I ducked in between a couple of workers at the front who’d incautiously allowed a quarter of a metre to open up between them. Menial followed with, no doubt, a smile at both of them which made them feel they were being done a favour.
And then we were there, a metre or two from the crumbling, tussocked edge. The platform and the spaceship loomed startlingly close. At that moment another cheer went up, as though to acclaim our arrival, and I realised that the capsule at the tip of the probe was, minutely but perceptibly, swaying. The platform was afloat.
“Hoo-rrayy!” I shouted, joining enthusiastically in the applause. Menial yelled something almost too high to hear beside me; I could hardly hear myself. Though a less spectacular moment than the flooding of the dock, it was freighted with greater significance: the beginning of the Sea Eagle/Iolair’s journey, which would end in space.
It was a strange launch vehicle, simultaneously more primitive and more advanced than anything sent into space in the first age of space exploration. The ancients could, no doubt, have built a fusion torchship, but they didn’t. They went straight from massive liquid-fuelled rockets to the nanotech diamond ships of the last days. In our time, with chemical fuels relatively expensive and nanotech (other than the tinker computers) quite beyond our reach, and the secret of controlled fusion still extant, the fusion torch is a logical choice.
But, as Fergal had implied, building it out of boiler plate was a trifle inelegant. On the other hand, the skills were there, locally available from shipbuilding; and the weight—given the immense power of the engine—was not a significant constraint. And say what you like about red-leaded steel plate, it is reliably resistant to sea-water. There was, of course, no question of launching such a monster from anywhere on land, which is less forgiving—of intense heat, high-energy particles and unstable isotopes—than the sea.
Its mission, too, was primitive, or at least simple: to launch into orbit an experimental communications and Earth-observation satellite. That payload had required the co-operation of scientists and engineers (tinkers or otherwise), lens-makers and photographers, from all over the civilised world. Its electronic and electrical systems strayed suspiciously close to the path of power—even deploying, if you wanted to be awkward, a system very like television. But after much soul-searching and acrimony, the majority of the most respected practitioners of Natural Theology had, with some reluctance, nodded their long-haired heads. Television, they gravely pointed out, had been destructive only as a mass medium. To object to it as a method of communication from a satellite to a ground station would, they averred, be crass superstition, unworthy of this enlightened age.
Needless to say, a minority of their equally respected, though (it has to be said) usually older, colleagues insisted that this was the first step on a slippery slope at the bottom of which lay a population reduced to a passively rotting mass of mental and physical wrecks. With equal inevitability, given the nature of Natural Theology, a much smaller (and, yes, younger) faction were pointing out that the sort of abject helotry described and decried by their conservative colleagues were in fact the peoples better known as the ancients, who had watched television assiduously and had an achievement or two to their credit before they fell. To which, of course… but the argument’s further iterations would be tedious to elaborate.
Merrial walked forward more boldly than I would have and sat down cheerily on the very lip of the cliff, her legs dangling over and her skirt elegantly spread on the heather to either side of her. I sat beside her and tried not to look down at a drop to the sea, direct and vertical except where it was interestingly varied by jutting rocks. We had found ourselves a viewpoint slightly in front of the platform, between its foremost extension and the open gates of the dock.
The shouting and cheering had stopped now, replaced by the susurrus of conversation, the continuing surge of the rising sea and the deep whine of the platform’s turbines as they laboured to move the gigantic structure. Very slowly, the mast-like rocking of the ship’s shaft was intersected by a net forward motion. Slow though it was, this set up a noticeable bow-wave at the front, clashing and splashing against the incoming waves. Complex interference patterns formed as the waves rebounded off the sides of the dock and the platform itself, and the sun, already past the zenith and dipping towards the west, made spectra in the spray.
Even at five kilometres per hour, the platform didn’t take long to pass us, to the sound of further cheering, and waving to and from the operational crew down on the decks. Another significant moment, duly registered by another round of applause, came when the platform passed through the gates and into the open sea—or at any rate Loch Kishorn.
After this there was really nothing to see except the slow departure of the rig, and people began to drift away. The platform had a long voyage ahead of it, out of the loch and into the Inner Sound, from whence it would pass the headlands of Rona and Skye before heading out into the Atlantic. Barring any serious mishap—and the weather forecasts were optimistic—it would proceed for seven more days before it was far enough out in the ocean to hold a position for the launch of the ship itself. The onboard crew would transfer to an escort vessel and stand off on the horizon, triggering the launch by radio control when the scientists and engineers had determined that the conditions were right. Given the robustness of the Sea Eagle and the power of its drive, little short of a severe storm could stand in its way. Only the platform was, in theory, vulnerable to the wind and the waves—so the chanciest part of the whole venture, the part which could literally sink it, was the one that had just begun.
Unless Menial’s fears about the orbital debris were borne out. Nothing more had been heard about this from Fergal or any other tinker, according to Druin, and he could be trusted on such a matter, according to Menial. Although her own contract on the project had come to an end, those of other tinkers working on mission-critical systems (as the cant had it) had not; and she was still well up on the latest tinker gossip—as, increasingly, was I.
In the weeks between our reconciliation and the floating of the platform we had had an interesting time, in which our joy in each other was countered—though not in any way diminished—by the reactions of other people to it. At the yard, I daily endured the merciless mockery which my mates seemed to think entirely compatible with continued friendly relations in other respects. In the softer circumstances of my previous experience—in childhood, schooling and University—some of their insults and abuse would have occasioned life-long, smouldering enmity, if not immediate physical violence. Here they passed as light-hearted badinage, and it was their ignoring rather than avenging that was taken as a token of manly honour.
The stand-offish attitudes of the tinkers at the camp were harder to take, but Menial insistently reassured me that they were a similar test, of the strength of my commitment to their ways, and to her. As the days and weeks passed their reactions to me had gradually warmed to the point of a frigid, prickly politeness.
Merrial and I were, by tinker custom, bundling—trying out the experience of living together before making a public commitment I was enjoying the experiment and I was as committed as I could ever imagine being, and so was Merrial, but neither of us was in any hurry to move our relationship on to a more formal basis. A tinker marriage is a serious matter, involving among other horrendous expenses—seamstresses, cooks, musicians—that of keeping hundreds of people drunk for a week.