Use of Weapons (Culture, #3)

by Iain M. Banks

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.

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. ’

‘I thought the rules were meant to be the same for everybody.’ ‘They are. But in Special Circumstances we deal in the moral equivalent of black holes, where the normal laws - the rules of right and wrong that people imagine apply everywhere else in the universe - break down; beyond those metaphysical event-horizons, there exist . . . special circumstances.’ She smiled. ‘That’s us. That’s our territory; our domain.’ ‘To some people,’ he said, ‘that might sound like just a good excuse for bad behaviour.’ Sma shrugged. ‘And perhaps they would be right. Maybe that is all it is.’ She shook her head, pulled one hand through her long wet hair. ‘But if nothing else, at least we need an excuse; think how many people need none at all.’