The Sky Road

7 The Claimant Bar

Out we went into the summer dusk. Moths sought the sun in street-lamps, baffled. The few quiet roads between the house and the Institute were crowded now, with local residents taking advantage of the slack season in bars normally jammed with students. Lads strutting their tight dark trousers, lasses swaying their big bright skirts. We must have looked a less happy couple, harried and hurrying.

A few lights burnt in the Institute, one of them the light in the corridor. As we stepped in and closed the door, the smell of pipe-smoke was stronger than before, and familiar.

“Someone’s around,” Menial whispered.

“Yes,” I replied, “it’s—”

Right on cue, an office door down the corridor opened and Anders Gantry stepped out. A small man with strong arms and a beer-barrel of a belly, hair curling grey like the smoke from his inseparable pipe. His shirt was merely grubby—his wife managed to impose fresh linen on him every week or so—but his jacket had not been cleaned in years. It smelled like it had been used to beat down fires, which it had.

He was the best historical scholar in the University, and quite possibly in the whole British Isles; and the kindest and most modest man I’d ever met.

“Ah, hello, Clovis,” he boomed. “How good to see you!” He strode up and shook hands. “And who’s your friend?”

“Menial—Dr. Anders Gantry,” I said.

He held her hand and inclined his head over her knuckles. “Charmed.” He looked at her in a vaguely puzzled way for a moment, then turned to me. “Now, colha Gree, what can I do for you?”

Gantry had agreed to supervise my project; it was a persistent irritant to my conscience that I hadn’t seen or written to him all summer.

“Oh, nothing at the moment, Dr. Gantry. I’ve been doing a fair bit of preliminary research up North, and I’ve about finished the standard references.” I rubbed my ear, uneasily remembering the dust on the books. “And I thought I’d take the opportunity of a wee visit to Glasgow to drop by the library.”

“That’s very commendable,” he said. I was unsure of the exact level of irony in his voice, but it was there. “We’ve rather missed you around here.”

“He works very hard,” Menial put in. “The space-launch platform project is on a tight schedule.”

“Oh, so that’s where you are. Kishorn. Hmm. Good money to be made up there, I hear. And you, miss?”

“I have an office job there,” Menial said blandly. She shot me a smile. “That’s how I know he works hard. He’s saving up money to live on next year.”

“Well, I suppose there are ways and ways of preparing for a project,” said Gantry, in a more indulgent tone. “No luck with patronage yet, I take it?”

“None so far, no.”

He clapped me around the shoulders. “Perhaps you should try to extract some research money from the space scientists,” he said. “Our great Deliverer had much to do with spaceflight herself. There might still be lessons in her life story, eh?”

Menial’s face froze and I felt my knees turning to rubber.

“Now that’s a thought,” I said, as calmly as possible.

Gantry guffawed. “Aye, you might even fool them into thinking that!” he said. “Good luck if you do. Now that you’re getting stuck in, Clovis, I have something to show you.” He grinned, revealing his teeth, yellow as a dog’s. “It’s in the library.”

With that he turned away and bounded up the stairs. I followed, mouthing and gesturing helplessness to Menial. To my relief, she seemed more amused than alarmed.

By the time we arrived at the open door of the library he’d vanished into the shadows.

“What are we going to do?” I whispered to Menial.

“If he stays around, you keep him busy,” she said. “I’ll get the goods.”

I was about to tell her how unlikely she was to get away with that when Gantry came puffing up, carrying a load of cardboard folders that reached from his clasped hands at his belt to his uppermost chin.

“Here we are,” he said, lowering the tottering stack on to a table. He sneezed. “Filthy with dust, I’m afraid.” He wiped his nose and hands on an even dirtier handkerchief. “But it’s time you had a look at it: Myra Godwin’s personal archive.”

“That really is amazing,” I said. My voice sounded like a twelve-year-old boy seeing a girl naked for the first time. I picked them up and put them down, one by one. Eight altogether: bulging cardboard wallets ordered by decade, from the 1970s to the 2050s.

I hardly dared to breathe on them as I opened the first one and looked at the document on the top of the pile, a shoddily cyclostyled, rusty-stapled bundle of pages with the odd title Building a revolutionary party in capitalist America. Published as a fraternal courtesy to the cosmic current.

“Why haven’t I seen these before?” I asked.

Gantry shuffled uncomfortably. He glanced at Menial, rubbed his chin and said, “Am I right in thinking you’re a tinker?”

“You’re right, I am that,” Merrial said, without hesitation.

Gantry smiled, looking relieved. “Urn, well. Between ourselves and all that. Scholars and tinkers both know, I’m sure, that we have to be… discreet, about the Deliverer’s… more discreditable deeds and, ah, youthful follies. So, although previous biographers have seen these documents, we don’t tend to show them to undergraduates. What I hope, Clovis, is that you’ll see a way to go beyond the, um, shall we say hagiographic treatments of the past, without…” He paused, sucking at his lower lip. “Ah, well, no need to spell it out.”

“Of course not,” I said.

I looked at the master scholar with what I’m sure must have been an expression of gratifying respect. “Shall we have a look through them now?”

Gantry stepped back and threw up his hands in mock horror. “No, no! Can’t have me looking over your shoulder at the raw material, Clovis. Unaided original work, and all that. This is yours, and there’s a thesis in there if ever I saw one. No, it’s time I was off and left you to it.” He hesitated. “Ah, I shouldn’t need to tell you, colha Gree, but not a word about this, or a single page of it, outside, all right?”

I had a brief, intense tussle with my conscience, which neatly tripped me up and jumped on me. “Nothing for the vulgar, of course,” I said carefully. “But in principle I could, well, show it to or discuss it with other scholars?”

“Goes without saying,” Gantry confirmed jovially. He tapped the side of his nose. “If you can find anyone you’d trust not to claim it as their own.” He winked at Menial. “Untrustworthy bunch, these scholars, I think you’ll find.” He punched me, playfully as he thought, in the ribs. “Confidence, man, confidence! I’m sure you have the wit to understand and explicate this lot yourself, and it’ll make your name, you mark my words!”

“Thank you,” I said, after a painful intake of breath. “Well… I think I’ll make a start right now.”

“Yes, indeed. Splendid idea. Don’t stay up too late.” His complicitous grin made it obvious that he thought it unlikely that we’d stay up too late. “Best be off then,” he said, as though to himself, then backed to the door and turned away.

“Good night to you, sir!” Menial called out after him.

“Good night,” came faintly back from the stairwell.

Menial let out a long breath.

“What a strange little man,” she said, in the manner of someone who has just encountered one of the Wee Folk.

“He’s not entirely typical of scholars,” I said.

“I should hope not,” Menial said. “Wouldn’t want you turning into something like that.”

“Heaven forbid,” I said, adding loyally, “but he’s a fine man for all his funny ways.” I looked down at the stack of folders. “Maybe it would be a good idea,” I said slowly, “if you were to do your thing with the computer, and I could stay here, just in case he comes back.”

“Oh, and leave me to face the deils all on my own?” Merrial mocked, then laughed, relenting. “Aye, that is not a bad idea. If he or anyone else comes in, keep them busy. I’ll not be long, and I’ll be fine.”

“What about this security barrier?”

She waved a hand and made a rude noise. Taugh! This wee gadget here has routines that can roast security barriers over a firewall and eat them for breakfast.”

Considering how she’d had to program something a lot simpler than that to sort out the dates, I doubted her, but supposed that was the black logic for you.

She smiled and slipped away; after an anxious minute of listening, I heard the sound of the inner door being opened and the scrape of a chair being dragged across the floor and propped against it. I relaxed a little and turned again to the files—to the paper files, I mentally corrected myself, for the first time making the connection between “files” in Merrial’s and, I presumed, tinkers’ usage, and my own.

I was eager to get into the early decades, but I knew that would be somewhat self-indulgent, and that I would have plenty of time for that It was the later years, closer to the time of the Deliverance, that were hidden from history. I picked up the folder for the final decade, the 2050s, and was about to open it when I heard Merrial scream.

I don’t remember getting to the door of the dark archive. I only remember standing there, my forward momentum arrested by a shock of dread that stopped me like a sparrow hitting a window. The file folder, absurdly enough, was still in my hands, and I held up that heavy mass of flimsy paper and fragile cardboard like a weapon—or a shield.

Merrial too was holding a weapon—the chair she’d been sitting on, and had evidently just sprung out of. In front of her, and above the computer, in a lattice of ruby light, stood the figure of a man. He was a tall man, and stout with it, his antique garb of cream-coloured jacket and trousers flapping and his shock of white hair streaming in the same invisible gale that had blown his hat away down some long corridor whose diminishing perspective carried it far beyond the walls of the room. His face was red and wrathful, his fist shaking, his mouth shouting something we couldn’t hear.

Holding the chair above her head, her forearm in front of her eyes, chanting some arcane abracadabra, Merrial advanced like one facing into a fire, and seized her seer-stone and machinery from the table. Its wire, yanked from its inconveniently placed socket, lashed back like a snapped fishing-line. The litde peg at the end, now bent like a fishhook, flew towards me and rapped against the file-folder. Merrial whirled around at the same moment, and saw me. She gave me a look worth dying for, and then a calm smile.

“Time to go,” she said. She let the chair clatter down, and turned again to face the silently screaming entity she’d aroused. As she backed away from the thing, it vanished. A mechanism somewhere in the computer whirred, then stopped. A light on its face flickered, briefly, then went out.

All the lights went out. From downstairs we faindy heard an indignant yell. I could hear Merrial stuffing her apparatus back in its sack. She bumped into me, still walking backwards.

Holding hands as though on a precipice, we made our way through the library’s suffocating dark. I could smell the dry ancient papers, the friable glue and frayed thread and leather of the bindings. From those fibres the ancients could have resurrected lost species of trees and breeds of cattle, I thought madly. Pity they hadn’t.

After a long minute our eyes began to adjust to the faint light that filtered in past window-blinds, and from other parts of the building. We walked with more confidence through the maze towards the door. On the ground floor of the building we could hear Gantry blundering and banging about.

Then, behind us, I heard a stealthy step. Menial heard it too and froze, her hand in mine suddenly damp. Another step, and the sound of something dragging. I almost broke into a screeching run.

“It’s all right,” Menial said, her voice startlingly loud. “It’s a sound-projection—just another thing to scare us off.”

Behind us, a low, deep laugh.

“Steady,” said Menial.

My thigh hit the edge of the table by the door. “Just a second,” I said. I let go of her hand, grabbed one more file-folder, put it in my other hand and then caught Menial’s hand again.

We reached the library door, slammed it behind us and descended the stairs as fast as we safely could, or faster. Then we lost all caution and simply fled, rushing headlong past Gantry’s angry and puzzled face, lurid in the small flame of the pipe-lighter he held above his head, and out into the night.

Night it was—for hundreds of metres around, all the power was off. We stopped running when we reached the first functioning street-lamps, on Great Western Road.

I looked at Menial’s face, shiny with sweat, yellow in the sodium puddle.

“What in the name of Reason was that?”

Merrial shook her head. “My mouth’s dry,” she croaked. “I need a drink.”

My feet led me unerringly to the nearest bar, the Claimant. It was quiet that evening, and Merrial was able to 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.”

“Oh,” he said dryly, “and what was it then, hmm?”

Without meaning to, I found my gaze drifting upward. “It was, uh, the demon internet software that I’m afraid I and my friend, um, accidentally invoked.”

Gantry lit his pipe and sent out a cloud of smoke.

“Yes, I had gathered that. And what on earth possessed you—so to speak—to poke around in the dark storage when I’d just given you more than enough material for years of study?”

I met his gaze again. “It was my idea,” I said. “Call it—excess of zeal. I got the idea before you gave me the papers, of course, but even after that I thought we might as well go through with it I’m afraid I was—rather blinded by the lust for knowledge.”

“And by another kind of lust, I shouldn’t wonder.”

Gantry said. “This friend of yours, she’s more than that, am I right?”

There seemed no point in denying it, so I didn’t.

“All right,” he said. He jabbed his pipe-stem at me, thumbed the stubble on his chin, and gnawed at his lower lip for a moment. “All right. First of all, let me say that the University administration has a job to do which is different from the self-administration of the academic community. It has to maintain the physical fabric of the place, and its supplies and services and so forth, and with the best will in the world I can’t interfere with any measures of investigation and discipline which it may see fit to take in this unfortunate matter. You appreciate that, don’t you?”

“Yes, of course.”

Tine. Well… as to any academic repercussions, there I can speak up for you, I can… refrain from volunteering information about how the demonic outbreak took place. But I can’t lie on your behalf, old chap. I’ll do my best for you, because I think it would be a shame to throw away someone with so much promise over what, as you say, was excess of scholarly zeal. Very understandable temptation, and all that. Some of the Senatus might well think to themselves, ‘Been there, done that—young once myself—fingers burnt—learned his lesson—say no more about it,’ and all that sort of thing.”

I relaxed a little on the hard chair. I’d been fiddling with a cigarette for a while, unsure if I had permission to smoke; Gantry leaned over with his lighter, absently almost taking my eyebrows off with its kerosene flare.

“Thank you.”

“However,” he went on, leaning back in his own chair, “there are some wider issues.” He waved his pipe about, vaguely indicating the surrounding shelves of hard-won knowledge. “We British are beginning to get the hang of this civilisation game. When the Romans left, there wasn’t a public library or a flush toilet or a decent road or a postman to be seen for a thousand years. When the American empire fell, I think we can honestly say we did a damn sight better, and indeed better than most. We lost the electronic libraries, of course, and a great deal of knowledge, but the infrastructure of civilisation pulled through the troubled times reasonably intact. In some respects, even improved. A great deal of that we owe to the very fact that the electronic records were lost—and along with them the chains of usury and rent, and the other… dark powers which held the world in what they even then had the gall to call ‘The Net.’ ”

He stood up and ambled along to a corner and leaned his elbow on a shelf. “What we have instead of the net is the tinkers.” He waved his hands again. “And telephony and telegraphy and libraries and so forth, of course, but that’s beside the point. The tinkers look after our computation, which even with the path of light most of us are… unwilling to do, because of what happened in the past, but are grateful there’s somebody to do it. This makes them… not quite a pariah people, but definitely a slightly stigmatised occupation. And that very stigma, you see, paradoxically ensures—or gives some assurance of—the purity of their product. It keeps the two paths, the light and the dark, separate. You see what I’m driving at?”

“No,” I said. “I’m afraid I don’t.”

“Oh.” He looked a little disappointed at my slowness on the uptake. “Well, not to put too fine a point on it, it’s one thing for scholars to risk their own bodies or souls with the dark storage. Not done, so to speak, but between you and me and the gatepost, it is done. It’s quite another for a tinker to do it. Could contaminate the seer-stones, y’see. Bad business.”

He stalked over and stared at me. The upshot, my friend, is that you had better get your tinker girlfriend back here with whatever she took, and get those file-folders you borrowed back here with it, if you want to have this episode overlooked. Clear?”

Yes, but—”

“No ‘buts’, Clovis. You don’t have much time. Get out and get back before anyone else notices, that’s the ticket.”

“I’ll do what I can,” I said, truthfully enough, and left.

As I hurried back to the lodging I kept trying to think what the hell we could do. I’d been hoping to hang on to the paper files for at least a week, which should give me enough time to see if there was anything of urgent significance in them. There was no way, however, that Menial could “return” whatever computer files she had managed to retrieve. She could pretend to delete them from her seer-stone’s memory, but I doubted if that would fool Gantry. He would want the stone itself, and she was most unlikely to give it to him.

The landlady let me in, because I’d left the outside door key with Menial. I gave her a forced smile and ran up the stairs, and knocked on the door of the room where I’d left Menial drowsing. No reply came, so I quietly opened the door.

Menial wasn’t there. Nor was anything that belonged to her. Nor were the two file-folders. I looked around, bewildered for a moment, and then remembered what Menial had said about photocopying the documents. I felt weak with relief. I gathered up my own gear, checked again that there was nothing of ours left in the room, and went downstairs.

“ Aye,” said the landlady, “the lassie went out a wee while after you did. She left the key with me.”

“Did she ask about photocopying shops around here?”

“No. But there’s only one, just around the corner. You cannae miss it.”

“Aw, thanks!”

I rushed out again and along the street and around the corner. The shop was there, sure enough, but Merrial wasn’t. Nobody answering to her—fairly unmistakable—description had called.

I wandered down Great Western Road in a sort of daze, and stopped at the parapet of the bridge over the Kelvin. The other bridge, which we’d crossed on the tram, was a few hundred metres upstream; the ruins of an Underground station, boarded-off and covered with grim warnings, was on the far bank. The riverside fish restaurant, where we’d eaten last night, sent forth smells of deep-fried batter. The river swirled along, the ash of my anxious cigarette not disturbing the smallest of its ripples.

She could not have just gone off with the goods; I was loyal enough to her to be confident in her loyalty to me, and did not even consider—except momentarily, hypothetically—that she’d simply used me to get at the information she sought. The most drastic remaining possibility was that she had somehow been got at herself, and had left under some urgent summons, or duress. But the landlady would surely have noticed any such thing, so it couldn’t have happened in the lodging.

Between there and the copy-shop, then. I formed a wild scheme of pacing the pavement, searching for a clue; of questioning passers-by. It seemed melodramatic.

More likely by far, I told myself, was that she’d simply gone somewhere for some reason of her own. She had her own return ticket She’d expect me to have the sense to meet her at the station. I could picture us laughing over the misunderstanding, even if some frantic calls would have to be made to Gantry.

Or even, she could have gone to another copy-shop!

A militiaman strolled past, his glance registering me casually. I stayed where I was until he was out of sight, well aware that heading off at once would only look odd; and also aware that staring with a worried expression over a parapet at a twenty-metre drop into a river might make the least suspicious militiaman interested.

By then, naturally, I was wondering if she’d been arrested, for unauthorised access to the University, necromancy, or just on general principles; but then again, if she had been, it was not my worry on anything but a personal level: as a tinker, she’d have access to a good lawyer, just as much as I would, as a scholar.

So the end of my agitated thinking, and a look at my watch, which showed that the time was a quarter past ten, was to decide to go to the station and wait for her.

The train was due to leave at eleven-twenty. At five past eleven I put down my empty coffee-cup, stubbed out my cigarette and strode over to the public telegraph. There I tapped out a message: GANTRY UNIV HIST INST REGRET DELAY IN FILE RETURN STOP WILL CALL FROM CARRON STOP RESPECTS CLOVIS.

I was on the point of hitting the transmit key when I smelled die scent and sweat of Menial behind me. Then she leaned past my cheek and said, in a warm, amused voice, “Very loyal of you, to him and to me.”

I turned and grabbed her in my arms. “Where the hell have you been?”

“Just fire off that message,” she said. “I’ll tell you on the train.” She was grinning at me, and I felt all worries fade as I hugged her properly, then stepped back to hold her shoulder at arm’s length as though to make doubly sure she was there. Her poke looked even larger and heavier than before.

“You’ve got the paper files?”

Yes,” she said, hefting the bag. “Come on.”

I transmitted the message, and we dashed hand in hand down the platform. The train wasn’t heavily used, and we found a compartment—half a carriage—to ourselves and swung down on to the seats and faced each other across the table, laughing.

“Well,” I said. “Tell me about it. You had me a wee bit worried, I have to admit.”

She curled her fingers across the back of my hand. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But I thought it seemed like a good idea to disappear. That way, if Gantry or anyone else leaned on you to give the files or the, you know, other files back, you could honesdy say you couldn’t, you really wouldn’t know where I was and would look genuinely flummoxed, say if they went so far as to come back to our room with you.”

“Oh, right. I was genuinely flummoxed, I’ll give you that. But if anyone was with me they could have made the same guess as I did, and come to the station.”

She shrugged. Td have kept out of sight.” She combed her fingers through a hanging fall of hair, smiling coyly. Tm no bad at that.”

“And caught the train at the last second?”

“Or something.” She didn’t seem interested in raking over speculative contingencies. “Anyway, we’re here, and we’ve got the goods. Nothing Gantry can do to get them off us now.”

“Aye. Still, I’ll have to wire him from Carron, reassure him they’re in safe keeping.”

“Like you said. So it’s all square.”

The train began to move. I looked out at the apparently shifting station and platform, gliding into the past in relative motion, then looked back at her.

“No,” I said. “It isn’t as straightforward as that.”

She listened to my account of what Gantry had said about the tinkers and the dark storage. When I’d finished she shook her head slowly.

“You should have just covered up about my being a tinker,” she said.

That was a shock. “How could I?” I protested. “He’d figured it already, and it would be easy enough to check. I didn’t want to lie to him. Especially not lie and get found out as soon as he picked up a phone.”

Her mouth thinned. “I suppose not. Fair enough. Your man’s trust matters in the long run. And maybe even being evasive would’ve confirmed his suspicion.” She looked as if a weight had settled on her shoulders at that moment.

“I would have been evasive—Truth help me, I would have lied if you’d asked me!”

“I couldn’t do that,” she said. “Ach, this is so complicated!”

“Hey, it’s all right,” I said. “We’ll think of something. I’ll string Gantry some kind of line, give us time to check out the files, and we’ll have them back in a, week. Take next Monday off too if I have to.”

Merrial’s eyes suddenly brimmed. She blinked hard.

“Dhia, I hope it’s that easy!” She sighed. “I wish I could tell you more right now.” She shook her head. “But I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Oh, mo chridhel I’m a tinker, and tinkers have to mind their tongues. Even if—especially if—their tongues are spending time in other mouths!”

“So you have secrets of your craft,” I said dryly, “which you have to keep. That’s all right with me.”

She looked as if she were about to say something urgent, and then all she said was, “I shouldn’t worry so much. It’ll probably all turn out all right.”

“Yes, sure,” I said, pretending to agree with her. “Oh, well. Shall we have a look at the files, then?”

“OK,” she said, pulling them out. “Tell you what. You can look through the early one, and I’ll look through the late. That’ll increase the chances that either of us will find something we can understand.”

“Fair enough,” I said.

I opened the folder from the 1990s and flipped impatiently through thoroughly dull and worthy stuff about medical charity, and some fascinatingly improbable economic statistics from Kazakhstan. Towards the end I found something more personal: pages ripped from a spiral-bound notebook, apparently a diary. I pored over the Deliverer’s scrawl:

Thurs Jul 16 98. Trawl of NYC’s remaining left bookshops—nostalgia, I guess. Picked up Against the Current in St. Mark’s—trendy place, left pubns marginalised, seems apt. The old Critique clique still banging on—Suzi W in AtC, etc. At least they’re loyal—unlike moi, huh. Then trekked over to Revo Bks—Avakian’s lot, madder than ever. They have a dummy electric chair in the shop for their Mumia campaign. Flipped through old debates on SU etc. Depressing thought “Marxism is a load of crap” kept coming to mind. Then Unity Books on W 23d. Couldn’t bear going to Pathfinder. After my little adventure, not sure I want to face the Fourth International cdes either. Or they me. Agh.

Fri Jul 17 98. Hot humid afternoon, rainstorm later. Met M on Staten Isl ferry. Leaned on the rail and looked at old Liberty thro near fog. M seems to know I’m telling the old gang about his approaches. Thing is he doesn’t seem to mind. (Girl with pink hair on the ferry. Swear same girl was in Boston. Am I being followed or getting paranoid?)

I couldn’t make head nor tail of this, and turned over to the last of the entries.

Thurs Dec 17 98. Almaty again. Hotel lounge TV tuned permanently to CNN. Green light of city falling in the night. Hospital filling up. Fucking Yanks. Here I am trying to help development, there they are trying to roll it back.

After that, nothing but a stain and an angry scribble, where the pen had dug into and torn the page. Perhaps she’d reached the end of that notebook, or stopped keeping a diary. I leafed through the rest of the papers, with an oppressive feeling that seeing through their present opacity would take even longer than I’d thought. Then an idly turned page brought me to a stop.

It was a photocopy of an old article she’d written, but it was a small advertisement accidentally included at its margin that caught my eye. It was for a public meeting on “Fifty Years of the Fourth International” and it had in one corner a symbol which was identical to the monogram on Menial’s pendant. It was all I could do not to knock my forehead or cry out at my own stupidity. What I’d thought were the letters “G” and “T” were in fact the hammer and sickle of the communist symbol, and the meaning of the “4” was self-evident. I’d missed the connection just because the symbol faced in the opposite direction to the one on the Soviet flag.

The sinister significance of the hammer and sickle made me feel slightly nauseous; the implication of that same symbol appearing across such a gulf of time induced a certain giddiness.

I closed the file and looked up, and found myself meeting Menial’s equally baffled eyes.

“It’s all either not very interesting, or completely fucking incomprehensible,” she said.

“Same here,” I said. “Let’s leave it.”

All that long afternoon, we talked about other things.

Batdes, mostly, as I recall. The train pulled into the station at Carron Town on the dot of six. The sun was still high, the late afternoon still warm. Once again tired and jaded by our journey, Menial and I left the train with an access of energy and a surge of hunger. Menial led the way straight to The Carronade, and we settled into a dark corner of the strangely polished-smelling bar with plates of farmed trout and fresh-picked peas and new potatoes, accompanied with a shared jug of beer.

“I can’t wait to get back to your place,” I said, “get a bit of privacy, and get my face right down into… the files.”

She laughed. “Aye, it’ll be great to get a good look at them at last, without having to look over our shoulders.”

But as she said it she was looking over my shoulder, as she had done every minute or so all through the meal. She had her back to the wall, I had my back to the bar. The pub was beginning to fill up with people from the project, in for a quick drink on their way home or to their lodgings. As yet I’d heard no voices I recognised.

“You seem a wee bit on edge,” I said.

“Aye, well, like I said on the train…”

Tergal?”

Tes.”

“You’re expecting to meet him here?” I asked, remembering that we were in this bar on her—albeit welcome—suggestion.

She opened her hands. “Maybe. Depends.”

“On what?” I piled up our empty plates and lit a cigarette.

“Och, on how they want to play it,” she said, sounding unaccustomedly bitter.

“Secrets or no secrets,” I said, trying to keep my tone light, “you’re going to have to let me in on this, sooner or later. I’m getting thoroughly tired of seeing you looking worried.”

“I don’t have to do anything!” she flared. “And you don’t have to see me looking like anything!”

I said nothing, staring at her, shocked and annoyed but already forgiving her; she’d been under a lot of tension, for reasons I knew about and reasons I knew I didn’t.

“Ach,” she said, gentle again, “I didn’t mean that, colha Gree. You’ve not been taught as I have, to be hard.”

At that I had to smile; she seemed more vulnerable than hard, at that moment. Her eyes widened. I heard a footstep behind us, and then Fergal swung uninvited on to the bench beside me.

“Hello,” Menial said, not warmly. Her glance returned to me.

“Oh, hi,” I said. He looked at our drinks. “My round, I think.” He reached back over his shoulder and snapped his fingers; most people wouldn’t have gotten away with that, but he did. In half a minute the barmaid was laying another full jug on the table.

“So, Menial,” he said quietly, “you got it?”

“We did,” said Menial. “As far as I can tell. I checked through it all this morning, and it’s the whole archive.”

“And where did you do that?” I butted in, a little indignantly.

“Kelvin Wood,” Menial said, giving me a disarmingly unabashed grin. “In the bushes.”

“So that’s what you were up to.”

Menial nodded, with a flash of her eyebrows. Fergal looked at her, then at me, as though to remind us that he had more important things on his mind.

Tine,” I said.

“That’s good news,” Fergal said, to Menial. He laughed briefly. “To put it mildly, eh?”

“Aye,” she said. “It is that.”

“Anyway, Clovis,” Fergal said, “you’ll appreciate that the information you’ve helped to retrieve needs to be looked at with an expert eye. Rather urgently, in fact, considering how long it may take.”

“Of course,” I said. “Any chance that I could take a look at it first, just glance through it?”

He shook his head. “Sorry, Clovis. You have no idea—no offence—of how much is there. It’s an incredible quantity of not very well organised information. In the time it would take for you to make sense of any of it, we could be searching for information we know how to interpret. Every hour might count.”

“Just a minute!” I said, dismayed and indignant. “Nobody mentioned anything about this. I want to get a look at them too, and not have them disappear into—”

“Some tinker hideaway?” Fergal raised his eyebrows. “It won’t be like that, I assure you. You have my word that we won’t keep them long—weeks at the most—and that you’ll get to see them and search them at your leisure as soon as we’ve finished.”

“But,” I said, “how will I know they haven’t been changed—even accidentally? Because I have to be able to rely on it.”

Merrial was looking desperately uncomfortable. She gave Fergal a quick, hot glare and leaned closer to me across the table.

“Think about it, man,” she said quietly. “This stuff is all illicit anyway—you could not exactly cite it in footnotes, could you? You can only use it to find leads to material you can refer to. So you’ll just have to trust us—trust me—that the information won’t be tampered with.”

“All right,” I said reluctantly.

“Good man!” He drained his glass and stood up. “Thanks for your help.” Fergal reached out a hand across the table. Merrial was already emptying her personal clutter out of the leather bag. She tightened its thong and passed it over; Fergal had caught it while I was still gazing, puzzled, at Merrial’s actions.

“Wait!” I said. “The paper files are still in there. You can’t take them!”

Fergal raised his eyebrows. “Why not?”

“These papers belong to the University.”

I’m afraid they don’t,” said Fergal, sounding regretful. “They belong to us.”

I looked frantically at Menial, who only gave a small, sad nod.

“Who the fuck is this ‘us’?” I demanded, though I already suspected the answer. “Come on, I can give you photocopies if you must.”

“Not good enough, old chap.”

“Then give me them back.”

“Sorry,” said Fergal. “I can’t.”

I shifted on my feet, moved my elbow; all by reflex. Fergal’s eyes narrowed.

“Don’t,” he said very quietly, “even think of messing with me.”

I was actually thinking of yelling out and calling on the others in the bar, some of whom had their eye on this confrontation. But something in Fergal’s stance and glance suggested that the only outcome of such a brawl would be his escape after inflicting some severe damage on our side, starting with me. And whichever side Merrial came in on, or even if she tried to stay out of it, she was likely to get hurt.

My honour wasn’t at stake in preventing Fergal’s departure with the papers—it would be at stake in getting them back—and for now I had no right to risk life and limb of myself or others over it.

“Take it, tinker,” I said. “I can bide.”

He smiled, without condescension.

“I hope I see you again,” he said, and was out the door.

I looked over at a few curious, tense faces at the bar, shrugged and returned to the table, where Merrial was shakily lighting one of my cigarettes.

“Some explanation might be in order,” I said, as casually as I could manage. One of my knees was vibrating.

Menial took a long breath and a long draw with it “Sorry,” she said. “I can’t, really.”

“But look,” I said. “Why didn’t you just tell me to hide the files, or say we’d put them back—”

I was getting exasperated and confused, and then the penny, finally, dropped.

“You agree with him!” I said. “You actually agree that he has some kind of a right to those papers, and to see the files first, and that nobody else can so much as look at them without his sufferance. Including me.”

She looked levelly back at me.

“And you’re not going to tell me why.”

A small shake of her head.

“And you knew all along this could happen.”

A smaller nod.

“All right,” I said. There were still two half-litres in the jug; I poured for both of us, and lit a cigarette myself, leaning forward into Menial’s smoke, almost into the tent of her hair. “All right.” The heel of my hand was rubbing beneath my eye; irritated with myself, I stopped doing that and fiddled with the cigarette instead. The sound of the laughter and conversation at the bar was like the noise of a burn over a rock, washing over and hiding our talk. We could say anything.

“I’m really at a loss,” I said. “I can’t believe you just set me up, but unless you tell me what’s really going on—”

“I told you,” she said. “I can’t. Can’t you trust me on that?”

“Oh, I can trust you on that all right,” I said. “But if I don’t get those files back like I promised, nobody at the University will ever trust me again.”

She looked as tense, as torn, as I felt.

Tm very sorry about that,” she said. “But there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“Come on,” I said. “There must be. Hell, if I get the files back, I can give your lot copies of all the files. Isn’t that worth more to them than just what they’ve got?”

“You don’t understand,” Menial said. “Now that we know about the other files, we’re going to have to get them all. Like Fergal said, they’re ours.”

“Ours’, indeed! I was unwilling, or unready, to challenge her about the society to which that might refer. I spread my hands. “You can’t expect me to accept that without a damn good reason, which you’re not giving me.”

“I’ve told you. I can’t. So why don’t we just forget about all this?”

“Menial,” I pleaded, dismayed at the depths of her lack of understanding, “these files are part of my work, my whole career depends on them. So, please—”

I reached out, touching her hair.

Her eyes glinted.

“Oh, fuck off.” she told me, not quite a yell but loud and emphatic enough to turn heads.

“I’ll do that,” I replied, and rose and stalked out. I glanced back from the door, and saw only the top of her head, and the forward fall of her hair, and her hands over her face. The door swung shut behind me.