Words&Dirt

“Just once, he thought, I’d like to know whose side I’m really on in something like this. Here I am, in this absurd fortress, packed with riches, crammed with concentrated nobility––such as it was, he thought, watching Keiver’s vacant-looking eyes––facing out the hordes beyond (all claw and tackle, brute force and brute intelligence) trying to protect these delicate, simpering products of a millennia’s privilege, and never knowing whether I’m doing the tactically or the strategically right thing.

The Minds did not assume such distinctions; to them, there was no cutoff between the two. Tactics cohered into strategy, strategy disintegrated into tactics, in the sliding scale of their dialectical moral algebra. It was all more than they ever expected the mammal brain to cope with.

He recalled what Sma had said to him, long long ago back in that new beginning (itself the product of so much guilt and pain); that they dealt in the intrinsically untoward, where rules were forged as you went along and were never the same twice anyway, where just by the nature of things nothing could be known or predicted or even judged with any real certainty. It all sounded very sophisticated and abstract and challenging to work with, but in the end it came down to people and problems.

This girl was what it came down to, here, this time; barely more than a child, and trapped in the great stone castle with the rest of the cream or scum (depending on how you looked at it), to live or die, depending on how well I advise, and on how capable these clowns are of taking that advice.

He looked at the girl’s flame-lit face, and felt something more than distant desire (for she was attractive) or fatherly protectiveness (for she was so young, and he, despite his appearance, so old). Call it…he didn’t know what. A realization; an awareness of the tragedy the whole episode represented; the break-up of the Rule, the dissolution of power and privilege and the whole elaborate, top-heavy system this child represented.

The muck and dirt, the king with fleas. For theft, mutilation; for the wrong thoughts, death. An infant mortality rate as astronomical as the life expectancy was minute, and the whole grisly, working package wrapped in a skein of wealth and advantage designed to maintain the dark dominion of the knowing over the ignorant (and the worst of it was the pattern; the repetition; the twisted variations of the same depraved theme in so many different places).

So this girl, called a princess. Would she die? The war was going against them, he knew, and the same symbolic grammar that presented her with the prospect of power if things went well also dictated her use, her expendability, if all failed about them. Rank demanded its tribute; the obsequious bow or the mean stab, according to the outcome of this struggle.

He saw her suddenly old, in the flickering firelight. He saw her shut in some slimed dungeon, waiting, hoping, scabbed with lice and ragged in sackcloth, head shaved, eyes dark and hollow in the raw skin, and finally marched out one snow-filled day, to be nailed to a wall with arrows or bullets, or face the cold axe blade.

Or maybe that too was too romantic. Maybe there would be some desperate flight to asylum, a lonely and bitter exile spent growing old and worn, barren and senile, forever remembering the ever more golden old times, composing futile petitions, hoping for a return, but growing slowly, inevitably, into something like the pampered uselessness her upbringing had always conditioned her for, but without any of the compensations she had been bred to expect from her station.

With a feeling of sickness, he saw that she meant nothing. She was just another irrelevant part of another history, heading––with or without the Culture’s carefully evaluated nudges in what they saw as the right direction––for what would probably be better times and an easier life for most. But not her, he suspected, not right at this moment.

Born twenty years earlier, she might have expected a good marriage, a productive estate, access to the court, and lusty sons, talented daughters…twenty years from now, perhaps an astutely mercantile husband, or even––in the unlikely event this particular genderist society was heading that way so soon––a life of her own; academic, in business, doing good works; whatever.

But, probably, death.”

––Use of Weapons, by Iain M. Banks, loc. 839-70