It was a warship, after all. It was built, designed to glory in destruction, when it was considered appropriate. It found, as it was rightly and properly supposed to, an awful beauty in both the weaponry of war and the violence and devastation which that weaponry was capable of inflicting, and yet it knew that attractiveness stemmed from a kind of insecurity, a sort of childishness. It could see that - by some criteria - a warship, just by the perfectly articulated purity of its purpose, was the most beautiful single artifact the Culture was capable of producing, and at the same time understand the paucity of moral vision such a judgement implied. To fully appreciate the beauty of a weapon was to admit to a kind of shortsightedness close to blindness, to confess to a sort of stupidity. The weapon was not itself; nothing was solely itself. The weapon, like anything else, could only finally be judged by the effect it had on others, by the consequences it produced in some outside context, by its place in the rest of the universe. By this measure the love, or just the appreciation, of weapons was a kind of tragedy.

The Attitude Adjuster thought it could see into the souls of the Affronters. They were not the happy-go-lucky life-and-soul-of-the-party grand fellows with a few bad habits they were commonly thought to be; they were not thoughtlessly cruel in the course of seeking to indulge other more benign and even admirable pleasures; they were not merely terrible rascals.

They gloried, first and foremost, in their cruelty. Their cruelty was the point. They were not thoughtless. They knew they hurt their own kind and others and they revelled in it; it was their purpose. The rest - the robust joviality, the blokish vivacity - was part happy accident, part cunningly exaggerated ploy, the equivalent of an angelic-looking child discovering that a glowing smile will melt the severest adult heart and excuse almost any act, however dreadful.

It had agreed to the plan now coming to fruition with a heavy soul. People would die, Minds be destroyed because of what it was doing. The ghastly danger was gigadeathcrime. Mass destruction. Utter horror. The Attitude Adjuster had lied, it had deceived, it had acted - by what it knew would be the consensual opinion of all but a few of its peers - with massive dishonour. It was all too well aware its name might live for millennia hence as that of a traitor, as an abhorrence, an abomination.

Still, it would do what it had become convinced had to be done, because to do otherwise would be to wish an even worse self-hatred upon itself, the ultimate abomination of disgust at oneself.