Great Sky River

by Gregory Benford

  “Dad…what…?”

  Killeen looked into the upraised, trustful face. “I… the laying-low. Guess I let it get me.”

  “Looked like alky,” Toby said sardonically.

  “The alky was a way out.”

  “Thought it was… Ledroff, maybe.”

  Toby was trying to comfort him, Killeen saw, and thought that being direct was the best way. Or maybe Toby simply wasn’t old enough to know how to talk and say nothing at the same time.

  Killeen nodded slowly, so his head didn’t ache so much. It was all coming back. “Ledroff…”

  “After the laying-low songs,” Toby said matter-of-factly, “he talked some.”

  “I remember…” A blur.

  “Decided we’d head for a Casa.”

  “Great. He got any idea where one is?”

  Toby shook his head. “Hesay lots, but not that.”

  “ ’Cause he dunno.”

  “Family liked how he talked, though.”

  “He make sense?”

  Guardedly: “Some.”

  “What’d I say?”

  “Nothin’ that went over real well.”

  “Oh.” Killeen couldn’t recall any of this. “I get much support?”

  “Some. Paid off lots better for Ledroff.”

  Killeen shook his thick hair free of droplets, wrung it in both hands. “Huh? How come?”

  “They made him Cap’n.”

  Killeen stopped, dumbstruck. “Cap’n?”

  “Yeafold, the voting was. Ever’body but you.”

  “Where was I?”

  Toby shrugged, a silent way to say that Killeen had been insensible by then.

  “We got better than Ledroff. Why, Jocelyn’s—”

  “He talks good.” Toby didn’t have to say better than you, drunk, but he didn’t need to. Killeen knew the Family thought he was good but unreliable, and not really old enough to be Cap’n anyway. Even if Fanny had been training him, same as Ledroff and Jocelyn.

  Until now Killeen had been glad to have them think that way, too. It kept them from always coming to him with disputes to settle, intrigues, the rest of it. Every Family had that, and on the run everybody whined more and sought shelter in the casting of words around their problems.

  “Well, maybe Ledroff will have some ideas after all,” Killeen said lamely.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I got look after you, anyway.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Something distracted him from his son’s guarded, puzzled expression—a small warning somewhere in the back of his mind. He brushed it aside. Time to scheme later. Right now he wanted to gain back some of his son’s respect.

  “You don’t really believe that,” Toby said solemnly, accusingly.

  “Well, let’s give him a chance.” Killeen climbed back into his overalls, scratching where the water hadn’t taken all the scum from his skin.

  “You figure he’s any good?” Toby persisted.

  “Well…” There was an obligation not to badmouth the Cap’n. Boys didn’t understand that.

  “Dad, you could’ve talked sense into them.”

  “Look, son, I don’t want to mess in that. Got enough just lookin’ after you.” Killeen sat and began drawing on his hydraulic boots.

  “You could’ve.”

  “Yea… well…” Killeen had no words. Ledroff had made him look stupid before he’d started drinking, he remembered that now. The man had been playing for support. Calculating that Killeen would drown his grief in alky. So Ledroff had held up the Witnessing until Killeen was thick into the sauce.

  “Well, I know I… I had a problem….”

  “Sure did.”

  “Guess I let it get away from me.”

  Toby swallowed with difficulty. “Y’shouldn’t do that”

  “Yeasay… it’s just…”

  “Fanny. I know.”

  “Fanny.” Last night the full weight of it had come in on him. He would never see that weathered, crusty face again. Never hear the gravel-voiced jokes. Never.

  Killeen rummaged for a way to deflect the talk. “Come on, let’s go outside.” He pulled on his helmet, secured it.

  Suspiciously: “What for?”

  He reflected wryly that Toby could see around him pretty easily, and only twelve years old at that. Even better evidence that he wasn’t cut out to be Cap’n. Everybody would guess his moves before he knew them himself. “Have a look at the land, now we’re not so tired.”

  “If Ledroff lets us,” Toby said sarcastically.

  “Don’t be so—”

  A faint tinny sound, high up.

  “Huh?” Toby asked.

  “Naysay!”

  Toby didn’t hear the sound. The boy opened his mouth to say something more, eyes serious and adamant. Killeen clapped a hand over the mouth and sent a whispery red Mayday to the Family. Something coming. But not on the floor.

  Through the long hollow bay Killeen heard the Family furtively snatch weapons from clips, shuffle across the tile deck, fade into hiding places. Quick, unhesitating, almost instinctual.

  Killeen pushed Toby into a hollow beneath a steaming sulfurous vat. The boy protested, wanting to see what would happen. Killeen kept a firm hand on the boy’s chest as he listened, figured.

  Anything downlooking in the IR would see the vats ripe in red. Hard to pick out humans, then. Adequate shelter for the moment, but the Family would be pinned down. Once the ones up above were spread widely, each human who emerged would be a ripe moving blob, target-simple.

  Killeen activated his boots. He stepped clear and leaped for the rim of the nearest vat. He landed unsteadily on the narrow steel ledge, felt his balance going. If he was lucky his IR image blended with the vat vapor. He wobbled, trying to see above, inhaling a rank biting lungful.

  A tinny clank to his left.

  He hesitated, starting to get scared. His arms wind-milled to keep steady.

  Another clank.

  He leaped. Off at an angle this time, vector chosen more by his toppling than by his plan.

  He soared into the high arching vault. A sudden coldness invaded his chest and he felt a thousand hostile eyes probe him. He did not know the smooth curve he followed was a parabola but sensed immediately that he would hang too long at the apex, too warm and radiant against the cold ceiling. So as he passed a broad girder he lunged and grasped it. He hauled himself onto a rough shelf deep in rust flakes.

  He rolled, lost his grip, almost fell off the other side. The dust of ages prickled his nose. The slumbering dark seemed shot through with flashes of yellow and ivory. Killeen got to his hands and knees and blinked to let his eyes adjust.

  He was staring into the face of a mech. It was a three-eyed navvy, with skin of burnished organiform and blunt brass seize-and-draw hands. It wasn’t a fighter but it lunged at him, face coming up fast in Killeen’s still-speckled vision.

  He jerked a ramrod launcher from his belt and held it forward and the navvy—knowing nothing of fighting, and obviously commandeered by some higher form, enlisted for this—slammed into it. The sharp point sensed the mech coming and darted sideways to the softest spot. Killeen held it firmly and felt the point go in, just beneath a thin ceramic slitvent. The point found a circuit, worked its magic, and the mech abruptly froze.

  But this was just a simple navvy. Killeen rolled left to see around it. Across the chasm were further webbed girders, solid black lines scratched in gray gloom. Something skittered along one. No, three. Opalescent forms moving in quick little rushes, surefooted.

  And beyond, in gathering muskgloom, were two more. They had traction clasps which clamped them to the girders and permitted easy movement. Long bodies, a feathery quality to their gliding gait. And between the wedgelines of girders, smaller forms prowled among the knobby iron struts.

  Killeen’s tongue touched his farthest back tooth a certain way and he sent Stay still. They’re up top, on a low-frequency channel he would never understand but had used throughout
his life:

  His only advantage was the navvy body. He pulled a pulse pistol from the belt and awkwardly leaned around the lifeless hulk. The nearest target was coming his way, perhaps curious but more likely following a search pattern.

  Below, the vats fumed covering vapors. Killeen flashed a quick look in the IR and saw a mottled haze, pinpricked by bright sources which might be human. As soon as this bunch of mechs scanned the floor, they would select targets, he knew.

  He shot the first one clean. Its fore-eyes flared blue and then it died. The next target started to turn his way. He kicked hard at the navvy body. It rocked unsteadily. That would make it look active. Immediately something smacked into it, delivering crackling blue webs.

  All right. That would tell them that this mech was dead and the real target had to be elsewhere. Good enough. He kicked it again and it teetered. A second bolt hit it and blew a tread off the far side. The navvy wrenched sideways and fell, exposing Killeen.

  He was ready and fired quickly at anything he could see. Already an illusion of misty orange leaped into his right eye. He knew they would blind him if they could find the right key into his nervous system.

  Two more dim profiles shot at the mech as it fell. He traced them by their sudden spurts of emission in the radio. He thought he had hit them. Then the mech struck the deck below with a splintering crash. It roared in his ears, which had enhanced themselves without his thinking of it. The crash brought cries of surprise in his inner ear, from the Family.

  A bright green volley glared at his right. A crisp sputtering answered, bringing the descending hurrriiii of a wounded mech.

  A hoarse shout of Got ’im! and more firing.

  Killeen felt the odd whoooom of passing bolts. If one struck it could wriggle into his circuits, seize his nerves or worse. He fired back at the source. The mechs were of a class he could not tell, but they moved quickly in the gloom and were not mere scavengers. They did not aim to kill, but to probe and subvert.

  There! Up!

  Crossin’to you, Jake.

  Trackin’x Watch—

  A white glare.

  Jake!

  The sudden brightness blinded Killeen for a moment. He kept his head down while his systems adjusted and when he looked up again there were fewer mech-signatures in the IR.

  In his inner ear hoarse voices shouted.

  Ledroff gave cool commands.

  Someone was counting dead mechs but Killeen paid no attention. He was looking for movement among the vats.

  Down a shrouded lane below came something slick. It had a narrow, ferret head and oblong body. Killeen recognized it: a Crafter.

  The Crafter slipped among repair modules and threaded its way quickly through a spare-parts bin. Spindly legs jerked and found purchase.

  A Crafter was not a fighter or forager. They were smart, though, able to organize navvy teams. Surely this one would not usually care about a band of scavengers which had blundered into its resting station.

  But it had organized the navvys up here as a diversion while it crept below. That meant that the Crafter either felt itself threatened or else had an injunction specifically to act against humans, even if that was not its main job.

  And it was only meters away from the cubby where Toby crouched.

  Killeen knew he could not penetrate the Crafter’s upper body with a bolt. Only his ramrod could.

  He got to his feet, crouched low, and judged distances. A beamed message to Toby would alert the Crafter. He perched to jump and—

  —whooooom—a blurring, clawing cloud flooded him with brittle images of crisp yellow deserts, gritty sand, sicksweet smell of roasting flesh—all scrambled and coming fastfurious into him. He lost his balance, felt his hands and feet go coldhard numb.

  He jumped anyway.

  The deck rushed up at him and he leaned forward, sensing nothing in his body but able to direct his sawdust hollow hands to thrust forward on the ramrod. Wind whistled. The Crafter gleamed metalpure in pale descending light. The ramrod quivered into life, its head turning as its minute sensors sought and savored. The Crafter’s ceramic sheen beckoned it.

  Killeen hit the Crafter boots first and rocked forward. The ramrod point plunged in and he felt it snake and seek and bite hard. A fast jolt of electricity shot through him and shorted to the self-ground of the Crafter, its power source exhausting itself in a snapping prickly surge.

  It whined and froze.

  Killeen lay on it for long moments, unscrambling his senses.

  Something strong had hit him just before he dived. He listened to distant silky shouts and tried to tag the voices with names. They were all saying something about Jake but for a while he could not untangle the mingled threads.

  Only as he stiffly picked himself off the curved carbochrome back of the Crafter did he understand: Jake-the-Shaper was dead. Not just killed, but suredead. Something up among the halfdark girders had found Jake, sucked him of self, and was now gone.

  Toby swam into his vision, leaned him back against the Crafter cowling. His son popped a drink into Killeen’s mouth and spoke to him anxiously. Killeen muttered something, his voice a dry croak. Slowly, the world came back.

  Ledroff came clumping down the sky, bounding among the now-ordinary girders, torchlit in orange. Ledroff was in a pureblind rage, eyes glowering. Five women searched the struts for the things that had attacked, but there was nothing left. Ledroff saw Killeen leaning against the Crafter’s ceramo-shank and landed a few steps away, his legs wheezing with the impact.

  “What’d you do?”

  “Heard ’em coming. Went up top.” Killeen squeezed fingers against his eyesockets, trying to make them trigger over to normal vision.

  “You shoot first?”

  “Sure.” Killeen felt his eyes click back to normal. The world leaped toward him, then steadied.

  “I naysayed shooting.”

  “Wasn’t time to ask.”

  “Damnfool! These’re ordinary mechs. They wouldn’t’ve left us if you hadn’t—”

  “Belay the noughtsay, Ledroff. They were directed.”

  Ledroff’s face bunched into a grimace of disbelief. “By what?”

  Killeen slapped the Crafter.

  “This’s a laborer,” Ledroff said dismissively. “It wouldn’t hunt us.”

  “It did. Way I figure, we surprised it while it was laid up in this Trough, getting fixed. Toby found the parts, ’member?”

  “Coulda been left here anytime.”

  “Navvys woulda picked up the parts. Crafter dropped them and finished up its repair job quick, once it heard us comin’ in.”

  “Took its navvys with it?”

  “Looks like. Those mechs up there, you give ’em a look. Modified. Crafter’s good at that. It heard us, backed off. Thought things through. Built a little raiding party while we were resting up last night.”

  Ledroff scowled. “Maybe.”

  Killeen sighed. “Hasta be.”

  Toby put in, “That’s what happened.”

  Ledroff smiled at the boy. “I’ll decide that.”

  Killeen was about to spit back a sharp reply when Jocelyn came up hurriedly and said, “Cap’n, we tried with Jake. Couldn’t save even a scrap.”

  Ledroff nodded soberly. Hearing Ledroff addressed as Cap’n startled Killeen. He was going to have to take orders from this man.

  Ledroff already carried the mantle of the Cap’ncy with unconscious gravity. He said, as though to himself, “Point is, what’d the Crafter want?”

  “Kill us,” the boy said with horrible simplicity.

  “Crafters make things, Toby,” Ledroff said. He lifted an extruder arm from the burntout carcass and hefted it. “They don’t hunt humans.”

  “Till now,” Killeen said. “Till now.”

  FOUR

  Two dead in two days. Suredead. Gone.

  The Family was thus diminished more than through the loss of three or even four to the ordinary death. Centuries had piled upon them this injun
ction: that while the shuddering final gasp of the body was a tragedy to the person, it need not hurt so deeply those who loved the vanquished soul.

  If Fanny or Jake had lingered there would have been time. A few Family members carried the small intricate gear which could extract vital fractions of the neardead—quickly, deftly, gathering up threads of pastlife and personality.

  But something in the rafting girders had aimed at Jake the most awful of weapons. The suredeath was, until now, encountered only in the Marauder mechs.

  The thing above had escaped. If it was a mere navvy, or even another Crafter, that meant the mechs had added another hateful ability to their riverrun of innovation.

  Two suredead. So deep a wound made it impossible for the Family to leave the Trough that day. Wisdom would have forced them out, away from such a betrayed trap, but wisdom comes only from reflection. The Family mourned and hated, both acts sapping them of purpose.

  In vengeance Killeen fell upon the Crafter. He kicked in plates, ripped away whipwire antennae. The Family gathered and in pureblind rage they stripped the Crafter clean. They yanked free the parts and servos, booty used to maintain their own suits. Over the finely machined carcass they crawled, pillaging the finest workmechship of factories men had never seen and never would.

  Mourning Jake-the-Shaper, women savagely ripped away delicate finetuned components, slashed through orchestrated constellations in copper and silicon, and tossed aside what they neither recognized nor could use. This was almost all of the Crafter, for none in the Family knew how such things worked. The most able of them could only connect modular parts, trusting her eye to find the right element. Of theory they had little, of understanding even less. Long eras of hardship and flight had hammered their once-rich heritage of knowledge into flat, rigid rules of thumb.

  In place of science they had simple pictures, rules for using the color-coded wires which carried unknown entities: Volts, Amps, Ohms. These were the names of spirits who lived somehow in the mechs and could be broken to the will of humanity. Currents, they knew, flowed like water and did silent work. Clearly, the shiny wreaths of golden wire and perfectly machined onyx squares somehow bossed the currents. Electrons were tiny beasts who drove the motions of larger beasts; such was obvious.