Explicit Scenes & Offensive Sounds

A million big flying bugs were battering themselves against the glowing glass tubes.

The stories he’d heard had prepared him for the size of the place—it was huge, stretching away out of sight in either direction, and six or seven stories tall in some places—but had not quite prepared him for the lunacy of the architecture. Everything was rounded or tapering out to spiny points; there were no planes or right angles, and the lavishly applied stucco had the appearance of leathery hide. The many unsymmetrical windows and doors were inset, in arches so ragged and so randomly placed that they seemed to have been made by firing cannons at the walls from within—though each window was covered by an intricately worked grille; a profusion of apparently ornamental arches gave the place a morbidly skeletal appearance, which was not entirely relieved by the hundreds of banners and giant pinwheels and weathervanes. Most of the windows glowed with colored light, and the big front doors were wide open and spilling out a loud two-toned singing, not unlike the Jaybirds’ mind-blurring hum.

Rivas ran trembling fingers through his hair and took the invitation out of his pocket. This must be the place, he thought, and started forward. He walked slowly, for each step required an individual choice between continuing and fleeing.

At the top of the bridge he paused to look around. Deviant’s Palace, he saw, was the hub of a dozen canals, which all disappeared inside the place through high arches. He descended the far side of the bridge and approached the stairs.

A fat, hooded person scrambled out of a manhole in front of him and blocked his way. In glowing letters on the person’s robe front was spelled out: I GOT MY ASHES HAULED AT DEVIANT’S PALACE. “Sorry, sir, invitation only tonight,” piped up a sexless voice.

Rivas held up his invitation.

The hooded figure peered at it in the bright electric light. “Well, excuse me, the guest of honor! Just head right on in—you’re expected.”

The situation had already had a fever-dream unreality to it, but this grotesque courtesy totally disoriented Rivas. “Thank you,” he said, and as he went up the steps he actually caught himself wishing he’d shaved.

From overhead he heard a windy sighing, and looking up he saw the wooden gargoyles he’d once heard described. They were writhing and stretching out splintery arms and rolling their heads. Rivas had been told that when the things cried out it was with human voices, but tonight it was just a whispery roaring that he heard, like the voices of the trash men in Irvine.

Through the open doors he could see a carpeted hallway. He shrugged and stepped inside.

In a loop of a canal a few hundred feet from the structure, ripples spread as a corpse drained of blood floated to the surface.

That’s a little better, thought the thing under the water. I can think a little more clearly now. So he thinks he can lose me by going into that place, does he? Think again, Gregorio.

It swam closer, already faintly uncomfortable with the burning and itching, in spite of the shielding water around it. He knows I hate these places, it thought. That’s why he keeps going to them. But once I’ve got him, we’ll go where I want to go.

It looked back and up at the floating corpse, wishing the old drunk had had more vitality. That’s what I need, it thought. If I could drain somebody strong, then I could become so strong myself, and solid, that I could simply beat Rivas into submission.

The thing shivered with pleasure at the thought.

Well, it told itself, get moving. You don’t want Rivas to die before you can catch up to him. It kicked its froggy feet and swam toward one of the arches in the wall of Deviant’s Palace.

Another hooded figure approached Rivas as soon as he’d entered the low hall.

“We meet again, Mister Rivas!” came a woman’s voice from inside the cowl. “The Lord will be pleased that you could attend on such short notice.” The hood was flung back and Sister Sue smiled crazily at him. “You should be flattered,” she said. “He nearly never troubles himself to invite anyone. Generally he just lets them drift west.”

Rivas had managed to control, and, he hoped, conceal, his instant impulse to run. Right at the moment, he told himself firmly, there are many more dire things to fear than this girl. “Well hello, Sister Sue,” he said, deciding he might as well enter into the spirit of the evening. “Uh… what an unexpected pleasure.”

With a clever but completely unconvincing imitation of vivacity she took his arm and led him up the hall. “During our brief acquaintance,” she said, “I’ve gathered that you’re fond of music and drink.” The former, as you perceive, is provided.” Evidently she meant the two-tone hum. “Might we furnish you with some of the latter?”

All at once the whole awkwardly stilted pretense, from the calligraphic invitation to Sister Sue’s nearly impenetrable imitation of high society speech, made Rivas vaguely sick. “Yes, thanks,” he said tiredly. “Tequila neat, please.” At least the offer of a drink was an indication that they didn’t intend to hit him with the sacrament. The smell of the sea seemed to be even stronger inside the building.

She led him down the hall to a flight of stairs and down these to a beautifully tiled but lopsided arch, and simultaneously a drink was put into his hand and he stepped through the arch.

He nearly dropped the glass. He was standing on a sort of dock at the bottom of a vast cathedral of a chamber, and he almost thought he was outside again because of the damp chill and a faint mist that made the ceiling hard to see. Colored lamps dangling on long chains set the mist aglow and cast highlights on the broad and apparently deep pool that was most of the floor. Wide tiers with tables and chairs on them ringed the ascending walls at uneven intervals, and bridges spanned the gulf in several places. The arch Rivas had walked out through was the smallest of at least a dozen that ringed the chamber, and with a thrill of panic Rivas realized that the whole place looked inadequately supported—the tiers, the bridges, the vast expanses of inward-sloping stone far above his head; the structure, it seemed to Rivas, needed many more pillars.

Big polygonal rafts drifted on the surface of the lagoon like leaves on a pond, and as Rivas’s eyes grew accustomed to the soaring volume of the place and able to focus on smaller things, he saw that there were chairs and a table and candles, and in most cases a party of diners, on each raft. Waiters in little gondolas sculled among them, occasionally raising waves and drawing curses from the diners.

One raft held steady, perhaps anchored, way out in the middle of the lagoon, and instead of a table it had a ring of holes cut in it. All the holes were empty except the bigger central one, in which bobbed something that Rivas thought was a leather beanbag chair. The smell on the chilly air, he noticed, was the same one he’d encountered in Irvine—a mix of fish and garbage.

Sister Sue rang a bell mounted on the arch beside them, and though the silvery note wasn’t loud, conversation stopped at all the tables. The monotonous singing stopped too, and the thing Rivas had thought was a beanbag chair straightened up, revealing itself to be the unsubmerged top half of a man—bald, brown, and fatter than Rivas would have thought a person could get.

“Mister Rivas,” came a glutinous whisper that echoed among the canal arches. “So good of you to come.” And Rivas realized that this must be his host, Norton Jaybush himself, Lord of Irvine and Venice,

Rivas remembered the drink in his hand, and took a sip of it. It was tequila all right, and the peppery bite of it was reassuring, evidence that a sane world did still exist somewhere outside. “Mister Jaybush, I think,” he said loudly; but when his voice echoed back at him he realized that he could speak in a conversational tone and still be heard throughout the enormous chamber—evidently the place had been built with acoustics in mind. “Or should I say Mister Sevatividam? High time we met.” Cool, he thought with some cautious satisfaction. Very cool.

One of the gondolas swept up to the dock, and the boatman’s pole flexed as he brought the boat to a halt. With a smile, Rivas solicitously took Sister Sue’s elbow as if to help her aboard, but she smiled back—with such joyful malice that his smile became a wince—and said, “You first, brother.”

The boatman held the gondola steady while Rivas maneuvered himself and his drink into it, and then Sister Sue swung in behind him. She prodded his back with something hard, and said cheerfully, “The Lord wants you alive, so I won’t shoot to kill—but if you want to mess around, I’ll be happy to ruin your elbow.”

“I’m sure it’d get you all excited,” Rivas agreed.

Again the gondolier flexed the long pole against the pool wall, and the little boat surged smoothly out onto the face of the water. They passed a raft of diners, and Rivas glanced at them curiously. They were an oddly mixed lot—some were just filthy Blood freaks that somebody had dressed up in tinfoil hats and red monkey jackets, but others had the narrow faces and elegant dinner clothes of aristocracy—but for some reason the faces of all the alert ones wore expressions of alarm as they returned Rivas’s stare.

Though he was keeping his face twisted in a smile that he hoped looked more confident than nervous, he was estimating how many ways there might be to get out of here. Somehow the idea of drawing his knife and using Jaybush as a hostage didn’t seem feasible; the man was far too fat to be moved readily, and touching him would probably subject one to an unsought dose of the sacrament. Sue, and no doubt others too, had guns, so swimming back to the dock entrance was out. But these arches obviously connected this lagoon to the canals outside. It might be possible to swim out through one of them.

And in through one of the eastern arches a thing came swimming, several yards under the water’s surface, its big eyes peering at the wobbling patches of light overhead. It paused, its head turning on its stalk neck as it scanned the many rafts up there.

The gondola was nearing Jaybush’s raft, and Rivas reluctantly met the gaze of his host. The man’s eyes were nearly hidden in folds of fat, but Rivas could see mild humor in them, as though Jaybush was finding tonight’s proceedings tolerably amusing. A parent attending a school play, thought Rivas.

“You’ve learned some things, sir,” Jaybush rumbled. “But be careful. Knowledge is a toxin. Why, just the fact of your having spoken my true name means that quite a number of these people must die tonight.” A smile widened the huge pumpkin head as Jaybush looked around at the many rafts. Rivas was a little surprised that none of the diners did anything more than look unhappy at this hews.

The gondola bumped up alongside the raft. “Out you go, brother,” said Sister Sue.

Rivas finished his drink, leaned out and set the glass down on the wooden surface of the raft, and then managed to follow it without falling into the water. He crouched awkwardly on the raft, hoping that everyone couldn’t see how it made him tremble to be this close to the thing called Jaybush.

There was, he could see now, a submerged chair hung below each of the round holes cut in Jaybush’s raft. “Do please be seated,” his host told him.

“Uh… right. Thanks.” Rivas lowered himself into one, now feeling ridiculous as well as scared. The water was cold.

Sister Sue climbed out of the gondola with effortless agility and slithered into another hole across the raft from him. Her smile was as sunny as ever, and she held an automatic pistol with relaxed familiarity.

Jaybush, bobbing in the big central hole like some disagreeable centerpiece, beamed at him. “Well!” said the Messiah. “As you say, it is high time we met. I believe, in fact, sir, that you know me better than anyone else does. A number of people have taken both Blood and the sacrament, but you are the very first, I believe, to have developed procedures to shield yourself from their effects! Even in,” he paused to wink ponderously, “other places, no one ever attained the insight into my nature that you have.”

Rivas grinned unhappily, for he’d just recognized an important reason for his having accepted the invitation—to show off. He had wanted to let this interstellar limpet eel know that he had indeed learned its secrets. If he had simply ignored the invitation and gone back to Ellay, not only would Uri be doomed, but Sevatividam would think Rivas hadn’t been bright enough to figure the invitation out.

“Do you see the men with rifles on the small rafts around the pool’s periphery?” Jaybush went on. “They are, like the jaybush you encountered at the Cerritos Stadium, deaf. Not for the same reason, but just so that, in case the very direst sort of secrets are revealed here tonight, requiring the deaths of all hearers except myself and conceivably you, I won’t be left unattended.” He caught Rivas’s glance at Sister Sue. “Yes, my boy,” Jaybush said, “even our dear Sister Sue will have to die if certain things are spoken aloud.”

Sister Sue’s smile didn’t falter.

Rivas discovered that he was not tempted to shout, for example, He’s a psychic vampire from outer space!… and he thought he caught a glint of surprise in her eyes.

“And,” said Jaybush, “since you have learned such an unprecedented amount about me, I’m going to make an unprecedented offer to you.” He was smiling—everybody at the table was smiling—and Rivas couldn’t tell if he really did have some kind of offer to make or was simply playing with him. God, the man was fat! “I want you to join me,” Jaybush said.

“Merge with the Lord?” Rivas asked drily.

“No, not merge with—link with. I’m sure you’ve often seen people with undeveloped twins attached to or imbedded in their bodies. I’m offering you the opportunity to become such an appendage—psychic rather than physical, of course—to me.” He chuckled. “And another five or six of our guests have become dead people.”

Several of the guests called for drinks, and Rivas raised his hand, too. “Why don’t we let the remaining people go?” he asked, wishing he’d thought of it before.

“How many of you would like to leave?” Jaybush asked. No one spoke and no hands were raised. He waited until Rivas’s fresh tequila was brought, then said, “How does my offer sound?”

Rivas took a long thoughtful sip. “Let’s see,” he said finally. “It sounds insincere, impossible, and definitely, absolutely unattractive.”

There were gasps from the surrounding rafts, and even Sister Sue looked a little shocked.

Jaybush, though, just laughed good-naturedly, the fruity ho-ho-ho echoing away into the upper reaches of the huge chamber, where other imperiled guests peered down from the high tiers and bridges. “Ah. Well, I’ll explain it to you more fully—to the further decimation of our guests—over dinner, eh?”

That must have been a cue, for a waiter now piloted a gondola up to the raft and deftly laid big plastic-sealed menus in front of Sister Sue, Rivas, Jaybush and two of the presently empty holes. Rivas looked at Jaybush and cocked an eyebrow.

“Ah, my dear fellow,” Jaybush said, “you and Sister Sue being old friends, I was beginning to feel left out! So there will be some feminine company for myself, too—and since there’s so much of me, heh heh heh, I get two girls.”

Rivas’s instant suspicion was confirmed when he looked beyond the grinning Messiah. A bigger gondola was being sculled toward Jaybush’s dining raft, and the two women passengers were Sister Windchime and—though he had to squint and wait until it got closer to be sure—Urania Barrows. Uri had obviously been weeping recently; Sister Windchime looked paler and more drawn than she had when she and Rivas had ridden together to the Regroup Tent, but her mouth was a firm, straight line.

“Ah, but I see you know these young ladies also! You do get around, don’t you, sir?” Jaybush leaned back and indulged in a fit of laughter that set his corpulent body jiggling like a rack of carne asada on a windy day in the meat market.

“Why are they here,” Rivas asked in a voice he managed to keep even.

“Simply to brighten the conversation,” said Jaybush, spreading his palms ingenuously, “and to serve as examples and illustrations in a story or two I might tell.”

When their gondola stopped beside the raft the gondolier whispered to the two women, and Sister Windchime climbed across and settled into one of the vacant holes, but Uri shook her head and fresh tears ran down her cheeks.

“Please,” she said brokenly, “couldn’t I just go back to the—”

The boatman touched the back of her neck, and she gasped in sudden pain and then climbed obediently onto the raft and, with a splash that wetted her four raft mates, seated herself.

Rivas’s left hand had gone to his right sleeve before he remembered that he’d transferred his knife to the improvised pocket under his collar; and now the boatman was poling his craft away and all Rivas could do was clench his jaws together very hard.

“There we are,” said Jaybush fondly. He picked up his menu and then glanced around with raised eyebrows, so the others, even Uri, did the same.

Rivas was not surprised to see, when he glanced at the menu, that Deviant’s Palace specialized in the more outré forms of Venetian dining.

“I think,” said Jaybush to the waiter, who had been holding his little boat steady since presenting the menus, “that I’ll have the sport bass livers in film-darkening sauce. Though,” he added genially to the others, “I don’t think I’d recommend such hot food for the rest of you.” He turned to Sister Sue.

“Un plato de legumbres,” she said, handing her menu to the waiter.

Sister Windchime had been studying the menu, and Rivas realized that she could read—like her horseback riding, it was not a common skill. “Y para mi la gallena en mole, por favor,” she said.

Uri was blinking around unhappily. Clearly she hadn’t recognized Rivas. “I don’t know,” she quavered; “I guess a couple of tacos. Soft shell, and with extra cheese but no salsa.” And it occurred to Rivas that he couldn’t remember whether Uri knew how to read or not.

It was his turn. May as well get something good, he thought, since it’s probably my last meal. “Let’s see,” he said, raising one eyebrow like an actor trying to look judicious. The incongruity of the whole scene—the possibly naked fat man in front of him, the underwater chairs, the handsomely printed menus, the formal clothes and tinfoil hats of the diners on the other rafts, the prospect of eating poisonous food with the finest spices and sauces—made him want to giggle hysterically. “I’d like the camarones al diablo, please.”

“Ah, sir,” said the waiter with a regretful smile, “that is available only with sport shrimp.” He held up his hands to show how big the sport shrimp were.

“Fine,” said Rivas with an airy wave. “And with that, a couple of bottles of Dos Equis.”

“And a bottle of Santa Barbara Riesling for the ladies,” added Jaybush, “and for myself and the gentleman a bottle of tequila and a pitcher of sangrita.”

The man nodded, collected the rest of the menus and poled the gondola away.

“Though I didn’t know what it was at the time,” remarked Jaybush to Rivas, “I could feel you participating in my memories when you used agony to clarify and disarm your inadvertent dose of Blood.” He pointed his finger at a couple of guests in turn, his thumb vertical and bending as he said, “Bang, bang.” Turning back to Rivas he went on, “So I think you’ll understand what I’m about to say. I have found knowledge in this place—technology—which, though presently neglected and disordered, leads me to believe that the shedding of the host body and the expenditure of personal energy involved in… leaving a place, can be avoided. You see? I’m convinced that it’s possible to preserve the body, to construct a machine to shelter it and carry it to… the next place.”

Rivas just managed to restrain himself from saying, Space travel! Instead he just nodded.

“You understand what I mean,” said Jaybush with an approving nod. “And if you happened to glance southeast during your trek through the Holy City’s back yard, you probably saw my Cape Canaveral. Bang! Bang! Bang! And I know you’ve had conversations with one of the inadvertent castings known as… well, you know what I mean. And you know the healing and recuperative powers it has, through me. So you see what I’m offering you, dear boy, is immortality, and unimaginable travel, and more knowledge than any entity other than myself has ever had!”

Rivas took another sip of his drink, and shook his head more in wonder than refusal. “Perhaps I,” he said slowly, “withdraw the ‘impossible.’ Let’s look at the ‘insincere.’ Why me? What’s in it for you?”

“Well! As far as what’s in it for me, I’ll tell you frankly that I’m spread just a bit thin at the moment, a trifle overextended; like a farmer with vast fields of ripe crop but no field hands or horses and only a couple of bushel baskets. And, too, ten years ago I foolishly indulged in the, uh, extravagance that left the Holy City paved in glass. Bang! Bang!”

Rivas nodded, remembering Jaybush’s memory of the sudden unexpected white flash.

“So,” the Messiah went on, “I’d find it useful to have a full partner, rather than just a lot of uninformed employees, who could travel back and forth between here and Irvine—bang!—and make sure everything’s proceeding efficiently, and perhaps give me useful advice from the point of view of an intelligent and informed native. We could present you as a sort of latter-day Saint Paul—once a merciless scourge of the true faith, but now, enlightened and forgiven, one of its stoutest pillars! I like it. Greg, Greg, why do you persecute me?” He chuckled hugely.

“And,” he said, “as to the question of why you—my dear fellow, you underestimate yourself! I learned something about you, too, during our brief psychic linking. Why, in all my travels, I swear to you, never have I encountered such a fellow soul! Confess, confess—you too find other entities interesting only to the extent that they might give you pleasure or hindrance. Like me you consume with greedy haste everything you can get from them, and are indifferent to what may become of them afterward; you are in fact sickened by the sight of them afterward, like being forced to linger over the chilling, congealing remains of a dinner! And, like me, your real focus of attention, shorn of peripheral poses and pretences, is the one thing, the only thing, worth an eternity of regarding—yourself. You and I understand each other perfectly, boy. We could, without having to simulate any affection for each other, help each other considerably. We don’t merge with anyone, boy. We consume. You and I are always distinct, undiluted, individual. Quanta rather than arbitrary segments of continuum.” Jaybush laughed harshly. “We’re two of a kind.”

Rivas stared across the deck table at the fat smiling face and knew that no one had ever understood him as thoroughly.

“And is,” said Jaybush, “the offer still—how did you put it—‘definitely, absolutely unattractive’?”

“No,” said Rivas.

Neither of the women at the table had seemed to be paying any particular attention to the conversation—Uri had been staring earnestly into Jaybush’s face whether he was speaking or not, and Sister Windchime had been just as intently staring at her hands, wearing the expression of pained tenseness of someone who’s just swallowed a too-big mouthful—but now Sister Windchime looked up and met Rivas’s glance, and the look of hurt and betrayal in her eyes had doubled.

Jeez, kid, thought Rivas, I’m agreeing with your damned Messiah, your precious god.

The gondola was back, laden with steaming trays, and the waiter dexterously put the right plates in front of the right people and set out the drinks.

“But I’m afraid,” Rivas added, touching the sewn-in lump under his collar for reassurance, “I’m going to refuse.”

Jaybush, a forkful of some glowing trash halfway to his bulging mouth, paused to smile tolerantly. “Are you sure, my boy? Tell papa why.”

Rivas downed the remainder of his tequila and refilled his glass. “Well,” he said almost comfortably, sure now that he would never leave Deviant’s Palace alive and that nothing he could say would change anything, “because of… a bald boy who died on a garbage heap. And a pile of old stove parts that died on a glass plain. And a murdering pimp who evoked, and died out of, loyalty. And a whore with a sense of justice. Am I boring you? And because of Sister Windchime, who has compassion, though you’ve tried hard to stamp it out of her. And because the hard selfish part of Greg Rivas is swimming around in a canal someplace.”

“I understand, my boy,” said Jaybush gently, putting down his fork. “What you need is to see a little show, isn’t it?”

“No,” said Rivas unsteadily.

“I know you don’t mean that.” Jaybush smiled and clapped his blubbery hands and raised his voice and called, “I need some volunteers from the audience!” As if all twitched by the same string, half a dozen people leaped up from chairs at various tables.

“One of the waiters is bringing around a boat,” Jaybush called to them. “I’d appreciate it if you’d all get into it, and he’ll bring it to a spot right in front of this raft.”

Rivas watched as the six people, three of whom were women, stepped one by one into the boat the waiter was towing around the lagoon behind his gondola. At last the boat, with all of them on it now, was left rocking gently in front of Jaybush’s raft table.

“Hi!” Jaybush called to the boat’s occupants.

“Hi,” they all responded.

“How’s everybody feeling? Glad to be here?”

An overlapping chorus replied, “Sure!” “You bet!” “Damn right!”

“Glad to hear it,” Jaybush assured them. “Now I want all of you to pay attention, okay? Please stand up—carefully, don’t want you all tumbling into the water—and each of you look straight at me and hold out your hands, palms up, as if you were carrying a dish.”

Smiling cheerfully, the six people did as they were told, and after some jostling and elbowing they all stood facing Jaybush’s raft and holding out cupped hands.

“Do you know what you’re holding?” Jaybush asked.

They shook their heads, glanced at each other, shook their heads again. Rivas suspected that they’d been hypnotized.

“What each of you is holding is his or her own face,” said Jaybush forcefully. “You’re all standing there holding your faces in your hands, and the fronts of your heads are as smooth as eggs! You’re all absolutely identical! Good heavens, don’t any of you drop your face, or get it switched with someone else’s!”

None of the people moved, beyond some shiftings of weight and licking of lips, but now they were agitated, tense. Their hands were claws.

“You can’t even speak!” marveled Jaybush. “You’re just egg things.” He picked up a salt shaker and tossed it into the water. His face was placid, but he put panic into his voice as he said, “You dropped them! You’ve all dropped your faces in the water!”

All six of the people instantly leaped into the water, splashing Jaybush’s raft and sending their boat rocking away.

“And are you, sir,” asked Jaybush, turning to Rivas, “holding on securely to your own face?”

“Yes.” Rivas peered down at the agitated water.

“Ah. Never any uncertainty about who it is in the mirror? Here’s a question—if there’s no mirror around, do you still have a face? Are you sure?” He followed the direction of Rivas’s gaze. “Oh! Oh, no, my boy, they won’t be coming back up. Would you?”

Involuntarily Rivas again touched the lump under his collar. “I… don’t know.”

“Identities can erode,” Jaybush said. “I’m offering you the chance to armor yours and preserve it forever—but they can erode.” He extended one fat finger and leaned toward Sister Windchime. “Merge with the—”

“No,” said Rivas sharply.

Urania had stopped chewing her taco and was looking alarmed again.

Jaybush glanced at Rivas in feigned surprise. “I beg your pardon?”

“Don’t give her the sacrament.”

Sister Windchime hadn’t moved, but was staring hard at nothing and holding her fork so tightly that her knuckles were white.

“But you’d benefit too,” Jaybush told Rivas. “We’d share, if we were linked. I’m in a mood to consume both these girls tonight, right down to the core, and bequeath two more pocalocas to the Venice streets. Bang! Bang! Of course, if my partner objected, I wouldn’t do it. Are you my partner?”

Rivas was somehow certain that if he said “Yes” now, he would not be able to take it back later; so he pursed his lips and rapidly whistled the first ten notes of Peter and the Wolf while simultaneously doing a gunning drum accompaniment with his knife and fork against the tabletop—and then a number of things happened all at once: Jaybush collapsed unconscious, Sister Sue registered clear surprise for the first time that evening, and a slingshot-propelled stone the size of a golf ball slammed hard into Rivas’s solar plexus. He was knocked back almost out of his seat, and for a moment he hung half off the raft, staring down—then his pain-clenched muscles relaxed and he slumped back down and forward across his plate, sending huge sport shrimps rolling away across the table, and he lay that way for a while, gagging and retching to get air into his abused lungs. He’d glimpsed something in the water below him, but the agony in his chest left him no attention for it.

When, still wheezing, Rivas straightened up, Jaybush had recovered and was blinking around. “Well!” said the fat man with somewhat forced joviality. “You did it, boy. As surely as if you’d cut her throat with a knife. I’m sorry, Sister Sue, but Rivas has killed you.”

Sister Sue smiled brilliantly at Rivas and caressed her automatic.

Urania, who didn’t seem to be following much of this, stared. “Rivas? Greg?”

Rivas nodded, and then managed to choke out, “Yes.” A moment later he was able to add, “Came to… rescue you.” He looked at Jaybush. “That’s why… no musicians in the renaissance you… artificially induced for us? Because music… renders you unconscious?”

Jaybush waved his massive arms. “You’re all dead!” he called up to the people on the tiers and bridges. He waved at the people on the other rafts. “Everyone!” He lowered his arms and remarked to Rivas, “Yes, that’s why. And it’s why I still try to suppress it, and why the pocalocas stomp anybody who even whistles a tune. It isn’t all music that does it, but I believe a blanket policy is best. It’s mainly the irregular rhythms you call gunning, and melodies with the kind of notes they used to call accidentals. Apparently my brain waves correspond in some fashion to your musical scale and times, and are damped out by certain violations of them. If you do that again, of course, my deaf guards will silence you again, and I’ll have them bind and gag you so that you needn’t feel called upon to interfere when I set about draining these two ladies in the most pleasurable way.” He smiled. “You know, in the buoyancy of salt water I am surprisingly agile, which of course is why I like to have a lot of canals available to me.” His smile grew broader and more kindly. “I really think we understand each other. And I don’t see why you should need time to consider my really very generous offer, so I won’t give you any time.”

He extended his finger again toward Sister Windchime. “Will you link with me or not? Answer!”

Rivas remembered the glimpse he’d got of the water under the raft, and belatedly he realized what he’d seen down there. At first he’d assumed that it was the drifting corpse of one of the face-divers… but it had been moving.

He remembered Sevatividam’s unease—outright fear, in fact—when the planet of the floating globes and walruslike creatures had been picked clean; the walrus things were all dead, but there were hungry things swimming among the fallen globes… sentient replicas of the original creatures, each one accidentally formed when one of the originals had received Sevatividam’s touch while in extreme pain… and Sevatividam had feared them, for though attempting to drain him would kill any venturesome replica, totally overload it, the process would harm Sevatividam too…

Rivas bit his middle knuckle thoughtfully—and bit a section of skin right off, though he was careful not to wince. Then he lowered his hand into the water below his submerged chair and let the blood leak into the water.

Forgive me, he thought, trying to project the thought, as thoughts had been projected at him when, four days ago, his soul had hung bodiless in the sky over the Regroup Tent. I’m yours, he thought now, come and take me. I’m sorry I hurt you, sorry I fled from you. Come take my blood.

Sevatividam’s finger moved closer to Sister Windchime.

“Wait,” Rivas snapped. He’d felt a surge in the water under his hand. “I’ll give me to you—the part of me you’re interested in, anyway.”

“My dear boy,” said Sevatividam, lowering his hand.

Rivas felt teeth clamp onto his hand. He turned his surprised gasp into a smile—and then, contorting like a man trying very hard to strike a match on the seat of his pants, he yanked the hemogoblin up through the hole.

In the instant of general stunned surprise he flung the squealing thing directly into Sevatividam’s face, and as a follow-through to the action he rolled forward out of his submerged seat, somersaulted across the raft—aware of the bang and aspirated thop of bullets being lashed past very close to him—and dove into the water, drawing his knife with his bitten left hand as he sank.

He had no idea what to do now. He had probably got himself and Uri and Sister Windchime killed, but he was certain they’d all been doomed anyway.

Then he was jarred by a solid boom and rattle of bubbles. Something big had impacted very hard with the water. There were further booms as more stuff crashed in, and thinking that whatever was going on might at least be distracting the gunmen, he kicked up to the surface.

It was even noisier out in the air than it had been under water. There were mountainous rendings and crackings from overhead, and the long screams of people falling, and the evidently random pop and ricochet of gunfire, but Rivas’s attention was drawn to the raft he’d vacated moments ago—and not just because of the pain-convulsed figure of Sister Sue, who had clearly caught at least one of the bullets meant for Rivas.

A man trying to scream while inflating a balloon would probably have produced sounds like the ones Sevatividam was making now, and as Rivas blinked up at the spectacle he saw Sevatividam’s bulk visibly diminishing. The Messiah’s narrowing arms were tearing at a luminous membrane that covered his head, and during the couple of seconds it took Rivas to swim to the raft and scramble back aboard, the membrane—which was twitching and pulsing independent of Sevatividam’s wrenching at it—doubled the intensity of its glow, then tripled it, and then began actually to flicker with pale flames.

Another thing rushed down through the smoky air and exploded a splash when it hit the water, and Rivas realized that it was masonry, that the whole structure was coming down. Because Sevatividam was losing power?

Sister Windchime had already got up out of her chair, and Rivas shouted at Uri, “Up! Come on! We’ve got to get out of here!”

Uri sobbed and extended her hands—one of which still clutched the remains of a taco—toward Jaybush. “Lord, save us!” she wailed.

Rivas put down his knife, drew back his left hand and balled it into a fist, and then carefully gave her a solid downward punch next to her chin. Her mouth was knocked open, but clacked shut again when her head hit the table. “Get a boat,” he shouted to Sister Windchime, “and get her and you into it.” He retrieved his knife and turned to Jaybush. A bullet sang past and actually stung the end of his nose, so he crowded closer to the Messiah, almost hugging him.

It hurt to be that close, for the hemogoblin was definitely burning now, but through its dazzlingly vaporizing substance Rivas could see Sevatividam’s eyes glaring specifically up at him, full of agony but full of promise too.

Rivas winked at him and drove the knife blade through the clinging hemogoblin into the tanned slab of chest, digging around a bit before finding a gap between the ribs.

A strange thing happened when he drew the blade out; as if he’d reached into a tub of water and stabbed a hole in the bottom, the burning hemogoblin began draining into Sevatividam. Now there was fear in the pouchy eyes, and something like… pleading?

Not certain that it was by his own volition, Rivas now swiped the blade across the corded throat, and after the first hard-propelled gout of blood had burst out and rocked him back, and he’d dragged his sleeve across his eyes to be able to see again, he saw an angular object about the size of a thumb joint emerge from the opened throat and hover unsupported in the air in front of his face.

It quivered, and the blood disappeared from it in a fine spray, and he saw that it was a crystal.

Behind him Sister Windchime had found a gondola and wrestled Uri’s bulk into it—the gunfire had stopped, but the rain of stone was getting worse, the water was choppy, the air full of splash spray, and the night sky more and more visible beyond the buckling walls and ceiling—but Rivas slowly reached out and took hold of the crystal.

Instantly there was a voice in his head: Swallow me. You win. You’re the boss. I’ll work for you. Swallow me.

He knew what it would mean—to live forever, always knowing who he was, with a cozy border between what was himself and what wasn’t, never to be hurt; in fact, never to be touched.

A week ago he might have been tempted. He pushed the crystal into the tequila bottle and firmly corked it.

He turned around. Sister Windchime was in the gondola with Uri and was clutching the edge of the raft, but not patiently. Rivas tossed the bottle into the little boat and started forward. The light was bad with most of the hanging lamps extinguished, and so though he heard the hollow coughlike sound of another section of roof giving way, and even looked up in useless alarm, he never saw the piece of stone that came tumbling down through the smoke-fouled air and broke his head.