Use of Weapons (Culture, #3)

by Iain M. Banks

“They also,” Skaffen-Amtiskaw said, “refuse to acknowledge machine sentience fully; they exploit proto-conscious computers and claim only human subjective experience has any intrinsic value — carbon fascists.”

He shrugged as they walked onto the wooden pier. “Inflation.” Sma frowned. “What’s that?”

He looked round the library. So many old books; they smelled. So many words set down, so many lives spent scribbling, so many eyes dimmed by reading. He wondered that people bothered as much as they did.

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.” He looked at Erens. “You’ve attacked the wrong thing.”

Twice, in the depths of the sleeping ship, he almost killed somebody. One of those times, it was somebody else.