Transmaniacon (3 page)

“They don't cooperate or anything?” Fuller asked.

“Not much. But only once have any two of them gone to a full-scale war. Chicago crushed Los Angeles, left it a flaming ruin…”

“You hear that, Ranger?” Fuller called over his shoulder. “Chicago burned L.A. and the Japanese and all the foreigners are blown to Kingdom Come!” The bikers in the rear shouted something incomprehensible between catcalls and laughter. “Beautiful!”

“Beautiful?” Ben asked wonderingly.

Fuller smiled. “You bet yer ass, Rackey. With the Barrier up, there's no interference from the outside. Everything's so unstable, with all these little pocket governments, it's just crying for someone to come along and sew it up. A strong man with a good fleet of these things—” He patted the dashboard.

“There are variables here pretty alien to your time,” Ben said. “Might be hard to control.”

Fuller only shrugged. “Hey what's ol' Chicago like now? I grew up there, east side.”

“Chicago?” Ben smiled grimly. “It's a police state now, or an organized-crime state depending on how you look at it, building up reserves for conquest. They're fairly stabilized lately…almost went down in the Famines, but they were among the first to develop hydroponics and algae farms and solar power, so they got by. Of course, they had to do away with a third of their population, at first, to have enough food for the rest to eat, but it got them through. Now, as long as you do what you're told, you'll get enough to eat in Chicago. The whole city's one building, a big plasteel-coated, off-white hive-thing, fifty miles by eighty, like the ancient walled city-states but even more a single unit. No open courtyards, and it's all under one big ugly square roof with a gawdawful lot of chimneys. Chicago seems to be the paradigm for the ultimate city-state. The others are beginning to look like it. Maybe in another century they'll all be that way…”

“Is San Francisco still—?”

“Still there. Run by the Cult of Dis. A suicide cult.”

“I heard warnings about Houston…”

“Go near it and you run a high risk of enslavement. The dolphins. The dolphins are the only ones who can get outside the Barrier, as far as we know. The Barrier extends underground, at the borders, in a solid wall for an indeterminate depth, and undersea in a grid which nothing larger than a pilot whale can get through. People have gone beyond in miniature subs, but no one's ever come back. The dolphins come and go as they please, but they aren't telling what goes on out there. Why should they? They rule Houston and they hold enough power to keep Chicago and New York at bay.”

“Dolphins . . . rule Houston?” Fuller repeated, struggling to comprehend. “Run that one by me again.”

“You heard me. There was a Naval research center there before the Panic, and they had a language-interpretation breakthrough. They taught the dolphins to communicate, or vice-versa, and it turned out they were even more intelligent than we thought. After things collapsed and Houston was burning, a party of scientists came to the dolphins and asked them for advice. The dolphins told them just what to do, how to get things under their control, and their recommendations worked. The city planners put the place back together, another thinly disguised martial order, and became increasingly dependent on the advice of the dolphins. The dolphins jockeyed themselves into positions of social necessity. And they had machines built they could operate with sound-waves, their own high-pitched squeaking. These machines linked them to computers that controlled the city's cybernetic police force. One day they had the council of scientists killed. And took over. And now they rule, and men in Houston are their slaves. Some say it's the most scientifically advanced of the city-states... I'd always understood, as a boy, that dolphins were known as a benevolent bunch. But man, these dolphins are ruthless… Let's see, what else belongs in this geography lesson? Atlanta is a city of bandits, mostly copter-pirates, an organized hierarchy of thieves preying on trade routes between city-states...”

“Never mind. Christ, I've heard enough,” Fuller protested. “How much farther to this palace?”

Ben turned to Fuller in alarm. “I thought you were flying this thing.”

Fuller laughed sourly. “Do you imagine
he
would leave anything like this up to chance? The navigator is pre-programmed. I activate the nulgrav lift, the navigator takes us there, and back when we're done. No stops between.”

“Who is he? What does he actually intend to do with this exciter thing?”

“Don't try to pump me, Rackey. Just do your job. It doesn't matter what his plans are. You can go back to retirement after this job. 'Til he needs you again.” He took a vial out of a jacket pocket, and sniffed something from it, then put it back, zipping the pocket shut. “Why did you retire, anyway?”

“Don't try to pump me, Fuller,” Ben replied, grinning. But Fuller's question triggered recollections. He had tried not to think about his reasons for retiring. But the reasons were there, as stark and as ugly as vultures on a telephone line: He was losing control of his talent. He'd find himself practicing incitement, all the skills Old Thorn had taught him, even when he wasn't being paid. He found himself promoting needless fights, seeding contentions—always operating beneath a skillfully contrived camouflage of dissembling, always apparently innocent. He was doing it simply for enjoyment, to relieve his own boredom. And he lost his few friends and his lovers. It was when Ella left him-- he knew he had to quit. He made other excuses to himself—the mounting risk that he would be discovered—but part of him had known. He had turned his power against his own life.

Let this be the last time
, he said to himself, and it was the closest he'd ever come to a prayer.

Something glistened among the stars, something growing and pulsing. “The Chaldin Palace,” Ben announced. “Directly ahead.” Like a coral tracery of crystalline arteries, blooming and enfolding itself, contracting, and blooming again, the forever-revel hung uneasily against the impartial backdrop of the blue-black desert sky. “The palace itself,” Ben explained, “is the cylinder inside the tube ways.”

It was a thousand yards by three hundred of rotating linkage in plasteel, flexibly jointed at every level; it moved like a snake in its lair through intertwining arteries. The tubeways were transparent, luminous plasglass and the whole affair was supported by monopole gravitational modifiers. Commonly called nulgrav.

Fuller laughed. “That thing…that's a palace? Looks like a subway going full-speed through see-through tunnels--tied in a knot!”

The other three had come from aft and were watching over Ben's shoulder. “Looks like a roller coaster,” the skull-faced man said.

Roller-coastering through transparent passageways, the palace was driven by air pressure, following a course dictated by the ever-shifting sculpture of the tubeways. It was a flying flexible tower mingled with a dragon shape. The worm Oroboros, Ben thought. “The passengers are protected from the inertia--gotta be, that thing is moving inside the tubes at three hundred miles an hour. Clusters of nulgrav nodes. It's a real art to place them. Some of the gravitational increase from acceleration is released to give the passengers a sense of up and down, relative to floors.”

“Satan's fucktool,” Fuller swore. “I hope we get out of it as easily as we get in. He told me how we'll do it, more or less. But he didn't explain why it works.”

“Suppose we'll have to trust our employer,” Ben ventured. “He leaves us no choice. And perhaps having to trust him makes him seem
trustworthy,
but–”

“I didn't think you'd try the provocateur stuff on me so quickly, Rackey.” Fuller's tone was icy as he added,
“Cease.”

Ben shrugged.
Can't blame a guy for trying.

The palace loomed on them, the auto-navigator drew them in toward the translucent blister extruding from one end. The hangar doors opened—they were sucked in—and it closed behind them.

Inside: A vast parking lot containing several hundred other vehicles, most of them air-cars with rotors on their bellies; in the fashion of the Denver aristocracy most of the crafts were modeled on flying animals or insects. The fly-car set down between a huge metallic grasshopper in chrome-flake green and silver trim, and a giant bat, with outstretched wings of simulated leather over aluminum bone-struts and genuine brown fur on its bulbous torso. Ahead, someone had parked a huge bee, complete in every detail. Ben made out gigantic yellow and black wasps, four-passenger moths, an open-air touring butterfly, and a sporty swallow, all with their rotors and fuselage so artfully concealed they seemed ready to perk up their various outsize heads and leap into willful flight.

But only a few of the cars were nulgrav driven. That was reserved for the grossly affluent.

Overhead: Curved, gray metal roof; a slick green floor below.

Ben was startled by a voice crackling from their radio
. “Identify via reservation code.”

Fuller cleared his throat and quoted, “‘We're pain, we're steel, we're a plot of knives.'”

“Code acknowledged, invitation valid. Voiceprint checks. Professor Chaldin welcomes you. Please take advantage of the taxi unit waiting outside your vehicle.”

Followed by the erstwhile bikers, Fuller and Ben climbed from the fly's thorax, down the ladder, and stepped into the cushioned interior of the spherical taxi.

The hatch squeezed shut, and Ben was looking into the eyes of the dark woman who'd come with Fuller. The faint limn seeping from the walls invested her pale skin with an unseemly glow. He braced his feet on the resilient floor, hooked his arm through a stability strap, and asked her, “What's your name?”

“Gloria.” Her brown eyes hardened as she examined him critically. “That's what it was. Gloria. I don't know what it is anymore. That was my name while I was alive.”

“Shut up, Gloria,” the thin man at her side interrupted. “Stop with that bullshit. You're alive. Frozen ain't always dead.”

There was no sense of passage as the unit sped through the tubeways, matched the palace's velocity and sidled into its hangar as if for an orbital linkup. The trip was over, the curved door rolled back, and they emerged into a hallway. The globe fell away down the hall as if it was dropped into a shaft, and vanished round a corner. They were joined by a drone-cyber: a cylinder on a basketball-sized bearing, polished chrome to its waist where, on a cushion and fed with tubes, shaved and wired through the cranium, rested a man's severed head. The eyes were open and alert, the rest of the face was dead. It was encased in a glass tube flush with the metal cylinder. Above the glass-cased head, a metal top separated into jointed utility extensions, now folded like an umbrella. Fuller sneered when he saw the drone. Gloria looked faintly annoyed.

One of the bikers said, “Jeez.”

The head, cheeks sunken, nose beaked, deep-set green eyes flashing with electricity, rotated on its turntable to examine them.

Ben was used to the drones: condemned criminals with personality and volition removed, their brains and eyes directing the machinery, their activities programmed. A hospitable voice from the grid at the five-foot cylinder's octopal crest said, “Welcome. Kindly accompany me to the forever-revel.”

Doors without handles were set into the translucent, off-white walls on either side. The hall curved gradually upward, tracing the interior contours of the cylindrical palace. They stopped at one of the doors, and the drone spoke a series of numbers; the door slid aside, and they entered the party.

Odors of hundreds of perfumes, sweat, steam, tobacco, wine, antiseptics. A kaleidoscopic vista, a circular cavern floor-to-wall-to-ceiling-to-wall with people; mists, streams of warm water running through mid-air in nulgrav currents, phosphorescence and sparks flaring and shifting into protean, eye-pleasing patterns overhead.

Most guests invited to Chaldin's forever-revel considered themselves honored and attended eagerly. The palace was legendary. In the eighteen-year history of the levitated edifice everyone invited had accepted—though all were fully aware that they would never meet their host. Chaldin never attended. The party was managed by a human majordomo and a concealed central computer which was aided by its agent-extensions, the drones.

The palace had a number of reputations--wonderful, horrible, and every shade between. Ben had never before acquired an invitation, but he had done considerable research into the forever-revel. It presented an intriguing game board for the exercise of his distinctive skills. It appeared that some of the stories told about the palace were true and some were gross exaggeration. It had never lived up to the aggrandized achievements in decadence that were attributed to it by certain journalists. The tales of baby-drowning contests were entirely false, though the rumors of a tasting room for exotic diseases had some truth in them. The stories of mandatory initiation into a bestiality cult were fabricated, though it cannot be denied that guests so inclined were provided with certain unusual species of specially trained animals. The allegation that all guests must swear fealty to Beelzebub was unfounded gossip; yet it was true that Lady Seth founded a forever-revel sect devoted to the worship of the holo portrait of Professor Chaldin, before whose monumental image peculiar nocturnal activities, which would be considered reprehensible by the Denver status quo, drew a healthy number of participants…and it was to this gigantic, jovial three-dimensional bust of Chaldin that Ben's eyes were drawn as they entered the revel hall…

The moving face was seamed; deep furrows ran down from the corners of his mouth, and the unnaturally wide eyes, vividly blue, gave the impression of a ventriloquist's dummy. The dyed black hair was cut into a fashionable cube with jaw-length sideburns. He was very much older, Ben guessed, than first glance suggested. The huge, semi-transparent eyes on the forty-foot head rolled back and forth in mirth; the blue pupils against the overbearing whites of the eyes were like choking madmen writhing in white hospital sheets. The mouth snapped open and clacked shut in repetitious imitations of mirth, roughly following the rhythms of the seamless flow of thudding electro-rock. There was an identical bust, like a moving mirror image, going through the same actions, backwards, at the opposite end of the hall. The taped holo image repeated its actions, seeming to observe and cackle at the antics of the crowd below.