As I would.
What did I have to complain about?
I laughed at myself, at my own youthful folly. In the long view of history, in the promise of a long life to come, the difference in our chronological age, however great, could only be insignificant.
A step, a swish, a scent. Her warm, dry hand clasped mine.
“Are you all right, Clovis?”
I turned and looked at her, and drew her towards the plinth. We sat down.
“Menial,” I said, “I know who you are.”
“Oh,” she said. “And who am I?”
I handed her the booklet, open at the page.
She sat for a long moment looking down at it, with a slight smile and a slowly welling tear.
“Ah, fuck,” she said. “Everybody else there is long gone, as far as I know. But maybe I wouldn’t know, as they wouldn’t know about me.” She sniffed, and handed the booklet back. “So now you know. I never wanted to be what people would expect of me, if they knew.”
“But you are,” I said. “You knew about the AI, and you expected Fergal to do what he did. I saw your face when he said it, and it was like you’d just cracked a piece of white logic.”
“Or black! Aye, I knew. The Deliverer told me about it herself, just before the end. She warned me that it was a dangerous thing, though benign according to its lights. Like Fergal!”
“But why did you give it to him?”
Menial leaned back and looked up. “Because the deadly debris is up there, colha Gree. I know what happened at the Deliverance, because I lived through it. I saw the flashes. I was there when the sky fell. I knew the ship would never get through without a much better guidance system than the one I was working on—well, I knew by the time I’d finished testing it, which was not that long ago. I needed someone to find the AI under cover of seeking something else, and I needed someone who’d put it on the ship—for good reasons or bad.”
She lowered her gaze and smiled. “So here we are. And now it’s you who has to decide, mo grdidh. That ship’s success will stimulate others, from other lands as well, from the Oriental and the Austral states. Competition between companies and continents, great revolutions to come, and the sky road before us. If it’s not launched, or its new mind is ripped out and it fails, or if indeed the AI is not smart enough to save it, then it’ll be a long time before it’s tried again. And the next to try might not be as benevolent as the International Scientific Society. It could be an army, or an empire.”
She grabbed my shoulders and gazed at me. “If you walk in there and tell Druin and his boys, that’s what could still happen.”
I closed my eyes. T can see that,” I said, “but I’m more concerned about the power Fergal, or someone like him, might have.”
“Open your eyes,” Menial said.
She was looking very serious. “That thing, the AI, the planner, it can only do what people let it tell them to do. Fergal said there are no such people yet. What he should have said is, there are no such people any more. Your people, colha Gree, they are not the types to let themselves be ordered about by communists—because they have never been ordered about by anyone!”
“Ah!” I said, suddenly understanding. “Because of the Deliverance, and the Deliverer!”
Menial laughed.
“ ‘No saviours from on high deliver’,” she said wryly. “Your people delivered themselves. That’s another thing I saw, and I’ll tell you about one day. If you’re still with me.”
“Oh, yes,” I said. “I’m still with you.”
“Good,” she said. “We have a lot to do and a long time to do it in.”
She looked around pointedly. The square was jumping.
“So, colha Gree, are you going to ask me for a dance?”
“Of course,” I said. “Would you do me the honour?”
For a second before we whirled away I stared at the scene before me, fixing it in my memory. Behind the statue Mars was rising, a blue-green dot in the East. Whatever became of the ship, whether it soared to a safe orbit or was blasted to smithereens, other ships would get out there somehow, on the sky road.
Whatever the truth about the Deliverer, she will remain in my mind as she was shown on that statue, and all the other statues and murals, songs and stories: riding, at the head of her own swift cavalry, with a growing migration behind her and a decadent, vulnerable, defenceless and rich continent ahead; and, floating bravely above her head and above her army, the black flag on which nothing is written.