Great Sky River (34 page)

Nothing pursued them. They retreated through a crowded factory complex ripe with acrid flavors. Mechs worked the catwalks
and corridors, giving the fleeing human figures no notice. Whatever the Mantis’s powers, it evidently could not put all local
mechs on alert. Or else did not feel it needed to.

Hatchet tried to slow them, make a stand to see if the Crafter had escaped. No one paid him any attention. They ran on. A
desperate fever gripped them. Killeen saw in an
abstract way how Hatchet felt, but his instincts told him otherwise.

He remembered his father chuckling once and saying dryly, “Brave man fights, smart man runs.” Hatchet had not been on the
march for years. Holed up in Metropolis, the Cap’n had lost his edge.

After passing through three factories they reached the wall of the entire zone. It was ribbed and veined with intricately
intersecting pipes. The wall thrummed with fluid gurgles. Cermo-the-Slow had belied his name and gotten there first. He found
a hatch which had a manual override. Evidently maintenance mechs used it to get at the pipe complex innards. The passage was
tight. They had to worm their way through one at a time.

Without much discussion the team left the huge zone with its vast plaza. They had not revived their sensoria and had no idea
how close the Mantis might be. Killeen sent Toby ahead with Shibo and stood rear guard beside Hatchet, looking back for a
moment. “Damn close,” he said.

“Don’t matter much.” Hatchet spat, puffing. “We’re dead anyway.”

“Rather be dead than suredead.”

“Shit.” Hatchet spat again. “Dead’s dead.”

Killeen felt a cool rage rattling in his chest. But all he said was, “You keep nothing from them, you’re just like them.”

“Crafter felt the same way,” Hatchet said sourly. “Funny, a mech bein’ just as crazy as you.”

Killeen blinked. “Crafter wouldn’t go suredead? But they’re its own kind.”

“Years back, when I was first talkin’ with it, through
the translator, it said it was a Renny ’cause it wouldn’t give up its
self”

“Ever ask it what the ordinary mechs think?”

Hatchet shrugged. “Near as I can tell, they don’t.”

Killeen’s gaze swept the rectangular corridors that led away among ranks of noisily working cam-drive machines. A mech appeared
but didn’t look at the two men. “What you mean?”

“My father told me once. Mechs wear out, they’re ordered in. Don’t think ’bout it at all. Got a override command built in
’em. Get stripped for metals, raw parts.”

“Same as they strip us down,” Killeen said. “Sure-death.”

“Get on in. I’ll cover.” It was Hatchet’s right as Cap’n to be the last out, traditionally the most dangerous position. Killeen
wriggled his way through the hatch. He had to work through tight intersections in complete darkness. Pipes poked his ribs,
tried to trip him. The thought came that if the mechs wanted to take them one at a time this would be an effective trap. But
then he saw a light ahead. A pipe caught his shock-absorber sleeve as he stumbled out into a ghostly ruby glow.

He was in a long slab of a room. From its low ceiling hung oddly shaped bundles suspended by translucent threads. The walls
and floor emitted smoldering dim light.

The team had stopped, staring. Killeen, too, tried to see more detail. Hatchet emerged behind Killeen, took one long survey
of the apparently limitless room, and whispered, “Get some cover. Quick!”

Killeen followed Toby, who was recovering his speed. They stopped beside a large lumpy thing that revolved slowly in inky
shadows. Its lower edge hung near
Killeen’s head. He let his eyes ’scope out to detect any movement in the vast, stretching room. Even at max amp he could
see no motion other than the achingly slow turning of the things suspended from the ceiling. Nothing touched the floor. A
silky silence floated on chilled, antiseptic air.

This place had a feel of obsessive exactness, the clean spaces and rigid perspectives making a frame for the oblong, misshapen
masses that spun silently. But as Killeen stepped toward the nearest mass he caught a sharp scent that tainted his lungs with
memories of wood rot and mold. He remembered crawling in a basement of the Citadel, a boy exploring the damp recesses in search
of treasure and mystery. Thick smells had assaulted him, moist soil and rancid clothing, crusted old boxes and half-filled
jars of moldy sluggish liquids.

The faint, hellish light seemed to brighten. He held his breath.

He was watching something like a large mass of tightly wound conduits. That was his first perception, and as his eyes adjusted
further he could see their rubbery elastic sheaths. An oily sheen lubricated their gray, mottled surfaces. They moved. Slid
and groped persistently, blindly. A machine. Bent on some purpose he could not imagine, not made of metal, veined and turgid,
yes. But it had that strange machinelike, nonliving way of motion. It did not occur to him that this could be anything else.
The coiled tubes were waxy in the dim buttery glow. Jelly lubricated their movements. Their slippery heave and slide had the
momentum of programmed purpose. Thicker tubes wound among the slim ones. Accordion-pleated extrusions branched off to other
joinings. With gravid slowness, oval fissures opened in the large tube nearest to
Killeen, breaking the oily glaze. It was swelling. It sighed faintly and a fine blue mist rose from it. He caught the sweet
sewer smell he remembered from the drop tower in the Citadel, a heavy lush hint of what would assault the nose if you ever
leaned over the long drop and caught the flavored breeze.

His eyes moved beyond, trying to grasp overall movement.

The tubes pulsed. Here and there a spot on a slippery conduit showed pale porosity. As Killeen and Toby watched, a fissure
broke open. It worked wider. Killeen saw that the tubes were hollow, flexing coils. The nearest made a wet, sucking noise.
It writhed from the snakelike embrace of another and coiled away. Rings rippled in its skin.

Killeen sensed coiling momentum gather through the entire mass before him. Another tube broke free. It had a slick globular
head which he saw only for a moment because it buried itself in a new, still-widening fissure nearby.

A furious clenching began in the surrounding mass. Killeen had the impression of a muscular gathering. Currents of moist,
sour air brushed him. He heard faint smacks and slides. Then a soft, quickening, wheezing undertone. Like the breathing of
a giant.

More fissures puckered in the walls of nearby tubes. They grew, their oval mouths ridged by ropy pink cords. They yawned,
red-rimmed and slick, pocked. More wrinkled tubes wrenched free of the mass and waved in the thick air. Their blunt heads
swelled. They sought and quickly found fissures that seemed to break and grow in answer to the freed tubes. The heads wormed
among the working mass and plunged into the yawning fissures. A
long shuddering accompanied each entry. The writhing pink mass shivered unspeakably. Killeen saw almost against his will
that each was a coupling, male and female organs that formed of the gelatinous mass and met in a grotesque slithering, each
calling up the other from the unshaped ooze that palped and stroked itself in jellied, blunt frenzy.

Killeen grasped Toby’s arms and pulled him away. “Get… get back.”

“What
is
it?” Toby’s voice rasped.

“Something… awful.”

As they backed away he could see round, leathery bulges hanging from some of the tubes. Balls. Balls conjuring some foul semen.

The engorged fissures were growing hair. Matted black wire sprouted along the tubes as he watched.

The waxy light around them quickly faded. Toby asked more questions for which Killeen had no answers and he shushed the boy.
He took two steps forward. The light brightened. Did the restless slithering of the suspended mass quicken? He moved away.
Yes, the diffuse glow ebbed. The mindless motion slowed.

“It’s made to… operate… when somebody’s near.”

“Thought it was a machine,” Toby said matter-of-factly.

“So did I… not sure now.”

The others stared at other nearby shapes, frowning. Only a moment had passed but to Killeen it seemed a yawning, stretched
time. Hatchet called shakily, “Form up! We got to move.”

They obeyed mutely. Long lanes of the suspended masses stretched away. As they approached, each mass in
turn stirred in sullen, waxing light. They soon learned to move quickly past.

Cool quiet enveloped them. Mist rose from the hanging masses, layering the air with acrid traceries. Their steps rang hollowly.

They knew they had no plan, that Hatchet was leading them without a clear goal. But it was better to go on than to endure
the strangeness here, and the enveloping sense of awful forces moving with purposes beyond human understanding.

They walked quickly. Pools of brimming glow dogged them as the masses began their performances, then ebbed. The sensation
of being followed, if only by automatic mechanisms, hastened their steps.

Ahead a dark blankness grew. It was a grainy wall of black mesh.

Hatchet dispatched Cermo to the right and the wounded Kingsman to the left to find a way through. The Kingsman was back within
moments, gesturing silently. No one spoke. Hatchet revived their sensoria long enough to cast tentatively along the wall.
Nothing showed. He sent a darting yellow call-back to Cermo, then let the web of sensoria dwindle to a pale nothingness.

The Kingsman had found a hexagonal hatch. Rails led to it from far down the lines of sculptures. Hatchet thought some kind
of service mech probably ran along the rails. He used one of the key cylinders the Crafter had given him. The indented plate
accepted it and clicked three times. The hatch slid aside.

Shibo went first this time. Killeen helped the Kingsman who had lost control of his arms. They all had to bend down for the
short, wide little passageway beyond.

Shibo cautiously worked her way forward. People bumped one another in the dark. Killeen’s back began to ache. He tried not
to think at all about their chances. To think was to despair and that meant you stopped. Once you did that you were only waiting
for the end. He had learned that in long years on the march, had seen good men and women cut down by the despair that reached
into them like a claw of ice and seized their hearts.

Fatigue tugged at them all.

No one talked. Killeen’s world had narrowed to the close darkness and the feel of his hand on Toby’s shoulder.

Abruptly light forked into his eyes, bringing searing brilliance. A panel had opened automatically ahead.

“Looks clear!” Shibo called.

They stumbled out into a vault so large Killeen could not see either the walls or the ceiling. Buildings dwindled away in
the distance. Complex machinery festooned each surface of the humming factories. Mechs zoomed high in the air below a canopy
of gray fog. Amber blades of luminescence shot through rising bubbles of greenish vapor.

They blinked. Eyes darted nervously. The air smelled of harsh acid.

“Heysay,” Hatchet called. “Let’s go.”

Cermo wheezed. “Where?”

“Out. Gotta find our way out.”

Cermo said slowly, “Great. Which way?”

“We search till we find, is all,” Hatchet said adamantly.

A Kingsman asked, “Think maybe we try find the Renny?”

“Renny’s gone,” Killeen said. “Mantis eats mechs like that for breakfast.”

Hatchet’s eyes narrowed, sharpening the V of his face. “You got better idea?”

Killeen shook his head wearily.

They started toward the far wall even though they couldn’t see it. Hatchet said he had a good sense of direction and that
this was the way toward the surface of the mountain-building that enclosed them.

They walked for an hour before the Mantis found them.

He stood in a warm valley between hills of bright green. Beneath his feet was a spongy brown mat. It stretched away about
as far as he could throw a stone—but for the first time in his life, he saw no stones within reach.

The brown mat’s ragged margin gave way to the hill’s slick green, glinting in the sunlight. He peered upward but ivory clouds
hid all hints of Denix or the Eater. Somehow the radiance still slanted down strongly.

He felt the fibrous carpet. It gave a soft resistance, suggesting something solid beneath. He wondered what the green slick
stuff was. Grass? And another question. He groped for it. Something…

Toby.
He whirled, looking in all directions.

Nothing. He was alone in a rolling landscape. A moment before he had been with Toby, he remembered, and
now there was only the rough brown like tightweave beneath his feet and…

The hills moved.

The one ahead of him was shrinking. Ponderously, with a slight murmur. He turned to see the rise behind him swelling, its
green luster catching glints from the skyglow.

He felt a surge. A faint rippling tremor came up through his feet. He was moving backward… up the slick mound. The brown mat
slid upward, pressing him slightly farther into the soft resistance. He felt himself slowly rise up the green hill as behind
him a polished green valley opened.

Somehow he was riding on something which could climb the smooth green hills. Steadily the brown weave beneath his feet made
its way up toward a rounded peak.

Killeen took a step. The spongy mat cushioned him. He started walking uphill toward the edge of it. In the several moments
this took he saw the hillcrest draw near and took advantage of the added height to look in all directions. There were other
green hills, arranged in long ridgelines. But no other mats, no feature to give perspective.

He reached the edge just before the mat topped the hill. Seen up close, the green was mottled and flecked with white and yellow
motes. He reached down to touch the glassy surface rushing under the mat.

He had never seen moisture as more than the tinkling brooks which broke free of a rocky clasp. In the Citadel he had enjoyed
three full baths, aromatic occasions surrounded by ritual. He had had one at his Outcoming, one after his first hunt with
his father, and one more with Veronica the night of their marriage. There should have
been another bath, shared with Veronica, at Toby’s birth. But there had not been enough water then and they had put it off.
The drought never lifted. Snowglade’s slow parching deepened.