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 . . .
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.