The Sky Road

“We look at what we’ve got,” she said. “Somewhere no one will see us, or bother us.”

I knew just the place.

Because it was vacation time there were few students around, so my landlady was happy to rent me my usual small room above the book shop on South-park Avenue for one night. She didn’t raise an eyebrow as she took my five marks and handed over a bedroom key, even though it was only about half past four in the afternoon. I suppose she assumed we wanted to use the room for sex.

She gave us a quick cup of coffee and shared a smoke, and a couple of months’ worth of local gossip, in the back of her kitchen, then waved us upstairs with a wink at me. The room had a fairly generous, though notionally single, bed and a chair and table and power socket. The window had been left open, but its only view was of the back yard. Still, one could look out and see the sky any time one wanted.

“Perfect,” Merrial said.

She unloaded the seer-stone and its peripheral pieces again and set them up on the table, running a small cable from the black box to the wall socket. The little box began to hum faintly, and at the same moment a human face loomed out of the dark of the seer-stone, mouthing distress.

“Ah, fuck that,” Merrial said. She rubbed the stone with a cuff, and the face fell apart into flecks of colour. “Now,” she said, “let’s get on with sorting and searching. We’re looking for stuff from before the Deliverance, but finding it in this lot won’t necessarily be easy. Let’s hope the files are date-stamped.”

She sat in the chair, motioning to me to perch on the table, and started tapping away at her version of a keyboard. “Ah, good, we can sort by date.”

The list reappeared in the depths of the glassy stone, this time with a stack of articles at the top with a single date of 28 May 2059. Merrial stroked with her finger gently and slowly along a tiny bar on the keyboard, then tapped another key. “Let’s see what this is.”

We peered together into the glass and began to read.

Bankrupt of any perspective for overcoming the crisis, the ruling elite can only sit and watch as society disintegrates beneath it Factories fail to fulfil their obligations, corruption is rife, and the real value produced in the economy continues to plummet. Many industrial sectors actually produce negative value: their output is worth less—in market or any other terms—than the raw materials they take in; in essence, they are vast organizations for spoiling resources.

In the absence of any genuine move towards a market, or —from the other side—any initiative from the workers, the system can only continue to disintegrate.

“Sounds like 2059 all right,” Menial said. That was what the Deliverance delivered us from.”

I nodded, cautiously. “Let’s just look further down…”

What cannot be ruled out is that the Moscow oligarchy could launch some diversionary military adventure, but this too would rapidly develop its own problems, and intensify those of the centre.

“Damn!” I said.

“What?”

“This isn’t 2059, it’s more like 1999!”

The invasion of Afghanistan must be seen in this context.

“No, it’s 1979! Well—” I frowned at the date at the foot of the article “—actually 1980, but it was written about the situation in ’79. In the Soviet Union.” I laughed bitterly. “The reason it’s a bit difficult to tell at first what period she’s talking about is that it was in the Soviet Union that the collapse started, right there in the 1970s. After the Soviet Union disintegrated it just got worse, and spread.”

This much was a fairly well-accepted historical account, which I’d covered in my undergraduate studies in Ancient History.

“So why’s it dated 2059?” Menial asked. She stroked the bar and rolled the list down again. “Hah!” she said. “This file, and a whole lot of others by the look of it, were put on to the computer at that date. Which doesn’t mean they were created then. I don’t know if I can extract the original creation date, either.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Maybe this is where I can help. I should be able to tell the rough date from the titles of the files, or maybe a quick look at their contents.”

“There are thousands of files in there,” she pointed out. “If dating each of them takes as long as it did to date that one, we’ll be here all night.”

I smiled. “Why should that be a problem?”

It turned out not to be a problem. Although the bulk of the files had the same date in the “date” column of Menial’s machine, and she gave up looking for a way to find what she called the “create-date”, quite a large number of the files had a date reference of some kind in their titles. These were apparendy articles from magazines or newspapers, by Myra Godwin or about her. We quite quickly got into a way of working that let me identify such files, and Menial deal with them, copying the date from the title to another “date” column. After ten minutes of this she hit her forehead with the heel of her hand and cried, “Stop!”

“What is it?”

“We’re wasting our time. I’m wasting our time, I mean.” She rubbed her hands. “What we need here is a wee program, to scan the titles for dates, extract them, reformat them and then sort by date…”

“I’ll take your word for it,” I said, not having understood all of her words. She waved me away, with a look of abstracted concentration on her face.

“This’ll be easy,” she said. “It’ll save us hours.”

I sat on the windowsill, smoking a cigarette, while her fingers flickered over the small keyboard, making a pattering noise like rain on a roof. It struck me that there seemed to be no discernible difference between the white logic and the black, but no doubt this only showed my ignorance.

“Tessl,” she said. “No bother.”

She hit a key and sat back. Then she leaned forward again, peering at the stone.

“Oh fuck!”

I eyed her warily.

“I used fucking two-digit year-dates. Force of habit. Fucking thing falls over on the year 2000.”

The pattering started again.

About half an hour later Menial had the files partially ordered by date, and we could dig about in them with a little more confidence in their relevance to our concerns.

“ ‘Defence Policy Contract (Expiry), Vatican City, 11 December 2046’,” Menial read out. “That looks interesting.”

She pressed one of her keys and the file, as she put it, opened: instead of the title glowing a little brighter among the others, we could see the whole document. Parts of it were in impenetrable legal language (parts of it, in fact, were in Latin) but there was enough there for us to form a good idea of what it was about.

Menial paused before opening another file, one labelled “Mutual Protection/Space Merchants/ 2058”.

We looked at each other, both a little pale, each waiting for the other to speak first.

Menial swallowed hard, and reached for one of my cigarettes.

“You do know,” she said slowly, “just what the Deliverer had to do to make a living, under the Possession?”

“Well…” I could feel my lower lip moving back and forth over the edge of my teeth, and stopped it. “Yes. It’s one of the aspects of history that historians tend not to talk about. In popular works, that is.”

“OhhF Menial let out a held breath in relief. “You know about the slave camps, then.”

“What?” For a fleeting instant, I literally saw a black shadow before my eyes. I pointed at the seer-stone’s script. “I thought you were talking about the nuclear blackmail!”

Menial looked puzzled. “Nuclear blackmail? I know she got some nuclear weapons from the Papanich, that’s right here. What has that to do with how she made her living?”

“Oh, Reason above!” I clutched my head. “Let’s get this straight. You think the dirty secret is that she ran slave camps. I think it’s that she trafficked in nuclear threats.”

Menial sighed. “Yes, that’s it.” She unfurled her hand and forearm with parodied politeness. Tou first.”