The Sky Road

13 The Sea Eagle

iVaiiin drummed on the roof of Menial’s house. The view outside was dreich. I’d looked out the window earlier, down the glen and the loch; ranks of cloud were marching in off the sea, and one after another shedding their loads on the hills. Inside, it was warm: we sat huddled together, backs to the piled-up pillows, sipping hot black coffee.

“No work today, thank Providence,” I said.

“Not at the yard anyway,” said Menial. She waved a hand at the soldering-iron and seer-stones and clutter in the corner of the room.

“You start learning a different work, here.”

“Aye, great,” I said.

“What is this Providence you talk about, anyway?” she asked.

“Urn.” I stared at the slow swirl of the coffee. “It’s… the helpful side of Nature, you might say. When things work out as we would wish, without an apparent cause.” I looked at her. “You must know that.”

“But that’s just coincidence,” she said. “All things come by Nature.”

“Some things are more than coincidence, and Nature is more than—” I was going to say “more than Nature” but stopped and laughed. “You really don’t know any Natural Theology?”

“No,” she said cheerfully. “I’ve always just taken for granted that the outsiders have strange beliefs. Never gone into the details.” She put her empty mug down at her side of the bed and snuggled up to me. “Go on. Tell me the details.”

“Oh, God. All right. Well, the usual place to start is right here.” I tapped her forehead, gently. “Inside there. From the outside we see grey matter, but from the inside we think and feel. We know there are billions of cells in there, processing information. So thinking and feeling—consciousness—is something that information does. It’s what information is, from the inside, its subjective side. Where there’s information, there’s consciousness.”

“But there’s information everywhere,” she said. “Wherever anything affects anything else, it’s information. The rain falling on the ground is information.”

“Exactly!” I slid my arm around her shoulders. “You’ve got it.”

“Got what? Oh.” She shifted a little and looked straight at me. “You mean there’s consciousness everywhere?”

Yes! That’s it!”

“But, but—” She looked around. “You mean to tell me you think that clock, say, has thoughts?”

The ticking was loud in the room as I considered this.

“It has at least one,” I said cautiously.

“And what would that be?”

“ ‘It’s later… it’s later… it’s later.’ ” She laughed. “But the whole universe—”

“Is an infinite machine, which implies an infinite mind.” I put my hand behind her head, cradling the container of her finite mind.

“ ‘And this all men call God’,” I concluded smugly.

Menial punched me.

“And the computers, I suppose you would say they are conscious too?”

“Aye, of course,” I said.

“What a horrible thought.”

“They may not be conscious of what we see from the outside,” I said. “They may be thinking different thoughts entirely.”

Menial gazed abstractedly out of the window.

“What thought is the rain thinking?”

“Can’t you hear it?” I said. “It’s thinking ‘yesssss’.”

“Hmm,” she said. “Now there’s a. coincidence…”

We used the couple of days before my reinstatement in my job at the yard for the beginnings of an education in fine soldering and in programming, the latter subject being simultaneously fascinating and maddening. We also made a painstaking study of the Deliverer’s documents, which continued—after we’d returned the originals to Gantry, and I’d returned to work at the yard—with the photocopies, but they yielded no information relevant to the ship’s mission. The folder from the 2050s reinforced, in its casual references and assumptions more than its explicit statements, the staggering extent of the orbital activity of pre-Deliverance humanity. But it contained no hint of the Deliverance itself.

There was one moment when I thought I had won a real historical insight, albeit one tangentially relevant to our immediate concerns.

I looked up from the stack of papers on Menial’s broad table. Every evening after work, I’d slowly sifted through them, as now, in the late sun.

“Menial?” I said. She turned from the seer-stone apparatus on which she was working, and laid down her soldering-iron.

You found something?”

“No, just—realised something. These Greens she talks about in some of her articles, the marginal people who lived outside the cities. She makes the point here that they had a lot more practical skills than folk gave them credit for, that they weren’t just ignorant barbarians but farmers and smiths and electricians and so on.”

“Yes,” she said, with a mysterious smile. “That was true.”

“Well! These people, the Greens, they must have been the ancestors of the tinkers!”

“Here,” she said, passing me a cigarette. “You’re going to need this.”

“Why?” I asked, lighting up.

“Because—oh, Dhia, how can I break this to you gently? You’ve got it the wrong way round entirely! Why do you think we call the settled folk ‘the outsiders’?”

“What?”

“Aye, the Greens, the barbarians, these are not our ancestors, Clovis. They’re—I was going to say yours, but I can’t say that any more, mo graidh, now you’re one of us. They’re the ancestors of the outsiders! We are the survivors, the descendants, of the city folk!”

“So how is it that we—I mean the outsiders—live in the cities now?”

She stood up then, walking around the small room like a lecturer, gesturing with her cigarette.

“Oh, but your face is a picture, colha Gree! They live in the cities now because they invaded them, they moved in at the Deliverance when the old civilisation and city life had broken down. And they’re still there, bless them, blundering around like the barbarians they are, in the borrowed costumes of the past. All these scholars that you wanted to emulate, they’re just rummaging about in the ruins, reading books they misunderstand so badly it isn’t funny. You’re well out of that, my love, you’ll learn more from us in a year than in a lifetime at the University!” Indeed.

A huge cheer went up, almost drowning the inrush-ing roar of water, as the sluice-gates opened. The water poured over the edge of the drydock in a saline Niagara that went on and on, until it seemed that the loch itself would be lowered before the deep hole was filled. Faster than a tide, the water crept up the legs and pontoons of the platform.

Menial’s hand gripped mine as we made our way through the crowd, pushing to the front like children. The entire accessible part of the cliff-edge around the dock was lined with people. Everybody who’d worked at the yard, on the platform or the ship, was certainly there, along with casual visitors from the surrounding towns, keen sightseers from all over the Highlands, and outright enthusiasts from even farther afield. A couple of hundred metres around the cliff and inward, officers of the International Scientific Society, project managers and exemplary workers made speeches from a wooden stage with a raised dais and an awning. Nobody farther away than fifty metres, at the outside, could make out a word these dignitaries said, particularly not from the PA speakers strung out like fairy-lights on catenaries of cable all over the place. Squawks and howls and crackles worthy of a railway station echoed around the cliff-faces.

I ducked in between a couple of workers at the front who’d incautiously allowed a quarter of a metre to open up between them. Menial followed with, no doubt, a smile at both of them which made them feel they were being done a favour.

And then we were there, a metre or two from the crumbling, tussocked edge. The platform and the spaceship loomed startlingly close. At that moment another cheer went up, as though to acclaim our arrival, and I realised that the capsule at the tip of the probe was, minutely but perceptibly, swaying. The platform was afloat.

“Hoo-rrayy!” I shouted, joining enthusiastically in the applause. Menial yelled something almost too high to hear beside me; I could hardly hear myself. Though a less spectacular moment than the flooding of the dock, it was freighted with greater significance: the beginning of the Sea Eagle/Iolair’s journey, which would end in space.

It was a strange launch vehicle, simultaneously more primitive and more advanced than anything sent into space in the first age of space exploration. The ancients could, no doubt, have built a fusion torchship, but they didn’t. They went straight from massive liquid-fuelled rockets to the nanotech diamond ships of the last days. In our time, with chemical fuels relatively expensive and nanotech (other than the tinker computers) quite beyond our reach, and the secret of controlled fusion still extant, the fusion torch is a logical choice.

But, as Fergal had implied, building it out of boiler plate was a trifle inelegant. On the other hand, the skills were there, locally available from shipbuilding; and the weight—given the immense power of the engine—was not a significant constraint. And say what you like about red-leaded steel plate, it is reliably resistant to sea-water. There was, of course, no question of launching such a monster from anywhere on land, which is less forgiving—of intense heat, high-energy particles and unstable isotopes—than the sea.

Its mission, too, was primitive, or at least simple: to launch into orbit an experimental communications and Earth-observation satellite. That payload had required the co-operation of scientists and engineers (tinkers or otherwise), lens-makers and photographers, from all over the civilised world. Its electronic and electrical systems strayed suspiciously close to the path of power—even deploying, if you wanted to be awkward, a system very like television. But after much soul-searching and acrimony, the majority of the most respected practitioners of Natural Theology had, with some reluctance, nodded their long-haired heads. Television, they gravely pointed out, had been destructive only as a mass medium. To object to it as a method of communication from a satellite to a ground station would, they averred, be crass superstition, unworthy of this enlightened age.

Needless to say, a minority of their equally respected, though (it has to be said) usually older, colleagues insisted that this was the first step on a slippery slope at the bottom of which lay a population reduced to a passively rotting mass of mental and physical wrecks. With equal inevitability, given the nature of Natural Theology, a much smaller (and, yes, younger) faction were pointing out that the sort of abject helotry described and decried by their conservative colleagues were in fact the peoples better known as the ancients, who had watched television assiduously and had an achievement or two to their credit before they fell. To which, of course… but the argument’s further iterations would be tedious to elaborate.

Merrial walked forward more boldly than I would have and sat down cheerily on the very lip of the cliff, her legs dangling over and her skirt elegantly spread on the heather to either side of her. I sat beside her and tried not to look down at a drop to the sea, direct and vertical except where it was interestingly varied by jutting rocks. We had found ourselves a viewpoint slightly in front of the platform, between its foremost extension and the open gates of the dock.

The shouting and cheering had stopped now, replaced by the susurrus of conversation, the continuing surge of the rising sea and the deep whine of the platform’s turbines as they laboured to move the gigantic structure. Very slowly, the mast-like rocking of the ship’s shaft was intersected by a net forward motion. Slow though it was, this set up a noticeable bow-wave at the front, clashing and splashing against the incoming waves. Complex interference patterns formed as the waves rebounded off the sides of the dock and the platform itself, and the sun, already past the zenith and dipping towards the west, made spectra in the spray.

Even at five kilometres per hour, the platform didn’t take long to pass us, to the sound of further cheering, and waving to and from the operational crew down on the decks. Another significant moment, duly registered by another round of applause, came when the platform passed through the gates and into the open sea—or at any rate Loch Kishorn.

After this there was really nothing to see except the slow departure of the rig, and people began to drift away. The platform had a long voyage ahead of it, out of the loch and into the Inner Sound, from whence it would pass the headlands of Rona and Skye before heading out into the Atlantic. Barring any serious mishap—and the weather forecasts were optimistic—it would proceed for seven more days before it was far enough out in the ocean to hold a position for the launch of the ship itself. The onboard crew would transfer to an escort vessel and stand off on the horizon, triggering the launch by radio control when the scientists and engineers had determined that the conditions were right. Given the robustness of the Sea Eagle and the power of its drive, little short of a severe storm could stand in its way. Only the platform was, in theory, vulnerable to the wind and the waves—so the chanciest part of the whole venture, the part which could literally sink it, was the one that had just begun.

Unless Menial’s fears about the orbital debris were borne out. Nothing more had been heard about this from Fergal or any other tinker, according to Druin, and he could be trusted on such a matter, according to Menial. Although her own contract on the project had come to an end, those of other tinkers working on mission-critical systems (as the cant had it) had not; and she was still well up on the latest tinker gossip—as, increasingly, was I.

In the weeks between our reconciliation and the floating of the platform we had had an interesting time, in which our joy in each other was countered—though not in any way diminished—by the reactions of other people to 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 you getting on?” I asked boldly. “With your new friend?”

“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 up to a few days before the Deliverance. It knows nothing about what happened but it does know that the Deliverer had control of nuclear and other weapons in space. So the possibility that—you know, what we feared—was true is too strong to ignore. But at this stage—hell, if the mission were aborted, or if the ship were destroyed, God alone knows how long it’d be before we’ll see another. There was only one way to do it, and that was to make a copy and let it into the ship’s own seer-stone control systems. Out of sheer self-preservation, the copy would be forced to take the kind of fast-reacting control over the ship’s drive that would let it dodge through any debris that’s still there.”

“Would that work?” I asked Menial, who was staring at Fergal as though seeing past him.

“Oh, aye,” she said, without looking around, “we couldn’t do that ourselves, but an AI would be in with a chance, I reckon. But what happens once it’s up?”

Fergal grinned. “It just sits in the centre of a new communications web, that’s all. A useful thing to have.”

“Bloody dangerous, you mean!” I said.

“Don’t worry,” said Fergal, realising he’d gone too far. “It’s not going to interfere with the satellite. It’ll just… gather information. For the future.”

“Oh God!” Menial exclaimed. “You’re out of your fucking mind! That thing is a deil! It’ll have the world in a new Possession before you know it!”

“It’ll be our Possession,” Fergal said.

Tours, you mean!”

Fergal stretched out his legs.

“And what would be wrong with that?”

He looked at our appalled faces and burst out laughing.

“Don’t be stupid,” he said. “There’s no way it can do anything without having people to work with, and there are no such people yet.” He placed a thumb on Menial’s chin for a moment. “As you fine well know.”

She smacked his hand away, none too gently.

“That was not funny,” she said. She got up with unsteady dignity. “I’m going for a piss.”

Fergal watched me watching her thread her way through the throng. If he detected the tumult in my thoughts he gave no sign.

“No chance of persuading you, Clovis?”

“Not a chance in hell,” I said, still distracted. His casual banter fooled me for not a second; this was a man who wanted power, Possession indeed, and his current scheme with the AI would not be his last. He was a man I would have to watch, and might one day have to kill.

“Oh, well,” he said. “Our day will come, and you’ll see it.”

I was about to contest this when I felt a hand on my shoulder.

“Oh, hello, Catherine.”

My former landlady smiled down at me; like everyone here, she was already a bit drunk. She nodded at Fergal and looked back at me.

“Hi, Clovis. I hope you like your new accommodation.”

“Oh, aye.”

She reached into a pouch on her hip. “I’ve got something for you,” she said. “A letter that arrived a few days ago, I didn’t get round to—”

“That’s all right,” I said, taking the bulky envelope. “Thanks.”

Fergal, perhaps subdued by his rebuff, was moodily studying his drink, or tactfully respecting my privacy, as I opened the package. From the handwriting of the address, I knew it was from Gantry. It contained a letter and a thick booklet. The letter was neatly typed. I glanced down the predictable hand-wringing about my expulsion from the University (the trial had been a farce, not that I cared any more) and about my choice of tinkering as a career; then turned over to the next sheet.

I almost dropped the papers as I fumbled open the booklet and turned to the page. It showed—in much sharper detail and better colour than in modern photographs—some kind of social occasion. People were sitting, smartly dressed, at long tables, clapping their hands as others in their company danced. In the immediate foreground was a girl, caught in mid-twirl, her thick black hair swaying around behind her head, one hand swinging her long, layered skirt out to the side, her bare feet lightly, precisely placed. A fine dancer. Merrial.

She was even named, in the small print of the caption.

It could be an ancestor, I tried to tell myself, as Gantry thought. But I knew it was not so. If anyone could be identified from a photograph, Merrial could. She looked, in the picture, no different from how she looked this day.

I had, from the first moment I’d seen her, thought her younger, fierier, fresher than myself, and attributed her occasional ironies and unreasonably intelligent remarks to her native wit, which I was quite unenviously happy to regard as greater than my own. It was a shock to realise that they were the wisdom of age. Dear God, how old was she? She had lived since the Deliverer’s time! The thought was enough to make me feel dizzy.

Gantry was right about one thing—1 had seen this picture before, on an idle trawl through the Institute’s public-relations archive. And, as I had anticipated, the memory of seeing it did come back. It had only been a few seconds’ pause as I’d turned the pages, a couple of years earlier, my attention momentarily caught by this pretty image from the past.

Fergal’s voice broke into my appalled reflections.

“Bad news from home?”

I shook my head, folding the letter around the booklet again, inserting the sheets in the envelope and slipping it into my pocket.

“No, no,” I said, forcing a smile. “Nothing like that. It’s just—1 feel faint, I think I’ve had too much to drink, on an empty stomach, you know?”

I clapped my hand to my mouth.

“Oh God.” I swallowed. The tinker’s sardonic, sceptical eyes regarded me. I realised that I had still to decide what to do about another shock, delivered only minutes earlier: that he—apparently with Mer-rial’s expectation—had put the AI on the ship. All it would take to expose him, and blast whatever schemes either or both of them had hatched, would be a word to Druin…

“You sure you’re all right?”

“Yeah, I’ll be fine. I just need some fresh air. I’m going out. Could you tell Menial to come out too?”

“Sure,” he said, already scanning the crowd for other company. “Where’ll you be?”

“In the square,” I said. “At the statue.”