Use of Weapons

Use of Weapons

Iain M. Banks

Published:
1990. ISBN: 1 85723 135 X

For Mic.

Acknowledgement

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.

'Slight Mechanical Destruction'

Zakalwe enfranchised;

Those lazy curls of
smoke above the city,

Black wormholes in the
air of noontime's 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 people's 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, it's you
and us knife missiles now,

Our lunge and speed and
bloody secret:

The way to a man's 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 Unpublished.

Prologue

'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 colour 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, spiralling 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; I've bit the glass,
too... mmm... I'm bleeding.' There was another pause. 'You hear?' The muffled,
slurred voice increased a little in volume. 'I'm 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 centre 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.

There
were one or two dulled paintings and frayed tapestries on the walls, but vacant
spaces for many more. Tall triangular windows of coloured glass threw wedges of
light across the mosaic and the wood. The white stone walls rose to red piers
at the top, supporting huge black beams of wood that closed over the length of
the hall like a giant tent of angular fingers.

The
young man kicked an antique chair the right way up and collapsed into it. 'What
pedigree blood?' he said. He rested one hand on the surface of the great table,
and put the other up to and over his scalp, as if through thick long hair,
though in fact his head was shaved.

'Eh?'
said the voice. It appeared to come from somewhere beneath the great table the
young man sat beside.

'What
aristocratic connections have you ever had, you drunken old bum?' The young man
rubbed his eyes with clenched fists, then, with his hands open, massaged the
rest of his face.

There
was a lengthy pause.

'Well,
I was once bitten by a princess.'

The
young man looked up at the hammer-beamed ceiling and snorted. 'Insufficient
evidence.'

He
got up and went out onto the balcony again. He took a pair of binoculars from
the balustrade and looked through them. He tutted, swaying, then retreated to
the windows, bracing himself against the frame so that the view steadied. He
fiddled with the focus, then shook his head and put the binoculars back on the
stonework and crossed his arms, leaning against the wall and gazing out over
the city.

Baked;
brown roofs and rough gable ends, like crusts and ends of bread; dust like
flour.

Then,
in an instant, under the impact of remembrance, the shimmering view before him
turned grey and then dark, and he recalled other citadels (the doomed tent city
in the parade-ground below, as the glass in the windows shook; the young girl -
dead now - curled up in a chair, in a tower in the Winter Palace). He shivered,
despite the heat, and shoved the memories away.

'What
about you?'

The
young man looked back into the hall. 'What?'

'You
ever had any, umm, connections, with our, ah... betters?'

The
young man looked suddenly serious. 'I once...' he began, then hesitated. 'I
once knew some-one who was... nearly a princess. And I carried part of her
inside me, for a time.'

'Say
again? You carried...'

'Part
of her inside me, for a time.'

Pause.
Then, politely: 'Wasn't that rather the wrong way round?'

The
young man shrugged. 'It was an odd sort of relationship.'

He
turned back to the city again, looking for smoke, or people, or animals, or
birds, or anything that moved, but the view might as well have been painted on
a backdrop. Only the air moved, shimmering the view. He thought about how you
could make a backdrop tremble just so to produce the same effect, then
abandoned the thought.

'See
anything?' rumbled the voice under the table.

The
young man said nothing, but rubbed his chest through the shirt and open jacket.
It was a general's jacket, though he wasn't a general.

He
came away from the window again and took up a large pitcher that stood on one
of the low tables by the wall. He lifted the pitcher above his head and
carefully up-ended it, his eyes closed, his face raised. There was no water in
the pitcher, so nothing happened. The young man sighed, gazed briefly at the
painting of a sailing ship on the side of the empty jug, and gently replaced it
on the table, exactly where it had been.