Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

of you.’
    To distract myself from the turmoil of mixed feelings this
assurance induced, I asked her, ‘So what is it that I can
tell you?’
    ‘What you know,’ she said. Tve always thought the
scholars might know more about the Deliverer than they’re
letting on.’
    I laughed. ‘There are no secrets among scholars,
they’re not like the tinkers. All we find out is published.
If it doesn’t square with what most folk believe,
that’s their problem; but most folk don’t read
scholarly works, anyway. And – well, I suppose they are
like the tinkers in this – they have a more realistic
attitude among themselves. It’s true, the Deliverer was no
perfect saint. But I’ve seen nothing to suggest that she
ever did anything as dire as… as you said.’
    She made a grimace of disappointment. ‘Oh, well. Maybe
it was too much to hope that something like that would be written
down on paper.’ She plucked a pink clover and began tugging
out the scrolled petals one by one and sucking them; passed one
to me. I took it between my teeth, releasing the tiny drop of
nectar on to my tongue.
    ‘On paper,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘There
could be other information where we can’t reach
it.’
    ‘In the dark storage?’
    ‘Aye, well, like I said last night – it’s
there, but we can’t reach it.’
    ‘I could reach it,’ Merrial said casually.
    ‘Oh, you could, could you?’
    ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I can get hold of
equipment to take data out of the dark storage and put it in safe
storage.’
    ‘Safe storage?’ I asked, too astonished to query
more deeply at that moment.
    ‘You know,’ she said. ‘The
seer-stones.’
    ‘And how would you know that?’
    Again the remote gaze. ‘I’ve seen it done.
By… engineers taking short cuts.’
    ‘There’s a good reason why the left-hand path is
avoided,’ I said.
    ‘„Necessity is its own law“,’ she
said, as though quoting, but the expression came from no sage
I’d ever read. ‘Anyway, Clovis, it’s not as
dangerous as you may think.’
    Curiosity drove me like prurience. ‘How do they do it
safely? Draw pentagrams with salt, or what?’
    ‘No,’ she said, quite seriously. ‘They make
lines with wire – isolated circuits, you know? That’s
what confines anything that might be waiting to get out. There
are other simple precautions, for the visuals – ’ she
made a cutting motion with her hand in response to my baffled
look ‘ – but ninety-nine times out of a hundred
there’s nothing to worry about anyway. Just words and
pictures.’ She chuckled darkly. ‘Sometimes strange words and pictures, I’ll give you
that.’
    ‘And the hundredth time?’
    ‘You meet a demon,’ she said, very quietly but
emphatically. ‘Most times, you can shut it down before it
does any damage.’
    ‘And the other times?’ I persisted.
    ‘It gets loose and eats your soul.’
    I stared at her. ‘You mean that’s actually true?’
    She laughed at me. ‘Of course not. It makes your
equipment burst into flames or explode with a loud bang,
though.’
    ‘I can see how that might be a hazard.’
    She reached over and touched my lips. ‘Shush, man,
don’t go on like an old woman. Most of the stuff in the
dark storage is useless to us, or evil in a different way from
what you think. Evil ideas from the old times, they can make you
sick, and make you want to share them, so they spread like a
disease.’
    She leaned back again and closed her eyes, enjoying the sun
like a cat. ‘I reckon you and I are strong enough and
healthy enough in our minds to be safe from that sort of
thing.’ She opened her eyes again and gave me a challenging
look.
    The path of power is always a temptation, as Mer-rial had so
lightly said last night. Until now, it had never seriously
tempted me; I knew the dangers, and knew no way of getting to the
undoubted rewards. Now such a way was being offered; it might
reduce by years the time required for researching my thesis, it
might even give me a head start on the Life. The lust for the
lost knowledge made my head throb.
    The question was out before I knew what I was saying.
‘Do you want me to help you to do it?’
    Her eyes widened and brightened. ‘Could you? That
would be just – wonderful!’
    She was looking at me with so much admiration and respect that
I could not imagine not doing what it would take to deserve it.
But even in my besotted eagerness to please her, my