Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

sight, and which kept on
going for several minutes.
    When the list had stopped its crawl she said, ‘OK,
copy,’ and rattled at the keyboard again. A picture of an
hourglass appeared on the screen, and the sand began to run. The
seer-stone, meanwhile, showed a tree, branching and budding and
growing leaves.
    After about a minute and a half the sand had all flowed from
the top half of the glass, and the stone was filled with green.
Both displays vanished.
    ‘That’s it,’ Menial said.
    ‘That’s all?’
    Tes,’ she grinned. ‘That’s all the files
that mention Myra Godwin transferred, from the dark storage to
the stane. No bad going, eh?’
    ‘Brilliant,’ I said. She stood up, leaned around
behind the computer again, disconnected her wire and wound it
quickly around her hand. Then she poked a few more keys on both
keyboards. The screen went that shining grey again, and the stone
went back to black.
    She smiled at me. ‘You have my permission to turn the
power off.’
    We left the small room, and the larger library, exactly as we
had found them, and walked quietly down the stairs and out of the
Institute. When we were a few metres down the street and away we
hugged each other and yelped.
    ‘We did it!’ Menial gloated. ‘We actually
fucking did it!’
    ‘Yes, I still can hardly believe it,’ I said. I
caught her hand. ‘Now what do we do?’
    ‘We look at what we’ve got,’ she said.
‘Somewhere no one will see us, or bother us.’
    I knew just the place.
     
    Because it was vacation time there were few students around,
so my landlady was happy to rent me my usual small room above the
book shop on South-park Avenue for one night. She didn’t
raise an eyebrow as she took my five marks and handed over a
bedroom key, even though it was only about half past four in the
afternoon. I suppose she assumed we wanted to use the room for
sex.
    She gave us a quick cup of coffee and shared a smoke, and a
couple of months’ worth of local gossip, in the back of her
kitchen, then waved us upstairs with a wink at me. The room had a
fairly generous, though notionally single, bed and a chair and
table and power socket. The window had been left open, but its
only view was of the back yard. Still, one could look out and see
the sky any time one wanted.
    ‘Perfect,’ Merrial said.
    She unloaded the seer-stone and its peripheral pieces again
and set them up on the table, running a small cable from the
black box to the wall socket. The little box began to hum
faintly, and at the same moment a human face loomed out of the
dark of the seer-stone, mouthing distress.
    ‘Ah, fuck that,’ Merrial said. She rubbed the
stone with a cuff, and the face fell apart into flecks of colour.
‘Now,’ she said, ‘let’s get on with
sorting and searching. We’re looking for stuff from before
the Deliverance, but finding it in this lot won’t
necessarily be easy. Let’s hope the files are
date-stamped.’
    She sat in the chair, motioning to me to perch on the table,
and started tapping away at her version of a keyboard. ‘Ah,
good, we can sort by date.’
    The list reappeared in the depths of the glassy stone, this
time with a stack of articles at the top with a single date of 28
May 2059. Merrial stroked with her finger gently and slowly along
a tiny bar on the keyboard, then tapped another key.
‘Let’s see what this is.’
    We peered together into the glass and began to read.
     
    Bankrupt of any perspective for overcoming the crisis, the
ruling elite can only sit and watch as society disintegrates
beneath it Factories fail to fulfil their obligations, corruption
is rife, and the real value produced in the economy continues to
plummet. Many industrial sectors actually produce negative value:
their output is worth less – in market or any other terms
– than the raw materials they take in; in essence, they are
vast organizations for spoiling resources.
    In the absence of any genuine move towards a market, or
– from the other side – any initiative from
the workers, the system can only continue to
disintegrate.
     
    ‘Sounds like 2059 all right,’ Menial said. That
was what the Deliverance delivered us from.’
    I nodded, cautiously. ‘Let’s just look further
down…’
     
    What cannot be ruled out is that the Moscow oligarchy could
launch some diversionary military adventure, but this too would
rapidly develop its own problems, and intensify those