The Sky Road tfr-4

by Ken MacLeod

  She rode along beside the red-haired man, troubled but unconvinced by his strange tirades. Wet branches of beech and birch brushed past them, making her duck and blink. The stony path led up the side of the hill above the settlement. Myra looked back down at it before it passed from view.

  “How do you people live?” she asked. “You can’t live just on raiding, and some day soon, according to you, there’ll be nothing left to raid. Like, who pays for these anti-missile missiles?”

  “We all do,” Jordan said. “We don’t have taxes, that’d be a laugh. We—not just this village, all of the free people—have a couple of simple economic principles that have been applied in communities like this for nearly a hundred years now. One is that we don’t have rent, but land ain’t free—God ain’t making any more of it, but we keep right on making more people. So we apply the equivalent of rent to community purposes, like defence. The other is that any individual, or any group, can issue their own currency, backed up at their own risk. No landlords, no usurers, and no officials.”

  “Oh, great,” said Myra. “A peasant’s idea of Utopia.

  Single tax and funny money! Now I’ve heard everything!”

  “It does work,” Jordan said. “We, as you can see, flourish. We’re the future.”

  Jordan,” she said, “you know I found some clips of you on my encyclopaedia? Well, from them I’d never have figured you for going over to the Green Slime. Or for a preacher, come to that.”

  Jordan laughed, unoffended. “The world will fall to the barbarians or to the machines. I chose the barbarians, and I chose to spread some enlightenment among them. Hence the preaching, which was—to begin with—of a kind of rationalism. I can honestly say I have led many of my people away from the dark, heathen worship of Gaia, and from witchcraft and superstition. But I also found, like many another missionary, that I preferred their way of life to the one from which I’d come. And along with loving nature, I came to love nature’s God.”

  “You were an atheist.”

  “So I believed. I later realised that I was an agnostic. A militant agnostic, if you like. All theology is idolatry, all scripture is apocrypha. All we can say is that God is One. God encompasses the world, there is nothing outside him, and nothing opposed to him. How could there be? So God approves of all that happens, because all that happens is his will. God loves the world, all of it, from the Hubble to the Planck, from the Bang to the Crunch. God is in the hawk hovering up there and in the mouse that cowers from its claws in yonder field. God is in the sickle and the sheaf, the hammer and the hot iron, the sword and the wound. God is in the fire and in the sun and in the holocaust. God was in the spy I had killed today, and in the man who killed him.”

  Antinomianism was, Myra knew, a common enough heresy in periods of revolution or social breakdown. Four hundred years ago, these same words could have been ranted forth on those very hills. There was nothing new in what Jordan said, but Myra felt sure it would not disturb him in the slightest to point this out. He had probably read Winstanley and Christopher Hill for himself.

  “You seem to know a lot about this unknowable God of yours.”

  That I do.”

  “Is God in the machines, in the AIs that you fear?”

  “That too, yes.”

  “What’s the difference between a God who makes no difference and takes no side and no God at all?”

  They had reached the crest of the hill. Jordan reined in his horse. Myra stopped too, and looked down the hill at the grey ribbon of the motorway and the white blocks of a service-station.

  So close, all the time.

  “You can walk from here,” Jordan said dryly. He took her horse’s reins as Myra dismounted. He soberly returned her holstered weapon, her passport and her phone.

  “Oh, and to answer your question. There is no difference, in a sense. But to believe that God is in everything, and is on your side whatever you do and whatever happens, gives one a tremendous access of energy.” He grinned down at her. “Or so I’ve found.”

  And with that, the agnostic fanatic was gone, swift on his horse.

  Myra slogged down the hill to the service area, cleaned up, made some phone calls while she ate in the cafeteria, and hired a car to take her to London.

  She arrived, through all the obstacles thrown up by the small battles on the way, on the evening of the following day. She had long since missed her appointment with the Foreign Office; she had told them that in advance, and they’d asked her to call back when she arrived, to make another.

  But, after all she had seen along the way, and all she had not seen—such as any evidence that people like Jordan’s band, and worse, operated with anything other than insolence and impunity, give or take the odd gunship attack—there didn’t seem to be a whole hell of a lot of a point.

  13

  The Sea Eagle

  iVaiiin drummed on the roof of Menial’s house. The view outside was dreich. I’d looked out the window earlier, down the glen and the loch; ranks of cloud were marching in off the sea, and one after another shedding their loads on the hills. Inside, it was warm: we sat huddled together, backs to the piled-up pillows, sipping hot black coffee.

  “No work today, thank Providence,” I said.

  “Not at the yard anyway,” said Menial. She waved a hand at the soldering-iron and seer-stones and clutter in the corner of the room.

  “You start learning a different work, here.”

  “Aye, great,” I said.

  “What is this Providence you talk about, anyway?” she asked.

  “Urn.” I stared at the slow swirl of the coffee. “It’s… the helpful side of Nature, you might say. When things work out as we would wish, without an apparent cause.” I looked at her. “You must know that.”

  “But that’s just coincidence,” she said. “All things come by Nature.”

  “Some things are more than coincidence, and Nature is more than—” I was going to say “more than Nature” but stopped and laughed. “You really don’t know any Natural Theology?”

  “No,” she said cheerfully. “I’ve always just taken for granted that the outsiders have strange beliefs. Never gone into the details.” She put her empty mug down at her side of the bed and snuggled up to me. “Go on. Tell me the details.”

  “Oh, God. All right. Well, the usual place to start is right here.” I tapped her forehead, gently. “Inside there. From the outside we see grey matter, but from the inside we think and feel. We know there are billions of cells in there, processing information. So thinking and feeling—consciousness—is something that information does. It’s what information is, from the inside, its subjective side. Where there’s information, there’s consciousness.”

  “But there’s information everywhere,” she said. “Wherever anything affects anything else, it’s information. The rain falling on the ground is information.”

  “Exactly!” I slid my arm around her shoulders. “You’ve got it.”

  “Got what? Oh.” She shifted a little and looked straight at me. “You mean there’s consciousness everywhere?”

  Yes! That’s it!”

  “But, but—” She looked around. “You mean to tell me you think that clock, say, has thoughts?”

  The ticking was loud in the room as I considered this.

  “It has at least one,” I said cautiously.

  “And what would that be?”

  “ ‘It’s later… it’s later… it’s later.’ ” She laughed. “But the whole universe—”

  “Is an infinite machine, which implies an infinite mind.” I put my hand behind her head, cradling the container of her finite mind.

  “ ‘And this all men call God’,” I concluded smugly.

  Menial punched me.

  “And the computers, I suppose you would say they are conscious too?”

  “Aye, of course,” I said.

  “What a horrible thought.”

  “They may not be conscious of what we see from the outside,” I sai
d. “They may be thinking different thoughts entirely.”

  Menial gazed abstractedly out of the window.

  “What thought is the rain thinking?”

  “Can’t you hear it?” I said. “It’s thinking ‘yesssss’.”

  “Hmm,” she said. “Now there’s a. coincidence…”

  We used the couple of days before my reinstatement in my job at the yard for the beginnings of an education in fine soldering and in programming, the latter subject being simultaneously fascinating and maddening. We also made a painstaking study of the Deliverer’s documents, which continued—after we’d returned the originals to Gantry, and I’d returned to work at the yard—with the photocopies, but they yielded no information relevant to the ship’s mission. The folder from the 2050s reinforced, in its casual references and assumptions more than its explicit statements, the staggering extent of the orbital activity of pre-Deliverance humanity. But it contained no hint of the Deliverance itself.

  There was one moment when I thought I had won a real historical insight, albeit one tangentially relevant to our immediate concerns.

  I looked up from the stack of papers on Menial’s broad table. Every evening after work, I’d slowly sifted through them, as now, in the late sun.

  “Menial?” I said. She turned from the seer-stone apparatus on which she was working, and laid down her soldering-iron.

  You found something?”

  “No, just—realised something. These Greens she talks about in some of her articles, the marginal people who lived outside the cities. She makes the point here that they had a lot more practical skills than folk gave them credit for, that they weren’t just ignorant barbarians but farmers and smiths and electricians and so on.”

  “Yes,” she said, with a mysterious smile. “That was true.”

  “Well! These people, the Greens, they must have been the ancestors of the tinkers!”

  “Here,” she said, passing me a cigarette. “You’re going to need this.”

  “Why?” I asked, lighting up.

  “Because—oh, Dhia, how can I break this to you gently? You’ve got it the wrong way round entirely! Why do you think we call the settled folk ‘the outsiders’?”

  “What?”

  “Aye, the Greens, the barbarians, these are not our ancestors, Clovis. They’re—I was going to say yours, but I can’t say that any more, mo graidh, now you’re one of us. They’re the ancestors of the outsiders! We are the survivors, the descendants, of the city folk!”

  “So how is it that we—I mean the outsiders—live in the cities now?”

  She stood up then, walking around the small room like a lecturer, gesturing with her cigarette.

  “Oh, but your face is a picture, colha Gree! They live in the cities now because they invaded them, they moved in at the Deliverance when the old civilisation and city life had broken down. And they’re still there, bless them, blundering around like the barbarians they are, in the borrowed costumes of the past. All these scholars that you wanted to emulate, they’re just rummaging about in the ruins, reading books they misunderstand so badly it isn’t funny. You’re well out of that, my love, you’ll learn more from us in a year than in a lifetime at the University!” Indeed.

  A huge cheer went up, almost drowning the inrush-ing roar of water, as the sluice-gates opened. The water poured over the edge of the drydock in a saline Niagara that went on and on, until it seemed that the loch itself would be lowered before the deep hole was filled. Faster than a tide, the water crept up the legs and pontoons of the platform.

  Menial’s hand gripped mine as we made our way through the crowd, pushing to the front like children. The entire accessible part of the cliff-edge around the dock was lined with people. Everybody who’d worked at the yard, on the platform or the ship, was certainly there, along with casual visitors from the surrounding towns, keen sightseers from all over the Highlands, and outright enthusiasts from even farther afield. A couple of hundred metres around the cliff and inward, officers of the International Scientific Society, project managers and exemplary workers made speeches from a wooden stage with a raised dais and an awning. Nobody farther away than fifty metres, at the outside, could make out a word these dignitaries said, particularly not from the PA speakers strung out like fairy-lights on catenaries of cable all over the place. Squawks and howls and crackles worthy of a railway station echoed around the cliff-faces.

  I ducked in between a couple of workers at the front who’d incautiously allowed a quarter of a metre to open up between them. Menial followed with, no doubt, a smile at both of them which made them feel they were being done a favour.

  And then we were there, a metre or two from the crumbling, tussocked edge. The platform and the spaceship loomed startlingly close. At that moment another cheer went up, as though to acclaim our arrival, and I realised that the capsule at the tip of the probe was, minutely but perceptibly, swaying. The platform was afloat.

  “Hoo-rrayy!” I shouted, joining enthusiastically in the applause. Menial yelled something almost too high to hear beside me; I could hardly hear myself. Though a less spectacular moment than the flooding of the dock, it was freighted with greater significance: the beginning of the Sea Eagle/Iolair’s journey, which would end in space.

  It was a strange launch vehicle, simultaneously more primitive and more advanced than anything sent into space in the first age of space exploration. The ancients could, no doubt, have built a fusion torchship, but they didn’t. They went straight from massive liquid-fuelled rockets to the nanotech diamond ships of the last days. In our time, with chemical fuels relatively expensive and nanotech (other than the tinker computers) quite beyond our reach, and the secret of controlled fusion still extant, the fusion torch is a logical choice.

  But, as Fergal had implied, building it out of boiler plate was a trifle inelegant. On the other hand, the skills were there, locally available from shipbuilding; and the weight—given the immense power of the engine—was not a significant constraint. And say what you like about red-leaded steel plate, it is reliably resistant to sea-water. There was, of course, no question of launching such a monster from anywhere on land, which is less forgiving—of intense heat, high-energy particles and unstable isotopes—than the sea.

  Its mission, too, was primitive, or at least simple: to launch into orbit an experimental communications and Earth-observation satellite. That payload had required the co-operation of scientists and engineers (tinkers or otherwise), lens-makers and photographers, from all over the civilised world. Its electronic and electrical systems strayed suspiciously close to the path of power—even deploying, if you wanted to be awkward, a system very like television. But after much soul-searching and acrimony, the majority of the most respected practitioners of Natural Theology had, with some reluctance, nodded their long-haired heads. Television, they gravely pointed out, had been destructive only as a mass medium. To object to it as a method of communication from a satellite to a ground station would, they averred, be crass superstition, unworthy of this enlightened age.

  Needless to say, a minority of their equally respected, though (it has to be said) usually older, colleagues insisted that this was the first step on a slippery slope at the bottom of which lay a population reduced to a passively rotting mass of mental and physical wrecks. With equal inevitability, given the nature of Natural Theology, a much smaller (and, yes, younger) faction were pointing out that the sort of abject helotry described and decried by their conservative colleagues were in fact the peoples better known as the ancients, who had watched television assiduously and had an achievement or two to their credit before they fell. To which, of course… but the argument’s further iterations would be tedious to elaborate.

  Merrial walked forward more boldly than I would have and sat down cheerily on the very lip of the cliff, her legs dangling over and her skirt elegantly spread on the heather to either side of her. I sat beside her and tried not to look down at a drop to the sea, direct and vertical except wher
e it was interestingly varied by jutting rocks. We had found ourselves a viewpoint slightly in front of the platform, between its foremost extension and the open gates of the dock.

  The shouting and cheering had stopped now, replaced by the susurrus of conversation, the continuing surge of the rising sea and the deep whine of the platform’s turbines as they laboured to move the gigantic structure. Very slowly, the mast-like rocking of the ship’s shaft was intersected by a net forward motion. Slow though it was, this set up a noticeable bow-wave at the front, clashing and splashing against the incoming waves. Complex interference patterns formed as the waves rebounded off the sides of the dock and the platform itself, and the sun, already past the zenith and dipping towards the west, made spectra in the spray.

  Even at five kilometres per hour, the platform didn’t take long to pass us, to the sound of further cheering, and waving to and from the operational crew down on the decks. Another significant moment, duly registered by another round of applause, came when the platform passed through the gates and into the open sea—or at any rate Loch Kishorn.

  After this there was really nothing to see except the slow departure of the rig, and people began to drift away. The platform had a long voyage ahead of it, out of the loch and into the Inner Sound, from whence it would pass the headlands of Rona and Skye before heading out into the Atlantic. Barring any serious mishap—and the weather forecasts were optimistic—it would proceed for seven more days before it was far enough out in the ocean to hold a position for the launch of the ship itself. The onboard crew would transfer to an escort vessel and stand off on the horizon, triggering the launch by radio control when the scientists and engineers had determined that the conditions were right. Given the robustness of the Sea Eagle and the power of its drive, little short of a severe storm could stand in its way. Only the platform was, in theory, vulnerable to the wind and the waves—so the chanciest part of the whole venture, the part which could literally sink it, was the one that had just begun.