Tim Powers - Dinner At Deviant's Palace

God knew what it might do. Rivas wasn't eager to find out.

The engine roar, which had been so steady that he'd stopped being aware of it, abruptly lost most of its volume and became a low uneven chugging. The basket rocked and bobbed for a few moments as it collided with the hull and the basket in front of it, and then it hung blessedly steady. Muffled by the tarpaulin, he could hear voices calling, loudly but not excitedly.

What the hell, he thought nervously. Are we docking? But we can't be, I'd have felt the turbulence if we'd moved back into shallow water.

Above him a voice shouted clearly, «Take 'em from the back. Here.» Rivas's cage shook. «I'll untie it when you've got it.»

Through the hull Rivas could hear the footsteps of the girls shifting uneasily, and it reminded him of something. Yes, in all of Jaybush's memories, even the memories of being the stripped-down crystalline seed drifting through space, he had clearly, implicity been a masculine thing. Evidently gender could be intrinsic, independent of the physical systems of organs and hormones and whatnot that Rivas had always thought dictated it. That must be, he thought, why women can take the sacrament forever without quite reaching the far-gone stage—there must be some kind of core to femaleness which Jaybush, being male, can't consume.

Rivas thought of that meteor shower that legend claimed– and his father had verified—lit the sky one night during the year before Jaybush's birth. He thought, If someone had impossibly known what parasite was riding along among that handful of interstellar debris, could anything have been done then? If the crystal thing can survive huge accelerations and re-entry temperatures and the raw radiations of interstellar space, though, I suppose it wouldn't be bothered by a boot tromp or a hammer blow or being tossed into the fireplace. And how does it get into somebody?

Something metal clanked against Rivas's cage, and then right next to his head he heard the tarpaulin tear and metal rasp on metal, and he could see a spot of light where a hook had torn through. The hook rattled a bit, and then he heard, a little more clearly because of the hole, someone call, «Got it solid. Go ahead and untie.»

Rivas could feel an agitation in the line that held the basket to the boat—and then the whole basket tilted over, filling up with water, and he knew the far-gone kid must be under the surface, and he lunged downward to hoist him up next to the hook, which seemed destined to become the basket's highest point. His right hand collided horribly with the boy's head and Rivas felt consciousness receding, but he gritted his teeth and forced himself to stay aware. Catching a breath and letting himself tumble to what was now the bottom of the cage, he used his good hand to grab the boy's belt and shove him upward to where, if anywhere in this confinement, there was air.

Rivas braced himself, holding the breath he'd taken, and waited while the cage shook and swung on the hook, and he told himself, Wait, just a few seconds more. They've got to haul this up out of the water in a moment. Wait. . . .

His lungs were working in his chest, trying to break the seal of his closed throat and inhale sea water, and again he felt his consciousness fading. Christ, he thought shrilly, you're about to pass out, man, you'll drown for sure, struggle to the top while you still can and hook an arm through the bars so that even if you do lose consciousness you'll be held up out of the water, do you want to die for a far-gone, who can't even see or think or feel gratitude, do you want to die for this absolutely minimum example of humanity?

He was bitterly disappointed in himself when he realized that he was not going to trade places with the boy. Good job, Greg, he thought—the man hires you to save Uri, and you lose your damn life saving a mindless, poisoned kid who's probably got only days to live at best, and who'll most likely die right now as soon as you pass out and let go of him.

Abruptly all the water rushed down past him with a racket of bubbling and the kid was suddenly far too heavy and the surface of the water swirled past his face and he was gasping air—and then his left arm buckled and the boy fell down onto him and Rivas's crushed right hand was jammed under the two of them and with a scream that only dogs could have heard he sprang away from consciousness like an arrow from a bow.

Rivas had for a while been dimly aware that he was lying on his back with a weight across his middle on a corrugated surface that, though uncomfortable, he couldn't be bothered to get up from. He didn't care what had awakened him, for he planned to sleep quite a while longer. It was still dark after all.

Some people were up and about, though. Somebody was even whistling.

Then a wet canvas was flapped away somewhere overhead and suddenly there was light beyond his closed eyelids. Without particularly noticing them, he was aware of the smells of beer, sweat and fish.

«Well!»

Rivas didn't open his eyes or move.

«Uh,» the voice went on, «this ain't Blood, in this one.»

«What's in there, then?» queried another voice irritably.

A finger touched Rivas's sea-chilled cheek. «It's . . . well, Joe, it's a couple of dead guys.»

«Dead guys.» Rivas heard a chair scrape on a floor. He kept his eyes shut and held his breath when clumping boots approached. If they think you're dead, he told himself, be dead. «Damn me, you're right. Jaybirds trying to escape, I guess. Hell! And we've paid for the stuff that was in here.»

«Can we get our money back?»

A pause followed, and then a disgusted exclamation as the boots moved away. «That'll take some considering. Whether we even ask or not, I mean. We could show 'em these two and say, see, these guys dumped the Blood and climbed in in its place, but that'd be awful damn close to admitting we know it's from the Holy City. It ain't just to keep the product cold that they use all the extra fuel it takes to drag these baskets on the outside of their boat—the main reason they do it that way is so guys like us can hook it and run real quick, without getting any kind of look inside their boat. And the stuff's in glass and metal so if there's any mix-up it'll just sink. They don't want rumors getting out about any connection between Irvine and Venice. No, I'm afraid we'll have to eat this loss. That or go asking to eat some bullets.»

«Dump 'em?»

There was a sigh. «I guess.»

«Out like with the garbage?»

«No point carrying 'em any distance, is there? What'd you want to do, say some prayers over 'em?»

Some gesture may have been the reply, but the next thing Rivas knew the battered metal basket was being noisly pushed across an uneven floor. He braced himself, wondering what the garbage arrangements consisted of around here.

They turned out to be primitive. The man kept pushing the basket across the floor until the bottom edge caught against the sill of a very low, open window, and the basket simply turned over and dumped its two occupants out.

Rivas found himself cartwheeling through empty air– the sensation reminding him of something—and then he impacted onto a slanted heap of rotting, feculent trash. As he rolled dizzily down the slope of broken wood, boxes and bad old food, he was sure that he and the boy were not the first bodies to be tossed here.

Dizzy and sick with the pain of his hand, Rivas simply lay for a while in sunlight at the foot of the garbage heap. When the pain had backed off a little he sat up, worked his arms and legs cautiously to see if anything had broken during his fall—nothing, it seemed, had—and then he looked around for the far-gone kid. He saw him off to the right, lying on his back. He was breathing.