Passengers lined the ornate railings as the boat slowed, foam leaped in the air, and backwash splashed about the stone quay. A whistle sounded eerily and deck hands threw across thick ropes.
Stan caught one and looped it expertly about a stay. “Come on!”
Crowds had coagulated from somewhere, seeming to condense out of the humidity onto the jetty and quay. A hubbub engulfed the induction ship. Crates and bales descended on crane cables. Wagons rumbled forth to take them and John found himself in a gang of Zoms, tugging and wrestling the bulky masses. Crowds yawped and hailed and bargained with vortex energy all around.
The Zoms followed Stan’s orders sluggishly, their mouths popping open as they strained, drool running down onto their chests. These were corpses kindled back to life quite recently, and so still strong, though growing listless. Zoms were mostly men, since they were harvested for heavy manual labor. But a hefty woman labored next to John and between loads she put her hand on his leg, directly and simply, and then slipped her fingers around to cup his balls. John jerked away, her reek biting in his nostrils. Zoms hungered for life. Perhaps they knew that they would wither, dwindling into torpid befuddlement, within months. The heavy woman leered at him and felt his ass. He moved away from her, shivering.
And bumped into a shabby Zom man who turned sluggishly and mumbled, “John. John.”
The boy peered into the filmed eyes and slack mouth. Parchment skin stretched over stark promontories of the wrecked face. Memories stirred. Some faint echo in the cheekbones? The sharp nose?
“John … Father …”
“No!” John cried.
“John … came here … time …” The Zom reached unsteadily for the boy’s shoulder. It was in the tottering last stages of its second life, the black mysteries’ energy now seeping from it.
“You’re not my father! Get away.”
The Zom gaped, blinked, reached again.
“No!” John 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, filmed eyes peering at the hazy other side of the world.
“Hey, it botherin’ you?” Stan asked.
“Just, they just get to me, is all.”
John studied the slack-jawed face and resolved that this Zom could not possibly be his father. 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.”
The rest of the unloading John 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.
The labor was fast and hard, for the induction ship was already taking on its passengers. By the time John 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.
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 subagent for one of the big importation enterprises and had a steady run of jobs, so John was kept busy the rest of the day. The Zoms from the quay wore out quickly and Stan brought out another crew of them. John 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 day ended as the big bare patch of worldwall overhead dimmed. This was a lucky occurrence, as people still preferred to sleep in darkness, and 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. John had once seen a night that lasted several “days” so that folks began to openly speculate whether the illumination would ever return to the worldwall. When the sulphurous glow did return it waxed into stifling heat and piercing glare so ferocious that everyone regretted their earlier impatience for it.
Stan took John to his own boarding house and arranged for him, leaving just enough time for a bath of cold river water before supper. John was amazed at the boarding table to see the rapid-fire 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 John 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. John 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 which burst into flame when a man touched his cigar to it. Stan ate one and then contentedly sat back in his wicker chair, picking his teeth with a shiny pocket knife, an exhibition of casual bravery unparalleled in John’s experience.
Afterward John wanted more than anything to sleep, but Stan enticed him into the hubbub 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 John could not fathom. At the end of it she then fell with a crash to the floor and it took three men to carry her out. John could not decide whether this was part of the act or not, for it was more entertaining than the singing.
Stan thrust some dark beer upon him and artfully took that moment to pay John his day’s wages, which of course made John seem a piker if he did not buy the next round, which came with unaccountable speed. He was halfway through that mug and thinking better of this evening, of this huge complex city, of his fine new friend Stan, and generally of the entire world itself, when he recalled how his own father had said that in their family one discarded a cork once pulled from a bottle, knowing with assurance that it would not be needed again.
This connection troubled him, but Stan relieved John’s frown by stretching his legs out and sticking a sock-clad foot up. The sock had a face sewed on it so that Stan could jiggle his toes and make the face show anger, smile, even blink. All the while Stan carried on a funny conversation with the artistic foot. But this made John remember his first day at the orphanage, cold and bleak, when a tall boy had stuck his grey-socked foot from beneath some covers. John mistook it for a rat and threw his knife, skewering the foot. That had made him unpopular for some time around there.
He smiled at this and had another beer sip. Stan’s face went pale. John felt a presence behind him.
Turning, he saw a tall man dressed in leather jacket and black pants, sporting a jaunty blue cap. No one but pilots could wear such a cap with its gold flashings across the bill.
“Mr.—Mr. Preston,” Stan said.
“You gentlemen out for an evening? Not too busy to discuss business?”
Mr. Preston smiled with an austere good nature, as befitted a representative of the only unfettered and truly independent profession John knew. Lords found themselves hampered by parliaments, ministers knew the constraints of their parishioners, even schoolteachers in their awful power finally worked for towns.
But a silver river pilot knew no governance. A ship’s captain could give a half dozen or so orders as the induction motors readied and she backed sluggishly into the stream, but as soon as the engines engaged, the captain’s rule was overthrown. The pilot could then run the vessel exactly as he pleased, barking orders without consultation and beyond criticism by mere mortals.