“No!” Toby pushed the Zom hard and it went down. It made no attempt to catch itself and landed in a sprawl of limbs. It lay inert, its eyes filmed.
“Hey, it botherin’ you?” Stan asked.
“Just, they just get to me, is all.”
“These’re made in Resurrection City, I heard.”
“Where’s that?”
“’Nother Lane entire. They knock off copies from raw stock.”
“From dead people?”
“Don’t have to be. Got a mind-copy, just fast-grow a template, marry them up—zingo, you got cheap labor galore.”
Toby studied the slack-jawed face and resolved that this Zom could not possibly be his father. The false Abraham had fooled him for a moment but not this thing, no. There was really no resemblance at all, now that he took a close and objective scrutiny.
“Let it lay there,” Stan said dismissively. “We got work to do.”
It was so far gone Toby could not tell if this was some copy from the Restorer, which he supposed was what Stan meant by Resurrection City, or in fact the true Killeen, somehow aged in the esty.
So he put the matter out of his mind. He would treat this Zom as a copy, like that one of his grandfather back in the field hospital. He decided this and thought of it no more. It did not occur to him that he could not have done this only a few years before.
The rest of the unloading Toby helped carry out without once looking toward the crumpled form. Ladies stepped gingerly over the Zom and a passing man kicked it, all without provoking reaction.
Sweat was trickling into his eyebrows and so he did not see the mechs at first. “Heyso!” someone called. Toby looked up—
—into an onrushing sleek snout. Two others followed. They banked in the soft air and their shock wave slammed down onto the docks. People ran all whichways but Toby stood still, watching the silvery craft climb up the air. They pitched and yawed to no apparent purpose, angling out over the shore.
“Looking,” Stan said. “Been here before.”
“These same ones?” Toby asked.
“Smaller last time.”
The craft banked and glided now, slower and more careful as they prowled over the town. Toby still did not move. Mechs could pick up servos working. Stan gave him a puzzled look and cautiously got down behind some bales of sticky-grass.
They were coming back. Calls trilled in his receptors. “Bishops!” he whispered. He could pick out Cermo, Jocelyn, others. So the mechs had gotten the Family codes. He killed his inboards, in case some vagrant signal might get out in response.
They came right overhead. The moment passed with agonizing slowness and for a crazy instant he thought they must have stopped dead high above him. Then they were out over the river and he could start breathing again.
Just as he did, somebody shot at the mechs. It was a reasonably sophisticated weapon, Toby could tell, because it left virtually no detectable backtrail. Probably it used some sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum that Bishops could not sense.
The mechs could. The shot came from somewhere downstream and they rushed that way. It had done them no harm that Toby could see. They fired once, all three together. Someone screamed. The mechs moved off and the screaming stopped. Whoever had died had been foolish. Toby had not for a moment considered trying to help them against mechs of such a caliber. That he had learned as a boy.
“They did that ’fore, too,” Stan said. He stood up from behind the bale and tried to make out as if he had not been there.
“Get anybody?”
“Not that I heard.”
“Which way did they go then?”
“Just like these—” Stan pointed as the three leveled out and accelerated. “Downtime.”
“Always?”
“Certain. After somebody, I ’spect.”
And trying to sucker Bishops in, too, Toby thought. Maybe him. Or maybe it meant there were Bishops about.
They went downriver. Maybe that meant he should not.
After the mechs were out of sight everyone went on as though nothing had happened. The labor was fast and hard, for the induction ship was already taking on its passengers. Crowds, packages, happy confusion. By the time Toby returned from a nearby warehouse where the first wagonload went, only ripples in the mud-streaked river showed that the ship had tarried there at all.
FOUR
Mr. Preston
That day was long and hard, what with plenty of barrels and hogsheads and wooden crates to unlash and sort out and stack in the crumbling stone warehouse. Stan was a subagent for one of the big importation enterprises and had a steady run of jobs, so Toby was kept busy the rest of the day.
They had little tech here and relied on grunt labor. The Zoms from the quay wore out quickly and Stan brought out another crew of them. Toby did not see the one that had collapsed and did not go looking for it in the musty rear of the warehouse where they were kept, either.
The laboring time ended as the big bare patch of timestone overhead dimmed. This was a lucky occurrence, as people still preferred to sleep in darkness. Though there was no cycle of day and night here, a few hours of shadow were enough to set most into the slumber they needed. Toby had once seen a night that lasted several “days” so that folks began to openly speculate whether the illumination would ever return to the timestone. When the sulphurous glow did come it waxed into stifling heat and piercing glare so ferocious that everyone regretted their earlier impatience for it.
Stan took Toby to his own boarding house and arranged for him, leaving just enough time for a bath of cold river water before supper. Toby was amazed at the boarding table to see the rapidfire putting away of victuals combined with fast talking, as though mouths were meant to chew and blab at the same time. Game hens roasted to golden brown appeared on an immense platter and were seized and devoured before they reached him, though Stan somehow managed to get two and shared. A skinny man with a goatee opposite Toby cared only for the amusements of his mouth, alternately chewing, joking, and spitting none too accurately into a brass spittoon set beside him. Stan ate only with his knife, nonchalantly inserting the blade sometimes all the way into his mouth. Toby managed to get forkfuls of gummy beans and thick slabs of gamy meat into himself before dessert came flying by, a concoction featuring an island of hard nuts in a sea of cream that burst into flame when a man touched his cigar to it. Stan ate some and then contentedly sat back in his wicker chair, picking his teeth with a shiny pocket knife, an exhibition of casual bravery unparalleled in Toby’s experience.
Afterward Toby wanted more than anything to sleep, but Stan enticed him into the hubbub of the streets. They ended up in a bar dominated for a time by an immense, well-lubricated woman whose tongue worked well in its socket, her eyes rolling as she sang a ballad Toby could not fathom. At the end of it she fell with a crash to the floor and it took three men to carry her out. Toby could not decide whether this was part of the act or not, for it was more entertaining than the singing.
