by Ken MacLeod
“So you came looking for me?”
“Aye,” she grinned. “But I wasn’t to know what I’d find. Could have been somebody who was only interested in scholarship, or who would not have gone along with the idea. Anyway, I kept my ears open, and it was not long before I heard about you.”
Drain laughed, as much at my embarrassment as at her account.
“Clovis was not exactly quiet about his interests! He’s been bending our ears about the Deliverer and history all the bloody summer. But back to your Fergal. It sounds like he took your worries seriously.”
“Oh, sure,” Menial said. “I got the impression that quite a few tinkers have the same idea, and… at least some people in the International had even stronger reasons to think it.”
Drain took a sudden wasteful gulp of his good whisky.
“Why would the tinkers—or this International—want to keep that a secret?”
Menial stared at him. “Because the Deliverer’s reputation, and her last message to the world, is what protects the tinkers! If the ordinary folk, the outsiders—no offence—got to think she was some mass-murdering monster like Stalin, what would they care about anything she said?”
Drain cupped his chin with his hand and regarded her quizzically.
“Is that what you think, or is that what Fergal told you?”
“Both, but, well, yes. I see what you mean.”
“More than I can say,” I said.
Merrial turned to me. “What he means is, it’s something I’ve accepted as long as I can remember without thinking about it, but when you say it out and think about it, it just doesn’t seem very likely.”
“Exactly!” said Druin. “It’s true up to a point, mind, but fundamentally it doesn’t explain why the tinkers and the rest of us rub along fairly well for the most part. The story that they’re the Deliverer’s children, as it’s said, is just a symbol, a signpost or landmark, like the statue itself. We don’t get on with the tinkers because we respect the Deliverer—we respect the Deliverer and maintain her statues because we get along with the tinkers. And we do that because we need the tinkers, and they need us.”
I looked at the man, astonished. In all my years of study I had never read or heard a hint of anything like that. I had certainly never had such a reflection on my own. That something so self-evidently true—once stated—yet so unobvious and against the grain of what Gantry would have called “vulgar cant” should come from this metalworker and not from a scholar was something of a shock to my estimation of scholarship, not to mention of myself.
There was no way I could say all this without sounding condescending, so I only said, “Druin, that’s brilliant. Never thought of that.”
He gave me a thin-lipped, narrow-eyed smile, as if he knew my unspoken thoughts. “Aye,” he said, “brilliant or no, I’m pretty sure the thought has occurred to our man Fergal. So his secrecy has other aims than that. If you, Clovis, were to publish your great work on the Deliverer when you’re an older and wiser man, which proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that she was the most wicked woman who ever walked the Earth, do you think for a minute that folk would start throwing stones at the tinkers?” He laughed. “No, they’d be throwing stones at you!”
“Where does that get us?” I asked, somewhat defensively.
“It gets us to this,” Druin said slowly, tapping the table with a blunt fingernail. “Like I said, Fergal’s desire for secrecy in this matter is not for the reason Menial and you thought. In fact, from the way you say he behaved when Menial found the wee man in the stone, I would say that finding yon thing, whatever it is, was his real aim all along. That was what he sent you both to seek in Glaschu. Now that you’ve found it for him, he doesn’t give a damn about any supposed space debris. And don’t forget, Menial, you raised the matter with the project and the only reason you were slapped down hard is that of course the designers have thought of that—whether the Deliverer’s doing or no, the stuff that was up in orbit in the past must have gone somewhere! In the old records, such as they are, you could see them like moving stars with the naked eye—is that not so, Clovis?”
I nodded.
“Well, they’re no there the now, and our best telescopes—which isn’t saying much, I admit, compared to the ones with which the ancients saw the Universe born, but still—can’t see a speck up there. And there’s no more shooting stars now than there was in antiquity—we know that for sure, because these records were on paper and were passed on. So there’s likely no cloud of debris around the Earth, although if the Deliverer did as you said, I guess there could be some heavy stuff up there in the high orbits yet. But even that’s unlikely. It’s said that in the troubled times the sky fell, and the best scientists’ guess is that that was our ancestors’ way of saying what they saw when the great space cities, long deserted or filled with dead, were eventually brought spinning down by the thin drag of the air up yon and fell to Earth of their own accord.”
By this time I was beyond being surprised by Druin; his words were just further nails in the coffin of my conceit.
“Did you find anything in the computer files about this?” I asked Menial.
She shook her head. “No, there’s nothing that goes up to the date of the Deliverance itself. It was when I was searching through them that I opened the file that released what Fergal called the ‘artificial intelligence’.” Her eyes widened at the memory. “At first I thought it was just one of they faces that appear in the stones.”
“What are those, by the way?” Druin asked.
Merrial waved her hand. “We don’t know. We’ve found references to things called Help programs, and that seems to be what they—are they’re aye spelling out ‘help’, anyway! Just some old stuff that got passed down, I think. But this thing wasn’t one of them at all. It looked straight at me, and spoke.”
“What did it say?”
“ ‘Hello’,” she said, in an unnaturally deep voice.
We all laughed.
She gave an exaggerated shudder. “My next thought—when I’d got over the shock a—bit was that it was a security demon, like the one you and me ran across in Glasgow. But it wasn’t that, either. It wasn’t warning me off—it was inviting me in. That’s when I ran with it to Fergal.”
“Who seems to have accepted its invitation,” I said. “He lost interest in all else as soon as he saw it.”
“Hmm,” said Druin. He stood up and stepped over to the doorway, perhaps to get away from our smoke. The sky, an hour after midnight, was still light—or growing lighter again—behind him. “Which rather suggests to me that that was his objective all along. As why shouldn’t it be?” He turned back to us, his eyes shining. “Who wouldn’t want to talk to an artificial intelligence? The ancients had them, and even the tinkers have lost them—am I right, Menial?”
“Oh, sure,” she said. “I’ve never seen or heard of us having anything like that myself, and I… I think I would have.”
Tou know,” Druin said, “this is a relief, really. All right, the two of you were used by Fergal, maybe put through a bit of anguish and inconvenience, but no great harm has come of it. And no, Clovis, I don’t count your little difficulties as great harm—you’ll have worse trouble than that before you’re my age!”
“All right,” I said, holding back some irritation, “I can see how it might not seem important to you. But Fergal has got hold of this thing, and what’s worrying me is what he intends to do with it.”
“What he intends to do with it,” said Druin, “depends on what it is. Any ideas there, Menial?”
“No,” she said. “It was in Myra Godwin’s files, and we know that some people had these things back then—it could have been some kind of adviser or counsellor. Maybe Fergal knows what it is, but I don’t.”
“I hate to think what Fergal might do with an adviser that has access to knowledge from the past,” I said. Druin shook his head.
“So what if Fergal has found a new toy, or a new friend for all I kno
w? It’s none of our damn business, and certainly none of mine—it has nothing to do with the security of the ship, now has it?”
“You’ve got over your annoyance at being held and disarmed pretty damn quick,” I said sourly.
“Ach!” Druin said. “Hot words. Forget it. Who would sue a tinker, anyway?”
At that Menial and I both had to laugh. The futility of “taking a tinker to court” was proverbial.
“That doesn’t solve the problem though,” Menial said.
“What problem?”
“The problem isn’t the thing itself. Fergal is the problem.” She frowned, evidently troubled. “He’s no exactly evil—his intentions are good, in a way, and he can be a very… charming man in his way, on a personal level; but he’s very… single-minded, you know? He has a tendency to focus on one thing at a time, and to over-ride anything and everybody else.”
Druin snorted. “Hah! I don’t know Fergal, but I know the type. More by repute than experience, thank Providence.” He chuckled. “Mind you, if ever I run across a manager like that, he tends to have a short career thereafter. As a manager, anyway.” He stomped over and sat down again. “But still—that’s a problem for your lot, no for mine. I still say we’d best let the matter drop. The project’s getting awful close to completion, we’re actually ahead of schedule, and there’s big bonuses riding on getting the platform out the yard before the end of August—which could make the difference between getting it out before the winter and having to wait till the spring. That’s no small thing, and trouble wi the tinkers is the one thing that could blow it at this stage.”
“What worries me about Fergal,” I said, “is not so much his personality as his beliefs. I know you’re not that kind of person, Menial, but communism is notoriously susceptible to characters who are… who can twist it into a reason for doing what they’d like to do anyway, which is living outside the covenant.”
“What do you mean by ‘the covenant’?” asked Druin.
“Och, what you said—when Fergal seemed to be threatening to kill you. Blood for blood, death for death—that’s the covenant, the rock. Or what you said about us and the tinkers, having to live together—same thing, on the side of the living.”
Tergal sometimes says things like that,” Menial interjected hastily. That so-and-so ought to be shot, or whatever. He doesn’t mean it, it’s just hot words, as Druin put it.”
Druin made a conciliatory gesture. “What you’re both saying may well be true enough,” he said mildly. “The covenant is strong in our days, for reasons which—och, we all know the reasons! So a man like Fergal can rant and rave, but he can’t do much harm. How many of the tinkers would you say follow his ideas, as opposed to, say, respecting him as a man and an engineer?”
“Not many,” said Menial cautiously.
Druin leaned back and took a sip of whisky, then topped up our coffees.
“Well, there you are,” he said in a relaxed and expansive tone. “Like I said, no business of mine.” He leaned forward, becoming more concentrated in his expression, fixing us both with his gaze. “As to what my business is, Fergal and his two sidekicks were right in one respect—I do have a place on the site security committee. I’m no spy—I was put there by the union, dammit! And I did push for having your clearance revoked, Clovis. What else could I do, with the information I had? But I can equally well push to have it restored, and I will. You’ll be back at your job in a day or two, if you want it, whatever your University decides about you.”
“That’s—” I shook my head “—that’s great, that’s what I want. Thanks.”
“But before you return you files to the University, have another look through them, and try to see if there is anything in them about what happened at the Deliverance. Or anything about this artificial intelligence. Tell me what you find, even if it’s nothing, just to put my mind at rest. Put that couple of days to good use, you and Menial.” He grinned slyly. “I don’t need to tell you to do the same with the nights. Speaking of which, I’m off to my bed. And meanwhile, not a word about all this. Keep the peace with the tinkers, and we’ll get this show on the road.”
“The sky road,” I said, quoting Fergal.
“Aye. Everybody happy?”
We walked to Menial’s house, and on the way we talked.
“I thought,” she said, “that you were too committed to your history, your research and your old papers, to be willing to stay with me. That was what I was upset about, not your questions.”
“Ah,” I said. “And I thought you were too committed to the secrets of your society to trust me.”
“Aach,” we both said at once.
I told her what Druin had said, about the tinkers’ methods of recruitment.
She laughed, clinging to my arm and swinging away out on it, looking up at me and looking away, giggling.
“It’s true!” she said. “It wasn’t what I’d planned.”
“So you—”
Tell for you and hoped you’d join us, yes.”
“Ah-ha-ha! Become a tinker!”
“Well, why not?”
She swung around and caught me by both elbows and looked me straight in the eyes.
“Why not?” she repeated.
I thought of what I’d seen and felt—and smelt—in the library when I went there with Menial, and I thought of what I’d seen in the old power-station. This was history, this was the real thing, not dead but living, a continuity with the past and an earnest of the future, the sky road indeed. But who’s to say it was those considerations that weighed with me, and not the sight of Menial under the stars, on her way to a bed I could share for all the nights of my life?
Not me, for sure.
“Why not,” I said. “Yes.”
12
Dark Island
Coming in from the West on the M8, the taxi hired by the Kazakhstani consulate to take Myra from Glasgow Airport was hit by small-arms fire just as it came of! the flyover at Kinning Park.
Myra saw white starry marks pock the smoky armoured glass, did-did-did, heard the wheels’ whee of acceleration; her hand went reflexively to the shoulder holster under her coat and got caught in the strap of the seatbelt For a moment, as she looked down at her recently, newly smooth and now suddenly white hand, she thought death had found her at last—that she was going to die old and leave a good-looking corpse.
Then they were out of it, smoothly away, swinging around up and on to the Kingston Bridge over the Clyde. Myra twisted about and looked back and to the left, where the standard-practice burning-tyres smokescreen rose somewhere among the office-blocks and high-rises into the pale-blue late-May morning sky. A helicopter roared low and fast above the motorway, making the big car rock again, and flew straight at one of the tall buildings. A diagonal streak of punched square holes was abruptly stitched across the reflective glass of the building’s face. The helicopter paused, hovering; the car swooped from the brow of the bridge, and the scene passed out of sight.
“Jesus,” she said, shaken. “What was all that about?”
The speaker in the partition behind the driver’s seat came on.
“Greens,” the man said. “They sometimes shoot at traffic from the airport.” She saw his reflected eyes frown, his head shake. He wasn’t wearing a peaked cap. He was wearing a helmet. The car slowed as the traffic thickened. “Sorry about that.”
“Can’t be helped, I guess,” Myra said. “But—” she put on her best ignorant-American tone “—I thought you folks had that all under control. In the cities, anyway.”
Not what she’d call a city—there were taller buildings in Kapitsa, for fuck’s sake! Even with its hills Glasgow looked flat. She could see the University’s bone-white tower above the stumpy office-blocks. The place had changed considerably since the 1970s, but not as much as she’d expected, considering all it had been through: the 2015-2025 Republic, the Third World War and the Peace Process; then the Restoration and the guerilla war against the Hanoverian reg
ime, and the Fall Revolution and the New Republic, itself now in its fourteenth year of (what it too, inevitably called) the struggle against terrorism. The blue, white and green tricolour of the United Republic and the saltire of the Scottish State flew from all official or important buildings.
“No, I’m afraid it’s not all under control at all,” the driver was saying. “They’re right here in the towns now, and there’s bugger all we can do about them. Apart fae bombing the suburbs, and it’s no that bad yet.”
“Just bad enough to be strafing tower-blocks?”
“Aye.”
Myra shivered and setded back in the seat. Her not very productive mission to NYC had taken up less time than originally scheduled, leaving her a couple of days before her pencilled-in meeting with someone from the United Republic’s Foreign Office. She was beginning to wish that nostalgia—and an itch to personally sort out the disposal of her archive—hadn’t made her decide to spend that Saturday and Sunday in Glasgow.
The United Republic, though not her first choice of possible allies, was still the next best thing to the United States. It was politically opposed to the Sheenisov advance, but hadn’t done much to stop it because it had a healthy distaste for entanglements in the Former Union. On the other hand, thanks to shared oil interests in the Sprady Islands it was a strong military and trading partner of Vietnam, which was standing up pretty well against the Khmer Vertes, which… after that it got complicated, but Parvus had the story down to the details. The upshot was that with an actual state on offer as a stable ally, the UR might well be interested in a deal, nukes or no nukes.