by John Shirley
“Hey! Slow down,” Gloria laughed. “You’re stoned, man. You’re talking a thousand miles an hour!” Then she stopped laughing and added somberly, “Look, I know you don’t like to be pestered about it. But with that exciter inside you, and with you being stoned, you got to think control all the time, Ben.”
“Yes. Yes. True. Yes.” He blew out his cheeks and composed himself. She was right. He needed absolute control now, especially with the exciter over-eager in his chest.
But he was ebullient. The drug had charged him with singing electricity and sparks jumped between his teeth. His muscles trembled for exercise and he imagined that a light shone from his eyes.
The car landed on the fifteenth terrace from the base of the crenelated pyramid. They stepped out, onto the glossy chromium. Ben groaned. “No guards! No one? Kibo! Where are they? Why haven’t we been challenged?”
Kibo frowned. “I don’t know. But if Chaldin wore the insignia of the Progressivists and ordered my men away…naturally, since they are sworn Progressivists until—”
“Never mind. Oh, damn, never mind, I don’t want to hear about it. Wait in the vehicle and when Bolton and the other two arrive, escort them to me. I’ll be in the central cupola.” And, cursing under his breath, Ben strode into the empty tubular corridor leading into the Fist. The corridor was long, lit from overhead by a strip of fluorescence. Ben’s needler was in his hand.
“This thing is immense!” Gloria cried. “It must be a hundred storeys high and a half-mile at the base!”
Ben nodded, hoping he remembered the way. He’d only been inside three times, though he’d memorized the operation of the machine from a mock-up of the operating cupola he’d had erected inside the penthouse, in the extra bedroom. And he had memorized the blueprints. Occasionally, corridors led off to the right and left. But the way should be straight ahead. The passage was slowly bending to the right. At last, the sound of voices.
“I didn’t see their owl-car outside,” whispered Gloria.
“Probably on the other side,” said Ben. “They came in the other way.”
“But they’ll likely know we’re here.” From her jacket she withdrew a pistol, a needler, taken from one of Chaldin’s guards. The one she had left with his throat cut.
They rounded the corner and came out into a high-ceilinged, circular room. Two men in gray uniforms with the symbols of the Order printed on their backs were working on a panel opposite. They had their backs to him, but Ben glimpsed the plastic explosives in their hands. He smiled. So it was to be that easy. He stepped forward and raised his gun.
Gloria hissed and dragged him back into the corridor.
“Stupid!” she whispered. “They’d be expecting us. Why do you think they have the symbols so conveniently painted on their backs? It’s a lure. Fuller must be above, waiting, figuring we’d take care of those two and step into the open.”
Ben looked up. A catwalk ran in a spiral around the walls, thirty feet up, ascending to the cupola. It would naturally extend to the wall above the door from which they were about to emerge. There would be Fuller, waiting, gun cocked, directly overhead,
“Now, what I think we ought to do—” Gloria began.
“Don’t bother,” said Chaldin.
They turned. Ben froze. There was a gun aimed at his head. He dropped his needler. Gloria dropped hers—two guns like dead lovers.
Fully visible in the light, Chaldin was enclosed from the waist down in an electronic prosthetic device. Ben was reminded of the dolphins.
Chaldin’s eyes were twinkling green and whimsical in the webwork of wrinkles. In person he was considerably less imposing then his holo made him out to be. But he held the needler on them with a steady, if withered, right hand. His voice was high and thin but the authority was there. “Fuller, come here!” Chaldin shouted.
Why didn’t he shoot me from behind? Ben wondered. Then he knew. He can still use me. As a drone-cyber. My brain on a platter hooked to an exciter? Better to be dead.
Ben slowly turned, in time to see Fuller’s boot connect with his side. A flare of pain, and Ben went sprawling, as Fuller said:
“Oh man, it’s good to see you again, Rackey. Oh, it’s good.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
If a Fist Can Strike the Sky . . .
Ben assessed the situation and reduced it to its components. To extricate himself from this one he would have to know the position and strength of every piece on the board.
The command cupola was a hemispherical room with a curved roof of glass that looked up into the shaft rising to the transmission-dish at the peak of the pyramid. The curved walls were embossed with the Fist’s instrumentation. In the center of the room, on a floor of glass, were four low couches whose heads pointed inward; over their head-cushions dangled metal helmets. Wires passed from the rear of the helmets, up over an L-strut and down through the floor. One couch for the operator, three for the focusing engineers. Chaldin, his white hair seeming to burn in the light that streamed from beneath the glass floor, was encompassed from his feet to his armpits in a shell of brushed metal which widened at a base supported by four wheels and which was steered by his thought impulses. He was at the opposite wall withdrawing a panel of circuitry.
Fuller stood five feet to Ben’s right, needler raised, cocked and ready, it was pointed at Ben’s right temple. Ben’s hands were tied from behind. Gloria was sitting on the floor to his right, her hands bound behind. One passage led off to the right, one off to the left. No doors blocked the way.
Below, light. The energies of the Fist, kept barely in check.
And for now, that was all.
Except for the two guards, Chaldin’s hired killers, now waiting outside in the owl-car. Chaldin had decided that Ben might try to use the exciter on them, turn them against him. He sent them out of Ben’s reach. Possibly there were others—Kibo would soon know.
Chaldin had explained he was electronically insulated against the exciter and said he’d trained Fuller to resist it, to recognize the sensation accompanying transmania interference. So, should Fuller recognize the influence of the exciter, he was to blow Ben’s head off, instantly. Which made Ben understandably nervous.
Because Fuller had reason to hate him. If Fuller decided to kill him, how would Chaldin know that Ben hadn’t tried to use the exciter, that Fuller had only imagined or pretended to feel its influence? Fuller could kill him when he chose. Only the sign of the Order, Chaldin’s authority emblazoned on his cheek, kept him in check.
Ben mentally reviewed what he knew of the Order. It was an order, once benign, devoted to the exaltation of Luciferage Rofocale and the attendant Principles. Rofocale was an excommunicated fourteenth-century English monk who had claimed to be the physical incarnation of the angel Lucifer, Lucifer the Light, the Angel of Mentality, known by the uninitiated as Baal and Dis and Satan and Thanatos. And Crux, God of Mathematics. And this was the sign of the Order: An equal-armed, with a hook emerging from the lower vertical.
It was an ancient sign. It predated the Order. It was a variant on an ancient sign for Saturn.
Rofocale had been an advocate of Monwill, the practice of merging personalities and initiatives of a number of people into that of a single perfect leader; the societal equivalent of the berserker-animus tradition, a group invocation to possession by a patron spirit. The shaman becomes one with the best-spirit, members of the Order become one with their priest, Ipssissimus, and believe they are physical extensions of him, that he is the earthly manifestation of Lucifer, the source of the pure white light of mathematical Truth, Lucifer’s wisdom, the revelation of the perfect mathematical order of the universe, the equation whose conclusion is universal subjugation to the Will of Lucifer. A simple equation: Will times Dominance equals Submission.
It was then that Ben had an insight. A crucial insight. He could almost hear the click-click-clack of things coming together.
Upon his private appreciation of this insight, he congratulated himself. He consider
ed himself very clever for having deduced most of Chaldin’s exploitive role in the overall scheme of the Order. But Ben was drugged, stimulated to sensational peaks of acuity. He congratulated himself, but he should have thanked the white powder. The sensation of the drug was like a cold and jewel-like white light, a sharp and smoldering white heat—in the heart.
And it was this sense of brilliant light, bursting from within, that prompted him to say, “Look at the light, Fuller. Why isn’t Chaldin transformed?”
Chaldin whirred about, lips trembling. With his left hand he pushed a circuitry drawer back into the wall, with his right he stabbed a finger toward Ben. “Rackey, none of us are going to be sheep for your childish games. We aren’t the common herd. We’re not like those animals you manipulated in the square. We are the living Will of Lucifer.”
But Fuller was regarding Chaldin with a troubled eye.
“Come, come, Chaldin!” said Ben. “The farce is done. Admit what you are. Are you the priest for the present age of the Order? No, you are a withered old man, with no authority. Do you suppose I fall for your virile villain act? No. That is only the recording. The person behind that role––where is he now, Chaldin? That ambitious young man. He is wasted and all that is left are the symbolic rags hung on the scarecrow. I have asked myself, time and again: Why? Why is Chaldin, a brilliant man, slave to his ambitions with the syndicates, with the Order, slave to the polemics of dominance. Why? Just because? Because some people are innately evil? No. Because he was programmed that way. By the complexes of his youth. He had to prove himself, at one time, so he constructed a schema for acquiring power. And power was intoxicating, addictive, because there was no end for his need to prove himself. So he adhered to the schemes as if they were yogas, and year after year after year he devoted himself to this single structure, his formula for dominance—until one day he was no longer a man. He was just a formula, a living scheme, a walking rhetoric that discarded all ethic and regret. He had become—”
“He had become perfect,” Chaldin hissed. “But you are quite right, Rackey. I am no longer human. I am a set of ideals. And that, to me, is the very definition of perfection. And you? You are callow, bumptious and insolent!”
“A perfect man could walk without wheels,” said Ben softly.
Chaldin slammed his hand onto the metal case of his prosthesis. His mouth opened, twisted awry. Then he shook, a visible effort at control. He relaxed. He smiled, very faintly. “You will not be permitted to do that to me again, Rackey. It was an astute analysis, and you knew it would infuriate me. But I will not permit you to rattle me. That is why you will always be my subordinate.” He closed his eyes, swallowed, and nodded to himself. He opened his eyes and glanced at Ben, then at Fuller’s troubled face. “Now, it’s time for you to earn your keep, Rackey. We’re keeping you alive because you promise to be useful. Realistically—and if nothing else, a Professional Irritant is a realist—you will admit that from now on, the game is ours. We have Security on our side—no one is going to interfere with us. The Fist is going, the Barrier remains.
“Immediately, my concern is the elimination of the Fist with the most efficient means at hand. The thing has to be destroyed. You must know that I can demolish it with bombs if I have to. But it would take more time than I’m willing to invest to bring one large enough from Denver. And the thing must be completely destroyed, razed to the ground. I don’t want to leave the slightest chance for it to be repaired. So, since you are so thoroughly familiar with this repulsive object, I assume you can offer a suggestion as to the most efficient means of demolishing it. If it works, we’ll let your dear Gloria free, after you’re safely droned, and you will have the satisfaction of knowing she is well.”
Unhesitating, Ben said, “Certainly. As you point out, I’ve nothing to lose now. The Fist can be set to destroy itself. Its ram field can be adjusted to reverse and double back halfway up the fire-shaft. It implodes and shatters the whole affair.”
“Good. Now, understand, Rackey, that if you attempt to deceive me in this, I’ll know. I personally operate and maintain the central Barrier projector. It was I who designed it. The Fist apparently works on very much the same principle, and while I do not understand its updated control system so well I can operate it alone, I do comprehend enough to recognize any deception, should you attempt to set it in some way other than what we’ve agreed on.”
“I understand. It will be as you say.”
“Good. Now, come here and show me how to set the controls.”
Fuller’s watchful eye on him, Ben did as he was asked.
The wires binding his wrists were pinching painfully, his hands were going to sleep. He considered asking that his hands be freed so that he could set the Fist by himself. But Chaldin would only laugh at him. So he stepped forward and quietly directed Chaldin through the dial settings that would generate the total energies necessary for transmission. Chaldin set the dials so that the fist of force would reverse and destroy its own projector. Ben explained why it would take six hours for the Fist to generate power enough to make its own death.
Chaldin listened closely and seemed satisfied.
He rolled down a corridor to issue departure-preparation orders to the crew of the owl-car; they would need another vehicle to transport Ben and Gloria.
Once more standing beside Gloria, Ben spoke to Fuller. “What do you know of the light-renewal principle of Lucifer’s Perfect Reinstatement?”
Fuller shrugged and raised his gun. “I know. Now shut up.”
Ben laughed. Gloria gave him a warning look. But the drug was on the rise again. “Fuller, Chaldin is the Order’s Ipssissimus Mage for the present age. Right? The Ipssissimus is said to walk the earth in frail human form until he is bathed in cold, electric white light. The light...”
Fuller frowned and looked up, at the feeble light coming from the top of the transmission shaft.
“Nah, Fuller. I’m not talking about the light up above, man. I’m talking the Hellfire down below. I’m talking to you, man, about the goddamned Lucifer Light. You know that Light, you’ve seen it in daydreams. It’s the light that never warms. The light of legend. From below. From the floor.”
As if a small child, compelled by his father’s command, Fuller looked at the transparent floor, at the ghost-vaporous cool white light that streamed upward from the generator casings. Ben followed his gaze.
Below, all was seething white like the heart of a galaxy seen through a smoky lens. Frothy, cloudy, the light shimmered up to illuminate their features in spectral starkness as the Fist worked itself into a rage that, like - a sudden release of repressed hostility, would slam the sky in six hours.
Ben spoke rapidly, in Fuller’s language.
“When bathed in pure white electric light the Mage—Chaldin—is supposed to instantly change into the Black Angel. But he’s still nothing but an old man in a fancy wheelchair, man. Yet you saw him bathed in that light. That motherfucker snowed you, man. He’s told you that he was sixty-eight years old, that he only recently came into possession of the cryogenic chambers that he had you and Gloria and Ranger in, on cold storage. But didn’t you hear him, man? He said he was there when they built the Barrier. He designed it, man. You know how long ago that was, man?”
“A century...” Fuller breathed.
“You bet your sweet ass. And you believe that stuff how he just recently found you people? Gloria told me how the meatlockers they had you in were built into the walls of the basement of his building and they looked like they had been there a long time. Like a century. Not just brought recently. You see, man? He’s an old man, a very old man. He’s kept you on the shelf for more than a century. He could have released you any time. Any time. But what’s it to him? He ripped you off. He couldn’t care less if you were faithful to The Order. The Order’s just a tool to him. And you were just a tool that wasn’t useful till recently. He kept you on ice a century and he’d never have let you out if he’d had any sense.”
“Y
ou’re a complete ass, Fuller,” said Chaldin flatly, like a doctor diagnosing a malady.
He rolled to the center of the room, fists clenched against the metal of his prosthesis.
Ben was pleased to see him angry. Let him lose a little control—Fuller would pick up on it, it would reinforce his doubts. Old Thorn had said: A man who becomes angry becomes uncontrolled. A man without control is a man very vulnerable.
Fuller’s gun was still sighted on Ben, but now it wavered.
Looking into Fuller’s eyes, Ben knew he had him. Fuller had been trained by Chaldin to resist the exciter—but only those gross Frequencies with which Chaldin was familiar. Ben, however, had had time to experiment, to perfect his technique. There were subtler levels of empathic inducement—gentle prods, hardly more than psychic tickles. Sometimes a man holding himself flexed to resist a blow to the belly can be made to recoil at the touch of a feather to the back of his neck.
Ben had touched Fuller, inwardly, ever so gently. Fuller, always keyed up, reacted by turning his excess tension against Chaldin. Fuller had been dictator over the Transmania MC and over the twentieth century’s west coast chapter of the Order. He was unused to being told what to do. In some part of himself, he would resent it. And, before the Sleep, Fuller had been a young man, bred in a time when young rebels were notoriously suspicious of old men of property. Chaldin epitomized old men of property. The thing that had won Fuller’s devotion was his gratitude for Chaldin’s reviving him, and this Ben had already undermined, his idolatry of Chaldin as a divine symbol of the Order.