Great Sky River

by Gregory Benford

  EPILOG Argo

  ONE

  The Argo lay buried beneath a knobby hill that looked completely natural. The entrance portals were under a deep gully half-filled with gravel. Killeen had been the first to go in because the portal was keyed to accept only an authentic human handprint. It had some way to check his genetic coding, too, searching for key configurations that showed he descended from the humans who had pioneered Snowglade.

  The mechs had figured this out but that was all. No mech simulacrum would have made it in. It was easy for him though and no safety triggers or alarms went off. The portals led through tunnels to a huge enclosure under the hill.

  Killeen spent time afterward on the brow above the steadily expanding excavation, looking out across a shallow broad stream and the plain beyond that rose into blue mountains. There were snowy peaks in the mountains and the water ran down from them painfully cold. This place was halfway around Snowglade from the speck that was man’s Metropolis and here he could see the advance of the mech climate. He had to wear doubleweave jacket and leggings or else his feet would ache. He and Toby spent hours down by the stream listening to the sound of it on the pebbles and boulders that lay smoothed and night-black in the channels. The water streamed clear and swift with a tinge of blue in it. Toby picked thin plates of ice from the eddies at the bank and skipped them like stones across the broad fast water and then yowled at the stinging cold in his hands.

  The mechs liked the cold. Legions of them went by the stream and up to the hill and the dust they raised filmed the sharp air. The large shell-shaped enclosure they had now uncovered was streaked with the rust of ages and the slow settling of it had powdered the ship within. Killeen and Toby had watched the mechs carefully cut the dirt away from the enclosure’s interlocking framework and then peel it back to reveal the hard stark whiteness of the Argo. Long columns of mechs marched in complex formations to rake back stone and soil systematically, searching for remnant traces of whoever had left the ship. They treated it like an archaeological site of a long-dead culture.

  The Argo was buried in a metal-rich area so no simple detector could pick it out from above. Whoever had left it had intended it to stay a long time and had provided against quakes and seepage. Several times mechs had prospected this area for ore but had never found the ship.

  The squads of mechs raised more dust that fell on the Argo and for the first two days that was the only thing that touched the broad bone-white skin of it. The ship was like two palms cupped together. The palms joined seamlessly but fore and aft translucent cowlings covered complex extrusions. The mechs seemed to know what these things were and treated them very gingerly as they rolled back the cowlings.

  Then the Mantis had ceased its directing of the mech army and come to the small encampment of humans. It needed two people who could enter the ship’s locks. Again only a human hand could trigger the right response. Killeen could tell that the Mantis had tried a number of ways to unlock the mechanisms but had failed and was momentarily mystified. He thought the Mantis was surprised that humans had once devised something a mech could not quickly crack, but when he said this in passing the Mantis replied:

  No. A long time has elapsed since elements of me saw such work from your kind, but it is not unknown to us. The first of your phylum who came to the Center were not so skilled when they arrived. (Unintelligible.) They quickly learned some of our arts, however. You yourself encountered one of their duplications of a great work from your own far past, I believe.

  “Whatsay? I don’t—”

  I was tracking you at the time. You had an unfortunate encounter with a Marauder, class 11. I had been unable to dissuade it from attacking you. (As I noted before, I must work within my society’s contexts.) You took refuge in an artifact which we had preserved from that longpast event, when several of your phylum re-created the thing they called Taj Mahal. It was marked with the emblem of the human who led that party, a group now gone elsewhere in the Center.

  Killeen remembered staring long and hard at that monument so he could place it in permanent storage. He called that up now and studied the artful curves, the solemn white glow of the stonework. Then he saw the square marker set in black. NW. So that stood for some forefather who had shaped and built as mechs did. “They made the Argo?”

  No. They came well before the Chandeliers and were the first humans here at the Center. Later came other humans. The Argo, as nearly as we can glean from these surrounds, was the product of the early Citadel makers. They foresaw a time when your phylum might need a means of escape. They had witnessed our works towering in other parts of the Center and knew that time would bring us to occupy and shape Snowglade (as you call it) to higher purposes.

  Killeen snorted. “Killin’ Snowglade’s a higher purpose?”

  You must understand that my interest in you does not mean I believe your destiny is somehow on the level of ours. This, too, will be apparent to you as you learn more.

  Killeen smiled without humor and said nothing.

  He was learning to sense something of the complex interweaving states the Mantis possessed. It was a mistake, he knew, to believe that behind the Mantis’s words lay anything like emotion. Thing about aliens is, they’re alien, his father had said, and he would not forget it. Still, any feeling for what state the Mantis was in could be useful.

  The Mantis was a faint presence on the edge of his sensorium when Killeen entered the Argo for the first time. Cermo-the-Slow and a Rook had made the first entrance and found nothing they could understand. Now micromechs crept stealthily into the Argo, trying to understand the ship.

  From the Mantis Killeen picked up a chromatic shifting that seemed to correspond to anticipation, excitement, interest. He and Shibo prowled oval corridors dimly lit by red running lights. The Mantis could identify some modular sections from old mech records. Pieces of the Argo came from mechtech sculpted to human needs. Others had been shaped from ancient human designs, perhaps reflecting the technology which humanity brought to the Galactic Center long ago.

  Killeen felt spurts of recognition from some of his oldest Aspects as he inspected the Argo. Old human technology brought warm memories welling up. Man was tied to his artifacts.

  The Mantis commented:

  Precisely. Often your works long outlive you. We, who propagate forward forever, do not tie any of our deep concerns to artifacts. They are passing tools, soon to be rubbish. This is one of the many intriguing distinctions between you and us.

  When the Mantis spoke through his Arthur Aspect, Killeen had to guard against replying with more than a distracted assent. The Mantis was a thin wedge driven into Arthur, and might pick up Killeen’s own protected thoughts. Deception was difficult.

  He was aided, though, by his other Aspects. The Mantis had not co-opted them. Their pleased chatter as the Argo’s mysteries unfolded served to mask Killeen’s more canny, assessing thoughts.

  The Aspects’ muted cries would once have plucked at his attention, diverting him. Now he found he could suppress them to mere shadowy flickers on the wall of his mind. He had learned that in the Aspect storm. To his surprise, he now suffered no stark dreams when he slept, or had to struggle to smother his Aspects and Faces when he awoke. They still rode far back in him, though, and came quickly when summoned. He had only occasional glimmerings of the way they had struck at him in the storm. The waves that had broken over him, a biting acrid fluid of squirming bugs and spiders—that image he could swiftly force down.

  Yet it came back to him in an oddly different way as he moved through the murky passages of the Argo. Micromechs scrambled everywhere. Their insect energy inspected and checked and fixed the long-dormant mechanisms of the slumbering craft. They seemed like waves washing over the carcass of a deep-sea beast, now beached and forlorn.

  Yet the Argo stirred. He could feel at the tapering fringes of his own sensorium a skittering, bright presence. The Argo’s inner networks were reviving.

  Laboring mech squadrons flowe
d like dark streams around the pebble that was the small human camp. There were many varieties of mech which humans had never seen before. Tubular forms, blocky things, splotchy as semblages with razor-sharp tools. Somehow these methodical machines knew to avoid humans and gave their open fires and tents wide berth.

  In all, slightly more than a hundred people had come on the long trip to the Argo site. Mostly Bishops and Rooks, they had been frightened by the Duster that had flown them and the commandeered Rattler that had brought them here from the landing field. The Mantis had been the first startling encounter for them, when it met them beyond the hills that ringed Metropolis. But perhaps because of the prior presence of the Mantis in their sensoria, they got used to its assemblage of pipes and nodules.

  Still, the motley collection of humans needed constant reassurance. Killeen found this irksome. People continually peppered him with questions whenever he returned from the Argo site to their camp.

  What was that gas that had enclosed the ship, the one that made you talk funny if you inhaled some of it? (Helium, Arthur informed him. An inert protection against rust.)

  Why was the Mantis getting bigger? (It added components to direct the swelling mech crews.)

  Why was it so cold here? (They were nearer the northern pole. But Metropolis would eventually feel such bite, as the mech changes progressed.)

  Food was running short; couldn’t the mechs hurry? (Making a centuries-dead ship work again took time. And Killeen would ask the Mantis to have some mechmade food brought in. Not tasty, but filling.)

  Why was the manmech coming with them? (Left behind, far from its work site, it would be run down by a Marauder. It carried some fragment of the old human ways. And it wanted to come.)

  He was glad Fornax and Ledroff had declined to go. Having either along would make this impossible. Both men had listened to Killeen’s proposal and had promised to ponder it overnight. But in the morning retreat had lined their drawn faces. As the three of them had spoken, the two Cap’ns had eyed him with new recognition. Speaking softly, not rushing things, Killeen had bargained for the people who wanted to go and see what the Argo was.

  So the time had come three days later when the long column wound out of Metropolis. They might all return, of course. There was no guarantee that the Argo even existed anymore or that it would work. They had only the map of the manmech to guide them. But a hundred-strong they gambled.

  Ledroff had stayed with the remaining Bishops. Already he was more occupied with maneuvering against Fornax, to become Cap’n of the entire Metropolis. But neither Cap’n was strong enough yet to stop the party that wanted to go to the Argo and so they had stood and watched, blank-faced.

  The loss of Hatchet, the revelation of what he had done, the sudden jolting Mantis presence—these had rocked Metropolis and made Killeen’s maneuvers possible. Hatchet had kept silent about his deals with the Crafter and what he saw on raids. Unlike the ancient Family rituals of tale-telling following a raid, Hatchet had confined talk to stories of their stealth. The Mantis’s depiction of what Hatchet was willing to do, the awful moment with the Fanny-thing—this had forever dirtied Hatchet’s memory

  Killeen had all along phrased everything as mere possibility, as an exploration. Yet he knew when he marched out that he would never see Metropolis again. Even if the Argo had been a mere tale, he would not have gone back. Better to roam slow-dying Snowglade than to cower in a cage.

  Still, he understood the sense of the majority that stayed. Fornax and Ledroff would make competent keepers. With the Mantis’s protection, Families could grow.

  Humanity had always been dominated by the stay-behinds, Arthur had told him. It was a prudent strategy for the race, a heavy hedge on every daring bet. So none of the departing party had scorned the timid; wordlessly, with intuition born of hard trial, they understood.

  The people gathered together on a bleak hillside to watch the Argo’s first flight.

  It lifted with a rumble from the staging area around the burial site. Human hands had flown it into orbit long ago. The Argo had linked the Citadels with the Chandeliers. The ship used mech parts, linked solely to human commands. Its sensorium answered to telltale signatures of human thought processes and rejected mechspeak in any form.

  So, though humans now knew nothing of things mechanical, once again human hands had to fly her.

  Shibo had been the obvious choice. Her exskell could perform the deft, quick moves of piloting. And through her sensorium the Mantis could link the Argo’s ship-mind to her exskell.

  Killeen sat beside her as she made the ship’s motors thrum and storm and thrum again. She had trained for days, with the Mantis’s help. Once routes and channels were laid down in her sensorium, the ship’s intricate self-sentient structures took over. They could interlock with her mechanical movements through the exskell.

  Her hands flew swiftly among the command modules, her exskell buzzing. Anything done by word-level simple transmission of instructions would have been impossibly slow.

  She took it well. A dim rivulet of the flow came to Killeen through the margins of his own sensorium. Raw touches and cutting smells and sour tastes, all scrambled and scratch-quick. Her face tightened with effort as she moved over the oblique board before her. At each step the ship verified that she was indeed human; an ancient security measure.

  Her eyelids fluttered, her lips drew thin and pale.

  “Heysay?” he whispered beside her.

  “Getting it.” Words slipped from between clenched teeth.

  “Leave off if you feel—”

  “I can. I can do it.”

  She seemed to be listening to far voices. Killeen felt the swirl of information funnel through her like an accelerating wind.

  The ship whined higher. He felt a wobbling sensation.

  “We’re clear,” she said, so faintly he could barely hear.

  A drifting sensation swept over him. It was only a dim echo of what she endured but it told him of the data inputs from a thousand sensors. He felt himself lift and tilt and glide.

  He had the sudden perception of looking down, straight down. A carved hillside hung below like gnawed fruit.

  —Yeasay!— Cermo-the-Slow called faintly from below. —They’re flyin’.—

  “You’re wonderful,” he said simply.

  She sat at the board like a queen, the first human to master this strange artifact since the days of the Chandeliers. He knew the importance of it but could feel only the personal: his sudden love for her. Bursting liberation.

  Having control of his own mind and being able to give of himself without constraint.

  Unbidden, Arthur’s small voice, free of the Mantis, chirped:

  You are now tapped in to her pheromones. These are molecular notches which must link up to excite the full level of male-female attraction. The Mantis undid the inset which the Family Bishop imposed on all. Do not mistake this for anything ethereal or intellectual. Fitting of such neural notches is unrelated to the lady’s social standing or your opinion of her. Mating proceeds not to express the higher functions within, unfortunately, but to please the great genetic pool lapping around us. I must say—

  Killeen cut him off.

  He and Toby walked beneath the twilight sky that evening, more to keep warm by moving than to see the endless workings of the mechs. The scuttling forms labored without sleep, refitting the Argo, gathering supplies, doing their own inexplicable research.

  “How’s the Mantis get so many ’em workin’ for it?” Toby asked.

  “It’s like a… a Cap’n for mechs,” Killeen finished, realizing that in fact he knew nothing of what the Mantis was.

  “Think it’ll really let us go?’

  “It better.”

  “Don’t see why it should.” Toby frowned. Killeen saw in the boy’s face a struggling to understand that confirmed what had happened to him Inside the mechplex.

  His son was changing with every passing day, thrust forward by the gravity of events to a
n early adulthood. A certain blithe assurance was gone from Toby, would never return. He would worry each odd point of the world now until he had it, understood it, could fit it in the scheme of things.

  “We used the only weapon we had left,” Killeen said. “Vulnerability.”

  “Don’t get it.”

  Killeen hand-signaled to Toby to shut down his sensorium.

  “All ’em?”

  “Yeasay.” When they had only stunted, conventional senses, Killeen said, “If it kept us all in Metropolis we wouldn’t be the same.”

  Toby blinked. “Huh?”

  “Boxed in, we wouldn’t be true humans anymore.”

  “Turn into porkers?”

  “Yeasay. So fat, hafta get mechs in, cart us ’round.”

  “All those people we left, they gone get fat, you figure?”

  “Maybe. Not that that’ll bother the Mantis much. Way I figure it, Mantis’ll track us, too.”

  “How?”

  “Those micromechs.”

  “Ummm.”

  Toby stopped walking, hands in jacket pockets, his breath fogging the still air. “Heysay hear somethin’?”

  Killeen saw the Mantis approaching from the Argo. “Kindle your systems. Don’t want it suspectin’.”

  As his sensorium brightened he felt the hard outline of the Mantis intrude. He said as if in ordinary conversation, “Thing is, son, there’s something we lose…”

  Laughter. That is the signature of your inner sense. That will die in the Metropolis.

  Toby started, eyes big.

  “Dammit!” Killeen shouted at the consuming dark around them. “I said before, don’t come in like that. We have a code, a right, privacy among ourselves.”

  Yes—and that, too, is part of that “Something” you feel you would lose. This facet is related to your interior processing. I do not understand how this is so. It relates to your habits, of that I am sure. You must sleep to filter your experience of the world. This is typical of lower, naturally evolved forms.