Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

someone who’d put it on the ship – for good reasons
or bad.’
    She lowered her gaze and smiled. ‘So here we are. And
now it’s you who has to decide, mo grdidh. That
ship’s success will stimulate others, from other landsas
well, from the Oriental and the Austral states. Competition
between companies and continents, great revolutions to come, and
the sky road before us. If it’s not launched, or its new
mind is ripped out and it fails, or if indeed the AI is not smart
enough to save it, then it’ll be a long time before
it’s tried again. And the next to try might not be as
benevolent as the International Scientific Society. It could be
an army, or an empire.’
    She grabbed my shoulders and gazed at me. ‘If you walk
in there and tell Druin and his boys, that’s what could
still happen.’
    I closed my eyes. T can see that,’ I said, ‘but
I’m more concerned about the power Fergal, or someone like
him, might have.’
    ‘Open your eyes,’ Menial said.
    She was looking very serious. ‘That thing, the AI, the
planner, it can only do what people let it tell them to do.
Fergal said there are no such people yet. What he should have
said is, there are no such people any more. Your people,
colha Gree, they are not the types to let themselves be ordered
about by communists – because they have never been ordered
about by anyone!’
    ‘Ah!’ I said, suddenly understanding.
‘Because of the Deliverance, and the Deliverer!’
    Menial laughed.
    „ ‘No saviours from on high deliver“,’
she said wryly. ‘Your people delivered themselves.
That’s another thing I saw, and I’ll tell you about
one day. If you’re still with me.’
    ‘Oh, yes,’ I said. ‘I’m still with
you.’
    ‘Good,’ she said. ‘We have a lot to do and a
long time to do it in.’
    She looked around pointedly. The square was jumping.
    ‘So, colha Gree, are you going to ask me for a
dance?’
    ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Would you do me the
honour?’
    For a second before we whirled away I stared at the scene
before me, fixing it in my memory. Behind the statue Mars was
rising, a blue-green dot in the East. Whatever became of the
ship, whether it soared to a safe orbit or was blasted to
smithereens, other ships would get out there somehow, on the sky
road.
    Whatever the truth about the Deliverer, she will remain in my
mind as she was shown on that statue, and all the other statues
and murals, songs and stories: riding, at the head of her own
swift cavalry, with a growing migration behind her and a
decadent, vulnerable, defenceless and rich continent ahead; and,
floating bravely above her head and above her army, the black
flag on which nothing is written.