The State Of The Art by Banks Iain M

Author:Banks, Iain M. [Banks, Iain M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Collections, Science
ISBN: 1597800740
Publisher: Night Shade
Published: 1991-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

4.4: God Told Me To Do It

'Why did I do what?'

'What you did to Linter. Alter him. Revert him.'

'Because he asked me to do it,' the ship said. I was standing in the top hangar deck. I'd waited till I was back on the ship before I confronted it, via a remote drone.

'And of course it had nothing to do with hoping he might dislike the feeling so much he'd come back into the fold. Nothing to do with trying to shock him with the pain of being human when the locals have at least had the advantage of growing up with it and getting used to the idea. Nothing to do with letting him inflict a physical and mental torture on himself so you could sit back and say “I told you so” after he came crying to you to take him back.'

'Well as a matter of fact, no. You obviously believe I altered Linter for my own ends. That's not true. I did what I did because Linter requested it. Certainly I tried to talk him out of it, but when I was convinced that he meant what he said and he knew what he was doing and what it entailed - and when I couldn't reasonably decide he was mad - I did what he asked.

'It did occur to me he might not enjoy the feeling of being something close to human-basic, but I thought it was obvious from what he'd said when we were talking it over beforehand that he didn't expect to enjoy it. He knew it would be unpleasant, but he regarded it as a form of birth, or rebirth. I thought it unlikely he would be so unprepared for the experience, and so shocked by it, that he would want to be returned to his genofixed norm, and even less likely that he would go on from there to abandoning his idea of staying on Earth altogether.

'I'm a little disappointed in you, Sma. I thought you would understand me. One's object in trying to be scrupulously fair and even-handed is not to seek praise, I'm sure, but one would hope that having done something more honest than convenient, one's motives would not be questioned in such an overtly suspicious manner. I could have refused Linter's request; I could have claimed that I found the idea unpleasant and didn't want to have anything to do with it. I could have built a perfectly adequate defence on aesthetic distaste alone; but I didn't.

'Three reasons: One; I'd have been lying. I don't find Linter any more repellent or disgusting than I did before. What matters is his mind; his intellect and the state it's in. Physiological details are largely irrelevant. Certainly his body is less efficient than it was before; less sophisticated, less damage-resistant, less flexible over a given range of conditions than, say, yours ... but he's living in the Twentieth Century West, and at a comparatively privileged economic level; he doesn't have to have brilliant reflexes or better night-sight than an owl.

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