Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

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