Dinner at Deviant's Palace (22 page)

A
T FIRST RIVAS TRIED
to resist the warm euphoric drowsiness that was stealing over him; he reminded himself of the danger he was in, and the much greater danger Uri was in, and he tried to feel tension and anxiety.

Somehow, though, it all seemed postponeable. After all, what could he do to help or hinder things from inside this ridiculous cage? Perhaps the wisest thing to do would be to go to sleep, in this actually quite comfortable bed of rushing water. The shaking wasn’t nearly so bad now that they’d apparently got out past the breakers. It occurred to him that he’d heard of waterbeds, but this was the first riverbed he knew of.

He laughed heartily, and for quite a while, at the notion.

Singing a song seemed like a good idea for a few moments, but sleep proved more imperative. He snuggled up against the steel bars on the hull side, not forgetting to say good night to all the girls on the other side of the wood—what were they in, anyway, a big barrel? A keg of leg, ho ho, a butt of butts; he was whooping with laughter now—then he subsided and arranged himself for sleep, wondering, with the last spark of awareness, why the sea water tasted so… what, not salty…
rusty
, that was it. Like blood.

To his own intense annoyance he let himself sink no further toward sleep. Let me sleep, he begged himself; of
course
sea water tastes like blood. It used to
be
blood. No, the other way around, evolutionarily blood was once just a quantity of sea water contained in the hollow body of some early form of life… sponges or jellyfish or something. Right. Now that
that’s
settled, he thought, let’s go to bed.

But again one part of his mind—a part that was becoming seriously alarmed—resisted sleep. Why, he thought muzzily,
should
the sea water have the rusty iron taste of blood? And why is my thumb… and the bullet lash down my back too… going numb? And what is it that this… thought-dissolving blurriness reminds me of?

The answers arrived almost simultaneously. Shifting to a more comfortable position in the hope of tricking himself into sleep, he became aware of two objects in his hip pocket, a big hard lump and a flat hard disk. Irritably he reached down under the turbulent water and dug them out.

By touch he could tell what they were. They were the jar of Blood, evidently empty, that he’d pocketed after giving the dying boy a whiff, and the lid that had once been screwed onto it. Evidently he was sitting right now in a vigorously stirred soup of Blood. And the oblivion that was eroding the awareness out from under him had the same feeling of being
monitored
that his very first long ago receiving of the Jaybird communion had had.

Taking Blood felt like receiving the sacrament.

He knew this was important… in a way. Actually, wasn’t it something he’d already guessed? Or would have, soon? Of course it was.

No
, insisted the unhappy, struggling part of his mind, it’s
important
.

Right, right. Much too important to consider before taking a little nap.

The salty, rusty fluid crashing around him in the darkness was hot, or so it seemed to him now, and he tried to remember where he was but couldn’t. Evidently he’d got inside the heart of some huge being.

He wasn’t sure who he was himself. The very idea of self seemed odd. He reached up to touch his face and it took all his strength to do it; he fumbled at his own face, feeling the toothless gums, the sunken cheeks, the hairless skull. There was another person too inside the spasming chamber of muscle, a bigger person, one who still had hair, and it warmed him to realize that that was him, too—or he and that person were both equally members of someone higher, the someone whose blood crashed powerfully, sustainingly, around them in the hot darkness…. Individual awareness was now recognizable as a kink in an otherwise perfectly smooth fabric….

One of the four hands in the bouncing basket let go of an empty jar and a lid and then drifted to the bars that, through the covering tarpaulin, abraded back and forth across the hull; and with nearly no more intent than a flower has in turning to the sun, the hand tried to wedge its fingers between one of the bars and the hull.

After a while the basket obligingly swung away from the hull for a moment, as the barge crested a bigger than usual wave, and the fingers were able to curl all the way around the steel bar before the sea slammed the basket back against the hull.

As the fingers of his right hand were crushed between the two ponderous weights, Rivas warped back into self-awareness like a stretched-out-straight spring suddenly released. The hotly nauseating agony in his hand was his anchor, and he forced himself to move toward it along his frayed connection with it, away from the blurred state in which even sharing was a meaningless concept because in the long run there was only one entity in the universe. The pain became more definitely
his own
with every bit of progress, until at last he was again aware of being in the churning cold water in the lightless metal basket with himself
here
and the far-gone boy
over there
.

He held his maimed hand under water—the salt stung it savagely for a moment, but then the cold water began numbing it—and he realized he could see if he wanted to.

He was still in the pitch-dark cage; what he could see wasn’t anything that was here, and he was aware of that, but it was vivid, and certainly nothing he’d ever seen before.

A miles-high stone wall in glaring purple light, wavy and blobbly and full of holes like a frozen splash, cut off half the horizon and a third of the gray sky, and things were visible gliding on diaphanous wings among the lacy stone pseudopods at the top. Looking down, a movement that covered quite a distance, as if his neck was yards and yards long, he saw a thing like an orange spider or a hundred-legged starfish, and he reached out a… Jesus, what
was
that, a sort of unfolding length of dried gut… and touched the orange creature.

Strength flowed into him, and out of the spidery thing, apparently, for it curled its legs and its color dimmed and it slowly settled to the sand. Belatedly he noticed that the creature had two shadows, a red one that lay behind it and a blue one that lay out to one side….

… And then he was in a volcanic-looking natural amphitheater, smooth as a bubble with the top broken away, and, incapacitated by the consequences of some unimaginable self-indulgence, he was watching a crowd of the spider-things. They were arranged in a line curled to form a big spiral, and one of them in the center began walking out of the coil, pausing in front of each of its motionless fellows to extend a leg and make a touch… and at each touch he felt the strength flow into him as the one touched dimmed and slowly collapsed…. This was of course be cause for the occasion he had
become
the one that was walking and touching the others….

Though Rivas knew he could stop seeing any of this any time he decided to, the vision faded now by itself. It had had a flavor of… memory. A rueful recollection.

“Not so tasty, those weren’t,”
spoke the boy in the darkness.
“Just lucky for me that their glow was more a psychic than a chemical effect. Too bad the highfliers never came down. Hard to see, but once I thought I saw one of them carrying something that seemed to be a tool. They might have been
tasty
.”

Another vision was starting up, and Rivas let himself watch.

A dimly green-lit plain was what he saw, viewed from above, with clusters of strange, spherical flowers on long stalks growing up from it. He sensed that he wasn’t alone, and sure enough a moment later a bulbous, streamlined animal went porpoising past him, downward, followed by two more. As he watched them recede, their apparent size diminishing with their increasing distance from him, he saw that they were still well short of the flower globes, which must therefore be huge and much more distant than he’d supposed.

As he started down himself, his ponderous body working to propel him through the transparent but thick medium, he saw that the top half of each sphere was silvery, and he knew that the silver stuff inside was what held each of the spheres up and kept the mooring lines taut, and as he swam closer he saw skeletal constructions inside the bottom halves, and, in the top halves, spots of colored brightness that might have been fires….

The scene changed then, and he glimpsed a spiral line of creatures that looked like walruses made of flexible palm-tree trunks, and again one that he had become extended an extremity—a sort of catfish whisker—to touch each one in turn, and the strength flowed into him with each touch….

And when once again he had drained from their minds enough of the strength, the psychic power to move things at a distance, he swam back to the secluded grotto which he had made his own. He had sniffed out some fairly hot pitchblende and adorned his cavern with it; and though this seasoning left something to be desired, the
entrée
itself was as rich as any he’d ever tasted.

The heavy component of the medium through which he swam was abundant down here in the old quiet valleys, and, using just a flicker of the vast energy he’d taken from his flock, he made a globe of vacuum around a slightly smaller ball of the omnipresent medium. He looked the ball over to make sure it was perfect, and then, still without touching it, moved it away from him, deeper into the grotto. Feeding like this always damaged his body, and though he could make repairs on it almost as easily as he had caused the globe of vacuum to appear, there was no sense in putting the body in a situation where it might be outright destroyed. Too much trouble would be involved in finding another.

The ball was far enough away now, around several corners; and with his mind, powered now by the vast energy he’d stolen, he
squeezed
it.

The resistance was strong, but his power was stronger. He doubled and then redoubled his pressure. The ball, inside its diminishing shell of vacuum, was now half its original size, and continuing slowly to shrink.

He squeezed even harder, and now he could feel the drain on his energy; but what with the local concentration of the heavy stuff, and the slight head start of the already tremendous pressure down here, and the copious amount of power he’d taken from his flock, he was confident that he’d be able to squeeze it to ignition and then glut himself on the resulting radiation, without having to unmake any bit of the crystal which, unlike the aquatic body he was now temporarily wearing, was himself.

When the ball of heavy water had been compressed down to a tiny fraction of the size it had been, he reached into it with his mind and all at once agitated its atoms furiously, using up nearly the last of his stolen strength to do it—but then a second later he was battered by a blast of nutrition, the entire revitalizing spectrum of radiant energy. Suddenly it was easy to maintain the compression, a physical pleasure to squeeze the stuff; and, as always, he had to resist the temptation to drag more matter in and squeeze even harder as his capability increased, had to fight the perverse inclination to squeeze the products of the first ignition into another, and then the ashes of that one into still another, drawing from each compaction a little less energy than from the one before until, carried away and unable to stop, he would heedlessly pass the point where energy could be derived from the transmutations, and each successive fusion would be
taking
energy from him. He’d done that occasionally, on other worlds than this aquatic one, and though the super-heavy, unstable elements he was left with were pleasant to have around, tickling him with the particles of their decay, they weren’t nearly worth the crippling efforts it took to produce them, nor the years of slow recuperation he needed afterward.

The scene changed again, and though the new vision was of the same world as the previous one, Rivas knew that it occurred much later. He was making a long swimming journey across vast extents of the green plain, but finding only empty spheres lying on the ground, the silvery stuff having long since leaked away and the mooring lines curled in limp loops around them. The walrus things were all dead, and the only beings that prowled here were the vampiric facsimiles of them, very hungry now that there were no genuine ones left for them to attach themselves to. One of these voracious, semi-transparent things had been accidentally created each time he had touched one of the walrus creatures that had been in extreme pain; the strength had flowed out from the suffering communicant, but at a sort of psychic slant, so that he’d been unable to catch it and consume it. These stray unabsorbed strengths eventually became a sort of being themselves, solidifying and even acquiring independent wills if they managed to attach themselves to a sufficient number of the genuine, original creatures; and these artificial, hungry things would cling to
him
if they could, and try to drain
him
, and though they’d get more from the disastrous conjunction than they could deal with—a burst of psychic energy that would certainly kill them—it would damage him, too. It was time, regrettably, to leave.

“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…