When he was at the top of his jump he spread his arms and legs to catch the breeze and stay up there, and as he stared out at the shadow-mottled blue face of the sea he warped his still ectoplasmic eyes through a dozen round and oval shapes, trying to focus on what he needed to see.
Then he had it in sight, and his fingers and long toes lashed madly in the air to keep him steady.
It was a big wide barge with odd projecting cowls and wings and fins, like an exploded beetle, surging along so strongly, and leaving such a white wake, that the flying man knew it was powered by some species of engine. And it was, his fine-tuned senses told him, crowded inside with women. The twiddle-fingered airborne man frowned primly.
Well, he thought, I daresay Rivas is enjoying this cruise.
There were bales under dark cloths dragging in the water alongside the boat, and the kite man finally caught on that Rivas was in one of the bales. He couldn't have explained how he knew it, only that when he looked at the boat and thought of Rivas he got an impression of cold rushing water and darkness and stale air.
Boy, boy, the flying man thought, clicking his tongue and shaking his translucent head pityingly. You do sopoorly on your own. It's time you and I had another chat.
The hemogoblin spread flattened arms and, at home on the wind, swooped away toward the sea, leaving the land behind.
Chapter 8
At first Rivas tried to resist the warm euphoric drowsiness that was stealing over him; he reminded himself of the danger he was in, and the much greater danger Uri was in, and he tried to feel tension and anxiety.
Somehow, though, it all seemed postponeable. After all, what could he do to help or hinder things from inside this ridiculous cage? Perhaps the wisest thing to do would be to go to sleep, in this actually quite comfortable bed of rushing water. The shaking wasn't nearly so bad now that they'd apparently got out past the breakers. It occurred to him that he'd heard of waterbeds, but this was the first riverbed he knew of.
He laughed heartily, and for quite a while, at the notion.
Singing a song seemed like a good idea for a few moments, but sleep proved more imperative. He snuggled up against the steel bars on the hull side, not forgetting to say good night to all the girls on the other side of the wood– what were they in, anyway, a big barrel? A keg of leg, ho ho, a butt of butts; he was whooping with laughter now– then he subsided and arranged himself for sleep, wondering, with the last spark of awareness, why the sea water tasted so . . . what, not salty . . . rusty, that was it. Like blood.
To his own intense annoyance he let himself sink no further toward sleep. Let me sleep, he begged himself; of course sea water tastes like blood. It used to be blood. No, the other way around, evolutionarily blood was once just a quantity of sea water contained in the hollow body of some early form of life . . . sponges or jellyfish or something. Right. Now that that's settled, he thought, let's go to bed.
But again one part of his mind—a part that was becoming seriously alarmed—resisted sleep. Why, he thought muz-zily, should the sea water have the rusty iron taste of blood? And why is my thumb . . . and the bullet lash down my back too . . . going numb? And what is it that this . . . thought-dissolving blurriness reminds me of?
The answers arrived almost simultaneously. Shifting to a more comfortable position in the hope of tricking himself into sleep, he became aware of two objects in his hip pocket, a big hard lump and a flat hard disk. Irritably he reached down under the turbulent water and dug them out.
By touch he could tell what they were.They were the jar of Blood, evidently empty, that he'd pocketed after giving the dying boy a whiff, and the lid that had once been screwed onto it. Evidently he was sitting right now in a vigorously stirred soup of Blood. And the oblivion that was eroding the awareness out from under him had the same feeling of being monitored that his very first long ago receiving of the Jaybird communion had had.
Taking Blood felt like receiving the sacrament.
He knew this was important . . . in a way. Actually, wasn't it something he'd already guessed? Or would have, soon? Of course it was.
No, insisted the unhappy, struggling part of his mind, it's important.
Right, right. Much too important to consider before taking a little nap.
The salty, rusty fluid crashing around him in the darkness was hot, or so it seemed to him now, and he tried to remember where he was but couldn't. Evidently he'd got inside the heart of some huge being.
He wasn't sure who he was himself. The very idea of self seemed odd. He reached up to touch his face and it took all his strength to do it; he fumbled at his own face, feeling the toothless gums, the sunken cheeks, the hairless skull. There was another person too inside the spasming chamber of muscle, a bigger person, one who still had hair, and it warmed him to realize that that was him, too—or he and that person were both equally members of someone higher, the someone whose blood crashed powerfully, sus-
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 . . . .