action.
So, yes, these people. They share collective responsibility for the actions of their Minds, including the Minds of Contact and Special Circumstances. That’s the way they’ve set it up, that’s the way they want it to be. There are no ignorants here, Quil, no exploited, no Invisibles or trodden-upon working class condemned forever to do the bidding of their masters. They are all masters, every one. They can all have a say on everything. So by their own precious rules, yes, it was these people who let what happened to Chel happen, even if few actually knew anything about the details at the time.
~ Do only I think that this is… harsh?
~ Quil, have you heard even one of them suggest that they might disband Contact? Or reign-in SC? Have we heard any of them even suggesting thinking about that? Well, have we?
~ No.
~ No, not one. Oh, they tell us of their regret in such pretty language, Quilan, they say they’re so fucking sorry in so many beautifully expressed and elegantly couched and delivered ways; it’s like it’s a game for them. It’s like they’re competing to see who can be most convincingly contrite! But are they prepared to really do anything apart from tell us how sorry they are?
~ They have their own blindnesses. It is the machines we have our real argument with.
~ It is a machine you are going to destroy.
~ And with it five billion people.
~ They brought it upon themselves, Major. They could vote to disband Contact today, and any one or any group of them could leave tomorrow for their Ulterior or for anywhere else, if they decided they no longer agreed with their damned policy of Interference.
~ It is still a terrible thing we’re asked to do, Huyler.
~ I agree. But we must do it. Quit, I’ve avoided putting it in these terms because it sounds so portentous and I’m sure it’s something you’ve thought about yourself anyway, but I do have to remind you; four and a half billion Chelgrian souls depend on you, Major. You really are their only hope.
~ So I’m told. And if the Culture retaliates?
~ Why should they retaliate against us because one of their machines goes mad and destroys itself?
~ Because they will not be fooled. Because they are not so stupid as we would like them to be, just careless sometimes.
~ Even if they do suspect anything, they will still not be certain it was our doing. If everything goes according to plan it will look like the Hub did it itself, and even if they were certain we were responsible, our planners think that they will accept that we brought about an honest revenge.
~ You know what they say, Huyler. Don’t fuck with the Culture. We are about to.
~ I don’t buy the idea that this is some piece of wisdom the other Involveds have arrived at thoughtfully after millennia of contact with these people. I think it’s something the Culture came up with itself. It’s propaganda, Quil.
~ Even so, a lot of the Involveds seem to think it’s true. Be even slightly nice to the Culture and it will fall over itself to be still nicer back. Treat them badly and they—
~ —And they act all hurt. It’s contrived. You have to come on really evil to get them to drop the ultra-civilised performance.
~ Slaughtering five billion of them, at least, will not constitute what they’d regard as an act of evil?
~ They cost us that; we cost them that. They recognise that sort of revenge, that sort of trade, like any other civilisation. A life for a life. They won’t retaliate, Quil. Better minds than ours have thought this through. The way the Culture will see it, they’ll confirm their own moral superiority over us by not retaliating. They’ll accept what we’re going to do to them as the due payment for what they did to us, without provocation. They’ll draw a line under it there. It’ll be treated as a tragedy; the other half of a debacle that began when they tried to interfere with our development. A tragedy, not an outrage.
~ They might wish to make an example of us.
~ We are too far down the Involved pecking order to be worthy opponents, Quilan. There would be no honour for them in punishing us further. We have already been punished as innocents. All you and I are trying to do is even up that earlier damage.
~ I worry that we may be being as blind to their real psychology as they were to ours when they tried to interfere. With all their experience, they were wrong about us. We have so little training in second-guessing the reactions of alien species; how can we be so certain that we will get it right where they failed so dismally?
~ Because this matters so much to us, that’s why. We have thought long and hard about what we’re going to do. All this began exactly because they failed to do the same thing. They have become so blase about such matters that they try to interfere with as few ships as possible, with as few resources as possible, in search of a sort of mathematical elegance. They have made the fates of entire civilisations part of a game they play amongst themselves, to see who can produce the biggest cultural change from the smallest investment of time and energy.
And when it blows up in their faces, it is not they who suffer and die, but us. Four and a half billion souls barred from bliss because some of their inhuman Minds thought they’d found a nice, neat, elegant way to alter a society which had evolved to stability over six millennia.
They had no right to try to interfere with us in the first place, but if they were determined to do it they might at least have had the decency to make sure they did it properly, with some thought for the numbers of innocent lives they were dealing with.
~ We still may be committing a second mistake upon a first. And they may be less tolerant than we imagine.
~ If nothing else, Quilan, even if there is some retaliation by the Culture, however unlikely that might be, it doesn’t matter! If we succeed in our mission here then those four and a half billion Chelgrian souls will be saved; they’ll be admitted to heaven. No matter what happens after that they’ll be safe because the Chelgrian-Puen will have allowed them in.
~ The Puen could allow the dead in now, Huyler. They could just change the rules, accept them into heaven.
~ I know, Quilan. But there is honour to be considered here, and the future. When it was first revealed that each of our own deaths had to be balanced by that of an enemy-
~ It wasn’t revealed, Huyler. It was made up. It was a tale we told ourselves, not something the gods graced us with.
~ Either way. When we decided that was the way we wanted to lead our lives with honour, don’t you think that people realised then that it might lead to what looked like unnecessary deaths, this instruction to take a life for a life? Of course they knew that.
But it was worth doing because in the long run we benefited as long as we maintained that principle. Our enemies knew we would not rest while we had deaths unavenged. And that still applies, Major. This is not some dry bit of dogma consigned to the history books or the string-frames in monastic libraries. This is a lesson that we have to keep reinforcing. Life will go on after this, and Chel will prevail, but its rules, its doctrines must be understood by each new generation and each new species we encounter.
When this is all over and we are all dead, when this is just another piece of history, the line will have been held, and we’ll be the ones who held it. No matter what happens, as long as you and I do our duty, people in the future will know that to attack Chel is to invite a terrible revenge. For their good—and I mean this, Quil, for their good as well as Chel’s, it’s worth doing now whatever has to be done.
~ I’m glad you seem so certain, Huyler. A copy of you will have to live with the knowledge of what we are about to do. At least I’ll be safely dead, with no back-up. Or at least not one that I know about.
~ I doubt they’d have made one without your consent.
~ I doubt everything, Huyler.
~ Quil?
~ Yes?
