Matter (Culture, #8)

by Iain M. Banks

These men wore high plumed helmets and their polished armour glittered brightly in the glare. “They’re all very parade ground,” Anaplian said. “It’s like they’re expecting to bump into somebody out here they need to impress.” “God?” the drone suggested.

“I’ll get the knife to buzz the wires,” the drone said. “What does that mean?” “Vibrates them, so that whatever the monofils go through, it’ll be like getting sliced by an implausibly sharp battleaxe rather than the world’s keenest razor,” the drone said helpfully.

Besides, his father had always entirely given everybody who’d ever met him the strong impression that he would most assuredly live for ever.

Choubris was taken aback. He’d never seen the prince weep like this, not sober (everybody knew that to drink was to increase the hydrographical pressure within a body, thus expressing the relevant fluids from all available bodily orifices, so that didn’t count).

“You think its disappearance is unlikely?” Utli said, now expressing mock seriousness. “Vanishingly,” Shoum said, but the joke didn’t translate.

“Indeed not, sir. If the gods had meant us to fly they’d have given us the wings and the caude the pox.” “If they hadn’t meant us to fly, gravity would be stronger,” Ferbin replied.

Perhaps if everybody saw what he, his brother and their friends were seeing, the Sarl might sink into a state of apathy and depression, for they would know how little their lives really counted within the ever-expanding hierarchies of alien powers beyond them.

“You don’t really want to go,” she said, a sly expression on her face. She nodded. “That doesn’t want to go.” He looked down. He was hard again. “That’s not me,” he told her, “that’s only my cock.” He tapped his head. “This wants to go.”

“You have spies there, ma’am?” “No, but information osmoses.”

However, I must make clear: my species is supposed to mentor those who mentor those who mentor your people. I am layers and levels away from being jurisdictionally allowed to have any direct influence.

“As I say, news osmoses. And where news is concerned, the Culture is of a very low pressure.” “I fail to understand you, ma’am.” “They tend to hear everything.”

Most men – most women, too, no doubt – lived and died under the general weight of the drives and needs, expectations and demands they experienced from within and without, beaten this way and that by longings for sex, love, admiration, comfort, importance and wealth and whatever else was their particular fancy, as well as being at the same time channelled into whatever furrows were deemed appropriate for them by those on high.

“The source of my name,” the vessel had replied, “The Hundredth Idiot, is a quotation: ‘One hundred idiots make idiotic plans and carry them out. All but one justly fail. The hundredth idiot, whose plan succeeded through pure luck, is immediately convinced he’s a genius.’ It is an old proverb.”

“I understand most people like to pretend that such oversight doesn’t exist, that it isn’t happening to them; I take a different view. I address those I know must be watching me. So, now you know.

“I shall sit, sir,” Ferbin told him, doing so, “but I am grievously disappointed.” Holse sat too. He was glad of this; the wine was very good and it would be a criminal shame to have to abandon it.

Thank you. How goes your peace conference? Slowly. Having exhausted the possibilities of every other form of mass-murder they could possibly employ against each other, the natives now appear intent on boring each other to death. They may finally have discovered their true calling.

The Morthanveld very much approved of themselves, and the larger the numbers of their kind there were present, the more self-approval they felt.

When one grows up in a place, no matter how exotic it may seem to others, it is still where all the usual banalities and indignities of childhood occur. Home is always the norm. It is everywhere else that is marvellous.”

ship’s interior swept around them. You really must see this, he said, glancing at her. No need to overstate, she told him. I am already here, going with you. She had never been very good at being romantic. Wooing and seduction, even played as a kind of game, seemed dishonest to her somehow.

I have wandered the galaxy for the last eight hundred years, seeing all I could of other civilisations and peoples. There is always more to see, of course; the galaxy renews and re-forms itself faster than one can make one’s way round it.

Oramen smiled and looked out at the maelstrom of crashing water and swirling wind. “Well, it would only be for a moment or two, just to experience something of that fabulous power, that mighty energy.” He shivered with the anticipation of it.

Was it more honourable to starve than to steal when others had the means to feed you but chose not to, unless you paid with money you did not have? He thought not. By choosing to starve you became your own oppressor, keeping yourself in line, harming yourself for having the temerity to be poor, when by rights that ought to be a constable’s job.