With the surety of a good teacher, Jopale dismissed Rit’s concerns. “These are genuine sanctuaries, and my new home is waiting for me. I just have to get there now. And I feel quite sure that I will.”
Saying those words, he believed them.
Rit seemed to take it all to heart. He put away his map and found his own copy of the member’s handbook, opening it to one of his favorite pages.
Finally, Jopale began to eat his meal. He had purchased two scrambler hands, fried but not too greasy, and a whitish lump of sweetcake and cultured algae in a salty soup, all washed down with a tall bottle of fermented sap imported from the Earlands. The drink was the most expensive item on the limited menu, and it was the most appreciated. The hard kick of the liquor was already working on his mood when his companion spoke again, using a sorry little voice to ask, “But what if?”
“What if what?” Jopale responded testily.
“What if these thieves and con artists did believe this world was coming to an end? And by promising berths to us and maybe a million others like us, they earned enough money to finance their own salvation.”
Jopale grimaced, breathing through his teeth.
“What if a New Isle is waiting, but not for us?” Rit persisted.
Jopale felt a smile emerge on its own. Then with a bitter laugh, he told his traveling companion, “Well then. Then we aren’t in any worse shape than the rest of the world. Now are we?”
On Again
Jopale had always excelled at school, including respectable grades earned in each of the three sciences. But he never achieved a profound understanding of genetics or selective forces. He learned what was absolutely necessary, relying on his clear memory when it came to the standard exams. Introductory classes demanded little else, while the high-level courses—those rarefied environments where professors wanted more than disgorged fact and holy equations—had never been in his future.
But one lesson Jopale took from science was this: Mockmen were wondrous creatures, pliable and creative by every genetic measure.
A glance around the station proved that truism. Most of the mock-men were big creatures, two or three times larger than a grown human. They had been bred for compliance and power when necessary and a minimal metabolism to help reduce the food bills. Yet some of these creatures were small and slender as a child. And a few of the kitchen workers were quicker than any human being—a blessing in this hurly-burly business. What’s more, no two of them could be confused for each other, even though they might be siblings or a parent and grown child. All had an oval face and a protruding chin beneath a small, seemingly inadequate mouth. Yet each face was unique. Jopale’s own girl had descended from giants that lived for generations on his family farm—a generalist by design and by training, her head topped with beastly red hair, a dramatic chin hanging from the parabolic jaw, and blue inhuman eyes gazing out at a world full of motion and incomprehensible purpose. If the creature had a voice, she would have commanded a vocabulary of several hundred easy words. But of course the larynx was pierced when she was a baby, leaving her able to communicate only with simple gestures and vaguely human expressions. A creature of habit and duty, his mockman was too simple to understand the dire state of the world—an ignorance that Jopale couldn’t help but envy, at least now and again.
“Everything with a spine arose from a common ancestor,” he had learned long ago. His biology professor—an ancient woman blessed with her own sturdy backbone—explained to the class, “A single creature must have been the originator of us all. On some ancient continent, long dead and rotted away, this precursor to humans ran about on two legs, climbing up into the saprophytes and epiphytes, grabbing what food it could with its primitive hands.”
“Like a scrambler?” a student had asked.
Jopale didn’t ask the question, thankfully. The professor reacted with a click of the tongue and a sorry shake of her head. “Hardly,” she replied. “Scramblers are as far removed from our founding species as we are. As the mockmen are. Flying yabbers, copper eels, plus everything else you can name… all of these species would look at that vanished organism as being its very distant ancestor. That is, if simple beasts could ever think in such abstract terms.”
“But where did the first vertebrates come from?” another student inquired. “From the sea? Or from some earlier continent?”
“Nobody knows,” the professor replied. Then with the surety of age, she added, “And nobody will ever discover that unnecessary answer. Since there’s no way to study the matter any further than it has been studied by now.”
Jopale had been sitting in the station for several hours, changing position as the plastic chair pushed against his rump. At that moment, he happened to be thinking about his biology teacher, long dead, and about the nature of surety. And to stave off boredom, he was studying the astonishing diversity of false humans who sat and walked among those who were real.
Suddenly a short, homely mockman entered the dining hall. It was female, dressed in the stiff uniform of a station worker. And like with a few of her species, some quirk of genetics had swollen her skull, giving her a genuine forehead under a cap of thick black hair. That forehead was remarkable enough. But then the newcomer opened her mouth, revealing a clear and exceptionally strong voice.
“The westbound worm is rested and ready,” she sang out, the clarity of each word taking travelers by surprise. “Leave by way of the door behind me, sirs and madams. If you have a ticket. You must have a ticket. The westbound worm is fed and eager. She will be leaving shortly, my friends.”
Most of the room stood up.
“That wasn’t as long as I feared.” An elderly woman wearing elegant clothes and amber gems was smiling at her good fortune. “I was ready to sit for quite a while longer,” she admitted to her companion.
A handsome man, perhaps half her age, muttered, “I wonder why this is.”
The rich woman had to laugh at him. “It’s because we are special, darling. What more reason do you need?”
Jopale was among the last to reach the open doorway. Soldiers were waiting, carefully examining each ticket and every piece of identification. Meanwhile, the uniformed mockman stood beside the long line, smiling happily. Why did that creature make him feel so uneasy? Was it her face? Her voice? No, what bothered Jopale was the way she stared at the other faces, black eyes settling only on those who were human.
“Good journey,” she said to Jopale.
Then to Rit, who was directly behind him, she said, “You are in trustworthy hands, sir. No need to worry.”
She could read the man’s fear.
A one-in-a-million creature, thought Jopale. Or there was another explanation, and far more sordid too. Glancing over his shoulder, he wondered if she could be a hybrid—a quirk of biology that wasn’t destroyed at birth, but instead was fed and trained for this halfway demanding task. Nothing like her would ever happen in his homeland. It wasn’t allowed. But World’s Edge was a different part of the world, and Jopale’s long journey had taught him many lessons, including that every place had its own culture, and cultures were defined by odd little customs understandable only to themselves.
“This way, this way!” the old caretaker cried out.
Jopale showed the soldiers what they wanted to see, his own mockman standing silently to his right.
Master Brace was at the end of the long platform, shouting for the passengers and waving both arms. Even at a distance, his face betrayed a look of genuine concern. Something bad must have happened. But their giant worm lay motionless on the greased trail, apparently sleeping. Its intestine was still jammed full of half-digested food. The worm’s bloated shape said as much, and looking through the plastic windows, Jopale saw a rich dark mixture of masticated wood pulp and sweet knuckle-roots, happy muscles pressing the feast into new positions, the elastic walls working on the stubborn chunks and bubbles.