Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

is different from
the self-administration of the academic community. It has to
maintain the physical fabric of the place, and its supplies and
services and so forth, and with the best will in the world I
can’t interfere with any measures of investigation and
discipline which it may see fit to take in this unfortunate
matter. You appreciate that, don’t you?’
    ‘Yes, of course.’
    Tine. Well… as to any academic repercussions, there I
can speak up for you, I can… refrain from volunteering
information about how the demonic outbreak took place. But I
can’t lie on your behalf, old chap. I’ll do my best
for you, because I think it would be a shame to throw away
someone with so much promise over what, as you say, was excess of
scholarly zeal. Very understandable temptation, and all that.
Some of the Senatus might well think to themselves, „Been
there, done that – young once myself – fingers burnt
– learned his lesson – say no more about it,“
and all that sort of thing.’
    I relaxed a little on the hard chair. I’d been fiddling
with a cigarette for a while, unsure if I had permission to
smoke; Gantry leaned over with his lighter, absently almost
taking my eyebrows off with its kerosene flare.
    ‘Thank you.’
    ‘However,’ he went on, leaning back in his own
chair, ‘there are some wider issues.’ He waved his
pipe about, vaguely indicating the surroundingshelves of hard-won
knowledge. ‘We British are beginning to get the hang of
this civilisation game. When the Romans left, there wasn’t
a public library or a flush toilet or a decent road or a postman
to be seen for a thousand years. When the American empire fell, I
think we can honestly say we did a damn sight better, and indeed
better than most. We lost the electronic libraries, of course,
and a great deal of knowledge, but the infrastructure of
civilisation pulled through the troubled times reasonably intact.
In some respects, even improved. A great deal of that we owe to
the very fact that the electronic records were lost – and
along with them the chains of usury and rent, and the
other… dark powers which held the world in what they even
then had the gall to call „The Net!“
    He stood up and ambled along to a corner and leaned his elbow
on a shelf. ‘What we have instead of the net is the
tinkers.’ He waved his hands again. ‘And telephony
and telegraphy and libraries and so forth, of course, but
that’s beside the point. The tinkers look after our
computation, which even with the path of light most of us
are… unwilling to do, because of what happened in the
past, but are grateful there’s somebody to do it. This
makes them… not quite a pariah people, but definitely a
slightly stigmatised occupation. And that very stigma, you see,
paradoxically ensures – or gives some assurance of –
the purity of their product. It keeps the two paths, the light
and the dark, separate. You see what I’m driving
at?’
    ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m afraid I
don’t’
    ‘Oh.’ He looked a little disappointed at my
slowness on the uptake. ‘Well, not to put too fine a point
on it, it’s one thing for scholars to risk their own bodies
or souls with the dark storage. Not done, soto speak, but between
you and me and the gatepost, it is done. It’s quite
another for a tinker to do it. Could contaminate the seer-stones,
y’see. Bad business.’
    He stalked over and stared at me. The upshot, my friend, is
that you had better get your tinker girlfriend back here with
whatever she took, and get those file-folders you borrowed back here with it, if you want to have this episode overlooked.
Clear?’
    Yes, but – ’
    ‘No „buts“, Clovis. You don’t have
much time. Get out and get back before anyone else notices,
that’s the ticket’
    ‘I’ll do what I can,’ I said, truthfully
enough, and left.
    As I hurried back to the lodging I kept trying to think what
the hell we could do. I’d been hoping to hang on to the
paper files for at least a week, which should give me enough time
to see if there was anything of urgent significance in them.
There was no way, however, that Menial could ‘return’
whatever computer files she had managed to retrieve. She could
pretend to delete them from her seer-stone’s memory, but I
doubted if that would fool Gantry. He would want the stone
itself, and she was most unlikely to give it to him.
    The landlady let me in, because