One universal anachronism was on the buildings’ roofs, with solar cells covering the south side. (A more prosaic anachronism was that every building, even the churches, had something for sale.)
At least it made the business of food and shelter simple. There was enough frozen and irradiated food to last us several lifetimes, most of it more interesting than our survival rations, if less nutritious.
We decided to spend the night at Molly Malone’s Wayside Inn. Marygay and I were surprised to see, behind the registration desk, a price list for sexual services. Cat said all you got was robots. Clean robots.
But then our own robot, the carrier, delivered its own larger surprise. We went back out of Molly Malone’s to get our bags, and there they were, lined up neatly on the boardwalk.
And behind them, instead of a machine, stood a ruggedly handsome cowboy. He didn’t look like the worn-out robots, but he didn’t look quite human, either. He was too big, over seven feet tall. He left deep footprints in the dust, and when he stepped onto the boardwalk, it creaked alarmingly.
“I’m not really a carrier,” he said. “Not any kind of machine. It was just handy to look and act like one, down at the spaceport.”
He talked in a slow drawl that I recognized vaguely from childhood, and then it clicked: he looked like the actor John Wayne. My father had loved his movies and my mother despised him.
While he talked, he rolled a fat joint of tobacco. “I can be the carrier again, or whatever thing or organism we need about that size.”
The Tauran spoke up. “Please demonstrate?”
He shrugged and produced a large wooden match, and scratched it alight on the sole of his boot. Sulfur dioxide and, when he puffed the joint into life, the acrid tang of tobacco. I hadn’t smelled it in thirty years, or thirteen hundred. Cigarettes, they used to be called.
He stepped back three giant strides and blurred and flowed into the shape of the carrier. But he kept the colors of blue jeans and leather and held the smoldering cigarette in a human hand that grew out of the top.
Then he changed again, into an oversized Tauran, still holding the cigarette. He said something to Antres 906 in rapid Tauran, and then changed back into John Wayne. He took a last puff and pinched the cigarette out between thumb and forefinger.
None of us could come up with anything intelligent to say, so I opted for the obvious: “You’re some kind of alien.”
“Actually, no; nothing of the kind. I was born on Earth, about nine thousand years ago. It’s you guys who are creatures from another planet.”
“A shape-changer,” Marygay whispered.
“Like you’re a clothes-changer. To me, I’m always the same shape.” He twisted his leg around to a break-bone angle and looked at the boot sole. “You don’t have a name for us, but you could call us Omnis. The Omni.”
“How many are you?” Po asked.
“How many you need? A hundred, a thousand? I could turn into a troop of Campfire Girls, as long as they didn’t mass more than two-some tonnes. Maybe a horde of locusts. But it’s hell to get them all back together in one bunch.”
“You people have been on Earth for nine thousand years…” Max began.
“Try a hundred fifty thousand, and we aren’t people. We don’t even look like people, most of the time. I was a Rodin sculpture in a museum for more than a century. They never could figure out how the thieves got me through the door.” He laughed, and John Wayne split down the middle, and re-formed as two museum guards in uniform, a petite young woman and a fat old man.
They spoke in absolute unison: “When I do something like this, I’m an actual `group mind,’ like Taurans and Man aspire to being. It can be useful, but confusing, too.” The two figures collapsed into a pile of hundreds of scuttling cockroaches. Two Mickey Mouse robots rolled toward them, and they quickly re-formed into John Wayne, who kicked one of the robots onto the roof of Molly Malone’s.