Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

The temperature in the room
seemed to have dropped a few kelvins. Now I understood why
she’d been making these invocations. At moments like that
even the most rational person will utter whatever name of the
deity springs to mind.
    ‘It won’t bite,’ she said.
    I sidled forward, keeping a wary eye on the thing, as one
might do towards a dog about whom one had received just such an
assurance. With the hand that Menial couldn’t see, I made
the sign of the Horns, then realised that this was shamefully
superstitious and began instead mentally to recite a few Names of
the One, and of the Prophets: Allah, Buddha, Christ, Deity,
Jordan, Justice…
    ‘Did I do that?’ I asked.
    Khomeini, Krishna, Mercy, Mary, Odin, Necessity,
Nature…
    ‘When you switched the power on, yes.’
    Paine, Providence, Quine, Reason, Yaweh, Zoroaster. That
should do.
    She gazed into my eyes with impish amusement, and reached
forward and stroked my face. The rasp of my stubble sounded
uncannily loud.
    ‘It’s all right, mo grdidh,’ she
said. ‘I’m a tinker. I know what I’m doing.
This thing here -’ she patted the top of it’ –
is just a machine that does the same thing as the seer-stanes,
only not so well. It’s no a deil, ye ken. It’s a
computer.’
    ‘Aye, I know that…’
    ‘Well, start acting as if you believed it,’ she
said.
    ‘But is it a television?’ I shuddered
inwardly at naming that dark instrument of the Possession.
    She shook her head. ‘No. This here is a keyboard, and
this here is a screen. The screen, or monitor, works on a similar
principle to a television, but it is not a television. And even
if it was, it couldn’t do you any harm.’
    Easy enough for her to say that, I thought, but wisely
didn’t say.
    ‘Assuming it still works at all,’ she added
cheerfully. ‘The chips got fried in the Deliverance, for
the most part.’
    (Me neither, but that’s what she said.)
    She rattled a few keys. The screen’s snowstorm responded
not at all.
    ‘Control alt delete,’ she said to herself, and hit
three keys simultaneously.
    Nothing happened, again.
    ‘Hmm,’ she said. She reached forward and prodded a
stud on the machine. The screen turned black.
    ‘So much for that one,’ she said. She stood up and
leaned over the table and started looking more closely at the
various boxes.
    ‘Hey!’ she said. ‘Got it! One of these looks
like it’s radiation-hardened!’ She reached in among
the boxes and started fiddling dangerously with live cables,
removing a lead from the back of the box we’d used and
sticking it in the back of another one. What had seemed to be
merely the blank front of that box suddenly lit up, a smoothly
shining grey, revealing itself to be a screen.
    ‘Yess!’ said Merrial, punching the air.
    By this point I was beginning to get a grip on myself, though
I must admit I almost lost it completely when Merrial turned
around and prodded a letter on the keyboard and the words
‘Demon Internet Software’ flashed up on the
screen.
    Allah, Buddha, Christ…
     
    ‘All right,’ Merrial said briskly, as the screen
with the three sinister names disappeared and was replaced by a
picture with lots of tiny pictures spread out on it.
‘We’ve got this bugger up and running, but Christ
knows how long it’ll stay up.’ (She talked this way,
I’d come to notice, with its curious combination of obscure
sexual and religious references, when she was in what she’d
called her ‘ tinker mode’.) ‘So what we better
do is whip the stuff out of it ay ess ay pee.’
    ‘Out of it what?’
    ‘As. Soon. As. Possible.’
    ‘Oh, right. Toot sweet.’
    ‘What?’
    I waved a hand. ‘Let’s get on with it, as you
say.’
    ‘Yip.’
    She carefully uncoiled one of the strands of copper wire, and
attached a little peg with a copper pin to the end. This she
inserted in a round hole (which, she explained, did not fucking
have to be round the fucking back, but fucking was) in the
pediment of the computer.
    ‘Right,’ she said. The tip of her tongue between
her lips, she tapped out the words ‘Myra Godwin’, the
name of the Deliverer, on the key-board. They simultaneously
appeared on the screen and on the now black seer-stone.
    ‘Go,’ she said, hitting another key.
    A few seconds passed (tongue between the teeth again) and the
screen and the stone filled with a list of tides which crept
slowly upwards, its top moving out of