Great Sky River (4 page)

“No! That fast?” Jocelyn stared up at him, eyes fevered and wide, wanting him to deny what she could see.

“Mantis…” The realization squeezed his throat. “It’s damn quick.”

“You hit it, though,” Jocelyn said.

“Luck. Just luck.”

“We’ve… never…”

“This one’s got some new tricks.”

Jocelyn’s voice was watery, plaintive. “But Fanny! She could protect herself better’n anybody!”

“Yeasay. Yeasay.”

“She knew
every
thing.”

“Not this.”

In Fanny’s half-closed, fear-racked eyes Killeen saw signs which the Family had been spared for months. Around her eyes oozed
pale gray pus. A bloodshot bubble formed in the pus as he watched. The bubble popped and let forth a rancid gas.

The Mantis had somehow interrogated Fanny’s nerves, her body, her very self—all in moments. Mechs could never before do that
swiftly, from a distance. Until now, a Marauder mech had to capture a human for at least several uninterrupted minutes.

That had been a small advantage humanity had over the roving, predator mechs, and if this Mantis was a sign, that thin edge
was now lost.

Killeen bent to see. Jocelyn peeled back the hard-webbed rubbery skinsuit. Fanny’s flesh looked as though thousands of tiny
needles had poked through it, from inside. Small splotches of blueblack blood had already dried just under the skin.

The Mantis had invaded her, read all. In a single scratching instant it had peeled back the intertwined neuronets that were
Fanny and had learned the story of her, the tale each human embeds within herself. The ways she had taken pleasure. How she
had felt the sharp stab of pain. When and why she had weathered the myriad defeats that were backrolled behind her, a long
undeviating succession of dark and light and swarming dark again, through which she had advanced with stolid and unyielding
pace, her steady path cut through the mosaic of worlds and hopes and incessant war.

The Marauder-class mechs sometimes wanted that:
not metals or volatiles or supplies of any sort. Nor even the tiny chips of brimming ’lectric craft which mere men often sought
and stole from lesser mechs, the navvys and luggos and pickers.

The suredeath. Marauders wanted information, data, the very self. And in questioning each small corner of Fanny the Mantis
had sucked and gnawed and erased everything that had made her Fanny.

Killeen cried in confused rage. He sprinted back to the fragmented Mantis and yanked free a leg strut.

Chest heaving, he slammed the arm-length strut into the wreckage, sending parts flying. Ledroff tried to call to him and he
bellowed something and then shut down his comm line entirely.

He did not know how long the smashing and shouting lasted. It filled him and then finally emptied him in the same proportion,
expending his rage into the limitless air.

When he was done he walked back to Fanny and raised the strut in mute, defeated salute.

This was the worst kind of death. It took from you more than your present life, far more—it stole also the past of once-felt
glory and fleeting verve. It drowned life in the choking black syrup of the mechmind. It laid waste by absorbing and denying,
leaving no sign that the gone had ever truly been.

Once so chewed and devoured, the mind could never be rescued by the workings of men. If the Mantis had merely killed her,
the Family could probably have salvaged some fraction of the true Fanny. From the cooling brain they could have extracted
her knowledge, tinted with her personality. She would have been stored in the mind of a Family member, become an Aspect.

The Mantis had left not even that.

The suredeath. Tonight, in the final laying-low of Fanny, there would be no truth to extract from the limp hollowed body which
Killeen saw so forlorn and crumpled before him. The Family could carry none of her forward and so it was almost as though
she had never walked the unending march that was humanity’s lot.

Killeen began to cry without knowing it. He had left the valley with the Family before he noticed the slow-burning ache he
carried. Only then did he see that this was a way that Fanny still lived, but all the same it was no comfort.

Shadows stretched long and threatening, pointing away from the hoteye of the Eater. Its harsh radiance cast fingers across
the stream-cut plain, fingers reaching toward the onstruggling human tide.

Each windgouged rock, though itself dull and worn, cast a lively colored shadow. The Eater’s outer ring was smoldering red,
while the inner bullseye glared a hard blue. As disksetting came and the Eater sank to the horizon, it drew from the least
rocky upjut a tail of chromatic ribbons. Shifting shadows warped the land, stretching perspectives. The seeing was hard.

So it was a while before Killeen was sure. He blinked his eyes, jumping his vision through the spectrum, and barely picked
up the wavering fern-green pip.

“Heysay,” he called. “Ledroff! Give a hard lookleft.”

The Family was spread through a canyon shattered by some ancient conflict. No one was closer than a klick. They slowed, glad
to pause after the hours of steady, fearful flight.

“For what?” Ledroff called.

“See a Trough?”

“No.”

Killeen panted slowly, smoothly, not wanting the sour sound of his fatigue to carry to the others. Ledroff’s response was
slow and minimal. Killeen knew that if Fanny had been speaking, Ledroff would have been sharp and quick. By Family tradition,
they would choose a new Cap’n as soon as they found safe camp. Until then, Killeen was point and called their maneuvers. Ledroff
understood, but that didn’t stop his grumbling.

They had paused to conduct a quick service for Fanny, concealing the body in a hastily made cairn. Then they had run long
and hard. They could not go much farther. Killeen had to find shelter.

“Jocelyn? See anything?”

“I… maybe.”

“Where?”

“A little thing… could be a mistake…” Strain laced her thin voice.

“Can you cross-scan with me?”

“I… here…”

A quick picture flared in Killeen’s right eye. Jocelyn’s overlay showed a sputtering blip.

“Let’s find it,” he said.

“Naysay,” Ledroff said sternly. “Better we sack in the open.”

“And shut ourselves down?” Jocelyn asked, disbelieving.

“Safer. Mech will naysay it’s us.”

“We’re too tired,” Killeen said. He knew Ledroff would have been right, if the Family wasn’t played out. Mechs usually couldn’t
find a human in a powered-down suit. They scented circuits, not skin.

“Trough? Found Trough?” Toby sounded fuzzy from daze-marching.

“Could be,” Killeen said. “Let’s look.”

Ledroff shouted, “Noway!”

But a chorus of assent drowned him out. Ledroff started arguing. Which was what you’d expect when a Family marched without
electing a new Cap’n. They all needed to rest and think.

Killeen ignored Ledroff and loped in long low strides over the nearest hill. It took teeth-gritting effort to achieve the
flowing smoothness but he knew the following Family would take note. Without thinking about the matter clearly he understood
that, worn to a brittle thinness, the Family needed some display of strength to give confidence, to regain their vector.

Ledroff came up behind. Killeen’s eyes automatically integrated Jocelyn’s display and picked up the sputtering slight promise-note
again. He surged over rumpled, scarred hills and realized he had overshot only when the signal faded.

“It’s buried,” he said.

“Where?” Ledroff asked with a cutting, impatient edge.

“Under that old factory.”

Tucked into a dimpled seam were sloping sheds of wrought rockmetal. Navvys clucked and rolled and labored around them, carrying
out the endless production that had given mechs their steady dominion over humanity. Such sheds were erected wherever the
land offered a
rich seam of weather-collected minerals. This was a neglected station, far from the lands where mechs chose to build their
majestic woven ceramic warrens. Yet the endless succession of such minor stations had flooded this world with mechlife and
soon, Killeen reflected, might end the long battle between the mechs and all else.

“Nosee! No is,” Sunyat called from far away. She was always the most cautious of the Family. “Maybe trap.”

Killeen made a show of ignoring her, same as he had done to Ledroff. Most times that was the best way, rather than talk. “Trough’s
buried. Navvys’ve built on top of it.”

“Troughs’re
that
old?” Jocelyn asked.

“Old as mechs. Old as men,” Killeen said. He landed beside a navvy and followed the half-blind thing as it rolled into the
factory. Sure enough, the navvys were refining some ceramo-base extract from the rocks, oblivious to the large rusted door
that formed one whole wall of their little world.

Within moments the Family had converged on the factory. They sapped each navvy, powering them down enough to pry out some
portable power cells, but not so far that the navvy would register a malf. At this they moved with accustomed grace. This
small place had no supervisor mechs to confront, no dangers. Navvys were easy pickings. The fact that the Family was like
rats stealing crumbs from a back larder did not concern or bother them.

Ledroff went into the Trough first, Killeen behind. It was a vast old barn, ripe with scents Killeen savored in the air. The
Family conducted its entry automatically, each darting forward while the others covered, exchanging not a word. Killeen and
Jocelyn crept carefully along rows of leaky vats, boots squishing in the slop.

Nothing. No navvys came to greet them, mistaking them for mechs. That meant this Trough was tended poorly, expected few visitors.
Its navvys were loaned to the factory outside.

“Out of business,” Ledroff grunted, sitting down on an iron-ribbed casement. He started shucking off his suit.

“Food’s good,” Jocelyn said. She had already stuck a fist into an urn of thick syrupy stuff. She licked it with relish. Long
brown hair spilled over her helmet ring, escaping. Her bony face relaxed into tired contentment.

Killeen listened as other Family prowled the long hallways, sending back the same report: nobody home. He went back to the
entrance and helped swing the big moly-carb hatch closed. That was it, for him. They were in safe haven and now he let himself
lie down, feeling the quiet moist welcome of the Trough envelop him.

Around him the Family unsuited. He watched them lazily. Jocelyn shucked her knobby knee cowlings with a heavy sigh. Mud had
spattered her shin sheaths; she had to pop their pinnings free with the heel of her hand. Her slab-muscled thighs moved gracefully
in the dappled light, but inspired no answering in Killeen.

The Family removed their webbed weaves and tri-socketed aluminum sheaths, revealing skins of porcelain, chocolate, sallow.
Their flesh had red, flaky areas where insulation bunched and rubbed. Many carried ruddy seams of forgotten operations. Others
showed the blue-veined traceries of old implants. These were add-ons from the days when the Family still knew how to work
such things. Glossy slick spots spoke of injuries soothed. But nothing could shore up the sagging flesh, the pouch-bellies
of inflamed organs. The Family carried a wearying burden of slowly accumulating biotroubles, unfixable
without the technology that they had lost with the Citadel.

Jocelyn had found a bubbling caldron of sweetyeast. Killeen ate some of the foamy yellow head with the single-minded ferocity
that the years of wandering had taught each of them. It had been four weeks now since they’d last found a Trough. They all
had been running on hardpack rations and bitter water hand-scooped from tiny, rare streams.

Troughs were all that kept them alive now. The dank, dark places had been made for the Marauder-class mechs, and of course
for the higher mechs for which humans had no names because men never survived a meeting with one. Marauders—like Lancers,
Snouts, Trompers, Baba Yaggas—needed bioproducts. Roving, they sometimes stopped in at the randomly sited Troughs to refeed
their interior, organic parts.

“Think this’s better?” Jocelyn asked quietly. She displayed her hair, now washed. Killeen realized he had dozed off for a
while.

“Looks different, yeasay. Fine.”

He could never think of anything to say to her these days. She was finger-curling her hair into a tide of tight whorls that
seemed to rush away from her high forehead. Cermo-the-Slow carefully combed her side panels down from the crown. Jocelyn had
already parted and smoothed Cermo’s bushy blond growth, which sloped over his ears with streamers of white and yellow. A blue
elastic gathered his thick tufts into a firm knot at the base of his skull.

Killeen dreamily squatted, watching Cermo groom Jocelyn. A life of running had given all the Family legs which could squat
for days, ready to move instantly. It
had also given them helmets for protection, which in turn messed their hair. In the years when humanity dwelled in the Citadel,
those who went out to forage among the slowly encroaching mechworld had been treated to a ceremonial cleansing upon their
return. This ritual expanded from a mere efficient scrub into a prolonged bath and hairdressing. Those brave enough to venture
forth deserved a marker, and their hair became their badge. At each return they would sculpt it differently, whether men or
women, affecting elaborate confections. They wore lustrous locks lightly bound by a jeweled circlet, or thick slabs parted
laterally, or two narrow strips with a blank band between; this last was termed a reverse Mohawk, though no one could recall
now what the proper name meant.

Killeen liked his hair done as finely as any. It was long, with rumpled currents working into unmanageable snarls at his neck.
Undoing the damage of the march would take patience.

He decided that this was not the right moment to ask Jocelyn. He had paid little attention to her of late, had little feeling
for her beyond the simple, automatic brotherhood he gave any other of the Family. They had slept together—fitfully, as all
things were now—for years. But a hundred days ago the Family had decided in Whole Council to numb the sex centers of each
member.