Great Sky River (5 page)

It was a necessary move, even overdue. Killeen had voted for it himself. They could not squander the energy, psychic and physical
alike, which men and women expended on each other. It was the firmest measure of their desperation. Sex was a great bonding.
But alertness and single-minded energy rewarded the hunted with survival. The Family had learned this sorely.

There was far more to the transcending magic between men and women than the chip-controlled sexcen. He felt this whenever
he spoke to Jocelyn. Old resonances rang in him, coiling pressures unfurled.

But it was never with Jocelyn the way it had been with Veronica. He knew now that it never would be. That had passed from
his life.

Still, they could share the pleasures of grooming. They moved continually, every frag of packmass weighing on the tip-edge
of survival, and hair had become their sole remaining mirror of self pride. They combed and slicked and pigmented themselves,
against the raw rub of their world. Plucking beauty from a tangled, smelly mat brought some small refuge.

The sweetyeast had finished its work. Cermo had dropped a pinch of primer into vats as soon as the Family entered. Long ago,
the mechs had converted their organic proteins, made the molecules helix in the sense opposite to what humans could digest.
Cermo’s precious primer—a dwindling legacy of the Citadel—coiled the helix back, to human use.

Cermo and Killeen popped the release valve on a big vat and portioned bowls of froth out to the eager Family. To force the
valve, Killeen used the leg strut he had taken from the Mantis. It seemed right to use a trophy as a pilfer tool.

When Killeen felt the sugary sap working in him, bringing an emberburn of interest, he lurched to his feet again and went
to pace through the Trough. Its long, inky corridors reeked of coarse full grain, of buttery soup, or ripe tastes unnameable.

It could have been a thousand years since a Crafter or Stalker came here, seeking food. Yet the Trough murmured
and cooked on. Its repair displays still offered themselves, articulated arms yawning for the embrace of a mech. Electrical
auras buzzed, trying to entice vagrant machines with indecipherable crackling promises of renewed energies. The worn or damaged
mechs who wandered into a Trough might know only dimly what they needed, or that they needed anything at all. The Trough seduced
them with sensuous lubrication, with fresh clip-in components, with rich mechwealth humans could tap only fractionally.

Killeen found a huge cavern in which blue-green lichen hung in strands, fluttering in the passing almond-rich breeze. Trompers
liked those, he knew. A mere tongue-lick would kill a fullgrown man.

In a side passage were stacks of grease-paste. Some said mechs ate the slimy nuggets, while others thought it was a lubricant.
Killeen slashed open cases, watching it shower out, cursing under his breath. If humans starved, so would mechs.

Another cavern offered great mossy black slabs. Snouts used those to replace living polybind joints. Killeen’s father had
shown him all these things, knew their function. But now the Family could use only what it could carry.

“Dad?”

Killeen was startled. “Naysay!” he called softly, swiftly. “Bear on my spark.”

“Why?” came Toby’s stillsoft voice, all electrical.

“Naysay!”

Toby came flitting through the pools of shadow, between vast vats of fuming vapors. The boy automatically moved to take advantage
of light’s inky confusions, as twelve hard years had taught him.

Toby reached his father and gazed up at him in the amber halflight. His face was unmarked by fear, dark eyes open to a world
of endless new adventure. “Why be so quiet?”

“If there’re defense mechs, they’d hide far back in here.”

“Jazz! You think there might be?”

Killeen didn’t, really, but anything that made the boy cautious was useful. “Suresay, I would.”

“I naysaw any,” Toby said breathlessly. As did all members of the Family, they grasped and patted each other in the dark,
hands speaking, trusting the human press of flesh over all other signatures.

“They carry cutters. Slice you spinewise in the dark.” He cuffed Toby slightly, grinning.

“I cut
them.”

“Noway nosay.”

“I
will.”

“With what?”

“This.”

Toby produced a forked circuit-choker. It had long prongs that could wriggle into any mech’s input hole. Some said the senstive
tips were living-tech, organic.

“Where’d you get that?”

Toby smiled impishly. His bright eyes danced merrily as he read his Dad’s puzzlement. “Junkpile.”

“Where?” Killeen tried not to let his concern show.

“C’mon.”

Toby was starved for playmates. In the years since Calamity, the Family had been forced to wander, never spending more than
a few days in a single place. Any longer and some silent alarm might bring Lancers or worse.

So the boys and girls of the Family had never known permanence, never paused anyplace to build a play fort or learn the intricacies
of shared, invented games. Watching Toby bound away into the veined halfdusk, Killeen wondered if Toby needed games at all.
To him their long flight from the Calamity was like a play of endless pursuit. Life was a game.

Toby had seen dozens die, but with the effortless immortality of the young could shrug it off. The Family’s blighted history
was still only a talked-about backdrop, weightless. And Toby was too young to understand the Aspects, though he knew that
in some way the dead still lived through them. That was apparently enough.

Ahead, Toby disappeared down a gloomy passage. Killeen had to stoop to follow, his nose filling with the musk of moldering
grease.

“Here,” Toby whispered.

Killeen felt a chill steal over him as he poked at the pile of debris. Carbs, axles, sprocket drives, plugs and caps and tanks.
Parts he recognized without understanding.

All from a Marauder-class mech.

All the latest designs.

All burnished with use, but still showing silvershine where they’d been protected from the grit outside.

“Good stuff,” Killeen said casually.

“Yeafold, eh-say?”

“Ummmm…” But parts of what?

“Can I use it, then?”

Killeen hefted a crosshead block. It was big enough to fit on a Stalker. “Uh, what?”

Exasperated, Toby said,
“This”
holding out the circuit-choker.

“Oh. What for?”

“Kill navvys!”

Killeen looked around, studying the pools of shadow. If a Stalker was in here, had heard the Family come through the hatch,
and decided to bide its time…

“Well?”

Speculations. And a fidgety feeling. That was all.

Killeen looked at his son and saw there the open testament of all that he could hope to pass on, the slender thread of his
posterity. Yet Toby would not be fully what a human could be in this harsh world if he had his childhood stolen from him.
He needed a sense of security, of certainties. And if Toby became fearful now, he would sleep poorly. Tomorrow he would be
less swift.

“Come on, we’ll go back, hit the food vats. Have some more chow.”

“Awwww…”

“Then we’ll go outside, maybe, nick some navvys.”

Toby brightened. He was the last child in the Family. Mechs and accident and racking disease had stolen all the others. “Jazz!”

Killeen got the boy to play a kind of hide and seek, with Toby leading the way back. This let Killeen rear guard without seeming
to do so, ears pricked. He sensed nothing strange. The caverns rang hollow, empty, waiting.

When they reached the vats Toby was winded. Killeen found him a glob of sticky foam stuff that smelled of leather and spice.
Then he went to Ledroff and described the mech parts.

“So? I checked the whole place,” Ledroff said. “Had Jake-the-Shaper do it, too.”

“Those parts weren’t old. Latest stuff.”

“So a mech left ’em.”

“And might be back.”

“Might not, too.” Ledroff squinted at Killeen. His luxuriant black beard grew up to his eyes and hid his expression, but the
cutting edge of Ledroff’s voice was clear enough.

“You wanted we sack down in the valley, ’member?” Killeen said evenly.

“So?”

“Maybe you were right.”

Ledroff shrugged elaborately. “Different now.”

Something had changed since arriving here, something to give Ledroff assurance. Killeen shook his head. “It’s damnsight odd.
Why’re parts left in a pile? Usually navvys take ’em.”

Ledroff grinned, showing broad yellow teeth. He looked around at the few Family members within earshot and raised his voice.
“What’s got you so jumpy?”

“That Mantis today.”

“Whatsay of it?” Ledroff demanded loudly.

“Fanny said once that a Mantis, it works with others.”

“What others?” Ledroff’s bushy eyebrows lowered, encasing his eyes in shadow.

“There were a bunch of navvys in that valley.”

“Near where the Mantis was?” Ledroff’s lips lingered on the words, turning them over for inspection.

“Yea. Ten of ’em at least—”

“Those can’t hunt us,” Ledroff said scornfully. “You’re getting addled.”

Killeen smiled grimly. “You ever see a Marauder-class mech travel with navvys?”

“I’d vex on mechs, not navvys.” Ledroff laughed
loudly. The rhyming’s slight taunt confirmed Killeen’s suspicion. Ledroff was playing to the audience. But why?

“A mech who has navvys can have other mechs. Stalkers. Or Lancers.”

“You can be night guard, then,” Ledroff said mildly. “Put your vexings to good work.”

He unstuck a gobbet of organic paste from his belt and offered it to Killeen. The Family nearby nodded, as if some point had
been made, and went back to digesting their motley meals. Killeen only dimly sensed what Ledroff wanted with such talk, but
decided to let it go. Fanny’s death had fair well unhinged them all.

Killeen took the food and ate, an age-old sign of comradeship. Ledroff smiled and walked off. Toby came from seeking more
sweet and thumped down beside his father, gesturing at Ledroff. “What wanted?”

“Talk of the laying-low,” Killeen said. No reason to bother the boy with his own misgivings.

“When’ll it be?”

“A while.”

“Time for some more of the sticky?”

“Sure.”

Toby hesitated for a moment. “It’s okay, the sticky. But when’re we finding a Casa again?”

“We’ll start looking tomorrow.”

Toby seemed content with that stock answer, and went scampering off. Killeen found some rank but nourishing stuff that tasted
like metal filings mixed in cardboard. His thumbnail chemsensor assured him it wasn’t poisoned; Marauders did a lot of that.

He picked at the gummy stuff, thinking. He couldn’t remember how many months it had been since the Family had stayed in a
Casa. A year, maybe—only he had no
clear idea how much a year was. He knew only that it was more months than he could number on both hands. To know exactly would
mean calling up one of his Aspects, and he did not like to do that.

Unbidden, taking advantage of Killeen’s distraction, his Arthur Aspect spoke. The small, precise voice seemed to come from
a spot just behind his right ear. In fact, the chip that carried Arthur and many more Aspects rode high in Killeen’s neck.

Our last stay in a Casa was 1.27 years ago. Snowglade years, of course.

“Uh-huh.”

The Aspect was irritated at not having been called up for so long. This showed in the clipped, prissy exactness of its voice.

The Family does not use the week or month any longer; otherwise I would speak in those terms. Such short time scales are artifacts
of a settled people, adjusted to priorities of agriculture. In my day—

“Don’t get on that,” Killeen snapped.

I was merely pointing out that even a year ceases to have meaning now, since the mechs have obliterated the seasons.

“Don’t wanna hear talk ’bout the old days.” He forced the Aspect back into the recesses of his mind. It squawked as he compressed
it.

Killeen listened to his Aspects less and less now. He’d had the Arthur Aspect only since the Calamity, and had consulted it
seldom. Aspects had lived in eras when the Families dwelled in Citadels or the larger, ancient Arcologies. They knew damn
little about being perpetually on the run. Even if they had, Killeen disliked their talk of how great things had been. Killeen
always smothered Arthur’s techtalk. No matter how they phrased it, Aspects always came over as rebuking the Family for having
fallen this low.

Killeen didn’t want to hear that, or anything about the Mantis attack. Their long flight from it had let him keep his grief
bottled up. But he could feel the press of it, and knew it had to vent.

Ledroff was moving among the crouching figures of the Family, arranging the nightwatch. Soon the Witnessing would begin. They’d
discuss Fanny’s death, and sing, and then choose the next Cap’n.

Killeen got up, his legs stiff from hard running, back tight and aching. But he would have to dance his respect to Fanny,
sing the hoarse cries of farewell.

“One good thing for that,” he muttered to himself. He had not been thinking of it, but now his nose caught the thick, swarming
savor of alcohol vapor from a nearby vat.

Troughs produced it as a side effect of their endless chemcycling. An old story held that mechs got high on alky, too, though
there was no evidence of it. Come to think of it, there was no proof that mechs got high at all, Killeen thought.

He didn’t like alky as much as the sensos you got in a Casa, nobody did. But alky would get him through the
laying-low. He needed it. Yes. Yes. He followed his nose.

Killeen woke with a technicolor headache.

Ledroff’s voice came booming down from somewhere high in the air. Killeen rolled over and blearily realized he had fallen
asleep on his watch.

“Lazeball!” Ledroff shouted at him. “Up!”

“I… what…”

“Naysay you
any
thing. Up!”

Killeen got to his hands and knees, feeling every muscle stretch tight and stingsore.