But, after all she had seen along the way, and all she had not seen—such as any evidence that people like Jordan’s band, and worse, operated with anything other than insolence and impunity, give or take the odd gunship attack—there didn’t seem to be a whole hell of a lot of a point.
13
The Sea Eagle
iVaiiin drummed on the roof of Menial’s house. The view outside was dreich. I’d looked out the window earlier, down the glen and the loch; ranks of cloud were marching in off the sea, and one after another shedding their loads on the hills. Inside, it was warm: we sat huddled together, backs to the piled-up pillows, sipping hot black coffee.
“No work today, thank Providence,” I said.
“Not at the yard anyway,” said Menial. She waved a hand at the soldering-iron and seer-stones and clutter in the corner of the room.
“You start learning a different work, here.”
“Aye, great,” I said.
“What is this Providence you talk about, anyway?” she asked.
“Urn.” I stared at the slow swirl of the coffee. “It’s… the helpful side of Nature, you might say. When things work out as we would wish, without an apparent cause.” I looked at her. “You must know that.”
“But that’s just coincidence,” she said. “All things come by Nature.”
“Some things are more than coincidence, and Nature is more than—” I was going to say “more than Nature” but stopped and laughed. “You really don’t know any Natural Theology?”
“No,” she said cheerfully. “I’ve always just taken for granted that the outsiders have strange beliefs. Never gone into the details.” She put her empty mug down at her side of the bed and snuggled up to me. “Go on. Tell me the details.”
“Oh, God. All right. Well, the usual place to start is right here.” I tapped her forehead, gently. “Inside there. From the outside we see grey matter, but from the inside we think and feel. We know there are billions of cells in there, processing information. So thinking and feeling—consciousness—is something that information does. It’s what information is, from the inside, its subjective side. Where there’s information, there’s consciousness.”
“But there’s information everywhere,” she said. “Wherever anything affects anything else, it’s information. The rain falling on the ground is information.”
“Exactly!” I slid my arm around her shoulders. “You’ve got it.”
“Got what? Oh.” She shifted a little and looked straight at me. “You mean there’s consciousness everywhere?”
Yes! That’s it!”
“But, but—” She looked around. “You mean to tell me you think that clock, say, has thoughts?”
The ticking was loud in the room as I considered this.
“It has at least one,” I said cautiously.
“And what would that be?”
“ ‘It’s later… it’s later… it’s later.’ ” She laughed. “But the whole universe—”
“Is an infinite machine, which implies an infinite mind.” I put my hand behind her head, cradling the container of her finite mind.
“ ‘And this all men call God’,” I concluded smugly.
Menial punched me.
“And the computers, I suppose you would say they are conscious too?”
“Aye, of course,” I said.
“What a horrible thought.”
“They may not be conscious of what we see from the outside,” I said. “They may be thinking different thoughts entirely.”
Menial gazed abstractedly out of the window.
“What thought is the rain thinking?”
“Can’t you hear it?” I said. “It’s thinking ‘yesssss’.”
“Hmm,” she said. “Now there’s a. coincidence…”
We used the couple of days before my reinstatement in my job at the yard for the beginnings of an education in fine soldering and in programming, the latter subject being simultaneously fascinating and maddening. We also made a painstaking study of the Deliverer’s documents, which continued—after we’d returned the originals to Gantry, and I’d returned to work at the yard—with the photocopies, but they yielded no information relevant to the ship’s mission. The folder from the 2050s reinforced, in its casual references and assumptions more than its explicit statements, the staggering extent of the orbital activity of pre-Deliverance humanity. But it contained no hint of the Deliverance itself.
There was one moment when I thought I had won a real historical insight, albeit one tangentially relevant to our immediate concerns.
I looked up from the stack of papers on Menial’s broad table. Every evening after work, I’d slowly sifted through them, as now, in the late sun.
“Menial?” I said. She turned from the seer-stone apparatus on which she was working, and laid down her soldering-iron.
You found something?”
“No, just—realised something. These Greens she talks about in some of her articles, the marginal people who lived outside the cities. She makes the point here that they had a lot more practical skills than folk gave them credit for, that they weren’t just ignorant barbarians but farmers and smiths and electricians and so on.”
“Yes,” she said, with a mysterious smile. “That was true.”
“Well! These people, the Greens, they must have been the ancestors of the tinkers!”
“Here,” she said, passing me a cigarette. “You’re going to need this.”
“Why?” I asked, lighting up.
“Because—oh, Dhia, how can I break this to you gently? You’ve got it the wrong way round entirely! Why do you think we call the settled folk ‘the outsiders’?”
“What?”
“Aye, the Greens, the barbarians, these are not our ancestors, Clovis. They’re—I was going to say yours, but I can’t say that any more, mo graidh, now you’re one of us. They’re the ancestors of the outsiders! We are the survivors, the descendants, of the city folk!”
“So how is it that we—I mean the outsiders—live in the cities now?”
She stood up then, walking around the small room like a lecturer, gesturing with her cigarette.
“Oh, but your face is a picture, colha Gree! They live in the cities now because they invaded them, they moved in at the Deliverance when the old civilisation and city life had broken down. And they’re still there, bless them, blundering around like the barbarians they are, in the borrowed costumes of the past. All these scholars that you wanted to emulate, they’re just rummaging about in the ruins, reading books they misunderstand so badly it isn’t funny. You’re well out of that, my love, you’ll learn more from us in a year than in a lifetime at the University!” Indeed.
A huge cheer went up, almost drowning the inrush-ing roar of water, as the sluice-gates opened. The water poured over the edge of the drydock in a saline Niagara that went on and on, until it seemed that the loch itself would be lowered before the deep hole was filled. Faster than a tide, the water crept up the legs and pontoons of the platform.
Menial’s hand gripped mine as we made our way through the crowd, pushing to the front like children. The entire accessible part of the cliff-edge around the dock was lined with people. Everybody who’d worked at the yard, on the platform or the ship, was certainly there, along with casual visitors from the surrounding towns, keen sightseers from all over the Highlands, and outright enthusiasts from even farther afield. A couple of hundred metres around the cliff and inward, officers of the International Scientific Society, project managers and exemplary workers made speeches from a wooden stage with a raised dais and an awning. Nobody farther away than fifty metres, at the outside, could make out a word these dignitaries said, particularly not from the PA speakers strung out like fairy-lights on catenaries of cable all over the place. Squawks and howls and crackles worthy of a railway station echoed around the cliff-faces.