Unless Merrial’s fears about the orbital debris were borne out. Nothing more had been heard about this from Fergal or any other tinker, according to Druin, and he could be trusted on such a matter, according to Merrial. Although her own contract on the project had come to an end, those of other tinkers working on mission-critical systems (as the cant had it) had not; and she was still well up on the latest tinker gossip—as, increasingly, was I.
In the weeks between our reconciliation and the floating of the platform we had had an interesting time, in which our joy in each other was countered—though not in any way diminished—by the reactions of other people to it. At the yard, I daily endured the merciless mockery which my mates seemed to think entirely compatible with continued friendly relations in other respects. In the softer circumstances of my previous experience—in childhood, schooling and University—some of their insults and abuse would have occasioned life-long, smouldering enmity, if not immediate physical violence. Here they passed as light-hearted badinage, and it was their ignoring rather than avenging that was taken as a token of manly honour.
The stand-offish attitudes of the tinkers at the camp were harder to take, but Merrial insistently reassured me that they were a similar test, of the strength of my commitment to their ways, and to her. As the days and weeks passed their reactions to me had gradually warmed to the point of a frigid, prickly politeness.
Merrial and I were, by tinker custom, bundling—trying out the experience of living together before making a public commitment. I was enjoying the experiment and I was as committed as I could ever imagine being, and
so was Merrial, but neither of us was in any hurry to move our relationship on to a more formal basis. A tinker marriage is a serious matter, involving among other horrendous expenses—seamstresses, cooks, musicians—that of keeping hundreds of people drunk for a week.
Merrial looked over at me.
‘Time to go?’
‘Aye.’
We stood up and made our way back, easier now, through the thinning crowd. For obvious reasons, alcohol was strictly banned from the site, and from this day’s event. Everybody was heading back for the towns, starting with the nearest, Courthill. The end of the project, and the final pay-packets and bonuses, would be celebrated by drinking the pubs dry over the course of the afternoon and evening.
We wandered along the path back to the main road, occasionally greeting people we knew. The stage from which the speeches had been made stood empty, and was already being dismantled. The various dignitaries were moving down the path in a compact group, and I hurried a little to overtake them on the grass, eager for a closer glimpse of the famous men and women who had travelled far to honour our achievement. Merrial observed this behaviour with sardonic toleration.
I was pointing out a renowned Russian astronomer and an English spacecraft engineer to Merrial when we both noticed Fergal towards the rear of the procession, walking alone among them all. I was surprised to see him, then realised that I shouldn’t be—he had been the project manager on the guidance system, after all. At the same moment, he noticed us. He beckoned us over.
Merrial glanced at me. I shrugged. We went over and joined him, I making sure that I walked between him and Merrial. I felt uneasily that we had no place there, but the rest of the dignitaries politely paid us no attention whatever, to the extent that they noticed us at all, and weren’t simply caught up in their own deep conversations.
He looked at us sidelong, without hostility. Our confrontation might as well never have happened, for all that he showed of bearing any grudge. For myself, it was different.
‘How have you two been getting on?’ he asked. He’d obviously heard of our bundling.
‘Oh, fine. Great!’
Merrial caught my hand and swung it. ‘This one’s no an outsider any more, I’ll tell you that.’
‘Good.’ He smiled, and changed the subject. ‘It’s a great day for us all.’
‘Aye,’ I said. ‘But I’ll not be sure of it until the ship’s in orbit.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that,’ he said. His gaze flicked to Merrial’s eyes. ‘The ship is safe.’
‘How are
you
getting on?’ I asked boldly. ‘With your new friend?’
‘Who—oh, the AI!’
‘What?’
‘Art-if-icial In-tell-igence,’ Fergal and Merrial articulated at the same moment. I glanced from one to the other and laughed.
‘I have to learn that sort of thing sometime!’
‘Indeed you do,’ said Fergal indulgently. ‘Still, you have plenty of centuries ahead to learn it.’
‘Well, I suppose two is plenty, at that,’ I replied, puzzled at this odd remark.
Fergal stopped, then hastened on as others trod on our heels.
‘She hasn’t told you?’
Merrial was looking at him and at me with a mute appeal that somehow seemed to mean something different for both of us. Fergal firmly shook his head.
‘Well, she bloody should have.’
‘I didn’t want to—’ began Merrial.
‘Give him an improper inducement? Or scare him off?’ Fergal smiled sourly. ‘Like it or not, Merrial MacClafferty, it’s a bit late for either now, wouldn’t you think?’
‘Oh, I’m not sure he’s ready—’
‘Will you two,’ I said, ‘please stop talking as if I wasn’t there?’
Fergal glanced over his shoulder, looked ahead, then turned his gaze to the ground and spoke in a low voice.
‘Do you know why people today live longer than they did until some time before the Deliverance?’
‘Aye,’ I said. ‘I found references to it in the Deliverer’s papers. Life-extension treatments. I suppose in some way the effects must have persisted, and become hereditary.’
‘Close enough,’ he said, evidently resisting an impulse to quibble. ‘Well, the people who became the ancestors of the tinkers had a better treatment.’
My heart thudded. ‘How much better?’
He looked around again. A couple of metres separated us from the others on that path, before and behind.
‘So much better that we don’t know how much better it is.’
I looked at Merrial, feeling the blood drain from my face, and then rush back. I squeezed her hand.
‘Well, if you’ll have me, I don’t care if you do outlive me, and stay young while I grow old.’ Easy enough to say, when you’re twenty-two and don’t
believe that ageing or death have any personal application in the first place. But to my surprise, Merrial laughed.
‘This one isn’t genetic, any more than the other,’ she said. ‘It’s—’
‘Infectious,’ said Fergal. ‘Or is it contagious? I can never remember.’
‘Whatever,’ said Merrial. ‘It’s, um, sexually transmitted.’
She sounded almost embarrassed.
Fergal, it seemed, was still welcome in The Carronade, and even Druin, when he passed him at the bar, was affable towards him. I guessed, myself, after my third litre and sixth whisky, that the tinker Internationalist was anxious to show us his friendly side. I remained unpersuaded by it, but decided to make the most of it while it lasted. I had still not assimilated the news that I could expect to live longer than I’d ever expected, and it would take me long enough to do it.
‘So what,’ I asked him, at a corner table in the security of the raucous din around us, ‘was that thing Merrial found? The AI?’
‘It’s … a planner,’ he said. ‘A mind that can co-ordinate an entire economy. Something we’re going to need, some day.’
‘After your glorious revolution?’
‘Yes, and maybe before. It’s a revolutionary itself.’
‘So what are you going to do with it?’ I asked.
Fergal might have been, as Jeanna had said, able to hold his drink. He may well have not done or said anything without calculating its effect on the vectors of his purposes. But I’m sure it was a reckless impulse that made him say what he said next.
‘It’s on the ship. Well, a copy of it, anyway.’
He was looking at me, not at Merrial, as he spoke. He didn’t see what I saw: the momentary flash of triumph and delight on Merrial’s face. That glimpse, as much as his words, must have drained the colour from mine. And then—I could see her dissembling—by the time Fergal turned to her, she looked even more shocked than I felt.
‘Why the hell did you do that?’ she asked.
Fergal leaned in and lowered his voice. ‘I learned a few things from the AI,’ he said. ‘Its memories go right up to a few days before the Deliverance. It knows nothing about what happened but it does know that the Deliverer had control of nuclear and other weapons in space. So the possibility that—you know, what we feared—was true is too strong to ignore. But at this stage—hell, if the mission were aborted, or if the ship were destroyed, God alone knows how long it’d be before we’ll see another. There was only one way to do it, and that was to make a copy and let it into the ship’s own seer-stone control systems. Out of sheer self-preservation, the copy would be
forced to take the kind of fast-reacting control over the ship’s drive that would let it dodge through any debris that’s still there.’
‘Would that work?’ I asked Merrial, who was staring at Fergal as though seeing past him.
‘Oh, aye,’ she said, without looking around, ‘we couldn’t do that ourselves, but an AI would be in with a chance, I reckon. But what happens once it’s up?’
Fergal grinned. ‘It just sits in the centre of a new communications web, that’s all. A useful thing to have.’
‘Bloody dangerous, you mean!’ I said.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Fergal, realising he’d gone too far. ‘It’s not going to interfere with the satellite. It’ll just … gather information. For the future.’
‘Oh God!’ Merrial exclaimed. ‘You’re out of your fucking mind! That thing is a deil! It’ll have the world in a new Possession before you know it!’
‘It’ll be our Possession,’ Fergal said.
‘Yours, you mean!’
Fergal stretched out his legs.
‘And what would be wrong with that?’
He looked at our appalled faces and burst out laughing.
‘Don’t be stupid,’ he said. ‘There’s no way it can do anything without having people to work with, and there are no such people yet.’ He placed a thumb on Merrial’s chin for a moment. ‘As you fine well know.’
She smacked his hand away, none too gently.
‘That was not funny,’ she said. She got up with unsteady dignity. ‘I’m going for a piss.’
Fergal watched me watching her thread her way through the throng. If he detected the tumult in my thoughts he gave no sign.
‘No chance of persuading you, Clovis?’
‘Not a chance in hell,’ I said, still distracted. His casual banter fooled me for not a second; this was a man who wanted power, Possession indeed, and his current scheme with the AI would not be his last. He was a man I would have to watch, and might one day have to kill.
‘Oh, well,’ he said. ‘Our day will come, and you’ll see it.’
I was about to contest this when I felt a hand on my shoulder.
‘Oh, hello, Catherine.’
My former landlady smiled down at me; like everyone here, she was already a bit drunk. She nodded at Fergal and looked back at me.
‘Hi, Clovis. I hope you like your new accommodation.’
‘Oh, aye.’
She reached into a pouch on her hip. ‘I’ve got something for you,’ she said. ‘A letter that arrived a few days ago, I didn’t get round to—’
‘That’s all right,’ I said, taking the bulky envelope. ‘Thanks.’
Fergal, perhaps subdued by his rebuff, was moodily studying his drink, or tactfully respecting my privacy, as I opened the package. From the handwriting of the address, I knew it was from Gantry. It contained a letter and a thick booklet. The letter was neatly typed. I glanced down the predictable hand-wringing about my expulsion from the University (the trial had been a farce, not that I cared any more) and about my choice of tinkering as a career; then turned over to the next sheet.
However, Clovis, and just as a little reminder of the joys of historical research—you may remember I looked a little puzzled when you introduced your girlfriend, Merrial? The reason was that I thought I recognised her from somewhere. Actually, of course, I hadn’t—but I’d come across a picture of what may be an ancestor of hers by the same name, in one of the institute’s old yearbooks—2058, in fact. You may even have glanced through this once yourself. Have a look at page 35—the resemblance is quite striking.
(Needless to say, I expect you to return …
I almost dropped the papers as I fumbled open the booklet and turned to the page. It showed—in much sharper detail and better colour than in modern photographs—some kind of social occasion. People were sitting, smartly dressed, at long tables, clapping their hands as others in their company danced. In the immediate foreground was a girl, caught in mid-twirl, her thick black hair swaying around behind her head, one hand swinging her long, layered skirt out to the side, her bare feet lightly, precisely placed. A fine dancer. Merrial.