Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

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 equallywell 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.’

 
12
Dark Island
     
     
    Coming in from the West on the M8, the taxi hired by the
Kazakhstani consulate to take Myra from Glasgow Airport was hit
by small-arms fire just as it came of! the flyover at Kinning
Park.
    Myra saw white starry marks pock the smoky armoured glass, did-did-did, heard the wheels’ whee of
acceleration; her hand went reflexively to the shoulder holster
under her coat and got caught in the strap of the seatbelt For a
moment, as she looked down at her recently, newly smooth and now
suddenly white hand, she thought death had found her at last
– that she was going to die old and leave a good-looking
corpse.
    Then they were out of it, smoothly away, swinging around up
and on to the Kingston Bridge over the Clyde. Myra twisted about
and looked back and to the left, where the standard-practice
burning-tyres smokescreen rose somewhere among the office-blocks
and high-rises into the pale-blue late-May morning sky. A
helicopter roared low and fast above the motorway, making the big
car rock again, andflew straight at one of the tall