Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

keeping hundreds of people drunk for a week.
    Merrial looked over at me.
    Time to go?’
    ‘Aye.’
    We stood up and made our way back, easier now, through the
thinning crowd. For obvious reasons, alcohol was strictly banned
from the site, and from this day’s event. Everybody was
heading back for the towns, starting with the nearest, Courthill.
The end of the project, and the final pay-packets and bonuses,
would be celebrated by drinking the pubs dryover the course of
the afternoon and evening.
    We wandered along the path back to the main road, occasionally
greeting people we knew. The stage from which the speeches had
been made stood empty, and was already being dismantled. The
various dignitaries were moving down the path in a compact group,
and I hurried a little to overtake them on the grass, eager for a
closer glimpse of the famous men and women who had travelled far
to honour our achievement. Menial observed this behaviour with
sardonic toleration.
    I was pointing out a renowned Russian astronomer and an
English spacecraft engineer to Menial when we both noticed Fergal
towards the rear of the procession, walking alone among them all.
I was surprised to see him, then realised that I shouldn’t
be – he had been the project manager on the guidance
system, after all. At the same moment, he noticed us. He beckoned
us over.
    Menial glanced at me. I shrugged. We went over and joined him,
I making sure that I walked between him and Menial. I felt
uneasily that we had no place there, but the rest of the
dignitaries politely paid us no attention whatever, to the extent
that they noticed us at all, and weren’t simply caught up
in their own deep conversations.
    He looked at us sidelong, without hostility. Our confrontation
might as well never have happened, for all that he showed of
bearing any grudge. For myself, it was different.
    ‘How have you two been getting on?’ he asked.
He’d obviously heard of our bundling.
    ‘Oh, fine. Great!’
    Menial caught my hand and swung it. ‘This one’s no
an outsider any more, I’ll tell you that’
    ‘Good.’ He smiled, and changed the subject.
‘It’s a great day for us all.’
    ‘Aye,’ I said. ‘But I’ll not be sure
of it until the ship’s in orbit.’
    ‘Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that,’ he said.
His gaze flicked to Menial’s eyes. ‘The ship is
safe.’
    ‘How are you getting on?’ I asked boldly.
‘With your new friend?’
    ‘Who – oh, the AI!’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Art-if-icial In-tell-igence,’ Fergal and Menial
articulated at the same moment. I glanced from one to the other
and laughed.
    T have to learn that sort of thing sometime!’
    ‘Indeed you do,’ said Fergal indulgently.
‘Still, you have plenty of centuries ahead to learn
it.’
    ‘Well, I suppose two is plenty, at that,’ I
replied, puzzled at this odd remark.
    Fergal stopped, then hastened on as others trod on our
heels.
    ‘She hasn’t told you?’
    Menial was looking at him and at me with a mute appeal that
somehow seemed to mean something different for both of us. Fergal
firmly shook his head.
    ‘Well, she bloody should have.’
    ‘I didn’t want to – ’ began
Menial.
    ‘Give him an improper inducement? Or scare him
off?’ Fergal smiled sourly. ‘Like it or not, Mer-rial
MacGlafferty, it’s a bit late for either now,
wouldn’t you think?’
    ‘Oh, I’m not sure he’s ready –
’
    ‘Will you two,’ I said, ‘please stop talking
as if I wasn’t there?’
    Fergal glanced over his shoulder, looked ahead,then turned his
gaze to the ground and spoke in a low voice.
    ‘Do you know why people today live longer than they did
until some time before the Deliverance?’
    ‘Aye,’ I said. ‘I found references to it in
the Deliverer’s papers. Life-extension treatments. I
suppose in some way the effects must have persisted, and become
hereditary.’
    ‘Close enough,’ he said, evidently resisting an
impulse to quibble. ‘Well, the people who became the
ancestors of the tinkers had a better treatment.’
    My heart thudded. ‘How much better?’
    He looked around again. A couple of metres separated us from
the others on that path, before and behind.
    ‘So much better that we don’t know how much better
it is.’
    I looked at Menial, feeling the blood drain from my face, and
then rush back. I squeezed her hand.
    ‘Well, if you’ll have me, I don’t care if
you do oudive me, and stay young while I