ALL MORNING THE LITTLE group moved south along the shore of the great inland sea that, though its broad surface now extended north nearly to the walls of Ellay, was still called San Pedro Bay; and though Rivas didn’t particularly slow the group—he climbed over fallen building sides, waded down streets reclaimed by the sea, and plodded across the occasional stretches of gray powder as tirelessly as any of them—his pace remained somnambulistic, his gaze unfocused.
They’d moved into the Inglewood Desolate, a wide band that extended east all the way from Venice; plants grew poorly in the Desolate, but the main reason for its almost complete lack of population was the spectrum of illnesses suffered by long term residents, and the impossibility of having unsporting children here. Several times during their trek lean faces peered longingly down at them from glass-less windows or up from sewer vents, but the hunched, hungry, scarcely human creatures that would have attacked other travelers let Sister Sue’s band pass unmolested, for it was only in and around the cities that the Jaybirds pretended to be pacifists, and the dwellers in the Desolate had learned to stay away from even the most defenseless-looking group of them.
They passed a few piers that had been built recently enough not to have been swallowed by the ever-rising water, but one could only speculate about what businesses might be practiced by the men who moored their boats at them, for the furtive sailors never yelled or waved, and all carried long knives and slingshots.
The area around the Gage Street pier, though, was a sort of Jaybird settlement. Several tents had been erected, and every month a different group of shepherds took over the task of maintaining the boats and making sure all new recruits were shipped on across the bay.
Sister Sue’s group presented no problems. Along with the rest of them, Rivas shambled docilely out to the end of the pier. The Jaybirds’ pier was a result of luck rather than construction, for it was a big, ancient truck lying on its side; the uphill end of it, which was the cab, was half buried in the layers of soil that a dozen winter floods had flung over it, and out at the far end the top side of the box-shaped trailer was nearly awash in the water of the bay. The surface of this pier was rusted and scuffed and riddled with finger-sized punch holes, but a big cross that might once have been red was still dimly visible painted on it, along with fragments of words, after a hundred baking summers. Ordinarily Rivas would have tried to read the words and guess at their meaning, but today they were just patterns on the pavement. Beyond the rear of the truck, silhouetted against to his new masters earlier that day… but now it only deepened his frown. He glanced at Sister Sue and saw that she was watching him, and he looked away quickly.
The nearest horizon was a ragged line of bone-white buildings three miles away across the bay, but the shepherd at the end of the pier was squinting south, where the bay broadened out and one could see, this being a clear day, the distant dot that was Long Beach Island. At the seaward end of the pier Rivas hung back, seeming to find something disquieting about traveling on the water, but a shepherd stepped up impatiently behind him and gave him a hard shove between the shoulders. Rivas wound up making a flailing jump down onto one of the benches, but once he was in the boat he sat down quietly.
Sister Sue stared at him, then turned to the shepherd, shrugged, and resumed getting the rest of her group aboard.
In the midafternoon the boat tacked in to a Jaybird dock at Cerritos, which, being a good two miles below the southern edge of the Desolate, presented an almost tropical front to the bay, with tall trees trailing flowers and vivid greenery over the water. The harsh cries of monkeys and parrots rang for hundreds of yards through the trees up and down the coast, and the warty top halves of a few amphibian heads poked up out of the water to see what the commotion was, but there was no hitch as the shepherd helped everyone up out of the boat and onto the dock. As he pushed away and let the wind fill his main and jib sails for the skate back northwest to the Gage Street pier, Sister Sue’s band plodded up the foliage-roofed highroad that split the narrow band of coastline jungle and led the group finally to the crest of a hill from which they could look down on the Cerritos Stadium. Other groups of Jaybirds were arriving from north and south and inland, and there was a considerable crowd at the gates. Sister Sue led her group down.
Over the stadium’s entrance gates some agile devotee had painted, with more fervor than skill, a mural of the Messiah Norton Jaybush welcoming all of humanity with outstretched, misproportioned arms; and the painted crowd on which he was looking down became, below the long lintel over the gates, the real, animate crowd of smiling Jaybirds jostling up to get inside. They were all silent, and the only sounds were panting, and the scuff of shod or callused feet, and the occasional uncomplaining grunt of a member of the faithful being momentarily compressed against a wall.
Once inside the huge weathered bowl of the stadium, Rivas absently noticed eight rickety wooden towers set up at even intervals around the periphery of the wide field, and on the little railed platform at the top of each tower stood a brown-robed, bearded man holding a crook-topped staff. Once free of the press at the gates, the various Jaybird groups became distinct and separate again, and each group set out walking toward the base of one or another of the towers.
There were no visible differences among the hooded, tower-top shepherds, and in this orderly dispersal it was, for once, the most deteriorated and imbecilic member of each group that determined on a specific tower and led his or her band across the weedy field toward it. The tower toward which Rivas’s group plodded was on the far side of the enclosed field, and most of the other bands were already standing at ease in the shadow of other towers by the time his band came to a halt.
As if at a signal, all the tower-top shepherds abruptly opened their mouths and began producing a low, steady note, and a moment later every deteriorated Jaybird in the stadium joined in with a shrill “eee” sound; though a ground-rumbling roar now instead of a buzz, it was the same insistent two-tone note that had aided Rivas’s acquiescence to his new masters earlier that day… but now it only deepened his frown. He glanced at Sister Sue and saw that she was watching him, and he looked away quickly.
As suddenly as it had started the sound stopped, and in the moment that the last harsh echoes were rebounding away among the high tiers, Rivas took an involuntary step forward, as if the sound had been something physical he’d been pushing against.
The shepherds slung their staves through their belts and climbed nimbly down from the towers, and Rivas watched the one his group and a couple of others were clustered around. When the man got to the ground he straightened up, hiked his staff free and then strode up to Sister Sue and spoke to her quietly.
She indicated Rivas with a nod of her head and then whispered to the bearded shepherd for nearly half a minute. The expression on the man’s tanned, craggy face didn’t change, but he slowly lifted his head to stare at Rivas, and when Sister Sue had finished he walked over to the new member.
“Welcome to your real family, Brother Boaz,” he said in a deep voice.
Rivas glanced around uneasily, then nodded. “Uh, thank you.”
“How old are you?”
“…Eighteen? I think eighteen.”
The shepherd raised an eyebrow and looked more closely at Rivas’s face and hair. “Hmm. Take off your knapsack, please, and let me have it.”
Rivas looked over at Sister Sue, who smiled and nodded. With evident reluctance he reached up, slipped the canvas straps off his shoulders, shrugged the knapsack off and held it out toward the shepherd.
The man took it, stepped back and began undoing the buckles. Around the arena the other shepherds were also busy taking stock of new recruits, and, except for the low mutter of those conversations, the wind in the ragged high tiers was the only sound.
“Or thirty-one,” said Rivas.
The shepherd looked up. “What?”
“Maybe I’m thirty-one years old.”
The man had got the flap open, but paused to squint at him. “Maybe thirty-one, eh? Have you ever… been with us before?”
“No, sir. I ran away from home yesterday. My father’s a tenant farmer for Barrows. The Currency brandy estates.”
“Let me get this straight,” said the shepherd curiously as he pulled a large cloth-wrapped bundle out of the knapsack. “You leave home at thirty-one and call it running away?”
Rivas was breathing deeply now, clearly trying to resist panic. “No, eighteen,” he said tensely. “That’s right, eighteen. For sure.”
The shepherd opened his mouth to ask another question but shut it again when he saw what was wrapped up in the cloth—Rivas’s second-best pelican.
The gaze he now turned on Rivas was full of suspicion. “What the hell is this?”
After a pause Rivas said, almost in a whisper, “Somebody’s pelican.”
“Somebody’s? It’s not yours?… Damn it, answer me!”
“No, sir.” Rivas rubbed his hand across his mouth. “I have one, but not as nice as that.”
“Well, Brother Boaz, music is one of the things we have to sacrifice.” He opened his hand and the instrument fell to the ground with a discordant bwang, and then he lifted a heavy boot and stamped the thing flat.
The shepherd started to turn away, then froze, and an instant later he had whirled back to face Rivas again. “Say, what’s your name?”
For a moment Rivas’s apprehensive frown left his face and, proud of knowing the answer, he said, “Brother Boaz.”
“No, damn it, I mean before, what was your—”
A strident trumpet note suddenly split the air, and a voice from the far side of the arena shouted through a megaphone, “Make yourselves ready for the Lord!”
The shepherd craned his neck and saw that an old man in a white robe had entered the stadium. “The jaybush is here,” he said. “You walk out into the center of the field. We’ll talk some more after the sacrament.” He gave Rivas a push and then turned to the other groups around his tower. “All new members follow this brother!” he called. “I’ll greet you all personally afterward.”
Rivas plodded out across the uneven ground, which was stippled now with fresh green weed shoots after the rain, and though he walked as slowly as any of the hundred or so new members who were approaching from all sides of the arena in a steadily shrinking circle, his mind was racing.
That wasn’t my pelican, he thought, I remember mine, I saved up my jiggers and bought it when I was sixteen—okay, so why do I remember the one he stomped? Hell, I even remember that its E-string screw didn’t bind properly, and needed to be readjusted after every set.
Set? What do I mean set? That’s right, I play at the… what’s the name of the place? The Bom Sheltr, that’s it, in Venice; of course, and I’m twenty-five—why in hell was I thinking eighteen or thirty-one?
And what in God’s name am I doing back among the Jaybirds? And lining up for the communion while sober?
He paused for a moment, but a dim suspicion that he did have some presently forgotten purpose in being here made him reluctantly resume the quasi-ceremonial pace. He surreptitiously touched his wrist and was reassured to feel his knife strapped there as usual. Okay, he thought, I’ll play this scene up to, but not including, the point of receiving the sacrament. This seems to be the Cerritos Stadium, and from my old birdy days I remember where the kitchen exit is; with surprise, speed and my knife, I should be able to be out of here and into the hills within two minutes.
The white-robed figure of the jaybush had been walking toward the center of the field at a slightly quicker pace than the tightening ring of communicants, and just before shoulder to shoulder contact caused the ring to stop shrinking he slipped between a couple of them and then made his way to the very center. For ten long soundless seconds he scrutinized the nervously eager people in the ring.
Then, “Kneel,” he said, in a voice like concrete blocks rubbed together.
Everyone in the stadium did, with a rustling and thudding that seemed loud in the silence. Rivas squinted up at the jaybush, and the man’s robe shone so in the afternoon sun that the sky looked darkened to purple behind him. The man looked around the congregation again, then slowly crossed to stand in front of a young girl six places away to Rivas’s right.
“Merge with the Lord,” the jaybush said, then reached out and touched her forehead.
She oomphed as if she’d been punched in the belly, and a moment later she was rolling on the damp ground outside the circle.
And suddenly it all came back to Rivas: Barrows hiring him to perform the redemption of Urania, the nightmare he’d had about her, and his own alarming susceptibility to this predatory religion.
Let me out of here, he thought, instinctively reaching into his sleeve for the knife; if the plain recruitment tricks can make a grinning zombie of me so easily, what would a dose of the sacrament do?
But you can’t run, he realized a moment later—not without blowing your hard-won earnest-new-boy cover and wrecking your chance of finding Urania.
But I can’t take the sacrament sober either, he thought desperately. His heart was pounding in his coldly hollow-chest, and when he darted a glance to his right he saw that there were now only two people to be disposed of before it was his own turn. He noticed that he was whimpering deep in his throat, and with some difficulty he forced himself to stop it.
“Merge with the Lord,” said the jaybush, touching the forehead of the boy who was next in line. The boy slumped limply to the ground, and Rivas heard his jaw clack shut as his face hit the dirt.
Rivas dug up inside his sleeve and tugged slightly on the knife grip so that an inch of blade was free of the sheath, and then he pressed the nail of his thumb up against the bottom edge. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes.
“Merge with the Lord.” Gasp, Thud.
As he heard the jaybush’s boots scuff to directly in front of him, Rivas exhaled…
…and then drove his thumb up against the blade edge, which split the nail and grated against the bone. The pain was a bright, hot flare that brought a metallic taste to his mouth, and he forced his mind to cling to the agony and focus on it to the exclusion of everything else.
He didn’t even hear the jaybush say, “Merge with the Lord.”
There was a silent, stunning impact and then he was falling through an abyss so frigid that what lived and moved here—and he knew something did—partook of an animation below freezing, as he’d read that liquid helium was said by the ancients to begin to crawl at temperatures approaching absolute zero; his own warmth was being violently wrung out of him, but more kept on coursing into him through his left hand—specifically through his thumb.
He was being stretched both toward the bottomless cold and toward the heat, and though he sensed a tearing in himself, in his mind, he willed himself to move in the direction of the heat; then he seemed to be rushing upward, though whatever had been on the other side of the rip in his soul had now broken free of him and, alive but separate, was pacing him. It became more distant and soon he wasn’t aware of it anymore, nor of the sentience in the black cold below.
What he was aware of was an aching hip and pebbly, damp dirt against his cheek. He sat up and looked around—the jaybush was gone, though the crowd around the field’s periphery was still out there, and all of them were still kneeling; then he let his gaze fall onto his fellow communicants.
Only a couple had regained, or kept, consciousness, and they were blinking around stupidly like people lately roused from sodden sleep. Most were still stretched out on the dirt, several of them twitching, the rest limp and conceivably dead. Of the ones near enough to see closely, quite a few were bleeding from injuries sustained during falls or fits; his gashed thumb probably wouldn’t excite any comment.
And then he realized that he was still clear-headed—as alert as he ever was, and with his memory and personality intact. This new-found pain defense worked even better than the drunk defense, for though the latter insulated him from the sacrament, it did leave him drunk.
The thought of drink reminded him of the pint of Malk whiskey concealed behind a flap in his knapsack, and brought him to his feet. He walked across the field to his own Jaybird group, being careful to act dopey and clumsy.
Sister Sue watched him approach, but the shepherd kept his back turned until Rivas paused a few feet away—then he turned around, and he was holding the pint of whiskey.
“You recover fast,” the shepherd said.
Rivas put on a foolish grin and brushed some stray strands of hair off his forehead, leaving a smear of blood over one eyebrow. “Murphy’s still playing in the yard,” he said thickly, “even though Mom told him to come in.” It was the sort of thing people said when recovering from the sacrament.
“You’re bleeding, Brother Boaz,” said Sister Sue in a concerned tone, at the same time giving the shepherd a hand signal that Rivas didn’t catch.
“Yeah?” Rivas stared at his split thumb with what he hoped looked like foolish astonishment. “Gee.”
“Piece of old glass, probably, out there that he fell on,” said the shepherd. “Say, brother, what’s this?” he asked Rivas, holding up the flat bottle.
Rivas peered at it. “Whiskey,” he said finally. “I think it’s mine.”
“It was yours.”
The shepherd let it fall. It didn’t break when it hit the ground, but it did when the man stamped on it. Rivas forced himself not to let his chagrin show.
“Liquor’s another thing we have to sacrifice,” the shepherd told him. “You’re lucky it was still full, and that the sister here says you were sober when she picked you up this morning. Still, liquor and a musical instrument, both on one novitiate.” He shook his head thoughtfully. “What’s your name again?”
“Joe Wiley,” said Rivas at random. “Uh, no, sorry, I mean Brother Boaz.”
“And how old are you?”
“I… forget.”
The shepherd nodded, then smiled. “Did you like taking the sacrament?”
Rivas closed his eyes and inhaled the fumes of the lost whiskey. “Oh, yes sir.”
“Good, because I’m going to set up a special treat for you. Most people only get to take it once a day at the very most, but we’re going to let you have it twice today, isn’t that great? I think you’ll be able to talk to me more… frankly, afterward. How does that sound?” Before Rivas could answer, the shepherd added, “Oh, and we’ll have you sitting down, so you won’t fall and hurt yourself this time.”
Rivas widened his eyes. “I’d love it,” he said. Then he whispered, “But won’t everybody else be jealous?”
“Naw. It’ll be our little secret. Follow me.”
He led Rivas across the dirt to a door in the stadium wall, and through it and down a dim corridor to a room with a bolt on the outside of the door. “Sorry there’s no window or lamp,” he told Rivas, “but you’ve got the Lord Jaybush watching over you now, so there’s no need to be scared of the dark. There’s a chair in there—find your way to it and sit down.”
Rivas hesitated. Once again, he thought, I could knife him and run. Easier now than before. But, once again, that would blow my cover.
Do I really want Urania back this much?
“Yes,” he sighed, and stepped into the room. The door was instantly slammed shut behind him, the buffet of air pressure letting him know that the room was indeed windowless, and very small, too. A tool storage room once, probably. A moment later he heard the bolt clank solidly home.
After a bit of cautious shambling and groping, his split thumb collided agonizingly with the promised chair, and he sat down. Okay, he told himself, let’s get one thing straight, there’s no way you’re going to take that damned sacrament again. Don’t even consider worrying about that. I’ll kill the jaybush if I have to… but maybe I can whistle him out, and then sprawl on the floor, so that when he regains consciousness he’ll think he already gave it to me. He pursed his lips and in a simultaneously hesitant and hasty gunning rhythm, whistled the first six notes of Peter and the Wolf—the bright adventurous tune sounding constricted and out of place in these surroundings—and then, satisfied, he sat back to wait.
He remembered how he had come to discover this special property of music, and of Peter and the Wolf in particular.
In the hills north of the Seal Beach Desolate the Jaybird band he was with had followed a column of smoke until they found, broken up and still burning and scattered across one of the little dry riverbeds, the remains of a Santa Anan merchant caravan. The raiders, whoever they’d been—probably the self-styled modern hooters, who had to ride weirdly customized bicycles instead of the fabled motorcycles ridden by their historical namesakes but did still carry the dreaded hooter swords, painstakingly slotted to produce a loud hooting when whirled in the air at high speed—had taken everything of particular value, but the Jaybirds had lots of time and would be content with meager pickings. They rooted and scrabbled patiently among the blood-spattered wreckage, and came away with a modest haul of metal pieces and wire… but Rivas came across a pelican, miraculously unbroken.
And so for a few minutes the nineteen-year-old Rivas forgot the ruin around him and treated the sprawled corpses to a few of the old melodies he’d learned from his father; and the calculatedly uneven rhythms that he eventually evolved into gunning startled the carrion birds overhead and made them circle a little higher.
The other members of his band somehow didn’t guess that he’d owned and played one before, and assumed that his modest proficiency was a miracle. Rivas had let them think, it, and that evening when they’d returned to the nest he had set about writing new, pious lyrics to accompany the handful of tunes he knew how to play.
A month or so later a circuit-riding jaybush had passed through to administer the communion, and Rivas had selflessly offered to forego the joy of receiving the sacrament in order that the event might be graced with music. The jaybush had had no particular objection, and proceeded with the ceremony while Rivas sawed and plucked his way through Blue Moon, Can’t Always Get What You Want, and other traditional favorites—and he played them at a fairly traditional tempo—but something happened when he wearied of that sort of thing and began to do an emphatically gunned rendition of Peter and the Wolf.
At the first bouncing notes the jaybush had paused, and as the tune continued the man’s eyes had unfocused and his outstretched hand had fallen limp to his side. Rivas had of course noticed it, though he didn’t suspect that his music was the cause, and glancing around he saw that all the far-gones had ceased their usual speaking-in-tongues background rumble and were also inert. The jaybush snapped out of it and resumed working his way down the line as soon as the tune came to an end, and the far-gones started up their eerily synchronized jabbering again, and young Rivas thoughtfully put his instrument away for the evening.
In the next couple of weeks he’d managed to prove to himself that that tune, when rendered at a gunning tempo, did reduce the very deteriorated communicants from near to total unconsciousness, and when the next circuit-riding jaybush passed through, Rivas found an opportunity to verify the effect with him, too.
From then on it had been his secret last-ditch defense against the sacrament, and in later years, after his stay in Venice and his eventual return to Ellay, it became the trade secret that made him the best redeemer in the business.
But, he reminded himself worriedly as he sat now in the lightless little room, now they’re down on music. Is that just for the sake of deprivation, or are they onto my trick?
After a long time in the dark he heard footsteps in the corridor and saw a wavering line of yellow light appear and brighten under the door, and then the bolt rattled and snapped back and the door was pulled open. The jaybush stood in the doorway with a flaring torch in his left hand, looking like some Old Testament prophet with his robe and wild white beard, and for a few seconds he just stood there—presumably staring at Rivas, though his face was in shadow down to his prominent cheekbones and it was hard to be sure. Rivas took the opportunity to glance around the room. Some stringy webs in the corners implied big spiders, but his chair was the only piece of furniture.
“A great privilege is yours,” the jaybush grated.
“Yes, sir,” said Rivas, trying to sound eager. “I mean, father. Or whatever. I’m just glad you all think I’m worthy of it.”
The white-robed figure stepped into the room and, reaching out to the left, fitted the butt of the torch into an old can that had been nailed to the wall. Now the long right arm lifted, with the pointer finger extended like the stinger of some oversized insect.
Rivas puckered his lips and began whistling Peter and the Wolf.
The arm remained up, the feet kept moving and the finger stayed pointing at him.
He whistled a few more notes, more shrilly, and then kicked the chair over backward and rolled to his feet behind it, not even caring if he roused some spiders.
Another robed figure came into view behind the jaybush and laid a restraining hand on the old man’s shoulder. The jaybush stepped back, turned and left the room. Rivas heard his steps receding away up the corridor as the by now familiar shepherd entered the room, smiling and holding a pistol trained at Rivas’s stomach.
Though frightened, Rivas was a little surprised that the man would use so awkward and unreliable a weapon—antique pistols refitted to shoot spring-propelled poison darts were a trendy item among the high society ladies in the city, but the darts frequently got fouled up in the barrel and at the best of times had nearly no range nor accuracy. Rivas tensed, and calculated how he would jump.
“He’s deaf,” the shepherd remarked. He cocked the gun and raised it. “Now, no hard feelings, but we don’t care if you’re McAn or Bailey or Rivas or just some creep trying to kidnap his wife away from us. We can’t have you around.”
“Oh Jesus, mister, don’t shoot me,” quavered Rivas, falling forward onto one knee and snaking his left hand up into his right sleeve—and then from the half-kneeling position he lunged strongly upward, whipping the knife free and driving it at the shepherd’s chest.
The pistol exploded beside his ear as he came up and a hot lash ripped his shoulder a moment before he slammed heavily against the shepherd. Together they thudded into the wall and rebounded, knocking the torch loose and spattering both of them with scalding wax, and then Rivas had spun away in the sudden darkness, lost his footing and tumbled to the floor. He heard the shepherd lurch forward, collide with the chair and go over it and then fall thrashing and gasping in the corner.
Christ, thought Rivas frantically as he slapped the floor around himself for the lost knife, the goddamn gun shoots bullets, he shot me, he’s probably aiming it at the noise I’m making right now, where’s the goddamn knife….
All his muscles were tensed in useless anticipation of the next bullet, and even after he heard the harsh exhalation from the corner and the staccato knocking of one of the shepherd’s boots against the wall and floor, and realized what it meant, it took him nearly a full minute to relax enough even to get to his feet.
Live ammunition, he marveled. Where on earth can he have got it? I thought it all went stale half a century ago.
After a while he stopped panting. The torch had gone out when it fell, and the room was illuminated only dimly by the light that filtered down the hall, but after some peering he saw his knife on the floor and picked it up. It was slippery with warm blood. He shoved it back into its sheath, promising himself he’d clean it later.
He took a deep breath, tried not to pay attention to the hollow feeling in his belly and the sudden sweat on his face, and then he forced himself to walk around the fallen chair, get down on his knees, and grope for the pistol.
He thought his eyes would become accustomed to the dimness, but somehow as the minutes went by he could see even less than before. The shepherd’s death spasm had left his corpse smelling very bad, and when Rivas’s fumbling search forced him to move the body he had no idea what his hands were getting wet with. Webs stretched and tore under his fingers in the darkness, and his thumb had started bleeding again, slicking everything he touched, and the dead body seemed to have gotten huge, so that Rivas could hardly move without bumping into an arm or a leg… or maybe it had, spiderlike itself, grown more limbs in the dark… or maybe there was more than one corpse in here, maybe there were dozens, all over the floor, behind him, getting silently to their feet, wide-eyed in the dark, reaching for him with cooling hands….
A spider or something tapped across his hand, but instead of exploding in a scream Rivas imploded into a sort of mentally crystallized state. His jaws were clenched together so hard that his whole head hurt, and his knees were helping push against his lower jaw, both kneecaps jammed under his chin and his arms wound tightly around his shins.
Hang on, he thought dimly, just hold it all in, maintain stasis, until Jaybush can take the whole thing away. Don’t want agitation, motion, stuff, people… come soon, take it all away from me.
But he hadn’t backed far enough away from it all, and he knew he was lying on his side on the floor like a knocked-over barrel, and that his elbow was in agony. He released the grip of his hands, and his knees fell away from his chin and he coughed.
Alarm quickly replaced the crystalline stasis as he struggled to his feet. There was more light in the corridor outside, as if approaching torches were only a corner or two away, and voices were getting louder. He reeled to the doorway and hurried down the corridor in the direction away from the light.
He wished he’d found the pistol, but he was fairly confident that he could find the kitchen—and the kitchen exit!—from here.
An hour later he was crouched on the shaded balcony of a half-collapsed apartment building a few miles south of the stadium, wishing he hadn’t lost the pint of whiskey, which he’d brought along as much for its disinfectant properties as for its relaxing ones. Though his bullet-furrowed shoulder had stopped bleeding, it was hot and aching, and he was afraid that it—or maybe his thumb—had got infected and was responsible for his present feverish dizziness.
You can’t get sick now, he told himself angrily, you’ve got to decide with a clear head what to do. I’m blown with the Jaybirds, Sister Sue’s band, anyway, and all my supplies are gone. What any smart redemptionist would do at this point is go home, refund half the client’s advance, apologize and recommend a colleague; especially a redemptionist who has every reason to believe he’s begun losing his mind.
But they’ve got Urania. If I’m not willing to risk it for her, then what am I saving it for?
He stood up, flexing his hot, throbbing shoulder against the weight it seemed to have on it. The only thing I can do, he thought bleakly, is to move much further southeast, along the shore of the Long Beach Channel and into the Seal Beach Desolate—assume the worst, that Urania is being taken directly toward the Holy City in Irvine, get well ahead of her and then slowly try to work my way back northwestward without letting any Jaybird group get past me unobserved.
The realization that it was a nearly impossible task didn’t make him change his mind about attempting it.
Rivas sighed, plodded out of the shade to the end of the tilted balcony and was about to climb back down the outward-leaning stairs, when out of the corner of his eye he caught a glimpse of his shadow on the stucco wall.
And then despite his dizziness he had instantly vaulted over the rail with a hoarse yell of fear, and he landed heavily on his side but forced himself to go rolling and somersaulting across the yard, scraping against walls and grinding his wounded shoulder across the dirt… for in blurry silhouette against the wall he had seen an as-yet-only-tenuous shape crouched on his shoulder, the shadow of a thing still mostly transparent but clearly man-shaped.
After a few frantic, spasmodic seconds Rivas scrambled to his feet, wheezing, and peered around fearfully behind him, afraid the dislodged thing might still be near enough to pounce on him and reattach itself.
Then he saw it, a dozen feet away. Its ectoplasmic substance had been torn and crumpled in Rivas’s slithering progress across the yard, but it was hunching itself up into a crouch, and though it was as hard to get a good look at as a jellyfish in clear water, Rivas could see the thing’s faintly pink-tinged face curl in an idiot grin.
He was desperately trying to remember what he’d heard—and naively scoffed at!—about the creatures known as hemogoblins: that they were mostly commonly encountered in the southern hills, and started out as almost invisible cellophanelike bags that drifted through the air until they could attach themselves to an open wound; they expanded and took on human shape and a reddish color as they ingested more and more of the blood of their host, until finally the host expired and the vitalized hemogoblin was able to walk around and hunt rather than just fly randomly, like a dandelion seed, on the wind. He’d even heard stories of them speaking.
The indistinct anthropoid shape started toward him, and he scooped up a handful of dirt and lashed it at the thing. The dirt tore through it like shrapnel, but in a few seconds it had re-knit itself and was grinning at him again.
It began hissing, in bursts, and then it whispered, “Rivas.”
“Get the hell away from me,” he told it in a voice shrilled by tension.
“Need little blood,” the thing pointed out.
Rivas pulled loose his clotted knife and tossed it onto the dirt. The move reminded him of tossing a crust of bread to a stray dog to keep it from following you. “Take that first,” he said unsteadily. “I’ll wait right here until you’re done with it.” He’d seen a gravelly stretch a few yards to his right, and as soon as the thing began to suck the knife he planned to dive over there and then just keep flinging handfuls of rocks until the thing was so shredded and scattered that it wouldn’t ever be able to pull itself back together.
But when the hemogoblin reached out and touched the bloody knife it instantly became much more clearly visible, and Rivas saw that its face, impossibly, was a perfect caricature of his own; and a moment later he was running away with the boundless energy of absolute panic, his knife and all thought of strategy forgotten.
When he rolled to a gasping halt five minutes later—having followed the last street of his zigzagging course past the point where, undercut by the bay, it ended in a muddy slope—his panic had thinned out to mere apprehension, and he was able to note with chagrin the mud that now caked his once white clothes.
He sat up, gingerly rubbing his abraded palms together, and stared back up the slope he’d just cartwheeled down. The black ash band exposed in the soil’s cross section was clearly visible, and he remembered his father saying that it was always about two feet under the surface anywhere one went, so it wasn’t difficult for Rivas to calculate how far he’d tumbled—about twelve feet, he decided. Lucky I didn’t break a leg, he thought as he stood up, suppressing a groan—or my neck.
It occurred to him that he was hungry, and he stared out across the broad wrinkled face of the water, which was beginning to glitter gold under the late afternoon sun. He was far enough south so that the fresh water of the Ellay River would be fairly well mixed with the sea, and there might be some salt-water fish out there; he wasn’t nearly hungry enough to experiment with the sort of fresh-water specimens that somehow throve in the Inglewood Desolate. But how was he to catch anything?
Then to the north he saw a sail, and when he squinted at it he recognized the sophisticated rigging the Jaybirds used. All at once thankful for the broad smears of mud on his clothes, he carefully but quickly picked his way along the shoreline until he came to a gap in the bank, a water-cut cleft choked with age-rounded chunks of broken concrete. He clambered up over them, pausing a couple of times to admire the line of decorated tile that ran across one edge of a few of them, and up at street level he shambled toward the clustered, tumbled, vine-hung buildings, hoping at least to find edible vegetation.
He didn’t seem to be able to keep his mind on the concerns of the moment, though; just as he’d paused to peer at the century-old decorations on the broken stones, he found himself shading his eyes to look up at the rooftops and balconies around him, where now only lizards, birds and the occasional cat sunned themselves, and he was imagining what it would be like to waste an afternoon picnicking up on one of them with Uri on the return trip. He wasn’t considering the odds against his finding her, nor the fact that a lot of hard psychological crowbarring was required to even partially free a person’s mind from the Jaybird template. He finally found an avocado tree and managed to knock down a couple of avocados and then he climbed a fire escape to the top of a three-story building and sat there and stared at the slow sunset while he chewed them up.
Two distinct lines of smoke stood up from Long Beach Island in the south, and when the sky began to get dark he thought he could glimpse the winking yellow dots of distant fires.