Use of Weapons (Culture, #3)

by Iain M. Banks

He looked out over the waves after that, and suddenly felt that they were no longer bringing things to him, no longer messengers from the distant storms offering their bounty, but instead had become a pathway; a route, another distant sort of opportunity, beckoning.

You know,’ he told the rock, ‘I’ve got this really nasty feeling that I’m dying... but then all my feelings are pretty nasty at the moment, come to think of it. What do you think?’ The rock didn’t say anything.

Ah yes, here we have the nasty big flat rock, sitting doing nothing, just amoral and dull, and it sits like an island in the polluted pool. The pool is a tiny lake on the little island, and the island is in a drowned crater. The crater is a volcanic crater, the volcano forms part of an island in a big inland sea. The inland sea is like a giant lake on a continent and the continent is like an island sitting in the seas of the planet. The planet is like an island in the sea of space within its system, and the system floats within the cluster, which is like an island in the sea of the galaxy, which is like an island in the archipelago of its local group, which is an island within the universe; the universe is like an island floating in a sea of space in the Continua, and they float like islands in the Reality, and . . .

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. You feel you’ve done something. It’s an achievement. ’

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 them relevant, even - if one was to follow the exact development of one single human through the various stages - the identical connections.