by Ken MacLeod
The Sky Road
( The Fall Revolution - 4 )
Ken Macleod
Centuries after its catastrophic Deliverance, humanity is again reaching into space. And one young scholar working in the space-ship yard, Clovis colha Gree, could make the difference between success and failure.
Ken Macleod
The Sky Road
For Mic
1
The Light and the Fair
So it came that Menial found him in the square at Carron Town
She walked through the fair in the light of a northern summer evening, looking for me. Of the hundreds of people around her, the thousands in the town and the thousands on the project, only I would serve her purpose. My voice and visage, mind and body were her target acquisition parameters.
I sat on the plinth of the statue of the Deliverer, drained a bottle of beer and put it carefully down and looked around, screwing up my eyes against the westering sun. The music faded for a moment, then another band struck up, something rollicking and loud that echoed off the tall buildings around three sides of the square and boomed out from the open side across the shore and over the water. The still sealoch was miles of gold, the distant hills and islands stacks of black. The air was warm and shaking with the music and heavy with scent and sweat, alcohol-breath and weed-smoke. People were already dancing, swinging and swirling among the remaining stalls of the day’s market. I caught glimpses and greetings from various of my workmates, Jondo and Druin and Machard and the rest, as they whirled past in the throng with somebody who might be their partner for the hour, or for the night, or for longer.
For a moment, I felt intensely alone, and was about to jump up and plunge in and seek out someone, anyone, who would take me even for one dance. It was not normally this way; usually at such occasions through the summer I had got lucky. Like most of my fellow-workers, I was young and—of necessity—strong, and my vanity needed no flattery, and we were most of us open-handed strangers, and therefore welcome. But I was in a serious and abstracted mood, the coming autumn’s study already casting its long shadow back, and in all that evening’s gaiety I had not once made a woman laugh, and my luck had fled.
She walked through that dense crowd as if it wasn’t there. I saw her before she saw me. Her long black hair was caught around the temples by two narrow braids; the tumbling waves of the rest showed traces of auburn in the late sun. That golden light and ruddy shadow defined her tanned and flushed face: the large bright eyes, the high cheekbones, the curve of her cheek and jaw, the red lips. She wore a gown of plain green velvet that seemed, and probably was, made to show off her strong and well-endowed figure. Her gaze met mine, and locked. Her eyes were large and a little slanted, and they caught my glance like a trap.
There is, no doubt, some bodily basis for the crude cartoon of such moments—the arrow through the heart. A sudden demand on the sugar reserves of the cells, perhaps. It’s more like a thorn than an arrow, and passes in less than a second, but it’s there, that sharp, sweet stab.
A moment later she stood in front of me, looking down at me quizzically, curiously, then she came to some decision and sat down beside me on the cold black marble. The hooves of the Deliverer’s horse reared above us. We stared at each other for a moment. My heart was hammering. She appeared younger, more hesitant, than she’d seemed with her first bold gaze. Her irises were golden-brown, ringed with green-blue. I could see a faint spatter of freckles beneath her tan. A fine gold chain around her neck suspended a rough mesh of gold wire containing a seer-stone the size of a pigeon’s egg. It hung between her breasts, its small world flickering randomly in that gentle friction. An even thinner silver chain implied some other ornament, but it hung below where I could see. The dagger and derringer and purse on her narrow waist-belt were each so elegant and delicate as to be almost nominal. There was some powerful undertone to her scent, whether natural or artificial I didn’t know.
“Well, here you are,” she said, as though we’d arranged to meet at this very place. For a couple of heartbeats I entertained the thought that this might be true, that she was someone I really did know and had unaccountably, unforgivably forgotten—but no, I had no memory of ever having met her before. At the same time I couldn’t get rid of a conviction that I already knew her, and always had.
“Hello,” I said, for want of anything less banal. “What’s your name?”
“Menial,” she said. “And you are…?”
“Clovis,” I said. “Clovis colha Gree.”
She nodded to herself, as though some datum had been confirmed, and smiled at me.
“So, colha Gree, are you going to ask me for a dance?”
I jumped to my feet, amazed. “Yes, of course. Would you do me the honour?”
“Thank you,” she said. She took my hand in a warm, dry grasp and rose gracefully, merging that movement with her first step. It was a fast dance to a traditional air, “The Tactical Boys’. Talking was impossible, but we communicated a great deal none the less. Another measure followed, and then a slower dance.
We finished it a long way from where we’d started—fetched up close to the outside tables of the biggest pub on the square, The Carronade. Some of the lads from work were already at one of the tables, with their local girls. My mates gave me odd looks, compounded of envy and secret amusement; their female partners were looking lasers at Menial, for no reason I could fathom. She was attractive all right, and looking more beautiful to my eyes with every passing second, but the other girls were not obviously less blessed; and she wasn’t a harlot, unless she was foolish (harlotry being a respected but regulated trade in that town, its plying not permitted in the square).
Introductions were awkwardly made.
“What will you be having, Menial?” I asked.
She smiled up at me. She was, in truth, almost as tall as I, but my boots had high heels.
“A beer, please.”
“Fine. Will you wait here?”
I gestured to a vacant place on the nearest bench, beside Jondo and his current lass.
“I will that,” Menial said.
Jondo shot me another odd look, a smile with one corner of his mouth turned down, and his eyebrows raised. I shrugged and went through to the bar, returning a few minutes later with a three litre jug and a couple of tall glasses. Menial was sitting where she’d been, ignoring the fact that she was being ignored. I put this unaccustomed rudeness down to some petty pretty local quarrel, of which Carron Town—and the yard and, indeed, the project—had plenty. If one of Menial’s ancestors had offended one of Jondo’s (or whoever’s) that was no business of mine, as yet.
The table was too wide for any intimate conversation to be carried on across it, so I sat down beside her, setting off a Newtonian collision of hips all the way along the bench as my friends and their girlfriends shuffled their bums away from us. I filled our glasses and raised mine.
“Slainte,” I said.
“Slainte, mo chridhe? she said, quietly but firmly, her gaze level across the tilted rim.
And cheers, my dear, to you, I thought. Again her whole manner was neither shy nor brazen, but as though we had been together for months or years. I didn’t know what to say, so I said that.
“I feel we know each other already,” I said. “But we don’t.” I laughed. “Unless when we were both children?”
Menial shook her head. “I was not here as a child,” she said, in a vague tone. “Maybe you’ve seen me at the project.”
“I think I would remember,” I said. She smiled, acknowledging the compliment, as I added, “You work at the project? I sounded more surprised than I should have been—there were plenty of women working on it, after all, in catering and administration.
“
Aye,” she said, “I do.” She fondled the pendant, warming a fire within it, and not only there. “On the guidance system.”
“Oh,” I said, suddenly understanding. “You’re a—an engineer.”
“I am a tinker,” she said in a level tone, using the word I’d so clumsily avoided. She spoke it with a pride as obvious, and loud enough to be heard. A snigger and a giggle passed around the table. I glared past Menial’s shoulder at Jondo and Ma-chard. They shook their heads slightly, doubtfully, then returned to their conversations.
Justice judge them. As a city man I felt myself above such rural idiocies—though realising her occupation had given even me something of a jolt. Whatever passed between us, it would be less or more serious than any fling with a local lass. I leaned inward, so that Menial’s shoulders and mine defined a social circle of our own.
“Sounds like interesting work,” I said.
She nodded. “A lot of mathematics, a lot of—and this time she did lower her voice—’programming.”
“Ah,” I said, trying to think of some response that wouldn’t reveal me to be as prejudiced as my workmates. “Isn’t it very dangerous?” I resisted the impulse to look over my shoulder, but I was suddenly, acutely aware of the massive presence of the hills around the town, their forested slopes like the bristling backs of great beasts in the greater Wood of Caledon.
“White logic,” Menial explained. “The right-hand path, you know? The path of light.” She did not sound as though the distinction mattered a lot to her.
“Reason guide you,” I responded, with reflex piety. “But—it must be tempting. The short cuts, yeah?”
“The path of power is always a temptation,” she said, with casual familiarity. “Especially when you’re working on a guidance system!” She laughed; I confess I shuddered. She fingered her talisman. “Enough about that. I know what I’m doing, so it isn’t dangerous. At least, not as dangerous as it looks from outside.”
“Well.” Despite the electric frisson her words aroused, I was as keen as she was to change the subject. “You could say the same about what I do.”
“And what do you do?” She asked it out of politeness; she already knew. I was sure of that, without quite knowing why.
“I work in the yard,” I said.
“On the ship?”
“Oh, not on the ship!” A self-deprecating laugh, not very sincere. “On the platform. For the summer, I’m a welder.”
She slugged back some beer. “And the rest of the time?”
“I’m a scholar,” I said. “Of history. At Glaschu.”
This was a slight exaggeration. I had just attained the degree of Master of Arts, and my summer job was a frantic, frugal effort to earn enough to support myself for an attempt at a doctorate. Scholarship was my ambition, not my occupation. But I refused to call myself a student. Menial looked at me with the sort of effortful empathy with which I’d favoured her self-disclosure. “That sounds… interesting,” she said. “What part of history?”
I gestured across the square, to the statue’s black silhouette. Behind it, from the east, the first visible stars of the evening pricked the sky.
The life of the Deliverer,” I said.
“And what have you learned?” She leaned closer, transparently more interested; her black brows raised a fraction, her bright dark eyes widening. Without thinking, I lit a cigarette; remembered my manners, and offered her one. She took it, grinning, and helped herself to the jug of beer, then filled my glass too. “You wouldn’t think there’d be much new to learn,” she added, looking up through her eyelashes.
I rose to the bait. “Ah, but there is!” I told her. “The Deliverer lived in Glasgow, you know. For a while.”
“A lot of places will tell you she lived there—for a while!” Menial laughed.
“Aye, but we have evidence,” I said. “I’ve seen papers written with her own hand, and signed. There is no controversy that it was her who wrote them. What they mean, now, that’s another matter. And a great deal of other writing, printed articles that is, and material that is still in the—you know.”
“Dark storage?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Dark storage. I wish—” Even here, even now, it was impossible to say just what I wished. But Merrial understood.
“There you go, colha Gree,” she said. “The path of power is always a temptation!”
“Aye, it is that,” I admitted gloomily. “You can look at them, labelled in her own hand, and you wonder what’s in them, and—well.”
“Probably corrupt,” she said briskly. “Not worth bothering with.”
“Of course corrupt—”
She shook her head, with a brief, small frown. “In the technical sense,” she explained. “Garbage data, unreadable.”
Garbage data? What did that mean?
“I see,” I said, seeing only that she’d just tried to explicate part of the argot of her profession; another unseasonable intimacy.
“All the same,” she went on, “it must be strange work, history. I don’t know how you can bear it, digging about in the dead past.”
I had heard variations of this sentiment from so many people, starting with my mother, that exasperation welled within me and I’m sure showed on my face. She smiled as though to assure me that she didn’t hold it against me personally, and added, “The Possessors don’t work only through the black logic, you know. They can get to your mind through their words on paper, too.”
“You speak very freely,” I said. For a woman, I didn’t add.
She took it as a compliment, and thus paid me one by not recognising the stiff-kneed priggishness that my remark represented.
“It’s the tinker way,” she said, giving me another small shock. “We talk as we please.”
I couldn’t come back on that, so I ploughed on.
“We have to understand the Possession,” I explained self-righteously, “to understand the Deliverance.”
“But do we understand the Deliverance?” she asked, teasing me relentlessly. “Do you, Clovis colha Gree?”
T can’t say,” I said—which was true enough, though ecological with the truth.
“Good,” Merrial said. “We would not claim to understand it, and we knew the Deliverer better than most.” A sly smile. “As you know.”
I nodded, slowly. I knew all right. Despised and feared though they sometimes are, it is not for nothing that the tinkers are known as the Deliverer’s children. They worked her will long ago, in the troubled times, and the benison of that work has protected them down the generations; that and—on a more cynical view—their obscure and irreplaceable knowledge.
I had heard rumours—always disparaged by the University historians—of a firmer continuity, a darker arcana, that linked today’s tinkers and the Deliverer, and that reached back to times yet more remote, when even the Possession was but a sapling, its shadow not yet covering the Earth.
Her hand covered mine, briefly.
“Don’t talk about it,” she said.
So we talked about other things: her work, my work, her childhood and mine. The glasses were twice refilled. She stood up, hefting the now empty jug. “Same again?”
I rose too, saying, “I’ll get them—”
“I insist,” she said, and was gone. I watched the sway of her hips, the way it carried over to swing her heavy skirt and ripple the torrent of hair down her back, as she passed through the crowd and disappeared through the wide door of The Carronade. My friends observed this attention with sardonic smiles.
“You’re in for an interesting time, Clovis,” Jondo remarked. He stroked his long red pony-tail suggestively, making his girlfriend laugh again. “Looks like the glamour’s got you.”
Machard smirked. “Seriously, man,” he told me, “take care. You don’t know tinks like we do. They’re faithless, godless, clannish and they don’t settle down. At best she’ll break your heart, at worst—”
“What is the matter with you?” I hissed, leaning sideways to k
eep the girls out of the path of my wrath. “Come on, guys, give the lady a chance / My two friends” expressions took on looks of insolent innocence.
“Ease off, Clovis,” said Machard. “Just advice. Ignore it if you like, it’s your business.”
“Too damn right it is,” I said. “So mind your own.” I spoke the harsh words lightly—not fighting words, but firm. The two lads shrugged and went back to chatting up their lassies. I was ignored, as Menial had been.
The late train from Inverness glided down the glen, sparks from the overhead wire flaring in the twilight, and vanished behind the first houses. A minute later I could hear the brief commotion as it stopped at the station, a few streets away. The clouds and the tops of the hills glowed pink, the same light reflecting off a solitary airship, heading west. Few lights were on in the town—half past ten in the evening was far too early for that—but the houses that spread up the side of the glen and along the shore were beginning to seem as dark as the pine forest that began where the dwellings ended.
Farther up the great glen the side-lights and tail-lights of vehicles traced out the road’s meander, and the dark green of the wooded hillsides met the bright green of the lower slopes, field joined to field, pasture to pasture all the way to where the haunches of the hills hid the view, and the land was dark. Somewhere far away, but sounding uncannily close, a wolf howled, its protracted, sinister note clearly audible above the sounds of the town and the revelry of the fair.
The square was becoming more packed and noisy by the minute. The drinking and dancing would go on for hours. Jugglers and tumblers, fire-eaters and musicians competed for attention and spare cash, with each other and with the hawkers. The markets on summer Thursdays were locally called “the fair”, but only once a month did they amount to much, with a more impressive contingent of performers than were here now, as well as travelling players, whirling mechanical rides and, of course, tinkers; the last pursuing their legitimate trade of engineering and their less reputable, but often more lucrative, craft of fortune-telling.