by John Shirley
“You will be required to exercise this ability in the Chaldin Palace. You will have to create a diversion that will keep the security drones at bay while you break into Chaldin’s sanctum and obtain for me an object. You will bring back the object and you will be given your freedom. Until I need you again.”
Until I need you again. Ben could almost hear the axe falling.
“Well, what is the fucking thing?” Ben asked, tensing.
The dark outline paused, shifted in its seat. Ben wished his eyes would adjust to the light so he could see the man’s face. But the glare from the quarter moon was too bright.
“I have pondered this matter,” the distorted voice croaked. “Should I tell Rackey what it is? I have decided that your curiosity will not be stilled till you have the answer, and doubtless you would pry at its container to learn its secrets. This could have disastrous results. The object is dangerous and fragile. So I’ll tell you now. It is a device for the augmentation of the telepathic transfer of mania. The Transmaniacon--that is my term for it. Properly…mounted…it seeks out strong, hostile human emotions, amplifies them. It can turn a street-brawl into a raging mob and a border skirmish into a full-scale war. I have a variety of uses for it. I warn you, when you set hands on it, do not attempt to utilize it. You will have your opportunity under controlled conditions at a future date. For now, regard it as lethal and do not attempt to investigate its workings.”
“Suppose I do obtain it. How do I know you won’t kill me anyway? I need some insurance.”
“No. You have only my word for now. But consider: Why should a canny chess player deprive himself of useful pieces? If I can make use of you once, I can use you again. I would be reluctant to kill a man in possession of such finely honed skills. You are invaluable. I would wish to have you alive; I would wish your good will and cooperation so that you do my work cheerfully and efficiently. Therefore, you can be assured of full remuneration for your efforts.”
Ben hesitated, glanced up at the startlingly realistic constellations slowly wheeling overhead, then back at the man-shadow blotting out a sizeable portion of the celestial fields. “When do we start?” he asked, attempting cheeriness.
“I have already secured for you, and your new companions, an invitation to Chaldin’s forever-revel. You’ll go this very evening, once you have been outfitted with whatever equipment you require. Fuller and friends will accompany you—they should not seem out of place amid the costumed party-goers in the palace. Fuller has already memorized the escape procedure. Only your initiative is needed.”
The discussion continued for an hour, the bikers stirring restlessly, shifting from foot to foot, the man with the skull-face yawning. When Ben knew enough, Fuller and the others followed him out of Room Zero. They took the elevator to the storeroom, where Ben found the necessary accoutrements laid out for him. When they were suitably garbed, they ascended to the roof.
Ben was a little surprised when he saw the nulgrav vehicle on the roof, but not much. Only select city-states possessed nulgrav. The formula was no longer a secret, but the manufacture of nulgrav plates was incredibly expensive, and the raw materials required could be had only by mining outside the womblike walls of the city-states—a perilous procedure at best: There was no law outside the cities.
Ben was not at all surprised to see the nulgrav car molded in the scaled-up macrocosmic model of a common house-fly. He dubbed it the fly-car. The forty-foot fly was complete in almost every detail, its decorative thirty-foot wingspread constructed from transparent plastic and veined with gold and platinum wires, shimmering like real insect wings in the sullen lights surrendered by the tense city night about them. The fly was so complete, so well proportioned, the bikers seemed reluctant to approach it. It crouched on barbed, hairy legs, sense-wires fanning from its thorax, overlapping spiracle scales forming its abdomen, antennae sprouting from its enormous gargoyle-ugly head; its compound eyes—translucent enough so Ben could make out the car’s control panel behind them—glittered in the half-light. Ben ducked under its mandibles and climbed after Fuller up a rung ladder and into the fly-car’s belly. It was cramped inside but fairly comfortable, fully decked out with cushions and a bar. Ben immediately dialed a straight gin. He slugged it down, shuddering, then joined Fuller in the forward cabin. The other three reclined in the cushioned hold aft, the fly’s abdomen.
“How long you been awake?” Ben asked, settling into the starboard of the two seats and strapping himself in.
“A month. Maybe a month and a half. Don’t understand the big picture much, but he promises to teach me more with hypnotic induction. He had a drone cyber show me how to operate this thing.” His fingers played over the knobs, and lights winked on, dials came into view. They rose. The concave windshield was adjusted to give an unbroken view, and Ben watched the city dwindle beneath them. The lights’ baleful glares became coy twinkles, then bright avenues and sweeping concourses, contiguous with the brocading glow-fluid pipes. As always with nulgrav, there was no sense of acceleration, no evidence of inertia.
Ben glanced over his shoulder, and in the dim red cabin light he saw the woman watching him. She had taken off her dark glasses and her brown eyes were anomalously soft. What was her relationship to the others? Why had his employer awakened all four of the frozen Transmaniacs—did each of them have some special skill? Or was it out of loyalty to the Order, to whom Transmaniacon members were divine martyrs?
Fuller asked, “What’s this Barrier I keep hearing about?”
Ben glanced at Fuller. His eyes were in shadow, like two black holes sucking in light.
Ben leaned back and sighed, looking out over the desert, the wilderness outside the city-states. The stars were sharp, the mountains loomed black. “The Barrier went up shortly after you went down,” he began. “Five years after they froze you, they started activating the Barrier projection installations. The good old US government, may it rest in peace, put it up… The Barrier was conceived as the perfect defense against nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare. It’s a screen of densely flowing ions held in place by a magnetic field generated by the rotation of the planet itself. It’s said that as long as the earth continues to turn the Barrier will stand. The Barrier is usually invisible, except around the edges near the ground. It will not permit certain toxic combinations of gases, certain forms of bacteria, or any solid object to penetrate it. Not even birds. It entirely encloses the continental zone once called the United States.”
Fuller shook his head in stunned silence. Ben was pleased to see Fuller rattled. “The whole goddamn US? Inside this Barrier? Like a fucking terrarium in a bottle?” He snorted in disbelief.
Ben shrugged. “That’s the way it is. If you don’t believe me, just take this insect up for about a half-mile, at which point I’m going to bail out. Because if you keep going you’ll get swatted by the Barrier. Wind passes through it, of course, and clouds of pure H20. Light up to certain frequencies—but heavy laser won’t penetrate it. The Barrier was set up a half an hour before the third world war ignited. Russia, China, Israel, Britain, Germany, India, Japan, and Saudi Arabia fried one another. The only nuclear power that stayed out of it was Brazil, but as far as we know they died in the fallout. What remained of civilization outside the Barrier collapsed into barbarity or slowly died from radiation poisoning. We aren’t sure what it’s like out there now ... We can’t get there to find out. The Barrier cages us in…”
Now Fuller was laughing. “Israel? Russia? Britain? Japan? Gone? Excellent/” Then he frowned and his affability faded. “What do you mean, we can’t get out? Wasn’t the Barrier taken down after the radiation dropped?”
“It took a long time for the radiation to fade to fairly safe levels. Meantime, there was an upheaval here. Revolution, civil war, ecological collapse . . . birds, insects, and certain other creatures in the eco-food chain couldn’t get inside the Barrier. And pollution couldn’t get out. The ecology went insane for a while. The air got foul and the temperament o
f the country got fouler. The country fragmented and a lot of things died. What remained formed into small clusters, the city-states, and a few nomadic tribes. The city-states became independent from one another, developed their own food and power sources.
“The men who knew the Barrier’s secrets died in Washington during the civil war--when some stoned-out Air Force lunatics decided to make the capital a crater. This is the clincher: No one knows where the controls for the Barrier are stored.”
“No clue?”
“Some figure it’s in the Adirondacks...down in a bunker. But no one knows exactly where. No one even knows how the damn thing is maintained. You’d have thought it would have broken down by now. Sooner or later, whatever is holding it there will wear out and the outer world will bust in to what used to be the USA and then the city-states might have to stop being such whiny pussies and band together again...”
“They don’t cooperate or anything?” Fuller asked.
“Not much. But only once have any two of them gone to a full-scale war. Chicago crushed Los Angeles, left it a flaming ruin…”
“You hear that, Ranger?” Fuller called over his shoulder. “Chicago burned L.A. and the Japanese and all the foreigners are blown to Kingdom Come!” The bikers in the rear shouted something incomprehensible between catcalls and laughter. “Beautiful!”
“Beautiful?” Ben asked wonderingly.
Fuller smiled. “You bet yer ass, Rackey. With the Barrier up, there’s no interference from the outside. Everything’s so unstable, with all these little pocket governments, it’s just crying for someone to come along and sew it up. A strong man with a good fleet of these things—” He patted the dashboard.
“There are variables here pretty alien to your time,” Ben said. “Might be hard to control.”
Fuller only shrugged. “Hey what’s ol’ Chicago like now? I grew up there, east side.”
“Chicago?” Ben smiled grimly. “It’s a police state now, or an organized-crime state depending on how you look at it, building up reserves for conquest. They’re fairly stabilized lately…almost went down in the Famines, but they were among the first to develop hydroponics and algae farms and solar power, so they got by. Of course, they had to do away with a third of their population, at first, to have enough food for the rest to eat, but it got them through. Now, as long as you do what you’re told, you’ll get enough to eat in Chicago. The whole city’s one building, a big plasteel-coated, off-white hive-thing, fifty miles by eighty, like the ancient walled city-states but even more a single unit. No open courtyards, and it’s all under one big ugly square roof with a gawdawful lot of chimneys. Chicago seems to be the paradigm for the ultimate city-state. The others are beginning to look like it. Maybe in another century they’ll all be that way…”
“Is San Francisco still—?”
“Still there. Run by the Cult of Dis. A suicide cult.”
“I heard warnings about Houston…”
“Go near it and you run a high risk of enslavement. The dolphins. The dolphins are the only ones who can get outside the Barrier, as far as we know. The Barrier extends underground, at the borders, in a solid wall for an indeterminate depth, and undersea in a grid which nothing larger than a pilot whale can get through. People have gone beyond in miniature subs, but no one’s ever come back. The dolphins come and go as they please, but they aren’t telling what goes on out there. Why should they? They rule Houston and they hold enough power to keep Chicago and New York at bay.”
“Dolphins . . . rule Houston?” Fuller repeated, struggling to comprehend. “Run that one by me again.”
“You heard me. There was a Naval research center there before the Panic, and they had a language-interpretation breakthrough. They taught the dolphins to communicate, or vice-versa, and it turned out they were even more intelligent than we thought. After things collapsed and Houston was burning, a party of scientists came to the dolphins and asked them for advice. The dolphins told them just what to do, how to get things under their control, and their recommendations worked. The city planners put the place back together, another thinly disguised martial order, and became increasingly dependent on the advice of the dolphins. The dolphins jockeyed themselves into positions of social necessity. And they had machines built they could operate with sound-waves, their own high-pitched squeaking. These machines linked them to computers that controlled the city’s cybernetic police force. One day they had the council of scientists killed. And took over. And now they rule, and men in Houston are their slaves. Some say it’s the most scientifically advanced of the city-states... I’d always understood, as a boy, that dolphins were known as a benevolent bunch. But man, these dolphins are ruthless… Let’s see, what else belongs in this geography lesson? Atlanta is a city of bandits, mostly copter-pirates, an organized hierarchy of thieves preying on trade routes between city-states...”
“Never mind. Christ, I’ve heard enough,” Fuller protested. “How much farther to this palace?”
Ben turned to Fuller in alarm. “I thought you were flying this thing.”
Fuller laughed sourly. “Do you imagine he would leave anything like this up to chance? The navigator is pre-programmed. I activate the nulgrav lift, the navigator takes us there, and back when we’re done. No stops between.”
“Who is he? What does he actually intend to do with this exciter thing?”
“Don’t try to pump me, Rackey. Just do your job. It doesn’t matter what his plans are. You can go back to retirement after this job. ’Til he needs you again.” He took a vial out of a jacket pocket, and sniffed something from it, then put it back, zipping the pocket shut. “Why did you retire, anyway?”
“Don’t try to pump me, Fuller,” Ben replied, grinning. But Fuller’s question triggered recollections. He had tried not to think about his reasons for retiring. But the reasons were there, as stark and as ugly as vultures on a telephone line: He was losing control of his talent. He’d find himself practicing incitement, all the skills Old Thorn had taught him, even when he wasn’t being paid. He found himself promoting needless fights, seeding contentions—always operating beneath a skillfully contrived camouflage of dissembling, always apparently innocent. He was doing it simply for enjoyment, to relieve his own boredom. And he lost his few friends and his lovers. It was when Ella left him-- he knew he had to quit. He made other excuses to himself—the mounting risk that he would be discovered—but part of him had known. He had turned his power against his own life.
Let this be the last time, he said to himself, and it was the closest he’d ever come to a prayer.
Something glistened among the stars, something growing and pulsing. “The Chaldin Palace,” Ben announced. “Directly ahead.” Like a coral tracery of crystalline arteries, blooming and enfolding itself, contracting, and blooming again, the forever-revel hung uneasily against the impartial backdrop of the blue-black desert sky. “The palace itself,” Ben explained, “is the cylinder inside the tube ways.”
It was a thousand yards by three hundred of rotating linkage in plasteel, flexibly jointed at every level; it moved like a snake in its lair through intertwining arteries. The tubeways were transparent, luminous plasglass and the whole affair was supported by monopole gravitational modifiers. Commonly called nulgrav.
Fuller laughed. “That thing…that’s a palace? Looks like a subway going full-speed through see-through tunnels--tied in a knot!”
The other three had come from aft and were watching over Ben’s shoulder. “Looks like a roller coaster,” the skull-faced man said.
Roller-coastering through transparent passageways, the palace was driven by air pressure, following a course dictated by the ever-shifting sculpture of the tubeways. It was a flying flexible tower mingled with a dragon shape. The worm Oroboros, Ben thought. “The passengers are protected from the inertia--gotta be, that thing is moving inside the tubes at three hundred miles an hour. Clusters of nulgrav nodes. It’s a real art to place them. Some of the gravitational increase from
acceleration is released to give the passengers a sense of up and down, relative to floors.”
“Satan’s fucktool,” Fuller swore. “I hope we get out of it as easily as we get in. He told me how we’ll do it, more or less. But he didn’t explain why it works.”
“Suppose we’ll have to trust our employer,” Ben ventured. “He leaves us no choice. And perhaps having to trust him makes him seem trustworthy, but–”
“I didn’t think you’d try the provocateur stuff on me so quickly, Rackey.” Fuller’s tone was icy as he added, “Cease.”
Ben shrugged. Can’t blame a guy for trying.
The palace loomed on them, the auto-navigator drew them in toward the translucent blister extruding from one end. The hangar doors opened—they were sucked in—and it closed behind them.
Inside: A vast parking lot containing several hundred other vehicles, most of them air-cars with rotors on their bellies; in the fashion of the Denver aristocracy most of the crafts were modeled on flying animals or insects. The fly-car set down between a huge metallic grasshopper in chrome-flake green and silver trim, and a giant bat, with outstretched wings of simulated leather over aluminum bone-struts and genuine brown fur on its bulbous torso. Ahead, someone had parked a huge bee, complete in every detail. Ben made out gigantic yellow and black wasps, four-passenger moths, an open-air touring butterfly, and a sporty swallow, all with their rotors and fuselage so artfully concealed they seemed ready to perk up their various outsize heads and leap into willful flight.
But only a few of the cars were nulgrav driven. That was reserved for the grossly affluent.
Overhead: Curved, gray metal roof; a slick green floor below.
Ben was startled by a voice crackling from their radio. “Identify via reservation code.”
Fuller cleared his throat and quoted, “‘We’re pain, we’re steel, we’re a plot of knives.’”
“Code acknowledged, invitation valid. Voiceprint checks. Professor Chaldin welcomes you. Please take advantage of the taxi unit waiting outside your vehicle.”
