The Sky Road tfr-4

by Ken MacLeod

  I switched on the overhead light and stepped with an assumed air of boldness across the threshold. The small back room appeared innocent enough. It had a desk, with a couple of chairs in front of it and on its top a cluster of boxy, bulky structures like models of ancient architecture. Aluminium shelves lined the walls on either side. The air held a different, subtler smell, almost like the smell of washed hair or polished horn, with a sharp note of acetones.

  Menial sniffed. “Like a rotting honeycomb,” she remarked cheerfully. I fought down a heave.

  “Would smoking get rid of the miasma?” I suggested.

  “Yes, but it might damage the disks.”

  While I was still looking around for anything that remotely resembled a disc, Menial began rummaging along the shelves. The boxes arrayed there were translucent, the colour of sheepskin, with dusty, close-fitting lids. They contained flat black plates about nine centimetres square and two millimetres thick. She picked out a few at random, held them up and shook them slightly. From every one, a sooty black dust drifted down. Oxidation crystals crusted the small metal plates at their edges. She shook her head. “Hopeless,” she said.

  In other, smaller boxes there were smaller, shiny wafers. These, when she picked them out, simply crumbled to the touch.

  “So much for them,” she said. “We’ll just have to see if there’s anything on the hard drive.” She pulled up a seat in front of the machines. The largest, before which she sat, had a sort of window-pane on the front of it. She opened her poke, rummaged out the clutter on top and carefully extracted her strange devices. She laid them on the table: the seer-stone glowing with random rainbow ripples, a small black box and the frame of lettered levers, all connected by the coils of insulated copper wire.

  “Oh, look, that thing there has the same—”

  “Don’t touch it!”

  “All right.”

  She glanced up at me. “Sorry to snap. I’m a bit jumpy.”

  “Aye, well, me too.”

  “Also I’m in tinker mode.” She smiled. “Courtesy doesn’t come into it. If you want to help, see if you can find a power source for this thing while I set up my system.” She waved a hand vaguely in the darkness under the table.

  Suppressing a qualm, I stooped down into that darkness, and after a moment while my eyes adjusted I saw a dusty power-socket, with three holes. A centimetre-thick cable hung from the back of the table and ended in a three-pronged plug. Deducing how plug and socket fitted together was the work of a moment, as was inserting the one into the other.

  The light around me brightened suddenly. Mer-rial’s boot hit my ribs, and she simultaneously uttered an odd imprecation.

  “What?”

  “Christ, don’t do that!”

  Another strange prayer. I crawled backwards from under the table. Menial gave me a glare.

  “I thought that was what you wanted me to do,” I protested.

  “Oh.” She thought about it. “I suppose you could have taken it that way, yes. I forgive you. Now come here and sit down.” She patted the seat beside her.

  As I got to my feet I noticed what had happened to the machine, and where the extra light was coming from. The window on the front of the box was glowing a pearly grey with darker and lighter flecks swirling through it, like the sky above a port on a snowy day. I took a step backwards. The temperature in the room seemed to have dropped a few kelvins. Now I understood why she’d been making these invocations. At moments like that even the most rational person will utter whatever name of the deity springs to mind.

  “It won’t bite,” she said.

  I sidled forward, keeping a wary eye on the thing, as one might do towards a dog about whom one had received just such an assurance. With the hand that Menial couldn’t see, I made the sign of the Horns, then realised that this was shamefully superstitious and began instead mentally to recite a few Names of the One, and of the Prophets: Allah, Buddha, Christ, Deity, Jordan, Justice…

  “Did I do that?” I asked.

  Khomeini, Krishna, Mercy, Mary, Odin, Necessity, Nature…

  “When you switched the power on, yes.”

  Paine, Providence, Quine, Reason, Yaweh, Zoroaster. That should do.

  She gazed into my eyes with impish amusement, and reached forward and stroked my face. The rasp of my stubble sounded uncannily loud.

  “It’s all right, mo grdidh,” she said. “I’m a tinker. I know what I’m doing. This thing here—” she patted the top of it“—is just a machine that does the same thing as the seer-stanes, only not so well. It’s no a deil, ye ken. It’s a computer.”

  “Aye, I know that…”

  “Well, start acting as if you believed it,” she said.

  “But is it a television?” I shuddered inwardly at naming that dark instrument of the Possession.

  She shook her head. “No. This here is a keyboard, and this here is a screen. The screen, or monitor, works on a similar principle to a television, but it is not a television. And even if it was, it couldn’t do you any harm.”

  Easy enough for her to say that, I thought, but wisely didn’t say.

  “Assuming it still works at all,” she added cheerfully. “The chips got fried in the Deliverance, for the most part.”

  (Me neither, but that’s what she said.)

  She rattled a few keys. The screen’s snowstorm responded not at all.

  “Control alt delete,” she said to herself, and hit three keys simultaneously.

  Nothing happened, again.

  “Hmm,” she said. She reached forward and prodded a stud on the machine. The screen turned black.

  “So much for that one,” she said. She stood up and leaned over the table and started looking more closely at the various boxes.

  “Hey!” she said. “Got it! One of these looks like it’s radiation-hardened!” She reached in among the boxes and started fiddling dangerously with live cables, removing a lead from the back of the box we’d used and sticking it in the back of another one. What had seemed to be merely the blank front of that box suddenly lit up, a smoothly shining grey, revealing itself to be a screen.

  “Yess!” said Merrial, punching the air.

  By this point I was beginning to get a grip on myself, though I must admit I almost lost it completely when Merrial turned around and prodded a letter on the keyboard and the words “Demon Internet Software” flashed up on the screen.

  Allah, Buddha, Christ…

  “All right,” Merrial said briskly, as the screen with the three sinister names disappeared and was replaced by a picture with lots of tiny pictures spread out on it. “We’ve got this bugger up and running, but Christ knows how long it’ll stay up.” (She talked this way, I’d come to notice, with its curious combination of obscure sexual and religious references, when she was in what she’d called her “tinker mode’.) “So what we better do is whip the stuff out of it ay ess ay pee.”

  “Out of it what?”

  “As. Soon. As. Possible.”

  “Oh, right. Toot sweet.”

  “What?”

  I waved a hand. “Let’s get on with it, as you say.”

  “Yip.”

  She carefully uncoiled one of the strands of copper wire, and attached a little peg with a copper pin to the end. This she inserted in a round hole (which, she explained, did not fucking have to be round the fucking back, but fucking was) in the pediment of the computer.

  “Right,” she said. The tip of her tongue between her lips, she tapped out the words “Myra Godwin”, the name of the Deliverer, on the key-board. They simultaneously appeared on the screen and on the now black seer-stone.

  “Go,” she said, hitting another key.

  A few seconds passed (tongue between the teeth again) and the screen and the stone filled with a list of tides which crept slowly upwards, its top moving out of sight, and which kept on going for several minutes.

  When the list had stopped its crawl she said, “OK, copy,” and rattled at the keyboard again. A pi
cture of an hourglass appeared on the screen, and the sand began to run. The seer-stone, meanwhile, showed a tree, branching and budding and growing leaves.

  After about a minute and a half the sand had all flowed from the top half of the glass, and the stone was filled with green. Both displays vanished.

  “That’s it,” Menial said.

  “That’s all?”

  Tes,” she grinned. “That’s all the files that mention Myra Godwin transferred, from the dark storage to the stane. No bad going, eh?”

  “Brilliant,” I said. She stood up, leaned around behind the computer again, disconnected her wire and wound it quickly around her hand. Then she poked a few more keys on both keyboards. The screen went that shining grey again, and the stone went back to black.

  She smiled at me. “You have my permission to turn the power off.”

  We left the small room, and the larger library, exactly as we had found them, and walked quietly down the stairs and out of the Institute. When we were a few metres down the street and away we hugged each other and yelped.

  “We did it!” Menial gloated. “We actually fucking did it!”

  “Yes, I still can hardly believe it,” I said. I caught her hand. “Now what do we do?”

  “We look at what we’ve got,” she said. “Somewhere no one will see us, or bother us.”

  I knew just the place.

  Because it was vacation time there were few students around, so my landlady was happy to rent me my usual small room above the book shop on South-park Avenue for one night. She didn’t raise an eyebrow as she took my five marks and handed over a bedroom key, even though it was only about half past four in the afternoon. I suppose she assumed we wanted to use the room for sex.

  She gave us a quick cup of coffee and shared a smoke, and a couple of months’ worth of local gossip, in the back of her kitchen, then waved us upstairs with a wink at me. The room had a fairly generous, though notionally single, bed and a chair and table and power socket. The window had been left open, but its only view was of the back yard. Still, one could look out and see the sky any time one wanted.

  “Perfect,” Merrial said.

  She unloaded the seer-stone and its peripheral pieces again and set them up on the table, running a small cable from the black box to the wall socket. The little box began to hum faintly, and at the same moment a human face loomed out of the dark of the seer-stone, mouthing distress.

  “Ah, fuck that,” Merrial said. She rubbed the stone with a cuff, and the face fell apart into flecks of colour. “Now,” she said, “let’s get on with sorting and searching. We’re looking for stuff from before the Deliverance, but finding it in this lot won’t necessarily be easy. Let’s hope the files are date-stamped.”

  She sat in the chair, motioning to me to perch on the table, and started tapping away at her version of a keyboard. “Ah, good, we can sort by date.”

  The list reappeared in the depths of the glassy stone, this time with a stack of articles at the top with a single date of 28 May 2059. Merrial stroked with her finger gently and slowly along a tiny bar on the keyboard, then tapped another key. “Let’s see what this is.”

  We peered together into the glass and began to read.

  Bankrupt of any perspective for overcoming the crisis, the ruling elite can only sit and watch as society disintegrates beneath it Factories fail to fulfil their obligations, corruption is rife, and the real value produced in the economy continues to plummet. Many industrial sectors actually produce negative value: their output is worth less—in market or any other terms—than the raw materials they take in; in essence, they are vast organizations for spoiling resources.

  In the absence of any genuine move towards a market, or —from the other side—any initiative from the workers, the system can only continue to disintegrate.

  “Sounds like 2059 all right,” Menial said. That was what the Deliverance delivered us from.”

  I nodded, cautiously. “Let’s just look further down…”

  What cannot be ruled out is that the Moscow oligarchy could launch some diversionary military adventure, but this too would rapidly develop its own problems, and intensify those of the centre.

  “Damn!” I said.

  “What?”

  “This isn’t 2059, it’s more like 1999!”

  The invasion of Afghanistan must be seen in this context.

  “No, it’s 1979! Well—” I frowned at the date at the foot of the article “—actually 1980, but it was written about the situation in ’79. In the Soviet Union.” I laughed bitterly. “The reason it’s a bit difficult to tell at first what period she’s talking about is that it was in the Soviet Union that the collapse started, right there in the 1970s. After the Soviet Union disintegrated it just got worse, and spread.”

  This much was a fairly well-accepted historical account, which I’d covered in my undergraduate studies in Ancient History.

  “So why’s it dated 2059?” Menial asked. She stroked the bar and rolled the list down again. “Hah!” she said. “This file, and a whole lot of others by the look of it, were put on to the computer at that date. Which doesn’t mean they were created then. I don’t know if I can extract the original creation date, either.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Maybe this is where I can help. I should be able to tell the rough date from the titles of the files, or maybe a quick look at their contents.”

  “There are thousands of files in there,” she pointed out. “If dating each of them takes as long as it did to date that one, we’ll be here all night.”

  I smiled. “Why should that be a problem?”

  It turned out not to be a problem. Although the bulk of the files had the same date in the “date” column of Menial’s machine, and she gave up looking for a way to find what she called the “create-date”, quite a large number of the files had a date reference of some kind in their titles. These were apparendy articles from magazines or newspapers, by Myra Godwin or about her. We quite quickly got into a way of working that let me identify such files, and Menial deal with them, copying the date from the title to another “date” column. After ten minutes of this she hit her forehead with the heel of her hand and cried, “Stop!”

  “What is it?”

  “We’re wasting our time. I’m wasting our time, I mean.” She rubbed her hands. “What we need here is a wee program, to scan the titles for dates, extract them, reformat them and then sort by date…”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” I said, not having understood all of her words. She waved me away, with a look of abstracted concentration on her face.

  “This’ll be easy,” she said. “It’ll save us hours.”

  I sat on the windowsill, smoking a cigarette, while her fingers flickered over the small keyboard, making a pattering noise like rain on a roof. It struck me that there seemed to be no discernible difference between the white logic and the black, but no doubt this only showed my ignorance.

  “Tessl,” she said. “No bother.”

  She hit a key and sat back. Then she leaned forward again, peering at the stone.

  “Oh fuck!”

  I eyed her warily.

  “I used fucking two-digit year-dates. Force of habit. Fucking thing falls over on the year 2000.”

  The pattering started again.

  About half an hour later Menial had the files partially ordered by date, and we could dig about in them with a little more confidence in their relevance to our concerns.

  “ ‘Defence Policy Contract (Expiry), Vatican City, 11 December 2046’,” Menial read out. “That looks interesting.”

  She pressed one of her keys and the file, as she put it, opened: instead of the title glowing a little brighter among the others, we could see the whole document. Parts of it were in impenetrable legal language (parts of it, in fact, were in Latin) but there was enough there for us to form a good idea of what it was about.

  Menial paused before opening another file, one labelled “Mutual Protection/S
pace Merchants/ 2058”.

  We looked at each other, both a little pale, each waiting for the other to speak first.

  Menial swallowed hard, and reached for one of my cigarettes.

  “You do know,” she said slowly, “just what the Deliverer had to do to make a living, under the Possession?”

  “Well…” I could feel my lower lip moving back and forth over the edge of my teeth, and stopped it. “Yes. It’s one of the aspects of history that historians tend not to talk about. In popular works, that is.”

  “OhhF Menial let out a held breath in relief. “You know about the slave camps, then.”

  “What?” For a fleeting instant, I literally saw a black shadow before my eyes. I pointed at the seer-stone’s script. “I thought you were talking about the nuclear blackmail!”

  Menial looked puzzled. “Nuclear blackmail? I know she got some nuclear weapons from the Papanich, that’s right here. What has that to do with how she made her living?”

  “Oh, Reason above!” I clutched my head. “Let’s get this straight. You think the dirty secret is that she ran slave camps. I think it’s that she trafficked in nuclear threats.”

  Menial sighed. “Yes, that’s it.” She unfurled her hand and forearm with parodied politeness. Tou first.”

  “All right.” I noticed that my left knee was juddering up and down; I stood up, and paced the floor as I spoke. “You know about nuclear detenence?”

  “Oh, aye,” she said, with a grimace.

  “Well, yes, to us the policy of threatening to burn to death many great cities and their inhabitants seems wicked, but the ancients didn’t see it that way.

  In fact, some of them began to see nuclear deterrence as a good, which like all goods would be better bought and sold by businesses than provided by governments. The trouble was, all nuclear weapons were owned by governments, and were impossible to buy and hard to steal.

  “So Myra Godwin and her husband, Georgi Davidov, stole a government. Davidov was a military man, and he carried out a military coup in a part of Kazakhstan, in a region which was very unpleasant and barren but which did happen to have a large stockpile of nuclear weapons. In a way, what happened was that the soldiers who manned the nuclear weapons decided to claim some territory, and nobody dared gainsay them.