Use of Weapons

by Iain M. Banks

  He sat, looking at a small table in front of him. He sighed. 'I see. And all I have to do is leave?'

  'Yes; come with us.'

  'What happens after that?'

  'The high priests will be kidnapped by an Imperial commando squad brought in by Humanist controlled aircraft. The citadel here will be taken over by the troops outside; there are raids planned on the field HQs; they should be pretty bloodless. If necessary, the Hegemonarchy planes, tanks, artillery pieces and trucks will be put out of action, should the armed forces ignore the call put out by the high priesthood to surrender their arms. Once they've seen a few planes and tanks laser-blasted from space, it's expected the fight will go out of the army.'

  Sma stopped pacing, came to stand in front of him, on the far side of the little table. 'It all happens at dawn tomorrow. It should be fairly bloodless, really, Zakalwe. You might as well leave now; it would be best.' He heard her exhale. 'You've done... brilliantly, Cheradenine. It's worked; you did it; brought Beychae out, got him... motivated or whatever. We're grateful. We're very grateful, and it's not easy...'

  He raised one hand to stop her. He heard her sigh. He looked up from the small table, up to her face. 'I can't leave right away. There are a few things I have to do. I'd rather you left now and then came back. Pick me up tomorrow; at dawn.' He shook his head. 'I won't desert them until then.'

  Sma opened her mouth, then closed it, glanced at the drone. 'All right; we'll be back tomorrow. Zakalwe, I -'

  'It's all right, Diziet,' he interrupted calmly, and slowly stood up. He looked into her eyes; she had to look away. 'It'll be as you say. Good-bye.' He didn't hold out his hand.

  Sma walked to the door; the drone followed her.

  The woman looked back. He nodded once; she hesitated, seemed to think the better of saying anything, and went out.

  The drone stopped there too. 'Zakalwe,' it said. 'I just want to add -'

  'Out!' he screamed, and in one movement turned, swooped, caught the small table between the legs and threw it with all his might at the floating machine. The table bounced off an invisible field and clattered to the floor; the drone swept out and the door closed.

  He stood staring at it for some time.

  II

  He was younger then. The memories were still fresh. He discussed them with the frozen, seemingly sleeping people sometimes, on his wanderings through the cold, dark ship, and wondered, in its silence, if he really was mad.

  The experience of being frozen and of then being woken up had done nothing to dull his memories; they remained keen and bright. He had rather hoped that the claims they made for freezing were over-optimistic, and the brain did indeed lose at least some of its information; he'd secretly desired that attrition, but been disappointed. The process of warming and revival was actually rather less traumatic and confusing than coming round after being knocked unconscious, something that had happened to him a few times in his life. Revival was smoother, took longer, and was really quite pleasant; in truth quite like waking up after a good night's sleep.

  They left him alone for a couple of hours after they'd run the medical checks and pronounced him fit and well. He sat, wrapped in a big thick towel, on the bed, and - like somebody probing a diseased tooth with tongue or finger, unable to stop checking that it really does hurt every now and again - he called up his memories, going through the roll-call of those old and recent adversaries he'd hoped he might have lost somewhere in the darkness and the cold of space.

  All his past was indeed present, and everything that had been wrong present too, and correct.

  The ship was called the Absent Friends; its journey would take it over a century. It was a mercy voyage, in a way; its services donated by its alien owners to help assuage the after-effects of a terrible war. He had not really deserved his place, and had used false papers and a false name to secure his escape. He'd volunteered to be woken up near the middle of the journey to provide part of the human crew because he thought it would be a shame to travel in space and never really know it, never appreciate it, never look out into that void. Those who did not choose to do crew duty would be drugged on planet, taken into space unconscious, frozen out there, and then wake up on another planet.

  This seemed undignified, to him. To be treated so was to become cargo.

  The two other people on duty when he was woken were Ky and Erens. Erens had been supposed to return to the ranks of the frozen people five years earlier, after a few months of duty on the ship, but had decided to stay awake until they arrived at their destination. Ky had been revived three years later and should also have gone back to sleep, to be replaced after a few months by the next person on the crew rota, but by then Erens and Ky had started to argue, and neither wanted to be the first to return to the stasis of the freeze; there had been stalemate for two and a half years while the great slow ship moved, quiet and cold, past the distant pinprick lights that were the stars. Finally they'd woken him up, at last, because he was next on the rota and they wanted somebody else to talk to. As a rule, however, he just sat in the crew section and listened to the two of them argue.

  'There's still fifty years to go,' Ky reminded Erens.

  Eren waved a bottle. 'I can wait. It isn't forever.'

  Ky nodded at the bottle. 'You'll kill yourself with that stuff, and all the other junk you take. You'll never make it. You'll never see real sunlight again, or taste rain. You won't last one year let alone fifty; you should go back to sleep.'

  'It isn't sleep.'

  'You should go back to it, whatever you want to call it; you should let yourself be frozen again.'

  'And it isn't literally frozen... freezing, either.' Erens looked annoyed and puzzled at the same time.

  The man they'd woken up wondered how many hundreds of times the two had been through this argument.

  'You should go back into your little cold cubicle like you were supposed to, five years ago, and get them to treat you for your addictions when they revive you,' Ky said.

  'The ship already treats me,' Erens told Ky, with a kind of slow drunken dignity. 'I am in a state of grace with my enthusiasms; sublimely tensioned grace.' So saying, Erens tipped the bottle back and drained it.

  'You'll kill yourself.'

  'It's my life.'

  'You might kill us all; everybody on the whole ship, sleepers too.'

  'The ship looks after itself,' Erens sighed, looking round the Crew Lounge. It was the only dirty place on the ship. Everywhere else, the ship's robots tidied, but Erens had worked out how to delete the Crew Lounge from the craft's memory, and so the place could look good and scruffy. Erens stretched, kicking a couple of small recyclable cups off the table.

  'Huh,' Ky said. 'What if you've damaged it with all your messing around?'

  'I have not been "messing around" with it,' Erens said, with a small sneer. 'I have altered a few of the more basic housekeeping programs; it doesn't talk to us anymore, and it lets us keep this place looking lived-in; that's about it. Nothing that's going to make the ship wander into a star or start thinking it's human and what are these intestinal parasites doing in there. But you wouldn't understand. No technical background. Livu, here; he might understand, eh?' Erens stretched out further, sliding down the grubby seat, boots scraping on the filthy surface of the table. 'You understand, don't you, Darac?'

  'I don't know,' he admitted (he was used to answering to Darac, or Mr Livu, or just Livu, by now). 'I suppose if you know what you're doing, there's no real harm.' Erens looked pleased. 'On the other hand, a lot of disasters have been caused by people who thought they knew what they were doing.'

  'Amen,' Ky said, looking triumphant, and leant aggressively-towards Erens. 'See?'

  'As our friend said,' Erens pointed out, reaching for another bottle. 'He doesn't know.'

  'You should go back with the sleepers,' Ky said.

  'They're not sleeping.'

  'You're not supposed to be up right now; there's only supposed to be two people up at any point.
'

  'You go back then.'

  'It isn't my turn. You were up first.'

  He left them to argue.

  Sometimes he would put a spacesuit on and go through the airlock into the storage sections, which were in vacuum. The storage sections made up most of the ship; over ninety-nine per cent of it. There was a tiny drive unit at one end of the craft, an even tinier living unit at the other, and - in between - the bulging bulk of the ship, packed with the un-dead.

  He walked the cold, dark corridors, looking from side to side at the sleeper units. They looked like drawers in a filing cabinet; each was the head-end of something very like a coffin. A little red light glowed faintly on each one, so that standing in one of the gently spiralling corridors, with his own suit lights switched off, those small and steady sparks curved away in a ruby lattice folded over the darkness, like some infinite corridor of red giant suns set up by some obsessively tidy-minded god.

  Spiralling gradually upwards, moving away from the living unit at what he always thought of as the head of the ship, he walked up through its quiet, dark body. Usually he took the outermost corridor, just to appreciate the scale of the vessel. As he ascended, the pull of the ship's fake gravity gradually decreased. Eventually, walking became a series of skidding leaps in which it was always easier to hit the ceiling than make any forward progress. There were handles on the coffin-drawers; he used them once walking became too inefficient, pulling himself along towards the waist of the ship, which - as he approached it - turned one wall of coffin-drawers to a floor and the other to a ceiling, in places. Standing under a radial corridor, he leapt up, floated towards what was now the ceiling with the radial corridor a chimney up through it. He caught a coffin-drawer handle, and used a succession of them as rungs, climbing into the centre of the ship.

  Running through the centre of the Absent Friends there was an elevator shaft that extended from living unit to drive unit. In the very centre of the whole ship, he would summon the elevator, if it wasn't already waiting there from last time.

  When it came, he would enter it, floating inside the squat, yellow-lit cylinder. He would take out a pen, or a small torch, and place it in the centre of the elevator car, and just float there, watching the pen or torch, waiting to see if he had stationed it so exactly in the centre of the whole slowly spinning mass of the ship that it would stay where he'd left it.

  He got very good at doing this, eventually, and could spend hours sitting there, with the suit lights and the elevator lights on sometimes (if it was a pen) or off (if it was a torch), watching the little object, waiting for his own dexterity to prove greater than his patience, waiting for - in other words, he could admit to himself - one part of his obsession to win over the other.

  If the pen or torch moved and eventually connected with the walls or floor or ceiling of the elevator car, or drifted through the open door, then he had to float, climb (down) and then pull and walk back the way he had come. If it stayed still in the centre of the car, he was allowed to take the elevator back to the living unit.

  'Come on, Darac,' Erens said, lighting up a pipe. 'What brought you along on this one-way ride, eh?'

  'I don't want to talk about it.' He turned up the ventilation to get rid of Eren's drug fumes. They were in the viewing carousel, the one place in the ship where you could get a direct view of the stars. He came up here every now and again, opened the shutters and watched the stars spin slowly overhead. Sometimes he tried to read poetry.

  Erens still visited the carousel alone as well, but Ky no longer did; Erens reckoned Ky got homesick, seeing the silent nothingness out there, and the lonely specks that were other suns.

  'Why not?' Erens said.

  He shook his head and sat back in the couch, looking out into the darkness. 'It isn't any of your business.'

  'I'll tell you why I came along if you tell me why you did,' Erens grinned, making the words sound childish, conspiratorial.

  'Get lost, Erens.'

  'Mine is an interesting story; you'd be fascinated.'

  'I'm sure,' he sighed.

  'But I won't tell you unless you tell me first. You're missing a lot; mm-hmm.'

  'Well, I'll just have to live with that,' he said. He turned down the lighting in the carousel until the brightest thing in it was Erens' face, glowing red with reflected light on each draw of the pipe. He shook his head when Erens offered him the drug.

  'You need to loosen up, my friend,' Erens told him, slumping back in the other seat. 'Get high; share your problems.'

  'What problems?'

  He saw Erens' head shake in the darkness. 'Nobody on this ship hasn't got problems, friend. Nobody out here not running away from something.'

  'Ah; ship psychiatrist now are we?'

  'Hey, come on; nobody's going back, are they? Nobody on here's ever going back home. Half the people we know are probably dead already, and the ones that aren't will be, by the time we get where we're going. So if we can't ever see the people we used to know again, and probably never see home again, it has to be something pretty damn important and pretty damn bad, pretty damn evil to make a body up and leave like that. We all got to be running from something, whether it's something we did or something we had done to us.'

  'Maybe some people just like travelling.'

  'That's crap; nobody likes travelling that much.'

  He shrugged. 'Whatever.'

  'Aw, Darac, come on; argue, dammit.'

  'I don't believe in argument,' he said, looking out into the darkness (and saw a towering ship, a capital ship, ringed with its layers and levels of armament and armour, dark against the dusk light, but not dead).

  'You don't?' Erens said, genuinely surprised. 'Shit, and I thought I was the cynical one.'

  'It's not cynicism,' he said flatly. 'I just think people overvalue argument because they like to hear themselves talk.'

  'Oh well, thank you.'

  'It's comforting, I suppose.' He watched the stars wheel, like absurdly slow shells seen at night; rising, peaking, falling... (And reminded himself that the stars too would explode, perhaps, one day.) 'Most people are not prepared to have their minds changed,' he said. 'And I think they know in their hearts that other people are just the same, and one of the reasons people become angry when they argue is that they realise just that, as they trot out their excuses.'

  'Excuses, eh? Well, if this ain't cynicism, what is?' Erens snorted.

  'Yes, excuses,' he said, with what Erens thought might just have been a trace of bitterness. 'I strongly suspect the things people believe in are usually just what they instinctively feel is right; the excuses, the justifications, the things you're supposed to argue about, come later. They're the least important part of the belief. That's why you can destroy them, win an argument, prove the other person wrong, and still they believe what they did in the first place.' He looked at Erens. 'You've attacked the wrong thing.'

  'So what do you suggest one does, Professor, if one is not to indulge in this futile... arguing stuff?'

  'Agree to disagree,' he said. 'Or fight.'

  'Fight?'

  He shrugged. 'What else is left?'

  'Negotiate?'

  'Negotiation is a way to come to a conclusion; it's the type of conclusion that I'm talking about.'

  'Which basically is disagree or fight?'

  'If it comes to it.'

  Erens was silent for a while, drawing on the pipe until its red glow faded, then saying, 'You have a military background, at all, yeah?'

  He sat and watched the stars. Eventually he turned his head and looked at Erens. 'I think the war gave us all a military background, don't you?'

  'Hmm,' Erens said. They both studied the slowly moving star-field.

  Twice, in the depths of the sleeping ship, he almost killed somebody. One of those times, it was somebody else.

  He stopped on the long, spiralling outer corridor, about halfway to the waist of the ship, where he felt very light on his feet, and his face was a little flushed
with effects of normal blood pressure working against the reduced pull. He hadn't intended to look at any of the stored people - the truth was, he never really thought about them in any but the most abstract way - but suddenly he wanted to see something more of a sleeper than just a little red light. He stopped at one of the coffin-drawers.

  He had been shown how to work them after he'd volunteered to act as crew, and had another, rather perfunctory, run through the procedures shortly after being revived. He turned the suit lights on, flipped out the drawer's control pad, and carefully - using one bulky, gloved finger - keyed in the code that Erens said turned off the ship's monitoring system. A little blue light came on. The red light stayed steady; if it flashed the ship knew there was something wrong.

  He unlocked the cabinet, drew the whole device sliding out.

  He looked at the woman's name, printed on a plastic strip stuck to the head-unit. No-one he knew, anyway, he thought. He opened the inner cover.

  He looked in at the woman's calm, deathly pale face. His lights reflected on the crinkled transparent plastic wrapping covering her like something you'd buy in a shop. Tubes in her nose and mouth, leading away beneath her. A small screen flashed on above her tied-up hair, on the head-unit. He looked; she seemed in good shape, for somebody so nearly completely dead. Her hands were crossed across the chest of the paper tunic she wore. He looked at her finger-nails, like Erens had said. Quite long, but he'd seen people grow them longer.

  He looked at the control pad again, entered another code. Lights flashed all over the control surface; the red light did not start flashing, but almost everything else did. He opened a little red and green door set in the top of the head-unit. Out of it he took a small sphere of what looked like fine green wires, containing an ice blue cube. A compartment alongside gave access to a covered switch. He pushed the cover back, put his finger down to the switch.