Transmaniacon (7 page)

Lenny carried the dishes to the airfoil cleaner, returned and sat down, grunting. He took bent cigarettes from a side pocket and passed them around. Ben declined. Lenny watched the girl curiously as she fumbled with his lighter. He showed her how to make the electric arc that lit the cigarette. “Strange crew,” he said.

Ben nodded. “It's a long story.”

“Where's Lady Ella?” Lenny asked, leaning back in the wooden chair, hands folded over his hairy belly.

“Left me after the party. Haven't seen her since… Lenny, I'm sorry about what happened, I—”

“Don't gimme that nonsense,” Lenny interrupted, teeth rending his cigarette. He sat up suddenly and very straight and put his hands on the table. “You'd do it again. Don't try to play on my sympathies. You deserved to lose her. And your friends.”

“I've retired. I really have. No more, unless it's an emergency.”

“Sure. Sure, you have.” He shook his head and stared up at the wooden rafters. Finally, he said, “What you here for?”

“On our way to Las Vegas. Running from some unfriendly people. I've got something with me, might interest you.” Ben handed over the exciter, explained what he'd been told it was supposed to do. “I'm hoping you can tell me how to use it. In payment I can give you money, since my friendship doesn't seem to mean anything. Or you can copy the thing, if you think you'll have use for it.”

Lenny examined the shiny ellipsoid critically. “I'll look it over.” He seemed intrigued. “I can tell you right now, this metal is psychic-conductive. Designed to interact with the nervous system. Probably tissue permeable.” Before Ben could ask questions Lenny rose, gingerly carrying the ellipsoid, and started for the door of his lab.

“Lenny, can I use the house computer to trace a nulgrav car's serial number?” Ben called after him.

“Probably,” Lenny said over his shoulder. “Go ahead.”

Ben copied the serial number from the control panel inset and ran his request through the interface affixed to the kitchen wall. The screen immediately lit up with a name. Ben cursed. He read it again. “That's what I thought,” he said. On the screen was the name
Chaldin, Arthur Pelham
/
Doctor of Philosophy: Physics, Biology, Chemistry
/
Master, Electronic Synthesis Theory.

Ben felt ill.

“He blew up his own palace?” Gloria asked, looking over his shoulder.

Ben turned to her with an admiring glance. “That's the way it looks,” he said. “I suppose he could have taken the exciter out anytime himself. No need for me to steal it. But he wanted the palace destroyed. Could be a lot of reasons. Like insanity, or—”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “Everything he does is very deliberate. No wasted energy. I didn't really have time to know him, but you can tell, when you're inside his operation. He wanted all this to happen just like it did.”

“Probably most of his enemies had been invited for that particular party-cycle,” Ben mused. “When a man has an opportunity like that, to destroy, say, a hundred of those dangerous to him in one night...to a man like Chaldin, trading hundreds of bystanders for the removal of a hundred enemies is a bargain. Maybe that's why he built the palance in the first place...” He sipped some coffee. It tasted real; it felt real. Close enough. “Suppose he's been planning a move, for a long time--a campaign to extend his control to every city within the Barrier. Certain people would put up resistance along the way. If those people were lured to the forever-revel and disposed of, then the path is almost cleared for him. Chances are he monitored our part in its destruction, had it transmitted to his lab, and he keeps it as a record. If the local bosses challenge him, he can show them the footage--we go down, not him. He's safe, his enemies are out of the way. But he put the exciter in my hands. Maybe it's a dummy. Why should he risk the real thing? Maybe there's no such machine, maybe it was a story he told me to get me involved with him.” He shook his head. “Thinking about it makes me bone-tired. Guest rooms are down the hall there--I'm gonna use one.”

Ben went to the guest-room and lay down on the bare mattress, in the adobe coolness. Almost instantly, he was asleep.

He awakened suddenly. Someone was sitting on the bed. He rolled over. Gloria was there, legs crossed, her elbows propped on a knee, her chin cupped in a palm. She twitched the end of her left foot and swayed to some impatient inner rhythm as she asked, “What did Lenny mean about you deserving to lose her--and your friends?”

Ben lay back, one arm over his eyes, studying the swirling lights under his eyelids. “I've been using my ability…indiscriminately. When there was no need to disrupt things. Without even thinking. I don't know why. Maybe boredom. Maybe the reason I started the whole thing in the first place took me over--just anger. I was always kind of angry at people...” He broke off, amazed that he'd shared that with her. He cleared his throat. “I don't know. But...I pretended someone was interested in the lover of a close friend of mine. I spread some rumors, knowing that my…friend was in a critical period. I knew it and played on it, and a fight started. He challenged the man I had led him to believe was after his wife. One of them died that night, and only when he fell onto the floor with the hole in his chest. And Ella left me...”

He trailed off, again wondering why he was unburdening himself to this woman. Ordinarily he refused to speak freely about himself. He hadn't confided in Ella about his desire to sail the seas until he'd known her for three years. Maybe it was because Gloria belonged to another era and couldn't judge him according to the rules of this time. Or maybe because she was so uncaring, so dispassionate, so uncritical. She had, after all, complacently accepted association with Fuller the Slayer.

“There's something I'd better tell you,” the woman said.

He lowered his arm from his eyes and looked at her.

In the shadows she looked like a half-starved little girl. Her eyes were hollow, her mouth assumed the laxity of despair.

“Fuller isn't dead.” said Gloria.

Ben sat bolt upright. “I shot him from six inches away!”

“He musta been moving some. You musta just grazed him. Because it was only a scratch on the side of his head. After I dragged him out of the fly-car he opened his eyes and looked at me. I ran back to the fly-car and we took off.”

“Why didn't you tell me?” Even in his own ears Ben's voice was cold as metal. He realized he was gripping one of her arms. There was pain in her moist eyes. He let go.

Rubbing her bicep and regarding him with a cryptic half-smile she said, “I didn't care if he was alive. He never did nothing to me. During the trial he tried to tell 'em I didn't kill anybody. I'm in no hurry to see him dead.” She made a gesture of dismissal with her limp and delicate fingers.

Shakily, Ben stood and stretched. “Fuller will come after me.” He said, mostly to himself.

“You really think our employer was Chaldin?”

Ben nodded. “For a person who acts like she doesn't care about anything, you ask a lot of questions.”

“I'm curious, but I don't
care
, really. Nothing's real. I just woke up here…and a big crowd of people died yesterday night, and I don't really know why.”

He caught a look in her eyes, as though a shutter had been opened and for a moment he glimpsed the mind within. Then the shutter slammed in his face.

But he had seen her misery. She felt lost.

Gloria had awakened to an alien and exceptionally perverse world, and what friends and family she'd had were more than a century dead. Before they'd frozen her, there had been the trial and the conviction for a crime she hadn't committed, the rejection by a world that knew nothing about her, except what the newspapers claimed—that she should be reviled as a cult murderer.

In her eyes now he saw ennui and a dull loneliness. He was swept up in an impulse--an impulse that surprised him: He threw his arms about her and drew her close. She didn't resist. She leaned on his chest and to his amazement he found he was stroking her hair. He noted the ear cusp plugged in her right ear. She was sad and angry, listening to sad and angry music. She swayed against him to the beat. He bent to kiss her…

She stiffened, withdrew, sensing she'd let her guard down. The shutters were locked tightly in her black eyes. No light escaped them.

Ben let his hands drop to his sides. To fill the uncomfortable silence he said the first thing that came into his head, “What, uh, what song's playing on the ear-cusp?”

She frowned, listening. “
Helter-Skelter
. By the Beatles.” She made a great show of shrugging, turned and left the room, closing the door carefully behind her.

A few seconds passed--and then the door opened and Lenny came inside. “I know how to use it,” he said.

Ben stared at him. “Use what?”

“The exciter.” Lenny's small jet eyes glistened. He whispered, “A whole new principle in amplification.”

“Not sure I want to know...But...How's it work?”

“We just cut open your chest and stick it in. We can probably put it in the space in there where a normal person has a heart,” said Lenny, grinning.

***

Ben awoke on a hospital bed. He groaned, shifted about. The bed felt like a lab of stone. He was a mattress, but an unforgiving one. Gingerly, he felt the scar on his chest, close beneath his sternum. He could feel the exciter, the Transmaniacon, in there, hard and cold, not far beneath his heart. He hoped Lenny was right. The metal, he had told him, was devised from a silicon base which his flesh would not reject. But where had the surgeons found room for it? Contrary to popular opinion, Ben Rackey had a heart. No room there. There was no bulge, only the thin scar, healing with unnatural rapidity. Good surgeons in Las Vegas.

He'd planned to give it all up...

But Chaldin would be out to control, or destroy him. And Fuller--would simply kill him, if he could. Ben needed an edge.

His clothes were laid out for him on a metal chair beside the bed. Otherwise, the windowless white room was bare. He got up, stretched, and dressed hurriedly, glancing at his watch. Nearly ten. He had been under for eighteen hours. Moving about, he could not feel the exciter in his chest. Good.

In the narrow hall outside his room, Gloria was sitting against the wall, asleep, her head propped on her folded coat. He bent and gently shook her awake. She frowned, glared at him out of slitted lids, then stood and stretched, irritably pushed away his hand when he tried to help her up. He could see the outlines of her ribs through her yellowed T-shirt. She pulled the leather jacket on, then smiled sleepily at him. “Is it where it's supposed to be? The exciter, I mean.”

“It is.”

“That was quick. A few days. Don't you have to lie up? Or pay the bill?”

“I paid beforehand, by radio credit-code. I've got an account in a Vegas bank. And I'm rested already. All healed up. Things are changed nowadays, in some places. In some parts of the country a broken bone can be healed in hours—but a few hundred miles from there the best you can hope for is a witch doctor and maybe an amputation. Good surgeons in Las Vegas. Where's your brother? Where's Ranger?”

She ignored the question. “Hey, how come Chaldin trusted you to bring that exciter back to him? I mean if it was his all along, why didn't he give you a dummy or something? The thing must be valuable.”

“He invented it, he could make more. But it's psychic-conductive metal. That means it has to be attuned to the electromagnetic emanations of the user. I have to keep it next to my body so it can align itself to my personal electricity. I figure he intended me to use it. The thing is an electronic Ben Rackey, in a way. It's a manipulator and intensifier of hostility and emotional uncertainty. And so am I--or anyway it's something I know how to do.” He rubbed his head. He was a little woozy. “I know the game. Chaldin needs me to operate it, to direct it. He needs a man with precision in emotional incitement. There are only a few Professional Irritants. I'm the best of them. Maybe he didn't figure I'd take control this soon.”

“He invented the euphonium to quiet people down, make them harmless, and he invented this thing that makes them violent-like.” She nodded to herself. “Yeah, he's got plans.”

“Where's your brother?”

She shifted nervously. “Out playing. I don't know what he's doing. I told him you said to stay out of that stuff but that just pissed him off. He gets pissed off easy. He went into that Carousel Mall, down the way.”

Oh no,
Ben thought. He ran to the nearest elevator, and she trotted after him.. In the elevator she asked, “You worried?”

“Fuck yeah. He'll get himself in trouble and expose us all. He doesn't know what he's doing. Not here.”

“And you know just what you're doing, I suppose? When are you going to test that thing in your chest?”

“Not till we get back to Lenny's, he's setting up controlled experiments. Only--we'll see. This is a dangerous city.”

“How do you like--turn the thing on? Just thinking...?”

“The exciter? Not exactly. It's tuned to a certain brainwave frequency—never mind.”

The elevator door opened onto the subterranean city's main avenue. Chaldin Avenue.

“Tell you something,” Ben said. “If Fuller survived the desert and went back to Chaldin, then Chaldin's figured out where we are, within a few miles. And he owns most of the casinos on this street. It's named after him.”

The avenue was only a wide corridor flanked by neon-festooned arcades. Twenty feet overhead, light panels cast a pale glitter over the dusty, curling tinsel that dangled everywhere. Striving for anonymity, dressed in inconspicuous smocks of dull gray and brown, natives of all the cities that were not armed camps hurried by, avoiding each other's eyes. In gutters on both sides of the broad hallway a narrow conveyor belt carried away refuse: empty drink bulbs, handbills, scraps of food, a broken stiletto, a gutted wallet, a shattered wrist phone. All were swept away, to rendezvous at last with a distant furnace. The long-dead body of an old man swept past, head pillowed on a crumpled aluminum tin.