Transmaniacon

by John Shirley

  “Maggot-swill Rackey pleads for punishment! There is no birth without the violence of eruption. So be it! There is no dynasty begun without the violence of usurpation. So be it! A wooden altar is not built without the violent felling of the tree. So be it! As we are born let us die, as we begin let us end, from violence, to violence, through violence to peace. So be it! You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. So be it!”

  The mourner in white intoned: “Death, where is thy victory? It is here! Here!”

  He bent and, in the ritual manner of the worshippers of Dis, tossed a handful of dust in Ben’s eyes. “Rise, Mourner Rackey.”

  Ben stood, eyes stinging. Gloria was still kneeling.

  “This one is initiated?” asked the venerable mourner.

  “Ahhh— yes, O Burdened Mourner.” Ben answered hastily. “But she is unwell. Our long march has dulled her senses, the invocations are lost to her.” Ben swallowed. Not one of his better lies. If they were not accepted into the caravan they would have no cover and no defense from Fuller, who was certainly not far behind. Ben recalled the overland vehicle he’d seen attached to the wasp-car. If it was intact, Fuller would be here shortly. And if he had salvaged the laser-rifle…

  The man in the white robe regarded Ben balefully.

  “You are lying. This is evident. Apparently this woman has no background in Dis Adeptus. Yet…” He bent and lifted Gloria’s face with a trembling white stick-finger to her chin. He looked into her eyes. He nodded. “She is a child of the mysteries. She can travel with us.” He turned away and began to issue instructions to the lesser Dis officiaries waiting patiently nearby.

  Gloria stood up, clapping dust off her knees. “What did he mean, I’m a ‘child of the mysteries’?” “He means you’re their kind of folks,” Ben replied lightly. “Real basic Dizzy stock, I suppose.” They accepted and donned red robes offered them by the storekeeper, pulling them over their clothes. “Too damn hot,” Ben complained. They pulled the cowls over their heads to conceal their faces and went to the file of the newly-initiated, sitting along the stream, scowling and rubbing their aching feet.

  They had just sat down when Gloria gasped and tugged Ben’s arm. “What is it?” '

  She was staring over her shoulder at the pack animals coming up with the rear of the procession. They were Denver Genetic Manipulation products. “They’re hands,” Gloria said.

  They were immense hands, with fingers a yard long, a proportionate palm and a short wrist ending abruptly, as if a giant’s hand had been lopped off at the wrist. Each huge hand had great lumpy calluses at the tips of the fingers, where it walked on the ground. It had no nails, but the horny knuckles resembled those of a human hand. “That looks like human skin!” Gloria sputtered.

  “That’s what it is,” Ben said.

  The oversized hands were beasts of burden for the pilgrims, khaki bundles of provisions strapped to their backs. Several of them were unloaded as they watched. The freed hands grazed lazily amongst the sage, eating through beaks concealed in their palms; they moved like slow spiders, crawling low to the ground on their fingers, resembling huge pink tarantulas pulling themselves along.

  “Where are their eyes?” Gloria asked, swallowing her revulsion.

  “They don’t have any. Listen, you’d better get used to seeing things like that. They’re genetically-engineered flesh-machines. Lab-bred from human chromosomes for specialized tasks. You’ll see a lot of them as we head west. There are many species of flesh-machines. They can’t reproduce, most of them, but the Genetic Manipulations people in Denver make a lot of them. There are rumors that the dolphins are contracting with Denver to build an army of brainless killing machines. The hands, and all flesh-tractors, are fairly docile. But they have a simple brain and I think I can enrage them, direct them, if it becomes necessary. They’re strong. Very strong.”

  “Where are we going from here?”

  “Unless some means of transportation offers itself to us, we’ll travel with the pilgrims to San Francisco and try to get to Detroit from there. It might be to our advantage to go to Astor, though, before Detroit. We’ll see. You know, you can still drop out. You can stay with these people till you get clear of Fuller. No reason you should travel with me. He’s going to do his damnedest to kill me. Chaldin is a powerful man.”

  “Oh, stop being so maudlin. I don’t want to wander by myself in San Francisco. At least, I know you. Somewhat. I’m going to stick with you, at least ’til I know my way around.”

  A Dizzy was handing strips of dried, bacon-like meat to the resting cultists along the stream. Ben declined, saying he’d just eaten, though his stomach growled hungrily. Gloria accepted the meat and examined it curiously. Ben whispered, “I doubt you’ll want to eat that. It’s human flesh. A few of the pilgrims kill themselves along the way to feed the others. That is dried pilgrim.”

  Gloria shrugged and bit it. “Always wondered what human flesh tastes like. Not bad…”

  Ben looked away. A child of the mysteries, he thought.

  Minutes later, at the clash of cymbals, Ben nudged Gloria and they rose with the others, joining the ranks of Dizzies in circles around the man in white. They took up the low, humming chant, “Zero times Zero equals Zero times Zero equals Zero times Zero equals…” ad infinitum.

  Peering between three layers of red cowl, Ben could see the two miniature guillotines set up facing one another, with the man in the white robe standing between them. The guillotines were made of wood and equipped with heavy blades, long as butcher knives. Below each blade were two semicircles cut into the receiving cradle, fitted for ankles and wrists.

  “Who will offer their gross physicality to be purged? Who will be shot into the third eye of the Godhead like an arrow to its mark?”

  “Maggot-swill Bulmer pleads!” called a young man, stepping from the crowd. It was a haggard man with a thatch of wispy blond hair and a pathetic red beard; his deep-set, blue-gray eyes starved for death. Ben realized that all the worshippers somehow resembled Death’s Heads. It’s their diet, he told himself. They eat little, they grow gaunt, the skull presses through. He half believed it.

  The young man stripped off his robe, tossed it on the ground, mumbled the imprecation against material possessions, and spat on the robe.

  Then he lay down between the two guillotines, on his back, ankles through one, wrists through the other, skinny buttocks on the stones. The mourner spoke: “We are the flesh of envy, you are the skeleton of triumph!”

  The red-hooded crowd chanted, “Zero times Zero equals Zero times Zero equals…”

  Ben glanced at Gloria. She seemed greatly entertained by the scene. She watched in fascination as the mourner, mumbling incantations, anointed Blessed Receiver Bulmer with the purifying oils. Gloria was swaying and twitching, and Ben hissed, “Did you put that rock ’n’ roll tape in your ear again? If you did, take it out before someone notices—we’re not even supposed to be wearing our clothes under these robes!”

  “No one’ll notice,” she whispered, giggling. “I’ve got it turned down low. It’s playing ‘Love It To Death,’ by Alice Cooper, and—”

  “Shhh!”

  The mourner was rising over the young man, his eyes on the sun, staring into it without blinking. Tears coursed his cheeks as he intoned:

  “For this very day a sign from Dis appeared to us. Lo! In the sky Mourner Drett witnessed a great battle! The Lord of Flies, Beelzebub, in the form of a fly great as a thundercloud, contended with the master Dis who wore the form of a monstrous wasp, and wasp and fly did battle, till wasp stung fly and fly bit wasp and both tumbled to earth! The omen speaks! The battle of Dis, the eternal war between Glorious Death and Pestilent Life, continues on the earth! Dis exhorts us thereby to do battle in our hearts! Witness the triumph of Dis in Mourner Bulmer!”

  “Zero times Zero equals Zero times Zero equals…”

  The mourner in white bent and released the blades on the guillotines. A whine as they fell, a chunk sound
. The young blessed receiver screamed. “Glory comes! Gloria arrives!” he shrieked.

  “Zero times Zero equals Zero times Zero equals…”

  The blades neatly severed his feet from his legs and his hands from his wrists. The young man whimpered and thrashed, bleeding to death.

  The mourner drew forth a blessed and polished knife and bent by the young man to cut the strips for the drying rack. “Tomorrow’s supper,” whispered Ben. The hands and feet were collected in sacks, the blood caught in wineskins.

  The chant ended; the hooded cultists made an arcane sign and wandered away.

  Two vehicles arrived, almost at the same instant, one from the east and one fr,om the west.

  The one from the east came overland, an open-air electric jeep with tires like gross black balloons, churning up dust behind it. Fuller and another man sat in the jeep, Fuller driving, the stranger holding a laser rifle in his lap.

  From the west came a San Francisco police helicopter, to check the pilgrim’s entrance permits, as they were now crossing into the land officially claimed by the Republic of San Francisco. Fuller leapt from the jeep and was roughly questioning the Dizzies, keeping one eye on the SFPD. Gloria and Ben edged away through the crowd. They approached the police helicopter. It was a two-man vehicle, fueled by a limited electric charge. Its rotors slowed, chopping the air listlessly. Both the pilot and the rider got out.

  “Ben, can you operate one of those?” Gloria asked softly.

  Ben nodded.

  The police wore gray uniforms striped horizontally, with their badge numbers large on their chests. They spoke in quiet tones with the mourner in white—respectfully—and glanced disinterestedly through the sheaf of papers he had given them. Behind them three Genetic Manipulations flesh-machines squatted on the ground. Ben wondered, Could the Transmania device manipulate flesh-machines ? The hands had small but human brains. They probably could become angry. They were kept as beasts of burden and whipped, driven all day. It seemed likely there would be a stored reservoir of resentment, even in those primitive brains. He could find it. He maneuvered until he was standing near the open door of the copter, Gloria just behind him. The keys were inside. Fuller was drawing near, pushing through the crowd.

  Ben considered: If he leapt into the copter, the police would fire on them before he could get out of range. No, he needed time. The needlers on the cops’ hips were bundles of chrome warning.

  Fuller and his assistant stood nearby. The cops hadn’t yet taken note of them. Fuller seemed unafraid of the police. Probably, Chaldin had provided him with entrance permits. It was Fuller’s assistant, a brawny, bald man, who held the weapon.

  Ben looked at the oversized hands resting on their palms in the dirt, listlessly stirring their leg-fingers. He concentrated. Almost instantly, the hands leapt forward and seized those nearest them—as Ben had calculated, these were the two cops and Fuller’s assistant. The three hands wrapped around the uniformed cops, uttering burbling noises, while the cops screamed as their insides were squeezed up to fill their bubble helmets. The big man with the laser rifle was on the ground, the hand gripping and compressing him with five pink boas hard as tree-limbs. He snarled as his face turned black. His eyes bulged. Fuller clawed at the fingers, trying to get at the laser weapon, knowing that Ben must be somewhere nearby.

  Ben leapt into the cockpit of the copter, and Gloria climbed up beside him. The Dizzies hardly noticed; they were busy shouting instructions to the unheeding flesh-machines, attempting to free the cops. Ben turned the key, pressed the pedal, and the rotors turned, then picked up speed, throwing off a whirlwind. The cultists staggered back under the wind pressure. Gloria fired the .45 at Fuller, but the moving copter jarred her. She missed. Fuller melted into the crowd.

  The copter lifted off over a field of angrily shaking fists.

  Ben swung over the hill and put distance behind him. “Where the hell you headed?” Gloria shouted over the grind of the rotor blades.

  “Astor!” Ben shouted back. And they almost got there.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Astor, the Dirty Jewel

  After the copter’s power reading fell to bottom, Ben set it down in the first clearing he spotted.

  He cut the engines and leaned back in the seat, stretching. It had been a long afternoon, a long night, and a long morning—the vibrations of the copter made his insides feel jellied. Now, it wasn’t quite noon. A sunny morning, few clouds, a faint breeze.

  “What you stop for?” asked Gloria, yawning, stepping down from the cockpit to stand in the meadow.

  “Out of charge. She’d have gone on maybe another mile and that would be it, down we’d go. So I stopped first opportunity. We walk from here. Not far, only about ten miles to the outskirts of Astor. Should be no problem, if we don’t get lost. And if we don’t run into frags.” Ben climbed down to stand blinking in the sunlight beside her in the meadow of short yellow grass. He did some knee bends to stretch his cramped legs.

  “I’m famished,” said Gloria.

  “Should be some berries on the way.”

  “Big deal. Say, do you have an account in Astor?”

  “No, but I have some…connections there. I think I can find transportation to Detroit. And there are other arrangements I want to make.”

  “Do you think Fuller’s close behind?”

  “I doubt it. It would take him some time to get hold of another flyer. He would probably assume we went to San Francisco, since that was the nearest city-state and since I have an account there. So they’ll concentrate their search there. There are likely to be some of Chaldin’s people looking for us in all the cities. But Astor will be tough for them. It’s difficult to go in disguise in Astor, to pretend to be one of the locals. There’s something about the Astorians. Ummm, an aura of the eccentric difficult to duplicate. A man of Astor always knows another man of Astor—and they’d recognize a phony. So Chaldin’s boys would stand out like red rubber noses and they’d get no cooperation from the locals. Astorians don’t approve of espionage or chicanery unless it’s performed as an art form, as with the Brothers of Proteus. Very few people migrate to Astor. It requires a peculiar temperament. Well, we’d better get going...”

  “Wait!” Gloria climbed back into the copter and rummaged behind the torn vinyl seat. “Ah!” she said triumphantly. She climbed down, prying open a cardboard box. “It just occurred to me the cops would have far enough to go that they would have brought rations.”

  They ate the four protein compresses and the dried fruit in the box, and set off, feeling almost confident again.

  The thorny underbrush tangling beneath the hulking, drooping fir trees was nearly impenetrable. At last they found a faint path along the creek, leading downhill, northwest, in the general direction of Astor. The air was sweet with conifer resins and perfumes of the short purple blossoms and the white trumpets of morning glory that twined beside the shallow creek.

  After an hour of trudging through the woods they stopped to drink from the stream. They sat in the coolness on the mossy bank. Gloria washed her face, then took off her shoes and dangled her feet in the cold water. There was a smile ghosting at the corners of her lips.

  When she realized Ben was watching her she frowned and asked hastily. “What’s Astor like?”

  “It’s a city at the confluence of the two major rivers in the Northwest. This is where Oregon was when you were…around. Astor extends sixty miles, maybe seventy, down the valley. Grows insanely. The woods around the city are crawling with frags. I suppose you’re going to tell me you don’t know what frags are.”

  “I don’t know what frags are.”

  “They’re this country’s human pestilence. There are thousands of them between the cities. Frags are fragments of humanity, predatory tribal offshoots. Genetic Manipulations experiments gone bad and escaped, insane vagabonds, escaped criminals and their descendants—all of them reverted to savagery. They run together not quite as harmoniously and fraternally as a pack of wil
d dogs. They’re cannibals and always dangerous. Not one of them speaks a word of English, even if they once knew how, because the ones who never knew how won’t permit it. They growl instead. They’re vicious and there are lots of them. They live in burrows, but because they don’t wear clothes or use fire, about three-fourths of them die over the winter each year. But since they do a lot of rutting, there are always more. No discernible culture except rule by the strongest.”

  “You talk like you hate them. In a personal sort of way.”

  Ben nodded, staring at the shimmering stream, listening to the fragile, transient lives voiced in the rushing of the water. “Traveling through the Northwest a friend and I were captured by a frag pack.

  “They, ah, they tied us up. And, umm, they decided to eat my friend; they didn’t bother to kill her before stripping the meat off. When they were still fighting over the bones, a hunting party came through from Astor. They shot a few frags, took me off to the city-state with them.”

  He swallowed hard and concentrated, managed to banish the picture from his mind. “Astor—in some ways Astor isn’t so different from the frags: They don’t speak much in Astor, they mostly laugh. I stayed for two months and I never did figure out how they’ve got the city-state organized. Well, I did find out that everyone there works maintaining the city one month out of the year, and does what he pleases the rest of the time. Sometimes it pleases them to work. Sometimes they take the other eleven months off for dancing and playing music, for building homes. For painting, for sculpting, for hunting, for staring into space, for organizing festivals and orgies. They duel a lot there, for fun mostly. There are outbreaks of violence, and almost no policing. Compared to the other city-states there are almost no laws. Eleven months of the year, initiated Astorans do exactly as they please--and I don’t understand how the place remains standing.”

  They were silent a while, listening to the creek, the call of hidden birds, the drone of insects. A brisk wind collected clouds and arranged them to hem in the sun, until the shade outmatched the sunlight and a damp chill filled the air.