Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

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 asink 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 theproject 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 Fer-gal. 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