Matter (Culture, #8)

by Iain M. Banks

The dim green glow of the Gazan-g’ya Crater lit up her body and that of the Grand Zamerin, the gentle light slowly increasing as Sursamen turned and presented more of the vast pockmark of the crater to the rays of the star Meseriphine.

The last vestige of the lace’s presence informed her that her heart was still completing the beat it had been beginning when she’d first clicked in.

altogether. The result was that while their individuals had what appeared to be complete freedom within their societies,

“What rest? What rest is there? Rest is . . . rest is beneficial. Renews the frame, redefines the nerves, resupplies the muscles and allows the mechanical stresses on the greater bodily organs to abate. Yes, that is rest, and crave it we might. Death is not rest, no; death is the end of rest. Death is decay and rotting down, not building up!

The Culture represented the hospital, or perhaps a whole caring society, Contact was the physician and SC the anaesthetic and the medicine. Sometimes the scalpel.

A temple was worth a dozen barracks; a militia man carrying a gun could control a small unarmed crowd only for as long as he was present; however, a single priest could put a policeman inside the head of every one of their flock, for ever.

“but we have found that the underdisciplined child will bump up against life eventually and learn their lessons that way – albeit all the harder for their parents’ earlier lack of courage and concern. The overdisciplined child lives all its life in a self-made cage, or bursts from it so wild and profligate with untutored energy they harm all about them, and always themselves. We prefer to underdiscipline, reckoning it better in the long drift, though it may seem harsher at the time.”

“Still, it is often easier to be the second in command, prince,” Hyrlis said. “The throne is a lonely place, and the nearer you are to it the clearer you see that. There are advantages to having great power without ultimate responsibility. Especially when you know that even the king does not have ultimate power, that there are always powers above.

There are those who hold that, statistically, we must live in a simulation; the chances are too extreme for this not to be true.” “There are always people who can convince themselves of near enough anything, seems to me, sir,” Holse said.

“By this reasoning we must, after all, be at the most base level of reality – or at the most exalted, however one wishes to look at it. Just as reality can blithely exhibit the most absurd coincidences that no credible fiction could convince us of, so only reality – produced, ultimately, by matter in the raw – can be so unthinkingly cruel. Nothing able to think, nothing able to comprehend culpability, justice or morality could encompass such purposefully invoked savagery without representing the absolute definition of evil. It is that unthinkingness that saves us. And condemns us, too, of course; we are as a result our own moral agents, and there is no escape from that responsibility, no appeal to a higher power that might be said to have artificially constrained or directed us.”

“It might, but people can be quite good at spotting what has been faked. And the effect on people who do not know that anything can be faked is usually profound.

“Does it start from what you might call reality, though?” Holse asked,

Holse such a good character

Holse smiled sadly. “Matter, eh, sir?” “Matter.” Hyrlis nodded. “And anyway, where would be the fun in just playing a game? Our hosts could do that themselves. No. They need us to play out the greater result. Nothing else will do. We ought to feel privileged to be so valuable, so irreplaceable. We may all be mere particles, but we are each fundamental!”

but these are changed days, Fanthile. Perhaps they are even the New Age that my father talked about, when feats of practical business matter more than those of arms.”

The It’s My Party And I’ll Sing If I Want To was an Escarpment-class GCU which had been strongly associated with Special Circumstances

Haha

the 303rd was something of a wide-spectrum humanoid stoners’ hang-out.

There was a whole section of the organisation devoted to watching developing civilisations for signs that some so-called Wanderer had – with prior intent, opportunistically or even accidentally – turned into a local Mad Professor, Despot, Prophet or God. There were other categories, but these four formed the most popular and predictable avenues people’s fantasies took them along when they lost their moral bearings down amongst the prims. Most Wanderers caused no such problems, however, and such itinerants normally found somewhere to call home eventually, usually back in the Culture. Some, though, never settled anywhere, roaming all their lives, and of these a few – a surprisingly large proportion compared to the rest of the Culture’s population – lived, effectively, for ever. Or at least lived until they met some almost inevitably violent, irrecoverable end. There were rumours – usually in the form of personal boasts – of individuals who had been around since the formation of the Culture itself, nomads who’d drifted the galaxy and its near infinitude of peoples, societies, civilisations and places for thousands upon thousands of years.

“But all peoples go,” Oramen said gently, as though explaining something to a child. “No one remains in full play for long, not taking the life of a star or a world as one’s measure. Life persists by always changing its form, and to stay in the pattern of one particular species or people is unnatural, and always deleterious. There is a normal and natural trajectory for peoples, civilisations, and it ends where it starts, back in the ground.

medics? These people know nothing about radiation sickness, she replied. Anybody escaping would have