Banks, Iain - Culture 04 by Banks Iain

Author:Banks, Iain
Language: eng
Format: epub

PDF Transform

PDF Transform

Y

Y

Y

er

Y

er

B

2

B

2

B

.0

B

.0

A

A

Click here to buy

Click here to buy

w

w

w

w

w .

w

A B B YY.com

.A B BYY.com

'Hello,' it said.

'Mollen can't speak, you see. Hasn't said a word in all the time we've known him.'

'Yes,' said the woman. She was completely submerged in the chair now. 'We decided he needed to clear his throat; so we took out his tongue.' She either giggled or belched.

'We've met.' He nodded to the big man, whose face contorted strangely under the scars.

The party in the boat-house cellar went on. He almost collided with a woman who had her eyes on the back of her head. Some of the revellers were exchanging limbs now. People sported four arms, or none (begging for drinks to be brought to their mouths), or an extra leg, or had arms or legs of the wrong sex. One woman was parading around with a man in tow who wore a sickly stupid grin; the woman kept lifting her skirt and displaying a complete set of male sexual equipment.

He hoped they all forgot who had what at the end of the evening.

They passed through the tame party, where fireworks were showering everybody with cool sparks; they were all laughing at that and - he could think of no other word - cavorting.

He was wished farewell. It was the same car that took him back, though it had a different driver. He watched the lights and the city's calm expanses of snow, and thought about people at parties and people at war; he saw the party they had just left, and he saw the grey-green trenches with mud-caked men waiting nervously; he saw people dressed in shiny black, whipping each other and being tied up... and he saw people shackled to bed frames or chairs, shrieking, while the uniformed men applied their particular skills.

He sometimes had to be reminded, he realised, that he still possessed the capacity to despise.

The car powered its way through the silent streets. He took the dark glasses off. The empty city swept past.

VI

Once - between the time he'd taken the Chosen across the badlands and the time he'd ended up broken like an insect in the flooded caldera, scratching signs in the dirt - he had taken some leave, and for a while had entertained the idea of giving up his work for the Culture, and doing something else

PDF Transform

PDF Transform

Y

Y

Y

er

Y

er

B

2

B

2

B

.0

B

.0

A

A

Click here to buy

Click here to buy

w

w

w

w

w .

w

A B B YY.com

.A B BYY.com

instead. It had always seemed to him that the ideal man was either a soldier or a poet, and so, having spent most of his years being one of those - to him -

polar opposites, he determined to attempt to turn his life around and become the other.

He lived in a small village, in a small, rural country on a small, undeveloped, unhurried planet. He stayed with an old couple in a cottage in the trees in the dales beneath the high tors. He rose early and went for long walks.

The countryside looked new and green and

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.