Transmaniacon (15 page)

Trill nodded. “There's an airship for Detroit tomorrow afternoon, trading nulgrav nodes. You should be able to hide in the cargo-hold. They don't expect stowaways, they won't be looking for them. It's the only transportation to Detroit. We're not on good terms with them, and they won't let any but the pilots go.”

“And the Brothers of Proteus?”

“They'll be sending a man around this evening…they are poison, Ben. Don't get it on your fingers. I, for one, won't deal with them. And so, to avoid having to look at them, I must leave you soon. So here are directions to the cargo ship. Heed: On the field of yellow wands trend to the silver arches. Pass through the silver arches, and the red-bellied bird at the left of the flock flies to Detroit. At least, that's the word.”

Old Trill tugged on his beard, winked at Gloria, and trudged away down the path.

“Are you going to tell me what the Brothers of Proteus are, or are you going to be mysterious about that, too?” Gloria asked.

She doesn't want to leave Astor, Ben thought. .

“Listen…if you want to wait here for me, in a few months I'll—”

“Don't gimme that crap. You think I'm a frightened damsel? Fuck off. Your ass'd be grass'd without me, jack. Now out with it. What are they?”

Ben sighed. “The Brothers of Proteus are an elite corps of terrorist mercenaries. They operate on the theory that political attitudes are all a matter of vantage-point. All political activities are valid from a given viewpoint. With this they justify their mercenary flexibility. They consider themselves artists. I suppose they really are—”

“Yeah but what the hell do they
do?"

“They terrorize. They undermine, they perform select acts of attrition. They are professional guerillas, terrorists for hire. But the key to the brothers is this: If you pay them they will
believe
in you. Absolutely inflexibly. That is their art. Thespians unto murder. If you pay them for one year's services—in advance—they enter a state of mind where they are single-mindedly dedicated to your political standpoint. And for one year they really believe it. They kill to support their new beliefs, if that's what you pay them to do. Their viewpoints are protean, but once you pay them to enter
your
viewpoint it becomes
theirs.
'Til their scheduled time in your service is up.”

“Artists, huh? Sound like a pack of killer pigs to me,” Gloria spat. She stood, stretched, and went into the cabin, closed the door behind her.

The afternoon waned. The blonde light became sallow, amber, bruised with red.

A stranger strode up to the cabin. A tall black man in sleeveless green military khakis and wearing a jauntily cocked multi-colored beret. Ben motioned for him to sit beside him on the steps.

But the man stepped to the porch and shook his head, crossed his arms, and waited. His face was squat, his nose flat. His eyes were onyx black and rimmed with red. He was over a foot taller than Ben and massive. Sweat marked out wheels under his arms. He stared.

Ben stood, faced him, and returned the stare. Their eyes locked. “I'm Rackey.”

“I'm Kibo. What advance?”

“None. In Astor. Name your own advance on your arrival in Detroit three weeks from now. You will be paid before you begin work. But I can give you nothing now… Do you know who I am?” Kibo nodded. “Your word is good. Until we arrive in Detroit.”

“How will you travel?”

“We have a vehicle.”

“I see. More than one? Another for hire?”

“No. But you can travel with us.”

Ben shook his head. “No, we've got to leave tomorrow. I have to get there well ahead of you, and prepare things for your work. I'll have to work out some way to get you into the city. Detroit isn't easy to penetrate. It will take time. We'll fix a rendezvous point outside the city walls. So I'll have to find what transportation I can. We'll get there.” Without removing his eyes from Ben's, Kibo reached into his shirt pocket and removed a small white disk. “Your hand in agreement.”

Ben offered his hand, Kibo took Ben's forefinger and thumb and pressed them onto the waxy surface of the disk. The imprint was recorded and Kibo spoke into the grid on the opposite side. “Rackey, Proteus, Vance Square, Detroit, August four. In lieu of advance. Done.” He handed the disk to Ben and Ben spoke into it: “Rackey, Proteus. Done.”

The transaction complete, they shook hands. The big man in green departed, vanished into the fast-darkening woods.

The cabin door creaked. Gloria came from behind and slipped her arm around his waist. He turned to embrace her and she asked calmly, “How many people will that mman kill for you, Ben?”

“Only as many as necessary,” he replied, and wished he could stay in Astor.

***

The next afternoon a pod took them to the landing field.

The first part of Trill's directions were easy enough to follow; They found the yellow wands encircling one of the fields where they passed through the silvery arches to the series of honeycomb bays. It was dinner hour, the hangars were deserted. They found a large cargo car, rather crudely shaped like a robin, most of the red paint worn off its belly.

But there were two such vehicles, identically styled.

“Which one?” Ben wondered aloud.

“He said the bird at the left of the flock. The bird farthest left, I guess.”

“I don't much care for guesswork, but it's all we've got at present, I suppose.”

“Can't you hire a craft? Do we
have
to stowaway?”

“There are no privately-owned ships here. The city owns them all and it won't rent them out for private jaunts. I don't know how to operate one of these big birds. So…”

“Can't steal one either, huh? Okay. Can you get in?”

For answer, Ben strode to the round hatchway securely locked into the vast, curving metal hull arching fifty feet over their heads. From his gray skintight suit he produced five flat metal tools and set to work on the lock of the hatch.

Ten minutes later they had resealed the hatch from within and were crouching among the wired-down crates in the cargo-hold.

It was a very uncomfortable trip.

Ben had hoped to slip from the crates and out of the hold before he and Gloria were noticed by the crew. How they would accomplish this, he had no idea.

But some six hours later when the transport set down, and the seemingly incessant vibrations of the rickety metal vehicle finally stopped, they were hunched down by the metal door to the cargo-hold, Ben with the needler drawn and set on stun, Gloria on the other side, knife in hand.

The door rumbled, creaked, and swung back.

The thing that entered the room was not one of the pilots.

It was a dolphin in a prosthetic case.

It rolled in on rubber wheels supporting a circular metal platform; an aluminum frame upheld a diagonal hammock on which the dolphin rested on its belly, the extra-aquatic pressures of greater gravity somewhat reduced by a few small nulgrav nodes fastened to the hammock straps. A recycling, purified stream of brine water constantly washed the dolphin from small tubes mounted in the aluminum frame. A microphone on a bar below the dolphin's snout picked up the high-pitched sounds it used to direct the voice-controlled minicomputer that steered and maintained the entire prosthetic set-up.

The dolphin turned, saw them, and squawked something into the microphone below its snout. Its tiny eyes glittered with intelligence and it wriggled in its support hammock with the excitement of its find.

“We picked the wrong ship, Gloria,” said Ben. Unnecessarily.

“Oh
really?
You mean this isn't
Detroit?"
she replied sardonically.

The motor-controlled manslaves who guarded Houston crowded into the hold. There were ten of them, their weapons all aimed at Ben and Gloria.

Ben smiled weakly, inclined his head politely, and dropped his gun.

They were bound from behind, metal shackles at their wrists, taken out of the ship and into elevators. And down. Between ship and elevator they had five minutes to glimpse the sky, and after that, all was underground. And undersea.

On either side marched tall men burnt dark by sun, dressed head to toe in gray-black sharkskin uniforms; the air was humid and sweltering above; in the subaquatic citadel all was air-conditioned. “What now?” Gloria asked in a whisper.

“They'll probably take us to their temple. It's on the sea bottom in Houston's harbor. Invaders to Houston are usually enslaved or made party to the festivities. I don't know much about them, I've never been here. But I know they have a use for human blood.”

“Oh, right. Vampire dolphins.”

“No, it isn't the dolphins who need the blood, personally. To keep the population under control they've instituted a religion. They themselves are the objects of worship.”

“Oh, naturally. Yeah, so they need our blood for communion or something. But what are
we––
”

She was silenced, by a rifle haft between her shoulder blades. She grimaced but didn't cry out. Ben took a deep breath and grit his teeth. “We wait for an opportune time to retest the exciter,” he hissed.

They were taken on a three-wheeled car, escorted by six guards and one harnessed dolphin, through a dimly lit, metal-walled tunnel booming with echoes. The dampness of the air, the sudden coolness, indicated to Ben that they were in a tunnel under the sea.

They arrived at a receiving dock. The dolphin spoke to another in a white harness who was in charge of the gateway, and they were admitted into the labyrinthine corridors of the sea-bottom palace.

The palace of the priests of Houston was constructed like a tremendous snowflake composed of hundreds of chambers in symmetrical arrangement around the center dome. They were marched through glass-walled halls where Ben had to restrain himself from holding his breath. The glass tunnel ran across the sea bottom and beyond the immaculately clean glass teemed the sea's life: squatting, swirling, finning, nosing, swimming things both bright and ominous. The water was fairly shallow here and the encrustations of coral lifted to nose from the sea; sunlight struck down in gyrating shafts.

Ben's confidence had been summarily dashed at their discovery and capture. A stupid mistake, an avoidable mistake. The wrong ship.
Infantile!
he derided himself. But now, immersed in the aura of the sea, some of his confidence was returning. This was home base for Ben Rackey. He was doing it all for the sea. To drop the Barrier and free the sea. The sea would know; he felt it, intuitively. The sea would succor its own. The sea would kill for him.

Like sentient, defiant chess-kings they appraised one another. The taller Frater, on the left of where Ben and Gloria sat chained beside the pool, wore a red cocked hat worked with gold lace and faced with the shining Eye of Horus. Already, in ritual preparation, his left eye was blanked by a black eye-patch. His remaining pale blue eye was cold but penetrating. A black hipskirt was his only garment, and a red mandala was painted gaudily on his thin chest. The other Frater, a dwarf, was thirty yards from his opponent at the opposite corner of the great hexagonal pool sunk in the tile floor of the center dome. White tile, polished black stone walls, waters more serenely blue than the Frater's troubled eye. The dwarf's white skirt and jet-and-silver braided hat held between them a torso stunted and twisted like a weather-strained oceanside tree. But an intensity in his white bearded face identified him as an adeptus.

Both men were knee-deep in sparkling sea water. Their bare feet were firmly planted amid the copper intaglio designs flooring the pool.

Ben and Gloria were sitting cross-legged, their ankles shackled with silver chains linked to rods that were embedded in the stone tiles. Three dolphins lay in their coolant harnesses on a stone platform, beside the entranceway, observing the proceedings silently. They were flanked by four impassive guards.

Speaking low, Ben said, “Gloria, the big man with the red hair has the keys to our chains. That's what we need first. But in order to confuse things so I can obtain the keys-- I'll have to use the exciter. If the guard is out of our reach after I've begun the mania transfer, then we're sunk. So to speak. I've got the outlines of a plan—”

“Sure, you've always got a plan. Some time it's going to fall through. Like your plan to get us to Detroit. There has to be an easier way to get there. Listen, you won't mind, I hope, if
I
have a hand in this plan? Clue me in on the proceedings here so I know what's going on, and 'maybe I can come up with something.”

Ben chuckled. His confidence was still there and it was still irrational. They were chained to stone on the floor of a temple containing only enemies, thirty feet beneath the sea, in the harbor of a city-state which also contained only enemies. The chances for escape seemed infinitesimally small. Confidence and optimism in such a situation were ludicrous. Ben, however, felt both rising within him with the inexorable certainty of the tides.

But to Gloria he said, “Okay. Listen, the copper intaglios are supposed to be material realizations of the priest's subconscious landscapes. Sort of like the ancient mandalas. The variations in mounds, swells, declivities, and spirals in the copper relief map represent the unconscious mind of each contender.

The model acts as an amplifier for psychic energies which animate the water images, in much the same way that the resonance from a violin makes its characteristic pattern on loose sand—”

“For a guy who's never been here you sure know a lot about it…and,
what
water images?”

“I know only what Old Thorn told me about it. Part of my Professional Irritant training was to memorize the low-down on the various city-state cultures. And the water images—well, you'll see. They're manifestations of the Will of the Frater, in a ritual supposedly representing the will of God altering the shape of reality.”