Use of Weapons

'Okay; positioned; all clear.' She looked up as the lifter tugs sailed back towards the engineering space, then back at him. 'All that's happened is that reality has caught up with the way people always did behave anyway. So, no, you don't feel any wonderful release from debilitating illnesses.' She scratched one ear. 'Except maybe when you think about it.' She grinned. 'I guess in school, when you're seeing how people used to live… how aliens still do live… then it hits home, and I suppose you never really lose that entirely, but you don't spend much time thinking about it.'

They walked across the black expanse of thoroughly featureless material ('Ah,' the woman had said, when he'd mentioned this, 'you take a look at it under a microscope; it's beautiful! What did you expect, anyway? Cranks? Gears? Tanks full of chemicals? )

'Can't machines build these faster?' he asked the woman, looking around the starship shell.

'Why, of course!' she laughed.

'Then why do you do it?'

'It's fun. You see one of these big mothers sail out those doors for the first time, heading for deep space, three hundred people on board, everything working, the Mind quite happy, and you think; I helped build that. The fact a machine could have done it faster doesn't alter the fact that it was you who actually did it.'

'Hmm,' he said.

(Learn woodwork; metalwork; they will not make you a carpenter or a blacksmith any more than mastering writing will make you a clerk.)

'Well, you may «hmm» as you wish,' the woman said, approaching a translucent hologram of the half- completed ship, where a few other construction workers were standing, pointing inside the model and talking. 'But have you ever been gliding, or swum underwater?'

'Yes,' he agreed.

The woman shrugged. 'Yet birds fly better than we do, and fish swim better. Do we stop gliding or swimming because of this?'

He smiled. 'I suppose not.'

'You suppose correctly,' the woman said. 'And why?' she looked at him, grinning. 'Because it's fun.' She looked at the holo model of the ship to one side. One of the other workers called to her, pointing at something in the model. She looked at him. 'Excuse me, will you?'

He nodded, as he backed off. 'Build well.'

'Thank you. I trust we shall.'

'Oh,' he asked. 'What's this ship to be called?'

'Its Mind wishes it to be called the Sweet and Full of Grace,' the woman laughed. Then she was deep in discussion with the others.

He watched their many sports; tried a few. Most of them he just didn't understand. He swam quite a lot; they seemed to like pools and water complexes. Mostly they swam naked, which he found a little embarrassing. Later he discovered there were whole sections — villages? areas? districts? he wasn't sure how to think of them — where people never wore clothes, just body ornaments. He was surprised how quickly he got used to this behaviour, but never fully joined in.

It took him a while to realise that all the drones he saw — even more various in their design than humans were in their physiology — didn't all belong to the ship. Hardly any did, in fact; they had their own artificial brains (he still tended to think of them as computers). They seemed to have their own personalities, too, though he remained sceptical.

'Let me put this thought experiment to you,' the old drone said, as they played a card-game which it had assured him was mostly luck. They sat — well, the drone floated — under an arcade of delicately pink stone, by the side of a small pool; the shouts of people playing a complicated ball-game on the far side of the pool filtered through bushes and small trees to them.

'Forget,' said the drone, 'about how machine brains are actually put together; think about making a machine brain — an electronic computer — in the image of a human one. One might start with a few cells, as the human embryo does; these multiply, gradually establish connections. So one would continually add new components and make the relevant, even — if one was to follow the exact development of one single human through the various stages — the identical connections.

'One would, of course, have to limit the speed of the messages transmitted down those connections to a tiny fraction of their normal electronic speed, but that would not be difficult, nor would having these neuron-like components act like their biological equivalents internally, firing their own messages according to the types of signal they received; all this could be done comparatively simply. By building up in this gradual way, you could mimic exactly the development of a human brain, and you could mimic its output; just as an embryo can experience sound and touch and even light inside the womb, so could you send similar signals to your developing electronic equivalent; you could impersonate the experience of birth, and use any degree of sensory stimulation to fool this device into thinking it was feeling touching, tasting, smelling, hearing and seeing everything your real human was (or, of course, you might choose not actually to fool it, but always give it just as much genuine sensory input, and of the same quality, as the human personality was experiencing at any given point).

'Now; my question to you is this; where is the difference? The brain of each being works in exactly the same way as the other; they will respond to stimuli with a greater correspondence than one finds even between monozygotic twins; but how can one still choose to call one a conscious entity, and the other merely a machine?

'Your brain is made up of matter, Mr Zakalwe, organised into information-handling, processing and storage units by your genetic inheritance and by the biochemistry of first your mother's body and later your own, not to mention your experiences since some short time before your birth until now.

'An electronic computer is also made up of matter, but organised differently; what is there so magical about the workings of the huge, slow cells of the animal brain that they can claim themselves to be conscious, but would deny a quicker, more finely-grained device of equivalent power — or even a machine hobbled so that it worked with precisely the same ponderous-ness — a similar distinction?

'Hmm?' the machine said, its aura field flashing the pink he was beginning to identify as drone amusement. 'Unless, of course, you wish to invoke superstition? Do you believe in gods?'

He smiled. 'I have never had that inclination,' he said.

'Well then,' the drone said. 'What would you say? Is the machine in the human image conscious, sentient, or not?'

He studied his cards. 'I'm thinking,' he said, and laughed.

Sometimes he saw other aliens (obviously aliens, that is; he was sure that a few of the humans he saw each day were not Culture people, though without stopping to ask them it was impossible to tell; somebody dressed as a savage, or in some obviously non-Culture garb, was quite possibly just dressing up like that for a laugh, or going to a party… but there were some very obviously different species around as well).

'Yes, young man?' the alien said. It had eight limbs, a fairly distinct head with two quite small eyes, curiously flower-like mouth parts, and a large, almost spherical, lightly haired body, coloured red and purple. Its own voice was composed of clicks from its mouth and almost subsonic vibrations from its body; a small amulet did the translating.

He asked if he could sit with the alien; it directed him to the seat across the table from it in the cafe where he had overheard it talking briefly to a passing human about Special Circumstances.

'… It is in layers,' the alien replied to his question. 'A tiny core of Special Circumstances, a shell of Contact, and a vast chaotic ecosphere of everything else. Bit like a… you come from a planet?'

He nodded. The creature glanced at its amulet for a translation of the gesture the man had used — it was not what the Culture called nodding — then said, 'Well, it is like a planet, only the core is tiny; very tiny. And the ecosphere is more disparate and less distinct than the wrapping of atmosphere round a globe; a red giant star might even be a better comparison. But in the end, you will never know them, because you will be like me, in Special Circumstances, and only ever know them as the great, irresistible force behind you; people like you and I are the edge; you will in time come to feel like a tooth on the biggest saw in the galaxy, sir.' The alien's eyes closed; it waggled all its limbs very energetically, and its mouth parts crackled. 'Ha ha ha!' the amulet said, primly.

'How did you know I was actually involved with Special Circumstances?' he asked, sitting back.