Great Sky River
Authors: Gregory Benford
“Where are you from?” Killeen asked on the sensorium. With effort he made his voice a blend of acoustics and electrospeech.
He constricted his throat like a man trying to imitate a frog. The effect, transduced and filtered by buried chips, sent electromagnetic
ringings into the fine, thin air.
There was a long moment of wind-stirred silence. Then,
I am slow. Stretched this far, I tire.
I wanted to reach a being called Killeen.
Killeen blinked with such startlement that his eyes flipped into the gaudy infrared. “Wha—? That’s me!”
I have a message for you.
ACCLAIM FOR GREGORY BENFORD’S CLASSIC NOVELS OF THE GALACTIC CENTER
ACROSS THE SEA OF SUNS
“So good it hurts. Benford puts it all together in this one— adult characters, rich writing, innovative science, a grand philosophical
theme—it’s all here.”
—
Washington Post Book World
“Confirms again Benford’s unsurpassed ability to simultaneously sustain literary values and exciting speculative science.”
—Publishers Weekly
TIDES OF LIGHT
“Mr. Benford is a rarity: a scientist who writes with verve and insight not only about black holes and cosmic strings but
about human desires and fears.”
—
New York Times Book Review
“Benford’s most adventurous, most philosophical, and most scientifically creative novel. The best sf novel so far this year.”
—
Houston Post
Fiction
Beyond Infinity
The Martian Race
Eater
The Stars in Shroud
Jupiter Project
Shiva Descending
(with William Rotsler)
Heart of the Comet
(with David Brin)
A Darker Geometry
(with Mark O. Martin)
Beyond the Fall of Night
(with Arthur C. Clarke)
Against Infinity
Cosm
Foundation s Fear
Artifact
Timescape
The Galactic Center Series
In the Ocean of Night
Across the Sea of Suns
Great Sky River
Tides of Light
Furious Gulf
Sailing Bright Eternity
Non-fiction
Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates
Across Millennia
Copyright © 1987 by Abbenford Associates
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First eBook Edition: October 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-56750-3
Contents
PART TWO: The Once-Green World
PART THREE: The Dreaming Vertebrates
To
Lou Aronica and David Brin
two knights of the Sevagram
K
illeen walked among the vast ruins.
Exhausted, he kept on through a jumble of shattered steel, caved-in ceilings, masonry and stone and smashed furniture.
His breath rasped as he called his father. “Abraham!”
A cold murmuring wind snatched the name away. Smoke seethed from crackling fires and streamed by him, making the air seem
to waver and flow.
From here the Citadel sprawled before him down the broad, knobbed hill. Intricate warrens were now squashed into heaps of
stone and slag. Legs stiff from exhaustion, eyes stinging with smoke and grief, he paused above a shattered plain of marble-white
rubble—the caved-in shards of a dome that once rose a kilometer above the Citadel arboretum. Places where he had run and played,
loved and laughed…
“Abraham!” He had seldom spoken his father’s name and now it seemed strange and foreign. He wheezed, coughed. The acrid bite
of smoke caught in his throat.
The lower ramparts of the Citadel burned fiercely. The
mechs had penetrated there first. Black murk hung over the larger districts—the Broadsward, the Green Market, and the Three
Ladies' Rest. Soot coated the jagged teeth of broken walls.
Beyond, lofty spires had been cut to blunt stubs. Their stumps radiated gorgons of structured steel. The shifting breeze brought
him the crunch of collapsing walls.
But the wind carried no moans or shrieks. The Citadel lay silent. The mechs had taken lives and selves and left nothing but
emptied bodies.
Killeen turned and moved along the hillside. This was his old neighborhood. Tumbled-down blocks and twisted girders could
not wholly conceal the paths and corridors he had known as a boy.
Here a man lay, eyes bulging at the bruised sky.
There a woman was split in two beneath a fallen beam.
Killeen knew them both. Friends, distant relatives of Family Bishop. He touched the cold flesh of each and moved on.
He had fled with the remnants of Family Bishop. They had quickly reached the far ridgeline and only then had he seen that
his father was not among the survivors. Killeen had turned back toward the Citadel, wearing powered leggings for speed. Like
lean pistons, his legs carried him within the slumped defensive walls before anyone in the Family noticed that he was gone.
Abraham had been defending the outer ramparts. When the mechs had breached those, the human perimeter had fallen back in a
mad scramble. The mechs poured in. Killeen was sure he had heard his father’s voice calling over the comm. But then the battle
had submerged them all in a rushing hot tornado of death and panic.
—Killeen!—
He stopped. Cermo-the-Slow was calling over the comm. “Leave me alone,” Killeen answered.
—Come on! No time left!—
“You head on back.”
—No! There’s mechs still around. Some comin' this way.—
“I’ll catch up.”
—Run! No time left.—
Killeen shook his head and did not answer. With a flick of a finger he dropped out of the comm net.
He climbed among tumbled stone. Even in his powered suit it was hard to make his way up the steep angles of ruined walls.
Though the mechs had gouged gaping holes, the massive bulwarks had stood for a while. But beneath the incessant pounding blows
even the heavy foundations had finally yielded.
He walked beneath an arch that had miraculously survived. He knew what lay ahead but could not keep himself from it.
She was in the same position. The heat beam had caught his wife as he carried her. Her left side was seared raw.
“Veronica.”
He bent down and looked into her open gray eyes. They peered out at a world forever vanquished.
He gently tried to brush closed her rebuking eyes. Her gummy, stiff eyelids refused to move, as if she would not give up her
last glimpse of the Citadel she had loved. Her pale lips parted with the half-smile she always made just before she spoke.
But her skin was cold and hard, as if it had now joined the unyielding solidity of the soil itself.
He stood. He felt her eyes at his back as he made himself walk on.
He scrambled over slumped piles that had been homes, workshops, elegant arcades. Fires snapped in the central library.
The public gardens had been his favorite spot, a lush wealth of moist green in the dry Citadel. Now they were blasted, smoking.
As he passed the smashed Senate, its alabaster galleries groaned and trembled and slowly clattered down.
He moved on warily, but there was no sign of mechs. “Abraham!”
Around him lay the exploded remains of his boyhood. Here in his father’s workshop he had learned to use the power-assisting
craft. There, beneath a lofty corbelled vault, he had first met a demure, shy Veronica.
“Abraham!”
Nothing. No body. It probably lay beneath collapsed bulwarks.
But he had not covered all the rambling complex that men had built through generations. There was still some chance.
—Killeen!—
It was not Cermo this time. Fanny’s voice cut through to him sharp and sure, overriding his own cutoff of the comm.
—Withdraw! There’s nothing we can do here now.—
“But… the Citadel…”
—It’s gone. Forget it.—
“My father …”
—We must run.—
“Others … There might be …”
—No. We’re sure. Nobody left alive here.—
“But…”
—
Now.
I’ve got five women covering the Krishna Gate. Come out that way and we’ll head for Rolo’s Pass.—
“Abraham…”
—Hear me? Hustle!—
He turned for one last look. This had been all the world for him when he was a boy. The Citadel had made humanity’s warm clasp
real and reassuring. It had stood resolutely against a hostile universe outside, strong yet artful. Its delicate towers had
glistened like rock candy. Returning to the Citadel from short forays, his heart had always leaped when he saw the proud,
jutting spires. He had wandered the Citadel’s labyrinthian corridors for many hours, admiring the elegant traceries that laced
the high, molded ceilings. The Citadel had always been vast and yet warm, its every carefully sculpted niche infused with
the spirit of the shared human past.
He looked back toward where Veronica’s body lay.
There was no time to bury her. The world belonged now to the living, to fevered flight and slow melancholy.
Killeen made himself take a step away from her, toward the Krishna Gate. Another.
The blasted walls teetered past. He had trouble finding his way.
Fog and smoke swirled before him. “Abraham!” he called again against empty silence.
The Citadel’s high, spidery walkways now lay broken in the dust, sprawled across the inner yards. He crossed the ancient,
familiar ground in a numbed daze. Craters yawned where he had once scampered and laughed.
At the edge of the smoldering ruins he looked back. “Abraham!”
He listened and heard nothing. Then, distantly, came a quick buzzing of mech transmissions. The rasping sound narrowed his
mouth.
He turned and ran. Ran without hope, letting his legs find the way. Stinging dust clouded his eyes—
A jerk.
Intense, blinding light.
“Hey, c’mon. Wake up.”
Killeen coughed. He squinted against the high glare of harsh yellow lamps. “Huh? What—”
“C’mon, gotta get up. Fanny says.”
“I, I don’t—”
Cermo-the-Slow loomed over him. The big smiling face was weary but friendly. “I just pulled the stim-plug on you, is all.
Got no time, wake you up easy.”
“Ah … easy …”
Cermo frowned. “You been dreamin' again?”
“I… the Citadel…”
Cermo nodded. “I was ’fraid that.”
“Veronica… found her.”
“Yeah. Look, you don’t think ’bout that, hear? She was a good woman, won’ful wife. But you got let go her now.”
“I…” Killeen’s tongue was raw from calling his father. Or was it from the alcohol he had gulped last night?
This was morning, early morning. He felt the stiffness in him from the night’s sleep. Peering upward, he could make out the
shadowy bulk of alien machinery. They had bedded down for the night in a Trough, he remembered. Around him, Family Bishop
was waking up.
“C’mon,” Cermo urged. “Sorry I pulled the plug so quick. Snap up now, though. We’re movin' out.”
“How… how come?”
“Ledroff spotted some Snout comin' this way. Figures it’s headed into this Trough for supplies.”
“Oh…” Killeen shook his head. An ache spread from his temples into his clammy forehead. A bead of night sweat dripped from
his nose as he sat up.
