Great Sky River

by Gregory Benford

  Ledroff and Fornax had fallen to disagreeing at each rest stop. They kept their steadily running dispute well within Clan bounds, yet could not repress their edgy irri tation with each other. Even the pacing of their march was disputed, seemingly resolved, and disputed still again.

  Ledroff urged caution. Fornax wanted to reach the center of the Splash quickly, holding that it would be rich and rife with natural foods. Fornax kept leading the Rooks out ahead of the agreed two-pronged formation. Ledroff swore at Fornax over the comm, and once slammed his own helmet to the ground in exasperation. Since helmets were the hardest piece of mancraft to make, and nobody had spares for most of the chips a full one required, this was an act both striking and impressively crazed.

  They navigated by the sky. Both Families had long since lost their global survey gear. Denix gave them a sunset. Night was tempered by the Eater’s wide-cut swath across the sky, making a wan, silvery twilight. Both Families stopped to rest then. This often seemed the only concrete point of agreement between them.

  Killeen avoided this evening’s dispute by going on flank patrol. He took Toby with him. They walked in silence, letting their collective sensorium detect the latent caressing strum of hills and gnarled, stubby trees. It was harder here to catch the rippling tenor of distant mech movement, or sniff the oily tang of them. Life interfered. They picked up a scurrying, twittering symphony.

  “Dad?” Toby’s throat was raw from the day’s hard skip-walking.

  “Hear somethin’?”

  “No, nothin’ here. I was wonderin’, though.”

  “’Bout what?”

  “That woman couple days ago.”

  “The Aspect-crazed one.”

  “Yeasay.”

  Killeen had been expecting Toby to bring it up. “Most aren’t nearly so bad.”

  “She be all right?”

  “Prob’ly. Can walk now. Her Aspects’re still a li’l scared. Want live some.”

  “Crazy dancin’ the way she did? That’s livin’?”

  Toby stopped walking and turned toward his father. They stood lean and flat-muscled, shorn of padding and walkwear, stripped down to wrinkled jumpsuits. A wedge of the Eater’s broad disk stuck above the horizon, spattering blue-tinged shadows on Toby’s face and making it hard for Killeen to read. The boy’s mouth was twisted to one side, as though containing words that tasted bad.

  “She carries maybe dozen Aspects,” Killeen said. “They all try to run things, they…” He breathed deeply, struggling to explain a sensation beyond words. Of yammering mouse-voices. Of tiny hands pressing. Itching against your inner eyeballs. “They coming at you so fast, you can’t tell you-thinking from they-saying.”

  “Sounds… well…”

  “Terrible.”

  Toby’s mouth was still tight, the lips pulled around strangely. “Yeasay.”

  Killeen spread his hands in a gesture he hoped was casual. “Look, things’re running pretty foul right now. Ever’body’s jumpy. Aspects’re people, ’member. Just kind of shrunk, is all.”

  “Will they be like that when they ride me?”

  “Nobody said they’d ride you.” Killeen spoke this halflie in hopes that it would deflect the building anger he sensed behind the misshapen mouth, but he saw that it was useless.

  The words came out of the suddenly loosened lips, each one ejected like a spat tack. “Damn if they will!”

  “Can’t,” Killeen said rapidly. “You’re too young.”

  “I won’t, I tell you.”

  “Nobody’s talkin’ about it, son.” Killeen tried to reassure.

  “Soon’s we get situated, they’ll start in. I’m of age, damn near.”

  Killeen embraced his son so the boy did not have to struggle to say more. They both knew what he felt and that there was nothing either of them could do about it. Toby was growing fast, even while on the run continually. Soon somebody would notice and the Cap’n would have to answer to the Family as a whole why Toby wasn’t carrying an Aspect. There were many Aspects available, stored in chips that Ledroff toted on his right hip. Each could give the Family access to information or crafts that they might well need in a hurry sometime. And with the Rook woman available the insertion would be pretty easy.

  Killeen wished he could tell Toby that he’d stop them, delay the mounting of an Aspect on the boy. But they both knew he would have to obey if the Cap’n decided.

  “Look, I—”

  “It’s okay, Dad,” Toby said, his watery voice muffled against the rough tightweave of Killeen’s jumpsuit. “I know. I know.”

  Killeen sent Toby in after they completed the first wide circuit of the camp. The boy needed sleep, and Killeen needed to think.

  To carry an Aspect was of help to the Family but it could hobble a boy, bombard him with brittle confusions, set his fresh ideas among mutiny voices. The Family was in its worst situation ever. They had lived all right for a few years after the Calamity, laying up in Casas and Troughs for long chains of comforte days. Then there had been plenty of time to acquire an Aspect, to reconcile the tiny, disparate souls.

  But now they lived on the ragged edge. There was no sure refuge. The Aspects sensed the growing desperation among them all, smelled it in the back corners of the mind. If Toby was mounted, and soon after they had to hardmarch, or were attacked…

  Making the next several circuits, Killeen several times shook his head furiously as though to clear it. Each time he had carefully thought through their situation, and had envisioned Toby’s accepting an Aspect. He could not let that happen. Yet even stronger was the injunction to live by the stern rule of the Family. He saw that he would have to find a path between these two unmovable truths. There seemed no way to avoid the boy’s fate.

  They had been moving at a good pace the next day when Killeen made his discovery.

  He came warily over a hill and saw a cracked valley where a broad slab of stone had resisted the Splash’s upthrust. Small streams cut it.

  He called to Jocelyn, “Easy passage to left. Open water! Bear hard by the saddleback when you cross.” He headed fast downslope, across the dimpled valley and up a narrowing pass which promised a quick way through. He drank his fill in a stream. It was cold and sharp-flavored and stung his hands as he scooped it into his mouth. Then, as Family appeared over the ragged ridge-line behind him, he moved on.

  It was halfway up the steeply rising slope that he saw the lonely rock slab, tilted over halfway to the ground. It had to be manmade. Mechs polished and laser-cut their rockwork. This was a rough speckled gray granite, seamed with alabaster, crossed by whispery signs. The worn edges and discolored grooves of the lettering spoke of age. Even the Citadel had not held rocks so ornately worked, so old.

  He puzzled at it and at last heeded Arthur’s insistence.

  It’s quite aged, I’ll grant. Far older than I. Archaic. Not the sort of thing I would ever write, even though I was something of a scribe and bard in my first life.

  “Read it.”

  Here, I’ll have to give it the form and voice appropriate.

  He,

  on whose arm fame was inscribed, when, in battle in the vasty countries, he kneaded and turned back the first attack. With his breast he parted the tide of enemies—those hideous ones, mad-mechanical and unmerciful to the fallen.

  He,

  who crossed in warfare the seven kinds of living-dead. By his victory Snowglade did fall to Humankind.

  He,

  by the breezes of whose prowess the southern ocean is still perfumed.

  He,

  whose great zeal utterly consumed the machines by great glowing heat.

  He: Like a burned-out fire in a great forest, even now leaves not his treasure, Snowglade.

  He: Who led Humankind from the steel palaces aloft.

  He: As if wearied, has quitted the obvious life.

  We give him now a bodily form in others, so that having won sole supreme sovereignty on this world, he may walk in.

  Snowgla
de: Acquired by his arm.

  He: Having the name of Chandra.

  He: Who set forth Humanity in the names of the Pieces.

  He: Who divided the ice among the Families.

  He: Who strides among you as able forefather.

  He lies here as well.

  By the time Arthur had finished the long, singsong chant, others of the Family had come to stand beside Killeen. He had opened Arthur to their sensoria. The low easy rhythms of it captured the Family. Even though they could not read the words inscribed deeply into the rock they had a sense of the weight of time that pressed against this message.

  Mutely, one by one, they touched the slanted stone. In front of it was a slight square depression where Killeen suspected the man Chandra was buried.

  He sighed and moved on up the hillside with Toby. They said nothing. Somehow the sentences from a time unimaginably distant seemed to weigh more heavily than the slaughter of yesterday. If Chandra had indeed come here long ago and driven back the mechs, he was a truly great figure.

  Was Chandra an Aspect? Try as he might, Killeen could think of no Family member who carried an Aspect so named, or so powerful. But if Aspects of Chandra still lived, and Killeen could fit such an Aspect into himself, perhaps it would make him a better Family member, or better father…

  He was walking without truly seeing, which is why Toby glimpsed it first. “Dad. See there? Looks like a mech building.”

  In the sensorium no one had noticed it yet. They were talking of the Chandra slab. Voices slurred and nipped, the steady background roundtalk by which humanity sewed up the frame of their experience, smoothed the rub of their world.

  He frowned again. They avoided mech places, and this odd thing ahead…

  He saw abruptly that it was not one mechwork, but two.

  One moved. A Rattler.

  It came at them from right flank. The Rattler moved with a coiling and recoiling motion, treads grinding beneath. Killeen could hear its gray ceramo-ribs pop with exertion.

  The Family was already running even as the Rattler’s angle of attack fully registered. They could not make the canyon mouth beyond. There was precious little shelter in the dry streambeds nearby.

  “Make right!” Ledroff called. The Family vectored immediately, seeing his intention. The mech building would provide some shelter.

  They had only moments. Three Rook women used all their boot power to accelerate ahead, then turned to lay down retarding fire.

  Killeen added to it without slowing, firing on an awkward tilt. No point in being accurate; their shots pocked and ricocheted but did not slow the smug-ugly and inexorable Rattler.

  They would not all make it. “Toby! Faster!” he called, knowing it was useless and yet wanting to give vent to his knotting apprehension.

  This was the Rattler they’d seen before, he was sure of it. It must have disgorged its half-finished meal to follow. Never before had a Rattler been so aggressive as to track them.

  A figure ran slower though no less frantically than the others: Old Mary. She had not been feeling well these last few days. Already she had dropped behind. Killeen heard her labored panting turn to gasps.

  He turned back. She came struggling up an incline and Killeen fired over her, directly into the bluehot mouth of the Rattler. The thing barely acknowledged the antennae blown off, the gouges in its obdurate face.

  It caught Old Mary. Arms and the quick-opening mouth ingested her almost casually. It never slowed its oncoming momentum.

  “Mary!” Killeen cried in rage and frustration. He knew the Rattler would only later discover she was not metal throughout, like a mechthing. Taste her, find her indigestible, spit her out.

  Killeen had no time for remorse. He whirled and fled, realizing that he was now the most exposed. The Rattler undoubtedly saw them all as a covey of defenseless metal-sheeted beings and mistook them for free sources of cheap ore. Since they did not carry the eat-me-not codes of this Rattler’s city, they were fair game.

  Killeen gave himself over to the running. The Rattler came flexing and oozing over a weedy streambed.

  A hollow shuuuung twisted the air by his head. It was a blaring noise-cast, blending infra-sonic rumbles at his feet with electromagnetic screeches, ascending to teeth-jarring frequencies.

  The Rattler was trying to confuse him, scramble his sensors. He ducked his head reflexively, though it did no good, and made all his receptors go dead. Except for his fast-lurching vision he heard and felt nothing.

  Toby stumbled ahead. Killeen grabbed him by shoulder and haunch and lifted him up a sandbank.

  Another shuuuung echoed dimly in his sheathed mind. It was so powerful it caught Toby unaware. He crumpled. He bent, sucked in breath. With a rolling motion Killeen took Toby’s weight across his back.

  Close now, the Rattler sent a feverhot neural spark forking into Killeen’s leg. The muscles jumped and howled and then went stonecold dead.

  Killeen stumbled forward. The mech building ahead loomed. It was tall, imposing, far higher than the usual mechwork.

  He wasn’t going to make it.

  He staggered. “Killeen!” someone called.

  Sand slid beneath his boots. The sky reeled.

  He fumbled for his weapon. The Rattler would be on him in a moment. If he could fire sure and quick and steady—

  Then the world came rushing in. Sound blared. The Rattler’s crunch and clank was hollow, diminishing.

  Someone was pounding him on the back.

  Toby’s weight slipped off.

  His sensorium flooded with scattershot pricklings, tripped open by some freeing signal.

  Killeen turned to confront the Rattler. He saw only the rear of it as massive gray cylinders slid and worked. It was retreating.

  Cermo-the-Slow was shouting, “—hadn’t shut down your ears you’da heard it bellow. Right mad it was.”

  “Why? Why’d it stop?”

  “That li’l thing there.”

  A small pyramid poked up through the sandstone shelf they stood on. Killeen had passed it without noticing.

  He blinked at the finely machined thing. “How?”

  “Dunno. Musta given the Rattler orders.”

  Killeen had heard of such things, but never seen one. The four-sided monument of chromed faces and ornate designs must have told the Rattler to come no closer.

  Family shouted at him joyfully. Toby was fine. Shibo beamed. Considering their terror of only moments before, their glee was permissible, even after the loss of Old Mary.

  Exhausted but exultant faces swam in his vision. They brought him up toward the large mech building. Friends brought him drink. Children clapped their hands in glee.

  Mechs could not violate a command to leave a mechwork alone. Humans could. Thus they stepped with impunity into the grounds of the massive construction. The spacious plaza’s flatness felt odd after broken ground.

  Killeen frowned, puzzled. What was so different about this place?

  Ordinarily he ignored whatever mechs built beyond what he could pillage. This thing, though, had saved his life.

  It was broad and high. And impossibly shaped.

  Atop a huge marble platform sat what Killeen at first thought must be an illusion. Only mechs made mirages; he was on guard. But when he kicked the thing, it gave back a reassuring solid thud.

  It was massive, made of plates of ivory stone, yet it seemed to float in air. Pure curves met at enchanting though somehow inevitable angles. Walls of white plaques soared upward as though there were no gravity. Then they bulged outward in a dome that seemed to grow more light and gauzy as the rounded shape rose still more. Finally, high above the gathering Families, the stonework arced inward and came to an upthrusting that pinned the sky upon its dagger point.

  The arabesques of gossamer-thin stone, shining white, did not interest Killeen so much as the evident design. He had never seen such craft.

  Around him swirled celebration. Their deliverance without even a battle was a signal for
exaltation. Cermo-the-Slow got into the strong, rough fruit brandy that served both as ritual fluid and as a valued currency among Families.

  Ledroff and Fornax hesitated, then decided to let the festing go on. It was only midday, but the Families had been under strain. A wise Cap’n let vagrant energies dissipate.

  Killeen watched them make this decision, heads bowed together. He didn’t like it, but he went along.

  Hoarse voices rose in song. Hands plucked at him. Two Rook women beckoned to him, their intentions clear. Their smooth skins, browned by the double suns, could not match the ghostly pale of the stones he crossed. The Rooks, despite all they had suffered, had not discon nected their sexcens. He murmured thanks, stroked their shiny hair, and moved on. Shibo was not nearby, he noted.

  He explored, ignoring the ricocheting voices. At the borders of the vast square marble platform stood four delicate towers. Killeen walked between them, eyeing their solemn, silent upjut. They stood like sentinels at the monument’s corners, guards against whatever rude forces the world could muster.

  He saw that each tower leaned outward at a tiny angle. Something told him the reason. When the towers finally collapsed, they would fall outward. Their demise would not damage the huge, airy building at the center.

  On the back of the last marble wall there was a single plate of solid black. It seemed like a dark eye that gazed out on a land inhospitable. Written above it in ebony script was NW.

  As Killeen approached, it blinked. A ruby glaze momentarily fogged its surface and into his mind came a steady, chanting voice that spoke of glories gone and names resonantly odd.

  Killeen felt the words as crystalline cold wedges of meaning, beyond mere talk. He gaped as he understood.

  The thing was, incredibly, not mechmade.

  It was instead of human times and ’facture.

  Yet the mechs had left it untouched.

  Killeen listened for a while, comprehending nothing beyond the singular fact of it: that men and women had once made things as fine and ordered as mechs. Far more beautiful than the Citadels. And had done it so well that even machines gave their work tribute and place.