Great Sky River

by Gregory Benford

  Hatchet punched some instructions into the signifier circuits. There were hexagonal insert points embossed on the ceramo-metal wall. Killeen had never seen anyone make use of them.

  Hatchet did not even pause. He pulled small cylinders from his flap pockets and stuck them slowly into the holes. He turned each one until it clicked. Through his efficiency, nervousness glittered, like sky seen through speckled clouds. The team watched him with drawn faces.

  The portal’s square polymer gate slid aside. No one made a move through the arch.

  “This’s far as it goes,” Hatchet said, standing back. “Now…”

  Silence. Edgy glances. Killeen suddenly knew that this was where the Kings had suffered their two deaths.

  Hatchet said, “We need the boy.”

  “How?” Killeen said, his throat narrow and dry.

  “He’s got to crawl through that. Then null out the circuits on the other side.”

  “He can’t. No legs, remember?”

  “That’s the trick,” Hatchet said. “He’s the only one can do it.”

  “Have somebody else crawl.”

  “You don’t get it. Your boy, he’s got no Aspects. So he’s missing lots circuitry, the inset boards, all that. This gate senses that stuff.”

  “This is what the Crafter meant?” Killeen asked, stalling.

  “Sure. He saw it right away.” Hatchet’s eyes danced, alight with possibility. “We’ve never been able to get through here. The ’quipment to fix up Toby, it’s beyond this gate. The kid, he’s got less circuitry. The mechs’ve set this gate so it’ll catch even humans. We got practically no insets, compared with a mech—but this gate sees just a scrap.”

  “It killed your people.”

  “Yeasay. See, it’s not just that your boy’s got no Aspects,” Hatchet said. Now his face was concerned, reasonable. He spread both hands in a can’t-you-see? gesture. “The Renny, he figures with your boy’s legs out, there’s even less nerve-linked stuff for the gate pickups.”

  “You…” Killeen eyed the rest of the team. He would dearly love to ruin Hatchet right here, kick his balls to sour mush. But that wouldn’t save Toby.

  Sly and chilly the words came from the Cap’n of the Kings. “Want me to make it an order?”

  “You don’t know it’ll work.”

  “Renny figures it will. That’s why it asked about the boy back at the landing strip, right?”

  Killeen nodded.

  “Crafter’s not risking its precious circuits,” Shibo said dryly. But she saw the situation. She would back up Killeen but the decision was his. In the end nobody can carry another’s weight.

  Killeen saw that Hatchet had deliberately not told him any of this until now, when there was no time left to dispute it. “Even if the Crafter’s right, Toby can’t get through there.”

  Shibo started to agree. Hatchet held up his hand, his mouth set firmly. “Got arms, right? He can pull himself through.”

  Killeen stood rigid, unable to think of anything. He had to ward this off. But he had no time to develop reasoning, no argument against a Cap’n who had steered this whole raid toward this moment.

  Killeen reminded himself that Hatchet had been on many raids, knew things, had done things for the Crafter. Called the Renegade “he,” like it was human.

  Ever since Hatchet had heard Killeen arguing with the Crafter out loud, he had understood. And not told anyone else. Because it solved some problem Hatchet had. Because it opened some possibility….

  “What’s in there?” Killeen demanded.

  “Bioparts. Fact’ry, supplies, storage, ever’thing.”

  “The Crafter needs ’em?”

  “Yeah. He’ll give us a lot, we bring out what he needs.”

  “That’s worth so much?”

  Hatchet said confidently, “With the right parts, right ’quipment, yeasay. See, the Renny can get metal parts pretty easy. Biostuf’s harder. Mechs can’t ’facture bioparts so easy. So they guard it.”

  Arthur’s tinny voice darted in Killeen’s mind:

  I believe the mechs guard bioparts inventories precisely in order to thwart Renegades. Bioparts require more delicate manufacture. To suppress unauthorized use, biofactories are protected by such sensitive traps as this gate.

  Crafter say is big complex.

  We can get help here.

  Killeen sensed a faint, strobing contact between his Aspect and the Crafter. Good. They needed a guide and—

  Hatchet said warmly, “C’mon, Killeen. The Renny can fix up things. Your arm. Toby’s legs. What other choice you got?”

  Killeen stood for a long moment, not wanting to let the moment pass, trying to see a way clear. If he held on to the fractional seconds they could never add up to the awful moment when his son would have to—

  “Dad?”

  Killeen looked blankly down at Toby lying a short distance away. The carrysling folded around him, a tight-weave blanket above the pale, wan face.

  “Dad, I might’s well do it. I’m no use this way.”

  Written on Toby’s face was stubborn endurance and a thin despair his father had never seen. Killeen felt a coldness in his stomach. In the space of a heartbeat Killeen abruptly saw his son as another person, not as a principle or a legacy but as a separate intelligence, now able to plot his own path. Toby had in his own way made the sign that signified his mastery of his destiny. Now the covenants of the Family Bishop released Killeen from his persistent role. Killeen saw that he could gladly grasp at this. But he could not bring himself to do it.

  Shibo said quietly, “Toby right.”

  The team saw the moment for what it was, the crucial fulcrum that always must finally pivot a child’s world into something larger. The change could come in sanctified ritual or on the field of battle, but once it had come, the turning instant between father and son could never reverse.

  Killeen nodded. Toby had the right to risk. The right to die, if he chose.

  They pushed the boy as close as they could. The matrix of gate sensors was a woven strip of polyrich sheen that wrapped completely around the inside gate frame.

  It buzzed when Toby’s hand reached across the threshold.

  “Go on!” Hatchet urged.

  “Don’t bother him,” Killeen spat out fiercely. “Let him feel his way.”

  “Gate won’t wait long,” Hatchet said. “Hurry, boy.”

  Toby reached another hand forward. His errant fingernails were long and pale. His legs trailed behind him, limp and useless. Under his green tightweave jumper the legs already looked shrunken and pulpy, as though from long years of neglect. Toby got a good grip on the gate frame. Grunting, he pulled himself forward.

  “How long’s he got?” Shibo asked.

  “Well…” Hatchet licked his lips. “Early days, we had a girl. Hurt pretty bad. She tried to crawl through.”

  “Yeasay?” Killeen demanded.

  “She… I didn’t time it but… she was most the way through….”

  “Damn you! How long?”

  “She… she got further than this. But it was longer.

  I—”

  Killeen shouted at Toby, “Pull!”

  Sweat broke out on the boy’s chalky face. A quiet descended. Killeen could hear others draw in a breath and hold it.

  Toby’s fingers felt ahead and found a thin crack in the warped flooring. It was a polybind tile whose edge had curled up at a small angle. It provided enough of a lip for Toby’s fingernails to pry at it. The lip curved slightly. Toby got all his fingers on the edge and pulled. He came forward minutely. This brought him into reach of another tile. He got three fingers over the lip of it and grunted.

  Killeen could not see that the boy moved at all. The hard black frame of the gate seemed to swell in his vision until it filled his sight. Toby was halfway across it.

  The boy slid with infinitesimal scraping slowness. Killeen leaned as near as he could without intersecting the gate fields. The background whisper of mech traffic seemed t
o fall away.

  Toby inched forward. His legs dragged with a soft rasp.

  The gate abruptly clicked. A faint whine started.

  “What’s that?” Killeen blurted.

  Hatchet said, “Dunno. Time before, I don’t remember—”

  “Get him back!” one of the team called. Killeen did not know who it was or why they said it but the voice shook him. He took a step, hand stretched toward Toby’s feet. Maybe Killeen could yank him back in one quick movement, before the gate sensed the approach of the inset circuitry in his head.

  Fast. One quick movement.

  He stepped again. Reached down to grab Toby’s ankles—

  Shibo struck him hard on the shoulder. Off balance, he fell sideways.

  The gate whined louder.

  “Damn!” Killeen scrambled back to his feet.

  “Dad! Leave off!” Toby called.

  “But—”

  “I’ll… do… it….”

  The boy dragged himself on again, clutching some fragmentary edge so thin Killeen could not see it.

  Toby’s face was pressed into the slick surface so that he could reach as far ahead as possible. But that meant he could not see.

  The gate clicked.

  Toby’s face was filmed with sweat and dirt. Beneath that the skin was deathly pale with exertion. His hands grasped ahead and found nothing. The smooth flooring gave him no purchase.

  “Lookleft,” Shibo called softly. “Bump.”

  Toby ran his left hand along and found a ripple in the polished floor. He dragged himself a hand’s length.

  “Ahead now,” Killeen said. “Looks like a ridge.”

  Fingers caught on the lip of some buried cable cover. Toby stretched. This time he got four fingers of each hand barely over the edge. Only the tips caught. The boy gasped and then held his breath. His forearm muscles clenched.

  In the silence Killeen heard small popping noises. He looked around. The team was absolutely still. It took him a moment to realize that the sounds came from Toby.

  Each was distinct and clear. An instant passed before he realized what the sound was. Toby’s fingernails were snapping off.

  The boy bit his lip. Blood trickled down his chin.

  He expelled a breath like a cough. Somehow his fingers caught the lip right. He dragged forward.

  A hand’s length. Two. Three. His fingers scrabbled out ahead.

  The gate whine stopped. An absolute silence descended.

  Toby got up on his elbows. Grunted. Turned. Dug his elbows against the thin edge of tile that had brought him this far. Heaved. Wrenched himself sideways and—impossibly—rolled… forward… legs flapping over each other, carried by the hips… across the gate threshold.

  The gate gave three clear, sharp notes.

  “That’s the okay,” Hatchet said. His voice was tight and high. “See? Damn well knew it’d work. Just you flip those switches there, Toby.”

  Hatchet was still grinning, hands on hips, when Killeen clipped him hard on the point of his chin. Hatchet went down with a look of sudden, aggrieved puzzlement on his face.

  It was a dank, foul-smelling place.

  Crannies vented acrid clouds into a warm, moist atmosphere. Vats bubbled. Colloids flowed through transparent pipes that ascended high into a concealing murk.

  Killeen could not see the ceiling. The roiling clouds up there sometimes parted to show darker layers above. Flying mechs darted into the vapor on odd, looping trajectories.

  Go to left.

  Crafter wants in.

  The sliding gray intelligence that Killeen felt nibbling at the edge of his sensorium now quickened its rhythms. The Crafter was coming; he could feel it.

  The team moved fast along a narrow hallway. Killeen and Shibo had to labor to keep up, with Toby swaying in the carrysling between them. Killeen’s shoulders ached with a pain that came almost like spreading warmth. They passed between two colossal holding vats. Amber mist wafted into the air far above them.

  They reached another archway. This was triple the size of the one Toby had negotiated. Hatchet seemed to know this type. He plunged two cylinder keys into an inset lock. The iron-blue webmetal gate slid open. The Crafter was not in the open space beyond.

  Shibo asked, “Crafter here?”

  Killeen’s teeth worked at his lip. “Its directions said so. Somethin’ in here it wants. It don’t give a ratsrear ’bout us but it damn well better—”

  The Crafter abruptly shot into view. It moved so quickly Killeen saw it only as a suddenly expanding wedge of high-gloss metal. It bolted through the gate, ratcheting loudly. Its treads crunched to a stop near the team.

  Bud translated:

  Get on.

  Need speed.

  Killeen signaled to Hatchet, who nodded. Silently the humans swarmed up the Crafter’s side. Killeen held Toby on a mudguard over the treads. They barely got on before the Crafter started off at high speed. The Renegade passed some mechs which gave no sign of noticing, just kept up their eight-armed labors.

  They accelerated. Smears of light and shadow passed. The Crafter surged through narrow alleyways, its treads clattering. The humans held on against sudden lurches and assaulting chords of vibration.

  Killeen tried to place Toby higher but it was impossible. Sometimes the mudguard would shriek, scraping a corner as they rounded it. The second time this happened, half of Toby’s tightweave blanket ripped away.

  “Slow!” Killeen called. “We’ll—”

  The Crafter slammed to a stop. Killeen bundled Toby into what was left of the tightweave. He saw that the Crafter had stopped not for them but because this was a new manufacturing complex. Towers of sullen amber glass rose and twisted with byzantine grace. Fluids percolated in some, rushed like mountain streams in others. The ceiling flooded them with a harsh, ultraviolet glare. Killeen looked at his hand and could see black veins beneath the skin.

  Supplies this way.

  Come.

  The Crafter led them.

  The mech could barely squeeze through a narrow gap between two translucent, inverted cones which bubbled with noxious currents. Harsh brown layers of gas drifted silently overhead. Heavy air clasped at them, working moist cool fingers into their sinuses.

  They came into a gallery of identical pods. Green polyalum casings rose in identical stacks into the vapor sky above. Pipes led everywhere.

  “Hold,” Hatchet whispered. He gestured. A mech was working at the far end of the complex. It could not see the thin line of humans from this angle. The Crafter faded back behind a boxy housing.

  That’s smart mech.

  Multiple processor, class 3.

  Best it not sense us.

  “Can’t the Crafter shut it down?” Killeen asked.

  Others notice it gone.

  Crafter is afraid here.

  Must be quick.

  Killeen relayed the message to Hatchet and then soundlessly asked, What’s it doing to fix Toby?

  We go to special place.

  Crafter knows repairs done there.

  It better not be trying some trick, Killeen thought precisely. A veiled threat, though he doubted any of them could harm the Renegade.

  It says is honest.

  Must hurry though.

  Hatchet conferred with his people. The Kingsmen nodded, whispering. Cermo said the mech looked almost done with its job; it was cleaning up, putting tools away.

  “Too chancy to try a lateral maneuver,” Hatchet said. Everyone agreed. Nobody knew the way.

  They waited for the mech to move off. Killeen and Shibo put Toby down beside one of the pods. Killeen’s nerves had been leaping as they turned every fresh corner. His sensorium rippled with pungent hints. A leak dripped somewhere, amplified by the polished reflecting surfaces. Obscure rumblings spoke of fluid movements beneath their boots. Steam whistled from a vat.

  Killeen leaned against a polished bronze pod. This bewildering complex was far larger than anything his father had ever described. The Bis
hops had nibbled at the mere outlying fringe of something they could not understand. Here everything depended on stealth alone. There would be no hope of fighting or escaping, if they were caught. He wondered idly if any humans had found a way to live in such a labyrinth. Rats in the walls. Pests.

  He felt a click in the machinery behind him and turned to see. A window in the pod had phased into transparency. Beyond was a mass of something moving in pale blue light. He frowned, puzzled. Levers and pivots worked with patient energy beneath a glistening wet film. But there was something about the angle, the bulky pivot col lars….

  Legs. Human legs.

  They were all pumping. Steady. Relentless.

  The pivots were sockets. Ample hip joints were mounted to a shaft in the back wall. Thighs picked up the stroke of this steel shaft.

  Farther down, the turning joints were human knees. Green kneecaps flexed as the thigh muscles worked beneath pale yellow, transparent skin. The legs pumped down through stringy shanks. But the calf sinews did not taper into tendons that attached to ankles. Instead, at each completion of its pump, a leg bunched and drove hard against something coarse and leathery.

  He could see seven legs bunching and stroking, each at a different phase of the cycle. They delivered thrust to the complicated brown nexus where the foot should be, a power train that converted flywheel energy into a complex series of modulated crankshaft motions.

  Pump. Stroke.

  Flex. Turn. Kick.

  A slick sheen kept the parchment-yellow skin moist.

  He turned away, breathing hard.

  He had the impression that the arms and legs were growing, bulking out the muscles. But for what?

  He deliberately made himself not think of what he saw. There was no room in his mind for anything but essentials.

  His sensorium gave back a numbed hollow shock. At the base of his spine he felt a brimming warmth that was a temptation. The sensorium itself could move to protect itself. With stealthy fingers it reflexively tried to soothe the images in his mind.

  A tempting oblivion. To let a blank indifference ease an icy slab between him and the remorselessly pumping legs.