“What is the matter with you?” I hissed, leaning sideways to keep the girls out of the path of my wrath. “Come on, guys, give the lady a chance / My two friends” expressions took on looks of insolent innocence.
“Ease off, Clovis,” said Machard. “Just advice. Ignore it if you like, it’s your business.”
“Too damn right it is,” I said. “So mind your own.” I spoke the harsh words lightly—not fighting words, but firm. The two lads shrugged and went back to chatting up their lassies. I was ignored, as Menial had been.
The late train from Inverness glided down the glen, sparks from the overhead wire flaring in the twilight, and vanished behind the first houses. A minute later I could hear the brief commotion as it stopped at the station, a few streets away. The clouds and the tops of the hills glowed pink, the same light reflecting off a solitary airship, heading west. Few lights were on in the town—half past ten in the evening was far too early for that—but the houses that spread up the side of the glen and along the shore were beginning to seem as dark as the pine forest that began where the dwellings ended.
Farther up the great glen the side-lights and tail-lights of vehicles traced out the road’s meander, and the dark green of the wooded hillsides met the bright green of the lower slopes, field joined to field, pasture to pasture all the way to where the haunches of the hills hid the view, and the land was dark. Somewhere far away, but sounding uncannily close, a wolf howled, its protracted, sinister note clearly audible above the sounds of the town and the revelry of the fair.
The square was becoming more packed and noisy by the minute. The drinking and dancing would go on for hours. Jugglers and tumblers, fire-eaters and musicians competed for attention and spare cash, with each other and with the hawkers. The markets on summer Thursdays were locally called “the fair”, but only once a month did they amount to much, with a more impressive contingent of performers than were here now, as well as travelling players, whirling mechanical rides and, of course, tinkers; the last pursuing their legitimate trade of engineering and their less reputable, but often more lucrative, craft of fortune-telling.
The train pulled away, trailing its sparks along the Canon’s estuarial plain and around the Carron sea-loch’s southern shore.
Menial returned with a full jug, a bottle of whisky and a tray of small glasses. Without a word she placed the tray and the bottle in the middle of the table and sat down, this time opposite me. She filled our tall glasses, put down the jug and gestured to the whisky bottle. “Help yourselves,” she said.
My friends became more friendly towards her after that. We all found ourselves talking together, talking shop, the inevitable gossip and grumbles of the project, about this scandal and that foreman and the other balls-up; ironically, the girls seemed to feel excluded, and fell to talking between themselves. Menial, showing tact enough for both of us, noticed this and gradually, now that the ice was broken, returned her conversation to me. Jondo and Machard took up again their neglected tasks of seduction or flirtation. When, a couple of hours later, she asked me to see her home, their ribaldry was relatively restrained.
The square was noisier than ever; the only people heading for home, or for bed, were like ourselves workers on the project who, unlike the locals, had to work on the following day, a Friday. We walked through the dark street to the north of the square and across the bridge over the Carron River towards the suburb of New Kelso. Merrial stopped in the middle of the bridge. One arm was tight around my waist. With the other, she waved around.
“Look,” she said. “What do you see?”
On our right the town’s atomic power-station’s automation hummed blackly in the dark; to our left the fish-farms, warmed by the reactor’s run-off, spread down to the shore. I looked to left and right, and then behind to the main town, ahead to New Kelso, across the loch to the other small towns.
She smiled at my baffled silence.
“Look up.”
Overhead the Milky Way blazed, the aurora borealis flickered, a communications aerostat glowed pink in a sun long since set for us. The Plough hung above the hills to the north. A meteor flared briefly, my indrawn breath a sound effect for its silent passage. To the west the sky still had light in it: the sun would be up in four hours.
T can see the stars,” I said.
“That’s it,” she said, sounding pleased at my per-ceptiveness. “You can. We’re in the very middle of a town of ten thousand people, and you can see the Milky Way. Not as well as you could see it from the top of Glas Bhein, sure enough, but you can see it. Why?”
I shrugged, looking again back and forth. I’d never given the matter thought.
“No clouds?” I suggested brightly.
She laughed and caught my hand and tugged me forward. “And you a scholar of history!”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
She pointed to the street-lamp at the end of the bridge’s parapet. Its post was about three metres high; its conical cowl’s reflective inner surface sharply cut off all but the smallest upward illumination. “Did you ever see lamps like that in pictures of the olden times?” she asked.
“Now that I come to think of it,” I said, “no.”
“A town this size would have had lamps everywhere, blazing light into the sky. From street-lamps and windows and shop-fronts. The very air itself would glow with it. You could see just a handful of stars on the clearest night.”
I thought about the ancient pictures I’d peered at under glass. You know, you’re right,” I said. “That’s what it looked like.”
“Some people,” Menial went on, in a sudden gust of anger, “lived their whole lives without once seeing the Milky Way!”
“Very sad,” I said. In fact the thought gave me a tight feeling in my chest, as if I were struggling to breathe. “How did they stand it?”
“Aye, well, that’s a question you could well ask.” She glanced up at me. “I thought you might know.”
“I never noticed, to be honest.”
“And why don’t we do it?” She gestured again at the electric twilight of the surrounding town.
“Because it would be wasteful,” I said. As soon as the words were out I realised I’d said them without thinking, and that it wasn’t the answer.
Menial laughed. “We have power to spare!”
It was my turn to stop suddenly. We’d taken a right and were going down a path past the power-station. I knew for a fact that it could, when called upon in a rare emergency—such as when extra heating was required to clear snow from a blizzard—produce enough electricity to light up Canon Town several times over.
You’re right,” I said. “So why don’t we do it? I’ve seen pictures of the great cities of antiquity, and you’re right, they shone. They looked… magnificent. Perhaps it was so bright they didn’t need to see the stars—they had the city lights instead! They made their own stars!”
Menial was slowly shaking her head.
“Maybe that was fine for them,” she said. “But it wouldn’t be for us. We all get—uneasy when we can’t see the night sky. Don’t you, just thinking about it?”
I took a deep breath, and let it out with a sigh. “Aye, you’re right at that!”
We walked on, her strides pacing my slower steps.
“You’re a strange woman,” I said.
She smiled and held my waist more firmly and leaned her head against my shoulder. I found myself looking down at her hair, and down at the scoop neckline of her dress and the glowing stone between her breasts.
“Sure I am,” she said. “But so are we all, that’s what I’m saying. We’re different from the people who came before us, or before the Deliverer’s time, and nobody wonders how or why. The feeling we have about the sky is just part of it. We live longer and we breed less, we sicken little, sometimes I think even our eyes are sharper} these changes are hardwired into our radiation-hardened genes—”