"Huh."
"What do you like to do?"
"Huh."
"Touch your toes." The creature bends and fingers its toes. "Stand up." It stands. "Why are you here?"
"Huh."
Abby feels tears blurring her vision, and she wipes at them angrily. She knows nothing other than what she has been born with, yet this thing pains her, offends her. It is nothing so shallow as mourning the creature's rights or feeling upset at the abuse; it is more as though she senses the fallacy of the drones existence. Everything else on this ship — all the creatures she is about to pass by for the very last time — has risen out of rightness. Cast as they have been into the Memory, still they had their time, and they take up a space in the world that was once meant for them. These drones that Blake made are simply wrong.
"Get the hell out of here," she whispers, and the drone turns and leaves. She continues her final walk to the stern.
* * *
The first of the chambers is hot and humid, bustling with activity. Drones dash here and there, fussing about the huge steel vat that stands at the center of the chamber. Abby feels a thrill of power as she hides back in the shadows to watch. She came from a vat — perhaps even this one — drawn out of the Memory and given life. That was natural, and that was also magic, and she has spent the years since her birthing struggling to come to terms with both. She walked, she thought, she talked with Voice, and she dreamed, but she could make out no true dividing line between what Benedict Blake plucked out of nature and what he forced back into it. Magic was a bending of its rules, but it was far less simple than that. There were complexities and subtleties, and however many birthings she witnessed — scores, perhaps a hundred — she never understood what she was truly seeing.
"One last time?" she whispers. "Shall I try to comprehend what I'm seeing one last time?" Her head tells her to flee, now that the idea of escape is upon her. But her heart bids her to stay, to watch. Because in truth, each birthing is beautiful. And every new creation she witnesses makes her feel more justified in being alive.
The vat — huge enough to hold Abby a hundred times over — is starting to shake and smoke, and several drones dash out from beneath it, squealing. Something has pattered down on their gray hides, and patches of skin seem to be fading into nothing. The Memory is leaking, Abby thinks. She tries to make out shapes in the darkness beneath the vat, wondering what can be slipping through between sheet-metal whose rivets have been weakened over the decades. Shadows flail, another drone runs out, its rear half already seemingly vanished.
"More hydrochloric acid!" a voice roars. Blake is in the room.
She sinks farther back into shadows, kneeling behind a pile of discarded crates. What they contain she does not know, but they stink of fish and chalk. She peers between two crates and watches the man walk down a metal staircase.
His long coat swings around his feet, giving the impression that he floats rather than walks, and his gray beard reaches his chest. His shoulders are narrow, his hands splayed as if it hurts for his fingers to touch. Blake's face burns with excitement, and his eyes catch the weak electrical light and reflect it back as a fierce glare. "More acid, damn you!"