Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

something in jest, then glanced at Myra and
shut up.
    ‘What?’
    ‘Nah. Forget it. The business to hand is what we do now,
about the coup.’
    Myra let the argument go on. There was a case, she admitted to
herself, on both sides. But Valentina had been right –
there was a subjective edge to Myra’s response. The space
movement’s central element was Mutual Protection, and
Mutual Protection’s central element was David Reid. If the
space movement got its way he would be the most powerful man in
the world.
    No way was she going to let that bastard win.

 
3
The Ship o the Yird
     
     
    An hour later, after a run across town that was bloody hard in
(and on) my boots, and a hasty wash and change into my work
clothes, I stood at the station bus-stop with my steel
safety-helmet in one hand and my aluminium lunch-box in the
other. Packing my lunch was the only non-basic service that my
landlady provided, but for me that was enough to forgive her the
absence of breakfast, dinner, laundry and reliable hot water.
    The sun’s growing heat was burning off the morning mist
on the loch and between the hills. I felt as though I might at
any moment rise and float away myself. My eyes felt sandy and my
brain felt hot, but these discomforts did not diminish the kinder
glow of elation somewhere in my chest and gut. In a strange way I
could hardly bear to think about Mer-rial – every time I
did so brought on such an explosion of joy that I quivered at the
knees, and I almost feared to indulge it to excess. I wanted to
keep it, hoard it, dole it out to myself when I really needed it,
not gulp it all down at once. (Which is of coursea mistaken
notion – that particular well, like all too many others, is
bottomless.
    What I thought about instead was another woman – the
Deliverer, under whose memorial I had met Merrial, and under
whose remote and ancient protection she and her people lived.
(Protected from persecution, at any rate, if not from
prejudice.)
    Over the past four years, History had been one of the arts I.
had struggled to master. It hadn’t been easy, even in
Glaschu, where the place fair drips with it, as they say. The
baffled aversion expressed by Merrial was a common enough
reaction. In a time of so many opportunities, and a place buzzing
with innovative work in so many fields which could be applied to
bring about manifest human betterment, it seemed perverse
(sometimes even to me) for a vigorous and intelligent young man
to turn aside from such arts as Literature, and Music, and
Kinematography, or from the sciences: Astronomy, Medicine, the
many branches of Natural Theology; from the improving pursuits of
Practical Philosophy and Mechanical and Civil Engineering –
to turn aside from all these useful works of the intellect, not
even for the understandable and, within reason, commendable
attractions of business and pleasure, but to fossick about in
mouldering documents and crumbling ruins, and to fill his head
with bloody images and mind-numbing figures from the mega-dead
past.
    It was a distasteful and faintly disreputable fascination,
with a whiff of necrophilia, even of necromancy, about it. But,
whether we will or no, we’re all historians, each with our
own outline of history in our heads. This was a point I’d
often had to make to sceptical listeners, from parents and
siblings through to patronage committees and on to friendsand
workmates in drink-fuelled debate. We pick up the outline from
parents and teachers and preachers, from songs and statues and
stories.
    In the beginning, God made the Big Bang, and there was light.
After the first four minutes, there was matter. After billions of
years, there were stars and planets, and the Earth was formed.
The water above the sky separated from the water below the sky,
which brought forth all manner of creeping things. Over millions
of years they were shaped by God’s invisible hand, Natural
Selection, into great monsters of land and sea. The Earth was
filled with violence, and God sent an asteroid, Katy Boundary, to
destroy it. The sky was dark at noon for forty days, and almost
all the living things were destroyed. Among those who survived
were little beasts like mice, and they replenished the Earth, and
burrowed into it and became coneys, and climbed trees and became
monkeys, and climbed down and became Men –
     – ape-men and cave-men, Egyptians and Babylonians,
Greeks and Romans,