The self-grown houses rose seamlessly from fruitful soil. Seed-crafters advertised with gaudy signs, some the new neon-piping sort that spelled out whole words in garish, jumpy brilliance—Skillgrower, Houseraiser, even Custom Homeblossoms.
They wandered through raucous bars, high-arched malls, viny factory-circles, and found them smoothly, effortlessly elegant, their atmospheres moist with fragrances that issued from their satiny woods. Women worked looms that grew directly from the damp earth. Stan asked one of these laboring ladies why she could not simply grow her clothes straight on the bush, and she laughed, replying, “Fashion changes much too quick for that, sir!” and then smothered a giggle at Stan’s misshapen trousers and sagging jacket.
This put Stan of a mind to carouse, and soon Toby found himself strolling through a dimly lit street that reeked of, as Stan put it, “used beer.”
The women who lounged in the doorways here were slatternly in their scarlet bodices and jet-black, ribbed corsets. Far different from the blocky, muscular women prized so in Family Bishop.
Toby felt his face flush and recalled a time long ago, in the Citadel Bishop school. Family Bishop was strict in matters of lineage, which translated into a tight sexual code until the mating age.
The boys’ coach had given them all a sheet of special paper and a pen that wrote invisibly, with orders to draw a circle for each time they masturbated—“shaking hands with your best friend,” he called it. The invisibility was to preclude discovery and embarrassment.
At the end of a month they had all brought the sheets in. The coach had hung them up in rows and darkened the classroom, then turned on a special lamp. Its violet glow revealed the circles, ranks upon ranks of them, to the suddenly silent boys. “This,” the coach had said, “is the way God sees you. Your inner life.”
The aim of all this displayed sin was to get the boys to cut down on their frequency, for lonely Onan’s dissipation sapped the intellectual skills—or so the theory went. His Isaac Aspect had supplied data on Onan, calling it a “folk tale” and sniffing with disdain at such primitive sexual mores.
Instead, the exercise led to endless boasting, after they had returned to daylight and each knew his own circle-count, and yet could claim the highest number present, which was one hundred and seven.
Toby had attained a mere eighty-six, somewhat cowed by the exercise itself. Later he felt that if he had known the end in mind, he could have pushed himself over a hundred, easy.
In Cairo, sophisticated women were easily available. He felt a vague loyalty to Besen, troubled by his memory of her image trapped in the cube in Mr. Preston’s house. Was she still alive? Would she mind his indulging himself?
Lust banished such fine distinctions, leaving him with a fidgety tautness. But the women beckoning with lacquered leers and painted fingers and arched blue eyebrows somehow did not appeal. He remembered Besen’s lopsided smile and missed it terribly.
Stan made some fun of him for this. Toby reacted with surly swearwords, most fresh-learned from Mr. Preston.
Anger irked his stomach. He left Stan bargaining with a milk-skinned woman who advertised with red hair and hips that seemed as wide as the river, and made his way through the darkling city. If his father had come this way there would be a sign. He had only to find it.
TEN
Zom Master
Labyrinths of inky geometry enclosed him. Passing conversations came to him muffled and softly discordant as he worked his way among the large commercial buildings near the docks. Here the jobbing trade waxed strong, together with foundries, machine shops, oil presses, flax mills, and towering elevators for diverse crops, all springing from the intricately tailored lifecrafts known best in Cairo.
Not that such arts grew no blemishes. Slick yellow fungus coated the cobbled streets, slippery malignancies that sucked at Toby’s heels, yearning to digest him. Trough-like gutters were awash in fetid fluids, some stagnant and brown-scummed, others running fast and as high as the thick curbstones.
Each building had a mighty cask, several stories high, grown out from the building itself and shooting stilt-roots down to support the great weight of rainwater it held. Never near the river was there enough topsoil to support wells. The passing veils of rain were all Cairo had, and as if to make this point, droplets began to form in the mist overhead and spatter Toby as he searched.
He descended into a lowland zone of the city, where the streets lay silent, with an empty Sunday aspect. But the wrought-iron symbology on the ramshackle buildings here told the reason. They made heavy, rugged ciphers and monograms, filled in with delicate cobwebs of baffling, intricate weave. Toby could make out in the gathering gloom the signs of Zom businesses, bearing the skulls and ribbed ornamentation. This solidity offset other fragilities. Cairo dwelled so near the great time-storm arcs that its folk always spoke conditionally, ending their statements about events with “so far” and “seems to be” and “in the sweet sometimey.”
His bad luck, of course, that the timestone glow would ebb at just this time. The rain dribbled away, leaving a dank cold. He looked upward and saw that far overhead was a broad island of sandy waste, interrupting the timestone, and so leaving this part of the city permanently darker. So they had decided to put the Zom industry here, in constant gloom.
He peed against a building, reasoning that it would help it to grow just like any plant—though he did modestly slip down a side alley to do it. So Toby was off the street when a squad of Zom women came by.
They shambled, chill-racked and yellow-faced, eyes playing about as if in addled wonder, and one saw Toby. She grinned, an awful rictus, and licked her lips and hoisted her skirt with one hand, gesturing with the other index finger, eyebrows raised. Toby was so transfixed he stopped urinating and stood there shock-still until finally the Zom shrugged and went on with the other miserables. His heart restarted again some time after and he put himself back in his pants.
Zoms were accepted as a necessity for their brute labor, he told himself. Still his breath came short, his chest grew tight and fluttery. He chided himself.
Following the Zoms was easy. In a street of wavering oil lamps was the Zom Raiser.
The man was tall, in a stovepipe-thin charcoal suit. He sat in a spacious room, working at an ancient stone desk, scribbling on a flat computer face. Along the walls were deep alcoves sunk into shadow.
“I’m looking for a, my father. I thought maybe—”
“Yes yes,” the man said. “An old story. Go ahead, look.”
This abruptness startled Toby so that it was some moments before he fully realized what he saw.
Grimy oil lamps cast dim yellow radiance across long rows of slanted boards, all bearing adult corpses. They were not shrouded, but wore work clothes, some mud-caked. Toby walked down the rows and peered into bloodless, rigid faces. In the alcoves were babes laid out in white shrouds.
All had the necessary ribbed ironwork cage about them. Pale revitalizing fluids coursed through tubes into their nostrils, pumped by separate hearts—bulbous, scarlet muscles attached at the ribs, pulsing. The fluids did their sluggish work down through the body, sending torpid waves washing from the sighing chest through the thick guts and into the trembling legs. Their charge expended, the fluids emerged a deep green from the rumps, and spilled into narrow troughs cut into the hardwood floor.
Amid echoing drips and splashes he returned to the stone desk, an island of luminosity in the cool, clammy silence. “He’s not here.”
“Not surprising. We move them on fast.” The man’s deep-sunken eyes gave nothing away.
“You raised anybody looks like me?”
“Got a name for him?”
Toby gave it. The man studied a leather-bound ledger and said, “No, not in the records. Say, though, I recall something . . .”
Toby seized the Zom Raiser by the shoulders. “What?”
“Leggo. Leggo, I say.” He shied back and when Toby’s hands left him he straightened himself the way a chicken shakes its feathers into order. “You damn fools come barging in here, you’re always—”
“Tell me.”
Something in Toby’s voice made the man cease and study him for a long moment. “I was trying to recollect. I’ve seen must be a dozen look sorta like you, if I ’member right.”
