Great Sky River (19 page)

“Wait!” Killeen called.

Dappled glows retreated up the field lines in a gathering rush. As they dwindled, the customary dovetailing planetary magnetic
fibers reappeared, intricately pointing toward the south pole.

They watched for a long time but the presence did not return. Killeen talked about it as they finished his round, with Shibo
replying in her usual grudging monosyllables. The entire episode was incomprehensible. Easy enough to obey, at least. No one
had hopes of a fresh Citadel. Keeping on the move was a necessity, not a choice.

“What in hell’s an Argos?” Killeen demanded of Shibo, exasperated.

“Ask Aspect.”

Arthur piped in immediately:

I suspect this is a transmission error. Argos was a city in classical Greece, on Earth. Its role in early intellectual—

Killeen cut off the Aspect’s wearying ramble and strode along beside Shibo. Whatever the field-being had meant was of no matter
now, for the message was plainly old and pointless. Killeen resolved to do as he usually did, and not trouble himself with
the warehouse of dusty data and massing history that the Aspects were forever pressing upon him.

Many of his older Aspects gave less and less information as they aged. A kind of senility set in. The nattering insect voices
could recall a party three centuries ago but were vague about mech insignias seen last week. And the fineries they recalled
from the Arcologies—opulent, crystal ballrooms the size of hills, sideboards groaning
with sweetmeats, gowns translucent yet crisply warm—filled Killeen with a resentful, shamed envy.

The oldest Aspects were the worst, yammering of impossible glories. Other Family members felt the same. Jocelyn could hardly
bear to call up hers; they were unusually aged and sent her pictures of wealth she knew had to be faked.

Images of the magnetic being ricocheted in Killeen’s mind, mingling with faint Aspect talk. He shook his head to clear it.

Pay Aspects true attention and they would rob him of the grittiness of the world, its supple rub.

He left Shibo and made back toward camp, letting himself feel the slumbering wealth of the Splash. He never tired of it.
So green,
he thought.
So green, green, green.

They marched on amid a sense of greening and convergence. The undulating hills gave their pace a sensual rhythm. Small, squeaking
things scampered from underfoot. Verdant wealth and sweet air lulled them. For a full day they saw no sign of mechlife. It
was as though the dry, dead world the mechs had made of Snowglade had vanished. From long-slumbering depths seeped out old
moist richness.

Ledroff and Fornax had fallen to disagreeing at each rest stop. They kept their steadily running dispute well within Clan
bounds, yet could not repress their edgy irri
tation with each other. Even the pacing of their march was disputed, seemingly resolved, and disputed still again.

Ledroff urged caution. Fornax wanted to reach the center of the Splash quickly, holding that it would be rich and rife with
natural foods. Fornax kept leading the Rooks out ahead of the agreed two-pronged formation. Ledroff swore at Fornax over the
comm, and once slammed his own helmet to the ground in exasperation. Since helmets were the hardest piece of mancraft to make,
and nobody had spares for most of the chips a full one required, this was an act both striking and impressively crazed.

They navigated by the sky. Both Families had long since lost their global survey gear. Denix gave them a sunset. Night was
tempered by the Eater’s wide-cut swath across the sky, making a wan, silvery twilight. Both Families stopped to rest then.
This often seemed the only concrete point of agreement between them.

Killeen avoided this evening’s dispute by going on flank patrol. He took Toby with him. They walked in silence, letting their
collective sensorium detect the latent caressing strum of hills and gnarled, stubby trees. It was harder here to catch the
rippling tenor of distant mech movement, or sniff the oily tang of them. Life interfered. They picked up a scurrying, twittering
symphony.

“Dad?” Toby’s throat was raw from the day’s hard skip-walking.

“Hear somethin’?”

“No, nothin’ here. I was wonderin’, though.”

“’Bout what?”

“That woman couple days ago.”

“The Aspect-crazed one.”

“Yeasay.”

Killeen had been expecting Toby to bring it up. “Most aren’t nearly so bad.”

“She be all right?”

“Prob’ly. Can walk now. Her Aspects’re still a li’l scared. Want live some.”

“Crazy dancin’ the way she did? That’s livin’?”

Toby stopped walking and turned toward his father. They stood lean and flat-muscled, shorn of padding and walkwear, stripped
down to wrinkled jumpsuits. A wedge of the Eater’s broad disk stuck above the horizon, spattering blue-tinged shadows on Toby’s
face and making it hard for Killeen to read. The boy’s mouth was twisted to one side, as though containing words that tasted
bad.

“She carries maybe dozen Aspects,” Killeen said. “They all try to run things, they…” He breathed deeply, struggling to explain
a sensation beyond words. Of yammering mouse-voices. Of tiny hands pressing. Itching against your inner eyeballs. “They coming
at you so fast, you can’t tell you-thinking from they-saying.”

“Sounds… well…”

“Terrible.”

Toby’s mouth was still tight, the lips pulled around strangely. “Yeasay.”

Killeen spread his hands in a gesture he hoped was casual. “Look, things’re running pretty foul right now. Ever’body’s jumpy.
Aspects’re people, ’member. Just kind of shrunk, is all.”

“Will they be like that when they ride me?”

“Nobody said they’d ride you.” Killeen spoke this halflie in hopes that it would deflect the building anger he sensed behind
the misshapen mouth, but he saw that it was useless.

The words came out of the suddenly loosened lips, each one ejected like a spat tack. “Damn if they will!”

“Can’t,” Killeen said rapidly. “You’re too young.”

“I won’t,
I tell you.”

“Nobody’s talkin’ about it, son.” Killeen tried to reassure.

“Soon’s we get situated, they’ll start in. I’m of age, damn near.”

Killeen embraced his son so the boy did not have to struggle to say more. They both knew what he felt and that there was nothing
either of them could do about it. Toby was growing fast, even while on the run continually. Soon somebody would notice and
the Cap’n would have to answer to the Family as a whole why Toby wasn’t carrying an Aspect. There were many Aspects available,
stored in chips that Ledroff toted on his right hip. Each could give the Family access to information or crafts that they
might well need in a hurry sometime. And with the Rook woman available the insertion would be pretty easy.

Killeen wished he could tell Toby that he’d stop them, delay the mounting of an Aspect on the boy. But they both knew he would
have to obey if the Cap’n decided.

“Look, I—”

“It’s okay, Dad,” Toby said, his watery voice muffled against the rough tightweave of Killeen’s jumpsuit. “I know. I know.”

Killeen sent Toby in after they completed the first wide circuit of the camp. The boy needed sleep, and Killeen needed to
think.

To carry an Aspect was of help to the Family but it could hobble a boy, bombard him with brittle confusions,
set his fresh ideas among mutiny voices. The Family was in its worst situation ever. They had lived all right for a few years
after the Calamity, laying up in Casas and Troughs for long chains of comforte days. Then there had been plenty of time to
acquire an Aspect, to reconcile the tiny, disparate souls.

But now they lived on the ragged edge. There was no sure refuge. The Aspects sensed the growing desperation among them all,
smelled it in the back corners of the mind. If Toby was mounted, and soon after they had to hardmarch, or were attacked…

Making the next several circuits, Killeen several times shook his head furiously as though to clear it. Each time he had carefully
thought through their situation, and had envisioned Toby’s accepting an Aspect. He could not let that happen. Yet even stronger
was the injunction to live by the stern rule of the Family. He saw that he would have to find a path between these two unmovable
truths. There seemed no way to avoid the boy’s fate.

They had been moving at a good pace the next day when Killeen made his discovery.

He came warily over a hill and saw a cracked valley where a broad slab of stone had resisted the Splash’s upthrust. Small
streams cut it.

He called to Jocelyn, “Easy passage to left. Open water! Bear hard by the saddleback when you cross.” He headed fast downslope,
across the dimpled valley and up a narrowing pass which promised a quick way through. He drank his fill in a stream. It was
cold and sharp-flavored and stung his hands as he scooped it into his mouth. Then, as Family appeared over the ragged ridge-line
behind him, he moved on.

It was halfway up the steeply rising slope that he saw the lonely rock slab, tilted over halfway to the ground. It had to
be manmade. Mechs polished and laser-cut their rockwork. This was a rough speckled gray granite, seamed with alabaster, crossed
by whispery signs. The worn edges and discolored grooves of the lettering spoke of age. Even the Citadel had not held rocks
so ornately worked, so old.

He puzzled at it and at last heeded Arthur’s insistence.

It’s quite aged, I’ll grant. Far older than I. Archaic. Not the sort of thing I would ever write, even though I was something
of a scribe and bard in my first life.

“Read it.”

Here, I’ll have to give it the form and voice appropriate.

He,

on whose arm fame was inscribed, when, in battle in the vasty countries, he kneaded and turned back the first attack. With
his breast he parted the tide of enemies—those hideous ones, mad-mechanical and unmerciful to the fallen.

He,

who crossed in warfare the seven kinds of living-dead. By his victory Snowglade did fall to Humankind.

He,

by the breezes of whose prowess the southern ocean is still perfumed.

He,

whose great zeal utterly consumed the machines by great glowing heat.

He: Like a burned-out fire in a great forest, even now leaves not his treasure, Snowglade.

He: Who led Humankind from the steel palaces aloft.

He: As if wearied, has quitted the obvious life.

We give him now a bodily form in others, so that having won sole supreme sovereignty on this world, he may walk in.

Snowglade: Acquired by his arm.

He: Having the name of Chandra.

He: Who set forth Humanity in the names of the Pieces.

He: Who divided the ice among the Families.

He: Who strides among you as able forefather.

He lies here as well.

By the time Arthur had finished the long, singsong chant, others of the Family had come to stand beside Killeen. He had opened
Arthur to their sensoria. The low easy rhythms of it captured the Family. Even though they could not read the words inscribed
deeply into the rock they had a sense of the weight of time that pressed against this message.

Mutely, one by one, they touched the slanted stone. In front of it was a slight square depression where Killeen suspected
the man Chandra was buried.

He sighed and moved on up the hillside with Toby. They said nothing. Somehow the sentences from a time unimaginably distant
seemed to weigh more heavily than the slaughter of yesterday. If Chandra had indeed come
here long ago and driven back the mechs, he was a truly great figure.

Was Chandra an Aspect? Try as he might, Killeen could think of no Family member who carried an Aspect so named, or so powerful.
But if Aspects of Chandra still lived, and Killeen could fit such an Aspect into himself, perhaps it would make him a better
Family member, or better father…

He was walking without truly seeing, which is why Toby glimpsed it first. “Dad. See there? Looks like a mech building.”

In the sensorium no one had noticed it yet. They were talking of the Chandra slab. Voices slurred and nipped, the steady background
roundtalk by which humanity sewed up the frame of their experience, smoothed the rub of their world.

He frowned again. They avoided mech places, and this odd thing ahead…

He saw abruptly that it was not one mechwork, but two.

One moved. A Rattler.

It came at them from right flank. The Rattler moved with a coiling and recoiling motion, treads grinding beneath. Killeen
could hear its gray ceramo-ribs pop with exertion.

The Family was already running even as the Rattler’s angle of attack fully registered. They could not make the canyon mouth
beyond. There was precious little shelter in the dry streambeds nearby.

“Make right!” Ledroff called. The Family vectored immediately, seeing his intention. The mech building would provide some
shelter.

They had only moments. Three Rook women used all
their boot power to accelerate ahead, then turned to lay down retarding fire.

Killeen added to it without slowing, firing on an awkward tilt. No point in being accurate; their shots pocked and ricocheted
but did not slow the smug-ugly and inexorable Rattler.

They would not all make it. “Toby! Faster!” he called, knowing it was useless and yet wanting to give vent to his knotting
apprehension.

This was the Rattler they’d seen before, he was sure of it. It must have disgorged its half-finished meal to follow. Never
before had a Rattler been so aggressive as to track them.

A figure ran slower though no less frantically than the others: Old Mary. She had not been feeling well these last few days.
Already she had dropped behind. Killeen heard her labored panting turn to gasps.