Divisions (62 page)

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Authors: Ken MacLeod

BOOK: Divisions
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‘It wasn’t!’
‘But why? Even if he’s as hostile as you say, he’ll have people searching for him if he doesn’t return, and it won’t take anyone long to think of looking here.’
Fergal flicked his fingers. ‘We could make it look like an accident that had nothing to do with us. It’s a dangerous sport, deer-hunting.’
‘And I would go along with your story, or join him at the bottom of a cliff?’
‘Something like that.’
‘What,’ I asked, trying to keep my voice from betraying my rage and fear, ‘is important enough to justify doing
something like that
, now?’
‘Ah.’ Fergal frowned. ‘He—and you—have arrived at a very awkward moment. We’ve found something in the files that Merrial retrieved—something we’ve been missing for a very long time, and which we only recently realised might be stored at the University, of all places. We—’
He paused. ‘Let’s just say we’d lose a lot if anyone started poking around now. There’s obviously an investigation going on, and we really aren’t in a position to resist any intrusion in force.’ He dusted his palms and stood up, laying the rifle carefully aside across the sink, within his reach and out of mine. ‘Which is where you come in, Clovis. Obviously we don’t want to kill Druin, or yourself.’
‘If you can possibly avoid it.’
‘Exactly!’ he smiled, damning himself with his grin. ‘No need for any of that. You’re an intelligent bloke, Clovis, and you can help us. All you have to do is persuade Druin that there’s nothing here to threaten the project, and that he should leave well alone.’
‘That shouldn’t be hard,’ I said. ‘And Druin shouldn’t worry you. Even if he is what you say, he’s only doing his job. And speaking of jobs, I’ve just lost mine and I want an explanation. As well as the files you took, and a chance to speak to Merrial.’
Fergal narrowed his eyes. ‘Merrial might not want to speak to you.’
‘That’s for her to say.’
‘As for the files—’
He frowned, considering. I got the impression that he was beginning to feel the files were turning out to be more trouble than they were worth.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘I understand why you feel they’re yours. But they’re not mine to let you have, or yours to take. The Deliverer left them to the University, not to the Fourth International.’
Fergal jumped up as if he’d sat on a wasp.
‘Who told you about the Fourth International?’
I shrugged. ‘I’m a historian,’ I said. ‘It’s common knowledge among scholars.’
This double lie deflated Fergal somewhat. He sat back down and eyed me warily.
‘So what do you know about it?’
‘It’s a communist secret society that goes back to before the Deliverer’s time.’
‘Hmm,’ he said. He rubbed an eyelid. ‘That’s about right. Though “communist” doesn’t really tell you what it’s all about, these days.’ He laughed harshly. ‘God, I sometimes feel if we could get
capitalism
back—’
‘The Possession?’ I asked incredulously.
‘Well, you would call it that. Let me tell you, it would be better than this dark age you people have got yourselves bogged down in.’
‘This is a dark age?’ I laughed in his face. ‘We’re building a spaceship not fifty kilometres from here.’
‘Oh, Christ.’ Fergal knotted his fists. ‘Aye, building it out of boiler plate. You build everything, up to crude atomics and even fucking
laser-fusion engines
with skills handed down from master to apprentice. Compared to the ancients, you people are complete barbarians. Compared to what you could be—’
He sighed and stood up, and began pacing the room like a beast in a cage. ‘You could have a world where nobody has to do any work that isn’t like play, where almost any sickness or injury could be mended, where nobody has to die, where we live like gods and fill the skies with our children’s
children. Instead we have
this.
’ He smacked his palm with his fist and looked around with an expression of disgust.
‘And who would do the work in this paradise?’ I asked, perhaps more offensively than I intended.
‘Machines, of course. Every bit of work in the world can be done by machines, linked up and co-ordinated.’
‘Oh, right,’ I said, disappointed. ‘The path of power.’
‘It doesn’t have to be like that, next time—’
‘
Next
time?’
Fergal leaned over the table on his fists, in a manner simultaneously intimidating and confidential. ‘That’s what the International exists for: the next time. The next chance humanity has to break out of this prison. Our time will come, again. And next time, we’ll be ready.’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t understand.’
He looked at me with some regret, then straightened up and moved back to his seat. ‘It’s no use trying to explain it to you now,’ he said. ‘There’s so much you need to know to make sense of it, and you have no way of getting—’
He was interrupted by a banging on the door.
‘Who’s there?’ he shouted.
‘It’s me—Merrial! Fergal, you’ve got to—’
‘Wait there!’
His shouted command came too late. The door burst open and Merrial charged in. She rushed past me and placed something on the table and then snatched her hands back from it as though it were a dish too hot to handle. It was a seer-stone apparatus, and the stone in the middle of it was glowing with colour and alive with movement, forming a tiny scene under the domed surface, a bubble of life startling in its virtual reality.
The scene was of a forest glade, in which a man sat elf-like on a rock. He looked out at us, quite calm and uncanny. He spoke, and his voice came from a speaker in the side of the surrounding apparatus. The volume was too low to make out what he was saying—certainly not above Merrial’s shouting.
‘You never told me there was a deil in it!’
Fergal had jumped up, and was staring down intently at the stone. He raised a hand, without looking up.
‘Calm down, Merrial,’ he said mildly. ‘This is no deil. It’s what you were looking for.’
‘What in hell is that?’ I asked. I too was on my feet, peering entranced at the amazing, beautiful thing.
‘It’s an artificial intelligence,’ the tinker said, his voice thrilled with awe.
He stooped to the seer-stone and placed his ear close to the speaker and listened. Merrial seemed to have noticed me just as I spoke.
‘What are you doing here?’ she asked. Her eyes were reddened, her cheeks pale with fatigue. She looked scared and puzzled.
‘I came here for you,’ I said. ‘I hoped you might want me to come back.’
‘But I thought—’
‘You two, please leave now,’ Fergal said. He didn’t even look up at us. He waved a hand absently to one side. ‘Take your weapons and tools, Clovis, take this woman if you want and get the hell out of here with your friend, the company spy.’
Merrial turned and looked down at Fergal.
‘You want me to go?’ She sounded hurt, but hopeful as well.
‘Yes, yes,’ Fergal said, impatiently deigning to spare her a glance. ‘You’ve done your job, and very well too. Your skills won’t be needed in the … next phase. Oh, and Clovis—take the bloody paper files while you’re at it. We won’t be needing them any more, either.’
Merrial glowered at Fergal for a moment and clutched my hand.
‘Clovis, what’s going on?’
‘I think we’d better do as he says,’ I said. I let go of her hand and edged around the table, picking up the rifle I’d carried and the gear from my belt. I buckled them back on, shoved the sheathed dagger back in my boot and took Merrial’s hand in my left, keeping the rifle in my right. Together we backed out of the room. Fergal didn’t watch us go, or even—as far as I could see—notice. He was talking quietly to the sprite in the stone. I pushed the door shut with my toe.
‘Do you want to come with me?’
Merrial blinked. ‘Of course I do.’
I hugged her (rather awkwardly with the rifle in one hand, but I wasn’t letting go of it again) and then said, ‘We better get out before that bastard changes his mind.’
‘Or something worse happens. Yes, come on.’
The big work-shop space was still busy, with lights coming on here and there as the evening shadows lengthened—the time, I was startled to realise, was only ten o’clock—and the ambient light reddened. A few people on the overhead walkways glanced down at us curiously, but that was all.
The room in which Druin was being held was only a few quick strides away. I opened the door and walked in, Merrial close behind me. This room had only a chair in the middle, with one very bright light above it. Druin was sitting on that chair with a bored, sullen and stubborn expression on his face, while the two tinkers who’d accompanied Fergal stood, one in front of him and one behind. Their raised voices fell silent as we entered.
Their rifles—and Druin’s—were propped against the back wall; mine was pointing straight ahead. It still wasn’t loaded, but they weren’t to know that.
‘Fergal says you’re to let him go,’ said Merrial.
‘What have they been doing to you?’ I asked.
Druin stood up and stretched. ‘Och, nothing to speak of,’ he said. ‘They have merely been boring me with an account of my sins. I have not yet found it in my heart to confess.’ He deftly retrieved his weapons and kit. ‘I’ll thank you to escort us out, gentlemen.’
One of the tinkers found his voice. ‘I want this confirmed by Fergal.’
‘You do that if you like,’ Merrial said. ‘But I warn you, he’s not in a friendly mood.’
The tinker opened his mouth and closed it again. He smiled at Merrial in a surprisingly complicit way, which made me suspect that he and Merrial had some shared experience of Fergal’s moods. ‘Oh, well, it’s your responsibility, ’ he said.
We stepped outside the room.
‘Wait a minute,’ said Merrial.
She skipped away up a stair-ladder and ran along a walkway, her feet setting the metal ringing. We waited in uneasy silence until she returned, the two file-folders hugged to her chest.
‘That’s us,’ she said. ‘All set.’
The two men walked ahead of us down a long central passage through the machine shop to the building’s ancient green copper doors, then turned sharply left and showed us out through a rather less imposing wooden door.
‘Goodbye,’ said Druin balefully.
The tinkers ignored him.
‘Are you leaving?’ one of them asked Merrial.
‘I’m going home,’ she said. ‘I hope I see you again.’
 
 
Druin’s truck was just over a kilometre away. We hastened along the quiet road, the late sun in our eyes. Druin strode briskly in front. Merrial’s hand was clasped in mine, fingers intertwined. None of us said very much; we had too much to say all at once.
At last we reached the truck. Druin stopped and looked at the rifles.
‘Och, I forgot, we have some deer to kill.’
He laughed at my face, and took the two rifles and racked them again on the back of the truck. We went around to the cab and climbed in. Merrial shared the double passenger-seat with me; it was comfortably crowded. For a minute we all slumped gratefully. I passed Merrial a cigarette and lit for both of us. The Kyle train clattered past.
‘You know,’ Druin said reflectively, ‘I’ve never before had a gun pointed at me, thank Providence. It isn’t an experience I’d want to repeat.’
‘I don’t think they’d really have killed either of us,’ I said. ‘It was us who marched in with rifles, after all.’
‘Aye,’ said Druin indignantly, ‘and I’ve carried a rifle into The Carronade many’s the time, and nobody ever took it ill.’
‘Different situation—’
‘Fergal could have killed you!’ Merrial interrupted. ‘If he was in the mood. It was only the possible consequences that stopped him. You did something
stupidly
dangerous going there.’
‘Well, we went there to get you, and to get yon papers that Clovis makes such a fuss about,’ Druin grinned. ‘And that’s what we’ve come out with.’
‘What a charming way to put it,’ said Merrial, unoffended. I leaned past her and frowned at Druin.
‘What about you? Fergal said you were working for site security, spying on the unions and on the tinkers. And that you argued for getting me sacked. Is that true?’
‘I don’t
spy
on anyone,’ Druin said. ‘That’s just the tinkers’ way of putting it, at least those three who caught us. There’ll be the deil to pay for that, you know!’
‘How?’ Druin’s non-denials hadn’t passed me by, but this was more urgent.
Druin turned the engine on and began to steer the truck back on to the road west. ‘False imprisonment!’ he said. ‘And assault with a deadly weapon, which is what threatening someone with a gun is. You and me, Clovis, we could sue the bastards.’ He glanced across at me sharply. ‘You haven’t any idea, by any chance, why they kept us in the first place, and why they let us go when they did? I mean, with me they just kept banging on about what a scab I was. What did Fergal have to say to you? And, come to think of it, what are you two up to anyway? I know you’re up to something, and that it concerns the ship. Which means it concerns me.’

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