Great Sky River (43 page)

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 flowed 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 an 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.

Toby’s mouth twisted, his eyes narrowed. Killeen saw that rather than being scared, the boy already considered the Mantis
an irritant. He understood this but knew it was dangerous. They were getting used to the Mantis.
Thing about aliens is, they’re alien.

“So what you do, huh? Don’t sleep?” Toby demanded.

We process information in parallel systems while remaining conscious. Such clearing mechanisms as sleep and laughter we do
not need.

Toby said derisively, “Must get on your nerves.”

Killeen said, “Don’t have any. Nerves, I mean.”

Toby shrugged. “Can’t be much fun.”

“Prob’ly isn’t,” Killeen agreed.

Toby chuckled. “Prob’ly don’t know what fun is, right?”

Not precisely, no. It has to do with your downtime processing mechanism, of that I am sure. You accumulate your curious dynamic
tensions through conscious operations. Some of these discharge during your downtime processing, your sleep. (Unintelligible.)
Others escape with the venting of the reflexive sounds—

“Laughin’?” Toby asked in disbelief.

Yes. There are also accumulations of identity-signifiers. You must continually maintain your self-knowledge, your interior
image of your essence, in order to keep your subprograms working property. We have similar systems, of course. Yours, though,
appear to be keyed to your sexual identity. Internal questionings accumulate. Only by reaffirming your sexual self, by uniting
with an opposite member, can you resolve and discharge these accumulated signifier problems—tensions, I suppose you would
call them. Curiously, this can occur with only a small sample of the available candidates, often merely
one
candidate. For example, your father has, once I released him of some crude internal programming, formed with Shibo a—

Killeen said sharply, “Don’t go talking dumb ’bout things you don’t know.”