Great Sky River

  THE MESSENGER

  “Where are you from?” Killeen asked on the sensorium. With effort he made his voice a blend of acoustics and electrospeech. He constricted his throat like a man trying to imitate a frog. The effect, transduced and filtered by buried chips, sent electromagnetic ringings into the fine, thin air.

  There was a long moment of wind-stirred silence. Then,

  I am slow. Stretched this far, I tire.

  I wanted to reach a being called Killeen.

  Killeen blinked with such startlement that his eyes flipped into the gaudy infrared. “Wha—? That’s me!”

  I have a message for you.

  ACCLAIM FOR GREGORY BENFORD’S CLASSIC NOVELS OF THE GALACTIC CENTER

  ACROSS THE SEA OF SUNS

  “So good it hurts. Benford puts it all together in this one— adult characters, rich writing, innovative science, a grand philosophical theme—it’s all here.”

  —Washington Post Book World

  “Confirms again Benford’s unsurpassed ability to simultaneously sustain literary values and exciting speculative science.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  TIDES OF LIGHT

  “Mr. Benford is a rarity: a scientist who writes with verve and insight not only about black holes and cosmic strings but about human desires and fears.”

  —New York Times Book Review

  “Benford’s most adventurous, most philosophical, and most scientifically creative novel. The best sf novel so far this year.”

  —Houston Post

  ALSO BY GREGORY BENFORD

  Fiction

  Beyond Infinity

  The Martian Race

  Eater

  The Stars in Shroud

  Jupiter Project

  Shiva Descending (with William Rotsler)

  Heart of the Comet (with David Brin)

  A Darker Geometry (with Mark O. Martin)

  Beyond the Fall of Night (with Arthur C. Clarke)

  Against Infinity

  Cosm

  Foundation s Fear

  Artifact

  Timescape

  The Galactic Center Series

  In the Ocean of Night

  Across the Sea of Suns

  Great Sky River

  Tides of Light

  Furious Gulf

  Sailing Bright Eternity

  Non-fiction

  Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates

  Across Millennia

  Copyright

  Copyright © 1987 by Abbenford Associates

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Warner Books

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  The Aspect name and logo are registered trademarks of Warner Books.

  First eBook Edition: October 2009

  ISBN: 978-0-446-56750-3

  Contents

  THE MESSENGER

  ALSO BY GREGORY BENFORD

  COPYRIGHT

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE: Long Retreat

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  PART TWO: The Once-Green World

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  PART THREE: The Dreaming Vertebrates

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  EPILOG Argo

  ONE

  TWO

  Timeline of Galactic Series

  About the Author

  To

  Lou Aronica and David Brin

  two knights of the Sevagram

  PROLOGUE

  The Calamity

  Killeen walked among the vast ruins.

  Exhausted, he kept on through a jumble of shattered steel, caved-in ceilings, masonry and stone and smashed furniture.

  His breath rasped as he called his father. “Abraham!”

  A cold murmuring wind snatched the name away. Smoke seethed from crackling fires and streamed by him, making the air seem to waver and flow.

  From here the Citadel sprawled before him down the broad, knobbed hill. Intricate warrens were now squashed into heaps of stone and slag. Legs stiff from exhaustion, eyes stinging with smoke and grief, he paused above a shattered plain of marble-white rubble—the caved-in shards of a dome that once rose a kilometer above the Citadel arboretum. Places where he had run and played, loved and laughed…

  “Abraham!” He had seldom spoken his father’s name and now it seemed strange and foreign. He wheezed, coughed. The acrid bite of smoke caught in his throat.

  The lower ramparts of the Citadel burned fiercely. The mechs had penetrated there first. Black murk hung over the larger districts—the Broadsward, the Green Market, and the Three Ladies' Rest. Soot coated the jagged teeth of broken walls.

  Beyond, lofty spires had been cut to blunt stubs. Their stumps radiated gorgons of structured steel. The shifting breeze brought him the crunch of collapsing walls.

  But the wind carried no moans or shrieks. The Citadel lay silent. The mechs had taken lives and selves and left nothing but emptied bodies.

  Killeen turned and moved along the hillside. This was his old neighborhood. Tumbled-down blocks and twisted girders could not wholly conceal the paths and corridors he had known as a boy.

  Here a man lay, eyes bulging at the bruised sky.

  There a woman was split in two beneath a fallen beam.

  Killeen knew them both. Friends, distant relatives of Family Bishop. He touched the cold flesh of each and moved on.

  He had fled with the remnants of Family Bishop. They had quickly reached the far ridgeline and only then had he seen that his father was not among the survivors. Killeen had turned back toward the Citadel, wearing powered leggings for speed. Like lean pistons, his legs carried him within the slumped defensive walls before anyone in the Family noticed that he was gone.

  Abraham had been defending the outer ramparts. When the mechs had breached those, the human perimeter had fallen back in a mad scramble. The mechs poured in. Killeen was sure he had heard his father’s voice calling over the comm. But then the battle had submerged them all in a rushing hot tornado of death and panic.

  —Killeen!—

  He stopped. Cermo-the-Slow was calling over the comm. “Leave me alone,” Killeen answered.

  —Come on! No time left!—

  “You head on back.”

  —No! There’s mechs still around. Some comin' this way.—

  “I’ll catch up.”

  —Run! No time left.—

  Killeen shook his head and did not answer. With a flick of a finger he dropped out of the comm net.

  He climbed among tumbled stone. Even in his powered suit it was hard to make his way up the steep angles of ruined walls. Though the mechs had gouged gaping holes, the massive bulwarks had stood for a while. But beneath the incessant pounding blows even the heavy foundations had finally yielded.

  He walked beneath an arch that had miraculously survived. He knew what lay ahead but could not keep himself from it.


  She was in the same position. The heat beam had caught his wife as he carried her. Her left side was seared raw.

  “Veronica.”

  He bent down and looked into her open gray eyes. They peered out at a world forever vanquished.

  He gently tried to brush closed her rebuking eyes. Her gummy, stiff eyelids refused to move, as if she would not give up her last glimpse of the Citadel she had loved. Her pale lips parted with the half-smile she always made just before she spoke. But her skin was cold and hard, as if it had now joined the unyielding solidity of the soil itself.

  He stood. He felt her eyes at his back as he made himself walk on.

  He scrambled over slumped piles that had been homes, workshops, elegant arcades. Fires snapped in the central library.

  The public gardens had been his favorite spot, a lush wealth of moist green in the dry Citadel. Now they were blasted, smoking.

  As he passed the smashed Senate, its alabaster galleries groaned and trembled and slowly clattered down.

  He moved on warily, but there was no sign of mechs. “Abraham!”

  Around him lay the exploded remains of his boyhood. Here in his father’s workshop he had learned to use the power-assisting craft. There, beneath a lofty corbelled vault, he had first met a demure, shy Veronica.

  “Abraham!”

  Nothing. No body. It probably lay beneath collapsed bulwarks.

  But he had not covered all the rambling complex that men had built through generations. There was still some chance.

  —Killeen!—

  It was not Cermo this time. Fanny’s voice cut through to him sharp and sure, overriding his own cutoff of the comm.

  —Withdraw! There’s nothing we can do here now.—

  “But… the Citadel…”

  —It’s gone. Forget it.—

  “My father …”

  —We must run.—

  “Others … There might be …”

  —No. We’re sure. Nobody left alive here.—

  “But…”

  —Now. I’ve got five women covering the Krishna Gate. Come out that way and we’ll head for Rolo’s Pass.—

  “Abraham…”

  —Hear me? Hustle!—

  He turned for one last look. This had been all the world for him when he was a boy. The Citadel had made humanity’s warm clasp real and reassuring. It had stood resolutely against a hostile universe outside, strong yet artful. Its delicate towers had glistened like rock candy. Returning to the Citadel from short forays, his heart had always leaped when he saw the proud, jutting spires. He had wandered the Citadel’s labyrinthian corridors for many hours, admiring the elegant traceries that laced the high, molded ceilings. The Citadel had always been vast and yet warm, its every carefully sculpted niche infused with the spirit of the shared human past.

  He looked back toward where Veronica’s body lay.

  There was no time to bury her. The world belonged now to the living, to fevered flight and slow melancholy.

  Killeen made himself take a step away from her, toward the Krishna Gate. Another.

  The blasted walls teetered past. He had trouble finding his way.

  Fog and smoke swirled before him. “Abraham!” he called again against empty silence.

  The Citadel’s high, spidery walkways now lay broken in the dust, sprawled across the inner yards. He crossed the ancient, familiar ground in a numbed daze. Craters yawned where he had once scampered and laughed.

  At the edge of the smoldering ruins he looked back. “Abraham!”

  He listened and heard nothing. Then, distantly, came a quick buzzing of mech transmissions. The rasping sound narrowed his mouth.

  He turned and ran. Ran without hope, letting his legs find the way. Stinging dust clouded his eyes—

  A jerk.

  Intense, blinding light.

  “Hey, c’mon. Wake up.”

  Killeen coughed. He squinted against the high glare of harsh yellow lamps. “Huh? What—”

  “C’mon, gotta get up. Fanny says.”

  “I, I don’t—”

  Cermo-the-Slow loomed over him. The big smiling face was weary but friendly. “I just pulled the stim-plug on you, is all. Got no time, wake you up easy.”

  “Ah … easy …”

  Cermo frowned. “You been dreamin' again?”

  “I… the Citadel…”

  Cermo nodded. “I was ’fraid that.”

  “Veronica… found her.”

  “Yeah. Look, you don’t think ’bout that, hear? She was a good woman, won’ful wife. But you got let go her now.”

  “I…” Killeen’s tongue was raw from calling his father. Or was it from the alcohol he had gulped last night?

  This was morning, early morning. He felt the stiffness in him from the night’s sleep. Peering upward, he could make out the shadowy bulk of alien machinery. They had bedded down for the night in a Trough, he remembered. Around him, Family Bishop was waking up.

  “C’mon,” Cermo urged. “Sorry I pulled the plug so quick. Snap up now, though. We’re movin' out.”

  “How… how come?”

  “Ledroff spotted some Snout comin' this way. Figures it’s headed into this Trough for supplies.”

  “Oh…” Killeen shook his head. An ache spread from his temples into his clammy forehead. A bead of night sweat dripped from his nose as he sat up.

  “You better stay off the stim-tab awhile,” Cermo said, frowning. “Gives you bad dreams.”

  “Yeah.” Killeen nodded and started groping for his boots. They were the first thing you put on and the last you took off.

  “It’s been years, after all,” Cermo said kindly. “Time we let it be.”

  Killeen frowned. “Years… ?”

  “Sure.” Cermo studied him a moment, plainly worried. “Been six years since the Calamity.”

  “Six…”

  “Look, we all like it, gettin' a li’l stimmed now ’n' then. Not if it takes you back into bad times though.”

  “I… I guess so.”

  He clapped Killeen on the shoulder. “Get on up, now. We’re movin' quick.”

  Killeen nodded. Cermo-the-Slow went away to awaken others. His large frame slipped quickly among the shadows of the alien vats and machines.

  Killeen’s hands pulled on his boots but his mind still wandered among memories. His dirty clothes, the worn boots, the calluses and stains on his hands… all testified to what had happened since the fall of the Citadel, the Calamity.

  He stood slowly, feeling his chilled muscles stretch and protest.

  The Citadel was gone.

  Veronica.

  Abraham.

  He had left now only Toby, his son. Only a fragment of Family Bishop.

  And finally, he had left before him now the endlessly stretching prospect of flight and rest and flight again.

  PART ONE

  Long Retreat

  ONE

  Something was after them.

  The Family had just come straggling over a razorbacked ridge, beneath a pale jade sky. Killeen’s shocks wheezed as his steady lope ate up the downgrade.

  The red soil was deeply wrinkled and gullied. Cross-hatching was still sharp in the tractor-tread prints that cut the parched clay. There had been so little rain the prints could well be a century old.

  A black-ribbed factory complex sprawled at the base of the slope. Killeen flew over the polished ebony domes, sending navvys scuttling away from his shadow, clacking their rude dumb irritation.

  Killeen hardly saw them. He was watching spiky telltales strobe-highlighted on his right retina.

  There: a quick jitter of green, pretty far back.

  It came and went, but always in a new place.

  There, again. Far behind.

  Not directly following them, either. Not a typical Marauder maneuver. Smart.

  He blinked, got the alternative display. The Family was a ragged spread of blue dabs on his topo map. He was pleased to see they kept a pretty fair lops
ided triangle. Cermo-the-Slow was dragging ass behind, as always.

  Killeen saw himself, an amber winking dot at the apex. Point man. Target.

  He grimaced. This was his first time ever as point, and here came some damn puzzle. He’d tried to beg off when Cap’n Fanny ordered him to the front. There were others better experienced—Ledroff, Jocelyn, Cermo. He’d much rather have stayed back. Fanny kept giving him extra jobs like this, and while he’d do whatever she said without protest, this had made him jittery from the start.

  Fanny knew more than anybody, could see through Marauder tricks. She should be up here. But she kept pushing him.

  Now this. He dropped from the air, eyes slitted.

  Killeen came down on a pocked polyalum slab, the old kind that mechs had used for some long-forgotten purpose. Packing fluff blew in the warm wind, making dirty gray drifts against his cushioned crustcarbon boots. Mechmess littered the ground, so common he did not notice it.

  “Got a pointer behind,” Killeen sent to Fanny.

  —Snout?— she answered.

  “Nossir noway,” Killeen answered quickly to cover his nerves. “Think I’d sing out if was that same old Snout, been tagging us for days?”

  —What is, then?—

  “Dunno. Looks big, then small.”

  Killeen did not understand how his retinal area scan worked, had only a vague idea about radar pulses. He did know things weren’t supposed to look large on one pass and small the next, though. Habit told you more than analysis.

  —’Quipment’s bust?—

  “I dunno. Flashes okay,” Killeen said reluctantly. Was Fanny joshing him? He didn’t know which he liked less, something that could come up on them this way, or his gear gone flatline on him.

  Fanny sighed. She was a nearly invisible speck to his right rear, wiry and quick. Killeen could hear her clicking her teeth together, trying to decide, the way she always did.

  “Whatsay?” he prodded impatiently. It was up to her. She was Cap’n of the Family and had a long lifetime rich in story and experience, the kind of gut savvy that meant more in dealing with Marauder mechs than anything else.

  She had been Cap’n for all the years that Family Bishop had been on the move. She knew the crafts of flight and pursuit, of foraging and stealing; of deception and attack. And through terrible years she had held the Family together.