The Sky Road

5 The Church of Man

Merrial was, as promised, waiting. She sat on the plinth, as I had done, under the Deliverer’s equestrian statue. She wore a loose summer dress with a colourful tiered skirt. Something stirred in my memory, then vanished like a dream in the morning. She was in animated conversation with a man sitting beside her. They both looked up as I arrived.

“Hello,” I said warily.

He was a tall, thin man, about thirty, I reckoned; quite brown, with sharp features and dark eyes which had a sort of quirky, questioning look in them; black hair curly on top, short at the back and sides; dressed in leather trousers and jacket and a white cotton T-shirt with a red bandana. A fine chain hung around his throat beneath the bandana, its pendant—if any—below the T-shirt’s round collar.

“Hello,” Menial said warmly. “Clovis, this is Fergal.”

The man stuck his right hand out and I shook it, noticing as I did so that one of his thumbs pressed the back of my hand and that he held on, as though waiting for some response, for about a second longer than I subconsciously expected, before letting go.

“Pleased to meet you, Clovis,” he said. His voice was low and deep, his accent was hard to place: correct, but by that very correctness of intonation in each syllable, somehow foreign; it reminded me of a Zanu prince I’d once heard speak at the University.

“Let’s get some drinks,” he said, rising to his feet. We strolled to the nearest vacant table outside The Carronade. Fergal took our requests and disappeared inside.

“Who is that guy?” I asked.

Merrial favoured me with a slow smile. “You sound jealous,” she teased.

“Ah, come on. Just curious.”

“I’ve known him a long time,” she said. “Nothing personal. Just… one of us.”

“Well, I had kind of figured he was a tinker.”

Menial’s eyes narrowed slightly. “Yes, that’s it,” she said.

Fergal returned in a few moments, taking his seat beside me and opposite Merrial. I offered him a cigarette, which he accepted with an oddly ironic smile.

“Well,” he said, lighting it, “you know about the… concern, for the ship?”

I nodded. Tes, but Merrial said nothing about its being shared.”

He grinned. “Oh, it’s quite widely shared, I can tell you that. It’s a brave offer you’ve made, and—” he spread his hands “—all I can say is, thanks.”

I was more puzzled than modest about this reference to the bravery of my offer, so I just shrugged at that.

“Are you on the project too?”

He seemed amused. Tm not on site, but I am on the payroll, if that’s what you mean,” he said. “All of—” he glanced at Menial “—our profession are very much involved in the project as a whole.” He took a long swallow of beer, and a draw on his cigarette, becoming visibly more relaxed and expansive as he did so. “Its success matters a lot to us. We’re very keen to see the sky road taken again.”

“I like that,” I said. “ ‘The sky road’.”

“Yes,” he said. “Well, it took you people long enough to get back on it.”

“Back?”

“You walked it once.” Another glance at Menial, then a smile at me. “Or we did.”

“Our ancestors did,” I said.

“That’s what I meant to say,” he said idly. “But to business. I’ll have to get a piece of equipment that you—or rather, Menial—is going to need. That’s going to take some time, but I’ll manage it this weekend. You’ll have to book some time off and seats on the Monday train.” He smiled wryly. “Not much point trying to travel on the Saturday or the Sunday, anyway. No trains and damn slow traffic, even if you wanted to drive.”

I nodded. “And the University would have all its hatches battened anyway.”

Yeah, that’s a point. Still, can’t complain—the free weekend is one of the gains of the working class, eh?”

“You could call it that,” I said. “Mind you, whether what goes on at the University should count as work—”

We went on talking for a bit. Fergal was cagey about himself, and I didn’t press him, and after another couple of beers he got up and left. We had the evening, and the weekend, to ourselves.

Menial slept, leaning against my shoulder, all the way from Carron Town to Inverness. It seemed a shame for her to miss the journey, but I reckoned she must have seen its famously spectacular and varied scenery before, many more times than I had. Besides, I liked watching her sleep, an experience which, in the nature of our past three nights, I had hitherto not had much time to savour.

We had caught the early train, at 5.15 on the Monday morning. Each of us had separately arranged to have the first two days of the week off, by seeking out our different supervisors in the Carron bars on the Friday evening. It was to be hoped that Angus Grizzlyback would remember that I was not coming in this morning; but if he didn’t, I was sure my loyal friends would remind him, with predictable and—as it happened—inaccurate speculation as to how I intended to spend the day.

We had, in fact, spent the Saturday and the Sunday in just that way, very enjoyably, in bed or out on the hills. On the Saturday afternoon Merrial had guddled a trout from a dark, deep pool in the Alt na Chuirn glen; leapt up with the thrashing fish clutched in her hands and danced around, surefooted on the slippery stones. Again, something had moved in my mind, like a glimpsed flick of a tail in the water, which had—as soon as the shadow of my thought fell on it—flashed away.

The sun rose higher, the shadows shortening, apparently in the face of the train’s advance. We stopped at all the small, busy towns built around forestry and light industry and—increasingly as we moved east—farming: Achnasheen, Achnashellach, Achanalt, Garve… The electric engine’s almost silent glide surprised the short-memoried sheep, rabbits and deer beside the track, and set up a continuous standing wave of animals, sauntering or lolloping or springing away. I saw a wolf’s grey-shadowed shape at Achanalt; as we rounded the cliff-face at Garve I saw a wild goat on a shelf; and spotted an eagle patrolling the updrafts above the slope of Moruisg.

I didn’t wake Merrial for any of them.

I smoked, once, with a coffee brought around on a rattling trolley by a lass in tartan trews. Neither the sound nor the smell nor the smoke stirred Merrial at all, except to a few deeper breaths, long ripples in the spate of her hair across her breast and over my chest. I let her head nestle in the now awkward crook of my left arm, and alternated the cup and the cigarette in my right hand. It was a quiet train, for all that it was busy, with clerks and traders on their weekly commute from their coastal homes to their work in Inverfefforan or Inverness.

On Merrial’s lap, with her left arm—crooked like mine—protectively over it, lay a bulky poke of polished leather, fastened with a drawstring thong. It may have bulged a little larger, and weighed a little heavier, than the kind of bags that lasses tend to lug around, but it would have taken a close and sharp observer to notice. Inside it, concealed by a layer of the sort of oddments one would expect to find in such a poke—a cambric kerchief, cosmetics, smallbore ammunition and the like—was the complicated apparatus that Fergal had delivered to her house early on the Sunday evening. It was built around a seer-stone about fifteen centimetres in diameter, nested in neat coils of insulated copper wire. The strangest aspect, to me, of this device was an arrangement of delicate levers, each marked with a letter of the alphabet, queerly ordered: QWERTYUIOP… Probably, I thought, a spell.

“Grotty old place,” said Merrial, rubbing her face with her hands and looking around the damp, flag-stoned concourse of Inverness station. Her cheeks reddened, her eyes widened under the smooth friction of her palms. Her dress, this time of blue velvet, looked a bit rumpled. We were standing at the coffee-bar, having twenty minutes to wait for the 8.30 to Glasgow.

I looked up at the creosoted roof with its wide skylight panels and suspended electric lamps. “At least it doesn’t have pigeons.”

“Can’t say herring-gulls are much of an improvement.” She kicked out with one booted foot, sending a hungry, red-eyed bird squawking away. One end of the station opened to the platforms, the other to the main street. The arrangement seemed peculiarly adapted to set up cold but unrefreshing draughts. Despite its mossy walls and paving, the station was more recent than the buildings outside, most of which pre-dated the Deliverance, if not all three of the world wars.

I finished my bacon roll, smiled at Merrial—who was mumbling, half to herself and around mouthfuls of her own breakfast, some irritated speculation about the degenerative evolution of scavenging sea-birds—and wandered over to the news-stand. There I stocked up on cigarettes and bought a copy of the Press and Journal, a newspaper which outdoes even the West Highland Free Press in its incorrigible parochialism and venerable antiquity. Most of its pages consisted of small advertisements, to do with fishing, farming, uranium and petroleum mining and, of course, Births, Marriages and Deaths. The last of these could take up half a tall column of small print: “Dolleen Starholm, peacefully in her sleep, aged 251 years, beloved great-great-grandmother of…” followed by scores of names; and sometimes (as in this case) the discreet indication of cult affiliation: “RIP” or “IHS”. More frequent, and more prominent, were proud affirmation of the orthodox hope: “Returned by the Flame” (or the Sky or the Sun or the Sea) “to the One”.

I went back to the counter and, while Merrial finished off her breakfast, scanned the sparse snippets of national and international news that had managed to wedge their way in among the earth shak-ingly important football and shinty reports, fishing disputes and Council debates.

The Congress of Paris had ceremonially opened its ninety-seventh year of deliberations, and had immediately plunged into bitter controversy about a proposal to empower the Continental Court to adjudicate border problems between cantons and communes; the apparently more difficult matter of disagreements between countries having been resolved by the Congress long ago, its success had apparently gone to its collective head.

I sighed and turned the page. Another American republic had voted a contribution from tariff revenue to the spaceship project, which was gratifying but mysterious—there was even an editorial comment about it, full of sage mutterings about how their ways were not ours, and that we should not disdain such assistance, immoral though it might seem to us. I wasn’t too sure; to me, it smelt of stealing money, but the Americans have a much greater reverence for their governments than people have in more civilised lands. If offered some loot by an African king or Asian magnate or South American cacique, I should hope the International Scientific Society would politely decline, and this case seemed little different. But all of this was, at this moment, quite theoretical, as no such offer, and indeed no news at all, from Asia or Africa appeared in today’s edition. I rolled it up and decided to leave the national news until later.

Menial brushed crumbs from her lips and looked at me with amusement. “You really look as though you’re paying attention to all that,” she said, picking up her leather poke. I hitched my canvas satchel on my shoulder and we strolled to the Glasgow train.

“Well, I do follow the news,” I said, somewhat defensively, as we took our seats, this time facing each other across a table. “What’s wrong with that?”

Menial shrugged. “It’s so… ephemeral,” she said. “And unreliable.”

“Compared with what?”

“Don’t misunderstand me,” she said. “I’m sure this, what is it—” she reached for the paper, and spread it out “—Congress here is real, and really did do what the article says it did. But it is only a tiny part of the truth, and perhaps not the most important part of what is going on there in Paris. Let alone what is going on elsewhere in Paris. So that, and all the other such pieces give you, really, a false picture of the world.”

I could have been offended, but was not. “I’m a scholar of history, remember?” I said. “I understand how newspaper reports, even documents aren’t everything—”

“Oh, you don’t want to hear what I think about historical documents.”

“So what else can you do?”

She frowned at me, puzzled. “You travel around and find things out for yourself.”

“Aye, if only we all had the time.”

She touched the tip of my nose with the tip of her finger. “It’s what tinkers do, and they have all the time in their lives for it.”

The train pulled out, the Moray Firth in sight at first, with its kelp fields and fish-farms, and then nothing to see for a while but the close-packed pines of Drumossie Wood as the train turned and the engines took the strain of the long, slow ascent to Slochd.

A couple of hours later, maybe, after Speyside of the malts and bleak Drumochter, we were in the long and beautiful glens between Blair Atholl and Dunkeld. On one side of the line were streams full of trout and turbines, on the other hillsides buzzing with the saws and drills of workshops. The train stopped for five minutes at Dunkeld. A small, old town of stone, still with its Christian cathedral.

Merrial looked out of the windows, around at the scene, and sat back with a slight shudder.

“A strange place,” she said, “with the hills around it like an ambush.”

“But that’s why it’s a great place,” I said, and told her the story of how the Cameronians had held off the Highland host and saved the Revolution to which they owed their freedom. She listened with more interest, even, than my telling of the tale deserved, and leaned back at the end and said, “Aye well, maybe there’s some use to history, after all. I’ll never be afraid of these hills again.”

It was two in the afternoon by the time the train reached Glasgow’s Queen Street Station, and glad enough we were to get off it. Sometimes two people who can fascinate each other endlessly when alone together, and who can spark off each other in convivial company, find themselves inhibited among strangers who are unignorably in earshot, and find themselves growing shy and silent and stale. So it was with us, towards the end of that journey. I couldn’t even find it in my heart to talk about the Battle of Stirling when we passed through the town.

We both brightened, though, on jumping down on the platform. The familiar Glasgow railway-station smell—of currying fish, and curing leaf, and spark-gapped air, and old iron and wood-alcohol and hot oil and burnt vanilla—hit my sinuses like a shot of poteen. Menial, too, seemed invigorated by it, taking a deep breath of the polluted stench with a look of satisfaction and nostalgia.

“Ah, it’s good to be back,” she said.

I glanced sidelong at her as we walked down the platform. “When were you in Glasgow? And how could I have missed you?”

She smiled and squeezed my hand. “Oh, I forget. Ages ago. But the smell brings it back.”

“That and the noise.”

“The what?”

“THE—”

But she was laughing at me.

We crossed the station concourse, agreeing that, on balance, pigeons were a worse nuisance than sea-birds (though, as Menial gravely pointed out, better eating). This comment, and some of the more appetising components of the smell, reminded us that we were ravenous, so we bought sandwiches and botties of beer from a stall in the station and carried them out to George Square.

We sat down on a bench by a grassy knoll under the statue of the Deliverer.

“Shee that,” Menial said, pointing upwards as she munched. “It’sh mean.”

“ What?”

She swallowed. “The statue. The old city fathers must have been a bit stingy.”

I looked up. “No argument about the city fathers,” I said. They’re still tight-fisted. But that statue looks fine to me.”

“The horse is black,” Menial pointed out. She tapped the handle of her knife on a fetlock. “And cast in bronze. The lady herself is green—just copper. They got out the oxy-acetylene torches and hacked off the original rider, a king or general or whatever, and stuck the Deliverer in his place!”

I stood up and paced around it, peering.

“You’re right,” I said. “You can see the joins. I must have looked at that statue a hundred times, and not noticed anything wrong with it.” I looked up at the lady’s head. “And she has a different face from the one in Canon Town, and they’re both different from any pictures I’ve seen of the Deliverer.”

“Well, there you go, colha Gree,” she said. “Some things a tinker can teach a scholar, eh?”

“Oh aye,” I said. I sat down again. “Mind you, it could hardly be just parsimony—it’s a fine piece of work after all, and they’ve done her hair in gold.”

Ton’s gold paint,” she said scornfully. “And as for artistry, the breed and the trappings of the horse are all wrong for the time and the circumstances.”

She was right there, too, when I looked. This was no steppe horse, bare-back broken, roughly saddled, such as was shown quite authentically in Canon Square. Instead, it was a hussar’s mount, in elaborate caparison. But I thought then, and still think, that the representation of the Deliverer herself was well done. A fine example of the Glasgow style; which, perhaps, makes the equine bodge appropriate, and part of the artist’s point.

We binned our litter and headed for the nearest tramway stop, in Buchanan Street. The transport system is one of Glasgow City Council’s proudest public works, a more than adequate replacement for the great Underground circle, which was—it’s said—one of the wonders of the ancient world. Judging by the remnants of it that here and there have outlasted centuries of flooding and subsidence, it is quite possible to agree that such it must have been.

The tram came along, bell clanging, and we jumped on and paid our groats and clattered like children up the spiral steps to the upper deck. The bell rang again and the tram lurched forward, creaking up Buchanan Street and swaying as it turned the corner into Sauchiehall.

Glasgow’s main drag looked clogged with traffic, but everything—steam-engine and motor-car and horse-cart and bicycle alike—made way for the tram’s implacable progress. The pedestrians, at this time of the day, were mosdy women shopping. But all of them, whether young lasses just out of school or mothers with young children or retired ladies at their leisure, had to pick up their skirts, their pokes or their weans and run for their lives when the tram bore down on a crossing. The shops and offices from recent centuries are built of logs and planks, and rarely go higher than two storeys. The older, pre-Deliverance buildings are of stone; some have as many as five floors. In ancient times there were much higher buildings, but most of them were made of concrete, which doesn’t last well, and—agonising though it may be for archaeology—almost all of their structures have long since been plundered for steel and glass. Their foundations give rectangular patterns to the growth of trees in the forests around Glasgow: Pollock Fields, Possil Wood, Partick Thorn.

Farther away, to the west, we could just make out the haze and smoke from the Glydeside shipyards, on which most of Glasgow’s prosperity depended. The shipyards were the seedbed of the skills which—along with Kishorn’s deep-water dock, almost unique on this side of the Atlantic—had made Scotland the logical site for the launch-platform’s construction.

At the top of Sauchiehall there’s a new stone bridge, to replace the original concrete one that has crumbled away. It carried us over the Eighth Motor Way and into Woodlands Road, which runs along beside the Kelvin Woods. (They, and the river that runs through them, are named after Lord Kelvin, who invented the thermometer.)

We stepped off the tram at the crest of University Avenue, and stood for a moment looking at the main building, a huge and ancient pile called Gil-morehill. It looks like a piece of religious architecture that has run wild, but it is solely devoted to secular knowledge, a church of Man.

“It’s not as old as it looks,” Menial said, as though determined not to be impressed. “That’s Victorian Gothic.”

I didn’t believe her, but I didn’t argue. I had felt in its chill stone and warm wood the shades of Scotus and Knox and Kelvin, of Watt and Millar and Ferguson, and no disputed date could shake my conviction that the place was almost as old as the nation whose mind it had done so much to shape.

“Whatever,” I said. “Anyway, the department we’re going to isn’t there.”

“Just as well,” Merrial said.

It was actually in one of the small side streets off University Avenue, all of whose buildings date back at least to the twentieth century. The trees that line it are probably as old, gigantic towers of branch and leaf, taller than the buildings. Their bulk darkened the street, the leaves of their first fall formed a slippery litter underfoot.

“So we just walk up and knock on the door?” Merrial asked.

“No,” I said. “I’ve got a key.”

She glanced down at her leather bag. “And you’re sure we won’t be challenged?”

“Aye, I’m sure,” I said. We’d been over this before. As a prospective student, with my project already accepted even if as yet unfunded, I had every right to be here—in fact, I should have been here more often, through the summer. So no one should question us, or our presence in the old archive. We’d planned how we’d do the job, but its proximity seemed to be making Merrial more nervous than I was.

“All right,” she said.

The key turned smoothly in the oiled lock, and the tongue clicked back. I pushed the heavy door aside and we stepped in. I locked it behind us. The place was silent, and as far as I could tell it was empty. The hallway was dim and cool, its pale yellow paint darkened by generations of nicotine, and it divided after a few metres into a narrower corridor leading deeper into the Institute and a stairway leading to the upper floors. The place had a curious musty odour of old paper and dusty electric lightbulbs, and a faint whiff of pipe-smoke. I checked the piles of unopened mail on the long wooden table at the side. A few notes for me, which a quick check revealed were refusals of various applications for patronage. I stuffed them in my jacket pocket and led the way up two flights of stairs to the library, switching on the fizzing electric lamps as we went.

Menial wrinkled her nose as I opened the library door and switched on the lights.

“Old paper.” I said.

She smiled. “Dead flies.”

I made to close the door after we entered the room, but Menial touched my arm and shook her head.

“I couldn’t stand it,” she said.

“You’re right, me neither.” The still, dead air made me feel short of breath.

I held her hand, as much for my reassurance as for hers, as we threaded our way through the maze of ceiling-high book-cases. Menial, to my surprise, once or twice tugged to make me pause, while she scanned the titles and names on cracked and faded spines with a look of recognition and pleasure.

“The Trial of the Anti-Soviet Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites!” she breathed. “Amazing! Do you know anything about that?”

“It was some kind of public exorcism,” I said, hurrying her along. I’d once glanced into that grim grimoire myself, and the memory made me slightly nauseous. “People claimed they had turned into rabid dogs who would go out and wreck machinery. Horrible. What superstitious minds the communists had.”

Menial chuckled, but shot me an oddly pleased look.

At the far end of the library the ranks of bookcases stopped. Several tables and chairs were lined up there, apparently for study—but no one, to my knowledge, ever studied at them. The most anyone could do was to put down a pile of books or documents there for a quick inspection of their contents under the reading-lights, before rushing out of the library. I recalled Menial’s comment that people today are more claustrophobic than their ancestors.

Beside these tables was another door, of iron, with a handle but no lock. The mere thought of the possibility of that door’s having a lock was enough to give me a cold sweat.

“Here we are,” I said, and added, to make light of it, “the dark archive.”

“What’s inside it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never been in it.”

She frowned. “Is it off limits, or what?”

“No, no.” I shook my head. “It’s not forbidden or anything. Hardly anybody wants to go in.”

“No point in hesitating,” said Merrial. “Let’s get it over with.”

I turned the handle and pulled the door back. To fit with my feelings, it should have given off an eldritch squeak, but its heavy hinges were well-lubricated. A couple of times I worked the handle from the inside. It appeared to be in good order, but I dragged one of the chairs over and used it to prop the door open, just in case it closed accidentally.

I switched on the overhead light and stepped with an assumed air of boldness across the threshold. The small back room appeared innocent enough. It had a desk, with a couple of chairs in front of it and on its top a cluster of boxy, bulky structures like models of ancient architecture. Aluminium shelves lined the walls on either side. The air held a different, subtler smell, almost like the smell of washed hair or polished horn, with a sharp note of acetones.

Menial sniffed. “Like a rotting honeycomb,” she remarked cheerfully. I fought down a heave.

“Would smoking get rid of the miasma?” I suggested.

“Yes, but it might damage the disks.”

While I was still looking around for anything that remotely resembled a disc, Menial began rummaging along the shelves. The boxes arrayed there were translucent, the colour of sheepskin, with dusty, close-fitting lids. They contained flat black plates about nine centimetres square and two millimetres thick. She picked out a few at random, held them up and shook them slightly. From every one, a sooty black dust drifted down. Oxidation crystals crusted the small metal plates at their edges. She shook her head. “Hopeless,” she said.

In other, smaller boxes there were smaller, shiny wafers. These, when she picked them out, simply crumbled to the touch.

“So much for them,” she said. “We’ll just have to see if there’s anything on the hard drive.” She pulled up a seat in front of the machines. The largest, before which she sat, had a sort of window-pane on the front of it. She opened her poke, rummaged out the clutter on top and carefully extracted her strange devices. She laid them on the table: the seer-stone glowing with random rainbow ripples, a small black box and the frame of lettered levers, all connected by the coils of insulated copper wire.

“Oh, look, that thing there has the same—”

“Don’t touch it!”

“All right.”

She glanced up at me. “Sorry to snap. I’m a bit jumpy.”

“Aye, well, me too.”

“Also I’m in tinker mode.” She smiled. “Courtesy doesn’t come into it. If you want to help, see if you can find a power source for this thing while I set up my system.” She waved a hand vaguely in the darkness under the table.

Suppressing a qualm, I stooped down into that darkness, and after a moment while my eyes adjusted I saw a dusty power-socket, with three holes. A centimetre-thick cable hung from the back of the table and ended in a three-pronged plug. Deducing how plug and socket fitted together was the work of a moment, as was inserting the one into the other.

The light around me brightened suddenly. Mer-rial’s boot hit my ribs, and she simultaneously uttered an odd imprecation.

“What?”

“Christ, don’t do that!”

Another strange prayer. I crawled backwards from under the table. Menial gave me a glare.

“I thought that was what you wanted me to do,” I protested.

“Oh.” She thought about it. “I suppose you could have taken it that way, yes. I forgive you. Now come here and sit down.” She patted the seat beside her.

As I got to my feet I noticed what had happened to the machine, and where the extra light was coming from. The window on the front of the box was glowing a pearly grey with darker and lighter flecks swirling through it, like the sky above a port on a snowy day. I took a step backwards. The temperature in the room seemed to have dropped a few kelvins. Now I understood why she’d been making these invocations. At moments like that even the most rational person will utter whatever name of the deity springs to mind.

“It won’t bite,” she said.

I sidled forward, keeping a wary eye on the thing, as one might do towards a dog about whom one had received just such an assurance. With the hand that Menial couldn’t see, I made the sign of the Horns, then realised that this was shamefully superstitious and began instead mentally to recite a few Names of the One, and of the Prophets: Allah, Buddha, Christ, Deity, Jordan, Justice…

“Did I do that?” I asked.

Khomeini, Krishna, Mercy, Mary, Odin, Necessity, Nature…

“When you switched the power on, yes.”

Paine, Providence, Quine, Reason, Yaweh, Zoroaster. That should do.

She gazed into my eyes with impish amusement, and reached forward and stroked my face. The rasp of my stubble sounded uncannily loud.

“It’s all right, mo grdidh,” she said. “I’m a tinker. I know what I’m doing. This thing here—” she patted the top of it“—is just a machine that does the same thing as the seer-stanes, only not so well. It’s no a deil, ye ken. It’s a computer.”

“Aye, I know that…”

“Well, start acting as if you believed it,” she said.

“But is it a television?” I shuddered inwardly at naming that dark instrument of the Possession.

She shook her head. “No. This here is a keyboard, and this here is a screen. The screen, or monitor, works on a similar principle to a television, but it is not a television. And even if it was, it couldn’t do you any harm.”

Easy enough for her to say that, I thought, but wisely didn’t say.

“Assuming it still works at all,” she added cheerfully. “The chips got fried in the Deliverance, for the most part.”

(Me neither, but that’s what she said.)

She rattled a few keys. The screen’s snowstorm responded not at all.

“Control alt delete,” she said to herself, and hit three keys simultaneously.

Nothing happened, again.

“Hmm,” she said. She reached forward and prodded a stud on the machine. The screen turned black.

“So much for that one,” she said. She stood up and leaned over the table and started looking more closely at the various boxes.

“Hey!” she said. “Got it! One of these looks like it’s radiation-hardened!” She reached in among the boxes and started fiddling dangerously with live cables, removing a lead from the back of the box we’d used and sticking it in the back of another one. What had seemed to be merely the blank front of that box suddenly lit up, a smoothly shining grey, revealing itself to be a screen.

“Yess!” said Merrial, punching the air.

By this point I was beginning to get a grip on myself, though I must admit I almost lost it completely when Merrial turned around and prodded a letter on the keyboard and the words “Demon Internet Software” flashed up on the screen.

Allah, Buddha, Christ…

“All right,” Merrial said briskly, as the screen with the three sinister names disappeared and was replaced by a picture with lots of tiny pictures spread out on it. “We’ve got this bugger up and running, but Christ knows how long it’ll stay up.” (She talked this way, I’d come to notice, with its curious combination of obscure sexual and religious references, when she was in what she’d called her “tinker mode’.) “So what we better do is whip the stuff out of it ay ess ay pee.”

“Out of it what?”

“As. Soon. As. Possible.”

“Oh, right. Toot sweet.”

“What?”

I waved a hand. “Let’s get on with it, as you say.”

“Yip.”

She carefully uncoiled one of the strands of copper wire, and attached a little peg with a copper pin to the end. This she inserted in a round hole (which, she explained, did not fucking have to be round the fucking back, but fucking was) in the pediment of the computer.

“Right,” she said. The tip of her tongue between her lips, she tapped out the words “Myra Godwin”, the name of the Deliverer, on the key-board. They simultaneously appeared on the screen and on the now black seer-stone.

“Go,” she said, hitting another key.

A few seconds passed (tongue between the teeth again) and the screen and the stone filled with a list of tides which crept slowly upwards, its top moving out of sight, and which kept on going for several minutes.

When the list had stopped its crawl she said, “OK, copy,” and rattled at the keyboard again. A picture of an hourglass appeared on the screen, and the sand began to run. The seer-stone, meanwhile, showed a tree, branching and budding and growing leaves.

After about a minute and a half the sand had all flowed from the top half of the glass, and the stone was filled with green. Both displays vanished.

“That’s it,” Menial said.

“That’s all?”

Tes,” she grinned. “That’s all the files that mention Myra Godwin transferred, from the dark storage to the stane. No bad going, eh?”

“Brilliant,” I said. She stood up, leaned around behind the computer again, disconnected her wire and wound it quickly around her hand. Then she poked a few more keys on both keyboards. The screen went that shining grey again, and the stone went back to black.

She smiled at me. “You have my permission to turn the power off.”

We left the small room, and the larger library, exactly as we had found them, and walked quietly down the stairs and out of the Institute. When we were a few metres down the street and away we hugged each other and yelped.

“We did it!” Menial gloated. “We actually fucking did it!”

“Yes, I still can hardly believe it,” I said. I caught her hand. “Now what do we do?”

“We look at what we’ve got,” she said. “Somewhere no one will see us, or bother us.”

I knew just the place.

Because it was vacation time there were few students around, so my landlady was happy to rent me my usual small room above the book shop on South-park Avenue for one night. She didn’t raise an eyebrow as she took my five marks and handed over a bedroom key, even though it was only about half past four in the afternoon. I suppose she assumed we wanted to use the room for sex.

She gave us a quick cup of coffee and shared a smoke, and a couple of months’ worth of local gossip, in the back of her kitchen, then waved us upstairs with a wink at me. The room had a fairly generous, though notionally single, bed and a chair and table and power socket. The window had been left open, but its only view was of the back yard. Still, one could look out and see the sky any time one wanted.

“Perfect,” Merrial said.

She unloaded the seer-stone and its peripheral pieces again and set them up on the table, running a small cable from the black box to the wall socket. The little box began to hum faintly, and at the same moment a human face loomed out of the dark of the seer-stone, mouthing distress.

“Ah, fuck that,” Merrial said. She rubbed the stone with a cuff, and the face fell apart into flecks of colour. “Now,” she said, “let’s get on with sorting and searching. We’re looking for stuff from before the Deliverance, but finding it in this lot won’t necessarily be easy. Let’s hope the files are date-stamped.”

She sat in the chair, motioning to me to perch on the table, and started tapping away at her version of a keyboard. “Ah, good, we can sort by date.”

The list reappeared in the depths of the glassy stone, this time with a stack of articles at the top with a single date of 28 May 2059. Merrial stroked with her finger gently and slowly along a tiny bar on the keyboard, then tapped another key. “Let’s see what this is.”

We peered together into the glass and began to read.

Bankrupt of any perspective for overcoming the crisis, the ruling elite can only sit and watch as society disintegrates beneath it Factories fail to fulfil their obligations, corruption is rife, and the real value produced in the economy continues to plummet. Many industrial sectors actually produce negative value: their output is worth less—in market or any other terms—than the raw materials they take in; in essence, they are vast organizations for spoiling resources.

In the absence of any genuine move towards a market, or —from the other side—any initiative from the workers, the system can only continue to disintegrate.

“Sounds like 2059 all right,” Menial said. That was what the Deliverance delivered us from.”

I nodded, cautiously. “Let’s just look further down…”

What cannot be ruled out is that the Moscow oligarchy could launch some diversionary military adventure, but this too would rapidly develop its own problems, and intensify those of the centre.

“Damn!” I said.

“What?”

“This isn’t 2059, it’s more like 1999!”

The invasion of Afghanistan must be seen in this context.

“No, it’s 1979! Well—” I frowned at the date at the foot of the article “—actually 1980, but it was written about the situation in ’79. In the Soviet Union.” I laughed bitterly. “The reason it’s a bit difficult to tell at first what period she’s talking about is that it was in the Soviet Union that the collapse started, right there in the 1970s. After the Soviet Union disintegrated it just got worse, and spread.”

This much was a fairly well-accepted historical account, which I’d covered in my undergraduate studies in Ancient History.

“So why’s it dated 2059?” Menial asked. She stroked the bar and rolled the list down again. “Hah!” she said. “This file, and a whole lot of others by the look of it, were put on to the computer at that date. Which doesn’t mean they were created then. I don’t know if I can extract the original creation date, either.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Maybe this is where I can help. I should be able to tell the rough date from the titles of the files, or maybe a quick look at their contents.”

“There are thousands of files in there,” she pointed out. “If dating each of them takes as long as it did to date that one, we’ll be here all night.”

I smiled. “Why should that be a problem?”

It turned out not to be a problem. Although the bulk of the files had the same date in the “date” column of Menial’s machine, and she gave up looking for a way to find what she called the “create-date”, quite a large number of the files had a date reference of some kind in their titles. These were apparendy articles from magazines or newspapers, by Myra Godwin or about her. We quite quickly got into a way of working that let me identify such files, and Menial deal with them, copying the date from the title to another “date” column. After ten minutes of this she hit her forehead with the heel of her hand and cried, “Stop!”

“What is it?”

“We’re wasting our time. I’m wasting our time, I mean.” She rubbed her hands. “What we need here is a wee program, to scan the titles for dates, extract them, reformat them and then sort by date…”

“I’ll take your word for it,” I said, not having understood all of her words. She waved me away, with a look of abstracted concentration on her face.

“This’ll be easy,” she said. “It’ll save us hours.”

I sat on the windowsill, smoking a cigarette, while her fingers flickered over the small keyboard, making a pattering noise like rain on a roof. It struck me that there seemed to be no discernible difference between the white logic and the black, but no doubt this only showed my ignorance.

“Tessl,” she said. “No bother.”

She hit a key and sat back. Then she leaned forward again, peering at the stone.

“Oh fuck!”

I eyed her warily.

“I used fucking two-digit year-dates. Force of habit. Fucking thing falls over on the year 2000.”

The pattering started again.

About half an hour later Menial had the files partially ordered by date, and we could dig about in them with a little more confidence in their relevance to our concerns.

“ ‘Defence Policy Contract (Expiry), Vatican City, 11 December 2046’,” Menial read out. “That looks interesting.”

She pressed one of her keys and the file, as she put it, opened: instead of the title glowing a little brighter among the others, we could see the whole document. Parts of it were in impenetrable legal language (parts of it, in fact, were in Latin) but there was enough there for us to form a good idea of what it was about.

Menial paused before opening another file, one labelled “Mutual Protection/Space Merchants/ 2058”.

We looked at each other, both a little pale, each waiting for the other to speak first.

Menial swallowed hard, and reached for one of my cigarettes.

“You do know,” she said slowly, “just what the Deliverer had to do to make a living, under the Possession?”

“Well…” I could feel my lower lip moving back and forth over the edge of my teeth, and stopped it. “Yes. It’s one of the aspects of history that historians tend not to talk about. In popular works, that is.”

“OhhF Menial let out a held breath in relief. “You know about the slave camps, then.”

“What?” For a fleeting instant, I literally saw a black shadow before my eyes. I pointed at the seer-stone’s script. “I thought you were talking about the nuclear blackmail!”

Menial looked puzzled. “Nuclear blackmail? I know she got some nuclear weapons from the Papanich, that’s right here. What has that to do with how she made her living?”

“Oh, Reason above!” I clutched my head. “Let’s get this straight. You think the dirty secret is that she ran slave camps. I think it’s that she trafficked in nuclear threats.”

Menial sighed. “Yes, that’s it.” She unfurled her hand and forearm with parodied politeness. Tou first.”

“All right.” I noticed that my left knee was juddering up and down; I stood up, and paced the floor as I spoke. “You know about nuclear detenence?”

“Oh, aye,” she said, with a grimace.

“Well, yes, to us the policy of threatening to burn to death many great cities and their inhabitants seems wicked, but the ancients didn’t see it that way.

In fact, some of them began to see nuclear deterrence as a good, which like all goods would be better bought and sold by businesses than provided by governments. The trouble was, all nuclear weapons were owned by governments, and were impossible to buy and hard to steal.

“So Myra Godwin and her husband, Georgi Davidov, stole a government. Davidov was a military man, and he carried out a military coup in a part of Kazakhstan, in a region which was very unpleasant and barren but which did happen to have a large stockpile of nuclear weapons. In a way, what happened was that the soldiers who manned the nuclear weapons decided to claim some territory, and nobody dared gainsay them.

The local people had suffered grievously under the rule of the Communists. Stalin had starved at least a million of them in the 1930s. But things had improved a lot, and after the fall of the Communists they found themselves worse off under the lairds and barons and usurers. The real answer to their problems was not known at the time, or not known widely enough, and they began to hanker for the secure if limited life they had known before.

“This was where Myra and Georgi had their stroke of genius. While Myra was studying here she was a follower of a man called Trotsky, who had been killed by Stalin and who became a banner for a different kind of communism, purged of Stalin’s crimes. As if there could be such a thing!”

“What do you mean?” Menial asked, narrow-eyed.

“Oh, come on, you know, communism—” The word made me physically nauseous, as though dirty hands were pawing me. “Everybody minding each other’s business, everybody owned by everybody else, and that’s just the ideal! What could that be but evil? Let alone the reality, of a small ruling group doing the minding and the owning!”

“How did that help the Deliverer?”

I shrugged. “She may have believed it when she was young. Nobody’s perfect. But when the Davidovs set up their state, they did so in the name of Trotsky, even though they did not really believe in him any more. They kept enough communism to keep people secure, and enough freedom to let them be happy and rich.”

Menial’s face was set in an interested but carefully neutral expression.

“And the way they got rich,” I went on, “was this. They started selling options to use the nuclear weapons they held. That way, states that had no nuclear weapons of their own could have nuclear deterrence. They were quite open about it, but they had to stop after the Third World War, when the last empire consolidated its grip.”

I sighed and shrugged. “It’s a blot on her record, I’ll give you that. But they never actually used them.”

Menial looked a bit shaken. “So the scholars have known that all along? Well, I know what Godwin’s people did after they lost their little nuclear threat business.” She smiled, thin-lipped. “It seems you don’t.”

She opened the other file. This one, which I read with growing honor, was about a very different contract. It was a monthly report on work done by prisoners, guarded by a company called Mutual Protection, for another company called Space Merchants.

“Prison labour was another good,” Menial said, “that our Deliverer thought best to supply on the free market.”

“But that’s slavery!”

“Indeed it is,” said Merrial. “That’s why we don’t talk about it. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of your scholars have covered it up too.” Her eyes narrowed. “Maybe some of the senior tinkers know about this nuclear business, and all. But they don’t talk about it.”

We sat looking at each other, with the sudden passion of people who have lost something that they believed in, and have only each other left. It was all the more bitter because we each had separately thought we had been told the worst about the great woman, had smugly thought we were mature enough to know it and keep it quiet from the gullible populace, and we each had found that we had our selves been gulled by our own guild; that there was an even darker tale to tell. My mind was racing, and I could feel a headache coming on. At the same time I felt a sense of release, a small deliverance, as the image of the Deliverer toppled in my mind.

With a short break when we wandered out into the warm evening for dinner in a fish restaurant by the Kelvin, we worked through the files. We found plenty about Myra Godwin’s strange career—more than enough to write a pretty sensational biography—but nothing about what had happened around the time of the Deliverance itself. It was after nine when Merrial jumped up and hissed, “Shit! Shit!”

“What’s the matter?”

“I’ve found a catalogue file. No meaningful tide, wouldn’t you just fucking believe it. And it’s got far, far more entries than we’ve got files here. We just got the low-security stuff! The rest is still in the University’s dark storage.”

I rubbed my sore eyes, and reached out for Mer-riaFs hand. “So what’s still there might be worse?”

“You said it. It might even contain the stuff we’re looking for. We have to go back.”