The Sky Road

direct action against it, though God knows Georgi tried to persuade them to. They assured us they just didn’t have the clout, and I believe them. Now you seem to be suggesting that we throw our weight, such as it is, against it. My own view is that we’d accomplish more by staying neutral. It could work to our advantage—if we accommodate ourselves to new realities in good time.”

Myra unfroze her face. “Get in on the winning side, you mean?” she suggested lightly.

Yes, exactly,” Kozlova said. She seemed encouraged by Myra’s response, or lack of response. “After all,” she ploughed on, “we ourselves are in a way part of the space movement, we go back a long way with it, and the Sheenisov are as much a threat to us as the barbarians and reactionary governments are to some other enclaves. Frankly, I think we should put out some diplomatic feelers to the other side before the crunch, which as you correctly point out is a matter of days or weeks away. And we’re not exactly in a position of strength at the moment. So there is indeed a certain urgency to our decision.”

“Interesting,” Myra murmured. “Anyone else?”

Denis Gubanov (Internal Security) broke in sharply. “The Chair spoke in her message of states being suborned and subverted. I don’t think we should let ourselves become one of them! Whatever the rhetoric, and the propaganda of inevitability, it’s obvious what’s going on. Imperialism took a severe blow with the fall of the Yanks, but the blow wasn’t fatal, worse luck. Monopoly capital always finds new political instruments, and the space movement, so-called, has proved an admirable vehicle.” He snorted, briefly. “Literally—a launch vehicle! Through it, the rich desert the Earth. Why should we help them on their way?”

“More to the point,” said Sherman (Trade and Industry), making his disdain for Denis’s rhetoric emphatically clear, “there is the question of what we will do for a living when the camps are worked out.”

“We could always—” began Kozlova, as though about to say something in jest, then glanced at Myra and shut up.

“What?”

“Nah. Forget it. The business to hand is what we do now, about the coup.”

Myra let the argument go on. There was a case, she admitted to herself, on both sides. But Valentina had been right—there was a subjective edge to Myra’s response. The space movement’s central element was Mutual Protection, and Mutual Protection’s central element was David Reid. If the space movement got its way he would be the most powerful man in the world.

No way was she going to let that bastard win.

3 The Ship o the Yird

An hour later, after a run across town that was bloody hard in (and on) my boots, and a hasty wash and change into my work clothes, I stood at the station bus-stop with my steel safety-helmet in one hand and my aluminium lunch-box in the other. Packing my lunch was the only non-basic service that my landlady provided, but for me that was enough to forgive her the absence of breakfast, dinner, laundry and reliable hot water.

The sun’s growing heat was burning off the morning mist on the loch and between the hills. I felt as though I might at any moment rise and float away myself. My eyes felt sandy and my brain felt hot, but these discomforts did not diminish the kinder glow of elation somewhere in my chest and gut. In a strange way I could hardly bear to think about Mer-rial—every time I did so brought on such an explosion of joy that I quivered at the knees, and I almost feared to indulge it to excess. I wanted to keep it, hoard it, dole it out to myself when I really needed it, not gulp it all down at once. (Which is of course a mistaken notion—that particular well, like all too many others, is bottomless.

What I thought about instead was another woman—the Deliverer, under whose memorial I had met Merrial, and under whose remote and ancient protection she and her people lived. (Protected from persecution, at any rate, if not from prejudice.)

Over the past four years, History had been one of the arts I. had struggled to master. It hadn’t been easy, even in Glaschu, where the place fair drips with it, as they say. The baffled aversion expressed by Merrial was a common enough reaction. In a time of so many opportunities, and a place buzzing with innovative work in so many fields which could be applied to bring about manifest human betterment, it seemed perverse (sometimes even to me) for a vigorous and intelligent young man to turn aside from such arts as Literature, and Music, and Kinematography, or from the sciences: Astronomy, Medicine, the many branches of Natural Theology; from the improving pursuits of Practical Philosophy and Mechanical and Civil Engineering—to turn aside from all these useful works of the intellect, not even for the understandable and, within reason, commendable attractions of business and pleasure, but to fossick about in mouldering documents and crumbling ruins, and to fill his head with bloody images and mind-numbing figures from the mega-dead past.

It was a distasteful and faintly disreputable fascination, with a whiff of necrophilia, even of necromancy, about it. But, whether we will or no, we’re all historians, each with our own outline of history in our heads. This was a point I’d often had to make to sceptical listeners, from parents and siblings through to patronage committees and on to friends and workmates in drink-fuelled debate. We pick up the outline from parents and teachers and preachers, from songs and statues and stories.

In the beginning, God made the Big Bang, and there was light. After the first four minutes, there was matter. After billions of years, there were stars and planets, and the Earth was formed. The water above the sky separated from the water below the sky, which brought forth all manner of creeping things. Over millions of years they were shaped by God’s invisible hand, Natural Selection, into great monsters of land and sea. The Earth was filled with violence, and God sent an asteroid, Katy Boundary, to destroy it. The sky was dark at noon for forty days, and almost all the living things were destroyed. Among those who survived were little beasts like mice, and they replenished the Earth, and burrowed into it and became coneys, and climbed trees and became monkeys, and climbed down and became Men—

— ape-men and cave-men, Egyptians and Babylonians, Greeks and Romans, Christians and Americans, Chinese and Russians. The Americans fell but their empire lived on as the Possession, until the Deliverer rose in the east and struck it down. Troubled times followed, and then peace.

So why disturb it—answer me that, lad!

Because the truth is more interesting and ultimately more instructive than a farrago of fable? I had acquired the taste not just for truth but for detail; for the peculiar pleasure that comes from seeing the real relationship between events in terms of cause and effect rather than narrative convention. It’s a satisfaction which I’ll defend as genuinely scientific.

But what use is it, eh?

To that I had no ready answer, except to define the result as art, in the same way as the method could be defined as science. The argument that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it failed to impress most people, convinced as they were that there was no risk whatsoever of history’s more ruinous errors being repeated. So I had to reach for the argument that real history told a better story because it was a truer story; that reality had its own beauty, sterner and higher than that of myth.

The particular story I wanted to tell was of the life of the Deliverer. My proposal for a thesis on her early years as a student and academic in Glasgow, long before she became the figure known to history, was only the beginning of my own world-conquering ambition: to reconstruct, as much as one can across that gulf of time, the mind and personality and circumstance that had shaped the future that was now our past.

It might take decades of research, years of writing. Whatever else I did, this biography would define my own: a life for a Life. Perhaps it was an unconscious balking at that price, or some half-baked, self-justifying attempt to pay my dues to what my more practical-minded contemporaries called “real work”, or something more positive, a dimly felt attraction to the world of material striving and measurable success, a turning towards the future and away from the past, that led me that summer to Garron Town and the Kishorn Yard.

“Thank God it’s Thursday,” said a cheerful voice behind me. I turned and grinned at Jondo, who was leaning against the bus-stop sign and eating a black pudding and fried-egg roll. Behind him a score of workers were by now queuing up. Vendors of snacks, hot drinks and newspapers worked along the line.