of course, when the safety of the Universe as we know it is at stake, in which case I would reluctantly have to consider making a brave and noble sacrifice. Naturally, should such a situation ever arise, I’d try to save the officers and crew who serve beneath me. I’d go down with the ship, of course.'

'Of course. Well, that’s—'

'Wait; there’s another quality I haven’t mentioned yet.'

'Are there any left?'

'Certainly. Ambition.'

'Silly of me. Of course.'

'It will not have escaped your attention that until now nobody ever thought of wanting to become captain of the Arb.'

'A perhaps understandable lapse.' Jhavins, one of my friends, brought off a fine cut on the black ball, and I applauded. 'Good shot.'

Li prodded my shoulder. 'Listen properly.'

'I’m listening, I’m listening.'

'The point is that my wanting to become captain, I mean even thinking of the idea, means that I should be 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 thought you 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 anyway we 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’s starting 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

5.1: 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 the Arbitrary 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 could die!

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 pleasant in a masochistic sort of way, and certainly made shipboard life seem more attractive. But the rest had been so boring. 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 the Arbitrary. 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