Words&Dirt

“‘You don’t have to go back, Lededje,’ Sensia said gently.  ‘You could stay here, make a new life in the Culture.’

Lededje used the heels of her hands to dry round her eyes.  ‘You know, for almost as long as I can remember that was the one thing I wanted?’ she said.  She glanced at Sensia, who looked puzzled.  ‘All those years, all those times I tried to run away, the one thing nobody ever asked me was where I might be running to.’  She smiled a small, thin smile at the avatar, who looked surprised now.  ‘If they had asked,’ Lededje told her, ‘I might even have told them: I was running away to the Culture, because I’d heard they’d escaped the tyranny of money and individual power, and that all people were equal here, men and women alike, with no riches or poverty to put one person above or beneath another.’

‘But now you’re here?’ Sensia offered, sounding sad.

‘But now I’m here I find Joiler Veppers is still deferred to because he is a rich and powerful man.’  She took a deep, shuddering breath.  ‘And I find I need to return because that is my home, like it or not, and I must make my peace with it somehow.'”

––Surface Detail, by Iain M. Banks, loc. 2687-96