Tou know,” Druin said, “this is a relief, really. All right, the two of you were used by Fergal, maybe put through a bit of anguish and inconvenience, but no great harm has come of it. And no, Clovis, I don’t count your little difficulties as great harm—you’ll have worse trouble than that before you’re my age!”
“All right,” I said, holding back some irritation, “I can see how it might not seem important to you. But Fergal has got hold of this thing, and what’s worrying me is what he intends to do with it.”
“What he intends to do with it,” said Druin, “depends on what it is. Any ideas there, Menial?”
“No,” she said. “It was in Myra Godwin’s files, and we know that some people had these things back then—it could have been some kind of adviser or counsellor. Maybe Fergal knows what it is, but I don’t.”
“I hate to think what Fergal might do with an adviser that has access to knowledge from the past,” I said. Druin shook his head.
“So what if Fergal has found a new toy, or a new friend for all I know? It’s none of our damn business, and certainly none of mine—it has nothing to do with the security of the ship, now has it?”
“You’ve got over your annoyance at being held and disarmed pretty damn quick,” I said sourly.
“Ach!” Druin said. “Hot words. Forget it. Who would sue a tinker, anyway?”
At that Menial and I both had to laugh. The futility of “taking a tinker to court” was proverbial.
“That doesn’t solve the problem though,” Menial said.
“What problem?”
“The problem isn’t the thing itself. Fergal is the problem.” She frowned, evidently troubled. “He’s no exactly evil—his intentions are good, in a way, and he can be a very… charming man in his way, on a personal level; but he’s very… single-minded, you know? He has a tendency to focus on one thing at a time, and to over-ride anything and everybody else.”
Druin snorted. “Hah! I don’t know Fergal, but I know the type. More by repute than experience, thank Providence.” He chuckled. “Mind you, if ever I run across a manager like that, he tends to have a short career thereafter. As a manager, anyway.” He stomped over and sat down again. “But still—that’s a problem for your lot, no for mine. I still say we’d best let the matter drop. The project’s getting awful close to completion, we’re actually ahead of schedule, and there’s big bonuses riding on getting the platform out the yard before the end of August—which could make the difference between getting it out before the winter and having to wait till the spring. That’s no small thing, and trouble wi the tinkers is the one thing that could blow it at this stage.”
“What worries me about Fergal,” I said, “is not so much his personality as his beliefs. I know you’re not that kind of person, Menial, but communism is notoriously susceptible to characters who are… who can twist it into a reason for doing what they’d like to do anyway, which is living outside the covenant.”
“What do you mean by ‘the covenant’?” asked Druin.
“Och, what you said—when Fergal seemed to be threatening to kill you. Blood for blood, death for death—that’s the covenant, the rock. Or what you said about us and the tinkers, having to live together—same thing, on the side of the living.”
Tergal sometimes says things like that,” Menial interjected hastily. That so-and-so ought to be shot, or whatever. He doesn’t mean it, it’s just hot words, as Druin put it.”
Druin made a conciliatory gesture. “What you’re both saying may well be true enough,” he said mildly. “The covenant is strong in our days, for reasons which—och, we all know the reasons! So a man like Fergal can rant and rave, but he can’t do much harm. How many of the tinkers would you say follow his ideas, as opposed to, say, respecting him as a man and an engineer?”
“Not many,” said Menial cautiously.
Druin leaned back and took a sip of whisky, then topped up our coffees.
“Well, there you are,” he said in a relaxed and expansive tone. “Like I said, no business of mine.” He leaned forward, becoming more concentrated in his expression, fixing us both with his gaze. “As to what my business is, Fergal and his two sidekicks were right in one respect—I do have a place on the site security committee. I’m no spy—I was put there by the union, dammit! And I did push for having your clearance revoked, Clovis. What else could I do, with the information I had? But I can equally well push to have it restored, and I will. You’ll be back at your job in a day or two, if you want it, whatever your University decides about you.”
“That’s—” I shook my head “—that’s great, that’s what I want. Thanks.”
“But before you return you files to the University, have another look through them, and try to see if there is anything in them about what happened at the Deliverance. Or anything about this artificial intelligence. Tell me what you find, even if it’s nothing, just to put my mind at rest. Put that couple of days to good use, you and Menial.” He grinned slyly. “I don’t need to tell you to do the same with the nights. Speaking of which, I’m off to my bed. And meanwhile, not a word about all this. Keep the peace with the tinkers, and we’ll get this show on the road.”
“The sky road,” I said, quoting Fergal.
“Aye. Everybody happy?”
We walked to Menial’s house, and on the way we talked.
“I thought,” she said, “that you were too committed to your history, your research and your old papers, to be willing to stay with me. That was what I was upset about, not your questions.”
“Ah,” I said. “And I thought you were too committed to the secrets of your society to trust me.”
“Aach,” we both said at once.
I told her what Druin had said, about the tinkers’ methods of recruitment.
She laughed, clinging to my arm and swinging away out on it, looking up at me and looking away, giggling.
“It’s true!” she said. “It wasn’t what I’d planned.”
“So you—”
Tell for you and hoped you’d join us, yes.”
“Ah-ha-ha! Become a tinker!”
“Well, why not?”
She swung around and caught me by both elbows and looked me straight in the eyes.
“Why not?” she repeated.
I thought of what I’d seen and felt—and smelt—in the library when I went there with Menial, and I thought of what I’d seen in the old power-station. This was history, this was the real thing, not dead but living, a continuity with the past and an earnest of the future, the sky road indeed. But who’s to say it was those considerations that weighed with me, and not the sight of Menial under the stars, on her way to a bed I could share for all the nights of my life?
Not me, for sure.
“Why not,” I said. “Yes.”
12
Dark Island
Coming in from the West on the M8, the taxi hired by the Kazakhstani consulate to take Myra from Glasgow Airport was hit by small-arms fire just as it came of! the flyover at Kinning Park.
Myra saw white starry marks pock the smoky armoured glass, did-did-did, heard the wheels’ whee of acceleration; her hand went reflexively to the shoulder holster under her coat and got caught in the strap of the seatbelt For a moment, as she looked down at her recently, newly smooth and now suddenly white hand, she thought death had found her at last—that she was going to die old and leave a good-looking corpse.
Then they were out of it, smoothly away, swinging around up and on to the Kingston Bridge over the Clyde. Myra twisted about and looked back and to the left, where the standard-practice burning-tyres smokescreen rose somewhere among the office-blocks and high-rises into the pale-blue late-May morning sky. A helicopter roared low and fast above the motorway, making the big car rock again, and flew straight at one of the tall buildings. A diagonal streak of punched square holes was abruptly stitched across the reflective glass of the building’s face. The helicopter paused, hovering; the car swooped from the brow of the bridge, and the scene passed out of sight.