Consider Phlebas

'Thought so. Heard your knife missile took the expansive way out.'

Balveda shrugged.

Horza looked her in the eye and said, 'I don't suppose you'd be here if you had anything important you could tell them, would you?'

'Here, perhaps,' Balveda conceded. 'Alive, no.' She stretched her arms out behind her and sighed. 'I suppose I'll have to sit out the war in an internment camp, unless they can find somebody to swap. I just hope this thing doesn't go on too long.'

'Oh, you think the Culture might give in soon?' Horza grinned.

'No, I think the Culture might win soon.'

'You must be mad.' Horza shook his head.

'Well…' Balveda said, nodding ruefully, 'actually I think it'll win eventually.'

'If you keep falling back like you have for the last three years, you'll end up somewhere in the Clouds.'

'I'm not giving away any secrets, Horza, but I think you might find we don't do too much more falling back.'

'We'll see. Frankly I'm surprised you kept fighting this long.'

'So are our three-legged friends. So is everybody. So are we, I sometimes think.'

'Balveda,' Horza sighed wearily, 'I still don't know why the hell you're fighting in the first place. The Idirans never were any threat to you. They still wouldn't be, if you stopped fighting them. Did life in your great Utopia really get so boring you needed a war?'

'Horza,' Balveda said, leaning forward, 'I don't understand why you are fighting. I know Heidohre is in-'

'Heibohre,' Horza interjected.

'OK, the goddamn asteroid the Changers live in. I know it's in Idiran space, but-'

'That's got nothing to do with it, Balveda. I'm fighting for them because I think they're right and you're wrong.'

Balveda sat back, amazed. 'You…' she began, then lowered her head and shook it, staring at the floor. She looked up. 'I really don't understand you, Horza. You must know how many species, how many civilisations, how many systems, how many individuals have been either destroyed or… throttled by the Idirans and their crazy goddamned religion. What the hell has the Culture ever done compared to that?' One hand was on her knee, the other was displayed in front of Horza, clawed into a strangling grip. He watched her and smiled.

'On a straight head count the Idirans no doubt do come out in front, Perosteck, and I've told them I never did care for some of their methods, or their zeal. I'm all for people being allowed to live their own lives. But now they're up against you lot, and that's what makes the difference to me. Because I'm against you, rather than for them, I'm prepared-' Horza broke off for a moment, laughing lightly, self-consciously.'… Well, it sounds a bit melodramatic, but sure — I'm prepared to die for them.' He shrugged. 'Simple as that.'

Horza nodded as he said it, and Balveda dropped the outstretched hand and looked away to one side, shaking her head and exhaling loudly. Horza went on, 'Because… well, I suppose you thought I was just kidding when I was telling old Frolk I thought the knife missile was the real representative. I wasn't kidding, Balveda. I meant it then and I mean it now. I don't care how self-righteous the Culture feels, or how many people the Idirans kill. They're on the side of life — boring, old-fashioned, biological life; smelly, fallible and short-sighted, God knows, but real life. You're ruled by your machines. You're an evolutionary dead end. The trouble is that to take your mind off it you try to drag everybody else down there with you. The worst thing that could happen to the galaxy would be if the Culture wins this war.'

He paused to let her say something, but she was still sitting with her head down, shaking it. He laughed at her. 'You know, Balveda, for such a sensitive species you show remarkably little empathy at times.'

'Empathise with stupidity and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot,' muttered the woman, still not looking at Horza. He laughed again and got to his feet.

'Such… bitterness, Balveda,' he said.

She looked up at him. 'I'll tell you, Horza,' she said quietly, 'we're going to win.'

He shook his head. 'I don't think so. You wouldn't know how to.'

Balveda sat back again, hands spread behind her. Her face was serious. 'We can learn, Horza.'

'Who from?'

'Whoever has the lesson there to teach,' she said slowly. 'We spend quite a lot of our time watching warriors and zealots, bullies and militarists — people determined to win regardless. There's no shortage of teachers.'

'If you want to know about winning, ask the Idirans.'

Balveda said nothing for a moment. Her face was calm, thoughtful, perhaps sad. She nodded after a while. 'They do say there's a danger… in warfare,' she said, 'that you'll start to resemble the enemy.' She shrugged. 'We just have to hope that we can avoid that. If the evolutionary force you seem to believe in really works, then it'll work through us, and not the Idirans. If you're wrong, then it deserves to be superseded.'

'Balveda,' he said, laughing lightly, 'don't disappoint me. I prefer a fight… You almost sound as though you're coming round to my point of view.'

'No,' she sighed. 'I'm not. Blame it on my Special Circumstances training. We try to think of everything. I was being pessimistic.'

'I'd got the impression SC didn't allow such thoughts.'

'Then think again, Mr Changer,' Balveda said, arching one eyebrow. 'SC allows all thoughts. That's what some people find so frightening about it.'

Horza thought he knew what the woman meant. Special Circumstances had always been the Contact section's moral espionage weapon, the very cutting edge of the Culture's interfering diplomatic policy, the elite of the elite, in a society which abhorred elitism. Even before the war, its standing and its image within the Culture had been ambiguous. It was glamorous but dangerous, possessed of an aura of roguish sexiness — there was no other word for it — which implied predation, seduction, even violation.

It had about it too an atmosphere of secrecy (in a society that virtually worshipped openness) which hinted at unpleasant, shaming deeds, and an ambience of moral relativity (in a society which clung to its absolutes: life/good, death/bad; pleasure/good, pain/bad) which attracted and repulsed at once, but anyway excited.

No other part of the Culture more exactly represented what the society as a whole really stood for, or was more militant in the application of the Culture's fundamental beliefs. Yet no other part embodied less of the society's day-to-day character.

With war, Contact had become the Culture's military, and Special Circumstances its intelligence and espionage section (the euphemism became only a little more obvious, that was all). And with war, SC's position within the Culture changed, for the worse. It became the repository for the guilt the people in the Culture experienced because they had agreed to go to war in the first place: despised as a necessary evil, reviled as an unpleasant moral compromise, dismissed as something people preferred not to think about.

SC really did try to think of everything, though, and its Minds were reputedly even more cynical, amoral and downright sneaky than those which made up Contact; machines without illusions which prided themselves on thinking the thinkable to its ultimate extremities. So it had been wearily predicted that just this would happen. SC would become a pariah, a whipping-child, and its reputation a gland to absorb the poison in the Culture's conscience. But Horza guessed that knowing all this didn't make it any easier for somebody like Balveda. Culture people had little stomach for being disliked by anybody, least of all their fellow citizens, and the woman's task was difficult enough without the added burden of knowing she was even greater anathema to most of her own side than she was to the enemy.

'Well, whatever, Balveda,' he said, stretching. He flexed his stiff shoulders within the suit, pulled his fingers through his thin, yellow-white hair. 'I guess it'll work itself out.'

Balveda laughed mirthlessly. 'Never a truer word…' She shook her head.

'Thanks, anyway,' he told her.

'For what?'

'I think you just reinforced my faith in the ultimate outcome of this war.'

'Oh, just go away, Horza.' Balveda sighed and looked down to the floor.

Horza wanted to touch her, to ruffle her short black hair or pinch her pale cheek, but guessed it would only