Use of Weapons

by Iain M. Banks

  'Okay, so it's a balance. All societies are like that; the damping hand of the old and the firebrand youth together. It works out through generations, or through the set-up of your institutions, and their change and even replacement; but Governance, the Humanists, combine the worst of both approaches. Ancient, vicious, discredited ideas backed with adolescent war-mania. It's a crock of shit, Tsoldrin, and you know 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? What is all your studying worth, all your learning, all your knowledge, if it doesn't lead to wisdom? And what's wisdom but knowing what is right, and what is the right thing to do? You're almost a god to some of the people in this civilisation, Tsoldrin; again, whether you like it or not. If you do nothing... they'll feel abandoned. They'll feel despair. And who can blame them?'

  He made a resigned sort of gesture with his hands, putting them both down on the stone parapet, gazing out to the darkening sky. Beychae was silent.

  He gave the old man a while longer to think, then looked round at the flat stone summit of the hill, at all the strange stone instruments. 'An observatory, eh?'

  'Yes,' Beychae said after a moment's hesitation. He touched one of the stone plinths with one hand. 'Believed to have been a burial site, four or five thousand years ago; then to have had some sort of astrological significance; later, they may have predicted eclipses with readings taken here. Finally, the Vrehids built this observatory to study the motions of the moons, planets and stars. There are water-clocks, sundials, sextants, planet-dials... partial orreries... there are crude seismographs here, too, or at least earthquake direction indicators.'

  'They have telescopes?'

  'Very poor ones, and only for a decade or so before the Empire fell. The results they got from the telescopes caused a lot of problems; contradicted what they already knew, or thought they knew.'

  'That figures. What's this?' One of the plinths held a large, rusty metal bowl with a sharp central spindle.

  'Compass, I think,' Beychae said. 'It works by fields,' he smiled.

  'And this? Looks like a tree stump.' It was a huge, rough, very slightly fluted cylinder perhaps a metre in height, and twice that across. He tapped the edge. 'Hmm; stone.'

  'Ah!' Tsoldrin said, joining him at the stone cylinder. 'Well, if it's what I think it is... it was originally just a tree stump, of course...' He ran his hand over the stone surface, looked round the edge for something. 'But it was petrified, long ago. Look though; you can still see the rings in the wood.'

  He leant closer, looking at the grey stone surface by the fading afternoon light. The growth rings of the long dead tree were indeed visible. He leant forward, taking off one of the suit gloves, and with his fingers stroked the surface of the stone. Some differential weathering of the wood-become-rock had made the rings tangible; his fingers felt the tiny ridges run beneath their surface like the fingerprint of some mighty stone god.

  'So many years,' he breathed, putting his hand back to the very sapling centre of the stump, and running his hand out again. Beychae said nothing.

  Every year a complete ring, signature of bad year and good by the spacing, and every ring complete, sealed, hermetic. Every year like part of a sentence, every ring a shackle, chained and chaining to the past; every ring a wall, a prison. A sentence locked in the wood, now locked in stone, frozen twice, sentenced twice, once for an imaginable time, then for an unimaginable time. His finger ran over the ring walls, dry paper over ridged rock.

  'This is just the cover,' Beychae said from the other side. He was squatting down, looking for something on the side of the great stone stump. 'There ought to be... ah. Here we are. Don't expect we'll be able to actually lift it, of course...'

  'Cover?' he said, putting the glove back on and walking round to where Beychae was. 'Cover for what?'

  'A sort of puzzle the Imperial Astronomers played when the viewing was patchy,' Beychae said. 'There; see that handhold?'

  'Just a second,' he said. 'Want to stand back a little?' Beychae stood back. 'It's supposed to take four strong men, Zakalwe.'

  'This suit's more powerful than that, though balancing might be a little...' He found two hand-holds on the stone. 'Suit command; strength normal max.'

  'You have to talk to the suit?' Beychae asked.

  'Yeah,' he said. He flexed, lifting one edge of the stone cover up; a tiny explosion of dust under the sole of one of the suit's boots announced a trapped pebble giving up the struggle. 'This one you do; they have ones you just have to think about something, but...' he pulled on one edge of the cover, sticking one leg out to shift his centre of gravity as he did so. '... but I just never liked the idea of that.' He held the whole stone top of the petrified stump above his head, then walked awkwardly, to the noise of crunching, popping gravel under his feet, to another stone table; he lowered, shifted the stone cover sidways until it rested on the table, and returned; he made the mistake of clapping his hands together, and produced what sounded like a gunshot. 'Oops,' he grinned. 'Suit command; strength off.'

  Revealed by the removal of the stone cap was a shallow cone. It seemed to have been carved from the petrified stump itself. Looking closer, he could see that it was ridged, tree ring by tree ring.

  'Quite clever,' he said, mildly disappointed.

  'You're not looking at it properly, Cheradenine,' Beychae told him. 'Look closer.'

  He looked closer.

  'I don't suppose you have anything very small and spherical, do you?' Beychae said, 'Like a... ball-bearing.'

  'A ball-bearing?' he said, a pained expression on his face.

  'You don't have such things?'

  'I think you'll find in most societies ball-bearings don't last much beyond room-temperature superconductivity, let alone field technology. Unless you're into industrial archeology and trying to keep some ancient machine running. No, I don't have any ball...' he peered closer at the centre of the shallow rock cone. 'Notches.'

  'Exactly.' Beychae smiled.

  He stood back, looking at the ridged cone as a whole. 'It's a maze!'

  Maze. There had been a maze in the garden. They outgrew it, became too familiar with it, eventually only used it when other children they didn't like came for the day to the great house; they could lose them in the maze for a few hours.

  'Yes,' Beychae nodded. 'They would start out with small coloured beads or pebbles, and try to work their way to the rim.' He looked closer. 'They say there might have been a way to turn it into a game, by painting lines that divided each ring into segments; little wooden bridges and blocking pieces like walls could be used to facilitate one's own progress or prevent that of one's rivals.' Beychae squinted closer in the fading light. 'Hmm. Paint must have faded.'

  He looked down at the hundreds of tiny ridges on the surface of the shallow cone - like a model of a huge volcano, he thought - and smiled. He sighed, looked at the screen set into the wrist of the suit, tried the emergency signal button again. No reply.

  'Trying to contact the Culture?'

  'Mmm,' he said, gazing again at the petrified maze.

  'What will happen to you if Governance find us?' Beychae asked.

  'Oh,' he shrugged, walking back to the balustrade they had stood at earlier. 'Probably not much. Not very likely they'll just blow my brains out; they'll want to question me. Should give the Culture plenty of time to get me out; either negotiated or just snapped away. Don't worry about me.' He smiled at Beychae. 'Tell them I took you by force. I'll say I stunned you and stuffed you into the capsule. So don't worry; they'll probably let you go straight back to your studies.'

  'Well,' Beychae said, rejoining the other man at the balustrade. 'My studies were a delicate construction, Zakalwe; they maintained my carefully developed disinterest. They may not be so easy to resume, after your... exuberantly violent interruption.'

 
'Ah.' He tried not to smile. He looked down at the trees, then at the suit gloves, as though checking all the fingers were there. 'Yeah. Look, Tsoldrin... I'm sorry... I mean about your friend, Ms Shiol.'

  'As am I,' Beychae said quietly. He smiled uncertainly. 'I felt happy, Cheradenine. I hadn't felt like that for... well, long enough.' They stood watching the sun sink behind the clouds. 'You are certain she was one of theirs? I mean, absolutely?'

  'Beyond any reasonable doubt, Tsoldrin.' He thought he saw tears in the old man's eyes. He looked away. 'Like I said; I'm sorry.'

  'I hope,' Beychae said, 'that is not the only way the old can be made happy... can be happy. Through deceit.'

  'Maybe it wasn't all deceit,' he said. 'And anyway, being old isn't what it used to be; I'm old,' he reminded Beychae, who nodded, took out a kerchief and sniffed.

  'Of course; so you are. I forgot. Strange, isn't it? Whenever we see people after a long time we are always surprised how they've grown or aged. But when I see you, well, you haven't changed a bit, and instead I feel very old - unfairly, unjustifiably old - beside you, Cheradenine.'

  'Actually I have changed, Tsoldrin.' He grinned. 'But no, I haven't got any older.' He looked Beychae in the eye. 'They'd give you this, too, if you asked them. The Culture would let you grow younger, then stabilise your age, or let you grow old again, but very slowly.'

  'Bribery, Zakalwe?' Beychae said, smiling.

  'Hey, it was just a thought. And it'd be a payment, not a bribe. And they wouldn't force it on you. But it's academic, anyway.' He paused, nodding into the sky. 'Completely academic; now. Here comes a plane.'

  Tsoldrin looked out to the red clouds of sunset. He couldn't see any aircraft.

  'A Culture one?' Beychae asked cautiously.

  He smiled. 'In the circumstances, Tsoldrin, if you can see it, it isn't a Culture one.' He turned and walked quickly, picking up the suit helmet and putting it on. Suddenly the dark figure became inhuman, behind the armoured, sensor-studded faceplate of the suit. He took a large pistol from the suit holster.

  'Tsoldrin,' his voice came booming from speakers set in the suit chest as he checked the settings on the gun. 'If I were you I'd get back to the capsule, or just plain run away and hide.' The figure turned to face Beychae, the helmet like the head of some gigantic, fearsome insect. 'I'm fixing to give these assholes a fight, just for the sheer hell of it, and it might be best for you if you weren't nearby.'

  IV

  The ship was over eighty kilometres long and it was called the Size Isn't Everything. The last thing he'd been on for any length of time had actually been bigger, but then that had been a tabular iceberg big enough to hide two armies on, and it didn't beat the General Systems Vehicle by much.

  'How do these things hold together?' He stood on a balcony, looking out over a sort of miniature valley composed of accommodation units; each stepped terrace was smothered in foliage, the space was criss-crossed by walk-ways and slender bridges, and a small stream ran through the bottom of the V. People sat at tables in little courtyards, lounged on the grass by the stream side or amongst the cushions and couches of cafes and bars on the terraces. Hanging above the centre of the valley, beneath a ceiling of glowing blue, a travel-tube snaked away into the distance on either side, following the wavy line of the valley. Under the tube, a line of fake sunlight burned, like some enormous strip light.

  'Hmm?' Diziet Sma said, arriving at his elbow with two drinks; she handed one to him.

  'They're too big,' he said. He turned to face the woman. He'd seen the things they called bays, where they built smaller space ships (smaller in this case meant over three kilometres long); vast unsupported hangars with thin walls. He'd been near the immense engines, which as far as he could gather were solid, and inaccessible (how?), and obviously extremely massive; he'd felt oddly threatened on discovering that there was no control room, no bridge, no flight deck anywhere in the vast vessel, just three Minds - fancy computers, apparently - controlling everything (what!?)

  And now he was finding out where the people lived, but it was all too big, too much, too flimsy somehow, especially if the ship was supposed to accelerate as smartly as Sma claimed. He shook his head. 'I don't understand; how does it hold together?'

  Sma smiled. 'Just think; fields, Cheradenine. It's all done with force fields.' She put one hand out to his troubled face, patted one cheek. 'Don't look so confused. And don't try to understand it all too quickly. Let it soak in. Just wander around; lose yourself in it for a few days. Come back whenever.'

  Later, he had wandered off. The huge ship was an enchanted ocean in which you could never drown, and he threw himself into it to try to understand if not it, then the people who had built it.

  He walked for days, stopping at bars and restaurants whenever he felt thirsty, hungry or tired; mostly they were automatic and he was served by little floating trays, though a few were staffed by real people. They seemed less like servants and more like customers who'd taken a notion to help out for a while.

  '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 offence - 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 catalogue, evaluate, compare; I come up with theories and argue with colleagues, here and elsewhere. But... the job's never finished; always new examples, and even the old ones get re-evaluated, and new people come along with new ideas about what you thought was settled... but,' he slapped the table, 'when you clean a table you clean a table. You feel you've done something. It's an achievement.'

  'But in the end, it's still just cleaning a table.'

  'And therefore does not really signify on the cosmic scale of events?' the man suggested.

  He smiled in response to the man's grin, 'Well, yes.'

  'But then, what does signify? My other work? Is that really important, either? I could try composing wonderful musical works, or day-long entertainment epics, but what would that do? Give people pleasure? My wiping this table gives me pleasure. And people come to a clean table, which gives them pleasure. 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?'

  He talked to people all the time; in bars and cafes, mostly. The GSV's accommodation seemed to be divided into various different types of lay-out; valleys (or ziggurats, if you wanted to look at them like that) seemed to be the most common, though there were different configurations.

  He ate when he was hungry and drank when he was thirsty, every time trying a different dish or drink from the stunningly complicated menus, and when he wanted to sleep - as the whole vessel gradually cycled into a red-tinged dusk, the ceiling light-bars dimming - he just asked a drone, and was directed to the nearest unoccupied room. The rooms were all roughly the same size, and yet all slightly different; some were very plain, some were highly decorated. The basics were always there; bed - sometimes a real, physical bed, sometimes one of their weird field-beds - somewhere to wash and defaecate, cupboards, places for personal effects, a fake window, a holo screen of some sort, and a link up to the rest of the communications net, both aboard and off-ship. The first night away, he linked into one of their direct-link sensory entertainments, lying on the bed with some sort of device activated under the pillow.

  He did not actually sleep that night; instead he was a bold pirate prince who'd renounced his nobility to lead a brave crew against the slaver ships
of a terrible empire amongst the spice and treasure isles; their quick little ships darted amongst the lumbering galleons, picking away the rigging with chain shot. They came ashore on moonless nights, attacking the great prison castles, releasing joyous captives; he personally fought the wicked governor's chief torturer, sword against sword; the man finally fell from a high tower. An alliance with a beautiful lady pirate begot a more personal liaison, and a daring rescue from a mountain monastery when she was captured...

  He pulled away from it, after what had been weeks of compressed time. He knew (somewhere at the back of his mind) even as it happened that none of it was real, but that seemed like the least important property of the adventure. When he came out of it - surprised to discover that he had not actually ejaculated during some of the profoundly convincing erotic episodes - he discovered that only a night had passed, and it was morning, and he had, somehow, shared the strange story with others; it had been a game, apparently. People had left messages for him to get in touch, they had enjoyed playing the game with him so much. He felt oddly ashamed, and did not reply.

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

  It was all he could do to keep the memories at bay.

  'Na,' the woman said in the Mainbay. 'It doesn't really work that way.' They stood on a half-constructed starship, on what would eventually be the middle of the engines, watching a huge field-unit swing through the air, out of the engineering space behind the bay proper and up towards the skeletal body of the General Contact Unit. Little lifter tugs manoeuvred the field unit down towards them.

  'You mean it makes no difference?'

  'Not much,' the woman said. She pressed on a little studded lanyard she held in one hand, spoke as though to her shoulder. 'I'll take it.' The field-unit put them in shadow as it hovered above them. Just another solid slab, as far as he could see. It was red; a different colour from the black slickness of the starboard Main Engine Block Lower under their feet. She manipulated the lanyard, guiding the huge red block down; two other people standing twenty metres away watched the far end of the unit.