The Sky Road

She glanced up at me. “Sorry to snap. I’m a bit jumpy.”

“Aye, well, me too.”

“Also I’m in tinker mode.” She smiled. “Courtesy doesn’t come into it. If you want to help, see if you can find a power source for this thing while I set up my system.” She waved a hand vaguely in the darkness under the table.

Suppressing a qualm, I stooped down into that darkness, and after a moment while my eyes adjusted I saw a dusty power-socket, with three holes. A centimetre-thick cable hung from the back of the table and ended in a three-pronged plug. Deducing how plug and socket fitted together was the work of a moment, as was inserting the one into the other.

The light around me brightened suddenly. Mer-rial’s boot hit my ribs, and she simultaneously uttered an odd imprecation.

“What?”

“Christ, don’t do that!”

Another strange prayer. I crawled backwards from under the table. Menial gave me a glare.

“I thought that was what you wanted me to do,” I protested.

“Oh.” She thought about it. “I suppose you could have taken it that way, yes. I forgive you. Now come here and sit down.” She patted the seat beside her.

As I got to my feet I noticed what had happened to the machine, and where the extra light was coming from. The window on the front of the box was glowing a pearly grey with darker and lighter flecks swirling through it, like the sky above a port on a snowy day. I took a step backwards. The temperature in the room seemed to have dropped a few kelvins. Now I understood why she’d been making these invocations. At moments like that even the most rational person will utter whatever name of the deity springs to mind.

“It won’t bite,” she said.

I sidled forward, keeping a wary eye on the thing, as one might do towards a dog about whom one had received just such an assurance. With the hand that Menial couldn’t see, I made the sign of the Horns, then realised that this was shamefully superstitious and began instead mentally to recite a few Names of the One, and of the Prophets: Allah, Buddha, Christ, Deity, Jordan, Justice…

“Did I do that?” I asked.

Khomeini, Krishna, Mercy, Mary, Odin, Necessity, Nature…

“When you switched the power on, yes.”

Paine, Providence, Quine, Reason, Yaweh, Zoroaster. That should do.

She gazed into my eyes with impish amusement, and reached forward and stroked my face. The rasp of my stubble sounded uncannily loud.

“It’s all right, mo grdidh,” she said. “I’m a tinker. I know what I’m doing. This thing here—” she patted the top of it“—is just a machine that does the same thing as the seer-stanes, only not so well. It’s no a deil, ye ken. It’s a computer.”

“Aye, I know that…”

“Well, start acting as if you believed it,” she said.

“But is it a television?” I shuddered inwardly at naming that dark instrument of the Possession.

She shook her head. “No. This here is a keyboard, and this here is a screen. The screen, or monitor, works on a similar principle to a television, but it is not a television. And even if it was, it couldn’t do you any harm.”

Easy enough for her to say that, I thought, but wisely didn’t say.

“Assuming it still works at all,” she added cheerfully. “The chips got fried in the Deliverance, for the most part.”

(Me neither, but that’s what she said.)

She rattled a few keys. The screen’s snowstorm responded not at all.

“Control alt delete,” she said to herself, and hit three keys simultaneously.

Nothing happened, again.

“Hmm,” she said. She reached forward and prodded a stud on the machine. The screen turned black.

“So much for that one,” she said. She stood up and leaned over the table and started looking more closely at the various boxes.

“Hey!” she said. “Got it! One of these looks like it’s radiation-hardened!” She reached in among the boxes and started fiddling dangerously with live cables, removing a lead from the back of the box we’d used and sticking it in the back of another one. What had seemed to be merely the blank front of that box suddenly lit up, a smoothly shining grey, revealing itself to be a screen.

“Yess!” said Merrial, punching the air.

By this point I was beginning to get a grip on myself, though I must admit I almost lost it completely when Merrial turned around and prodded a letter on the keyboard and the words “Demon Internet Software” flashed up on the screen.

Allah, Buddha, Christ…

“All right,” Merrial said briskly, as the screen with the three sinister names disappeared and was replaced by a picture with lots of tiny pictures spread out on it. “We’ve got this bugger up and running, but Christ knows how long it’ll stay up.” (She talked this way, I’d come to notice, with its curious combination of obscure sexual and religious references, when she was in what she’d called her “tinker mode’.) “So what we better do is whip the stuff out of it ay ess ay pee.”

“Out of it what?”

“As. Soon. As. Possible.”

“Oh, right. Toot sweet.”

“What?”

I waved a hand. “Let’s get on with it, as you say.”

“Yip.”

She carefully uncoiled one of the strands of copper wire, and attached a little peg with a copper pin to the end. This she inserted in a round hole (which, she explained, did not fucking have to be round the fucking back, but fucking was) in the pediment of the computer.

“Right,” she said. The tip of her tongue between her lips, she tapped out the words “Myra Godwin”, the name of the Deliverer, on the key-board. They simultaneously appeared on the screen and on the now black seer- stone.

“Go,” she said, hitting another key.

A few seconds passed (tongue between the teeth again) and the screen and the stone filled with a list of tides which crept slowly upwards, its top moving out of sight, and which kept on going for several minutes.

When the list had stopped its crawl she said, “OK, copy,” and rattled at the keyboard again. A picture of an hourglass appeared on the screen, and the sand began to run. The seer-stone, meanwhile, showed a tree, branching and budding and growing leaves.

After about a minute and a half the sand had all flowed from the top half of the glass, and the stone was filled with green. Both displays vanished.

“That’s it,” Menial said.

“That’s all?”

Tes,” she grinned. “That’s all the files that mention Myra Godwin transferred, from the dark storage to the stane. No bad going, eh?”

“Brilliant,” I said. She stood up, leaned around behind the computer again, disconnected her wire and wound it quickly around her hand. Then she poked a few more keys on both keyboards. The screen went that shining grey again, and the stone went back to black.

She smiled at me. “You have my permission to turn the power off.”

We left the small room, and the larger library, exactly as we had found them, and walked quietly down the stairs and out of the Institute. When we were a few metres down the street and away we hugged each other and yelped.

“We did it!” Menial gloated. “We actually fucking did it!”

“Yes, I still can hardly believe it,” I said. I caught her hand. “Now what do we do?”