Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

Christians and Americans, Chinese and
Russians. The Americans fell but their empire lived on as the
Possession, until the Deliverer rose in the east and struck it
down. Troubled times followed, and then peace.
    So why disturb it – answer me that, lad!
    Because the truth is more interesting and ultimately more
instructive than a farrago of fable? I had acquired the taste not
just for truth but for detail; for the peculiar pleasure that
comes from seeing the real relationship between events in terms
of cause and effect rather than narrative convention. It’s
a satisfaction which I’ll defend as genuinely
scientific.
    But what use is it, eh?
    To that I had no ready answer, except to define the result as
art, in the same way as the method could be defined as science.
The argument that those who do not learn from history are doomed
to repeat it failed to impress most people, convinced as they
were that there was no risk whatsoever of history’s more
ruinous errors being repeated. So I had to reach for the argument
that real history told a better story because it was a truer
story; that reality had its own beauty, sterner and higher than
that of myth.
    The particular story I wanted to tell was of the life of the
Deliverer. My proposal for a thesis on her early years as a
student and academic in Glasgow, long before she became the
figure known to history, was only the beginning of my own
world-conquering ambition: to reconstruct, as much as one can
across that gulf of time, the mind and personality and
circumstance that had shaped the future that was now our
past.
    It might take decades of research, years of writing. Whatever
else I did, this biography would define my own: a life for a
Life. Perhaps it was an unconscious balking at that price, or
some half-baked, self-justifying attempt to pay my dues to what
my more practical-minded contemporaries called ‘real
work’, or something more positive, a dimly felt attraction
to the world of material striving and measurable success, a
turning towards the future and away from the past, that led me
that summer to Garron Town and the Kishorn Yard.
     
    ‘Thank God it’s Thursday,’ said a cheerful
voice behind me. I turned and grinned at Jondo, who was leaning
against the bus-stop sign and eating a black pudding and
fried-egg roll. Behind him a score of workers were by now queuing
up. Vendors of snacks, hot drinks and newspapers worked along the
line.
    ‘It’s Friday,’ I pointed out.
    ‘That’s what I meant,’ he said around a
mouthful, hand-waving with the remainder of his breakfast.
‘Force of habit.’ He swallowed. ‘Pay-day, at
any rate.’
    I nodded enthusiastically. Half my pay was telegraphed
straight to my account at the Caledonian Mutual Bank; out of the
remainder I had to pay for my lodgings, food and drink, and a
modicum of carousing at the weekly fair. By Friday mornings I had
just enough cash to get through the day. Pay was high, but so was
the cost of living – the project had pulled up prices for
miles around it.
    Jondo was a man about my own age, his beer-gut already as
impressive as his muscles. His long red hair, now as usual worn
in a pony-tail, and his pale eyes and eyebrows gave him the look
of a paradoxically innocent pirate; inherited perhaps from his
ancestors who’d gone a-viking, and come to this land to
pillage and settled down to farm, and to whom the Christian
gospel had come as good news indeed, a welcome relief from
heathendom’s implacable codes of honour and vengeance. He
spoke with the soft accent of Inverness, where – rumour had
it – there were Christians still.
    I tried to imagine Jondo drinking blood at some dark ceremony.
The momentary absurd image must have brought a smirk to my
face.
    ‘What’s so funny, Clovis?’ he growled. Then
he smiled, balling up the waxed paper and chucking it, wiping the
grease from his hands on the oily thighs of his overalls.
‘Ach, I know. A good night with your tinker lass, was
it?’
    ‘You could say that.’
    ‘Aye, well, each to their own, I suppose,’ he
said,in the tone of one making a profound and original
observation. ‘Here’s the bus.’
    The bus, already half-full, drew to a halt beside us in a
cloud of wood-alcohol exhaust, its brakes squealing and its
flywheel shrieking. I hopped on, paid my groat to the driver and
settled down in a window seat. Jondo heaved his bulk in beside
me, gave me another lewd