Tim Powers - Dinner At Deviant's Palace

The scene changed again, and though the new vision was of the same world as the previous one, Rivas knew that it occurred much later. He was making a long swimming journey across vast extents of the green plain, but finding only empty spheres lying on the ground, the silvery stuff having long since leaked away and the mooring lines curled in limp loops around them. The walrus things were all dead, and the only beings that prowled here were the vampiric facsimiles of them, very hungry now that there were no genuine ones left for them to attach themselves to. One of these voracious, semi-transparent things had been accidentally created each time he had touched one of the walrus creatures that had been in extreme pain; the strength had flowed out from the suffering communicant, but at a sort of psychic slant, so that he'd been unable to catch it and consume it. These stray unabsorbed strengths eventually became a sort of being themselves, solidifying and even acquiring independent wills if they managed to attach themselves to a sufficient number of the genuine, original creatures; and these artificial, hungry things would cling to him if they could, and try to drain him, and though they'd get more from the disastrous conjunction than they could deal with—a burst of psychic energy that would certainly kill them—it would damage him, too. It was time, regrettably, to leave.

» Ishould have taken more time with them,» said the boy in the dark basket sadly. « I should have conserved them, bred fresh herds. They were tasty.»

Still in the memory, he swam up out of the warm nourishing levels to the outer surface; and when he splashed out, his borrowed body bursting around him in the inadequate pressure, he separated from the ruptured organic ruin the tough crystal that was himself, and, using up a distressingly large amount of the energy he'd acquired here, he flung himself up into the starry sky at a speed sufficient to get out of the bent space around this world.

And then once again there were simply the aeons of waiting, of remembering past satiations and hoping for more; at rest, with no sensory apparatus with which to perceive the universe wheeling around him. Stuff—dust, pebbles, ice—would gradually collect on him, until he formed the minimally sentient heart of a drifting boulder, a potential comet or meteor . . .

And then, like every time before, after much waiting there would come the shiftings, the stretching . . . with his obsessive self-attention he'd notice the faint stressing of an electron valence here, the tendency of a molecular ring there to become just the slightest bit elliptical . . . and he'd know he was near something.

Most often it would pass; and sometimes he could feel the tickle of hard radiation, and he'd know to propel himself away, for though hot naked nuclei and crowded photon-waves were delicious, it would unmake him to fall into one of the dense furnaces from which they sprayed. And then, too, it often happened that, though there was none of the fusion-heat, the stretching effect would simply become steady, and he'd have to use up more energy to get closer . . . and of course in the heartbreaking majority of cases he'd impacted onto a sterile surface devoid of life, and he had had to spend still more of his own power just to leave and get back out to the eternal sea.

But always before he'd come dangerously close to the point where converting any more of his crystal-self to energy would mean losing some of his personality and memories, he'd found something, if only seas of primitive life that barely repaid the exit fee; and once in a while he found the tasty ones, the ones who knew they were ones.

» Sentience ,» said the far-gone boy smugly. « That's what Sevatividam likes .»

Always he learned, and eventually even came to think in, the language of his hosts . . . though he always thought of himself by his own, real name, which he'd always had, and had by now heard rendered into—it must be—thousands of accents, on waves that had vibrated in air, water, methane, ammonia . . . the name best rendered in the language of these people here in this newest place by the syllables Sevatividam.

This place—Rivas caught several scenes at once: the glass plain he'd been on last night, the walls of a canal moving past under a blue sky, a glow of warm nourishing nuclear fire shining up through the water of a harbor at twilight, a rooftop balcony with bent towers beyond it as white and bumpy as the spinal columns of giants—this place was one of the best he'd ever come across.

» Lots of people ,» the boy said. « Astasty as any I've found. » He sighed. « Iwish I'd been able to maintain their little local golden age, their little renaissance, a decade or so longer; it wasn't costing me all that much energy and attention to cultivate great artists and doctors and politicians among them, and even though it would have meant postponing the real feasting for a while, how luscious they'd have been after I'd let them fall from a real cultural height, tumble back down to the old despair after a whole generation of confident optimism! »

The far-gone kid sighed again. « But of course after only four years of cultivating and fertilizing them, I got carried away .»

The visions were dimming out—or, more accurately, Rivas was losing access to them—but he got a glimpse of a tremendous amount of rock falling from all directions into a point of intolerably bright light. He was squeezing the whole pile through dozens of levels of fusion and he could feel the tickling all through his body—and then everything became the white light, and it was all he could do to make a shell around his body to keep it from being vaporized in the explosion he'd accidentally touched off.

» Inever got so carried away before ,» the far-gone observed in a voice half rueful and half awed. « Inever made quite so much of the heavy unstable stuff. I guess if you have too much of it all piled together at once it begins to decay in step or something, or chain reacts like a live coal on a stack of paper . . . for years after that error in judgment I scarcely had strength to move, let alone donate energy and attention to maintain the Ellay renaissance . . . yes, getting the Holy City paved in glass was very expensive. . . .»

For a while the kid was silent, then he laughed softly. « But even after just four years, they weren't bad; after their precious Sixth Ace was assassinated and all their artists burned out and went mad after being deprived of my unsuspected support, and everybody saw that the brief but tantalizing promise was all a lie. People are so tasty when they're truly embittered, truly despairing.. .and that's when they come to Sevatividam. They can't stand the bitter rain, so they run in under one of the two awnings — religion or dissipation — and guess who's waiting for them under both awnings at once . . . .»

The tumbling sea water had flushed the dose of Blood out of the metal basket, and the effects were wearing off. He had lost the ability to see Jaybush's memories. His hand was numb except when anything touched it—when that happened it exploded in a hot flare of pain that shocked, sickened and aged him.

Rivas knew now that pain was just as effective an insulator from Blood as it was from the communion; which made sense, after all, since it seemed that both things were just differently labeled straws for Jaybush to push into the punchbowls of people's psyches. And though it insulated him from the usual unconsciousness and loss of identity and subsequent period of confusion, it certainly didn't prevent an awareness of Jaybush—it seemed to force that. When, six days ago in the Cerritos Stadium, he'd taken the sacrament while pressing the blade of his knife through his thumbnail, he'd been distantly aware of a chilly alien sentience; today's dose of Blood, clarified by the ruining of his right hand, had shown him Jaybush's memories as clearly as if they'd been Rivas's own. Another administration of either agent, accompanied by some further physical damage, might . . .