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.
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. «Ishould 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.