Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

lap, with her left arm – crooked like
mine – protectively over it, lay a bulky poke of polished
leather, fastened with a drawstring thong. It may have bulged a
little larger, and weighed a little heavier, than the kind of
bags that lasses tend to lug around, but it would have taken a
close and sharp observer to notice. Inside it, concealed by a
layer of the sort of oddments one would expect to find in such a
poke – a cambric kerchief, cosmetics, smallbore ammunition
and the like – was the complicated apparatus that Fergal
had delivered to her house early on the Sunday evening. It was
built around a seer-stone about fifteen centimetres in diameter,
nested in neat coils of insulated copperwire. The strangest
aspect, to me, of this device was an arrangement of delicate
levers, each marked with a letter of the alphabet, queerly
ordered:
    QWERTYUIOP… Probably, I thought, a spell.
     
    ‘Grotty old place,’ said Merrial, rubbing her face
with her hands and looking around the damp, flag-stoned concourse
of Inverness station. Her cheeks reddened, her eyes widened under
the smooth friction of her palms. Her dress, this time of blue
velvet, looked a bit rumpled. We were standing at the coffee-bar,
having twenty minutes to wait for the 8.30 to Glasgow.
    I looked up at the creosoted roof with its wide skylight
panels and suspended electric lamps. ‘At least it
doesn’t have pigeons.’
    ‘Can’t say herring-gulls are much of an
improvement.’ She kicked out with one booted foot, sending
a hungry, red-eyed bird squawking away. One end of the station
opened to the platforms, the other to the main street. The
arrangement seemed peculiarly adapted to set up cold but
unrefreshing draughts. Despite its mossy walls and paving, the
station was more recent than the buildings outside, most of which
pre-dated the Deliverance, if not all three of the world
wars.
    I finished my bacon roll, smiled at Merrial – who was
mumbling, half to herself and around mouth-fuls of her own
breakfast, some irritated speculation about the degenerative
evolution of scavenging sea-birds – and wandered over to
the news-stand. There I stocked up on cigarettes and bought a
copy of the Press and Journal, a newspaper which outdoes
eventhe West Highland Free Press in its incorrigible
parochialism and venerable antiquity. Most of its pages consisted
of small advertisements, to do with fishing, farming, uranium and
petroleum mining and, of course, Births, Marriages and Deaths.
The last of these could take up half a tall column of small
print: ‘Dolleen Starholm, peacefully in her sleep, aged 251
years, beloved great-great-grandmother of…’ followed
by scores of names; and sometimes (as in this case) the discreet
indication of cult affiliation: ‘RIP’ or THS’.
More frequent, and more prominent, were proud affirmation of the
orthodox hope: ‘Returned by the Flame’ (or the Sky or
the Sun or the Sea) ‘to the One’.
    I went back to the counter and, while Merrial finished off her
breakfast, scanned the sparse snippets of national and
international news that had managed to wedge their way in among
the earth shak-ingly important football and shinty reports,
fishing disputes and Council debates.
    The Congress of Paris had ceremonially opened its
ninety-seventh year of deliberations, and had immediately plunged
into bitter controversy about a proposal to empower the
Continental Court to adjudicate border problems between cantons
and communes; the apparently more difficult matter of
disagreements between countries having been resolved by the
Congress long ago, its success had apparently gone to its
collective head.
    I sighed and turned the page. Another American republic had
voted a contribution from tariff revenue to the spaceship
project, which was gratifying but mysterious – there was
even an editorial comment about it, full of sage mutterings about
how their ways were not ours, and that we should not disdain such
assistance, immoral though it mightseem to us. I wasn’t too
sure; to me, it smelt of stealing money, but the Americans have a
much greater reverence for their governments than people have in
more civilised lands. If offered some loot by an African king or
Asian magnate or South American cacique, I should hope the
International Scientific Society would politely decline, and this
case seemed little different. But all of this was, at this
moment, quite