by John Shirley
Bolton was choking. Bunn was whimpering. Remm was cursing. Ben was gripping the arms of his chair till he felt fingernails break and bleed. He could feel the veins standing out at his temples.
He closed his eyes and looked at the image of the disk, the representation of the energy distribution in the Fist.
The disk was uneven. Bunn’s side was quaking, Bolton’s was wavering. Opening his eyes, Ben saw the result: the Barrier had expanded ten more feet.
In the Fist’s cupola, the white light lanced from below like a nova; Ben could barely make out the figures on the screen through the glare.
Thunder and shrieks assailed his ears by turn. He was soaked in sweat, his teeth squeaked, their edges powdering as he ground them together. “Hold!” he growled at Bunn and Bolton. The white disk solidified, the Barrier stopped expanding. But he realized it couldn’t last. His will was the binding force for those of the other three. Ben Rackey’s will, fired by monomania, at loggerheads with Fuller’s will, fueled by insane malice. Rackey struggled with Fuller, Fist, and Barrier. He seemed to see Fuller’s narrowed eyes, his gritting teeth, his purpling brow. Ben held and held. But it couldn’t last.
And knowing it couldn’t last, he was left with one choice.
Rapidly, he awakened the exciter. The metal oval planted in his chest began to throb. He advanced it instantly to full and undiluted output and hurled it at Bolton, Bunn, and Remm.
The exciter molded them all into a four-component unit of radiant antipathy.
The white disk went rigid, solidified, and became the blinding white of an exploding sun.
Broadened, tumescent, the Fist clamped down with an almost audible grunt.
Ben had a flashing image from Fuller’s mind:
Fuller was lying on his back, his head encased in a helmet. His eyes were big and intense. Trapped. He was a divided man. He didn’t altogether want to do what he was doing. But—Ben had a split-second glimpse of a monstrous blue figure, a scarlet visage, its hollow eye sockets like white beacons.
Bolton, Bunn and Remm, and Rackey concentrated. Their projection nodes merged into a single intense down-thrust of power, a surge of resentment, spontaneous as a lashing fist.
Fuller’s face appeared to Ben. His eyes asked mercy.
The Fist compressed the Barrier like a man compressing a snail in his fingers. The shell collapsed inward with an earth-shaking crack. Fuller was crushed within it like a slug beneath a sledgehammer.
Ben looked away from the sudden explosion of white light on the screen.
In Detroit, the ground beneath the pyramid trembled. And was still.
Outside, the public decapitations of aristocrats were momentarily interrupted as the mob turned to gawk at the dull glow on the horizon.
Ben awoke to see Kibo glowering down at him. Not a cheering sight.
“The outcome?” Ben croaked.
“Fuller and Barrier crushed. The patriarchs of Detroit dead. The mob is headed here. I suggest we leave.”
Ben removed his helmet and sat up.
Gloria arrived, carrying a cup of water. It looked beautiful and tasted even better. His head was still pounding, but he felt strong enough to get around on his own. He and Gloria embraced.
He turned to speak to the others. “Well, erstwhile Patriarchs of the Insulation Committee, you are welcome to accompany—” He stopped.
Bolton was gone. Remm and Bunn were lying, arms askew, glazed eyes gazing at nothing, blood trickling from noses and open mouths.
“They died in that last surge,” Gloria whispered. “I think their hearts burst. Bolton ran out of here screaming, pounding his head, kicking at empty air, frothing at the mouth. He looked—”
“Insane.” Ben muttered. They walked slowly, arm in arm, out toward the nulgrav car. Silently, Kibo followed.
“Things worked for us in Astor because we surrendered to those people,” Gloria murmured. “And we came out on top here because we refused to surrender. Makes you wonder. Which is the best course to take? Like, at any time, any given moment, maybe there is always a choice that’s more useful. You know? Either surrender or resist. Sometimes one, sometimes the other. I guess the trick is knowing which is right for a certain time. I guess. I don’t know. How could you tell?”
Ben’s head hurt. He didn’t feel much like thinking. But unthinkingly he said, “In Astor we surrendered to a force we trusted. It’s like sailing, I guess. You hoist your sails or haul them down depending on whether the wind is blowing the way you know you should go.” He grimaced. “I don’t want to think about it. The only thing it doesn’t hurt me to contemplate is sleep.”
It was dark outside, lights reflected in the sheen of the Fist’s polished metal. The blue-black sky was cloudless; the stars looked brittle and about as friendly as the Devil’s teeth.
The skyline of Detroit was unusually dark, except for red flares here and there where fires consumed whole sections of the city. “Yeah. Time to split,” Gloria said.
“How much longer do you work for me?” Ben asked Kibo.
“Another three days, according to contract.”
“Good. Then you can fly us to New York. It ought to be safe there for a while. I’ve got an account there—my last one. I’ll give you a bonus. And I intend to see a shipbuilder and a surgeon.”
“In that order?” Gloria asked, climbing after him into the car.
“No. The surgeon first. As soon as we land,” said Ben, tapping his chest over the place where the exciter waited, dormant.
“You aren’t really serious about this,” said Gloria flatly, looking at him askance.
“Perfectly serious. Did you think I was joking when I paid to have this ship built?” Ben replied.
“No, but I guess I never thought you’d go through with it. I thought maybe you’d cruise around some and then come into port.”
“I don’t much blame you for thinking that. I can see where it might look a bit mad.”
“I know. I know,” she said, wrapping her long arms around his waist.
They were standing on the aft deck of his newly built thirty-five foot teakwood sailboat, the Joseph Conrad. No engine, only a few instruments for navigation and for keeping the boat on course while he slept. “I know what I’m doing.” he said.
The boat was moored to a crumbling wharf that extended like a mandarin’s fingernail from a long spit of rocky land reaching from the southern hook of what once had been Boston’s harbor. The wreck of a half-sunk destroyer thrust a rusted, pitted gray-orange bow from the white-capped seas a quarter of a mile offshore. No other ships were visible. The mercury-gray sea was choppy but not impudent. The tide was going and a cold, fair wind blew northeast. Ben was eager to be off.
With Gloria giving him periodic nervous looks, Ben cranked up the anchor and cast off, instructing her in unfurling the proper sails, and went to the helm, tacking southeast to catch the full brunt of the gust.
The ship sliced cleanly into the waves, tossing its prow like the snout of an eager horse. Ben could feel the wind in the sails; he felt it in the vibrations of the vessel’s wood as surely as if the ship were an organic extension of his own person.
“I’ll be damned,” Gloria muttered. “You’re grinning. I’ve never seen you grin. I don’t know as I like it.”
In fact, Ben’s chest filled with singing as the wind filled the sails. One thing only dragged him back, laid its weight on him. He reached into the pocket of his heavy black peajacket and withdrew the small, shiny metal oval.
He strapped the wheel to keep the ship on course and went to the taffrail, looking at the bristling white wake, the light bringing out the emerald depth of the water. Then he looked at the focus of transmaniac energies, the exciter, glinting in his right hand. He reached out, turned his hand palm-down over the water, and opened his fingers.
For five seconds, the metal disk clung to his hand, though he did nothing to hold it back. As if it were magnetized there. Clinging like a snail. Then, reluctantly, it dropped away,
plunked into the sea, vanished into the waters like a fading leer.
He turned and smiled at Gloria. Her right hand went into his pea jacket, her slender fingers probing beneath his shirt, tracing the ridges of scar-tissue on his chest. “That’s a big, unfriendly ocean, Ben.”
“I know. But I’ve sailed from Astor to ’Frisco and from New Orleans to New York dozens of times, along the coast, inside the Barrier.”
She’s almost as lovely as the sea, he thought.
In this wan light her features seemed to glow, and her eyes were darkly appealing. Asking for something. He shook his head. “I’m not going to change my mind,” he said, feeling oddly weightless.
“You—didn’t forget anything? You sure? You got all the provisions you’re going to need to cross a goddamn ocean?”
“Sorry,” he said. “No reason to go back. I have it all. But I suppose, if you really can’t go with me, I can turn around. But there’s the tide and everything. And the wind. It will take me, working against those factors, several hours to get back in.”
She shook her head, reaching out to support herself against the rail as the boat bucked. “No, hell no, it’d be a shame for you to turn back now. I guess.” She sighed. “No. But, Ben, you know what the odds against your getting there are? And even if you make it, you must know it’s not going to be friendly over there. It’s all either radioactive craters or savages—”
“I’ve been waiting thirty years for this, Gloria. I waited thirty years and yet I could hardly bear to wait those last two months as they built the boat. If the Joseph Conrad had taken another week to complete I’d have tried going by raft.”
Gloria wore a pair of khaki pants over a one-piece black bathing suit, and sandals. She kicked off the pants and sandals and strode with an air of determination to the rail. She looked down into the sea and shivered. “Looks cold.”
“You can be sure it’s cold… Where you going to go if—when—you get back to shore?”
“Astor, I think. Look, Ben, I want to go with you. But I can’t. I can’t stand boats, and frankly, I don’t think you’re going to make it there alive. I came this far because I was sure you’d change your mind when you got a look at what you were up against, here. I mean, you were always so practical. You think I’m going to go to sleep for a century just to wake up and get myself drowned a few months later? I’m just not the faithful-woman-type who follows you no-matter-where. I’m sorry. Because of the way I feel. About you. I––”
Ben struggled with himself and won. He managed to keep back tears. “I feel that way, too. About you. And peace in a place like Astor sounds good. And with you—even better. But I can’t. Call it momentum. Decades ago I surrendered to a force. It made me what I am and it broke the Barrier and it brought me here. And now it’s taking me across the sea. I could go in a nulgrav car, of course. But it wouldn’t be the same. No. I have to. I’m crazy, I guess. I don’t expect you to come with me. Thanks for coming this far. I mean it. So...” He forced a chuckle. “You thought I’d change my mind once I got out here, eh?”
“Yeah.” She smiled and kissed him. “I think you’re crazy.”
“I wish I’d brought a life raft for you. If you want to swim back to land you’d better get started. I hope you’re a damn good swimmer. You’re going to have to fight the tide, currents, and the cold. Don’t surrender to them. You a good swimmer, are you?”
“Damn straight. Helluva good swimmer, no brag. I can get back. You…watch out for those sonuvabitching Houston dolphins while you’re out there, they got no reason to love you.” She bent and removed something from the pocket of her discarded pants. She straightened, and explained, “The rock tape.” She put it to her ear.
“What’s it playing?” Ben asked.
“Pink Floyd, ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun.’”
She handed the capsule to Ben. He put it in a coat pocket.
“You gotta have something to listen to, on the way,” she said.
Then, she climbed up onto the rail, poised, and dived clean and true, into the spread of the wake.
Gloria surfaced, shook her water-flattened hair from her eyes and, teeth chattering, began to breaststroke toward shore--to find her way back to Astor.
Ben looked after her for a moment, reflecting that the currents were treacherous here. There were some mean breakers closer in. But it wasn’t far, and he figured she had a favorable chance to make it to shore. And they’d left a nulgrav car on the wharf.
He returned to the wheel, unstrapped it and took its pegs in his hands, feeling the beam and breadth of the ship in the vibrations of the smooth wood under his fingers.
It was morning, the wind was chill, the sky flat and gray with clouds. He was alone but for the singing wind and the hissing seas. And he surrendered to those forces, the wind and seas.
As he passed the point where once before the Barrier would have stopped him, he shuddered, half-expecting to crash into it. Nothing but salt spray struck him. He smiled.
He took a deep breath, sucked in air sweet with the briny rot of the sea, and thought, Eight to one probability that she’ll make it ashore. Six to one against Ben Rackey making it alone across the Atlantic Ocean.
He was satisfied with those odds. With the wind at his back he sailed for Europe, and the New World.