The difference between us, he thought as he hefted his knapsack and wandered in an aimless fashion to a different corner, is that I'm fishing for predators.
During the next fifteen minutes he saw, too, a number of people who were genuinely in the sort of plight he was mimicking. Hunched down in a doorway near where he'd been standing before, Rivas noticed an obviously malnourished, no more than teenaged boy muttering angrily to several imaginary companions, and Rivas wondered what it was that had brought the boy to this state. Liquor or syphilis generally took decades to ruin a person's mind, but dope could have—especially the Venetian Blood—or the Jaybird sacrament, though the Jaybirds nearly never let strangers see any of their very badly eroded communicants.
There was a drunken girl stumbling around, too, who seemed at first to be with the inexpert pelican player but was eventually led away by a grinning baldy-sport who, Rivas happened to know, was a Blood dealer. What's the matter, thought Rivas sourly, the dope trade so bad you've got to pimp in your spare time? I'd go rescue her if I wasn't certain she'd drift right back here to one of you.
Some people, he thought, simply have no will to survive—they're walking hors d'oeuvres waiting for someone who can spare the time to devour them. And while it's probably some such unattractive quality as egotism or vanity that has kept me clear of . . . that catastrophic relaxation, it's the reason I'm still alive and able to think, and I'll work on keeping it.
Rivas smiled, remembering his response to his first taking of the Jaybird sacrament—while the rest of the recovering communicants had been praising the Lord Jaybush and making sure they knew when the sacrament would be administered again so as not to miss it, young Gregorio Rivas, though stunned, exhausted and glad to have found shelter and company, was coldly appraising the situation. He didn't doubt that the mysterious Norton Jaybush was certainly more than a man and possibly a god, but the prospect of abandoning his individuality in order to «merge with the Lord» was profoundly repugnant to him.
The Jaybird band that picked him up had taken him to a nest in one of the neglected structures outside the wall and introduced him to the Jaybird way of life. He had, that first day, watched several of the far-gone communicants «speaking in tongues,» and he was disturbed not so much by the gibberish pouring out of the slack faces as by the fact that they were all doing it in precise, effortless unison, as if—and Rivas still recalled the image that had occurred to him then—as if each of them was just one visible loop of a vast, vibrating worm. Rivas had had no wish to graft himself on, and soon discovered that an alcohol-dulled mind was inaccessible to the sacrament. Thereafter, despite the Messiah's ban on liquor, he had been careful to take the sacrament only when he was, unobtrusively, drunk. This let him parry the alertness-blunting effects of the damaging communion . . . though it wasn't until he got the idea of incorporating his musical skills into the Jaybird services that he found himself able, if only furtively, to riposte.
And then, when he'd finally left the Jaybirds and drifted northwest to Venice, there had been Blood.
Venice was a savage carnival of a town that had sprung up like crystals in a saturate solution around the semicircular bay known as the Ellay-Ex Deep, in the center of which was a submarine pit that was reputed to glow with fantastic rainbow colors on some nights. A person who had a lot of money and could take care of himself could sample some amazing pleasures, it was said, in the rooms above the waterfront and canalside bars—Rivas had heard stories of «snuff galleries» where one could strangle to death people who were actually volunteers, frequently but not always goaded to this course by the money that would subsequently be paid to their families; of «sporting establishments,» brothels whose inmates were all physically deformed in erotically accommodating ways; of sport-seafood restaurants, whose long-time patrons eventually could be conveyed inside only with some difficulty, being blind, decomposing and confined to wheeled aquariums . . . but eager for just one more deadly, fabulously expensive meal; and of course he'd heard whispers about the quintessential nightclub of the damned, the place about which no two stories were consistent but all attributed to it a horrible, poisonous glamor, the establishment known as Deviant's Palace.
As a jiggerless young vagrant, Rivas was in no position even to verify the existence of such fabulous places, and even a tortilla with some beans rolled up in it was the price of a day's hard labor—but Blood was cheap.
The drug was a reddish brown powder that could be snorted, brewed, smoked or eaten, and it sucked the user into a semicomatose state, comfortingly bathed by the triple illusion of great deeds done, time to rest, and warmth; longtime users claimed to feel also a vast, loving attention, as if it was God himself rocking the cradle.
In Venice it was daringly fashionable to sample Blood, perhaps because the genuine Blood freaks were such an unattractive crew. Many of them simply starved to death, unwilling to buy food with money that could be used to get more of the drug, and none of them ate much, or bathed, or shambled any farther than to the next person that could be wheedled out of a jigger or two, and then back to the Blood shop.
After Rivas found himself a steady job washing dishes in one of the many restaurants and got a little money, he wandered one evening into a narrow little Blood shop beside one of the canals, curious about the drug because in Ellay it was illegal and expensive. The man who ran the shop was a user himself, and delivered such a glowing panegyric in praise of the stuff that Rivas fled, sensing that this all-reconciling drug would rob him of his carefully constructed vanity, his painful memories of Urania, his budding musical ambitions . . . in short, everything that made him Gregorio Rivas.
«Beautiful morning, isn't it?»
Rivas jumped realistically and looked with wary hope at the man who'd paused beside him. Though not as tall as Rivas, he was a good deal stockier, and except for his nose and his eyes his whole face was hidden by a hat and a bushy copper beard.
«Uh, yeah,» said Rivas in a nervous tone as he shifted his knapsack to a more comfortable position on his shoulders. «Kind of cold, though.»
«Yeah, it is.» The man yawned and leaned against the wall beside Rivas. «Waiting for someone?»
«Oh yes,» said Rivas quickly, «I—» He paused and then shrugged. «Well, no.»
The man chuckled. «I see. Listen, I'm on my way to get some food. You hungry?»
Rivas hoped that the quick gesture of touching his wallet looked spontaneous. «Uh, I guess not.»
«You sure? The place I'm thinking of will give us each a big plate ofmachaca conjuevos, on the house, no charge.» He winked. «And I can get us a table right next to the fire.»
Rivas frowned. This was beginning to sound wrong. «Yeah? Where's this?»
«Oh, it's a little place on Spring, run by some friends of mine.» The man yawned again and stretched his arms over his head and then let them fall—one of them landed, and stayed, around Rivas's shoulders.
Rivas's mouth became a straight line. «Spring and what?»
«Huh? Oh, only a couple of blocks from here, Spring and Main. A five minute—»