Matter (Culture, #8)

by Iain M. Banks

Sursamen collected adjectives the way ordinary planets collected moons. It was Arithmetic, it was Mottled, it was Disputed, it was Multiply Inhabited, it was Multi-million-year Safe, and it was Godded.

We seek to be just to the peoples in our charge and those that we mentor by, usually, declining the always obvious option of facile intervention. One might intervene and interfere at every available opportunity and at every single instant when things did not turn out as any decent and reasonable creature would like. However, with every intervention, every interference – no matter how individually well-meant and seemingly right and proper judged purely on its own immediate merits – one would, subtly, incrementally but most certainly remove all freedom and dignity from the very people one sought only to help.”

“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.”

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. In life you hoped to do what you could but mostly you did what you were told and that was the end of it.

“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.”

“You should be ashamed,” the man said sadly. “Really we’re no better – you’re no better – than the savages. They always find excuses to justify their crimes, too. The point is not to commit them in the first place.” “I do see your point. I really do.” “So be ashamed then. Tell me you’re ashamed.” “We are,” Anaplian assured him. “Constantly. Still, we can prove that it works. The interfering and the dirty-tricking; it works. Salvation is in statistics.”

She wanted to tell him that it was all okay, that there was nothing really to worry about, that the universe was a terrible, utterly uncaring place and then people came along and added suffering and injustice to the mix as well and it was all so much worse than he could imagine and she knew because she had studied it and lived it, even if just a little. You could make it better but it was a messy process and then you just had to try – you were obliged, duty-bound to try – to be sure that you did the right thing.

Welcome to the future, she thought, surveying all this wordage and tat. All our tragedies and triumphs, our lives and deaths, our shames and joys are just stuffing for your emptiness.

knowledge in the Culture is cheap beyond measuring, however the ruthlessness required to use that knowledge proficiently in a less forgiving society is almost unheard of.

The Sarcophagus gave off, it seemed to him as he walked up to it, an aura of utter solidity; of settled, stolid, almost crushing containment and impassivity, of – indeed – timelessness, as though this thing had witnessed the passing of ages and epochs ungraspable by men, and yet still, somehow, was more of the future than of the past.