TWO

Shadows stretched long and threatening, pointing away from the hoteye of the Eater. Its harsh radiance cast fingers across the stream-cut plain, fingers reaching toward the onstruggling human tide.

Each windgouged rock, though itself dull and worn, cast a lively colored shadow. The Eater’s outer ring was smoldering red, while the inner bullseye glared a hard blue. As disksetting came and the Eater sank to the horizon, it drew from the least rocky upjut a tail of chromatic ribbons. Shifting shadows warped the land, stretching perspectives. The seeing was hard.

So it was a while before Killeen was sure. He blinked his eyes, jumping his vision through the spectrum, and barely picked up the wavering fern-green pip.

“Heysay,” he called. “Ledroff! Give a hard lookleft.”

The Family was spread through a canyon shattered by some ancient conflict. No one was closer than a klick. They slowed, glad to pause after the hours of steady, fearful flight.

“For what?” Ledroff called.

“See a Trough?”

“No.”

Killeen panted slowly, smoothly, not wanting the sour sound of his fatigue to carry to the others. Ledroff’s response was slow and minimal. Killeen knew that if Fanny had been speaking, Ledroff would have been sharp and quick. By Family tradition, they would choose a new Cap’n as soon as they found safe camp. Until then, Killeen was point and called their maneuvers. Ledroff understood, but that didn’t stop his grumbling.

They had paused to conduct a quick service for Fanny, concealing the body in a hastily made cairn. Then they had run long and hard. They could not go much farther. Killeen had to find shelter.

“Jocelyn? See anything?”

“I… maybe.”

“Where?”

“A little thing… could be a mistake…” Strain laced her thin voice.

“Can you cross-scan with me?”

“I… here…”

A quick picture flared in Killeen’s right eye. Jocelyn’s overlay showed a sputtering blip.

“Let’s find it,” he said.

“Naysay,” Ledroff said sternly. “Better we sack in the open.”

“And shut ourselves down?” Jocelyn asked, disbelieving.

“Safer. Mech will naysay it’s us.”

“We’re too tired,” Killeen said. He knew Ledroff would have been right, if the Family wasn’t played out. Mechs usually couldn’t find a human in a powered-down suit. They scented circuits, not skin.

“Trough? Found Trough?” Toby sounded fuzzy from daze-marching.

“Could be,” Killeen said. “Let’s look.”

Ledroff shouted, “Noway!”

But a chorus of assent drowned him out. Ledroff started arguing. Which was what you’d expect when a Family marched without electing a new Cap’n. They all needed to rest and think.

Killeen ignored Ledroff and loped in long low strides over the nearest hill. It took teeth-gritting effort to achieve the flowing smoothness but he knew the following Family would take note. Without thinking about the matter clearly he understood that, worn to a brittle thinness, the Family needed some display of strength to give confidence, to regain their vector.

Ledroff came up behind. Killeen’s eyes automatically integrated Jocelyn’s display and picked up the sputtering slight promise-note again. He surged over rumpled, scarred hills and realized he had overshot only when the signal faded.

“It’s buried,” he said.

“Where?” Ledroff asked with a cutting, impatient edge.

“Under that old factory.”

Tucked into a dimpled seam were sloping sheds of wrought rockmetal. Navvys clucked and rolled and labored around them, carrying out the endless production that had given mechs their steady dominion over humanity. Such sheds were erected wherever the land offered a rich seam of weather-collected minerals. This was a neglected station, far from the lands where mechs chose to build their majestic woven ceramic warrens. Yet the endless succession of such minor stations had flooded this world with mechlife and soon, Killeen reflected, might end the long battle between the mechs and all else.

“Nosee! No is,” Sunyat called from far away. She was always the most cautious of the Family. “Maybe trap.”

Killeen made a show of ignoring her, same as he had done to Ledroff. Most times that was the best way, rather than talk. “Trough’s buried. Navvys’ve built on top of it.”

“Troughs’re that old?” Jocelyn asked.

“Old as mechs. Old as men,” Killeen said. He landed beside a navvy and followed the half-blind thing as it rolled into the factory. Sure enough, the navvys were refining some ceramo-base extract from the rocks, oblivious to the large rusted door that formed one whole wall of their little world.

Within moments the Family had converged on the factory. They sapped each navvy, powering them down enough to pry out some portable power cells, but not so far that the navvy would register a malf. At this they moved with accustomed grace. This small place had no supervisor mechs to confront, no dangers. Navvys were easy pickings. The fact that the Family was like rats stealing crumbs from a back larder did not concern or bother them.

Ledroff went into the Trough first, Killeen behind. It was a vast old barn, ripe with scents Killeen savored in the air. The Family conducted its entry automatically, each darting forward while the others covered, exchanging not a word. Killeen and Jocelyn crept carefully along rows of leaky vats, boots squishing in the slop.

Nothing. No navvys came to greet them, mistaking them for mechs. That meant this Trough was tended poorly, expected few visitors. Its navvys were loaned to the factory outside.

“Out of business,” Ledroff grunted, sitting down on an iron-ribbed casement. He started shucking off his suit.

“Food’s good,” Jocelyn said. She had already stuck a fist into an urn of thick syrupy stuff. She licked it with relish. Long brown hair spilled over her helmet ring, escaping. Her bony face relaxed into tired contentment.

Killeen listened as other Family prowled the long hallways, sending back the same report: nobody home. He went back to the entrance and helped swing the big moly-carb hatch closed. That was it, for him. They were in safe haven and now he let himself lie down, feeling the quiet moist welcome of the Trough envelop him.

Around him the Family unsuited. He watched them lazily. Jocelyn shucked her knobby knee cowlings with a heavy sigh. Mud had spattered her shin sheaths; she had to pop their pinnings free with the heel of her hand. Her slab-muscled thighs moved gracefully in the dappled light, but inspired no answering in Killeen.

The Family removed their webbed weaves and tri-socketed aluminum sheaths, revealing skins of porcelain, chocolate, sallow. Their flesh had red, flaky areas where insulation bunched and rubbed. Many carried ruddy seams of forgotten operations. Others showed the blue-veined traceries of old implants. These were add-ons from the days when the Family still knew how to work such things. Glossy slick spots spoke of injuries soothed. But nothing could shore up the sagging flesh, the pouch-bellies of inflamed organs. The Family carried a wearying burden of slowly accumulating biotroubles, unfixable without the technology that they had lost with the Citadel.

Jocelyn had found a bubbling caldron of sweetyeast. Killeen ate some of the foamy yellow head with the single-minded ferocity that the years of wandering had taught each of them. It had been four weeks now since they’d last found a Trough. They all had been running on hardpack rations and bitter water hand-scooped from tiny, rare streams.

Troughs were all that kept them alive now. The dank, dark places had been made for the Marauder-class mechs, and of course for the higher mechs for which humans had no names because men never survived a meeting with one. Marauders—like Lancers, Snouts, Trompers, Baba Yaggas—needed bioproducts. Roving, they sometimes stopped in at the randomly sited Troughs to refeed their interior, organic parts.

“Think this’s better?” Jocelyn asked quietly. She displayed her hair, now washed. Killeen realized he had dozed off for a while.

“Looks different, yeasay. Fine.”

He could never think of anything to say to her these days. She was finger-curling her hair into a tide of tight whorls that seemed to rush away from her high forehead. Cermo-the-Slow carefully combed her side panels down from the crown. Jocelyn had already parted and smoothed Cermo’s bushy blond growth, which sloped over his ears with streamers of white and yellow. A blue elastic gathered his thick tufts into a firm knot at the base of his skull.

Killeen dreamily squatted, watching Cermo groom Jocelyn. A life of running had given all the Family legs which could squat for days, ready to move instantly. It had also given them helmets for protection, which in turn messed their hair. In the years when humanity dwelled in the Citadel, those who went out to forage among the slowly encroaching mechworld had been treated to a ceremonial cleansing upon their return. This ritual expanded from a mere efficient scrub into a prolonged bath and hairdressing. Those brave enough to venture forth deserved a marker, and their hair became their badge. At each return they would sculpt it differently, whether men or women, affecting elaborate confections. They wore lustrous locks lightly bound by a jeweled circlet, or thick slabs parted laterally, or two narrow strips with a blank band between; this last was termed a reverse Mohawk, though no one could recall now what the proper name meant.

Killeen liked his hair done as finely as any. It was long, with rumpled currents working into unmanageable snarls at his neck. Undoing the damage of the march would take patience.

He decided that this was not the right moment to ask Jocelyn. He had paid little attention to her of late, had little feeling for her beyond the simple, automatic brotherhood he gave any other of the Family. They had slept together—fitfully, as all things were now—for years. But a hundred days ago the Family had decided in Whole Council to numb the sex centers of each member.

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.