Transmaniacon (16 page)

“I think you're making it all up so you'll sound worldly,” Gloria muttered.

Ben stared into the water. Shadows. Sepulchral intimations in the ripplings; shadows, accepting and dispelling form.

About the two men facing off in the pool a haze was gathering, a milky glow that glimmered and was gone. The men stood statue still, their eyes locked. Then, a small ripple unfolded from the water between the knees of each Frater, two ripples formed at once, speeding toward one another, as if marking the courses of torpedoes. But there was nothing beneath the clear water that might have set up such a rippling. Nothing there but a few fluttering shadows. The watery beams slowed and stopped, hanging suspended, rising a few inches from the otherwise calm surface. The ends of the vanes began to bubble faintly, and seemed to round off. A node of fountaining water reared up at the prow of each rail, spouting seven feet in the air.

The watery pillars, still connected to the Fraters by unbroken vanes, hovered a yard apart like crystal axes. Then the geysers began to take recognizable shapes, sculpting themselves from the inside out. Horses. They became full-scale war-horses, three dimensional, glossy-blue, and translucent. They peeled back their lips in silent whinnies, their nostrils flaring and steaming, manes of white foam swirling, sprays for tails, hooves of rose-quartz, furious sapphire eyes, muscles rolling like the tides. They champed and reared, their hind hooves planted and levering on the water's surface as if it were the firmest earth. They struck at each other with bright front hooves and gemlike teeth. Where the hooves made impact the water dimpled but didn't splash.

In a flail of translucent hooves the horse on Ben's right was driven back and toppled to its knees. But as the other horse sprang forward it was met by the lance of a rider who had instantaneously fabricated itself out of the newly saddled back of the fallen water image. The liquid-man was a medieval knight, a muscular figure barely visible beneath his bubble-molded suit of armor. His helm concealed his face. The lance propped in his right arm drove through the chest of the other horse. The wounded phantasm twisted, frenzied, throwing its long head back on a neck thick with veins, veins standing out with blood that wasn't there. Ben could almost hear the horse's scream. There was no blood, but the horse lost its shape like a pierced water balloon viewed in slow motion, then dissolving into mist.

But now a second knight sprang up, lathed from the twist-devil of the waters that flowed from the collapsing horse. The horse melted, vanished; the armored knight afoot was linked to its Frater by a pipeline of protruding water extending back from his left ankle. He was armed with a circular shield and a half-visible sword that glistened and roiled, and he drove it to the hilt between the ribs of the surviving horse. The horse deflated and its rider fell to one side, dropping his lance which instantly vaporized. The armed knight swung his glassy blade overhead where it "snagged the light and threw wheeling prisms onto the inky walls. He swung for the killing blow, but a third vane had shot out from the drowned knight's patron and another warrior rose from the water. He leapt from the still surface to intercept the sword of the armed knight with his own. Water versus water. There was no audible sound as the blades struck, but Ben was aware of a ringing shrillness on the bones of his inner ear. The knights silently clashed, even as a fourth vane sent reinforcement to the third warrior, while the remaining warrior forged for himself a blade from the waters. Now four knights contended and flashed hummingbird-wing blades wildly, though not a ripple stirred the pool's surface.

The muted reverberations rattled the bones of Ben's head, growing more insistent as the blades met more often. He covered his eyes. But he had seen shadows in the corners of the pool, feeding on the Frater's shadows, seeming to grow denser, to become angular, to take the form of a human skeleton. There, off in that corner of the pool, welling inkiness gave way to white lace; a white skeleton, constructed of breaker foam, with eye-sockets shining like beacons took shape as Ben stared.

He understood with certainty, now, the part he and Gloria played here. They were prizes. The contest would determine the owner of the captive slaves. And the winning Frater would do with them as he pleased.

The exciter pulsed alive within him, cold and hard and vibrating like an inner blade. He concentrated on the newest water image. The skeleton grew. The skeleton was his own mental projection, amplified by the exciter. His entry into the contest.

The Fraters had tranced to rigidity, their eyes rolled back with only the whites showing, their expressions hard but impassive. But now, sensing the intervention of a third party, their mouths curled in snarls.

The skeleton, Ben's spectral extension, stepped between the battling knights and seemed to be holding them apart and docile with outstretched arms. The knights paused, their swords lowered, as the specter's dangling jaw moved up and down in silent query. It was looking at Ben, asking him a question.

Ben was soaked in sweat, the tensions were shaking him from within. But he kept his eyes locked on the glowing lanterns of the skull's eyes, and he commanded. The skeleton nodded—and collapsed. Its foam-waters fell, splashed, spread outward, as if to infect the knights with its own virulent substance. Ben concentrated, Ben commanded.

Like stiff, clockwork men, moving upstream against the will of the Fraters, the four knights turned their backs to their former opponents. They moved slowly back up the vanes toward their progenitors, swords poised offensively.

Two on one, they reached the holy men and raised refracting blades. The adeptus dwarf made a supreme effort. His face, in its strained etching, matched the pattern of the copper flooring beneath him. The two knights facing him were exploded, spraying showers of droplets down on the assemblage. The dolphins shrilled apprehensively, the guards muttered.

But the taller Frater was frozen in terror of his own creations. The watery knights facing him raised their argent blades—and the blades turned to ice at Ben's command. The blades fell, the ice edges slashed at the trembling man from either side, meeting in his throat. He gurgled, jerked, and slid into the water, his eyes still staring. His blood colored the water like a tropical sunset.

The dwarf had climbed from the pool and was consulting with the two other Fraters and the dolphins in the viewbox, all chattering excitedly. The dwarf was pointing at Ben insistently. The others found it hard to believe the interference had come from an outlander.

The blood was radiating from the corpse in the pool, forming scarlet aureoles. It colored half the pool with its questing fingers of red. Ben was vaguely aware that someone was firing questions at him.

He ignored them. He was watching the blood. He was concentrating.

Ben nudged Gloria. They stood. Ben glared at the Dwarf and pointed at his chains.

The dwarf shook his head.

Ben pointed at the pool and slowly drew a finger across his throat. He smiled. The dwarf nodded.

The Frater spoke sharply to the guard with the keys. Eyeing Ben suspiciously, the guard came to them and bent, unlocked the chains.

The dwarf waddled near and began, “Now we have freed you, reverse the tide! I know what you have done. We've got to stop it
now,
I cannot—”

“No,” said Ben. “Can't do it. I don't see any point in drowning Houston but I can't stop it now. It's feeding on long-time smoldering resentments of the city's subjugated humanity, Frater. You've got them well-controlled, but the anger is there, buried within them. And I've liberated that anger. Even now—” They looked toward the pool. The stained water from the slain Frater had elongated, stretched wide and formed the outline of a human bloodstream.

The outline rose and absorbed the waters to form a sheath of transparent flesh. The thing seemed to inhale the water from which it sprang into itself, growing. The pool was fed by a channel to the sea outside, so there was no limit to the giant's size. It would grow until the repressed hostility that fed it was satiated.
It will grow and thrive on the darker wellsprings of this city-state's collective unconscious,
Ben thought.
It will grow and grow until
—

But Gloria was dragging Ben backwards by the arm. He resisted, involuntarily fascinated by the glassy behemoth. “C'mon, asshole, we got to beat it!” Gloria shouted at him, wrenching him back. Ben gazed in admiration at his creation.
It's not mine any longer,
he thought suddenly. There was a crest on its smooth reddish cranium, gills where its nose should be, a blue-white glow instead of eyes, flat legs without feet. It looked down at them from a hundred eighty feet, already hunched against the lofty ceiling of the crystal dome which emerged from the surface of the sea fifty feet out of the waters.

Wires of red proliferated through the massive water-creature, arterial courses inside the heavy, glossy limbs. Its chest and skull formed an armor of ice and its right arm sprouted a long, crooked scythe in place of a hand. The rainbow arc of the scythe solidified, crusted, ice spanning its twenty-foot length. In his mind, Ben felt it getting sharper.

The mer-thing swung its blade, and it came like the Arctic winter wind. Three guards turned and bolted. A flash of silver, and three men were decapitated, bodies staggering on a few steps to collapse in soft, lonely heaps. Three heads clung to the adhesive, frost of the scythe blade, their faces still contorting spasmodically. The giant threw back its head and swallowed the whole length of the scythe blade, then drew it out again clean; Ben could see the silhouettes of the three heads, already disintegrating, sinking in an orderly parade down the translucent esophagus.

The water giant kept growing.

All the dolphin-Lords had gone but one. The remaining dolphin conferred in squeaks with the dwarf Frater, issuing orders. The dwarf bowed, backed away three steps, turned and leapt into the pool, foundered quickly to his copper mind-scape, and took up his pose.

Ben's heart was banging. He wanted to help the dwarf, but he felt that it had gone out of his range, that any use of the exciter would only make the giant more powerful and enraged. “Ben,
are
you going to stand there till we
drown?”
Gloria shouted.

The Frater had just gone into trance when fingers muscled with ice lifted him by the throat. The giant held the dwarf over its mouth and twisted his stunted body in opposite directions; snapping his spine at the waist, it wrung him out, squeezing the blood from him as a man might drain the juice from an orange. Then it tossed the withered husk aside. And grew until it was struggling with the ceiling of the dome, its mouth working in soundless snarls.

“Ben,
any second it's going to notice us!” Gloria whispered. “I'm going.” Ben sighed and turned, followed Gloria out. He was startled to see the room was all but deserted. Except for the single dolphin-Lord whose mobile harness was trapped by a fallen chair lying on its side in the narrow exit. The dolphin trilled at Ben imploringly. Ben tossed the chair out of the way, and he and Gloria leapt onto the dolphin's platform. The dolphin had no time to protest unwanted hitchhikers. It sped off down the tunnel as fast as the prosthetic conveyance would take it. Thin spray from the water channeled over its glossy hide, sprinkling Ben's eyes. The tunnel sank away, seemingly endless, dim and straight. A resounding crunch echoed from behind. The walls rocked and trembled, the prosthetic platform shivered, caromed from wall to wall. Ben and Gloria clung to the rail against each jarring.

But they reached the end of the tunnel, a portal with a ready ramp leading into a tall, blue, cylindrical vehicle with its nose pointing straight up into a vertical shaft. The dolphin's platform—Gloria and Ben hanging on tenaciously—rolled up the gangway and into the ship. The door closed automatically behind and sealed.

They assisted the dolphin into a large transparent tank in the control chamber. It squeaked into the underwater mike on its tank console and almost instantly the forward cabin door opened and a helmeted slave in black, eyes stony, came into the room and sat in the control chairs. “He's motor-controlled,” Ben muttered.

They sat down beside the motor-controlled servant, on either side. He didn't notice them, responding only to the dolphin's squeaks, coming to him over the microphone in his black helmet. He manipulated the control knobs, a style of instrumentation unfamiliar to Ben, and the craft shot up into the shaft. The viewscreen flickered alive. They caught a brief glimpse of a vertical tunnel and the blue sky, then the craft arced up and out, leveling off. They were circling the sunken temple, about a hundred feet over the water.

The crystal of the dome emerging from the water was cracking from within, like a huge egg hatching, and as they watched, it shattered outward. A gleaming, translucent hand groped through the gap, followed by the crested head. It gave a great effort and heaved at the dome. The white stone cracked further—and then gave entirely; rough crystal boulders flew up and tumbled into the sea. The pounding waves caved in the crystal dome further, until the chamber they had vacated was filled and the temple drowned. As the sea poured in on the glass giant it raised its arms in exultation and rose up, and up. And grew, fed by the two seas: the briny sea and the sea of resentment from the people in the nearby city-state.

“What if it keeps on growing? And on and on?” Gloria asked, breathing heavily. “It has the whole sea to draw on.”

Ben considered, swallowing. Then he shook his head. “No. It's given form by the telekinetic invocations of the dead Fraters' life-force—and my exciter. But it's given strength and
growth
by the hatred of enslaved Houston. He who hates, hates himself most: It will turn against the city that sustains it. With the death of the city's inhabitants it will lose its well of life. It will have no source of life. It will collapse. Now it turns to the city—”