Use of Weapons (Culture, #3)

by Iain M. Banks

The muck and dirt, the king with fleas. For theft, mutilation; for the wrong thoughts, death. An infant mortality rate as astronomical as the life expectancy was minute, and the whole grisly, working package wrapped in a skein of wealth and advantage designed to maintain the dark dominion of the knowing over the ignorant (and the worst of it was the pattern; the repetition; the twisted variations of the same depraved theme in so many different places).

He’d done what they’d asked; he’d be paid, and at the end of all this, after all, there was his own attempt to claim absolution for a past crime. Livueta, say you will forgive me.

“Here,” the man said, presenting the tiny furry creature to Sma. She took it reluctantly. It was warm, had four limbs arranged conventionally, smelled attractive and wasn’t any sort of animal she’d ever seen before; it had large ears on a large head, and as she held it, it opened its huge eyes and looked at her. “That’s the ship,” the man who’d handed her the animal said. “Hello,” the tiny being squeaked. Sma looked it up and down. “You’re the Xenophobe?” “Its representative. The bit you can talk to. You can call me Xeny.” It smiled; it had little round teeth. “I know most ships just use a drone, but” — it glanced at Skaffen-Amtiskaw — “they can be a bit boring, don’t you think?”

“You bastards!” he thought, not sure, even then, exactly who he meant. He managed to scream one syllable. “El — !” Then the blade slammed into his neck. The name died. Everything had ended but it still went on.

And he realized he had lost her. Not Shias Engin, whom he’d loved, or thought he had, and certainly lost . . . but her; the other one, the real one, the one who’d lived within him through a century of icy sleep.

He had thought he would not lose her until the day he died. Now he knew differently, and felt broken by the knowledge and the loss.

“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?

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 onward 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 which one to aim and fire; that talent, that ability, that use of weapons.

He envied people who could be born, be raised, mature with those around them, have friends, and then settle down in one place with one set of acquaintances, live ordinary and unspectacular, unrisky lives and grow old and be replaced, their children coming to see them . . . and die old and senile, content with all that had gone before.

“But you see yourself on the side of good, do you, Cheradenine?” He smiled and sat on the stone plinth, legs swinging. “I have no idea whether they’re the good guys or not, Tsoldrin. They certainly seem to be, but then who knows that seeming is being?” He frowned, looked away. “I have never seen them be cruel, even when they might have claimed they had an excuse to be so. It can make them seem cold, sometimes.”

The ship was over eighty kilometers long and it was called Size Isn’t Everything.

“Of course I don’t have to do this,” one middle-aged man said, carefully cleaning the table with a damp cloth. He put the cloth in a little pouch, sat down beside him. “But look, this table’s clean.” He agreed that the table was clean. “Usually,” the man said. “I work on alien — no offense — alien religions; Directional Emphasis In Religious Observance; that’s my speciality . . . like when temples or graves or prayers always have to face in a certain direction; that sort of thing? Well, I catalog, evaluate, compare; I come up with theories and argue with colleagues, here and elsewhere. But . . . the job’s never finished;

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?”

The rooms he slept in always contained places to sit; field extensions, moldable wall units, real couches, and — -sometimes — ordinary chairs. Whenever the rooms held chairs, he moved them outside, into the corridor or onto the terrace.

“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.”

“Oh,” he asked. “What’s this ship to be called?” “Its Mind wishes it to be called the Sweet and Full of Grace.” The woman laughed.

It took him a while to realize that all the drones he saw — even more various in their design than humans were in their physiology — didn’t all belong to the ship. Hardly any did, in fact; they had their own artificial brains

‘Za-kalwe, in all the human societies we have ever reviewed, in every age and every state, there has seldom if ever been a shortage of eager young males prepared to kill and die to preserve the security, comfort and prejudices of their elders, and what you call heroism is just an expression of this simple fact; there is never a scarcity of idiots.’

He believed that Darckense really was an unwilling hostage; many people had been taken by surprise when Elethiomel attacked the city; just the speed of the advance had trapped half the population, and Darckense had been unlucky to be discovered trying to leave from the chaos of the airport; Elethiomel had had agents out looking for her.