Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

of the library. I recalled
Menial’s comment that people today are more claustrophobic
than their ancestors.
    Beside these tables was another door, of iron, with a handle
but no lock. The mere thought of the possibility of that
door’s having a lock was enough to give me a cold
sweat.
    ‘Here we are,’ I said, and added, to make light of
it, ‘the dark archive.’
    ‘What’s inside it?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’ve
never been in it.’
    She frowned. ‘Is it off limits, or what?’
    ‘No, no.’ I shook my head. ‘It’s not
forbidden or anything. Hardly anybody wants to go in.’
    ‘No point in hesitating,’ said Merrial.
‘Let’s get it over with.’
    I turned the handle and pulled the door back. To fit with my
feelings, it should have given off an eldritch squeak, but its
heavy hinges were well-lubricated. A couple of times I worked the
handle from the inside. It appeared to be in good order, but I
dragged one of the chairs over and used it to prop the door open,
just in case it closed accidentally.
    I switched on the overhead light and stepped with an assumed
air of boldness across the threshold. The small back room
appeared innocent enough. It had a desk, with a couple of chairs
in front of it and on its top a cluster of boxy, bulky structures
like models of ancient architecture. Aluminium shelves lined the
walls on either side. The air held a different, subtler smell,
almost like the smell of washed hair or polished horn, with a
sharp note of acetones.
    Menial sniffed. ‘Like a rotting honeycomb,’ she
remarked cheerfully. I fought down a heave.
    ‘Would smoking get rid of the miasma?’ I
suggested.
    ‘Yes, but it might damage the disks.’
    While I was still looking around for anything that remotely
resembled a disc, Menial began rummaging along the shelves. The
boxes arrayed there were translucent, the colour of sheepskin,
with dusty, close-fitting lids. They contained flat black plates
about nine centimetres square and two millimetres thick. She
picked out a few at random, held them up and shook them slightly.
From every one, a sooty black dust drifted down. Oxidation
crystals crusted the small metal plates at their edges. She shook
her head. ‘Hopeless,’ she said.
    In other, smaller boxes there were smaller, shiny wafers.
These, when she picked them out, simply crumbled to the
touch.
    ‘So much for them,’ she said. ‘We’ll
just have to see if there’s anything on the hard
drive.’ She pulled up a seat in front of the machines. The
largest, before which she sat, had a sort of window-pane on the
front of it. She opened her poke, rummaged out the clutter on top
and carefully extracted her strange devices. She laid them on the
table: the seer-stone glowing with random rainbow ripples, a
small black box and the frame of lettered levers, all connected
by the coils of insulated copper wire.
    ‘Oh, look, that thing there has the same –
’
    ‘Don’t touch it!’
    ‘All right’
    She glanced up at me. ‘Sorry to snap. I’m a bit
jumpy.’
    ‘Aye, well, me too.’
    ‘Also I’m in tinker mode.’ She smiled.
‘Courtesy doesn’t come into it. If you want to help,
see if you can find a power source for this thing while I set up
my system.’ She waved a hand vaguely in the darkness under
the table.
    Suppressing a qualm, I stooped down into that darkness, and
after a moment while my eyes adjusted I saw a dusty power-socket,
with three holes. A centimetre-thick cable hung from the back of
the table and ended in a three-pronged plug. Deducing how plug
and socket fitted together was the work of a moment, as was
inserting the one into the other.
    The light around me brightened suddenly. Mer-rial’s boot
hit my ribs, and she simultaneously uttered an odd
imprecation.
    ‘What?’
    ‘Christ, don’t do that!’
    Another strange prayer. I crawled backwards from under the
table. Menial gave me a glare.
    ‘I thought that was what you wanted me to do,’ I
protested.
    ‘Oh.’ She thought about it. ‘I suppose you
could have taken it that way, yes. I forgive you. Now come here
and sit down.’ She patted the seat beside her.
    As I got to my feet I noticed what had happened to the
machine, and where the extra light was coming from. The window on
the front of the box was glowing a pearly grey with darker and
lighter flecks swirling through it, like the sky above a port on
a snowy day. I took a step backwards.