Tim Powers - Dinner At Deviant's Palace

Rivas felt almost betrayed to realize it. Come on, he thought, you're one of the wealthiest men in Ellay, surely you can see through this nonsense if I can.

He leaned back and looked out the window at the sunlit but still damp landscape. To the west he could see a green band that was the edge of the south farms, but to the south was nothing but the spread of tumbled, empty buildings, a scene lost somewhere between city scape and landscape, animated by rolling tumbleweeds and, once in a while, the ragged figure of a scavenger too weak to venture very far from the city walls. Further to the south he could see the gleam of San Pedro Harbor. And beyond that, he knew, was Long Beach Island and then the open sea, and, way down the coast at the mouth of the Santa Ana River, Irvine.

I hope I can catch her, he thought, before having to travel too far in that direction. He shuddered, remembering one redemption—one that had not succeeded—that actually brought him within sight of the high white walls of Jaybush's Holy City at Irvine. I never, he thought firmly, want to be that close to that damned place again. It wouldn't be so bad if I didn't more than half suspect he is some kind of messiah. My father used to swear he'd seen the spray of shooting stars that lit the sky on the night of Jaybush's conception, thirty-some years ago—and even rival religions admit that before he retired from public life he several times did, verifiably, bring dead people back to life . . . though of course the rival religions claim he had Satan's help.

A patch of morning sunlight had been inching its way across the wall, and when Rivas glanced again at the old woman in the corner, he saw that the light had reached her face, and, in her gaping mouth, was glittering on all the bits of metal glued to her teeth. Well, Barrows can't say he isn't getting his money's worth, he thought. There must be half a pound of scrap metal in there. Rivas knew—as Barrows evidently didn't—that this was just a gaudy prop, that real toothtalking was supposed to be a consequence of having tiny metal fillings in the teeth. In years past a few people with such fillings had reported hearing faint voices in their mouths; but they said it happened very seldom and only on mountain tops, and Rivas hadn't heard of a verified case of it showing up within at least the last ten years.

It was, though, a priceless piece of popular superstition for fortunetellers to exploit.

Rivas yawned audibly—so that for a moment he and the old woman seemed to be yawning in tandem—but he closed his mouth with a snap when Barrows darted an angry glance at him, and he had to make do with just arranging himself more comfortably in his chair. He'd given up trying to sleep last night after a dream about Urania had sent him jack-knifing out of bed just as the one o'clock bell was being rung. He'd spent the remainder of the night on the roof of his building with his pelican, sawing and strumming increasingly fantastic gun improvisations on the tune of Peter and the Wolf.

Perhaps because Rivas seemed unimpressed with her routine thus far, the old Toothtalker let her jaw relax and hurried to a closet from which, after knocking a few things over, she produced a yellow plastic telephone with a receiver which began buzzing and clicking after she gave it a couple of shakes. She frowned reprovingly at Rivas as she began whispering into it.

For a few minutes he tried to pay attention, if only to figure out what she was saying about him to the spirit world, but the interrupted dream from last night seemed to cling to him like a faint, disagreeable odor, ignorable most of the time but intruding itself whenever he shifted position. Finally he sighed and gave in, and let the recollection take him.

In the dream Urania had been one of a row of people kneeling in a typical Jaybird nest, a cramped room out in the ruins somewhere, littered with the sort of relics that aren't worthy anybody's time to scavenge. The priest– known as the jaybush, for during administration of the sacrament he was supposed to become an actual, literal extension of the Messiah, Norton Jaybush himself—moved down the line, pausing in front of each communicant just long enough to touch him or her on the forehead.

Every one of the kneeling figures at least jerked at the touch, and many pitched over in violent fits. Rivas still remembered very clearly his own first receiving of the sacrament—remembered watching the jaybush work his way down the line toward him, and wondering how much of the gaffed-fish response was just hysteria or outright faking; and then the jaybush had come to him, and touched his forehead, and the rending physical shock of it had blacked him out, leaving him to wake up on the floor, dazed and bruised and stupefied, half an hour later.

In the dream, when the jaybush came to Urania and touched her, she had raspingly exhaled a cloud of pink vapor, and then had steadily kept on exhaling more of it, long after her lungs should have been wrung completely empty, and when Rivas rushed up in concern and took her in his arms he could feel her flesh diminishing inside her clothes like an outgoing tide; for a long time he cradled the still impossibly exhaling and ever-lighter girl, and when the emptying finally stopped and he raised his head from her shoulder and looked down into her face, it was nothing more than a naked skull that gaped blindly up at him.

And, he recalled now with something like nausea, that discovery had not in any way altered his determination to bring her back to Ellay and make her his wife. He rubbed his eyes and pushed a stray lock of hair back into place.

«Ah,» the old woman said, nodding and pacing back and forth with the telephone receiver pressed to her ear. «Neutrons, you say? Goddamn. And . . . master cylinders? Lord have mercy.» She squinted down her nose at Rivas to see if he was properly impressed by these esoteric terms. He noticed that she hadn't bothered to connect the end of the telephone cord to anything, and it was dragging around on the floor behind her. He wondered whether she'd trip over it. «Ten-four,» she said finally, and then put the telephone down on the window sill, apparently to cool off.

She turned to her guests. «Well, the spirits had a lot to say. You, sir,» she said, pointing at Rivas, «are the focus of a lot of uncertainty. You see, in every equation there's an unknown factor—the hex, as we mathematicians say– and in order to untangle the various lifelines involved and see which one comes out healthy at the end, it's necessary to . . .»

She went into a long speech then, full of «identity resonances» and «orbital velocities of the soul,» frequently waving toward her dust-covered and obviously random collection of shabby books to support her statements. Presently she dug out a deck of playing cards and, while shuffling them, explained that Matt Sandoval, Ellay's legendary First Ace, had designed the fifty-two cards on his deathbed as a means for mystically savvy people to be able to consult him even after his demise. The four «aces,» she informed her guests, were called that because they represented the four natures of the Ace himself. She then began laying the cards out on a tabletop in a significant-looking pattern, scowling or nodding as each card was added.

Rivas stopped paying attention. During the last several years he had laboriously learned to read the old-time writing, with all its silent letters, superfluous tenses and fabulous, credulity-straining words; and he'd actually read a number of the books and magazines that were just decorations in the more affluent households, and props for fortunetellers. And though he had arrived at no very clear understanding of the bright, crowded, «electrical» world of more than a century ago—even their maps described a southern California coastline that didn't exist—he'd gleaned enough to know that most people who made their livings by claiming to know about the ancient wonders actually knew less about them than he did.