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that time it was fully light.The field around the car popped and the two small platforms under the auto
appeared, white slivers in the misty morning.They disappeared with their own 'pop's as the ship displaced
them.
I drove to Paris.Living in Kensington I'd had a smaller car, a VW Golf, and the Volvo was like a tank
after that.The ship spoke through my terminal brooch telling me which route to take to Paris, and then
guided me through the streets to Linter's place.Even so it was a slightly traumatic experience because the
whole city seemed snarled up with some cycle race, so when I eventually arrived in the courtyard just off
the Boulevard St Germain, where Linter had an apartment, I was in no mood to find that he wasn't there.
'Well where the hellis he?' I demanded, standing on the balcony outside the apartment, hands on hips,
glaring at the locked door.It was a sunny day, getting hot.
'I don't know,' the ship said through the brooch.
I looked down at the thing, for all the good that did. 'What?'
'Dervley has taken to leaving his terminal in his apartment when he goes out.'
'He -' I stopped there, took a few deep breaths, and sat down on the steps.I switched my terminal off.
Something was going on.Linter was still here in Paris, despite the fact that this was where he'd been sent
originally; his stay here shouldn't have been any longer than mine in London.Nobody on the ship had seen
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him since we'd first arrived; it looked like he hadn't been back to the ship at all.All the rest of us had.Why
was he staying on here?And what was he thinking of, going out without taking his terminal?It was the act
of a madman; what if something happened to him?What if he got knocked down in the street? (This
seemed quite likely, judging from the standard of Parisian driving I'd encountered.) Or beaten up in a
fight?And why was the ship treating all this so matter-of-factly?Going out without your terminal was
acceptable enough on some cosy Orbital, and positively commonplace in a Rock or onboard ship,
buthere ? Like taking a stroll through a game park without a gun and just because the natives did it all the
time didn't make it any less crazy.
I was quite certain now there was much more to this little jaunt to Paris than the ship had led me to
believe.I tried to get some more information out of the beast, but it stuck to its ignorant act and so I gave
up and left the car in the courtyard while I went for a walk.
I walked down the St Germain until I came to the St Michel, then headed for the Seine.The weather was
bright and warm, the shops busy, the people as cosmopolitan as they were in London, if a little more
stylishly dressed, on average.I think I was disappointed at first; the place wasn't that different.You saw
the same products, the same signs; Mercedes-Benz, Westing-house, American Express, De Beers, and
so on but gradually a more animated flavour of the city came through.A little more of Miller's Paris (I'd
zipped through theTropics the previous evening, as well as crossing them that morning), even if it was a
little tamed with the passing of the years.
It was a different mix, another blend of the same ingredients; the traditional, the commercial, the
nationalist I rather liked the language.I could just about make myself understood, at a fairly low level (my
accent wasformidable , the ship had assured me), and could more or less read all the signs and
advertisements but spoken at the standard rate I couldn't make out more than one word in ten.So the
language in the mouths of thoseParisiens was like music, one unbroken flow of sound.
On the other hand, the populace seemed very reluctant to use any other language save their own even
when they were technically able to, and if anything there seemed to be even fewer people in Paris willing
and able to speak English than there were Londoners likewise equipped to tackle French.Post-Imperial
snobbishness, perhaps.
In the shadow of Notre Dame I stood, thinking hard as I looked at that dull froth of brown stone which is
the façade (I didn't go in; I was fed up with cathedrals, and by that time even my interest in castles was
flagging).The ship wanted me to talk with Linter, for reasons I couldn't understand and it wasn't prepared
to explain.Nobody had seen the guy, nobody had been able to call him, and nobody had received a
message from him all the time we'd been over Earth.What had happened to him?And what was I
supposed to do about it?
I walked along the banks of the Seine with all that cluttered, heavy architecture around me, and
wondered.
I remembered the smell of roasting coffee (coffee was soaring in price at the time; them and their
Commodities!), and the light that struck off the cobbles as little men turned on taps inside the sidewalks
to wash the streets.They used old rags slung in front of the kerbs to divert the water this way and that.
For all my fruitless pondering, it was still wonderful to be there; therewas something different about the
city, something that really did make you feel glad to be alive.
Somehow I found my way to the upstream end of the Ile de Cité, although I'd meant to head towards the
Pompidou Centre and then double back and cross by the Pont des Arts.There was a little triangular park
at the island end, like some green fore-castle on a seaship, prow-facing those big-city waters of the dirty
old Seine.
I walked into the park, hands in pockets, just wandering, and found some curiously narrow and austere -
almost threatening - steps leading down between masses of rough-surfaced white stone.I hesitated, then
went down, as though towards the river.I found myself in an enclosed courtyard; the only other exit I
could see was down a slope to the water, but that was barred by a jagged construction of black steel.I
felt uneasy.There was something about the hard geometry of the place that induced a sense of threat, of
smallness and vulnerability; those jutting weights of white stone somehow made you think of how
delicately crushable human bones were.I seemed to be alone.I stepped, reluctantly inquisitive, into the
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dark, narrow doorway that led back underneath the sunlit park.
It was the memorial to the Deportation.
I remember a thousand tiny lights, in rows, down a grilled-off tunnel, a recreated cell, fine words
embossed but I was in a daze.It's over a century ago now, but I still feel the cold of that place; I speak
these words and a chill goes up my back; I edit them on screen and the skin on my arms, calves and
flanks goes tight.
The effect remains as sharp as it was at the time; the details were as hazy a few hours afterwards as they
are now, and as they will be until the day I die.
3.2:Just Another Victim Of The Ambient Morality
I came out stunned.I was angry at them, then.Angry at them for surprising me, touching me like that.Of
course I was angry at their stupidity, their manic barbarity, their unthinking, animal obedience, their
appalling cruelty; everything that the memorial evoked but what really hit me was that these people could [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]