it. At the yard, I daily endured the merciless mockery which my mates seemed to think entirely compatible with continued friendly relations in other respects. In the softer circumstances of my previous experience—in childhood, schooling and University—some of their insults and abuse would have occasioned life-long, smouldering enmity, if not immediate physical violence. Here they passed as light-hearted badinage, and it was their ignoring rather than avenging that was taken as a token of manly honour.
The stand-offish attitudes of the tinkers at the camp were harder to take, but Menial insistently reassured me that they were a similar test, of the strength of my commitment to their ways, and to her. As the days and weeks passed their reactions to me had gradually warmed to the point of a frigid, prickly politeness.
Merrial and I were, by tinker custom, bundling—trying out the experience of living together before making a public commitment I was enjoying the experiment and I was as committed as I could ever imagine being, and so was Merrial, but neither of us was in any hurry to move our relationship on to a more formal basis. A tinker marriage is a serious matter, involving among other horrendous expenses—seamstresses, cooks, musicians—that of keeping hundreds of people drunk for a week.
Merrial looked over at me.
Time to go?”
“Aye.”
We stood up and made our way back, easier now, through the thinning crowd. For obvious reasons, alcohol was strictly banned from the site, and from this day’s event. Everybody was heading back for the towns, starting with the nearest, Courthill. The end of the project, and the final pay-packets and bonuses, would be celebrated by drinking the pubs dry over the course of the afternoon and evening.
We wandered along the path back to the main road, occasionally greeting people we knew. The stage from which the speeches had been made stood empty, and was already being dismantled. The various dignitaries were moving down the path in a compact group, and I hurried a little to overtake them on the grass, eager for a closer glimpse of the famous men and women who had travelled far to honour our achievement. Menial observed this behaviour with sardonic toleration.
I was pointing out a renowned Russian astronomer and an English spacecraft engineer to Menial when we both noticed Fergal towards the rear of the procession, walking alone among them all. I was surprised to see him, then realised that I shouldn’t be—he had been the project manager on the guidance system, after all. At the same moment, he noticed us. He beckoned us over.
Menial glanced at me. I shrugged. We went over and joined him, I making sure that I walked between him and Menial. I felt uneasily that we had no place there, but the rest of the dignitaries politely paid us no attention whatever, to the extent that they noticed us at all, and weren’t simply caught up in their own deep conversations.
He looked at us sidelong, without hostility. Our confrontation might as well never have happened, for all that he showed of bearing any grudge. For myself, it was different.
“How have you two been getting on?” he asked. He’d obviously heard of our bundling.
“Oh, fine. Great!”
Menial caught my hand and swung it. “This one’s no an outsider any more, I’ll tell you that.”
“Good.” He smiled, and changed the subject. “It’s a great day for us all.”
“Aye,” I said. “But I’ll not be sure of it until the ship’s in orbit.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that,” he said. His gaze flicked to Menial’s eyes. “The ship is safe.”
“How are
“Who—oh, the AI!”
“What?”
“Art-if-icial In-tell-igence,” Fergal and Menial articulated at the same moment. I glanced from one to the other and laughed.
T have to learn that sort of thing sometime!”
“Indeed you do,” said Fergal indulgently. “Still, you have plenty of centuries ahead to learn it.”
“Well, I suppose two is plenty, at that,” I replied, puzzled at this odd remark.
Fergal stopped, then hastened on as others trod on our heels.
“She hasn’t told you?”
Menial was looking at him and at me with a mute appeal that somehow seemed to mean something different for both of us. Fergal firmly shook his head.
“Well, she bloody should have.”
“I didn’t want to—” began Menial.
“Give him an improper inducement? Or scare him off?” Fergal smiled sourly. “Like it or not, Mer-rial MacGlafferty, it’s a bit late for either now, wouldn’t you think?”
“Oh, I’m not sure he’s ready—”
“Will you two,” I said, “please stop talking as if I wasn’t there?”
Fergal glanced over his shoulder, looked ahead, then turned his gaze to the ground and spoke in a low voice.
“Do you know why people today live longer than they did until some time before the Deliverance?”
“Aye,” I said. “I found references to it in the Deliverer’s papers. Life-extension treatments. I suppose in some way the effects must have persisted, and become hereditary.”
“Close enough,” he said, evidently resisting an impulse to quibble. “Well, the people who became the ancestors of the tinkers had a better treatment.”
My heart thudded. “How much better?”
He looked around again. A couple of metres separated us from the others on that path, before and behind.
“So much better that we don’t know how much better it is.”
I looked at Menial, feeling the blood drain from my face, and then rush back. I squeezed her hand.
“Well, if you’ll have me, I don’t care if you do oudive me, and stay young while I grow old.” Easy enough to say, when you’re twenty-two and don’t believe that ageing or death have any personal application in the first place. But to my surprise, Mer-rial laughed.
“This one isn’t genetic, any more than the other,” she said. “It’s—”
“Infectious,” said Fergal. “Or is it contagious? I can never remember.”
“Whatever,” said Menial. “It’s, urn, sexually transmitted.”
She sounded almost embarrassed.
Fergal, it seemed, was still welcome in The Carcon-ade, and even Druin, when he passed him at the bar, was affable towards him. I guessed, myself, after my third litre and sixth whisky, that the tinker Internationalist was anxious to show us his friendly side. I remained unpersuaded by it, but decided to make the most of it while it lasted. I had still not assimilated the news that I could expect to live longer than I’d ever expected, and it would take me long enough to do it.
“So what,” I asked him, at a corner table in the security of the raucous din around us, “was that thing Menial found? The AI?”
“It’s… a planner,” he said. “A mind that can coordinate an entire economy. Something we’re going to need, some day.”
“After your glorious revolution?”
“Yes, and maybe before. It’s a revolutionary itself.”
“So what are you going to do with it?” I asked.
Fergal might have been, as Jeanna had said, able to hold his drink. He may well have not done or said anything without calculating its effect on the vectors of his purposes. But I’m sure it was a reckless impulse that made him say what he said next.
“It’s on the ship. Well, a copy of it, anyway.”
He was looking at me, not at Menial, as he spoke. He didn’t see what I saw: the momentary flash of triumph and delight on Menial’s face. That glimpse, as much as his words, must have drained the colour from mine. And then—I could see her dissembling—by the time Fergal turned to her, she looked even more shocked than I felt.
“Why the hell did you do that?” she asked.
Fergal leaned in and lowered his voice. “I learned a few things from the AI,” he said. “Its memories go right
