Great Sky River

by Gregory Benford

  “Maybe. Anybody ever ask ’em?”

  Into Hatchet’s face came a guarded look. “Who could?”

  Killeen was concentrating on his own thoughts but he noticed the small hesitation in Hatchet’s hooded eyes. The man’s sharp chin turned and caught the dying light of Denix’s sunset through an open hole that served as window. Hatchet was hiding something.

  “Kings used be good at mechtalk.”

  Hatchet’s mouth narrowed. “Yeasay.”

  “Thought you might’ve picked up some information since your Calamity.”

  “We spent years runnin’, same as you.”

  “You’ve sure done a lot better’n us,” Killeen said, to take the edge away from the conversation. Better to back off and come at it from a different direction.

  Hatchet relaxed a little but said nothing.

  Killeen went on easily, “We had one trained translator. Mantis killed her.”

  “Uh-huh. We got one translator, a woman.”

  “She learn much?”

  “Nothin’ real useful.”

  “I see.”

  Hatchet said, “You Bishops got any Aspects can translate?”

  “Read signs, things like that?”

  “Anything you can. Always need skills.”

  “Well…” Killeen asked Arthur, then replied, “No Aspects, no. One my Faces can, though.”

  “Any good?”

  “Some.”

  Hatchet looked interested behind his veiled eyes. “Good.”

  “That woman translator—”

  “She’s sick now.”

  Killeen wondered what Hatchet was still hiding. It might just be private King Family business. Probably better to skirt the issue.

  Ideas brimmed in Killeen and he could not resist giving them voice. “Point is, why’d they attack the Citadels?”

  Hatchet pursed his lips, the expression drawing his face even longer in the shadowed burnt-gold twilight. “Irritated, maybe.”

  “Why send the Mantis now? Why build a special Marauder?”

  “Finish us off.” Hatchet was distracted, bothered, and did not want to show it.

  “Why take all that trouble? A whole new design. First it used mirages on us, really good ones. Looked absolutely real. I never saw a Marauder could do anything near so good before.”

  “So?”

  “We killed what we thought was its mainmind. Great. Then we find it’s dispersed its intelligence into midminds. So we kill those. Looks okay. Then yesterday we run into a navvy carrying a full mind—and weapons.”

  “Hey, easy,” Hatchet said, sitting forward.

  Killeen realized he had been shouting, his right fist balled tight. His left hung useless, limp. “Well, you see. They’re putting a lot into the Mantis.”

  “Yeasay to that.” Hatchet sucked on his teeth, gazing into the distance. “You people’ve suffered a lot. More’n us. Mind, we don’t begrudge you space, even if you’ve drawn this Mantis.”

  “We’re ’preciative,” Killeen said. The unspoken truth was that Metropolis might not be able to resist the Mantis. Hatchet feared that.

  Still, the Kings had a lot of confidence. Several had already come by his hut and regaled Killeen with stories of how they’d crushed Marauder attacks. But Hatchet could see the Mantis was different.

  The coming of the other Families might not be simply the blessed reuniting of humanity. Equally, it could spell the end of Metropolis.

  Had this realization been what Hatchet wanted to hide? No, there was something more. Hatchet had quickly passed over what their translator had found out.

  There was no point in suggesting that they go out and track the Mantis. Hatchet would never rob Metropolis of its main force. What’s more, Killeen realized, he himself was no advertisement for the wisdom of tracking the thing. His left arm hung as a limp rebuke at his side.

  He said a few more things to make their gratefulness apparent, though he was sure Ledroff and Fornax had done the same. It never hurt to layer on the sweet manners between Families.

  He added, though, “Point is, though, why are the mechs tryin’ mash us down in the dust?”

  Hatchet said again, “They hate us. Pureblood simple.”

  Killeen took a breath and said decisively, “Naysay.”

  “How come, then?”

  “I think they’re afraid of us. We scare ’em some way.”

  Hatchet laughed strangely. Then he stood, the signal that Killeen’s time was up, that the Cap’n of the Kings had things to do.

  EIGHT

  “Dad… ?”

  Toby had been asleep for so long Killeen could no longer resist the urge to shake him gently, seeking reassurance that the boy had not slipped into some down-winding neural spiral.

  “Yeasay, yeasay. I’m here. You’re all right.”

  “I feel… funny.”

  “Any pain?”

  “No, I… kinda… can’t feel.”

  “Where?”

  “Legs. Just the legs now.”

  “Guts okay?”

  “Yeasay.”

  “Sure?”

  Unexpectedly, Toby grinned. “Sure I’m sure. Put your hand down there, I’ll pee into it.”

  “Think you can hit a pot?”

  “It’s either that or try for the window.”

  Killeen found it harder than he’d have guessed to get Toby sitting up on the raised pallet. Toby, too, seemed sobered by the effort. Shadows passed in his eyes and his throat contracted with some interior struggle. Then it was gone, leaving no sign in his smooth, papery skin. He peed roisterously into the clay pot, laughing.

  “When’ll my legs come back?” Toby asked when he was lying back down.

  “Rest a bit, we’ll see.”

  Killeen had tried to keep his voice easy and cheerful but Toby caught something in it. “How long?”

  “They don’t know. Never saw a case like this, where a Marauder was surekillin’ and got interrupted.”

  “Marauder? Looked like navvy.”

  “Well…”

  Toby’s face clouded. “Reg’lar one?” To be brought down by a mere navvy…

  “Naysay. Was a Marauder disguised as a navvy. Mantis made it, I figure.”

  Toby brightened. “Least I wasn’t got by some damn navvy.”

  “Nasty one, yeasay.”

  “How’s your arm?”

  “Not good.” No point in lying.

  “Use it any?”

  “Can’t even wipe my ass.”

  “Since when didja?”

  Killeen grinned, the lines splitting his sunburned face like trenches. “Look I don’t snatch off one them legs and close that mouth with it.”

  “Least it’d be something decent to eat.”

  Killeen fed him supper. He carried on conversation as wan halfnight fell, shadowing the room. He made making his own tour of Metropolis seem more colorful than it really had been. Toby was enthusiastic about getting out and seeing it on his own. Killeen promised to take him out tomorrow. He would have to carry the boy in his arms or else devise some wheelchair. He had to struggle to keep his voice from giving away much of what he felt. Hatchet and the others who knew about these things said there was no way any of them could fix Toby’s damage.

  Even Angelique, when she had come to visit in the day, had mournfully shaken her head. She knew how to adjust eyes and mouth-taste. She could get into some other chips at the skull base. Whole body systems were beyond her, though. No one had even a hint of how they worked or where their neural junctions came into the spine. Toby had three tapjoints set into his spine, small pink hexagonal notches. The woman who installed them had died at the Citadel Bishop. Nobody among the Bishops or Rooks or Kings knew how to connect through the notches, or even if Toby’s damage was repairable through them.

  He was relieved when Toby drifted into sleep, just as Killeen had begun rummaging for interesting things to say. He went out of the small square building to get more water from the King wells and met Shibo on
the path.

  Her look framed her question. Killeen said, “Seems fine ’cept for the legs.”

  “Head?”

  “Well, he talks okay. I’ll take him out tomorrow, test his reflexes maybe.”

  She blinked slowly in the slanted, dry light. Her eyelids slid like gray ghosts and he had the feeling that he could see through them to the ivory masks of her eyes. “You?”

  “What, this arm? ’S okay.”

  She kneaded it with both hands. “Feel?”

  “No, nothing.”

  “Fix?”

  He shook his head, still thinking about Toby. Nobody knew how to fix much of anything, it seemed. They began to walk together, directionless. It seemed profoundly odd to be moving down a path, amid forms shaped by human hands. The small, almost obsessively precise details of mechwork were missing. In their place were agreeable errors, lines askew, artless curves. “Hatchet say?”

  “Family King doesn’t know if any other Families survived. We’re the only ones who’ve found them. If the Splash attracts more…”

  He let the thought trickle away. He could not think far ahead to distant, theoretical possibilities when Toby’s face bobbed in his memory, pale but still cheerful.

  In the boy’s eyes had been a puzzlement with his own body that would quickly turn to futile anger and then despair. Killeen knew the cycle. He had seen it on the march with the injured.

  “You talk Mantis with Hatchet?”

  He was always surprised at how much she knew without his telling her. “Yeasay naysay,” he quoted an old rhyme, “mansay noway.”

  “Mantis?”

  “He’s worried ’bout it, sure.”

  “Wonders if Metropolis safe.”

  “Yeasay. I do, too. Hatchet’s… hiding something.”

  “What?”

  “Dunno. Me, I wonder why Metropolis is here at all. How come the Mantis left it alone?”

  “I checked defenses. They’re good, but…” He could tell by her arched eyebrows that she didn’t believe this explanation.

  “Wish Fanny was here,” he said wistfully. This was the first time he had said her name in a long while. The events since her suredeath had opened a chasm in all their lives. He wished she had left an Aspect he could carry.

  “Fanny?”

  “Oh, course. I forgot you never knew her.”

  “Your Cap’n?”

  “Was. Best damn one ever. She’d go through this Hatchet like a hot knife through butter.” He liked this old phrase, even though it reminded him that he hadn’t seen butter since the Citadel.

  Shibo said abruptly, “Hatchet not right.”

  “Huh? ’Bout what?”

  She tapped her temple. “Not right this way.”

  This startled Killeen. “Why you say?”

  “You hear his welcoming speech?”

  “No, fell asleep. What’d he say?”

  “Metropolis greatest city ever.”

  Killeen chuckled. “These mud huts?”

  “Great ’cause can withstand Marauders.”

  Killeen’s mouth turned down in puzzlement. “Not many Marauders come this far in the Splash. They catch on we’re here, we’ll see plenty them. Hatchet’s been damn lucky so far.”

  “Yeasay. Then he talk about reuniting Families.”

  “Huh?”

  “He wants be Cap’n.”

  “Cap’n all the Families?”

  “Think so. Kings cheer him all the time.”

  Killeen shook his head. “This Hatchet, he’s done a lot, I give him that. He can lead. Look how proud the Kings are. Not a wise Cap’n, though.”

  “Yeasay.” Softly she added, “Fanny wise?”

  He smiled. “She used to say, old people don’t get wise, they just get careful.” He paused. “Or was that my father said that?”

  “Not always true, anyway.”

  “Yeasay. Fanny was wise, even though she’d rag you for sayin’ it. Hatchet, he’s not.”

  “Yeasay.” Her face was somber as she regarded passing warm yellow rectangles that looked into the narrow huts. Family singing drifted outward on the soft breeze.

  Metropolis used a line of sentries and outer defenses beyond the ring of nearby hills. They could sense any mech approach. That made possible this casual indifference to an exposed light. Killeen did not think it wise.

  The sprawled town shimmered in its fragrant haze of campfire smoke. Moist air cloaked his face, its welcome weight filled his lungs. This was the tang of life, riding winds and burrowing in the rich loam. Once, Arthur had told him, all Snowglade had been this way.

  He forced his thoughts back to practical things. “Why’d the mechs rebuild the Mantis each time? After the Calamity the Marauders could’ve hunted us down, if they wanted.”

  Shibo said, “Tried. Pick us off if they run across us.”

  “Yeasay, but they didn’t hunt the way the Mantis does.” Killeen balled his right fist. “They just let us go for years. Forgot us, ’cept for Marauders we’d run into by accident. That was bad enough. Now they’ve sent the Mantis. Why?”

  Shibo smiled. “Don’t frown. Makes you look old.”

  He noticed that she had completely redone her hair. It swooped upward from her broad crown in twisted braids flecked with silver. Then it fanned outward in a frozen black fountain. Her eyes glistened and her jumpsuit was clean and brushed.

  Ready for romance, he thought. She gave him a slow, up-from-under look.

  He wasn’t in the mood.

  He could not bring himself to tell her that he was certainly interested in an abstract kind of way, but lacked the motivation. When his Family laid down the law about sexcens, Killeen had not minded so much. He’d been sleeping with Jocelyn then, but the sweet memory of Veronica kept coming back to him. He was past that wonderful time of his youth when the simple and almost unexpected pleasure of the act was enough to hold him entranced. It had been clear that Jocelyn could never be what Veronica had been, and that had brought a bittersweet aftertaste to every touch and gesture.

  He opened his mouth to skirt around the subject but nothing would come out. Damn! Like I was a kid! He cast about for something to say, mind spinning in vacuum, and ahead of them saw a tube set on a frame.

  He knew full well what it was but managed gratefully to seize upon it with fake puzzlement. His delight, though, was real.

  The Citadel had boasted one such, and he could not imagine how Family King had managed to save theirs. Maybe they had rescued it from their own Citadel ruins, years after their Calamity. That would fit Hatchet’s style.

  He peered through the ancient viewer. Clouds drifted away, revealing a shimmering band of starlight. He could see that the dense stream of stars lay beyond the nearby ruby lanes of dust. Arthur said:

  A welcome vision! I have not witnessed this for so very long. That is the Mandikini—an ancient Asian Indian word of fabled Earth. It denotes the plane of the galaxy, the so-called Milky Way. The Indian translates literally as “great sky river,” since they believed—

  “Come look,” Killeen said to Shibo, cutting off Arthur.

  Shibo had never seen an electrotelescope before. She dutifully looked through it, scanning the twilight sky, and then asked him about something in the finder screen.

  Killeen peered at the small, crystalline object. A memory from childhood rushed through him. “The Chandelier,” he said. “There’s one still left!”

  “What is?”

  “A city. Human city! Didn’t Family Rook come from a Chandelier?”

  She shook her head, puzzled. Killeen said, “We all did, long time back. Came down, settled Snowglade.”

  Arthur had reminded him of these forgotten tales only yesterday. Killeen had been letting the Aspect speak more often, trying to learn more mechtech. He had not told Shibo this, hoping to pick up a few craftsman tricks to impress her.

  “Families built?”

  From the inner whisper of Aspect Nialdi Killeen plucked a quick fact. He was glad to have
some area where he could at least seem to know more than Shibo.

  “Families were formed when humanity came down from Chandeliers. ’Way long ago.”

  “One Chandelier?”

  “Uh, no, three,” he got from Nialdi.

  “We made?”

  Her incredulity echoed Killeen’s unspoken feelings. It was flatly incredible that men had ever known how to shape things in the high blackness, or even to fly there. Even the strange whitestone monument they had found the day before seemed an impossible accomplishment.

  Yet when he had first seen the Chandelier as a boy the world had seemed safe and humanity capable. Now he knew the truth.

  Killeen sensed a seething unease in the back of his mind. He studied the Chandelier again, its glinting crystalline finery hanging dry and cool against a flat blackness. Scattershot emotions echoed through his sensorium. It was a lovely jewellike place among so much swimming nothing, so much an affirmation against the eternal denying blank.

  But in him this provoked a sudden cry.

  His Aspects sent smothered yelps of glee and pride and fervent desolated ache. They yearned outward from their recesses.

  Bubbling voices washed over him. He gasped.

  “You all right?”

  Killeen realized his face must reflect some of the swarming frenzy that blew red and roiling within him. “Ah, yeasay. Just… let me look a… li’ 1 longer….”

  Nialdi cried:

  How lovely it is! Beauty! Humanmade!

  Arthur shouted:

  —If I had simply followed the advice of my good friends, in a timely manner, I would have gotten promoted enough. My turn would have come up. I certainly could have gained at least a temporary appointment to the Crewboard in the Drake Chandelier. And if I had—no matter how much you hoot, Nialdi, don’t think I can’t hear you, even if you do encode your insults!—I would have stayed in the Chandelier. And would still be there!

  Mechs hit the Chandeliers too last I heard.

  Even in my day nobody knew if they were working.

  No signals from them.

  Just hanging in the sky like Christmas tree ornaments.

  You stayed there you’d likely be suredead.

  You refer lightly to such great tragedy? When the devilworked hordes engulfed all that was left of life-giving reason and judgment in this foul abyss?