Use of Weapons (Culture, #3)

by Iain M. Banks

She’d talk to him about her old loves and old hopes and new hopes and he half listened,

he felt lost and abandoned, and the worst of it was that he felt abandoned by himself.

When he tried to tabulate his love, list all the things about her that drew him to her, he found himself starting at the larger facts — her beauty, her attitude to life, her creativity — but as he thought over the day that had just passed, or just watched her, he found individual gestures, single words, certain steps, a single movement of her eyes or a hand starting to claim equal attention. He would give up then, and console himself with something she’d said: that you could not love what you fully understood.

“I’ve heard that shit before. ‘We was robbed.’ ‘The folks back home let us down.’ ‘The media were against us.’ Shit . . .” He ran a hand through his wet hair. “Only the very young or the very stupid think wars are waged just by the military. As soon as news travels faster than a dispatch rider or a bird’s wing the whole . . . nation . . . whatever . . . is fighting. That’s your spirit, your will. Not the grunt on the ground. If you lose, you lose. Don’t whine about it.

You’ve earned the right to some leisure; nobody’s arguing. But that won’t stop you feeling guilty when — not if — the bad stuff comes. You have the power, Tsoldrin, whether you like it or not; just doing nothing is a statement, don’t you understand that?