by John Shirley
Followed by the erstwhile bikers, Fuller and Ben climbed from the fly’s thorax, down the ladder, and stepped into the cushioned interior of the spherical taxi.
The hatch squeezed shut, and Ben was looking into the eyes of the dark woman who’d come with Fuller. The faint limn seeping from the walls invested her pale skin with an unseemly glow. He braced his feet on the resilient floor, hooked his arm through a stability strap, and asked her, “What’s your name?”
“Gloria.” Her brown eyes hardened as she examined him critically. “That’s what it was. Gloria. I don’t know what it is anymore. That was my name while I was alive.”
“Shut up, Gloria,” the thin man at her side interrupted. “Stop with that bullshit. You’re alive. Frozen ain’t always dead.”
There was no sense of passage as the unit sped through the tubeways, matched the palace’s velocity and sidled into its hangar as if for an orbital linkup. The trip was over, the curved door rolled back, and they emerged into a hallway. The globe fell away down the hall as if it was dropped into a shaft, and vanished round a corner. They were joined by a drone-cyber: a cylinder on a basketball-sized bearing, polished chrome to its waist where, on a cushion and fed with tubes, shaved and wired through the cranium, rested a man’s severed head. The eyes were open and alert, the rest of the face was dead. It was encased in a glass tube flush with the metal cylinder. Above the glass-cased head, a metal top separated into jointed utility extensions, now folded like an umbrella. Fuller sneered when he saw the drone. Gloria looked faintly annoyed.
One of the bikers said, “Jeez.”
The head, cheeks sunken, nose beaked, deep-set green eyes flashing with electricity, rotated on its turntable to examine them.
Ben was used to the drones: condemned criminals with personality and volition removed, their brains and eyes directing the machinery, their activities programmed. A hospitable voice from the grid at the five-foot cylinder’s octopal crest said, “Welcome. Kindly accompany me to the forever-revel.”
Doors without handles were set into the translucent, off-white walls on either side. The hall curved gradually upward, tracing the interior contours of the cylindrical palace. They stopped at one of the doors, and the drone spoke a series of numbers; the door slid aside, and they entered the party.
Odors of hundreds of perfumes, sweat, steam, tobacco, wine, antiseptics. A kaleidoscopic vista, a circular cavern floor-to-wall-to-ceiling-to-wall with people; mists, streams of warm water running through mid-air in nulgrav currents, phosphorescence and sparks flaring and shifting into protean, eye-pleasing patterns overhead.
Most guests invited to Chaldin’s forever-revel considered themselves honored and attended eagerly. The palace was legendary. In the eighteen-year history of the levitated edifice everyone invited had accepted—though all were fully aware that they would never meet their host. Chaldin never attended. The party was managed by a human majordomo and a concealed central computer which was aided by its agent-extensions, the drones.
The palace had a number of reputations--wonderful, horrible, and every shade between. Ben had never before acquired an invitation, but he had done considerable research into the forever-revel. It presented an intriguing game board for the exercise of his distinctive skills. It appeared that some of the stories told about the palace were true and some were gross exaggeration. It had never lived up to the aggrandized achievements in decadence that were attributed to it by certain journalists. The tales of baby-drowning contests were entirely false, though the rumors of a tasting room for exotic diseases had some truth in them. The stories of mandatory initiation into a bestiality cult were fabricated, though it cannot be denied that guests so inclined were provided with certain unusual species of specially trained animals. The allegation that all guests must swear fealty to Beelzebub was unfounded gossip; yet it was true that Lady Seth founded a forever-revel sect devoted to the worship of the holo portrait of Professor Chaldin, before whose monumental image peculiar nocturnal activities, which would be considered reprehensible by the Denver status quo, drew a healthy number of participants…and it was to this gigantic, jovial three-dimensional bust of Chaldin that Ben’s eyes were drawn as they entered the revel hall…
The moving face was seamed; deep furrows ran down from the corners of his mouth, and the unnaturally wide eyes, vividly blue, gave the impression of a ventriloquist’s dummy. The dyed black hair was cut into a fashionable cube with jaw-length sideburns. He was very much older, Ben guessed, than first glance suggested. The huge, semi-transparent eyes on the forty-foot head rolled back and forth in mirth; the blue pupils against the overbearing whites of the eyes were like choking madmen writhing in white hospital sheets. The mouth snapped open and clacked shut in repetitious imitations of mirth, roughly following the rhythms of the seamless flow of thudding electro-rock. There was an identical bust, like a moving mirror image, going through the same actions, backwards, at the opposite end of the hall. The taped holo image repeated its actions, seeming to observe and cackle at the antics of the crowd below.
Ben and company had stepped from a door in a tall porcelain hummock protruding seamlessly from the floor; similar exit chutes were situated at intervals about the contrivance. Voice slightly amplified above the noise of crowd and pulsing music, the drone-cyber politely explained how they could use the exit chute to find the rooms they had been assigned, how to order food, drink, and drugs from the panels set into the white hummocks nearer the floor. They were instructed in the use of the hallucinogenic sauna, the pools, the multimedia exposition, the orgy rooms, the autoerotic solitude booths, and the restroom. Then the drone rolled away to other duties and the pasty face within jerked slightly with inertia as it wheeled sharply to the right.
The huge ballroom was a latitudinal cross-section of the encompassing cylinder, like the interior of a tin can with its inhabitants, the proverbial can of worms, standing on the curved walls at right angles to what would be the bottom of a can. Consequently, the crowd was ranked in a complete circle up what seemed to be the walls to the ceiling so that, from a distance, they looked like dangling stalactites. They were held topsy-turvy to one another by nulgrav and centrifugal force in an unseemly cooperation.
Over it all Chaldin’s face stared, giggling, from the two flat ends of the tube, as though to survey everything below; he was slowly turning, one head one way, one the other, so sometimes the giant holo busts were upside down from one another.
The leather-jacketed Transmaniacs did not arouse sustained interest. They were given chilly glances, mumbled amenities. Then the party-goers turned back to their conversations and debates, gambling and meditative self-disciplines, love-making and sportive wrestling. About four hundred crowded the circular room, costumes and cosmetics as varied as the vehicles in which they’d arrived.
...A woman whose sole garb was a flexible sheath of polished chrome, resembling mirror-glass poured into the mold of a bald and naked Venus ... A young man wearing a mesh to which clung threescore trained hummingbirds and canaries; they fluttered when he sat, twittering and hopping from his rear to another perch . . . An old woman garbed in a billowy gown of liquid film held in place by an electric field, rippling and changing colors at her slightest gesture . . . Men in the skins of real and imaginary animals; and in the skins of other men—a young man wearing the slack but whole and seamless skin of a young woman, the sagging empty head laid back over his shoulders like a cowl, the empty breasts and arms drooping but preserved in their original texture and luster… Costumes from the past—astronauts, legendary rock stars, gangsters, tourists in Miami beach, golden flesh-simulations caked on delicate frames to resemble surfers and muscle-men…
A sprinkling of nudity and subtle, tasteful cloth gowns, plain white robes and somber suits. Some revelers were nude except for cosmetically simulated wounds gaping in symmetrical, arabesque patterns; others, with skin dyed or tattooed, wore only painted replicas of tuxedos and gowns, the dye so skillfully applied it appeared that their
hands and genitals were sewn on over their garments.
Transvestites and transsexuals danced with self-conscious delicacy. Silver-wrought dildos suspended from g-strings, speed butches strutted, accompanied by lovers fitted out in spikes and black leather.
Primitivists crawled on hands and knees through the polychromatic forest of limbs, sniffing hinds and marking out territory. Overhead, a few fey ephemeralists watched listlessly; the ephemeralists permitted nothing to touch them, nothing and no one, until death, except the nutrient blue-white gel that enclosed them in slug-like sarcophagi and the magnetic vibrations of the nulgrav currents in which they were forever suspended.
Ben smiled. He liked parties.
There was just a suggestion, a vague and faint, of distant drone underlying the thudding electro-rock…It was the euphonium, which kept some semblance of order here, and induced something akin to a trance state; the euphonium tones played almost subliminally, a cunning, manipulative muzak underlying the dance music.
Then Ben remembered the euphonium. “Your bafflers,” he whispered to Fuller and friends. They took small plastic black cusps from their pockets and inserted them in their ears. The cusps played tapes of heavy-metal rock ’n’ roll, an electric-music art form extinct for a century; extinct—but the only known musical structure capable of countering the euphonium.
Ben didn’t need the cusps; the discipline he’d learned from Old Thorn screened out the muzak’s dampening pulse. His capacity for hostility was both healthy and intact. The muzak did not dull the mind; only the capacity for conflict.
Ben hadn’t had to explain the euphonium to the bikers, not in any great detail. They had understood it immediately, they were familiar with the twentieth century’s supermarket muzak. Chaldin had developed the euphonium from the muzak principle. Elemental repetitions of subdued rhythms and hypnotically keyed, sanguine chords produced a lulled acquiescence in the listener, especially when it was played at a low volume, as background to other activity, when the tonal arrangement was more likely to penetrate at one’s subconscious levels. Supermarket chains had once utilized muzak to dull shoppers, rendering them suggestible, vulnerable to the claims made for useless, overpriced products.
Chaldin had perfected this system. His euphonium played near-subsonically, subliminally, twenty-four hours a day--more obviously audible in quieter parts of the palace--while the holo-image of his head twitched and leered at the guests meandering through the social games and the contrived, innocuous conflicts which Chaldin’s activity schedules and peripheral media stimuli subtly introduced into the crowds. The euphonium kept his guests malleable and ignorant, while from some distant Denver sanctum he monitored the palace’s events, combining and recombining them into a thousand variations of the social nucleus. The palace was an experiment in large-scale crowd manipulation.
The euphonium could be countered by tough rock ’n’ roll and by one other means. A mind influenced by the euphonium was under a sort of mild but sustained pressure. If Ben could incite even a momentary upset he could use the euphonium to reinforce his disturbance. Alcohol is a depressive drug, but under certain circumstances a drunk, normally slow and passive, tends to become violent; the euphonium’s superficial repression of hostility could, with a certain added impetus, suddenly spur the release of unconscious violence. A quiet drunk becomes a killer. It was this principle Ben now set out to apply.
He waved at the bikers and they began their part in the work. They knew what to do. They set off in separate directions, shoving rudely through the crowd, pushing past people as if they were in a hurry, leaving faint wakes of aggravation which the soothing throbs of the subsonic euphonium immediately quieted. But those brief flashes of annoyance were all Ben required. He sidled swiftly through the crowd, dropping casual but psychologically aimed comments within earshot of those who had been rankled by the bikers. He made his comments from behind, so those who heard didn’t see who’d spoken. He modulated his voice and his pacing into wave-length contours designed to slide between the pacifying pulses of the euphonium.
Within twenty minutes he had the crowd buzzing with mounting irritation.
He was careful to stand in no one place for more than thirty seconds. Keep them moving, keep it churning, get the stopped-up anger loose in its socket and throbbing like an infected tooth, seething like berserker’s blood. He fell into the berserker’s trance, becoming identified with unfettered aggression, visualizing himself as a traveling pocket of violence. And so he became a conductor and a transistor for malevolent energies.
To someone he said: “While Chaldin keeps you here, what occurs with your wife and children?”
Ben moved on and to someone else he suggested: “Why does Chaldin permit you to leave the palace only after, your invitation has expired? Who gave him the right to detain you?”
Ben went on.
“Who is that man to your right staring at? Is it you? Why does he look at you so contemptuously?”
To another Ben whispered, “Why is your wife conversing so avidly with that handsome stranger?”
Years of practice and discipline had refined Ben’s skills at observation, deduction and evaluation, enabling him to make instantaneous and accurate appraisals of any subject so that ninety-seven percent of the time his first comment hit one’s Achilles’ heel. When he set eyes on the short, tubby conceptual artist with his mustache ends lacquered into curlicues that arced up and around his eyes, he knew that all he’d need to say would be: “Why did your mother hate you for masturbating?”
He said it, and the fellow burst into tears and stamped his feet like an aggrieved infant.
Ben went on.
“Why did that odious young man in the leather jacket shove you? Doesn’t he know who you are? Maybe he doesn’t care who you are!”
And Ben went on.
Occasionally he stopped long enough for a twenty-minute conversation with certain key individuals--carefully chosen--whose hostility, though slow to awaken, was extraordinarily volatile, and catching. Such was Lady Hann.
Lady Hann stood before him, five-foot-three and weighing in at two hundred eighty pounds. She may have been female, but Ben wasn’t entirely certain. Her impressive girth was girdled in a pearly white gown embroidered with seashells. Abalones covered her transplanted breasts, an overgrown oyster shell rose over her head from the collar behind; the floor-length gown twinkled with a fabric-gram image tuned to slowly-rolling moonlit surf, and when she turned, her voluminous petticoats crashed about her ankles like white-capped breakers. Above her doughy, excessively made-up face, her scalp was missing, replaced by a mirror-chrome inset which reflected Ben’s face in a squat distortion. Lady Hann’s blue lips worked against one another like small fish, and a dribble of wine fell from the corner of her mouth to be vaporized by her gown’s protective dining shield. Beyond Lady Hann was the door to the hallucinogen saunas, and beyond the saunas were a glass wall, a metal wall, and another glass wall, and beyond that was empty air with a long drop to the nighted canyon floor where pensive lizards watched with eyes of the same silver-green reptilian sheen as Lady Hann’s.
Ben almost grew dizzy at the scale of the place.
A security drone wheeled by, and Ben hoped the drone-cybers’ reliance on the euphonium had made them as lax as his employer had predicted.
To one side of Lady Hann an intent group in simulated animal skins sluggishly danced what they supposed were ancient tribal rites of South American aborigines, their eyes glazed with synthetic yage; to her left the famous artificially joined Fallon-bred Siamese octuplet attempted an incredibly complex yoga posture in which Ben, sliding in and out of the berserker trance as it suited him, saw prodigious possibilities for the generation of irritation. While quietly conversing with Lady Hann (obliquely suggesting that certain of her rivals had given her the ultimate insult by accusing her of dressing in outmoded fashions), he studied the octuplet, astounded by their incongruous grace: The eight of them, nude but tattooed in racing stripes and ancie
nt armed-forces insignias, were joined by smoothly grafted wings of skin and gristle at the waist; four men and four women facing inward, all approximately the same height; their internal organs also joined in part through their flesh bridges. For one to urinate, the other seven had to exert bladder pressure, and when one was stimulated at the groin, the rest also registered the tingle. An orgasm for one was orgasm for all. But it was an arrangement far from idyllic. When one got sick, all fell ill. The operation was irreversible. Therefore, when one died, the others would have to tote the corpse about with them until it rotted off or they sickened by contagion and died themselves. For the Siamese octuplet, ostensibly simple human activities—bathing, eating, swimming, lying down to sleep, boarding a bus––required the skill and total concentration of a dedicated acrobatic troupe. Ben had seen tapes of them group-copulating in a null-gravity room, a sight as lovely as the writhing of a pink sea anemone in the first rush of incoming tides.
It would almost be a shame to disrupt them.
But when Lady Hann was distracted, Ben whispered to one of the octuplets: “The man across from you has discovered a means to reverse, for himself, the operation that joined you, and he plans to force the unit to split up, though several of you will die in the process.” The octuplet Ben whispered to wasn’t consciously aware of the whisper; it was projected into him without his quite being aware of it... Within ten minutes an argument sprang up between the joined eight and Ben heard them begin to slap and claw and shriek. But he had turned away. It was time, things were nearly ready, the pot was close to boiling. The crowd was simmering, the primitivists had begun to howl, shouts of frustration rang out above the quickening din.
“It’s spurious gossip!” declared Lady Hann furiously. “Where is another with a flash-cap like mine?”
“He wears a hat to disguise it when you’re near; they laugh about it behind your back,” whispered Ben earnestly, sympathetically--subvocally.
