“Do you mind if I smoke?” I asked. I wanted to give the impression of weakening; my craving made it credible.
“Sure, go right ahead,” said Fergal.
I took the materials from my pocket and lit up.
“What I don’t understand,” I said, “is why you’re so bothered by his turning up here. You even threatened to kill him. Maybe that was a bluff—”
“It wasn’t!”
“But why? Even if he’s as hostile as you say, he’ll have people searching for him if he doesn’t return, and it won’t take anyone long to think of looking here.”
Fergal flicked his fingers. “We could make it look like an accident that had nothing to do with us. It’s a dangerous sport, deer-hunting.”
“And I would go along with your story, or join him at the bottom of a cliff?”
“Something like that.”
“What,” I asked, trying to keep my voice from betraying my rage and fear, “is important enough to justify doing something like that, now?”
“Ah.” Fergal frowned. “He—and you—have arrived at a very awkward moment. We’ve found something in the files that Menial retrieved—something we’ve been missing for a very long time, and which we only recently realised might be stored at the University, of all places. We—”
He paused. “Let’s just say we’d lose a lot if anyone started poking around now. There’s obviously an investigation going on, and we really aren’t in a position to resist any intrusion in force.” He dusted his palms and stood up, laying the rifle carefully aside across the sink, within his reach and out of mine. “Which is where you come in, Clovis. Obviously we don’t want to kill Drain, or yourself.”
“If you can possibly avoid it.”
“Exactly!” he smiled, damning himself with his grin. “No need for any of that. You’re an intelligent bloke, Clovis, and you can help us. All you have to do is persuade Drain that there’s nothing here to threaten the project, and that he should leave well alone.”
“That shouldn’t be hard,” I said. “And Drain shouldn’t worry you. Even if he is what you say, he’s only doing his job. And speaking of jobs, I’ve just lost mine and I want an explanation. As well as the files you took, and a chance to speak to Menial.”
Fergal nanowed his eyes. “Menial might not want to speak to you.”
That’s for her to say.”
“As for the files—”
He frowned, considering. I got the impression that he was beginning to feel the files were turning out to be more trouble than they were worth.
“Look,” I said, “I understand why you feel they’re yours. But they’re not mine to let you have, or yours to take. The Deliverer left them to the University, not to the Fourth International.”
Fergal jumped up as if he’d sat on a wasp.
“Who told you about the Fourth International?”
I shrugged. Tm a historian,” I said. “It’s common knowledge among scholars.”
This double lie deflated Fergal somewhat. He sat back down and eyed me warily.
“So what do you know about it?”
“It’s a communist secret society that goes back to before the Deliverer’s time.”
“Hmm,” he said. He rubbed an eyelid. “That’s about right. Though ‘communist’ doesn’t really tell you what it’s all about, these days.” He laughed harshly. “God, I sometimes feel if we could get capitalism back—”
“The Possession?” I asked incredulously.
“Well, you would call it that. Let me tell you, it would be better than this dark age you people have got yourselves bogged down in.”
“This is a dark age?” I laughed in his face. “We’re building a spaceship not fifty kilometres from here.”
“Oh, Christ.” Fergal knotted his fists. “Aye, building it out of boiler plate. You build everything, up to crude atomics and even fucking laser-fusion engines with skills handed down from master to apprentice. Compared to the ancients, you people are complete barbarians. Compared to what you could be—”
He sighed and stood up, and began pacing the room like a beast in a cage. “You could have a world where nobody has to do any work that isn’t like play, where almost any sickness or injury could be mended, where nobody has to die, where we live like gods and fill the skies with our children’s children. Instead we have this.” He smacked his palm with his fist and looked around with an expression of disgust.
“And who would do the work in this paradise?” I asked, perhaps more offensively than I intended.
“Machines, of course. Every bit of work in the world can be done by machines, linked up and coordinated.”
“Oh, right,” I said, disappointed. “The path of power.”
“It doesn’t have to be like that, next time—”
“Next time?”
Fergal leaned over the table on his fists, in a manner simultaneously intimidating and confidential. “That’s what the International exists for: the next time. The next chance humanity has to break out of this prison. Our time will come, again. And next time, we’ll be ready.”
I shook my head. “I don’t understand.”
He looked at me with some regret, then straightened up and moved back to his seat. “It’s no use trying to explain it to you now,” he said. “There’s so much you need to know to make sense of it, and you have no way of getting—”
He was interrupted by a banging on the door.
“Who’s there?” he shouted.
“It’s me—Menial! Fergal, you’ve got to—”
“Wait there!”
His shouted command came too late. The door burst open and Menial charged in. She rushed past me and placed something on the table and then snatched her hands back from it as though it were a dish too hot to handle. It was a seer-stone apparatus, and the stone in the middle of it was glowing with colour and alive with movement, forming a tiny scene under the domed surface, a bubble of life star-ding in its virtual reality.
The scene was of a forest glade, in which a man sat elf-like on a rock. He looked out at us, quite calm and uncanny. He spoke, and his voice came from a speaker in the side of the surrounding apparatus.
The volume was too low to make out what he was saying—certainly not above Menial’s shouting.
“You never told me there was a deil in it!”
Fergal had jumped up, and was staring down intently at the stone. He raised a hand, without looking up.
“Calm down, Menial,” he said mildly. “This is no deil. It’s what you were looking for.”
“What in hell is that?” I asked. I too was on my feet, peering entranced at the amazing, beautiful thing.
“It’s an artificial intelligence,” the tinker said, his voice thrilled with awe. He stooped to the seer-stone and placed his ear close to the speaker and listened. Menial seemed to have noticed me just as I spoke.
“What are you doing here?” she asked. Her eyes were reddened, her cheeks pale with fatigue. She looked scared and puzzled.
“I came here for you,” I said. “I hoped you might want me to come back.”
“But I thought—”
Tou two, please leave now,” Fergal said. He didn’t even look up at us. He waved a hand absently to one side. “Take your weapons and tools, Clovis, take this woman if you want and get the hell out of here with your friend, the company spy.”
Menial turned and looked down at Fergal.
“You want me to go?” She sounded hurt, but hopeful as well.
Tes, yes,” Fergal said, impatiendy deigning to spare her a glance. “You’ve done your job, and very well too. Your skills won’t be needed in the… next phase. Oh, and Clovis—take the bloody paper files while you’re at it. We won’t be needing them any more, either.”