This was his favorite legacy, far better than the Aspects’ whole gobbled lifetimes of streaming talk. He liked this form of the melodic art especially, the forward tilt to it, the wonderful, sweeping Moze Art. How many generations back in the Family had the composer lived? Perhaps the man was a great-grandfather. Killeen would like to be able to claim close kinship. Arthur tried to blurt out some ancient lore, but Killeen was too transfixed by the artful rhythms to pay attention.

As he loped to the song’s surge and play he noted that the Family was moving faster. Ledroff had summoned up the firm rhythms to get them quickly away from the Rattler, damping fears. It had worked.

—Duster!— someone cried.

The music stopped abruptly.

Killeen was caught in midstride. He glided for a long instant, hit, and rolled into a narrow dry rivulet. He sniffed through the long wavelengths. “No mechsmell.”

He located Toby and then listened to the Families seeking shelter. Rook mothers and fathers called, plain tive and hysterical, for their children. Panic edged the sensorium.

Shibo sent, —Naysay. Look.—

He closeupped the horizon and at first could not believe what he saw. Had Angelique fouled his farseer? These flying objects looked distant, but they smelled to be close by.

Shibo sent a clear, calm, —Birds.—

Astonished, the Families got to their feet. They brushed off dirt and peered at the fluttering, living skyfog. Hundreds of specks darted and twittered above the bushes.

For a long moment no one said anything. Then a cheer rang through the comm. Some of the younger ones had never seen a thing aloft not made of metal. They had thought only mechs ruled the air, much as their emissions stained the dawn sky a milky gray.

Toby ran forward, shouting “Heyyea! Heyyea!” The tiny agents of organic life, instead of greeting him as a member of their kin, burst upward into a surprised, fleeing cloud. Toby blinked, startled.

Killeen laughed. “You’ll have go easy with ’em.”

Toby frowned. “Don’t they like us?”

“Life’s born scared.”

“Scared even of life?”

“’Specially.”

“Mechs aren’t.”

“Mechs’re ’fraida mechs. ’Member those navvys calling Mayday back there?”

Toby nodded decisively. “Mechs’re ’fraid us, too.”

Killeen gave his son a wan smile, knowing exactly why the boy wanted to assert himself with such a baldly false declaration. “Maybe,” he answered mildly.

“Are.” Toby fingered the burnished-steel disk pistol on his belt, unconsciously stroking this small emblem of power.

“Navvys and managers’ll call Mayday when they see us, but that’s ’cause they mistake us for enemy mechs.”

Toby’s mouth twisted into a look of derisive mirth. “Naysay!”

“Is.”

“We’re two-legged. Mechs’re treaded.”

“So?”

“Mechs see that.”

“Our ’quipment’s mechmetal. Navvys see that, is all.”

“Nosay noway,” Toby said firmly. To end this slight affront to his inner picture of human status, he booted off to his marching position. Killeen watched him go, a thin figure skip-walking with oblivious lithe grace over rumpled scrub and gully.

Toby needed to feel that humanity dealt at least on even terms with the mechs, that there was a scheme of loss and gain to their endless running. It was a way to accept and put behind him the slaughter of the day before. Killeen would not lie to him, but all the same he could avoid saying plainly what the boy was slowly seeing: that humans mattered so little even navvys were unprogrammed to react to them. Only Marauders carried orders regarding humans, and those were rules of simple extermination. Even the fearsome Mantis probably had no great status in mech culture.

Killeen himself needed to let the slaughter slip behind him. He could not simply spend long hours arranging his hair, staring pensively into space, as some like Jocelyn did—building arabesques that would dissolve the next time he put on his helmet. That never worked.

Killeen felt the shocked regret and sorrow as a heavy, black, blunt pressure inside, undefined and unreachable. He seldom talked of such dimly felt obstructions. There had been a time when Jocelyn had tried to get him to handle his feelings that way. It had only made him feel awkward and stupid, his tongue a dumb, leathery, betraying instrument.

He decided to work out his frustration as he had so many times before. He called to Ledroff, “I’il farflank left.”

“Yeasay!” Ledroff answered with evident relief.

All morning the Cap’n had been the target of nags and whines. The slaughter’s burden had mixed with sore feet and pulled muscles to brew a salty soup of discontent. Jocelyn had taken left flank all day and needed someone to spell her.

The land was smooth and young here, as though the blunt elements had smudged instead of cutting. The hills ran in jumbled groups where massive ridges slumped. Killeen ran in long lopes at the farthest extremity of the Families’ sensorium. He saw from this distance that they were crossing regular undulations in the terrain. These rises and falls slightly curved away from the advancing human triangles. Killeen frowned at this puzzle.

A coy tickler came from Arthur:

Given that we are in a Splash, this is unsurprising.

Killeen sensed the Aspect’s mild pique at not being directly consulted. Still, he was damned if he’d be coaxed into asking. He waited a moment and Arthur said nothing more. Killeen eased Bud’s Face into full activity.

Splash makes shock waves.

Spread out from center.

Compress rock.

Leaves ridgelines.

Ridges curve around center.

Easy to see.

Before Killeen could respond Arthur spat acidly,

That is one hypothesis, yes. And only narrowly is it the most likely. I would venture that these ridgelines were formed by a reflected set of shock waves. Recall that this tundra had been laid sometime before by the Dusters. Under it lies the glacial ice of Snowglade, which the Dusters have isolated from the biosphere, thus making our environment so dry. The shock waves caused momentary melting of these ice beds. This forced upthrusts, forming the ridges. When—

Too complicated.

Just follow the curves.

Should get greener.

Killeen shoved Bud and Arthur back far enough that their continuing argument came to him only as a faint, querulous mutter. His boots propelled him over the next ridgeline, a feeling of freedom and quest welling in him. He saw that indeed the next rounded, lumpy hills were slightly greener. Enough of their talk had sunk in to prick his interest. The green was deepest near the hilltops, as though ice dwelled nearer the surface there. It would melt enough on a warm day to feed deep roots.

This was about as much as he could remember from has boyhood farming drudgery. At the Citadel he had pre ferred to rove and plunder, as had his father. Still, the art of watering crops with icemelt had stuck with him and now pricked his sense of approaching lush refuge.

He landed beside a gnarly ball of chaparral to deal with his toilet. This demanded some preparation. He had to unslip his chest straps, his carrybelt, and his traveling jockbrace. Adopting the position left one vulnerable, but still he preferred solitude. The gratification of his daily squatting came first from being alone and momentarily free of Family. Second, there was the abstract satisfaction of aiding green life through his unwanted excretions. Third, in the desolation of Snowglade the act gave vent to his sweaty self, his internal squeezings and bubblings, processes he no more thought about than he did his cyberrhythms and circuit defenses and sensoria. In a hard world it was—though he never would have admitted it— a simple, eloquent pleasure.