Divisions (51 page)

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Authors: Ken MacLeod

BOOK: Divisions
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Merrial knocked back her whisky in one deft swallow, and summer returned to her face.
‘Jesus!’ she swore. ‘I needed that. Give me a cigarette.’
I complied, gazing at her while lighting it, glancing covertly around while I lit my own. The pub, which I’d patronised throughout my student years, was a friendly and comfortable place, though its wall decorations could chill you a bit if you pondered on them: framed reproductions of ancient posters and notices and regulations about ‘actively seeking employment’ and ‘receiving benefit’. It was something to do with living on public assistance, which is what many quite hale and able folk, known as claimants, had had to resort to in the days of the Possession, when land was owned by lairds and capital by usurers.
The usual two old geezers were recalling their first couple of centuries in voices raised to cope with the slight hearing impairment that comes with age; a gang of lads around a big table were gambling for pennies, and several pairs of other lovers were intent only on each other; and the singer’s song floated high notes over them all.
‘You were about to say?’ I said. My own voice was shakier than Merrial’s had been at any point in the whole incident. At the same time I felt giddy with relief at our escape, and a strange exciting mixture of dread and exaltation at the sure knowledge that my life was henceforth unpredictable.
‘I wasn’t,’ Merrial said, ‘but I’ll tell you anyway. That thing we saw was the deil that guards the files. But,’ she added brightly, ‘blowing fuses for several blocks around was the worst it could do.’
‘Hey, that’s comforting.’
‘Yes, it is,’ she said, in a very definite tone. ‘Better that than an electric
shock that burns your hands or a fire that brings down the whole building. Or—’
‘What?’
‘I’ve heard of worse. Ones that attack your mind through your eyes.’
‘And there you were laughing at the very idea, back at the yard.’
‘Aye, well,’ she said. ‘It was just me that had to face them. No sense in getting you worried.’
‘Oh, thanks.’
She took my hand. ‘No, you were brave in there.’
‘Ach, not a bit of it,’ I agreed.
 
 
‘So, after all, we didn’t get much,’ I said, returning to our table with refilled glasses about two minutes later. Outside, I could hear a growing commotion of militia rattles and whistles and fire-brigade bells. Somewhere across the street, a vehicle with a flashing light trundled slowly past.
Merrial looked up from riffling through the folders.
‘Well, you got the 2050s and the 1990s,’ she said. ‘That’s something. What
I
got—’ she patted her bag, grinning ‘—was a whole lot more. Maybe everything, I don’t know yet.’
I put the glasses down very carefully.
‘The … um, barrier … didn’t work, then?’
‘Up to a point. Like I said, my machine, and the logic on it, are stronger than the other one. It just couldn’t stop that thing from doing what it kept warning it
would
do. You can steal a bone from a dog if you ignore the barks and don’t mind the bites.’ In a less smug tone, she added, ‘But it all depends on how much I pulled out before I had to …’
‘Pull out!’
‘Yes.’
‘So what do we do now?’ I looked down at the folders. ‘I suppose I’ll have to try and square things with Dr Gantry.’ Confused thoughts fought in my mind, like those programs Merrial talked about. One sequence of impulses made me think through a scheme of grovelling apology and covering up and smoothing over. Another made me realise that I was almost certainly in very deep trouble with the University authorities, and had quite possibly affronted Gantry in ways that he might find hard to forgive.
‘Oh, and how are you going to do that?’ Merrial asked. ‘I reckon he won’t be too pleased about your running off with this lot.’
‘That he won’t,’ I said gloomily. ‘But I could always say I grabbed them to save them, or something, and that I’ll return them in a few days. After photocopying them, of course. No, it’s the other thing that’ll have him pissed
off. Heaven knows what damage that thing did—I doubt it was just a power cut. More like blown fuses all over the place, maybe worse. That’ll be looked into, and not just by the University. And he’s going to want to know who you are and what we were up to.’
‘Hmm.’ Merrial blew out a thin stream of smoke, observing it as though it were a divination. ‘Well, seeing as he knows my name, and where I work … tell you what, colha Gree. Assume he does make a fuss, or somebody else asks questions. What I do not want getting out is that this has anything to do with the ship, or with … my folk. What we can say, and with some truth, is that you were led by excess of zeal to poke around in … the dark place. That you inveigled me into helping you. That you’re very sorry, you got your fingers burned, and you won’t do it again. And that of course the files you took will not be seen by anyone outside the community of scholars. Their
photocopies
, now, they might be seen, but you need say nothing of that.’
I had been thinking of counting Merrial as an honorary scholar in my own version of that bit of casuistry, but hers would do at a pinch. My two conflicting programs meshed: I was in trouble, yes, but I could get out of it, by the aforementioned grovelling and covering up.
The clock above the bar showed the time was a quarter past ten.
‘I doubt Gantry’s still around,’ I said. ‘And I don’t know where he lives, or his phone number, if he has one. I suppose the best thing to do is see him in the morning, before we leave.’ I took my return ticket from my pocket. ‘Train leaves at forty minutes before noon. I’ll be round to see him at nine, and try and straighten things out.’
Merrial nodded. ‘Sound plan,’ she said. She cocked an ear. ‘Things seem to be quietening down, but I don’t think wandering around back there would be a good idea right now.’
‘D’you want to go back and check over what we’ve got?’
‘
Dhia
, no! I’ve looked at enough of that for one day. I want to stay here and drink with you, and maybe dance with you—if a wee bit of siller can make that fiddler change his tune—and then go back to the lodging and test the strength of that bed with you.’
That is not what we should have done, I grant you; but are you surprised at all that it is what we did?
 
 
I sat on the steps outside the Institute, in the still, chill morning under the shadows of the great trees, and looked at my watch. Ten to nine. I sighed and lit another cigarette. A couple of hundred metres away a pneumatic drill started hammering. Brightly painted trestles and crossbeams and piles of broken tarmac indicated that some similar work had been done already during the night.
The path of power, indeed. One reason why it’s called that is that electronic computation is inextricably and unpredictably linked to electrical power generation, and can disrupt it in expensive and dangerous ways. I had an unpleasant suspicion that the cost of all this was, one way or another, going to meander through some long system of City Council and University Senate accountancy, and arrive at my feet.
‘Good morning, Clovis.’ I looked up at Gantry. He had his pipe in one hand and a key in the other. ‘Come on in.’
His office had a window that occupied most of one wall, giving a soothing view of a weed-choked back yard, and bookcases on the others. Every vertical surface in the room was stained slightly yellow, and every horizontal surface was under a fine layer of tobacco ash. I wiped ineffectually at the wooden chair in front of his desk while he sat down on the leather one behind it.
He regarded me for a moment, blinking; ran his fingers through his short hair; sighed and began refilling his pipe.
‘Well, colha Gree,’ he said, after a minute of intimidating silence, ‘you have no idea how much my respect for you has increased by your coming here. When I saw you a moment ago, stubbing out your cigarette on the pavement, I thought, “Now, there’s a man who knows to do the decent thing.” Considerable improvement on your blue funk last night; considerable. ’
I cleared my throat, vaguely thinking that whatever the doctors may say, there
must
be something harmful in a habit which makes your lungs feel so rough in the morning. ‘Aye, well, Dr Gantry, it wasn’t yourself I was afraid of.’
‘Oh,’ he said dryly, ‘and what was it then, hmm?’
Without meaning to, I found my gaze drifting upward. ‘It was, uh, the demon internet software that I’m afraid I and my friend, um, accidentally invoked.’
Gantry lit his pipe and sent out a cloud of smoke.
‘Yes, I had gathered that. And what on earth possessed you—so to speak—to poke around in the dark storage when I’d just given you more than enough material for years of study?’
I met his gaze again. ‘It was my idea,’ I said. ‘Call it—excess of zeal. I got the idea before you gave me the papers, of course, but even after that I thought we might as well go through with it. I’m afraid I was—rather blinded by the lust for knowledge.’
‘And by another kind of lust, I shouldn’t wonder,’ Gantry said. ‘This
friend
of yours, she’s more than that, am I right?’
There seemed no point in denying it, so I didn’t.
‘All right,’ he said. He jabbed his pipe-stem at me, thumbed the stubble
on his chin, and gnawed at his lower lip for a moment. ‘All right. First of all, let me say that the University administration has a job to do which is different from the self-administration of the academic community. It has to maintain the physical fabric of the place, and its supplies and services and so forth, and with the best will in the world I can’t interfere with any measures of investigation
and discipline
which it may see fit to take in this unfortunate matter. You appreciate that, don’t you?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Fine. Well … as to any academic repercussions, there I can speak up for you, I can … refrain from volunteering information about how the demonic outbreak took place. But I can’t lie on your behalf, old chap. I’ll do my best for you, because I think it would be a shame to throw away someone with so much promise over what, as you say, was excess of scholarly zeal. Very understandable temptation, and all that. Some of the Senatus might well think to themselves, “Been there, done that—young once myself—fingers burnt—learned his lesson—say no more about it,” and all that sort of thing.’
I relaxed a little on the hard chair. I’d been fiddling with a cigarette for a while, unsure if I had permission to smoke; Gantry leaned over with his lighter, absently almost taking my eyebrows off with its kerosene flare.
‘Thank you.’
‘However,’ he went on, leaning back in his own chair, ‘there are some wider issues.’ He waved his pipe about, vaguely indicating the surrounding shelves of hard-won knowledge. ‘We British are beginning to get the hang of this civilisation game. When the Romans left, there wasn’t a public library or a flush toilet or a decent road or a postman to be seen for a thousand years. When the American empire fell, I think we can honestly say we did a damn sight better, and indeed better than most. We lost the electronic libraries, of course, and a great deal of knowledge, but the infrastructure of civilisation pulled through the troubled times reasonably intact. In some respects, even improved. A great deal of that we owe to the very fact that the electronic records were lost—and along with them the chains of usury and rent, and the other … dark powers which held the world in what they even then had the gall to call “The Net”.’
He stood up and ambled along to a corner and leaned his elbow on a shelf. ‘What we have instead of the net is the tinkers.’ He waved his hands again. ‘And telephony and telegraphy and libraries and so forth, of course, but that’s beside the point. The tinkers look after our computation, which even with the path of light most of us are … unwilling to do, because of what happened in the past, but are grateful there’s somebody to do it. This makes them … not quite a pariah people, but definitely a slightly stigmatised occupation. And that very stigma, you see, paradoxically ensures—or
gives some assurance of—the purity of their product. It keeps the two paths, the light and the dark, separate. You see what I’m driving at?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m afraid I don’t.’
‘Oh.’ He looked a little disappointed at my slowness on the uptake. ‘Well, not to put too fine a point on it, it’s one thing for scholars to risk their own bodies or souls with the dark storage. Not done, so to speak, but between you and me and the gatepost, it
is
done. It’s quite another for a tinker to do it. Could contaminate the seer-stones, y’see. Bad business.’
He stalked over and stared at me. ‘The upshot, my friend, is that you had better get your tinker girlfriend back here with whatever she took, and get those file-folders you
borrowed
back here with it, if you want to have this episode overlooked. Clear?’
‘Yes, but—’
‘No “buts”, Clovis. You don’t have much time. Get out and get back before anyone else notices, that’s the ticket.’
‘I’ll do what I can,’ I said, truthfully enough, and left.

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