“You?” Toby could not conceal his amazement. “A short little—”
“We kept to the original specs, kid,” Andro’s mouth twisted with sardonic amusement. “We respect tradition, in case you hadn’t noticed. You ground-pounder types always pump yourselves up, never fails.”
“Those who didn’t, the mechs got,” Killeen said soberly.
“Yeasay,” Cermo put in. “We needed power, sensos, carryin’ mass, techstuff. Adds weight.”
Andro squinted at Cermo. “As is obvious. Nothing to be ashamed of, I assure you. Most Families go that way when mech competition gets bad. Hard for them to shed the mass once they get here, though. And they get nasty on their perpetual diets.”
“There are other Families here?” Killeen asked, his skewed mouth giving away his puzzlement.
“We got them all—even the original templates, somewhere.”
“The first Bishops?” Jocelyn asked, awed. “From the Chandeliers?”
“Ummm? Oh, of course—somewhere. And somewhen.” Andro stopped tapping his fingers, read his palm, and slapped his hands together with a sharp crack. When he took them apart, the screen was gone and his right hand looked just like the other one, lined and dirty. “That’s it. There’s some kind of hold-for-arrival message for you. Somebody expected you might show up somewhen.”
“From who?” Killeen demanded.
“I don’t know. I’m an inspector, not a library.”
“Where can we find this message?”
“Have to see the Regency.”
“Let’s go, then.”
He eyed them shrewdly. “You’re sure you don’t have a license?”
Killeen’s eyes narrowed. “Little one, we have just come through—”
“I know what you’ve come through—if you’re who you say you are. Fresh meat, just in from the colonies.”
“Colonies?” Jocelyn was aghast. “We were the last fragments, holding out on Snowglade until—”
“I know,” Andro said, “but it’s a story I’ve heard before. Last off your planet. Point is, you’re the best ones. You got here.”
Jocelyn said, “All the other Families, the mechs got.”
“Just what I said. We can use people who know how to scramble for their supper. Or so goes the official yam-weaving. Me, I wonder if we got too many already, never mind—”
“Why all this about a license?” Toby asked mildly.
“Kid, you’d be shocked how many traders try to dress up all country and dumb, come through here, think they can just slide by the tax man.” Andro eyed him. “They pump themselves with bioemergents, so they look big for a day or two. Then they have to pee it all away. Ummm, you’re the smallest here . . .”
“I’m no phony,” Toby said, offended.
“Um. Suppose not. You don’t look clever enough to fake it, either.”
Toby bristled. “Hey, now—”
“I’ll pass you, then.” Andro wrinkled his nose, seeming to reach a decision, nodding to himself. “You can go through. But nobody else from your ship until you’ve seen the Regency—that’s the rule.”
“Why?” Killeen’s jaw muscles bunched, visibly containing his irritation. “My crew wants out. All of them. We’ve been cooped up for years in—”
“Think the Regency wants a mob of club-footed innocents dumped into their city?” Andro waved a hand at the gray walls around them.
“This is a city?” Toby asked, thinking there must be a language problem. Cities in the old days had been elegant, airy, places of sweet music and luminescence.
Andro chuckled. “No, kid, this is a reception cell. I’ll show you the city.”
FOUR
A Day in Court
It didn’t look like much of a city. The Land of Dwarves, Toby had christened it before they had walked two blocks.
Even in a crowd he could see far into the distance, over the heads of everybody. Stubby people, hurrying everywhere. Yakking, yelling, laughing, and all in a noisy rush. In the hazy distance was more of the same. Stubby buildings, gray and brown and black. Stubby trees, even. On Snowglade they would have been bushes.
“What is this place?” Cermo sent on comm.
From Andro’s lack of reaction Toby gathered that he could not intercept their Family line. Killeen sent a quick signal that it was all right to talk this way, so Toby said, “And who are these runts?”
Jocelyn sent a puzzled note. “They’re sure not the high-minded types I expected.”
“Yeasay,” Killeen said. “When we found humans here, I expected them to be from the Chandeliers. Or the Great Epoch, even. The heroic ones, people who could build in the sky, fought well against mechs, explored True Center.”
Cermo said, “I thought the Great Epoch was when we got to True Center.”
