The Sky Road

grab a corner seat while I bought a couple of pints and a brace of whiskies. By the empty fireplace a fiddler played and a woman sang, an aching Gaelic threnody of loss.

Merrial knocked back her whisky in one deft swallow, and summer returned to her face.

“Jesus!” she swore. “I needed that. Give me a cigarette.”

I complied, gazing at her while lighting it, glancing covertly around while I lit my own. The pub, which I’d patronised throughout my student years, was a friendly and comfortable place, though its wall decorations could chill you a bit if you pondered on them: framed reproductions of ancient posters and notices and regulations about “actively seeking employment” and “receiving benefit”. It was something to do with living on public assistance, which is what many quite hale and able folk, known as claimants, had had to resort to in the days of the Possession, when land was owned by lairds and capital by usurers.

The usual two old geezers were recalling their first couple of centuries in voices raised to cope with the slight hearing impairment that comes with age; a gang of lads around a big table were gambling for pennies, and several pairs of other lovers were intent only on each other; and the singer’s song floated high notes over them all.

“You were about to say?” I said. My own voice was shakier than Menial’s had been at any point in the whole incident. At the same time I felt giddy with relief at our escape, and a strange exciting mixture of dread and exaltation at the sure knowledge that my life was henceforth unpredictable.

“I wasn’t,” Menial said, “but I’ll tell you anyway. That thing we saw was the deil that guards the files. But,” she added brightly, “blowing fuses for several blocks around was the worst it could do.”

“Hey, that’s comforting.”

“Yes, it is,” she said, in a very definite tone. “Better that than an electric shock that burns your hands or a fire that brings down the whole building. Or—”

“What?”

“I’ve heard of worse. Ones that attack your mind through your eyes.”

“And there you were laughing at the very idea, back at the yard.”

“Aye, well,” she said. “It was just me that had to face them. No sense in getting you worried.”

“Oh, thanks.”

She took my hand. “No, you were brave in there.”

“Ach, not a bit of it,” I agreed.

“So, after all, we didn’t get much,” I said, returning to our table with refilled glasses about two minutes later. Outside, I could hear a growing commotion of militia rattles and whistles and fire-brigade bells. Somewhere across the street, a vehicle with a flashing light trundled slowly past.

Menial looked up from riffling through the folders.

“Well, you got the 2050s and the 1990s,” she said.

That’s something. What I got —” she patted her bag, grinning “—was a whole lot more. Maybe everything, I don’t know yet.”

I put the glasses down very carefully.

“The… um, barrier… didn’t work, then?”

“Up to a point. Like I said, my machine, and the logic on it, are stronger than the other one. It just couldn’t stop that thing from doing what it kept warning it would do. You can steal a bone from a dog if you ignore the barks and don’t mind the bites.” In a less smug tone, she added, “But it all depends on how much I pulled out before I had to…”

Tull out!”

“Yes.”

“So what do we do now?” I looked down at the folders. “I suppose I’ll have to try and square things with Dr. Gantry.” Confused thoughts fought in my mind, like those programs Menial talked about. One sequence of impulses made me think through a scheme of grovelling apology and covering up and smoothing over. Another made me realize that I was almost certainly in very deep trouble with the University authorities, and had quite possibly affronted Gantry in ways that he might find hard to forgive.

“Oh, and how are you going to do that?” Merrial asked. “I reckon he won’t be too pleased about your running off with this lot.”

“That he won’t,” I said gloomily. “But I could always say I grabbed them to save them, or something, and that I’ll return them in a few days. After photocopying them, of course. No, it’s the other thing that’ll have him pissed off. Heaven knows what damage that thing did—I doubt it was just a power cut. More like blown fuses all over the place, maybe worse. That’ll be looked into, and not just by the University. And he’s going to want to know who you are and what we were up to.”

“Hmm.” Menial blew out a thin stream of smoke, observing it as though it were a divination. “Well, seeing as he knows my name, and where I work… tell you what, colha Gree. Assume he does make a fuss, or somebody else asks questions. What I do not want getting out is that this has anything to do with the ship, or with… my folk. What we can say, and with some truth, is that you were led by excess of zeal to poke around in… the dark place. That you inveigled me into helping you. That you’re very sorry, you got your fingers burned, and you won’t do it again. And that of course the files you took will not be seen by anyone outside the community of scholars. Their photocopies, now, they might be seen, but you need say nothing of that.”

I had been thinking of counting Menial as an honorary scholar in my own version of that bit of casuistry, but hers would do at a pinch. My two conflicting programs meshed: I was in trouble, yes, but I could get out of it, by the aforementioned grovelling and covering up.

The clock above the bar showed the time was a quarter past ten.

“I doubt Gantry’s still around,” I said. “And I don’t know where he lives, or his phone number, if he has one. I suppose the best thing to do is see him in the morning, before we leave.” I took my return ticket from my pocket. “Train leaves at forty minutes before noon. I’ll be round to see him at nine, and try and straighten things out.”

Menial nodded. “Sound plan,” she said. She cocked an ear. “Things seem to be quietening down, but I don’t think wandering around back there would be a good idea right now.”

“D’you want to go back and check over what we’ve got?”

“Dhia, no! I’ve looked at enough of that for one day. I want to stay here and drink with you, and maybe dance with you—if a wee bit of siller can make that fiddler change his tune—and then go back to the lodging and test the strength of that bed with you.”

That is not what we should have done, I grant you; but are you surprised at all that it is what we did?

I sat on the steps outside the Institute, in the still, chill morning under the shadows of the great trees, and looked at my watch. Ten to nine. I sighed and lit another cigarette. A couple of hundred metres away a pneumatic drill started hammering. Brightly painted trestles and crossbeams and piles of broken tarmac indicated that some similar work had been done already during the night.

The path of power, indeed. One reason why it’s called that is that electronic computation is inextricably and unpredictably linked to electrical power generation, and can disrupt it in expensive and dangerous ways. I had an unpleasant suspicion that the cost of all this was, one way or another, going to meander through some long system of City Council and University Senate accountancy, and arrive at my feet.

“Good morning, Clovis.” I looked up at Gantry. He had his pipe in one hand and a key in the other. “Come on in.”

His office had a window that occupied most of one wall, giving a soothing view of a weed-choked back yard, and bookcases on the others. Every vertical surface in the room was stained slightly yellow, and every horizontal surface was under a fine layer of tobacco ash. I wiped ineffectually at the wooden chair in front of his desk while he sat down on the leather one behind it.

He regarded me for a moment, blinking; ran his fingers through his short hair; sighed and began refilling his pipe.

“Well, colha Gree,” he said, after a minute of intimidating silence, “you have no idea how much my respect for you has increased by your coming here. When I saw you a moment ago, stubbing out your cigarette on the pavement, I thought, ‘Now, there’s a man who knows to do the decent thing.’ Considerable improvement on your blue funk last night; considerable.”

I cleared my throat, vaguely thinking that whatever the doctors may say, there must be something harmful in a habit which makes your lungs feel so rough in the morning. “Aye, well, Dr. Gantry, it wasn’t yourself I was afraid of.”