Great Sky River Read online

  “Navvys and managers’ll call Mayday when they see us, but that’s ’cause they mistake us for enemy mechs.”

  Toby’s mouth twisted into a look of derisive mirth. “Naysay!”

  “Is.”

  “We’re two-legged. Mechs’re treaded.”

  “So?”

  “Mechs see that.”

  “Our ’quipment’s mechmetal. Navvys see that, is all.”

  “Nosay noway,” Toby said firmly. To end this slight affront to his inner picture of human status, he booted off to his marching position. Killeen watched him go, a thin figure skip-walking with oblivious lithe grace over rumpled scrub and gully.

  Toby needed to feel that humanity dealt at least on even terms with the mechs, that there was a scheme of loss and gain to their endless running. It was a way to accept and put behind him the slaughter of the day before. Killeen would not lie to him, but all the same he could avoid saying plainly what the boy was slowly seeing: that humans mattered so little even navvys were unprogrammed to react to them. Only Marauders carried orders regarding humans, and those were rules of simple extermination. Even the fearsome Mantis probably had no great status in mech culture.

  Killeen himself needed to let the slaughter slip behind him. He could not simply spend long hours arranging his hair, staring pensively into space, as some like Jocelyn did—building arabesques that would dissolve the next time he put on his helmet. That never worked.

  Killeen felt the shocked regret and sorrow as a heavy, black, blunt pressure inside, undefined and unreachable. He seldom talked of such dimly felt obstructions. There had been a time when Jocelyn had tried to get him to handle his feelings that way. It had only made him feel awkward and stupid, his tongue a dumb, leathery, betraying instrument.

  He decided to work out his frustration as he had so many times before. He called to Ledroff, “I’il farflank left.”

  “Yeasay!” Ledroff answered with evident relief.

  All morning the Cap’n had been the target of nags and whines. The slaughter’s burden had mixed with sore feet and pulled muscles to brew a salty soup of discontent. Jocelyn had taken left flank all day and needed someone to spell her.

  The land was smooth and young here, as though the blunt elements had smudged instead of cutting. The hills ran in jumbled groups where massive ridges slumped. Killeen ran in long lopes at the farthest extremity of the Families’ sensorium. He saw from this distance that they were crossing regular undulations in the terrain. These rises and falls slightly curved away from the advancing human triangles. Killeen frowned at this puzzle.

  A coy tickler came from Arthur:

  Given that we are in a Splash, this is unsurprising.

  Killeen sensed the Aspect’s mild pique at not being directly consulted. Still, he was damned if he’d be coaxed into asking. He waited a moment and Arthur said nothing more. Killeen eased Bud’s Face into full activity.

  Splash makes shock waves.

  Spread out from center.

  Compress rock.

  Leaves ridgelines.

  Ridges curve around center.

  Easy to see.

  Before Killeen could respond Arthur spat acidly,

  That is one hypothesis, yes. And only narrowly is it the most likely. I would venture that these ridgelines were formed by a reflected set of shock waves. Recall that this tundra had been laid sometime before by the Dusters. Under it lies the glacial ice of Snowglade, which the Dusters have isolated from the biosphere, thus making our environment so dry. The shock waves caused momentary melting of these ice beds. This forced upthrusts, forming the ridges. When—

  Too complicated.

  Just follow the curves.

  Should get greener.

  Killeen shoved Bud and Arthur back far enough that their continuing argument came to him only as a faint, querulous mutter. His boots propelled him over the next ridgeline, a feeling of freedom and quest welling in him. He saw that indeed the next rounded, lumpy hills were slightly greener. Enough of their talk had sunk in to prick his interest. The green was deepest near the hilltops, as though ice dwelled nearer the surface there. It would melt enough on a warm day to feed deep roots.

  This was about as much as he could remember from has boyhood farming drudgery. At the Citadel he had pre ferred to rove and plunder, as had his father. Still, the art of watering crops with icemelt had stuck with him and now pricked his sense of approaching lush refuge.

  He landed beside a gnarly ball of chaparral to deal with his toilet. This demanded some preparation. He had to unslip his chest straps, his carrybelt, and his traveling jockbrace. Adopting the position left one vulnerable, but still he preferred solitude. The gratification of his daily squatting came first from being alone and momentarily free of Family. Second, there was the abstract satisfaction of aiding green life through his unwanted excretions. Third, in the desolation of Snowglade the act gave vent to his sweaty self, his internal squeezings and bubblings, processes he no more thought about than he did his cyberrhythms and circuit defenses and sensoria. In a hard world it was—though he never would have admitted it— a simple, eloquent pleasure.

  He relaxed into elemental sensation, just as he eased into the moist clasp of alcohol when he could. As he squatted and relieved himself he was abruptly surprised to see a small mouse venture from a tangle of crusty vines and stare at him.

  This was the first animal Killeen had seen in years. He blinked, startled. The mouse peered up at the man-mountain and squeaked. It seemed unafraid but in some way puzzled.

  “Know what I am?”

  Moist eyes studied him warily.

  “I’m like you! See?”

  Tiny paws arched, ready to run.

  “We both crap, even.”

  A nose twitched skeptically.

  “See? I’m flesh too. Not a mech.”

  The small furry thing was fascinated with Killeen’s size. It sniffed audibly. They studied each other across an unbridgeable chasm.

  Finally he finished his toilet and stood up. “Heysay, found a mouse,” he sent on the general sensorium. This provoked cries of delight. When Killeen booted off the hillside and onward, the mouse was still gazing, tiny eyes bright and clear.

  That night they camped between two twisted hills. Ledroff gave Killeen the midnight guard duty, though this was the third night in a row he had stood it. Ledroff was growing into the Cap’ncy, but leaned on Killeen a bit harder than on the others.

  Shibo did part of the watch with him. She was firm about keeping talk to a minimum, so their sensoria could pick up the smallest signal. Killeen liked the simple feel of her company. The night was cloud-shrouded, but stars broke through in patches.

  Her watch was next and they had to circle the camp once as he showed her the minor telltales he had spied in the shadowed plain. It was pleasant to walk beside her, even if they spent the time in nearly wordless, sensoriumlinked communion, than to lie inert and resting in the camp, sleep shot through by conflicts.

  “Quiet?”

  “Plenty,” he answered.

  Her broad smile split the gloom, a white crescent. “Tired?”

  “Naysay. Could kick down a mountain.”

  “Ummmm!” she murmured in mock admiration.

  “Sleep good?”

  “Hard ground.”

  “Ball up some them bushes, make a pad.”

  “Best pad human.”

  Her glittering eyes caught the dim Eater disk-radiance and he saw that she was jazzing him. “Man or woman?”

  “Man best.”

  “Nope. Woman’s best. Got more fat.”

  “Fat? Naysay.”

  “You got more’n me.”

  “No porker, me.”

  “Right kind pork. Just right.”

  “I lie not-flat under you.”

  This was not only the longest sentence he had ever heard from her, it was the most interesting. “Wouldn’t ’spect you to lie flat.”

  “Good.” Again the quick, white smile. He co
uldn’t think of anything to say next. The ever-strobing sensorium subtly invaded them, made their worlds prickly-acute. But with him downtuned in the sexcen, the banter and wry, sideways glances finally sputtered off into the quilted halfnight, fruitless and without a sure vector. Killeen regretted this and fumbled for a way to say it to her. But then an animal bolted from scrub nearby and they had to spend a while parallaxing it and being sure it was nothing more. By that time the moment had trickled away and he did not know how to bring them back to where they had been. It seemed things were slipping away a lot like that lately, that the world was hurrying by before he grasped it.

  Skirting a cracked plain, Killeen heard a cool, dry ratcheting.

  “What’s that?” He had been trying to coax a word or two from Shibo. Now he stopped suddenly, head cocked.

  “Singing,” Shibo said.

  “More Families?” Killeen asked hopefully. For years the Bishops had thought themselves alone. Now he dared imagine repeated miracles. Toby spent every free moment with his new child-friends, and hungered for more.

  “Strange.”

  “Not singing,” Killeen said after a moment. “Sorta…”

  “No acoustics.”

  “Like a voice far off,” Killeen said. “From a mouth made of metal.”

  They scanned all directions, eyes running up and down the spectrum, all sense amped to max. Nothing.

  “I sense no mechs,” Shibo confirmed.

  “What’s it saying?”

  “Heard such once. Magnetic.”

  “Huh?” Killeen shifted to the ultraviolet and caught a faint radiance.

  He felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck.

  Something hovered in the night.

  But nothing made of matter.

  He had been looking for approaching figures on the hummocked ground and had not paid attention to the air above. He saw above them playing tides of gauzy luminescence. Down from some lofty focus sprayed lines of tangled bluewhite light. He amped his eyes still more, blessing Angelique’s expert craft.

  The lines made an immense dim web. It spread angularly across the sky, narrowing and converging toward the south. Killeen sent a silent question to Arthur.

  You’re seeing the dipolar lines of Snowglade’s magnetic field. It varies inversely as the cube of the distance from the southern pole—which lies below the horizon, beyond that butte. This local pattern, however, is some type of anomaly. I do not understand it, but I can speculate—

  “Answer!” Shibo urged.

  She heard something he did not. Killeen’s caution made him hesitate. The thing might be an extrusion of the mechs, after all.

  He listened hard. Once he’d shut off Arthur’s small, warbling voice he could just barely pick up a strumming.

  I stem and break and waver. Hear me out. Now!

  Killeen shot a questioning glance at Shibo. Her smooth face was rapt.

  “Where’re you from?” Killeen asked on the sensorium. With effort he made his voice a blend of acoustics and electrospeech. He constricted his throat like a man trying to imitate a frog. The effect, transduced and filtered by buried chips, sent electromagnetic ringings into the fine, thin air.

  There was a long moment of wind-stirred silence. Then,

  The storms howl where I am. You are but vague whisperings. You talk so fast.

  “I said, where’re you from?” Again the stretched moments.

  I circle the Eater.

  “So do we,” Killeen said, exasperated.

  Above he saw flickering orange gouts descending along the blue field lines. Arthur’s voice squeaked in his mind, pointing out that these were particles infalling toward the pole, striking the atmosphere, making a gauzy aurora.

  These tracers showed him the enormity of it. The auroral voice-thing had shaped the local field lines into a magnetic cone which spread down from a point far above. A tentlike web fanned evenly to all sides. Killeen saw he and Shibo were at the center of the circle it marked out. So it was no accident; the thing intended to speak specifically to them.

  I am slow. Stretched this far, I tire. I wanted to reach a being called Killeen.

  Killeen blinked with such startlement that his eyes flipped into the gaudy infrared. “Wha—? That’s me!”

  In long seconds of silence he thought he heard several faint, timorous voices whistling down the field lines. Sliding forth from some immense, outlined presence.

  I have a message for you. Here.

  Subtly the ringing tone shifted, as though reciting.

  Don’t try to build a Citadel. Keep moving. Ask for the Argo.

  “What? What’s an Argo?”

  I am relaying this message. I do not understand its content “Where’s it from?”

  It comes from further in. Toward the Eater.

  “Who from?”

  I do not know what kind of thing sends it.

  Shibo asked pointedly, “What’re you then?”

  A knit of magnetic flux. A mere garment, some say, for plasma winds to wear. I swim in copper-hinged light, beside the mouth that knows no end. I am trapped in many-poled field lines, wrapped rubbery about the accreting disk of the Eater.

  Killeen sputtered, puzzled, “How in hell did you get there?”

  I once was something else. I do not know what. Perhaps an Aspect. Now I am a holy anointed spinning toroid of plasma and field.

  “Why?” Killeen asked. Whisperings, drones.

  Why but? What else is worth a glance? I tell you, little Killeen: Not marble, not the gilded monuments of princes, shall outlive me.

  Fancy language lost him immediately. “Huh?”

  Immortal, I am. They say.

  “They?” Shibo asked.

  The makers of this place, this soft castle that flies on turbulent winds, above the glaring stretched disk of infalling, roiling hot.

  To accompany this sharply spoken line, jade-cool glories lit the elegantly curving field lines. Killeen wondered how far those energetic stabs of phosphorescence had come. If the thing that spoke was at the Eater, which lived in the far-off sky…

  “You’re in the Eater disk?”

  My tangled feet are, aye. My head scrapes against the stars.

  They stood in stunned silence. “Were human?” Shibo ventured at last. Along the wispy field-strands flowed yellow, burnt-gold, orange, as though the being was marshaling its resources, or riffling through vast dusty files of magnetic memory.

  Again, I do not know. I was some form of being, mortal, awash in entropy’s swamp. Long ago. Something within me hails from long-gone fossil ages.

  Killeen struggled with conflicting impulses. There was something horrible about a thing so grotesquely big. But it spoke with a stringy tone that recalled cables under tension, a tight-wound humming. In some way it was human. And it had a message for him.

  “What’s an Argo?”

  Let a moment pass in reclaiming a distant part of me… yes, here. Not exactly Argo, but Argos, yes. More than one Argo? My phase-memory replies to me that Argos was “an early rival of Sparta.” There you have it.

  “What the hell’s Sparta?”

  A city.

  “Where?” Shibo asked.

  The field lines rippled. Crimson flecks shot down them.

  I have no data. Hopelessly old, this file. And this language you use! Hobbled, rude, a simpleton’s dull way of herding meaning into linear, boxy cages.

  Shibo said, “Good enough for us.”

  No doubt. To give you your due, I remark that while scanning its vocabulary I do find there entries oddly artful, even obliging. Seersucker. Sibilant. Straitlaced. Such words! With grace, they hover on the edge of meaninglessness. Argos though is without grace or content. Well, enough. I only bring this message, as was my charge, and now depart.

  “Wait!” Killeen called.

  Dappled glows retreated up the field lines in a gathering rush. As they dwindled, the customary dovetailing planetary magnetic fibers reappeared, intricately pointing toward the sout
h pole.

  They watched for a long time but the presence did not return. Killeen talked about it as they finished his round, with Shibo replying in her usual grudging monosyllables. The entire episode was incomprehensible. Easy enough to obey, at least. No one had hopes of a fresh Citadel. Keeping on the move was a necessity, not a choice.

  “What in hell’s an Argos?” Killeen demanded of Shibo, exasperated.

  “Ask Aspect.”

  Arthur piped in immediately:

  I suspect this is a transmission error. Argos was a city in classical Greece, on Earth. Its role in early intellectual—

  Killeen cut off the Aspect’s wearying ramble and strode along beside Shibo. Whatever the field-being had meant was of no matter now, for the message was plainly old and pointless. Killeen resolved to do as he usually did, and not trouble himself with the warehouse of dusty data and massing history that the Aspects were forever pressing upon him.

  Many of his older Aspects gave less and less information as they aged. A kind of senility set in. The nattering insect voices could recall a party three centuries ago but were vague about mech insignias seen last week. And the fineries they recalled from the Arcologies—opulent, crystal ballrooms the size of hills, sideboards groaning with sweetmeats, gowns translucent yet crisply warm—filled Killeen with a resentful, shamed envy.

  The oldest Aspects were the worst, yammering of impossible glories. Other Family members felt the same. Jocelyn could hardly bear to call up hers; they were unusually aged and sent her pictures of wealth she knew had to be faked.

  Images of the magnetic being ricocheted in Killeen’s mind, mingling with faint Aspect talk. He shook his head to clear it.

  Pay Aspects true attention and they would rob him of the grittiness of the world, its supple rub.

  He left Shibo and made back toward camp, letting himself feel the slumbering wealth of the Splash. He never tired of it. So green, he thought. So green, green, green.

  FOUR

  They marched on amid a sense of greening and convergence. The undulating hills gave their pace a sensual rhythm. Small, squeaking things scampered from underfoot. Verdant wealth and sweet air lulled them. For a full day they saw no sign of mechlife. It was as though the dry, dead world the mechs had made of Snowglade had vanished. From long-slumbering depths seeped out old moist richness.