Great Sky River

by Gregory Benford

The Kingsman had found a hexagonal hatch. Rails led to it from far down the lines of sculptures. Hatchet thought some kind of service mech probably ran along the rails. He used one of the key cylinders the Crafter had given him. The indented plate accepted it and clicked three times. The hatch slid aside.

  Shibo went first this time. Killeen helped the Kingsman who had lost control of his arms. They all had to bend down for the short, wide little passageway beyond.

  Shibo cautiously worked her way forward. People bumped one another in the dark. Killeen’s back began to ache. He tried not to think at all about their chances. To think was to despair and that meant you stopped. Once you did that you were only waiting for the end. He had learned that in long years on the march, had seen good men and women cut down by the despair that reached into them like a claw of ice and seized their hearts.

  Fatigue tugged at them all.

  No one talked. Killeen’s world had narrowed to the close darkness and the feel of his hand on Toby’s shoulder.

  Abruptly light forked into his eyes, bringing searing brilliance. A panel had opened automatically ahead.

  “Looks clear!” Shibo called.

  They stumbled out into a vault so large Killeen could not see either the walls or the ceiling. Buildings dwindled away in the distance. Complex machinery festooned each surface of the humming factories. Mechs zoomed high in the air below a canopy of gray fog. Amber blades of luminescence shot through rising bubbles of greenish vapor.

  They blinked. Eyes darted nervously. The air smelled of harsh acid.

  “Heysay,” Hatchet called. “Let’s go.”

  Cermo wheezed. “Where?”

  “Out. Gotta find our way out.”

  Cermo said slowly, “Great. Which way?”

  “We search till we find, is all,” Hatchet said adamantly.

  A Kingsman asked, “Think maybe we try find the Renny?”

  “Renny’s gone,” Killeen said. “Mantis eats mechs like that for breakfast.”

  Hatchet’s eyes narrowed, sharpening the V of his face. “You got better idea?”

  Killeen shook his head wearily.

  They started toward the far wall even though they couldn’t see it. Hatchet said he had a good sense of direction and that this was the way toward the surface of the mountain-building that enclosed them.

  They walked for an hour before the Mantis found them.

  SIX

  He stood in a warm valley between hills of bright green. Beneath his feet was a spongy brown mat. It stretched away about as far as he could throw a stone—but for the first time in his life, he saw no stones within reach.

  The brown mat’s ragged margin gave way to the hill’s slick green, glinting in the sunlight. He peered upward but ivory clouds hid all hints of Denix or the Eater. Somehow the radiance still slanted down strongly.

  He felt the fibrous carpet. It gave a soft resistance, suggesting something solid beneath. He wondered what the green slick stuff was. Grass? And another question. He groped for it. Something…

  Toby. He whirled, looking in all directions.

  Nothing. He was alone in a rolling landscape. A moment before he had been with Toby, he remembered, and now there was only the rough brown like tightweave beneath his feet and…

  The hills moved.

  The one ahead of him was shrinking. Ponderously, with a slight murmur. He turned to see the rise behind him swelling, its green luster catching glints from the skyglow.

  He felt a surge. A faint rippling tremor came up through his feet. He was moving backward… up the slick mound. The brown mat slid upward, pressing him slightly farther into the soft resistance. He felt himself slowly rise up the green hill as behind him a polished green valley opened.

  Somehow he was riding on something which could climb the smooth green hills. Steadily the brown weave beneath his feet made its way up toward a rounded peak.

  Killeen took a step. The spongy mat cushioned him. He started walking uphill toward the edge of it. In the several moments this took he saw the hillcrest draw near and took advantage of the added height to look in all directions. There were other green hills, arranged in long ridgelines. But no other mats, no feature to give perspective.

  He reached the edge just before the mat topped the hill. Seen up close, the green was mottled and flecked with white and yellow motes. He reached down to touch the glassy surface rushing under the mat.

  He had never seen moisture as more than the tinkling brooks which broke free of a rocky clasp. In the Citadel he had enjoyed three full baths, aromatic occasions surrounded by ritual. He had had one at his Outcoming, one after his first hunt with his father, and one more with Veronica the night of their marriage. There should have been another bath, shared with Veronica, at Toby’s birth. But there had not been enough water then and they had put it off. The drought never lifted. Snowglade’s slow parching deepened.

  His heart gave three slow, solid thumps before Killeen could fathom what he saw.

  The rushing polished green splashed over his hand. Water. He put his hand in again, unable to believe in so much water. White froth churned over his fingers. He blinked in amazement and threw some into his face. It was warm and tasted of a spice, salt.

  As he looked up, the mat reached the top of the hill. He could see a long way now, over a landscape of endless green slopes and foamy crests.

  Without slowing, his mat slipped over the edge and began to descend.

  He could get some idea of his speed by watching the scummy streaks of white that streamed toward him and then slid under the mat. He turned and watched the far edge of his mat come over the crest of the hill. The long white streamers reappeared from beneath the brown carpet and fled over the mound.

  Automatically he got down on his knees and pushed his face into the translucent water. He drank. The salt did not bother him. He had long gotten used to drinking water of all flavors and purity. You stored it up when you could. He drank steadily, working at it until he felt his belly fill. Then he sat back—and saw the water looming over him like a wall, about to topple.

  But it did not. He felt a tremor through his knees as the green water hill rose still higher, towering against a soft ivory sky. But it did not fall.

  He felt a downward surge and then his mat began to climb the green rise. Only then did he glimpse what must be happening. He was in the grip of water so huge and momentous that it made waves. His brown carpet was riding the waves in this immense water. He was on a…

  An island. Yes. Or perhaps a raft. Yes, a raft.

  This came from Arthur. Killeen eagerly asked more but the Aspect would not answer.

  He stood, marveling. The hilltops were an emerald green, while the valleys shimmered with a deeper, glassy color. As he passed over the crest he saw a few spots break into white foam, then fade.

  Except for the slow surge that came up through his feet, Killeen could not tell he was moving. He seemed to glide up one hillside and then down it to another, identical, hill.

  So much water. A world of water, where even the spongy solidness of his mat was unusual. At the next hilltop he peered carefully all around and could see no other brown stain upon the endless rolling green mounds. The giant waves marched on to the far, misty horizon. A whole seething world of water.

  The Mantis. The thought came to him suddenly with a sense of absolute conviction.

  This was a fraction of the Mantis sensorium. Or the way it saw the world.

  There was no place on Snowglade where so much water lay open. So the mat beneath him could not be there. It was an illusion, just like the false images he had seen before from the Mantis. Far more convincing, enveloping, real.

  But what was this illusion for?

  He remembered running from the Mantis, fevered and hopeless, Toby beside him.

  Now he was alone on a brown raft. Adrift.

  Wearing nothing, his suit and leggings and helmet gone.

  He called up each of his Aspects and Faces, even those he had not used for y
ears. None answered.

  His sensorium gave back only a hollow, droning grayness.

  He walked all the way around the outer edge. There was nothing more to see, simply the same layered mesh everywhere. He stopped for a moment to drink again, enjoying the sensation of burying his face in water which sloped up and was higher than the land. The slap and gurgle of the small waves his hands made was to him a sound of uncountable wealth, a fluid richness without end.

  When he got up there was a speck on the horizon. He watched it grow, banking up and down the gravid waves, approaching on a zigzag path.

  It was another island. Larger, ridged.

  Instead of a featureless plain, bristly vegetation covered most of it.

  Something moved there.

  Killeen squinted as the long green undulations brought it closer. There were dense, knotted bushes growing atop a white ground cover. The other island had knobby small rises and hollows, unlike his. As it grew, his eyes searched for some human figure among the gnarled growth but saw nothing.

  Branches swayed with the swell of the huge waves. Was that the movement he had seen?

  The larger island seemed to slide effortlessly over the crests of the green hills and Killeen had to remind himseff that the islands were not moving themselves, but followed the contours of the waves. All his experience was no guide here.

  As the island neared he suddenly saw that it was not heading directly for his. Instead it would pass some distance away and even seemed to be gaining speed. He tried to remind himself that this place was a sensorium, and his instincts didn’t apply. But he somehow knew the other island was important.

  He stepped into the warm water at the mat’s edge. He had no idea how to move through water, or even if there was a way to do it. Then he saw something moving in the brambles of the approaching island. A human figure. It took no notice of him but kept walking into the vegetation. He could not tell who it was.

  He stroked tentatively at the water and took a step. Abruptly he sank to his waist. This sent a shrill alarm through him, a sensation he could not have imagined: fear of water, the provider of life.

  Lie down in it. Then pull water toward you with your hands and kick with your legs. Hold your breath when your head is under water.

  The quick darting information from Arthur broke his hesitation. He pushed away from his island and thrashed at the warm currents that brushed him. His legs churned. Water rushed up his nose. Briny pricklings invaded his sinuses and he sputtered.

  But he moved. He got a dog-paddle rhythm going and managed to keep his head fixed toward where the other island would pass. He gave himself over to the rhythmic surgings, swooping water behind him like a kind of thick, warm air. Coughing, rolling in the swell, he made progress.

  The other island-raft came at him achingly slowly. He felt no fatigue but his arms began to sing with the strain. Then a chance wave caught him and plunged him down-slope at the island. Foam curled around him. He banked into the wave and felt it seem to bunch and thrust behind him. Startled, he cut a swath down the shimmering wall of green. And tumbled onto the mat below, gasping.

  His head rang from banging into the ground. He got up and walked unsteadily toward the dense, clotted growth nearby. It looked impenetrable. He skirted around it toward one of the white open spaces. There was no sign of the human figure. This island was much bigger than his. Stubby trees dotted the high ground. There were other things farther back in the vegetation which he could not make out so he started up the incline of white—

  And backed away, trembling.

  The white ground cover was a jumble of bones.

  The edge of it was made of small, slender fragments. Fingers. Hands. Toes.

  Farther in were broken ribs. Forearms. A garden of smashed pelvises.

  At the top of the small knoll were thighs. Intact barrel rib cages. Thick arms. Bleached skulls with their perpetual grins and gaping eyesockets.

  The boneyard spread over hummocks and rises. It stopped at the undergrowth but reappeared halfway up a nearby knoll.

  Killeen blinked, his fear pressing up into his throat. He tentatively angled toward an opening in the bushes. Their slender branches whispered as the sea swell deepened. Then he heard the other sound.

  Steps. Slow, crunching steps. Dull thuds punctuated by sharp cracks and pops.

  Something coming. He backed away, not knowing where the sounds came from. His eyes swept the horizon but he could not find his own island anymore in the green vastness.

  He looked back at the low sloping hillside just as a chromed sphere appeared over the crest. It came into view on a lattice of working rods and cables, legs clambering and jerking, many-toed feet coming down with a curious delicacy. Where it stepped bones broke.

  In a last despairing release Killeen stooped, found a knobby, bleached joint. He threw it straight at the topmost sphere of the Mantis. It bounced off with a sharp clang.

  Killeen felt his Aspects buzz to fresh life.

  Wants to talk.

  No harm.

  The machine is an anthology intelligence. It suppressed us in order to let you get your bearings. It can speak better through us than directly with you.

  “Why?” Killeen’s voice rasped with rage.

  Obviously, we are far more like it. As stored intelligences we Aspects can, through our digitized manifolds, better perceive the coded holographic speech of a machine. The Mantis has been teaching us how to do this these last few hours. I—

  “Hours?”

  The Mantis came steadily nearer on thrusting, jerky legs.

  You are in fact unconscious. This is a medium of communication for the Mantis. It incorporates us all into its… well, sensorium is too narrow a word. It has ranges and capabilities I cannot fathom. In a certain view, this place is a combined Fourier transform of both our minds and that of the Mantis. It is easier to engage such different intelligences in Fourier-space, where waves are reduced to momenta and a localized entity (such as yourself) is represented as a spreading packet of such momenta in the flat space-time of the Mantis. An interesting—

  “You understand it?”

  Not fully, no. Employing the help of this suitably tapered Fourier-space modeling, it still has difficulty communicating with even me, an Aspect. The Faces, of course, can barely fathom it. We are attempting—

  “What’s it want?”

  The Mantis stopped and settled down on the sloping ground. Killeen had to consciously stop his hands from clenching. His feet wanted to turn and run. He stood his ground.

  Human things, it says.

  Has already much.

  Wants to help humans live forever.

  Killeen spoke with razor-thin control. “That’s why it’s been hounding us? Killing us?”

  I report its true meaning here.

  You would die anyway, it says.

  It wants to help.

  “Leave us alone!” Killeen exploded, his fists tight and shaking at his side.

  Cannot.

  The mechmind will find you.

  Only the Mantis can save.

  Even a scrap is better than nothing left.

  “We’re not a goddamn scrap! We’re people. All that’s left after you brought on the Calamity and, and—”

  Killeen made himself stop. He had to keep control. There was probably no way out of this place, no hope of survival. But as long as he didn’t know that, as long as Toby or Shibo or any of the rest might still be alive, he had to keep going. Keep control.

  The Mantis knew that humans were congregating in Metropolis. It did not wish to disturb us. The Renegade Crafter was bound to make a mistake sometime and that would bring down the full force of the Marauders on the Metropolis. Surely, the Mantis says, we knew that.

  “Knew we’d fight someday, sure. Give us time, we’d do damn well against the Marauders.” Killeen put his hands on his hips to show he wasn’t thinking of running anymore. Even if this was some kind of mathematical space—whatever that meant—he knew the Mant
is would understand the signal.

  When Arthur spoke the Mantis’s reply there was a decided edge to it:

  Such bravado is amusing, and perhaps ordained in you, but unwise. Only because the Crafter concealed your location did Metropolis survive this long. And the Mantis helped with that, as well.

  “What? The Mantis…?”

  It helped Crafter.

  Crafter didn’t know though.

  “But the Mantis killed the Crafter!”

  Mantis seized Crafter.

  Crafter not dead.

  “I don’t understand, Hatchet said—” 1. Mantis kept Marauders away.

  “But Hatchet told me himself, couple Marauders found Metropolis. The Kings blew ’em away, clean-easy.”

  A few, yes.

  Were necessary.

  Otherwise Kings get suspicious.

  “Suspicious? Of what?”

  The fact that their Metropolis was an enclave supported by the Mantis. A spot where humans could congregate and merge. The Mantis herded the Bishops and Rooks toward Metropolis with that in mind.

  Killeen grimaced. “Herded us? It killed us! Suredead!”

  The wording in human speech is difficult here. The Mantis does not regard what it did at the ambushes as killing. The word it wishes to choose is, well, harvesting.

  Something in the way this was said, calm and flat in the tiny voice of Arthur, made a cool fear come into Killeen.

  “Surekilling… not giving us a chance to even preserve an Aspect…”

  Aspects very limited.

  Only get a little of us.

  I was complex man once.

  Now am tiny thing.

  Senses dull or gone.

  Never again feel it all.

  Alas, my stunted friend is correct. You surely did not think this trimmed existence of ours was enough, did you? We are small dolls, compared to the men and women we once were. Do you blame us for rattling the bars of our cages now and then? Even the maddened among us feels our truncated state, wants—

  Call me insane? I be the only who won’t kneel to this devil-machine before you! I will not yield—