Dinner at Deviant's Palace (18 page)

For a while he had absolutely no idea where he was. Then he remembered his fear of losing the job at Spink’s, and he tried to get his memory to let him know if that was what had happened. This looks like one of those jigger-a-week rooming houses in Dogtown, he thought, and to judge by how my head feels I’ve been abusing some truly horrible liquor.

He rubbed his face, and was dismayed to feel a four or five day growth of beard—all over his jaw, too, not just on his chin. That’s it, he thought sadly. You’re ruined, Greg. Drunk and bearded in the gutter. Bound to happen eventually. If Uri could see you now, wouldn’t she be sorry! The fresh-faced boy her father drove away thirteen years ago now nothing but a…

He paused in this bathetic reflection, for thinking of Uri had reminded him of something. Of course! How could he have forgotten all
that
? She’d gone birdy, and he’d risked his life to save her but she’d been taken into the Holy City. That made it an even sadder story—young lovers trampled to bits by an indifferent world—though it would be better if there was someone to know about it, a properly anguished audience… maybe he’d go birdy himself, voluntarily this time, just to be to that minimal degree with her at last…. What a touch!

Someone in a nearby bed had been gasping and sniffling for a while, and now let go a couple of loud sobs.

“Shut up,” whispered Rivas impatiently. Goddamn noisy bums, he thought.

He heard the person sit up. “You’re awake?” came a whisper.

“Think I could
sleep
in this damned outhouse?” The other person sounded like a girl. If she only knew who I am, he thought bitterly. She probably grew up singing my songs.

To his annoyance she stood up and shambled over to his bed. Jesus, he thought, she’s not only sloppy fat but a sport too. Bald as a stone. “I wasn’t sure you’d make it,” she said. “You looked real bad when they brought you in. One of the trash men hit you?”

So I’ve descended to getting into fights with trash men, Rivas thought with something like satisfaction. “I wouldn’t be surprised,” he told her. He felt the back of his head. His hair was stiff with dried blood, and there was a lump back there.

“I guess you tried to run.”

“Oh, yeah?” said Rivas, stung. “Bastard probably snuck up behind me.”

“Snuck up behind you,” repeated the girl in a tone of polite but absolute disbelief. “Right.” He was about to argue, but she went on. “I’ll be one myself soon,” she said sadly. “Lost my hair a while ago, and got the fever bad now. They’ll probably put me in one I helped to build.”

“Probably,” Rivas agreed, not caring what she was talking about. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’d like to—” He stopped talking, for he’d glanced at the window in the far wall, and all he could see through it was night sky… and there was no place within Ellay’s city walls, except up in the ragged towers, from which one could get an absolutely unobstructed horizontal view of the sky. He stood up, breathed deeply until the sudden dizziness passed, then hurried to the window and looked out.

A glassy plain, flawed with yards-long cracks here and there, reflected the bright stars, and in the distance was the straight white line of a wall dividing the glass from the sky. And then he remembered his decision to follow Uri inside, his meeting with Fracas McAn, the thing that was made of old litter but walked and spoke…. He could remember nothing beyond that, but clearly this girl must be right, he must have tried to run, and been chased down…

He was thankful that he couldn’t remember.

At length he turned away and stared at the form beside his bed that was the girl. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I must not have been making much sense just now. I had… forgotten where we are.”

“I wish I could forget,” she said.

“What do you—what do we—do here?”

“Oh”—he saw her spread her hands—“work. There’s machines that need tending, and the helium balloons always need patching—”

“
Helium
balloons?”

“Yeah, big old things for observation along the coast. I don’t like that job. I always burn myself with the iron, and the glue makes me dizzy.”

“Ah.” Obviously she means hot air balloons, he thought.

“And we build the trash men too, to do the really heavy work, though I understand we’re not making ’em as good as they used to be made. People say the Lord is getting tired of everything and doesn’t care so much that things be done just right anymore. And down at the beach the men mainly build and repair boats. That’s probably where you’ll be sent.”

Something was moving, way out there on the glass plain, and Rivas turned back to the window. In the middle distance a thing was limping wearily along. It looked like a huge misshapen puppet that someone had made of papier-mache stretched over a wire framework and had then partially burned, and it plodded along on its uneven legs as if on an errand that would take centuries to complete.

Rivas turned to the girl again, feeling like a child lost in a strange, cold house. “You said,” he began, but his voice came out soprano and he tried again. “You said put you in one of the ones you made. What did you mean?”

“What’s good for the Lord isn’t good for ordinary people,” she said. “We get sick here—and at his temple in the sister city, too, I hear—our hair falls out, and we get, like, sores, mostly on our feet and legs… and any that are pregnant don’t stay that way long… and so when we get so bad we’re gonna die, he—Jaybush—puts us into the… trash men.” She began crying again. “They call ’em trash men even if it’s a girl they put in it. Don’t make no difference, it ain’t anything, not in that way….”

Rivas was breathing fast. “What the
hell
, can’t you… can’t you
kill
yourselves, at least? Christ, they let you use tools, right?”

“Yeah,” the girl admitted, nodding. “But… it’s a sin, of course, suicide is, though somehow here in the city people don’t worry much about sins anymore… and anyway they… the trash men… gee, they do last practically
forever
.”

“Well, that’s
fine
,” Rivas whispered. “Listen, did a girl arrive here a couple of days ago? Slim and dark-haired with… I mean, a woman with dark hair….” He tried to remember the glimpse he’d caught of Uri in the Regroup Tent night before last. “A little bit heavy,” he finished lamely.

“Everybody in all the wagons before yours, for a week, nobody’s been brought here. They all went straight on south, the men to work on the boats and the women to be shipped direct to the temple in the sister city… that’s where the Lord is right now… and of course all the far-gones were took right to the bleeder huts.”

“Where’s the sister city?”

“I don’t know. We better get back in our beds. They don’t like it when we talk among ourselves.”

“Is it north of here, or south? The sister city,” he added, seeing her blank look.

“Oh. I don’t know.” She shambled back to her bed, yawning.

Rivas looked out the window. The limping thing was a distant unrestful figure far out across the plain. “What goes on in the—what did you call ’em?—bleeder huts?”

The boards under her mattress creaked as she climbed ponderously in. “Oh,” she yawned again, “bleeding, I suppose.”

Well, yeah, Rivas thought, not moving toward, his own bed. I had to ask?

“Tomorrow, probably,” the girl said sleepily. Then, after he’d given up on hearing any more from her, she added, “They’ll take you to the beach settlement.” After another long pause, she went on, “And weld your leg irons on.”

Zat so, thought Rivas. Leg irons, is it, and welded on. But of course, Greg, it’ll just be until you get so deteriorated that they put you in a trash man. My God. Well, I leave
tonight
.

“Of course,” said the girl, so sleepily that Rivas knew this would be her last statement of the night, “if they make you a trustee, you only gotta wear one.”

That doesn’t change my mind, kiddo, he thought. He went back to his bed and lay on it until he was sure the bald girl had fallen asleep, and then he got up silently and tiptoed down the central aisle to the end of the room. The door there was locked, but it was the work of a moment to poke his knife blade between the door edge and the jamb, lift the bar out of the slots outside and ease the door open. Evidently the authorities didn’t expect the inmates to have any tools—or initiative, probably.

He edged half his face past the door jamb, peered around with that eye, and then stuck his whole head out. It was brighter outside, with the stars and faint webbing of cloud reflected on the plain, and there seemed to be a faint glow emanating upward from under the glass. He didn’t see any of the trash men.

To his right was the same bleak, unearthy vista he’d seen from the window, but the view to his left, which was south, was more conventional; rows and rows of barracklike shacks, pretty clearly identical to the one he was crouched in the doorway of, receded away in the dimness.

He noticed that each one seemed to be casting a very faint shadow of light, like a building in a photographic negative, but when he peered in wonder he saw that the “shadows” were just even, abraded patches of glass, which reflected the starlight and the subsurface glow in a faint, unfocused radiance. Evidently the shabby buildings were unmoored, and being gradually shifted toward the sea by the wind, like a fleet of very old and slow ships.

Rivas ran silently to the next row of sheds, and snoring from inside the nearest one confirmed his guess that it was a duplicate of the one he’d left. One row at a time, with much fearful peering-about between sprints, he passed ten rows of the long shacks, and except for the one he’d been in and the next two, they all seemed to be empty.

Once there had come a mournful, windy wail from far away across the glass plain, but though he’d snatched out his knife and then frozen, the sound had not been repeated and no motion had been visible anywhere, and he’d eventually moved on.

The tenth row of sheds was the last, and south of him now was only a number of small round huts on stilts. Unlike the barrack buildings, these were arranged in irregular clusters, like huge mushrooms or termite towers, and it was hard to guess how many there might be. The bleeder huts, he thought uneasily.

The shore lay somewhere beyond them, so after making sure his knife was both firmly sheathed and easily drawable, he set off at a careful jogging pace from which he could almost instantly stop, break to the side at a wide angle, or double his forward speed.

He passed a dozen clusters of the little raised buildings during the next ten minutes, but when he drew near the very last one, with only featureless glass beyond, he slowed, and when he was next to it he let his pace falter, and then finally he stopped.

What’s this, he asked himself sourly, pure
curiosity
?

Well, hell, he thought, how can you not stop and at least peek into something called a bleeder hut?

He moved toward the structure’s four-foot-high ladder as silently as a shadow… and in the sudden subjective silence, without his own breath and heartbeat pounding in his ears, he became consciously aware of something he’d subliminally noticed several seconds earlier.

Soft, regular breathing, not quite snores, could be faintly heard issuing from these stilted huts—and every pause between inhalation and exhalation, every hitch and sigh and occasional grunt, was exactly identical, from hut to hut, in perfect, effortless unison, a subtle prodigy being quietly performed out here on this lake of glass with no audience but Gregorio Rivas and the remote stars.

I’ll be damned, he thought as he approached, then touched, the wooden ladder—at any moment now I may become the first person I’ve ever heard of to be a witness to people
snoring
in tongues.

The ladder was lashed together with wire and old rope, and creaked when he put his weight on it, but he was certain nothing inside the hut could hear any noise he might make; he wasn’t sure exactly what there was to fear in this vitreous wasteland, but he knew there was nothing threatening nearby… certainly not in this lonely, southernmost hut.

The door swung open quietly at his touch—there was not even a token latch here. Inside he dimly saw five beds, but they were leaned up against the walls at steep angles, and when his eyes adjusted to the darkness he saw that each sleeping body was belted to the bed frame; and when he stepped closer to one, he saw that a narrow dark tube was attached to the inside of the person’s elbow, and curled down to the floor, where it disappeared through a hole drilled in the boards.

Rivas felt a little queasy at the sight. Bleeder hut, he thought; I get it. But why drain off the blood of far-gone Jaybirds?

He went to the ladder and climbed back down to the glass, and then bent over and peered under the hut. All five tubes, he saw, fed into a central tank which was connected by metal pipes to a couple of smaller tanks. Something that looked like an old-time air conditioner was attached to the front of the main tank, and it had a metal nozzle projecting from it. He put his finger in the nozzle and felt the grooves of screw-threading… and when he took his finger out there was a dry powder on it.

He sniffed it… and was suddenly reminded of his days as a destitute dishwasher in Venice, for the powder was, unmistakably, Blood.

He looked back at the hundreds of other bleeder huts, standing nearly silent in the starlight, and he was sure that each of them, too, held sleeping far-gones whose blood was steadily being drained through tubes into a tank and somehow being refined into the deadly Venetian drug.

Rivas shivered with fear, but for once it wasn’t for himself. This is big, he thought unhappily, bigger than anyone dreams. I wonder if even the shepherds know.

Blood is manufactured in the Holy City.

The bald girl back there said that all newly arrived women—including, presumably, Uri—have been shipped to the sister city. I think I know now what the sister city is.

And, God help me, I’m afraid I may know what place, there, is Jaybush’s temple.

He paused indecisively, trying to assimilate this new knowledge, and he remembered wondering who was talking when the far-gones spoke in tongues—what was the origin of the signal for which they were just passive receivers. He had guessed that it might be the voice of Norton Jaybush himself, who, having so to speak eaten their souls from within by means of his devastating sacrament, couldn’t then entirely withdraw his psychic teeth from the shells of the many bodies, so that they resonated when he spoke… but now it occurred to Rivas that if he was postulating psychic teeth, then he was talking about psychic resonances, too.