Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

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 everwalked 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
bestscientists’ 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