Great Sky River, Page 6

  In the days of the Citadel there had been men and women who knew crude electrocraft. The years of long retreat had eliminated them. And there was no time to patiently learn anew from the Family’s Aspects.

  The Family scavenged with a vengeance, tearing the Crafter apart brutally. Cylinders bled oil on the tile deck. Optical threads snarled up and tripped the plunderers, only to be stamped flat and kicked into dark corners.

  Killeen slowly let his rage seep from him. He had known Jake-the-Shaper all his life, a rather distant man of hangdog eyes and a thin, perpetually exhausted mouth. He mourned him. But the implications of the attack would not leave his mind. He left off the looting and instead probed its inert entrails, lured by curiosity.

  He found the inboard mainmind by accident. A frosted aluminum panel suddenly popped free. Killeen blinked, startled out of his reflective daze. He knew he had only moments to act. He had assumed the Crafter was already dead, but the encrusted mass inside hummed with muted energy.

  He could call for Sunyat, ask her what to do. She might know and she might not, but in any case the time it took her to arrive would narrow their chances greatly.

  So he mentally braced himself. He made the few twists and taps at his skull and called up his Arthur Aspect.

  You have been very busy.

  “Arthur? Look—”

  Perhaps you do not recognize me? Six times you have summoned me in, I believe, some several years.

  “Yea, yea.” Damned if Arthur didn’t bring up a gripe, right in the middle of— “Look, how I disarm this one?”

  Why do you want to? I doubt you can fathom it.

  “Dammit, no backtalk! How?”

  Very well. See that yellow relay? Pull it up.

  An overlay winked in Killeen’s left eye, a ghost image of the relay rising, disconnecting. He followed the picture.

  Now use the pliers. Tweak the blue cables free.

  He did. An ominous buzzing began.

  Quick! The spring clip!

  Killeen cut it with a slicer bolt set on max. The main-mind rasped nastily but did not show signs of dying. “Ah,” he sighed.

  Quite satisfactory. Ever since I have known them, the higher-order mechanicals have had quite good defenses against theft of their memories.

  “Uh-huh.” He stripped away lightpipes to find the cluster-core.

  A simple evolutionary development, really. This Crafter does not wish its expertise stolen by a competing class of machines, or by those serving a foreign city. So it is taught to fry itself before it can be interrogated.

  Killeen half-listened to Arthur’s lecture running through his head as he snipped away the leads to the cluster-core. He never did understand much of what Arthur said, but when he was doing some job like this it was handy to have an Aspect up and running, ready to give advice. The trouble was getting them to shut up. Arthur had lived centuries before and ruminated endlessly about the old times. Killeen seldom had the patience for such talk. But he did like the chromatic emotional halo around Arthur’s Aspect, a cool distant certainty that insinuated into Killeen’s way of thinking.

  Yet we caught this one. Odd. Probably there is some delay before they suicide. Elsewise, a sudden accident could convince it that it was being attacked. That would make it suicide unnecessarily. So this delay period when we caught it must mean that Crafters are programmed more against accident than against attack. Yes, I’m sure that’s it. I—

  Killeen had his pliers near the core. He felt first a flash of heat in his hand. Then a quick rattling spurt jarred him. It was so loud he did not feel it as sound but as a force, like getting hit in the ear by a fist.

  He staggered away. Numbed fingers dropped the pliers. Family members howled and covered their ears. They came tumbling off the Crafter body, scampering away with offended yips.

  Killeen breathed deeply, dazed. His sensocenters were momentarily blitzed. He sucked in amplified musk and oil and rank sour chemwaste. Through a near-silent gray world he called, “Damn! What exploded?”

  Nothing. That was not sound, though I admit your/our nervous system does not distinguish these very finely any longer. (A necessary adaptation, I fear, but one which loses a certain delicate thread of sensibility.)

  “What the hell…”

  A baying of complaint sounded through the cavern.

  It was a powerful electromagnetic signal. I caught a dab of it. I gather it has the typical signature of the Crafter’s personality, its accumulated (though finely processed; trimmed of excess; admirably well edited) knowledge.

  Killeen blinked. “Wha… Why?”

  The Crafter was broadcasting to its home. Saving its heritage, I’ll wager. Now it can die.

  Killeen staggered back to the Crafter carcass, his head ringing. His tongue felt fuzzy, his eyes kept trying to cross. He picked up the pliers and poked at the cluster-core.

  “Hey! It’s got no power.”

  The dead take their secrets with them.

  “All?”

  Anything that a competing mech civilization might find useful. Data on this territory, or on variant machines this Crafter has encountered. Skills it has acquired, perhaps. And of course a fragment of the personality this experience has generated in as advanced a mech as this.

  Killeen followed almost none of this, but he didn’t bother to ask. A question would just bring more endless yammer winding through his mind. He could hear Arthur’s original voice, rather prissy and refined, but moving faster than real people could ever talk. When he called up an Aspect, it sat in the back of his mind like a monkey on the shoulder. It could chatter on, give technical help, and Killeen got a character-scent of the person behind the seated knowledge, like someone in the same room with him.

  “Anything we can salvage?”

  Let’s see… try that stimclat there.

  Killeen had no idea what a “stimclat” might be. Arthur sensed this as he formed the word, and so provided a dancing green dot beside a flanged metal part. Killeen attached leads and did as Arthur’s green simulation said. In a moment he felt a quick darting pleasure-pain sensation behind his ears.

  “What’s that?”

  Some of the Crafter’s recent memory, I daresay. We might mine it for information.

  “Heysay, I’m kinda tired.”

  Actually, he was bored. Arthur would know that too, but something made him keep up a polite manner with the Aspect. After all, Arthur was an ancestor.

  Rest, then. I’ll translate from mechspeak and show you results later.

  Killeen did not rest, though he seemed to. He reclined on a mossy cushion of brown organo-refuse and fished forth a small slab of memorychip. It was ancient and showed cracks and gouges of use, though the pale polylithium was said to be surehardened.

  He had been thinking of this for days. And especially he lusted for it in the chilled nights when the Family had to sleep on rough ground beneath the star-spattered sky. He would then look up into the orange and green and bluehot points of light, hundreds of thousands of them scattered like jewels in oil, wreathed by radiance that came from halos of dust and gas. Ample light streamed down, enough to walk and even read—if any of the Family could have read more than simple numbers and a few directions coded on mechs.

  This was the only night he had ever known, a welcome halfdark after the blistering doubleday cast by the Eater and their own planet’s star, Denix. Yet he fled from it, too, when he could. Into the realms of the old dead times.

  He found an output current plug in an autorepair slot. The cage walls were scarred and smeared from centuries of casual use by passing mechs. He spliced in the extra Amps and lay back and was at once in a gossamer finespun holotime of delight and transfigured brassy radiance.

  It came to him as a shuddering series of exaltations and shimmering potentials. Ruby. Tingling. Pepperhot. Slowbuilding. Raspbreathed.

  Spinning forever in a humming gyre… slicksliding grace beyond time or process… halfsleep and halfwake… this inner world filled his lungs
with cottony pleasure. Brought him again and again to the long-thrusting ecstasy yet did not let him pass over into warm oblivion. Sweet resurrections…

  Stark light. Rough swearing.

  Killeen blinked. A hand grabbed his collar and lifted him. “Didnja hear? There’s a transmech outside.”

  It was Cermo-the-Slow, his porepocked face orbiting against the overhead glare of the Trough. Cermo had disconnected Killeen from the power feed.

  “I… was just…”

  “I know whatcha doin’. Jes’ don’ let Ledroff catch you, is all.”

  Cermo-the-Slow let go. Killeen dropped back into the acrid moss. He had an impulse to jack himself back into the wall, snatch a few minutes before somebody else came by to muster him And forced his hand away from the cable. That somebody might be Toby. Too many times the boy had already caught his Dad slacksack on the tether, volted out.

  Slowly, slowly, Killeen put away the jack-tab, He had to remember that Fanny was gone. Everybody needed some refuge from the world’s rub, she’d said. She’d let him get away with some time on the jack. Some drinking, too.

  Not anymore. Ledroff was decent, solid, but inexperienced. Until now, Killeen had devoted himself to looking after Toby, begrudging the time spent on Family business. That would have to change. But it would be hard.

  Getting up, away from temptation, took all his blurred concentration. As he got creakily to his feet he heard Ledroff barking somewhere at Family who still lounged or slept. Killeen hurried to pull on his hydraulic boots.

  He fidgeted clasps into fittings, making himself suit-ready. And Arthur broke in with:

  I’ve analyzed that scrap of memory from the Crafter. Quite interesting, I think you’ll find.

  “Uh?”

  See? Views the Crafter had gathered.

  His eyes filled with yellow-green still-lifes: a journal of repairs made and things shaped. There were closeups of complex machine parts. Tangles of circuitry. But beyond, as needless incidental background, were hills of florid green and even windblown silver-yellow growths that Killeen recognized. Trees.

  “These… they’re not from the oldtimes?”

  No. From the Crafter’s encrypted data, I gather these are recent. They are from sites only a few days’ march from here.

  “Great!”

  Abruptly the lush still-life switched off. Arthur sensed an approach even before the still-fuzzy Killeen could. Ledroff loomed before him, the thick black beard like a shield to hide the man’s true expression.

  “What’s great?” Ledroff demanded. “You near ready?”

  “Uh, yea… Cap’n.” Killeen made himself say it. The word was hard to get out. “Look, I was just processing some quickgrit from that Crafter.”

  Ledroff shrugged. “Crafters dunno nothin’.” He turned away.

  “Naysay! This one attacked, didn’t it?”

  Ledroff turned, hands on hips. “It made a mistake.”

  “It organized those navvys. Took Jake.”

  “So?”

  “I think it’s something new.”

  “Programmed to recognize us?”

  “Yeasay, if it chances on us. And then not just call for a Marauder and wait. It recruits some navvys and strikes.”

  Ledroff frowned. “Yea, so I’ve thought as well.”

  “I sliced a frag from its memory.”

  Ledroff looked guarded, as though Killeen was lying. “You’ve been downdoggo.”

  Killeen answered sheepishly, “Just a rest, that’s all.”

  Ledroff was a big man but seemed now curiously unsure of himself. He did not welcome new information, but instead distrusted it. Killeen realized that the man had finally gotten what he wanted for so long—the Cap’ncy—but had no clear idea of what to do next. And feared that this fact would come out. This was in his voice, a mere shade of defensiveness. “So?”

  “Can read some.”

  Gruffly: “Do.”

  “Have.”

  Suspiciously: “And… ?”

  “Big green valley. Three-, four-day march.”

  Ledroff looked startled, then beamed with sudden relief. The Family had been without good maps or sure direction ever since the Calamity, when all humanity’s orbiting satellites were destroyed. They had wandered, using only old maps and surveys. Their only certain guide was the need to avoid the mech cities, where surely they would be killed. Yet the ever-shifting weather of their world, Snowglade, had by now confused their remaining maps. They had no true vector any longer.

  Ledroff thought out loud, “A transmech just came in at the factory outside. If we can redirect it, override its routine…”

  “This greenland, it could be a fringe of a Splash.”

  “Yeasay, yeasay.” Ledroff looked relieved.

  Killeen smiled, glad to be for once not the layabout he knew Ledroff had always thought him to be. “Let’s go. Come on!”

  FIVE

  Jake-the-Shaper’s laying-low had taken a while, and then the grumbling of the Family took more as they got ready to move again. Voices rose in fatigued dissent. Tired, sun-browned faces knotted. Eyes narrowed, considering hangdog resistance.

  The Family was only beginning to shake off the dust of the last several weeks. Legs ached from the long shuffling march. Bellies growled for more of the vatsoup, the protein cakes, the spongy sourbread. They hungered for the Trough’s moist illusion of security and wanted to cling to it.

  Ledroff showed some leadership then. He had stopped several from trashing the Trough itself, after the Crafter attack. Such fever-blind revenge might well have raised an alarm, brought a Marauder to answer it. Ledroff calmly disarmed the alky-soaked few, set them to useful work.

  He also tolerated no mean, spiteful talk. In the years since the Calamity the Family had learned that aimless jawing had to be carefully controlled. In a crisis—slowcoming or quick, no matter—it was always better to run than to talk.

  Someone had to cut off the winding jabber that passed for discussion. This Ledroff did, using his booming voice to override.

  The Family meandered to their gear and reluctantly figured how much they each could carry away from the Trough. They dallied, ate some more, took every chance to stop and sit and fidget with their harnesses, their’matics, their carefully tended boots. Ledroff’s voice boomed again then, cajoling them to resuit and pack away foodstuffs for a march of uncertain end. Killeen nodded, still smarting from his humiliation, but he saw what had to be done.

  There were jobs. Ledroff assigned some to covering their tracks in the Trough. The worst task fell to Killeen and Cermo-the-Slow: disposing of Jake. There was no place to bury the carcass, a stiffening, stilled clockwork whose skin was a patchwork of blotchy browns and oblongs of stark white. As he hoisted it, Killeen felt Jake’s deadweight as a thing more solid and bulky than the living Jake had been.

  They had to feed Jake slowly into one of the vats, letting the flesh dissolve into a ruddy mucus. It was wrong to waste flesh in the soil, that they knew and felt deeply. What went into a Trough could someday come out of it.

  Still, watching Jake blur and bleed, the ghostwhite bones first poking up through translucent papery skin, and then splitting it, the peeling parchment curling away—

  Killeen’s heart had climbed into his throat. His hands were slippery on Jake’s ankle. The harsh fumes that rose from the waxy vat scum found their way high up into his head and fogged his eyes, leaked tears from his eyes.

  Yet it was Fanny he wept for, not Jake.

  Time ticked on. The smell cut sharper. At last he could let Jake go. As a foot and spindly calf sank into brown, crusted mire, Killeen said goodbye to Fanny as well. Then he stumbled away.

  He helped Toby suit up, carefully sealing his son’s pullpoints, letting the details of preparation fill up his mind.

  Only when they were moving again did he think.

  Across the sloping valleys they came. Killeen carried his punishing penalty load on upper and lower back. He huffed in air as he took lon
g strides, letting his percussive landings exhale it.

  He had long since learned from his father the effort-saving, forward-tilted stride. In Snowglade’s low gravity the muscles of humanity, augmented with servos and cobbled-together suits, made them stride like giants. The parts were filched from mechs and hand-wrought to human calves and shoulders. Shapemetal blended and smoothed like a soft chrome clay, when it was triggered with the right de-poly signal.

  This was the principal craft the Family still retained— indeed, would die without. Jake-the-Shaper had been best at it. Jocelyn, Cermo, and a few more knew the shaping art. The talent lived mostly in the hands, so the Family carried it as an ongoing dexterous art. Many of the Aspects which rode in the backminds of the Family members knew as much. But mere talksay was not enough. Aspects could not work your muscles. You had to have the feel of it, or else seams would pop, burrs would rub at bunching muscles, servos would clog and freeze.

  Killeen listened with a fraction of his mind to the hum and work of his suit, letting his senses range over the land ahead. Tawny scrub bushes dotted the hills, life persistent and uncrushed, though the orange clay was crosscut by myriad mech treads.

  “Looking damper,” he sent.

  —See any streams?— Jocelyn answered.

  “Those gullies southward look fresh.”

  —You suresay this is the right vector?—

  “Dead on.”

  Arthur came in unbidden:

  I’m recalculating every ten minutes. We are heading at the bearing I judge appropriate for the data the Crafter carried. Of course, the Crafter might have been confused, or erred—

  “Beggin’ off now, uh?” Killeen muttered irritably.

  I am not. I simply said—

  Ledroff broke in, —You checking the route?—

  Arthur was inaudible to anyone except Killeen, of course. It was uncanny, though, how Ledroff could gather what Killeen’s Aspect was saying. Maybe Killeen had been muttering over the comm. “Yeafold. See those green spikes? There were some like it in one of the Crafter’s pictures.”