Tim Powers - Dinner At Deviant's Palace

tainingly, around them in the hot darkness . . . . Individual

awareness was now recognizable as a kink in an otherwise perfectly smooth fabric . . . .

One of the four hands in the bouncing basket let go of an empty jar and a lid and then drifted to the bars that, through the covering tarpdulin, abraded back and forth across the hull; and with nearly no more intent than a flower has in turning to the sun, the hand tried to wedge its fingers between one of the bars and the hull.

After a while the basket obligingly swung away from the hull for a moment, as the barge crested a bigger than usual wave, and the fingers were able to curl all the way around the steel bar before the sea slammed the basket back against the hull.

As the fingers of his right hand were crushed between the two ponderous weights, Rivas warped back into self-awareness like a stretched-out-straight spring suddenly released. The hotly nauseating agony in his hand was his anchor, and he forced himself to move toward it along his frayed connection with it, away from the blurred state in which even sharing was a meaningless concept because in the long run there was only one entity in the universe. The pain became more definitely his own with every bit of progress, until at last he was again aware of being in the churning cold water in the lightless metal basket with himself here and the far-gone boy over there.

He held his maimed hand under water—the salt stung it savagely for a moment, but then the cold water began numbing it—and he realized he could see if he wanted to.

He was still in the pitch-dark cage; what he could see wasn't anything that was here, and he was aware of that, but it was vivid, and certainly nothing he'd ever seen before.

A miles-high stone wall in glaring purple light, wavy and blobbly and full of holes like a frozen splash, cut off half the horizon and a third of the gray sky, and things were visible gliding on diaphanous wings among the lacy stone pseudopods at the top. Looking down, a movement that covered quite a distance, as if his neck was yards and yards long, he saw a thing like an orange spider or a hundred-legged starfish, and he reached out a . . . Jesus, what was that, a sort of unfolding length of dried gut . . . and touched the orange creature.

Strength flowed into him, and out of the spidery thing, apparently, for it curled its legs and its color dimmed and it slowly settled to the sand. Belatedly he noticed that the creature had two shadows, a red one that lay behind it and a blue one that lay out to one side . . . .

. . . And then he was in a volcanic-looking natural amphitheater, smooth as a bubble with the top broken away, and, incapacitated by the consequences of some unimaginable self-indulgence, he was watching a crowd of the spider-things. They were arranged in a line curled to form a big spiral, and one of them in the center began walking out of the coil, pausing in front of each of its motionless fellows to extend a leg and make a touch . . . and at each touch he felt the strength flow into him as the one touched dimmed and slowly collapsed . . . . This was of course because for the occasion he had become the one that was walking and touching the others . . . .

Though Rivas knew he could stop seeing any of this any time he decided to, the vision faded now by itself. It had had a flavor of . . . memory. A rueful recollection.

» Not so tasty, those weren't ,» spoke the boy in the darkness. «Just lucky for me that their glow was more a psychic than a chemical effect. Too bad the highfliers never came down. Hard to see, but once I thought I saw one of them carrying something that seemed to be a tool. They might have been tasty.»

Another vision was starting up, and Rivas let himself watch.

A dimly green-lit plain was what he saw, viewed from above, with clusters of strange, spherical flowers on long stalks growing up from it. He sensed that he wasn't alone, and sure enough a moment later a bulbous, streamlined animal went porpoising past him, downward, followed by two more. As he watched them recede, their apparent size diminishing with their increasing distance from him, he saw that they were still well short of the flower globes, which must therefore be huge and much more distant than he'd supposed.

As he started down himself, his ponderous body working to propel him through the transparent but thick medium, he saw that the top half of each sphere was silvery, and he knew that the silver stuff inside was what held each of the spheres up and kept the mooring lines taut, and as he swam closer he saw skeletal constructions inside the bottom halves, and, in the top halves, spots of colored brightness that might have been fires . . . .

The scene changed then, and he glimpsed a spiral line of creatures that looked like walruses made of flexible palmtree trunks, and again one that he had become extended an extremity—a sort of catfish whisker—to touch each one in turn, and the strength flowed into him with each touch . . . .

And when once again he had drained from their minds enough of the strength, the psychic power to move things at a distance, he swam back to the secluded grotto which he had made his own. He had sniffed out some fairly hot pitchblende and adorned his cavern with it; and though this seasoning left something to be desired, the entrйe itself was as rich as any he'd ever tasted.

The heavy component of the medium through which he swam was abundant down here in the old quiet valleys, and, using just a flicker of the vast energy he'd taken from his flock, he made a globe of vacuum around a slightly smaller ball of the omnipresent medium. He looked the ball over to make sure it was perfect, and then, still without touching it, moved it away from him, deeper into the grotto. Feeding like this always damaged his body, and though he could make repairs on it almost as easily as he had caused the globe of vacuum to appear, there was no sense in putting the body in a situation where it might be outright destroyed. Too much trouble would be involved in finding another.

The ball was far enough away now, around several corners; and with his mind, powered now by the vast energy he'd stolen, he squeezed it.

The resistance was strong, but his power was stronger. He doubled and then redoubled his pressure. The ball, inside its diminishing shell of vacuum, was now half its original size, and continuing slowly to shrink.

He squeezed even harder, and now he could feel the drain on his energy; but what with the local concentration of the heavy stuff, and the slight head start of the already tremendous pressure down here, and the copious amount of power he'd taken from his flock, he was confident that he'd be able to squeeze it to ignition and then glut himself on the resulting radiation, without having to unmake any bit of the crystal which, unlike the aquatic body he was now temporarily wearing, was himself.

When the ball of heavy water had been compressed down to a tiny fraction of the size it had been, he reached into it with his mind and all at once agitated its atoms furiously, using up nearly the last of his stolen strength to do it—but then a second later he was battered by a blast of nutrition, the entire revitalizing spectrum of radiant energy. Suddenly it was easy to maintain the compression, a physical pleasure to squeeze the stuff; and, as always, he had to resist the temptation to drag more matter in and squeeze even harder as his capability increased, had to fight the perverse inclination to squeeze the products of the first ignition into another, and then the ashes of that one into still another, drawing from each compaction a little less energy than from the one before until, carried away and unable to stop, he would heedlessly pass the point where energy could be derived from the transmutations, and each successive fusion would be taking energy from him. He'd done that occasionally, on other worlds than this aquatic one, and though the super-heavy, unstable elements he was left with were pleasant to have around, tickling him with the particles of their decay, they weren't nearly worth the crippling efforts it took to produce them, nor the years of slow recuperation he needed afterward.