Great Sky River (42 page)

He had sketched for them his way, the tale of the Argo. From the Families had come an answering song, a muttered assent peppered
by questions, doubts, naysays which bobbed like flecks on a dark ocean. They did not all agree. At best a fraction had the
resolve and spirit to follow where the ideas led, to take the first few steps marked in uncertain sands.

But some had it. Some had heard.

He had never thought it could be so exhausting. He had great respect for what a Cap’n had to summon up. His mouth was dry
and his legs ached as though he had been marching for hours.

Then he felt the pressing weight of the Mantis mind returning to his sensorium.

Despite your phylum’s limitations, you are capable of surprises.

“Thanks most kindly and fuck you,” Killeen said.

The people walking nearby heard the Mantis as well. They all stopped, heads tilted back. The Mantis seemed to crowd the very
air with its presence.

Even given my great abilities, your invitation is at root impossible.

“It’s an expression, not a proposition.”

I see. I have interrogated historical compilations from our cities, circling Snowglade. Among the messy archives of (admittedly,
nearly indecipherable) human lore, there are faint traces of such a craft named Argo. It may have been built to reach your
Chandeliers. Apparently, when we began to spread over Snowglade and carry out the necessary changes in it, your forefathers
elected to store the fast-vanishing human technology.

“You understand my offer?”

Your threat, yes. (Unintelligible.) Indeed, if you attempted to reach the Argo by yourself, I could easily stop you. I can
cause Marauders to block your path.

Killeen smiled coolly. “Sure. Stoppin’ us is easy. Just kill us.”

Which is precisely what I do not want, of course. I had believed that I could complete my art in one human generation. I see
now this cannot be. You are deeper and stranger than I suspected.

Shibo broke in, “Always be some stay here, in zoo. You use them.”

But do they represent the full range of your odd talents? This I do not know.

“You’ll find out. Just let some of us go.”

A hollow pressure rang through the sensorium, repre
senting some alien reaction Killeen could not interpret in human terms.

I will do more than that. I shall even help you.

Killeen did not take part in the cheering that broke out among the Bishops and Rooks nearby. Wary, he wondered what the Mantis’s
true thoughts were, and motives.

“Mantis present now?” Shibo asked.

“I can feel it.” Killeen rubbed his face. He had a headache that ran like strips of fire along his brow. He asked her to press
the spots behind his ears at the base of his skull. That was the old Bishop way of releasing the pain and it soon brought
easing. His senses seethed and sought, awakening. To him her hands were purring ruby-hot.

“It’d always be like this if we stay here,” he said as the warmth crept over him. “Mantis’ll be there in the background.”

“Watching?”

“Wish it was only. Naysay noway we can stop it.”

“Senses us?”

“We could get rid of it if we shut down our sensoria. Went blind.”

“Don’t want.”

“Me either. I… I’ll try…”

Carefully he focused his attention on the points where the faint buzzing presence entered him. He pushed it away. Gently,
carefully. Then harder. The subdued hum vanished.

“I think it’ll go if we want.”

She nodded. “I feel too.”

“Still around though.”

“Yeasay. But it goes.”

“I’d’ve never got through the Aspect storm without it. I’d be in a trance, same as that woman Hatchet used have as his translator.
Her Aspects must’ve panicked on a raid.”

“Crafter couldn’t fix her?”

“That’s what I figure. Mantis gave me just enough help. It’s some use.”

“I don’t like though.”

He knew what she meant. Life under a benign umbrella would always hint of distant eyes.

Slowly she let her eyes stray from the stars visible out the window. She looked at him aslant, speculatively. A thin knowing
smile illuminated the smooth planes of her face.

“The interlock commands I had. The sexcen modifications. They’re gone.”

She said nothing, just smiled.

He kissed her neck, face, mouth. All tasted of the air and soil but the mouth was stronger, deeper, moist. His knees dropped
him to the rough dirt floor. His teeth searched for the pullstring of her jumper. The weave was harsh and his beard scraped
a purr from it. The cloth came free and slid easy and she locked her legs over his back. The small room was twilight cool
and had no bed. They rolled over twice on the fragrant lumpy dirt. His saliva soaked through the cloth before he got it all
off her using only his mouth. He would not give up his hold on her, or she hers. They rolled again, this time against the
wall, stubbing toes, bumping knees.

She wriggled away. A popping sound, snaps. She slid free of her exskell.

Then he encountered in the gathering dark her hip, her marvelous compact breasts. His tongue discovered her back, sharp shoulder
blades, furred nape of the neck. Kneading. Rubbing away the riverrun layered silt of tension and fear that had built up in
them both. He felt thick years of it shimmer and dissolve. Her teeth plucked delicious pain from his lips. His chin bristled
in her hair. A wind blew down from her great nostril mountains. Layers peeled away and he felt deep within an old Aspect of
his, a woman, sliding down his arms and into his fingers. He had not felt it this way before, with Veronica or Jocelyn. A
soft womanly weight came into his touch. Going layers down. Access. Slow nudges. Rolling down slow tremors together, they
moved in a hovering hush. Her legs enclosed him. Cradled heat burst into his mouth. Grab, release, return, circle. A liberating
toss of the hip brought bone to bone. Bellies opened and a shoulder fell through to the vexed heart. The woman in him felt
her trip-hammer pulse quicken, ebb, come again. A hushed audience seemed to attend each movement, the slick slice of him and
her together ramifying up into higher chords. Fit snug. Passages widened as muscles stuttered. He grasped and suspended himself,
felt her spiral up. Heat lifted her hair.

Twists and twinges set off sure long motions and he felt in the instant the meaning of the grotesque statuary he had seen
back in the mechplex. The tortured coiling thing reflected his need for this and yet in its relentless plunging power and
opening fissures managed to get the whole thing profoundly wrong. The Mantis would never know them. There was a press of essences
beyond the digital romance. A deep-buried spirit filled organic life. It came from origins in the way the universe was made,
and generated
out of itself the life each mortal being felt throbbing in every sliding moment. The Mantis had robbed such moments as this
from the suspended minds of the suredead but it could not surecopy this; Killeen knew this fact solidly and forever in the
mere passing twist and twinge of a second. She felt it too, gave him a flex and thrust that brought moist skirtings into him.
She loosened a knot in his wrist so it snapped up into his elbow, whizzed through his shoulder, wakened a hollowness behind
his right ear. She kissed him, sinking teeth into soft gums. Their tongues slid rough over each other, finding the slick underside.
Hothearted, she nicked him higher. Something had unlocked him and he felt the secret source of the power he had that day in
the bowl, the push behind his solid words. Life regenerate. As he was his father had been and Toby would be: tongue into ear,
moist brush of seabreeze. His father lived. He passed the movement back to her and her teeth drew red lines down his throat.
A bead grew from a slow delirium firepoint. Centripetal violence clasped them both. It hit him hard.

EPILOG Argo

T
he 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.