Great Sky River Page 16

  Dazed, eyes opened but unseeing, he did not hear Cermo-the-Slow until a hand clapped on his shoulder.

  “Come on! You get first hack.”

  “What… ?”

  “Gone take one these down.”

  “One of—”

  “Big crash time! Big! Cel’brate!”

  Already some of the Family were scrawling marks at the base of one of the slender towers. Cermo-the-Slow tugged Killeen toward them. It was no longer interesting to pillage mech factories, but this strange place was different.

  “You don’t understand,” Killeen said. “This isn’t a mech building.”

  Cermo snickered. “Think’s a hill? Huh?”

  “Humans made it”

  Cermo laughed.

  “They did! There’s a voice from over there—”

  “Hearin’ voices,” Cermo called to the others. “Rattler musta addled him some.” Raucous catcalls answered.

  “Humanity built this. That’s why it’s so, so beautiful.”

  “Mechstuff, ’s all.” Cermo walked to the foot of the tower.

  “No! Long time ago, somebody—men and women, us—did such work. Look, just look at it.”

  Cermo had the others with him, faces smirking and chuckling and preparing in their bleary way to do what men and women did whenever they found undefended mechwork.

  “More damn foul mechstuff, ’s what it is,” Cermo said with a touch of irritation. “You don’t want part of it, we’ll take it all.”

  Two women laughed and handed Cermo a cutter-beam tube, one ripped from the Crafter so long ago. Cermo thumbed a button and a ready buzzing came from it.

  A fevered mix of anguished rage propelled Killeen forward. Cermo half-turned to the tower and pointed the cutter-beam at one of the creamy stone plates. The crowd made a murmuring noise of anticipation, highpitched threads of glee racing through it.

  Killeen hit him solidly in the back. Cermo lurched. His face smacked into the tower. Killeen caught him with a roundhouse kick in the ribs. The cutter clattered on marble.

  “You—” Cermo blurted. Killeen kicked the buzzing cutter away.

  Cermo feinted and hit Killeen squarely in the right eye.

  Killeen staggered back, trying to focus.

  Cermo ducked down and lumbered out. Killeen tripped him. The big man struck a broad stone plate and groaned.

  Killeen looked for Ledroff or Fornax. They were far away and seemed unconcerned. He shouted to a sea of angry faces, “Leave it! It’s ours. Human.”

  A woman called, “You protectin’ mech garbage? I—”

  “People ’way back did this. People different from us.”

  The woman bared her gray teeth. “Who says? This’s mechwork!”

  “Not going argue with you. Back off.” Killeen stared at them, stony and redfaced, eyes wide.

  Slitted eyes regarded him, assessing chances of taking him in a fight.

  Hands grasped at air, eager for the weight of a weapon.

  Wind whistled among the high bright towers.

  And the moment passed. The crowd shuffled to the side, muttering darkly, eyes averted. They went to try to recapture their merriment.

  Killeen helped Cermo sit up, brought him water. Cermo was a man of quick moods and the anger had passed. Killeen shared some brandy with him. They embraced. The matter was over, except for Cermo’s sore ribs and Killeen’s bruised eye.

  Then he stood and watched thin cirrus skate across the sky, framed by the towers and the enchantment of the great curving dome.

  Again he listened to the ancient hollow voice and its singsong chant. He paid little attention as Ledroff and then Fornax briefly spoke to him about the incident.

  Toby peered at the towers for a while and Killeen told him it was a manwork. Toby wrinkled up his nose with blithe boyhood wonder and a few minutes later was playing again with the Rook children.

  He told Shibo and she nodded but said nothing. Around them the momentum of celebration spent itself.

  The Cap’ns decided to put distance between them and the Rattler. The Families, after all, had eaten, and could regain their earlier pace. To groans and complaint they ordered the Families back on the march.

  Killeen shook his head and tapered the aged voice down to a dim dry warble. He, too, would like to rest here for a while. To grieve for Old Mary. To fest. To relive through story and celebration the humiliation of the Rattler.

  Tugging on his pack, Killeen frowned. If mechs honored this human place, then humans should too. Of that he was sure.

  “March!” Ledroff called. “Hanks out. Go!”

  They left the flat plaza without looking back.

  Arthur was excited but Killeen was in no mood to listen closely. The Aspect could not explain how this monument got here or why. Arthur knew of nothing like it in his own time. It seemed to have no connection with the slab of Chandra nearby. Killeen tuned down Arthur’s puzzled excitement. Again he took flank left for the journey ahead.

  Arthur kept repeating a name. He turned it over in his mind, trying to make sense of it. It was like no language he had ever known.

  Finally he gave up. Lost in time, it meant nothing, though he did note that the slow and gravid sound, Taj Mahal, rode pleasingly on the lips.

  FIVE

  The next morning Killeen rose to news that buzzed through camp. On the night watch Shibo had spotted a navvy reconning them from a distant hill. She had shot at it but her bolt either missed or, ominously, was deflected.

  Ledroff and Fornax decided to send a tracking team after the navvy. The two Cap’ns took the Families off at a diverging angle.

  Six formed the party, all volunteers. Two were Bishop men still smoldering from the Mantis-brought deaths of relatives. Two were women from Family Rook, lean and angular. They wore their hair chopped short and curled in tight knots, forming a design and lettering from some ancient monumental symbol whose purpose no one remembered. They were outrunners, trained for hunting and led by their own character to the passion of pursuit. Shibo, though not an outrunner herself, was their friend and volunteered as well.

  They laughed and joked with the two men and seemed to Killeen—who was the sixth—no different from other women he had known. Family Bishop had no women hunters, though Jocelyn was an outrunner of sorts. Killeen gathered from their talk that the Rooks had always kept scrupulously equal divisions of labor, so that men and women shared in cooking and hunting, defense and craft, even in carryweight and outrunning. The Rook women displayed through their gravgreen tightweave great slabs of muscle in thigh and calf. Yet they carried themselves with a light and airy nonchalance.

  Killeen found them all agreed: the special navvy could lead to the Mantis, and taking the Mantis by surprise was a lot better than the other way around.

  So they set out on a long and wearisome day. Though centuries had shaped them for running, Killeen knew he had to pace himself. Age had begun to tug at him. Aches and familiar soreness in his knees and hips told him that he was pushing his endurance. Thin sensations came from embedded sensors, reporting micromolecular inventories. Killeen automatically took these into account without the faintest notion of their origin.

  Shibo sent, —Toby safe.—

  Killeen blinked. “I’m that obvious? But you’re right— I don’t like leaving him.”

  —Mantis goes for elders, seems like.—

  “That’s what I keep tellin’ myself. Worth the risk, I figure, if we get the jump on the Mantis.”

  —Hope. We hope,— she said pensively.

  They followed the navvy treads along an arroyo swampy from runoff. Streams broke freely from the loamy hills. The ice was melting underneath and seepage welled up in the low pockets, celebrated by flourishes of greenery.

  They followed the treadmarks out onto a broad plain. Killeen got more and more exasperated as they searched the area. He knew the navvys’ typical speed, their general ability to negotiate terrain. These tracks followed a clean, intelligent path between outcropping
s of ice-worn stone and the boggy low washes where treads would foul and jam. This navvy was smarter than any he’d seen. As they covered the plain in lengthy, skimming, boot-boosted strides, the others noticed it too.

  —Naysay,— one of the Rook women called over comm, —track stops here.—

  —Wind erased,— Shibo sent.

  The area was parched and took a print well. Where the firmly packed clay gave way to sand the treadmarks faded. Killeen sped over the tawny stretch. “Can’t see where it came out,” he said.

  —Perimeter it!— the other Rook woman called. She was in charge and seemed to take as a personal affront any delay in finding their quarry.

  They traced the outer boundary of the broad, shallow wash. Nowhere did a track emerge, yet in the wide area there was nothing substantial to hide a navvy.

  —Section search!— the Rook woman called. They divided the oblong area into pieces and paced off a regular grid search, peering under every bush. Nothing.

  The Eater and Denix were both low on the knobby horizon before she gave up. There was no sign of the navvy. —I hate going back without even a sighting,— the woman said.

  —No damn sense innit,— a Bishop man said in fa tigued exasperation. —We’d’ve seen any transporter come, pick it up. No place navvy could go.—

  Shibo said, —Air maybe.—

  —Navvys that fly!— the second Rook woman snorted. —Never heard such.—

  And a Bishop man added, —Navvys’re too dumb. Always were, always will be.—

  On the march back they had to scale truly mountainous terrain. It was the first time Killeen could remember going over high passes, for the Bishop tactic had been to keep to the valleys, avoiding conspicuous heights. The Rooks seemed more used to it, and their woman leader made a good case that they had to go over the saddle-backed peaks if they were to reach the Families by dusk.

  On the long climb Killeen reflected on what the man had said. The Families had always carried in the backs of their minds that assertion, uninspected and capricious: always were, always will be.

  Yet everything now pointed oppositely. It struck Killeen suddenly that they were always behind the zigs and zags of the mechciv. Humanity needed the traditions and rituals which held the Families together, and had once united the Clans. Yet change was their only true weapon now, not the puny and often ineffectual pistols and guns they carried. Or looted, rather—projectors plucked from the inert carcasses of Marauders, or lasers ripped from ore-seeking burrowers like the dumb Snouts. Weaponry adequate for the day but not for the slow steady passage of this unending war, a conflict desperate on one side and almost casual on the other.

  He called Shibo on close-comm and asked what she thought. Her self-sufficient, enclosed distance had melted slightly, and Killeen had overcome some of his shyness.

  Even so, he was gratified when she immediately answered, —Must learn mechtech, yeasay.—

  “Y’mean scavenge better?”

  —No, build.— Her voice was flat, firm.

  “From mech parts we could build mech weapons, yeasay, but—”

  —Build human weapons. Not just copy mechs.—

  “People hate mechs, Shibo. Don’t want learn it. Can’t, anyway.”

  He could hear her flinty um-hummm though she was some distance away. They had spread out to avoid ambush. The team was making quick time through a raw mountain pass. Snowglade was so young a world that the mountains had no topsoil at all. —Mechs deliberately make understanding hard.—

  This startled Killeen. “You figure?”

  —They defend their tech against other mech cities. What’ll confuse them’ll confuse us.—

  “Sounds hopeless, then.”

  —Naysay. Human tech we could learn. Did learn, in the Arcologies.—

  He didn’t want to hear about how great things had been in the old days. To keep her talking, though, he said, “You mean that Taj Mahal thing we saw?”

  —Yeasay.—

  “If humans could do that once…”

  —We could again,— she said simply.

  “That weapon yours—how’s it work?”

  —I’ll show you tonight.— She hefted the long, tubular gun. —I sized it out for human use.—

  “Damnfine.” Killeen was impressed.

  They reached camp as the small sheltered fires started. There were burnable brambles in the sequestered notch Fornax had found for the Rooks, and over a nearby hill spread the Bishops. It would be demeaning to give up the dignity of separate and defensible campsites, no matter how diminished the resources of each Family. So each built the ordained three fires and covered them with a stretched-frame tent of tightweave. The flame was far too visible in the infrared, but the wide and steepled tent would disperse the image too broadly for a mech sensor to pick it out. Or so went the litany.

  As he clumped heavily into camp, shrugging off his equipment, Killeen was acutely aware of the curiously comfortable way the Families bedded down among their own softening assumptions. They used rules of thumb inherited from grandfathers who had fallen in conflicts which now, in the swift compression of their own legacy, were but names: Skipjohn’s Draw, Stonewall, Grammaw’s, Bowles-son’s Surprise, The Three-Rattler One, Chancellorsville. Fine names, spoken of reverently around the fires. Killeen wondered, though, if for each name they also inherited in equal measure an unseen vulnerability. This thought troubled him, for until now he too had felt without thinking that the Family’s survival lay in their traditions.

  He ate with Toby and Jocelyn and Shibo. They all scavenged for roots or berries that could mix agreeably with the hardpack grub brought from the last Trough. Checked for human biocompatibility, mashed and heated with streamwater, the paste gave off a fructifying aroma. They made short work of it.

  Then the Family entered into that most pleasurable of hours in their days, a time of relaxed muscles and the loggy stuffed feel that casts an obliging film over the coming sleep. The talk began then. It stirred around the three encased fires like whorls of enchantment, taking them away from their sore bodies and constant low apprehension. Two Rook visitors described their flights and battles. Rook women traded stories of mech giveaway smells and signs, how to read their tracks for age and intent, how sometimes they would lie craftily in wait near springs and ponds. First Fornax led a mild ranking, then Ledroff.

  They all savored the blending of Families, for it meant the wash of new tales, jokes, stories. There was rumor of romance, too, though this Ledroff cut short with a raised eyebrow and bemused scowl. Better not bring this up. Despite their adversity, the Rooks were not all down-tuned in the sexcen, and the Bishops could scarcely reply with intimations of their own dehydrated lusts. This might provoke a certain wan and wistful discontent.

  Success has many voices but failure is mute. It would have been good to have a tale to tell from the day’s tracking team. Killeen brooded over their losing the navvy’s trail. He took only nominal part in the singing after dinner, and listened to only the first of the talk, before sneaking off.

  Cermo saw him go and caught up, offering a flask of coarse but powerful brandy. Killeen felt a quick, darting hunger for it, reached out—and drew back his hand. “Don’t think so.”

  “Aw, c’mon. Hard day. Li’l alky’ll set you right.”

  “Set me on my ass. Set me dumb. Get me started, I’ll slurp up all you got.”

  “Not ’fore I do,” Cermo said merrily, and Killeen could see the man was already far gone.

  “Sorry, Cermo,” he said gently.

  He had to consciously make himself walk away from it. He could already taste the rough cut of the brandy, smell its thick vapor. But he knew what it would do and what he would keep on being if he took it.

  Running away into the mind’s own besotted refuges was too easy. He had been damned lucky so far. Nothing dangerous had happened when he had been drinking, or hung over, or tapped in to a stim circuit in a Trough.

  But nobody’s luck held forever.

 
He would have to keep his head clear if he was ever to learn. He made himself go over to where Shibo sat alone. Her high cheekbones caught the dim halflight, shrouding her eyes and making them unreadable, mysterious. As the last Knight, she would always be welcome around the campfires. But she seldom went, preferring to tinker with mech parts she carried in a black knapsack.

  He spent an hour with her but it felt more like a day. He had not felt so daunted and humble since the days when he first went out with his father on simple scavenging raids.

  Shibo had not merely mastered mechtech, she had made it comprehensible. She could recase her own ammo for her gun. She knew how to realign its bore. From mech scrap she had fashioned a self-loader that folded neatly into the gun stock. It fit snugly into her exskell, so to load while firing she had only to breathe. Killeen admired how deftly she had made her deficiency—the ever-moving exskell ribs—into an asset. Her rate of fire was higher than any Killeen had ever seen.

  As she taught, she spoke more than she ever had. She had been fitted with the exskell as a girl. A craftswoman had made her exskell of foam polycarbon, worked from Snout debris. Killeen suspected that had kindled Shibo’s ability to translate mech tangles into human terms. Perhaps this had saved her after the Knight Calamity.

  As she taught him she showed no smugness, no preening pride, nothing but a penetrating attention to the job at hand. Many in the Families disliked mech artifacts and tolerated only those clearly shaped to human use. Leggings, calf-clasping shock absorbers, moly-vests—these Killeen was used to. He had to overcome his distaste as Shibo taught.

  Then, slowly, he became intrigued. In her hands the alien objects took on a redeeming human dimension. Her quick, incisive thinking opened paths for him, banished mech mysteries. When she said, “Well, done. Sleep now, yeasay?” he was sorry the time was over.

  Cermo snored as Killeen passed by him. The big man’s mouth yawned slackly at the sky.

  Killeen felt restless despite his fatigue, yet he did not want to join the figures around the campfires. Though he did not mind the stink he carried from days of hard-marching, he remembered his mother’s old rule—bathe when you could, because no one knew how well Marauders could smell.