Great Sky River (38 page)

“An old woman with a flower. Only lookit the tits on ’er. Wouldn’t mind eatin’ some that fruit, right?”

The forced jollity brought a fine film of sweat to Hatchet’s face and Killeen could see the idea bloom there, see it ricochet
in the hot eyes.

Hatchet’s head swiveled, listening. Waves of strain swept his face. Then he nodded. “Yeasay. Nice ripe fruit.”

Hatchet turned and walked toward the wavering figure. Its quick wet eyes studied his approach. “Job calls for a
man.”
Hatchet’s voice was hollow, as though coming from far away in cloudy madness.

He reached the Fanny-thing. Dropped his pants. “Takes a man t’do it.”

Killeen could not make himself move. He had killed the Fanny-thing in the Mantis’s sensorium. Done it without thinking. The
Mantis had watched him build up to it, talking to him all the time. And then had shattered his son before his eyes.

All, Killeen saw, in preparation for this.

He clutched at Toby, pulled his son to his side. Neither could say anything. They watched as the Fanny-thing stood slowly
on one foot. It hooked the other around Hatchet’s waist. Hatchet was stiff, ready. His eyes stared off into dreamy space while
his hands were already braced on the Fanny-thing’s shoulders. She lifted her free leg still farther to rest it on his jutting
hip bone. As she moved Killeen could see that between her legs was something that rustled and trembled eagerly. At the middle
of
the shadowed cleft two furrows opened. The ridges pulsed, closed, pulsed. The narrow slitted mouth had whiskers that moved
languidly in the still air.

The Fanny-thing’s eyes rolled. Its rose bulged and reddened.

Hatchet’s knees bent as he sought the angle. The creature cupped him with its blunt, budded hands.

All in absolute silence and darkness.

“Ahhhhh…” Hatchet sighed as he entered it.

Killeen shot them both. He used his small pellet gun. The charges struck each in the side of the head and ended it instantly.

He lowered the gun and gripped Toby tightly by the shoulders. If the Mantis sought retribution this time it would have to
come at them and they would have some infinitesimal chance. Only a moment.

He looked at Toby and they both nodded, silently.

Bodies cooled in the soft gloom and the two humans waited.

But the Mantis did not come.

They made their slow recessional through a land cut and grooved. For some unknown purpose mechs had furrowed and shaped the
rough hillsides into tight, angular sheets and oblique ramps. Huge cartouches marked laminated, swooping metallic planes.
Clouds of pale, shimmering gray dust gathered in the air above gleaming
mechworks. The Crafter had to twist and work its way through the labyrinth.

“I didn’t know what it meant,” Killeen said to Shibo abruptly, as though he were taking up a conversation where they had left
off. But they had not spoken together since they were inside the mechplex.

“Can’t know,” Shibo said.

“For a while you think you do,” he said. “It was showing us things, I know that. Things it thought would mean something, something
human. I didn’t care about that so much.”

Shibo nodded. She had had a different experience inside the Mantis thought-space, he knew. They all had.

“Part of me was sitting back from it. I thought I could keep it that way. Just watching. The place was real and then it wasn’t
and then it was again.”

She nodded again.

“I think it was proud. Proud what it had done. Art, it said. I kept it that way in my head for a while and then I couldn’t.”

Shibo watched him with flat, expectant eyes. “You killed what it showed.”

“I didn’t think.”

“Didn’t need thinking.” She watched the slick surfaces go by.

“So when I saw the thing like Fanny for the second time there was a while when I didn’t think it was real either.”

She nodded.

“Then Hatchet was with it. I would have killed it a second time anyway I guess. Even without Hatchet,” Killeen said distantly.

“It was not-us.”

“No. Not-us.”

“Mantis had it all wrong.”

“Howsay?” she asked.

“It can’t tell kinds love apart.”

“Hard for us sometimes too.”

Killeen’s jaw muscles bunched and relaxed, bunched and relaxed. “When Hatchet went with it he joined it. Not-us.”

“All gone now,” Shibo said. “Forget.”

“There might have been more to it than that. I didn’t know. Hatchet might have done that before. Maybe you make yourself do
it the first time and then later it gets easier and finally you don’t mind. Don’t even think about it. Hatchet maybe did it
before. I didn’t think about that.”

“Could ask the other Kings.” She looked at him calmly, just letting the idea hang there.

He thought for a long time. Then he shook his head slowly, as though dazed. “No.”

They watched the strange hills. In some places you could see down through into deep caverns. Translucent layers showed blurs
of darting mech motions.

“No,” he said again. “Can’t ask a Family ’bout something that bad.”

They rode for a long time without anyone in the party talking. Of them all only Killeen had killed but no one had said anything
about it.

The Crafter was subtly different now. It moved less certainly, slower, with a murmuring drone.

Killeen sighed, stood, stretched. He searched for something to say.

“Guess when the Mantis ’harvested’ the Crafter, that took the life out,” Killeen said to Shibo.

They rode on a cleft in the Crafter’s side. Toby swung
from some piping below, climbing among them for the sheer sport of it. He seemed unfazed by all that had happened inside
the mountain-sized building. It had only been a few hours and the adults were still dazed and silent, clinging to the Crafter’s
side and watching with absent stares as the landscape rumbled by.

“Mantis said needed Crafter harvested,” Shibo answered.

Killeen nodded. The Mantis had penetrated each human’s sensorium, deciphered ways of talking to each of them separately. This
had dawned on him as he staggered away from where he had killed Hatchet and the Fanny-thing. Apparently each human had undergone
some encounter with the Mantis. Each had been shocked into pensive silence.

They left the strange place of carved, laminated land and surged across a flat tan plain. Mechs buzzed and flew everywhere.
Kileen felt himself getting edgy again, his eyes shifting at each passing mech, hands aching to reach for a weapon.

Arthur’s cool voice came laden with the brittleness it had when in the possession of the Mantis:

No need for alarm. I have cleared the way.

The tones were distant, scrupulous. Arthur was crammed into a small compartment by an intruding personality of far greater
heft and power.

The Mantis had made no mention of the killing. It had brought the Crafter with it and directed the humans to board, like any
ordinary mech quickly cleaning up debris after a job was done.

Now the Mantis escorted them back toward Metropo
lis. Its presence was pervasive. Dry and distant, it answered questions and gave orders.

From what the Mantis had implied, Killeen now saw how deeply they had been drawn in. The Crafter had all along been operating,
without knowing it, under a safe umbrella cast by the Mantis. That was why the Crafter had been able to lead Hatchet into
so many mech factories without getting caught.

The mech civilization was complicated. Separate fiefdoms regulated defense of the factories, so the Mantis could not ensure
complete safety. Two humans had been lost to a new type of guard, developed by the factories to defend against just such Renegades
as the Crafter.

A similar, adapted mech had attacked the Bishops in the Trough that night after Fanny died. The Mantis could not completely
control the Marauders, could not stop the hunting of humans. On occasion it had to surekill humans itself, or else arouse
suspicion.

Still, it had managed to conceal the Metropolis; the Crafter had spoken true about that. But the Crafter had never known that
itself was a tool of another presence.

Now that strange intelligence carried the human party back to their enclave, a scruffy village that dared to call itself Metropolis.
And Killeen had a good idea of how the Mantis would treat them henceforth: as pets. Clients. Raw material for its art.

“We’re going back on that Duster?” Killeen asked. He addressed the Mantis directly. The reply came in Arthur’s voice, but
the Aspect was only a narrow funnel through which a far greater bulk forced and compressed itself. Killeen could sense Arthur
struggling to translate. Often Arthur would simply blurt Unintelligible and skip on to what he could render into human terms.

Yes. I can use the traitor Crafter to transport you, but it must return for demolishment soon. (Unintelligible.) I could not
disguise its penetration of the biological warren. Thus it must be sacrificed, broken to its constituent parts.

“Gone tear it down?”

A traitor must be rendered to infinitesimal oblivion. There is always the possibility that it has in some limited fashion
made of itself an anthology mind, like me. If so, all portions of it must be consumed and obliterated. The price for insurrection
is true death.

“It worked with you. You can’t save it?” The answer came rimmed with iceblue calm:

It was a lesser mind.

“So’re we.”

Just so. Still, you do not betray your kind.

“Crafter was just stayin’ alive.”

It did so in a manner against our precepts. That is the crucial distinction. (Unintelligible.) I discovered the Crafter some
time ago and did not report it because I knew I could use it for higher purposes. That is the only moral reason to suffer
such an aberrant mind. It wished to retain all its memories, personality, everything. That is not possible
when an individual mind is subsumed into the mechmind. (Unintelligible.) A portion of the individual experience propagates,
yes. A sense of selfness, yes. But not the whole. That would require storage space and complication without end.

He closeupped the horizon and saw a fast transport platform. There rode the Mantis.

It had tracked them this way ever since leaving the biological factories, keeping within transmission sight but at a remove.
Killeen had the uneasy suspicion that the Mantis was covering its ass in some way. If they were intercepted by some higher-order
mechs, the Mantis could get away, pretend innocence.

Killeen felt himself relax, the tightness in his muscles draining. Something in him made him say with a jaunty lilt he did
not feel, “No mech heaven, huh?”

You attempt to make trivial that which is exalted. To be recycled into the hosting mind, and then propagated outward again
in a specific mind and place—that is the most any consciousness could hope for, surely.

“Is it all
you
want?” Shibo asked.

Killeen blinked; he had imagined his conversation was private. Slowly, without making any sign, the Mantis was invading and
integrating the responses of the humans.

I am of a different order. An anthology intelligence cannot be fully killed, since it is arrayed over the entire surface of
this world. (Unintelligible.) Even a maximal thermonuclear blast could
end only my elements on the illuminated face. My sense of self is kept by the phase-locked coherence of each locale, much
as a net of antennae spread over an area can see as though it were one eye of that size. Yet it is not an eye at all. In a
similar way, I am not a mind but
the
mind.

Killeen grinned. “You didn’t look so hot when Shibo ’n’ me, we blew you all to shot an’ scatteration. ’Member? Back when the
Rooks ’n’ Bishops met?”

He was reasonably sure the Mantis would not let any of them live long, but a manic urge in him made him poke at the distant
mech with gleeful malice.

I was prepared for that. I had recorded many of you and needed time to sort, to digest. So I transported all self-sense out
of those parts, to another locale. In your terminology, you destroyed hardware, not software.

“Slowed you some, dinnit?” Shibo asked. Her lean face split with a sardonic smile. She had caught Killeen’s mood. They were
all released from a dark compression. No matter what their fate, they would not be daunted.

True. Anthology minds pay such a price. We are accustomed to being unlocalized, however. That was why I could not fathom,
at first, your feelings about my sculptures. I—indeed, all mechs—am used to being broken into parts, repaired, and reassembled.
That is the natural way. I did not understand that for you mortal, organic intelligences,
the iconography of the human body, rendered into parts, would be repulsive.

“Those
things
we ran into?” Killeen remembered the disembodied legs and arms, the hideous sculpture of human genitalia remorselessly working—

Indeed. I see the distinction now, one of those points which seems obvious only in retrospect. The sole time you see the inner
workings of each other is when one is ill, malfunctioning, and must be opened. Or, of course, during decay. In either case
the subject person is in pain, unconscious, or dead. Such occasions cast into the human mind sets of associations freighted
with strong emotions. Negative ones, purely. None of us has realized this before. It is a profound discovery. (Unintelligible.)
This is one of those valuable aspects which art can capture, giving us an enduring picture of the organic world.

“Don’t count on it,” Shibo said dryly. Killeen grinned.

What do you mean? I cannot read your—

Killeen said, “Those ’sculptures’ of yours?
That
isn’t humanity. It’s a horror show. A bunch of freaks. You don’t know shit about humanity.”

Excretion, we know. Ingestion, we know. And all that lies between.

Killeen was startled when everyone in the party laughed, the sound rolling off the steely carapace of the
lumbering Crafter. He was further delighted when the Mantis sent clipped, interrogating signals shooting like crimson streamers
through their sensoria.