Dinner at Deviant's Palace (21 page)

“What did you call it a minute ago?” asked the shepherd, possibly through clenched teeth.

“I meant to say harv—”

“What?”

“Blood, brother,” admitted Brother Willie unhappily.

“Why did you call it that?”

“I don’t know, I—”

“Why?”

There was a pause, and then Brother Willie said, sniffling, “I been around. I had Blood once or twice. I know it when I see it.”

“Ah.” The horse stamped and flapped its lips. “If you are the ones to spot our intruder, I’ll
overlook
this.” The horse galloped back down the pier, and then the hoofbeats receded away into the steady whisper of the rain on the sea.

“You… damned…
idiot
.”

“Aw, Jesus, brother, all I—”

“Shut up! Say Jaybush if you want to swear! I’ve met far-gones smarter than you. Yes, get the harvest powder into the baskets and over the sides. And make sure the tarps cover every bit, hear? If sun gets in and ruins one
pinch
of this batch, I think you’re gonna wind up manning a hose in a bleeder hut yourself.”

For a while there was just a lot of clanking and grunting from above, then a big cubical object wrapped in a tarpaulin descended jerkily into Rivas’s view on the end of a rope, hit the water, and with a lot of bubbling and flapping of the tarp sank until three-quarters of its bulk was under the water. Another followed, and then another, until the side of the boat that Rivas could see was adorned from bow to stern with a full dozen bobbing black bales connected to it by taut cables. He could hear the tactless Brother Willie performing the same operation now on the far side of the boat.

Rivas wondered how the boat was rigged. Even with the strange cowling visible around the bow, it seemed to him that it should be impossible to sail with all those bundles hanging along the sides.

“You know,” Brother Willie called at one point to his older companion on the pier, “I hope old Rivas does come by here. I’ll shoot that flare gun right at his head.”

“Ahh,” the older man said, and spat, “there’s somebody raising hell here, I suppose—but it ain’t Gregorio Rivas.”

“How do
you
know?”

“Man, there ain’t no such person as Gregorio Rivas. That’s just a booger man. ‘Rivas is here, Rivas was seen there, look out for Rivas.’ It’s just to keep us all hopping.”

Another basket of Blood splashed down in the rain. “Nah,” said Brother Willie decisively. “Nah, man, a guy I knew
seen
Rivas! In Ellay.”

Rivas could tell the other man had shrugged. “I knew a guy once that swore he talked to Elvis Presley. Had one o’ them old liquor bottles, was like a statue of Elvis Presley. Said his ghost lived in it. I listened over an hour, didn’t hear nothin’.”

Suddenly Rivas had an idea. He hoisted his sleeping cargo down off the nail and then, holding the boy’s face up clear of the water, paddled silently out from under the pier and around the wide stern—evidently it was some kind of barge—to the far side. The rain, as heavy as ever, masked any involuntary splashing he might have done, and no doubt made Willie and his companion less likely to stand around peering.

Looking around from behind the sternmost portside basket, Rivas saw for a moment against the paling sky a silhouette that must have been Willie, leaning out over the rail high above Rivas’s head to lower a basket up by the bow. The men were still desultorily talking, but from down at water level under the curve of the stern Rivas couldn’t hear what they were saying.

Very gingerly he lifted the far-gone, hooked the back of his shirt over one corner of the basket, and then spent a minute gradually letting the mooring cable take the boy’s weight so that it wouldn’t thrum or move or creak. He then held the basket with one hand and began unlacing the tarpaulin with the other, and when he’d loosened it and peeled it back, he saw that the basket was a metal cage full of boxes made of crude rippled glass, each about a foot long and six inches square at the ends. The basket was held shut by a simple sliding bolt which had been shot through the rings, turned down and wired in place. Rivas began untwisting the wire.

The rain was letting up as the sky brightened, and Rivas forced himself to work both more quietly and more quickly. At last, when the rain had diminished to a misty drizzle, and Rivas, glancing up, could see the highest soaring seagulls flash bright with sunlight, he was able to work the bolt back, swing the basket’s gate down without dislodging the sleeping boy, and then gently, one at a time, lift out all the glass boxes and let them sink away into the sea.

On a sudden impulse he re-caught the last box, worked it open and looked speculatively at the three screw-top glass jars inside; and then he looked at his unconscious companion, whose occasional muttering and snarling had, during the rain, fortunately gone unnoticed. Would a hit of this stuff shut the boy up?

Worth a try, he decided. It seems like kind of a closed loop, by-your-bootstraps idea, but I’ve never heard that anybody’s
immune
to the stuff’s effects. And there’s certainly more in it than
just
powdered blood—all those tanks and machineries under the bleeder hut must have been adding something to the raw material.

He took one of the jars out, letting the glass box and the two remaining jars join the rest of them on the sea floor, and he unscrewed the lid and carefully held the jar of fine brown powder to the boy’s nostrils and, as the boy’s next inhalation came, Rivas blew on the powder, raising a cloud of it. He jerked his own face back so as not to get any of it himself, but the kid seemed to inhale some, so Rivas twisted the cap back onto the jar and tucked it into his hip pocket.

Next, with a fervent prayer that neither of the Jaybirds was looking at this basket’s cable just now, he hoisted the kid off the corner of the basket, pulled him around and shoved him inside. He pulled up the bony legs and folded them and pushed them in too, and then he climbed in himself.

Sitting up in the basket, the water swirled around his chest. He braced himself and leaned way out and down, ducking his head under the surface, and groped with his free hand until he found the basket’s let-down gate. He heaved on it, dragged it up through the water like a comb through hair and finally got it closed and loosely bolted, and then he managed, with his fingertips poking out between the bars of the basket grating, to twitch the tarpaulin back down over them and pull it straight so that, with luck, the untied lacing wouldn’t show.

At last in the darkness he allowed himself to relax. His companion would presumably keep quiet for a while under the influence of the Blood, and was wedged in with his head jammed into one of the top corners so that, though he might succumb to starvation or pneumonia, there was no way he could drown; and Rivas, though anything but comfortable sitting on a steel grating, chest-deep in salt water and tented under an old tarp, at least felt a good deal safer than he had at any time since deciding to follow Uri into the Holy City.

Through the sound conduction achieved by leaning his head against the steel bars which were pressed against the hull, he could hear the slow knocking of footsteps aboard—Brother Willie’s, he assumed. Willie seemed to be wandering back and forth aimlessly, sometimes pausing for several minutes at the stern end—Rivas could tell because the knocking sounded louder to him—and probably staring toward the huge distant pale buildings he’d glimpsed last night in the rain. He wished he could see what Willie was seeing.

What on earth, he wondered as he crouched in the light-less cage with the drugged, dying far-gone, do you suppose those buildings are? Dwellings? For whom? Offices? For what work?

Suddenly there was a drum roll of booming knocks, and after his first jump of startlement he realized that the noise must be that of a lot of people coming aboard—and being herded on like cattle, to judge by the commotion. He guessed that at least one more wagonload of Jaybirds had come in through the gate last night. Hadn’t that poor baldy girl said that most of the incoming girls were being shipped directly to the sister city?

Hello, girls, he thought sadly, nodding at the hull. Do give my regards to poor Sister Windchime… and Uri, too, of course.

The booming of footsteps continued to jar his cage randomly for a while, then settled down. He had just begun to relax again when a deafening rumble started up, setting his teeth on edge and making the cage bars vibrate so violently that it itched to sit on them, and he yanked his head away from contact with the hull and splashed his hands up out of the water to cover his ears. My God, he thought, that’s got to be an engine! They’ve got internal combustion!

A moment later his guess was confirmed, for the hull scraped forward and then the cage tilted as the mooring cable couldn’t give any more, and the water that had been a pool around him became a sluicing river, loudly rushing in from around and under the tarp on the forward side and splashing up against the aft side. Suddenly it wasn’t at all impossible for his unconscious companion to drown, and Rivas leaned forward to make sure the boy was well braced above the flood.

Well, he thought as he tried to adjust to the idea that this noise and shaking would not be stopping soon, at least it’ll cut down on the travel time.

Soon the barge had moved out past the breakwater into the open sea and the real waves, and for several seconds after they breasted the first one he really believed that the basket he was in had been savagely yanked up at least ten feet into the air and then allowed to fall back to the surface, and then yanked up again as soon as it had solidly whacked the water. This toss and plummet effect continued, with no sign of ever coming to an end, and when he’d got himself braced well enough to be able to think, he discovered that the only way he could keep himself from opening the basket and diving out was to promise himself, at each bone-jarring impact, that he would only endure five more.

Slam.
Only five more, Greg—hang on!
Slam.
All but five done now. You can take five more.
Slam.
Okay, count ’em down, that was six, here comes five…

Over the Holy City the clouds were disrupted by frequent violent updrafts, and the flying man banked north off them so as to skim the Santa Ana River and the barren beaches south of Hunningten Town rather than actually fly over the glass plain of Irvine, even though most of himself was down there. He didn’t know that it was free neutrons that made his soap bubble skin itch, but he knew that flying near the place made him feel bad. He hoped the bulk of himself wouldn’t come to harm in there.

Though only five days old, he was getting better at handling his ever-heavier body. Now he skimmed in low over a hill and down the far side, twitching fluff from the bobbing heads of dandelions and startling bees and enjoying being in the shade of the hill…. He was still in direct sunlight, but he was momentarily cut off from the hard, itchy heat radiating from the Holy City.

The hill descended quite a distance, and he was able to surge up fast, lose speed and stall, without rising above its crest. And as he gently drifted down, he wondered why Rivas had to keep pretending he still wanted this Uri creature. The sinking man, his balloon-fingered hands spread to slow his drifting descent, reviewed the scanty memories Rivas had of the woman. Why, he thought as he tap-dancingly touched down—he still didn’t have enough weight to bend stiff weeds—why, he hardly remembers her at
all
. She’s important to him only as an excuse for… for…

Well, the drifting man didn’t quite know. Something like an alcoholic’s attitude toward liquor. Rivas had somehow got into the position of needing something he didn’t like… no… more precisely, he’d got into the position of not liking something he needed. Why?

The featherweight man dancing over the tops of the flowers didn’t really
care
why, he simply didn’t want
Rivas
to learn why… because if Rivas knew, it might clear up his confusions and interfere with the dancing man’s seduction of him. And the thistledown man wanted—so very badly!—to merge with Gregorio Rivas. How else was either of them to become whole?

All night the rainy wind had been from the north, but the sun had begun silently to shatter the clouds, and fitful breezes were occasionally blowing in from the sea. When the next gust bent the grass and made the balloon man grab a weed stalk to keep from being tumbled inland, he lifted his plastic-bag head and snuffed the sea air.

He’d caught a scent of Rivas, but distantly, and in a strange, bloody-smelling mix. The featherweight man kicked and rose like a kite launched in a strong wind, and he didn’t mind getting above the hill into the hot region, for he could see better from up here.

When he was at the top of his jump he spread his arms and legs to catch the breeze and stay up there, and as he stared out at the shadow-mottled blue face of the sea he warped his still ectoplasmic eyes through a dozen round and oval shapes, trying to focus on what he needed to see.

Then he had it in sight, and his fingers and long toes lashed madly in the air to keep him steady.

It was a big wide barge with odd projecting cowls and wings and fins, like an exploded beetle, surging along so strongly, and leaving such a white wake, that the flying man knew it was powered by some species of engine. And it was, his fine-tuned senses told him, crowded inside with women. The twiddle-fingered airborne man frowned primly.
Well
, he thought, I daresay Rivas is enjoying
this
cruise.

There were bales under dark cloths dragging in the water alongside the boat, and the kite man finally caught on that Rivas was in one of the bales. He couldn’t have explained how he knew it, only that when he looked at the boat and thought of Rivas he got an impression of cold rushing water and darkness and stale air.

Boy, boy, the flying man thought, clicking his tongue and shaking his translucent head pityingly. You do so
poorly
on your own. It’s time you and I had another chat.

The hemogoblin spread flattened arms and, at home on the wind, swooped away toward the sea, leaving the land behind.