but I think we'll all sleep more soundly knowing there's someone on guard. Just in case. I'll take the first watch.'
'I'll relieve you in three hours,' said Finlay. 'Then Toby. The night should be over by then.'
'Damn it all,' said Julian, suddenly so angry that he was almost reduced to tears. 'Even our childhood's being taken away from us and spoiled. Is nothing sacred anymore?'
He glared around at the others, but they had nothing to say. In the end, Finlay and Evangeline took him by the arms and led him away to the cabins, to get what sleep they could. Toby and Flynn looked at each other, shrugged, and went after them. Giles found a wall to put his back against, from where he could see most of the deck and the entrances onto it, sat down, drew his gun and put it on the deck beside him, then drew his sword and laid it across his knees, ready for use. And so he sat, looking out into the night, watching the bright flares of explosions in the night and listening to their muted thunder, thinking his own thoughts. The toys kept to themselves in the main stateroom, doing whatever it was toys did in the night, and bothered no one. And the great paddle steamer sailed steadily on down the River, into the heart of the darkness.
Halloweenie came around in the morning, a few hours after the smiley sun had hauled itself back into the sky, knocking respectfully on cabin doors and telling everyone that breakfast was ready in the galley for those who wanted it. Everyone turned up, even Toby, who'd just finished his stint on guard, and was growling at everyone that he wasn't really a morning person. No one wanted to miss anything. They'd all showered and taken care of their ablutions. The modern bathrooms and toilets tucked away behind the cabins had come as a pleasant surprise. Apparently the world of childhood had had to make some concessions to its adult patrons. Breakfast turned out to be a cholesterol special of bacon, sausages, eggs, and other things that were bad for you, cooked by the Captain, who wore a frilly pinafore.
The good ship Merry Mrs. Trusspot was still chugging steadily down the dark soft-drink River, keeping a careful equal distance from both banks. They appeared to have made good progress during the night, and were now in unfamiliar territory. The constant rumble of fighting and explosions was still distant, but noticeably louder. The land on either side of the River was made up of huge game boards, wide as fields. They were battlefields now, the ground churned up by fighting, and disfigured with bomb craters. The bright colors of the boards had faded, and the markings were torn apart and meaningless. Dead playing pieces lay scattered everywhere. Broken chess pieces that had vaguely human shapes. Knights with shattered horseheads, bishops with cracked mitres, pawns with their electronic guts hanging out.
There was no sign of battle anywhere. The war had moved on. There was no way of telling who, if anyone, had won here.
After a while, the board games gave way to giant jigsaws, the pieces broken and scattered, sometimes rearranged for tactical reasons, so that the pictures made no sense anymore. Some pieces were just missing, removed for no apparent reason. There were more dead toys, left to lie where they had fallen because honor for the dead was a human thing. Toys just recycled what they could, and got on with their war. Sometimes the dead were presented in novel ways, for aesthetic or psychological reason, to throw horror and fear into the heart of the enemy.
A whole regiment of sailor dolls had been carefully crippled and disfigured and then crucified in long rows the length of a hillside. There were hundreds of the crosses, stretching up the hill to the very top, where one sailor doll, presumably the leader, had been crucified upside down, and then set on fire. Smoke was still rising from his charred and blackened costume. Evangeline wanted to stop the ship. She was sure a few of the dolls were still struggling feebly. The Captain refused. There was always the chance, he explained with what seemed genuine remorse, that this was the bait in a trap. It was the kind of thing the bad toys did. The humans looked, but couldn't see any sign of an enemy.
'They can be anywhere,' said the Captain. The humans remembered the rag dolls under the railroad tracks and were silent.
Farther on, hundreds of toy dogs and cats lay still among the bomb craters, ripped and torn apart, their stuffing rising out of great rents in their bodies like fluffy white guts. Their animal faces seemed innocent and puzzled in death, as though wondering how and why they had come to their end in such a manner. Bruin Bear and the Sea Goat stood very close together as the ship moved slowly past the carnage, holding paws but refusing to let themselves look away. Poogie sat at their heels, sniffing quietly, tears brimming in his large sad eyes. The toy who'd named himself Anything stood a little apart and watched in silence as they passed a field containing dead adaptor toys like himself. The gleaming metal toys had mostly died in the midst of changes, caught in strange half shapes that were neither one thing nor another, as though death had come upon them while they were desperately trying to find some shape that didn't contain the wounds that were killing them.
Thankfully, after that trees and shrubbery began to appear along the banks, thickening into trailing woods that hid the killing fields from view. The trees were tall and broad, heavy with summer greenery, but no birds sang on the branches, and no animals moved in the lower vegetation. The woods had been built for show, made for climbing and hiding and other games, and there was nothing natural about them.
The day grew slowly warmer, hot enough to raise a sweat without actually being uncomfortable. The humans lay sprawled in deck chairs, watching the quiet scenery go by, waited on by Halloweenie, who couldn't do enough for them. When he wasn't getting them cold drinks or hot snacks, he sat at their feet and asked endless questions about what life was like on other worlds. He'd only ever known toys, human patients, and then the war. He couldn't understand half the answers he got, but he just laughed and shook his bony head, and asked more questions. The Li'l Skeleton Boy loved stories, and would listen happily to tales of bravery and derring-do from Giles and Finlay. He tried to listen to Toby, but most of the journalist's stories went right over his head. Poogie, the Bear, and the Goat played endless games of quoits on the deck, and argued constantly about the rules, especially when the Goat was losing. Anything kept mostly to himself, but would occasionally take time out from his brooding to change into different shapes for Halloweenie, who found it endlessly amusing, and would shriek and clap his bony hands at each new transformation. Anything rarely joined in conversation, but he would sometimes talk quietly with Halloweenie, always clamming up if anyone else came near. The Captain stayed on the bridge, guiding the paddle steamer down the exact center of the River, and studying both banks with scowling suspicion. The parrot never strayed from his shoulder, murmuring comforting obscenities to itself.
Small artificial animals lived in holes and burrows in the earth of the River-banks, and would sometimes wave and chirp cheerful greetings to the humans, from a cautious distance. Artificial dolphins, made in bright primary colors, came swimming up the River and swam alongside the ship for a while, occasionally raising their sleek heads out of the dark liquid to study the humans with bright, knowing eyes, neither hindering nor helping. The long day passed slowly, warm and pleasant and undemanding, just as it must have been in the early days of Shannon's dream. The sounds of the war were just a distant rumble, like far-off thunder threatening a storm to come, and some of the humans were actually dozing when the ship passed into disputed territory, and everything went to hell in a hurry.
The toys had crept through the trees, keeping to the shadows, silent and unobserved, and then slipped quietly into the dark waters of the River. They swam deep beneath the surface, not needing to breathe, and then climbed the sides of the ship, unseen by any. Until they came swarming over the guardrails, waving swords and axes and screaming curses against Humanity. They were colorful, jagged figures, boiling over the railings the whole length of the ship. They were human in shape and size, but composed of different-colored parts and components. They had arms of different lengths, legs out of proportion to their bodies, heads that turned through three hundred and sixty degrees. Finlay recognized the toys from his own childhood. They came as separate pieces—bodies, limbs and heads of different colors and types, that a child could fit together to make a whole. Or you could swap the parts with other toys to make new figures. Someone had brought the idea to Shannon's World, and now the patchwork toys had come to take revenge for years of being dismantled and rebuilt at a child's whim, never having anything to call their own, not even their own bodies.
The humans sprang to their feet, shock and alarm driving out their drowsiness. They just had time to draw their swords, and then the toys were upon them. Finlay and Evangeline stood together, back-to-back, hacking at the toys as they came within range. Giles was caught and cornered in the bow, but stood his ground, his heavy sword shearing through the patchwork bodies with ease. He fought calmly and economically, conserving his strength and refusing to be intimidated by the sheer numbers ranged against him. Toby and Flynn put a stateroom wall at their backs and built a barricade of deck chairs from behind which they could fire their disrupters, blowing great holes in the packed crowd of toys. Flynn's camera hovered overhead, covering the action.
