Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

the dock was lined with
people. Everybody who’d worked at the yard, on the platform
or the ship, was certainly there, along with casual visitors from
the surrounding towns, keen sightseers from all over the
Highlands, and outright enthusiasts from even farther afield. A
couple of hundred metres around the cliff and inward, officers of
the International Scientific Society, project managers and
exemplary workers made speeches from a wooden stage with a raised
dais and an awning. Nobody farther away than fifty metres, at the
outside, could make out a word these dignitaries said,
particularlynot from the PA speakers strung out like fairy-lights
on catenaries of cable all over the place. Squawks and howls and
crackles worthy of a railway station echoed around the
cliff-faces.
    I ducked in between a couple of workers at the front
who’d incautiously allowed a quarter of a metre to open up
between them. Menial followed with, no doubt, a smile at both of
them which made them feel they were being done a favour.
    And then we were there, a metre or two from the crumbling,
tussocked edge. The platform and the’ spaceship loomed
startlingly close. At that moment another cheer went up, as
though to acclaim our arrival, and I realised that the capsule at
the tip of the probe was, minutely but perceptibly, swaying. The
platform was afloat.
    ‘Hoo-rrayy!’ I shouted, joining enthusiastically
in the applause. Menial yelled something almost too high to hear
beside me; I could hardly hear myself. Though a less spectacular
moment than the flooding of the dock, it was freighted with
greater significance: the beginning of the Sea
Eagle/Iolair’s journey, which would end in space.
    It was a strange launch vehicle, simultaneously more primitive
and more advanced than anything sent into space in the first age
of space exploration. The ancients could, no doubt, have built a
fusion torchship, but they didn’t. They went straight from
massive liquid-fuelled rockets to the nanotech diamond ships of
the last days. In our time, with chemical fuels relatively
expensive and nanotech (other than the tinker computers) quite
beyond our reach, and the secret of controlled fusion still
extant, the fusion torch is a logical choice.
    But, as Fergal had implied, building it out of boiler plate
was a trifle inelegant. On the otherhand, the skills were there,
locally available from shipbuilding; and the weight – given
the immense power of the engine – was not a significant
constraint. And say what you like about red-leaded steel plate,
it is reliably resistant to sea-water. There was, of course, no
question of launching such a monster from anywhere on land, which
is less forgiving – of intense heat, high-energy particles
and unstable isotopes – than the sea.
    Its mission, too, was primitive, or at least simple: to launch
into orbit an experimental communications and Earth-observation
satellite. That payload had required the co-operation of
scientists and engineers (tinkers or otherwise), lens-makers and
photographers, from all over the civilised world. Its electronic
and electrical systems strayed suspiciously close to the path of
power – even deploying, if you wanted to be awkward, a
system very like television. But after much soul-searching and
acrimony, the majority of the most respected practitioners of
Natural Theology had, with some reluctance, nodded their
long-haired heads. Television, they gravely pointed out, had been
destructive only as a mass medium. To object to it as a method of
communication from a satellite to a ground station would, they
averred, be crass superstition, unworthy of this enlightened
age.
    Needless to say, a minority of their equally respected, though
(it has to be said) usually older, colleagues insisted that this
was the first step on a slippery slope at the bottom of which lay
a population reduced to a passively rotting mass of mental and
physical wrecks. With equal inevitability, given the nature of
Natural Theology, a much smaller (and, yes, younger) faction were
pointing out that the sort of abject helotry described and
decried bytheir conservative colleagues were in fact the peoples
better known as the ancients, who had watched television
assiduously and had an achievement or two to their credit before
they fell. To which, of course… but the argument’s
further iterations would be tedious to elaborate.
    Merrial walked forward more