Transmaniacon

by John Shirley

  “I told you explicitly not to talk to this con-man,” Chaldin said. “You’re, a fool to have permitted him to speak at all, an idiot to have let him speak more than a sentence, and an ass for listening. I’ve spent three months teaching you maintenance of the Barrier. It’s very simple, and if you’d paid attention you could have learned in one month. You don’t listen to me, Carleton. I warned you about trying to rescue Manson. There was no point in risking it! He had served the Order! He was a blunderer! We washed our hands of him! I told you it would end in disaster––oh, back then I had a different face. You believed it was Hughes, warning you against the Manson debacle. But, it was convenient for me, then, to travel in that guise—”

  “How old are you, Mr. Chaldin?” Ben shot mockingly.

  Enraged, Chaldin turned to him and roared, “How old am I? You mumbled that Luciferage Rofocale must return in flesh to possess every Ipssissimus bathed in the cold white light? Infidel! Cretin!” He trembled. “Idiot!” His jowls shivered. “Short-lived insect!” He leaked drool onto his chin. “I am Luciferage Rofocale! Know that in my diverse arts I am that man, that original and Perfect Mage who walked this dusty plane six centuries ago! How old am I?” He stopped shouting. But now his voice was lethal in its softness. “I am six hundred ninety-four years old. The Order? Something I dreamed up when I had illusions about bringing peace to the earth by uniting it under one ruler. An errant artifice, an invention, a squalid trifle. It is a toy! The Order is my own exciter, Rackey! Don’t you suppose I had a model for the exciter? The exciter’s circuitry is patterned after the pattern of the Order’s organization—”

  It was then that Chaldin must have felt Fuller’s eyes on him. For he fell silent and turned to face Fuller. And it was probably then he realized his mistake. He had demeaned the Order in the presence of the Order’s most eager acolyte. Fuller was more than eager, he was a lunatic about it.

  Chaldin had lost control. Over himself and therefore over Fuller. And that had given Ben access to Fuller.

  Fuller’s defenses were gone. Ben opened up the exciter. Full.

  Now Ben was grateful for the drug Gloria had given him. It was the ultimate link between Fuller and him. Similar stimulants were the chemical backbeat for Fuller’s frenetic era, the late twentieth century. Their hearts echoed in the same electric drumbeats, the same drug-accentuated resentments. And when Fuller finally sensed the full incursion of the exciter, its tempo and modulation now oddly familiar, much like that of his own drugged spirit, he came to believe that it was a feeling arising from within himself and not one imposed by Ben Rackey. The unheard, speeding throb of rage filled the room with invisible but tangible presence.

  And Chaldin made another mistake, the same mistake Regis had made. He displayed fear. It was there on his face.

  Ben had all he needed.

  He released all the hostilities Fuller had stored in his life, all at once. And as he did this, he wondered if he was making a mistake. Fuller had been a casual killer. Maniacal rage was no stranger to him. What would this release?

  The animus, the berserker, the archetype of the Killer made itself visible in Fuller’s taut features. Fuller dropped his gun. Chaldin began to roll backwards, his eyes looking into Fuller’s. Chaldin had come six hundred ninety-four years to meet this instant. He recognized it. A man does not live almost seven centuries and find his death a surprise when it comes. He knows it, from many portentous dreams. He rolled backwards before its inexorable approach.

  But he raised his arms to embrace it as Fuller charged.

  Gloria sucked in her breath and looked away.

  Ben, still psychically linked to Fuller, could not look away. He wished to God he could.

  There was Fuller’s white face, every muscle in that face flexed, the lines of his features radiating from his staring eyes and snarling mouth like the design of a demonic ceremonial mask.

  His outstretched arms hovered over his head, their skin rippling over muscles like oil on metal. The sockets of the red skull-face radiated pure white light: the animus of murder, Fuller, in the instant his hands closed around Chaldin’s throat.

  A malevolent god stood in the room, thirty feet high, naked and bristling, straddling Fuller who was methodically tearing Chaldin’s head from his shoulders.

  Ben could see the far wall through the looming figure. But he was certain it was more than hallucination. He saw the crest along the cranium and neck. It was a glass giant...

  Propelled by Fuller’s insistently digging fingers, Chaldin’s head popped from his body, struck the floor and rolled backwards, mouth snapping open and shut in reflex, eyes rolling as if in grotesque parody of the huge laughing holo figure of him that had presided over the forever-revel.

  The glass giant-vanished.

  Eyes staring, unblinking, Fuller was ripping at the shoulders of the ancient Mage. He used both hands and teeth.

  Ben and Gloria suddenly realized they were free to move. Though no longer spellbound, Ben was exhausted and ill. Dry-heaving, hands still bound so they could make no use of the fallen weapons, they ran to the right, down the short corridor, out into the main passage. They ran headlong, coughing, streaming tears, for a quarter mile, until at last they stumbled out into the sunlight.

  Where three armed men awaited.

  “Why hello, Ladd!” said Bolton cheerfully.

  Ben fainted.

  Ben awoke ten minutes later, free of his bonds and lying on his back in the rear of Kibo’s nulgrav car. They were still on the ground and, through a round side window, he could see a light glinting off the metallic bulk of the Fist. Gratefully, he accepted water in a paper cup from Remm. He lay back and sighed. “Gloria?”

  “Right here.” She bent over him, trying to keep the concern from her face. Ben smiled. How she loved to seem aloof!

  “Gloria, is Kibo here?”

  She nodded.

  “Tell him to take one of the cars up and wait for Fuller to take off in the owl-car—or has he gone already?”

  “Fuller? Not yet. We’ve just been arguing about what to do—”

  “For now,” said Ben weakly speaking with effort, “we let him go. We’ll send some men into the pyramid, chase him out the other side to make certain he doesn’t have time to plant any bombs. And tell them, even if they have the opportunity to kill him, that they shouldn’t. I’m hoping he’ll go to the Barrier coordinating center. We can follow him and find it. Tell Kibo to take along a camera and a transmitter when he follows. I want to be able to see pictures of wherever it is he’s going. He’ll head for the central Barrier projector, if he knows where it is. And send someone in there to, uh, clean up the mess. I have to go back in and work, get the machine back into the right setting. I can’t do it with—”

  She silenced him with a finger on his lips, and nodded.

  When she had gone, Ben lay on his back, trying to relax, but his breathing was hard. Strength was a memory. He stared at the metal plates of the car’s ceiling and seemed to see, wavering in and out, a red demonic face with eyes like cold beacons…

  He squeezed his eyes shut.

  Suddenly, the cabin seemed over-hot. “Remm! Bolton!”

  They came and assisted him out to the fresh air.

  Slowly, his strength returned. He leaned against the vertical face of the pyramid’s tier. Here in the shadow the metal was pleasantly cool.

  Gloria returned. “It’s happened like you said. He took off the other way.” And at that instant the owl-car lifted, from the opposite side of the pyramid, hovered at the crest as if examining them, then sped south. Kibo followed, well behind, in a dart-shaped nulgrav car.

  “He’s still in the rage. And there are four of Chaldin’s men dead where the owl-car was. He didn’t just kill them. He mutilated them. Looks like he did it with his bare hands. And they had weapons. Ah, Ben. You freed something inside him.”

  “Yeah. I wonder—is this what demonic possession is? And has been all along? Just suppressed hatred that the brain store
s chemically and gets released all of a sudden, floodgates wide?” Should he mention the glass giant? Had she seen it too? He couldn’t bring himself to talk about it yet. The remembrance of the thing’s face wrenched his stomach.

  “Anyway, we cleaned Chaldin away.”

  “Well, then, let’s go inside. Things to do.”

  She tried to help him up but he shook off her hand and got to his feet. He was still dizzy, a little weak, but he felt human again. Human again? he thought, and laughed.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Nothing. Come on.” He led the way into the pyramid, and they walked slowly, hand-in-hand, down the long metal throat.

  When they emerged into the cupola Ben called Remm, Bunn, and Bolton on the vidphone; they answered from the nulgrav car, where they were drinking chilled wine. “No more wine,” he ordered. “You’ll need absolutely clear heads. Now, Bunn, I want you to go out for food and coffee, plenty of both. Return as soon as possible. Take half a dozen Brothers with you, and avoid the main avenues. Security is paranoid. Tell Remm and Bolton to come in here. I need them.”

  ‘‘Certainly. But who are these men in green? These Brothers?”

  “They work for me. I’ll explain later. But don’t ask them any questions. It would only confuse you.”

  Ben switched off, wondering why they took his orders with so little hesitation. Certainly, he had snowed them well. But he wondered if the most important factor was their need for a dominating figure. They must have felt lost for a long time, undirected, their city coming apart beneath them. And perhaps Ben was their man on the white horse. So be it, and God help them.

  He checked the reading on the rectangular energy-level indicator. It was red. It would go from red to orange and from orange to pink and from pink to coral to yellow to white. And on white, the Fist would be ready. There were five hours left.

  Methodically, hardly thinking about it, he changed the setting so that the Fist was once again aimed at the Barrier rather than at itself.

  He pressed a button that caused an eight-foot-square vidscreen to roll up opposite his couch, ready for Kibo to transmit the picture. He sat down on the couch and watched the screen…

  …while the light from below came ever more strongly, ever whiter.

  Gloria sat on the couch beside him. “I’ve got one more good hit of that stuff if you need it.”

  “Perhaps I will, later. Think you can run the equalizer? You did practice at it in case we needed a technician, and now we have no technicians. They’re all in hiding from the pedestrian riots.”

  “Yeah. One of the Brothers said the pedestrians are burning the northwest end of the city. They’ve got to the transmitters for reactant nulgrav currents and demolished them. The aristos all came tumbling down. Those who survived are all disoriented, they find it hard to get used to the ground. Actually touching it.” She laughed.

  “You seem pleased with the whole thing.”

  “I am, no denying it. And the indentured pedestrian militia is getting in on it. I’m glad I dumped my matriarch rags.”

  “Fine with me what they do with the city. As long as they leave the Fist alone. Did Kibo bring the rest of the Brothers here?” She nodded. “Good.” He stretched, winced at aching muscles. “Well? Are you prepared to equalize?”

  “I guess so. I did it on the mock-ups. It was easy. I just keep adjusting the output so that the four transmission nodes are putting out exactly the same amount of energy—they all have to be equal. As the level of energy increases they tend to fall out of synch. So I keep adjusting the knobs, ’til the dials for each node read the same.”

  “Right. It sounds easy. It is, for ten minutes at a time. But you might have to do it for maybe two hours, maybe more. It’s easy to be distracted in that time. Or bored, Don’t let either happen.”

  “What do you think Fuller’s going to do?”

  “I suspect he’s going to oppose us actively in this. Try to destroy us with the Barrier, and preserve it afterwards. If only for the sake of antipathy. Because by now he knows that it was I who made him kill Chaldin. I released this thing in him. He may be still in the throes of it, and hardly thinking, though, uh, I have a feeling about it.” He fell silent for a moment. Then he looked at her, spoke softly. “Gloria?”

  “Yes?”

  “The exciter is making changes in me. I’m not always in control. The temptation to cut loose with it is almost too much. Because when I’ve increased its output to a certain degree there’s a sort of…stimulation.” He struggled for words. “It’s almost sexual. At least, it’s seductive. But if I give in to it, I lose control. And there’s something else. When I was in rapport with Fuller, pushing him to move against Chaldin, there was a link between us. A psychic link, though not really telepathy. Usually, the rapport is only, one way. Usually, only the recipient of the exciter’s impulses feels it. But in that trance I felt and I saw, for a few moments, exactly what he felt and saw. It happened during the riot, too. For a few seconds I heard what the crowd was thinking. And I think that’s dangerous.”

  “And I think that’s an understatement. You keep going that way, man, you’ll go insane. You better get that goddamn thing taken out.”

  “I will, when I can.” He lowered his eyes, then looked back at Gloria. “When I was in rapport with Fuller it was as if his rage was leaking back to me. I felt that if he hadn’t killed Chaldin right then, I might have gone to help. It was beginning to affect me.” He stopped and turned to look at her in wonder. “Why do I forever find myself maundering to you about my problems? I’m always unburdening to you, telling you things I’ve never told anyone. Why is that?”

  She looked both pleased and uncomfortable. “Maybe we’re alike, in some way. Way under the skin. Doesn’t matter why. Hey, go on with what you were saying…about it beginning to affect you.”

  “Oh, well—when I felt that feedback from him, I saw something. Hallucination, I guess. Maybe. A face in the air. A big blue thing with a red skullish face, and eyes—”

  “Eyes like beacons of white light,” she finished for him. She cleared her throat. “Uh-huh. If it was an illusion, then I imagined it too. I don’t think it was hallucination or holograph. I think it was like the one at Houston but smaller, and made of air and blood, instead of water and blood. It was a thing, a spirit that—”

  “A spirit that attends murder,” said Ben, nodding. “Maybe it’s always there, at all killings. But we were able to see it because you were, uh, hooked into Fuller, and I’m sort of hooked into you.”

  They were silent. The only sound was the soft whine of the generators. The white light was no longer so ghostly. It was taking on the intensity of a spotlight. Ben glanced at Gloria. Her gaunt features were sepulchral in the light from below.

  Finally, Gloria asked, “You believe that stuff…about Chaldin being Luciferage Rofocale? Six hundred some years old?”

  Ben shrugged. “It’s possible. They never found the body of Rofocale. He disappeared one day. It was assumed he’d been killed and his body burned by his enemies. Many leaders of the Order vanished over the years—the Order made up myths saying that they had ascended to Perfection, but possibly it was Rofocale, just changing faces. Chaldin accomplished much as an inventor. And I know he was at least a hundred seventy-five years old. So why not six hundred? And Chaldin—or Rofocale, perhaps—was an extraordinary man.”

  “You’re not so ordinary yourself. Look, Ben, if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a heart-to-heart, talk. Makes me nauseous. But maybe it is time for one. Man, you cannot survive this thing forever. How long can a person do what you’ve been doing and survive? Chaldin’s dead, but maybe the killers he hired to pick you off are men of their word, ready to carry out the bargain. Or maybe the Order will seek you out for vengeance, if they find out. Why go on? With what you’ve been telling me about that thing in your chest draining you, poisoning you, don’t you think it’s time to re-think the whole thing?”

  “At this point? No. Ma
ybe after the Barrier is down. You forget, I was ready to retire when Chaldin dragged me into this. I didn’t want the fight. But when I saw the opportunity to drop the Barrier… Frankly, all I want is to go to sea, and to hell with the rest of it.”

  “You could have tossed it all out the window. It’s a big country—”

  “No, not with the Barrier standing.”

  “Why?”

  He lay back on the couch, gazed up at the darkening sky at the top of the shaft. A few stars already visible. “Because Old Thorn...well...”

  “Who’s Old Thorn, anyway?”

  “The man who taught me all I know. My mentor, my father. My second father, that is. He took me from my real parents when I was eight. He’d been looking for someone to train, to take up where he’d left off. He looked at me and saw in me the perfect candidate. How long does a man hope to survive this profession, you ask? Old Thorn was a hundred thirty when he was assassinated. There is a long line of pros in my—my field, Gloria. They go back six hundred years and more. To the inception of the Order. Professional Irritants are a splinter group from the Order. That’s why I know so much about it. Our discipline was first perfected within the confines of the Order. Professional Irritants created the Inquisition. The Order had use for it. None of those actually burned were in fact worshippers of Lucifer. The judges of the Inquisition—all secretly Luciferians— were strengthened by the situation—financially, because they obtained the lands of those who were burnt; and socially, because they were the only ones above suspicion.” He paused, thoughtful. “We were behind other things. Marie Antoinette was one of us. She worked hard to promote the French Revolution. But the Order failed to rescue her as they’d promised. And then there was—”