Great Sky River

by Gregory Benford

“Damn! Where’s Fornax?”

  Killeen touched the woman’s face. It felt clammy, spongy.

  “Lookit her hands.” Toby didn’t know to be worried.

  Killeen glanced around, saw no Fornax, nothing but some Rooks looking their way. “They’re taking big chunks of her sensorium. Living through it.”

  “They can see us?”

  Killeen hesitated. He didn’t want Toby to have to think about things like this, not added on to everything else that had happened. But the boy would wonder anyway, now that he’d seen. “Yeasay. When Aspects get like this, they drop the filters we have. They let everything flood in. Try grab all the world they can, while they can.”

  “Jazz…”

  “But if they overdo it—”

  The woman jumped to her feet. She began to dance frantically, kicking high with her boots, flailing her arms in impossible arcs. Her feet and hands were in the air at the same time, forming strange arches and rhythms. She crashed to the ground. Legs flailed and she kept dancing. She kicked wildly against the dirt and stones. By sheer effort she thrust herself upright again, legs still pumping wildly. Her whole body writhed in absurd fast-time, counterpointing every movement of hands or legs. Sweat jumped out all over her and yet her face remained impassive. She blinked incessantly as though strobe-cutting her vision, and her eyes rolled farther into her head. Her mouth opened. A low, guttural song. The notes slid into a moan as she heat-danced faster, throwing up a cloud of dust.

  Toby backed away, startled, his mouth turning down at the corners with dismay and fright. Killeen pushed him away farther and then leaped at the woman’s back. She twisted, all the while keeping up the mad rapt dance. She flailed at him open-handed. Her right foot caught him in the knee with a back kick that was part of the frantic syncopation and he went sprawling. He looked around. Family were running this way, but he could not see Fornax. The woman got back to her feet from sheer force of her drumming heels. She began to leap higher and higher, using her boots to perform huge, exaggerated pirouettes. Abruptly a soprano shriek burst from her.

  Killeen lunged at her again. This time he caught her as she prepared for another grand leap. He popped open a small capillary mound on her shoulder. With a wrench he rolled her back over his hip, thrusting his weight against her to stop her from moving.

  The capillary socket was an ageold feature of every human. It had been designed directly into the human DNA to give ready access to the brain. Using it demanded precise tools. Opening it required delicate adjustments. It was the most exacting portal in the body.

  Killeen stuck his finger in it.

  She howled, flexed—and went limp.

  Toby helped cradle her to the ground. Killeen clapped the capillary shut and was thumbing the tablock back in place when Fornax’s voice boomed from above. “Don’t open that. Don’t you know—and that’s Ann! One of ours!”

  “Yeasay,” Killeen said, getting to his feet. “I won’t open it.”

  “You—you’ve already popped it.” Fornax looked aghast, his pale lips pulled back above his scraggly beard.

  “No choice. Aspects were ridin’ her.”

  “You could’ve—”

  “Let her hurt herself, pull a muscle, pop a seam. Sure.”

  Fornax bristled. “That is a Rook Family matter!”

  Killeen saw Fornax was going to stand on principle and in that moment took his measure of the man. “Yeasay, and I apologize.”

  “You put your finger…”

  “Stops ’em, usually.”

  “You might’ve caused mental damage!” Fornax was still angry, unable to let go of it right away even in the face of an apology. Even as his eyes still flashed their stern admonition, his mouth pursed in momentary inner reflection. Killeen saw that the man let his emotions run on until his head caught up, put a brake on things. Not a good way to be Cap’n. At least Killeen knew that much.

  “Her Aspects got so much spunk, let them fix her mental stuff,” Killeen said.

  “Well now, I—”

  Toby burst in, “You weren’t here. Had do somethin’!”

  Killeen patted him on the shoulder, pleased and yet not wanting Fornax to get the idea the boy was a smartmouth. “Rooksay wins here, Toby.”

  Toby persisted, “But it—”

  A long, steaming moment passed between the two men.

  “Thanks for your help,” Fornax said gruffly, suddenly aware of others watching. “Both you,” nodding at the boy.

  Killeen touched his forehead in way of tribute. Fornax had made a good, quick change, showing the sort of control people expected of a Cap’n. He decided Fornax wasn’t half-bad. The march to come would be a finer, truer test. Still, he could see that Ledroff and Fornax might weather and grow into the kind of Cap’ns the Families so desperately needed. Neither of them was worth Fanny’s left thumb, but then, who was?

  They marched hard for two days. On the open, sun-washed plain their only safety lay in fluidity. Ledroff and Fornax kept the Families separated into two triangular wedges with three fore-scouts, four flanking, and three trailers. Marauders had a history of attacking from the rear flank, often using as approaching cover a ridgeline just crossed by the trailers.

  They headed inward, toward the apparent center of the Splash. They had only crude navigation and no one knew how old this Splash was. Yet as they skip-walked across sloped valleys the evidence gathered about them. Brambles gave way to thick-leaved bushes. Dry scrub slowly ebbed. Tufts of tan sprouted in the shadows. Streambeds yielded moist soil only a single spadeful down.

  Midafternoon of the second day, the Families were beginning subtly to intermingle. They traded encouragement and information about easier routes with the ease of worn veterans. Killeen could feel a slow melding. Perhaps the genetic and historical basis for keeping Families separate would recede before the tide of necessity and diminished numbers. But this was a detail, compared to their seldom-spoken yet always-felt dilemma. They sought refuge.

  They were a people seasoned in the Citadels, in the enveloping comforts of a fixed sanctuary. Only the daring, the brave and young, had gone forth from the Citadels to capture and steal from the mechciv. Now all the Family had to live as nomads. Their only hostels were the Troughs and the rare Casas. So they clung to the hope of some final resting site, some permanence in a reeling world.

  Killeen ruminated on this vaguely, glad that they had Cap’ns to confront such issues. He felt Arthur’s presence simmering in the back of his mind, and the cool, ironic voice arose:

  You realize, don’t you, that humanity started as nomads?

  “Back before the Citadels?”

  Far before that, of course. Surely you remember what I discussed before?

  “Damnation, I can’t recall everything! You’d rather talk than breathe, way I see it.”

  I’ve told you, I don’t have adequate maps of this Splash. It is recent. But I am sorry about that messy episode when you awoke two days ago. We are worried; and I suppose it does come out at the worst times for you, and in the worst way.

  “Just keep your place. No jabber. I got be sharp.”

  Let me merely add that the nomad way of life is genetically quite all right for us humans. Civilization is a relatively recent invention—

  “Mechciv you mean?”

  No, our civilization. Not simply the crude forms we had in the Citadels. The original human society. It was vast, glorious! They built the ships which brought us here—a voyage of incomprehensible distance. They came to make contact with the voices they could hear over radio. They—

  “Whose?”

  Arthur’s voice begrudged the fact:

  Well, apparently the transmissions were leakage from a faction of mech civilization. But understand, it spoke in a difficult code, one we may have misinterpreted. The original Captains were coming to find what the message promised—a library of all galactic knowledge. Think of it!— the collected writings and pictures and songs, who knows what wealth? The Captains’ ships could cru
ise just under the speed of light Even so, their voyage required over seventy thousand years. Such sacrifice—

  “They came to learn from mechs?” To Killeen this was as incomprehensible as learning from a stone, or the air. Mechs simply were, a force of nature beyond communication.

  Well, admittedly—

  Shibo’s high-pitched call came to him, —Duster!—from the other side of a narrow, stony valley. It jolted him from his running-reverie.

  The Families instantly dropped to the ground and sought shelter. Over a far mesa drifted a four-winged thing that glinted like finespun copper in the Eater’s slanting hotblue radiance. It had a light and lazy look, Killeen thought. He had not seen one for some time but this one did not have the determined straightline way to it.

  Shibo’s clipped voice showed she had made the same conclusion. —Duster empty. Looking.—

  “Figure it’s on its way back home? Surveying?” Killeen squinted at the slender sweptback body. No signs of the pale white dust that usually descended in a thin, precise stream.

  —It saw.—

  “Dunno if it pick us up. Pretty far away.”

  —Not dusting. Looking.—

  The Families lay downdoggo for a long while as the craft swooped and glided in elegant curves. Killeen appreciated its movement, waiting silent and unthinking for it to go. They had all learned long ago to let mechs pass unopposed unless the odds were lopsided for them. Against Dusters there were never any advantages.

  When the Duster dropped below the horizon they began a fast skip-walk in the opposite direction. Killeen had Toby come closer and watched the right near flank more often. The Marauders never worked with Dusters, as near as anyone could tell, but since the Mantis Killeen expected anything, everything.

  So it was that he heard the sound of metallic agony before the others. It wafted over his sensorium in a high, skimming note and then was gone. Killeen signaled to the rest and compiled a vector fix. It pointed to a nearby brush-choked arroyo.

  Killeen slipped through wiry brambles and glimpsed the source of the thin, microwave scream. A Rattler, absorbed in its work.

  The thing had seized a whole squad of alloy-navvys. The navvys were apparently trying to set up a processing plant next to a rich ore seam. The Rattler was devouring each, its belly already fired up. Killeen could hear the deep bass ground-shaking tremor as it melted them down into easily portable assets. A gut-roar came from the Rattler as it digested, its ceramo-ribs contracting with pops and groans as it forced navvys into its innards.

  Nearby, two burning hulks still fumed. They were the manager mechs that had been watching over this work crew. With these eliminated, the navvys could only squeak calls to their distant city. This far into the Splash, the Rattler’s own transport would be here to carry away the plunder before help arrived.

  Killeen signaled the others to stay back.

  Rattlers were not dangerous when working at their main tasks. Some Marauders were scavengers, like the Scrabblers or Snouts. They were fairly easy to avoid if you were quick and posted scouts. Others were agents in the incessant conflict between different mech cities. The Pickers and Rattlers and Stalkers had started to appear long before Killeen’s father’s time, seemingly in response to the inevitable scarcities of raw materials.

  Rattlers were elongated, treacherous machines which seemed to coil and recoil as they moved. They searched out low-level mechs of other cities and dismantled them, breaking them down for spare parts or simple metals. Their jointed, slipsliding skins housed long tubular smelters and foundries.

  Killeen had come upon one with his father, long ago. It had been trying to eat some minor mech. The Citadel had needed large-scale spare parts then, the kind that Marauders had in plenty.

  So their band had waited until the Rattler was fully distended, lying like a gorged tube of scratched aluminum, beginning to excrete ingots of ore.

  They had descended at that vulnerable moment and gutted it quick-clean, tearing away parts and frying its mainmind. They also ambushed the Rattler’s ore carriers, when they dutifully arrived.

  That had been one of the best times he had ever had with his father. Just the two of them, prowling the flanks of the scavenging band. Killeen had potted a Snout that carried edible foods for its organic parts. They had both stuffed themselves with the greasy goo.

  They had been out six days in all, and returning on the morning of the seventh they had learned that Killeen’s mother had died while they were gone. There was nothing they could have done. She had caught one of the plagues left over from the era when the mechs had tried to eliminate humanity through bioengineered virulence. Plagues seldom surfaced anymore, mostly because the biosphere was too weak to support them long. But even the old epidemics, lying dormant in some ditch, could mutate and infest again. Her death had brought Killeen and his father closer in the narrowing years before the Calamity.

  Staring at the gorging Rattler, Killeen felt the old struggle within himself. His vision narrowed to a red-rimmed halo around the booming, insufferably ugly thing. The pipings of the Family dimmed, his sensorium world fell away. Crisp lightning forked bluehot in his eyes. He seemed pitched forward, balancing on the balls of his feet, ready to rush in a satisfying pureblind rage, to bring desolation and dismemberment to the self-absorbed and smug-ugly Rattler.

  Then he felt a hand on his arm and Shibo whispered, “Still.”

  “I, I got—”

  “Go.”

  “Kill ’em all, the damned—”

  “Go now.”

  “I… I just…”

  Her hand lay cool and strong on him. He felt the tightness in him ebb. He sensed the others hanging back at the mouth of the arroyo, felt their puzzlement at why he had ventured this far in. “Needless. Rattler’s carriers arrive soon.”

  “I…”

  “Only way beat Marauders is learn them.”

  “But—”

  “Not risk self. Remember Toby.”

  “I… yeasay. Yeasay.”

  They left the Marauder to its meal.

  THREE

  They moved swiftly, driven by the mere glancing encounter with the Duster and Rattler. The slowly thickening vegetation around them had seemed an unspoken promise of verdant peace. Only as they put distance behind them did this assurance return.

  The Families whispered among themselves about the air’s soft moisture, the pale emerald grass, the twisted brown vines and creepers which sprouted from crevices and small sheltered basins. To find a Rattler obliviously doing its job in this surrounding undercut their unvoiced dream. It propelled them faster toward the center of the Splash.

  Killeen himself felt no such flight response. Marauders angered him without touching any longer the wellsprings of fear. To him they were a constant threat, hateful but natural.

  Even in the first moment of glimpsing the Rattler he had thought it blandly evil, a scene without any possible protagonist. The navvys being eaten as they cried for their distant protector were no less an ancient enemy than the Rattler which digested them. And even as red rage had seized him and his memories had swelled, he had taken the time to notice that the Rattler’s treads were snarled with brambles caught in the links. it was harder for mechs to move in the plant-clogged terrain here. Another small advantage. Another way that Splashes revived the once-green world.

  Ledroff called for a song. Across the comm sensorium soared an ancient Family march, composed far in the past by some great groundstriding marshal. Killeen let the pounding spirit of the music come into him. Family song poured from his throat.

  This was his favorite legacy, far better than the Aspects’ whole gobbled lifetimes of streaming talk. He liked this form of the melodic art especially, the forward tilt to it, the wonderful, sweeping Moze Art. How many generations back in the Family had the composer lived? Perhaps the man was a great-grandfather. Killeen would like to be able to claim close kinship. Arthur tried to blurt out some ancient lore, but Killeen was too transfixed by the artful
rhythms to pay attention.

  As he loped to the song’s surge and play he noted that the Family was moving faster. Ledroff had summoned up the firm rhythms to get them quickly away from the Rattler, damping fears. It had worked.

  —Duster!— someone cried.

  The music stopped abruptly.

  Killeen was caught in midstride. He glided for a long instant, hit, and rolled into a narrow dry rivulet. He sniffed through the long wavelengths. “No mechsmell.”

  He located Toby and then listened to the Families seeking shelter. Rook mothers and fathers called, plain tive and hysterical, for their children. Panic edged the sensorium.

  Shibo sent, —Naysay. Look.—

  He closeupped the horizon and at first could not believe what he saw. Had Angelique fouled his farseer? These flying objects looked distant, but they smelled to be close by.

  Shibo sent a clear, calm, —Birds.—

  Astonished, the Families got to their feet. They brushed off dirt and peered at the fluttering, living skyfog. Hundreds of specks darted and twittered above the bushes.

  For a long moment no one said anything. Then a cheer rang through the comm. Some of the younger ones had never seen a thing aloft not made of metal. They had thought only mechs ruled the air, much as their emissions stained the dawn sky a milky gray.

  Toby ran forward, shouting “Heyyea! Heyyea!” The tiny agents of organic life, instead of greeting him as a member of their kin, burst upward into a surprised, fleeing cloud. Toby blinked, startled.

  Killeen laughed. “You’ll have go easy with ’em.”

  Toby frowned. “Don’t they like us?”

  “Life’s born scared.”

  “Scared even of life?”

  “’Specially.”

  “Mechs aren’t.”

  “Mechs’re ’fraida mechs. ’Member those navvys calling Mayday back there?”

  Toby nodded decisively. “Mechs’re ’fraid us, too.”

  Killeen gave his son a wan smile, knowing exactly why the boy wanted to assert himself with such a baldly false declaration. “Maybe,” he answered mildly.

  “Are.” Toby fingered the burnished-steel disk pistol on his belt, unconsciously stroking this small emblem of power.