Great Sky River (14 page)
Authors: Gregory Benford
“Damnall!”
The first navvy to reach the base encountered a piece of the Mantis and hoisted it aboard, fitting it securely atop the carryrack.
“Assemble,” the woman said.
“What?”
She said nothing. They watched silently. Killeen helped Toby up onto the brow of the gully and a few others joined them. There
were dozens of Mantis parts and the navvys carefully dealt with each one.
Killeen studied the navvys with eyes slitted against the combined glare of Denix and the Eater. Too late now he understood
that the Mantis had taken advantage of the two-star glare. Even augmented as they were, a heritage handed down from centuries
before, humans could not see as well as mechs in either dark or searing bright. Against the Mantis’s illusions they were blind.
And the Mantis had caught them when they were least guarded, most open and humanly vulnerable. Killeen clenched his jaw regularly,
as though chewing on this fact.
He did not want to walk back onto the plain behind them, to see who had fallen. He had seen too much of it in the last few
days. The sensorium carried skittering wails of despair, of horrible surprise.
There would be time for that. He watched as two navvys met and mutually put their loads on a bare rock platform. It would
make as good a workbench as they seemed to require. One navvy sprouted a set of fine-pointed tools and began to take apart
a chunky, half-ruined segment of the Mantis.
“They’re fixin’ it,” Toby said wonderingly.
“Seen before?” the woman asked.
“Naysay, nothing like,” Killeen answered. “But the mainmind—”
“Not one mind.”
“Howcome?”
“Easier heal.”
Toby put in, “Easier bring it live again, too.”
“That, yeasay.” The woman pursed her lips, as if tasting a possibility she didn’t like.
“Looks like they’ve found a way to disperse the mind into different parts of the Mantis.”
“One stupid, many smart?” she asked distantly.
Killeen saw what she meant. If intelligence could be made up of many dispersed pieces, each of low level, but each contributing
a vital fraction of what was needed for a much smarter mech… “Maybe. Then the navvys come in, fix it up. Maybe replace one
of the small minds if it’s dead.”
“Then waking again. Thinking. Hunting.” Her ebony hair was arabesqued in coils that had a blue sheen. It made a woven pattern
almost like looking at tightweave with a close-eye.
“A new kind Marauder?” Killeen asked.
The woman arched her bushy eyebrows and said nothing.
“We can’t kill it?” Toby asked, hobbling around to test his leg.
“Not unless you skrag the whole works,” Killeen said, starting to figure in his head. He estimated without numbers, just judging
by the feel of his memory. Answers popped into his head and he didn’t stop to wonder whether they came from Arthur or some
other techAspect he carried. He simply said, with assurance, “We barely got enough ammo. Maybe could pound each piece of that
Mantis. Be real close though.”
Toby said, “I’ll help!”
The woman frowned. “Too much.”
Killeen agreed. “We skrag it, we’ll use up most our armament.”
“Dangerous.”
Killeen looked questioningly at her and saw she meant not immediate threat but rather the challenge that Marauders like this
represented. A new mech idea.
Toby scrambled away, looking for weapons, his leg working like a stiff rod but well enough to carry him. The woman said nothing,
just watched the navvys slowly dragging parts together. Her breathing was so shallow it did not flex the exskell. Time-softened
gray tightweave clung to her body. She was thin but her supple curves stood out against the unavoidable rigidities of her
armor-web exskell, making her seem a feminine prisoner in a
black cage. He wondered how she powered it. Then he noticed the back of her shirt zipped down; she must have opened it while
she loped back from the Mantis. Photovoltaic eyes turned as she moved, following the ultraviolet mana of the Eater.
All to drive a shell which brought her muscle power up to the level of others. In her, the genetic pruning for greater strength
had failed. Her metabolism converted food less efficiently into power. She needed this ribbed husk to keep up with the rest
of her Family. Their rules were harsh. A member who fell behind died.
He asked, “Think we should skrag it?”
“Must.”
“I’ll get Ledroff, some others. Those navvys’re funny-actin’, too. We’d better plan on taking them out from a distance. No
simple disconnect.”
“Time.”
“What? I figure hours before they’ve got all the parts—”
“No. We mourn first.”
He nodded. It had been better to stand here and think about the Mantis than to go and find the friends hurt or dead or even
suredead. But now he had to.
“You’re… ?”
“Shibo.”
“Family Rook?”
“Family Knight.”
“This isn’t your Family?”
“I meet them. My Family gone.”
Her eyes regarded him flatly, giving nothing away. She had not come from his Citadel, for there had been no Knights there.
So the other Citadels had been destroyed, too.
Killeen had come to feel that his loss was as great as anyone’s, but this woman before him had lost her entire lineage and
faced as well the insurrection of her own weak body. He had myriad questions to ask her, but the wan and pensive gaze she
turned on him erased all thoughts in the enormity of its unstated implications.
“Let’s go. The Families’ll need help.”
He helped her surmount the gully and cross the bleak landscape strewn with the newfallen dead.
ONE
H
e came awake but did not come alive. He heard and saw nothing.
Killeen had to guide him only a seeping perception of gradients in temperature. He was lying on his belly and felt a thin
chill steal up into him from the dank ground. It was as if the soil itself struck upward into him, slow and methodical, spreading
through his jumpsuit, into groin and hip, creeping across his chest and into his shoulders. His arms were crossed, his forehead
resting over them. In his nostrils the chill sank upward into his oozing sinuses. The sharp bite of it kindled spatterings
of rosy heat in his eyes.
He turned his head. No sight, no sound. The shredded heatspurts dwindled. As if in reply, crosscut sensations of bitter cold
lashed over him. He felt crisp warm waves ripple his still-numb skin. Elusive traceries of dulling cold fought across his
face. Thermal battles mixed the two in whirling knots he felt as pinprick flares, darting in hard vortices, sputtering. To
his surprise the flux resolved not into minute threads of hot and chill but instead into what
they had been all along: voices. The tiny, mingled, raucous speech of his Aspects.
The Grail will brook no mealymouthed stalling now Arthur. We have got to force these people to
move
and right quick, too.
- Got to get shelter.
- Mantis—don’t understand it.
- Can’t take these losses.
Of course, I feel quite as threatened as the rest of you by the reckless way they have been squandering opportunities. They
could have followed the path we advised back at that place—what was it?—Lost Mother Ridge, that was the name. If they had,
we would almost certainly have reached a Casa. I distinctly remember a Casa near there. Nialdi, your memory for the grand
old days surpasses mine. What was that Casa called?
It was Oasis Godstone. I blessed the site myself at its consecration to our cause.
Ah yes, a lovely event, I’m sure. There were so many in those fine centuries, when we had proportioned way stations between
the Citadels. What wealth! We traveled without fear nipping at our heels, never bothering to carry water or provisions, for
we knew they lay a mere short-march away, in Casas or Citadels where—
1. Stick to topic.
Very well, Bud. You needn’t be snippish. As I see it, with the remaining maps, we could still retrace our steps and search
for Oasis Godstone. Spotty and dated as the maps are, of course I cannot be sure, but my calculations—
They’ve erred
far more,
Arthur, by ignoring the words of our Fellowship. The vouchsafed command we carry from the first days here
—
nay, from the Providential Truth made known unto us from aeons immemorial!—definitely shows that this wandering in a mechmade
wilderness is a wrongful path to the eventual resurrection of us all. My halfdead brothers, if we are to walk the land in
strength and fullness, we
must
pull together.
I take offense at your hectoring, Nialdi. Your medical skills I respect and do not deny, but—
I am a spiritual guide to the Family, as well! I was encased as Aspect for my moral sense, not merely
—
- Pulpit-pounding not same as wisdom.
- Stick to what we can do now.
What we must do, my stunted little Face friend, is exert
leadership.
This blighted desolation wherein we so humbly lie is an abomination! Our dwindled-down Family still carries our honorable
name and is
still capable
of attaining the heights humanity once harbored—
- How we go?
- Anyplace better than this.
- Maybe build ship.
- Lost lastship 269 years ago.
You are leaping too far ahead, Bud. I am quite aware of the mech atrocities which resulted in our losing the last of the starships
which bore us to this hive of gargantuan—
Mech devils! Use no other nicey-nice word for it, Arthur! These are unholy
—
- Hard to build ship.
- Have to make Citadel first.
- Nobody knows shipcraft now.
- Don’t talk so fast you two.
- I’m only a Face you know.
All this went by in a shredded heatpricked blur. Killeen lay motionless.
Somewhere in him sentience and volition were unjoined wires trying to snugfit again. The heat-spilling voices blended with
chilly tremors in his eardrums. Their tangential argument resounded in sweeping thermal bellnotes—vexed, rambling, incoherent.
He focused himself and wrestled back command of his sight. A square in his left eye filled with dawn-gray radiance and a fuzzy
rounded edge of a stone.
He felt the voices shrinking, talking even more rapidly now. His blunted, part-blinded sensorium translated their speech into
waning thermal codes. Rude dashes of hot and cold rushed over his chest and neck, blaring. Arthur
and Nialdi and Bud didn’t want to shrink back into their cramped cells. They called to him.
Penitent you be who jostles into silence the word and wisdom of and from your forefathers! Dare you not
—
I believe you could benefit from this discussion yourself, Killeen. I fully grant your need to arise and see what is happening,
but I suggest you will find much of what we say germane to the situation now faced by both Families. We need to work out a
strategy based on careful assessments of potentialities and risks, including—
- Listen, Killeen, I can figure for you.
- You give me time I could take apart that Mantis.
- See how it works.
He swept them away, squeezed them toward their crannies.
Into Killeen’s eyes leaped angular blocks of light. His blindness fluttered away. The outside world rushed at him. He turned
his head and saw the dry plain surge and twist, stretching away. The Family was sleeping. The Eater was a hazy violet whirlpool
squatting above a distant mountain peak.
As his Aspects relinquished his perception-processing space, he caught the dusty savanna scent, mingled with fragrant human
musk. His ears crackled, letting in the wind-whisper.
Aspects needed time to sense the world directly, not as mere leftovers. That kept them from becoming dry, husk
like embodiments, slow to respond, little better than an ancient library book. When Killeen was awake, they got snippets
of the world, sitting behind his consciousness. As he slept, they could raise his eyelids, catch glimpses that gave them a
gratifying sliver of experience. Such thin gruel was all they got. They listened through his eardrums, savored his sensorium—while
also providing the service of isolating him, ensuring deep sleep.
Aspects craved the rush of perception, for it was all they now knew of life. As he awoke, Killeen could not hurry matters.
He had to let them withdraw slowly, yielding up chunks of his sensorium sadly, one at a time, as they retreated into their
bleak cells of chipstore.
This last night, Killeen had let out two Aspects, Arthur and Nialdi. They were his strongest and needed the most airing.
Bud, the Face of an engineer killed by a Snout centuries ago, was a powerful presence despite his limitations.
Faces were partial recordings of the dead. A brain deprived of oxygen, or whose nervous system was badly shocked by death,
could not be fully Aspected. Personality was far harder to extract from a mind sliding into the swarming dark. The Family
saved only the dead’s expertise and craft.
Such a recorded Face gave some dim aura of the original person, trimmed and slow-thinking. Bud had been a fine translator
of mech signs. He had even mastered some mech languages, back when humanity had contact with renegade mechs. Killeen had grown
impatient with the Face’s slowness. Sometimes he thought Bud was not even a Face, and belonged with the lowest personae, the
Analogs. Still, Bud proved useful for finding an entry
into a mech or figuring the arcane designations on mech parts.
Killeen got up, feeling muscles knot. Yesterday’s terrors had become morning aches. He blinked his left eye and called up
the Bishop Family topo. Toby’s orange icon said he was still sleeping, halfway up a sheltering arroyo. Good. The boy needed
his rest.
