I slid my arm around Merrial’s shoulders. She smiled at me, then gazed straight ahead.
‘Tell him,’ she said. ‘Tell him it all.’
So I did, as we pulled out of Dark and drove into the sunset.
‘Aye, well,’ said Druin, ‘you’ve told me all you know, Clovis.’ He sipped his whisky and flicked at a midge. ‘Quite a tale! But I haven’t heard Merrial’s side, and I reckon that’s more than half the story.’
We were sitting around a roughly made, age-smoothed table in the broad
stone-flagged kitchen of Druin’s house, ourselves surrounded by the shelves of crockery, the shining electric oven and a sink with a dripping tap. Arrianne and the children had long since gone to bed. The back door stood open to the warm night, and the smells and sound of the sea-loch. A saucer on the table was filling up with our cigarette-butts. Beside it a bottle of whisky and a pot of coffee were emptying fast.
Merrial rubbed her eyebrows, ran her fingers through the wide swathes of her hair and flicked them back behind her shoulders. She had not expanded on any of my account, beyond the occasional corroborative comment or nod.
‘Well, all right,’ she said. ‘From my side there’s—well, some of it I’d rather talk about with Clovis—it really is personal, it really is no concern of yours, Druin.’
Druin tilted his hand. ‘OK. And the rest?’
‘Ah, well, it goes back a wee bit, to when I started worrying about … stories I’d heard about what happened at the Deliverance. Basically, it was that the Deliverer, Myra Godwin herself, had set off something that physically destroyed the settlements and satellites, and that in doing so she’d not only killed God knows how many people, she’d created a barrier to anything ever getting safely back into space again. Every orbiting platform that was destroyed would have been broken into fast-moving fragments which in turn would destroy others, and so on until there was nothing left but a belt of debris around the Earth—and anything that goes up now would just end up as more debris! Now, Fergal is a well-respected tinker, apart from his being a … leading member of the International.’ She shot us a glance. ‘Which is not as sinister as you think! But that’s by the way. Fergal’s in charge of the tinkers who’re working on the project, though he doesn’t work on the site himself. So after getting nowhere with the project management, I took it to him, and he said we should try to investigate it for ourselves. It was myself who suggested we could look for someone who might have access to anything the Deliverer left at Glasgow, and that, well, there were students working on the project for the summer who might …’
‘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.’
Druin 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,’ Merrial 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.’
Druin took a sudden wasteful gulp of his good whisky.
‘Why would the tinkers—or this International—want to keep that a secret?’
Merrial 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?’
Druin 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 Merrial and you thought. In fact, from the way you say he behaved when Merrial 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, Merrial, 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 Merrial.
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, Merrial?’
‘Oh, sure,’ she said. ‘I’ve never seen or heard of us having anything like that myself, and I … I think I would have.’
‘You 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, Merrial?’
‘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 Merrial and I both had to laugh. The futility of ‘taking a tinker to court’ was proverbial.
‘That doesn’t solve the problem though,’ Merrial 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, Merrial, 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.’
‘Fergal sometimes says things like that,’ Merrial 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?’