Reasons: the Culture

It was, the Culture knew from the start, a religious war in the fullest sense. The Culture went to war to safeguard its own

peace of mind: no more.

But that peace was the Culture’s most precious quality, perhaps its only true and treasured possession.

In practice as well as theory the Culture was beyond considerations of wealth or empire. The very concept of money—regarded

by the

Culture as a crude, over-complicated and inefficient form of rationing—was irrelevant within the society itself, where

the capacity of its means of

production ubiquitously and comprehensively exceeded every reasonable (and in some cases, perhaps,

unreasonable) demand its not

unimaginative citizens could make. These demands were satisfied, with one exception, from within

the Culture itself. Living space was

provided in abundance, chiefly on matter-cheap Orbitals; raw material existed in virtually

inexhaustible quantities both between the stars and

within stellar systems; and energy was, if anything, even more generally

available, through fusion, annihilation, the Grid itself, or from stars

(taken either indirectly, as radiation absorbed in

space, or directly, tapped at the stellar core). Thus the Culture had no need to colonize, exploit

or enslave.

The only desire the Culture could not satisfy from within itself was one common to both the descendants of its original human

stock and the

machines they had (at however great a remove) brought into being: the urge not to feel useless. The Culture’s

sole justification for the relatively

unworried, hedonistic life its population enjoyed was its good works; the secular evangelism

of the Contact Section, not simply finding,

cataloguing, investigating and analyzing other, less advanced civilizations but—where

the circumstances appeared to Contact to justify so

doing—actually interfering (overtly or covertly) in the historical processes

of those other cultures.

With a sort of apologetic smugness, Contact—and therefore the Culture—could prove statistically that such careful and benign

use of “the

technology of compassion" (to use a phrase in vogue at the time) did work, in the sense that the techniques it

had developed to influence a

civilization’s progress did significantly improve the quality of life of its members, without

harming that society as a whole by its very contact with

a more advanced culture.

Faced with a religiously inspired society determined to extend its influence over every technologically inferior civilization

in its path

regardless of either the initial toll of conquest or the subsequent attrition of occupation, Contact could either

disengage and admit defeat—so

giving the lie not simply to its own reason for existence but to the only justificatory action

which allowed the pampered, self-consciously fortunate

people of the Culture to enjoy their lives with a clear conscience—or

it could fight. Having prepared and steeled itself (and popular opinion)

through decades of the former, it resorted eventually,

inevitably, like virtually any organism whose existence is threatened, to the latter.

For all the Culture’s profoundly materialist and utilitarian outlook, the fact that Idir had no designs on any physical part

of the Culture itself

was irrelevant. Indirectly, but definitely and mortally, the Culture

was

threatened… not with conquest, or loss of life, craft, resource or territory, but

with something more important: the loss

of its purpose and that clarity of conscience; the destruction of its spirit; the surrender of its soul.

Despite all appearances to the contrary, the Culture, not the Idirans,

had

to fight, and in that necessity of desperation eventually gathered a

strength which—even if any real doubt had been entertained

as to the eventual result—could brook no compromise.