Great Sky River Read Online Free PDF Page B

Family carried a wearying burden of slowly accumulating biotroubles, unfixablewithout 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. Ithad 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