Great Sky River (7 page)

And it was only meters away from the cubby where Toby crouched.

Killeen knew he could not penetrate the Crafter’s upper body with a bolt. Only his ramrod could.

He got to his feet, crouched low, and judged distances. A beamed message to Toby would alert the Crafter. He perched to jump
and—

—
whooooom
—a blurring, clawing cloud flooded him with brittle images of crisp yellow deserts, gritty sand, sicksweet smell of roasting
flesh—all scrambled and coming fastfurious into him. He lost his balance, felt his hands and feet go coldhard numb.

He jumped anyway.

The deck rushed up at him and he leaned forward, sensing nothing in his body but able to direct his sawdust hollow hands to
thrust forward on the ramrod. Wind whistled. The Crafter gleamed metalpure in pale descending light. The ramrod quivered into
life, its head turning as its minute sensors sought and savored. The Crafter’s ceramic sheen beckoned it.

Killeen hit the Crafter boots first and rocked forward. The ramrod point plunged in and he felt it snake and seek and bite
hard. A fast jolt of electricity shot through him and shorted to the self-ground of the Crafter, its power source exhausting
itself in a snapping prickly surge.

It whined and froze.

Killeen lay on it for long moments, unscrambling his senses.

Something strong had hit him just before he dived. He listened to distant silky shouts and tried to tag the voices with names.
They were all saying something about Jake but for a while he could not untangle the mingled threads.

Only as he stiffly picked himself off the curved carbochrome back of the Crafter did he understand: Jake-the-Shaper was dead.
Not just killed, but suredead. Something up among the halfdark girders had found Jake, sucked him of self, and was now gone.

Toby swam into his vision, leaned him back against the Crafter cowling. His son popped a drink into Killeen’s mouth and spoke
to him anxiously. Killeen muttered something, his voice a dry croak. Slowly, the world came back.

Ledroff came clumping down the sky, bounding among the now-ordinary girders, torchlit in orange. Ledroff was in a pureblind
rage, eyes glowering. Five women searched the struts for the things that had attacked,
but there was nothing left. Ledroff saw Killeen leaning against the Crafter’s ceramo-shank and landed a few steps away, his
legs wheezing with the impact.

“What’d you
do?”

“Heard ’em coming. Went up top.” Killeen squeezed fingers against his eyesockets, trying to make them trigger over to normal
vision.

“You shoot first?”

“Sure.” Killeen felt his eyes click back to normal. The world leaped toward him, then steadied.

“I naysayed shooting.”

“Wasn’t time to ask.”

“Damnfool! These’re ordinary mechs. They wouldn’t’ve left us if you hadn’t—”

“Belay the noughtsay, Ledroff. They were directed.”

Ledroff’s face bunched into a grimace of disbelief. “By what?”

Killeen slapped the Crafter.

“This’s a
laborer,”
Ledroff said dismissively. “It wouldn’t hunt us.”

“It did. Way I figure, we surprised it while it was laid up in this Trough, getting fixed. Toby found the parts, ’member?”

“Coulda been left here anytime.”

“Navvys woulda picked up the parts. Crafter dropped them and finished up its repair job quick, once it heard us comin’ in.”

“Took its navvys with it?”

“Looks like. Those mechs up there, you give ’em a look. Modified. Crafter’s good at that. It heard us, backed off. Thought
things through. Built a little raiding party while we were resting up last night.”

Ledroff scowled. “Maybe.”

Killeen sighed. “Hasta be.”

Toby put in, “That’s what
happened.”

Ledroff smiled at the boy. “I’ll decide that.”

Killeen was about to spit back a sharp reply when Jocelyn came up hurriedly and said, “Cap’n, we tried with Jake. Couldn’t
save even a scrap.”

Ledroff nodded soberly. Hearing Ledroff addressed as Cap’n startled Killeen. He was going to have to take orders from this
man.

Ledroff already carried the mantle of the Cap’ncy with unconscious gravity. He said, as though to himself, “Point is, what’d
the Crafter want?”

“Kill us,” the boy said with horrible simplicity.

“Crafters make things, Toby,” Ledroff said. He lifted an extruder arm from the burntout carcass and hefted it. “They don’t
hunt humans.”

“Till now,” Killeen said. “Till now.”

Two dead in two days. Suredead. Gone.

The Family was thus diminished more than through the loss of three or even four to the ordinary death. Centuries had piled
upon them this injunction: that while the shuddering final gasp of the body was a tragedy to the person, it need not hurt
so deeply those who loved the vanquished soul.

If Fanny or Jake had lingered there would have been time. A few Family members carried the small intricate
gear which could extract vital fractions of the neardead—quickly, deftly, gathering up threads of pastlife and personality.

But something in the rafting girders had aimed at Jake the most awful of weapons. The suredeath was, until now, encountered
only in the Marauder mechs.

The thing above had escaped. If it was a mere navvy, or even another Crafter, that meant the mechs had added another hateful
ability to their riverrun of innovation.

Two suredead. So deep a wound made it impossible for the Family to leave the Trough that day. Wisdom would have forced them
out, away from such a betrayed trap, but wisdom comes only from reflection. The Family mourned and hated, both acts sapping
them of purpose.

In vengeance Killeen fell upon the Crafter. He kicked in plates, ripped away whipwire antennae. The Family gathered and in
pureblind rage they stripped the Crafter clean. They yanked free the parts and servos, booty used to maintain their own suits.
Over the finely machined carcass they crawled, pillaging the finest workmechship of factories men had never seen and never
would.

Mourning Jake-the-Shaper, women savagely ripped away delicate finetuned components, slashed through orchestrated constellations
in copper and silicon, and tossed aside what they neither recognized nor could use. This was almost all of the Crafter, for
none in the Family knew how such things worked. The most able of them could only connect modular parts, trusting her eye to
find the right element. Of theory they had little, of understanding even less. Long eras of hardship and flight had hammered
their once-rich heritage of knowledge into flat, rigid rules of thumb.

In place of science they had simple pictures, rules for
using the color-coded wires which carried unknown entities: Volts, Amps, Ohms. These were the names of spirits who lived somehow
in the mechs and could be broken to the will of humanity. Currents, they knew, flowed like water and did silent work. Clearly,
the shiny wreaths of golden wire and perfectly machined onyx squares somehow bossed the currents. Electrons were tiny beasts
who drove the motions of larger beasts; such was obvious.

In the days of the Citadel there had been men and women who knew crude electrocraft. The years of long retreat had eliminated
them. And there was no time to patiently learn anew from the Family’s Aspects.

The Family scavenged with a vengeance, tearing the Crafter apart brutally. Cylinders bled oil on the tile deck. Optical threads
snarled up and tripped the plunderers, only to be stamped flat and kicked into dark corners.

Killeen slowly let his rage seep from him. He had known Jake-the-Shaper all his life, a rather distant man of hangdog eyes
and a thin, perpetually exhausted mouth. He mourned him. But the implications of the attack would not leave his mind. He left
off the looting and instead probed its inert entrails, lured by curiosity.

He found the inboard mainmind by accident. A frosted aluminum panel suddenly popped free. Killeen blinked, startled out of
his reflective daze. He knew he had only moments to act. He had assumed the Crafter was already dead, but the encrusted mass
inside hummed with muted energy.

He could call for Sunyat, ask her what to do. She might know and she might not, but in any case the time it took her to arrive
would narrow their chances greatly.

So he mentally braced himself. He made the few twists and taps at his skull and called up his Arthur Aspect.

You have been very busy.

“Arthur? Look—”

Perhaps you do not recognize me? Six times you have summoned me in, I believe, some several years.

“Yea, yea.” Damned if Arthur didn’t bring up a gripe, right in the middle of— “Look, how I disarm this one?”

Why do you want to? I doubt you can fathom it.

“Dammit, no backtalk!
How?”

Very well. See that yellow relay? Pull it up.

An overlay winked in Killeen’s left eye, a ghost image of the relay rising, disconnecting. He followed the picture.

Now use the pliers. Tweak the blue cables free.

He did. An ominous buzzing began.

Quick! The spring clip!

Killeen cut it with a slicer bolt set on max. The main-mind rasped nastily but did not show signs of dying. “Ah,” he sighed.

Quite satisfactory. Ever since I have known them, the higher-order mechanicals have had quite good defenses against theft
of their memories.

“Uh-huh.” He stripped away lightpipes to find the cluster-core.

A simple evolutionary development, really. This Crafter does not wish its expertise stolen by a competing class of machines,
or by those serving a foreign city. So it is taught to fry itself before it can be interrogated.

Killeen half-listened to Arthur’s lecture running through his head as he snipped away the leads to the cluster-core. He never
did understand much of what Arthur said, but when he was doing some job like this it was handy to have an Aspect up and running,
ready to give advice. The trouble was getting them to shut up. Arthur had lived centuries before and ruminated endlessly about
the old times. Killeen seldom had the patience for such talk. But he did like the chromatic emotional halo around Arthur’s
Aspect, a cool distant certainty that insinuated into Killeen’s way of thinking.

Yet we caught this one. Odd. Probably there is some delay before they suicide. Elsewise, a sudden accident could convince
it that it was being attacked. That would make it suicide unnecessarily. So this delay period when we caught it must mean
that Crafters are programmed more against accident than against attack. Yes, I’m sure that’s it. I—

Killeen had his pliers near the core. He felt first a flash of heat in his hand. Then a quick rattling spurt jarred him. It
was so loud he did not feel it as sound but as a force, like getting hit in the ear by a fist.

He staggered away. Numbed fingers dropped the pliers. Family members howled and covered their ears. They came tumbling off
the Crafter body, scampering away with offended yips.

Killeen breathed deeply, dazed. His sensocenters were momentarily blitzed. He sucked in amplified musk and oil and rank sour
chemwaste. Through a near-silent gray world he called, “Damn! What exploded?”

Nothing. That was not sound, though I admit your/our nervous system does not distinguish these very finely any longer. (A
necessary adaptation, I fear, but one which loses a certain delicate thread of sensibility.)

“What the
hell
…”

A baying of complaint sounded through the cavern.

It was a powerful electromagnetic signal. I caught a dab of it. I gather it has the typical signature of the Crafter’s personality,
its accumulated (though finely processed; trimmed of excess; admirably well edited) knowledge.

Killeen blinked. “Wha… Why?”

The Crafter was broadcasting to its home. Saving its heritage, I’ll wager. Now it can die.

Killeen staggered back to the Crafter carcass, his head ringing. His tongue felt fuzzy, his eyes kept trying to cross. He
picked up the pliers and poked at the cluster-core.

“Hey! It’s got no power.”

The dead take their secrets with them.

“All?”

Anything that a competing mech civilization might find useful. Data on this territory, or on variant machines this Crafter
has encountered. Skills it has acquired, perhaps. And of course a fragment of the personality this experience has generated
in as advanced a mech as this.

Killeen followed almost none of this, but he didn’t bother to ask. A question would just bring more endless yammer winding
through his mind. He could hear Arthur’s original voice, rather prissy and refined, but moving faster than real people could
ever talk. When he called up an Aspect, it sat in the back of his mind like a monkey on the shoulder. It could chatter on,
give technical help, and Killeen got a character-scent of the person behind the seated knowledge, like someone in the same
room with him.

“Anything we can salvage?”

Let’s see… try that stimclat there.

Killeen had no idea what a “stimclat” might be. Arthur sensed this as he formed the word, and so provided a dancing green
dot beside a flanged metal part. Killeen attached
leads and did as Arthur’s green simulation said. In a moment he felt a quick darting pleasure-pain sensation behind his ears.

“What’s that?”

Some of the Crafter’s recent memory, I daresay. We might mine it for information.

“Heysay, I’m kinda tired.”

Actually, he was bored. Arthur would know that too, but something made him keep up a polite manner with the Aspect. After
all, Arthur was an ancestor.

Rest, then. I’ll translate from mechspeak and show you results later.

Killeen did not rest, though he seemed to. He reclined on a mossy cushion of brown organo-refuse and fished forth a small
slab of memorychip. It was ancient and showed cracks and gouges of use, though the pale polylithium was said to be surehardened.