Free Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road by Ken MacLeod Page A

Menial, I now
recalled with renewed interest, had not explicitly disavowed the
possibility – only discounted it, saying that she
wasn’t from around here.
    Neither, of course, was I. There was no reason why I
couldn’t have seen her. I couldn’t remember any such
encounter, but I already knew that our childhood memories are as
vagrant as our childhood selves, and as elusive; and as capable
of innocent, shameless deceit.
    The brute-force approach suggested itself: interrogate my
parents, brothers and sisters; ransack family photographs…
not yet. Already, the conscious thought that I sought the memory
would have released the insensible agency in my mind that I
privately thought of as the Librarian. That part of me would do
the rest, and bring back the record if it were to be found at all
– no doubt at some time as unexpected as it would be
inopportune, but welcome nonetheless.
    ‘ – the torch parts?’ said Angus.
    I realised I had missed something. Angus sighed.
    ‘You understand how to fit them, test and
adjust?’
    ‘Sure,’ I said, nodding with more confidence than
I felt.
    Tine, fine,’ said Angus, standing up and briskly
brushing the palms of his hands together. ‘Let’s get
on with it, gendemen.’
    The others were grinning at me.
    ‘Some night that must have been,’ said Murdo Too,
setting off another round of ribald teasing. Itook it in good
part but was relieved when they’d all clambered away into
the support structure, leaving me to get on with my job without
benefit of Angus’s unheard instructions. A couple of hours
passed quite pleasantly, if dangerously, and at the morning
tea-break Angus was happy enough with the results to turn me
loose on some sheet metal a dozen metres inward and ten up. I
perched in the din-filled open space of the support structure,
with nothing visible while I worked but what my own torch’s
jet illuminated, and with little else on my mind.
    About twelve o’clock I decided to knock off for lunch. I
throttled down the torch and lifted my mask. As I gathered up the
bits of kit to carry back I heard Menial’s voice. I blinked
and looked down. There she was, looking up from under a
safety-helmet.
    ‘Hi, Clovis!’ she shouted, waving a lunch-box.
    I waved back and returned to the scaffolding, dropped my tools
and grabbed my lunch-box and descended to the dock’s floor
so quickly that my boots made the stairwell ring. By the time
I’d reached the bottom, Merrial had walked over and was
waiting for me. She was wearing the standard boiler-suit and
boots, an outfit which – with her tied-back hair -gave her
a boyish look. Her hug and kiss of greeting were sweet and warm;
the rims of our helmets clanged, and we pulled apart,
laughing.
    ‘This is a fine surprise,’ I said.
    She caught my hand. ‘Gome on,’ she said. ‘I
know a good place.’
    We set off across the dock, to the predictable whistles and
cat-calls of my mates, high above. Around the vast perimeter of
the platform we went, and out into the daylight on the seaward
side. Justleft of the huge sea-doors Menial turned towards the
cliff, where a series of shelves and foot-holds formed a
dangerous-looking natural stairway, which she skipped up on to
and nimbly ascended. I followed, not looking down, until she
stopped on a wider, grassy, heathery shelf a good thirty metres
up.
    We sat down. Menial leaned back against the rockface, and I,
unthinking, did the same – then jerked forward as I
discovered again the scratches and bruises on my back. With our
legs stretched out, our feet were almost at the edge. I felt more
uneasy on that solid rock than I ever had at greater heights on
the platform. Across the top of the gates, across the sea-loch,
the Torridonian battlements of Apple-cross challenged the sky.
The scale of those ancient mountains dwarfed the ship itself to a
metal sculpture some eccentric artist had made in his back garden
in his spare