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minds, and those not afraid to act.'
'Okay, so it's a balance. All societies are like that; the damping hand of the
old and the firebrand youth together. It works out through generations, or
through the set-
up of your institutions, and their change and even replacement; but
Governance, the Humanists, combine the worst of both approaches. Ancient,
vicious, discredited ideas backed with adolescent war-mania. It's a crock of
shit, Tsoldrin, and you know it. You've earned the right to some leisure;
nobody's arguing. But that won't stop you feeling guilty when - not if - the
bad stuff comes. You have the power, Tsoldrin, whether you like it or not;
just doing nothing is a statement, don't you understand that? What is all your
studying worth, all your learning, all your knowledge, if it doesn't lead to
wisdom? And what's wisdom but knowing what is right, and what is the right
thing to do? You're almost a god to some of the people in this civilisation,
Tsoldrin; again, whether you like it or not. If you do nothing...
they'll feel abandoned. They'll feel despair. And who can blame them?'
He made a resigned sort of gesture with his hands, putting them both down on
the stone parapet, gazing out to the dark-ening sky. Beychae was silent.
He gave the old man a while longer to think, then looked round at the flat
stone summit of the hill, at all the strange stone instruments. 'An
observatory, eh?'
'Yes,' Beychae said after a moment's hesitation. He touched one of the stone
plinths with one hand. 'Believed to have been a burial site, four or five
thousand years ago;
then to have had some sort of astrological significance; later, they may have
predicted eclipses with readings taken here. Finally, the Vrehids built this
observatory to study the motions of the moons, planets and stars. There are
water-
clocks, sundials, sextants, planet-dials... partial orreries... there are
crude seismographs here, too, or at least earthquake direction indica-tors.'
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Iain M. Banks - Use of Weapons
'They have telescopes?'
'Very poor ones, and only for a decade or so before the Empire fell. The
results they got from the telescopes caused a lot of problems; contradicted
what they already knew, or thought they knew.'
'That figures. What's this?' One of the plinths held a large, rusty metal bowl
with a sharp central spindle.
'Compass, I think,' Beychae said. 'It works by fields,' he smiled.
'And this? Looks like a tree stump.' It was a huge, rough, very slightly
fluted cylinder perhaps a metre in height, and twice that across. He tapped
the edge.
'Hmm; stone.'
'Ah!' Tsoldrin said, joining him at the stone cylinder. 'Well, if it's what I
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think it is...
it was originally just a tree stump, of course...' He ran his hand over the
stone surface, looked round the edge for something. 'But it was petrified,
long ago. Look though; you can still see the rings in the wood.'
He leant closer, looking at the grey stone surface by the fading afternoon
light. The growth rings of the long dead tree were indeed visible. He leant
forward, taking off one of the suit gloves, and with his fingers stroked the
surface of the stone. Some differential weathering of the wood-become-rock had
made the rings tangible; his fingers felt the tiny ridges run beneath their
surface like the fingerprint of some mighty stone god.
'So many years,' he breathed, putting his hand back to the very sapling centre
of the stump, and running his hand out again. Beychae said nothing.
Every year a complete ring, signature of bad year and good by the spacing, and
every ring complete, sealed, hermetic. Every year like part of a sentence,
every ring a shackle, chained and chaining to the past; every ring a wall, a
prison. A sentence locked in the wood, now locked in stone, frozen twice,
sentenced twice, once for an imaginable time, then for an unimaginable time.
His finger ran over the ring walls, dry paper over ridged rock.
'This is just the cover,' Beychae said from the other side. He was squatting
down, looking for something on the side of the great stone stump. 'There ought
to be...
ah. Here we are. Don't expect we'll be able to actually lift it, of course...'
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Iain M. Banks - Use of Weapons
'Cover?' he said, putting the glove back on and walking round to where Beychae
was. 'Cover for what?'
'A sort of puzzle the Imperial Astronomers played when the viewing was
patchy,'
Beychae said. 'There; see that hand-hold?'
'Just a second,' he said. 'Want to stand back a little?' Beychae stood back.
'It's supposed to take four strong men, Zakalwe.'
'This suit's more powerful than that, though balancing might be a little...'
He found two hand-holds on the stone. 'Suit command; strength normal max.'
'You have to talk to the suit?' Beychae asked.
'Yeah,' he said. He flexed, lifting one edge of the stone cover up; a tiny
explosion of dust under the sole of one of the suit's boots announced a
trapped pebble giving up the struggle. 'This one you do; they have ones you
just have to think about some-thing, but...' he pulled on one edge of the
cover, sticking one leg out to shift his centre of gravity as he did so. '...
but I just never liked the idea of that.' He held the whole stone top of the
petrified stump above his head, then walked awkwardly, to the noise of
crunching, popping gravel under his feet, to another stone table; he lowered,
shifted the stone cover sidways until it rested on the table, and returned;
he made the mistake of clapping his hands together, and produced what sounded
like a gunshot. 'Oops,' he grinned. 'Suit command; strength off.'
Revealed by the removal of the stone cap was a shallow cone. It seemed to have
been carved from the petrified stump itself. Looking closer, he could see that
it was ridged, tree ring by tree ring.
'Quite clever,' he said, mildly disappointed.
'You're not looking at it properly, Cheradenine,' Beychae told him. 'Look
closer.'
He looked closer.
'I don't suppose you have anything very small and spherical, do you?' Beychae
said, 'Like a... ball-bearing.'
'A ball-bearing?' he said, a pained expression on his face.
'You don't have such things?'
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