More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
That’s the way they prefer to work; offering life, you see, rather than dealing death. You might call them soft, because they’re very reluctant to kill, and they might agree with you, but they’re soft the way the ocean is soft, and, well; ask any sea captain how harmless and puny the ocean can be.’
There were only twenty people on the very fast picket Xenophobe, and Sma had noticed that - as a general rule - the smaller the crew, the weirder the behaviour.
dreams, sometimes he would whisper to her about a great warship, a great metal warship, becalmed in stone but still dreadful and awful and potent, and about the two sisters who were the balance of that warship’s fate, and about their own fates, and about the Chair, and the Chairmaker.
Once upon a time there was . . . a ship. A great ship. A ship for destroying things with; other ships, people, cities . . . It was very big and it was designed to kill people and to keep people inside it from being killed.
The sun was sifted through the tree-heads; shadows moved to and fro along the veranda and over the small table and the two hammocks.
I’m saying with very few exceptions nothing lasts forever, and amongst those exceptions, no work or thought of man is numbered.
‘Why do you look so similar to us? I know all the outworlders aren’t humanoid, but a lot are. How come?’ ‘Well,’ he said, hand at his mouth again, ‘It’s like this; the . . .’ he belched. ‘. . . the dustclouds and stuff in the galaxy are . . . its food, and its food keeps speaking back to it. That’s why there are so many humanoid species; nebulae’s last meals repeating on them.’
He would give up then, and console himself with something she’d said; that you could not love what you fully understood. Love, she maintained, was a process; not a state. Held still, it withered.
Memories are interpretations, not truth, she insisted, and rational thought was just another instinctive power.
‘What’s this?’ ‘CREWS; assault rifle,’ Skaffen-Amtiskaw said. ‘Seven fourteen tonne batteries; seven-element single shot to forty-four point eight kilorounds a second (minimum firing time eight point seven five seconds), maximum single burst; seven times two-fifty kilogrammes; frequency from mid-visible to high X-ray.’
your stasis is your society, and mine . . . is my age. But we are both assured of death.’
‘Sma, believe me; it has not all been “fun”.’ He leant against a cabinet full of ancient projectile weapons. ‘And, worse than all that,’ he insisted, ‘is when you turn the goddamn maps upside-down.’ ‘What?’ Sma said, puzzled. ‘Turning the maps upside down,’ he repeated. ‘Have you any idea how annoying and inconvenient it is when you get to a place and find that they map the place the other way up compared to the maps you’ve got? Because of something stupid like some people think a magnetic needle is pointing up to heaven, when other people think it’s just heavier and pointing down? Or because
...more
‘Diziet; no! I don’t want Skaffen-Amtiskaw or anything else that thinks it can think for itself.’ ‘Hey; just refer to me as though I’m not here,’ Skaffen-Amtiskaw said. ‘Wishful thinking, drone.’ ‘Better than none at all, so above par for you,’ the machine said. He looked at the drone. ‘You sure they didn’t issue a factory-recall on your batch number?’ ‘Myself,’ said the drone, sniffily, ‘I have never been able to see what virtue there could be in something that was eighty per cent water.’
From General Systems Vehicle to very fast picket to small module to the lobbed capsule to the suit that stood in the cold desert dust with a man encased inside it.
You could see anything in the rain. The individual drops became streaks with the slowness of the eye; they merged and re-emerged as cyphers for the shapes you carried inside you; they lasted less than a heartbeat in your sight and they went on for ever.
He saw a chair, and a ship that was not a ship; he saw a man with two shadows, and he saw that which cannot be seen; a concept; the adaptive, self-seeking urge to survive, to bend everything that can be reached to that end, and to remove and to add and to smash and to create so that one particular collection of cells can go on, can move onwards and decide, and keeping moving, and keeping deciding, knowing that - if nothing else - at least it lives. And it had two shadows, it was two things; it was the need and it was the method. 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 whi...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
He supposed he had forgotten how different the setting of the canyon made the city, compared to others. Still, this too is similar, he thought. All is similar. He had been to so many different places and seen so much the same and so much utterly different that he was amazed by both phenomena . . . but it was true; this city was not so different from many others he’d known.
Still, he suspected if the Culture had really wanted to, it could have found far more spectacularly different and exotic places for him to visit. Their excuse was that he was a limited creature, adapted to certain sorts of planets and societies and types of warfare. A martial niche, Sma had called it.
The banners were either absurd or humorous, too. PACIFISTS AGAINST WALLS! and, EXPERTS? WHAT DO THEY KNOW? were two of the more translatable examples.
‘The Dehewwoff system of punishing by disease; graded capital punishment; the more serious the crime the more serious the disease the culprit is infected with. For minor crimes a mere fever, loss of livelihood and medical expenses; for more damaging misdeeds a bout of something lasting perhaps months, with pain and a long convalescence, bills and no sympathy, sometimes marks to show later on. For really ghastly crimes, infection with diseases rarely survived; near certain death but possible divine intervention and miracle cure. Of course, the lower one’s class, the more virulent one’s
...more
Now he realised, now he understood, now when it was too late to do anything about it. Ah, he made himself want to be sick. A chair, a ship, a . . . something else; he forgot.
But down through the Continua, the Universe, the Local Group, the Galaxy, the Cluster, the System, the Planet, the Continent, the Island, the Lake, the Island . . . the rock remained. AND THAT MEANT THE ROCK, THE CRAPPY AWFUL ROCK HERE WAS THE CENTRE OF THE UNIVERSE, THE CONTINUA, THE WHOLE REALITY
He kept a proper journal in a larger book, back in his room at the old couple’s cottage. He wrote his notes up in that each evening, as though filling out a report for some higher authority.
In another large journal book, he wrote his notes out again, along with further notes on the notes, and then started to cross words out of the completed, annotated notes, carefully removing word after word until he had something that looked like a poem. This was how he imagined poetry to be made.
The books he had brought about poetry and poets confused him even more, and he had to continually re-read passage after passage to retain each word, and even then still felt none the wiser.
This adversarial symbiosis, competition creating stasis, amused him.
He found a sun, a planet, out of all that existence, and fell towards it, knowing this was the place, the font of all his dreams and memories. He searched for meaning, found ashes. Where does it hurt? Well, just here, actually. A wrecked summerhouse, smashed and burned. No sign of a chair.
Zakalwe, Sma said, I visited a place (how had they come to this? What had made him mention anything about this? Had he been drunk? Guard down again? Probably trying to seduce Sma, but ended up under the table again), Zakalwe I once visited a place where they killed people by putting them in a chair.
They - get this - they either gassed them or they passed very high electric currents through them. A pellet dropped into a container beneath the seat, like some obscene image of a commode, producing a fatal gas; or a cap over their head, and their hands dipped in some conducting fluid, to fry their brains. You want to know the punch-line? Yeah, Sma, give us the punch-line. This same state had a law that forbade - and I quote - ‘cruel and unusual punishments!’
He circled, then tried to approach, zeroing in . . . But there were too many layers, and they defeated him. He was thrown out again, and had to circle the planet once more, and as he did so, saw the Chair, and saw the Chairmaker - not the one he’d thought of, before; the other Chairmaker, the real one, and one that he had to keep returning to, through all the memories - in all his ghastly glory.
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.
‘They want other people to be like them, Cheradenine. They don’t terraform, so they don’t want others to either. There are arguments for it as well, you know; increasing species diversity often seems more important to people than preserving a wilderness, even without the provision of extra living space.
The Culture believes profoundly in machine sentience, so it thinks everybody ought to, but I think it also believes every civilisation should be run by its machines. Fewer people want that.
“War is a long cliff.” You can avoid the cliff completely, you can walk along the top for as long as you have the nerve, you can even choose to leap off, and if you only fall a short way before you hit a ledge you can always scramble back up again. Unless you’re just plain invaded, there are always choices, and even then, there’s usually something you’ve missed - a choice you didn’t make - that could have avoided invasion in the first place. You people still have your choices. There’s nothing inevitable about it.’
But I don’t know what the right thing to do is; I sometimes think I know too much, I’ve studied too much, learned too much, remembered too much. It all seems to average out, somehow; like dust that settles over . . . whatever machinery we carry inside us that leads us to act, and puts the same weight everywhere, so that always you can see good and bad on each side, and always there are arguments, precedents for every possible course of action ... so of course one ends up doing nothing.
Perhaps that’s only right; perhaps that’s what evolution requires, to leave the field free for younger, unencumbered minds, and those not afraid to act.’ ‘Okay, so it’s a balance. All societies are like that; the damping hand of the old and the firebrand youth together.
The ship was over eighty kilometres long and it was called the Size Isn’t Everything
‘when you clean a table you clean a table. You feel you’ve done something. It’s an achievement.
My wiping this table gives me pleasure. And people come to a clean table, which gives them pleasure. And anyway,’ the man laughed, ‘people die; stars die; universes die. What is any achievement, however great it was, once time itself is dead? Of course, if all I did was wipe tables, then of course it would seem a mean and despicable waste of my huge intellectual potential. But because I choose to do it, it gives me pleasure. And,’ the man said with a smile, ‘it’s a good way of meeting people. So; where are you from, anyway?’
Whenever the rooms held chairs, he moved them outside, into the corridor or onto the terrace. It was all he could do to keep the memories at bay.
‘Can’t machines build these faster?’ he asked the woman, looking around the starship shell. ‘Why, of course!’ she laughed. ‘Then why do you do it?’ ‘It’s fun. You see one of these big mothers sail out those doors for the first time, heading for deep space, three hundred people on board, everything working, the Mind quite happy, and you think; 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.’
have you ever been gliding, or swum underwater?’ ‘Yes,’ he agreed. The woman shrugged. ‘Yet birds fly better than we do, and fish swim better. Do we stop gliding or swimming because of this?’ He smiled. ‘I suppose not.’ ‘You suppose correctly,’ the woman said. ‘And why?’ she looked at him, grinning. ‘Because it’s fun.’
‘Your brain is made up of matter, Mr Zakalwe, organised into information-handling, processing and storage units by your genetic inheritance and by the biochemistry of first your mother’s body and later your own, not to mention your experiences since some short time before your birth until now.
you will be like me, in Special Circumstances, and only ever know them as the great, irresistible force behind you; people like you and I are the edge; you will in time come to feel like a tooth on the biggest saw in the galaxy, sir.’
‘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.’ ‘Agreed,’ the alien said, and together they drank.
There is no certainty; least of all in Special Circumstances, where the rules are different.’ ‘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.’
When he eventually left the craft, to go on his first tour of duty for the Culture - a series of missions which culminated in him taking the Chosen to the Perfumed Palace on the cliff - it was on a ship just starting its second tour of duty; the General Contact Unit Sweet and Full of Grace. He never saw Chori again, and heard that she’d been killed on active service some fifteen years later. He was told this news while they were regrowing his body on the GSV Congenital Optimist after he’d been beheaded on - and then rescued from - a planet called Fohls.
single aircraft within range; confirm.’ ‘Confirmed. And stop asking me to confirm everything.’ ‘Control-jurisdiction assumed. Lapsing confirmatory instruction protocols; confirm.’ ‘Good grief. Confirmed!’ ‘Confirm protocol lapsed.’
The last four days had been the same while the storm-wind blew, and the weather people said they expected no break for another two or three days. He thought of the troops, hunkered down in trenches and ice caves, afraid to curse the howling storm, because it meant there would probably be no fighting. The pilots would be glad too, but pretend they were not, and would loudly curse the storm that prevented them flying;
