Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

of the
centre.
     
    ‘Damn!’ I said.
    ‘What?’
    ‘This isn’t 2059, it’s more like
1999!’
     
    The invasion of Afghanistan must be seen in this
context.
     
    ‘No, it’s 1979! Well -’ I frowned at the
date at the foot of the article ‘ – actually 1980,
but it was written about the situation in ‘79. In the
Soviet Union.’ I laughed bitterly. ‘The reason
it’s a bit difficult to tell at first what period
she’s talking about is that it was in the Soviet Union that
the collapse started, right there in the 1970s. After the Soviet
Union disintegrated it just got worse, and spread.’
    This much was a fairly well-accepted historical account, which
I’d covered in my undergraduate studies in Ancient
History.
    ‘So why’s it dated 2059?’ Menial asked. She
stroked the bar and rolled the list down again.
‘Hah!’ she said. ‘This file, and a whole lot of
others by the look of it, were put on to the computer at
that date. Which doesn’t mean they were created then. I
don’t know if I can extract the original creation date,
either.’
    ‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘Maybe this is
where I can help. I should be able to tell the rough date from
the titles of the files, or maybe a quick look at their
contents.’
    ‘There are thousands of files in there,’ she
pointed out. ‘If dating each of them takes as long as it
did to date that one, we’ll be here all night’
    I smiled. ‘Why should that be a problem?’
     
    It turned out not to be a problem. Although the bulk of the
files had the same date in the ‘date’ column of
Menial’s machine, and she gave up looking for a way to find
what she called the ‘create-date’, quite a large
number of the files had a date reference of some kind in their
titles. These were apparendy articles from magazines or
newspapers, by Myra Godwin or about her. We quite quickly got
into a way of working that let me identify such files, and Menial
deal with them, copying the date from the title to another
‘date’ column. After ten minutes of this she hit her
forehead with the heel of her hand and cried,
‘Stop!’
    ‘What is it?’
    ‘We’re wasting our time. I’m wasting
our time, I mean.’ She rubbed her hands. ‘What we
need here is a wee program, to scan the titles for dates, extract
them, reformat them and then sort by date…’
    ‘I’ll take your word for it,’ I said, not
having understood all of her words. She waved me away, with a
look of abstracted concentration on her face.
    ‘This’ll be easy,’ she said.
‘It’ll save us hours.’
    I sat on the windowsill, smoking a cigarette, while her
fingers flickered over the small keyboard, making a pattering
noise like rain on a roof. It struck me that there seemed to be
no discernible difference between the white logic and the black,
but no doubt this only showed my ignorance.
    Tessl’ she said. ‘No bother.’
    She hit a key and sat back. Then she leaned forward again,
peering at the stone.
    ‘Oh ffiuck!’
    I eyed her warily.
    ‘I used fucking two-digit year-dates. Force of habit.
Fucking thing falls over on the year 2000.’
    The pattering started again.
     
    About half an hour later Menial had the files partially
ordered by date, and we could dig about in them with a little
more confidence in their relevance to our concerns.
    ‘ „Defence Policy Contract (Expiry), Vatican City,
11 December 2046“,’ Menial read out. ‘That
looks interesting.’
    She pressed one of her keys and the file, as she put it,
opened: instead of the title glowing a little brighter among the
others, we could see the whole document. Parts of it were in
impenetrable legal language (parts of it, in fact, were in Latin)
but there was enough there for us to form a good idea of what it
was about.
    Menial paused before opening another file, one labelled
‘Mutual Protection/Space Merchants/2058’.
    We looked at each other, both a little pale, each waiting for
the other to speak first.
    Menial swallowed hard, and reached for one of my
cigarettes.
    ‘You do know,’ she said slowly, ‘just what
the Deliverer had to do to make a living, under the
Possession?’
    ‘Well…’ I could feel my lower lip moving
back and forth over the edge of my teeth, and stopped it.
‘Yes. It’s one of the aspects of history that
historians tend not to talk about. In popular works, that
is.’
    ‘Ohh!’ Menial let out a held breath in relief.
‘You know