'Oh, pardon me.' He rocked forward on his haunches, hugging himself.
'The only way they can go — and survive — is the same way we’ve come, and you’re saying that’s all shit. That’s refugee mentality, and they wouldn’t thank you for what you’re doing. They would say you’re crazy.'
He shook his head, hands in his armpits, still staring away. 'Maybe they don’t have to take the same route. Maybe they don’t need Minds, maybe they don’t need more and more technology. They might be able to do it by themselves, without wars and revolutions even… just by understanding, by some… belief. By something more natural than we can understand. Naturalness is something they still understand.'
'Naturalness?' I said, loudly. 'This lot’ll tell you anything is natural; they’ll tell you greed and hate and jealousy and paranoia and unthinking religious awe and fear of God and hating anybody who’s another colour or thinks different is natural. Hating blacks or hating whites or hating women or hating men or hating gays; that’s natural. Dog-eat-dog, looking out for number one, no lame ducks… Shit, they’re so convinced about what’s natural it’s the more sophisticated ones that’ll tell you suffering and evil are natural and necessary because otherwise you can’t have pleasure and goodness. They’ll tell you any one of their rotten stupid systems is the natural and right one, the one true way; what’s natural to them is whatever they can use to fight their own grimy corner and fuck everybody else. They’re no more natural than us than an amoeba is more natural than them just because it’s cruder.'
'But Sma, they’re living according to their instincts, or trying to. We’re so proud of living according to our conscious belief, but we’ve lost the idea of shame. And we need that too. We need that even more than they do.'
'What?' I shouted. I whirled round, took him by the shoulders and shook him. 'We should be what? Ashamed of being conscious? Are you crazy? What’s wrong with you? How can you say something like that?'
'Just listen! I don’t mean they’re better; I don’t mean we should try to live like them, I mean that they have an idea of… of light and shade that we don’t have. They’re proud sometimes, too, but they’re ashamed as well; they feel all-conquering and powerful but then they realize how powerless they really are. They know the good in them, but they know the evil in them, too; they recognize both, they live with both. We don’t have that duality, that balance. And… and can’t you see it might be more fulfilling for one individual — me — who has a Culture background who is aware of all life’s possibilities, to live in this society, not the Culture?'
'So you find this… hellhole more fulfilling?'
'Yes, of course I do. Because there’s — because it’s just so… alive. In the end, they’re right Sma; it doesn’t really matter that a lot of what’s going on is what we — or even they — might call "bad"; it’s happening, it’s there, and that’s what matters, that’s what makes it worthwhile to be here and be part of it.'
I took my hands off his shoulders. 'No. I don’t understand you. Dammit Linter, you’re more alien than they are. At least they have an excuse. God, you’re the fucking mythical recent convert, aren’t you? The fanatic. The zealot. I’m sorry for you, man.'
'Well… thank you.' He looked to the sky, blinking again.
'I didn’t want you to understand me too quickly, and—' he made a noise that was not quite a laugh '- I don’t think you are, are you?'
'Don’t give me that pleading look.' I shook my head, but I couldn’t stay angry with him looking like that. Something subsided in me, and I saw a sort of shy smile steal over Linter’s face. 'I am not,' I said, 'going to make this easy for you, Dervley. You’re making a mistake. The biggest you’ll ever make in your life. You’d better realize you’re on your own. Don’t think a few plumbing changes and a new set of bowel bacteria are going to make you any closer to homo sapiens either.'
'You’re a friend, Diziet. I’m glad you’re concerned… but I think I know what I’m doing.'
It was time for me to shake my head again, so I did. Linter held my hand while we walked back down to the bridge and then out of the park. I felt sorry for him because he seemed to have realized his own loneliness. We walked round the city for a while, then went to his apartment for lunch. His place was in a modern block down towards the harbour, not far from the massiveness of the city hall; a bare flat with white walls and little furniture. It hardly looked lived in at all save for a few late Lowry reproductions and sketches by Holbein.
It had clouded over in late morning. I left after lunch. I think he expected me to stay, but I only wanted to get back to the ship.
'Why did I do what?'
'What you did to Linter. Alter him. Revert him.'
'Because he asked me to do it,' the ship said. I was standing in the top hangar deck. I’d waited till I was back on the ship before I confronted it, via a remote drone.
'And of course it had nothing to do with hoping he might dislike the feeling so much he’d come back into the fold. Nothing to do with trying to shock him with the pain of being human when the locals have at least had the advantage of growing up with it and getting used to the idea. Nothing to do with letting him inflict a physical and mental torture on himself so you could sit back and say "I told you so" after he came crying to you to take him back.'
'Well as a matter of fact, no. You obviously believe I altered Linter for my own ends. That’s not true. I did what I did because Linter requested it. Certainly I tried to talk him out of it, but when I was convinced that he meant what he said and he knew what he was doing and what it entailed — and when I couldn’t reasonably decide he was mad — I did what he asked.
'It did occur to me he might not enjoy the feeling of being something close to human-basic, but I thought it was obvious from what he’d said when we were talking it over beforehand that he didn’t expect to enjoy it. He knew it would be unpleasant, but he regarded it as a form of birth, or rebirth. I thought it unlikely he would be so unprepared for the experience, and so shocked by it, that he would want to be returned to his genofixed norm, and even less likely that he would go on from there to abandoning his idea of staying on Earth altogether.
'I’m a little disappointed in you, Sma. I thought you would understand me. One’s object in trying to be scrupulously fair and even-handed is not to seek praise, I’m sure, but one would hope that having done something more honest than convenient, one’s motives would not be questioned in such an overtly suspicious manner. I could have refused Linter’s request; I could have claimed that I found the idea unpleasant and didn’t want to have anything to do with it. I could have built a perfectly adequate defence on aesthetic distaste alone; but I didn’t.
'Three reasons: One; I’d have been lying. I don’t find Linter any more repellent or disgusting than I did before. What matters is his mind; his intellect and the state it’s in. Physiological details are largely irrelevant. Certainly his body is less efficient than it was before; less sophisticated, less damage-resistant, less flexible over a given range of conditions than, say, yours… but he’s living in the Twentieth Century West, and at a comparatively privileged economic level; he doesn’t have to have brilliant reflexes or better night-sight than an owl. So his integrity as a conscious entity is less affected by all the alterations I’ve carried out on him than it already was by the very decision to stay on Earth in the first place.