Ken Macleod - The Sky Road

“I’m not so sure. Remember, there may not be many of us left in the world, but—” Valentina leaned closer “—there isn’t only one world.”

“Oh, don’t be—” Myra gave it a second thought. “Oh,” she said. “Our friends in the sky.”

“Yeah,” said Valentina. “The space fraction.”

“I don’t want to discuss this right now,” Myra said. She looked around, wildly. The place was jumping. One beautiful Kazakh girl whom she’d thought was a bride yelled something in what sounded like Japanese. Her big white dress shrank like shrink-wrap to her body, changing colour and hardening to a costume of pastel-shaded plastic armour. A smart-suit—made from, rather than by, nanotech—was a heinously expensive novelty, offering a limited menu of programmed transformations. Myra wondered how long it would be before its price plummeted, its repertoire exploded; how long it would be before people could as readily transform their bodies. A world of comic-book super-heroes—it didn’t bear thinking about. The girl struck a combative pose, to a scatter of applause from the other anime fans.

“Let’s get drunk,” Myra said.

Merrial was, as promised, waiting. She sat on the plinth, as I had done, under the Deliverer’s equestrian statue. She wore a loose summer dress with a colourful tiered skirt. Something stirred in my memory, then vanished like a dream in the morning. She was in animated conversation with a man sitting beside her. They both looked up as I arrived.

“Hello,” I said warily.

He was a tall, thin man, about thirty, I reckoned; quite brown, with sharp features and dark eyes which had a sort of quirky, questioning look in them; black hair curly on top, short at the back and sides; dressed in leather trousers and jacket and a white cotton T-shirt with a red bandana. A fine chain hung around his throat beneath the bandana, its pendant—if any—below the T-shirt’s round collar.

“Hello,” Menial said warmly. “Clovis, this is Fergal.”

The man stuck his right hand out and I shook it, noticing as I did so that one of his thumbs pressed the back of my hand and that he held on, as though waiting for some response, for about a second longer than I subconsciously expected, before letting go.

“Pleased to meet you, Clovis,” he said. His voice was low and deep, his accent was hard to place: correct, but by that very correctness of intonation in each syllable, somehow foreign; it reminded me of a Zanu prince I’d once heard speak at the University.

“Let’s get some drinks,” he said, rising to his feet. We strolled to the nearest vacant table outside The Carronade. Fergal took our requests and disappeared inside.

“Who is that guy?” I asked.

Merrial favoured me with a slow smile. “You sound jealous,” she teased.

“Ah, come on. Just curious.”

“I’ve known him a long time,” she said. “Nothing personal. Just… one of us.”

“Well, I had kind of figured he was a tinker.”

Menial’s eyes narrowed slightly. “Yes, that’s it,” she said.

Fergal returned in a few moments, taking his seat beside me and opposite Merrial. I offered him a cigarette, which he accepted with an oddly ironic smile.

“Well,” he said, lighting it, “you know about the… concern, for the ship?”

I nodded. Tes, but Merrial said nothing about its being shared.”

He grinned. “Oh, it’s quite widely shared, I can tell you that. It’s a brave offer you’ve made, and—” he spread his hands “—all I can say is, thanks.”

I was more puzzled than modest about this reference to the bravery of my offer, so I just shrugged at that.

“Are you on the project too?”

He seemed amused. Tm not on site, but I am on the payroll, if that’s what you mean,” he said. “All of—” he glanced at Menial “—our profession are very much involved in the project as a whole.” He took a long swallow of beer, and a draw on his cigarette, becoming visibly more relaxed and expansive as he did so. “Its success matters a lot to us. We’re very keen to see the sky road taken again.”

“I like that,” I said. “ ‘The sky road’.”

“Yes,” he said. “Well, it took you people long enough to get back on it.”

“Back?”

“You walked it once.” Another glance at Menial, then a smile at me. “Or we did.”

“Our ancestors did,” I said.

“That’s what I meant to say,” he said idly. “But to business. I’ll have to get a piece of equipment that you—or rather, Menial—is going to need. That’s going to take some time, but I’ll manage it this weekend. You’ll have to book some time off and seats on the Monday train.” He smiled wryly. “Not much point trying to travel on the Saturday or the Sunday, anyway. No trains and damn slow traffic, even if you wanted to drive.”

I nodded. “And the University would have all its hatches battened anyway.”

Yeah, that’s a point. Still, can’t complain—the free weekend is one of the gains of the working class, eh?”

“You could call it that,” I said. “Mind you, whether what goes on at the University should count as work—”

We went on talking for a bit. Fergal was cagey about himself, and I didn’t press him, and after another couple of beers he got up and left. We had the evening, and the weekend, to ourselves.

Menial slept, leaning against my shoulder, all the way from Carron Town to Inverness. It seemed a shame for her to miss the journey, but I reckoned she must have seen its famously spectacular and varied scenery before, many more times than I had. Besides, I liked watching her sleep, an experience which, in the nature of our past three nights, I had hitherto not had much time to savour.

We had caught the early train, at 5.15 on the Monday morning. Each of us had separately arranged to have the first two days of the week off, by seeking out our different supervisors in the Carron bars on the Friday evening. It was to be hoped that Angus Grizzlyback would remember that I was not coming in this morning; but if he didn’t, I was sure my loyal friends would remind him, with predictable and—as it happened—inaccurate speculation as to how I intended to spend the day.

We had, in fact, spent the Saturday and the Sunday in just that way, very enjoyably, in bed or out on the hills. On the Saturday afternoon Merrial had guddled a trout from a dark, deep pool in the Alt na Chuirn glen; leapt up with the thrashing fish clutched in her hands and danced around, surefooted on the slippery stones. Again, something had moved in my mind, like a glimpsed flick of a tail in the water, which had—as soon as the shadow of my thought fell on it—flashed away.

The sun rose higher, the shadows shortening, apparently in the face of the train’s advance. We stopped at all the small, busy towns built around forestry and light industry and—increasingly as we moved east—farming: Achnasheen, Achnashellach, Achanalt, Garve… The electric engine’s almost silent glide surprised the short-memoried sheep, rabbits and deer beside the track, and set up a continuous standing wave of animals, sauntering or lolloping or springing away. I saw a wolf’s grey-shadowed shape at Achanalt; as we rounded the cliff-face at Garve I saw a wild goat on a shelf; and spotted an eagle patrolling the updrafts above the slope of Moruisg.

I didn’t wake Merrial for any of them.

I smoked, once, with a coffee brought around on a rattling trolley by a lass in tartan trews. Neither the sound nor the smell nor the smoke stirred Merrial at all, except to a few deeper breaths, long ripples in the spate of her hair across her breast and over my chest. I let her head nestle in the now awkward crook of my left arm, and alternated the cup and the cigarette in my right hand. It was a quiet train, for all that it was busy, with clerks and traders on their weekly commute from their coastal homes to their work in Inverfefforan or Inverness.