Great Sky River (45 page)

“Yeasay. The manmech’ll be good for that.”

“It work out okay?”

“Sure. Wish it’d cut out that barking, though.”

“You don’t like it?”

“Well, that’s not so bad. Sounds funny with the woman voice, though. Was there really an animal made that noise once?”

Killeen smiled. “So I hear. Worked for us.”

“Did all the animals?”

“Some. What my Aspects tell me is, we got more and more of them working for us. Or we ate them, which is another way of working
for us I guess.”

“Are ’em?”

“Yeasay. First food humans ever had, I s’pose.”

Toby’s forehead wrinkled in doubt. “Thought we just ate plants.”

“Aren’t animals left on Snowglade big enough for eating. We would if we could find some, prob’ly.”

“Sounds funny. Not sure I’d like eating somethin’ that was movin’.”

“We’d cook it first, the way we do most plants. Aspects say there was a time when we took animals and put them in fact’ries.
Made them grow fast and didn’t let them get out or move much, so they’d grow faster. Then we’d eat them.”

Toby looked at Killeen in flat disbelief. “We’d do
that?
”

Killeen opened his mouth to say something and suddenly saw in his mind’s eye the grotesque scenes in the mechplex.

The pumping legs. Racks of bulging, muscular arms. The vaults of glazed human parts. The Mantis-made sculptures. And finally,
the shambling monstrous Fanny.

Had humans ever done that to lesser forms? Used them for parts of manufacture or casual amusement?

He found it hard to believe humans would do that to animals. Box and gouge and use them like machines. As though they were
not part of the long chain of being that united life against mechanism.

Killeen remembered the gray mouse that had peered up at him so long ago. Between them had passed a glimmering
recognition of joined origins and destiny. Cruel need might force Killeen to eat the mouse—though he could not imagine the
act—but never would he hurt or degrade it. Not the way the Mantis had eaten the essence of Fanny and made it into something
terrible.

No. He did not think humans would ever have done that.

You could not trust everything the Aspects said. They were repeating history they had heard and that could be wrong. Or they
could lie.

“Don’t worry ’bout that. Just go get something to eat. And watch yourself in the tunnels out there, huh? Could be mechs still
hidin’.”

Toby’s frown vanished in a glimmering. As the boy went out of the control room Killeen could see him cast his questions aside
and take up again the eagerness of the hunt. He would find the manmech and together they would prowl the corridors. Through
the complicated scheme of the ship would resound distant enthusiastic barking, glad cries, and the hot energy of pursuit.
Something in him looked forward to that, for reasons he could not name.

Snowglade was a brown, rutted ball.

That shocked them, even though they had fled and fought over innumerable broad wasted plains of it. Among the Families there
had always been the long-held memory of old Snowglade: of great lakes shimmering blue, of green glades, of moist high valleys
warmed by Denix radiance.

The globe that swam in the view-wall was a dried husk. Not the ample fruit which the Aspects remembered and spoke of recovering.
Snowglade was the pit of that
fruit, now eaten. The mechs had buried its ice, cooled its plains, smothered its brimming life in dust and desecration.

Mechworks dotted the night side of Snowglade with their pale, blue glow. Traceries looped and cut the night with amber, ruby,
burnt yellow. It was their world now.

Killeen listened to the startled exclamations as the people passed through the big control bay. They took a while to understand
what they saw and the ideas did not come easily.

Once they did, there was always a moment of indrawn breath, of amazement at the scale of what they witnessed and what it meant.
Snowglade was a blasted ruin. The fabled green paradise of their forefathers was lost.

He remembered Toby when he had been the merest infant. If you let him go for a second, or even partially subtracted some of
his support, the small brown thing would quickly respond. His arms would reach out to grab, his hands clench. Even his feet
would seek purchase and his toes would grasp.

The Arthur Aspect had told Killeen that this was an instinctive response. If matters of gravity changed, if support failed,
the young sought to grab their parent and hold on. The baby did not know it did it. It simply did.

Killeen wondered if they were doing that now. Reaching out from the dead parent planet. Grasping, even as they said farewell.

Life carrying out impulses implanted in the very way the world worked. Not following a program of its own, but a design won
from experience itself, from being immersed in the world and inseparable from it.

Grasping for something it did not fathom.

Shibo had stayed with the ship system until her eyelids drooped, her exskell whined, her hands strayed randomly. Then she
slept.

When she awoke, Snowglade was a dwindling dry mote. The Families were securing the ship by hook and by crook, figuring the
works of it. This was the first technology they had ever seen designed for human use. Tinkering with it, solving puzzles no
more complex than a doorknob, opened long-dormant ways of thinking, avenues sealed by the ancient identification of machines
with mechs and mechs with death.

Killeen took courage from this. If they could master this ship they had a chance. Not a good chance, perhaps, given what might
lurk up here in the swallowing black. But it was a beginning. And they had faced hard nights before.

Shibo told him what she had learned of their course. “Outward from the Center, that much I see. Winds of matter blow here.
We catch some that. Don’t know how but the ship does. So we go out.”

It was enough for the moment to know that the Mantis had not placed them on some deadly path. There was time enough to learn
more and in that could lie their future.

“We can’t take everything the Mantis did as wrong,” he said to Shibo and Cermo when they all met before the view-wall. “It
might have sent us somewhere useful.”

“Glad we killed it,” Cermo-the-Slow said, his face twisted up in distaste. “The Fanny-thing…”

Killeen nodded. “It did not know human dignity. How could it?”

Cermo shook his head. “Should’ve.”

“When you back us down and we haven’t got anything left, you can’t take our dignity,” Killeen said. “We’ll die
for it. Kill for it. Hatchet forgot that and so he died. Everyone in the Families understood that as soon as he or she saw
what Hatchet had done. That he would do anything, sink as low as he must, if that meant his Metropolis dream could continue.”

“Yeasay,” Shibo said.

He went on. “The Mantis made a mistake, showing everybody what Hatchet had done. I asked it that because it thought that would
somehow move us. Make us do what it wanted. Make Metropolis into a zoo. But instead it united us.”

Killeen said this slowly, carefully. Cermo had to understand it because Cermo had to tell the others, to speak for Killeen
when voices rose in opposition behind his back. As they always would.

There was much he wanted to tell Cermo and Shibo and the others but could not yet, in the confusion of so much newness.

“We got it,” Shibo said. “Mantis gone.”

Killeen gave her a wan smile. “Maybe. Prob’ly not, though.”

“But I burned it.”

“Mantis, it’s spread out some way. You blew it away so fast maybe it didn’t get all itself moved, sent other places on Snowglade.
Some got away, though. That’s what it did times before, when we thought we killed it. Maybe
nothin’
can kill it.”

Shibo said, “Next time—”

“Hope there’s no next time,” Killeen said fervently. He loved Shibo and didn’t ever want to subject her to a risk like the
one they had just run. “We were lucky. Damn lucky.”

And in destroying the Mantis they risked Metropolis,
as well. If the Mantis did not reassemble itself quickly, Marauders might find and attack the humans left behind.

There was no way around that fact. It was the price of their freedom and they would have to live with it.

To Killeen’s surprise Arthur broke in, his small precise voice seemingly unchanged from the time when he had been possessed
by the Mantis.

Hormones are great weavers of illusions. That was most clever, using the natural response of yourself and her to mask your
speech. Little problems, indeed. Quite probably the Mantis could not penetrate it to understand what you meant. Still, I do
feel you could perhaps have negotiated with it a more safe resolution of—

Killeen cut off the Aspect with a gruff grunt. Shibo lifted an eyebrow at him, as if suspecting what went on. He grinned.

Cermo-the-Slow asked about some details and Killeen answered with only part of his mind. He was tired but he did not want
to rest. There was so much to understand and so few clues. He would have to listen to his Aspects more than ever, but always
on guard against their incursions, their willfulness.

He wondered idly if the Mantis had such problems. What was an anthology intelligence? Wasn’t Killeen, with his Aspects and
Faces and own self-doubts, a collection of minds? As he grew older, parts of himself came into view like fresh landscape.

That was what the Mantis missed. Mech civilization was beyond humanity’s grasp in many ways, but of one thing Killeen was
sure. The machines lived forever in some
sense, their myriad selves gathered up and reprocessed in some collective mind. The impulse to do that must have come long
ago from the same despair that afflicted humans—the sure knowledge of a personal, final end.

So the mechs had made immortality their greatest aim. Renegades who wanted to preserve all their minds were condemned. Somehow,
mech civilization had decided that only a fraction of a single consciousness was worth saving. So it promised a salvation
of sorts. Killeen had listened to the rantings of his own Nialdi Aspect and knew that the idea of some God-granted life was
a powerful drive. Humans had believed that, too. Mechs had made it real. They had sought and found a way out of the crush
of matter and time. Their world was one of perpetual obedience to a single order, because to disobey meant true oblivion.

And that was where the Mantis had missed the essence of the thing. Killeen knew this in a way he could not express, any more
than he could say out loud what he felt when he put his arm around the shoulder of his son. But he knew it all the same.

Death’s sure and steady measure was not pure evil. It brought an intense poignant richness to every moment. To mortal men
each day came once and forever and struck sure into the heart. The machines would never know that. They lived in a kind of
still gray death, where no one moment meant anything, because all moments were alike.

Only the dreaming vertebrates knew that life held more than that.

Which was why the Argo voyaged up. They moved across dark vaults beneath shimmering stars, the great sky river, perhaps to
some tranquil end and perhaps equally to final black oblivion. But outward. Outwanrd.

* * *

He was passing down a corridor on the way to see to some trouble when Cermo-the-Slow and three Rooks stopped him to ask about
still another problem. There had been no time to call a meeting of Families, a Witnessing of all the events which had befallen
them so quickly, a time to sort it all out. But when they had all settled on a solution to the problem Cermo grinned and said,
“Yeasay, Cap’n.”

The four of them matter-of-factly departed. Killeen stood looking after them blankly This was a ship and she was under his
helm. But he had not fully thought of the fact that this was the first time in a long drumroll of centuries when the conditions
of the title were again met. Killeen blinked and even mouthed the word out loud. Then, slowly, he nodded.