The Sky Road tfr-4

by Ken MacLeod

  Gantry had agreed to supervise my project; it was a persistent irritant to my conscience that I hadn’t seen or written to him all summer.

  “Oh, nothing at the moment, Dr. Gantry. I’ve been doing a fair bit of preliminary research up North, and I’ve about finished the standard references.” I rubbed my ear, uneasily remembering the dust on the books. “And I thought I’d take the opportunity of a wee visit to Glasgow to drop by the library.”

  “That’s very commendable,” he said. I was unsure of the exact level of irony in his voice, but it was there. “We’ve rather missed you around here.”

  “He works very hard,” Menial put in. “The space-launch platform project is on a tight schedule.”

  “Oh, so that’s where you are. Kishorn. Hmm. Good money to be made up there, I hear. And you, miss?”

  “I have an office job there,” Menial said blandly. She shot me a smile. “That’s how I know he works hard. He’s saving up money to live on next year.”

  “Well, I suppose there are ways and ways of preparing for a project,” said Gantry, in a more indulgent tone. “No luck with patronage yet, I take it?”

  “None so far, no.”

  He clapped me around the shoulders. “Perhaps you should try to extract some research money from the space scientists,” he said. “Our great Deliverer had much to do with spaceflight herself. There might still be lessons in her life story, eh?”

  Menial’s face froze and I felt my knees turning to rubber.

  “Now that’s a thought,” I said, as calmly as possible.

  Gantry guffawed. “Aye, you might even fool them into thinking that!” he said. “Good luck if you do. Now that you’re getting stuck in, Clovis, I have something to show you.” He grinned, revealing his teeth, yellow as a dog’s. “It’s in the library.”

  With that he turned away and bounded up the stairs. I followed, mouthing and gesturing helplessness to Menial. To my relief, she seemed more amused than alarmed.

  By the time we arrived at the open door of the library he’d vanished into the shadows.

  “What are we going to do?” I whispered to Menial.

  “If he stays around, you keep him busy,” she said. “I’ll get the goods.”

  I was about to tell her how unlikely she was to get away with that when Gantry came puffing up, carrying a load of cardboard folders that reached from his clasped hands at his belt to his uppermost chin.

  “Here we are,” he said, lowering the tottering stack on to a table. He sneezed. “Filthy with dust, I’m afraid.” He wiped his nose and hands on an even dirtier handkerchief. “But it’s time you had a look at it: Myra Godwin’s personal archive.”

  “That really is amazing,” I said. My voice sounded like a twelve-year-old boy seeing a girl naked for the first time. I picked them up and put them down, one by one. Eight altogether: bulging cardboard wallets ordered by decade, from the 1970s to the 2050s.

  I hardly dared to breathe on them as I opened the first one and looked at the document on the top of the pile, a shoddily cyclostyled, rusty-stapled bundle of pages with the odd title Building a revolutionary party in capitalist America. Published as a fraternal courtesy to the cosmic current.

  “Why haven’t I seen these before?” I asked.

  Gantry shuffled uncomfortably. He glanced at Menial, rubbed his chin and said, “Am I right in thinking you’re a tinker?”

  “You’re right, I am that,” Merrial said, without hesitation.

  Gantry smiled, looking relieved. “Urn, well. Between ourselves and all that. Scholars and tinkers both know, I’m sure, that we have to be… discreet, about the Deliverer’s… more discreditable deeds and, ah, youthful follies. So, although previous biographers have seen these documents, we don’t tend to show them to undergraduates. What I hope, Clovis, is that you’ll see a way to go beyond the, um, shall we say hagiographic treatments of the past, without…” He paused, sucking at his lower lip. “Ah, well, no need to spell it out.”

  “Of course not,” I said.

  I looked at the master scholar with what I’m sure must have been an expression of gratifying respect. “Shall we have a look through them now?”

  Gantry stepped back and threw up his hands in mock horror. “No, no! Can’t have me looking over your shoulder at the raw material, Clovis. Unaided original work, and all that. This is yours, and there’s a thesis in there if ever I saw one. No, it’s time I was off and left you to it.” He hesitated. “Ah, I shouldn’t need to tell you, colha Gree, but not a word about this, or a single page of it, outside, all right?”

  I had a brief, intense tussle with my conscience, which neatly tripped me up and jumped on me. “Nothing for the vulgar, of course,” I said carefully. “But in principle I could, well, show it to or discuss it with other scholars?”

  “Goes without saying,” Gantry confirmed jovially. He tapped the side of his nose. “If you can find anyone you’d trust not to claim it as their own.” He winked at Menial. “Untrustworthy bunch, these scholars, I think you’ll find.” He punched me, playfully as he thought, in the ribs. “Confidence, man, confidence! I’m sure you have the wit to understand and explicate this lot yourself, and it’ll make your name, you mark my words!”

  “Thank you,” I said, after a painful intake of breath. “Well… I think I’ll make a start right now.”

  “Yes, indeed. Splendid idea. Don’t stay up too late.” His complicitous grin made it obvious that he thought it unlikely that we’d stay up too late. “Best be off then,” he said, as though to himself, then backed to the door and turned away.

  “Good night to you, sir!” Menial called out after him.

  “Good night,” came faintly back from the stairwell.

  Menial let out a long breath.

  “What a strange little man,” she said, in the manner of someone who has just encountered one of the Wee Folk.

  “He’s not entirely typical of scholars,” I said.

  “I should hope not,” Menial said. “Wouldn’t want you turning into something like that.”

  “Heaven forbid,” I said, adding loyally, “but he’s a fine man for all his funny ways.” I looked down at the stack of folders. “Maybe it would be a good idea,” I said slowly, “if you were to do your thing with the computer, and I could stay here, just in case he comes back.”

  “Oh, and leave me to face the deils all on my own?” Merrial mocked, then laughed, relenting. “Aye, that is not a bad idea. If he or anyone else comes in, keep them busy. I’ll not be long, and I’ll be fine.”

  “What about this security barrier?”

  She waved a hand and made a rude noise. Taugh! This wee gadget here has routines that can roast security barriers over a firewall and eat them for breakfast.”

  Considering how she’d had to program something a lot simpler than that to sort out the dates, I doubted her, but supposed that was the black logic for you.

  She smiled and slipped away; after an anxious minute of listening, I heard the sound of the inner door being opened and the scrape of a chair being dragged across the floor and propped against it. I relaxed a little and turned again to the files—to the paper files, I mentally corrected myself, for the first time making the connection between “files” in Merrial’s and, I presumed, tinkers’ usage, and my own.

  I was eager to get into the early decades, but I knew that would be somewhat self-indulgent, and that I would have plenty of time for that It was the later years, closer to the time of the Deliverance, that were hidden from history. I picked up the folder for the final decade, the 2050s, and was about to open it when I heard Merrial scream.

  I don’t remember getting to the door of the dark archive. I only remember standing there, my forward momentum arrested by a shock of dread that stopped me like a sparrow hitting a window. The file folder, absurdly enough, was still in my hands, and I held up that heavy mass of flimsy paper and fragile cardboard like a weapon—or a shield.

  Merrial too was holding a weapon—the chair sh
e’d been sitting on, and had evidently just sprung out of. In front of her, and above the computer, in a lattice of ruby light, stood the figure of a man. He was a tall man, and stout with it, his antique garb of cream-coloured jacket and trousers flapping and his shock of white hair streaming in the same invisible gale that had blown his hat away down some long corridor whose diminishing perspective carried it far beyond the walls of the room. His face was red and wrathful, his fist shaking, his mouth shouting something we couldn’t hear.

  Holding the chair above her head, her forearm in front of her eyes, chanting some arcane abracadabra, Merrial advanced like one facing into a fire, and seized her seer-stone and machinery from the table. Its wire, yanked from its inconveniently placed socket, lashed back like a snapped fishing-line. The litde peg at the end, now bent like a fishhook, flew towards me and rapped against the file-folder. Merrial whirled around at the same moment, and saw me. She gave me a look worth dying for, and then a calm smile.

  “Time to go,” she said. She let the chair clatter down, and turned again to face the silently screaming entity she’d aroused. As she backed away from the thing, it vanished. A mechanism somewhere in the computer whirred, then stopped. A light on its face flickered, briefly, then went out.

  All the lights went out. From downstairs we faindy heard an indignant yell. I could hear Merrial stuffing her apparatus back in its sack. She bumped into me, still walking backwards.

  Holding hands as though on a precipice, we made our way through the library’s suffocating dark. I could smell the dry ancient papers, the friable glue and frayed thread and leather of the bindings. From those fibres the ancients could have resurrected lost species of trees and breeds of cattle, I thought madly. Pity they hadn’t.

  After a long minute our eyes began to adjust to the faint light that filtered in past window-blinds, and from other parts of the building. We walked with more confidence through the maze towards the door. On the ground floor of the building we could hear Gantry blundering and banging about.

  Then, behind us, I heard a stealthy step. Menial heard it too and froze, her hand in mine suddenly damp. Another step, and the sound of something dragging. I almost broke into a screeching run.

  “It’s all right,” Menial said, her voice startlingly loud. “It’s a sound-projection—just another thing to scare us off.”

  Behind us, a low, deep laugh.

  “Steady,” said Menial.

  My thigh hit the edge of the table by the door. “Just a second,” I said. I let go of her hand, grabbed one more file-folder, put it in my other hand and then caught Menial’s hand again.

  We reached the library door, slammed it behind us and descended the stairs as fast as we safely could, or faster. Then we lost all caution and simply fled, rushing headlong past Gantry’s angry and puzzled face, lurid in the small flame of the pipe-lighter he held above his head, and out into the night.

  Night it was—for hundreds of metres around, all the power was off. We stopped running when we reached the first functioning street-lamps, on Great Western Road.

  I looked at Menial’s face, shiny with sweat, yellow in the sodium puddle.

  “What in the name of Reason was that?”

  Merrial shook her head. “My mouth’s dry,” she croaked. “I need a drink.”

  My feet led me unerringly to the nearest bar, the Claimant. It was quiet that evening, and Merrial was able to grab a corner seat while I bought a couple of pints and a brace of whiskies. By the empty fireplace a fiddler played and a woman sang, an aching Gaelic threnody of loss.

  Merrial knocked back her whisky in one deft swallow, and summer returned to her face.

  “Jesus!” she swore. “I needed that. Give me a cigarette.”

  I complied, gazing at her while lighting it, glancing covertly around while I lit my own. The pub, which I’d patronised throughout my student years, was a friendly and comfortable place, though its wall decorations could chill you a bit if you pondered on them: framed reproductions of ancient posters and notices and regulations about “actively seeking employment” and “receiving benefit”. It was something to do with living on public assistance, which is what many quite hale and able folk, known as claimants, had had to resort to in the days of the Possession, when land was owned by lairds and capital by usurers.

  The usual two old geezers were recalling their first couple of centuries in voices raised to cope with the slight hearing impairment that comes with age; a gang of lads around a big table were gambling for pennies, and several pairs of other lovers were intent only on each other; and the singer’s song floated high notes over them all.

  “You were about to say?” I said. My own voice was shakier than Menial’s had been at any point in the whole incident. At the same time I felt giddy with relief at our escape, and a strange exciting mixture of dread and exaltation at the sure knowledge that my life was henceforth unpredictable.

  “I wasn’t,” Menial said, “but I’ll tell you anyway. That thing we saw was the deil that guards the files. But,” she added brightly, “blowing fuses for several blocks around was the worst it could do.”

  “Hey, that’s comforting.”

  “Yes, it is,” she said, in a very definite tone. “Better that than an electric shock that burns your hands or a fire that brings down the whole building. Or—”

  “What?”

  “I’ve heard of worse. Ones that attack your mind through your eyes.”

  “And there you were laughing at the very idea, back at the yard.”

  “Aye, well,” she said. “It was just me that had to face them. No sense in getting you worried.”

  “Oh, thanks.”

  She took my hand. “No, you were brave in there.”

  “Ach, not a bit of it,” I agreed.

  “So, after all, we didn’t get much,” I said, returning to our table with refilled glasses about two minutes later. Outside, I could hear a growing commotion of militia rattles and whistles and fire-brigade bells. Somewhere across the street, a vehicle with a flashing light trundled slowly past.

  Menial looked up from riffling through the folders.

  “Well, you got the 2050s and the 1990s,” she said.

  That’s something. What I got —” she patted her bag, grinning “—was a whole lot more. Maybe everything, I don’t know yet.”

  I put the glasses down very carefully.

  “The… um, barrier… didn’t work, then?”

  “Up to a point. Like I said, my machine, and the logic on it, are stronger than the other one. It just couldn’t stop that thing from doing what it kept warning it would do. You can steal a bone from a dog if you ignore the barks and don’t mind the bites.” In a less smug tone, she added, “But it all depends on how much I pulled out before I had to…”

  Tull out!”

  “Yes.”

  “So what do we do now?” I looked down at the folders. “I suppose I’ll have to try and square things with Dr. Gantry.” Confused thoughts fought in my mind, like those programs Menial talked about. One sequence of impulses made me think through a scheme of grovelling apology and covering up and smoothing over. Another made me realize that I was almost certainly in very deep trouble with the University authorities, and had quite possibly affronted Gantry in ways that he might find hard to forgive.

  “Oh, and how are you going to do that?” Merrial asked. “I reckon he won’t be too pleased about your running off with this lot.”

  “That he won’t,” I said gloomily. “But I could always say I grabbed them to save them, or something, and that I’ll return them in a few days. After photocopying them, of course. No, it’s the other thing that’ll have him pissed off. Heaven knows what damage that thing did—I doubt it was just a power cut. More like blown fuses all over the place, maybe worse. That’ll be looked into, and not just by the University. And he’s going to want to know who you are and what we were up to.”

  “Hmm.” Menial blew out a thin stream of smoke, observing it as though it
were a divination. “Well, seeing as he knows my name, and where I work… tell you what, colha Gree. Assume he does make a fuss, or somebody else asks questions. What I do not want getting out is that this has anything to do with the ship, or with… my folk. What we can say, and with some truth, is that you were led by excess of zeal to poke around in… the dark place. That you inveigled me into helping you. That you’re very sorry, you got your fingers burned, and you won’t do it again. And that of course the files you took will not be seen by anyone outside the community of scholars. Their photocopies, now, they might be seen, but you need say nothing of that.”

  I had been thinking of counting Menial as an honorary scholar in my own version of that bit of casuistry, but hers would do at a pinch. My two conflicting programs meshed: I was in trouble, yes, but I could get out of it, by the aforementioned grovelling and covering up.

  The clock above the bar showed the time was a quarter past ten.

  “I doubt Gantry’s still around,” I said. “And I don’t know where he lives, or his phone number, if he has one. I suppose the best thing to do is see him in the morning, before we leave.” I took my return ticket from my pocket. “Train leaves at forty minutes before noon. I’ll be round to see him at nine, and try and straighten things out.”

  Menial nodded. “Sound plan,” she said. She cocked an ear. “Things seem to be quietening down, but I don’t think wandering around back there would be a good idea right now.”

  “D’you want to go back and check over what we’ve got?”

  “Dhia, no! I’ve looked at enough of that for one day. I want to stay here and drink with you, and maybe dance with you—if a wee bit of siller can make that fiddler change his tune—and then go back to the lodging and test the strength of that bed with you.”

  That is not what we should have done, I grant you; but are you surprised at all that it is what we did?

  I sat on the steps outside the Institute, in the still, chill morning under the shadows of the great trees, and looked at my watch. Ten to nine. I sighed and lit another cigarette. A couple of hundred metres away a pneumatic drill started hammering. Brightly painted trestles and crossbeams and piles of broken tarmac indicated that some similar work had been done already during the night.