The Sky Road

“And the other times?” I persisted.

“It gets loose and eats your soul.”

I stared at her. “You mean that’s actually true?”

She laughed at me. “Of course not. It makes your equipment burst into flames or explode with a loud bang, though.”

“I can see how that might be a hazard.”

She reached over and touched my lips. “Shush, man, don’t go on like an old woman. Most of the stuff in the dark storage is useless to us, or evil in a different way from what you think. Evil ideas from the old times, they can make you sick, and make you want to share them, so they spread like a disease.”

She leaned back again and closed her eyes, enjoying the sun like a cat. “I reckon you and I are strong enough and healthy enough in our minds to be safe from that sort of thing.” She opened her eyes again and gave me a challenging look.

The path of power is always a temptation, as Mer-rial had so lightly said last night. Until now, it had never seriously tempted me; I knew the dangers, and knew no way of getting to the undoubted rewards. Now such a way was being offered; it might reduce by years the time required for researching my thesis, it might even give me a head start on the Life. The lust for the lost knowledge made my head throb.

The question was out before I knew what I was saying. “Do you want me to help you to do it?”

Her eyes widened and brightened. “Could you? That would be just— wonderful!”

She was looking at me with so much admiration and respect that I could not imagine not doing what it would take to deserve it. But even in my besotted eagerness to please her, my genuine concern about the problem she thought she’d uncovered, and my own desire for the knowledge and for the adventure of obtaining it—even with all that, my whole training and my natural caution came rushing back, and I wavered.

“Oh, God,” I said. “I’ll have to think about it.”

“Can you get your thinking about it over by eight tonight?” Merrial asked drily.

“Maybe. And what if I say no?”

She held me in her level gaze. “I won’t think any the less of you. It won’t change a thing about that.”

“Sure?” I said, not anxiously but mischievously. I had already decided. She had seduced me into a frame of mind that feared neither God nor men nor devils. “Then what will you do?”

She shook her head. Til find some other way, or at the worst just register my protest in the record, and go on with my work as I’m told.”

“That sounds like a more sensible course in the first place.”

“It is that,” she said. “But I’d rather have the satisfaction of knowing the ship is safe, one way or another, than of saying ‘I told you so” afterwards.”

I couldn’t argue with that, and I didn’t want to. What she said must have had some deeper effect on me, because when we descended the perilous steps down from the heathery eyrie, each of us one stumble away from the welcoming arms of Darwin, I wasn’t afraid at all.

My room was narrow and long, under the slope of the roof. After the heat of the day it was full of the smell of old varnish and warm rust and the sound of creaking wood. The westward-facing skylight let in enough light to see by, and enough air to breathe.

I came in from work and threw off my overalls and shirt, tossed my temporarily heavy purse on the bed, and uncapped a chilled bottle of beer I’d bought at the bus-stop. I opened the skylight to its fullest extent and sat myself under it on the room’s one tall chair, and leaned my elbow on the window’s frame as though sitting at a bar. Beside my forearm tiny red arachnids moved about on the grey and yellow lichen like dots in front of my eyes.

Merrial and I would meet again in two hours. Plenty of time to wash and shave and dress, to consider and reconsider. I was almost tempted to have a brief sleep, but decided against it, attractive though the barely straightened bedding seemed at this moment. After soaking up the beer I’d get a good jolt of coffee. I lit my fifth cigarette of the day and gazed out over the rooftops towards the loch, my parched body gratefully absorbing the drink, my tired brain riding the rush of the leaf.

Merrial’s disturbing but alluring proposition had preoccupied me all afternoon, and although my decision was made I had plenty of doubts and fears. I would not be the first to mine the dark archives in the interests of history, or of engineering for that matter; it was neither a crime nor a sin, but it had always been impressed upon me that it was a dangerous folly. And, to be sure, I could think of no good reason for doing it, other than the ones which motivated myself and Merrial; no doubt everyone who had taken that path had felt the same about their reasons. Rationally, it was obvious why the dangers were better publicised than the benefits—those who found only madness and death in the black logic could not but be noticed, whereas those who found knowledge or wealth or pleasure discreedy kept their sinister source to themselves.

What hypocrisies, I wondered, did the tinkers practise, if they themselves would on occasion turn their hand to the leftward path? Until Menial had mentioned it, I’d suspected no such thing: but then, with the tinkers’ virtual monopoly of an understanding of the white logic, it was in their interests to publicly disparage the black. Optical and mechanical computing, and more especially the delicate interface between them—the seer-stones set like gems in the shining brass of the calculating machinery—were their speciality and secret skill. What would happen if people outside their guild were to start exploring the left-hand path in earnest, as a public enterprise rather than a private vice, heaven only knew. A new Possession, perhaps; in which case the tinkers might have to engineer a new Deliverance. It was not a reassuring thought.

I stubbed out the cigarette and sent the butt tumbling down the slate roof-tiles to the dry gutter. The sounds of people going home, of engines and hooves and feet, rose from the street below. I turned back into the room and finished the beer, then undressed and went into the sluice-shower and washed myself down. The water ran cold just before I got the last soap-suds off; I gritted my teeth and persisted, then leapt out and dried myself off while the electric kettle boiled. I filled a ewer with a mixture of cold and hot water and shaved carefully, then set some coffee to brew while I got dressed: in the same trousers and waistcoat as I’d worn the previous night, but I thought the occasion deserved a clean shirt.

The bed was close enough to the table for the two items of furniture to form a somewhat unergonomic desk. I sat down with the coffee and looked at the stack of books and papers I’d brought with me to read over the summer. I reached over and hauled a volume from the stack, cursed and got up and found a rag and wiped dust and cobwebs from all the books, washed my hands and sat down again. Sipping the cooling coffee, turning over the pages, I tried to focus my mind on the matters they contained.

When I was awakened for a third time by my forehead hitting the table I gave up and poured another coffee and turned my mind to my real worry, the one I didn’t want to think about: what if Merrial were simply using me? That she had sought me out in the first place because she wanted me to do a job for her?

I walked up and down the room’s narrow length, turning the question over almost as often as I turned around. After several iterations I decided that I couldn’t have been fooled about her feelings, that her passion was real—and that if she’d been intent on manipulating me, she would have done it more subtly—

But then, perhaps that itself was evidence of how subtly she’d done it. At that point I stopped. To suspect manipulation that subtle—an apparently clumsy and obvious approach disguising one devious and elegant—was to undermine the very confidence in my own judgement on which all such discriminations must perforce rely.

So I forgot my suspicions, and looked once more at the books, and at a quarter before eight went out into the evening to meet her, and my fate.

4 Paper Tigers

Three flags hung behind the coffin: the Soviet, red with gold hammer and sickle; the Kazakhstani, blue with yellow sun and eagle; and the ISTWR, yellow with black trefoil.

About two hundred people were crammed into the hall of the crematorium. The funeral was the nearest thing to a State occasion the republic had had since the Sputnik centenary. The entire depleted apparat was there, and a good proportion of the workers, peasants and intelligentsia was probably watching on television. The distinguished