'Sma' the ship said finally, with a hint of what might have been frustration in its voice, 'I’m the smartest thing for a hundred light years radius, and by a factor of about a million… but even I can’t predict where a snooker ball’s going to end up after more than six collisions.'
I snorted, could almost have laughed.
'Well,' the ship said, 'I think you’d better be on your way now.'
'Oh?'
'Yes. A passer-by has reported a woman on the bridge, talking to herself and looking at the water. A policeman is now on his way to investigate, probably already wondering how cold the water is, and so I think you should turn to your left and walk smartly away before he arrives.'
'Right you are,' I said. I shook my head as I walked off in the dusk light. 'Funny old world, isn’t it, ship?' I said, more to myself than to it.
The ship said nothing. The suspended bridge, big as it was, responded to my stepping feet, moving up and down at me like some monstrous and clumsy lover.
Back on the ship.
For a few hours the Arbitrary had left the world’s snowflakes unmolested, and gone collecting other samples at Li’s request.
The first time Li saw me on the ship he’d come up to me and whispered, 'Take him to see The Man Who Fell To Earth,' and slunk off. The next time I saw him he claimed it was the first time and I must be hallucinating if I thought we’d met before. A fine way to greet a friend and admirer, claiming he’d been going about whispering cryptic messages…
So; one moonless, November night, darkside over the Tarim Basin…
Li was giving a dinner party.
He was still trying to become captain of the Arbitrary, but he seemed to have his ideas about rank and democracy mixed up, because he thought the best way to become 'skipper' was to get us all to vote for him. So this was going to be a campaign dinner.
We sat in the lower hangar space, surrounded by our hardware. There were about two hundred people gathered in the hangar; everybody still on the ship was present, and many had come back off-planet just for the occasion. Li had us all sit ourselves round three giant tables, each two metres broad and at least ten times that in length. He’d insisted they should be proper tables, and complete with chairs and place settings and all the rest, and the ship had reluctantly filched a small Sequoia and done all the carving and turning and whatever to produce the tables and everything that went with them. To compensate, it had planted several hundred oaks in its upper hangar, using its own stored biomass as a growing medium; it would plant the saplings on Earth before it left.
When we were all seated, and had started talking amongst ourselves — I was sitting between Roghres and Ghemada — the lights around us dimmed, and a spotlight picked out Li, walking out of the darkness. We all sat back or craned forward, watching him.
There was much laughter. Li had greenish skin, pointed ears, and wore a 2001-style spacesuit with a zig-zag silver flash added across the chest (held on by micro-rivets, he told me later). He sported a long red cape which flowed out behind from his shoulders. He held the suit helmet in the crook of his left arm. In his right hand he gripped a Star Wars light sword. Of course, the ship had made him a real one.
Li walked purposefully to the head of the middle table, tramped on an empty seat at its head and strode onto the table top, clumping down the brightly polished surface between the glittering place settings (the cutlery had been borrowed from a locked and forgotten storeroom in a palace on a lake in India; it hadn’t been used for fifty years, and would be returned, cleaned, the next day… as would the dinner service itself, borrowed for the night from the Sultan of Brunei — without his permission), past the starched white napkins (from the Titanic; they’d be cleaned too and put back on the floor of the Atlantic), in the midst of the glittering glassware (Edinburgh Crystal, removed for a few hours from packing cases stowed deep in the hold of a freighter in the South China Sea, bound for Yokohama) and the candelabra (from a cache of loot lying under a lake near Kiev, sunk there by retreating Nazis judging from the sacks; also due to be replaced after their bizarre orbital excursion) until he stood in the centre of the middle table, maybe two metres from where I, Roghres and Ghemada sat.
'Ladies and gentlemen!' Li shouted, arms outstretched, helmet in one hand, sword humming brightly in the other. 'The food of Earth! Eat!'
He assumed a dramatic pose, pointing the sword back up the table, gazing heroically along its green glowing length, and leaning forward, one knee bending. The ship either manipulated its gravity field or Li had an AG harness under the suit, because he rose silently from the table and drifted along above it (holding the pose) to the far end, where he dropped gracefully and sat in the seat he’d used earlier as a step. There was scattered applause and some hooting.
Meanwhile, dozens of drones and slaved trays had made their way out of the elevator shaft and approached the tables, bringing food.
We ate. It was all ethnic food, though not actually brought up from the planet; vat-grown ship food, though not a gourmet on Earth could have spotted any difference between our stuff and the real thing. From what I could see, Li had used the Guinness Book of Records as his wine list. The ship’s copies of the wines involved were so good — we were told — that the ship itself couldn’t have told them apart from the real thing.
We chomped and gurgled our way through an eclectic but relatively orthodox series of courses, chatting and fooling, and wondering whether Li had anything else planned; this all seemed disappointingly conventional. Li came round, asking how we were enjoying the meal, refilling our glasses, suggesting we try different dishes, saying he hoped he could count on our vote on election day, and sidestepping awkward questions about the Prime Directive.
Finally, much later, maybe a dozen courses later, when we were all sitting there bloated and content and mellow and sipping on our brandies and whiskies, we got Li’s campaign speech… plus a dainty dish to set before the Culture.
I was a little drowsy. Li had come round with huge Havana cigars, and I’d taken one, and let the drug get to me. I was sitting there, puffing determinedly on the fat drug-stick, surrounded by a cloud of smoke, wondering what the natives saw in a tobacco high, but otherwise feeling just fine, when Li banged on the table with the pommel of the light sword and then climbed up and stood where his place setting had been (bang went one of the Sultan’s plates, but I suspect the ship managed to repair it). The lights went out, leaving one spot on Li.
I used some snap to clear the sleepiness and stubbed the cigar out.
'Ladies and gentlemen,'[11] Li said in a passable English, before continuing in Marain. 'I have gathered you here this evening to talk to you about Earth and what should be done with it. It is my hope and wish that after you’ve heard what I have to say you will agree with me on the only possible course of action… but first of all, let me say a few words about myself.' There were jeers and cat-calls as Li bent and took up his glass of brandy. He drained the glass and threw it over his shoulder. A drone must have caught it in the shadows because I didn’t hear it land.
'First of all,' Li rubbed his chin, stroking the long hair. 'Who am I?' He ignored a variety of shouts telling him 'a total fucking idiot', and the like, and continued. 'I am Grice-Thantapsa Li Erase 'ndane dam Sione; I am one hundred and seventeen years old, but wise beyond my years. I have been in Contact only six years, but I have experienced much in that time, and so can speak with some authority on Contact matters. I am the product of perhaps eight thousand years of progress beyond the stage of the planet that lies beneath our feet.' (Cries of 'Not much to show for it, huh?', etc.) 'I can track my ancestry back by name for at least that amount of time, and if you went back to the first dim glimmerings of sentience and you could end up going back—' ('last week?' 'your mother') '- through tens of thousands of generations.
11
The following speech — sourced from the