Use of Weapons (42 page)

'But
in the end, it's still just cleaning a table.'

'And
therefore does not really signify on the cosmic scale of events?' the man
suggested.

He
smiled in response to the man's grin, 'Well, yes.'

'But
then, what
does
signify? My other
work? Is that really important, either? I could try composing wonderful musical
works, or day-long entertainment epics, but what would that do? Give people
pleasure? My wiping this table gives me pleasure. And people come to a clean
table, which gives
them
pleasure. And
anyway,' the man laughed, 'people die; stars die; universes die. What is any
achievement, however great it was, once time itself is dead? Of course, if
all
I did was wipe tables, then of
course it would seem a mean and despicable waste of my huge intellectual
potential. But because I choose to do it, it gives me pleasure. And,' the man
said with a smile, 'it's a good way of meeting people. So; where are you from,
anyway?'

He
talked to people all the time; in bars and cafes, mostly. The GSV's
accommodation seemed to be divided into various different types of lay-out;
valleys (or ziggurats, if you wanted to look at them like that) seemed to be
the most common, though there were different configurations.

He
ate when he was hungry and drank when he was thirsty, every time trying a
different dish or drink from the stunningly complicated menus, and when he
wanted to sleep - as the whole vessel gradually cycled into a red-tinged dusk,
the ceiling light-bars dimming - he just asked a drone, and was directed to the
nearest unoccupied room. The rooms were all roughly the same size, and yet all
slightly different; some were very plain, some were highly decorated. The
basics were always there; bed - sometimes a real, physical bed, sometimes one
of their weird field-beds - somewhere to wash and defaecate, cupboards, places
for personal effects, a fake window, a holo screen of some sort, and a link up
to the rest of the communications net, both aboard and off-ship. The first
night away, he linked into one of their direct-link sensory entertainments,
lying on the bed with some sort of device activated under the pillow.

He
did not actually sleep that night; instead he was a bold pirate prince who'd
renounced his nobility to lead a brave crew against the slaver ships of a
terrible empire amongst the spice and treasure isles; their quick little ships
darted amongst the lumbering galleons, picking away the rigging with chain
shot. They came ashore on moonless nights, attacking the great prison castles,
releasing joyous captives; he personally fought the wicked governor's chief
torturer, sword against sword; the man finally fell from a high tower. An alliance
with a beautiful lady pirate begot a more personal liaison, and a daring rescue
from a mountain monastery when she was captured...

He
pulled away from it, after what had been weeks of compressed time. He knew
(somewhere at the back of his mind) even as it happened that none of it was
real, but that seemed like the least important property of the adventure. When
he came out of it - surprised to discover that he had not actually ejaculated
during some of the profoundly convincing erotic episodes - he discovered that
only a night had passed, and it was morning, and he had, somehow, shared the
strange story with others; it had been a game, apparently. People had left
messages for him to get in touch, they had enjoyed playing the game with him so
much. He felt oddly ashamed, and did not reply.

The
rooms he slept in always contained places to sit; field extensions, mouldable
wall units, real couches, and - sometimes - ordinary chairs. Whenever the
rooms held chairs, he moved them outside, into the corridor or onto the
terrace.

It
was all he could do to keep the memories at bay.

'Na,'
the woman said in the Mainbay. 'It doesn't really work that way.' They stood on
a half-constructed starship, on what would eventually be the middle of the
engines, watching a huge field-unit swing through the air, out of the
engineering space behind the bay proper and up towards the skeletal body of the
General Contact Unit. Little lifter tugs manoeuvred the field unit down towards
them.

'You
mean it makes no difference?'

'Not
much,' the woman said. She pressed on a little studded lanyard she held in one
hand, spoke as though to her shoulder. 'I'll take it.' The field-unit put them
in shadow as it hovered above them. Just another solid slab, as far as he could
see. It was red; a different colour from the black slickness of the starboard
Main Engine Block Lower under their feet. She manipulated the lanyard, guiding
the huge red block down; two other people standing twenty metres away watched
the far end of the unit.

'The
trouble is,' the woman said, watching the vast red building-brick come slowly
down, 'that even when people do get sick and die young, they're always
surprised when they get sick. How many healthy people do you think actually say
to themselves, "Hey, I'm healthy today!", unless they've just had a
serious illness?' She shrugged, pressed the lanyard again as the field-unit
lowered to a couple of centimetres off the engine surface. 'Stop,' she said
quietly. 'Inertia down five. Check.' A line of light flashed on the surface of
the engine block. She put one hand on the block, and pressed it again. It
moved. 'Down dead slow,' she said. She pressed the block into place. 'Sorzh;
all right?' she asked. He didn't hear the reply, but the woman obviously did.

'Okay;
positioned; all clear.' She looked up as the lifter tugs sailed back towards
the engineering space, then back at him. 'All that's happened is that reality
has caught up with the way people always did behave anyway. So, no, you don't
feel any wonderful release from debilitating illnesses.' She scratched one ear.
'Except maybe when you think about it.' She grinned. 'I guess in school, when
you're seeing how people used to live... how aliens still do live... then it
hits home, and I suppose you never really lose that entirely, but you don't
spend much time thinking about it.'

They
walked across the black expanse of thoroughly featureless material ('Ah,' the
woman had said, when he'd mentioned this, 'you take a look at it under a
microscope; it's beautiful! What did you expect, anyway? Cranks? Gears? Tanks
full of chemicals?')

'Can't
machines build these faster?' he asked the woman, looking around the starship
shell.

'Why,
of course!' she laughed.

'Then
why do you do it?'

'It's
fun. You see one of these big mothers sail out those doors for the first time,
heading for deep space, three hundred people on board, everything working, the
Mind quite happy, and you think; I helped build that. The fact a machine could
have done it faster doesn't alter the fact that it was you who actually did
it.'

'Hmm,'
he said.

(Learn
woodwork; metalwork; they will not make you a carpenter or a blacksmith any
more than mastering writing will make you a clerk.)

'Well,
you may "hmm" as you wish,' the woman said, approaching a translucent
hologram of the half-completed ship, where a few other construction workers
were standing, pointing inside the model and talking. 'But have you ever been
gliding, or swum underwater?'

'Yes,'
he agreed.

The
woman shrugged. 'Yet birds fly better than we do, and fish swim better. Do we
stop gliding or swimming because of this?'

He
smiled. 'I suppose not.'

'You
suppose correctly,' the woman said. 'And why?' she looked at him, grinning.
'Because it's fun.' She looked at the holo model of the ship to one side. One
of the other workers called to her, pointing at something in the model. She
looked at him. 'Excuse me, will you?'

He
nodded, as he backed off. 'Build well.'

'Thank
you. I trust we shall.'

'Oh,'
he asked. 'What's this ship to be called?'

'Its
Mind wishes it to be called the
Sweet and
Full of Grace
,' the woman laughed. Then she was deep in discussion with the
others.

He
watched their many sports; tried a few. Most of them he just didn't understand.
He swam quite a lot; they seemed to like pools and water complexes. Mostly they
swam naked, which he found a little embarrassing. Later he discovered there
were whole sections - villages? areas? districts? he wasn't sure how to think
of them - where people never wore clothes, just body ornaments. He was
surprised how quickly he got used to this behaviour, but never fully joined in.

It
took him a while to realise that all the drones he saw - even more various in
their design than humans were in their physiology - didn't all belong to the
ship. Hardly any did, in fact; they had their own artificial brains (he still
tended to think of them as computers). They seemed to have their own
personalities, too, though he remained sceptical.

'Let
me put this thought experiment to you,' the old drone said, as they played a
card-game which it had assured him was mostly luck. They sat - well, the drone
floated - under an arcade of delicately pink stone, by the side of a small
pool; the shouts of people playing a complicated ball-game on the far side of
the pool filtered through bushes and small trees to them.

'Forget,'
said the drone, 'about how machine brains are actually put together; think
about making a machine brain - an electronic computer - in the image of a human
one. One might start with a few cells, as the human embryo does; these multiply,
gradually establish connections. So one would continually add new components
and make the relevant, even - if one was to follow the exact development of one
single human through the various stages - the
identical
connections.

'One
would, of course, have to limit the speed of the messages transmitted down
those connections to a tiny fraction of their normal electronic speed, but that
would not be difficult, nor would having these neuron-like components act like
their biological equivalents internally, firing their own messages according to
the types of signal they received; all this could be done comparatively simply.
By building up in this gradual way, you could mimic exactly the development of
a human brain,
and
you could mimic
its output; just as an embryo can experience sound and touch and even light
inside the womb, so could you send similar signals to your developing
electronic equivalent; you could impersonate the experience of birth, and use
any degree of sensory stimulation to fool this device into thinking it was
feeling touching, tasting, smelling, hearing and seeing everything your real
human was (or, of course, you might choose not actually to fool it, but always
give it just as much genuine sensory input, and of the same quality, as the
human personality was experiencing at any given point).

'Now;
my question to you is this; where is the difference? The brain of each being
works in exactly the same way as the other; they will respond to stimuli with a
greater correspondence than one finds even between monozygotic twins; but how
can one still choose to call one a conscious entity, and the other merely a
machine?

'Your
brain is made up of matter, Mr Zakalwe, organised into information-handling,
processing and storage units by your genetic inheritance and by the
biochemistry of first your mother's body and later your own, not to mention
your experiences since some short time before your birth until now.

'An
electronic computer is also made up of matter, but organised differently; what
is there so magical about the workings of the huge, slow cells of the animal
brain that they can claim themselves to be conscious, but would deny a quicker,
more finely-grained device of equivalent power - or even a machine hobbled so
that it worked with precisely the same ponderous-ness - a similar distinction?

'Hmm?'
the machine said, its aura field flashing the pink he was beginning to identify
as drone amusement. 'Unless, of course, you wish to invoke superstition? Do you
believe in gods?'

He
smiled. 'I have never had that inclination,' he said.

'Well
then,' the drone said. 'What would you say? Is the machine in the human image
conscious, sentient, or not?'

He
studied his cards. 'I'm thinking,' he said, and laughed.

Sometimes
he saw other aliens (obviously aliens, that is; he was sure that a few of the
humans he saw each day were not Culture people, though without stopping to ask
them it was impossible to tell; somebody dressed as a savage, or in some
obviously non-Culture garb, was quite possibly just dressing up like that for a
laugh, or going to a party... but there were some very obviously different
species around as well).

'Yes,
young man?' the alien said. It had eight limbs, a fairly distinct head with two
quite small eyes, curiously flower-like mouth parts, and a large, almost
spherical, lightly haired body, coloured red and purple. Its own voice was
composed of clicks from its mouth and almost subsonic vibrations from its body;
a small amulet did the translating.

He
asked if he could sit with the alien; it directed him to the seat across the
table from it in the cafe where he had overheard it talking briefly to a
passing human about Special Circumstances.