Great Sky River (17 page)

They were a people seasoned in the Citadels, in the enveloping comforts of a fixed sanctuary. Only the daring, the brave and
young, had gone forth from the Citadels to capture and steal from the mechciv. Now all the Family had to live as nomads. Their
only hostels were the Troughs and the rare Casas. So they clung to the hope of some final resting site, some permanence in
a reeling world.

Killeen ruminated on this vaguely, glad that they had Cap’ns to confront such issues. He felt Arthur’s presence simmering
in the back of his mind, and the cool, ironic voice arose:

You realize, don’t you, that humanity started as nomads?

“Back before the Citadels?”

Far before that, of course. Surely you remember what I discussed before?

“Damnation, I can’t recall everything! You’d rather talk than
breathe,
way I see it.”

I’ve told you, I don’t have adequate maps of this Splash. It is recent. But I
am
sorry about that messy episode when you awoke two days ago. We
are
worried; and I suppose it does come out at the worst times for you, and in the worst way.

“Just keep your place. No jabber. I got be sharp.”

Let me merely add that the nomad way of life is genetically quite all right for us humans. Civilization is a relatively recent
invention—

“Mechciv you mean?”

No,
our
civilization. Not simply the crude forms we had in the Citadels. The
original
human society. It was vast, glorious! They built the ships which brought us here—a voyage of incomprehensible distance. They
came to make contact with the voices they could hear over radio. They—

“Whose?”

Arthur’s voice begrudged the fact:

Well, apparently the transmissions were leakage from a faction of mech civilization. But understand, it spoke in a difficult
code, one we may
have misinterpreted. The original Captains were coming to find what the message promised—a library of all galactic knowledge.
Think of it!— the collected writings and pictures and songs, who knows what wealth? The Captains’ ships could cruise just
under the speed of light Even so, their voyage required over seventy thousand years. Such sacrifice—

“They came to learn from
mechs?”
To Killeen this was as incomprehensible as learning from a stone, or the air. Mechs simply
were,
a force of nature beyond communication.

Well, admittedly—

Shibo’s high-pitched call came to him, —Duster!—from the other side of a narrow, stony valley. It jolted him from his running-reverie.

The Families instantly dropped to the ground and sought shelter. Over a far mesa drifted a four-winged thing that glinted
like finespun copper in the Eater’s slanting hotblue radiance. It had a light and lazy look, Killeen thought. He had not seen
one for some time but this one did not have the determined straightline way to it.

Shibo’s clipped voice showed she had made the same conclusion. —Duster empty. Looking.—

“Figure it’s on its way back home? Surveying?” Killeen squinted at the slender sweptback body. No signs of the pale white
dust that usually descended in a thin, precise stream.

—It saw.—

“Dunno if it pick us up. Pretty far away.”

—Not dusting. Looking.—

The Families lay downdoggo for a long while as the craft swooped and glided in elegant curves. Killeen appreciated its movement,
waiting silent and unthinking for it to go. They had all learned long ago to let mechs pass unopposed unless the odds were
lopsided for them. Against Dusters there were never any advantages.

When the Duster dropped below the horizon they began a fast skip-walk in the opposite direction. Killeen had Toby come closer
and watched the right near flank more often. The Marauders never worked with Dusters, as near as anyone could tell, but since
the Mantis Killeen expected anything, everything.

So it was that he heard the sound of metallic agony before the others. It wafted over his sensorium in a high, skimming note
and then was gone. Killeen signaled to the rest and compiled a vector fix. It pointed to a nearby brush-choked arroyo.

Killeen slipped through wiry brambles and glimpsed the source of the thin, microwave scream. A Rattler, absorbed in its work.

The thing had seized a whole squad of alloy-navvys. The navvys were apparently trying to set up a processing plant next to
a rich ore seam. The Rattler was devouring each, its belly already fired up. Killeen could hear the deep bass ground-shaking
tremor as it melted them down into easily portable assets. A gut-roar came from the Rattler as it digested, its ceramo-ribs
contracting with pops and groans as it forced navvys into its innards.

Nearby, two burning hulks still fumed. They were the manager mechs that had been watching over this work crew. With these
eliminated, the navvys could only squeak calls to their distant city. This far into the Splash,
the Rattler’s own transport would be here to carry away the plunder before help arrived.

Killeen signaled the others to stay back.

Rattlers were not dangerous when working at their main tasks. Some Marauders were scavengers, like the Scrabblers or Snouts.
They were fairly easy to avoid if you were quick and posted scouts. Others were agents in the incessant conflict between different
mech cities. The Pickers and Rattlers and Stalkers had started to appear long before Killeen’s father’s time, seemingly in
response to the inevitable scarcities of raw materials.

Rattlers were elongated, treacherous machines which seemed to coil and recoil as they moved. They searched out low-level mechs
of other cities and dismantled them, breaking them down for spare parts or simple metals. Their jointed, slipsliding skins
housed long tubular smelters and foundries.

Killeen had come upon one with his father, long ago. It had been trying to eat some minor mech. The Citadel had needed large-scale
spare parts then, the kind that Marauders had in plenty.

So their band had waited until the Rattler was fully distended, lying like a gorged tube of scratched aluminum, beginning
to excrete ingots of ore.

They had descended at that vulnerable moment and gutted it quick-clean, tearing away parts and frying its mainmind. They also
ambushed the Rattler’s ore carriers, when they dutifully arrived.

That had been one of the best times he had ever had with his father. Just the two of them, prowling the flanks of the scavenging
band. Killeen had potted a Snout that carried edible foods for its organic parts. They had both stuffed themselves with the
greasy goo.

They had been out six days in all, and returning on the morning of the seventh they had learned that Killeen’s mother had
died while they were gone. There was nothing they could have done. She had caught one of the plagues left over from the era
when the mechs had tried to eliminate humanity through bioengineered virulence. Plagues seldom surfaced anymore, mostly because
the biosphere was too weak to support them long. But even the old epidemics, lying dormant in some ditch, could mutate and
infest again. Her death had brought Killeen and his father closer in the narrowing years before the Calamity.

Staring at the gorging Rattler, Killeen felt the old struggle within himself. His vision narrowed to a red-rimmed halo around
the booming, insufferably ugly thing. The pipings of the Family dimmed, his sensorium world fell away. Crisp lightning forked
bluehot in his eyes. He seemed pitched forward, balancing on the balls of his feet, ready to rush in a satisfying pureblind
rage, to bring desolation and dismemberment to the self-absorbed and smug-ugly Rattler.

Then he felt a hand on his arm and Shibo whispered, “Still.”

“I, I got—”

“Go.”

“Kill ’em
all,
the damned—”

“Go now.”

“I… I just…”

Her hand lay cool and strong on him. He felt the tightness in him ebb. He sensed the others hanging back at the mouth of the
arroyo, felt their puzzlement at why he had ventured this far in. “Needless. Rattler’s carriers arrive soon.”

“I…”

“Only way beat Marauders is
learn
them.”

“But—”

“Not risk self. Remember Toby.”

“I… yeasay. Yeasay.”

They left the Marauder to its meal.

They moved swiftly, driven by the mere glancing encounter with the Duster and Rattler. The slowly thickening vegetation around
them had seemed an unspoken promise of verdant peace. Only as they put distance behind them did this assurance return.

The Families whispered among themselves about the air’s soft moisture, the pale emerald grass, the twisted brown vines and
creepers which sprouted from crevices and small sheltered basins. To find a Rattler obliviously doing its job in this surrounding
undercut their unvoiced dream. It propelled them faster toward the center of the Splash.

Killeen himself felt no such flight response. Marauders angered him without touching any longer the wellsprings of fear. To
him they were a constant threat, hateful but natural.

Even in the first moment of glimpsing the Rattler he had thought it blandly evil, a scene without any possible protagonist.
The navvys being eaten as they cried for their distant protector were no less an ancient enemy than
the Rattler which digested them. And even as red rage had seized him and his memories had swelled, he had taken the time
to notice that the Rattler’s treads were snarled with brambles caught in the links. it was harder for mechs to move in the
plant-clogged terrain here. Another small advantage. Another way that Splashes revived the once-green world.

Ledroff called for a song. Across the comm sensorium soared an ancient Family march, composed far in the past by some great
groundstriding marshal. Killeen let the pounding spirit of the music come into him. Family song poured from his throat.

This was his favorite legacy, far better than the Aspects’ whole gobbled lifetimes of streaming talk. He liked this form of
the melodic art especially, the forward tilt to it, the wonderful, sweeping Moze Art. How many generations back in the Family
had the composer lived? Perhaps the man was a great-grandfather. Killeen would like to be able to claim close kinship. Arthur
tried to blurt out some ancient lore, but Killeen was too transfixed by the artful rhythms to pay attention.

As he loped to the song’s surge and play he noted that the Family was moving faster. Ledroff had summoned up the firm rhythms
to get them quickly away from the Rattler, damping fears. It had worked.

—Duster!— someone cried.

The music stopped abruptly.

Killeen was caught in midstride. He glided for a long instant, hit, and rolled into a narrow dry rivulet. He sniffed through
the long wavelengths. “No mechsmell.”

He located Toby and then listened to the Families seeking shelter. Rook mothers and fathers called, plain
tive and hysterical, for their children. Panic edged the sensorium.

Shibo sent, —Naysay. Look.—

He closeupped the horizon and at first could not believe what he saw. Had Angelique fouled his farseer? These flying objects
looked distant, but they smelled to be close by.

Shibo sent a clear, calm, —Birds.—

Astonished, the Families got to their feet. They brushed off dirt and peered at the fluttering, living skyfog. Hundreds of
specks darted and twittered above the bushes.

For a long moment no one said anything. Then a cheer rang through the comm. Some of the younger ones had never seen a thing
aloft not made of metal. They had thought only mechs ruled the air, much as their emissions stained the dawn sky a milky gray.

Toby ran forward, shouting “Heyyea! Heyyea!” The tiny agents of organic life, instead of greeting him as a member of their
kin, burst upward into a surprised, fleeing cloud. Toby blinked, startled.

Killeen laughed. “You’ll have go easy with ’em.”

Toby frowned. “Don’t they
like
us?”

“Life’s born scared.”

“Scared even of life?”

“’Specially.”

“Mechs aren’t.”

“Mechs’re ’fraida mechs. ’Member those navvys calling Mayday back there?”

Toby nodded decisively. “Mechs’re ’fraid
us,
too.”

Killeen gave his son a wan smile, knowing exactly why the boy wanted to assert himself with such a baldly false declaration.
“Maybe,” he answered mildly.

“Are.” Toby fingered the burnished-steel disk pistol on
his belt, unconsciously stroking this small emblem of power.

“Navvys and managers’ll call Mayday when they see us, but that’s ’cause they mistake us for enemy mechs.”

Toby’s mouth twisted into a look of derisive mirth. “Naysay!”

“Is.”

“We’re two-legged. Mechs’re treaded.”

“So?”

“Mechs see that.”

“Our ’quipment’s mechmetal. Navvys see that, is all.”

“Nosay noway,” Toby said firmly. To end this slight affront to his inner picture of human status, he booted off to his marching
position. Killeen watched him go, a thin figure skip-walking with oblivious lithe grace over rumpled scrub and gully.

Toby needed to feel that humanity dealt at least on even terms with the mechs, that there was a scheme of loss and gain to
their endless running. It was a way to accept and put behind him the slaughter of the day before. Killeen would not lie to
him, but all the same he could avoid saying plainly what the boy was slowly seeing: that humans mattered so little even navvys
were unprogrammed to react to them. Only Marauders carried orders regarding humans, and those were rules of simple extermination.
Even the fearsome Mantis probably had no great status in mech culture.

Killeen himself needed to let the slaughter slip behind him. He could not simply spend long hours arranging his hair, staring
pensively into space, as some like Jocelyn did—building arabesques that would dissolve the next time he put on his helmet.
That never worked.

Killeen felt the shocked regret and sorrow as a heavy,
black, blunt pressure inside, undefined and unreachable. He seldom talked of such dimly felt obstructions. There had been
a time when Jocelyn had tried to get him to handle his feelings that way. It had only made him feel awkward and stupid, his
tongue a dumb, leathery, betraying instrument.