AT 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…
And then, like every time before, after much waiting there would come the shiftings, the stretching… with his obsessive self-attention he’d notice the faint stressing of an electron valence here, the tendency of a molecular ring there to become just the slightest bit elliptical… and he’d know he was near something.
Most often it would pass; and sometimes he could feel the tickle of hard radiation, and he’d know to propel himself away, for though hot naked nuclei and crowded photon-waves were delicious, it would unmake him to fall into one of the dense furnaces from which they sprayed. And then, too, it often happened that, though there was none of the fusion-heat, the stretching effect would simply become steady, and he’d have to use up more energy to get closer… and of course in the heartbreaking majority of cases he’d impacted onto a sterile surface devoid of life, and he had had to spend still more of his own power just to leave and get back out to the eternal sea.
But always before he’d come dangerously close to the point where converting any more of his crystal-self to energy would mean losing some of his personality and memories, he’d found something, if only seas of primitive life that barely repaid the exit fee; and once in a while he found the tasty ones, the ones who knew they were ones.
“Sentience,” said the far-gone boy smugly. “That’s what Sevatividam likes.”
Always he learned, and eventually even came to think in, the language of his hosts… though he always thought of himself by his own, real name, which he’d always had, and had by now heard rendered into—it must be—thousands of accents, on waves that had vibrated in air, water, methane, ammonia… the name best rendered in the language of these people here in this newest place by the syllables Sevatividam.
This place—Rivas caught several scenes at once: the glass plain he’d been on last night, the walls of a canal moving past under a blue sky, a glow of warm nourishing nuclear fire shining up through the water of a harbor at twilight, a rooftop balcony with bent towers beyond it as white and bumpy as the spinal columns of giants—this place was one of the best he’d ever come across.
“Lots of people,” the boy said. “As tasty as any I’ve found.” He sighed. “I wish I’d been able to maintain their little local golden age, their little renaissance, a decade or so longer; it wasn’t costing me all that much energy and attention to cultivate great artists and doctors and politicians among them, and even though it would have meant postponing the real feasting for a while, how luscious they’d have been after I’d let them fall from a real cultural height, tumble back down to the old despair after a whole generation of confident optimism!”
The far-gone kid sighed again. “But of course after only four years of cultivating and fertilizing them, I got carried away.”
The visions were dimming out—or, more accurately, Rivas was losing access to them—but he got a glimpse of a tremendous amount of rock falling from all directions into a point of intolerably bright light. He was squeezing the whole pile through dozens of levels of fusion and he could feel the tickling all through his body—and then everything became the white light, and it was all he could do to make a shell around his body to keep it from being vaporized in the explosion he’d accidentally touched off.
“I never got so carried away before,” the far-gone observed in a voice half rueful and half awed. “I never made quite so much of the heavy unstable stuff. I guess if you have too much of it all piled together at once it begins to decay in step or something, or chain reacts like a live coal on a stack of paper… for years after that error in judgment I scarcely had strength to move, let alone donate energy and attention to maintain the Ellay renaissance… yes, getting the Holy City paved in glass was very expensive….”
For a while the kid was silent, then he laughed softly. “But even after just four years, they weren’t bad; after their precious Sixth Ace was assassinated and all their artists burned out and went mad after being deprived of my unsuspected support, and everybody saw that the brief but tantalizing promise was all a lie. People are so tasty when they’re truly embittered, truly despairing… and that’s when they come to Sevatividam. They can’t stand the bitter rain, so they run in under one of the two awnings—religion or dissipation—and guess who’s waiting for them under both awnings at once….”
The tumbling sea water had flushed the dose of Blood out of the metal basket, and the effects were wearing off. He had lost the ability to see Jaybush’s memories. His hand was numb except when anything touched it—when that happened it exploded in a hot flare of pain that shocked, sickened and aged him.
Rivas knew now that pain was just as effective an insulator from Blood as it was from the communion; which made sense, after all, since it seemed that both things were just differently labeled straws for Jaybush to push into the punchbowls of people’s psyches. And though it insulated him from the usual unconsciousness and loss of identity and subsequent period of confusion, it certainly didn’t prevent an awareness of Jaybush—it seemed to force that. When, six days ago in the Cerritos Stadium, he’d taken the sacrament while pressing the blade of his knife through his thumbnail, he’d been distantly aware of a chilly alien sentience; today’s dose of Blood, clarified by the ruining of his right hand, had shown him Jaybush’s memories as clearly as if they’d been Rivas’s own. Another administration of either agent, accompanied by some further physical damage, might…
God knew what it might do. Rivas wasn’t eager to find out.
The engine roar, which had been so steady that he’d stopped being aware of it, abruptly lost most of its volume and became a low uneven chugging. The basket rocked and bobbed for a few moments as it collided with the hull and the basket in front of it, and then it hung blessedly steady. Muffled by the tarpaulin, he could hear voices calling, loudly but not excitedly.
What the hell, he thought nervously. Are we docking? But we can’t be, I’d have felt the turbulence if we’d moved back into shallow water.
Above him a voice shouted clearly, “Take ’em from the back. Here.” Rivas’s cage shook. “I’ll untie it when you’ve got it.”
Through the hull Rivas could hear the footsteps of the girls shifting uneasily, and it reminded him of something. Yes, in all of Jaybush’s memories, even the memories of being the stripped-down crystalline seed drifting through space, he had clearly, implicitly been a masculine thing. Evidently gender could be intrinsic, independent of the physical systems of organs and hormones and whatnot that Rivas had always thought dictated it. That must be, he thought, why women can take the sacrament forever without quite reaching the far-gone stage—there must be some kind of core to femaleness which Jaybush, being male, can’t consume.
Rivas thought of that meteor shower that legend claimed—and his father had verified—lit the sky one night during the year before Jaybush’s birth. He thought, If someone had impossibly known what parasite was riding along among that handful of interstellar debris, could anything have been done then? If the crystal thing can survive huge accelerations and re-entry temperatures and the raw radiations of interstellar space, though, I suppose it wouldn’t be bothered by a boot tromp or a hammer blow or being tossed into the fireplace. And how does it get into somebody?
Something metal clanked against Rivas’s cage, and then right next to his head he heard the tarpaulin tear and metal rasp on metal, and he could see a spot of light where a hook had tom through. The hook rattled a bit, and then he heard, a little more clearly because of the hole, someone call, “Got it solid. Go ahead and untie.”
Rivas could feel an agitation in the line that held the basket to the boat—and then the whole basket tilted over, filling up with water, and he knew the far-gone kid must be under the surface, and he lunged downward to hoist him up next to the hook, which seemed destined to become the basket’s highest point. His right hand collided horribly with the boy’s head and Rivas felt consciousness receding, but he gritted his teeth and forced himself to stay aware. Catching a breath and letting himself tumble to what was now the bottom of the cage, he used his good hand to grab the boy’s belt and shove him upward to where, if anywhere in this confinement, there was air.
Rivas braced himself, holding the breath he’d taken, and waited while the cage shook and swung on the hook, and he told himself, Wait, just a few seconds more. They’ve got to haul this up out of the water in a moment. Wait….
His lungs were working in his chest, trying to break the seal of his closed throat and inhale sea water, and again he felt his consciousness fading. Christ, he thought shrilly, you’re about to pass out, man, you’ll drown for sure, struggle to the top while you still can and hook an arm through the bars so that even if you do lose consciousness you’ll be held up out of the water, do you want to die for a far-gone, who can’t even see or think or feel gratitude, do you want to die for this absolutely minimum example of humanity?
He was bitterly disappointed in himself when he realized that he was not going to trade places with the boy. Good job, Greg, he thought—the man hires you to save Uri, and you lose your damn life saving a mindless, poisoned kid who’s probably got only days to live at best, and who’ll most likely die right now as soon as you pass out and let go of him.
Abruptly all the water rushed down past him with a racket of bubbling and the kid was suddenly far too heavy and the surface of the water swirled past his face and he was gasping air—and then his left arm buckled and the boy fell down onto him and Rivas’s crushed right hand was jammed under the two of them and with a scream that only dogs could have heard he sprang away from consciousness like an arrow from a bow.
Rivas had for a while been dimly aware that he was lying on his back with a weight across his middle on a corrugated surface that, though uncomfortable, he couldn’t be bothered to get up from. He didn’t care what had awakened him, for he planned to sleep quite a while longer. It was still dark after all.
Some people were up and about, though. Somebody was even whistling.
Then a wet canvas was flapped away somewhere overhead and suddenly there was light beyond his closed eyelids. Without particularly noticing them, he was aware of the smells of beer, sweat and fish.
“Well!”
Rivas didn’t open his eyes or move.
“Uh,” the voice went on, “this ain’t Blood, in this one.”
“What’s in there, then?” queried another voice irritably.
A finger touched Rivas’s sea-chilled cheek. “It’s… well, Joe, it’s a couple of dead guys.”
“Dead guys.” Rivas heard a chair scrape on a floor. He kept his eyes shut and held his breath when clumping boots approached. If they think you’re dead, he told himself, be dead. “Damn me, you’re right. Jaybirds trying to escape, I guess. Hell! And we’ve paid for the stuff that was in here.”
“Can we get our money back?”
A pause followed, and then a disgusted exclamation as the boots moved away. “That’ll take some considering. Whether we even ask or not, I mean. We could show ’em these two and say, see, these guys dumped the Blood and climbed in in its place, but that’d be awful damn close to admitting we know it’s from the Holy City. It ain’t just to keep the product cold that they use all the extra fuel it takes to drag these baskets on the outside of their boat—the main reason they do it that way is so guys like us can hook it and run real quick, without getting any kind of look inside their boat. And the stuff’s in glass and metal so if there’s any mix-up it’ll just sink. They don’t want rumors getting out about any connection between Irvine and Venice. No, I’m afraid we’ll have to eat this loss. That or go asking to eat some bullets.”
“Dump ’em?”
There was a sigh. “I guess.”
“Out like with the garbage?”
“No point carrying ’em any distance, is there? What’d you want to do, say some prayers over ’em?”
Some gesture may have been the reply, but the next thing Rivas knew the battered metal basket was being noisily pushed across an uneven floor. He braced himself, wondering what the garbage arrangements consisted of around here.
They turned out to be primitive. The man kept pushing the basket across the floor until the bottom edge caught against the sill of a very low, open window, and the basket simply turned over and dumped its two occupants out.
Rivas found himself cartwheeling through empty air—the sensation reminding him of something—and then he impacted onto a slanted heap of rotting, feculent trash. As he rolled dizzily down the slope of broken wood, boxes and bad old food, he was sure that he and the boy were not the first bodies to be tossed here.
Dizzy and sick with the pain of his hand, Rivas simply lay for a while in sunlight at the foot of the garbage heap. When the pain had backed off a little he sat up, worked his arms and legs cautiously to see if anything had broken during his fall—nothing, it seemed, had—and then he looked around for the far-gone kid. He saw him off to the right, lying on his back. He was breathing.
Rivas looked at his own right hand. The fingers were swollen and black, and at least two of them seemed not to be attached to the hand very securely. Poor old hand, he thought sadly.
He looked around, ignoring the mildly interested stares of a couple of children who’d been digging in the trash. He was in a wide court with high foliage-topped brick walls, and an arch to his left showed a segment of old alley that someone had tried to brighten by painting a lot of vividly blue birds across the surface of it. Certainly seems to be Venice, he thought.
He got up and limped over to where the boy lay. The boy’s eyes were open, staring straight up into the noon sun, and Rivas crouched to close them.
“New girls!” the boy exclaimed suddenly. “All right, gonna give ’em a treat, let ’em receive the sacrament from the Messiah himself, yes sir….”
“Good afternoon, Sevatividam,” said Rivas wearily.
“And won’t I touch them! Oh my, yes…” the boy said, and the contrast between the fatuous insinuation of the voice and the bony, wasted face it issued from was appalling.
“I’ve come to take one of them away from you.”
“Some pretties and some piggies,” the boy said judiciously.
“You know,” said Rivas hoarsely, leaning forward and bracing himself against the wall with his good hand, “I don’t think I can kill people anymore. Animals, even.”
“The piggies I’ll touch with my finger.”
“But I believe I could kill you. I believe I’ll try very hard to do that.”
As the boy’s voice diminished into muttering about how tasty it would be, Rivas tried, one-handed, to pick him up. A week ago he might have been able to do it. After five minutes he gave up and stood up straight.
The two children had resumed digging around in the trash—their ancient shopping cart was half full of junk—and Rivas said, “Hey. Kids.”
They looked up warily, their eyes in the wide, unspecific focus of animals ready to bolt in any direction.
“Could you… keep an eye on my friend here for a few minutes?” He knew he might as well be making the request to a couple of the monkeys swinging around and screeching in the wall-top greenery, but he needed to make the gesture, needed to let the universe know that he wasn’t ditching the boy.
The children stared at him, and one of them might have nodded before resuming the excavations.
“Thanks.” Rivas trudged to the arch and through it to the narrow alley outside. Tall houses, liberally scaffolded with wooden and iron balconies, leaned against each other in the sun, and to his right the alley was shaded by the rooftop connection of two old buildings, one on either side of the alley, that had bowed forward until their tops touched, like a couple of ragged old women exchanging gossip.
He knew where he was; a block or two north would be the Imperial Canal—no, it was Imperial Highway this far inland—and three or four blocks north of that would be the restaurant where he’d first got a job washing dishes. And where had that doctor lived? In a basement only a few buildings away from the restaurant, he recalled. The standards of cleanliness in the restaurant’s kitchen had provided the man with plenty of patients. And Rivas had gone back to him a few times during the ensuing years—once for a clap cure and a couple of times to have dueling wounds sewed up.
Rivas set off in that direction, noticing apartments where friends had lived whose names he now couldn’t remember, terrace bars where he’d taken young ladies for drinks on long ago late nights, canals he’d fallen into…. Much had changed—there were lots full of charred rubble where he remembered houses, new bars that had been Junk & Relic stores in his day, a new wide hole in the street where some cluster of antique sewer tunnels must have collapsed, over which a gaily beribboned but unsteady bridge had been built—but so much had not changed that he thought the ghost of young Gregorio Rivas must still haunt these streets and alleys and rooftop bridges; a self-consciously cynical ghost, inordinately proud of its skill with both sword and pelican, its capacity for liquor, and all the dues it imagined it had paid. The place was still Venice, where he’d spent his youth, still crowded with old buildings rotting under bright new paint, curbside hot food vendors, shouting parrots and street lunatics, still redolent with the smells of ordure and spicy cooking.
Though the restaurant had mercifully burned down, the doctor’s building was still there, but as he scuffed down the steps to the man’s door he wondered whether he would still be there. It had been—what—six years? He knocked at the door.
After a few seconds it swung open and he felt weak with relief to see that the man peering out of the doorway was the doctor. “Doctor Dendro!” Rivas said. “I’m glad you still live here. Do you still have that thing you used to call a stretcher barrow? There’s a—”
The gray-haired man was frowning. “Who are you?” he interrupted.
“Don’t you recognize me? I’m Greg Rivas. I came to you several times for—”
“Rivas.” The doctor stared at the ceiling. “You had the clap.”
“Well,” said Rivas, nettled in spite of everything, “yes. Once. But right now I’d appreciate it if you’d—”
Abruptly the doctor saw Rivas’s hand. “My God, man, what have you done to your hand? Come in here and—”
“Doctor,” said Rivas loudly, “I’d be grateful if you’d look at my hand.” More quietly, he went on, “But first I wish you’d get your stretcher barrow and come look at a friend of mine.”
“He worse off than you?”
“Yes.”
“All right.” The doctor waved him inside, and when Rivas had reeled in and blinked around enough to be able to see in the dimness, he smiled, for the place hadn’t noticeably changed since his last visit. Here was still the old wood stove autoclave, here were the window-blocking stacks of terrarium mold gardens, the astrological charts and the live, caged, two-headed snakes which may patients insisted be consulted before they’d accept any medication, the cupboards full of ancient and almost certainly useless bottled pills.
Doctor Dendro had put on his antique white coat with Doctor, Doctor, Gimme The News stitched on it, and from a closet rolled out the extended, padded wheelbarrow Rivas remembered. “Your man in much pain?” he asked Rivas.
“Unconscious.”
“Won’t risk bringing a hypodermic needle, then. Broke one since you were in last. Down to seven now.”
He wheeled the device out the door and Rivas followed. “I can’t pay you today,” Rivas said, “but as soon as I get back to—”
“I’ll take an I.O.U.” As they went up the steps the doctor sniffed. “Or will I? Blood’s bad stuff, Rivas. You used to have a little more sense.”
“It was an accidental dose. I gave some to this friend of mine as a, a sedative, and we both wound up doused in it.”
“It’s only a sedative to people who want that kind of sedative.”
When they got up to street level Rivas swayed dizzily in the sudden blast of sunlight.
“Sure you don’t want a ride in this yourself?” Dendro asked dubiously.
“No—thank you—I’d fall asleep, and when I next sleep it’s going to be for about twelve hours.”
He led the doctor back to the alley, and down it to the arch in the wall, and when he stumbled into the enclosed court the two children were gone but of course the far-gone still lay where he’d been, at the foot of the garbage pile. Rivas pointed, then leaned back against the wall and slid down it until he was sitting.
The doctor trundled his wheelbarrow over to the boy and crouched to look at him. He picked up one of the skeletal wrists, then dropped it and pushed back an eyelid. He looked over at Rivas and then stood up. “Sorry,” he said. “Boy’s dead.”
Rivas nodded and shrugged, and it wasn’t until the too bright scene blurred and fragmented that he realized, to his weary horror, that he was crying, for the first time in more years than he could remember. He tried to stop and discovered he couldn’t. He was breathing in harsh gasps, tears running down his unshaven cheeks, and he didn’t hear the doctor approach.
Dendro put his hand on Rivas’s shoulder. “He was a close friend?”
Rivas shook his head. “Just… some kid. I don’t know what the hell’s the matter with me.” He looked up. The doctor had put the wasted corpse in his wheelbarrow.
“I’ll take him to the burial pit,” Dendro said, “after I’ve fixed up your hand. Get up now.”
Rivas climbed to his feet and plodded after the doctor.
An hour and a half later, his hand a bandaged numbness swinging at his side, Rivas was wandering along the Lennox Street sidewalk, wondering which old acquaintances he might be able to find who’d loan him some money and give him food and a place to sleep. He could remember a number of people, but somehow he couldn’t picture any of them being particularly glad to see him, especially since his years of success in Ellay. And of course it was out of the question to consider looking up any of his old girlfriends. He’d never understood how some people could be friends with ex-lovers; his own romances always ended with at least one party feeling nothing but loathing for the other.
A street band on a corner ahead was banging out a melody on instruments made of kitchen utensils and car parts, and Rivas slowed, trying to identify the tune of the song. Then with a shock he realized it was a song he’d written himself, many years ago. He kept trying to remember a lyric before the singer could sing it, and finally managed to, moving his lips silently half a beat ahead of the band:
Well, I haven’t crapped in three weeks,
Feels like I never will again;
No, I haven’t crapped in three weeks,
Wonder if I ever will again—
They tell me Jaybush is gonna end the world soon,
Maybe I’ll do it then.
He had slowed to a stop in front of the musicians, and the singer slid a foot forward to nudge the hat that lay inverted on the pavement. Glancing down, Rivas saw a handful of jigger cards in it. He looked up, met the man’s gaze and shrugged apologetically, and the man rolled his eyes in a way that clearly conveyed, Then take off, hobo.
Rivas shambled on, but a moment later the music came to an abrupt, twanging halt. He looked back and saw the band hastily packing up, and looking beyond them he saw why.
Half a dozen of the sort of madwomen known locally as pocalocas were striding aggressively down the street, their arms swinging and their ragged skirts sweeping the pavement. Music often threw pocalocas into violent frenzies that abated only when the music stopped, and they’d been known to claw out eyes and bite as ferociously as dogs.
The musicians fled into a nearby bar, and they were swearing angrily, for the bar’s owner could certainly charge them for the temporary shelter. Rivas stepped well back out of the path of the wild-eyed women, and as they passed, as a couple of them scowled menacingly at him, it occurred to him for the first time, even though he’d seen them frequently during his years in Venice, that despite their savage restlessness their eyes had a distinctly birdy glaze.
He didn’t pursue that thought, though, for the sight of them had reminded him of someone who might be willing to help him.
He’d been about twenty-three years old, walking home in the early hours of the morning after the Bom Sheltr had shut down for the night, and from a dark alley he’d heard hard scuffling and the thump of blows and, in the instant when he’d been considering whether to interfere or move on, he’d heard a muffled female voice call for help. He’d drawn his knife, then, and interfered.
It was a band of pocalocas beating a young woman, and without using the blade of his knife—just the pommel as a club—he’d managed to kick and punch and slap them away. He’d helped the victim to her feet and then escorted her to her home, and she’d insisted that he sit down and have a drink while she washed the blood off her face and changed her clothes and prodded her ribs to see if any had been cracked.
When she’d reappeared, pleased that a black eye and some bruises were all she’d suffered, they had talked for a couple of hours, and young Rivas learned that she was a free-lance prostitute. He hadn’t asked, but he’d been certain that that explained the pocalocas’ attack—the madwomen reacted to public displays of affection as strongly as they reacted to music, and if, as he’d guessed, they’d come upon her consummating a business transaction in the alley, it would certainly have been enough to provoke the melée Rivas had broken up; the client, presumably, had made good his escape.
As he’d left her place at dawn she’d told him she owed him a big one, and during the next few years he’d taken it, as he’d phrased it to himself, in pieces, wandering over to her place whenever he was in the mood and not seeing any particular young lady. Perhaps because neither of them had ever thought of the intermittent liaison as significant, nor, once they’d got to know each other, found any reason to feel more than a faint, slightly patronizing fondness for the other, this relationship had not ended in the kind of bitter acrimony he was used to.
I wonder, he thought now as he tried to remember where she’d lived, if she’ll still be there, and if I entirely used up the big one.
The building, when he finally found it after several wrong turns, looked different, but after a moment he realized that it wasn’t; he’d simply never seen it in bright daylight before. You dog, he told himself. So it was with cautious optimism that he walked up the steps and knocked at the door. A man answered the door, though, and the furniture Rivas could see behind him wasn’t any he’d ever seen before.
The man was frowning suspiciously, and Rivas knew what he must look like, bandaged, bearded, exhausted and dirty, so he conjured up his most respectable tone of voice. “Excuse me, sir,” he said, “I’m trying to find a young lady that lived in this apartment, uh, eight years ago.”
“I only been here three,” the man said, not relaxing his frown. “What’s her name?”
Rivas felt his face getting red. “I… don’t remember, but she was kind of pretty, skinny, with dark hair…”
The man swore disgustedly and slammed the door.
Feeling obscurely humiliated, Rivas hurried back down the steps and walked briskly around the corner. I guess I could head for the old Bom Sheltr, he thought—assuming it’s still there—but when Steve Spink recruited me to play at his place in Ellay, I just went, I didn’t even tell old Hanker I was quitting, much less give notice.
But the thought of the Bom Sheltr reminded him that this woman—whatever her name had been—had liked to hang out in a place called, what was it, El Famoso Volcan, down on the Ladybug Canal. Lunchtime in those early years of the Seventh Ace had generally found her at one of the umbrella-shaded tables on the place’s canal-front patio. He glanced at the position of the sun above the uneven rooftops. Worth a try, he thought.
When he got there, though, he saw that the old EL FAMOSO VOLCAN sign was gone, replaced by a relic sign—REALIGNMENT AND BALANCING—obviously chosen more for its size and the handsomeness of its lettering than for any meaning in the old, hard-to-read words. It did still seem to be a restaurant, though, so he decided to go in and have a look—but once again he’d forgotten what he presently looked like.
He pushed open the door and had taken two steps into the coolness of the place when a hard hand closed on his shoulder. “Trash bins are out back, Chucko,” said a bored, unfriendly voice.
“Excuse me,” said Rivas, “I know I’m not dressed appropriately, but I simply want to find out whether—”
“Go somewhere else to find out, Chucko. Right now hit the road.”
“I’m Gregorio Rivas,” he said angrily, “and I’m the star performer at Spink’s in Ellay, which I imagine even you’ve heard of. Now all I want to do is—”
He was swung around and propelled with surprising force at the door, which slammed open when he hit it, and he was still moving too fast to negotiate the steps, and he wound up thudding into the hot dust and rolling several yards. As he was struggling dizzily to get up, something clanked on the ground near him. “No hard feelings, Chucko,” the man said, a moment before closing the door.
Half stunned but at least sitting up, Rivas blinked around stupidly until he saw what the man had thrown after him. It was a half-pint bottle, one-third full and with a few bread crumbs in it, of the cheapest local whiskey. Rivas snatched it up, uncorked it with his loosening teeth and drained it in a series of heroic swallows that sluiced the dust off his bristly chin with dribbled whiskey and made tears cut tracks through the dust on his gaunt cheeks.
“You’re looking good, Greg,” came a woman’s husky voice from right behind him.
He paused, then slowly lowered the bottle. Her voice had brought back her name. “Hello, Lisa,” he said.
She walked around to where he could see her. She doesn’t look bad, he thought. Some gray in her hair, more lines around her eyes and mouth… at least she hasn’t got fat. “I heard you were doing real well in Ellay,” she said. He couldn’t tell whether she was amused or pitying.
“Isn’t it obvious?” he asked her. “These clothes, my grooming, this fine old liquor I’m sipping?”
“The way restaurateurs hasten to serve you,” she agreed.
“Serve me to the canalside dogs. Listen, Lisa,” he said, wishing he hadn’t had the liquor, for he could feel it hitting his abused system hard, “is there any of that big one left?”
She stared down at him. “A little. Not as much as what you’re maybe thinking.”
“All I want is a place to sleep—a kitchen corner and a blanket is fine—for tonight, and maybe tomorrow night, no longer than that, and a bit of food, and enough jiggers to get some liquor and clothes.”
“I’d recommend a bath, too,” she said.
“Didn’t I say that? I meant to.”
She seemed to relax. “Okay, Greg. But that spends it, you understand? Not a drop of change.”
“Sure.” He wobbled to his feet. “Thanks.”
“What are you back here for? And so trashed-looking? It’s down this way, along the canal a half mile. Can you walk?”
“Yeah, half a mile, anyway. I’m…” He’d be doing her no favor to let her in on the Irvine-Venice connection. “I’m looking for someone.”
“Been looking down sewers, it seems like. What’d you do to your hand?”
“Mashed it. Saw a doctor today. He splinted my first two fingers and had to cut off two.”
She stopped. “Jesus, Greg! Can you still play your… what was it, pelican?”
“Right. I don’t know. Holding the bow shouldn’t be too hard, and as for plucking the strings, I never used the missing fingers much anyway. I guess it depends on how the two I’m left with heal up.”
“Huh. Mashing your hand have to do with finding this person?”
“Yes.”
“Anybody going to come looking for you? In rough ways?”
“No. This,” he said, waving his bandaged hand, “was an accident. Nobody did it to me.”
“Okay.” For a while they trudged along in silence, then she said, “You know, it was a shock to hear your name after all this time. I was with a guy there in the Lancing, and I hear this commotion by the front door, like a bum’s trying to get in, and then I hear the bum say he’s you. And then I ditch this guy and walk outside and it is you, sitting in the dirt and soaking your beard with cheap whiskey! You’re lucky I even still recognized you.”
“Reckon I am,” said Rivas shortly, not relishing this conversation.
“Are you in, like, disguise, or are you really this low?”
“I’m in goddamn disguise, okay?”
“You’re as grouchy as ever, that’s for sure.”
“I just lost two fingers, do you mind? I’m never at my most charming right after amputations.”
“Not a drop of change, Rivas. Not the price of a cup of beer.” Her tone was amiable but obviously sincere.
She lived in a narrow one-story house that fronted on the canal, with its own tiny pier and a flock of ducks hanging around in case anybody might throw bread crusts. She had obviously prospered, for on the roof he could see a maintained-looking water tank and the pole-mounted propeller of a windmill. She led him in and showed him where the bath was, and when he emerged twenty minutes later she had men’s clothes right in the house that fit him well enough. She’d cooked up scrambled eggs with some canal shrimps and onions and garlic while he was in the tub, and he cheered up immensely when he smelled it.
He sat down at her kitchen table, picked up his fork, and then didn’t speak for fifteen minutes. “God,” he said finally as he sat back after the last swallow, “thanks. I believe I was about to expire.”
“You’re welcome. Want a drink?”
“Oh no, I’d better not, I—well—maybe it’ll help me sleep.”
“Look at it as medicine,” she agreed drily. “What, beer, whiskey, tequila? No Currency.”
“To hell with Currency. Uh… tequila.”
“Coming up.”
She brought him a big shot with beer and salt and a quartered lemon on the side. He ignored the salt and lemon, bolted the tequila and chased it with the beer.
He looked up at her helplessly. “Somehow I’m still not sleepy.”
Her smile was becoming tired, but she refilled the glasses.
When he’d downed the third set he had to admit that, despite how dead for sleep he ought to be, the alcohol was giving him some kind of spurious energy and restlessness. “Maybe a walk,” he said, and though it was hard to speak he felt entirely sober, “would relax me a bit.”
“Okay, Greg. Can you find your way back here?”
“Sure. Okay if I borrow a couple of jiggers? Just pocket change.”
“Of course. I may be out myself when you get back, but if you yank on the fern by the front door—it’s plastic, the fern, I mean—it opens the latch. Got that?”
“Yank the fern, right.”
“And I’ll leave out the stuff you want—a shoulder pouch and a fifth of something, right?”
“That’s it. Tequila will be fine.”
She cocked her head and gave him a troubled look. “Am I going to have to worry about you, Greg?”
Even with shock, liquor and exhaustion working on him he could see that she wasn’t concerned that he might rob her or bring rowdy drunks back to her place; touched, he told her, “Nah, Lisa, I’m okay. Just going to have a drink at the old Bom Sheltr.”
“Do be careful. Here’s half a pint, which will buy you more than you ought to have, probably. And I can get you more tomorrow, if you need it.”
“Thanks, Lisa. I’ll pay it all back as soon as—”
“No,” she said. “No. Pay me back and you’ve put a bit of tilt on the scales again. Do it my way and we’ll be all square, with no reason to even speak to each other if we pass in the street.” Her smile had not faltered or become strained.
He knew he wasn’t understanding this, so he didn’t pretend to be hurt or angry. “Okay.” He got up, pocketed the half-pint card and walked, pretty steadily, to the door, and opened it. Somehow the sky had already gone molten in the west behind the tall palm trees, and the long shadows were purple. He turned back to her and said, “But thanks.”
She waved. “Por nada.”
The air had cooled outside, and though at noon it had smelled only of dust and baking pavement, now at twilight it was elusively scented with jasmine and gardenia and the not so distant sea. He scuffed thoughtfully down the canalside path, kicking an occasional pebble into the water, pondering the fact that he’d become a different man since leaving Venice five or six years ago…. No, Greg, he told himself, be honest, since leaving Ellay five days ago. Was it an improvement? It didn’t feel like it.
The flavors of the breeze changed as he walked toward the sea; now there was smoke in the air, the smoke from a hundred basement Mexican and Chinese kitchens, and though he knew he was probably imagining it he thought he detected tobacco and marijuana and perfume and the quiver of distant music. He remembered having whimsically wondered today whether the ghost of young Rivas might still haunt these bars and bridges and canals. Let’s go see, he thought, whether I can catch him out of the corner of my eye.
He smiled almost sadly when he rounded the last corner and saw, in the still vacant paved yard, the dozens of pieces of plexiglass set flush with the old concrete, for they reminded him of his very first days of working here, washing cups and pitchers in the yellow afternoon light that filtered down through the translucent plexiglass skylight. The upright, wedge-shaped shed which was the top of the entry stairs was a little flimsier-looking now, and the lettering on the sign over the doorway had been repainted carelessly at least once; but several more tall poles had been planted in the dirt or nailed to the sides of the shed, and the many lengths of wire and string draped from one to another were lavishly flagged with bits of cloth and colored plastic and tinfoil; and through the soles of his feet he fancied he could feel the bass beat of subterranean music. He pushed his disordered hair back from his forehead, straightened his borrowed coat and crossed the yard to the descending stairs.
The band was noisy and only just competent, but the place had so many tunnels and burrows that it wasn’t difficult to find a table from which the music was just a remote crashing. Candles behind colored glass threw tinted shadows, reminding him of one of the worlds he’d seen in Jaybush’s memory, the world where the orange spider-things had each cast two shadows, a red and a blue.
A waitress arrived. He’d never seen her before, and she obviously wasn’t interested in who he was. He ordered a tequila with water on the side, and she strolled away to get it.
All at once it came to him what it was that he’d been reminded of by the sensation of falling this afternoon, when the Blood dealer had dumped him and the far-gone boy onto the trash pile; for an instant it had taken him back to the at-rest-in-free-fall sensation of being in the long wait between planets. But that wasn’t a memory of his own—that was Jaybush’s. It didn’t please him to find himself sharing the Messiah’s recollections.
During his third tequila, just as he was getting ready to leave and walk back to the Ladybug Canal, a lean, grinning middle-aged man walked up to him hesitantly, pointing at him. Rivas couldn’t remember ever having seen him before.
“Greg?” the man said. “It’s Greg, right? Rivas!”
He could have denied it, but the man at REALIGNMENT AND BALANCING having doubted him and called him Chucko, and the irresponsibility induced by the tequila, made him smile and say, “Right.”
“I knew it! You remember me, don’t you?” The man dragged a chair over and sat down at Rivas’s table.
Ordinarily Rivas would probably have objected to the unsought company, but tonight he wanted reassurance—admiration, if only from this silly little man. “Remind me.”
“Jack Frenchfry. I been working here forever. Remember? I helped you arrange some of your first songs—polished ’em for you.”
Like hell you ever did, thought Rivas; but, “Sure, I remember you, Jack,” he said. “So how’s the old place doing?”
“Real good, Greg. Old Hanker died two years ago—he was real mad at you, but I told him, ‘Hey, Greg is a genius,’ I said, ‘and geniuses can’t be bothered with things like giving notice.’ Am I right? Hah? Yeah, they wanted me to take over the place when he died, but I told ’em I’d rather stay maiterdee, out where I can meet the people. I like meeting people, you know? That’s the kind of person I am.”
“Sure, Jack.” The man was beginning to depress him, but before Rivas could kill his drink and go, Frenchfry had ordered him another.
“You know who this guy is, Doris?” Frenchfry said to the waitress. “This is Greg Rivas from Spink’s in Ellay. We’re old friends. He comes back to see me every chance he gets, don’t you, Greg?”
“Sure,” said Rivas, feeling dizzy.
“You don’t look like him,” the waitress said. “And who needs old Rivas anyway?”
“I don’t know,” said Rivas, shaking his head.
“Just bring him the drink, will you, Doris?” The unnecessary harshness in Frenchfry’s voice made it clear to Rivas that the man had no particular authority over the girl. “If the new boss was here, Greg, he’d let me make it on the house—but he’s in Ellay, on business. Sorry. You know how it is trying to deal with damn clerks and cashiers.”
Rivas’s chest had gone cold and he fumbled in his pocket to see if he had enough left to cover this unwanted drink. He did, but barely, only if he ludicrously undertipped the waitress. That’ll impress her with me, he thought.
“Yeah, I just kind of work here part time,” said Frenchfry expansively, “in like an advisory capacity. Fact is, I quit too, a while ago. This new boss started yelling at me about some crap or other, and I walked out. Who needs ’em, eh?” He leaned forward with raised eyebrows and poked Rivas painfully in the chest. “You know something?”
Rivas’s drink was clanked down in front of him, and he pushed all his money across the table to the girl without looking at her. She took it and left with at least no spoken comment.
“You know something?” Frenchfry repeated.
“What,” said Rivas dully.
“You and me, Greg—we’re two of a kind.”
“Jesus.” Rivas pushed his chair back and stood up. Why had he come here?
“Hey, Greg, where are you going?” Frenchfry started to get up too. “I know, you want to go to a better place, right? With girls, if I remember you correctly, eh? Listen, there’s a place I go to a lot nearby where they got girls that’ll—”
“You stay here,” Rivas said, afraid he might hit the man, or start crying again. “I’m leaving.”
“Well, say, Greg, I wasn’t going to bring it up right now,” Frenchfry said, beginning to sound worried himself, “but I can’t break the last, uh, hundred-fifth note they paid me here, and I was wondering—”
“That was it,” said Rivas, “for that drink.” He pointed at the fresh glass. “All the money I had.” He was having trouble taking a deep breath. “But hey, help yourself, man. Mi tequila es su tequila.”
He blundered out of the place, aware of the stares of other drinkers. The waitress had obviously told them who he claimed to be. Some seemed to believe it and some didn’t, but none of them seemed very impressed.
In the darkness outside he walked quickly, as though trying to outpace the memory. You and me, Greg—we’re two of a kind. My God, he thought. And everybody there thought we were! So who cares? So I care—you are what people think you are, which is why it’s so important to get them thinking you’re someone who…counts. Gaah.
By the time he came to the canal, the night breeze seemed to have blown away the worst edges of the tequila and the memory, and he stood on the bank and watched the reflected moon waver on the black water and then separate into glowing white streaks as some swimming thing approached, rippling the water. A rat? No, too many ripples. A dog, conceivably, or some kid.
The low waves subsided as the swimmer stopped in the darkness below Rivas and to his left.
“Greg,” came a whisper from the darkness.
“Who’s—” he began, but he realized he didn’t have to ask. He tried to tell it to go away, but at the moment he didn’t have the strength.
“I can restore you,” said the whisper. There was a slurrying sound as the thing flapped gently in the black water.
“What do you mean?” Rivas asked angrily, though keeping his voice down. “You couldn’t lift up a medium-size stone.”
“True. But I’m part of you. Maybe the most important part, the part that makes—used to make—you you. You know when I… was born?”
“No.”
“That day at the Cerritos Stadium, when you gashed your thumb to avoid merging with Jaybush. That works, of course, intense pain does block you from the sacrament, but it splinters a piece of you away—something like a ghost. That’s me. And you’ve noticed qualities missing from yourself since then, haven’t you? Weaknesses where there used to be strengths, hesitations and uncertainties where you used to have assurance?”
“… Yes,” Rivas whispered.
“Merge with me and let me make you whole. You don’t mind merging with me—I’m nothing but yourself.”
“But… would I be…”
“Remember when you threw rocks at me that first day, how I tore apart but grew back together, so you couldn’t see I’d ever been cut?” It chuckled out there. “Merge with me and I’ll grow back your two fingers for you.”
Rivas gasped as if he’d been hit, and before he’d even thought about it he’d taken two steps forward, so that he was standing on the tilted dirt slope of the canal bank. There was more swirling in the water, and then the thing swam out of the shadows of the trees into the moonlight, and Rivas could see that it was a lot solider now than it had been when he’d seen it last.
“How did you get here?” he asked, thinking of all the populated urban miles around them.
“Followed your boat up,” the thing said, its voice taking on a gobbling sound because of its eagerness. “I caught the new-born ghost that was cast when you used the pain parry against that dose of Blood, so you don’t have to worry about where that piece of you went. I ate it. It’s in me. And then all day I’ve been eeling around through the canals, trying to find you. Almost got to you before that damn whore did. You don’t need her, do you?”
“Need her. Well, I don’t know, I—”
“You—we—don’t need anybody. Thinking you did is what split us in the first place, isn’t it? And it has nearly destroyed you.”
The thing had swum in closer, and Rivas didn’t have to whisper loudly at all for it to hear him. “I’m not sure that’s…”
“I was angry, earlier today,” the thing said, giggling reproachfully, “when I realized you were in that boat full of women. I was hoping you wouldn’t be stupid enough to… have congress with any of those vacas in the state you’re in.”
Rivas started to tilt, then took a step back, up the bank, to right himself. “Why… shouldn’t I?”
“It would diminish you. It always does, but in your present broken, unstrong condition it could make you forget.”
The thing had fishtailed closer as he backed off, and now he could see its fingers above the water, gripping the muddy stones and glistening like fat sea creatures in the moonlight.
“Forget what?”
“Who you are, man. If we forget we’re Rivas, what’s left of us?”
Rivas took two more steps back. “Whatever is me. That’s what’s left.”
The thing was trembling so violently that a lot of close rings were radiating away from it. The canal water smelled like crushed green leaves. “Come to me,” the thing in the water choked.
He was suddenly sure that to go to it would mean leaving behind things that had been too costly to acquire. The sadness in the glass eyes of the broken trash man, back in Irvine. The remembered ache in his arm from holding the dying boy up to the corner of the Blood basket where there was air. His shame at having struck a buyer’s-market bargain for saving Uri’s life. The grudged respect of Frake McAn.
He stepped all the way back up to the path. “No, thank you,” he said politely.
“Your fingers, I can replace your—”
“Get away from me,” said Rivas tensely, suddenly aware that he was scared. “Go catch a fish if you need some blood to drink.”
“You need me more than I need you, Rivas. I can—”
“Then you don’t need me at all.”
He turned on his heel and started walking toward Lisa’s house, which all at once seemed very far away; and a moment later he was running, for he’d heard splashing behind him and the slap of wet rubbery feet against the packed dirt of the path. The pursuing footfalls stopped after a few seconds and Rivas let himself slow down a little, thinking that the hemogoblin had stopped—he didn’t realize it had simply taken off and begun flying until it slammed into his shoulders and sent him tumbling down the slope to splash into the canal.
And then it was on him like a dog that has beaten its companions by only a few seconds to a big piece of meat. As the two of them rolled in the chilly salt water Rivas punched at it with his left fist, feeling jellyfish tissue split apart and spill, but always quickly re-knit, and its entirely solid teeth were greedily tearing at his arms and chest. They were both sobbing with fear and rage, and any time either of them got halfway to his feet the other knocked him down.
Finally Rivas got his knees around its waist and his hands on the corners of its jaw, and he pulled its face away from him, trying to use only the thumb and heel of his bad right hand.
It blew out a mouthful of water and blood and then, its big milky eyes boring into him in the moonlight, it whispered, “Please, Greg.”
Gripping it strongly with his legs, he began twisting its head around.
The creature began emitting a sort of whispered scream, but the noise was chopped off abruptly when he’d given the head one full turn. The thing’s hands were scrabbling at his chest and arms and sometimes even his face, but it didn’t seem to have developed fingernails yet, and the fingers just broke against him in a slimy nastiness that was worse than scratches would have been.
Rivas had been letting his head submerge in the canal water whenever he had a fresh breath and the move would allow him to get a new grip on the creature’s slippery head, but at the third full turn the thing’s neck began to split and spurt some kind of fluid into the water, and after that he tried to keep his head up out of it. The hemogoblin was heaving about under him so strongly that he was afraid he’d be flung off, and he couldn’t believe that the noise of their splashing wasn’t being heard, but at last at the eighth or ninth full turn the creature’s head, which like a clock-winding key had been getting more difficult to twist, snapped off, and the abruptly released force of his straining arms flipped Rivas right over in the fouled water.
The body of the hemogoblin went limp and, releasing a lot of bad-smelling bubbles, sank beneath him. He struggled to his feet and flung the still quivering head as far down the canal, in the direction away from Lisa’s house, as he could. After three seconds he heard it splash in the darkness. Then, leaving the body there, he swam up the canal, away from the two pieces of the creature, rinsing his mouth and hair in the canal water, which was relatively clean compared to what he had been splashing around in.
Before long he began imagining that something was wriggling silently through the water in his wake, and he clambered out onto the canal bank and walked the rest of the way to Lisa’s place. She wasn’t home, so he went in and took another bath—which exhausted her water supply—and crawled into the bed she’d made up for him.
And out in the sluggish, lightless canal, thin filaments were fingering out from two pieces of organic stuff in the water—a small round lump to the west and a big four-limbed lump to the east. The filaments from one traveled toward those of the other, and in the small hours of the night they touched, and merged… and slowly began to pull the two pieces together.
When Rivas awoke next morning at about seven, he was hungover and stiff, but he felt more solidly put together than he had for the past several days. Lisa was nowhere to be seen, so he broke some more eggs into a pan and dumped in the fillings from some tacos he found in her brick evaporation box, stirred the mess up over her re-stoked fire until it was nearly cooked, then folded in the taco shells, piled it all onto a plate, shook salsa furiosa over it all and then set to. After washing the meal down with a cool beer, he felt at least a lot less unqualified for the sortie he’d planned for this morning.
After washing the dishes and locking the door behind him he left Lisa’s house and walked north to Century and then turned left, toward the deep canals and the waterfront, the pouch with the bottle in it swinging at his side. The narrow sunlit streets were alive with cats, the rooftops with monkeys and the sky with parrots, though the human species was represented only by a few shamblers and some steamy smells of coffee and bacon wisping up from tiny street-level windows.
Nearly all of the items that were offered for sale in Venice’s shops or served in her restaurants were, if not made or grown locally, wagoned in from Santa Monica to the north or Ellay to the east; the mile of docks and piers rotting over the sea was the site of none but the most furtive sorts of trade, and the citizens who preferred shorefront property did so because they were in the Blood or birdy girl trade, or preyed on those who were, or liked having a whole ocean to dispose of inconveniences in, or simply were more comfortable swimming from place to place, along the waterfront or up and down the canal network, than trying to walk on limbs that had begun to devolve back toward a simpler way of life.
The waterfront area had been built up more than a century ago, during the days of the First Ace, and all the docks and sea walls and canals had been so determinedly built to last that the architects had not hesitated to add touches simply for the sake of decoration—fancy towers, fairy bridges too high and light for any actual traffic, even a seaside amusement park for children. But construction had stopped during the years of the Second Ace, and even maintenance was discontinued when the Third Ace came to power, and now the constructions were cracked, canted and undercut by the sea, and the towers and lacy bridges and the sun-bleached frameworks of the amusement park rides waved and creaked in the wind like the abandoned toys of a long-departed child.
Palms and hibiscus and vines grew in hybrid profusion here, and folklore had it that it was easier to get from place to place through the clustered treetops than by trying to negotiate the unmapped maze of alleys and canals and wobbly bridges, and that the snakes and bugs and monkeys one would encounter in the jungly heights would be less dangerous than the denizens below.
If he’d had two good hands Rivas might seriously have considered taking the green highroad on his trip to the waterfront. What he wanted to do this morning was get near enough to Deviant’s Palace to see if that was, as he feared, the destination of the barges full of Jaybird girls, once the Blood baskets had been sold off. There was, of course, the possibility that the barge he’d stowed away on had been the last for a week or so, and that he’d have to try to get into Deviant’s Palace without confirmation of his hunch; but he had heard nothing in the Holy City or from the boy who had spoken Sevatividam’s thoughts to indicate that the shipments of girls from Irvine were due to be cut any time soon.
As the sun slowly rose above the buildings at his back, the streets ahead of him became narrower, for lines of little houses and shops had been built down the middle of the old wide streets, and in some cases even the resulting ways had been split by rows of food and drink and fortune-telling and peepshow tents, so that no wagon nor even a very fat person could maneuver through. Some of the food tents and liquor vendors were doing business, but most of Venice had only gone to bed a couple of hours ago.
Closer to the sea the ways became uneven as alleys zigzagged sharply to circumnavigate collapsed buildings, or rose and fell where makeshift bridges had been flung up over gaps in the undercut pavement, and it became hard to keep moving west—it was as though the city itself were trying to prevent him from getting to the waterfront. At last, though, nearer to noon than dawn, Rivas edged his way cautiously out along a tilted, swaying fire escape and, crouching to look under the remains of some ancient gable that had broken free of its original mooring and was now jammed precariously between two roof edges, he saw the surging, wrinkled darkness of the sea. He shuffled along his perch, trying to keep the sea in sight, and climbed through an arched doorway that was in the slow process of becoming a window as the masonry settled away below it.
On the other side he got to his feet and looked around—and realized that he’d stumbled onto what appeared to be a long established scavenger’s roost. He was on a gently slanting rooftop with a fancy wrought iron railing along the seaward edge but not even a length of twine to stop a person from walking off the north or south edges; a number of the men on the roof had turned toward the arch as he’d clambered through it, and were now looking at him with a variety of expressions: alarm, anger, speculation and boredom. One man near Rivas seemed to be about to launch a kite that had a spread fish-net for a tail, most of the ones by the railing held fishing poles or binoculars, several were just sleeping in the sun, and one white-haired old fellow scampered to the north edge of the roof, crouched and then disappeared below the edge—presumably down a ladder—when Rivas entered.
“What do you want, hombre?” asked one lean old man whose yellowish beard, as Rivas saw when the man stood up and drew a knife, hung all the way to his belt.
Rivas grinned. “Just want to look at the ocean—and maybe find somebody to help me drink this.” He pulled the bottle of tequila out of his pouch.
The tension relaxed a little. The old man put his knife away, stepped forward and grudgingly took the bottle. He pulled the cork with his teeth and, holding the cork like a fat cigar, he sniffed the clear liquor. Evidently satisfied, he spat the cork over the rail and said, “Okay. But if you’re in Blood—”
“Or birdy girls,” added a young man with fine blond hair curling like golden smoke around his head.
“—Then you’ll find you’ve made a mistake coming here,” the old man finished.
“Not me,” Rivas assured everyone. “I’m just a… a birdwatcher.”
“What?” exclaimed the man with the kite.
“He’s kidding, Jeremiah,” said the yellow-bearded man. He tilted the bottle to his mouth, and bubbles gurgled up in it. “Well,” he said when he’d lowered it again, “your credentials are in order, sir.” He handed the bottle to someone else.
Rivas walked down the slope of the roof to the rail, but its moorings were so corroded-looking that he didn’t lean on it. Glancing left, right, and down, he saw why these men had chosen this place for their eyrie; there was deep water a hundred feet below for fishing, and since they were above most of the surrounding structures the rooftop commanded a wide view of the sea. Holding the rail carefully and glancing to his right, Rivas felt his already fluttery stomach become even colder, for he realized that the white building way off there, looking like a cutaway section of a nautilus shell with long-stemmed mushrooms growing all over it, was Deviant’s Palace. He looked away quickly, not wanting to let these men guess that his business had to do with that place.
Gradually all the rooftop businessmen resumed their activities, and as the bottle made the rounds the glances turned on Rivas became less suspicious. The man with the net-bearing kite got the thing up into the air and then began skipping back and forth across the rooftop and whistling peculiarly. Another man was watching the course of one particular rowboat and making notes in a little book, and one of the men with binoculars had found something in a nearby window that absorbed him totally. The blond young man kept looking around worriedly, as though he was supposed to have met someone here a while ago. Rivas just watched the ocean.
He saw any number of boats—a trio of broad ones with tall structures on their decks, a refitted ferryboat apparently operating as a seagoing bar and grill, and many fishing boats clustered around the dark blue patch of ocean where lay the submarine pit known as the Ellay-Ex Deep, dropping nets on long lines to haul up the mutant phosphorescent fish that were so highly prized in some circles—but none of them was obviously the sort he was watching for, and it occurred to him that he’d never gotten any kind of good look at the vessel that had brought him up from Irvine. At least a couple of these boats he’d seen today could have been the same one, or a duplicate.
The anxious young man with the curly hair peered through the arch where Rivas had entered, then went to the north edge of the roof and looked down. At last he turned back to the company and asked, “Did any of you hear the old man I was with say where he was going?”
“No, kid,” said the yellow-bearded man drunkenly. “Fact I din hear ’m say anything at all.”
Far off to his left, just on the horizon, Rivas could see some ponderous vessel approaching. The sun had just begun to fall away from the meridian, and he had to squint against the flickering needles of reflected sunlight.
It was some kind of barge, with strange cowls and fins all over it. There were masts and rigged sails, but Rivas felt certain that it was the boat he’d been watching for. Now all he had to do was note where it docked.
The boy leaned out over the north edge. “Hey?” he yelled. Rivas was just about to ask one of the men if he could borrow his binoculars when the boy added, “Lollypop?”