“So you came looking for me?”
“Aye,” she grinned. “But I wasn’t to know what I’d find. Could have been somebody who was only interested in scholarship, or who would not have gone along with the idea. Anyway, I kept my ears open, and it was not long before I heard about you.”
Drain laughed, as much at my embarrassment as at her account.
“Clovis was not exactly quiet about his interests! He’s been bending our ears about the Deliverer and history all the bloody summer. But back to your Fergal. It sounds like he took your worries seriously.”
“Oh, sure,” Menial said. “I got the impression that quite a few tinkers have the same idea, and… at least some people in the International had even stronger reasons to think it.”
Drain took a sudden wasteful gulp of his good whisky.
“Why would the tinkers—or this International—want to keep that a secret?”
Menial stared at him. “Because the Deliverer’s reputation, and her last message to the world, is what protects the tinkers! If the ordinary folk, the outsiders—no offence—got to think she was some mass-murdering monster like Stalin, what would they care about anything she said?”
Drain cupped his chin with his hand and regarded her quizzically.
“Is that what you think, or is that what Fergal told you?”
“Both, but, well, yes. I see what you mean.”
“More than I can say,” I said.
Merrial turned to me. “What he means is, it’s something I’ve accepted as long as I can remember without thinking about it, but when you say it out and think about it, it just doesn’t seem very likely.”
“Exactly!” said Druin. “It’s true up to a point, mind, but fundamentally it doesn’t explain why the tinkers and the rest of us rub along fairly well for the most part. The story that they’re the Deliverer’s children, as it’s said, is just a symbol, a signpost or landmark, like the statue itself. We don’t get on with the tinkers because we respect the Deliverer—we respect the Deliverer and maintain her statues because we get along with the tinkers. And we do that because we need the tinkers, and they need us.”
I looked at the man, astonished. In all my years of study I had never read or heard a hint of anything like that. I had certainly never had such a reflection on my own. That something so self-evidently true—once stated—yet so unobvious and against the grain of what Gantry would have called “vulgar cant” should come from this metalworker and not from a scholar was something of a shock to my estimation of scholarship, not to mention of myself.
There was no way I could say all this without sounding condescending, so I only said, “Druin, that’s brilliant. Never thought of that.”
He gave me a thin-lipped, narrow-eyed smile, as if he knew my unspoken thoughts. “Aye,” he said, “brilliant or no, I’m pretty sure the thought has occurred to our man Fergal. So his secrecy has other aims than that. If you, Clovis, were to publish your great work on the Deliverer when you’re an older and wiser man, which proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that she was the most wicked woman who ever walked the Earth, do you think for a minute that folk would start throwing stones at the tinkers?” He laughed. “No, they’d be throwing stones at you!”
“Where does that get us?” I asked, somewhat defensively.
“It gets us to this,” Druin said slowly, tapping the table with a blunt fingernail. “Like I said, Fergal’s desire for secrecy in this matter is not for the reason Menial and you thought. In fact, from the way you say he behaved when Menial found the wee man in the stone, I would say that finding yon thing, whatever it is, was his real aim all along. That was what he sent you both to seek in Glaschu. Now that you’ve found it for him, he doesn’t give a damn about any supposed space debris. And don’t forget, Menial, you raised the matter with the project and the only reason you were slapped down hard is that of course the designers have thought of that—whether the Deliverer’s doing or no, the stuff that was up in orbit in the past must have gone somewhere! In the old records, such as they are, you could see them like moving stars with the naked eye—is that not so, Clovis?”
I nodded.
“Well, they’re no there the now, and our best telescopes—which isn’t saying much, I admit, compared to the ones with which the ancients saw the Universe born, but still—can’t see a speck up there. And there’s no more shooting stars now than there was in antiquity—we know that for sure, because these records were on paper and were passed on. So there’s likely no cloud of debris around the Earth, although if the Deliverer did as you said, I guess there could be some heavy stuff up there in the high orbits yet. But even that’s unlikely. It’s said that in the troubled times the sky fell, and the best scientists’ guess is that that was our ancestors’ way of saying what they saw when the great space cities, long deserted or filled with dead, were eventually brought spinning down by the thin drag of the air up yon and fell to Earth of their own accord.”
By this time I was beyond being surprised by Druin; his words were just further nails in the coffin of my conceit.
“Did you find anything in the computer files about this?” I asked Menial.
She shook her head. “No, there’s nothing that goes up to the date of the Deliverance itself. It was when I was searching through them that I opened the file that released what Fergal called the ‘artificial intelligence’.” Her eyes widened at the memory. “At first I thought it was just one of they faces that appear in the stones.”
“What are those, by the way?” Druin asked.
Merrial waved her hand. “We don’t know. We’ve found references to things called Help programs, and that seems to be what they—are they’re aye spelling out ‘help’, anyway! Just some old stuff that got passed down, I think. But this thing wasn’t one of them at all. It looked straight at me, and spoke.”
“What did it say?”
“ ‘Hello’,” she said, in an unnaturally deep voice.
We all laughed.
She gave an exaggerated shudder. “My next thought—when I’d got over the shock a—bit was that it was a security demon, like the one you and me ran across in Glasgow. But it wasn’t that, either. It wasn’t warning me off—it was inviting me in. That’s when I ran with it to Fergal.”
“Who seems to have accepted its invitation,” I said. “He lost interest in all else as soon as he saw it.”
“Hmm,” said Druin. He stood up and stepped over to the doorway, perhaps to get away from our smoke. The sky, an hour after midnight, was still light—or growing lighter again—behind him. “Which rather suggests to me that that was his objective all along. As why shouldn’t it be?” He turned back to us, his eyes shining. “Who wouldn’t want to talk to an artificial intelligence? The ancients had them, and even the tinkers have lost them—am I right, Menial?”
“Oh, sure,” she said. “I’ve never seen or heard of us having anything like that myself, and I… I think I would have.”