Dinner at Deviant's Palace (6 page)

There was a drunken girl stumbling around, too, who seemed at first to be with the inexpert pelican player but was eventually led away by a grinning baldy-sport who, Rivas happened to know, was a Blood dealer. What’s the matter, thought Rivas sourly, the dope trade so bad you’ve got to pimp in your spare time? I’d go rescue her if I wasn’t certain she’d drift right back here to one of you.

Some people, he thought, simply have no will to survive—they’re walking hors d’oeuvres waiting for someone who can spare the time to devour them. And while it’s probably some such unattractive quality as egotism or vanity that has kept me clear of… that catastrophic relaxation, it’s the reason I’m still alive and able to think, and I’ll work on keeping it.

Rivas smiled, remembering his response to his first taking of the Jaybird sacrament—while the rest of the recovering communicants had been praising the Lord Jaybush and making sure they knew when the sacrament would be administered again so as not to miss it, young Gregorio Rivas, though stunned, exhausted and glad to have found shelter and company, was coldly appraising the situation. He didn’t doubt that the mysterious Norton Jaybush was certainly more than a man and possibly a god, but the prospect of abandoning his individuality in order to “merge with the Lord” was profoundly repugnant to him.

The Jaybird band that picked him up had taken him to a nest in one of the neglected structures outside the wall and introduced him to the Jaybird way of life. He had, that first day, watched several of the far-gone communicants “speaking in tongues,” and he was disturbed not so much by the gibberish pouring out of the slack faces as by the fact that they were all doing it in precise, effortless unison, as if—and Rivas still recalled the image that had occurred to him then—as if each of them was just one visible loop of a vast, vibrating worm. Rivas had had no wish to graft himself on, and soon discovered that an alcohol-dulled mind was inaccessible to the sacrament. Thereafter, despite the Messiah’s ban on liquor, he had been careful to take the sacrament only when he was, unobtrusively, drunk. This let him parry the alertness-blunting effects of the damaging communion… though it wasn’t until he got the idea of incorporating his musical skills into the Jaybird services that he found himself able, if only furtively, to riposte.

And then, when he’d finally left the Jaybirds and drifted northwest to Venice, there had been Blood.

Venice was a savage carnival of a town that had sprung up like crystals in a saturate solution around the semicircular bay known as the Ellay-Ex Deep, in the center of which was a submarine pit that was reputed to glow with fantastic rainbow colors on some nights. A person who had a lot of money and could take care of himself could sample some amazing pleasures, it was said, in the rooms above the waterfront and canalside bars—Rivas had heard stories of “snuff galleries” where one could strangle to death people who were actually volunteers, frequently but not always goaded to this course by the money that would subsequently be paid to their families; of “sporting establishments,” brothels whose inmates were all physically deformed in erotically accommodating ways; of sport-seafood restaurants, whose long-time patrons eventually could be conveyed inside only with some difficulty, being blind, decomposing and confined to wheeled aquariums… but eager for just one more deadly, fabulously expensive meal; and of course he’d heard whispers about the quintessential nightclub of the damned, the place about which no two stories were consistent but all attributed to it a horrible, poisonous glamor, the establishment known as Deviant’s Palace.

As a jiggerless young vagrant, Rivas was in no position even to verify the existence of such fabulous places, and even a tortilla with some beans rolled up in it was the price of a day’s hard labor—but Blood was cheap.

The drug was a reddish brown powder that could be snorted, brewed, smoked or eaten, and it sucked the user into a semicomatose state, comfortingly bathed by the triple illusion of great deeds done, time to rest, and warmth; longtime users claimed to feel also a vast, loving attention, as if it was God himself rocking the cradle.

In Venice it was daringly fashionable to sample Blood, perhaps because the genuine Blood freaks were such an unattractive crew. Many of them simply starved to death, unwilling to buy food with money that could be used to get more of the drug, and none of them ate much, or bathed, or shambled any farther than to the next person that could be wheedled out of a jigger or two, and then back to the Blood shop.

After Rivas found himself a steady job washing dishes in one of the many restaurants and got a little money, he wandered one evening into a narrow little Blood shop beside one of the canals, curious about the drug because in Ellay it was illegal and expensive. The man who ran the shop was a user himself, and delivered such a glowing panegyric in praise of the stuff that Rivas fled, sensing that this all-reconciling drug would rob him of his carefully constructed vanity, his painful memories of Urania, his budding musical ambitions… in short, everything that made him Gregorio Rivas.

“Beautiful morning, isn’t it?”

Rivas jumped realistically and looked with wary hope at the man who’d paused beside him. Though not as tall as Rivas, he was a good deal stockier, and except for his nose and his eyes his whole face was hidden by a hat and a bushy copper beard.

“Uh, yeah,” said Rivas in a nervous tone as he shifted his knapsack to a more comfortable position on his shoulders. “Kind of cold, though.”

“Yeah, it is.” The man yawned and leaned against the wall beside Rivas. “Waiting for someone?”

“Oh yes,” said Rivas quickly, “I—” He paused and then shrugged. “Well, no.”

The man chuckled. “I see. Listen, I’m on my way to get some food. You hungry?”

Rivas hoped that the quick gesture of touching his wallet looked spontaneous. “Uh, I guess not.”

“You sure? The place I’m thinking of will give us each a big plate of
machaca con juevos
, on the house, no charge.” He winked. “And I can get us a table right next to the fire.”

Rivas frowned. This was beginning to sound wrong. “Yeah? Where’s this?”

“Oh, it’s a little place on Spring, run by some friends of mine.” The man yawned again and stretched his arms over his head and then let them fall—one of them landed, and stayed, around Rivas’s shoulders.

Rivas’s mouth became a straight line. “Spring and what?”

“Huh? Oh, only a couple of blocks from here, Spring and Main. A five minute—”

“Right.” Rivas stepped out from under the man’s arm. “That would be the Boy’s Club. No thank you.” He strode off to find a different wall to lean on.

But the man came hurrying after him. “You know about the place, huh? Well, listen, lad, this is no time for false pride. Let me just—”

Rivas spun to face him, and he let the man see the knife he’d snatched from his right sleeve. “I can have it in your heart so fast you won’t have time to yell,” he remarked, not unkindly.
“Vaya.”

“Jesus, kid,” the man exclaimed, stepping back, “okay!” Once out of range of the knife he permitted himself to amble away insouciantly, and he called back over his shoulder, “But you could have had a friend!”

I like the way, thought Rivas in almost honest puzzlement as he settled the knife back in its sleeve sheath and walked on, that every person in the world thinks his or her friendship is worth something. My God, if I really was a broke, hungry kid, I’d be a lot more chagrined at the loss of that breakfast.

Earlier Rivas had noticed a gang of young people crouched around a fire under a canted stone arch beside the Relic Exchange, and when he glanced in that direction now he saw that one of the girls was walking toward him, smiling, her hands in the pockets of her long, pavement-sweeping dress.

“Lost a friend, huh?” she asked when she was close enough to speak quietly and be heard.

“Oh.” Rivas waved Vaguely. “I didn’t know him. He just came over and started talking to me.”

“Are you hungry? Come and share our breakfast.”

Rivas’s heart was thumping, for he suspected this might be the baited hook he’d been looking for, but he made himself look wistful as he said, “Well, I don’t have any money….”

The girl put her hand on his shoulder and looked into his eyes. “Money is just the checkers in a game played by unhappy children,” she told him earnestly, and he turned away in case his sudden burst of feral satisfaction might show in his face—for he recognized her statement as one of the standard Jaybird come-along lines, unchanged since he’d first heard it on that lonely morning thirteen years ago. He’d later used it himself when out on recruiting expeditions.

“That may be true,” he said, reciting a response to it that he remembered as being easy to counter, “but you need money to live.”

“No,” she said gently, pulling him toward the leaning arch, “you’re exactly wrong. You need money to
die
. It’s love you need to live.”

He laughed with sophomoric bitterness. “That’s even harder to find.”

“Anything’s hard to find,” she told him, “if you don’t know where to look for it or what it is.”

This girl’s smooth, Rivas thought as he allowed himself to be led toward the group of Jaybirds, who were all looking up now and smiling at him; the grime around her neck and wrists has been there a while, and the dress has been slept in, but the figure’s adequate, she delivers her lines with fair sincerity, and, despite her teeth, that smile is as bright as a lamp in a window on a stormy night, and it’s the only thing a hungry stray would notice anyway.

The Jaybirds in the circle shifted to make room for Rivas, and he looked around sharply as he sat down on the damp dirt, but Urania wasn’t one of them. It seemed to be a typical band—mostly young people, their faces ranging in expression from the timid optimism of the new recruit through the sunny confidence of those who, like the girl that had snagged him, had been with the faith for a while, to the vacuous inattention of a couple of long time communicants, on whose faces the obligatory smile sat like a welcome mat in front of an abandoned house.

“This is a new friend of ours,” his guide told the group as she sat down next to him, “who’s been kind enough to accept our invitation to breakfast.”

There were quietly delighted exclamations, and from all sides Rivas was warmly assured that his arrival had brightened their day enormously. Rivas set about the task of responding as they would expect him to.

Abruptly he realized that he was shaking hands and grinning like an idiot
spontaneously
—for at least several seconds there he had not been acting. He felt a faint stirring of uneasiness—no, genuine fear—deep inside himself, for this had happened to him only twice before in his life, this warm, happy surrender of personality: once thirteen years ago when as a scared runaway he had first been approached by the Jaybirds, and then once only three years ago while performing his last redemption. He had finally located the girl he’d been hired to snatch, had finalized his plan for the escape late that evening, and had incautiously permitted himself the luxury of relaxing in the crowded Jaybird nest in the meantime. Both times it had been just a brief slip, and he’d only been vulnerable at all because of extreme fatigue—but what was his excuse this time?

“What’s the matter, brother?” A skinny Jaybird girl had noticed Rivas’s sudden chill and was leaning forward solicitously, stroking his cheek with one hand and, he noticed out of the corner of his eye, furtively twitching the other hand at her companions in the tighten-the-net signal. Instantly the gang closed around him, expressing concern and as if by accident blocking all the directions in which he might make a run for it.

Rivas looked around at them all and decided it was time to find out which one was the boss here. “I, uh, was just thinking,” he stammered, “I really should be trying to find a way to get back home; to my family.”

He knew this called for a strong block, and that he’d learn now who their leader was; and as he’d guessed, it was Sister Sue, the girl who’d found him, that now knelt in front of him and took his hands and, leaning almost close enough to kiss, stared hard into his eyes.

“Trust yourself,” she said to him in a low vibrant voice that seemed to resonate in his teeth. “You realized that they weren’t your real family, didn’t you, saw that there are qualities and depths in yourself that they can’t share or recognize? Questions they not only can’t answer, but can’t even understand? That is why you left them—no, don’t interrupt—think about it, and you’ll realize I’m right. I knew the moment I saw you that you had a real soul and that you were seeking the family that you can join
totally
. I don’t say trust me, or them, or anyone; I tell you that the only person you dare trust is yourself. And where did your need to find love lead you? To me. To us.”

Her eyes were glistening with tears, and the other Jaybirds, even the deteriorated ones, were nodding at him and humming deep in their throats, half of them on a very low note and half on a very high one, and the insidious two-toned buzz seemed to get right in behind his eyes and set all the contents of his brain vibrating into softened blurs.

It was hard to remember anything… nearly impossible to hold onto a thought for more than a few seconds… but he knew he didn’t
need
to anymore. The self-consciousness, the anxious policing of his personal boundaries, could at last be relaxed.

He felt tired—his knees didn’t seem to have their usual spring—but of course he hadn’t gotten much rest last night, and he didn’t have any reason to stand up anyway. He was among people he could trust.

He was aware of some inconsistencies between his memory and his perceptions—he remembered this Jaybird band as consisting of different people, and he thought he’d been sitting with them at a different corner, and the gray overcast he remembered seemed to be gone, and his clothes were somehow clean and pressed again, no longer caked with dust and dried blood—but his own personal memories and perceptions no longer seemed crucially important.

He smiled into the pair of eyes that seemed to fill the whole world, and he realized that he felt better already. The loss of Urania might have happened years ago for all the pain it caused him now, and even the aches and stiffnesses from the beating Barrows and his men had given him last night, after Urania’s birthday party, were gone.