FRACAS MCAN SCOWLED FIERCELY at a harmless couple of Jaybird girls who were ambling down the other side of the street, and was edgily gratified to see them register alarm and duck into one of the ubiquitous prayer parlors, for the response indicated that his shepherd disguise was convincing—at least to the rank and file. And he only had a couple of blocks still to go before he got to the imminent-departure yard, and it looked like he wouldn’t have any trouble getting there while the morning dew was still wet on the wagon he was after, and before today’s fresh batch of wagons began to be wheeled in. Just so he didn’t run into a genuine shepherd! He supposed they probably had some system of passwords or winks or some damn thing that would instantly expose him as a phony. What a damnable advantage Rivas had in actually having been a Jaybird for a few years!
McAn was scared. In all his previous redemptions he’d been careful not to go anywhere near Irvine, and now here he was only a long stone’s throw from the high, inward-slanting white walls of the Holy City itself.
He touched the knife strapped to the inside of his left wrist, but it didn’t give him quite the confidence it usually did. He’d been feeling less than confident ever since the parents of this quarry had reluctantly explained to him that the first redeemer they’d hired to retrieve their son had limped back to Ellay with a bullet in his leg and a story of having been shot at by Jaybird shepherds armed with real working guns and live ammunition.
McAn had asked for five hundred fifths with half payable upon agreement, the most he’d ever asked for a job, and he had explained that he would search only in the areas north of the Seal Beach Desolate. They had objected to that at first, as his clients always did, but he gave them his standard explanation: that the residual radiation—an impressive phrase—was simply so great in those distant regions that no sane person would spend the kind of time there that even the easiest redemption would require, and that even if a Jaybird could be found and snatched at that point, he or she, and probably the redeemer too, would die like a Venetian fish-eater long before they got back to Ellay.
McAn had always known that the story wasn’t entirely true, but until the day before yesterday he’d never worried about how much of an exaggeration it might be.
He’d been following a caravan of several loosely connected Jaybird bands who’d been moving south from the Flirtin hills; he wandered along with them, imitating a birdy imbecile whenever anyone tried to speak to him, and he waited for them to stop somewhere and stage one of their big communion spirals so that he could see if anyone present particularly fitted the description of his quarry.
Finally, just as he’d been about to give up on them and retreat back north, they did all stop for a communion, in a parking lot at the Anahime Convenshin Centr. It had been about noon of the day before yesterday.
The shepherds had climbed to the tops of the old light poles and the weird two-tone roar had started up as the old man in white showed up and walked into the spiral, going around and around as he got closer to the center. McAn had watched the whole spectacle while sitting comfortably on the roof of a truck, remembering to wince occasionally and glance with chagrin at his hand, which he’d wrapped in the realistically red-spotted rag he always took with him now on redemptions. People in severe pain, he’d learned, were disqualified from taking the sacrament.
During the parking lot ceremony he spotted two possibles, and when the sacrament hammered them down he noted which of the sprawled shapes they were, so that after they recovered he’d be able to approach each of them and spring one of the questions the quarry’s parents had primed him with.
Though his luck, as he now knew, had been about to run out, it had not quite, abandoned him yet. The second of the boys, still somnambulistic from the communion, had not only shown clear recognition of the family dog referred to in the question—“Lucy’s chewing all her fur off and she’s covered with sores, what can we do besides have her killed?”—he’d even given the correct answer: “Put garlic in her food, like we did last summer.”
McAn had been eyeing the nearby fences and walls and doorways, looking for a hidden spot where he could knock the kid out and then carry him away unseen, when the shrill metallic whistling began. Because he’d been peering around he was among the first to see the several dozen Y-shaped bicycles racing across the pavement toward the Jaybird crowd, and he grabbed his quarry’s arm and pulled him along in the opposite direction through the confused crowd. An irregular pop-pop began punctuating the screams behind the fleeing pair, but it wasn’t until McAn and his quarry had broken away from the crowd and begun running south along a sheltered sidewalk that he realized the noise must have been gunfire.
The Jaybirds had been at two disadvantages when the attack occurred: most of their number were unconscious or disoriented, and, secure in the knowledge that hooters never dared to attack Jaybird bands, the shepherds had set up the communion in an open, paved spot.
McAn couldn’t get the boy to run for more than a minute at a time, and the fleetest Jaybird fugitives quickly caught up with and passed them, and soon McAn and his quarry were just two bobbing heads in a packed crowd that was being herded south by grim-faced shepherds on horseback. The shepherds held drawn pistols, and kept standing up in the stirrups to look back, and they took every opportunity to drive their herd up steep hillsides and through narrow gaps in the eternal aluminum chain-link fences—clearly they expected the starving hooters to try again. McAn assumed that the wagons, and all the still unconscious communicants, were being taken south too by some other route, but he couldn’t see anything—his horizon was the close heads of the Jaybirds who jogged uncomplainingly along all around him. All he could do was trot along with them and maintain his grip on his quarry’s arm.
They passed the wide street which was Chapman Av. They were in the Seal Beach Desolate now, and showed no sign of slowing down.
McAn still wasn’t too worried. Obviously there would be some opportunity between here and Irvine for him to grab the boy and slip away.
McAn paused now when he came to the alley that he’d reconnoitered last night. He knew it looped around to the square where the wagons stood, and he swept a disapproving glance over the street before he stepped out of the patchy, unwarm sunlight and into the shadows of the alley.
But of course, he thought, no such opportunity came, and here we are in actual goddamn Irvine. I’ve stumbled onto a couple of small pieces of luck—having been healthy-looking enough to be assigned to the detail that loaded wagons with the people, including my quarry, who passed out during the two-day forced march; and being able to salvage this robe from a shepherd killed yesterday, in the confusion of the hooters’ second attack—but now it’s time to make some luck. My disguise is good; they never iron these robes, so you can’t tell that this one spent twelve hours crumpled in my pack, and with the hood up you can’t see the cropped patches on my head where I cut off hair to make this fake beard with.
Think about that second two hundred and fifty fifths! And the unparalleled stories you’ll be able to tell once you get yourself and the kid out of this loony, bottom-of-the-world town.
I think the thing about this place that most puts my teeth on edge, he thought as he silently picked his way along the trash-littered alley, is that there’s nobody in the whole damn ramshackle settlement who’s not birdy as a bedbug. The real shepherds have to hop just to keep slugging all the guys who click over to the speaking-in-tongues channel, and piling them onto the wagons heading into the Holy City. I suppose I ought to punch somebody, just to seem in character. I wonder if there’s a back gate to the city somewhere, where they bring the empty wagons out. There must be otherwise you’d be able to see the piles of old wagons over the top of the wall. Heh heh. Unless they—
He froze, for a ragged figure was crouched tensely at the courtyard end of the alley, apparently staring at the wagon McAn had to get to. Well, McAn thought, his heartbeat beginning to accelerate as he flexed his right hand and stole silently forward, here’s where I start behaving in character.
But with an alertness uncharacteristic of Jaybirds the figure spun to face him when he was still several yards away, and with no hesitation the man drew a knife from his sleeve and lunged at McAn. McAn managed to knock the knife arm aside, but the man collided hard with him and they both tumbled to the filthy pavement. McAn’s false beard was hanging from one ear and was badly unraveled, but he’d sat up and got his own knife out now, and had begun a feint to draw a wide, flank-exposing parry from his opponent—
“Frake!” his opponent gasped, and McAn hesitated.
He peered at the gaunt, red-eyed face. “Who are you?” McAn asked in a clipped whisper, not lowering his knife.
“Rivas.”
“Tell me who you are, or—” McAn looked more closely. “Really?”
Rivas nodded, leaning back against the alley wall and obviously trying to pant quietly.
“What on earth’s happened to you, Rivas? And I thought you’d retired.”
“I did.” He took several deep breaths. “This is… special circumstances.”
McAn got painfully to his feet. “You’re awful hasty with a knife. You I was only going to hit.”
Rivas had got his breath back, and stood up too. “That’s why you were always the second-best redeemer.”
McAn smiled coldly as he carefully re-hooked the beard across his lean young face. “Yeah. I sure do envy what being number one has done for you.”
To McAn’s surprise, Rivas actually reddened. What’s this, Greg, he thought—did you shed the cynical armor too when you shaved off that silly, affected, half beard?
“You’re on a job, I gather,” said Rivas quietly. “Someone in that wagon?”
“Right. The skinny kid just inboard of the right rear wheel. I put him there late yesterday. Which one’s yours?”
“Mine’s already in the city. How’s this—you make some kind of commotion out in the street to get the attention of anybody who may be hanging around here and I’ll drag your boy over to this alley for you, and then I’ll take his place in the wagon.”
McAn stared at him with genuine horrified awe. “You’re going in there to get yours?”
Rivas nodded hopelessly.
And I thought I was walking the farthest, most insanely dangerous edge just by having come this far, thought McAn. Impulsively he tossed his knife to his left hand and held out his right. “Rivas, I’ve always figured you for a posturing, slimy son-of-a-bitch, but by God, I’ll tell anyone who’ll listen that you’re the best damn redeemer there ever was.”
Rivas gave him a fragile smile and took the extended hand. “Thank you, Frake.” He sheathed his knife. “Let’s get moving before they bring the conscious members of this band over here.”
Rivas didn’t know how McAn did it, but no more than half a minute after the young man had loped back up the alley there came a splintering crash from the street, followed by a lot of screaming; he even heard one voice, evidently that of a far-gone startled right over into the last stage, begin babbling about how tasty it was when everybody helped to boil down the heavy water.
Thanks, Frake, thought Rivas. He sprinted to the wagon, rolled the luckily emaciated boy over the rail, crouched to get him draped across his shoulders, then straightened up and, gritting his teeth against the possibility of losing consciousness himself, plodded to the alley. At the last possible instant he changed his mind and instead of simply heaving the kid like a sack of gravel, squatted down and rolled him almost gently onto the pavement.
The unconscious young man was wearing clothes very similar to his own, so Rivas just hurried back to the wagon, climbed in and lay down in the same position the boy had been in, with his face well concealed under someone’s limp shoulder, and then let his breathing and heartbeat slow down. After a while he heard a muted scuffling from the direction of the alley, and thought he heard a whispered, “Thanks, Greg. Good luck.”
The morning began gradually to warm up, and Rivas heard the rumble of other wagons arriving in the enclosed yard. From time to time he heard desultory conversation, though he didn’t catch any words. He actually fell asleep for a while, but came instantly awake when closely approaching boots and hooves clocked on the pavement and the wagon shifted as someone—and then a second person—climbed onto the driver’s bench. “These all still out?” someone asked. Rivas heard the jingling of harnesses.
“Yeah, looks like. Buckled up there? Okay, let’s go, the rest of you walk alongside.
The wagon jerked, then the axles began creaking and it was moving. Rivas could hear the footsteps of the conscious members of the band walking beside the vehicle; to judge by the snifflings and hitches in breathing, at least one of them was quietly weeping.
He felt the grating shifts of a couple of slow turns, and then all too soon the rattle of the wheel rims became a soft hissing and he realized they’d left the pavement and were crossing the hundred yards of pale sand that ringed the Holy City like a gritty moat, presumably merging with the real beach sand on the seaward side. It occurred to him that it would be very easy to break out in a high, keening wail that could be maintained indefinitely by doing it while inhaling too… and as soon as he thought of it, it became difficult not to do it.
One of the plodders alongside must have felt something similar, for the hot noon air was abruptly shaken with glossolalic jabbering.
Rivas wasn’t particularly surprised when no one silenced this babbler—he’d already come to the conclusion that the shepherds did that to keep them from revealing something… but who cared what might be learned by people who were in the very process of entering the Holy City?
“Annoyances!” croaked this far-gone now. “What do I care? Deal with it yourselves, you idiots, I’m not to be interrupted in my cooking…. Sevatividam can’t be bothered with these provincial problems… far places, long ago times, I take a longer view…. What if it was your dreaded Gregorio Rivas? He can’t impede me….”
Rivas had stiffened with panic, assuming that they knew who he was and were only conducting this performance to let him know, albeit a bit elaborately, that he was caught; he assumed the wagon would now stop, the bodies slumped around him would leap up, and he’d find himself surrounded by triumphant shepherds with drawn-back slingshots. But the wagon kept rolling and the plodders kept plodding and the speaker in tongues babbled on: “This stinking boat, you’re trying to kill me, careful, ow…”
Rivas began, one muscle at a time, to relax. Could it simply have been a coincidence? Who the hell was it that was talking, anyway? Obviously not the individual Jaybirds. Was it Norton Jaybush himself? How? And why in English now, when a few years ago it was all just gargling? Though the word—or name—Sevatividam showed up in both versions….
“…Leave me alone, I’m about to give the sacrament in Whittier,” the helplessly babbling man went on. “Oh, look at them all, turn around, you damned old carcass, I want to see them all…. Sevatividam’s blessings on you, my dears… give me your push, children, your at-a-distance strength… you never use it yourselves, you don’t need it… I wish I could just take that from you, not use you all up so fast… but it seems to be linked to your minds, so maybe you do need it… hard luck…. Oh, some first timers, how tasty….At this point the stuff became more the way Rivas remembered it from his own days as a Jaybird, just grunts and burping and conversational-tone yodeling.
The sweat from his moment of panic cooled him and he had nearly relaxed back to the degree of tension he’d been in before it, but suddenly he tensed up with fear again, for the light had dimmed and the air was a degree or two colder and he knew that they were even now under the high stone arch of the gate… and when the brightness returned and the chill passed he felt only worse, for he knew he was now on the inner side of the high white walls. As if to emphasize it for him, the gates slammed loudly behind the wagon.
The vehicle was riding perfectly smoothly now, the wheels making a featureless noise like water being slowly poured into a metal pan. Rivas had begun shivering among the tumbled bodies in the wagon bed, for he could tell by the very scent of the air—a sort of garbagey sweetness with burned overtones mixed with the fish smell of the sea—that he was in entirely unknown territory. He was pretty good at faking and bluffing the Jaybirds in the camps and stadiums and meeting places out there in the hills, though not even too successful at that lately, but now he was in the house of Norton Jaybush himself, the man—if he was a man—through whose generosity the Jaybirds had whatever they had of power and fearsomeness. In here he might find anything.
There are only two things, he thought, that I can be reasonably sure are in here to be found: Uri, and my own death.
The wagon slowed, and a man’s voice said, “All of you—this way,” and the sounds of the wagon’s pedestrian escort—the babbling of the far-gone, the snuffling and sobbing, and the thudding of all the footsteps—receded way to the right while the wagon resumed its course straight ahead, in a silence that only strung Rivas’s nerves tighter.
Quite a while later reins flapped and the wagon came to a stop—after a weird sensation of sliding that made Rivas wonder if they were on a vast sheet of glass—and the shepherd in the driver’s seat spoke: “One dozen as promised, Mister Trash Heap, sir.” Rivas heard the other man on the driver’s bench laugh nervously.
And suddenly there came a sound that made Rivas’s eyes open wide for a moment in pure astonishment; it was as if a man had channeled a whole valleyful of wind through one mouth-sized hole, and then for years experimented with holding all sorts of inorganic but flexible instruments up to that focus point of wind, exploring all the ranges of sound that could thus be produced, cooings and whistlings and bass rumblings, until finally he was able to approximate human speech.
“Yess,” sighed this implausible voice. “Run along you now, shepherds. Roentgens and rads like to bald you here in minutes only.”
“Right,” agreed the driver cheerfully. “Rags and rajahs gonna make me bald. Probably why rajahs wear rags on their heads, do you think? To cover it. Help him get the sleeping guys out of the wagon, will you, Bernie?”
“Okay,” Rivas heard Bernie say in a strangled voice.
The wagon rocked as Bernie hopped down, his boot nails audibly clicking on the ground. Bernie began hoisting up a body on the far side of the wagon from Rivas, but a moment later there was a sound like someone trying hard to sweep a tile floor with tree branches, and then Rivas felt something thrusting between himself and the floor of the wagon bed. It rolled him over, and he had to open his eyes just a slit.
After a few seconds of stunned staring he decided that the thing prodding at him wasn’t a tall fat man with a bucket over his head and bits of cardboard and rusty metal attached all over himself, for Rivas could see blue sky through many gaps in the thing’s neck and chest. He saw now that it had bits of glass for eyes, and some arrangement of rusty tanks and dented copper tubing inside the stripped baby carriage that was its chest, and its head was mainly an oversized cocktail shaker in which, in this silence, Rivas could hear something sloshing.
Somehow it didn’t occur to Rivas that this was the source of the windy voice, that this thing was in some sense alive, until it spoke again. “Wakeful, this one is,” it whistled, “or near.”
Then without any clear transition, though obviously much later, Rivas was thrashing with nightmares on a cold hard bed in darkness.
His head throbbed painfully and he was terribly thirsty, but every time he got up and went into the kitchen and filled a cup from the water tank and started to drink it, he realized he had only dreamed of getting up and was still in the comfortless bed. Finally he actually sat up—and knew he hadn’t done it before because of the unprecedented way it increased the pain in his head—and blinked around at a dim, long room with beds standing every few feet along both walls. The air was stale, and smelled faintly of fish and garbage.
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.
If he was correct, the speakers in tongues were mindlessly relaying not Norton Jaybush’s spoken words, but his thoughts. No wonder the shepherds silenced them, now that he was thinking in English.
So what was that stuff he was thinking in before? A gargling, yodeling, barking sort of language. Rivas remembered once seeing several far-gones all bite their lips at the same instant as they tried to produce some bit of gibberish particularly unsuited to human vocal organs. What language was that? How was it that Norton Jaybush, though born of woman, could, as the bald girl back there had pointed out, thrive in, perhaps require, an environment that strangely poisoned human bodies? Rivas had read old journals written in the decade before Sandoval had reorganized Ellay and set himself up as the First Ace, journals kept during the Dark Year, when for a solid year a yellow-brown overcast of smoke and dust masked the sky and made people wonder if the sun and moon were still out there… and he’d read about the symptoms the bald girl had described….
Uri—and Jaybush himself, that girl said—are in the sister city, he thought, which I’m now sure is Venice, in his temple, which I’m afraid is probably that terrible nightclub of the damned known as Deviant’s Palace. If I’m going in there after her, it would be useful to be able to hear Jaybush’s thoughts while I’m doing it.
He climbed back up the ladder and went inside again. He chose the lightest-looking of the five far-gones, a starved boy with no hair or teeth, and gently worked the blood-tap out of his arm. Blood coursed down the bony forearm and dripped from the limp fingers, but the flow seemed to stop when Rivas tied around the elbow a strip of cloth torn from his shirt. Then Rivas unbuckled the straps that held the strengthless body onto the bed, and he lowered it to the floor.
He climbed down the ladder again, grabbed the kid’s wrists and hauled him out of the shed, crouched and took the body onto his shoulders. Rivas straightened up and took a couple of steps away from the hut to drag the feet clear, and then he was carrying the boy’s full weight.
So, he thought dizzily, can you carry this all the way down to the beach? One way to find out. And if gets too heavy, I can always just drop him and walk on.
As he trudged along under his peacefully sleeping, ruined burden, he was reminded of his very first redemption, four years ago; he’d walked back into Ellay through the South Gate carrying his quarry in just this position.
It had been a favor for a friend. The man who was Rivas’s bass player then had told him that his daughter had run off nearly a month earlier with a band of Jaybirds, and Rivas had offered to try to find the girl by pretending to join the faith himself. It wasn’t a particularly risky thing for him to do, armed as he was with his drink defense and his Peter and the Wolf offense, and he’d managed to find her while her band was still within only a few miles of the Ellay walls, separate her from the band, knock her unconscious and carry her back home.
In fact the most exhausting part of that first redemption had been the subsequent three days, which he’d spent locked in a room with the girl while she raged and wept and broke things and begged to be allowed to return to the Jaybirds and the seductive oblivion of the sacrament. He’d laughed at her, and with his intimate knowledge of the faith he was able to damagingly ridicule its most illogical tenets. When she’d started doing Sanctified Dancing to avoid thinking about what he was saying, he’d brought in his pelican and accompanied her by playing the most insultingly bouncy and childish dance tunes he knew, and shouting encouragements to her like a square-dance caller.
Finally, gratifyingly, she’d come out of it, her eyes lost the birdy glaze, and she’d thanked him for giving her mind back to her.
Rivas had asked his grateful bass player not to tell people about the favor—the Jaybirds were, after all, not a pacifist crew, and theirs was a jealous god—but the bass player now had profound sympathy for other parents in the plight he’d been in, and he couldn’t help mentioning to a few of them the service Rivas was able to perform. Some of these had offered Rivas so much brandy to repeat his feat that he’d been unable to refuse, and by the time he was twenty-eight or so he was making more as a redemptionist than he was as a musician.
Clouds were scudding more thickly across the sky now, as he could tell without raising his head by watching then reflections in the glass under his metronomic feet, and a damp, chilly breeze tickled his ankles and got in under his torn shirt. I wonder who this kid was, he thought, and whether his parents could have afforded the services of a redemptionist. Unlikely. Brandy’s scarce these days, and even McAn, I’ve heard, won’t go out for less than a hundred fifths. Too late for this kid now anyway. There’s no way back for far-gones, and even without that, starvation and sickness seem to have got nearly all there ever was of him.
He squinted sideways at the pale, skeletal hand that flapped limply at his side with every step. Who were you, kid?
Sometimes the breeze from behind slacked, and when it did he thought he could hear the sighing crash of surf, far ahead; and the glass underfoot was frosted-looking now, and he could feel an increasing grittiness of sand with every step. He strained his neck to look forward, and saw that the glass plain ended in a jaggedly shattered edge a few hundred feet ahead. Beyond that was a paleness that had to be sand, and he thought he glimpsed low ragged buildings and points of dim yellow light.
And then above the scratching of his footsteps and the breathing of himself and the doomed boy, he heard behind him a mix of sounds like a thin stick being whipped back and forth through the air and quick taps on a taut snare drum and the rattling of a length of chain, and it was getting closer fast.
He spun around, automatically going into a sliding crouch so as not to fall, and saw, still a hundred yards away but closing, the jungle-gym-stuffed-with-old-car-parts figure of one of the trash men skating with a weird grace across the glass directly toward him, approaching with such speed that it grew from a distant dot to a noisy, sky-blotting bulk in only a couple of seconds, and only at the last instant did he manage to collect his wits and frog-hop out of its way to one side.
Rivas relaxed into the somersault it turned out he was making, and he rolled to his feet several yards beyond the sprawled looseness of the dying boy and watched the skating trash man, well past him now, flail its lawn-mower arms and lean around in a tight, screeching curve that threw up a starlight-glittering spray of glass chips. When it came looping back toward him, working its aluminum-pipe legs to get back some of its lost speed, he waited until it had a lot of momentum and then he feinted to his right and dove to his left.
The thing reached out an arm for him as it rushed past and succeeded in tearing his shirt, but then like an ungainly top it had spun out in a screeching abrasion of metal on glass, and as Rivas turned toward it it toppled and fell, still sliding.
Run up and try to disable it while it’s down, he wondered tensely, or run away? Remembering its speed, and his inert companion, he ran toward it.
The thing was making a terrible racket flailing its junk limbs against the splintering glass, but just as he ran up to it, planning to launch a flying kick at one of its knees, it rolled over and wobbled up onto its wide barbecue-grill feet and faced him.
Rivas skidded hastily to a stop and then just stood and caught his breath, cautiously confident that the thing couldn’t, from a dead stop, close the three yards between them more quickly than he could leap aside.
He stared at the roughly man-shaped construction. It was at least a foot taller than he was and twice as broad through the chest, but its legs were so ludicrously thin that looking at it was like looking at some biped bug under a magnifying glass.
Then it spoke, and it had the same sort of wind-in-the-rafters voice as the one that had apparently knocked him out this afternoon. “Brother,” it sighed. “Go back to bed. I’ll put the bleeder back.”
Rivas remembered the sad bald girl saying she’d soon wind up as one of these, and he had no wish to kill it. He noticed that some of its vacuum cleaner hoses and springs had been torn loose in its fall, and he found himself wishing he knew how to put them back. “Go away,” he said wearily to the thing. “If you try to stop me, one of us will be seriously hurt. I don’t think either of us wants that.”
“No,” the construction agreed, “but let this go I can’t. I’m…obliged… to stop you.” Starlight glittered remotely in its glass eyes.
“No, you’re not,” said Rivas. “Go to bed yourself. Do you things sleep? This boy was dying where I found him. I’d die if I stayed here. Roentgens and rads, right? Come on now—you know this is a place it’d be healthier to be far away from.”
He could hear a valve release a hiss of compressed air before the thing spoke. “It… doesn’t matter what I know,” it said. “It doesn’t matter what you know. Go… back to… bed.”
Exhaustion made Rivas willing to argue with the thing; the only other choice, after all, was to fight. “What will happen if I don’t? If I continue?”
“I’ll…(hiss)…stop you.”
“Would you kill me?”
“…Not mean to.”
Rivas looked beyond it, and then risked a glance over his shoulder at the distant wooden buildings down toward the beach. All this crashing around didn’t seem to have attracted any attention yet, but someone was bound to notice this unlikely trio out here on the glass before long.
“Okay,” he muttered, slumping. He glanced at its knees and tried to estimate which one had been most weakened in its fall; then he decided, and pivoted and lashed out his left foot in a hard kick. He felt it connect and then he was rolling away over the glass, his shoulder numbed by a blow from one of the thing’s arms. He heard a crash behind him:
Scrambling up, he saw that the trash man had fallen over and was stretching its metal arms out toward its broken-off leg, which lay on the plain several yards away. Rivas ran to the leg and kicked it further away—making a noisy clatter—then chased it, crouched, and picked the object up by the knee with his good hand.
The thing was scrapingly hunching toward him, hissing, and he stood still until it was within range and then swung his metal club, banging away the claw hand that was reaching for him, and a moment later, backhanded, he took a solid whack at the bucket head; but even as the club rebounded and Rivas started to hop back, the thing’s other arm darted out and caught his ankle. Rivas sat down heavily.
The trash man was pulling him toward itself, ripping his trouser leg and his skin, and its batted-away other hand was swinging back, clanking as it opened and closed, and the trash man was whisper-screeching, over and over, “Please… please…”
The thing was suddenly too close for Rivas to swing his club, but he did parry the incoming hand with it. Its other hand moved up to his knee, and for a moment he believed it intended to even the score by ripping his leg off at the knee; its grip was like bolt cutters, and Rivas panted through clenched teeth as he tried not to scream.
The other metal hand closed on his knee too, and the trash man pulled him so close that Rivas could stare right into the glass-chip eyes. “Please… please…” the thing was still saying.
He could see wires or tubes under the edge of its chin, and so he raised his club with one hand—the bucket head tilted back to see how the blow would fall—and with his other hand he snatched at the wires and yanked as hard as he could. They tore out and the thing went limp.
Rivas lay there and he stared into the glass eyes while he got his breath back, and he thought he saw intelligence in the two bits of glass, a mind still in there, helpless now but staring out at him in grieved reproach.
Finally he tried to stand up, but the metal hands were still clamped onto his knee. He swore, trying not to imagine another trash man skating in from the horizon right now, and with panicky haste he wrenched at them. He managed to open one hand—it looked as if it had originally been a waffle iron—but the other, some sort of stout caliper, he had to break off at the wrist. For a while he tried vainly to work it off over his knee, but then he remembered that the bald girl had said that trustees only had to wear one leg iron. A token of captivity, in effect. Perhaps this metal band might be mistaken for that. Worth a try, he thought; and one would push such a thing up high enough for it to grip, so as not to have it rattling around one’s ankle all day.
He stood up at last, the trash man’s hand an eccentric decoration for his shredded pants-leg, and wearily plodded to the boy, who of course had slept through the whole thing. He hoisted him up, got him draped over his shoulders again, and resumed his interrupted walk to the beach.
From far behind he heard a faint, rushing hiss, and he spun around so quickly that he nearly fell over, but it was just rain approaching, so he faced south again and kept walking. It became more audible, a multitudinous pattering behind him, and then swept over and past him, hurrying toward the sea, leaving him to follow more slowly in the downpour.
He was careful not to lose his balance where the glass ended, for before it gave way to the sand a dozen yards ahead, it became an obstacle course of rain-slick, broken, tilted shards, a fall on which would certainly cut a person up. He moved slowly over this broken glass section, but his pace didn’t pick up much when he’d got past it, for he was in deep loose sand now.
He squinted up from under his wet eyebrows at the flimsy-looking buildings ahead, and he wished he knew what to anticipate here. What had that girl said? The men are sent to the beach settlement, where they make and repair boats. And they have leg irons welded on. Well, fine, he thought. It sounds like tiring work. I hope they all sleep soundly.
He saw a gap between two buildings, and as he got closer he saw that it was a street that he was looking down the center of; and a moment later, peering through the sheets of rain, he saw agitated human figures. He stopped and tried to see by the faint reflections of yellow light ahead what the people were doing…. They seemed to be leaping and whirling in the rain….
Rivas almost grinned. They were doing Sanctified Dancing. And now that he listened for it he could hear over the steady whisper-roar of the rain the rhythmic hand-clapping of the people who stood around watching. No wonder they hadn’t heard his battle with the trash man.
Well, he thought as he started forward again, this isn’t as convenient as it would have been if they’d all been fast asleep, but it’s better than a few quiet watchful guards.
He was wondering whether to sneak around the far side of one of the structures—which would involve carrying his increasingly heavy burden an extra couple of hundred yards—or just stomp right down the street in a nothing-to-hide way, giving a birdy grin and a “Shepherd’s orders!” to any inquisitive people… when he realized he didn’t have the choice. He’d been seen.
A figure with a lantern was striding out toward him, waving, and in a minute he saw that the person wore the robe—and yes, he could see the crooked staff too now—of a shepherd. Rivas knew he was in no shape to outrun anybody, so he just put on a smile and kept trudging forward… but he was rehearsing in his mind exactly how he’d throw the kid at the shepherd if trouble arose, and in the same motion draw his knife and try for the man’s throat.
But it seemed that wouldn’t be necessary. The man smiled at Rivas with a little less contempt than shepherds usually showed for people, and when he was close enough for talk to be possible over the sound of the rain, he pointed at the unconscious young man and said, “Runaway?”
“Evidently,” said Rivas without hesitation. He saw the shepherd’s gaze go to the boy’s ankles and stay there while a wondering frown wrinkled his forehead, so he added, “Got his leg irons off too, somehow, what do you think of that?” He was acutely aware of the pressure which was his knife sheath against the inside of his right wrist.
The shepherd waved Rivas forward and then fell into step beside him. At least the rain was making the sand firmer underfoot. “I don’t like it,” the shepherd said. “It’s good for them to dance, of course, when it’s that or start thinking the wrong way, but it’s bad that they have to do it so much lately. And now this… sick kid got his irons off and tried to run.” He shook his head. “You,” he said, giving Rivas a stern look that, prolonged for just a few more seconds of silence than it was, would probably have had Rivas tossing the kid and snatching for his knife, “are supposed to see to it that this kind of thing doesn’t happen. You and the other trustees.”
“Yes,” said Rivas cautiously, thankful that his one-leg-iron trustee disguise seemed to be working. “I know. Well, this’ll spur us to be more diligent.”
Rivas found that he’d begun walking in a knock-kneed way to keep the shepherd from getting a good look at his leg iron; he realized this would only call attention to it, and he tried to remember how he’d been walking before.
“Take him straight down the street to the penitence cage,” the shepherd said. “I’ll have the other trustees rounded up. We’ve got to talk about how we’re going to get this situation straightened out. I wish the Lord spent more time here.”
“Me too,” Rivas croaked.
They were almost even with the buildings now, and he could see that the street between the rows of wooden structures was a cracked, sand-scoured section of some ancient highway.
The shepherd was lagging behind, but Rivas forced himself to keep walking at the same pace and, much more difficult, not to turn around constantly to keep an eye on him. So it was almost a relief when the man said, “Oh, say,” and Rivas had an excuse to stop and look back.
“Yes?”
“Why do you suppose your man ran north?”
To see the pretty bald girls, thought Rivas. To go skating with the trash men. “I don’t know,” he said.
The shepherd nodded thoughtfully. “Well—see you soon. We’ll be in the gun room.”
You bet, thought Rivas as he turned back toward the dancers and started walking again. Hold your breath till I get there, okay?
The clapping was loud now, and Rivas could see the spectators lined up on both sides of the street. The dancers were contorting enthusiastically in the rain in spite of the two feet of chain that linked every pair of ankles, waving their arms over their heads, some skipping in short runs across the pavement and some Bo Diddleying in place. Their clothes slapped wetly around their ankles and wrists, and the ones that weren’t bald snapped their wet locks and beards around like whips. Most of them had their eyes closed, and on each face was a nearly identical expression of quiet satisfaction.
Rivas walked right down the middle of the street, trying to stay out of everyone’s way, for no one gave any sign of seeing him.
The section of highway ended not far beyond the dancers and soon he was walking on wet sand again. He was sure he could hear a faint booming of surf now, and he peered ahead worriedly, fearing that he might not, after all this, be able to find a boat. I’ll ditch this kid and swim if I have to, he thought. I wonder where the penitence cage is, and how long it’ll take that shepherd to catch on that I’m not coming back.
The sand was giving way to old concrete again under his aching feet, and then to his astonishment he was walking on what appeared to be new concrete. In some ways it struck him as more miraculous to be able to make and lay concrete than to be able to manufacture ammunition.
He glanced to his left, which was southeast, and dimly saw tall pale buildings in the distance, made into abstract geometrical shapes by the night and the rain and the miles that separated him from them. And it came to him that what he was seeing was the Holy City. The shabby structures on the glass and sand behind him were like toolsheds tucked away out of sight at the back of a big estate…
The ocean is the front door, he thought; the gate the wagon brought me in through was the back door—the servants’ entrance.
Rivas stopped and stared… and then felt goose pimples prickling his arms, for he’d noticed a sphere suspended in the air above the buildings, and it had to be huge to be visible at all at this distance, and there was no glint of light at its bottom to indicate a fire, and he was suddenly sure that the bald girl had meant helium balloons… but where could Jaybush be getting helium?
Though slumped as loosely as ever, the boy suddenly began speaking, and Rivas was so startled that he nearly dropped him. “Who is it?” the boy had burst out. “Oh, him. When will the fool learn to come around to where I can see him, he knows I can’t roll over….”
Rivas was very glad this hadn’t happened when he was talking to the shepherd. There was no mistaking it for anything but genuine speaking in tongues, and far-gones could no more decide to escape than they could fly.
He’d noticed a dark band parallel to his course on his right and he’d been slanting toward it, and now he could tell by the sound of the rain falling there that it was a wide trench full of water. Looking to his left he saw another one further away, and now he noticed a similar band ahead that diagonally connected the two. Canals, he thought. Newly constructed, too, unlike the ones in Venice. Why is Jaybush so fond of canals?
When he arrived at the canal edge he crouched and rolled the young man off his shoulders onto the new concrete, and then he stood up and simply luxuriated in the ability to stand up straight and feel cold rain on the back of his neck, before climbing down into the water. It was warmer than the rain, and he swam out to the middle of the forty-foot-wide watercourse to see how deep it got. He discovered that even out here he could stand on the bottom and still have his chin out of the water. He went back and fetched the kid and then, towing the limp body behind with a collar-grip that kept the sleeping face above the surface of the water, he began moving down the canal toward the sea, sometimes swimming and sometimes wading. The buoyancy the salt water gave them made southward progress much less strenuous, and Rivas wished the canals had extended all the way up to the bleeder huts.
The canal walls tended to throw every splash and gasp back at him as echoes, so he had no hint that he was being pursued until he saw a ten-foot line of blindingly bright yellow light appear high up on the canal wall a dozen yards ahead and then instantly sweep back, past him and well over his head, and recede away northward faster than any bird.
He gaped after it in wonder, and several seconds later realized that it must have been the beam of a searchlight. Rivas had read of such things, and though he wasn’t sure whether or not they worked by electricity, he knew they required a level of technology he thought had been lost many Aces ago.
He resumed dog-paddling down the canal with his bobbing, sleeping burden in tow, a little more quickly now.