Great Sky River (35 page)

His heart gave three slow, solid thumps before Killeen could fathom what he saw.

The rushing polished green splashed over his hand. Water. He put his hand in again, unable to believe in so much water. White
froth churned over his fingers. He blinked in amazement and threw some into his face. It was warm and tasted of a spice, salt.

As he looked up, the mat reached the top of the hill. He could see a long way now, over a landscape of endless green slopes
and foamy crests.

Without slowing, his mat slipped over the edge and began to descend.

He could get some idea of his speed by watching the scummy streaks of white that streamed toward him and then slid under the
mat. He turned and watched the far edge of his mat come over the crest of the hill. The long white streamers reappeared from
beneath the brown carpet and fled over the mound.

Automatically he got down on his knees and pushed his face into the translucent water. He drank. The salt did not bother him.
He had long gotten used to drinking water of all flavors and purity. You stored it up when you could. He drank steadily, working
at it until he felt his belly fill. Then he sat back—and saw the water looming over him like a wall, about to topple.

But it did not. He felt a tremor through his knees as the green water hill rose still higher, towering against a soft ivory
sky. But it did not fall.

He felt a downward surge and then his mat began to
climb the green rise. Only then did he glimpse what must be happening. He was in the grip of water so huge and momentous
that it made waves. His brown carpet was riding the waves in this immense water. He was on a…

An island. Yes. Or perhaps a raft. Yes, a raft.

This came from Arthur. Killeen eagerly asked more but the Aspect would not answer.

He stood, marveling. The hilltops were an emerald green, while the valleys shimmered with a deeper, glassy color. As he passed
over the crest he saw a few spots break into white foam, then fade.

Except for the slow surge that came up through his feet, Killeen could not tell he was moving. He seemed to glide up one hillside
and then down it to another, identical, hill.

So much water. A world of water, where even the spongy solidness of his mat was unusual. At the next hilltop he peered carefully
all around and could see no other brown stain upon the endless rolling green mounds. The giant waves marched on to the far,
misty horizon. A whole seething world of water.

The Mantis. The thought came to him suddenly with a sense of absolute conviction.

This was a fraction of the Mantis sensorium. Or the way it saw the world.

There was no place on Snowglade where so much water lay open. So the mat beneath him could not be there. It was an illusion,
just like the false images he had seen before from the Mantis. Far more convincing, enveloping,
real.

But what was this illusion for?

He remembered running from the Mantis, fevered and hopeless, Toby beside him.

Now he was alone on a brown raft. Adrift.

Wearing nothing, his suit and leggings and helmet gone.

He called up each of his Aspects and Faces, even those he had not used for years. None answered.

His sensorium gave back only a hollow, droning grayness.

He walked all the way around the outer edge. There was nothing more to see, simply the same layered mesh everywhere. He stopped
for a moment to drink again, enjoying the sensation of burying his face in water which sloped up and was higher than the land.
The slap and gurgle of the small waves his hands made was to him a sound of uncountable wealth, a fluid richness without end.

When he got up there was a speck on the horizon. He watched it grow, banking up and down the gravid waves, approaching on
a zigzag path.

It was another island. Larger, ridged.

Instead of a featureless plain, bristly vegetation covered most of it.

Something moved there.

Killeen squinted as the long green undulations brought it closer. There were dense, knotted bushes growing atop a white ground
cover. The other island had knobby small rises and hollows, unlike his. As it grew, his eyes searched for some human figure
among the gnarled growth but saw nothing.

Branches swayed with the swell of the huge waves. Was that the movement he had seen?

The larger island seemed to slide effortlessly over the
crests of the green hills and Killeen had to remind himseff that the islands were not moving themselves, but followed the
contours of the waves. All his experience was no guide here.

As the island neared he suddenly saw that it was not heading directly for his. Instead it would pass some distance away and
even seemed to be gaining speed. He tried to remind himself that this place was a sensorium, and his instincts didn’t apply.
But he somehow knew the other island was important.

He stepped into the warm water at the mat’s edge. He had no idea how to move through water, or even if there was a way to
do it. Then he saw something moving in the brambles of the approaching island. A human figure. It took no notice of him but
kept walking into the vegetation. He could not tell who it was.

He stroked tentatively at the water and took a step. Abruptly he sank to his waist. This sent a shrill alarm through him,
a sensation he could not have imagined: fear of
water,
the provider of life.

Lie down in it. Then pull water toward you with your hands and kick with your legs. Hold your breath when your head is under
water.

The quick darting information from Arthur broke his hesitation. He pushed away from his island and thrashed at the warm currents
that brushed him. His legs churned. Water rushed up his nose. Briny pricklings invaded his sinuses and he sputtered.

But he moved. He got a dog-paddle rhythm going and managed to keep his head fixed toward where the other island would pass.
He gave himself over to the rhythmic
surgings, swooping water behind him like a kind of thick, warm air. Coughing, rolling in the swell, he made progress.

The other island-raft came at him achingly slowly. He felt no fatigue but his arms began to sing with the strain. Then a chance
wave caught him and plunged him down-slope at the island. Foam curled around him. He banked into the wave and felt it seem
to bunch and thrust behind him. Startled, he cut a swath down the shimmering wall of green. And tumbled onto the mat below,
gasping.

His head rang from banging into the ground. He got up and walked unsteadily toward the dense, clotted growth nearby. It looked
impenetrable. He skirted around it toward one of the white open spaces. There was no sign of the human figure. This island
was much bigger than his. Stubby trees dotted the high ground. There were other things farther back in the vegetation which
he could not make out so he started up the incline of white—

And backed away, trembling.

The white ground cover was a jumble of bones.

The edge of it was made of small, slender fragments. Fingers. Hands. Toes.

Farther in were broken ribs. Forearms. A garden of smashed pelvises.

At the top of the small knoll were thighs. Intact barrel rib cages. Thick arms. Bleached skulls with their perpetual grins
and gaping eyesockets.

The boneyard spread over hummocks and rises. It stopped at the undergrowth but reappeared halfway up a nearby knoll.

Killeen blinked, his fear pressing up into his throat. He tentatively angled toward an opening in the bushes. Their
slender branches whispered as the sea swell deepened. Then he heard the other sound.

Steps. Slow, crunching steps. Dull thuds punctuated by sharp cracks and pops.

Something coming. He backed away, not knowing where the sounds came from. His eyes swept the horizon but he could not find
his own island anymore in the green vastness.

He looked back at the low sloping hillside just as a chromed sphere appeared over the crest. It came into view on a lattice
of working rods and cables, legs clambering and jerking, many-toed feet coming down with a curious delicacy. Where it stepped
bones broke.

In a last despairing release Killeen stooped, found a knobby, bleached joint. He threw it straight at the topmost sphere of
the Mantis. It bounced off with a sharp clang.

Killeen felt his Aspects buzz to fresh life.

1. Wants to talk.
   
2. No harm.
   

The machine is an anthology intelligence. It suppressed us in order to let you get your bearings. It can speak better through
us than directly with you.

“Why?” Killeen’s voice rasped with rage.

Obviously, we are far more like it. As stored intelligences we Aspects can, through our digitized manifolds, better perceive
the coded holographic
speech of a machine. The Mantis has been teaching us how to do this these last few hours. I—

“Hours?”

The Mantis came steadily nearer on thrusting, jerky legs.

You are in fact unconscious. This is a medium of communication for the Mantis. It incorporates us all into its… well,
sensorium
is too narrow a word. It has ranges and capabilities I cannot fathom. In a certain view, this place is a combined Fourier
transform of both our minds and that of the Mantis. It is easier to engage such different intelligences in Fourier-space,
where waves are reduced to momenta and a localized entity (such as yourself) is represented as a spreading packet of such
momenta in the flat space-time of the Mantis. An interesting—

“You understand it?”

Not fully, no. Employing the help of this suitably tapered Fourier-space modeling, it still has difficulty communicating with
even me, an Aspect. The Faces, of course, can barely fathom it. We are attempting—

“What’s it want?”

The Mantis stopped and settled down on the sloping ground. Killeen had to consciously stop his hands from clenching. His feet
wanted to turn and run. He stood his ground.

1. Human things, it says.
   
2. Has already much.
   
3. Wants to help humans live forever.
   

Killeen spoke with razor-thin control. “That’s why it’s been hounding us? Killing us?”

1. I report its true meaning here.
   
2. You would die anyway, it says.
   
3. It wants to help.
   

“Leave us alone!” Killeen exploded, his fists tight and shaking at his side.

1. Cannot.
   
2. The mechmind will find you.
   
3. Only the Mantis can save.
   
4. Even a scrap is better than nothing left.
   

“We’re not a goddamn scrap! We’re
people.
All that’s left after you brought on the Calamity and, and—”

Killeen made himself stop. He had to keep control. There was probably no way out of this place, no hope of survival. But as
long as he didn’t
know
that, as long as Toby or Shibo or any of the rest might still be alive, he had to keep going. Keep control.

The Mantis knew that humans were congregating in Metropolis. It did not wish to disturb us. The Renegade Crafter was bound
to make a mistake sometime and that would bring down the full force of the Marauders on the Metropolis. Surely, the Mantis
says, we knew that.

“Knew we’d fight someday, sure. Give us time, we’d do damn well against the Marauders.” Killeen put his hands on his hips
to show he wasn’t thinking of running anymore. Even if this was some kind of mathematical space—whatever that meant—he knew
the Mantis would understand the signal.

When Arthur spoke the Mantis’s reply there was a decided edge to it:

Such bravado is amusing, and perhaps ordained in you, but unwise. Only because the Crafter concealed your location did Metropolis
survive this long. And the Mantis helped with that, as well.

“What? The Mantis…?”

1. It helped Crafter.
   
2. Crafter didn’t know though.
   

“But the Mantis killed the Crafter!”

1. Mantis seized Crafter.
   
2. Crafter not dead.
   

“I don’t understand, Hatchet said—” 1. Mantis kept Marauders away.

“But Hatchet told me himself, couple Marauders found Metropolis. The Kings blew ’em away, clean-easy.”

1. A few, yes.
   
2. Were necessary.
   
3. Otherwise Kings get suspicious.
   

“Suspicious? Of what?”

The fact that their Metropolis was an enclave supported by the Mantis. A spot where humans could congregate and merge. The
Mantis herded the Bishops and Rooks toward Metropolis with that in mind.

Killeen grimaced.
“Herded
us? It killed us! Suredead!”

The wording in human speech is difficult here. The Mantis does not regard what it did at the ambushes as killing. The word
it wishes to choose is, well,
harvesting.

Something in the way this was said, calm and flat in the tiny voice of Arthur, made a cool fear come into Killeen.

“Surekilling… not giving us a chance to even preserve an Aspect…”

1. Aspects very limited.
   
2. Only get a little of us.
   
3. I was complex man once.
   
4. Now am tiny thing.
   
5. Senses dull or gone.
   
6. Never again feel it
   all.
   

Alas, my stunted friend is correct. You surely did not think this trimmed existence of ours was enough, did you? We are small
dolls, compared to the men and women we once were. Do you blame us for rattling the bars of our cages now
and then? Even the maddened among us feels our truncated state, wants—

Call me insane? I be the only who won’t kneel to this devil-machine before you! I will
not
yield
—