Use of Weapons
Chapters - Iain M. Banks
Section: 'Slight Mechanical Destruction'
A poem by Diziet Sma, addressed to Cheradenine Zakalwe, reflecting on his recruitment by the Culture and his use as a weapon in their interventions. It describes how the Culture found and remade him, exploiting his warrior nature because their utopia spawns few fighters. The poem acknowledges that Zakalwe saw through their plans and found his own meaning in the work, feeling what they could only intellectualise.
Mentioned: Cheradenine Zakalwe, Diziet Sma
Prologue
In a deserted palace hall hung with weapons and murals of old battles, a young man in a general's jacket drinks alone on a balcony, watching a silent city beyond the walls. Beneath the great banqueting table, a drunken older companion called Cullis, in a too-large field marshal's coat with a micropistol for a false eye, slurs jokes about princesses and pedigree blood. The young man, whom Cullis calls Zakalwe, hauls him up, kits him out with guns, ammunition belts and bottles, an armoured eye patch and a helmet. As artillery shells begin to rain in, he drags Cullis down the green marble stairs, dodging plaster and shattering glass. In the courtyard he gets a half-track started while shells gut the royal apartments. Cullis briefly thinks he has been hit, but the red on his hand is wine from a bottle smashed inside his jacket. They drive out toward the desert as the hall collapses behind them, Cullis cursing the bastards.
POV: Cheradenine Zakalwe·On page: Cullis
Part 1: The Good Soldier
Part one of the novel's three-part structure - the header page introducing the first stretch of alternating forward (Arabic-numeral) and backward (Roman-numeral) chapters that make up the first third of the book.
Chapter 1: One
Diziet Sma works a glittering party in the turbine hall of the old power station she occupies, charming admirals, ministers and media while her hralzs trail her. She has cultivated the composer Relstoch Sussepin as her next conquest and slips away to meet him in the arboretum. Just as the flirtation tips toward seduction, the drone Skaffen-Amtiskaw interrupts: Special Circumstances needs her. The Voerenhutz peace Zakalwe and Tsoldrin Beychae secured forty years ago is collapsing, war across the cluster is imminent, and only the real Zakalwe can persuade the retired Beychae back into play. A stand-in will cover her ongoing peace conference; the very fast picket Xenophobe will collect her tomorrow. Sma agrees, briskly cancels press, redirects guests, makes her goodbyes to the pregnant hralz Gainly, and stipulates the stand-in must not sleep with anyone. Back in her apartments she is scanned to update the duplicate, then invites Sussepin to bed for the one night she has left.
POV: Diziet Sma·On page: Skaffen-Amtiskaw·Mentioned: Cheradenine Zakalwe, Tsoldrin Beychae
XIII
The Ethnarch Kerian wakes in his fortified bedroom to find a young intruder in motley clothes seated at the foot of his bed, a girl sleeping beside him. The Ethnarch tries his voice-activated alarm code, but the palace security is already dead. The intruder calmly tells a story about a soft, kind people who reward selected tyrants with retro-aging treatments in return for promises of better behaviour, and who, when the deal is broken, quietly remove the bad people to comfortable exile rather than killing them. Kerian, who took the youth treatments and continued the death trains in Youricam, lunges for a gun hidden in the headboard, only to find the intruder has emptied it. Begging and offering bribes, he is told to dress for collection. The young man then reveals he no longer works for the Culture, names himself Cheradenine Zakalwe, and shoots the screaming Ethnarch through the mouth. He strips off the clown clothes, dons a dark suit and mask, lifts a sleep patch from the girl, removes the security boxes, and leaves through the Ethnarch's secret escape route.
POV: Cheradenine Zakalwe·On page: Ethnarch Kerian
Chapter 2: Two
Morning at the dam. A guard drone disguised as a bird, controlled by Skaffen-Amtiskaw, peeks in on Sma and the sleeping Sussepin before she dresses and drives off down Riverside Drive in her sports car. From a clifftop castle overlooking the straits she clears the last bits of her old life and waits for pickup. Skaffen-Amtiskaw weaves her a flower chain while she remembers an earlier mission: lodged in a desert frontier town hunting a child messiah, she was set upon by slavers who killed the innkeeper and seized his daughters. She told the drone to do something; it cheerfully obliterated one man through a wall, hurled another into the ceiling, then unleashed its knife missile to dismember the riders in the square in seconds. Sma vomited, screamed at the drone, and warned it to use minimum force in future. Back in the present, the disguised module collects her from the keep roof and lifts off to rendezvous with the Xenophobe. The drone privately frets about telling her that Zakalwe has shaken off his tail. Meanwhile a figure that looks exactly like Sma rejoins the tour party below: the stand-in is in place.
POV: Diziet Sma·On page: Skaffen-Amtiskaw·Mentioned: Cheradenine Zakalwe
XII
The bombardment of the Winter Palace stretches into its second year. Held inside as the unofficial military adviser to the puppet government, Zakalwe passes his days as the captive companion of the foppish nobleman Astil Tremerst Keiver the Eighth and pieces together the truth that the besieged garrison has been ordered to keep firing the precious antique plasma cannon hidden under the state coach until it kills the besieging force's high command. He plays out the manoeuvre by walking out alone to negotiate the surrender, knowing it will let him steer the cannon's last shot.
POV: Cheradenine Zakalwe·On page: Diziet Sma, Astil Tremerst Keiver the Eighth, Princess Neinte·Mentioned: Livueta Zakalwe
Chapter 3: Three
Sma boards the very fast picket Xenophobe and finds the twenty-strong crew has deliberately given itself colds as a recreational fad. The ship's avatar appears as a small furry brown-and-yellow creature called Xeny that wants to cuddle. Skaffen-Amtiskaw, dreading her reaction, still avoids telling her the truth about their destination. At a fancy-dress party arranged to keep the crew off-topic, the crewmember Jetart Hrine asks why no one knows where they are going. The ship stages an exploding water sphere and Skaffen-Amtiskaw rams Hrine with its model-warship costume to silence her, but Hrine blurts out that Crastalier is an Open Cluster with half a million stars. Cornered, the drone admits that after his last job for Special Circumstances Zakalwe shook off the knife missile they had tailing him - he lured it into a medical NMR scanner on a planet shared with sea mammals, used the magnetic field to cripple it, then fried it with a military laser. He has roughly ten or twelve possible systems and may not want to be found at all. Sma, eerily calm, suggests narrowing the search to standard planets with small interesting wars, then returns to the party.
POV: Diziet Sma·On page: Skaffen-Amtiskaw, Cheradenine Zakalwe·Mentioned: Tsoldrin Beychae, Livueta Zakalwe, Shias Engin
XI
High in a turret of the besieged Winter Palace, crammed with the state coach of the Mythoclast and looted treasure, the foppish deputy vice-regent Astil Tremerst Keiver poses with a ceremonial rifle, collapses a bloodwood chair, and accidentally fires his sidearm. Zakalwe, the so-called War Minister sleeping inside the state coach, bursts out with a plasma cannon levelled at him. Calmed, the two share an awkward watch by the fire. Keiver opens a shutter onto the snowy plain of besiegers, anachronistic siege engines mixed with guided missiles and field projectors, and Zakalwe snaps at him to close it before they draw fire. Zakalwe reflects bitterly that Sma got him into this, that the aristos only gave him real authority after the war was lost, and that being ignored has its compensations. Keiver's young ward, the princess Neinte, comes in having heard the shot. Watching her in the firelight, Zakalwe sees her possible futures - dungeon, exile, or quiet uselessness - and thinks he should have stayed on the beach. He reminds himself he is doing this for his own absolution, and silently asks Livueta to forgive him.
POV: Cheradenine Zakalwe·Mentioned: Diziet Sma
Chapter 4: Four
Aboard the Xenophobe, Sma and Skaffen-Amtiskaw close on Zakalwe's location after weeks of travel, while a Continent-class GSV, the What Are the Civilian Applications?, is diverted toward them. Sma's module surfaces in a dock and she poses as a tourist outside the Foreign Ministry, drone disguised as a suitcase. The GCU Very Little Gravitas Indeed reveals that Zakalwe has become a planetary magnate selling Culture rejuvenation technology to five autocrats, hoping to civilise them; instead, the gambit is triggering coups and threatening thermonuclear catastrophe. Contact gives Sma a day before forced extraction. Zakalwe boards a submarine to a remote atoll, where he says goodbye to a weeping lover, then calmly invites Sma in.
POV: Diziet Sma·On page: Skaffen-Amtiskaw, Cheradenine Zakalwe
X
Zakalwe lives in a rickety shack in the dunes of a remote beach, beachcombing each day and refusing even to leave footprints. Parktown families drive their gaudy home-cars down to gawp at the strange tree-man who lives in something that cannot move. A woman from the parktown visits every few days for money; he tells her, in a language she cannot follow, stories about a magic land of wizards, a warrior who could no longer work for them, four children in a great garden, and a stone battleship with two sisters, a Chair and a Chairmaker. A trader's daughter starts bringing him food, watched by a jealous young man. After Zakalwe rebuffs the girl one night and forces her from his hut, the boy rapes and kills her and the parktown blames Zakalwe. He flees, captures the real killer, sets the shack alight and on the flame-lit dune disarms and humiliates the boy with the knives until the girl's crippled pet seabird attacks the sobbing youth, exposing his guilt. Shunned afterwards, Zakalwe lives in a tent until Sma appears on the beach, asking him to take one more job. The lever is her news that they have found Livueta. He agrees.
POV: Cheradenine Zakalwe
Chapter 5: Five
At his island hideaway, Zakalwe greets Sma cheerfully, his bags already packed. Over drinks in hammocks above a lagoon, Sma briefs him on Voerenhutz: the Humanists are gaining ground with aggressive terraforming policies, a sliding scale of sentient rights and refusal to acknowledge machine sentience, and dozen brushfire wars could ignite a larger one. He must persuade Tsoldrin Beychae out of retirement to pull the cluster the other way, as before. Zakalwe agrees without quibble. On the beach he catches and releases a small bright fish; Sma scolds him for his rejuvenation scheme with the autocrats, warns the mess he leaves behind, and reluctantly confirms the Culture still knows where the woman he wants to meet is. He demands the same fee as last time plus ten percent for inflation.
POV: Diziet Sma·On page: Cheradenine Zakalwe, Skaffen-Amtiskaw·Mentioned: Tsoldrin Beychae, Livueta Zakalwe
Part 2: An Outing
Part two of the novel's three-part structure - the header page opening the middle section of the alternating forward (Arabic-numeral) and backward (Roman-numeral) chapters.
IX
In an open-walled house by the ocean, Zakalwe lives with the poet Shias Engin, whom he met in a port bar after blundering into her brush-off of another suitor. He watches her sleep, transfixed, troubled by his sense that sex is a kind of invasion and unable to reconcile his soldier's history with this calm devotion. She traces his old scars, asks about each; he flinches at the puckered mark over his heart, the oldest of them, and at the memory of insects in a drowned volcano. She tells him memories are interpretations, not truth, and quietly heals something deep in him. They plan to climb the hill to free a krih animal that may be tangled in branches. At night, he sometimes imagines the real, hard Zakalwe walking through the curtain walls with a gun, judging his softness.
POV: Cheradenine Zakalwe·On page: Shias Engin
Chapter 6: Six
On the GSV What Are the Civilian Applications?, Sma finds Zakalwe drunkenly target-shooting an antique plasma rifle at a dyed black ice cube, the only "rubbish" the ship would supply; the gun only works once he asks for the trapdoor coverage to be lifted. The chapter then flashes back ten years to the GSV Congenital Optimist, where Sma sits beside him after the Fohls beheading while a new body is grown over two hundred days; Skaffen-Amtiskaw sends him a hat as a joke, and he grieves the loss of the heart that carried Shias's memory. Back in the present, he picks out weapons and his preferred FYT combat suit in the armoury (Sma vetoing his attempt to take a second), argues with Sma over rejuvenation and Culture lies, then departs by very fast picket and capsule, landing in a cold desert at dusk above the canyon city.
POV: Cheradenine Zakalwe·On page: Diziet Sma, Skaffen-Amtiskaw·Mentioned: Shias Engin, Tsoldrin Beychae, Livueta Zakalwe
VIII
As commander-in-chief of a losing army, Zakalwe shelters in a derelict cottage on a concrete plinth surrounded by floodwater after his staff car was washed away. His driver is dead; a bedraggled would-be assassin in a green greatcoat is tied to a chair, screaming insults and curses about his children. He argues wearily with her about defeat and morale, wipes her nose with a torn curtain, and refuses to take out his collapse on her. Through the rain he glimpses the Staberinde and broods on the Chairmaker. Rogtam-Bar arrives in a stolen amphibious truck with news: the government has fallen, and Zakalwe's mad commando scheme to overtop the Maclin reservoir worked, drowning the Fifth Army's High Command. Peace is being discussed. They load the still-shrieking woman aboard; Zakalwe is later demoted and stripped of medals.
POV: Cheradenine Zakalwe·On page: Rogtam-Bar
Chapter 7: Seven
Zakalwe descends into Solotol, a city sunk inside a vast canyon, and takes the top two floors of the Excelsior Hotel under the name Staberinde. Sma reports a perfect lure: ninety-five lost wax tablets of a famous poet, hidden in the cavity wall of an abandoned monastery, which Jarnsaromol University, where Beychae lives a hundred metres beneath the surface in library annex four, would prize. To draw attention, Zakalwe buys a whole street through the Vanguard Foundation's lawyers and stages a lavish free carnival with drugs, drink, banners, bands and money fired from a mortar. He spots a watching man and woman and records them, then leads them on a car chase ending at an old funicular. The pair, lounging in a white room while a woman is massaged, debate killing him, then resolve to try.
POV: Cheradenine Zakalwe·Mentioned: Diziet Sma, Tsoldrin Beychae
VII
Drifting in and out of consciousness after an aircraft crash on the planet Fohls, Zakalwe uses a learned mental technique to hold the pain at bay, picturing his mind as a citadel and his body as a city under siege. He recalls attending a funeral, then a fire on the plane. He wakes naked, broken-limbed and gangrenous, lashed to an X-shaped wooden frame underground in a tribal village. A girl washes him; painted men daub him as a sky-offering. Carried to a mound above the kneeling villagers, his head is hacked off with a curved sword while he tries to scream a name beginning "El-". A Culture module roars in seconds too late; it retrieves his head as the priest reinterprets the omen. The ship called the Staberinde haunts his hallucinations.
POV: Cheradenine Zakalwe·On page: Darckense Zakalwe, Livueta Zakalwe
Chapter 8: Eight
The first snow settles on the cleft city of Solotol as Zakalwe, posing as the lavish industrialist Mr Staberinde, dines alone and reviews his strategy by terminal earring with Diziet Sma. He has plastered the Staberinde name across airlines, streets and a cruise liner, hoping Tsoldrin Beychae will recognise a wartime codeword they once shared. On the way to a breakfast at the university, his car is diverted onto an iced storm drain; the driver leaps out and is killed, while Zakalwe rides the wreck down, jumps clear with a tool used as an ice-axe, and survives with a broken nose. A costumed invitation arrives. He persuades Sma to backdate records making the Vanguard Foundation look like an aggressive, anti-machine corporation under new ownership. That evening the mute, scarred chauffeur Mollen drives him to an Injured Party where guests sport novelty mutilations. The Governance couple question him; he plays the ruthless predator who keeps machines in their place, and accepts their offer to meet Beychae.
POV: Cheradenine Zakalwe·On page: Ubrel Shiol, Mollen·Mentioned: Diziet Sma, Tsoldrin Beychae
VI
On leave between escorting the Chosen across the badlands and his ordeal in the flooded caldera, Zakalwe tries to remake himself as a poet. He lodges with an old couple in a green rural country, walks the moors, notes flowers, animals and birds, and crosses words out of his journal to manufacture verse. He keeps his distance from a kite-flying stranger on the hills. Witnessing an overseer beat a runaway slave by the river, he hears from the old man that the overseer takes the tongues of escapees. After accidentally crushing a nest and killing the maimed mother bird, he abandons the journal, concedes he will never be a poet, and leaves. That same night the overseer is found trussed in bed, choked to death on dried tongues and blank paper.
POV: Cheradenine Zakalwe