The Sky Road

3 The Ship o the Yird

An hour later, after a run across town that was bloody hard in (and on) my boots, and a hasty wash and change into my work clothes, I stood at the station bus-stop with my steel safety-helmet in one hand and my aluminium lunch-box in the other. Packing my lunch was the only non-basic service that my landlady provided, but for me that was enough to forgive her the absence of breakfast, dinner, laundry and reliable hot water.

The sun’s growing heat was burning off the morning mist on the loch and between the hills. I felt as though I might at any moment rise and float away myself. My eyes felt sandy and my brain felt hot, but these discomforts did not diminish the kinder glow of elation somewhere in my chest and gut. In a strange way I could hardly bear to think about Mer-rial—every time I did so brought on such an explosion of joy that I quivered at the knees, and I almost feared to indulge it to excess. I wanted to keep it, hoard it, dole it out to myself when I really needed it, not gulp it all down at once. (Which is of course a mistaken notion—that particular well, like all too many others, is bottomless.

What I thought about instead was another woman—the Deliverer, under whose memorial I had met Merrial, and under whose remote and ancient protection she and her people lived. (Protected from persecution, at any rate, if not from prejudice.)

Over the past four years, History had been one of the arts I. had struggled to master. It hadn’t been easy, even in Glaschu, where the place fair drips with it, as they say. The baffled aversion expressed by Merrial was a common enough reaction. In a time of so many opportunities, and a place buzzing with innovative work in so many fields which could be applied to bring about manifest human betterment, it seemed perverse (sometimes even to me) for a vigorous and intelligent young man to turn aside from such arts as Literature, and Music, and Kinematography, or from the sciences: Astronomy, Medicine, the many branches of Natural Theology; from the improving pursuits of Practical Philosophy and Mechanical and Civil Engineering—to turn aside from all these useful works of the intellect, not even for the understandable and, within reason, commendable attractions of business and pleasure, but to fossick about in mouldering documents and crumbling ruins, and to fill his head with bloody images and mind-numbing figures from the mega-dead past.

It was a distasteful and faintly disreputable fascination, with a whiff of necrophilia, even of necromancy, about it. But, whether we will or no, we’re all historians, each with our own outline of history in our heads. This was a point I’d often had to make to sceptical listeners, from parents and siblings through to patronage committees and on to friends and workmates in drink-fuelled debate. We pick up the outline from parents and teachers and preachers, from songs and statues and stories.

In the beginning, God made the Big Bang, and there was light. After the first four minutes, there was matter. After billions of years, there were stars and planets, and the Earth was formed. The water above the sky separated from the water below the sky, which brought forth all manner of creeping things. Over millions of years they were shaped by God’s invisible hand, Natural Selection, into great monsters of land and sea. The Earth was filled with violence, and God sent an asteroid, Katy Boundary, to destroy it. The sky was dark at noon for forty days, and almost all the living things were destroyed. Among those who survived were little beasts like mice, and they replenished the Earth, and burrowed into it and became coneys, and climbed trees and became monkeys, and climbed down and became Men—

— ape-men and cave-men, Egyptians and Babylonians, Greeks and Romans, Christians and Americans, Chinese and Russians. The Americans fell but their empire lived on as the Possession, until the Deliverer rose in the east and struck it down. Troubled times followed, and then peace.

So why disturb it—answer me that, lad!

Because the truth is more interesting and ultimately more instructive than a farrago of fable? I had acquired the taste not just for truth but for detail; for the peculiar pleasure that comes from seeing the real relationship between events in terms of cause and effect rather than narrative convention. It’s a satisfaction which I’ll defend as genuinely scientific.

But what use is it, eh?

To that I had no ready answer, except to define the result as art, in the same way as the method could be defined as science. The argument that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it failed to impress most people, convinced as they were that there was no risk whatsoever of history’s more ruinous errors being repeated. So I had to reach for the argument that real history told a better story because it was a truer story; that reality had its own beauty, sterner and higher than that of myth.

The particular story I wanted to tell was of the life of the Deliverer. My proposal for a thesis on her early years as a student and academic in Glasgow, long before she became the figure known to history, was only the beginning of my own world-conquering ambition: to reconstruct, as much as one can across that gulf of time, the mind and personality and circumstance that had shaped the future that was now our past.

It might take decades of research, years of writing. Whatever else I did, this biography would define my own: a life for a Life. Perhaps it was an unconscious balking at that price, or some half-baked, self-justifying attempt to pay my dues to what my more practical-minded contemporaries called “real work”, or something more positive, a dimly felt attraction to the world of material striving and measurable success, a turning towards the future and away from the past, that led me that summer to Garron Town and the Kishorn Yard.

“Thank God it’s Thursday,” said a cheerful voice behind me. I turned and grinned at Jondo, who was leaning against the bus-stop sign and eating a black pudding and fried-egg roll. Behind him a score of workers were by now queuing up. Vendors of snacks, hot drinks and newspapers worked along the line.

“It’s Friday,” I pointed out.

“That’s what I meant,” he said around a mouthful, hand-waving with the remainder of his breakfast. “Force of habit.” He swallowed. “Pay-day, at any rate.”

I nodded enthusiastically. Half my pay was telegraphed straight to my account at the Caledonian Mutual Bank; out of the remainder I had to pay for my lodgings, food and drink, and a modicum of carousing at the weekly fair. By Friday mornings I had just enough cash to get through the day. Pay was high, but so was the cost of living—the project had pulled up prices for miles around it.

Jondo was a man about my own age, his beer-gut already as impressive as his muscles. His long red hair, now as usual worn in a pony-tail, and his pale eyes and eyebrows gave him the look of a paradoxically innocent pirate; inherited perhaps from his ancestors who’d gone a-viking, and come to this land to pillage and settled down to farm, and to whom the Christian gospel had come as good news indeed, a welcome relief from heathendom’s implacable codes of honour and vengeance. He spoke with the soft accent of Inverness, where—rumour had it—there were Christians still.

I tried to imagine Jondo drinking blood at some dark ceremony. The momentary absurd image must have brought a smirk to my face.

“What’s so funny, Clovis?” he growled. Then he smiled, balling up the waxed paper and chucking it, wiping the grease from his hands on the oily thighs of his overalls. “Ach, I know. A good night with your tinker lass, was it?”

“You could say that.”

“Aye, well, each to their own, I suppose,” he said, in the tone of one making a profound and original observation. “Here’s the bus.”

The bus, already half-full, drew to a halt beside us in a cloud of wood-alcohol exhaust, its brakes squealing and its flywheel shrieking. I hopped on, paid my groat to the driver and settled down in a window seat. Jondo heaved his bulk in beside me, gave me another lewd grin and a wink, released an evidently satisfying fart and went instantly to sleep.

Some passengers busied themselves with newspapers or conversation, but most dozed like Jondo or stared bleary-eyed like me. The discrepancy between the time-honoured four-day week and the project’s more demanding schedules reduced Friday work to a matter of clearing up problems left over from the past week and preparing for the next. Not even the inducement of double time could make more than a handful of the labour-force encroach on the sanctity of Saturday and Sunday, although it could make most of us work overtime through the week. No amount of patient lecturing from managers with clipboards and redundant hard hats could persuade us to adopt what they considered a more rational work pacing.

The bus lurched into motion. I lit a cigarette to dispel Jondo’s intestinal methane and laid my temple against the welcome throbbing coolness of the window. As we crossed the Carron and passed New Kelso I gazed beyond the suburb’s neat bungalows to where morning smoke rose from the tinker camp. A vivid image of Menial asleep—the tumble of black hair, the white-sleeved arm across the pillow—lit up my mind. I wondered what my chances were of seeing her through the day. I didn’t even know which office she worked in, and a desultory fantasy took shape of finding some fantastic excuse to visit them all: of working my way through the administration blocks and drawing-offices, spurning the flirtations of giggling girls and pensive older women with hunky pin-ups above their desks, until I finally walked into an engineering lab to find Menial alone and in a day-dream of her own, about me, into which my real arrival would be a passionately welcomed incursion…

Probably not.

My head swung away from the window as the bus turned left on to the main road along the northern shore. I jolted upright, making sure my head didn’t swing back and crack against the pane. Even at this hour in the morning the road was busy with commuter traffic and heavy trucks. The bus chugged slowly along, picking up yet more passengers in Jeantown, another village that the project had expanded, its packed buildings teetering perilously up the hillside. Out on the loch a pod of dolphins sported, their leaps drawing gasps and sighs from the less jaded or dozy of my fellow-passengers.

Then, with a great clashing of gears and screeching of flywheel as the auxiliary electric motors kicked in, the bus turned right, on to the road up into the hills between the two mountains, An Sgurr and Glas Bhein, that dominated the northern skyline of the lochside towns. To me, this afforded an inexhaustibly fascinating view of further ranges of hills and reaches of water. Everybody else on the bus ignored it completely. Someone opened a window to let out the smoke and let in some fresh air; a bee blundered in, causing a ripple of excitement and much brandishing of rolled newspapers before it bumbled out.

Above the last houses, above the meadows, the trees began: twenty-metre-tall beeches, then pine and rowan and birch, all the way up to the crags and the scree. Centuries ago these hills had been bare of all but rough pasture and heather, cropped by the infamous black-faced sheep. But these same bare hills had somehow sustained the sparse guerilla forces of Jacobite and Land Leaguer and Republican. Far below I could see the rocky peninsula known as the Island, a sheltering arm around the harbour, still with a small bunker on its top. During the First World Revolution a thirteen-year-old had written herself into local legend by bringing down a stealth fighter with a nuclear-tipped rocket-propelled grenade. In Jeantown’s poky museum you can see an ancient photograph of her: the grubby, grinning cadre of a Celtic Vietcong, posed with the rocket tube slung on her shoulder, beside unrecognisable wreckage on a scarred hillside where to this day nothing will grow.

Over the top of the saddleback and down into the long, dark glen where the Pretender had evaded Cumberland’s troops, where the Free Kirk had preached to the dispossessed, and where, later, the Army of the New Republic had cached their computers, the hardware of their software war against the last empire. The grim glen opened to another fertile plain of woods and fields and recently grown town, Courthill. Beyond it, at the edge of the sea-loch, lay the great scar of the Kishorn Yard. There was a trick of the eye in interpreting the sight—everything there, the cranes and the platform and the ship, were much bigger than their normal equivalents, like the Pleistocene relatives of familiar mammals.

The bus pulled up at the works gate. The stockade around the yard had been constructed more to protect the careless or reckless from wandering in than to safeguard anything it enclosed. I nudged Jondo awake and we alighted in a dangerous, fast-moving convergence of buses and cars and bikes. We strolled through the gate just as the seven-o’clock klaxon brayed. Hundreds, then thousands, of workers streamed through the gate and swarmed out across the yard. The place looked like a benign battlefield, crater-pocked, vehicle-strewn, littered with the living. I clamped the heavy helmet on my head, and with Jondo puffing along behind me, plunged in; ducking and dodging along walkways, over trenches, under cables; leaping perilous small-gauge railway tracks and over waterlogged trenches and dried-up culverts (drainage here had always been a bit hit-and-miss); past haulage vehicles and earth-movers, air-compressors and power-plants, portable cabins and toilets set down as if at random in the muck, until at length we reached the immense dry-dock that was the focus of the whole glorious affray.

The dry-dock was a giant rounded gouge out of the side of a hill where it sloped down to the sea—hundreds of metres across, tens of metres deep. Its rocky cliffs were old and weathered; it looked like some work of Nature, or of Providence—even of Justice, the smiting of the Earth by a wrathful God; but in fact it was the centuries-old work of Man. (It is their civil engineering that most impresses, of the works of the ancients, but this is perhaps because so much of it endures—greater works than these have gone to the rust and the rot.) Iron sluice-gates, on an appropriately Brobdingnagian scale, held back the sea—though pumps laboured day and night to counter the inevitable seepage and spill.

Within it towered the platform, a—someday soon—floating bastion of concrete and painted steel, and within that towered the ship. The Sea Eagle (lolair—pronounced something like “Yillirrih”—in the Gaelic) looked like a rocket-propelled grenade buried nose-down in the platform. Four fin-like flanges sloped from its central tower to intersect the ovoid surface of its reactor-shell and reaction-mass tank, which was forty metres across at its widest diameter. The part of it concealed by the platform tapered from this equator to the aerospike of the main jet, around which the flared nozzles of attitude jets made a scalloped array.

By now I was tramping along in the middle of my work-gang, Jondo and I having been joined by Ma-chard, Druin, the Lewismen—Murdo One and Murdo Too—Angelo and Trike. We descended a zig-zag iron stairway, down and down again, and walked across the floor of the dock, splashing through puddles of rainwater and seawater (some of which were so long-established that they had their own ecosystems) to the door at the base of the platform’s southwest leg. It was like going into a lighthouse: up and up, around and around the winding stair. The air smelt of wet metal, hot oil, damp concrete. Every surface dripped, every sound echoed.

After two minutes’ climb we reached the level of the internal scaffolding where we were working. I ducked through a service door in the inner side of the leg and emerged on to a walkway facing one of the platform’s turbines across a twenty-metre gap. At our current worksite, a dozen metres along the walkway, ladders, more scaffolding and planks disappeared into—in fact appeared to merge with—the unfinished structure of struts joining the support leg to the platform’s engine mount.

Our contract for the month was to finish that structure. There was no flexibility in the contract: there was only a month to go before the platform was floated out. Angus Grizzlyback, the foreman, was sitting at a wooden pallet mounted on crates to form a table, on which were spread some disassembled welding-torches, a small tin of kerosene and a few now very dirty seagull quills. He stood and glowered at us, reflexively lowering his head so as not to bash his pate on the next level up. You could see the white hairs on his chest and forearms which had inspired his nickname (or, for all I know, his surname, local custom being what it was). He was nearly two metres tall and about a hundred and fifty years old.

“Ah, good afternoon, gentlemen,” he said. “I trust you all enjoyed your long lie? Let’s see if we can think of something to occupy our leisure for the rest of the day.”

He drew a sheaf of finger-marked papers from his pocket as we gathered around the pallet. His pale grey eyes, under white brows, fixed me for a second.

“ And you can get started right away, colha Gree,” he added.

I nodded brightly, winced at the effect of this sudden violent motion, and went off to make the tea.

The morning meeting—twenty minutes of sitting around, drinking tea and smoking—was the routine start to the day. Work on the project was organised through a sort of ecological pyramid of contractors and sub-contractors, from the great kraken of the International Scientific Society all the way down to frantically scrabbling krill like myself. Angus Grizzlyback combined the functions of entrepreneur and foreman, which partly cut across, and pardy complemented, the job of the shop steward (in our case, Jondo) who held the equivalent position in the parallel pyramid of the union.

Conversation at the meeting, in my two months’ experience, revolved around rumour, the day’s news and sport. At the end of it everybody would drain their mugs, fold their newspapers, stub out their cigarettes, glance at some scrap of paper or doodle of slopped tea, nod to Angus and get cracking on some complex job to which only the most recondite allusion had been made. I would clear up the mess, rinse out the mugs if we were near a tap, and listen to Angus spell out my task for the day in terms suitable for the simple-minded.

Today’s agenda was dominated by a motion before the Strathcarron district council, reported in the West Highland Free Press, that the locality should delegate its coinage to the regional council at In-verfefforan. This dangerous proposal for centralisation found no favour around the pallet. It was forensically dissected by Angus, vulgarly derided by the Lewismen, angrily dismissed by the Carronich. I myself pointed out a recent lesson of history. A few years earlier, a similar proposal had been passed in Strathclyde. The Glasgow mark had lost all public confidence, and the scheme was abandoned when annual inflation reached a ruinous two per cent. The discussion moved on to the national football league, and my attention wandered.

You can guess where. This time, however, my thoughts were more rational, and troubling, than my previous delighted memories, eager anticipations and fond fantasies. High as my opinion was of myself, I could not shake off my impression that Menial had expected to find me; that she had known me, or known of me; that her first glance had signified recognition. Love and lust at that sight there had been, on both sides I was sure; but I was equally, though more obscurely, sure that this was not the first sight. I had recognised her too, but had no idea from where; with her it was conscious from the beginning, unconcealed but unexplained.

For a moment—I admit with shame—I considered the notion that we might have known each other in a previous life, whatever that may mean. On an instant I dismissed the idea as the foolish, womanish, oriental superstition that it is. Metempsychosis (though undoubtedly within the power of Omnipotence) has no place in the natural and rational religion.

So I lounged, elbows on the rough wood of the crude table, and sipped tea and smoked leaf while my companions argued about finance or football, and tried to apply my infinitesimal portion of Reason to a problem on which my passions were fully, and turbulently, engaged. The rational conclusion was that if we recognised each other we must have met before, not in an imagined previous life, but previously in this.

There were a number of possibilities on my side of the equation. (Menial’s I set aside—there were any number of ways in which she, from her privileged vantage, could have observed me, unobserved herself, and investigated me, undetected.) Was it conceivable that one of the hundreds of faces I saw nearly every day had been hers, unnoticed at the time? It seemed unlikely: hers was the kind of face I couldn’t help but notice. I’d have given her a second look, and more, in a crowd of thousands.

Had I seen her, then, in another context, perhaps not even in the flesh? In, for example, some poster or moving picture about the project (all of which, for understandable reasons of recruitment, lied about its complement of pretty girls)? The same objections applied—I’d remember the film, I’d have the poster.

By further elimination I quickly returned to the first explanation that had struck me: that we had met, or at least seen each other, in our earlier years; in childhood. Menial, I now recalled with renewed interest, had not explicitly disavowed the possibility—only discounted it, saying that she wasn’t from around here.

Neither, of course, was I. There was no reason why I couldn’t have seen her. I couldn’t remember any such encounter, but I already knew that our childhood memories are as vagrant as our childhood selves, and as elusive; and as capable of innocent, shameless deceit.

The brute-force approach suggested itself: interrogate my parents, brothers and sisters; ransack family photographs… not yet. Already, the conscious thought that I sought the memory would have released the insensible agency in my mind that I privately thought of as the Librarian. That part of me would do the rest, and bring back the record if it were to be found at all—no doubt at some time as unexpected as it would be inopportune, but welcome nonetheless.

“—the torch parts?” said Angus.

I realised I had missed something. Angus sighed.

“You understand how to fit them, test and adjust?”

“Sure,” I said, nodding with more confidence than I felt.

Tine, fine,” said Angus, standing up and briskly brushing the palms of his hands together. “Let’s get on with it, gendemen.”

The others were grinning at me.

“Some night that must have been,” said Murdo Too, setting off another round of ribald teasing. I took it in good part but was relieved when they’d all clambered away into the support structure, leaving me to get on with my job without benefit of Angus’s unheard instructions. A couple of hours passed quite pleasantly, if dangerously, and at the morning tea-break Angus was happy enough with the results to turn me loose on some sheet metal a dozen metres inward and ten up. I perched in the din-filled open space of the support structure, with nothing visible while I worked but what my own torch’s jet illuminated, and with little else on my mind.

About twelve o’clock I decided to knock off for lunch. I throttled down the torch and lifted my mask. As I gathered up the bits of kit to carry back I heard Menial’s voice. I blinked and looked down. There she was, looking up from under a safety-helmet.

“Hi, Clovis!” she shouted, waving a lunch-box.

I waved back and returned to the scaffolding, dropped my tools and grabbed my lunch-box and descended to the dock’s floor so quickly that my boots made the stairwell ring. By the time I’d reached the bottom, Merrial had walked over and was waiting for me. She was wearing the standard boiler-suit and boots, an outfit which—with her tied-back hair—gave her a boyish look. Her hug and kiss of greeting were sweet and warm; the rims of our helmets clanged, and we pulled apart, laughing.

“This is a fine surprise,” I said.

She caught my hand. “Gome on,” she said. “I know a good place.”

We set off across the dock, to the predictable whistles and cat-calls of my mates, high above. Around the vast perimeter of the platform we went, and out into the daylight on the seaward side. Just left of the huge sea-doors Menial turned towards the cliff, where a series of shelves and foot-holds formed a dangerous-looking natural stairway, which she skipped up on to and nimbly ascended. I followed, not looking down, until she stopped on a wider, grassy, heathery shelf a good thirty metres up.

We sat down. Menial leaned back against the rockface, and I, unthinking, did the same—then jerked forward as I discovered again the scratches and bruises on my back. With our legs stretched out, our feet were almost at the edge. I felt more uneasy on that solid rock than I ever had at greater heights on the platform. Across the top of the gates, across the sea-loch, the Torridonian battlements of Apple-cross challenged the sky. The scale of those ancient mountains dwarfed the ship itself to a metal sculpture some eccentric artist had made in his back garden in his spare time.

“My place,” Menial said.

“Some place,” I acknowledged. “It’s you who should be working on the platform, with a head for heights like this.”

Til keep to my cosy lab and my long lies, thanks.”

We opened our boxes and spread out and shared the contents, then got stuck in, both ravenous. For a few minutes we ate, without saying much, then Menial topped up the mugs, lit herself a cigarette, passed one to me and leaned back against the rock.

“Clovis, I have something to ask you—”

She stopped. She was looking straight ahead, as though she wanted to talk without looking at me.

“What is it?”

“Something you can maybe tell me. Something you might not be supposed to. It’s to do with the ship.”

This was getting more serious than love.

You want to know about welding?” I asked, trying to be flippant.

She laughed. “No, about history.”

“Oh.” I waved a hand. “Any time. But there must be plenty better qualified than I, all I know about in any depth is—”

She watched me as the penny dropped.

“The life of the Deliverer?”

“That’s the one,” she agreed cheerily.

“You’re serious?”

“I’m serious,” she said. She wasn’t looking away from me now, she was looking at me with a fixity and intensity of gaze I found alarming.

“All right,” I said, my mind treading water. “You seriously want to know something about the Deliverer? I can tell you anything you want. But what has that to do with the ship, for God’s sake?”

She took a deep breath, gazing away from me again at the tall ship. “It’s a fine ship there, colha Gree, and proud I am to be working on it. But consider this: it’ll be the first ship to have lifted from the Yird for many a hundred year. The first since the Deliverance. We don’t know much of what happened then, but we do know there were people and machines in space before the Deliverance, and we’ve heard never a word from them since. There’s no doubt they’re all dead. Why do you think that is?”

“There was a war,” I said patiently, “and a revolution. The Second World Revolution, or the Deliverance, as we call it. The folk outside the Yird had followed the path of power, and they fell with the Possession. Starved of supplies, or killed each other, most like.”

“So the story goes,” she said, in the tone of one tired of disputing it. “But what if it’s wrong? What if whatever cleared the near heaven of folk and machines and deils alike is still there?”

“Ah,” I said, glancing involuntarily up at the clear blue sky. “But it stands to Reason, the people in charge of the project will have considered this. Why don’t you take it up with them?”

They’ve considered it all right,” she said, “and rejected it. There’s no evidence of anything up there that could do the ship any harm. There’s no evidence that the loss of the space habitations was anything but what you’ve said.”

“So why do you think I might know anything about this—” I waved my hand dismissively “—supposed danger?”

“Because…” At this point, I swear, she looked around and leaned closer, almost whispering in my ear. “There has long been a tinker tradition, or rumour, or hint—you know how it is with the old folk—that whatever did destroy the space settlements and satellites and so on might still be there, and that it was… the Deliverer’s own doing.”

My mouth must have fallen open. I could feel it go instantly dry, and I felt a moment of giddiness and nausea. My fingers dug into the tough grass as the world spun dangerously. I looked at her, sickened, yet fascinated despite myself. The natural religion has no sin of blasphemy, but this was blasphemy as near as dammit. “That’s deep water, Menial.”

“You’re telling meV she snorted. “I’ve had trouble enough for even suggesting it. Everybody thinks the Deliverer was a perfect soldier of God, like Khomeini or somebody like that! Oh, among my own folk there’s a more realistic attitude, they’ll admit she had faults, but that’s just among ourselves. In public you won’t find a tink saying a word against her.”

I smiled wryly. “Except you.”

“This is not public, colha Gree.” She ran a finger down the side of my face and across my lips.

You must be very confident of that,” I said. “To tell me.”

“I’m confident all right,” she said. “I’m sure of you.”

To distract myself from the turmoil of mixed feelings this assurance induced, I asked her, “So what is it that I can tell you?”

“What you know,” she said. Tve always thought the scholars might know more about the Deliverer than they’re letting on.”

I laughed. “There are no secrets among scholars, they’re not like the tinkers. All we find out is published. If it doesn’t square with what most folk believe, that’s their problem; but most folk don’t read scholarly works, anyway. And—well, I suppose they are like the tinkers in this—they have a more realistic attitude among themselves. It’s true, the Deliverer was no perfect saint. But I’ve seen nothing to suggest that she ever did anything as dire as… as you said.”

She made a grimace of disappointment. “Oh, well. Maybe it was too much to hope that something like that would be written down on paper.” She plucked a pink clover and began tugging out the scrolled petals one by one and sucking them; passed one to me. I took it between my teeth, releasing the tiny drop of nectar on to my tongue.

“On paper,” I said thoughtfully. “There could be other information where we can’t reach it.”

“In the dark storage?”

“Aye, well, like I said last night—it’s there, but we can’t reach it.”

“I could reach it,” Merrial said casually.

“Oh, you could, could you?”

“Yes,” she said. “I can get hold of equipment to take data out of the dark storage and put it in safe storage.”

“Safe storage?” I asked, too astonished to query more deeply at that moment.

“You know,” she said. “The seer-stones.”

“And how would you know that?”

Again the remote gaze. “I’ve seen it done. By… engineers taking short cuts.”

“There’s a good reason why the left-hand path is avoided,” I said.

“ ‘Necessity is its own law’,” she said, as though quoting, but the expression came from no sage I’d ever read. “Anyway, Clovis, it’s not as dangerous as you may think.”

Curiosity drove me like prurience. “How do they do it safely? Draw pentagrams with salt, or what?”

“No,” she said, quite seriously. “They make lines with wire—isolated circuits, you know? That’s what confines anything that might be waiting to get out. There are other simple precautions, for the visuals—” she made a cutting motion with her hand in response to my baffled look “—but ninety-nine times out of a hundred there’s nothing to worry about anyway. Just words and pictures.” She chuckled darkly. “Sometimes strange words and pictures, I’ll give you that.”

“And the hundredth time?”

“You meet a demon,” she said, very quietly but emphatically. “Most times, you can shut it down before it does any damage.”

“And the other times?” I persisted.

“It gets loose and eats your soul.”

I stared at her. “You mean that’s actually true?”

She laughed at me. “Of course not. It makes your equipment burst into flames or explode with a loud bang, though.”

“I can see how that might be a hazard.”

She reached over and touched my lips. “Shush, man, don’t go on like an old woman. Most of the stuff in the dark storage is useless to us, or evil in a different way from what you think. Evil ideas from the old times, they can make you sick, and make you want to share them, so they spread like a disease.”

She leaned back again and closed her eyes, enjoying the sun like a cat. “I reckon you and I are strong enough and healthy enough in our minds to be safe from that sort of thing.” She opened her eyes again and gave me a challenging look.

The path of power is always a temptation, as Mer-rial had so lightly said last night. Until now, it had never seriously tempted me; I knew the dangers, and knew no way of getting to the undoubted rewards. Now such a way was being offered; it might reduce by years the time required for researching my thesis, it might even give me a head start on the Life. The lust for the lost knowledge made my head throb.

The question was out before I knew what I was saying. “Do you want me to help you to do it?”

Her eyes widened and brightened. “Could you? That would be just—wonderful!”

She was looking at me with so much admiration and respect that I could not imagine not doing what it would take to deserve it. But even in my besotted eagerness to please her, my genuine concern about the problem she thought she’d uncovered, and my own desire for the knowledge and for the adventure of obtaining it—even with all that, my whole training and my natural caution came rushing back, and I wavered.

“Oh, God,” I said. “I’ll have to think about it.”

“Can you get your thinking about it over by eight tonight?” Merrial asked drily.

“Maybe. And what if I say no?”

She held me in her level gaze. “I won’t think any the less of you. It won’t change a thing about that.”

“Sure?” I said, not anxiously but mischievously. I had already decided. She had seduced me into a frame of mind that feared neither God nor men nor devils. “Then what will you do?”

She shook her head. Til find some other way, or at the worst just register my protest in the record, and go on with my work as I’m told.”

“That sounds like a more sensible course in the first place.”

“It is that,” she said. “But I’d rather have the satisfaction of knowing the ship is safe, one way or another, than of saying ‘I told you so” afterwards.”

I couldn’t argue with that, and I didn’t want to. What she said must have had some deeper effect on me, because when we descended the perilous steps down from the heathery eyrie, each of us one stumble away from the welcoming arms of Darwin, I wasn’t afraid at all.

My room was narrow and long, under the slope of the roof. After the heat of the day it was full of the smell of old varnish and warm rust and the sound of creaking wood. The westward-facing skylight let in enough light to see by, and enough air to breathe.

I came in from work and threw off my overalls and shirt, tossed my temporarily heavy purse on the bed, and uncapped a chilled bottle of beer I’d bought at the bus-stop. I opened the skylight to its fullest extent and sat myself under it on the room’s one tall chair, and leaned my elbow on the window’s frame as though sitting at a bar. Beside my forearm tiny red arachnids moved about on the grey and yellow lichen like dots in front of my eyes.

Merrial and I would meet again in two hours. Plenty of time to wash and shave and dress, to consider and reconsider. I was almost tempted to have a brief sleep, but decided against it, attractive though the barely straightened bedding seemed at this moment. After soaking up the beer I’d get a good jolt of coffee. I lit my fifth cigarette of the day and gazed out over the rooftops towards the loch, my parched body gratefully absorbing the drink, my tired brain riding the rush of the leaf.

Merrial’s disturbing but alluring proposition had preoccupied me all afternoon, and although my decision was made I had plenty of doubts and fears. I would not be the first to mine the dark archives in the interests of history, or of engineering for that matter; it was neither a crime nor a sin, but it had always been impressed upon me that it was a dangerous folly. And, to be sure, I could think of no good reason for doing it, other than the ones which motivated myself and Merrial; no doubt everyone who had taken that path had felt the same about their reasons. Rationally, it was obvious why the dangers were better publicised than the benefits—those who found only madness and death in the black logic could not but be noticed, whereas those who found knowledge or wealth or pleasure discreedy kept their sinister source to themselves.

What hypocrisies, I wondered, did the tinkers practise, if they themselves would on occasion turn their hand to the leftward path? Until Menial had mentioned it, I’d suspected no such thing: but then, with the tinkers’ virtual monopoly of an understanding of the white logic, it was in their interests to publicly disparage the black. Optical and mechanical computing, and more especially the delicate interface between them—the seer-stones set like gems in the shining brass of the calculating machinery—were their speciality and secret skill. What would happen if people outside their guild were to start exploring the left-hand path in earnest, as a public enterprise rather than a private vice, heaven only knew. A new Possession, perhaps; in which case the tinkers might have to engineer a new Deliverance. It was not a reassuring thought.

I stubbed out the cigarette and sent the butt tumbling down the slate roof-tiles to the dry gutter. The sounds of people going home, of engines and hooves and feet, rose from the street below. I turned back into the room and finished the beer, then undressed and went into the sluice-shower and washed myself down. The water ran cold just before I got the last soap-suds off; I gritted my teeth and persisted, then leapt out and dried myself off while the electric kettle boiled. I filled a ewer with a mixture of cold and hot water and shaved carefully, then set some coffee to brew while I got dressed: in the same trousers and waistcoat as I’d worn the previous night, but I thought the occasion deserved a clean shirt.

The bed was close enough to the table for the two items of furniture to form a somewhat unergonomic desk. I sat down with the coffee and looked at the stack of books and papers I’d brought with me to read over the summer. I reached over and hauled a volume from the stack, cursed and got up and found a rag and wiped dust and cobwebs from all the books, washed my hands and sat down again. Sipping the cooling coffee, turning over the pages, I tried to focus my mind on the matters they contained.

When I was awakened for a third time by my forehead hitting the table I gave up and poured another coffee and turned my mind to my real worry, the one I didn’t want to think about: what if Merrial were simply using me? That she had sought me out in the first place because she wanted me to do a job for her?

I walked up and down the room’s narrow length, turning the question over almost as often as I turned around. After several iterations I decided that I couldn’t have been fooled about her feelings, that her passion was real—and that if she’d been intent on manipulating me, she would have done it more subtly—

But then, perhaps that itself was evidence of how subtly she’d done it. At that point I stopped. To suspect manipulation that subtle—an apparently clumsy and obvious approach disguising one devious and elegant—was to undermine the very confidence in my own judgement on which all such discriminations must perforce rely.

So I forgot my suspicions, and looked once more at the books, and at a quarter before eight went out into the evening to meet her, and my fate.