The Sky Road tfr-4

by Ken MacLeod

  Fergal said this in such a tone of loathing that I was surprised. The minor hassles between the unions and the contractors and subcontractors seemed to me hardly a matter for such moral outrage, let alone death threats. I folded my arms and cocked my head slightly to one side. Fergal leaned back again.

  “He pushed to have you sacked, you know,” he said. “That’s why he was in the bar at The Carron-ade.”

  I admit I felt slightly shaken by this, because it was entirely plausible and because it implied that someone in the bar had been watching us, but I still made no reply.

  “He has not come here, with you, to spy on us. He’s here to spy on you, to find out what your real connections to us are.”

  “If that’s what he’s doing, it sounds reasonable enough to me,” I said, goaded at last. “I’m sure none of what you’re doing is a threat to the project, anyway. That’s why I helped Menial in the first place. So what’s the problem with his being here?”

  “Oh, it has nothing to do with that. Menial told you the truth—we think there’s a possible threat to the ship, we’re investigating it urgently and if we find evidence for it we’ll present the evidence to the project’s management. No. Druin—and whoever is behind him—are looking for any stick to beat the tinkers with. He’s out to discredit us, and arouse hostility to us.”

  I shook my head. “No—he’s never shown any hostility to the tinkers, as far as I know.”

  “Naturally,” Fergal said derisively.

  “Why should he or anyone want to do that, anyway?”

  “God, you are so fucking naive!” Fergal waved a hand to indicate everything outside the room and inside the building. “We’re a somewhat privileged group, by virtue of our monopoly on skills which, frankly, are not hard to learn. Why should you depend on us to build and run your computers?” He laughed. “You’ve seen how we make them. It’s an ancient technology, called nanotech. We don’t understand it, but we can apply it. A farmer could do it, just as a farmer can grow crops without understanding how the molecular genetics and replication work. A competent mechanic, with maybe a skilled jeweller or watchmaker for the fiddly bits, could incorporate the seer-stones, as you call them, into machinery.”

  “They’d have to know the white logic.”

  “That too is not hard to learn. So what’s stopping you?”

  “Me?”

  Tour peopled he said impatiently.

  “Funnily enough,” I said, “I asked Druin that very question. He said it was—well, tradition, you would call it. It works, it goes back to the Deliverance, no point questioning it. That’s what he said.”

  “No doubt. And it wouldn’t have been long before he was complimenting you, saying he’d mulled it over and he thought it was a good question.”

  “Do you mind if I smoke?” I asked. I wanted to give the impression of weakening; my craving made it credible.

  “Sure, go right ahead,” said Fergal.

  I took the materials from my pocket and lit up.

  “What I don’t understand,” I said, “is why you’re so bothered by his turning up here. You even threatened to kill him. Maybe that was a bluff—”

  “It wasn’t!”

  “But why? Even if he’s as hostile as you say, he’ll have people searching for him if he doesn’t return, and it won’t take anyone long to think of looking here.”

  Fergal flicked his fingers. “We could make it look like an accident that had nothing to do with us. It’s a dangerous sport, deer-hunting.”

  “And I would go along with your story, or join him at the bottom of a cliff?”

  “Something like that.”

  “What,” I asked, trying to keep my voice from betraying my rage and fear, “is important enough to justify doing something like that, now?”

  “Ah.” Fergal frowned. “He—and you—have arrived at a very awkward moment. We’ve found something in the files that Menial retrieved—something we’ve been missing for a very long time, and which we only recently realised might be stored at the University, of all places. We—”

  He paused. “Let’s just say we’d lose a lot if anyone started poking around now. There’s obviously an investigation going on, and we really aren’t in a position to resist any intrusion in force.” He dusted his palms and stood up, laying the rifle carefully aside across the sink, within his reach and out of mine. “Which is where you come in, Clovis. Obviously we don’t want to kill Drain, or yourself.”

  “If you can possibly avoid it.”

  “Exactly!” he smiled, damning himself with his grin. “No need for any of that. You’re an intelligent bloke, Clovis, and you can help us. All you have to do is persuade Drain that there’s nothing here to threaten the project, and that he should leave well alone.”

  “That shouldn’t be hard,” I said. “And Drain shouldn’t worry you. Even if he is what you say, he’s only doing his job. And speaking of jobs, I’ve just lost mine and I want an explanation. As well as the files you took, and a chance to speak to Menial.”

  Fergal nanowed his eyes. “Menial might not want to speak to you.”

  That’s for her to say.”

  “As for the files—”

  He frowned, considering. I got the impression that he was beginning to feel the files were turning out to be more trouble than they were worth.

  “Look,” I said, “I understand why you feel they’re yours. But they’re not mine to let you have, or yours to take. The Deliverer left them to the University, not to the Fourth International.”

  Fergal jumped up as if he’d sat on a wasp.

  “Who told you about the Fourth International?”

  I shrugged. Tm a historian,” I said. “It’s common knowledge among scholars.”

  This double lie deflated Fergal somewhat. He sat back down and eyed me warily.

  “So what do you know about it?”

  “It’s a communist secret society that goes back to before the Deliverer’s time.”

  “Hmm,” he said. He rubbed an eyelid. “That’s about right. Though ‘communist’ doesn’t really tell you what it’s all about, these days.” He laughed harshly. “God, I sometimes feel if we could get capitalism back—”

  “The Possession?” I asked incredulously.

  “Well, you would call it that. Let me tell you, it would be better than this dark age you people have got yourselves bogged down in.”

  “This is a dark age?” I laughed in his face. “We’re building a spaceship not fifty kilometres from here.”

  “Oh, Christ.” Fergal knotted his fists. “Aye, building it out of boiler plate. You build everything, up to crude atomics and even fucking laser-fusion engines with skills handed down from master to apprentice. Compared to the ancients, you people are complete barbarians. Compared to what you could be—”

  He sighed and stood up, and began pacing the room like a beast in a cage. “You could have a world where nobody has to do any work that isn’t like play, where almost any sickness or injury could be mended, where nobody has to die, where we live like gods and fill the skies with our children’s children. Instead we have this.” He smacked his palm with his fist and looked around with an expression of disgust.

  “And who would do the work in this paradise?” I asked, perhaps more offensively than I intended.

  “Machines, of course. Every bit of work in the world can be done by machines, linked up and coordinated.”

  “Oh, right,” I said, disappointed. “The path of power.”

  “It doesn’t have to be like that, next time—”

  “Next time?”

  Fergal leaned over the table on his fists, in a manner simultaneously intimidating and confidential. “That’s what the International exists for: the next time. The next chance humanity has to break out of this prison. Our time will come, again. And next time, we’ll be ready.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t understand.”

  He looked at me with some regret, then straightened up and moved back to his sea
t. “It’s no use trying to explain it to you now,” he said. “There’s so much you need to know to make sense of it, and you have no way of getting—”

  He was interrupted by a banging on the door.

  “Who’s there?” he shouted.

  “It’s me—Menial! Fergal, you’ve got to—”

  “Wait there!”

  His shouted command came too late. The door burst open and Menial charged in. She rushed past me and placed something on the table and then snatched her hands back from it as though it were a dish too hot to handle. It was a seer-stone apparatus, and the stone in the middle of it was glowing with colour and alive with movement, forming a tiny scene under the domed surface, a bubble of life star-ding in its virtual reality.

  The scene was of a forest glade, in which a man sat elf-like on a rock. He looked out at us, quite calm and uncanny. He spoke, and his voice came from a speaker in the side of the surrounding apparatus.

  The volume was too low to make out what he was saying—certainly not above Menial’s shouting.

  “You never told me there was a deil in it!”

  Fergal had jumped up, and was staring down intently at the stone. He raised a hand, without looking up.

  “Calm down, Menial,” he said mildly. “This is no deil. It’s what you were looking for.”

  “What in hell is that?” I asked. I too was on my feet, peering entranced at the amazing, beautiful thing.

  “It’s an artificial intelligence,” the tinker said, his voice thrilled with awe. He stooped to the seer-stone and placed his ear close to the speaker and listened. Menial seemed to have noticed me just as I spoke.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked. Her eyes were reddened, her cheeks pale with fatigue. She looked scared and puzzled.

  “I came here for you,” I said. “I hoped you might want me to come back.”

  “But I thought—”

  Tou two, please leave now,” Fergal said. He didn’t even look up at us. He waved a hand absently to one side. “Take your weapons and tools, Clovis, take this woman if you want and get the hell out of here with your friend, the company spy.”

  Menial turned and looked down at Fergal.

  “You want me to go?” She sounded hurt, but hopeful as well.

  Tes, yes,” Fergal said, impatiendy deigning to spare her a glance. “You’ve done your job, and very well too. Your skills won’t be needed in the… next phase. Oh, and Clovis—take the bloody paper files while you’re at it. We won’t be needing them any more, either.”

  Menial glowered at Fergal for a moment and clutched my hand.

  “Glovis, what’s going on?”

  “I think we’d better do as he says,” I said. I let go of her hand and edged around the table, picking up the rifle I’d carried and the gear from my belt. I buckled them back on, shoved the sheathed dagger back in my boot and took Menial’s hand in my left, keeping the rifle in my right. Together we backed out of the room. Fergal didn’t watch us go, or even—as far as I could see—notice. He was talking quietly to the sprite in the stone. I pushed the door shut with my toe.

  “Do you want to come with me?”

  Menial blinked. “Of course I do.”

  I hugged her (rather awkwardly with the rifle in one hand, but I wasn’t letting go of it again) and then said, “We better get out before that bastard changes his mind.”

  “Or something worse happens. Yes, come on.”

  The big work-shop space was still busy, with lights coming on here and there as the evening shadows lengthened—the time, I was startled to realise, was only ten o’clock—and the ambient light reddened. A few people on the overhead walkways glanced down at us curiously, but that was all.

  The room in which Druin was being held was only a few quick strides away. I opened the door and walked in, Menial close behind me. This room had only a chair in the middle, with one very bright light above it. Druin was sitting on that chair with a bored, sullen and stubborn expression on his face, while the two tinkers who’d accompanied Fergal stood, one in front of him and one behind. Their raised voices fell silent as we entered. Their rifles—and Drum’s—were propped against the back wall; mine was pointing straight ahead. It still wasn’t loaded, but they weren’t to know that.

  Tergal says you’re to let him go,” said Menial.

  “What have they been doing to you?” I asked.

  Druin stood up and stretched. “Och, nothing to speak of,” he said. “They have merely been boring me with an account of my sins. I have not yet found it in my heart to confess.” He deftly retrieved his weapons and kit. Til thank you to escort us out, gentlemen.”

  One of the tinkers found his voice. “I want this confirmed by Fergal.”

  “You do that if you like,” Menial said. “But I warn you, he’s not in a friendly mood.”

  The tinker opened his mouth and closed it again. He smiled at Menial in a surprisingly complicit way, which made me suspect that he and Menial had some shared experience of Fergal’s moods. “Oh, well, it’s your responsibility,” he said.

  We stepped outside the room.

  “Wait a minute,” said Menial.

  She skipped away up a stair-ladder and ran along a walkway, her feet setting the metal ringing. We waited in uneasy silence until she returned, the two file-folders hugged to her chest.

  “That’s us,” she said. “All set.”

  The two men walked ahead of us down a long central passage through the machine shop to the building’s ancient green copper doors, then turned sharply left and showed us out through a rather less imposing wooden door.

  “Goodbye,” said Druin balefully.

  The tinkers ignored him.

  “Are you leaving?” one of them asked Menial.

  Tm going home,” she said. “I hope I see you again.”

  * * *

  Drain’s truck was just over a kilometer away. We hastened along the quiet road, the late sun in our eyes. Drain strode briskly in front. Menial’s hand was clasped in mine, fingers intertwined. None of us said very much; we had too much to say all at once.

  At last we reached the track. Drain stopped and looked at the rifles.

  “Och, I forgot, we have some deer to kill.”

  He laughed at my face, and took the two rifles and racked them again on the back of the track. We went around to the cab and climbed in. Menial shared the double passenger-seat with me; it was comfortably crowded. For a minute we all slumped gratefully. I passed Menial a cigarette and lit for both of us. The Kyle train clattered past.

  “You know,” Drain said reflectively, “I’ve never before had a gun pointed at me, thank Providence. It isn’t an experience I’d want to repeat.”

  “I don’t think they’d really have killed either of us,” I said. It was us who marched in with rifles, after all.”

  “Aye,” said Drain indignantly, “and I’ve carried a rifle into The Carronade many’s the time, and nobody ever took it ill.”

  “Different situation—”

  Tergal could have killed you!” Menial interrupted. “If he was in the mood. It was only the possible consequences that stopped him. You did something stupidly dangerous going there.”

  “Well, we went there to get you, and to get yon papers that Clovis makes such a fuss about,” Drain grinned. “And that’s what we’ve come out with.”

  “What a charming way to put it,” said Menial, unoffended. I leaned past her and frowned at Drain.

  “What about you? Fergal said you were working for site security, spying on the unions and on the tinkers. And that you argued for getting me sacked. Is that true?”

  “I don’t spy on anyone,” Druin said. That’s just the tinkers’ way of putting it, at least those three who caught us. There’ll be the deil to pay for that, you know!”

  “How?” Drum’s non-denials hadn’t passed me by, but this was more urgent.

  Druin turned the engine on and began to steer the truck back on to the road west. Talse imprisonment!” he sa
id. “And assault with a deadly weapon, which is what threatening someone with a gun is. You and me, Clovis, we could sue the bastards.” He glanced across at me sharply. “You haven’t any idea, by any chance, why they kept us in the first place, and why they let us go when they did? I mean, with me they just kept banging on about what a scab I was. What did Fergal have to say to you? And, come to think of it, what are you two up to anyway? I know you’re up to something, and that it concerns the ship. Which means it concerns me.”

  I slid my arm around Menial’s shoulders. She smiled at me, then gazed straight ahead.

  “Tell him,” she said. “Tell him it all.”

  So I did, as we pulled out of Dark and drove into the sunset.

  “Aye, well,” said Druin, “you’ve told me all you know, Clovis.” He sipped his whisky and flicked at a midge. “Quite a tale! But I haven’t heard Menial’s side, and I reckon that’s more than half the story.”

  We were sitting around a roughly made, age-smoothed table in the broad stone-flagged kitchen of Druin’s house, ourselves surrounded by the shelves of crockery, the shining electric oven and a sink with a dripping tap. Arrianne and the children had long since gone to bed. The back door stood open to the warm night, and the smells and sound of the sea-loch. A saucer on the table was filling up with our cigarette-butts. Beside it a bottle of whisky and a pot of coffee were emptying fast.

  Menial rubbed her eyebrows, ran her fingers through the wide swathes of her hair and flicked them back behind her shoulders. She had not expanded on any of my account, beyond the occasional corroborative comment or nod.

  “Well, all right,” she said. “From my side there’s—well, some of it I’d rather talk about with Clovis—it really is personal, it really is no concern of yours, Druin.”

  Druin tilted his hand. “OK. And the rest?”

  “Ah, well, it goes back a wee bit, to when I started worrying about… stories I’d heard about what happened at the Deliverance. Basically, it was that the Deliverer, Myra Godwin herself, had set off something that physically destroyed the settlements and satellites, and that in doing so she’d not only killed God knows how many people, she’d created a barrier to anything ever getting safely back into space again. Every orbiting platform that was destroyed would have been broken into fast-moving fragments which in turn would destroy others, and so on until there was nothing left but a belt of debris around the Earth—and anything that goes up now would just end up as more debris! Now, Fergal is a well-respected tinker, apart from his being a… leading member of the International.” She shot us a glance. “Which is not as sinister as you think! But that’s by the way. Fergal’s in charge of the tinkers who’re working on the project, though he doesn’t work on the site himself. So after getting nowhere with the project management, I took it to him, and he said we should try to investigate it for ourselves. It was myself who suggested we could look for someone who might have access to anything the Deliverer left at Glasgow, and that, well, there were students working on the project for the summer who might…”