Iain Banks: Use of Weapons

The girl from the previous evening lay still on the far side of the wide bed, just a lump under the covers. A couple of dormant screens on the wall to the Ethnarch’s left reflected the bedside light’s weak glow.

He was frightened, but fully awake now and thinking quickly. There was a gun concealed in the bed’s headboard; the man at the end of the bed didn’t seem to be armed (but then why was he here?). But the gun represented a desperate last resort. The voice code was the thing. The mikes and cameras in the room were on standby, their automatic circuits waiting for a specific sentence to activate them; sometimes he wanted privacy in here, other times he wanted to record something only for himself, and of course he’d always known there was a possibility that somebody unauthorised might get in here, no matter how tight the security was.

He cleared his throat. “Well well, this is a surprise.” His voice was even, he sounded calm.

He smiled thinly, pleased with himself. His heart — the heart of an athletic young anarchist woman up until eleven years ago — was beating quickly, but not worryingly so. He nodded. “This is a surprise,” he repeated. There; it was done. An alarm would already be ringing in the basement control room; the guards would come piling through the door in a few seconds. Or they might not risk that, and instead release the ceiling gas cylinders, blasting them both into unconsciousness in a blinding fog. There was a danger that it would rupture his eardrums (he thought, swallowing), but he could always take a new pair from a healthy dissident. Maybe he wouldn’t even have to do that; the rumour was that the retro-ageing might include the possibility of body-parts regrowing. Well, nothing wrong with strength in depth; back-ups. He liked the feeling of security that gave one. “Well, well,” he heard himself say, just in case the circuits hadn’t picked up the code first or second time round, “this is indeed a surprise.” The guards should be here any second…

The brightly dressed young man smiled. He flexed oddly, and leant forward until his elbows rested on the top of the bed’s ornate footboard. His lips moved, to produce what might have been a smile. He reached into one pocket of the baggy pantaloons and produced a small black gun. He pointed it straight at the Ethnarch and said. “Your code won’t work, Ethnarch Kerian. There won’t be any more surprises that you’re expecting and I’m not. The basement security centre is as dead as everything else.”

The Ethnarch Kerian stared at the little gun. He’d seen water pistols that looked more impressive. What is going on? Can he really have come to kill me? The man certainly didn’t dress like an assassin, and surely any serious assassin would just have killed him in his sleep. The longer this fellow sat here, talking, the more danger he was in, whether he had knocked out the links to the security centre or not. So he might be mad, but he probably wasn’t an assassin. It was simply ludicrous that a real, professional assassin would behave like this, and only an extremely able and completely professional assassin could have penetrated the palace security… Thus, the Ethnarch Kerian tried to convince his suddenly wildly beating, mutinous heart. Where were the damn guards? He thought again about the gun hidden in the ornamental headboard behind him.

The young man folded his arms, so that the little gun was no longer pointing at the Ethnarch. “Mind if I tell you a little story?”

He must be mad. “No; no; why don’t you tell me a story?” the Ethnarch said, in his most friendly and avuncular voice. “What’s your name, by the way; you appear to have the advantage over me.”

“Yes, I do, don’t I?” the old voice from the young lips said. “Actually there are two stories, but you know most of one of them. I’ll tell them at the same time; see if you can tell which is which.”

“I—”

“Ssh,” the man said, putting the little gun to his lips. The Ethnarch half glanced at the girl on the other side of the bed. He realised he and the intruder had been talking in quite low tones. Maybe if he could get the girl to wake, she might draw his fire, or at least distract him while he grabbed for the gun in the headboard; he was faster than he had been for twenty years, thanks to the new treatment… where the hell were those guards?

“Now look here, young man!” he roared. “I just want to know what you think you’re doing here! Eh?”

His voice — a voice that had filled halls and squares, without amplification — echoed through the room. Dammit, the guards in the basement security centre ought to be able to hear it without any microphones. The girl on the other side of the bed didn’t even stir.

The young man was smirking. “They’re all asleep, Ethnarch. There’s just you and me. Now; this story…”

“What…” the Ethnarch Kerian gulped, drawing his legs up under the covers. “What are you here for?”

The intruder looked mildly surprised. “Oh, I’m here to take you out, Ethnarch. You are going to be removed. Now…” he laid the gun on the broad top of the bed footboard. The Ethnarch stared at it. It was too far away for him to grab, but…

“The story,” the intruder said, settling back in the chair. “Once upon a time, over the gravity well and far away, there was a magical land where they had no kings, no laws, no money and no property, but where everybody lived like a prince, was very well-behaved and lacked for nothing. And these people lived in peace, but they were bored, because paradise can get that way after a time, and so they started to carry out missions of good works; charitable visits upon the less well-off, you might say; and they always tried to bring with them the thing that they saw as the most precious gift of all; knowledge; information; and as wide a spread of that information as possible, because these people were strange, in that they despised rank, and hated kings… and all things hierarchic… even Ethnarchs.” The young man smiled thinly. So did the Ethnarch. He wiped his brow and shifted back a little in the bed, as though getting more comfortable. Heart still pounding.

“Well, for a time, a terrible force threatened to take away their good works, but they resisted it, and they won, and came out of the conflict stronger than before, and if they had not been so unconcerned with power for its own sake, they would have been terribly feared, but as it was they were only slightly feared, just as a matter of course given the scale of their power. And one of the ways it amused them to wield that power was to interfere in societies they thought might benefit from the experience, and one of the most efficient ways of doing that in a lot of societies is to get to the people at the top.

“Many of their people become physicians to great leaders, and with medicines and treatments that seem like magic to the comparatively primitive people they’re dealing with, ensure that a great and good leader has a better chance of surviving. That’s the way they prefer to work; offering life, you see, rather than dealing death. You might call them soft, because they’re very reluctant to kill, and they might agree with you, but they’re soft the way the ocean is soft, and, well; ask any sea captain how harmless and puny the ocean can be.”

“Yes, I see,” the Ethnarch said, sitting back a little further shifting a pillow into place behind his back, and checking just where he was in relation to the section of headboard that concealed the gun. His heart was thrashing in his chest.

“Another thing they do, these people, another way they deal in life rather than death, is they offer leaders of certain societies below a certain technological level the one thing all the wealth and power those leaders command cannot buy them; a cure for death. A return to youth.”