The Sky Road tfr-4

by Ken MacLeod

  The train pulled away, trailing its sparks along the Canon’s estuarial plain and around the Carron sea-loch’s southern shore.

  Menial returned with a full jug, a bottle of whisky and a tray of small glasses. Without a word she placed the tray and the bottle in the middle of the table and sat down, this time opposite me. She filled our tall glasses, put down the jug and gestured to the whisky bottle. “Help yourselves,” she said.

  My friends became more friendly towards her after that. We all found ourselves talking together, talking shop, the inevitable gossip and grumbles of the project, about this scandal and that foreman and the other balls-up; ironically, the girls seemed to feel excluded, and fell to talking between themselves. Menial, showing tact enough for both of us, noticed this and gradually, now that the ice was broken, returned her conversation to me. Jondo and Machard took up again their neglected tasks of seduction or flirtation. When, a couple of hours later, she asked me to see her home, their ribaldry was relatively restrained.

  The square was noisier than ever; the only people heading for home, or for bed, were like ourselves workers on the project who, unlike the locals, had to work on the following day, a Friday. We walked through the dark street to the north of the square and across the bridge over the Carron River towards the suburb of New Kelso. Merrial stopped in the middle of the bridge. One arm was tight around my waist. With the other, she waved around.

  “Look,” she said. “What do you see?”

  On our right the town’s atomic power-station’s automation hummed blackly in the dark; to our left the fish-farms, warmed by the reactor’s run-off, spread down to the shore. I looked to left and right, and then behind to the main town, ahead to New Kelso, across the loch to the other small towns.

  She smiled at my baffled silence.

  “Look up.”

  Overhead the Milky Way blazed, the aurora borealis flickered, a communications aerostat glowed pink in a sun long since set for us. The Plough hung above the hills to the north. A meteor flared briefly, my indrawn breath a sound effect for its silent passage. To the west the sky still had light in it: the sun would be up in four hours.

  T can see the stars,” I said.

  “That’s it,” she said, sounding pleased at my per-ceptiveness. “You can. We’re in the very middle of a town of ten thousand people, and you can see the Milky Way. Not as well as you could see it from the top of Glas Bhein, sure enough, but you can see it. Why?”

  I shrugged, looking again back and forth. I’d never given the matter thought.

  “No clouds?” I suggested brightly.

  She laughed and caught my hand and tugged me forward. “And you a scholar of history!”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  She pointed to the street-lamp at the end of the bridge’s parapet. Its post was about three metres high; its conical cowl’s reflective inner surface sharply cut off all but the smallest upward illumination. “Did you ever see lamps like that in pictures of the olden times?” she asked.

  “Now that I come to think of it,” I said, “no.”

  “A town this size would have had lamps everywhere, blazing light into the sky. From street-lamps and windows and shop-fronts. The very air itself would glow with it. You could see just a handful of stars on the clearest night.”

  I thought about the ancient pictures I’d peered at under glass. You know, you’re right,” I said. “That’s what it looked like.”

  “Some people,” Menial went on, in a sudden gust of anger, “lived their whole lives without once seeing the Milky Way!”

  “Very sad,” I said. In fact the thought gave me a tight feeling in my chest, as if I were struggling to breathe. “How did they stand it?”

  “Aye, well, that’s a question you could well ask.” She glanced up at me. “I thought you might know.”

  “I never noticed, to be honest.”

  “And why don’t we do it?” She gestured again at the electric twilight of the surrounding town.

  “Because it would be wasteful,” I said. As soon as the words were out I realised I’d said them without thinking, and that it wasn’t the answer.

  Menial laughed. “We have power to spare!”

  It was my turn to stop suddenly. We’d taken a right and were going down a path past the power-station. I knew for a fact that it could, when called upon in a rare emergency—such as when extra heating was required to clear snow from a blizzard—produce enough electricity to light up Canon Town several times over.

  You’re right,” I said. “So why don’t we do it? I’ve seen pictures of the great cities of antiquity, and you’re right, they shone. They looked… magnificent. Perhaps it was so bright they didn’t need to see the stars—they had the city lights instead! They made their own stars!”

  Menial was slowly shaking her head.

  “Maybe that was fine for them,” she said. “But it wouldn’t be for us. We all get—uneasy when we can’t see the night sky. Don’t you, just thinking about it?”

  I took a deep breath, and let it out with a sigh. “Aye, you’re right at that!”

  We walked on, her strides pacing my slower steps.

  “You’re a strange woman,” I said.

  She smiled and held my waist more firmly and leaned her head against my shoulder. I found myself looking down at her hair, and down at the scoop neckline of her dress and the glowing stone between her breasts.

  “Sure I am,” she said. “But so are we all, that’s what I’m saying. We’re different from the people who came before us, or before the Deliverer’s time, and nobody wonders how or why. The feeling we have about the sky is just part of it. We live longer and we breed less, we sicken little, sometimes I think even our eyes are sharper} these changes are hardwired into our radiation-hardened genes—”

  “Our what?”

  I felt the shrug of her shoulder.

  “Just tinker cant, colha Gree. Don’t worry. You’ll pick it up.”

  “Oh, I will, will I?”

  “Aye. If you stay with me.”

  There was only one answer to that. I turned her around and kissed her. She clasped her lips to mine and slid her hands under my open waistcoat and sent them roving around my sides and back. I could feel them through my silk shirt like hot little animals. The kiss went on for some time and ended with our tongues flickering together like fish at the bottom of a deep pool; then she leaned away and gripped my shoulders and looked at me and said, “I reckon that means you’re staying, colha Gree.”

  Suddenly we were both laughing. She caught my hand and swung it and we started walking again, talking about I don’t know what. Out on the edge of town we turned a corner into a litde estate of dozens of single-storey wooden houses with chimneys. Some of the houses were separate, each with its own patch of garden; others, smaller, were lined up in not quite orderly rows. Even in the summer, even with electricity cables strung everywhere, a smell of woodsmoke hung in the air. Yellow light glowed from behind straw-mat blinds. A dog barked and was silenced by an irritable yell.

  “Hey, come on,” Menial said with an impish smile.

  I hadn’t realised how my feet had hesitated as the path had changed from cobbles to trampled gravel.

  “Never been in a tinker camp before,” I apologised.

  “We don’t bite.” Another cheeky grin. “Well, that is to say…”

  You really are a terrible woman.”

  “Oh, I am that, indeed. Ferocious—so I’m told.”

  “I’ll hold you to that.”

  “I’ll hold you to more.”

  She held me as she stopped in front of one of the small houses in the middle of the row, and fingered out a tiny key five centimetres long on a thong attached to her belt but hidden in a slit in the side of her skirt. The lock too seemed absurdly small, a brass circular patch on the white-painted door at eye level.

  “So are you coming in, or what?”

  Lust and reason warred with fear and superstition, and won. I follow
ed her over the polished wooden threshold as she switched on the electric light. I stood for a moment, blinking in the sudden 40-watt flood. The main room was about four metres by six. Against the far wall was a wood-burning stove, banked low; above it was a broad mantelpiece on which a large clock ticked loudly. The time was half past midnight. On either side of the stove were rows of shelves with hundreds of books. In the left-hand corner a workbench jutted from the wall, with a microscope and an unholy clutter of soldering gear and bits of wire and tools. Rough, unpolished seer-stones of various sizes lay among them. The main table of the house was a huge oaken piece about a metre and a half square, with carved and castered legs. A crocheted cotton throw covered it, weighted at the centre by a seer-stone hemisphere at least thirty centimetres in diameter, so finely finished that it looked like a dome of glass. Within it, hills and clouds drifted by.

  Menial stood by the table for a moment, reached up behind her head and removed a clasp from her hair, so that the two narrow braids fell forward and framed her face. Then she lifted the chain with the talisman, and the other, finer silver chain, from around her neck and deposited them on the table.

  The place smelt of woodsmoke and pot-pourri and the bunches of flowering plants stuffed into carelessly chosen containers in every available corner. The wooden walls were varnished, and hung with an incongruous variety of old prints and paintings—landscapes, ladies, foxes, cats, that sort of thing—and tacked-up picture-posters related to the project. An open door led to a tiny scullery; a curtained alcove beside it took up the rest of that end of the room. I presumed it contained the bed.

  But it was to a big old leather couch in front of the stove that she drew me first. She half-leaned, half-sat on the back of it, and began unbuttoning my shirt, then explored my chest with her lips and tongue—and teeth—as I applied myself to undoing the fastenings down the back of her dress, and working my boots off. As I kicked away the right boot the sgean dhu clattered to the floor. By this time she had unbuckled my belt, and with a shrug and a step we both shed our outer clothes, which fell to the floor in a promiscuous coupling of their own. Mer-rial stood for a moment in nothing but her long silk underskirt. I clasped her in my arms, her nipples hard, her breasts warm and soft against my chest; and we kissed again.

  We moved, we danced, Menial leading, towards the curtained alcove. She pulled away the curtain to reveal a large and reassuringly solid-looking bed. I knelt in front of her and pulled down her slip and knickers, and kissed her between the legs until she pulled me gently to my feet. I managed to leave my own briefs on the floor.

  We faced each other naked, like the Man and the Woman in the Garden in the story. Menial half-turned, threw back the bedcovers and picked up from the bed a long white cotton nightgown, which she shook out and held at arm’s length for a moment.

  “I won’t be needing that tonight,” she grinned, and cast it to the floor, and me to the bed.

  I woke in daylight, and lay for a minute or so basking in the warm afterglow, and hot after-images, of love and sex. Rolling over and reaching out my arm, I found that I was alone in the bed. It was still warm where Menial had slept. The air was filled with the aroma of coffee and the steady ticking of the clock—

  The time! I sat up in a hurry and leaned forward to see the big timepiece, and discovered with relief that it was only five o’clock. Thank Providence, we’d only slept an hour and a half. With the same movement I discovered a host of minor pains: bites on my shoulder and neck, scratches on my back and buttocks, aching muscles, raw skin…

  The animal whose attacks had caused all this damage padded out of the scullery.

  “Good morning,” she said.

  I made some sort of croaking noise. Menial smiled and handed me one of the two steaming mugs she’d carried in. She sat down on the foot of the bed, drawing her knees up to her chin to huddle inside her sark, its high neck and long sleeves and intricate whitework giving her an incongruous appearance of modesty.

  I sipped the coffee gratefully, unable to take my eyes off her. She looked calmly back at me, with the smile of a contented cat.

  “Good morning,” I said, finding my voice at last. “And thank you.”

  “Not just for the coffee, I hope,” said Menial.

  I was grinning so much that my cheeks, too, were aching.

  “No, not just for the coffee. God, Menial, I’ve never…”

  I didn’t know how to put it.

  “Done it before?” she inquired innocently.

  Coffee went up the back of my nose as I spluttered a laugh.

  “Compared with last night, I might as well not have,” I ruefully admitted. “You are—you’re amazing!”

  Her level gaze held me. She showed not the slightest embarrassment. “Oh, you’re not so bad yourself, colha Gree,” she said in a judicious tone. “But you have a lot to learn.”

  “I hope you’ll teach me.”

  “I’m sure I will,” she said. “If you want to stay with me, that is.” She waved a hand, as if this were a matter yet to be decided.

  “Stay with you? Oh, Merrial!” I couldn’t speak.

  “What?”

  “Nothing could make me leave you. Ever.”

  I was almost appalled at what I was saying. I had not expected to hear myself speak such words, not for a long time to come.

  “How sweet of you to say that,” she said, very seriously, but smiling. “But—”

  “But nothing!” I reached sideways and put the mug on the floor and shifted myself down the bed towards her. Without looking away from me, she put her mug down too, on a trunk at the end of the bed, and rocked forward to her knees to meet me. We knelt with our arms around each other.

  “I love you,” I said. I must have said it before, said it a lot of times through the night, but now there was all the weight in the world behind the words.

  “I love you too,” she said. She clung to me with a sudden fierceness, and laid her face on my shoulder. A wet, salt tear stung a love-bite there. She sniffed and raised her head, blinking her now even brighter eyes.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “I’m happy,” she said.

  “So am I.”

  She regarded me solemnly. “I have to say this,” she said, with another unladylike sniffle. “Loving me will not always make you happy.”

  I could not imagine what she meant, and I didn’t want to. “Why are you saying this?”

  “Because I must,” she said. Her voice was strained. “Because I have to be fair with you.”

  “Aye, sure,” I said. “Well, now you’ve warned me, can I get on with loving you?”

  She brightened instantly, as though some arduous responsibility had been lifted from her shoulders.

  “Oh yes!” she said, hugging me closer again. “Love me as much as you like, love me for ever!” She pulled back a little, looked down, then raised her gaze again to mine.

  “But not right now,” she added regretfully. “You have to go.”

  “Now?!” We had fallen out of our mutual dream into the workaday world, where we were two people who didn’t, really, know each other all that well.

  “Yes,” she insisted. “You have to get back across town, get… washed, and ready for work and catch the bus at half past six.”

  “I can catch it from here.”

  “The hell you can. People will talk.”

  “They’ll talk anyway.”

  “People around here, I mean.”

  I climbed reluctantly off the bed. Menial slipped lithely under the covers and pulled them up to her chin.

  “What about you?” I asked, as I searched out and sorted my clothes.

  “I’m an intellectual worker,” she said smugly as she snuggled down. “We start at nine.”

  She watched me dress with a sort of affectionate curiosity. “What have you got on your belt?”

  I patted the hard leather pouches and fastened the buckle. “The tools of a tradesman,” I told her, “and the weapons of a ge
ntleman.”

  “I see,” she said approvingly.

  “So when will I see you again?” I asked, as I recovered the sgean dhu and stuck it back down the side of my boot.

  “Tonight, eight o’clock, at the statue? Go for something to eat?”

  I pretended to give this idea thoughtful consideration, then we both laughed, and she sat up again and reached out to me. We hugged and kissed goodbye. As I backed away to the door, grudging even a moment without her in my sight, a flickering from the big seer-stone caught my eye. I stopped beside the table and stooped to examine it. As I did so I noticed Menial’s two pendants: the talisman—the small seer-stone—now showing a vaguely organic tracery of green, and on the silver chain a silver piece about a centimetre in diameter which appeared to be a monogram made up of the letters “G” and “T” and the numeral “4”.

  The table’s centre-piece was all black within, except for an arrangement of points of light which might have been torches, or cities, or stars. They flashed on and off, on and off, and the bright dots spelled out one word: HELP.

  I glanced over at Menial. “It’s reached the end of its run,” I remarked.

  “Reset it then,” she said sleepily from the pillow.

  I brushed the stone’s chill surface with my sleeve, restoring it to chaos, and with a final smile at Merrial opened the door and stepped out into the cock-crowing sunlight.

  and she threw her arms around him that same night she drew him down.

  2

  Ancient Time

  Death follows me, she thought, as she rode into the labour-camp. There was something implacable about it, like logic: it follows, it follows… The thought’s occurrence had nothing to do with logic; it appeared like a screensaver on the surface of her mind, whenever her mind went blank. It troubled her a little, as did another thought that drifted by in such moments: where are the swift cavalry?

  The gate rolled shut behind her, squealing in its rusty grooves. The wind from the steppe hummed in the barbed-wire fence and whipped away the dust kicked up as she reined in the black horse. A guard hurried over; he somehow managed to make his brisk soldierly step look obsequious, even as his bearing made his dark-blue microfibre fatigues look military. He doffed a baseball cap with the Mutual Protection lettering and logo.