Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

workmates. ‘Isn’t it very dangerous?’ I
resisted the impulse to look over my shoulder, but I was
suddenly, acutely aware of the massive presence of the hills
around the town, their forested slopes like the bristling backs
of great beasts in the greater Wood of Caledon.
    ‘White logic,’ Menial explained. ‘The
right-hand path, you know? The path of light.’ She did not
sound as though the distinction mattered a lot to her.
    ‘Reason guide you,’ I responded, with reflex
piety. ‘But – it must be tempting. The short cuts,
yeah?’
    ‘The path of power is always a temptation,’ she
said, with casual familiarity. ‘Especially when
you’re working on a guidance system!’ She laughed; I
confess I shuddered. She fingered her talisman. ‘Enough
about that. I know what I’m doing, so it isn’t
dangerous. At least, not as dangerous as it looks from
outside.’
    ‘Well.’ Despite the electric frisson her words
aroused, I was as keen as she was to change the subject.
‘You could say the same about what I do.’
    ‘And what do you do?’ She asked it out of
politeness; she already knew. I was sure of that, without quite
knowing why.
    ‘I work in the yard,’ I said.
    ‘On the ship?’
    ‘Oh, not on the ship!’ A self-deprecating laugh,
not very sincere. ‘On the platform. For the summer,
I’m a welder.’
    She slugged back some beer. ‘And the rest of the
time?’
    ‘I’m a scholar,’ I said. ‘Of history.
At Glaschu.’
    This was a slight exaggeration. I had just attained the degree
of Master of Arts, and my summer job was a frantic, frugal effort
to earn enough to support myself for an attempt at a doctorate.
Scholarship was my ambition, not my occupation. But I refused to
call myself a student. Menial looked at me with the sort of
effortful empathy with which I’d favoured her
self-disclosure. ‘That sounds… interesting,’
she said. ‘What part of history?’
    I gestured across the square, to the statue’s black
silhouette. Behind it, from the east, the first visible stars of
the evening pricked the sky.
    The life of the Deliverer,’ I said.
    ‘And what have you learned?’ She leaned closer,
transparently more interested; her black brows raised a fraction,
her bright dark eyes widening. Without thinking, I lit a
cigarette; remembered my manners, and offered her one. She took
it, grinning, and helped herself to the jug of beer, then filled
my glass too. ‘You wouldn’t think there’d be
much new to learn,’ she added, looking up through her
eyelashes.
    I rose to the bait. ‘Ah, but there is!’ I told
her. ‘The Deliverer lived in Glasgow, you know. For a
while.’
    ‘A lot of places will tell you she lived there –
for a while!’ Menial laughed.
    ‘Aye, but we have evidence,’ I said.
‘I’ve seen papers written with her own hand, and
signed. There is no controversy that it was her who wrote them.
What they mean, now, that’s another matter. And a great
deal of other writing, printed articles that is, and material
that is still in the – you know.’
    ‘Dark storage?’
    ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Dark storage. I wish
– ’ Even here, even now, it was impossible to say
just what I wished. But Merrial understood.
    ‘There you go, colha Gree,’ she said. ‘The
path of power is always a temptation!’
    ‘Aye, it is that,’ I admitted gloomily. ‘You
can look at them, labelled in her own hand, and you wonder
what’s in them, and – well.’
    ‘Probably corrupt,’ she said briskly. ‘Not
worth bothering with.’
    ‘Of course corrupt – ’
    She shook her head, with a brief, small frown. ‘In the
technical sense,’ she explained. ‘Garbage data,
unreadable.’
    Garbage data? What did that mean?
    ‘I see,’ I said, seeing only that she’d just
tried to explicate part of the argot of her profession; another
unseasonable intimacy.
    ‘All the same,’ she went on, ‘it must be
strange work, history. I don’t know how you can bear it,
digging about in the dead past.’
    I had heard variations of this sentiment from so many people,
starting with my mother, that exasperation welled within me and
I’m sure showed on my face. She smiled as though to assure
me that she didn’t hold it against me personally, and
added, ‘The Possessors don’t work only through the
black logic, you know. They can get to your mind through their
words on paper, too.’
    ‘You speak very freely,’ I said. For a