by John Shirley
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.
They stepped into the Carousel Mall’s entranceway and turned into an unoccupied selection booth. Ben closed the door behind them and opened another one leading into a boisterous bar. Young men and women, their bodies leased to motor-control service, danced with salacity on foot-lighted platforms. Someone tossed a bottle, which bounced off a young man’s already bruised right thigh, but he continued dancing without registering even a facial tic.
Ben looked around, didn’t see Ranger, then pressed the selector stud beside the door. The room whirled past them, the faces within blurring into a multicolored wall, before they resettled into an entirely different chamber.
“Did we move or did the room move?” Gloria asked.
“We did. The selection booths move on rails around the different levels of the mall.”
“It’s like a lazy Susan.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
In the next room was a sauna, and a turbulent pool of prismatic hot water at- the center of the hexagonal room, wooden-faced young boys massaging bored-faced old men.
Ben hastily pressed the stud, the room turned away
, another came into view.
“Someone should off those old bastards,” Gloria said softly.
“True,” Ben said. “Las Vegas is kinda like what Bangkok used to be.”
“I didn’t feel our booth move.” Gloria remarked.
Ben shrugged and looked for Ranger, poking his head cautiously into the next room. There was so much smoke he couldn’t see far, but he was fairly sure Ranger wasn’t inside. He coughed, feeling the first vertigo and elation of the combined drugs in the smoke, quickly pulled his head back, closed the door and breathed deep of purer air. “Going to need some aspirin.” He pressed the selection stud again.
This time they were shown a black metal door painted with the number 8 in gold leaf. Surrounding the number was the hook of a silver question mark and under that, white letters declared: Club Members Only, Show Card!
Ranger couldn’t be there.
He pressed the selection stud again. This time it gave them a game room. To the right of the door six troughs brimmed with viscous gray liquid that bubbled slowly and insolently. At each trough a tourist had plunged bare arms in the muck up to the elbow. Each man or woman felt for an unseen something, faces set in utter concentration. A young woman shrieked and yanked her arm clear, dripping sludge. She clamped her bloody hand, missing a thumb, to her chest. An attendant, yawning, handed her a tube of flesh-seal, for which he charged her three chips.
A thin man with sparse gray hair, clothed only in white plastic body-spray, probed calmly, unperturbed by the cries of the woman gambler beside him. Suddenly he grinned and withdrew something from the muck: a large oyster shell.
Panting with anticipation, he pried the shell wide with his fingers. It snapped open easily and something dark and bristly launched itself at his face, where it clung over his eyes like a huge wet spider; as he flailed at it a black-and-silver uniformed attendant hurried to his side and led him away…
An old man with many scars on his seamed face drew a shell from his trough and examined it dubiously. Cautiously tilting it away from him, he pried it open, and then with an exultant cry drew forth a large, perfect white pearl.
Ranger was not among those at the troughs.
Ben switched rooms. Another game room, men and women working feverishly over more troughs. No Ranger.
They went to the next room. Three women, two men, lined up on a stage, all of them nude and personable, with dead eyes but big shiny smiles. A man and a woman side by side each wore a crown, the three others, had large symbols tattooed on their bare chests: a spade, a heart, a diamond. The king and queen were clubs. A crowd of men and women, mostly middle-aged and dressed in the conservative smocks, cannily eyed the group on stage. An attendant with a glossy silver strip over his eyes announced, “Bid by turns.” One of the players stepped confidently to the platform, put his arms around one of the women and kissed her on the lips, bending her head back with the force of the kiss. She kissed him back.
“Bid!” A woman stepped onto the stage, put her arms around the woman who was the seven of diamonds, and kissed her; the kiss was returned. The first two gamblers remained, fervently kissing but watching the other players from the corners of their eyes.
The dealer barked, “Bid!” and a young man strode jauntily to the stage, kissed the Queen of Clubs and was promptly slapped in the face. The king spat on him. The young man, white-faced, returned to his place. Gloria laughed loudly, and several of the players as well as the dealer turned to give her a warning glare. “What are they putting up as bets?” Gloria asked.
“For this particular game, their children.” Ben replied.
She looked at him sidelong. “What do you mean?”
“Precisely what I said. If they lose, they lose one of their children to the casino. They leave their children in a room a few levels below, and, if they lose the child is carted away to be inculcated with motor-control. It then becomes the property of the casino and is given out as a prize or traded or sold back to the loser if he or she can afford it. Credit chips aren’t much use here, as gambling exchange. Either you bet your children or yourself or you risk a scar at the troughs. If you get scarred enough they repair your face—in exchange for which you work for them two years on no salary except a very minimal room and board.”
“What’s motor-control?”
“Like those dancers we saw in the first room, and all the pleasure chamber servicers—people whose motor functions are controlled by programs planted in their brains. They’re radio controlled by remote operators, or computers, and given to winners for a specified period....” He shrugged.
“Let’s move on.”
“Fine by me,” Ben responded dryly. The room spun away. The next room was a pleasure-womb. Empty. But vidscreen images along the right of the transparent covering over the doorway displayed, in miniature, samples of activity in similar rooms. Disinterested teenage girls and boys performed in a variety of erotic poses for sleepy, masked patrons who sucked on barbiturate mists.
“Surprisingly, Ranger isn’t here,” Ben observed. “Like a fool I gave him tin to trade for food; naturally he’ll use it for something else. I only hope he hasn’t bet his freedom somewhere...Might already have been pressed into service, if he lost. Attractive individuals are pleasure servicers, the less attractive become hydroponic laborers, janitors--or they traded to plantations. ”
Staring at the child servicers Gloria said, “You can’t tell me I’m alive and make me believe it.” And in fact her voice was lifeless. “Cuz...this can’t be real.”
Ben didn’t bother to argue.
They went on, until they came to a long gallery with pellet guns at one end chained to short plastic bars. An attendant stood at one side in a padded suit and opaque bullet-proof helmet. At the far end, condemned criminals dodged back and forth, stimulated to run across the range by electric jolts. Two tourists listlessly took pot shots at them, scoring occasional hits; the pellets were small but sank deep, it took hours for the targets to die from their multitude of wounds. The players made bets on their projected accuracy. A naked, pallid fat man, wearing white plastic angel wings and a tinfoil halo, dodged across the range, howling, streaming tears. His body was mottled with pellet craters seeping blood.
Gloria snorted and reached up to press the selector stud.
Another room came into view, its door sealed over with plastic. Inside was a tall man with blotchy skin, a potbelly, and frightened brown eyes. His curly black beard framed a toothless mouth that hung slack in terror. He was on his knees, trembling before a short haggard man with his back to the door. “Ah,” said Ben. “This is a very expensive entertainment. The man on the floor is a criminal condemned to death by the city-state Las Vegas. He has been sold to this agency who, in accordance with the customer’s requests, has surgically altered the criminal’s face, physically imparted to him other attributes which make him resemble exactly the individual the customer most reviles in all the world. Lenny once paid to have an ex-wife copied over some condemned woman. Blew her brains out. Looks like this fellow’s going to get it by strangulation.” The small man was sliding his fingers slowly about the kneeling man’s neck. Gloria reached up and punched the stud.
A room full of gamblers appeared. Each was steadfastly observing two young women and a boy not quite in his teens forced to dance with motor-control--they’d been dancing for some days. They would dance until they died from exhaustion. The boy was wobbling, missing the beat, his eyes glazing. The music was a redundant tape-loop, electric, insistent, keening violently. The boy slipped to one knee, made a few final dance turns of the shoulder, and fell onto his face, convulsing. The gamblers who’d guessed the time of his death, within thirty minutes, went to the pay window to collect their winnings.
Ben punched the stud. The view showed them another game room. As before, a poker hand of nude men and women waited stolidly on a stage. “Bid!” called the dealer. Ranger emerged from the ranks of the players and climbed onto the dais.
“There!” Gloria h
issed, stepping into the room. “It’s Ranger!” She started for the stage.
Ben restrained her with a hand on her shoulder. “Wait. We’ve got to let him play it through. They wouldn’t permit us to interfere. There are gun cameras watching us...and guards offstage. He’s already bet his freedom.”
Gloria hesitated. “If he loses, can you buy him out of it?”
Ben shook his head. “If he loses, he’s theirs. They value grown-up slave trade more than credit chips. They wouldn’t release him.”
They watched Ranger sauntering from one to another of the “cards”; he seemed unable to make up his mind. There was a derisive murmuring from the gamblers as they noted his black leather jacket with the skull-and-crossbones on the back. It wasn’t considered tasteful to be dressed conspicuously in Las Vegas. The games themselves were to be the single outlet for self-expression.
A motor-controlled waitress in her early teens put a hand on Ben’s arm and smiled like a China doll. Her platinum wig was tilted off-center, her black velvet tights, highlighted with silver-wire lacings, were soaked in sweat. She seemed to be trembling from the shockwaves of an inner battle. Her silver-coated lips writhed as she struggled to overcome the motor-control. But she said only, “Drink, Sir? Massage? Discipline?” He responded with a stare. Ben had heard that occasionally strong-willed individuals came near to breaking free of motor-control. He could see her struggling with it. “I admire your courage,” he said in a soft voice. “You are to be commended. I doubt I would have struggled as long as you have.” There was a dim light of gratitude in her eyes. She nodded almost imperceptibly, turned twitching to Gloria, her lips moving jerkily as she said: “Something for…the…lady?”
Gloria swallowed and looked away. The waitress’ hand trembled--and she dropped her tray. It struck the floor with a smash that brought uniformed security guards. They noted the shivering, involuntary spasms.
“She’s gettin’ out from under it,” said a tall black woman attendant, reaching for her tubular gas-gun.
The waitress’ mouth worked silently. Finally, she managed: