Great Sky River Read online

  —Huh.— Ledroff was a distant speck, his voice tinged with skepticism. Killeen could tell it would be a long while before Ledroff forgot the alky-drinking. The Cap’n would use it as a handy way to undercut Killeen. Already he was favoring Jocelyn, to keep Killeen in his place.

  “Let’s go that way.”

  —Might’s well.—

  Killeen could hear Ledroff click his teeth together, which meant he hadn’t any better idea. Ledroff skip-walked, kicking up dust plumes. Beyond him chugged the transporter mech they had commandeered.

  The older Family members rode on the copper-ribbed sides of the big hauler, clinging with slaptabs to the buffed aluminum tank walls. They swung like boughs of motley fruit, bobbing as the transporter lumbered with dogged persistence over the bumpy terrain. Iron-gray massifs towered on the far horizon like unreachable fortresses.

  Killeen didn’t like jouncing along on the transporter and had given away his rest turns on it. He preferred to be in the open. If a Marauder chanced to intersect their path, it would see the outlying men and women first. It seemed to Killeen only right that he should be the most visible, while Toby walked closer to the transporter.

  To a Marauder its barrel-shaped fellow mech would not be a target. Only on close inspection could a Marauder tell that the dull-witted transporter had been hijacked, redirected, and no longer dutifully carried cargo from the little factory to a regional depot.

  —Heysay, Dad.— Toby waved from far away.

  “Time to eat?”

  Toby laughed. It was an old joke, from the time when the boy had wanted an extra snack every few klicks. That had been during the hard times after the Calamity. None of the Family had been truly prepared. None had imagined that their lot would be one of endless fleeing.

  —Noway,— Toby said. —I’m no porker.—

  “Whatsay then?”

  —I’m just getting tired of running alongside this fat-pack on the ’porter.—

  Nobody in the Family had a scrap of fat on them any longer, but their talk was full of references to carrying excess mass, to indulgence, to unsightly bulging clothes. It was a wan vestige of a time when fat had been possible, and valued as insurance against hard times. But now all times were hard, and the Family used the words of opulence with a certain longing, a hollow bravado, as if to keep the words alive was to preserve the promise that someday they could again amass an ample centimeter or two of girth.

  “You’ll pick up the porkers when they fall off.”

  —They’ll just go splat if they do.—

  “Keep your eye peeled all the same.”

  —I want be out with you.—

  “Too dangerous.”

  —Isn’t!—

  “Is.”

  —Isn’t! Nosay noway! Lookit the greenery sproutin'.—

  “A damp patch, is all.”

  —Isn’t! Ever’body knows mechs don’t like green.—

  “Maybe.”

  —They’re ’finid of it. Can’t see so good in green light.—

  “Where it’s green there’s water. Which helps rust.”

  —What I said, right? So lemme walk with you.—

  The plaintive warbling note in Toby’s voice touched Killeen. As he opened his mouth to tell his son to stay put and safe near the transmech, he instead found himself checking the blue-dabbed overlay in his right eye. A good firm forward-pointing triangle stood out against the topo map of the rumpled valley.

  “Okay. Cover on my left.”

  —Hey jubil!— Toby leaped twenty meters into the clear, bright air and landed on the run. He yelped with sudden energy and in moments was alongside his father.

  In his son’s voice Killeen had heard a treble of Veronica. Though he had recordings of her, he never called them up from his longstore chip at the base of his spine. Thus, the slightest trace of her could spear him bitter-sweetly. Toby was their full child. They had used no other genetic components in making him. Which meant that Toby was Veronica’s entire legacy.

  For Veronica had perished in the Calamity and was suredead.

  Most of the Clan had fallen then, scythed down by the deft cut and thrust of a mech onslaught against the Citadel. For hundreds of years before, the mechs had slowly claimed parts of Snowglade, and humanity had watched warily. Snowglade had been a cool, water-rich world with winds that stirred the moisture in great towering cottony clouds. Mechs did not like such planets, which is why humanity came to be there, to prosper in their own humble fashion.

  So went as much of history as Killeen had ever heard—though in truth he cared little for it. History was tales and tales were a kind of lie, or else not much different from them; he knew that much. Which was enough. A practical man had to seize the moment before him, not meander through dusty tales.

  Family Bishop had lived in rugged rockfastness and splendor in the Citadel. Killeen remembered that time as though across an impassable murky chasm, though in fact it had been only six years since the Calamity. All years before that were now compressed into one daybright wondrous instant, filled with people and events which had no substantial truth any longer, had been swept away as if they had never been.

  Since then the Bishops were swept forward not so much by a victorious horde behind, but rather by the mounting tide of the names of battles lost, bushwhacks walked into, traps sprung, Family members wounded or surekilled and sometimes even left behind in a disheartening white-eyed dishonorable scramble to escape, to save the remnant core of the Family, to keep some slender thread of heritage alive.

  The names were places on a map—Sawridge, Corinth, Stone Mountain, Riverrun, Big Alice Springs, Pitwallow—and maps were not paper now but encoded in the individual’s memorychip. So, through the six years of pursuit, as members of the Family fell and were swallowed up by the mechmind, the Family lost even the maps to understand where their forebears had stood and fought and been vanquished. Now the names were only names, without substance or fixity in the living soil of Snowglade.

  In retreat the Family could carry little, and cast aside the hardcopy maps and other regalia which had once signified their hold upon the land. So a string of dropped debris stretched across years and continents.

  Killeen’s father had vanished at the Citadel, gone into chaos. Veronica had been hit standing right beside Killeen. He had dragged her body with him, seeking a medic who could repair the damage. Only when he had fallen exhausted into a muddy irrigation ditch did he see that a burst had taken her sometime as he carried her. He had been too dazed and tormented to notice. Her eyes had bulged out, shockbright and with the pus dripping from them. Suredead.

  Until the Calamity he had known countless cousins, Family that had seemed boundless. Now he had only Toby.

  —Looksee. A navvy,— Toby called. He pointed and went bounding off

  “Heysay!” Killeen shouted. “Check that thing first.” He leaped forward and overtook his son.

  The navvy seemed innocuous. Its bright crosshatched carapace was freshly polished. Its stubby arms rummaged among scabbed mechwaste—cowlings, rusted housers, worn gray biojoints.

  Killeen approached. The mech spun its lightweight treads. They caught and clacked against an eroded spur of peppery, chipped granite. Fore-lenses swiveled to study Killeen. It paused a long moment, seeming to think. Then it turned away, uninterested, and started off downhill, raising fine dust that hung in the low gravity like shimmering fog.

  “Guess it’s okay,” Killeen said reluctantly.

  “Can I vest it?” Toby said acoustically, landing with a wheeze and thump on the crumbling grainy granite.

  “Harvest it? Thought you were full up with servos.”

  Toby shrugged, jangling. Small spare parts dangled from staylines at his waist.

  “You look like a walking scrapheap.”

  “Guy needs ’placements,” Toby said defensively.

  “Not more’n slow you down.”

  “Aw—lemme! I got room.” Toby’s face screwed into a laughable mask of pret
ended pain.

  “No” Killeen was himself surprised that he said it so sharply.

  “But I—”

  “No. Just no. Now get out on your point.”

  Toby wasn’t striding point, but using the word made /his position seem larger. That pleased the boy and he shrugged, eyebrows knitted wryly. He bounded off, ignoring the navvy that jounced away downslope.

  Killeen had long ago learned to listen when something nagged at him. He stood still for a long moment. He let his augmented senses sweep out, covering the slowmotion flow of the Family, the retreating navvy. Voices slurred and nipped, the steady background roundtalk of the Family.

  They were making good time down the valley. The transporter mech bumped along the bed of a sand river. Killeen selected the viewpoint of an old man, Fowler, who swung on a basket tether aboard the mech. He heard Fowler’s querulous questions—When’ll we stop? Gotany that soursap from the Trough? Whatta mean, is gone? Suresay we had jugsful!—and the pebbles spitting from under the mech treads.

  The valley lay quiet. Mechtrash dotted the rock-knobbed hills. Some rotted bioparts tainted the air. These random clumps of old parts littered all Snowglade, so common that Killeen barely noticed them. In outlands such as this, scavenger mechs did not bother to pick up rusted cowlings or heavy, broken axles for the long transport to smelters and factories. Over centuries the mess had gathered. As the mechs worked their changes in Snowglade’s weather, ice retreated, revealing even older junk from a time when mechs had run unknown things amid the old cold ages. These jumbles too blighted the land now, rust-red spots freckling the soil.

  Among this plants struggled, a welcome sign. For hours now they all had been pleased by small signs of ripening, of spreading grass, of tawny growth.

  Denix had set an hour before, and now the Eater was half-gnawed by the ragged hills. The shifting colors confused Killeen, making the least crag and gully brim with light-ripe illusions.

  The Family moved stolidly and with a dogged rhythm that expected little. As they breasted each rise, talk ran and swirled, words forking in the grouptalk. For months they had followed an unmarked trek through exhausted, bleached-dry valleys. Only Troughs had succored them. The slowsmelling promise ahead gave spring to their pace.

  Yet Killeen felt nothing awry, but the crosshatched navvy was odd enough to warrant remembering. He watched his son carefully and often rechecked their route.

  In the middle of a topo survey, Arthur said:

  I am enjoying the sight of greenery again.

  Killeen was surprised. This Aspect was usually distant, factual, a cool savor in Killeen’s mind.

  “Yeasay. I’ve tasted only Troughslop for so long….”

  I doubt you could eat these. They are tough, fibrous growths.

  “Must be ground water here.”

  I suspect we are entering a Splash site.

  Killeen brightened. “Yeasay you? It’ll get wetter?”

  Perhaps. A Splash is the fracture zone surrounding a meteor strike. The cracked rock permits an upwelling of permafrost which has eluded the mechs’ efforts to dry out the planet. Sometimes there is even glacial ice buried beneath the shifting sands. Meteors are the only feature of Snowglade’s weather which the mechs do not appear to have mastered. Given our star’s orbit about the Eater, which is quite elliptical, I find it unsurprising that we encounter many meteors. We are plunging nearer the Eater now, and a standard Gaussian distribution for the density of small, meteor-sized debris would predict that we shall receive strikes at an exponentiating rate.

  “Better weather?” Arthur had to truthsay, but sometimes the Aspect used a muddy, longtalk way to do it

  Again, perhaps. The mechs seem to be altering the orbit of IR-246.

  “Huh?”

  Sorry. You call our star Denix, am I correct?

  “That’s not what we call it, that’s what it is.”

  To me this star is the 246th infrared source positively resolved near the Galactic Center. The catalog made as we approached the inner zone of the center specifically assigned—

  “Heysay, that stuff sucks like a bucket of ticks. I—”

  An interesting expression, that. I remember it had its origin in an ancient Earthside civilization now enshrined solely in the holorecords—

  “Stuff the oldsay, heysay? I don’t understand—Denix is the sun, that’s what Denix’s name means.”

  You call it such, yes. It is a simple star like the millions you see when neither Denix nor the Eater is in the sky. As now.

  Killeen looked up, startled. The Eater was guttering into bloodred sleep beyond sawtooth peaks. High above in the darkening, pinpoints glowed in ambers, hard blues, opulent greens. Fine wisps threaded between the twinklings. Never had he thought they might be like Denix.

  “All… those?”

  There are approximately a million stars within a light-year of the Eater. Many have entered late stages of their evolution and display varied colors. Some vent streamers from their chromospheres. Advanced—

  “Cut the jabber! You mean they’re all big?”

  Some are larger than Denix—which after all is an Ml type, selected by your forefathers not for its beauty but rather because this planet was deep in a glacial age, and apparently of no abiding interest to the mech civilizations—while others—

  Killeen let Arthur lecture away, unheeded. For him the sky was suddenly a vast bowl of unimaginable depths. Those were other suns. His whole life—of earnest childhood, of love and labor and lost hopes, of ravaged retreats—he now saw as abruptly dwarfed, as tiny motions on a bare scratched plain, beneath a night filled with eyes.

  SIX

  They marched on through the halfnight. Snowglade never saw true darkness, for the million pinprick fires above conspired to seed the sky with a dim, persistent radiance. There were no solid, certain shadows.

  Yearly, distant blobs and swirls of twilight gas swept across the sky. Constellations of glowering stars changed in the span a boy took to grow to manhood. But stars were minor actors in the ruby-rich, storm-racked sky.

  Killeen’s ancestors had adapted eyes, able to scan on a scale stretched further than the normal human logarithmic response. He could see the stars as glowing torches and then, by screwing tight one eye, wreath them in a murky shroud of ink. Mechs could see in any dim radiance, so humanity had long ago aped the machines by tailoring their eyes.

  Toby sent, —Mech hive over that hill.—

  Killeen vectored right and in a moment landed beside his son. “Mechtypes?”

  Toby’s voice skittered high and excited: “I pick up three them Fact’ry luggos.”

  “Whatdoing?”

  “Workin’.”

  “Mining?”

  “Looks be ’facturin’.”

  “Manufacturing what?”

  “Dunno. See that transporter they’re unloadin’?”

  “Um. Bundles of…” Killeen amped up his eyes to max. He scanned the pale recesses for telltale tracks of large mechs.

  “Plants,” Toby said excitedly. “They harvestin’ plants.”

  Killeen squinted, still couldn’t pick up enough detail. He wondered if his eyes were losing their edge, going fuzzy on him. A man had to keep watching his ’quipment. Let it go awhile and it could kill you in a minute. Angelique, a young Bishop woman, could run some kind of internal program, unglitch eye trouble. He’d have to get a runthrough and checkout. He frowned, distracted by this annoyance.

  “Naysaw that before,” he said.

  “Nosee mechs usin’ plants?”

  “Saw some cut trees, back when—” and he stopped, because that led to back when the Citadel held firm and my father went out on raids, when humanity held forests and crops and all the lost legacy, and that was something he didn’t talk to Toby about just casually, “—when there was any.”

  “Wonder what they’re makin’?”

  Killeen watched the five blocky buildings clustered together in a side arroyo. Two dust devils marched down from
the hills. They swirled and glided near the brown clayformed buildings, upsucking cones of fine sand.

  “Can’t say. Longtime back, mechs’d chop down crops the Clan tried grow, in the valley near the Citadel. They just left ’em, though. Didn’t make anythin’ from ’em.”

  “Let’s do ’em!” Toby said brightly.

  Killeen looked at his son’s thin face, splotched with the mossybrown suit-rub growths that everybody got now and then. He cuffed him on the shoulder and laughed. “We got a mechscourge here?”

  “Yousay!” Toby laughed, too, and Killeen saw his mirth came in part from the fact that the boy could show his bravado and have it respected in a joshing way, without having it mean anything.

  The Family would decide on any attack. Boys ran with the rest, of course—the Family was never split while in dangerous action. Humans now feared more than anything a division, a loss, a fractioning. Still, the youngers ran far back on any assault, and so their word carried little weight. In that there was some remnant of childhood freedom for Toby. Killeen instinctively tried to keep that alive. He knew how quickly the hardness of the world would come in upon the boy and make him finally no longer a boy.

  Some Family arrived, coming down in low sloping curves, landing with pneumatic chuuungs. Ledroff conferred, talking with his helmet cocked back. A dozen Family clustered around him.

  Toby waved a gloved hand at Ledroff. “Think he’ll go?”

  “Dunno,” Killeen said.

  “Lookit his beard, hey.”

  The matted black hair was crimped in a curved line. Toby giggled. “Got it caught in his helmet ring.”

  Killeen smiled. “Bet that yanks when he runs.”

  An old tradition allowed mild joshing of a Cap’n, and Killeen felt a sizable pleasure in the joke. He still smarted from Ledroff’s adroit maneuver into the Cap’ncy.

  Killeen imagined Ledroff thought the beard made him look older. Maybe the smelly, helmet-tangled mass had helped make him Cap’n. Toby said, “Ugly bush.”