Great Sky River

by Gregory Benford

  Killeen liked his hair done as finely as any. It was long, with rumpled currents working into unmanageable snarls at his neck. Undoing the damage of the march would take patience.

  He decided that this was not the right moment to ask Jocelyn. He had paid little attention to her of late, had little feeling for her beyond the simple, automatic brotherhood he gave any other of the Family. They had slept together—fitfully, as all things were now—for years. But a hundred days ago the Family had decided in Whole Council to numb the sex centers of each member.

  It was a necessary move, even overdue. Killeen had voted for it himself. They could not squander the energy, psychic and physical alike, which men and women expended on each other. It was the firmest measure of their desperation. Sex was a great bonding. But alertness and single-minded energy rewarded the hunted with survival. The Family had learned this sorely.

  There was far more to the transcending magic between men and women than the chip-controlled sexcen. He felt this whenever he spoke to Jocelyn. Old resonances rang in him, coiling pressures unfurled.

  But it was never with Jocelyn the way it had been with Veronica. He knew now that it never would be. That had passed from his life.

  Still, they could share the pleasures of grooming. They moved continually, every frag of packmass weighing on the tip-edge of survival, and hair had become their sole remaining mirror of self pride. They combed and slicked and pigmented themselves, against the raw rub of their world. Plucking beauty from a tangled, smelly mat brought some small refuge.

  The sweetyeast had finished its work. Cermo had dropped a pinch of primer into vats as soon as the Family entered. Long ago, the mechs had converted their organic proteins, made the molecules helix in the sense opposite to what humans could digest. Cermo’s precious primer—a dwindling legacy of the Citadel—coiled the helix back, to human use.

  Cermo and Killeen popped the release valve on a big vat and portioned bowls of froth out to the eager Family. To force the valve, Killeen used the leg strut he had taken from the Mantis. It seemed right to use a trophy as a pilfer tool.

  When Killeen felt the sugary sap working in him, bringing an emberburn of interest, he lurched to his feet again and went to pace through the Trough. Its long, inky corridors reeked of coarse full grain, of buttery soup, or ripe tastes unnameable.

  It could have been a thousand years since a Crafter or Stalker came here, seeking food. Yet the Trough murmured and cooked on. Its repair displays still offered themselves, articulated arms yawning for the embrace of a mech. Electrical auras buzzed, trying to entice vagrant machines with indecipherable crackling promises of renewed energies. The worn or damaged mechs who wandered into a Trough might know only dimly what they needed, or that they needed anything at all. The Trough seduced them with sensuous lubrication, with fresh clip-in components, with rich mechwealth humans could tap only fractionally.

  Killeen found a huge cavern in which blue-green lichen hung in strands, fluttering in the passing almond-rich breeze. Trompers liked those, he knew. A mere tongue-lick would kill a fullgrown man.

  In a side passage were stacks of grease-paste. Some said mechs ate the slimy nuggets, while others thought it was a lubricant. Killeen slashed open cases, watching it shower out, cursing under his breath. If humans starved, so would mechs.

  Another cavern offered great mossy black slabs. Snouts used those to replace living polybind joints. Killeen’s father had shown him all these things, knew their function. But now the Family could use only what it could carry.

  “Dad?”

  Killeen was startled. “Naysay!” he called softly, swiftly. “Bear on my spark.”

  “Why?” came Toby’s stillsoft voice, all electrical.

  “Naysay!”

  Toby came flitting through the pools of shadow, between vast vats of fuming vapors. The boy automatically moved to take advantage of light’s inky confusions, as twelve hard years had taught him.

  Toby reached his father and gazed up at him in the amber halflight. His face was unmarked by fear, dark eyes open to a world of endless new adventure. “Why be so quiet?”

  “If there’re defense mechs, they’d hide far back in here.”

  “Jazz! You think there might be?”

  Killeen didn’t, really, but anything that made the boy cautious was useful. “Suresay, I would.”

  “I naysaw any,” Toby said breathlessly. As did all members of the Family, they grasped and patted each other in the dark, hands speaking, trusting the human press of flesh over all other signatures.

  “They carry cutters. Slice you spinewise in the dark.” He cuffed Toby slightly, grinning.

  “I cut them.”

  “Noway nosay.”

  “I will.”

  “With what?”

  “This.”

  Toby produced a forked circuit-choker. It had long prongs that could wriggle into any mech’s input hole. Some said the senstive tips were living-tech, organic.

  “Where’d you get that?”

  Toby smiled impishly. His bright eyes danced merrily as he read his Dad’s puzzlement. “Junkpile.”

  “Where?” Killeen tried not to let his concern show.

  “C’mon.”

  Toby was starved for playmates. In the years since Calamity, the Family had been forced to wander, never spending more than a few days in a single place. Any longer and some silent alarm might bring Lancers or worse.

  So the boys and girls of the Family had never known permanence, never paused anyplace to build a play fort or learn the intricacies of shared, invented games. Watching Toby bound away into the veined halfdusk, Killeen wondered if Toby needed games at all. To him their long flight from the Calamity was like a play of endless pursuit. Life was a game.

  Toby had seen dozens die, but with the effortless immortality of the young could shrug it off. The Family’s blighted history was still only a talked-about backdrop, weightless. And Toby was too young to understand the Aspects, though he knew that in some way the dead still lived through them. That was apparently enough.

  Ahead, Toby disappeared down a gloomy passage. Killeen had to stoop to follow, his nose filling with the musk of moldering grease.

  “Here,” Toby whispered.

  Killeen felt a chill steal over him as he poked at the pile of debris. Carbs, axles, sprocket drives, plugs and caps and tanks. Parts he recognized without understanding.

  All from a Marauder-class mech.

  All the latest designs.

  All burnished with use, but still showing silvershine where they’d been protected from the grit outside.

  “Good stuff,” Killeen said casually.

  “Yeafold, eh-say?”

  “Ummmm…” But parts of what?

  “Can I use it, then?”

  Killeen hefted a crosshead block. It was big enough to fit on a Stalker. “Uh, what?”

  Exasperated, Toby said, “This” holding out the circuit-choker.

  “Oh. What for?”

  “Kill navvys!”

  Killeen looked around, studying the pools of shadow. If a Stalker was in here, had heard the Family come through the hatch, and decided to bide its time…

  “Well?”

  Speculations. And a fidgety feeling. That was all.

  Killeen looked at his son and saw there the open testament of all that he could hope to pass on, the slender thread of his posterity. Yet Toby would not be fully what a human could be in this harsh world if he had his childhood stolen from him. He needed a sense of security, of certainties. And if Toby became fearful now, he would sleep poorly. Tomorrow he would be less swift.

  “Come on, we’ll go back, hit the food vats. Have some more chow.”

  “Awwww…”

  “Then we’ll go outside, maybe, nick some navvys.”

  Toby brightened. He was the last child in the Family. Mechs and accident and racking disease had stolen all the others. “Jazz!”

  Killeen got the boy to play a kind of hide and seek, with Toby
leading the way back. This let Killeen rear guard without seeming to do so, ears pricked. He sensed nothing strange. The caverns rang hollow, empty, waiting.

  When they reached the vats Toby was winded. Killeen found him a glob of sticky foam stuff that smelled of leather and spice. Then he went to Ledroff and described the mech parts.

  “So? I checked the whole place,” Ledroff said. “Had Jake-the-Shaper do it, too.”

  “Those parts weren’t old. Latest stuff.”

  “So a mech left ’em.”

  “And might be back.”

  “Might not, too.” Ledroff squinted at Killeen. His luxuriant black beard grew up to his eyes and hid his expression, but the cutting edge of Ledroff’s voice was clear enough.

  “You wanted we sack down in the valley, ’member?” Killeen said evenly.

  “So?”

  “Maybe you were right.”

  Ledroff shrugged elaborately. “Different now.”

  Something had changed since arriving here, something to give Ledroff assurance. Killeen shook his head. “It’s damnsight odd. Why’re parts left in a pile? Usually navvys take ’em.”

  Ledroff grinned, showing broad yellow teeth. He looked around at the few Family members within earshot and raised his voice. “What’s got you so jumpy?”

  “That Mantis today.”

  “Whatsay of it?” Ledroff demanded loudly.

  “Fanny said once that a Mantis, it works with others.”

  “What others?” Ledroff’s bushy eyebrows lowered, encasing his eyes in shadow.

  “There were a bunch of navvys in that valley.”

  “Near where the Mantis was?” Ledroff’s lips lingered on the words, turning them over for inspection.

  “Yea. Ten of ’em at least—”

  “Those can’t hunt us,” Ledroff said scornfully. “You’re getting addled.”

  Killeen smiled grimly. “You ever see a Marauder-class mech travel with navvys?”

  “I’d vex on mechs, not navvys.” Ledroff laughed loudly. The rhyming’s slight taunt confirmed Killeen’s suspicion. Ledroff was playing to the audience. But why?

  “A mech who has navvys can have other mechs. Stalkers. Or Lancers.”

  “You can be night guard, then,” Ledroff said mildly. “Put your vexings to good work.”

  He unstuck a gobbet of organic paste from his belt and offered it to Killeen. The Family nearby nodded, as if some point had been made, and went back to digesting their motley meals. Killeen only dimly sensed what Ledroff wanted with such talk, but decided to let it go. Fanny’s death had fair well unhinged them all.

  Killeen took the food and ate, an age-old sign of comradeship. Ledroff smiled and walked off. Toby came from seeking more sweet and thumped down beside his father, gesturing at Ledroff. “What wanted?”

  “Talk of the laying-low,” Killeen said. No reason to bother the boy with his own misgivings.

  “When’ll it be?”

  “A while.”

  “Time for some more of the sticky?”

  “Sure.”

  Toby hesitated for a moment. “It’s okay, the sticky. But when’re we finding a Casa again?”

  “We’ll start looking tomorrow.”

  Toby seemed content with that stock answer, and went scampering off. Killeen found some rank but nourishing stuff that tasted like metal filings mixed in cardboard. His thumbnail chemsensor assured him it wasn’t poisoned; Marauders did a lot of that.

  He picked at the gummy stuff, thinking. He couldn’t remember how many months it had been since the Family had stayed in a Casa. A year, maybe—only he had no clear idea how much a year was. He knew only that it was more months than he could number on both hands. To know exactly would mean calling up one of his Aspects, and he did not like to do that.

  Unbidden, taking advantage of Killeen’s distraction, his Arthur Aspect spoke. The small, precise voice seemed to come from a spot just behind his right ear. In fact, the chip that carried Arthur and many more Aspects rode high in Killeen’s neck.

  Our last stay in a Casa was 1.27 years ago. Snowglade years, of course.

  “Uh-huh.”

  The Aspect was irritated at not having been called up for so long. This showed in the clipped, prissy exactness of its voice.

  The Family does not use the week or month any longer; otherwise I would speak in those terms. Such short time scales are artifacts of a settled people, adjusted to priorities of agriculture. In my day—

  “Don’t get on that,” Killeen snapped.

  I was merely pointing out that even a year ceases to have meaning now, since the mechs have obliterated the seasons.

  “Don’t wanna hear talk ’bout the old days.” He forced the Aspect back into the recesses of his mind. It squawked as he compressed it.

  Killeen listened to his Aspects less and less now. He’d had the Arthur Aspect only since the Calamity, and had consulted it seldom. Aspects had lived in eras when the Families dwelled in Citadels or the larger, ancient Arcologies. They knew damn little about being perpetually on the run. Even if they had, Killeen disliked their talk of how great things had been. Killeen always smothered Arthur’s techtalk. No matter how they phrased it, Aspects always came over as rebuking the Family for having fallen this low.

  Killeen didn’t want to hear that, or anything about the Mantis attack. Their long flight from it had let him keep his grief bottled up. But he could feel the press of it, and knew it had to vent.

  Ledroff was moving among the crouching figures of the Family, arranging the nightwatch. Soon the Witnessing would begin. They’d discuss Fanny’s death, and sing, and then choose the next Cap’n.

  Killeen got up, his legs stiff from hard running, back tight and aching. But he would have to dance his respect to Fanny, sing the hoarse cries of farewell.

  “One good thing for that,” he muttered to himself. He had not been thinking of it, but now his nose caught the thick, swarming savor of alcohol vapor from a nearby vat.

  Troughs produced it as a side effect of their endless chemcycling. An old story held that mechs got high on alky, too, though there was no evidence of it. Come to think of it, there was no proof that mechs got high at all, Killeen thought.

  He didn’t like alky as much as the sensos you got in a Casa, nobody did. But alky would get him through the laying-low. He needed it. Yes. Yes. He followed his nose.

  THREE

  Killeen woke with a technicolor headache.

  Ledroff’s voice came booming down from somewhere high in the air. Killeen rolled over and blearily realized he had fallen asleep on his watch.

  “Lazeball!” Ledroff shouted at him. “Up!”

  “I… what…”

  “Naysay you anything. Up!”

  Killeen got to his hands and knees, feeling every muscle stretch tight and stingsore.

  Ledroff kicked him in the butt. Killeen yelped. He sprawled. A damp moldering smell rushed up into his nostrils, sharp and biting.

  Ledroff grabbed his collar and jerked him to his feet. Killeen staggered forward, pushed by the rough, callused hands of other men. His legs were wooden stumps. The hollow cavern swerved eerily. Women hooted, rebuking him. A hand cuffed his cheek. A muttered curse found strident echoes. The Family formed a grumbling circle in the dappled gray light. Ledroff marched Killeen to the center of it and booted him again in the ass.

  “Watchdrop,” Ledroff said simply, a plain indictment.

  “Drunk, he was!” a woman accused.

  Jake-the-Shaper, whose word carried far in the Family, said disgustedly, “Coulda got us raided.”

  Ledroff nodded. “Whatsay punishment?”

  The family didn’t hesitate to answer.

  “Three fullpouch!”

  “Naysay, four!”

  “My thermpack!”

  “Mine too!”

  “Let ’im carry my medkit.”

  “And canisters.”

  “All the canisters.”

  “Yeasay. He slept, let him stagger no
w.”

  Killeen kept his head bowed. He tried to remember what had happened. The alky, right. He’d had some. Done some dancing. Started sobbing, he remembered that. Drank some more…

  The Family bickered and joked and hooted. Idle rage, frustration—Ledroff orchestrated them to vent their feelings. Anger diffused into mere irritation. They finally settled on a penalty load for Killeen to carry: one fullpouch and the medkit, relieving two of the older women of a good third of their burden.

  “Take you it?” Ledroff demanded ritually.

  Killeen coughed hoarsely. “Uh, yea. Doubly yea.”

  Killeen then recited the sorrow-giving, letting the words trip out through swollen lips without having to think about them. Silence followed the ancient sayings.

  Ledroff laughed, breaking the remaining tension around the circle. His lips twisted in an unreadable expression, Ledroff made a joke about the stains on Killeen’s overalls. The Family chuckled. Killeen didn’t even look down to see. He knew he had fallen asleep on something sticky. He welcomed the laughter. To be the butt of a joke was nothing compared with the humiliation of not handling the alky, of falling asleep on watch.

  He didn’t look up to find his son’s eyes as Ledroff cuffed him aside. He felt a smarting in his eyes, perhaps from tears, but the roaring ache in his head made it impossible to cry. He would’ve liked to slink away, humiliated, but his mouth and throat were parched from the harsh malty alky. He walked unsteadily down an alleyway shadowed by a row of vats, away from the Family, until he found a spring of processed water. Someone had popped a feeder line, creating a frothing geyser. He slurped it up, stripped, washed himself in the bitterly cold spray. As he stood in the warming air, letting the breeze of a yawning duct dry him, Toby came from the inky recesses of a forging machine.