The Sky Road

11 The Rock Covenant

I followed Druin out of the tunnel and into the gallery of the seerstone growers without any idea of what he intended to do. Like him, I had my rifle slung and my hands empty. He strolled across the floor to a central aisle between the ranks of stone troughs and turned down it, walking in the same overall direction as we had been following in the tunnel—downwards, towards the old power-station.

“Hey!”

One of the growers came hurrying up. He was a stocky, dark man with sharp, darting eyes. His overalls were blue, dusted with white powder that caught the light like ground glass. He stopped a couple of metres in front of us and glared.

“What are you doing here?” he demanded. “How did you get in?”

“We’re—”

Druin motioned to me to be quiet.

“We’re just passing through,” he said. He gazed around the chamber with an expression of slack-jawed wonder. The other tinkers had stopped work and stood about watchfully. “It’s a fascinating place you’ve got here, I must say.”

“How did you get in here?” the tinker repeated, taking a step closer.

Druin jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Oh, we were out chasing the deer,” he explained casually. “We came across a kind of—” he looked at me, as if searching for a word “—a manhole, would you call it? In the woods up there. We went down it for a bit of a lark, like, and made our way down through yon tunnel.”

Druin hitched his thumb under the rifle’s strap and added, “So if you don’t mind, we’ll just be on our way.”

The tinker showed more real amazement than Druin had feigned.

“You came through the tunnel?”

“Aye,” said Druin. “It’s got some real eerie hollows in it,” he added, with an appreciative wink. He began to walk forward, and I beside him. To my surprise the tinker stepped aside, with a glance and a small shake of the head to his colleagues. I suspected that no outsider had made it past the cavern’s spectral guardians for a long time, and that the tinkers here just didn’t know what to make of us.

On either hand of us were the stone troughs; the ones we passed first each contained a layer of tiny stones, gravel almost; subsequent ranks had larger and fewer stones, until we reached the very end, where a trough—or rather, by this point, a large circular tub—might contain a single boulder. On the floor below the troughs were oddly shaped stones, apparently discarded; some of these casualties of quality-control had evidently ended up in the tunnel. However, we saw no hollows in that chamber, and I wondered if I’d misunderstood the implied sequence of events, or if the light in there was too bright for such displays.

Within the stones themselves, queerly distorted by the rippling water, strange fleeting scenes played themselves out with a coherence that increased with the size of the stones. I had no leisure to inspect them, but several times I felt that the faces flickering across these smooth surfaces were faces I had seen in the tunnel.

The walls and ceiling of the unnatural cave converged to an entranceway to another passage, about two and a half metres high and two wide. It continued for about thirty metres ahead of us, beyond which a darker doorway loomed. This corridor was unmistakably artificial, its squared walls and ceiling being made of the same glazed substance as the shaft. Its lighting, too, was subdy different from that of the growing-gallery—though it came from similar glass panels, it had that overtone of yellow which marked it as ordinary electric lighting, if more powerful than usually encountered. Our footsteps rang on the ceramic floor, echoing sharply.

“You carried yourself cool in there,” I said to Druin.

“Ah, it’s all bluff,” he said. “They’ve got used to folks being scared by their bluff. But I reckon we’ll soon meet some who’re ready for us—our friends back there will have signalled ahead.”

“You’re not bothered?”

“Not a bit.”

“I was, but I wasn’t going to show it My heart was hammering and my head was buzzing with bewildered images, like the seer-stones themselves, and my hand clutching the rifle’s strap was slick with sweat.

The response that Druin had expected—or, possibly, a stronger response—came when we were about two-thirds of the way down the corridor. Fergal and two other men appeared in the exit, barring our way. They carried rifles of an unfamiliar design, not aimed at us but ready for use. We walked forward. He stepped out in front of the others and raised a hand.

“Stop right there!” he ordered.

We stopped.

“What are you here for?” Fergal asked.

I decided it was about time I spoke up for myself.

Tm here to see you,” I said. “And Menial.”

“You’re seeing me,” Fergal said. He waved a dismissive hand. “I’ll talk to you later.” He stalked closer, to a few metres away, and stared at Druin. “I know you,” he said venomously.

Druin shrugged. “You’ll have seen me around.”

Fergal’s weapon was instantly aimed square at Druin’s gut. My companion made a twitch towards his rifle strap, then raised both hands above his head. The other two tinkers brought their rifles to bear at the same moment.

“I know who you are,” Fergal said slowly, “and what you are. Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t kill you now.”

Druin took a deep breath. “Och, man, if you have to ask that there is no help for you,” he said in a steady voice. I looked at him sideways, frozen except for a severe shaking in my jaw and my knees. “You see,” Druin went on conversationally, “if you were to kill me, now, my friend Clovis here would some time soon have to kill you. He would kill you and cut your head from your neck, and carry it to my widow and my weans to prove that you were dead and the matter was at an end.”

He glanced at me. “You would, aye?”

“I would,” I swore. I had eaten under Druin’s roof, and could not well refuse the task, if required. The thought of it made me feel sick, but it didn’t shake my resolve. I had no idea why Fergal might want to kill Druin in the first place, and I didn’t care. That he was willing to contemplate murder told me all I needed to know about him.

“Well, there you are,” said Druin. “You could kill Clovis too, I suppose, but that would just double your problem.”

I did not find this last consideration quite as definite and reassuring as Druin made it sound.

Fergal’s glance flicked between the two of us, his tongue unconsciously touching his lips. He backed off a little.

“Put down your weapons,” he said, then added, as we lowered our rifles, “all of them.”

As I unbuckled my belt I looked at Druin. He shook his head, almost imperceptibly. I placed my knife and pistol and multi-tool beside the rifle.

“The sgean dhu as well.”

I felt naked when I stood up. Quick hands passed over or patted my body.

“They’re clean.”

Fergal picked up my gear, and one of the other tinkers picked up Druin’s. Fergal jerked his chin at the exit and moved around behind us.

“This way.”

We walked forward to the end of the corridor. Beyond it was the open interior space of the old power-station; we descended a short flight of steps to a concrete floor and were told to halt. Behind us I could hear some low-voiced consultation. We waited for its decision, hands on our heads, and I looked about. The turbine, of course, was long since gone, as were most of the original fittings; all that remained was a haunting afterlife of odours, of flaked paint and rusted metal and antique brickwork. Above these whiffs rose the newer smells of concrete and solder. The whole big cuboidal building, with its long windows, had been turned into a complex factory full of workshops and walkways, noisy and bright with the screech and sparks of metalwork. From the number of people I glimpsed at their benches or hurrying along, I guessed that about a hundred tinkers were at work in the building.

Strangely I felt on safer ground here, amid those scores of busy people, and hard by the road and rail of civilisation. I knew this comfort was delusory, but clung to it anyway. The thought of calling out for help crossed my mind; then I reflected that Fergal and his comrades would hardly be so bold if their actions were unknown to the rest.

Suddenly the tinkers clattered down the steps behind us and we were each roughly jostled away, in opposite directions. I heard a door slam, from the other side of the stair, just before I was pushed through another.

The room into which I stumbled was a few metres square, with an overhead light, a table and a couple of chairs. Along its sides rough stacks of copper piping, coils of cable, sacks and so forth suggested that the room was one that currendy didn’t have a definite use, and was used indifferently as a store, a meeting-place and—now—an interrogation cell. There was even, as somehow seemed inevitable, a sink and an electric kettle and some grotty opened bags of coffee, sugar and tea.

Fergal stepped past me, spun a chair into place on the opposite side of the table and gestured to the other.

“Have a seat.”

He put the weapons he’d taken off me on the draining-board, keeping his own rifle trained on me all the while. Then he sat down, not at the table but tilting his chair against the far wall, and cradling the black rifle with its odd, curving ammunition clip.

“OK, man,” he said. “Looks like I underestimated you, Clovis.” I let this flattery pass. He rocked the chair forward again, gazing at me intently. You’ve got yourself into a bit of a mess,” he continued in a confidential tone, “and the others are pretty riled with you, but I think I can square it with them. We can sort this out.”

I said nothing.

“Do you know what Drain is?”

After waiting a moment for some response, he went on, “He’s a management spy, that’s what. He works for the site security committee of the ISS at Kishorn. He reports on union activists, among other things.”

Fergal said this in such a tone of loathing that I was surprised. The minor hassles between the unions and the contractors and subcontractors seemed to me hardly a matter for such moral outrage, let alone death threats. I folded my arms and cocked my head slightly to one side. Fergal leaned back again.

“He pushed to have you sacked, you know,” he said. “That’s why he was in the bar at The Carron-ade.”

I admit I felt slightly shaken by this, because it was entirely plausible and because it implied that someone in the bar had been watching us, but I still made no reply.

“He has not come here, with you, to spy on us. He’s here to spy on you, to find out what your real connections to us are.”

“If that’s what he’s doing, it sounds reasonable enough to me,” I said, goaded at last. “I’m sure none of what you’re doing is a threat to the project, anyway. That’s why I helped Menial in the first place. So what’s the problem with his being here?”

“Oh, it has nothing to do with that. Menial told you the truth—we think there’s a possible threat to the ship, we’re investigating it urgently and if we find evidence for it we’ll present the evidence to the project’s management. No. Druin—and whoever is behind him—are looking for any stick to beat the tinkers with. He’s out to discredit us, and arouse hostility to us.”

I shook my head. “No—he’s never shown any hostility to the tinkers, as far as I know.”

“Naturally,” Fergal said derisively.

“Why should he or anyone want to do that, anyway?”

“God, you are so fucking naive!” Fergal waved a hand to indicate everything outside the room and inside the building. “We’re a somewhat privileged group, by virtue of our monopoly on skills which, frankly, are not hard to learn. Why should you depend on us to build and run your computers?” He laughed. “You’ve seen how we make them. It’s an ancient technology, called nanotech. We don’t understand it, but we can apply it. A farmer could do it, just as a farmer can grow crops without understanding how the molecular genetics and replication work. A competent mechanic, with maybe a skilled jeweller or watchmaker for the fiddly bits, could incorporate the seer-stones, as you call them, into machinery.”

“They’d have to know the white logic.”

“That too is not hard to learn. So what’s stopping you?”

“Me?”

Tour peopled he said impatiently.

“Funnily enough,” I said, “I asked Druin that very question. He said it was—well, tradition, you would call it. It works, it goes back to the Deliverance, no point questioning it. That’s what he said.”

“No doubt. And it wouldn’t have been long before he was complimenting you, saying he’d mulled it over and he thought it was a good question.”

“Do you mind if I smoke?” I asked. I wanted to give the impression of weakening; my craving made it credible.

“Sure, go right ahead,” said Fergal.

I took the materials from my pocket and lit up.

“What I don’t understand,” I said, “is why you’re so bothered by his turning up here. You even threatened to kill him. Maybe that was a bluff—”

“It wasn’t!”

“But why? Even if he’s as hostile as you say, he’ll have people searching for him if he doesn’t return, and it won’t take anyone long to think of looking here.”

Fergal flicked his fingers. “We could make it look like an accident that had nothing to do with us. It’s a dangerous sport, deer-hunting.”

“And I would go along with your story, or join him at the bottom of a cliff?”

“Something like that.”

“What,” I asked, trying to keep my voice from betraying my rage and fear, “is important enough to justify doing something like that, now?”

“Ah.” Fergal frowned. “He—and you—have arrived at a very awkward moment. We’ve found something in the files that Menial retrieved—something we’ve been missing for a very long time, and which we only recently realised might be stored at the University, of all places. We—”

He paused. “Let’s just say we’d lose a lot if anyone started poking around now. There’s obviously an investigation going on, and we really aren’t in a position to resist any intrusion in force.” He dusted his palms and stood up, laying the rifle carefully aside across the sink, within his reach and out of mine. “Which is where you come in, Clovis. Obviously we don’t want to kill Drain, or yourself.”

“If you can possibly avoid it.”

“Exactly!” he smiled, damning himself with his grin. “No need for any of that. You’re an intelligent bloke, Clovis, and you can help us. All you have to do is persuade Drain that there’s nothing here to threaten the project, and that he should leave well alone.”

“That shouldn’t be hard,” I said. “And Drain shouldn’t worry you. Even if he is what you say, he’s only doing his job. And speaking of jobs, I’ve just lost mine and I want an explanation. As well as the files you took, and a chance to speak to Menial.”

Fergal nanowed his eyes. “Menial might not want to speak to you.”

That’s for her to say.”

“As for the files—”

He frowned, considering. I got the impression that he was beginning to feel the files were turning out to be more trouble than they were worth.

“Look,” I said, “I understand why you feel they’re yours. But they’re not mine to let you have, or yours to take. The Deliverer left them to the University, not to the Fourth International.”

Fergal jumped up as if he’d sat on a wasp.

“Who told you about the Fourth International?”

I shrugged. Tm a historian,” I said. “It’s common knowledge among scholars.”

This double lie deflated Fergal somewhat. He sat back down and eyed me warily.

“So what do you know about it?”

“It’s a communist secret society that goes back to before the Deliverer’s time.”

“Hmm,” he said. He rubbed an eyelid. “That’s about right. Though ‘communist’ doesn’t really tell you what it’s all about, these days.” He laughed harshly. “God, I sometimes feel if we could get capitalism back—”

“The Possession?” I asked incredulously.

“Well, you would call it that. Let me tell you, it would be better than this dark age you people have got yourselves bogged down in.”

“This is a dark age?” I laughed in his face. “We’re building a spaceship not fifty kilometres from here.”

“Oh, Christ.” Fergal knotted his fists. “Aye, building it out of boiler plate. You build everything, up to crude atomics and even fucking laser-fusion engines with skills handed down from master to apprentice. Compared to the ancients, you people are complete barbarians. Compared to what you could be—”

He sighed and stood up, and began pacing the room like a beast in a cage. “You could have a world where nobody has to do any work that isn’t like play, where almost any sickness or injury could be mended, where nobody has to die, where we live like gods and fill the skies with our children’s children. Instead we have this.” He smacked his palm with his fist and looked around with an expression of disgust.

“And who would do the work in this paradise?” I asked, perhaps more offensively than I intended.

“Machines, of course. Every bit of work in the world can be done by machines, linked up and coordinated.”

“Oh, right,” I said, disappointed. “The path of power.”

“It doesn’t have to be like that, next time—”

“Next time?”

Fergal leaned over the table on his fists, in a manner simultaneously intimidating and confidential. “That’s what the International exists for: the next time. The next chance humanity has to break out of this prison. Our time will come, again. And next time, we’ll be ready.”

I shook my head. “I don’t understand.”

He looked at me with some regret, then straightened up and moved back to his seat. “It’s no use trying to explain it to you now,” he said. “There’s so much you need to know to make sense of it, and you have no way of getting—”

He was interrupted by a banging on the door.

“Who’s there?” he shouted.

“It’s me—Menial! Fergal, you’ve got to—”

“Wait there!”

His shouted command came too late. The door burst open and Menial charged in. She rushed past me and placed something on the table and then snatched her hands back from it as though it were a dish too hot to handle. It was a seer-stone apparatus, and the stone in the middle of it was glowing with colour and alive with movement, forming a tiny scene under the domed surface, a bubble of life star-ding in its virtual reality.

The scene was of a forest glade, in which a man sat elf-like on a rock. He looked out at us, quite calm and uncanny. He spoke, and his voice came from a speaker in the side of the surrounding apparatus.

The volume was too low to make out what he was saying—certainly not above Menial’s shouting.

“You never told me there was a deil in it!”

Fergal had jumped up, and was staring down intently at the stone. He raised a hand, without looking up.

“Calm down, Menial,” he said mildly. “This is no deil. It’s what you were looking for.”

“What in hell is that?” I asked. I too was on my feet, peering entranced at the amazing, beautiful thing.

“It’s an artificial intelligence,” the tinker said, his voice thrilled with awe. He stooped to the seer-stone and placed his ear close to the speaker and listened. Menial seemed to have noticed me just as I spoke.

“What are you doing here?” she asked. Her eyes were reddened, her cheeks pale with fatigue. She looked scared and puzzled.

“I came here for you,” I said. “I hoped you might want me to come back.”

“But I thought—”

Tou two, please leave now,” Fergal said. He didn’t even look up at us. He waved a hand absently to one side. “Take your weapons and tools, Clovis, take this woman if you want and get the hell out of here with your friend, the company spy.”

Menial turned and looked down at Fergal.

“You want me to go?” She sounded hurt, but hopeful as well.

Tes, yes,” Fergal said, impatiendy deigning to spare her a glance. “You’ve done your job, and very well too. Your skills won’t be needed in the… next phase. Oh, and Clovis—take the bloody paper files while you’re at it. We won’t be needing them any more, either.”

Menial glowered at Fergal for a moment and clutched my hand.

“Glovis, what’s going on?”

“I think we’d better do as he says,” I said. I let go of her hand and edged around the table, picking up the rifle I’d carried and the gear from my belt. I buckled them back on, shoved the sheathed dagger back in my boot and took Menial’s hand in my left, keeping the rifle in my right. Together we backed out of the room. Fergal didn’t watch us go, or even—as far as I could see—notice. He was talking quietly to the sprite in the stone. I pushed the door shut with my toe.

“Do you want to come with me?”

Menial blinked. “Of course I do.”

I hugged her (rather awkwardly with the rifle in one hand, but I wasn’t letting go of it again) and then said, “We better get out before that bastard changes his mind.”

“Or something worse happens. Yes, come on.”

The big work-shop space was still busy, with lights coming on here and there as the evening shadows lengthened—the time, I was startled to realise, was only ten o’clock—and the ambient light reddened. A few people on the overhead walkways glanced down at us curiously, but that was all.

The room in which Druin was being held was only a few quick strides away. I opened the door and walked in, Menial close behind me. This room had only a chair in the middle, with one very bright light above it. Druin was sitting on that chair with a bored, sullen and stubborn expression on his face, while the two tinkers who’d accompanied Fergal stood, one in front of him and one behind. Their raised voices fell silent as we entered. Their rifles—and Drum’s—were propped against the back wall; mine was pointing straight ahead. It still wasn’t loaded, but they weren’t to know that.

Tergal says you’re to let him go,” said Menial.

“What have they been doing to you?” I asked.

Druin stood up and stretched. “Och, nothing to speak of,” he said. “They have merely been boring me with an account of my sins. I have not yet found it in my heart to confess.” He deftly retrieved his weapons and kit. Til thank you to escort us out, gentlemen.”

One of the tinkers found his voice. “I want this confirmed by Fergal.”

“You do that if you like,” Menial said. “But I warn you, he’s not in a friendly mood.”

The tinker opened his mouth and closed it again. He smiled at Menial in a surprisingly complicit way, which made me suspect that he and Menial had some shared experience of Fergal’s moods. “Oh, well, it’s your responsibility,” he said.

We stepped outside the room.

“Wait a minute,” said Menial.

She skipped away up a stair-ladder and ran along a walkway, her feet setting the metal ringing. We waited in uneasy silence until she returned, the two file-folders hugged to her chest.

“That’s us,” she said. “All set.”

The two men walked ahead of us down a long central passage through the machine shop to the building’s ancient green copper doors, then turned sharply left and showed us out through a rather less imposing wooden door.

“Goodbye,” said Druin balefully.

The tinkers ignored him.

“Are you leaving?” one of them asked Menial.

Tm going home,” she said. “I hope I see you again.”

Drain’s truck was just over a kilometer away. We hastened along the quiet road, the late sun in our eyes. Drain strode briskly in front. Menial’s hand was clasped in mine, fingers intertwined. None of us said very much; we had too much to say all at once.

At last we reached the track. Drain stopped and looked at the rifles.

“Och, I forgot, we have some deer to kill.”

He laughed at my face, and took the two rifles and racked them again on the back of the track. We went around to the cab and climbed in. Menial shared the double passenger-seat with me; it was comfortably crowded. For a minute we all slumped gratefully. I passed Menial a cigarette and lit for both of us. The Kyle train clattered past.

“You know,” Drain said reflectively, “I’ve never before had a gun pointed at me, thank Providence. It isn’t an experience I’d want to repeat.”

“I don’t think they’d really have killed either of us,” I said. It was us who marched in with rifles, after all.”

“Aye,” said Drain indignantly, “and I’ve carried a rifle into The Carronade many’s the time, and nobody ever took it ill.”

“Different situation—”

Tergal could have killed you!” Menial interrupted. “If he was in the mood. It was only the possible consequences that stopped him. You did something stupidly dangerous going there.”

“Well, we went there to get you, and to get yon papers that Clovis makes such a fuss about,” Drain grinned. “And that’s what we’ve come out with.”

“What a charming way to put it,” said Menial, unoffended. I leaned past her and frowned at Drain.

“What about you? Fergal said you were working for site security, spying on the unions and on the tinkers. And that you argued for getting me sacked. Is that true?”

“I don’t spy on anyone,” Druin said. That’s just the tinkers’ way of putting it, at least those three who caught us. There’ll be the deil to pay for that, you know!”

“How?” Drum’s non-denials hadn’t passed me by, but this was more urgent.

Druin turned the engine on and began to steer the truck back on to the road west. Talse imprisonment!” he said. “And assault with a deadly weapon, which is what threatening someone with a gun is. You and me, Clovis, we could sue the bastards.” He glanced across at me sharply. “You haven’t any idea, by any chance, why they kept us in the first place, and why they let us go when they did? I mean, with me they just kept banging on about what a scab I was. What did Fergal have to say to you? And, come to think of it, what are you two up to anyway? I know you’re up to something, and that it concerns the ship. Which means it concerns me.”

I slid my arm around Menial’s shoulders. She smiled at me, then gazed straight ahead.

“Tell him,” she said. “Tell him it all.”

So I did, as we pulled out of Dark and drove into the sunset.

“Aye, well,” said Druin, “you’ve told me all you know, Clovis.” He sipped his whisky and flicked at a midge. “Quite a tale! But I haven’t heard Menial’s side, and I reckon that’s more than half the story.”

We were sitting around a roughly made, age-smoothed table in the broad stone-flagged kitchen of Druin’s house, ourselves surrounded by the shelves of crockery, the shining electric oven and a sink with a dripping tap. Arrianne and the children had long since gone to bed. The back door stood open to the warm night, and the smells and sound of the sea-loch. A saucer on the table was filling up with our cigarette-butts. Beside it a bottle of whisky and a pot of coffee were emptying fast.

Menial rubbed her eyebrows, ran her fingers through the wide swathes of her hair and flicked them back behind her shoulders. She had not expanded on any of my account, beyond the occasional corroborative comment or nod.

“Well, all right,” she said. “From my side there’s—well, some of it I’d rather talk about with Clovis—it really is personal, it really is no concern of yours, Druin.”

Druin tilted his hand. “OK. And the rest?”

“Ah, well, it goes back a wee bit, to when I started worrying about… stories I’d heard about what happened at the Deliverance. Basically, it was that the Deliverer, Myra Godwin herself, had set off something that physically destroyed the settlements and satellites, and that in doing so she’d not only killed God knows how many people, she’d created a barrier to anything ever getting safely back into space again. Every orbiting platform that was destroyed would have been broken into fast-moving fragments which in turn would destroy others, and so on until there was nothing left but a belt of debris around the Earth—and anything that goes up now would just end up as more debris! Now, Fergal is a well-respected tinker, apart from his being a… leading member of the International.” She shot us a glance. “Which is not as sinister as you think! But that’s by the way. Fergal’s in charge of the tinkers who’re working on the project, though he doesn’t work on the site himself. So after getting nowhere with the project management, I took it to him, and he said we should try to investigate it for ourselves. It was myself who suggested we could look for someone who might have access to anything the Deliverer left at Glasgow, and that, well, there were students working on the project for the summer who might…”

“So you came looking for me?”

“Aye,” she grinned. “But I wasn’t to know what I’d find. Could have been somebody who was only interested in scholarship, or who would not have gone along with the idea. Anyway, I kept my ears open, and it was not long before I heard about you.”

Drain laughed, as much at my embarrassment as at her account.

“Clovis was not exactly quiet about his interests! He’s been bending our ears about the Deliverer and history all the bloody summer. But back to your Fergal. It sounds like he took your worries seriously.”

“Oh, sure,” Menial said. “I got the impression that quite a few tinkers have the same idea, and… at least some people in the International had even stronger reasons to think it.”

Drain took a sudden wasteful gulp of his good whisky.

“Why would the tinkers—or this International—want to keep that a secret?”

Menial stared at him. “Because the Deliverer’s reputation, and her last message to the world, is what protects the tinkers! If the ordinary folk, the outsiders—no offence—got to think she was some mass-murdering monster like Stalin, what would they care about anything she said?”

Drain cupped his chin with his hand and regarded her quizzically.

“Is that what you think, or is that what Fergal told you?”

“Both, but, well, yes. I see what you mean.”

“More than I can say,” I said.

Merrial turned to me. “What he means is, it’s something I’ve accepted as long as I can remember without thinking about it, but when you say it out and think about it, it just doesn’t seem very likely.”

“Exactly!” said Druin. “It’s true up to a point, mind, but fundamentally it doesn’t explain why the tinkers and the rest of us rub along fairly well for the most part. The story that they’re the Deliverer’s children, as it’s said, is just a symbol, a signpost or landmark, like the statue itself. We don’t get on with the tinkers because we respect the Deliverer—we respect the Deliverer and maintain her statues because we get along with the tinkers. And we do that because we need the tinkers, and they need us.”

I looked at the man, astonished. In all my years of study I had never read or heard a hint of anything like that. I had certainly never had such a reflection on my own. That something so self-evidently true—once stated—yet so unobvious and against the grain of what Gantry would have called “vulgar cant” should come from this metalworker and not from a scholar was something of a shock to my estimation of scholarship, not to mention of myself.

There was no way I could say all this without sounding condescending, so I only said, “Druin, that’s brilliant. Never thought of that.”

He gave me a thin-lipped, narrow-eyed smile, as if he knew my unspoken thoughts. “Aye,” he said, “brilliant or no, I’m pretty sure the thought has occurred to our man Fergal. So his secrecy has other aims than that. If you, Clovis, were to publish your great work on the Deliverer when you’re an older and wiser man, which proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that she was the most wicked woman who ever walked the Earth, do you think for a minute that folk would start throwing stones at the tinkers?” He laughed. “No, they’d be throwing stones at you!”

“Where does that get us?” I asked, somewhat defensively.

“It gets us to this,” Druin said slowly, tapping the table with a blunt fingernail. “Like I said, Fergal’s desire for secrecy in this matter is not for the reason Menial and you thought. In fact, from the way you say he behaved when Menial found the wee man in the stone, I would say that finding yon thing, whatever it is, was his real aim all along. That was what he sent you both to seek in Glaschu. Now that you’ve found it for him, he doesn’t give a damn about any supposed space debris. And don’t forget, Menial, you raised the matter with the project and the only reason you were slapped down hard is that of course the designers have thought of that—whether the Deliverer’s doing or no, the stuff that was up in orbit in the past must have gone somewhere! In the old records, such as they are, you could see them like moving stars with the naked eye—is that not so, Clovis?”

I nodded.

“Well, they’re no there the now, and our best telescopes—which isn’t saying much, I admit, compared to the ones with which the ancients saw the Universe born, but still—can’t see a speck up there. And there’s no more shooting stars now than there was in antiquity—we know that for sure, because these records were on paper and were passed on. So there’s likely no cloud of debris around the Earth, although if the Deliverer did as you said, I guess there could be some heavy stuff up there in the high orbits yet. But even that’s unlikely. It’s said that in the troubled times the sky fell, and the best scientists’ guess is that that was our ancestors’ way of saying what they saw when the great space cities, long deserted or filled with dead, were eventually brought spinning down by the thin drag of the air up yon and fell to Earth of their own accord.”

By this time I was beyond being surprised by Druin; his words were just further nails in the coffin of my conceit.

“Did you find anything in the computer files about this?” I asked Menial.

She shook her head. “No, there’s nothing that goes up to the date of the Deliverance itself. It was when I was searching through them that I opened the file that released what Fergal called the ‘artificial intelligence’.” Her eyes widened at the memory. “At first I thought it was just one of they faces that appear in the stones.”

“What are those, by the way?” Druin asked.

Merrial waved her hand. “We don’t know. We’ve found references to things called Help programs, and that seems to be what they—are they’re aye spelling out ‘help’, anyway! Just some old stuff that got passed down, I think. But this thing wasn’t one of them at all. It looked straight at me, and spoke.”

“What did it say?”

“ ‘Hello’,” she said, in an unnaturally deep voice.

We all laughed.

She gave an exaggerated shudder. “My next thought—when I’d got over the shock a—bit was that it was a security demon, like the one you and me ran across in Glasgow. But it wasn’t that, either. It wasn’t warning me off—it was inviting me in. That’s when I ran with it to Fergal.”

“Who seems to have accepted its invitation,” I said. “He lost interest in all else as soon as he saw it.”

“Hmm,” said Druin. He stood up and stepped over to the doorway, perhaps to get away from our smoke. The sky, an hour after midnight, was still light—or growing lighter again—behind him. “Which rather suggests to me that that was his objective all along. As why shouldn’t it be?” He turned back to us, his eyes shining. “Who wouldn’t want to talk to an artificial intelligence? The ancients had them, and even the tinkers have lost them—am I right, Menial?”

“Oh, sure,” she said. “I’ve never seen or heard of us having anything like that myself, and I… I think I would have.”

Tou know,” Druin said, “this is a relief, really. All right, the two of you were used by Fergal, maybe put through a bit of anguish and inconvenience, but no great harm has come of it. And no, Clovis, I don’t count your little difficulties as great harm—you’ll have worse trouble than that before you’re my age!”

“All right,” I said, holding back some irritation, “I can see how it might not seem important to you. But Fergal has got hold of this thing, and what’s worrying me is what he intends to do with it.”

“What he intends to do with it,” said Druin, “depends on what it is. Any ideas there, Menial?”

“No,” she said. “It was in Myra Godwin’s files, and we know that some people had these things back then—it could have been some kind of adviser or counsellor. Maybe Fergal knows what it is, but I don’t.”

“I hate to think what Fergal might do with an adviser that has access to knowledge from the past,” I said. Druin shook his head.

“So what if Fergal has found a new toy, or a new friend for all I know? It’s none of our damn business, and certainly none of mine—it has nothing to do with the security of the ship, now has it?”

“You’ve got over your annoyance at being held and disarmed pretty damn quick,” I said sourly.

“Ach!” Druin said. “Hot words. Forget it. Who would sue a tinker, anyway?”

At that Menial and I both had to laugh. The futility of “taking a tinker to court” was proverbial.

“That doesn’t solve the problem though,” Menial said.

“What problem?”

“The problem isn’t the thing itself. Fergal is the problem.” She frowned, evidently troubled. “He’s no exactly evil—his intentions are good, in a way, and he can be a very… charming man in his way, on a personal level; but he’s very… single-minded, you know? He has a tendency to focus on one thing at a time, and to over-ride anything and everybody else.”

Druin snorted. “Hah! I don’t know Fergal, but I know the type. More by repute than experience, thank Providence.” He chuckled. “Mind you, if ever I run across a manager like that, he tends to have a short career thereafter. As a manager, anyway.” He stomped over and sat down again. “But still—that’s a problem for your lot, no for mine. I still say we’d best let the matter drop. The project’s getting awful close to completion, we’re actually ahead of schedule, and there’s big bonuses riding on getting the platform out the yard before the end of August—which could make the difference between getting it out before the winter and having to wait till the spring. That’s no small thing, and trouble wi the tinkers is the one thing that could blow it at this stage.”

“What worries me about Fergal,” I said, “is not so much his personality as his beliefs. I know you’re not that kind of person, Menial, but communism is notoriously susceptible to characters who are… who can twist it into a reason for doing what they’d like to do anyway, which is living outside the covenant.”

“What do you mean by ‘the covenant’?” asked Druin.

“Och, what you said—when Fergal seemed to be threatening to kill you. Blood for blood, death for death—that’s the covenant, the rock. Or what you said about us and the tinkers, having to live together—same thing, on the side of the living.”

Tergal sometimes says things like that,” Menial interjected hastily. That so-and-so ought to be shot, or whatever. He doesn’t mean it, it’s just hot words, as Druin put it.”

Druin made a conciliatory gesture. “What you’re both saying may well be true enough,” he said mildly. “The covenant is strong in our days, for reasons which—och, we all know the reasons! So a man like Fergal can rant and rave, but he can’t do much harm. How many of the tinkers would you say follow his ideas, as opposed to, say, respecting him as a man and an engineer?”

“Not many,” said Menial cautiously.

Druin leaned back and took a sip of whisky, then topped up our coffees.

“Well, there you are,” he said in a relaxed and expansive tone. “Like I said, no business of mine.” He leaned forward, becoming more concentrated in his expression, fixing us both with his gaze. “As to what my business is, Fergal and his two sidekicks were right in one respect—I do have a place on the site security committee. I’m no spy—I was put there by the union, dammit! And I did push for having your clearance revoked, Clovis. What else could I do, with the information I had? But I can equally well push to have it restored, and I will. You’ll be back at your job in a day or two, if you want it, whatever your University decides about you.”

“That’s—” I shook my head “—that’s great, that’s what I want. Thanks.”

“But before you return you files to the University, have another look through them, and try to see if there is anything in them about what happened at the Deliverance. Or anything about this artificial intelligence. Tell me what you find, even if it’s nothing, just to put my mind at rest. Put that couple of days to good use, you and Menial.” He grinned slyly. “I don’t need to tell you to do the same with the nights. Speaking of which, I’m off to my bed. And meanwhile, not a word about all this. Keep the peace with the tinkers, and we’ll get this show on the road.”

“The sky road,” I said, quoting Fergal.

“Aye. Everybody happy?”

We walked to Menial’s house, and on the way we talked.

“I thought,” she said, “that you were too committed to your history, your research and your old papers, to be willing to stay with me. That was what I was upset about, not your questions.”

“Ah,” I said. “And I thought you were too committed to the secrets of your society to trust me.”

“Aach,” we both said at once.

I told her what Druin had said, about the tinkers’ methods of recruitment.

She laughed, clinging to my arm and swinging away out on it, looking up at me and looking away, giggling.

^{“It’s true!” she said. “It wasn’t what I’d planned.”}

^{“So you—”}

Tell for you and hoped you’d join us, yes.”

“Ah-ha-ha! Become a tinker!”

“Well, why not?”

She swung around and caught me by both elbows and looked me straight in the eyes.

“Why not?” she repeated.

I thought of what I’d seen and felt—and smelt—in the library when I went there with Menial, and I thought of what I’d seen in the old power-station. This was history, this was the real thing, not dead but living, a continuity with the past and an earnest of the future, the sky road indeed. But who’s to say it was those considerations that weighed with me, and not the sight of Menial under the stars, on her way to a bed I could share for all the nights of my life?

Not me, for sure.

“Why not,” I said. “Yes.”