Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks

Author:Iain M. Banks [Banks, Iain M.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Science Fiction
Publisher: Little Brown
Published: 2010-07-09T23:00:00+00:00

Eighteen

There was nothing worse, Veppers thought, than a loser who’d made it. It was just part of the way things worked – part of the complexity of life, he supposed – that sometimes somebody who absolutely deserved nothing more than to be one of the down-trodden, the oppressed, the dregs of society, lucked out into a position of wealth, power and admiration.

At least people who were natural winners knew how to carry themselves in their pomp, whether their ascendancy had come through the luck of being born rich and powerful or the luck of being born ambitious and capable. Losers who’d made it always let the side down. Veppers was all for arrogance – he possessed the quality in full measure himself, as he’d often been informed – but it had to be deserved, you had to have worked for it. Or at the very least, an ancestor had to have worked for it.

Arrogance without cause, arrogance without achievement – or that mistook sheer luck for true achievement – was an abomination. Losers made everybody look bad. Worse, they made the whole thing – the great game that was life – appear arbitrary, almost meaningless. Their only use, Veppers had long since decided, was as examples to be held up to those who complained about their lack of status or money or control over their lives: look, if this idiot can achieve something, so can anybody, so can you. So stop whining about being exploited and work harder.

Still, at least individual losers were quite obviously statistical freaks. You could allow for that, you could tolerate that, albeit with gritted teeth. What he would not have believed was that you could find an entire society – an entire civilisation– of losers who’d made it. And the Culture was exactly that.

Veppers hated the Culture. He hated it for existing and he hated it for – for far too damned many credulous idiots – setting the standard for what a decent society ought to look like and so what other peoples ought to aspire to. It wasn’t what other peoples ought to aspire to; it was what machines had aspired to, and created, for their own inhuman purposes.

It was another of Veppers’ deeply held personal beliefs that when you were besieged or felt cornered, you should attack.

He marched into the Culture ambassador’s office in Ubruater and threw the remains of the neural lace down on her desk.

“What the fuck is this?” he demanded.

The Culture ambassador was called Kreit Huen. She was a tall, statuesque woman, slightly oddly proportioned for a Sichultian but still attractive in a haughty, formidable sort of way. It had crossed Veppers’ mind on more than one occasion to have one of his impersonator girls change to look just like the Culture woman, so he could fuck her conceited brains out, but in the end he couldn’t bring himself to; he had his pride.

When Veppers burst in she was standing at a window of her generously proportioned penthouse office looking

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