Mr. Preston’s bushy eyebrows crowded together, momentarily puzzled at the quick, hard note that had come into Toby’s voice, but then he waved his hand amply. “Surely done, Mr. Toby. I must say there is something about you that is wise beyond your apparent years. I am prepared to hire your services.”
Stan was looking bug-eyed at this interchange. For two lowly freight musclers to be drinking with a pilot was like a damp river rat going to dinner at the mayor’s. And this latest development!
“Services?” Stan put in, unable to restrain himself any longer.
“Navigation. There’ve been five big time-squalls between here and Cairo since I was up that way. Now I got a commission to take the Natchez up that far and no sure way of knowing the river that far.”
“I’m not sure I know the river all that well,” Toby demurred, his mind still aswarm with scattershot thoughts.
“You see any of those storms?”
“Two of them, yessir. From a distance, though.”
“Only way to see one, I’d say,” Stan said with forced jocularity. He was still stunned from the offer.
The pilot grimaced in agreement, an expression that told much of narrow escapes and lost friends. “You kept your skiff well clear?”
“I poled and rowed, both. Prob’ly just lucky with the currents, truth to tell.”
“A time-storm attracts ships according to their mass, see? Your rowing was most likely the cause of your salvation,” the pilot said. “An induction ship, despite its power, must be more crafty. Its weight is its doom.”
Toby sipped his strong beer and said, “I don’t know as I want to go back up there, sir.”
“I’ll make it worth your while.” The pilot squinted at him, as though trying to see something in Toby’s face that he wasn’t giving away. “I was hoping you might have business back up there.”
Might have business. At once the Zom’s face lurched into Toby’s mind’s-eye and he felt the barroom close about him, its suffocating air clotted with cigar smoke. The banks of blue fumes swirled amid the seeping yellow glow of filament bulbs that sprouted from the walls, each the size of a man’s head with his hat on. Toby had kept his mind away from the memory until now but the weight of uncertainty again descended. He could not know if the Zom was his father unless he found it again, questioned it.
“Sir, I’m going to have to give you my reply tomorrow. I have to see to a certain matter right now.”
The surprise in Stan’s and Mr. Preston’s faces was almost amusing. It increased when Toby stood, bootheels smacking the floorboards loudly from the drink he had put down. He nodded solemnly and without a word plunged into the darkness outside.
FIVE
The Frozen Girl
Inky shapes still shifted in his mind as he knocked on the door of Mr. Preston’s house. Toby still felt himself encased in tangled memories, the hate he felt toward the Zom because he did not want it to be the Killeen he had known.
It was a fitful morning, with gray light piercing a fog and sending traceries across the rooftops along the slumbering river. Mechs and their virulence seemed infinitely far away. People here did not even talk about them. They were cloaked in this cozy, snug corner of the esty and would hear not a word of events beyond. Toby wondered if such people were typical of humanity. If so, what were the Bishops?
He could barely see the white picket fence framing Mr. Preston’s yard. The pearly wisps blotted out detail beyond the brick walk that led to the house. This was a grand place, he had to admit, even in such diffuse light. It was porticoed in pale pine, the massive columns topped with flowery capitals. He rapped the iron door knocker again and instantly the brass doorknob turned, as if attached to the knocker. A dwarf answered, a mute servant, and led Toby along a carpeted hall.
He was unprepared for the grandiosity of a pilot’s lodging, taking in with awe the mahogany furniture, a new electric lamp with yellow-paper shade, and an entire shelf of sound-sculptures. The dwarf retreated, gesturing at a yawning, tongueless mouth and showing the red servant tattoo on his shoulder to explain his silence.
A bounty of travel visions speckled the walls—Above the Falls of Abraham, Volcanic Quest, Heart of Lightness, Struggle Against Destiny—and many of literature, including the fanciful. Toby yearned to take the sheets and stroke them into luminosity, but as he reached for Time Stream and World-Wrack he heard heavy thumping footsteps and turned to find the pilot in full blue and gold uniform.
“I hope you have settled your other matter,” Mr. Preston said severely.
Only now did Toby recall clearly his abrupt departure from the table. The town beyond that raucous room had swallowed memory. He had made his way through narrow streets lined by rude buildings that seemed to lean out over the street, eclipsing the wan sky glow. The moist lanes near the river had been tangled and impossible to navigate without stumbling and stepping on sprawled forms, like bundles of clothing left for trash collection.
The masters of the Zoms left them where they lay, sure that they could not move without further feeding. Toby took hours to find the slack-jawed face he had seen on the quay, and then another long time peering at it before he was sure that the Zom was not merely in its lapsed state of rest. The thing had proved dead, limbs akimbo, stiffening into a hardened parody of a dance.
At morning the burly owner had come by, shrugged at the corpse, and thrown it into his wagon for disposal. Toby’s questions about the Zom the big man brushed aside—he didn’t know the names, no, nor where they came from, nor from what part of the great river they hailed. Resurrection City? Only a rumor.
And the last glimpse Toby had of that face had unsettled him further, as if in final death the Zom gave its last secret. There was a clear resemblance to his father. But was this a copy?
So with fatigue in his bones but a fresh, iron resolve in his spine Toby made himself stand erect beside the oak mantelpiece and say to Mr. Preston, “I’ll come, sir.”
“Damn good! Want to see the backtime, do you?”
“Yeasay.”
“Whuzzat?”
“Uh, yes.” The word still felt odd. See the backtime, yeasay—and go opposite to the mechs.
“Here, you had breakfast?”
Cornmeal flapjacks and fritters, brought by the mistress of the house, quickly dominated Toby’s attention while the pilot regaled him with lore and stories. Toby managed to keep the details of his long voyage downriver well-muddied, and was distracted from this task by Mr. Preston’s collection of oddments, arrayed along the walls. There were crystals, odd-colored stones betraying volcanic abuse, a circlet of ancestral hair, five flint arrowheads from the fabled days, and some works of handicraft like dozens Toby had seen before. Beside these were bronze-framed, stiff 3D’s of addled-looking children, aged uncles and the like, all arranged awkwardly and in Sunday-suited best for their bout with immortality.
But these oddments were nothing compared with the large transparent cube that dominated the dining room table. It shed cold air and Toby took it to be ice, but as he ate he saw that no drops ran off the sleek flat sides. Within its blue-white glow small objects of art were suspended—a golden filigree, a jagged bit of quartz, two large insects with bristly feelers, and a miniature statue of a lovely young girl with red hair and a flowing white robe.
He had nearly finished inhaling the molasses-fattened flapjacks and slurping down a pot of coffee when he chanced to notice that one of the insect wings had lowered. Keeping an attentive ear to the pilot, who had launched into what appeared to be a four-volume oral autobiography in first draft, he watched carefully and saw the girl spinning slowly about her right toe. Her robe fetched up against her left leg and then gracefully played out into a spinning disk of velvety delicacy.
By this time the insects had both flapped their transparent gossamer wings nearly through a quarter-stroke. They were both heading toward the girl. Their multifaceted eyes strobed and fidgeted with what to them must be an excited vigor, and to Toby was a torpid, ominous arabesque.
“Ah, the hunt,” the pilot interrupted his soliloquy. “Beautiful, eh? I’ve been watching it for long enough to grow three beards.”
“The girl, she’s alive.”
