Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

‘That’s
why we don’t talk about it. I wouldn’t be surprised
if some of your scholars have covered it up too.’ Her eyes
narrowed. ‘Maybe some of the senior tinkers know about this
nuclear business, and all. But they don’t talk about
it’
    We sat looking at each other, with the sudden passion of
people who have lost something that they believed in, and have
only each other left. It was all the more bitter because we each
had separately thought we had been told the worst about the great
woman, had smugly thought we were mature enough to know it and
keep it quiet from the gullible populace, and we each had found
that we had our selves been gulled by our own guild; that there
was an even darker tale to tell. My mind was racing, and I could
feel a headache coming on. At the same time I felt a sense of
release, a small deliverance, as the image of the Deliverer
toppled in my mind.
     
    With a short break when we wandered out into the warm evening
for dinner in a fish restaurant by the Kelvin, we worked through
the files. We found plenty about Myra Godwin’s strange
career – more than enough to write a pretty sensational
biography – but nothing about what had happened around the
time of the Deliverance itself. It was after nine when Merrial
jumped up and hissed, ‘Shit! Shit!’
    ‘What’s the matter?’
    ‘I’ve found a catalogue file. No meaningful tide,
wouldn’t you just fucking believe it. And it’s got
far, far more entries than we’ve got files here. We just
got the low-security stuff! The rest is still in the
University’s dark storage.’
    I rubbed my sore eyes, and reached out for Mer-riaFs hand.
‘So what’s still there might be worse?’
    ‘You said it. It might even contain the stuff
we’re looking for. We have to go back.’

 
6
Light Weapons
     
     
    Long ago there had been another country, called the
International. It was a country of the mind, a country of hope,
and it encompassed the world. Until one day, in August 1914, its
citizens went to war with each other, and the world ended.
Everything died in that war, God and Country and International
and Civilisation; died, and went to hell. Everybody died. The
survivors thought they were alive, but they were not. After
August 1914 there had been no living people in the world –
only dead people on leave, the damned and the demons. The last
morally responsible people in the world had been the Reichstag
fraction of the German Social-Democratic Party. They had voted
the credits for the Kaiser’s war, against every resolution
of their past. They had known the right thing to do, and they had
chosen the wrong. All subsequent history had been that of the
damned, of poor devils struggling in the hell these men had
pitched them into; and nobody could be judged for how they
behaved in hell.
    This thought, with its bleak blend of Christian and Marxist
heresies, had originally been expounded to her by David Reid, one
night many decades ago, when he was very drunk. It had sustained
Myra through many a bad night. At other times -in the days, and
the good nights – it seemed a callow undergraduate
nihilism, shallow and wicked and absurd. But in the bad nights it
struck her as profound and true, and, in its way, life-affirming.
If you thought of people as alive and each having a
life to live, you’d get so depressed at what so many
had got instead, this past century and a half, that on a bad
night you’d be tempted to add your own death to theirs, and
thus make an undetectable increment to that already unimaginable,
unthinkable number.
    A number which Myra, on her bad nights, suspected she had
already increased quite considerably. Not directly – if she
had sinned at all, it had been a sin of omission – and
nobody had ever blamed her for it, but she blamed herself. If she
had sold the deterrence policy to the German imperialists when
they’d needed it, torn up all her existing contracts and
sorted them out later, how many people would now be alive who now
were dead? On the bad nights the answer seemed to run into
millions. At other times, on more sober reflection, she realised
she wasn’t in that league; she wasn’t up there with
the Big Three; there was almost a sort of adolescent
self-dramatisation in the pretension; if she belonged in that
company at all it was in the second or third rank, below the
great revolutionaries but up there with the more destructive of