Transmaniacon (27 page)

“
Why?”

He lay back on the couch, gazed up at the darkening sky at the top of the shaft. A few stars already visible. “Because Old Thorn...well...”

“Who's Old Thorn, anyway?”

“The man who taught me all I know. My mentor, my father. My second father, that is. He took me from my real parents when I was eight. He'd been looking for someone to train, to take up where he'd left off. He looked at me and saw in me the perfect candidate. How long does a man hope to survive this profession, you ask? Old Thorn was a hundred thirty when he was assassinated. There is a long line of pros in my—my field, Gloria. They go back six hundred years and more. To the inception of the Order. Professional Irritants are a splinter group from the Order. That's why I know so much about it. Our discipline was first perfected within the confines of the Order. Professional Irritants created the Inquisition. The Order had use for it. None of those actually burned were in fact worshippers of Lucifer. The judges of the Inquisition—all secretly Luciferians— were strengthened by the situation—financially, because they obtained the lands of those who were burnt; and socially, because they were the only ones above suspicion.” He paused, thoughtful. “We were behind other things. Marie Antoinette was one of us. She worked hard to promote the French Revolution. But the Order failed to rescue her as they'd promised. And then there was—”

“Ben! Wait. I don't think I want to know what else you did.”

Ben snorted. “Very well. But kindly keep in mind it wasn't
me
personally. Until the last couple of decades, anyway. But they were people
like
me. They split from the Order in the eighteenth century and became freelance professionals without any religious orientation.” He paused again, closed his eyes. “Thirty years ago a group of Astorians discovered the location of the Central Coordinator for the Barrier projectors—which is where I think Fuller is headed— and they would have destroyed it. But Old Thorn found them out and stopped them. He needed the Barrier so he could do his work properly. He and Chaldin were alike in that, and other ways. So, Old Thorn killed them one and all. He killed twenty-five Astorians.”

“Why did he need the Barrier?”

“The hot-house conditions it creates keeps the cities at each other's throats. They have no room to expand outside the continent, so they deal with one another within the Barrier with the fear of invasion always hanging over them. It makes them touchy and antagonistic. The whole insular situation helps keep the cities from exchanging ideas, from losing their ignorance and fear of one another. And this makes it easy to disrupt them, and easy to find patrons for this disruption. Anyway, Old Thorn was a tough taskmaster, but he was all I had and I looked up to him. I thought he'd taken me in and reared me for his own, a poor orphan. It wasn't 'til I was twenty that I found out he killed my parents. They were part of the group from Astor who'd found the Coordinator and were planning to blow it up. I'd thought they died in an accident and that he'd taken me in.” Ben's voice was trembling. He asserted control. His voice was even when he said, “I found out from an associate of his who'd turned against him and was trying to turn me against him, too. I planned to kill Old Thorn, but I always seemed to find an excuse and I never went through with it. Someone else got him, years later. Old Thorn killed my parents to preserve the Barrier. I suppose that's at the root of my determination to drop the Barrier...

“The only contentment I had as a child was when Old Thorn took me sailing in San Francisco Bay. Sailing was his only vice. The only time I felt that I had a father in him was when we were out sailing. It was the only time I was happy. Hell, it was the only time he'd smile...”

“Rackey?” Kibo's voice cracked from the speaker-console .beside Ben's couch. “He's landed.”

Ben sat up and punched the microphone button. “Can you give me a picture, Kibo?”

For answer, the big vidscreen against the far wall flashed alive. Rocky hills, a few gnarled trees, snowcapped mountains in the background. The owl-car was perched atop a hill, sitting up beside a metal door flush with the hilltop which was flung open to reveal steps leading down into the stone.

“Kibo! Are you alone?”

“Yes.”

“Damn! You don't have anything with you large enough to blow that hill into the sky?”

“Sorry. One needler.”

“My short-sightedness. By the time we get something out there he'll have a good defense. We'll probably have to do it the hard way.
Hey,
what's going on there?”

The hill seemed to be erupting. It shrugged like an awakening bear and seemed to lift itself from the hills around it. It was lifting as if it had been only the upper portion of some mammoth piston sunk into the earth. It pressed upward, sloughing dirt and boulders off to both sides, the metal doors and stairway crushed and buried. “Kibo!” Ben shouted. “Move back! Move back! As far as you can get and still keep it on camera—”

“The hill shrank as Kibo pulled back. It seemed to explode, then, and the soil and rocks shot out and cascaded in all directions. Through a cloud of golden dust Ben and Gloria saw a gleaming silvery cylinder, a hundred feet high, forty feet in diameter. It stood like a monument in the settling cloud of yellow dust. The sinking sun shone and flared in the cylinder's right side.

“Ben,” Gloria whispered, “you told Kibo to move back right before that thing flung the rocks off of it. How did you know it was going to happen?”

“There's still a rapport between Fuller and me. I feel him. Every so often I get flashes, I seem to see what he is seeing; it's a split-second thing.”

“Is -that the Coordinator for the Barrier projectors?”

“The upper part of it. Fuller's in there, at least. I suppose he has to bring it out in the open so he can use it to redistribute the Barrier field, if he has to. The projectors work automatically, the Coordinator comes into play only when shape of the field has to be altered, and then it adjusts the projectors. And it's equipped with its own projector. That's how it tossed the hill out of the way. The projectors and the Coordinator have the same power source, and he can take all the power from the projectors and re-route it through the one projector in the Coordinator, if he has to. And that worries me.” The image on the screen wobbled, the mountains bounced, shock waves from the explosion rocking the car. “Stabilize it, Kibo. I need to see clearly, to concentrate. Don't move unless he fires at you. Settle yourself in for a wait of a few hours. You got everything you need there?”

“I'm fine. How's that?”

The picture was stable. Blue mountains, getting bluer as the dusk came on. Shadows of clouds crawling across sullen, craggy hills and the distant gleaming shaft of Fuller's cylinder. “Looks good, stay alert though. He might have some weaponry in that thing.”

“How do you know this thing's gonna work, Ben?” Gloria asked.

“The Fist? I
don't
know. It hasn't been tested. There're a million things could go wrong. It's one of the most complex pieces of machinery in history. Very few moving parts, though. Most of it is solid-state circuitry. It could break down—but I prefer not to think about it. There's nothing I could do.”

Bolton and Remm came in then, sheepishly explaining that they had become lost in the pyramid's corridors. They glanced at the screen and looked at Ben questioningly. He wasn't in the mood to fill them in. Bunn came in with the food. Plastic buckets of hot meat-vegetable mash and a flagon of hot coffee. Ben's stomach growled and he ate eagerly, keeping one eye on the screen. The shaft showed no further signs of activity.

The five ate in silence. Then Bunn discarded the containers. He returned to speak to the other two in whispers. They seemed exceptionally nervous.

“Are you ready?” Ben asked.

Bolton nodded. Ben said, “If you have any questions, ask them now. There won't be time, later. The bathroom is through that door, there, down the catwalk, first door on the left—”

Bolton stared down into the seething whiteness beneath the glass floor and nodded to himself. Then he looked up. He wore no goggles now. His small brown eyes glittered. “I don't think you've been altogether honest with us, Ben Rackey. We did some research into the life of Patriarch Tuskey.”

Ben smiled patronizingly. But he was worried. He needed these three to operate the focusing nodes. “And you doubt me? You want out?”

Bolton looked at Remm. Remm chuckled. “No,” said Remm. “We've come this far. And there is the matter of the oaths. Not that the ways of the patriarchy means much, anymore. The pedestrians are armed. I don't know where they got the guns. I suspect they've convinced Security—with a show of power—to change sides. I don't think the present regime will be in power tomorrow. And I think you must have known it would happen.”

Ben looked the man in the eye and decided Remm was smarter than he had supposed. “The time for pretense is gone. I care not a bit for Progressivism or Traditionalism. My concern is the elimination of the Barrier.”

Remm murmured. “Ah, well, I think it's a time of changes. We may as well have a part in one of them. I suppose you can get us out of the city safely? If we continue to work with you?”

“I'll take care of my own. I'll see you through safely, and give you some credits in New York.”

They were quiet for twenty minutes, watching the screen.

On the instruments to the left the energy-level tab went from pink to coral.

Gloria, sitting with her knees drawn up and her back against the wall, was swaying, her lips moving, eyes shut. Ben could see the rock ‘n' roll tape he'd given her to counter the euphonium, months ago, plugged into her left ear. “Hey, Gloria,” he called, laughing, thinking it was an odd time to listen to music, “What are you listening to?”

“A song called ‘Career of Evil,' by the Blue Oyster Cult,” she said, without opening her eyes.

“‘Career Of Evil,'” Ben repeated. There was something strikingly unlaughable about the sound of it.

He watched the light below, the glare attenuating into a flare, and waited.

The indicator had just changed from yellow to white when Ben said, “Patriarchs, assume your posts.”

Remm, Bunn, and Bolton lay back on their couches and lowered the focusing helmets over their heads. Ben could see their reflections on the glass ceiling. They lay in a circle, their heads at its center, against the white sheen from the floor. Gloria stood to one side, tending the equalizing knobs mounted on the wall.

On the screen, the silvery cylinder was emitting a thin blue glimmer from its upper end as Fuller strove to reinforce the Barrier.

The light from below had assumed the intensity of lightning. Ben closed his eyes. With his right hand he opened a small panel at the end of the couch's arm-rest. Within the panel was a toggle switch. “Throw the release switches,” he shouted. Remm, Bunn, and Bolton threw their switches, Ben flicked his own. Circuits closed, energy gathered itself for transmission like a crouching lion. The white light from below began to crawl up the shaft above them, released from the coils that circled the shaft behind the cupola's instrument panels. Four lines of spiral light, each controlled by a man on the command couches, snaked up the shaft overhead. Ben opened his eyes, seeing the streaks merge and become one solid beam. The intensity of the beam was controlled by the mental commands of those wearing the focusing helmets. Ben closed his eyes again and was witness to a vivid mental image: a wavering line of white. He concentrated. The lined slackened, stopped shivering, and became straight and thick and even whiter. Three other wavering white lines were branded into a field of black, side by side. He concentrated, and they converged.

He opened his eyes. The beam sprang skyward.

He had assumed there would be no sound as the Fist struck the Barrier, perhaps because both were constructed of invisible, charged particles. But he was startled to hear the crackling roar of the beam's impact on the Barrier. The sound was high-pitched and raking, like the shriek of rending metal.

Mentally controlling the attenuation of the Fist, Ben could actually feel its impact on the Barrier—he felt it as physically as if he had struck his own right hand hard against a metal door. He stiffened and arched his back, grit his teeth. He heard young Bolton cry out.

“Stay with it, Bolton!” Ben called. “Again!”

As one, they switched off the beam, let the energies coalesce for an instant, and then struck out again. Again, they struck the sky.

The Fist rang against the Barrier; outside, the restless pedestrians of the city-state Detroit dropped their weapons as they fell to their knees and clapped their hands to their ears, howling in pain. Then, after the last echoes of the resounding blow died away, they looked around in confusion and picked up their rifles. The revolution continued as before... A generation later, the legend would be well-rooted, a story-telling that at the instant of the revolutionary triumph, the sky rang like a great bell proclaiming liberty...

Inside the metal pyramid, Ben was up and moving from dial to dial, his excitement higher with each reading. At last he turned to his companions. “The Barrier is fallen.”

They spent just four minutes congratulating themselves before Gloria spat in anger, pointing at the screen that still contained an image of Fuller's Barrier control center.

The Barrier was there. Smaller, around the cylinder.

It was only a mile in diameter, now, and shrunken to this area, it had become almost opaque. It was a shield of blue, the cylinder a rectangular shadow within.

The blue shield shimmered and grew. It was perfectly round and rooted in the earth. It was expanding geometrically, foot by square foot, uprooting the earth as it went. Watching with mounting horror, Ben estimated that it was expanding outward at a rate of a square foot per second. Ten seconds passed in which it ripped up ten more square feet of ground. _