Great Sky River (8 page)

He had been thinking of this for days. And especially he lusted for it in the chilled nights when the Family had to sleep
on rough ground beneath the star-spattered sky. He would then look up into the orange and green and bluehot points of light,
hundreds of thousands of them scattered like jewels in oil, wreathed by radiance that came from halos of dust and gas. Ample
light streamed down, enough to walk and even read—if any of the Family could have read more than simple numbers and a few
directions coded on mechs.

This was the only night he had ever known, a welcome halfdark after the blistering doubleday cast by the Eater
and their own planet’s star, Denix. Yet he fled from it, too, when he could. Into the realms of the old dead times.

He found an output current plug in an autorepair slot. The cage walls were scarred and smeared from centuries of casual use
by passing mechs. He spliced in the extra Amps and lay back and was at once in a gossamer finespun holotime of delight and
transfigured brassy radiance.

It came to him as a shuddering series of exaltations and shimmering potentials. Ruby. Tingling. Pepperhot. Slowbuilding. Raspbreathed.

Spinning forever in a humming gyre… slicksliding grace beyond time or process… halfsleep and halfwake… this inner world filled
his lungs with cottony pleasure. Brought him again and again to the long-thrusting ecstasy yet did not let him pass over into
warm oblivion. Sweet resurrections…

Stark light. Rough swearing.

Killeen blinked. A hand grabbed his collar and lifted him. “Didnja hear? There’s a transmech outside.”

It was Cermo-the-Slow, his porepocked face orbiting against the overhead glare of the Trough. Cermo had disconnected Killeen
from the power feed.

“I… was just…”

“I know whatcha doin’. Jes’ don’ let Ledroff catch you, is all.”

Cermo-the-Slow let go. Killeen dropped back into the acrid moss. He had an impulse to jack himself back into the wall, snatch
a few minutes before somebody else came by to muster him And forced his hand away from the cable. That somebody might be Toby.
Too many times the boy had already caught his Dad slacksack on the tether, volted out.

Slowly, slowly, Killeen put away the jack-tab, He had
to remember that Fanny was gone. Everybody needed some refuge from the world’s rub, she’d said. She’d let him get away with
some time on the jack. Some drinking, too.

Not anymore. Ledroff was decent, solid, but inexperienced. Until now, Killeen had devoted himself to looking after Toby, begrudging
the time spent on Family business. That would have to change. But it would be hard.

Getting up, away from temptation, took all his blurred concentration. As he got creakily to his feet he heard Ledroff barking
somewhere at Family who still lounged or slept. Killeen hurried to pull on his hydraulic boots.

He fidgeted clasps into fittings, making himself suit-ready. And Arthur broke in with:

I’ve analyzed that scrap of memory from the Crafter. Quite interesting, I think you’ll find.

“Uh?”

See? Views the Crafter had gathered.

His eyes filled with yellow-green still-lifes: a journal of repairs made and things shaped. There were closeups of complex
machine parts. Tangles of circuitry. But beyond, as needless incidental background, were hills of florid green and even windblown
silver-yellow growths that Killeen recognized. Trees.

“These… they’re not from the oldtimes?”

No. From the Crafter’s encrypted data, I gather these are recent. They are from sites only a few days’ march from here.

“Great!”

Abruptly the lush still-life switched off. Arthur sensed an approach even before the still-fuzzy Killeen could. Ledroff loomed
before him, the thick black beard like a shield to hide the man’s true expression.

“What’s great?” Ledroff demanded. “You near ready?”

“Uh, yea… Cap’n.” Killeen made himself say it. The word was hard to get out. “Look, I was just processing some quickgrit from
that Crafter.”

Ledroff shrugged. “Crafters dunno nothin’.” He turned away.

“Naysay! This one attacked, didn’t it?”

Ledroff turned, hands on hips. “It made a mistake.”

“It organized those navvys. Took Jake.”

“So?”

“I think it’s something new.”

“Programmed to recognize us?”

“Yeasay, if it chances on us. And then not just call for a Marauder and wait. It recruits some navvys and strikes.”

Ledroff frowned. “Yea, so I’ve thought as well.”

“I sliced a frag from its memory.”

Ledroff looked guarded, as though Killeen was lying. “You’ve been downdoggo.”

Killeen answered sheepishly, “Just a rest, that’s all.”

Ledroff was a big man but seemed now curiously unsure of himself. He did not welcome new information, but instead distrusted
it. Killeen realized that the man had finally gotten what he wanted for so long—the Cap’ncy—but had no clear idea of what
to do next. And feared that this fact would come out. This was in his voice, a mere shade of defensiveness. “So?”

“Can read some.”

Gruffly: “Do.”

“Have.”

Suspiciously: “And… ?”

“Big green valley. Three-, four-day march.”

Ledroff looked startled, then beamed with sudden relief. The Family had been without good maps or sure direction ever since
the Calamity, when all humanity’s orbiting satellites were destroyed. They had wandered, using only old maps and surveys.
Their only certain guide was the need to avoid the mech cities, where surely they would be killed. Yet the ever-shifting weather
of their world, Snowglade, had by now confused their remaining maps. They had no true vector any longer.

Ledroff thought out loud, “A transmech just came in at the factory outside. If we can redirect it, override its routine…”

“This greenland, it could be a fringe of a Splash.”

“Yeasay, yeasay.” Ledroff looked relieved.

Killeen smiled, glad to be for once not the layabout he knew Ledroff had always thought him to be. “Let’s go. Come on!”

Jake-the-Shaper’s laying-low had taken a while, and then the grumbling of the Family took more as they got ready to move again.
Voices rose in fatigued dissent. Tired, sun-browned faces knotted. Eyes narrowed, considering hangdog resistance.

The Family was only beginning to shake off the dust of the last several weeks. Legs ached from the long shuffling march. Bellies
growled for more of the vatsoup, the protein cakes, the spongy sourbread. They hungered for the Trough’s moist illusion of
security and wanted to cling to it.

Ledroff showed some leadership then. He had stopped several from trashing the Trough itself, after the Crafter attack. Such
fever-blind revenge might well have raised an alarm, brought a Marauder to answer it. Ledroff calmly disarmed the alky-soaked
few, set them to useful work.

He also tolerated no mean, spiteful talk. In the years since the Calamity the Family had learned that aimless jawing had to
be carefully controlled. In a crisis—slowcoming or quick, no matter—it was always better to run than to talk.

Someone had to cut off the winding jabber that passed for discussion. This Ledroff did, using his booming voice to override.

The Family meandered to their gear and reluctantly figured how much they each could carry away from the Trough. They dallied,
ate some more, took every chance to stop and sit and fidget with their harnesses, their’matics, their carefully tended boots.
Ledroff’s voice boomed again then, cajoling them to resuit and pack away foodstuffs for a march of uncertain end. Killeen
nodded, still smarting from his humiliation, but he saw what had to be done.

There were jobs. Ledroff assigned some to covering their tracks in the Trough. The worst task fell to Killeen and Cermo-the-Slow:
disposing of Jake. There was no place to bury the carcass, a stiffening, stilled clockwork
whose skin was a patchwork of blotchy browns and oblongs of stark white. As he hoisted it, Killeen felt Jake’s deadweight
as a thing more solid and bulky than the living Jake had been.

They had to feed Jake slowly into one of the vats, letting the flesh dissolve into a ruddy mucus. It was wrong to waste flesh
in the soil, that they knew and felt deeply. What went into a Trough could someday come out of it.

Still, watching Jake blur and bleed, the ghostwhite bones first poking up through translucent papery skin, and then splitting
it, the peeling parchment curling away—

Killeen’s heart had climbed into his throat. His hands were slippery on Jake’s ankle. The harsh fumes that rose from the waxy
vat scum found their way high up into his head and fogged his eyes, leaked tears from his eyes.

Yet it was Fanny he wept for, not Jake.

Time ticked on. The smell cut sharper. At last he could let Jake go. As a foot and spindly calf sank into brown, crusted mire,
Killeen said goodbye to Fanny as well. Then he stumbled away.

He helped Toby suit up, carefully sealing his son’s pullpoints, letting the details of preparation fill up his mind.

Only when they were moving again did he think.

Across the sloping valleys they came. Killeen carried his punishing penalty load on upper and lower back. He huffed in air
as he took long strides, letting his percussive landings exhale it.

He had long since learned from his father the effort-saving, forward-tilted stride. In Snowglade’s low gravity the muscles
of humanity, augmented with servos and cobbled-together suits, made them stride like giants. The
parts were filched from mechs and hand-wrought to human calves and shoulders. Shapemetal blended and smoothed like a soft
chrome clay, when it was triggered with the right de-poly signal.

This was the principal craft the Family still retained— indeed, would die without. Jake-the-Shaper had been best at it. Jocelyn,
Cermo, and a few more knew the shaping art. The talent lived mostly in the hands, so the Family carried it as an ongoing dexterous
art. Many of the Aspects which rode in the backminds of the Family members knew as much. But mere talksay was not enough.
Aspects could not work your muscles. You had to have the feel of it, or else seams would pop, burrs would rub at bunching
muscles, servos would clog and freeze.

Killeen listened with a fraction of his mind to the hum and work of his suit, letting his senses range over the land ahead.
Tawny scrub bushes dotted the hills, life persistent and uncrushed, though the orange clay was crosscut by myriad mech treads.

“Looking damper,” he sent.

—See any streams?— Jocelyn answered.

“Those gullies southward look fresh.”

—You suresay this is the right vector?—

“Dead on.”

Arthur came in unbidden:

I’m recalculating every ten minutes. We are heading at the bearing I judge appropriate for the data the Crafter carried. Of
course, the Crafter might have been confused, or erred—

“Beggin’ off now, uh?” Killeen muttered irritably.

I am not. I simply said—

Ledroff broke in, —You checking the route?—

Arthur was inaudible to anyone except Killeen, of course. It was uncanny, though, how Ledroff could gather what Killeen’s
Aspect was saying. Maybe Killeen had been muttering over the comm. “Yeafold. See those green spikes? There were some like
it in one of the Crafter’s pictures.”

—Huh.— Ledroff was a distant speck, his voice tinged with skepticism. Killeen could tell it would be a long while before Ledroff
forgot the alky-drinking. The Cap’n would use it as a handy way to undercut Killeen. Already he was favoring Jocelyn, to keep
Killeen in his place.

“Let’s go that way.”

—Might’s well.—

Killeen could hear Ledroff click his teeth together, which meant he hadn’t any better idea. Ledroff skip-walked, kicking up
dust plumes. Beyond him chugged the transporter mech they had commandeered.

The older Family members rode on the copper-ribbed sides of the big hauler, clinging with slaptabs to the buffed aluminum
tank walls. They swung like boughs of motley fruit, bobbing as the transporter lumbered with dogged persistence over the bumpy
terrain. Iron-gray massifs towered on the far horizon like unreachable fortresses.

Killeen didn’t like jouncing along on the transporter and had given away his rest turns on it. He preferred to be in the open.
If a Marauder chanced to intersect their path, it would see the outlying men and women first. It seemed
to Killeen only right that he should be the most visible, while Toby walked closer to the transporter.

To a Marauder its barrel-shaped fellow mech would not be a target. Only on close inspection could a Marauder tell that the
dull-witted transporter had been hijacked, redirected, and no longer dutifully carried cargo from the little factory to a
regional depot.

—Heysay, Dad.— Toby waved from far away.

“Time to eat?”

Toby laughed. It was an old joke, from the time when the boy had wanted an extra snack every few klicks. That had been during
the hard times after the Calamity. None of the Family had been truly prepared. None had imagined that their lot would be one
of endless fleeing.

—Noway,— Toby said. —I’m no porker.—

“Whatsay then?”

—I’m just getting tired of running alongside this fat-pack on the ’porter.—

Nobody in the Family had a scrap of fat on them any longer, but their talk was full of references to carrying excess mass,
to indulgence, to unsightly bulging clothes. It was a wan vestige of a time when fat had been possible, and valued as insurance
against hard times. But now all times were hard, and the Family used the words of opulence with a certain longing, a hollow
bravado, as if to keep the words alive was to preserve the promise that someday they could again amass an ample centimeter
or two of girth.

“You’ll pick up the porkers when they fall off.”

—They’ll just go
splat
if they do.—

“Keep your eye peeled all the same.”

—I want be out with you.—

“Too dangerous.”