Transmaniacon (12 page)

“Zero times Zero equals Zero times Zero equals…”

The mourner in white bent and released the blades on the guillotines. A whine as they fell, a
chunk
sound. The young blessed receiver screamed. “Glory comes! Gloria arrives!” he shrieked.

“Zero times Zero equals Zero times Zero equals…”

The blades neatly severed his feet from his legs and his hands from his wrists. The young man whimpered and thrashed, bleeding to death.

The mourner drew forth a blessed and polished knife and bent by the young man to cut the strips for the drying rack. “Tomorrow's supper,” whispered Ben. The hands and feet were collected in sacks, the blood caught in wineskins.

The chant ended; the hooded cultists made an arcane sign and wandered away.

Two vehicles arrived, almost at the same instant, one from the east and one fr,om the west.

The one from the east came overland, an open-air electric jeep with tires like gross black balloons, churning up dust behind it. Fuller and another man sat in the jeep, Fuller driving, the stranger holding a laser rifle in his lap.

From the west came a San Francisco police helicopter, to check the pilgrim's entrance permits, as they were now crossing into the land officially claimed by the Republic of San Francisco. Fuller leapt from the jeep and was roughly questioning the Dizzies, keeping one eye on the SFPD. Gloria and Ben edged away through the crowd. They approached the police helicopter. It was a two-man vehicle, fueled by a limited electric charge. Its rotors slowed, chopping the air listlessly. Both the pilot and the rider got out.

“Ben, can you operate one of those?” Gloria asked softly.

Ben nodded.

The police wore gray uniforms striped horizontally, with their badge numbers large on their chests. They spoke in quiet tones with the mourner in white—respectfully—and glanced disinterestedly through the sheaf of papers he had given them. Behind them three Genetic Manipulations flesh-machines squatted on the ground. Ben wondered,
Could the Transmania device manipulate flesh-machines
? The hands had small but human brains. They probably could become angry. They were kept as beasts of burden and whipped, driven all day. It seemed likely there would be a stored reservoir of resentment, even in those primitive brains. He could find it. He maneuvered until he was standing near the open door of the copter, Gloria just behind him. The keys were inside. Fuller was drawing near, pushing through the crowd.

Ben considered: If he leapt into the copter, the police would fire on them before he could get out of range. No, he needed time. The needlers on the cops' hips were bundles of chrome warning.

Fuller and his assistant stood nearby. The cops hadn't yet taken note of them. Fuller seemed unafraid of the police. Probably, Chaldin had provided him with entrance permits. It was Fuller's assistant, a brawny, bald man, who held the weapon.

Ben looked at the oversized hands resting on their palms in the dirt, listlessly stirring their leg-fingers. He concentrated. Almost instantly, the hands leapt forward and seized those nearest them—as Ben had calculated, these were the two cops and Fuller's assistant. The three hands wrapped around the uniformed cops, uttering burbling noises, while the cops screamed as their insides were squeezed up to fill their bubble helmets. The big man with the laser rifle was on the ground, the hand gripping and compressing him with five pink boas hard as tree-limbs. He snarled as his face turned black. His eyes bulged. Fuller clawed at the fingers, trying to get at the laser weapon, knowing that Ben must be somewhere nearby.

Ben leapt into the cockpit of the copter, and Gloria climbed up beside him. The Dizzies hardly noticed; they were busy shouting instructions to the unheeding flesh-machines, attempting to free the cops. Ben turned the key, pressed the pedal, and the rotors turned, then picked up speed, throwing off a whirlwind. The cultists staggered back under the wind pressure. Gloria fired the .45 at Fuller, but the moving copter jarred her. She missed. Fuller melted into the crowd.

The copter lifted off over a field of angrily shaking fists.

Ben swung over the hill and put distance behind him. “Where the hell you headed?” Gloria shouted over the grind of the rotor blades.

“Astor!” Ben shouted back. And they almost got there.

After the copter's power reading fell to bottom, Ben set it down in the first clearing he spotted.

He cut the engines and leaned back in the seat, stretching. It had been a long afternoon, a long night, and a long morning—the vibrations of the copter made his insides feel jellied. Now, it wasn't quite noon. A sunny morning, few clouds, a faint breeze.

“What you stop for?” asked Gloria, yawning, stepping down from the cockpit to stand in the meadow.

“Out of charge. She'd have gone on maybe another mile and that would be it, down we'd go. So I stopped first opportunity. We walk from here. Not far, only about ten miles to the outskirts of Astor. Should be no problem, if we don't get lost. And if we don't run into frags.” Ben climbed down to stand blinking in the sunlight beside her in the meadow of short yellow grass. He did some knee bends to stretch his cramped legs.

“I'm famished,” said Gloria.

“Should be some berries on the way.”

“Big deal. Say, do you have an account in Astor?”

“No, but I have some…connections there. I think I can find transportation to Detroit. And there are other arrangements I want to make.”

“Do you think Fuller's close behind?”

“I doubt it. It would take him some time to get hold of another flyer. He would probably assume we went to San Francisco, since that was the nearest city-state and since I have an account there. So they'll concentrate their search there. There are likely to be some of Chaldin's people looking for us in all the cities. But Astor will be tough for them. It's difficult to go in disguise in Astor, to pretend to be one of the locals. There's something about the Astorians. Ummm, an aura of the eccentric difficult to duplicate. A man of Astor always knows another man of Astor—and they'd recognize a phony. So Chaldin's boys would stand out like red rubber noses and they'd get no cooperation from the locals. Astorians don't approve of espionage or chicanery unless it's performed as an art form, as with the Brothers of Proteus. Very few people migrate to Astor. It requires a peculiar temperament. Well, we'd better get going...”

“Wait!” Gloria climbed back into the copter and rummaged behind the torn vinyl seat. “Ah!” she said triumphantly. She climbed down, prying open a cardboard box. “It just occurred to me the cops would have far enough to go that they would have brought rations.”

They ate the four protein compresses and the dried fruit in the box, and set off, feeling almost confident again.

The thorny underbrush tangling beneath the hulking, drooping fir trees was nearly impenetrable. At last they found a faint path along the creek, leading downhill, northwest, in the general direction of Astor. The air was sweet with conifer resins and perfumes of the short purple blossoms and the white trumpets of morning glory that twined beside the shallow creek.

After an hour of trudging through the woods they stopped to drink from the stream. They sat in the coolness on the mossy bank. Gloria washed her face, then took off her shoes and dangled her feet in the cold water. There was a smile ghosting at the corners of her lips.

When she realized Ben was watching her she frowned and asked hastily. “What's Astor like?”

“It's a city at the confluence of the two major rivers in the Northwest. This is where Oregon was when you were…around. Astor extends sixty miles, maybe seventy, down the valley. Grows insanely. The woods around the city are crawling with frags. I suppose you're going to tell me you don't know what frags are.”

“I don't know what frags are.”

“They're this country's human pestilence. There are thousands of them between the cities. Frags are fragments of humanity, predatory tribal offshoots. Genetic Manipulations experiments gone bad and escaped, insane vagabonds, escaped criminals and their descendants—all of them reverted to savagery. They run together not quite as harmoniously and fraternally as a pack of wild dogs. They're cannibals and always dangerous. Not one of them speaks a word of English, even if they once knew how, because the ones who never knew how won't permit it. They growl instead. They're vicious and there are lots of them. They live in burrows, but because they don't wear clothes or use fire, about three-fourths of them die over the winter each year. But since they do a lot of rutting, there are always more. No discernible culture except rule by the strongest.”

“You talk like you hate them. In a personal sort of way.”

Ben nodded, staring at the shimmering stream, listening to the fragile, transient lives voiced in the rushing of the water. “Traveling through the Northwest a friend and I were captured by a frag pack.

“They, ah, they tied us up. And, umm, they decided to eat my friend; they didn't bother to kill her before stripping the meat off. When they were still fighting over the bones, a hunting party came through from Astor. They shot a few frags, took me off to the city-state with them.”

He swallowed hard and concentrated, managed to banish the picture from his mind. “Astor—in some ways Astor isn't so different from the frags: They don't speak much in Astor, they mostly laugh. I stayed for two months and I never did figure out how they've got the city-state organized. Well, I did find out that everyone there works maintaining the city one month out of the year, and does what he pleases the rest of the time. Sometimes it pleases them to work. Sometimes they take the other eleven months off for dancing and playing music, for building homes. For painting, for sculpting, for hunting, for staring into space, for organizing festivals and orgies. They duel a lot there, for fun mostly. There are outbreaks of violence, and almost no policing. Compared to the other city-states there are almost no laws. Eleven months of the year, initiated Astorans do exactly as they please--and I don't understand how the place remains standing.”

They were silent a while, listening to the creek, the call of hidden birds, the drone of insects. A brisk wind collected clouds and arranged them to hem in the sun, until the shade outmatched the sunlight and a damp chill filled the air.

Gloria dried her feet, put on her shoes, and stood up. “Let's go,” she said, and Ben followed her down the trail.

A light rain began to fall, gossamer curtains of mist fading in and out, when Ben and Gloria slid down the muddy bank abutting the gravel road. The road promised easier going toward Astor, but made them more vulnerable.

Ben was expecting the frags. And the frags were late.

He considered taking the gun from Gloria, keeping it ready. But he decided to leave it in her care. She was a better shot than he. “That gun fully loaded?” he asked as they set off down the road, headed due north.

She nodded and patted her zippered leather jacket where the gun bulged like a third breast. “Did you nurse on a gun instead of a breast as an infant, Gloria?” Ben asked absentmindedly, his eyes searching the underbrush beside the road.

Gloria permitted a corner of her mouth to smile. “No, but if I ever have a daughter,
she
will.”

The rain was heavier. Ben was still dressed in the tight, vertically striped bodysuit. Not much protection against the elements. The clamminess was sinking in, to his bones.

Don't get stiff, he warned himself. Stay loose, keep the muscles primed. The frags are late. But they'll be here. Patience.

The afternoon was over its crest, beginning the downhill slide into dusk.

Half an hour later the blue-gray gravel road was looping its interminable stretch up a hillside, the heavy growth of firs to both sides was becoming interspersed with short deciduous trees with shiny purple-green leaves; hummocks of moss encrusted with large lumps of gray fungi like stone gargoyles eroded smooth—the fungi very pale against moss very green against trunks and branches very somber.

The calls of birds ceased.

The insects hushed.

Even the sough of wind and the tinkle of distant creek quieted to whispers. The cloud banks thickened about the sun; the chill and shade fed one another and spread.

A rustle and a scrape and a hiss in the brambles to the left.

Ben didn't have to warn Gloria. Her eyes were bright, her right hand in her jacket on the handle of the gun.

When they had edged as far as they could to the right without turning their backs to the brambles, Ben shouted: “Up the bank!” Gloria sprang up the muddy incline, Ben close behind. They slid back down, cursing, on the first few tries, but they made the mossy level ground just as the first of the frags scrambled down onto the road behind.

Bubbling growls and liquid shrieks followed them into the bushes. The brambles clutched their clothes and left tracks on their legs and arms. They pushed on until they were stopped by an ancient stone wall, partly tumbled and overgrown with creepers, but high and formidable.
Barriers,
thought Ben angrily. There was no time to climb over or around.

They turned to face the first of the frags and Gloria's gun answered his growl with an explosive bark.

It happened so fast the man was hardly more than a hairy blur, an impression of narrowed red eyes and black-caked fingers, before he fell, a bullet hole through his belly. But Ben got a good long look at the man right behind.

The frag leapt and Ben was forced back, half against the wall, a rotting log beneath his hips. Gripping the yapping frag by the wrists, Ben strained to keep the snapping teeth from his throat. Foul spittle fell on his cheek, the reek of carrion made him choke, the weight of the frag crushed him. The man was stumpy, rock-hard, with an immense flaring mane of gray and black hair and beard. The bristling beard was parted for a pug nose and deep, black lines radiating from red-rimmed green eyes. Ben felt his consciousness slipping. He struggled for breath, heard Gloria grunt as she fought with someone, and felt like giving up. He was unused to fighting hand to hand and knew little about it. The frag jabbed with a knee which found Ben's left thigh. Ben bellowed and, suddenly more furious than afraid, pitched the man off him. The frag was up instantly, coming on while Ben was still struggling to his feet.