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It all remains so clear, so measured.I suppose some secretion had taken over the instant my midbrain
realized what was happening.It seemed very light in the alley, and everybody else was moving slowly,
along lines like laser beams or cross-hairs, casting weighted shadows in front of them along those lines in
the direction they were moving.
I stepped to one side, letting the boy and the knife spin past.A right-foot trip and a little pressure on his
wrist as he went by and he had to let the knife go.He stumbled and fell.I had the knife, and threw it far
away down the alley before turning back to Linter.
Two of them had him on the ground, kicking and struggling.I heard him cry out once as I moved towards
them, but I recall no other sound.Whether it was really as silent as I remember it, or whether I was simply
concentrating on the sense that yielded the most information, I don't know.I caught the heels of one of
them, and pulled, heaving him out and up, cracking his face against one boot where I'd stuck it out to
meet him.I threw him out of the way.The other one was already up.Lines seemed to be bunching up at
the side of my vision, and throbbing, making me think about how much time the first one had had to
regain his balance if not his knife.I realized I wasn't doing this the way you were meant to.The one in front
of me lunged.I stepped out of the way, turning again.I hit him on the head while I looked back at the first
one, who was on his feet, coming forward, but hesitating at the side of the one I'd hit second, who was
struggling up against the wall, holding his face; dark blood on pale skin.
They ran, as one, like a school of fish turning.
Linter was staggering, trying to stand.I caught him and he clutched at me, gripping my arm tightly, breath
wheezing.He stumbled and sagged as we got to the red and white light outside the little restaurant.A man
with a napkin stuffed in the top of his vest opened the door and looked out at us.
Linter fell at the doorstep.It was only then I thought of the terminal, and realized that Linter was gripping
the top of my coat, where the terminal brooch was.The smells of cooking came out of the open door.The
man with the napkin looked cautiously up and down the alley.I tried to prise Linter's fingers free.
'No,' he said. 'No.'
'Dervley, let go.Let me get the ship.'
'No.' He shook his head.There was sweat on his brow, blood on his lips.A huge dark stain was
spreading over the fawn coat. 'Let me.'
'What?'
'Lady?'
'No.Don't.'
'Lady?Want me to call the cops?'
'Linter?Linter?'
'Lady?'
'Linter!'
When his eyes closed his grip loosened.
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There were more people at the restaurant door.Somebody said, 'Jesus.' I stayed there, kneeling on the
cold ground with Linter's face close to mine, thinking:How many films? (The guns quieten, the battle
stops.) How often do they do this, in their commercial dreams? (Look after Karen for me that's an order,
mister you know I always loved you Killing of Georgie Ici resté un deporté inconnu) What am I doing
here?Come on lady.
'Come on lady.Come on, lady'Somebody tried to lift me.
Then he was lying beside Linter looking hurt and surprised and somebody was screaming and people
were backing off.
I started running.I jabbed the terminal brooch and shouted.
I stopped at the far end of the alley, near the street, and rested against a wall, looking at the dark bricks
opposite.
A noise like a pop, and a drone sinking slowly down in front of me; a business-like black-body drone,
the inky lengths of two knife missiles hovering on either side above eye level, twitchy for action.
I took a deep breath. 'There's been a slight accident,' I said calmly.
6.3:Halation Effect
I looked at Earth.It was shown, in-holo'd, on one wall of my cabin; brilliant and blue, solid and
white-whorled.
'Then it was more like suicide,' Tagm said, stretching out on my bed. 'I didn't think Catholics -'
'But I cooperated,' I said, still pacing up and down. 'I let him do it.I could have called the ship.After he
lost consciousness there was time; we could still have saved him.'
'But he'd been altered back, Dizzy, and they're dead when their heart stops, aren't they?'
'No; there's two or three minutes after the heart stops.It was enough time.I had enough time.'
'Well then so did the ship.Itmust have been watching; it was bound to have had a missile on the case.'
Tagm snorted. 'Linter was probably the most over-observed man on the planet.The ship must have
known too; it could have done something.The ship had the control, it had the real-time grasp; it isn't your
responsibility, Dizzy.'
I wished I could accept Tagm's moral subtraction.I sat down on the end of the bed, head in my hands,
staring at the holo of the planet in the wall.Tagm came over, hugged me, hands on my shoulders, head on
mine. 'Dizzy; you have to stop thinking about it.Let's go do something.You can't sit watching that damn
holo all day.'
I stroked one of Tagm's hands, gazed again at the slowly revolving planet, my gaze flicking in one glance
from pole to equator. 'You know, when I was in Paris, seeing Linter for the first time, I was standing at
the top of some steps in the courtyard where Linter's place was, and I looked across it and there was a
little notice on the wall saying it was forbidden to take photographs of the courtyard without the man's
permission.' I turned to Tagm. 'They want to own the light!'
6.4:Dramatic Exit, Or, Thank You And Goodnight
At five minutes and three seconds past three AM, GMT, on the morning of January the second, 1978,
the General Contact UnitArbitrary broke orbit above the planet Earth.It left behind an octet of Main
Observation Satellites - six of them in near-GS orbits - a scattering of drones and minor missiles, and a
small plantation of young oaks on a bluff near Elk Creek, California.
The ship had brought Linter's body back up, displacing it from its freezer in a New York City
morgue.But when we left, Linter stayed, in a fashion.I argued he ought to be buried on-planet, but the
ship disagreed.Linter's last instructions regarding the disposal of his remains had been issued fifteen years
earlier, when he first joined Contact, and were quite conventional; his corpse was to be displaced into the
centre of the nearest star.So the sun gained a bodyweight, courtesy of Culture tradition, and in a million
years, maybe, a little of the light from Linter's body would shine upon the planet he had loved.
TheArbitrary held its darkfield for a few minutes, then dropped it just past Mars (so there was just a
chance it left an image on an Earth telescope).Meanwhile it was snapping all its various remote drones
and sats away from the other planets in the system.It stayed in real space right up till the last moment
(making it possible that its rapidly increasing mass produced a blip on a terrestrial gravity-wave
experiment, deep in some mountain-mine), then totalled as it dispatched Linter's body into the stellar
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core, sucked a last few drones of Pluto and a couple of outlying comets, and slung Li's diamond at
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