The Sky Road

guidance system.”

“Oh,” I said, suddenly understanding. “You’re a—an engineer.”

“I am a tinker,” she said in a level tone, using the word I’d so clumsily avoided. She spoke it with a pride as obvious, and loud enough to be heard. A snigger and a giggle passed around the table. I glared past Menial’s shoulder at Jondo and Ma-chard. They shook their heads slightly, doubtfully, then returned to their conversations.

Justice judge them. As a city man I felt myself above such rural idiocies—though realising her occupation had given even me something of a jolt. Whatever passed between us, it would be less or more serious than any fling with a local lass. I leaned inward, so that Menial’s shoulders and mine defined a social circle of our own.

“Sounds like interesting work,” I said.

She nodded. “A lot of mathematics, a lot of—and this time she did lower her voice—’programming.”

“Ah,” I said, trying to think of some response that wouldn’t reveal me to be as prejudiced as my workmates. “Isn’t it very dangerous?” I resisted the impulse to look over my shoulder, but I was suddenly, acutely aware of the massive presence of the hills around the town, their forested slopes like the bristling backs of great beasts in the greater Wood of Caledon.

“White logic,” Menial explained. “The right-hand path, you know? The path of light.” She did not sound as though the distinction mattered a lot to her.

“Reason guide you,” I responded, with reflex piety. “But—it must be tempting. The short cuts, yeah?”

“The path of power is always a temptation,” she said, with casual familiarity. “Especially when you’re working on a guidance system!” She laughed; I confess I shuddered. She fingered her talisman. “Enough about that. I know what I’m doing, so it isn’t dangerous. At least, not as dangerous as it looks from outside.”

“Well.” Despite the electric frisson her words aroused, I was as keen as she was to change the subject. “You could say the same about what I do.”

“And what do you do?” She asked it out of politeness; she already knew. I was sure of that, without quite knowing why.

“I work in the yard,” I said.

“On the ship?”

“Oh, not on the ship!” A self-deprecating laugh, not very sincere. “On the platform. For the summer, I’m a welder.”

She slugged back some beer. “And the rest of the time?”

“I’m a scholar,” I said. “Of history. At Glaschu.”

This was a slight exaggeration. I had just attained the degree of Master of Arts, and my summer job was a frantic, frugal effort to earn enough to support myself for an attempt at a doctorate. Scholarship was my ambition, not my occupation. But I refused to call myself a student. Menial looked at me with the sort of effortful empathy with which I’d favoured her self-disclosure. “That sounds… interesting,” she said. “What part of history?”

I gestured across the square, to the statue’s black silhouette. Behind it, from the east, the first visible stars of the evening pricked the sky.

The life of the Deliverer,” I said.

“And what have you learned?” She leaned closer, transparently more interested; her black brows raised a fraction, her bright dark eyes widening. Without thinking, I lit a cigarette; remembered my manners, and offered her one. She took it, grinning, and helped herself to the jug of beer, then filled my glass too. “You wouldn’t think there’d be much new to learn,” she added, looking up through her eyelashes.

I rose to the bait. “Ah, but there is!” I told her. “The Deliverer lived in Glasgow, you know. For a while.”

“A lot of places will tell you she lived there—for a while!” Menial laughed.

“Aye, but we have evidence,” I said. “I’ve seen papers written with her own hand, and signed. There is no controversy that it was her who wrote them. What they mean, now, that’s another matter. And a great deal of other writing, printed articles that is, and material that is still in the—you know.”

“Dark storage?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Dark storage. I wish—” Even here, even now, it was impossible to say just what I wished. But Merrial understood.

“There you go, colha Gree,” she said. “The path of power is always a temptation!”

“Aye, it is that,” I admitted gloomily. “You can look at them, labelled in her own hand, and you wonder what’s in them, and—well.”

“Probably corrupt,” she said briskly. “Not worth bothering with.”

“Of course corrupt—”

She shook her head, with a brief, small frown. “In the technical sense,” she explained. “Garbage data, unreadable.”

Garbage data? What did that mean?

“I see,” I said, seeing only that she’d just tried to explicate part of the argot of her profession; another unseasonable intimacy.

“All the same,” she went on, “it must be strange work, history. I don’t know how you can bear it, digging about in the dead past.”

I had heard variations of this sentiment from so many people, starting with my mother, that exasperation welled within me and I’m sure showed on my face. She smiled as though to assure me that she didn’t hold it against me personally, and added, “The Possessors don’t work only through the black logic, you know. They can get to your mind through their words on paper, too.”

“You speak very freely,” I said. For a woman, I didn’t add.

She took it as a compliment, and thus paid me one by not recognising the stiff-kneed priggishness that my remark represented.

“It’s the tinker way,” she said, giving me another small shock. “We talk as we please.”

I couldn’t come back on that, so I ploughed on.

“We have to understand the Possession,” I explained self-righteously, “to understand the Deliverance.”

“But do we understand the Deliverance?” she asked, teasing me relentlessly. “Do you, Clovis colha Gree?”

T can’t say,” I said—which was true enough, though ecological with the truth.

“Good,” Merrial said. “We would not claim to understand it, and we knew the Deliverer better than most.” A sly smile. “As you know.”

I nodded, slowly. I knew all right. Despised and feared though they sometimes are, it is not for nothing that the tinkers are known as the Deliverer’s children. They worked her will long ago, in the troubled times, and the benison of that work has protected them down the generations; that and—on a more cynical view—their obscure and irreplaceable knowledge.

I had heard rumours—always disparaged by the University historians—of a firmer continuity, a darker arcana, that linked today’s tinkers and the Deliverer, and that reached back to times yet more remote, when even the Possession was but a sapling, its shadow not yet covering the Earth.

Her hand covered mine, briefly.

“Don’t talk about it,” she said.

So we talked about other things: her work, my work, her childhood and mine. The glasses were twice refilled. She stood up, hefting the now empty jug. “Same again?”

I rose too, saying, “I’ll get them—”

“I insist,” she said, and was gone. I watched the sway of her hips, the way it carried over to swing her heavy skirt and ripple the torrent of hair down her back, as she passed through the crowd and disappeared through the wide door of The Carronade. My friends observed this attention with sardonic smiles.

“You’re in for an interesting time, Clovis,” Jondo remarked. He stroked his long red pony-tail suggestively, making his girlfriend laugh again. “Looks like the glamour’s got you.”

Machard smirked. “Seriously, man,” he told me, “take care. You don’t know tinks like we do. They’re faithless, godless, clannish and they don’t settle down. At best she’ll break your heart, at worst—”

“What is the matter with you?” I hissed, leaning sideways to keep the girls out of the path of my wrath. “Come on, guys, give the lady a chance / My two friends” expressions took on looks of insolent innocence.