Great Sky River (20 page)

He turned back. She came struggling up an incline and Killeen fired over her, directly into the bluehot mouth of the Rattler.
The thing barely acknowledged the antennae blown off, the gouges in its obdurate face.

It caught Old Mary. Arms and the quick-opening mouth ingested her almost casually. It never slowed its oncoming momentum.

“Mary!” Killeen cried in rage and frustration. He knew the Rattler would only later discover she was not metal throughout,
like a mechthing. Taste her, find her indigestible, spit her out.

Killeen had no time for remorse. He whirled and fled, realizing that he was now the most exposed. The Rattler undoubtedly
saw them all as a covey of defenseless metal-sheeted beings and mistook them for free sources
of cheap ore. Since they did not carry the eat-me-not codes of this Rattler’s city, they were fair game.

Killeen gave himself over to the running. The Rattler came flexing and oozing over a weedy streambed.

A hollow
shuuuung
twisted the air by his head. It was a blaring noise-cast, blending infra-sonic rumbles at his feet with electromagnetic screeches,
ascending to teeth-jarring frequencies.

The Rattler was trying to confuse him, scramble his sensors. He ducked his head reflexively, though it did no good, and made
all his receptors go dead. Except for his fast-lurching vision he heard and felt nothing.

Toby stumbled ahead. Killeen grabbed him by shoulder and haunch and lifted him up a sandbank.

Another
shuuuung
echoed dimly in his sheathed mind. It was so powerful it caught Toby unaware. He crumpled. He bent, sucked in breath. With
a rolling motion Killeen took Toby’s weight across his back.

Close now, the Rattler sent a feverhot neural spark forking into Killeen’s leg. The muscles jumped and howled and then went
stonecold dead.

Killeen stumbled forward. The mech building ahead loomed. It was tall, imposing, far higher than the usual mechwork.

He wasn’t going to make it.

He staggered. “Killeen!” someone called.

Sand slid beneath his boots. The sky reeled.

He fumbled for his weapon. The Rattler would be on him in a moment. If he could fire sure and quick and steady—

Then the world came rushing in. Sound blared. The Rattler’s crunch and clank was hollow, diminishing.

Someone was pounding him on the back.

Toby’s weight slipped off.

His sensorium flooded with scattershot pricklings, tripped open by some freeing signal.

Killeen turned to confront the Rattler. He saw only the rear of it as massive gray cylinders slid and worked. It was retreating.

Cermo-the-Slow was shouting, “—hadn’t shut down your ears you’da heard it bellow. Right mad it was.”

“Why? Why’d it stop?”

“That li’l thing there.”

A small pyramid poked up through the sandstone shelf they stood on. Killeen had passed it without noticing.

He blinked at the finely machined thing. “How?”

“Dunno. Musta given the Rattler orders.”

Killeen had heard of such things, but never seen one. The four-sided monument of chromed faces and ornate designs must have
told the Rattler to come no closer.

Family shouted at him joyfully. Toby was fine. Shibo beamed. Considering their terror of only moments before, their glee was
permissible, even after the loss of Old Mary.

Exhausted but exultant faces swam in his vision. They brought him up toward the large mech building. Friends brought him drink.
Children clapped their hands in glee.

Mechs could not violate a command to leave a mechwork alone. Humans could. Thus they stepped with impunity into the grounds
of the massive construction. The spacious plaza’s flatness felt odd after broken ground.

Killeen frowned, puzzled. What was so different about this place?

Ordinarily he ignored whatever mechs built beyond what he could pillage. This thing, though, had saved his life.

It was broad and high. And impossibly shaped.

Atop a huge marble platform sat what Killeen at first thought must be an illusion. Only mechs made mirages; he was on guard.
But when he kicked the thing, it gave back a reassuring solid thud.

It was massive, made of plates of ivory stone, yet it seemed to float in air. Pure curves met at enchanting though somehow
inevitable angles. Walls of white plaques soared upward as though there were no gravity. Then they bulged outward in a dome
that seemed to grow more light and gauzy as the rounded shape rose still more. Finally, high above the gathering Families,
the stonework arced inward and came to an upthrusting that pinned the sky upon its dagger point.

The arabesques of gossamer-thin stone, shining white, did not interest Killeen so much as the evident design. He had never
seen such craft.

Around him swirled celebration. Their deliverance without even a battle was a signal for exaltation. Cermo-the-Slow got into
the strong, rough fruit brandy that served both as ritual fluid and as a valued currency among Families.

Ledroff and Fornax hesitated, then decided to let the festing go on. It was only midday, but the Families had been under strain.
A wise Cap’n let vagrant energies dissipate.

Killeen watched them make this decision, heads bowed together. He didn’t like it, but he went along.

Hoarse voices rose in song. Hands plucked at him. Two Rook women beckoned to him, their intentions clear. Their smooth skins,
browned by the double suns, could not match the ghostly pale of the stones he crossed. The Rooks, despite all they had suffered,
had not discon
nected their sexcens. He murmured thanks, stroked their shiny hair, and moved on. Shibo was not nearby, he noted.

He explored, ignoring the ricocheting voices. At the borders of the vast square marble platform stood four delicate towers.
Killeen walked between them, eyeing their solemn, silent upjut. They stood like sentinels at the monument’s corners, guards
against whatever rude forces the world could muster.

He saw that each tower leaned outward at a tiny angle. Something told him the reason. When the towers finally collapsed, they
would fall outward. Their demise would not damage the huge, airy building at the center.

On the back of the last marble wall there was a single plate of solid black. It seemed like a dark eye that gazed out on a
land inhospitable. Written above it in ebony script was
NW.

As Killeen approached, it blinked. A ruby glaze momentarily fogged its surface and into his mind came a steady, chanting voice
that spoke of glories gone and names resonantly odd.

Killeen felt the words as crystalline cold wedges of meaning, beyond mere talk. He gaped as he understood.

The thing was, incredibly, not mechmade.

It was instead of human times and ’facture.

Yet the mechs had left it untouched.

Killeen listened for a while, comprehending nothing beyond the singular fact of it: that men and women had once
made
things as fine and ordered as mechs. Far more beautiful than the Citadels. And had done it so well that even machines gave
their work tribute and place.

Dazed, eyes opened but unseeing, he did not hear Cermo-the-Slow until a hand clapped on his shoulder.

“Come on! You get first hack.”

“What… ?”

“Gone take one these down.”

“One of—”

“Big crash time! Big! Cel’brate!”

Already some of the Family were scrawling marks at the base of one of the slender towers. Cermo-the-Slow tugged Killeen toward
them. It was no longer interesting to pillage mech factories, but this strange place was different.

“You don’t understand,” Killeen said. “This isn’t a mech building.”

Cermo snickered. “Think’s a hill? Huh?”

“Humans made it”

Cermo laughed.

“They did! There’s a voice from over there—”

“Hearin’ voices,” Cermo called to the others. “Rattler musta addled him some.” Raucous catcalls answered.

“Humanity
built this. That’s why it’s so, so beautiful.”

“Mechstuff, ’s all.” Cermo walked to the foot of the tower.

“No! Long time ago, somebody—men and women,
us
—did such work. Look, just
look
at it.”

Cermo had the others with him, faces smirking and chuckling and preparing in their bleary way to do what men and women did
whenever they found undefended mechwork.

“More damn foul mechstuff, ’s what it is,” Cermo said with a touch of irritation. “You don’t want part of it, we’ll take it
all.”

Two women laughed and handed Cermo a cutter-beam tube, one ripped from the Crafter so long ago. Cermo thumbed a button and
a ready buzzing came from it.

A fevered mix of anguished rage propelled Killeen forward. Cermo half-turned to the tower and pointed the cutter-beam at one
of the creamy stone plates. The crowd made a murmuring noise of anticipation, highpitched threads of glee racing through it.

Killeen hit him solidly in the back. Cermo lurched. His face smacked into the tower. Killeen caught him with a roundhouse
kick in the ribs. The cutter clattered on marble.

“You—” Cermo blurted. Killeen kicked the buzzing cutter away.

Cermo feinted and hit Killeen squarely in the right eye.

Killeen staggered back, trying to focus.

Cermo ducked down and lumbered out. Killeen tripped him. The big man struck a broad stone plate and groaned.

Killeen looked for Ledroff or Fornax. They were far away and seemed unconcerned. He shouted to a sea of angry faces, “Leave
it! It’s ours. Human.”

A woman called, “You protectin’ mech garbage? I—”

“People ’way back did this. People different from us.”

The woman bared her gray teeth. “Who says? This’s mechwork!”

“Not going argue with you. Back off.” Killeen stared at them, stony and redfaced, eyes wide.

Slitted eyes regarded him, assessing chances of taking him in a fight.

Hands grasped at air, eager for the weight of a weapon.

Wind whistled among the high bright towers.

And the moment passed. The crowd shuffled to the side, muttering darkly, eyes averted. They went to try to recapture their
merriment.

Killeen helped Cermo sit up, brought him water. Cermo was a man of quick moods and the anger had passed. Killeen shared some
brandy with him. They embraced. The matter was over, except for Cermo’s sore ribs and Killeen’s bruised eye.

Then he stood and watched thin cirrus skate across the sky, framed by the towers and the enchantment of the great curving
dome.

Again he listened to the ancient hollow voice and its singsong chant. He paid little attention as Ledroff and then Fornax
briefly spoke to him about the incident.

Toby peered at the towers for a while and Killeen told him it was a manwork. Toby wrinkled up his nose with blithe boyhood
wonder and a few minutes later was playing again with the Rook children.

He told Shibo and she nodded but said nothing. Around them the momentum of celebration spent itself.

The Cap’ns decided to put distance between them and the Rattler. The Families, after all, had eaten, and could regain their
earlier pace. To groans and complaint they ordered the Families back on the march.

Killeen shook his head and tapered the aged voice down to a dim dry warble. He, too, would like to rest here for a while.
To grieve for Old Mary. To fest. To relive through story and celebration the humiliation of the Rattler.

Tugging on his pack, Killeen frowned. If mechs honored this human place, then humans should too. Of that he was sure.

“March!” Ledroff called. “Hanks out. Go!”

They left the flat plaza without looking back.

Arthur was excited but Killeen was in no mood to listen closely. The Aspect could not explain how this monument got here or
why. Arthur knew of nothing like it in his
own time. It seemed to have no connection with the slab of Chandra nearby. Killeen tuned down Arthur’s puzzled excitement.
Again he took flank left for the journey ahead.

Arthur kept repeating a name. He turned it over in his mind, trying to make sense of it. It was like no language he had ever
known.

Finally he gave up. Lost in time, it meant nothing, though he did note that the slow and gravid sound, Taj Mahal, rode pleasingly
on the lips.

The next morning Killeen rose to news that buzzed through camp. On the night watch Shibo had spotted a navvy reconning them
from a distant hill. She had shot at it but her bolt either missed or, ominously, was deflected.

Ledroff and Fornax decided to send a tracking team after the navvy. The two Cap’ns took the Families off at a diverging angle.

Six formed the party, all volunteers. Two were Bishop men still smoldering from the Mantis-brought deaths of relatives. Two
were women from Family Rook, lean and angular. They wore their hair chopped short and curled in tight knots, forming a design
and lettering from some ancient monumental symbol whose purpose no one remembered. They were outrunners, trained for hunting
and led by their own character to the passion of pursuit. Shibo, though not an outrunner herself, was their friend and volunteered
as well.

They laughed and joked with the two men and seemed to Killeen—who was the sixth—no different from other women he had known.
Family Bishop had no women hunters, though Jocelyn was an outrunner of sorts. Killeen gathered from their talk that the Rooks
had always kept scrupulously equal divisions of labor, so that men and women shared in cooking and hunting, defense and craft,
even in carryweight and outrunning. The Rook women displayed through their gravgreen tightweave great slabs of muscle in thigh
and calf. Yet they carried themselves with a light and airy nonchalance.

Killeen found them all agreed: the special navvy could lead to the Mantis, and taking the Mantis by surprise was a lot better
than the other way around.

So they set out on a long and wearisome day. Though centuries had shaped them for running, Killeen knew he had to pace himself.
Age had begun to tug at him. Aches and familiar soreness in his knees and hips told him that he was pushing his endurance.
Thin sensations came from embedded sensors, reporting micromolecular inventories. Killeen automatically took these into account
without the faintest notion of their origin.