The Sky Road

We sat down. Menial leaned back against the rockface, and I, unthinking, did the same—then jerked forward as I discovered again the scratches and bruises on my back. With our legs stretched out, our feet were almost at the edge. I felt more uneasy on that solid rock than I ever had at greater heights on the platform. Across the top of the gates, across the sea-loch, the Torridonian battlements of Apple-cross challenged the sky. The scale of those ancient mountains dwarfed the ship itself to a metal sculpture some eccentric artist had made in his back garden in his spare time.

“My place,” Menial said.

“Some place,” I acknowledged. “It’s you who should be working on the platform, with a head for heights like this.”

Til keep to my cosy lab and my long lies, thanks.”

We opened our boxes and spread out and shared the contents, then got stuck in, both ravenous. For a few minutes we ate, without saying much, then Menial topped up the mugs, lit herself a cigarette, passed one to me and leaned back against the rock.

“Clovis, I have something to ask you—”

She stopped. She was looking straight ahead, as though she wanted to talk without looking at me.

“What is it?”

“Something you can maybe tell me. Something you might not be supposed to. It’s to do with the ship.”

This was getting more serious than love.

You want to know about welding?” I asked, trying to be flippant.

She laughed. “No, about history.”

“Oh.” I waved a hand. “Any time. But there must be plenty better qualified than I, all I know about in any depth is—”

She watched me as the penny dropped.

“The life of the Deliverer?”

“That’s the one,” she agreed cheerily.

“You’re serious?”

“I’m serious,” she said. She wasn’t looking away from me now, she was looking at me with a fixity and intensity of gaze I found alarming.

“All right,” I said, my mind treading water. “You seriously want to know something about the Deliverer? I can tell you anything you want. But what has that to do with the ship, for God’s sake?”

She took a deep breath, gazing away from me again at the tall ship. “It’s a fine ship there, colha Gree, and proud I am to be working on it. But consider this: it’ll be the first ship to have lifted from the Yird for many a hundred year. The first since the Deliverance. We don’t know much of what happened then, but we do know there were people and machines in space before the Deliverance, and we’ve heard never a word from them since. There’s no doubt they’re all dead. Why do you think that is?”

“There was a war,” I said patiently, “and a revolution. The Second World Revolution, or the Deliverance, as we call it. The folk outside the Yird had followed the path of power, and they fell with the Possession. Starved of supplies, or killed each other, most like.”

“So the story goes,” she said, in the tone of one tired of disputing it. “But what if it’s wrong? What if whatever cleared the near heaven of folk and machines and deils alike is still there?”

“Ah,” I said, glancing involuntarily up at the clear blue sky. “But it stands to Reason, the people in charge of the project will have considered this. Why don’t you take it up with them?”

They’ve considered it all right,” she said, “and rejected it. There’s no evidence of anything up there that could do the ship any harm. There’s no evidence that the loss of the space habitations was anything but what you’ve said.”

“So why do you think I might know anything about this—” I waved my hand dismissively “— supposed danger?”

“Because…” At this point, I swear, she looked around and leaned closer, almost whispering in my ear. “There has long been a tinker tradition, or rumour, or hint—you know how it is with the old folk—that whatever did destroy the space settlements and satellites and so on might still be there, and that it was… the Deliverer’s own doing.”

My mouth must have fallen open. I could feel it go instantly dry, and I felt a moment of giddiness and nausea. My fingers dug into the tough grass as the world spun dangerously. I looked at her, sickened, yet fascinated despite myself. The natural religion has no sin of blasphemy, but this was blasphemy as near as dammit. “That’s deep water, Menial.”

“You’re telling meV she snorted. “I’ve had trouble enough for even suggesting it. Everybody thinks the Deliverer was a perfect soldier of God, like Khomeini or somebody like that! Oh, among my own folk there’s a more realistic attitude, they’ll admit she had faults, but that’s just among ourselves. In public you won’t find a tink saying a word against her.”

I smiled wryly. “Except you.”

“This is not public, colha Gree.” She ran a finger down the side of my face and across my lips.

You must be very confident of that,” I said. “To tell me.”

“I’m confident all right,” she said. “I’m sure of you.”

To distract myself from the turmoil of mixed feelings this assurance induced, I asked her, “So what is it that I can tell you?”

“What you know,” she said. Tve always thought the scholars might know more about the Deliverer than they’re letting on.”

I laughed. “There are no secrets among scholars, they’re not like the tinkers. All we find out is published. If it doesn’t square with what most folk believe, that’s their problem; but most folk don’t read scholarly works, anyway. And—well, I suppose they are like the tinkers in this—they have a more realistic attitude among themselves. It’s true, the Deliverer was no perfect saint. But I’ve seen nothing to suggest that she ever did anything as dire as… as you said.”

She made a grimace of disappointment. “Oh, well. Maybe it was too much to hope that something like that would be written down on paper.” She plucked a pink clover and began tugging out the scrolled petals one by one and sucking them; passed one to me. I took it between my teeth, releasing the tiny drop of nectar on to my tongue.

“On paper,” I said thoughtfully. “There could be other information where we can’t reach it.”

“In the dark storage?”

“Aye, well, like I said last night—it’s there, but we can’t reach it.”

“I could reach it,” Merrial said casually.

“Oh, you could, could you?”

“Yes,” she said. “I can get hold of equipment to take data out of the dark storage and put it in safe storage.”

“Safe storage?” I asked, too astonished to query more deeply at that moment.

“You know,” she said. “The seer-stones.”

“And how would you know that?”

Again the remote gaze. “I’ve seen it done. By… engineers taking short cuts.”

“There’s a good reason why the left-hand path is avoided,” I said.

“ ‘Necessity is its own law’,” she said, as though quoting, but the expression came from no sage I’d ever read. “Anyway, Clovis, it’s not as dangerous as you may think.”

Curiosity drove me like prurience. “How do they do it safely? Draw pentagrams with salt, or what?”

“No,” she said, quite seriously. “They make lines with wire—isolated circuits, you know? That’s what confines anything that might be waiting to get out. There are other simple precautions, for the visuals—” she made a cutting motion with her hand in response to my baffled look “—but ninety-nine times out of a hundred there’s nothing to worry about anyway. Just words and pictures.” She chuckled darkly. “Sometimes strange words and pictures, I’ll give you that.”

“And the hundredth time?”

“You meet a demon,” she said, very quietly but emphatically. “Most times, you can shut it down before it does any damage.”