Great Sky River Read online

  Yes. I can use the traitor Crafter to transport you, but it must return for demolishment soon. (Unintelligible.) I could not disguise its penetration of the biological warren. Thus it must be sacrificed, broken to its constituent parts.

  “Gone tear it down?”

  A traitor must be rendered to infinitesimal oblivion. There is always the possibility that it has in some limited fashion made of itself an anthology mind, like me. If so, all portions of it must be consumed and obliterated. The price for insurrection is true death.

  “It worked with you. You can’t save it?” The answer came rimmed with iceblue calm:

  It was a lesser mind.

  “So’re we.”

  Just so. Still, you do not betray your kind.

  “Crafter was just stayin’ alive.”

  It did so in a manner against our precepts. That is the crucial distinction. (Unintelligible.) I discovered the Crafter some time ago and did not report it because I knew I could use it for higher purposes. That is the only moral reason to suffer such an aberrant mind. It wished to retain all its memories, personality, everything. That is not possible when an individual mind is subsumed into the mechmind. (Unintelligible.) A portion of the individual experience propagates, yes. A sense of selfness, yes. But not the whole. That would require storage space and complication without end.

  He closeupped the horizon and saw a fast transport platform. There rode the Mantis.

  It had tracked them this way ever since leaving the biological factories, keeping within transmission sight but at a remove. Killeen had the uneasy suspicion that the Mantis was covering its ass in some way. If they were intercepted by some higher-order mechs, the Mantis could get away, pretend innocence.

  Killeen felt himself relax, the tightness in his muscles draining. Something in him made him say with a jaunty lilt he did not feel, “No mech heaven, huh?”

  You attempt to make trivial that which is exalted. To be recycled into the hosting mind, and then propagated outward again in a specific mind and place—that is the most any consciousness could hope for, surely.

  “Is it all you want?” Shibo asked.

  Killeen blinked; he had imagined his conversation was private. Slowly, without making any sign, the Mantis was invading and integrating the responses of the humans.

  I am of a different order. An anthology intelligence cannot be fully killed, since it is arrayed over the entire surface of this world. (Unintelligible.) Even a maximal thermonuclear blast could end only my elements on the illuminated face. My sense of self is kept by the phase-locked coherence of each locale, much as a net of antennae spread over an area can see as though it were one eye of that size. Yet it is not an eye at all. In a similar way, I am not a mind but the mind.

  Killeen grinned. “You didn’t look so hot when Shibo ’n’ me, we blew you all to shot an’ scatteration. ’Member? Back when the Rooks ’n’ Bishops met?”

  He was reasonably sure the Mantis would not let any of them live long, but a manic urge in him made him poke at the distant mech with gleeful malice.

  I was prepared for that. I had recorded many of you and needed time to sort, to digest. So I transported all self-sense out of those parts, to another locale. In your terminology, you destroyed hardware, not software.

  “Slowed you some, dinnit?” Shibo asked. Her lean face split with a sardonic smile. She had caught Killeen’s mood. They were all released from a dark compression. No matter what their fate, they would not be daunted.

  True. Anthology minds pay such a price. We are accustomed to being unlocalized, however. That was why I could not fathom, at first, your feelings about my sculptures. I—indeed, all mechs—am used to being broken into parts, repaired, and reassembled. That is the natural way. I did not understand that for you mortal, organic intelligences, the iconography of the human body, rendered into parts, would be repulsive.

  “Those things we ran into?” Killeen remembered the disembodied legs and arms, the hideous sculpture of human genitalia remorselessly working—

  Indeed. I see the distinction now, one of those points which seems obvious only in retrospect. The sole time you see the inner workings of each other is when one is ill, malfunctioning, and must be opened. Or, of course, during decay. In either case the subject person is in pain, unconscious, or dead. Such occasions cast into the human mind sets of associations freighted with strong emotions. Negative ones, purely. None of us has realized this before. It is a profound discovery. (Unintelligible.) This is one of those valuable aspects which art can capture, giving us an enduring picture of the organic world.

  “Don’t count on it,” Shibo said dryly. Killeen grinned.

  What do you mean? I cannot read your—

  Killeen said, “Those ’sculptures’ of yours? That isn’t humanity. It’s a horror show. A bunch of freaks. You don’t know shit about humanity.”

  Excretion, we know. Ingestion, we know. And all that lies between.

  Killeen was startled when everyone in the party laughed, the sound rolling off the steely carapace of the lumbering Crafter. He was further delighted when the Mantis sent clipped, interrogating signals shooting like crimson streamers through their sensoria.

  I see. You make those sounds. This appears to be a characteristic feature of your entire phylum.

  Toby asked, “Fie what? That some name you got for us?”

  You are the dreaming vertebrates. A curious subphylum, to be precise. And of course now quite rare. Some of my portions, which are themselves old almost beyond measure, can remember when there were many such as you.

  Killeen glanced at Shibo.

  You characteristically make this convulsive sound. Your programming manifests itself in this odd way.

  “That’s laughing,” Shibo said.

  A kind of… spice?

  Killeen chuckled. He knew immediately that the Mantis could not extract what it meant to laugh at the world. “Well, maybe.”

  Shibo asked, “Is your palate so flat?”

  I see that it might be. Each of you makes the sound differently, in ways not fully explained by the differences in genetic construction of throats and acoustic strings. I cannot predict or even easily recognize the pattern. Perhaps this is significant

  Shibo said, “You’re not getting it.”

  Getting what?

  “Whole point You laugh, you’re… you’re…” She stopped, stumped.

  When you make that curious sound, a brief illumination shoots through you. It is a sensation I recognize, at least in part. Something beyond the press of time. It is as though you lived as we do, for that quick stuttering verbal exclamation, that flash. For that space you are immortal.

  Killeen laughed.

  TEN

  They worked their way down through rutted valleys swarming with machines. The Mantis conducted them through a dense mechplex without seeming effort. It had the power to redirect the rushing traffic, deflecting inquiries.

  Then they broke into open country. It was barren, as the mechs liked it. Everywhere Killeen saw signs of the eroding biosphere. Gray weeds clung to mottled hills. Once he sighted a mountainside being gnawed away by a horde of the midget mechs who had dropped on them from a Duster, long ago.

  Killeen felt at peace with himself. No regrets about the killing of Hatchet plagued him and he did not wonder at that fact. It had been natural, a final drawing of the line between what was human and what was not. If the Mantis later killed him for it, there was little Killeen could do to alter that outcome. Even this prospect did not trouble him. He talked to the others, letting in the soft balm of human voices.

  He began to recognize terrain. The landing field for the Duster was beyond the next ridgeline.

  Denix was setting at their backs. The Eater furled its own radiance beyond the rolling hills. Wavering in the high air ahead were fibers of orange luminescence. Directly before them fresh traceries frenzied the air. Killeen puzzled, and then remembered.

  “Look!” he called to Toby and Shibo. />
  The Mantis, riding its crescent-shaped platform on a nearby hill, had seen the disturbance, too. Killeen could feel its pale swift intricacy in his sensorium, focusing forward, eyeing the descending lights.

  He made his voice blend both acoustics and electrotalk. Transduced by buried chips, his words sprang forth as croaked stabs at the air. “You! The one from the Eater!”

  The air wrinkled. Clouds made spindly, spinning feelers.

  Wind-whisperings nearly covered the faint sound when it came.

  Summer lashings veil me. I can barely hear your effusions. Speak louder!

  “How’s this?” Killeen gave all his voice to it, sending each word forth as a coarse, clipped wedge of electrosound.

  Better. That is Killeen, no? I have sought you.

  The Mantis said:

  What manner of—ah!

  Killeen was startled by the Mantis’s abrupt shutdown of transmission. It had fled.

  “Sought me for what?”

  The Crafter itself stopped, its engines spun down to silence. The humans still clung to it, watching the sky develop a web of shooting colors. Faint whistlings shot downward. Sparks marked the magnetic field lines. The threads twisted and focused, bending down through the deepening cobalt vault of sky.

  Killeen could see the entire geomagnetic bubble that shrouded Snowglade. It hung like a jeweled spiderweb and the stars seemed motes trapped in it. Then it began to deform. Speckled strands crunched together, as though a giant hand were wadding pliant paper. Where the fields necked together, sapphire-smooth glories flickered.

  Columns of dim radiance blew in from the depths of the gathering night sky. They forced the field lines closer still, making a magnetic bottleneck. There, the rolling, deep voice became stronger. It was as though the words came to him as spoken straight out of a spot among the stars.

  I have searched long and wary for you.

  Killeen shouted, his throat already getting hoarse, “Why?”

  You truly are the locus termed Killeen? I must be sure.

  “Read me,” he said. Killeen was curious if it could detect the lingering sour flavor of the Mantis in Killeen’s sensorium.

  Ah—it is you. But something is changed.

  “Yeasay, there’s—”

  Humble greetings to the minister of magnitudes!

  The jittery salute came so quickly Killeen could scarcely read it. The Mantis’s tone was different from anything he had ever heard.

  I sense a machine mode?

  Yes, and amply honored to receive you. I hope this does not bode for an early intersection of our world with the massless ones? That would, of course, be a summation and an honor as well. (Unintelligible.) With great respect, I believe we in the machine mode are not prepared for such an august presence to—

  No no, nothing like that. When the time tor intersection and ascension comes, you shall be well advised. These matters are dealt with at higher levels, I presume you know?

  Yes, of course! I did not venture to intrude upon the progressions and convergences of—

  Then please us with your absence.

  Oh! Yes!

  Killeen felt the Mantis shrink into a fat knot of black confusion. It withdrew, cowed.

  The amber-fluted voice rang down powerfully from a shadowed sky:

  The motive entity which bade me deliver the earlier message—that inductance again wishes to speak to you.

  Killeen blinked. “What…”

  It cannot speak directly, but must drive its meaning through electroflux and arching currents. It lives far further into the Eater than do L.

  “Where? Who?” How could anyone know him!

  It dwells inside the time-confused sphere of the Eater itself. It has plunged beyond the accretion disk, lower still than where my own feet are anchored by thick traps of raging plasma. This entity has dark realm a message. And it compels ne to bring it forth to you, along the stretched and rubbery magnetic ropes which are my body and soul.

  The humans around him all stared upward, mouths gaping. Killeen had lost his awe and was now frightened. If the energies which could crush the geomagnetic fields so casually should err, and sputter downward into lightning, they all would flare and crisp in an instant. And that was not unreasonable, since the being above was so clearly mad….

  The message is garbled. Strange storms of space and time blow in the Eater, tumbling words, muting all but a few. Still, I am enjoined by great and sufficient powers to relay what I can. The first portion of the message is this: Ask for theArgo. Remember.Ask for the Argo.

  Killeen frowned. Again the meaningless word. “Argo…”

  I know no more than ever what this word means. The second portion… portion…

  “It fades,” Shibo whispered.

  But wait. This machine near you—I sense it struggling. It resists my presence.

  Killeen shouted. “The second part! Tell me—”

  No. I weaken momentarily… but I shall force this… this irritating machine… to speak… truthfully….

  Killeen looked far up into the shadowy sky. The intricate tapestry of magnetic field lines dimmed. Its constrictions loosened. “Wait!” he cried. “The message’s second part!”

  From the flexing field lines came only silence. Killeen frowned and amped his sensors to max. Did he hear faint words?

  Into his sensorium coiled a dark presence. It was the Mantis returning, made bold again.

  I have never witnessed such an order of being before. They visit these realms seldom, preferring the energetic storms at the Eater’s margin.

  Even through the filter of Arthur’s cool tones, Killeen could sense the Mantis’s awe.

  “What is it?” someone of the party asked. Killeen searched the twisting folds of magnetic force that slid like ivory muscles through the sky.

  A magnetic mind. A personality of dimensions unknown in material beings. It lives in the complex warpage of magnetic stresses, with its information content stored in waves which suffer no damping. In this way it is another facet of immortality… a higher one than we achieve here. Such spirits are anchored in the disk of bluehot matter which orbits the Eater. (Unintelligible.) The accreting disk provides a base for many such minds, while their true selves extend out into the gaseous clouds and stars circling the center. I am honored to have seen one. It is a high aim of our culture to entertain such a presence. Some say these minds were once embodied in such as we.

  Killeen still watched the dark movements above, but something made him say sarcastically, “So you mechs’ve got a God?”

  Magnetic minds are not the highest phase. There is something greater.

  Shibo asked, “This Argo—you understand what the manmech means?”

  I… the magnetic being… forces me to tell you. I can sense it, feel its pressure. It compels… In the last few seconds I have interrogated history compilations from all around Snowglade. There are vague traces of such a thing, something named Argo, perhaps several.

  Killeen said, “I remember something about Argo being like some other city, Sparta. Help us find it.”

  This is impossible. The magnetic mind compels me to speak truly, but do not think it can dictate actions contrary to my interest. It is weak this moment… I can feel it….

  “Speak, damn you!” Killeen shouted angrily.

  At best I can hope that no other mech intercepted this transmission from the magnetic mind. If so, perhaps I can conceal the information for a time. You must understand that I am your ally. (Unintelligible.) I wish to preserve the best of humanity, down into the eras to come when you will be extinct. Still, I cannot allow humanity to escape into the realm beyond Snowglade.

  “Why not?” Shibo demanded.

  You could upset workings which we have had in motion for millennia.

  “How?” someone asked.

  Killeen could feel the constricted agony of the Mantis. The magnetic mind, unseen, was still making the Mantis speak truly. There was a quality to it of a higher authority forcing a
distant underling to kowtow.

  There are other… organic beings. Some have… invaded… the zone near the Eater. We do not wish to provoke……… alliances… among the lower lifeforms.

  This stirred the party

  Killeen frowned. So there was some way the mechs felt threatened by the very existence of humans. He had guessed that before. Unbidden, the Mantis answered his thoughts:

  The drive to exterminate you comes from higher up in our society. Though we have diverse, competing parts to our civilization on Snowglade, some directives unite us. One is to never allow the organic beings to link up. They are unimpressive overall, but together can be a nuisance.

  Killeen smiled but kept his thoughts to himself.

  Around him people spoke excitedly. Other life! Intelligent, alien, but at least living. Maybe even other humans, around other stars. It was an intoxicating notion.

  And it had all been triggered by the whispering intelligence that steepled filmy fields in the air, warping vast energies as casually as a man brushes aside a curtain.

  He gathered himself, amped his systems, and bellowed, “I’m still here! Killeen! Give me my message!”

  A drifting radiance stretched across the silent sky.

  Shibo touched his arm. He shook her off.

  The mighty will not come to such demands. You show arrogance unseemly in one so low. Get—

  “Quiet!”

  To Killeen’s surprise, the Mantis presence shrank away, as if afraid.

  Murmurings.

  Vague shimmering fluxes tightened. Ruby fingers poked toward them.

  Then the voice boomed forth again.

  I hear. A passing comet perturbed my raiments. I have evaporated it and can reach up to you again with my full presence. I did enjoy forcing that presumptuous machine to treat you fairly. Seldom do I have such innocent amusement. I hope a breath of truth will be useful to you. Alas, when I depart, it will return to its habits. Beware of it.