Great Sky River Read online

  But Killeen said, “Keeps down the sunburn.”

  “When I get one, won’t let my suit grab it.”

  “Naysay, I’ll do that—” and Killeen chucked Toby under the chin playfully.

  Ledroff sent on general comm: —Situation still the same?—

  Already Ledroff’s voice was acquiring a certainty of command.

  There was no sign of interest or changed routine in the far-distant factory. Killeen eyed Ledroff and wondered what the man would do. This could be the first real engagement since he’d become Cap’n. The man looked wary, his eyes slitted, studying.

  Scattershot talk laced Killeen’s sensorium. He murmured only to Toby, the two of them keeping track of the minute profiles of the mechs as the distant forms carried out tasks. Since Killeen’s dumbdrunk on watch, he had shied away from having much voice.

  Ledroff broke into their twofold comm: “Those buildings look new.”

  Toby said matter-of-factly, “Fused clay, looks to be.”

  Killeen was mildly surprised; the boy picked up information everywhere.

  Ledroff nodded. “Mechs using plants? Might ’facture something we could do with.”

  Killeen called up Arthur and asked silently, How you figure it?

  This Splash zone is perhaps a decade old. There surely has been time for mechciv to exploit the organic raw materials growing here.

  “Let’s hit it,” Jocelyn said.

  “Yeasay,” Cermo called, already edging downslope.

  Killeen could feel the quickening in the Family. They felt stronger from a mere night in a Trough. Were Jake and Fanny forgotten, caution trampled? No. The Family did not truly need supplies badly, but something stirred in them, something ageold—a lust for clean victory, for revenge. They’d gutted the Crafter, but Ledroff had not let them vandal the Trough. Their blood still rang of retribution, and this could serve. Letting them go might be the best idea. At least it would get the sliteyed meanness out.

  Ledroff glanced around, saw their impatiently shuffling feet, their thindrawn lips. Killeen felt the tide rising in them and knew it could either be seized or else would take a major clash to stop.

  “Form the star!” Ledroff called.

  “Yeasay!”

  “I’ll frontline!”

  “I’m point!”

  “Hoyea! Hoyea!”

  They downvectored on the factories, coming in along four axes to confuse any defenses. Nothing rose to meet them.

  Orange firenets crackled from their shoulders, finding navvys. The mechs went into demented throes of indecision, driven into cyberclash.

  The Family rushed through the construction yards, over racks of ceramo-tubing, down sheetcarbon assemblies. They kicked in partitions, searching for manager mechs. Killeen and Jocelyn split off and sped through a long hall crammed with vast machinery. Speed was the best tactic humans had. Labormechs were made to be sure and steady. They reacted a bit slowly, unless they were alerted to go to quick-time.

  They came panting into an open bay. A manager mech rushed at them, clacking its recognition codes over the broadband comm lines. It turned an owlish set of glazed lenses on them and realized a fraction too late that they were not simply mechs wandering mistakenly where they were unneeded. The manager spun away, retreating. A copper panel snapped aside and something protruded, found Killeen as target—

  Killeen leaped sideways. A rasp jarred him. He hit the deck before he sensed that the savage grating sound came to him electromagnetically. An acrid smell pricked his nose.

  Jocelyn laughed, covering her mouth. “It was just tryin’ toughtalk you, is all.”

  The rasping had been Jocelyn frying the manager with a crackling storm of microwave noise. It was frozen in a rigid, comic posture. Arms akimbo, one lone surviving sender bleated a symbol-call to NOTINTRUDE NOTINTRUDE.NOTINTRUDE.

  “Clothes!” Jooelyn called. She stepped over Killeen, obliviously sure he was unhurt. He got up, ruefully rubbing a shoulder. He had slammed against a big steel-sheathed machine with enormous axle-rollers. He saw it was some kind of press. Fiber entered it at the far end of the factory. Whirling cylinders tugged and wove and mixed in acrid chemicals—and out the near end came glossy sheets of amber-gold tightweave.

  Jocelyn tore some off admiringly. He left her to her rooting and found Ledroff nearby. Killeen tuned in to the comm. The Family crowded in, reporting.

  Supervisors numbed. No higher mechs in the ’plex.

  Factories secure. Some much-needed servos found.

  The supervisors had not sent out a mayday signal. The ’plex was transmitting no raidcry, as near as anyone could pick up.

  The older men and women were safely in. Guards posted.

  Ledroff listened, nodded. He grinned, showing stubbed brown teeth. His first raid as Cap’n, and it had gone well.

  Killeen checked for Toby, found him tinkering with a manager mech. “I gutshot a navvy,” Toby said forlornly, sorry he’d found nothing bigger. Killeen showed him how to make the manager spin on its rotors, whirring madly, its arms ratcheting. Toby laughed, banishing his frown. He was so taken with the mad mech that he forgot to cover his gaping, cheerful mouth. In the Citadel this had been impolite, a symbolic revealing of the coarse inner self. Killeen thought to remind him, but figured there was time enough for manners later. If ever.

  Ledroff ordered the navvys uncyberlocked and set back to labor. The Family could learn more of what went on here that way. Killeen watched the slow but powerful mechs as they kept on. They ignored the humans, since their supervisors had had no time to send out a formup call. Their dull cowlings bore designs that only manager mechs could read, and no human had ever deciphered.

  One had the same brushed, crosshatched alum carapace he had seen earlier, something new in navvy design. Killeen noted it and thought no more. Mech assembly was a subject of utter indifference to him—he could no more uncoil an axle housing, using fourwrench and screwdriver, than he could reprogram the biochips in his own head—but it was essential to know ordinary navvys from the higher-order mechs.

  Usually a cosmetic feature worked its way down from the smarter mechs to the navvys, but this crosshatched aluminum, coming first in the navvys, apparently had some purpose. The navvys who had helped the attack on the Trough had borne no special markings. Still, any change could mean danger.

  Once the factories were secure, the Family fell on the stacked wealth. Tightweave was a rarity. It responded to electrical touch-commands, splitting where a current-carrying fingernail sliced.

  A dozen of the Family called up Aspects and began using the old skills to cut and plan and fit fresh clothes. Laughter rang down the long ranks of still-spinning machinery. The Family liked labor when they could see clear result. New shirts, vests, and leggings to wear beneath their suits would improve everyone’s spirits.

  Killeen roved with Toby, inspecting. “Lookit,” the boy said, pointing to a huge mound of the tufted, dryleaved plants. Navvys were unloading small carts that brought the harvested stems and boughs. “How they make tight-weave from that?”

  “Some kinda mechknow.”

  Killeen shrugged. He had long since given up trying to figure how mechs worked their routine miracles. But Toby was young and thought he could understand everything in a world which had long since passed human comprehension.

  “These leaves got scabs.”

  Unbidden, Arthur’s cool, exact voice rippled at the back of Killeen’s mind:

  Those have a layer of silicon-boron to protect the plant from the Eater’s ultraviolet. It captures the hard photons and converts them through a phonon process into useful—

  “Naysay,” Killeen muttered, and Arthur fell silent. The Aspect’s departure left a faint tremor of pique, an irksome note strumming through Killeen’s sensorium.

  “Huh?”

  “Just shutting up some Aspect lingo.”

  Toby fingered the tough, glassy leaves. “Naysay such.”

  “Must be…” Killeen had an idea he
didn’t like.

  “Figure they’re mechmade?”

  Killeen nodded, his lips twisted aside in thought. “Could be. Look awful funny.”

  “If they use ’em, maybe they plant ’em?”

  “Never heard such.”

  “Sure rough, these. Like no plant at all.”

  Toby didn’t see the implications. Killeen said casually, “Search round some. See if the navvys’ve got seeds.”

  “Yeasay.” Toby was happy to be sent off on his own. He strode away through a rank of navvys which were carrying hexagonal plastibrass containers. The navvys were of the dumbest sort. They did not register Toby as more than a passing obstruction, a detail that temporarily clouded their route and then disappeared without their having to call up outside intelligence to pattern-recognize it. Major problems would be relayed to the manager mechs.

  Which meant, Killeen knew, that the whole ’plex would slowly shut down as navvys met difficulties, called to the managers for help, and got none. That would eventually send out a mayday to the central cities.

  Raids were always bracketed by that. The true art of them was guessing how long you had until some mid-manager mech showed up. Those could be microwave-fried, too, but it had been a long time since Killeen had seen one answer a mayday. The mechs were getting smarter. Or maybe they were just devoting a fraction more attention to their pest problem.

  For years now the Family had lived this way—as nomads raiding isolated navvy factories, holing up where they could, following a wanderers’ path through a landscape of increasing desolation. The ravaged hills offered no shade from the Eater’s glaring hammerstroke. What food they could scavenge and carry was compacted, portable cubes—chaws—that drove the muscles but burned the tongue with their power. Several in the Family still knew how to make chaws from the resources of Troughs, and several times the fate of the entire Family had turned upon those fourbrowns. The Family had run for long damaging times amid ruined canyons, driving forward only by chaws and stale mouthfuls of water that seeped from mechmade rockslides.

  Killeen remembered this as he treaded through shadowed corridors, beneath drumming clacking machinery. He was looking for Ledroff, but the ’plex was vast and filled with strumming long warrens of endless energetic ’facture. He explored, idling, curious.

  The strange, glassy plants gave forth more fruit than tightweave. From tirelessly spinning belts and presses came fibrous sheets, toughgrained and sturdy. Killeen felt some, tried to tear it without result. There were small stonehard devices, too, with connector jacks and cogs he did not understand. In all he counted a dozen or more intricate things that spilled from the factory, few of any meaning, and only the tightweave of any use to humanity. And warehouses nearby bulged with still more inexplicable ’factured devices, skinwrapped and enameled for shipping.

  His interest was purely practical. He no longer marveled at what could come from the incessant engine of mechcraft. Such bounteous wealth spewing forth now seemed to him as inevitable as the rich, organic world had appeared to his ancient ancestors. It was simply an enduring facet of the way things were, fully natural.

  His world was divided simply. He lived—as well as he could—among things green and soft and pliant, which had limited use and from which humanity had once sprung. But food came mostly from the vats of Troughs, or the rare damp warrens of the ancient, human-made Casas. Remnants of the once-rich Snowglade ecosphere bloomed in spots, mostly grasslands and desert-tough vines. This realm grew wild only in the outlands, beyond the cities and pathways of the mechs.

  On the other side of a hazy division lay most of his planet. The mechs pressed against the shrinking green oases. Most of Snowglade was now open, barren wasteland, used for resources. Dotted around Snowglade were ceramo-sculpted mechwarrens. Killeen had glimpsed one once, when the Family blundered over a mountain range and paid the price of six lost members. It was a glassy, steepled thing that crackled with electromagnetic crosstalk. Its deep, upwelling voice had rung through Killeen’s sensorium, immensely threatening.

  Killeen accepted as simple fact that those distant and feared zones were an entirely natural way for intelligence to go forward. The humming, rotating processes around him were unremarkable, obvious. No one in humanity doubted this, for they came from a heritage rung down through centuries, in which mechs had bested the Families in every way. Once Snowglade had been a chilly but greenfilled world. Now the dryness grew, the very air sucked moisture from the throats of men. And mechs seemed to have done it all.

  They most certainly did.

  He was numbed by the incessant drumroll of mech-work around him. Arthur’s intrusion at first seemed a vagrant thought of his own. “What means?”

  The mech civilization undertook centuries ago to change the ecology of Snowglade. They do not function well in the warm, wet world it was.

  “What’s so bad about it?”

  Moisture and heat quickly bring rust. Snowglade had Alpine woods once, and vast grasslands that stretched from horizon to horizon. The mechs came to see if the planet was useful for their projects, and seem to have decided that it was, though of course it needed what they would call, I quite believe, improvement.

  Killeen stopped beside a carboglass device that was milling what looked like large spheres of matted, chromed sponge. “How you know?”

  I was there. We were first aware of them as simple explorers. The Clans had set up their Citadels—

  “There were more than one?”

  Arthur’s smoothcoursing voice paused only momentarily in surprise:

  Oh yes, I forget so readily now. You are young. We once had glorious things. When we came to Snowglade we were under no illusion that we were safe from mechlife. But we could scarcely cover an entire planet, protect every—

  “Yeasay, get on with it.” He had never heard of anything truly manmade other than the Citadel, only of things fashioned from mechcraft or stolen outright. The Aspect frequently talked of things which Killeen knew did not exist and so he thought they were lies or brags or else tall tales to hold Killeen’s attention. The contrast of these past accounts with their present condition had made the Family seldom consult the Aspects.

  The mechs did not confront us directly. Some felt that the mechs scarcely noticed us, or else thought we were local lifeforms of no real consequence—a view which I suppose history has confirmed, with sad consequences for us all. At any rate—

  Here Arthur obviously sensed Killeen’s impatience. His voice speeded up until the images and thoughts came in bursting bluebright clots, vivid pictures delivered without explanation, letting Arthur’s remembered experience explode directly into Killeen:

  We noticed first that winters deepened and there was less rain. Our crops dwindled. We had to undertake some extensive breeding and genetic alterations to harden them against the warped seasons.

  “You savvyed weather?” Killeen was impressed, but wished there was some way he could keep Arthur from knowing. There wasn’t, of course. He felt the Aspect’s pleased aura.

  Understood, yes—or so we confidently thought. Only slowly did we realize that the mechs were deliberately bringing clouds of gas and dust into Snowglade’s planetary path. They even used fineground asteroids. This brought the dust-storms we thought were a passing feature of the changing weather, but were in fact causing that weather. The dust smothered our equatorial regions. Somehow, the mechs contrived to evaporate a great deal of the icepack at the poles. This drove Snowglade toward a dryer, cooler climate, using processes I cannot guess. Obviously the mech civilizations have worked this kind of planetary engineering before, and they well understood the thousands of small side effects one must calculate. It was a feat of awesome power, and one carried out so gradually we had no intimation of truly fundamental change until centuries had passed. By then our crops had withered and we were eking out an existence at the Citadels, planting more and reaping less with each passing year. We were innocent, thinking the mechs at best had not detected us, or at least
would ignore us. More the fools, we!

  Killeen picked up one of the chromed balls and tossed it to the floor. It shattered into a thousand strands of delicate spooling fiber, each glinting in the harsh fluorolight. He concentrated on Arthur’s fastpassing talk. Such ancient knowledge he had always ignored, figuring that Fanny would tell them what was useful. Ledroff, he knew, was similarly ignorant. “The Splashes’re still left,” he said.

  So paltry were our imaginations that we did not at first recognize the significance of the Splashes. Snowglade follows a near-circular orbit around Denix. Denix itself loops about the Eater in a long ellipse. All our time on Snowglade had been spent in the warm middle portion of its orbit—after the glacial stage, but before Denix approaches the Eater. Here:

  A three-color 3D diagram strobed in Killeen’s left eye. An iceblue dot circled a flame-red globe. Then point of view telescoped and the globe looped around a hotpoint swirl of colors: the Eater. Numbers and words Killeen could not read gave slide-sheets of data.

  “Yeah.” Killeen rummaged for something to say. “Pretty.”

  I do not work out such intricate aids for your artistic appreciation.

  Arthur’s voice was stern, piqued. Killeen dutifully shut his right eye. The diagram swelled, showing Snowglade as a mottled dry disk. Sandy blotches blended into gray, ribbed mesas.

  The view was time-sped. Centuries flickered by. Glinting sheets of ice dwindled. Clouds dispersed. Deserts gnawed at the flanks of flinty mountain ranges.

  This is what they have done to approach the climate which mechs desire. And then—

  Three notes piped in his right ear, an assembly-call. “Look, gotta go,” Killeen said with relief.

  Into his right eye popped a 2D map to guide him to Ledroff.

  SEVEN

  Killeen could see Ledroff was holding a meeting as he approached. Five Family were sitting on a big brassglass machine at the end of a tin-roofed assembly shed.

  “—since we silenced the managers quickstyle, there’s prob’ly no mayday, no outbound screamers, nothing.” Ledroff was saying as Killeen dropped down on a polished rampart.