Against A Dark Background by Iain M. Banks Page A

least.’
    `But, Doctor, what it all boils down to is this; can any amount of this sort of reasoning, historical or otherwise, really justify this sort of barbaric practice in this day and age? Briefly, please.’
    `Barbarism is always with us, Keldon. Lip City suffered an act of unparalleled barbarity eight years ago. What we have been forced to do is not barbaric; it is the will and the mercy of God. We can no more ignore this duty than we can neglect the adoration of Him. The Lady Sharrow - though we may feel sorry for her on a human level - represents a living insult for all those of the True and Blessed Belief. Her fate is not a matter for debate. She is the last of her line; a sad, barren and disabled figure whose misery has gone on too long. Her spirit, when it is finally released, will sing for joy that we were the ones who rescued her from her torment. I look forward to the eternal instant when her voice joins those of the Blessed whose conversion occurs after death; hers will be a muted exaltation, but it will be exaltation nevertheless, and eternal. Surely we should all wish her that.’
    `Doctor Braäst, we’re out of time. Thank you for those words.’
    ‘Thank you, Keldon.’
    `Well,’ the presenter said, turning to face the camera again with his eyebrows raised and just the suggestion of a shake of his head. ‘The war in Imthaid, now-’
    Zefla switched the screen off. Dloan turned back to the jet’s controls. The Log-jam was a vast metallic ice crystal, glittering in the distance at the margin of the land and sea.
    Zefla turned to Sharrow, slinging one long leg over her seat. ‘Buncha religious fuckwits.’ She shook her head, blonde hair swinging. ‘You’re going to be a fucking heroine at the end of this, Shar, and they’re going to look like the humourless hysterical dickshits they are.’
    Sharrow looked disconsolately at the darkened screen, nodding. ‘Only if they don’t get me,’ she said, turning away and looking out of the window, where the outlying sections of the Log-jam rose towards the dropping plane like a set of enormous, gleaming fingers.
    The plane landed without incident on Carrier Field.
    When the state of Piphram had been on the way downhill after its era of grandeur and wealth, centuries earlier, many of the seaships that had comprised its merchant fleet had been sold, many more had been scrapped, and hundreds had been mothballed. The mothballed ships - everything from megatonne bulk carriers to the most delicate and exquisite repossessed private yacht - had mostly been brought home, to lie in a broad lagoon on the coast of Piphram’s Phirarian province and await better trading conditions.
    Subsequently a modest land boom on the nearby coastal strip, between the Snowy Mountains and the lagoon-dotted coast pushed property prices up and Piphram’s historically punitive realestate taxes exaggerated the effect. Then somebody - spotting a loophole in the tax status of the lagoons - thought of using a couple of old car ferries as temporary floating dormitories.
    The two down-at-stern ferries, or rather their marginal situation, had proved to be a seed-point; within the chaos of Goltei s furiously complicated economic ecology, finance - along with its relevant material manifestations - tended to concentrate and crystallise almost instantaneously around any region where the conditions for profitmaking were even one shade more promising than elsewhere.
    Thus, the Log-jam had grown from a few rusty hulks to a fully-fledged city in less than a hundred years; at first the ships were moored together in clumps and people moved between them on small craft, then later the vessels were joined together. Some were welded to each other and some had secondary housing, office and factory units built upon and between them until the individual identity of the majority of the ships began to disappear in the emerging topology of the conglomerative city.
    The Log-jam now comprised many thousands of