Iain Banks - The State of The Art

'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.'

'Why couldn’t they have done a Caesarean?'

'I don’t know. I don’t know. I wondered about that myself. You know I was thinking about coming up to the ship?' He looked briefly at me, nodded. 'To see if anybody else might want to stay. I thought others might want to follow my example, especially after I’d talked to them, had a chance to explain. I thought they might see I was right.'

'Why didn’t you?' We stopped at another intersection. All the people charged around us, hurrying through the smells of burning petrol and cooking and rotten food. I smelled gas, and sometimes steam wrapped itself around us, damp and fragrant.

'Why didn’t I?' Linter mused, watching the Don’t WALK sign. 'I didn’t think it would do any good. And I was afraid the ship might find a way of keeping me on board. Do you think I was foolish?'

I looked at him, while the steam curled round us and the sign changed to WALK, but I didn’t say anything. An old guy came up to us on the far sidewalk and Linter gave him a quarter.

'But I’ll be fine by myself anyway.' We turned down Broadway, heading towards Madison Square, past shops and offices, theatres and hotels, bars and restaurants and apartment blocks. Linter put his arm round my waist, squeezed me. 'Come on, Dizzy, you aren’t saying much.'

'No, I’m not, am I?'

'I guess you still think I’m being stupid.'

'No more than the locals.'

He smiled. 'They’re really good people. What you don’t understand is you have to translate behaviour as well as language. Once you do realize that you’ll come to love these people the way I do. Sometimes I think they’ve come to terms with their technology better than we have, you know that?'

'No.' No I didn’t know that, here in mincerville, meat-grinder city. Come to terms with it; yeah sure… turn off the aiming computer, Luke; play the five tones; close your eyes and concentrate together, that’s the way… nobody here but us Clears… hand me down that orgone box…

'I’m not getting through to you, Dizzy, am I? You’re all closed up, not really here. You’re half-way out the system already, aren’t you?'

'I’m just tired,' I told him. 'Keep talking.' I felt like a helpless, twitching, pink-eyed rat caught in a maze in some shining alien laboratory; vast and glittering with some lethal, inhuman purpose.

'They do so well, considering. I know there’s a lot of horrible things going on, but it only seems so terrible because we pay so much attention to it. The vast majority of good stuff isn’t newsworthy; we don’t notice it. We don’t see what a good time most of these people are having. I’ve met a lot of quite happy people, you know; I have friends. I met them through my work.'

'You work?' I was actually interested.

'Ha ha. I thought the ship might not have told you that. Yes, I’ve had a job for the last couple of months; document translator for a big firm of lawyers.'

'Uh-huh.'

'What was I saying? Oh yeah; lots of people have a quite acceptable life; they’re pretty comfortable in fact. People can have neat apartments, cars, holidays… and people can have children. That’s a good thing, you know; you see a lot more children on a planet like this. I like children. Don’t you?'

'Yes. I thought everybody did.'

'Ha, well… anyway… in some ways these people would consider us backward, you know that? I know it might sound dumb, but it isn’t. Look at transport; the aircraft I had on my home plate was on its third or fourth generation, nearly a thousand years old! These people change their automobiles every year! They have throw-away containers and disposable clothes and fashions that mean changing your clothes every year, every season!—'

'Dervley—'

'Compared to them, the Culture moves at a snail’s pace!'

'Dervley, what was it you wanted to talk about?'

'Huh? Talk about?' Linter looked confused. We turned left onto Fifth Avenue. 'Oh, nothing in particular, I guess. I just thought it'd be nice to see you before you left; wish you bon voyage . I hope you don’t mind. You don’t mind, do you? The ship said you might not want to come, but you don’t mind, do you?'

'No, I don’t mind.'

'Good. Good, I didn’t think… ' his voice trailed off. We walked on in our own silence, in the midst of the city’s continuous coughing and spitting and wheezing.

I wanted to go. I wanted to get out of this city and off this continent and up from this planet and onto the ship and out of this system… but something kept me walking with him, walking and stopping, stepping down and out, across and up, like another obedient part of the machine, designed to move, to function, to keep going regardless, to keep pressing on and plugging away, warming up or falling down but always always moving, down to the drug store or up to company president or just to stay a moving target, hugging the rails on a course you hardly needed to see so could stay blinkered on, missing the fallers and the lame around you and the trampled ones behind. Perhaps he was right and any one of us could stay here with him, just vanish into the city-space and disappear forever and never be thought of again, never think again, just obey orders and ordinances and do what the place demands, start falling and never stop, never find any other purchase, and our twistings and turnings and writhings as we fall, exactly what the city expects, just what the doctor ordered…