“What’s it made out of?”

The man stared at him. “Wine!” he shouted. “Wine!” He kicked the bottle with his toe.

“But what’s it made out of?” asked Thanakar, smiling. “You made it yourself, didn’t you?”

The biter pulled his lips back to show his teeth, heavy and carnivorous, and gleaming white. He pressed his fists to both sides of his forehead and squatted down in the boxcar door until his face was level with theirs. They could hear a rumble of anger, deep in his huge chest. “Wine,” he said, carefully and slowly.

“It’s made from wine.”

Abu pulled the doctor by the elbow, and they backed away into the dark. “I hope you’ll be satisfied with that,” the prince remarked as they turned away. “I don’t think you’ll get a better answer.” From the boxcar behind them came a roar of rage, and then a bottle hurtled past their heads, missing them narrowly, crashing up ahead.

“Wine,” remarked Abu.

“Unpredictable fellow,” commented Thanakar, taking the prince’s arm.

“Yes. It’s not fair. The biters have a hard life. The others hate them because they have no pride. Yet without biters, the rest would starve.”

The cousins walked on, reaching an area of the yard where there was more light. They saw antinomials hurrying and ambling in the same direction, down towards the river where a crowd was forming on the bank. Upstream, the monstrous skeleton of the harbor bridge stretched into the darkness, for the suburbs on the other bank were all abandoned. Nearer, a row of docks stuck out into the mud. Because of the Paradise tides, the river had completely disappeared. Where it had been, the mud was dozens of feet thick.

Where the crowd was, the embankment overlooked a platform slung on steel wires between two docks.

In normal times it must have floated on the surface of the water, but now it hung suspended, fifteen feet above the mud. A bonfire burned on it, but besides that it was empty, though crowds of people sat and stood on the concrete embankment and on the docks on either side.

“We’re early,” said Abu. “I thought we’d be too late.” They reached the embankment, and he sat down happily and kicked his feet over the edge.

“I wish we had brought something to sit on,” said Thanakar, looking dubiously at the dirty ground.

“Oh well.”

A ladder hung from the underside of the platform down to someplace hidden in the mud, and as Thanakar sat down, some people climbed up from below and sat down by the fire. Abu scanned their faces, but they were far away and hard to recognize, until a huge golden cat leapt from the lap of one and sauntered carelessly across the stage to where a man was fiddling with the fire.

Thanakar looked around. The antinomials were completely silent, standing or sitting cross-legged, or hugging their knees. No one seemed part of any group. Again, there were no conversations, though some people hummed lazily to themselves. Yet they must have lived together their whole lives. Suffering and war, hunger and despair still had not given them a thing in common. In a crowd, their coldness and their isolation seemed uncanny.