Use of Weapons (culture, #3)

The third novel in Iain M. Banks's science fiction Culture series, Use of Weapons employs a distinctive dual-narrative structure. The Culture is a galaxy-spanning, post-scarcity civilization governed by vastly powerful artificial intelligences called Minds. Its citizens live in comfort and near-immortality aboard enormous starships and habitats. Its covert operations branch, Special Circumstances, intervenes in less advanced civilizations, sometimes using mercenary agents recruited from outside the Culture. One such agent is the man known as Cheradenine Zakalwe, whose story unfolds across two interwoven threads: one moving forward through a present-day mission, the other moving backward through his past, converging on a devastating revelation.

The novel opens with a prologue in which a young man called Zakalwe and a drunk, one-eyed field marshal called Cullis flee a palace as artillery shells destroy it around them. Zakalwe drags the barely conscious Cullis to a half-track vehicle and tears away toward the desert. The scene's full significance emerges only at the novel's end.

The forward narrative begins when Diziet Sma, a Culture agent working undercover on a peace conference, is interrupted by her companion drone, Skaffen-Amtiskaw, a sentient machine roughly the size of a suitcase. The Culture needs Zakalwe for an urgent mission in the Voerenhutz star cluster, where a former president named Tsoldrin Beychae has retired to scholarly seclusion. Without Beychae's public intervention, full-scale war is imminent. Sma must leave immediately aboard the very fast picket ship Xenophobe, while a mechanical stand-in takes her place.

The complication is that Zakalwe has disappeared. After his last job, he destroyed the knife missile, a tiny but lethal surveillance drone, that the Culture assigned to track him by luring it into a powerful medical scanner and frying it with a concealed military laser. A search across hundreds of star systems eventually locates his trail. Sma and Skaffen-Amtiskaw follow him by submarine to a tropical atoll, where he is saying goodbye to a girlfriend. To Sma's astonishment, Zakalwe agrees to the mission immediately, his bags already packed. He sets one crucial condition beyond the standard payment: The Culture must take him to see a woman named Livueta, whom he desperately wishes to find.

Aboard a massive Culture vessel, Zakalwe selects weapons and receives a briefing. The Vanguard Foundation, a Culture-controlled commercial front, will provide unlimited funds. He arrives alone in Solotol, a city built inside a two-kilometer-deep canyon. He checks into a hotel under the name "Staberinde," a word that carries private significance for both him and Beychae. He spends lavishly, buying businesses and broadcast companies all bearing the name, saturating local media until even a recluse in an underground archive must hear it. Two Governance officials, the true power behind the local corporate government, take notice and debate whether to kill Zakalwe or use him. They ultimately arrange for him to visit Beychae in his underground library.

Zakalwe recognizes that Beychae's young assistant, Ubrel Shiol, is actually a Governance agent. During an outing, he disarms Shiol, fights the silent driver Mollen, and calls for a Culture rescue capsule. When the half-conscious Shiol aims a concealed laser at Beychae rather than at Zakalwe, the old man finally understands he was a prisoner, not a guest. The capsule arrives and Zakalwe shoots down a pursuing fighter jet, but something disables the capsule in flight. They crash-land at a remote observatory far from the city.

Stranded with no communications, Zakalwe and Beychae debate. Beychae questions whether the Culture is truly disinterested; Zakalwe argues that war is never inevitable. A military aircraft from the Balzeit Hegemonarchy, one of the factions in the Voerenhutz conflict, arrives at the observatory. Its soldiers seize Zakalwe, claiming he is their prophesied military savior. Beychae reaches neutral territory and begins making public statements for peace.

Meanwhile, the backward-moving chapters excavate Zakalwe's history in reverse. He assassinates a genocidal dictator called the Ethnarch Kerian who broke a deal with the Culture. He endures a siege in a medieval Winter Palace, watching a young princess whose world is collapsing. He falls deeply in love with a poet named Shias Engin, who traces the scars on his body and finds a small puckered mark near his heart that makes him flinch. He is beheaded by natives on a planet called Fohls and rescued, barely alive, by the Culture. He lies dying in a volcanic caldera, scratching a distress signal in bird droppings. He commands a defeated army in a rainstorm, tying a captured enemy auxiliary to a chair that echoes another chair from his deeper past. He tries and fails to become a poet. He travels for decades on a slow ship under a false name, contemplating suicide.

The deepest flashback reveals the origin of everything. Four children grew up together in a great house: Cheradenine Zakalwe, his sisters Darckense and Livueta, and an unrelated boy named Elethiomel, whose father was executed for murder. As adults, the two men fight on opposite sides of a civil war. Elethiomel holds Darckense hostage inside the Staberinde, a great battleship he has cemented into a dry dock and converted into an impregnable fortress. Cheradenine besieges the ship but refuses to attack, hoping to save his sister. Then a delivery arrives: a small white chair constructed from Darckense's bones, her tanned skin fashioned into a cushion. Elethiomel, the Chairmaker, has murdered her and shaped her remains into furniture. Cheradenine puts a pistol to his own temple and pulls the trigger.

Sma tells Zakalwe he must win the Balzeit war: The Culture has decided to back the Hegemonarchy, and victory could swing the entire cluster toward peace. He succeeds brilliantly, luring the overextended enemy into the mountains and severing its supply lines. But Sma returns with devastating news: A political deal now requires the enemy to win. If Zakalwe's victory stands, peace negotiations for the entire cluster could collapse. Zakalwe agrees to leave but refuses to abandon the Hegemonarchy people before dawn. He shaves his head, walks into the citadel as the Imperial Army storms the walls, and moves through the carnage making no effort to hide or fight. Shot and bleeding, he drags himself atop the curtain wall and arranges fallen soldiers' bodies into a distress signal until the Culture module spots him.

Wounded and refusing medical treatment, Zakalwe insists on being taken to Livueta. On his home planet, he visits the Staberinde, now a museum piece in a public park. They travel to a hospital city where Livueta Zakalwe, now elderly and white-haired, works as a nurse. She refuses to speak to him and tells Sma never to bring him again. As he weeps, Livueta delivers the revelation: The real Cheradenine Zakalwe, her brother, died nearly two hundred years ago after receiving the bone chair. The man the Culture has employed all these years is Elethiomel, the Chairmaker himself, who took his victim's name, driven by guilt so profound he could never face it directly. He suffers a massive brain aneurysm; Skaffen-Amtiskaw performs emergency surgery to save his life.

The epilogue returns to the prologue scene, now reframed. The young man and the old man Cullis have planted a nuclear bomb in an abandoned city, hoping to destroy an invading army's leadership. They get drunk and tell lies, and sometimes the young man moves his hand over his bare scalp, through long hair that is no longer there. They stay up that night to watch the flash.