Transmaniacon (23 page)

“Kibo, mobilize the Brothers to disrupt this mob, any way they can. In fact, bring in that woman you've got who's such a good sniper. I'm not going to wait for Fuller's terms. I'm going in there.”

Kibo stared. “But…the demonstrators are Progressivists. As are
we.
”

Ben grabbed Kibo by the collar of his green silk cape and dragged his face near. His own actions seemed performed by someone else, as if he moved through a realm of cinematic impartiality. Once again, he was close to losing control.

He shook Kibo—who was a head taller and outweighed him by eighty pounds—and said, “Don't give me that brainwash pabulum! Stop
acting!
This is
real!”

“Precisely,” said Kibo, gently disengaging Ben's fingers. He did this with ease; he was a very strong man. “This is our reality—Progressivism. For another two months, our sympathies are dedicated. This is the pledge of the artist:
To The World, My Heart—From The World, My Bread.
We have taken the bread, now we must give our hearts. We simply cannot—”

“All right.” Ben spoke softly, seething inwardly. “Take me down. I am not a Brother: I am not bound by the contract. Take me to that balcony.” Their contract had stipulated that Ben's own activities were to be regarded as transcending the Traditionalist/ Progressivist contest. He was neither. They could not help him, now, nor interfere with him.

Kibo dropped the car and they hovered at the balcony, beside the owl-car. Instantly, Ben was at the opened side port, his gun ready. He needled the two surprised guards beside the anchored owl-shaped nulgrav car, and they dropped to the street below. He bent at the knees, preparing to spring from the car onto the balcony.

But he hesitated. He had glimpsed something shiny from a corner of his left eye, above the owl-car. He turned to look. A camera, the size of a walnut, its conical lens clicking at him, hovering a few feet away. It was a holo pick-up. He stood up straight, thinking hard. The camera recorded his actions—and there must be others nearby to obtain the several vantages necessary for the three-dimensional effect—transmitted them elsewhere from whence they would be projected. But projected where?

Into the sky?

Astonished, he looked up at himself. As tall as the tower he was about to assault, there was Ben Rackey, as if the sky itself were a vast mirror, gigantically reflecting him. He swatted at a camera, which moved deftly out of reach, and his image in the sky jiggled and shrunk a little, but it soon stabilized. He was looking at a transparent but clearly recognizable three-dimensional color image of himself, Ben Rackey dressed as a patriarch, his feet on the deck of the nulgrav car. His face, big as the sun, was dark with rage and his hand trembled eagerly at the trigger of his needler.

An amplified voice boomed out from below: “THIS IS YOUR TRADITIONALIST PATRIARCH DELEGATE AT WORK! MARK THE FACE OF DELEGATE LADD AND KNOW IT FOR THE ENEMY!” The words echoed from the surrounding canyon walls of steel and glass. The crowd below, watching the huge holo image on the sky, roared like wounded bear.

Ben had lost the battle. They could follow him everywhere with the mobile camera, and actions unfitting a delegate would be exposed to the public, ruining his cover. But he resolved not to lose the war.

He looked toward the closed double doors shutting the balcony from the apartments. Through a pane he glimpsed the lonely face of Carleton Fuller.

Fuller was laughing.

Wracked with frustration, Ben swung back into the car. “Take it back home. I'll work from there.”

Two hours later, after the Brothers of Proteus had accomplished considerable mayhem (forty deaths by explosion and three by sniping) in the name of Progressivism, Ben felt he might have produced enough fresh anti-Progressivist sympathies to use in the manipulation of the gathering crowd. He had arranged to protect himself from the cameras with a scrambler field, a small metal box attached to his belt to resemble a buckle. But he could not attack Chaldin's stronghold directly; he had lost the element of surprise.

Walking the earth, he stepped onto the front steps of the tower and addressed the demonstrators. He spoke through a micro-amplifier attached to the lapel of his conservative gray suit, and he activated the exciter, attuning it to full output.

“The Progressivist terrorists have maimed innocents for the last time!” The crowd turned to size him up. Its interest quickened as it recognized the face of the holo image who'd dominated the sky hours before. “These atrocities cannot be permitted to continue! Note that the Security Patrol sympathizes with the Progressivists! The police-thug-tools of the monarchical oppressor are themselves Progressivists…”

Less than half an hour later he had them whipped into a vengeful mood. He would have liked to have believed it was his own eloquence, personal presence, and sheer charisma which compelled them to shed their prudence. But he knew that it was largely the exciter.

He played on their sympathies and their fear of terrorists and on their universal dislike of cops. These approaches were only lubrication for the real mechanism of control: the release of repressed hostilities, magnified by their numbers, focused and intensified by his practiced use of the exciter.

And he got them moving toward the Tower of Lenses.

It was a mile across level ground. He enjoyed the walk. He stretched his legs, breathed deep of the warm afternoon air. He had them chanting: PULL THEM DOWN! PULL THEM DOWN! PROGRESSIVISTS DOWN! PULL THEM DOWN! He listened to them like a pleased primary school instructor nodding as his pupils rang out the alphabet.

Like an aboriginal battle drum the chant resounded and echoed. They seemed hardly aware that Ben was there, behind them, directing, though they must have known, somewhere inside, that another personality was driving them. Their eyes were staring, glassy, their pupils pinpoints, their mouths open. Ben thought,
A persuadable bunch.
He wondered why Detroit's pedestrians were so eminently gullible. It could probably be traced to their enforced lack of family life. The frustrated hearth instincts found easy outlet in mob activity—the mob was the closest thing they had to a family.

Listening to the throb of their chant and the throb of the exciter driving them before him, Ben envisioned the plexiform of emotional electricity connecting them in a mesh pattern which had its nexus in him, afferently passing to him the energies of their freed anger. This he received, amplified, and returned to them. He fed the mob. The growing mob. For it grew by the seconds as their personal magnetisms attracted bystanders and snowballed the mob into a crushing horde.

Everywhere, the invisible but inescapable unconscious diatribes. He picked up, as background noise, the crowd's telepathic invectives against all those who had offended over the years.
“Damn them … make them eat … walk on them … make them know what pedestrian means as a street knows … kiss my ... lot of them to … bury alive … make them … force them … hang them from the neck or better from their
…”

Chaldin's tower was in sight. Kibo had reported that Chaldin had rented the entire building. A brace of gray Security wagons settled to the ground on the street ahead. Ben smiled. Good! The police would provoke the mob for him, and save him energy.

Ben realized that his plan was sadly vague. He was not sure what he intended to do.
It is the great improviser who is always triumphant,
Old Thorn had said. Generally, he planned to drive the mob directly into Chaldin's jaws. He would have them looting the building, crushing anyone defending it. And when they had frightened off the sentries, Ben would go in, from below, take advantage of the confusion. And find Gloria. And maybe, maybe she would be alive.

The Security crew got one good look at the faces of the mob—and got back inside their vans. The vans spewed a yellow, eye-stinging smoke from their outvents. Ben shouted,
“Past them! Charge
!”

Holding its collective breath, he crowd charged through the thin smoke blanket, past the gray nulgrav vans, across the intersection and onto the walk leading to the Tower of Lenses. Ben glimpsed a man in a wheelchair wheeling it back into the building. The crowd below the speaker's stand there turned to face the onrushing horde from Ben's quarter.

From forty feet away, Ben gazed suddenly into the eyes of the man on the dais and knew him for an Irritant. It was the only other man who might have the savvy to control an exciter. It was Teude Regis.

Regis!

Regis and Ben regarded one another. Once, they had worked together. But now, Regis' bearded face was hard, his saturnine, sunken eyes glowed with anticipation of the kill. He wore shapeless black robes with a Progressivist symbol sewn on the chest in red.
How many false banners have you and I uncaringly waved, Regis?
thought Ben. Regis raised his arms and seemed to be concentrating. So Regis had been implanted with an exciter, too. Professional Irritant against Professional Irritant, exciter versus exciter, turmoil and Transmaniacon.

Ben's mob and Regis' came to a halt, facing off. They could have been mirror-images. They were the same people, dressed in the same somber clothes—but now divided against one another. Livid faces, dark clothing, red and shouting mouths.

Ben weighed the odds. The sun was behind him. It would possibly be a distraction to Regis, shining in his eyes. But Regis commanded a larger mob, almost twice as big. He'd had all morning to gather it. Ben looked up at the glistening tower and his mouth formed the name
Gloria.
But aloud he said, “Get them before they get you! Before they call their
friends
the
police!
”

The crowd charged, and Regis stiffened.

For an instant, there was a rapport between the two professionals. Ben's exciter, like a god's scepter, and the exciter of Regis, like a wizard's wand, exchanged electronic signals, and Ben caught a wavering mental image of the energy patterns and the distribution of will-force over the crowd from Regis' viewpoint. Ben nodded with satisfaction. Regis had little experience with the exciter…which would count mightily against him. Ben glanced behind. The Security wagons were held down by sniper fire from nearby rooftops. Kibo was earning his pay. As the mob fought, tooth and nail, strangling and slugging, flailing and kicking, Ben picked out those individuals with greater reserves of unvented hostility and concentrated on them. They became the spearheads of his force.

Regis made the mistake of trying to encompass the entire crowd, treating it as a single entity, a multi-limbed monster he would bend to his will. It was true that the mob was a single creature in many ways, a multi-celled organism, but there were levels and currents and cross-currents in crowds, as with any fluid medium, and these must be taken into account. The exciter could not be used to swing a mob as simply as one would swing a bludgeon.

Regis and Ben radiated pure provocation and the air steamed and stank with rage.

In the aura of sudden release of long-repressed energies, in the continuous, untiring explosion of transparent furies, the world was transformed. The sun seemed to burn more fiercely in the sky, the electric lights and neon signs on the patriarch levels overhead glowed three times brighter than usual and the windows of the buildings seemed ominously bright. The patriarchs had been warned away from the area; the sky was clear of them. For now, the world was just a setting for pedestrian rage.

The noise of the crowd rose to cacophony; it generated a tumultuous roar, as Ben's forces shivered Regis' over-consolidated crowd from within. Regis' crowd splintered and Ben's people charged. It was then Regis made his last mistake. He allowed himself to experience fear. Only his sense of authority, his faith in his own indomitability sustained him as master over the crowds. Fear attracted hostility.

Regis feared.

The crowd turned against him.

Ben looked away. Regis had been a worthy peer, once. He was crushed in seconds.

Ben shut off the exciter; it wasn't needed now, and it could endanger him.

A shadow fell over him. Ben looked up.

The sky was filled with ships. Huge black Security carriers were bringing their troops down to the street. He had to move fast.

He directed the crowd into the tower, and he followed at a discreet distance. He didn't care to see them tear the sentries apart. He ran up the steps, into the building, and pushed past the looters, sliding inobtrusively in and out of the crowd, trying hard not to jostle. The air was alive with shouts of glee, crackling, breaking glass. It was an old building, and still used fire extinguishers in wall-niches rather than built-in snuffers. He hoped he could get in and out before it caught fire. He found a servants' elevator and ducked into it, pressed the button, and waited impatiently, pacing back and forth, checking and rechecking his needler, cursing the delay. It took forty seconds to get to the top.

He was so keyed up when he reached the top floor that he fired wildly as the door opened, without looking first to see who was there. He squeezed off three spasmodic shots, splintering a fire extinguisher— scraps of metal and C0
₂
foam flew. Then he lowered the gun and took five deep breaths, concentrating to slow his heartbeat. When he felt in control, he looked out into the hall. No one there. Two halves of a fire extinguisher still gushed froth on the floor.

Gun at ready, he sidled down the hall, periodically looking over his shoulder. He approached the apartment where he expected to find Chaldin. It occurred to him, as he reached that door, that Chaldin might very well have gone. With the mob out of control and his Professional Irritant dead, Chaldin would be wise to take to the sky.

And Gloria?

“Who the hell's been attacking fire extinguishers?” said someone behind him.

He whirled, finger trembling on the trigger. Then he lowered the gun, smiling sheepishly. “You okay, Gloria?”

“Sure—what you think, I can't take care of myself? I'm some dumb fairy princess to rescue from the dragon? Christ. Those assholes don't even have the sense to tie me up good. First time he turned his back I slipped out my boot knife and stuck it in the guard.”