Great Sky River (9 page)

—Isn’t!—

“Is.”

—Isn’t! Nosay noway! Lookit the greenery sproutin'.—

“A damp patch, is all.”

—Isn’t! Ever’body knows mechs don’t like green.—

“Maybe.”

—They’re
’finid
of it. Can’t see so good in green light.—

“Where it’s green there’s water. Which helps rust.”

—What I said, right? So lemme walk with you.—

The plaintive warbling note in Toby’s voice touched Killeen. As he opened his mouth to tell his son to stay put and safe near
the transmech, he instead found himself checking the blue-dabbed overlay in his right eye. A good firm forward-pointing triangle
stood out against the topo map of the rumpled valley.

“Okay. Cover on my left.”

—Hey jubil!— Toby leaped twenty meters into the clear, bright air and landed on the run. He yelped with sudden energy and
in moments was alongside his father.

In his son’s voice Killeen had heard a treble of Veronica. Though he had recordings of her, he never called them up from his
longstore chip at the base of his spine. Thus, the slightest trace of her could spear him bitter-sweetly. Toby was their full
child. They had used no other genetic components in making him. Which meant that Toby was Veronica’s entire legacy.

For Veronica had perished in the Calamity and was suredead.

Most of the Clan had fallen then, scythed down by the deft cut and thrust of a mech onslaught against the Citadel. For hundreds
of years before, the mechs had
slowly claimed parts of Snowglade, and humanity had watched warily. Snowglade had been a cool, water-rich world with winds
that stirred the moisture in great towering cottony clouds. Mechs did not like such planets, which is why humanity came to
be there, to prosper in their own humble fashion.

So went as much of history as Killeen had ever heard—though in truth he cared little for it. History was tales and tales were
a kind of lie, or else not much different from them; he knew that much. Which was enough. A practical man had to seize the
moment before him, not meander through dusty tales.

Family Bishop had lived in rugged rockfastness and splendor in the Citadel. Killeen remembered that time as though across
an impassable murky chasm, though in fact it had been only six years since the Calamity. All years before that were now compressed
into one daybright wondrous instant, filled with people and events which had no substantial truth any longer, had been swept
away as if they had never been.

Since then the Bishops were swept forward not so much by a victorious horde behind, but rather by the mounting tide of the
names of battles lost, bushwhacks walked into, traps sprung, Family members wounded or surekilled and sometimes even left
behind in a disheartening white-eyed dishonorable scramble to escape, to save the remnant core of the Family, to keep some
slender thread of heritage alive.

The names were places on a map—Sawridge, Corinth, Stone Mountain, Riverrun, Big Alice Springs, Pitwallow—and maps were not
paper now but encoded in the individual’s memorychip. So, through the six years of pursuit, as members of the Family fell
and were swallowed
up by the mechmind, the Family lost even the maps to understand where their forebears had stood and fought and been vanquished.
Now the names were only names, without substance or fixity in the living soil of Snowglade.

In retreat the Family could carry little, and cast aside the hardcopy maps and other regalia which had once signified their
hold upon the land. So a string of dropped debris stretched across years and continents.

Killeen’s father had vanished at the Citadel, gone into chaos. Veronica had been hit standing right beside Killeen. He had
dragged her body with him, seeking a medic who could repair the damage. Only when he had fallen exhausted into a muddy irrigation
ditch did he see that a burst had taken her sometime as he carried her. He had been too dazed and tormented to notice. Her
eyes had bulged out, shockbright and with the pus dripping from them. Suredead.

Until the Calamity he had known countless cousins, Family that had seemed boundless. Now he had only Toby.

—Looksee. A navvy,— Toby called. He pointed and went bounding off

“Heysay!” Killeen shouted. “Check that thing first.” He leaped forward and overtook his son.

The navvy seemed innocuous. Its bright crosshatched carapace was freshly polished. Its stubby arms rummaged among scabbed
mechwaste—cowlings, rusted housers, worn gray biojoints.

Killeen approached. The mech spun its lightweight treads. They caught and clacked against an eroded spur of peppery, chipped
granite. Fore-lenses swiveled to study Killeen. It paused a long moment, seeming to think. Then
it turned away, uninterested, and started off downhill, raising fine dust that hung in the low gravity like shimmering fog.

“Guess it’s okay,” Killeen said reluctantly.

“Can I vest it?” Toby said acoustically, landing with a wheeze and thump on the crumbling grainy granite.

“Harvest it? Thought you were full up with servos.”

Toby shrugged, jangling. Small spare parts dangled from staylines at his waist.

“You look like a walking scrapheap.”

“Guy needs ’placements,” Toby said defensively.

“Not more’n slow you down.”

“Aw—lemme! I got room.” Toby’s face screwed into a laughable mask of pretended pain.

“No”
Killeen was himself surprised that he said it so sharply.

“But I—”

“No. Just no. Now get out on your point.”

Toby wasn’t striding point, but using the word made /his position seem larger. That pleased the boy and he shrugged, eyebrows
knitted wryly. He bounded off, ignoring the navvy that jounced away downslope.

Killeen had long ago learned to listen when something nagged at him. He stood still for a long moment. He let his augmented
senses sweep out, covering the slowmotion flow of the Family, the retreating navvy. Voices slurred and nipped, the steady
background roundtalk of the Family.

They were making good time down the valley. The transporter mech bumped along the bed of a sand river. Killeen selected the
viewpoint of an old man, Fowler, who swung on a basket tether aboard the mech. He heard Fowler’s querulous questions—
When’ll we stop? Got
any that soursap from the Trough? Whatta mean, is gone? Suresay we had jugsful!
—and the pebbles spitting from under the mech treads.

The valley lay quiet. Mechtrash dotted the rock-knobbed hills. Some rotted bioparts tainted the air. These random clumps of
old parts littered all Snowglade, so common that Killeen barely noticed them. In outlands such as this, scavenger mechs did
not bother to pick up rusted cowlings or heavy, broken axles for the long transport to smelters and factories. Over centuries
the mess had gathered. As the mechs worked their changes in Snowglade’s weather, ice retreated, revealing even older junk
from a time when mechs had run unknown things amid the old cold ages. These jumbles too blighted the land now, rust-red spots
freckling the soil.

Among this plants struggled, a welcome sign. For hours now they all had been pleased by small signs of ripening, of spreading
grass, of tawny growth.

Denix had set an hour before, and now the Eater was half-gnawed by the ragged hills. The shifting colors confused Killeen,
making the least crag and gully brim with light-ripe illusions.

The Family moved stolidly and with a dogged rhythm that expected little. As they breasted each rise, talk ran and swirled,
words forking in the grouptalk. For months they had followed an unmarked trek through exhausted, bleached-dry valleys. Only
Troughs had succored them. The slowsmelling promise ahead gave spring to their pace.

Yet Killeen felt nothing awry, but the crosshatched navvy was odd enough to warrant remembering. He watched his son carefully
and often rechecked their route.

In the middle of a topo survey, Arthur said:

I am enjoying the sight of greenery again.

Killeen was surprised. This Aspect was usually distant, factual, a cool savor in Killeen’s mind.

“Yeasay. I’ve tasted only Troughslop for so long….”

I doubt you could eat these. They are tough, fibrous growths.

“Must be ground water here.”

I suspect we are entering a Splash site.

Killeen brightened. “Yeasay you? It’ll get wetter?”

Perhaps. A Splash is the fracture zone surrounding a meteor strike. The cracked rock permits an upwelling of permafrost which
has eluded the mechs’ efforts to dry out the planet. Sometimes there is even glacial ice buried beneath the shifting sands.
Meteors are the only feature of Snowglade’s weather which the mechs do not appear to have mastered. Given our star’s orbit
about the Eater, which is quite elliptical, I find it unsurprising that we encounter many meteors. We are plunging nearer
the Eater now, and a standard Gaussian distribution for the density of small, meteor-sized debris would predict that we shall
receive strikes at an exponentiating rate.

“Better weather?” Arthur had to truthsay, but sometimes the Aspect used a muddy, longtalk way to do it

Again, perhaps. The mechs seem to be altering the orbit of IR-246.

“Huh?”

Sorry. You call our star Denix, am I correct?

“That’s not what we
call
it, that’s what it
is.”

To me this star is the 246th infrared source positively resolved near the Galactic Center. The catalog made as we approached
the inner zone of the center specifically assigned—

“Heysay, that stuff sucks like a bucket of ticks. I—”

An interesting expression, that. I remember it had its origin in an ancient Earthside civilization now enshrined solely in
the holorecords—

“Stuff the oldsay, heysay? I don’t understand—Denix is the
sun,
that’s what Denix’s name
means.”

You call it such, yes. It is a simple star like the millions you see when neither Denix nor the Eater is in the sky. As now.

Killeen looked up, startled. The Eater was guttering into bloodred sleep beyond sawtooth peaks. High above in the darkening,
pinpoints glowed in ambers, hard blues, opulent greens. Fine wisps threaded between the twinklings. Never had he thought they
might be like Denix.

“All… those?”

There are approximately a million stars within a light-year of the Eater. Many have entered late stages of their evolution
and display varied colors. Some vent streamers from their chromospheres. Advanced—

“Cut the jabber! You mean they’re all
big?”

Some are larger than Denix—which after all is an Ml type, selected by your forefathers not for its beauty but rather because
this planet was deep in a glacial age, and apparently of no abiding interest to the mech civilizations—while others—

Killeen let Arthur lecture away, unheeded. For him the sky was suddenly a vast bowl of unimaginable depths. Those were other
suns.
His whole life—of earnest childhood, of love and labor and lost hopes, of ravaged retreats—he now saw as abruptly dwarfed,
as tiny motions on a bare scratched plain, beneath a night filled with eyes.

They marched on through the halfnight. Snowglade never saw true darkness, for the million pinprick fires above conspired to
seed the sky with a dim, persistent radiance. There were no solid, certain shadows.

Yearly, distant blobs and swirls of twilight gas swept across the sky. Constellations of glowering stars changed
in the span a boy took to grow to manhood. But stars were minor actors in the ruby-rich, storm-racked sky.

Killeen’s ancestors had adapted eyes, able to scan on a scale stretched further than the normal human logarithmic response.
He could see the stars as glowing torches and then, by screwing tight one eye, wreath them in a murky shroud of ink. Mechs
could see in any dim radiance, so humanity had long ago aped the machines by tailoring their eyes.

Toby sent, —Mech hive over that hill.—

Killeen vectored right and in a moment landed beside his son. “Mechtypes?”

Toby’s voice skittered high and excited: “I pick up three them Fact’ry luggos.”

“Whatdoing?”

“Workin’.”

“Mining?”

“Looks be ’facturin’.”

“Manufacturing what?”

“Dunno. See that transporter they’re unloadin’?”

“Um. Bundles of…” Killeen amped up his eyes to max. He scanned the pale recesses for telltale tracks of large mechs.

“Plants,” Toby said excitedly. “They harvestin’ plants.”

Killeen squinted, still couldn’t pick up enough detail. He wondered if his eyes were losing their edge, going fuzzy on him.
A man had to keep watching his ’quipment. Let it go awhile and it could kill you in a minute. Angelique, a young Bishop woman,
could run some kind of internal program, unglitch eye trouble. He’d have to get a runthrough and checkout. He frowned, distracted
by this annoyance.

“Naysaw that before,” he said.

“Nosee mechs usin’ plants?”

“Saw some cut trees, back when—” and he stopped, because that led to
back when the Citadel held firm and my father went out on raids, when humanity held forests and crops and all the lost legacy,
and that was something he didn’t talk to Toby about just casually, “—when there was any.”

“Wonder what they’re makin’?”

Killeen watched the five blocky buildings clustered together in a side arroyo. Two dust devils marched down from the hills.
They swirled and glided near the brown clayformed buildings, upsucking cones of fine sand.

“Can’t say. Longtime back, mechs’d chop down crops the Clan tried grow, in the valley near the Citadel. They just left ’em,
though. Didn’t make anythin’ from ’em.”

“Let’s
do
’em!” Toby said brightly.

Killeen looked at his son’s thin face, splotched with the mossybrown suit-rub growths that everybody got now and then. He
cuffed him on the shoulder and laughed. “We got a mechscourge here?”