“I should have taken more time with them,” said the boy in the dark basket sadly. “I should have conserved them, bred fresh herds. They were tasty.”
Still in the memory, he swam up out of the warm nourishing levels to the outer surface; and when he splashed out, his borrowed body bursting around him in the inadequate pressure, he separated from the ruptured organic ruin the tough crystal that was himself, and, using up a distressingly large amount of the energy he’d acquired here, he flung himself up into the starry sky at a speed sufficient to get out of the bent space around this world.
And then once again there were simply, the aeons of waiting, of remembering past satiations and hoping for more; at rest, with no sensory apparatus with which to perceive the universe wheeling around him. Stuff—dust, pebbles, ice—would gradually collect on him, until he formed the minimally sentient heart of a drifting boulder, a potential comet or meteor…
And then, like every time before, after much waiting there would come the shiftings, the stretching… with his obsessive self-attention he’d notice the faint stressing of an electron valence here, the tendency of a molecular ring there to become just the slightest bit elliptical… and he’d know he was near something.
Most often it would pass; and sometimes he could feel the tickle of hard radiation, and he’d know to propel himself away, for though hot naked nuclei and crowded photon-waves were delicious, it would unmake him to fall into one of the dense furnaces from which they sprayed. And then, too, it often happened that, though there was none of the fusion-heat, the stretching effect would simply become steady, and he’d have to use up more energy to get closer… and of course in the heartbreaking majority of cases he’d impacted onto a sterile surface devoid of life, and he had had to spend still more of his own power just to leave and get back out to the eternal sea.
But always before he’d come dangerously close to the point where converting any more of his crystal-self to energy would mean losing some of his personality and memories, he’d found something, if only seas of primitive life that barely repaid the exit fee; and once in a while he found the tasty ones, the ones who knew they were ones.
“Sentience,” said the far-gone boy smugly. “That’s what Sevatividam likes.”
Always he learned, and eventually even came to think in, the language of his hosts… though he always thought of himself by his own, real name, which he’d always had, and had by now heard rendered into—it must be—thousands of accents, on waves that had vibrated in air, water, methane, ammonia… the name best rendered in the language of these people here in this newest place by the syllables Sevatividam.
This place—Rivas caught several scenes at once: the glass plain he’d been on last night, the walls of a canal moving past under a blue sky, a glow of warm nourishing nuclear fire shining up through the water of a harbor at twilight, a rooftop balcony with bent towers beyond it as white and bumpy as the spinal columns of giants—this place was one of the best he’d ever come across.
“Lots of people,” the boy said. “As tasty as any I’ve found.” He sighed. “I wish I’d been able to maintain their little local golden age, their little renaissance, a decade or so longer; it wasn’t costing me all that much energy and attention to cultivate great artists and doctors and politicians among them, and even though it would have meant postponing the real feasting for a while, how luscious they’d have been after I’d let them fall from a real cultural height, tumble back down to the old despair after a whole generation of confident optimism!”
The far-gone kid sighed again. “But of course after only four years of cultivating and fertilizing them, I got carried away.”
The visions were dimming out—or, more accurately, Rivas was losing access to them—but he got a glimpse of a tremendous amount of rock falling from all directions into a point of intolerably bright light. He was squeezing the whole pile through dozens of levels of fusion and he could feel the tickling all through his body—and then everything became the white light, and it was all he could do to make a shell around his body to keep it from being vaporized in the explosion he’d accidentally touched off.
“I never got so carried away before,” the far-gone observed in a voice half rueful and half awed. “I never made quite so much of the heavy unstable stuff. I guess if you have too much of it all piled together at once it begins to decay in step or something, or chain reacts like a live coal on a stack of paper… for years after that error in judgment I scarcely had strength to move, let alone donate energy and attention to maintain the Ellay renaissance… yes, getting the Holy City paved in glass was very expensive….”
For a while the kid was silent, then he laughed softly. “But even after just four years, they weren’t bad; after their precious Sixth Ace was assassinated and all their artists burned out and went mad after being deprived of my unsuspected support, and everybody saw that the brief but tantalizing promise was all a lie. People are so tasty when they’re truly embittered, truly despairing… and that’s when they come to Sevatividam. They can’t stand the bitter rain, so they run in under one of the two awnings—religion or dissipation—and guess who’s waiting for them under both awnings at once….”
The tumbling sea water had flushed the dose of Blood out of the metal basket, and the effects were wearing off. He had lost the ability to see Jaybush’s memories. His hand was numb except when anything touched it—when that happened it exploded in a hot flare of pain that shocked, sickened and aged him.
Rivas knew now that pain was just as effective an insulator from Blood as it was from the communion; which made sense, after all, since it seemed that both things were just differently labeled straws for Jaybush to push into the punchbowls of people’s psyches. And though it insulated him from the usual unconsciousness and loss of identity and subsequent period of confusion, it certainly didn’t prevent an awareness of Jaybush—it seemed to force that. When, six days ago in the Cerritos Stadium, he’d taken the sacrament while pressing the blade of his knife through his thumbnail, he’d been distantly aware of a chilly alien sentience; today’s dose of Blood, clarified by the ruining of his right hand, had shown him Jaybush’s memories as clearly as if they’d been Rivas’s own. Another administration of either agent, accompanied by some further physical damage, might…
God knew what it might do. Rivas wasn’t eager to find out.
The engine roar, which had been so steady that he’d stopped being aware of it, abruptly lost most of its volume and became a low uneven chugging. The basket rocked and bobbed for a few moments as it collided with the hull and the basket in front of it, and then it hung blessedly steady. Muffled by the tarpaulin, he could hear voices calling, loudly but not excitedly.
What the hell, he thought nervously. Are we docking? But we can’t be, I’d have felt the turbulence if we’d moved back into shallow water.
Above him a voice shouted clearly, “Take ’em from the back. Here.” Rivas’s cage shook. “I’ll untie it when you’ve got it.”
Through the hull Rivas could hear the footsteps of the girls shifting uneasily, and it reminded him of something. Yes, in all of Jaybush’s memories, even the memories of being the stripped-down crystalline seed drifting through space, he had clearly, implicitly been a masculine thing. Evidently gender could be intrinsic, independent of the physical systems of organs and hormones and whatnot that Rivas had always thought dictated it. That must be, he thought, why women can take the sacrament forever without quite reaching the far-gone stage—there must be some kind of core to femaleness which Jaybush, being male, can’t consume.
Rivas thought of that meteor shower that legend claimed—and his father had verified—lit the sky one night during the year before Jaybush’s birth. He thought, If someone had impossibly known what parasite was riding along among that handful of interstellar debris, could anything have been done then? If the crystal thing can survive huge accelerations and re-entry temperatures and the raw radiations of interstellar space, though, I suppos
e it wouldn’t be bothered by a boot tromp or a hammer blow or being tossed into the fireplace. And how does it get into somebody?
Something metal clanked against Rivas’s cage, and then right next to his head he heard the tarpaulin tear and metal rasp on metal, and he could see a spot of light where a hook had tom through. The hook rattled a bit, and then he heard, a little more clearly because of the hole, someone call, “Got it solid. Go ahead and untie.”
Rivas could feel an agitation in the line that held the basket to the boat—and then the whole basket tilted over, filling up with water, and he knew the far-gone kid must be under the surface, and he lunged downward to hoist him up next to the hook, which seemed destined to become the basket’s highest point. His right hand collided horribly with the boy’s head and Rivas felt consciousness receding, but he gritted his teeth and forced himself to stay aware. Catching a breath and letting himself tumble to what was now the bottom of the cage, he used his good hand to grab the boy’s belt and shove him upward to where, if anywhere in this confinement, there was air.
Rivas braced himself, holding the breath he’d taken, and waited while the cage shook and swung on the hook, and he told himself, Wait, just a few seconds more. They’ve got to haul this up out of the water in a moment. Wait….
His lungs were working in his chest, trying to break the seal of his closed throat and inhale sea water, and again he felt his consciousness fading. Christ, he thought shrilly, you’re about to pass out, man, you’ll drown for sure, struggle to the top while you still can and hook an arm through the bars so that even if you do lose consciousness you’ll be held up out of the water, do you want to die for a far-gone, who can’t even see or think or feel gratitude, do you want to die for this absolutely minimum example of humanity?
He was bitterly disappointed in himself when he realized that he was not going to trade places with the boy. Good job, Greg, he thought—the man hires you to save Uri, and you lose your damn life saving a mindless, poisoned kid who’s probably got only days to live at best, and who’ll most likely die right now as soon as you pass out and let go of him.
Abruptly all the water rushed down past him with a racket of bubbling and the kid was suddenly far too heavy and the surface of the water swirled past his face and he was gasping air—and then his left arm buckled and the boy fell down onto him and Rivas’s crushed right hand was jammed under the two of them and with a scream that only dogs could have heard he sprang away from consciousness like an arrow from a bow.
Rivas had for a while been dimly aware that he was lying on his back with a weight across his middle on a corrugated surface that, though uncomfortable, he couldn’t be bothered to get up from. He didn’t care what had awakened him, for he planned to sleep quite a while longer. It was still dark after all.
Some people were up and about, though. Somebody was even whistling.
Then a wet canvas was flapped away somewhere overhead and suddenly there was light beyond his closed eyelids. Without particularly noticing them, he was aware of the smells of beer, sweat and fish.
“Well!”
Rivas didn’t open his eyes or move.
“Uh,” the voice went on, “this ain’t Blood, in this one.”
“What’s in there, then?” queried another voice irritably.
A finger touched Rivas’s sea-chilled cheek. “It’s… well, Joe, it’s a couple of dead guys.”
“Dead guys.” Rivas heard a chair scrape on a floor. He kept his eyes shut and held his breath when clumping boots approached. If they think you’re dead, he told himself, be dead. “Damn me, you’re right. Jaybirds trying to escape, I guess. Hell! And we’ve paid for the stuff that was in here.”
“Can we get our money back?”
A pause followed, and then a disgusted exclamation as the boots moved away. “That’ll take some considering. Whether we even ask or not, I mean. We could show ’em these two and say, see, these guys dumped the Blood and climbed in in its place, but that’d be awful damn close to admitting we know it’s from the Holy City. It ain’t just to keep the product cold that they use all the extra fuel it takes to drag these baskets on the outside of their boat—the main reason they do it that way is so guys like us can hook it and run real quick, without getting any kind of look inside their boat. And the stuff’s in glass and metal so if there’s any mix-up it’ll just sink. They don’t want rumors getting out about any connection between Irvine and Venice. No, I’m afraid we’ll have to eat this loss. That or go asking to eat some bullets.”
“Dump ’em?”
There was a sigh. “I guess.”
“Out like with the garbage?”
“No point carrying ’em any distance, is there? What’d you want to do, say some prayers over ’em?”
Some gesture may have been the reply, but the next thing Rivas knew the battered metal basket was being noisily pushed across an uneven floor. He braced himself, wondering what the garbage arrangements consisted of around here.
They turned out to be primitive. The man kept pushing the basket across the floor until the bottom edge caught against the sill of a very low, open window, and the basket simply turned over and dumped its two occupants out.
Rivas found himself cartwheeling through empty air—the sensation reminding him of something—and then he impacted onto a slanted heap of rotting, feculent trash. As he rolled dizzily down the slope of broken wood, boxes and bad old food, he was sure that he and the boy were not the first bodies to be tossed here.
Dizzy and sick with the pain of his hand, Rivas simply lay for a while in sunlight at the foot of the garbage heap. When the pain had backed off a little he sat up, worked his arms and legs cautiously to see if anything had broken during his fall—nothing, it seemed, had—and then he looked around for the far-gone kid. He saw him off to the right, lying on his back. He was breathing.
Rivas looked at his own right hand. The fingers were swollen and black, and at least two of them seemed not to be attached to the hand very securely. Poor old hand, he thought sadly.
He looked around, ignoring the mildly interested stares of a couple of children who’d been digging in the trash. He was in a wide court with high foliage-topped brick walls, and an arch to his left showed a segment of old alley that someone had tried to brighten by painting a lot of vividly blue birds across the surface of it. Certainly seems to be Venice, he thought.
He got up and limped over to where the boy lay. The boy’s eyes were open, staring straight up into the noon sun, and Rivas crouched to close them.
“New girls!” the boy exclaimed suddenly. “All right, gonna give ’em a treat, let ’em receive the sacrament from the Messiah himself, yes sir….”
“Good afternoon, Sevatividam,” said Rivas wearily.
“And won’t I touch them! Oh my, yes…” the boy said, and the contrast between the fatuous insinuation of the voice and the bony, wasted face it issued from was appalling.
“I’ve come to take one of them away from you.”
“Some pretties and some piggies,” the boy said judiciously.
“You know,” said Rivas hoarsely, leaning forward and bracing himself against the wall with his good hand, “I don’t think I can kill people anymore. Animals, even.”
“The piggies I’ll touch with my finger.”
“But I believe I could kill you. I believe I’ll try very hard to do that.”
As the boy’s voice diminished into muttering about how tasty it would be, Rivas tried, one-handed, to pick him up. A week ago he might have been able to do it. After five minutes he gave up and stood up straight.
The two children had resumed digging around in the trash—their ancient shopping cart was half full of junk—and Rivas said, “Hey. Kids.”
They looked up warily, their eyes in the wide, unspecific focus of animals ready to bolt in any direction.
“Could you… keep an eye on my friend here for a few minutes?” He knew he might as well be making the request to a couple of the monkeys swin
ging around and screeching in the wall-top greenery, but he needed to make the gesture, needed to let the universe know that he wasn’t ditching the boy.
The children stared at him, and one of them might have nodded before resuming the excavations.
“Thanks.” Rivas trudged to the arch and through it to the narrow alley outside. Tall houses, liberally scaffolded with wooden and iron balconies, leaned against each other in the sun, and to his right the alley was shaded by the rooftop connection of two old buildings, one on either side of the alley, that had bowed forward until their tops touched, like a couple of ragged old women exchanging gossip.
He knew where he was; a block or two north would be the Imperial Canal—no, it was Imperial Highway this far inland—and three or four blocks north of that would be the restaurant where he’d first got a job washing dishes. And where had that doctor lived? In a basement only a few buildings away from the restaurant, he recalled. The standards of cleanliness in the restaurant’s kitchen had provided the man with plenty of patients. And Rivas had gone back to him a few times during the ensuing years—once for a clap cure and a couple of times to have dueling wounds sewed up.