The Sky Road

She brightened instantly, as though some arduous responsibility had been lifted from her shoulders.

“Oh yes!” she said, hugging me closer again. “Love me as much as you like, love me for ever!” She pulled back a little, looked down, then raised her gaze again to mine.

“But not right now,” she added regretfully. “You have to go.”

“Now?!” We had fallen out of our mutual dream into the workaday world, where we were two people who didn’t, really, know each other all that well.

“Yes,” she insisted. “You have to get back across town, get… washed, and ready for work and catch the bus at half past six.”

“I can catch it from here.”

“The hell you can. People will talk.”

“They’ll talk anyway.”

“People around here, I mean.”

I climbed reluctantly off the bed. Menial slipped lithely under the covers and pulled them up to her chin.

“What about you?” I asked, as I searched out and sorted my clothes.

“I’m an intellectual worker,” she said smugly as she snuggled down. “We start at nine.”

She watched me dress with a sort of affectionate curiosity. “What have you got on your belt?”

I patted the hard leather pouches and fastened the buckle. “The tools of a tradesman,” I told her, “and the weapons of a gentleman.”

“I see,” she said approvingly.

“So when will I see you again?” I asked, as I recovered the sgean dhu and stuck it back down the side of my boot.

“Tonight, eight o’clock, at the statue? Go for something to eat?”

I pretended to give this idea thoughtful consideration, then we both laughed, and she sat up again and reached out to me. We hugged and kissed goodbye. As I backed away to the door, grudging even a moment without her in my sight, a flickering from the big seer-stone caught my eye. I stopped beside the table and stooped to examine it. As I did so I noticed Menial’s two pendants: the talisman—the small seer-stone—now showing a vaguely organic tracery of green, and on the silver chain a silver piece about a centimetre in diameter which appeared to be a monogram made up of the letters “G” and “T” and the numeral “4”.

The table’s centre-piece was all black within, except for an arrangement of points of light which might have been torches, or cities, or stars. They flashed on and off, on and off, and the bright dots spelled out one word: HELP.

I glanced over at Menial. “It’s reached the end of its run,” I remarked.

“Reset it then,” she said sleepily from the pillow.

I brushed the stone’s chill surface with my sleeve, restoring it to chaos, and with a final smile at Merrial opened the door and stepped out into the cock-crowing sunlight.

and she threw her arms around him that same night she drew him down.

2 Ancient Time

Death follows me, she thought, as she rode into the labour-camp. There was something implacable about it, like logic: it follows, it follows… The thought’s occurrence had nothing to do with logic; it appeared like a screensaver on the surface of her mind, whenever her mind went blank. It troubled her a little, as did another thought that drifted by in such moments: where are the swift cavalry?

The gate rolled shut behind her, squealing in its rusty grooves. The wind from the steppe hummed in the barbed-wire fence and whipped away the dust kicked up as she reined in the black horse. A guard hurried over; he somehow managed to make his brisk soldierly step look obsequious, even as his bearing made his dark-blue microfibre fatigues look military. He doffed a baseball cap with the Mutual Protection lettering and logo.

“ Good morning, Citizen.”

That title was already an honorific. Myra Godwin-Davidova smiled and handed him the reins.

“Good morning,” she said, swinging down from the horse. She could hear her knee-joints creak. She lifted the saddlebags and slung them over her shoulder. The weight almost made her stagger, and the guard’s arm twitched towards her; but she wasn’t going to accept any help from that quarter. “That will be all, thank you.”

“As you wish, Citizen.” The guard saluted and replaced his cap. She was still looking down at him, her riding-boots adding three inches to her five-foot-eleven height.

She patted the big mare’s rump and watched as the guard led the beast away, then set off towards the accommodation huts. As she walked she pulled off her leather gauntlets and stuffed them awkwardly into the deep pockets of her long fur coat, and tucked a stray strand of silver hair under her sable hat. Hands mottled, veins showing, nails ridged: tough claws of an old bird, still flexible, but a better indication of her true age than her harshly lined but firm face, straight back and limber stride. Her knees hurt, but she tried not to let it show, or slow her down.

The camp perimeter was about one kilometre by two. Beyond the far fence she could see straight to the horizon, above which rose the many gantries and the few remaining tall ships of the old port. It had been a proud fleet once. How long before she would have to say, all my ships are gone and all my men are dead?

As if to mock her thought, a small ship screamed overhead; she caught a glimpse of it: angular, faceted, translucent, a spectral stealth-bomber shrieking skyward from Baikonur on a jet of laser-heated steam. The trail’s after-image floated irritatingly in front of her as she turned her gaze resolutely back to earth.

One of the camp’s factories was a couple of hundred metres away, a complex of aluminium pipework and fibre-optic cabling in a queasily organic-looking mass about fifty metres wide and twenty high, through which the control cabins and walkways of the human element were beaded and threaded like the eggs and exudate of some gargantuan insect. The name of the company that owned it, Space Merchants, was spelled out on the roof in twisty neon.

As she approached the nearest workers’ housing area it struck Myra, not for the first time, that the huts were more modern and comfortable than the concrete apartment block she lived in herself. Each hut was semi-cylindrical, its rounded ends streamlined to the prevailing wind; soot-black polycarbon skin with rows of laminated-diamond windows.

This particular cluster of accommodation huts was in two rows of ten, with the rutted remains of a twenty metre-wide paved road between them. A gang of a dozen men was engaged in repairing the road; the breeze carried a waft of sweat and tar. The men were using shovels, a gas burner under a tipping-and-spreading contraption, and a coughing diesel-engined road-roller: primitive, heavy equipment. On the sidewalk a blue-suited Mutual Protection guard lounged, picking his teeth and apparently watching a show in his eyes and hearing music or commentary in his ears.

The loom of Myra’s shadow made him jump, blink and shake his head with a small shudder. He started to his feet.

“No need to get up,” Myra said unkindly. “I just want to speak to some of the men.”

“They’re on a break, Citizen,” he said, squinting up at her. “So it’s up to them, right?”

“Right,” said Myra. Physical work counted as recreation. It was the intellectual labour of design and monitoring that taxed the convicts’ nerves.

She turned to the men, who waved to her and shouted greetings and explanations: she’d have to wait the few minutes it would take for them to finish spreading and rolling some freshly poured tarmac. Not offering one to the guard, she lit a Marley and let the men take their time finishing their break. She’d always insisted that her arrivals and inspections counted as work-time for the labourers.

Her spirits lifted as the Virginia and the Morocco kicked in. The labourers had their yellow suits rolled down to