Iain Banks Culture 01 Cons

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murmured; the man was quiet and motionless as a fallen statue.
She had intended to switch off the ship's autoguard and go back immediately
for the Mind, but the man's icy stillness frightened her. She went for the
emergency medical kit and turned up the heating in the hold, but when she got
back to the stretcher, the cold, blank-faced Changer was dead.
Appendices: the Idiran-Culture war
(The following three pages have been extracted from A Short History of the
Idiran War (English language/Christian calendar version, original text 2110
AD, unaltered), edited by Parharengyisa
Page 267
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
Listach Ja'andeesih Petrain dam Kotosklo. The work forms part of an
independent, non-commissioned but Contact-approved Earth Extro-Information
Pack.)
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Reasons: the Culture
It was, the Culture knew from the start, a religious war in the fullest sense.
The Culture went to war to safeguard its own peace of mind: no more. But that
peace was the Culture's most precious quality, perhaps its only true and
treasured possession.
In practice as well as theory the Culture was beyond considerations of wealth
or empire. The very concept of money - regarded by the Culture as a crude,
over-complicated and inefficient form of rationing - was irrelevant within the
society itself, where the capacity of its means of production ubiquitously and
comprehensively exceeded every reasonable (and in some cases, perhaps,
unreasonable) demand its not unimaginative citizens could make. These demands
were satisfied, with one exception, from within the Culture itself. Living
space was provided in abundance, chiefly on matter-cheap Orbitals; raw
material existed in virtually inexhaustible quantities both between the stars
and within stellar systems; and energy was, if anything, even more generally
available, through fusion, annihilation, the Grid itself, or from stars (taken
either indirectly, as radiation absorbed in space, or directly, tapped at the
stellar core). Thus the Culture had no need to colonise, exploit or enslave.
The only desire the Culture could not satisfy from within itself was one
common to both the descendants of its original human stock and the machines
they had (at however great a remove)
brought into being: the urge not to feel useless. The Culture's sole
justification for the relatively unworried, hedonistic life its population
enjoyed was its good works; the secular evangelism of the Contact Section, not
simply finding, cataloguing, investigating and analysing other, less advanced
civilisations but - where the circumstances appeared to Contact to justify so
doing - actually interfering (overtly or covertly) in the historical processes
of those other cultures.
With a sort of apologetic smugness, Contact - and therefore the Culture -
could prove statistically that such careful and benign use of 'the technology
of compassion' (to use a phrase in vogue at the time) did work, in the sense
that the techniques it had developed to influence a civilisation's progress
did significantly improve the quality of life of its members, without harming
that society as a whole by its very contact with a more advanced culture.
Faced with a religiously inspired society determined to extend its influence
over every technologically inferior civilisation in its path regardless of
either the initial toll of conquest or the subsequent attrition of occupation,
Contact could either disengage and admit defeat - so giving the lie not simply
to its own reason for existence but to the only justificatory action which
allowed the pampered, self-consciously fortunate people of the Culture to
enjoy their lives with a clear conscience - or it could fight. Having prepared
and steeled itself (and popular opinion) through decades of the former, it
resorted eventually, inevitably, like virtually any organism whose existence
is threatened, to the latter.
For all the Culture's profoundly materialist and utilitarian outlook, the fact
that Idir had no designs on any physical pan of the Culture itself was
irrelevant. Indirectly, but definitely and mortally, the Culture was
threatened . . . not with conquest, or loss of life, craft, resource or [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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