by John Shirley
Wires of red proliferated through the massive water-creature, arterial courses inside the heavy, glossy limbs. Its chest and skull formed an armor of ice and its right arm sprouted a long, crooked scythe in place of a hand. The rainbow arc of the scythe solidified, crusted, ice spanning its twenty-foot length. In his mind, Ben felt it getting sharper.
The mer-thing swung its blade, and it came like the Arctic winter wind. Three guards turned and bolted. A flash of silver, and three men were decapitated, bodies staggering on a few steps to collapse in soft, lonely heaps. Three heads clung to the adhesive, frost of the scythe blade, their faces still contorting spasmodically. The giant threw back its head and swallowed the whole length of the scythe blade, then drew it out again clean; Ben could see the silhouettes of the three heads, already disintegrating, sinking in an orderly parade down the translucent esophagus.
The water giant kept growing.
All the dolphin-Lords had gone but one. The remaining dolphin conferred in squeaks with the dwarf Frater, issuing orders. The dwarf bowed, backed away three steps, turned and leapt into the pool, foundered quickly to his copper mind-scape, and took up his pose.
Ben’s heart was banging. He wanted to help the dwarf, but he felt that it had gone out of his range, that any use of the exciter would only make the giant more powerful and enraged. “Ben, are you going to stand there till we drown?” Gloria shouted.
The Frater had just gone into trance when fingers muscled with ice lifted him by the throat. The giant held the dwarf over its mouth and twisted his stunted body in opposite directions; snapping his spine at the waist, it wrung him out, squeezing the blood from him as a man might drain the juice from an orange. Then it tossed the withered husk aside. And grew until it was struggling with the ceiling of the dome, its mouth working in soundless snarls.
“Ben, any second it’s going to notice us!” Gloria whispered. “I’m going.” Ben sighed and turned, followed Gloria out. He was startled to see the room was all but deserted. Except for the single dolphin-Lord whose mobile harness was trapped by a fallen chair lying on its side in the narrow exit. The dolphin trilled at Ben imploringly. Ben tossed the chair out of the way, and he and Gloria leapt onto the dolphin’s platform. The dolphin had no time to protest unwanted hitchhikers. It sped off down the tunnel as fast as the prosthetic conveyance would take it. Thin spray from the water channeled over its glossy hide, sprinkling Ben’s eyes. The tunnel sank away, seemingly endless, dim and straight. A resounding crunch echoed from behind. The walls rocked and trembled, the prosthetic platform shivered, caromed from wall to wall. Ben and Gloria clung to the rail against each jarring.
But they reached the end of the tunnel, a portal with a ready ramp leading into a tall, blue, cylindrical vehicle with its nose pointing straight up into a vertical shaft. The dolphin’s platform—Gloria and Ben hanging on tenaciously—rolled up the gangway and into the ship. The door closed automatically behind and sealed.
They assisted the dolphin into a large transparent tank in the control chamber. It squeaked into the underwater mike on its tank console and almost instantly the forward cabin door opened and a helmeted slave in black, eyes stony, came into the room and sat in the control chairs. “He’s motor-controlled,” Ben muttered.
They sat down beside the motor-controlled servant, on either side. He didn’t notice them, responding only to the dolphin’s squeaks, coming to him over the microphone in his black helmet. He manipulated the control knobs, a style of instrumentation unfamiliar to Ben, and the craft shot up into the shaft. The viewscreen flickered alive. They caught a brief glimpse of a vertical tunnel and the blue sky, then the craft arced up and out, leveling off. They were circling the sunken temple, about a hundred feet over the water.
The crystal of the dome emerging from the water was cracking from within, like a huge egg hatching, and as they watched, it shattered outward. A gleaming, translucent hand groped through the gap, followed by the crested head. It gave a great effort and heaved at the dome. The white stone cracked further—and then gave entirely; rough crystal boulders flew up and tumbled into the sea. The pounding waves caved in the crystal dome further, until the chamber they had vacated was filled and the temple drowned. As the sea poured in on the glass giant it raised its arms in exultation and rose up, and up. And grew, fed by the two seas: the briny sea and the sea of resentment from the people in the nearby city-state.
“What if it keeps on growing? And on and on?” Gloria asked, breathing heavily. “It has the whole sea to draw on.”
Ben considered, swallowing. Then he shook his head. “No. It’s given form by the telekinetic invocations of the dead Fraters’ life-force—and my exciter. But it’s given strength and growth by the hatred of enslaved Houston. He who hates, hates himself most: It will turn against the city that sustains it. With the death of the city’s inhabitants it will lose its well of life. It will have no source of life. It will collapse. Now it turns to the city—”
The giant stood like the Colossus of Rhodes, straddling the sunken wreckage of the temple. Ben glanced over his shoulder. The dolphin was staring at the screen, something of tragedy showing in its inhuman eyes.
Turning back to the screen, Ben could make out, between the giant’s legs, the dart-shaped outlines of hundreds of dolphins, heading out to sea…
The mer-thing, two hundred fifty feet high, sparkling in the sunlight, its heart a prismatic cartwheel, turned to mate with Houston. The last of the dolphins who had overseen the city were rolling frantically along the streets in their protective harnesses, or taking off in swarms of air-cars, deserting their slaves. Dozens of harnesses and platforms stood abandoned on the docks.
In the streets, the subjects of dolphin domination thronged. Those who had worshipped the dolphins, suddenly disillusioned, were running amuck and looting; those who were motor-controlled were left standing in little knots, staring stupidly at the great blank face of their impending death.
Ben had scarcely a glimpse of the city’s skyline, its soft aquiline shapes of porous metal and the tubular structures in horizontally piled loops—probably swimming channels for dolphins—its faceted domes and a hundred cross-hatching seawater canals, when the giant slammed like a tidal wave on the downtown area. The air boomed and tossed the nulgrav car; the dolphin squeaked to its servant and the ship was righted.
The dolphin squealed again and the servant turned the ship’s nose to the open sea and began to descend.
“Ben, he’s going to take it down into—”
“I know. I’m all out of plans. What do you suggest?”
It was hardly time for bandying suggestions. Gloria drew her knife from her boot and stood behind the motor-controlled driver, placing the blade’s edge against his jugular; as he had not been directed to notice this, he continued downward as if nothing had happened. “Tell the dolphin if it goes to the sea, it’s going to have to set this thing down all alone,” Gloria said.
Ben nodded and turned to the dolphin. He explained the situation in simple but obvious sign language. Without the slave, the dolphin would be helpless, unable to pilot the ship, would probably be killed in the impact when it eventually struck the sea or the Barrier…
The dolphin whipped about in its tank, turning tail angrily. But it realized it had no choice. It squeaked into the microphone and the mindless pilot took them up, and Ben directed the dolphin to head northeast.
Six hours later they were in Detroit.
CHAPTER SIX
Control
Ben maintained suites in New York, Fallon, San Francisco, Denver, and Detroit. All under assumed names.
“Patriarch Ladd, Sir! A pleasure to see you returned. We hope you will remain with us longer this time,” said the effusive, white-faced desk clerk, twirling his pen between his slender fingers. His pinched face twitched continually and the high eyebrows, always bobbing above his gray eyes, gave him a snobbish, inquisitive look which he probably hoped was aristocratic. “Certainly certainly certainly we are plea
sed pleased, pleased indeed! You were ever the quietest and most cooperative of our tenants. Why, you cannot, simply cannot, no you can’t imagine the difficulties we’ve been having—” he leaned forward and whispered conspiratorially— “with that awful man who moved into the Rose Suite! Just this morning, why just this morning you understand, he ejected—bodily, physically, corporeally, and personally—threw my chambermaid from the rooms. She wasn’t interested in his maps but oh, no, no, he was certain.”
Ben interrupted as politely as he could. “I wonder if I and my, ahh, my secretary could be admitted to my chambers now…? I don’t seem to have a key with me, my fault really, and we have much work to do.”
“Certainly certainly certainly, Sir!” cried the clerk.
He reached into a cubbyhole behind him and drew out a glass cube which he handed to Ben with a ceremonious flourish and with excessive caution, while bowing painfully low. Gloria smothered laughter.
They found the nulgrav lift. Ben handed Gloria the extra nulgrav reactant web he had extracted from his safe deposit box and waited as she strapped it over her bare midriff. When she had fastened the delicate gossamer web, they stepped into the shaft (Ben was already wearing his own nulgrav web) and the currents towed them slowly upward. On the way, Ben explained the difference between compensating and reactive nulgrav.
Compensating nulgrav, as employed in Astor, could make relatively weightless anything within range of its field. Reactive, the only nulgrav wavelength permitted for human use in Detroit, worked only for those persons fitted with nulgrav webs composed of flexible metal which reacted, with the field to produce weightlessness. Certain objects—lights, kinetic sculptures, signs, free-floating fountains, cargo conveyances—were channeled through compensating nulgrav fields.
“But why is the reactive sort the only kind permitted in Detroit?”
“Now there you have the key to Detroit’s system! In order to float in Detroit, one must have a web. And only the aristocracy may have webs. This restricts the areas to which the peasant pedestrians can travel. And inhibits their involvement or their ability to interfere with government.”
“That’s not ethical, man.”
“What have ethics to do with most governments?”
“But a pedestrian could steal a web or learn how to make one...”
“No. The whereabouts of each web is tracked. A central computer keeps tabs on a homing device planted in each web. Each web pulses out a unique signal. I have a metal plate implanted at the base of my skull. It’s a sort of metal that reacts with the signal from the web with its own distinctive qualification. And if that plate is parted from the web and the web is activated and radiates its signal, the monitors know that it is being used illegally. It takes them minutes to find the thief and kill him or her on the spot.”
“You talk like you have a real pride in this system, you know that?”
He ignored the remark. “The web you wear is registered with mine. I have responsibility for it. That’s why I made you put on that ring before you got here—it’s made of the same metal alloy as the plate in my cranium. You’ve got to be extremely careful about that.”
“Hey, doesn’t it bother you that they always know where you are, while you’re in the city?”
“They know where I am, but not what I’m doing. And there are those of us who have purchased…equipment…in other cities which, in a pinch, will baffle the signal.”
“Christ. You’ve got all the angles covered, don’t you?”
“You’re rather irritable, aren’t you? I do what I must.”
“It’s just…there’s something about this system that reeks. It hurts my nose.”
Ben could find no reply that didn’t sound overly defensive.
“Ben, how many aristocrats are there?”
“About six hundred patriarchs and, when I was last here, seven months ago, five hundred matriarchs.”
They arrived at the top floor. They floated down the hall to the suite of Patriarch Ladd—one half of the building’s top floor.
Ben tapped the glass key on the receiving plate, the distinctive tone resonated with the lock mechanism and-the door opened for them.
They removed their nulgrav webs, settled slowly to the floor.
Abruptly, Gloria turned to Ben and kissed him hard on the lips, holding his face between her hands. They embraced.
“Haven’t had a chance for...um...” Ben began.
“That’s okay. Let’s--just order dinner.”
Ben led the way to the dining room, a pentagonal chamber with three of its walls, one half the floor, and the entire ceiling constructed of two-way plasglass. Half the room extended like an enclosed balcony out into the air from the face of the building. Gloria and Ben stood for a long time on the glassy floor, looking down at the city-state of Detroit.
The city wore a mask. At first glance it was sleek, clean, shiny, built of trim towers, sweeping concourses and stably floating domes. Looking closer, they detected ominous, slapdash architecture rearing from the leprous smog layered below the Aristocratic Zones. The pedestrian’s Detroit. Built of old brick, plastic-coated wood, rusted steel. Buildings protruding brutally from the earth like spikes on a mailed fist.
The pedestrian grounds were obscured from the penthouse view at the very top of the Elgin towers. There were two penthouses there. Ben’s own, known as the Brass rooms, and those of the new stranger, known as the Rose rooms.
From their dining room floor Ben and Gloria looked out over murky cityscape, out to the metallic shimmer of the Great Lakes; the old names of these lakes had been forgotten and officially they went unnamed. But those unfortunate enough to live beside the closest of them universally referred to it as Lake Fester.
The room was wide and luminous. They reclined on cushions beside a crystal-blue stream that flowed in nulgrav currents through mid-air, threading in and out of the floating potted foliage and wending to vanish into a wall-niche. Gloria darted a long, white arm trying to capture one of the stream’s tropical fish, and missed. Ben chided her for disturbing his pets. She told him where he could put his fish. She dried her arm with white linen from the nulgrav-held glass tabletop. A covered tray of food drifted into the room and slowly lowered itself onto the table.
Imported game-hen braised in wine, a salad of the inch-thick spinach, algae cake, and fruit from the city-state’s underground gardens. They drank apricot wine and lay together on the cushions in the diminishing evening light, gazing up at the cobalt sky through the transparent roof.
Hardly noticing the transition, they began to make love. It was as if soft music, so soft it could be heard only on an unconscious level, had slowly, gradually increased in volume until they found themselves rollicking in its thunderous uproar, a symphonic climax that left them damp, weary, and amazed.
Weariness triumphed over amazement, sleep came to them both at once, as mysteriously as the sex.
***
From where Ben and Gloria rode, without vehicles or effort, swiftly but smoothly channeled on nulgrav currents, they could see the huge Eastern Wall, one of five massive plasteel walls that completely enclosed Detroit;, from here, a filmy strip of blue severed the city-state from the marshes outside. Beyond, deserted ruins of Old Detroit, abandoned tenements and auto factories—and beyond the ragged silhouette of those tumbling ruins, the marshes slept in leprous mist and hummocks tangled with mossy willows. It was not yet noon; weather-control had let most of the mid-summer air in from beyond the city walls; the atmosphere was a trifle sticky and heavy.
About them, three-dimensional sign cubes floated in compensating nulgrav fields, hieroglyphed with traffic indicators and newsbriefs. They rode Zero level, the uppermost reactant current segregated for Elite Aristocrats—the Senate—and their servants. “Think of yourself as Lady Ara of Ladd, serving The House of Ladd. You are Mr. Ladd’s personal secretary. Try to converse as little as possible—you have an accent. Never refer to me as Ben when others are anywhere near. Don’t botch o
ur cover. It would take very little to ruin it. It took me three steady years to work into this identity. It wasn’t easy to obtain and it’s not easy to keep. It puts me in the upper one hundred of the aristocracy and I need that position if I’m to destroy the Barrier.”
“Okay, okay. I’m not retarded, man, I can keep my mouth shut. Jeez.”
She squirmed in her nulgrav web, unused to the sense of unsupported movement. “It’s sort of like sky-diving horizontally,” she observed. “Only I hope you don’t stop the way sky-divers do.” Her impatient eyes traced the orderly flight of postal parcels through mid-air nulgrav currents, the parcels resembling a river of ice floes.
“And you’ve got to develop a sense of hauteur. You’re an aristocrat now, but you still wear the leather jacket, mentally anyway. You’ve got to drop it or you blow our cover.”
“I’ve dropped everything else,” murmured Gloria, for both she and Ben were nude except for the gossamer webs, silken loin cups and ankle bracelets, the summer fashion for Detroit’s elite. And over Ben’s head floated a head-dress moving its multitude of separate untouching parts in the special identity pattern of Delegate Patriarch Ladd. Around them, the head-dresses of other elites, shifting in vivid display, kept pace with them, intertwining in avid competition six inches over their brows. Each head-dress seemed to cry out: My bearer is important! See, he is a tax controller as was his father and this octagon represents his twelve years of service… No, my bearer is important, she is an accredited sculptress of the fifth degree, and utterly accountable for every turn of her medium and this spiral represents her newly renewed Artist’s Permit with a special commendation star, and here… Ben looked away. It was dangerous to stare at the head-dresses of others, the hypnotic identity patterns were said to impress their bearer’s will on the observer. Probably a superstition, but…
Neon snaked into, star figures, winking eyes and drinking lips. Commerce signs suspended in localized nulgrav fields.