Free Descent by Ken MacLeod Page B

head impatiently. ‘Anyway, that’s no the important thing. No the big secret. The big secret is why they kept it aw these years, aw these centuries. It was because ae that picture. The thing is, they kept it because they
recognised
it. They’ve known about the Fine for a long time, for a long, long time even before that picture was made. And, my da told me, they – we – see them for whit they are. The gadgies see angels or devils or aliens out ae science fiction, but we see them as they are, they scary fucking insect things.’
    ‘Who’s “we”?’ I asked. ‘Roma? Travellers?’
    ‘No exactly,’ said Calum. He hesitated, glancing around. ‘Our people. A people who kindae travel alang wi the travelling folk, that was how he put it.’
    ‘You’re having me on,’ I said.
    ‘I am no!’ Calum snapped. ‘Christ, man, I’m taking a risk just telling yi. I’m damn near betraying my family. I wouldnae make this up.’
    ‘So where did these mysterious people of yours come from?’ I asked, still sceptical of what he was saying. ‘Egypt? Asia? Atlantis? Outer space?’
    Calum licked his lips, and looked around again.
    ‘Nowhere,’ he said. ‘We’ve always been here. We were here before … the other people. Before the ice.’
    ‘I always suspected your old man was a Neanderthal,’ I said.
    Calum laughed. ‘Many a true word, an’ that.’
    ‘And these Neanderthals know what the Fine are up to?’
    ‘Oh aye,’ said Calum, suddenly confident again. ‘They watch. They’ve been watching us all alang, my da said. Probably aw the way back tae Africa, he said, though he admitted that was speculation. Since before the ice, he said, that we know for sure. Now and again, the Fine snatch someone, examine them, mark them and let them go. It’s like ecologists daein capture and release. Putting rings on birds, and that.’ He laughed. ‘I must say, that part ae it does make sense.’
    I recalled the item about ecologists microchipping dormice that had been on television at dinnertime on Saturday, and wondered if Calum had seen it too.
    ‘I still don’t believe you,’ I said.
    ‘Explain the picture, then.’
    ‘Explain how you got it,’ I said.
    ‘Pretended tae get a call fae Sophie, pulled out my phone, took a snap while my da was politely looking away.’
    ‘Oh, aye,’ I said. ‘Pull the other one.’
    ‘Please yourself,’ said Calum.
    He didn’t sound hurt. He sounded as if he didn’t care whether I believed him or not.
    The bell rang. We ran.
    That evening, after I’d done my homework, I sat at the desk in my bedroom and set about taking Calum’s strange picture apart. I began by zooming in to the highest resolution my phone was capable of. Peering closely at lines and letters, I could just make out a spidery tracery of ink in the fibres around them. So far, so good: unless Calum had used some specialised and expensive rendering software, this was a genuine photograph of part of a page. Of course, he could have written and drawn the page himself: as I recalled, his primary-school exercise-book cover doodles had always shown a disturbingly precocious grasp of perspective and anatomy, though these days he seemed to hide any artistic or graphic talent he might have under the bushel of O-level technical drawing, at which he excelled.
    I zoomed back out and isolated images of individual letters and pasted them to a side column. There were sixteen distinct symbols, plus the Roman numerals. I ran searches on every one of them, and found no matches. Relaxing the criteria and looking for resemblances to every known script returned nothing, though it did tell me more than I needed to know about alphabets. An image search on the apparent woodcut predictably brought up Greys and insects, but nothing close to the original.
    The only comprehensible marks on the picture were the Roman numerals. I searched on them, and predictably found lots of stuff about Roman numerals.
    IX VII meant nine and seven, so I