Use of Weapons (Culture, #3)

by Iain M. Banks

An asteroid belt-sized pile of shit is about to hit a fan exactly the size of this planet, thanks to Zakalwe’s ludicrous good-guy schemes,

the ship, set in stone, near the centre of the battered city, fired its great guns, gouting black and flashing yellow-white, and he knew what was coming, and tried to scream to cover the noise, but when it arrived it was the name of the ship that the guns had spoken, and it shattered the boat, demolished the castle, and resounded through the bones and spaces of his skull, like the laughter of an insane god, forever.

‘Hmm.’ He pretended to aim the readied gun. ‘Now, what’s to stop you putting your supporting hand over here, where the beams are going?’ ‘Common sense?’ suggested the drone.

‘If you want to do something useful, try finding something that the university might want.’ Sma shrugged. ‘It’s a capitalist society. How about money?’

The need was obvious; to defeat what opposed its life. The method was that taking and bending of materials and people to one purpose, the outlook that everything could be used in the fight; that nothing could be excluded, that everything was a weapon, and the ability to handle those weapons, to find them and choose which one to aim and fire; that talent, that ability, that use of weapons.

To avoid falling you had to walk like an old man, hands splayed as though trying to grasp a stick, bending at the waist when you wanted to walk straight-backed. This annoyed him, but walking on without acknowledging the changed conditions, and slipping on his backside, appealed to him even less.

He loved the plasma rifle. He was an artist with it; he could paint pictures of destruction, compose symphonies of demolition, write elegies of annihilation, using that weapon.

‘You’d rather let those decadent dickheads in Governance do it instead?’ ‘At least they’re involved, Zakalwe; it isn’t just a game to them.’ ‘Oh, I think it is. I think that’s exactly what it is to them. The difference is that unlike the Culture’s Minds, they don’t know enough to take games seriously.’

He walked for days, stopping at bars and restaurants whenever he felt thirsty, hungry or tired; mostly they were automatic and he was served by little floating trays, though a few were staffed by real people. They seemed less like servants and more like customers who’d taken a notion to help out for a while.

I catalogue, evaluate, compare; I come up with theories and argue with colleagues, here and elsewhere. But . . . the job’s never finished; always new examples, and even the old ones get re-evaluated, and new people come along with new ideas about what you thought was settled . . . but,’ he slapped the table, ‘when you clean a table you clean a table.

‘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.

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.

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.’

‘To the Culture,’ he said, raising his glass to the alien. It matched his gesture. ‘To its total lack of respect for all things majestic.’

Their machines could do everything else much better than they could; no sense in breeding super-humans for strength or intelligence, when their drones and Minds were so much more matter- and energy-efficient at both. But pleasure . . . well, that was a different matter. What else was the human form good for?

‘Suit; retract legs,’ he said, hinging the suit face-plate back. Happily, the suit was smart enough to realise he meant the aircraft’s legs, not its own.

‘We’re not just being incredibly lucky, I take it?’ Beychae muttered. He shook his head. ‘Not unless you count it as incredibly lucky that we’ve got a near military-standard electro-magnetic effector controlled by a hyper-fast starship Mind working this entire port like an arcade game from a light-year or so off, no.’

There were plans of the ship available on-screen, and he studied them, but they were really just for people to find their way about, and provided little useful information on how the ship might be taken over or disabled.

‘I strongly suspect the things people believe in are usually just what they instinctively feel is right; the excuses, the justifications, the things you’re supposed to argue about, come later. They’re the least important part of the belief. That’s why you can destroy them, win an argument, prove the other person wrong, and still they believe what they did in the first place.’

His wounds talked to him in the languages of pain and damage, and he had to listen to them, but paid them no further heed.

‘Death-wish,’ the drone muttered, quietly. ‘With extrovert complications.’