Dinner at Deviant's Palace (8 page)

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.