Iain Banks - Use of Weapons

Copyright 1990 by Iain M. Banks

Excerpt from Matter copyright 2008 by Iain M. Banks

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Orbit

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First eBook Edition: December 2008

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The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

ISBN: 978-0-316-06879-6

Praise for Iain M. Banks

Banks is a phenomenon... writing pure science fiction of a peculiarly gnarly energy and elegance.

William Gibson

There is now no British SF writer to whose work I look forward with greater keenness.

The Times

Poetic, humorous, baffling, terrifying, sexy#8212; the books of Iain M. Banks are all these things and more.

NME

Staggering imaginative energy.

Independent

Banks writes with a sophistication that will surprise anyone unfamiliar with modern science fiction.

New York Times

The Culture Books are not technological just-so stories. Theyre about faith in the future, about the belief that societies can make sense of themselves, can have fun doing so, can live by Good Works, and can do so in circumstances far removed from our own little circle of western civilization.

Wired

An exquisitely riotous tour de force of the imagination which writes its own rules simply for the pleasure of breaking them.

Time Out

Pyrotechnic, action-filled, satiric, outlandish, deep and frivolous all at once, these bravura space operas... juggle galactic scale... with a revelatory energy rarely matched in speculative fiction.

Science Fiction Weekly

Few of us have been exposed to a talent so manifest and of such extraordinary breadth.

New York Review of Science Fiction

By Iain M. Banks

Consider Phlebas

The Player of Games

Use of Weapons

The State of the Art

Against a Dark Background

Feersum Endjinn

Excession

Inversions

Look to Windward

The Algebraist

Matter

By Iain Banks

The Wasp Factory

Walking on Glass

The Bridge

Espedair Street

Canal Dreams

The Crow Road

Complicity

Whit

A Song of Stone

The Business

Dead Air

The Steep Approach to Garbadale

For Mic

I blame Ken MacLeod for the whole thing. It was his idea to argue the old warrior out of retirement, and he suggested the fitness program, too.

Zakalwe enfranchised;

Those lazy curls of smoke above the city,

Black wormholes in the air of noontimes bright Ground Zero;

Did they tell you what you wanted to be told?

Or rain skinned on a concrete fastness,

Fortress island in the flood;

You walked amongst the smashed machines,

And looked through undrugged eyes

For engines of another war,

And an attrition of the soul and the device.

With craft and plane and ship,

And gun and drone and field you played, and

Wrote an allegory of your regress

In other peoples tears and blood;

The tentative poetics of your rise

From a mere and shoddy grace.

And those who found you,

Took, remade you

(Hey, my boy, its you and us knife missiles now,

Our lunge and speed and bloody secret:

The way to a mans heart is through his chest!)

They thought you were their plaything,

Savage child; the throwback from wayback

Expedient because

Utopia spawns few warriors.

But you knew your figure cut a cipher

Through every crafted plan,

And playing our game for real

Saw through our plumbing jobs

And wayward glands

To a meaning of your own, in bones.

The catchment of these cultured lives

Was not in flesh,

And what we only knew,

You felt,

With all the marrow of your twisted cells.

Rasd Coduresa Diziet Embless Sma da Marenhide. c/o SC, Year 115 (Earth, Khmer calendar).

Marain original, own translation. Unpublished.

Tell me, what is happiness?

Happiness? Happiness... is to wake up, on a bright spring morning, after an exhausting first night spent with a beautiful... passionate... multi-murderess.

... Shit, is that all?

In his fingers, the glass lay like something trapped, sweating light. The liquid it contained was the same color as his eyes, and swilled around lethargically in the sunlight under his heavy-lidded gaze, the glinting surface of the drink throwing highlights onto his face like veins of quick gold.

He drained the glass, then studied it as the alcohol made its way down his throat. His throat tingled, and it seemed to him that the light tingled in his eyes. He turned the glass over in his hands, moving it carefully and smoothly, seemingly fascinated by the roughness of the ground areas and the silky slickness of the unetched parts. He held it up to the sun, his eyes narrowing. The glass sparkled like a hundred tiny rainbows, and minute twists of bubbles in the slender stem glowed golden against the blue sky, spiraling about each other in a fluted double helix.

He lowered the glass, slowly, and his gaze fell upon the silent city. He squinted out over the roofs and spires and towers, out over the clumps of trees marking the sparse and dusty parks, and out over the distant serrated line of the city walls to the pale plains and the smoke-blue hills shimmering in the heat haze beyond, beneath a cloudless sky.

Without taking his eyes from the view, he suddenly jerked his arm, throwing the glass over his shoulder, back into the cool hall, where it vanished into the shadows and shattered.

You bastard, said a voice, after a slight pause. The voice sounded both muffled and slurred. I thought that was the heavy artillery. I nearly crapped myself. You want to see the place covered with shit?... Oh hell; Ive bit the glass, too... mmm... Im bleeding. There was another pause. You hear? The muffled, slurred voice increased a little in volume. Im bleeding... You want to see the floor covered with shit and pedigree blood? There was a scraping, tinkling sound, then silence, then, You bastard.

The young man on the balcony turned away from the view over the city and walked back inside the hall, only a little unsteadily. The hall was echoing and cool. The floor was mosaic, millennia old, veneered over in more recent times with a transparent, scratch-proof covering to protect the tiny ceramic fragments. In the center of the hall there was a massive, elaborately carved banqueting table, surrounded by chairs. Around the walls were scattered smaller tables, more chairs, low chests of drawers, and tall sideboards, all made from the same dark, heavy wood.

Some of the walls were painted with fading but still impressive murals, mostly of battlefields; other walls, painted white, supported huge mandalas of old weapons; hundreds of spears and knives, swords and shields, pikes and maces, bolas and arrows all arranged in great whorls of pitted blade like the shrapnel of impossibly symmetrical explosions. Rusting firearms pointing importantly at each other above blocked-off fireplaces.