Great Sky River (25 page)

“Fanny?”

“Oh, course. I forgot you never knew her.”

“Your Cap’n?”

“Was. Best damn one ever. She’d go through this Hatchet like a hot knife through butter.” He liked this old phrase, even though
it reminded him that he hadn’t seen butter since the Citadel.

Shibo said abruptly, “Hatchet not right.”

“Huh? ’Bout what?”

She tapped her temple. “Not right this way.”

This startled Killeen. “Why you say?”

“You hear his welcoming speech?”

“No, fell asleep. What’d he say?”

“Metropolis greatest city ever.”

Killeen chuckled. “These mud huts?”

“Great ’cause can withstand Marauders.”

Killeen’s mouth turned down in puzzlement. “Not many Marauders come this far in the Splash. They catch on we’re here, we’ll
see plenty them. Hatchet’s been damn lucky so far.”

“Yeasay. Then he talk about reuniting Families.”

“Huh?”

“He wants be Cap’n.”

“Cap’n
all the Families?”

“Think so. Kings cheer him all the time.”

Killeen shook his head. “This Hatchet, he’s done a lot, I give him that. He can lead. Look how proud the Kings are. Not a
wise Cap’n, though.”

“Yeasay.” Softly she added, “Fanny wise?”

He smiled. “She used to say, old people don’t get wise, they just get careful.” He paused. “Or was that my father said that?”

“Not always true, anyway.”

“Yeasay. Fanny was wise, even though she’d rag you for sayin’ it. Hatchet, he’s not.”

“Yeasay.” Her face was somber as she regarded passing warm yellow rectangles that looked into the narrow huts. Family singing
drifted outward on the soft breeze.

Metropolis used a line of sentries and outer defenses beyond the ring of nearby hills. They could sense any mech approach.
That made possible this casual indifference to an exposed light. Killeen did not think it wise.

The sprawled town shimmered in its fragrant haze of campfire smoke. Moist air cloaked his face, its welcome weight filled
his lungs. This was the tang of life, riding winds and burrowing in the rich loam. Once, Arthur had told him, all Snowglade
had been this way.

He forced his thoughts back to practical things. “Why’d the mechs rebuild the Mantis each time? After the Calamity the Marauders
could’ve hunted us down, if they wanted.”

Shibo said, “Tried. Pick us off if they run across us.”

“Yeasay, but they didn’t
hunt
the way the Mantis does.” Killeen balled his right fist. “They just let us go for years. Forgot us, ’cept for Marauders we’d
run into by accident. That was bad enough. Now they’ve sent the Mantis. Why?”

Shibo smiled. “Don’t frown. Makes you look old.”

He noticed that she had completely redone her hair. It swooped upward from her broad crown in twisted braids flecked with
silver. Then it fanned outward in a frozen black fountain. Her eyes glistened and her jumpsuit was clean and brushed.

Ready for romance, he thought. She gave him a slow, up-from-under look.

He wasn’t in the mood.

He could not bring himself to tell her that he was certainly interested in an abstract kind of way, but lacked the motivation.
When his Family laid down the law about sexcens, Killeen had not minded so much. He’d been sleeping with Jocelyn then, but
the sweet memory of Veronica kept coming back to him. He was past that wonderful time of his youth when the simple and almost
unexpected pleasure of the act was enough to hold him entranced. It had been clear that Jocelyn could never be what Veronica
had been, and that had brought a bittersweet aftertaste to every touch and gesture.

He opened his mouth to skirt around the subject but nothing would come out.
Damn! Like I was a kid!
He cast about for something to say, mind spinning in vacuum, and ahead of them saw a tube set on a frame.

He knew full well what it was but managed gratefully to seize upon it with fake puzzlement. His delight, though, was real.

The Citadel had boasted one such, and he could not imagine how Family King had managed to save theirs. Maybe they had rescued
it from their own Citadel ruins, years after their Calamity. That would fit Hatchet’s style.

He peered through the ancient viewer. Clouds drifted away, revealing a shimmering band of starlight. He could see that the
dense stream of stars lay beyond the nearby ruby lanes of dust. Arthur said:

A welcome vision! I have not witnessed this for so very long. That is the Mandikini—an ancient Asian Indian word of fabled
Earth. It denotes the plane of the galaxy, the so-called Milky Way. The Indian translates literally as “great sky river,”
since they believed—

“Come look,” Killeen said to Shibo, cutting off Arthur.

Shibo had never seen an electrotelescope before. She dutifully looked through it, scanning the twilight sky, and then asked
him about something in the finder screen.

Killeen peered at the small, crystalline object. A memory from childhood rushed through him. “The Chandelier,” he said. “There’s
one still left!”

“What is?”

“A city. Human city! Didn’t Family Rook come from a Chandelier?”

She shook her head, puzzled. Killeen said, “We all did, long time back. Came down, settled Snowglade.”

Arthur had reminded him of these forgotten tales only yesterday. Killeen had been letting the Aspect speak more often, trying
to learn more mechtech. He had not told Shibo this, hoping to pick up a few craftsman tricks to impress her.

“Families built?”

From the inner whisper of Aspect Nialdi Killeen plucked a quick fact. He was glad to have some area where he could at least
seem to know more than Shibo.

“Families were formed when humanity came down from Chandeliers. ’Way long ago.”

“One Chandelier?”

“Uh, no, three,” he got from Nialdi.

“We made?”

Her incredulity echoed Killeen’s unspoken feelings. It was flatly incredible that men had ever known how to shape things in
the high blackness, or even to fly there. Even the strange whitestone monument they had found the day before seemed an impossible
accomplishment.

Yet when he had first seen the Chandelier as a boy the world had seemed safe and humanity capable. Now he knew the truth.

Killeen sensed a seething unease in the back of his mind. He studied the Chandelier again, its glinting crystalline finery
hanging dry and cool against a flat blackness. Scattershot emotions echoed through his sensorium. It was a lovely jewellike
place among so much swimming nothing, so much an affirmation against the eternal denying blank.

But in him this provoked a sudden cry.

His Aspects sent smothered yelps of glee and pride and fervent desolated ache. They yearned outward from their recesses.

Bubbling voices washed over him. He gasped.

“You all right?”

Killeen realized his face must reflect some of the swarming frenzy that blew red and roiling within him. “Ah, yeasay. Just…
let me look a… li’ 1 longer….”

Nialdi cried:

How lovely it is! Beauty! Humanmade!

Arthur shouted:

—If I had simply followed the advice of my good friends, in a timely manner, I would have gotten promoted enough. My turn
would have come up. I certainly could have gained at least a
temporary
appointment to the Crewboard in the Drake Chandelier. And if I had—no matter how much you hoot, Nialdi, don’t think I can’t
hear you, even if you do encode your insults!—I would have stayed in the Chandelier. And would
still
be there!

1. Mechs hit the Chandeliers too last I heard.
   
2. Even in my day nobody knew if they were working.
   
3. No signals from them.
   
4. Just hanging in the sky like Christmas tree ornaments.
   
5. You stayed there you’d likely be suredead.
   

You refer lightly to such great tragedy? When the devilworked hordes engulfed all that was left of life-giving reason and
judgment in this foul abyss?

Really, Nialdi, you must stop giving us sermons. I don’t care if you
are
an ordained philosopher. Can’t you just gaze upon the Chandelier, man, and revel in it? The mechs haven’t devoured it! Think
what that might mean.

I
sympathize with you, Arthur. No one wants more than I do the return of humanity—of all true
living things!
—
to our original station. Yeasay verily!

1. Then stop jawing so much.
   
2. Got to find a way out of here right now.
   
3. Stick to business.
   

—So of course the Chandelier era saw a tragic end. We had assumed too much about machines, their rapacity. But that is
no
reason to indulge in your fevered nightmares about the mechs. We—

You deny that they
chewed
most of our original ships? Killed most of our expedition?

Naturally I—

—
Then later returned, devoured our works again? Leaving
—
praise God!
—
this lone Chandelier. Merciful
—

Stop this cheap religious hokum! You won’t win me over with
that.
No one will be taken in by your—

1. See Killeen!
   
2. I know we’re overheated but look, it’s bothering him.
   

He reels! He’s caught some of our feelings.

Your hothouse mind, that’s what’s done it Your blind unreasoning hatred has—watch out!—

Killeen knew he was undergoing Aspect storm, but he could do little to stop it. He could not control his own body. It was
like the woman days ago, her Aspects running hot and wild.

He felt silver teeth saw through his skull.

Rasping hornets filled the dusky air.

He fell on his leaden arm.

Snow pelted his nostrils.

Insects ate at his eyes.

The next morning there was what would have been in the old Citadel days a Confluence of Families. Today it was three lean,
stringy-muscled men with straggly beards sitting in organiweave chairs inside a dullorange mud hut.

Killeen heard of it from Shibo, who was taking care of him. It came as thickly spaced words, acoustic wedges, propagating
solidly through silted silences.

He knew they were ruminating on matters he was in no mood to consider. Some thought they should integrate the Families in
what was both the fresh new Citadel and also, for the more somber souls, humankind, tenuous redoubt. Others felt there was
no real in numbers and they should burrow underground, or disperse into separate villages, or even go back on march.

Killeen didn’t care. His world had narrowed down to a simple set of intersecting forces, all hinged on definite objects.

Toby’s legs.

Shibo’s filmy eyes.

His own swaying cordwood left arm.

All solid and specific. He had to concentrate on them to bring back his full sensorium.

His Aspects had overloaded him. Now they cowered in the remote back shelves of his reverberating, honeycombed self.

He would heal, yes. A day, two.

One day passed without his much noticing it except as a bar of Denixlight that slid across the floor and up the far wall.
He ate and seemed to sleep for a moment and then the solid yellow-white bar was back on the rough clay floor.

He sat and thought.

If the Marauders attacked Metropolis, Killeen would not be of much use in the defense. Even when he recovered, he would not
be able to cradle a projector or gun accurately. And if Metropolis fell and there was another in the long series of humiliating
retreats, the Family would leave Toby behind.

His sputtering Aspect voices called him, their thin whispers resounding when he gave them the least chance.

But they had little useful to say. He had to get his arm function back, they said. Forget Toby.

Killeen sat in the cramped soil-damp hut, watching Toby sleep. He knew that Fornax and Hatchet and Ledroff were talking only
a short distance away about what were for him and Toby matters of life itself. Yet he did not stir.

Every parent, he realized, knows at some point that his own grip on the future is slippery and must eventually fail. That
comes with the weathering of age. In a way
children were life’s answer to mortality. Their small but persistent presence was a constant reminder that you were no longer
in the frontier generation. That history was preparing to move on beyond you. That for them to flower, their parents finally
and justly had to wither and give ground.

This was natural and proper and came without discussion or even clear thought. Killeen felt it in the pressing quiet of the
hut. The random sounds of Metropolis came through the window as from a distant and filmy place, the mumble of activity like
a voice that could be heard but never understood. He watched his son and knew he had to do something, but the hinge that would
set him in motion refused to budge. It would not deliver him into clear action. He felt this as a sullen knot in him.

He did not mind giving ground himself. His own life carried as little weight as his own frugal backpack. Years of death and
steady retreat had not diminished his opinion of the valor and dignity of humanity, but it had impressed him with the random
and uncaring way of things. That he could be obliterated by a casual blow from a passing machine which knew neither pain nor
remorse—that was the central fact of the world. But that this world could now so easily annihilate his legacy, Toby—that was
a truth he could not allow

Killeen watched the slow, grave heave of his son’s chest beneath rough tightweave blankets. A fly droned in through the sunstruck
window. The tiny circling saw inspected the bare necessities of the hut and then lit on Toby’s hand and wandered busily on
it. Killeen let the fly go. It was alive and so carried its own rights. His father had taught him his burden and duty to all
lifeforms, as their greatest representative. Humankind spoke for the
kingdoms of doomed life. It could not transgress against forms lesser and unknowing. Killeen tolerated the fly until it started
to crawl on Toby’s face. Then he scooped it up and carried it to the window and set it upon a passing breeze.