Use of Weapons (Culture, #3)

by Iain M. Banks

‘Many of their people become physicians to great leaders, and with medicines and treatments that seem like magic to the comparatively primitive people they’re dealing with, ensure that a great and good leader has a better chance of surviving. 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.’

Advice unacted upon almost always might have been right,

‘By the way,’ she said. ‘Why ten per cent more money?’ He shrugged as they walked onto the wooden pier. ‘Inflation.’ Sma frowned. ‘What’s that?’

He lay, often, looking at her sleeping face in the new light that fell in through the open walls of the strange house, and he stared at her skin and hair with his mouth open, transfixed by the quick stillness of her, struck dumb with the physical fact of her existence as though she was some careless star-thing that slept on quite unaware of its incandescent power; the casualness and ease with which she slept there amazed him; he couldn’t believe that such beauty could survive without some superhumanly intense conscious effort.

Any lousy species ever invents the telescope and the spectroscope and starts looking in between the stars, what do they find?’ He knocked the glass on the table. ‘Loads of stuff; but much of it alcohol.’ He drank from the glass. ‘Humanoids are the galaxy’s way of trying to get rid of all that alcohol.’

Love, she maintained, was a process; not a state. Held still, it withered.

use the weapons

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.

If I were a seabird . . . but how could you be a seabird? If you were a seabird your brain would be tiny and stupid and you would love half-rotted fish guts and tweaking the eyes out of little grazing animals; you would know no poetry and you could never appreciate flying as fully as the human on the ground yearning to be you. If you wanted to be a seabird you deserved to be one.

‘the good news is, we managed to get the blood off the hangar floor.’ ‘I expect it to be returned.’ ‘Deal, but we’re not cleaning it.’

He wore a plain uniform, without even the half-dozen or so medal ribbons that even the most junior officer seemed to warrant just for existing. He spoke to the mostly dull, demoralised and thoroughly hidebound field generals and colonels, to their staff, and to the foot soldiers and tank crews, as well as to the cooks and the supply teams and the orderlies and doctors. Most of the time he needed an interpreter; only the top brass spoke the Cluster’s common tongue, but even so he suspected the troops felt closer to somebody who spoke a different language but asked them questions than they did to somebody who shared their language and only ever used it to give orders.

‘Most people are not prepared to have their minds changed,’ he said. ‘And I think they know in their hearts that other people are just the same, and one of the reasons people become angry when they argue is that they realise just that, as they trot out their excuses.’

‘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.’

use of weapons