I don’t know if it was the traffic, the noise, the crowds, the soaring buildings or the starkly geometric expanses of streets and avenues (I mean, I’ve never even heard of a GSV which laid out its accommodation as regularly as Manhattan), or just everything together, but whatever it was, I didn’t like it. So; a bitterly cold, windy Saturday night in the big city on the Eastern seaboard, only a couple of week’s shopping left till Christmas, and me sitting in a little coffee shop on 42nd Street at eleven o'clock, waiting for the movies to end.
What was Linter playing at? Going to see Close Encounters for the seventh time, indeed. I looked at my watch, drank my coffee, paid the check and left. I tightened the heavy wool coat about me, pulled on gloves and a hat. I wore needle-cords and knee-length leather boots. I looked around as I walked, a chill wind against my face.
What really got to me was the predictability. It was like a jungle. Oslo a rock garden? Paris a parterre, with its follies, shady areas and breeze-block garages inset? London with that vaguely conservatory air, a badly kept museum haphazardly modernized? Wien a too severe version of Paris, high starch collared, and Berlin a long garden party in the ruins of a baroque sepulchre? Then New York a rain forest; an infested, towering, teeming jungle, full of great columns that scratched at the clouds but which stood with their feet in the rot, decay and swarming life beneath; steel on rock, glass blocking the sun; the ship’s living machine incarnate.
I walked through the streets, dazzled and frightened. The Arbitrary was just a tap on my terminal away, ready to send help or bounce me up on an emergency displace, but I still felt scared. I’d never been in such an intimidating place. I walked up 42nd Street and carefully crossed Sixth Avenue to walk along its far side towards the movie theatre.
People streamed out, talking in twos and groups, putting up collars, walking off quickly with their arms round each other to find someplace warm, or standing looking for a cab. Their breath misted the air in front of them, and from the lights of the mothership to the lights of the foyer to the lights of the snarling traffic they moved. Linter was one of the last out, looking thinner and paler than he had in Oslo, but brighter, quicker. He waved and came over to me. He buttoned up a fawn-coloured coat, then put his lips to my cheek as he reached for his gloves.
'Mmm. Hello. You’re cold. Eaten yet? I’m hungry. Want to eat?'
'Hello. I’m not cold. I’m not hungry either, but I’ll come and watch you. How are you?'
'Fine. Fine,' he smiled.
He didn’t look fine. He looked better than I remembered, but in big city terms, he was a bit scruffy and not very well-fed looking. That fast, edgy, high-pressure urban life had infected him, I guess.
He pulled on my arm. 'Come on; let’s walk. I want to talk.'
'All right.' We started along the sidewalk. Bustle-hustle, all their signs and lights and racket and smell, the white noise of their existence, a focus of all the world’s business. How could they stand it? The bag ladies; the obvious loonies, eyes staring; the grotesquely obese; the cold vomit in the alleys and the bloodstains on the kerb; and all their signs, those slogans and lights and pictures, flickering and bright, entreating and ordering, enticing and demanding in a grammar of glowing gas and incandenscing wire.
This was the soul of the machine, the ethological epicentre, the planetary ground zero of their commercial energy. I could almost feel it, shivering down like bomb-blasted rivers of glass from these undreaming towers of dark and light invading the snow-dark sky.
Peace in the Middle East? the papers asked. Better celebrate Bokassa’s coronation instead; better footage.
'You got a terminal?' Linter said. He sounded eager somehow.
'Of course.'
'Turn it off?' he said. His eyebrows rose. He looked like a child all of a sudden. 'Please. I don’t want the ship to overhear.'
I wanted to say something to the effect that the ship could have bugged every individual hair on his head, but didn’t. I turned the terminal brooch to standby.
'You seen Close Encounters?' Linter said, leaning towards me. We were heading in the direction of Broadway.
I nodded. 'Ship showed us it being made. We saw the final print before anybody.'
'Oh yes, of course.' People bumped into us, swaddled in their heavy clothes, insulated. 'The ship said you’re leaving soon. Are you glad to be going?'
'Yes, I am. I didn’t think I’d be, but I am. And you? Are you glad to be staying?'
'Pardon?' A police car charged past, then another, sirens whooping. I repeated what I’d said. Linter nodded and smiled at me. I thought his breath smelled. 'Oh yes,' he nodded. 'Of course.'
'I still think you’re a fool, you know. You’ll be sorry.'
'Oh no, I don’t think so.' He sounded confident, not looking at me, head held high as we walked down the street. 'I don’t think so at all. I think I’m going to be very happy here.'
Happy here. In the grand, cold design and the fake warmth of the neon, while the drunks brown-bagged and the addicts begged and the deadbeats searched for warmer gratings and a thicker cardboard box. It seemed worse here; you saw the same thing in Paris and London, but it seemed worse here. Take a step from a shop you had to have an appointment for, swathed in loot across the sidewalk to the Roller, Merc or Caddy purring at the kerb, while some poor fucked-up husk of a human lay just a spit away, but you’d never notice them noticing… Or maybe I was just too sensitive, shell-shocked; life really was a struggle on Earth, and the Culture’s 100 percent non-com. A year was as much as you could have expected any of us to handle, and I was near the end of my resistance.
'It’ll all work out, Sma. I’m very confident.'
Fall in the street here and they just walk around you…
'Yes, yes. I’m sure you’re right.'
'Look.' He stopped, turned me by the elbow so that we stood face to face. 'I’m going to have to tell you. I know you probably won’t like me for it, but it’s important to me.' I watched his eyes, shifting to look at each of mine in turn. His skin looked more mottled than I remembered; some pore-deep dirt.
'What?'
'I’m studying. I’m going to enter the Roman Catholic Church. I’ve found Jesus, Diziet; I’m saved. Can you understand that? Are you angry with me? Does it upset you?'
'No, I’m not angry,' I said flatly. 'That’s great, Dervley. If you’re happy, I’m happy for you. Congratulations.'
'That’s great!' He hugged me. I was pressed against his chest; held; released. We resumed our walk, walking faster. He seemed pleased. 'Damn, I can’t tell you Dizzy; it’s just so good to be here, to be alive and know there are so many people, so much happening! I wake up in the morning and I have to lie for a while just convincing myself I’m really here and it’s all really happening to me; I really do. I walk down the street and I look at the people; just look at them! A woman was killed in the place I stay in last week; can you imagine that? Nobody heard a thing. I go out and I go on buses and I buy papers and watch old movies in the afternoon. Yesterday I watched a man being talked down from the Queensboro bridge. I think people were disappointed. D'you know, when he came down he tried to claim he was a painter?' Linter shook his head, grinning. 'Hey, I read a terrible thing yesterday, you know? I read that there are times when there’s a really complicated birth and the baby’s caught inside the mother and probably already dead, and the doctor has to reach up inside the woman and take the baby’s skull in his hand and crush it so they can save the mother. Isn’t that terrible? I don’t think I could have condoned that even before I found Jesus.'