by John Shirley
The cabin door creaked. Gloria came from behind and slipped her arm around his waist. He turned to embrace her and she asked calmly, “How many people will that mman kill for you, Ben?”
“Only as many as necessary,” he replied, and wished he could stay in Astor.
***
The next afternoon a pod took them to the landing field.
The first part of Trill’s directions were easy enough to follow; They found the yellow wands encircling one of the fields where they passed through the silvery arches to the series of honeycomb bays. It was dinner hour, the hangars were deserted. They found a large cargo car, rather crudely shaped like a robin, most of the red paint worn off its belly.
But there were two such vehicles, identically styled.
“Which one?” Ben wondered aloud.
“He said the bird at the left of the flock. The bird farthest left, I guess.”
“I don’t much care for guesswork, but it’s all we’ve got at present, I suppose.”
“Can’t you hire a craft? Do we have to stowaway?”
“There are no privately-owned ships here. The city owns them all and it won’t rent them out for private jaunts. I don’t know how to operate one of these big birds. So…”
“Can’t steal one either, huh? Okay. Can you get in?”
For answer, Ben strode to the round hatchway securely locked into the vast, curving metal hull arching fifty feet over their heads. From his gray skintight suit he produced five flat metal tools and set to work on the lock of the hatch.
Ten minutes later they had resealed the hatch from within and were crouching among the wired-down crates in the cargo-hold.
It was a very uncomfortable trip.
Ben had hoped to slip from the crates and out of the hold before he and Gloria were noticed by the crew. How they would accomplish this, he had no idea.
But some six hours later when the transport set down, and the seemingly incessant vibrations of the rickety metal vehicle finally stopped, they were hunched down by the metal door to the cargo-hold, Ben with the needler drawn and set on stun, Gloria on the other side, knife in hand.
The door rumbled, creaked, and swung back.
The thing that entered the room was not one of the pilots.
It was a dolphin in a prosthetic case.
It rolled in on rubber wheels supporting a circular metal platform; an aluminum frame upheld a diagonal hammock on which the dolphin rested on its belly, the extra-aquatic pressures of greater gravity somewhat reduced by a few small nulgrav nodes fastened to the hammock straps. A recycling, purified stream of brine water constantly washed the dolphin from small tubes mounted in the aluminum frame. A microphone on a bar below the dolphin’s snout picked up the high-pitched sounds it used to direct the voice-controlled minicomputer that steered and maintained the entire prosthetic set-up.
The dolphin turned, saw them, and squawked something into the microphone below its snout. Its tiny eyes glittered with intelligence and it wriggled in its support hammock with the excitement of its find.
“We picked the wrong ship, Gloria,” said Ben. Unnecessarily.
“Oh really? You mean this isn’t Detroit?" she replied sardonically.
The motor-controlled manslaves who guarded Houston crowded into the hold. There were ten of them, their weapons all aimed at Ben and Gloria.
Ben smiled weakly, inclined his head politely, and dropped his gun.
CHAPTER FIVE
Glass Giants
They were bound from behind, metal shackles at their wrists, taken out of the ship and into elevators. And down. Between ship and elevator they had five minutes to glimpse the sky, and after that, all was underground. And undersea.
On either side marched tall men burnt dark by sun, dressed head to toe in gray-black sharkskin uniforms; the air was humid and sweltering above; in the subaquatic citadel all was air-conditioned. “What now?” Gloria asked in a whisper.
“They’ll probably take us to their temple. It’s on the sea bottom in Houston’s harbor. Invaders to Houston are usually enslaved or made party to the festivities. I don’t know much about them, I’ve never been here. But I know they have a use for human blood.”
“Oh, right. Vampire dolphins.”
“No, it isn’t the dolphins who need the blood, personally. To keep the population under control they’ve instituted a religion. They themselves are the objects of worship.”
“Oh, naturally. Yeah, so they need our blood for communion or something. But what are we––”
She was silenced, by a rifle haft between her shoulder blades. She grimaced but didn’t cry out. Ben took a deep breath and grit his teeth. “We wait for an opportune time to retest the exciter,” he hissed.
They were taken on a three-wheeled car, escorted by six guards and one harnessed dolphin, through a dimly lit, metal-walled tunnel booming with echoes. The dampness of the air, the sudden coolness, indicated to Ben that they were in a tunnel under the sea.
They arrived at a receiving dock. The dolphin spoke to another in a white harness who was in charge of the gateway, and they were admitted into the labyrinthine corridors of the sea-bottom palace.
The palace of the priests of Houston was constructed like a tremendous snowflake composed of hundreds of chambers in symmetrical arrangement around the center dome. They were marched through glass-walled halls where Ben had to restrain himself from holding his breath. The glass tunnel ran across the sea bottom and beyond the immaculately clean glass teemed the sea’s life: squatting, swirling, finning, nosing, swimming things both bright and ominous. The water was fairly shallow here and the encrustations of coral lifted to nose from the sea; sunlight struck down in gyrating shafts.
Ben’s confidence had been summarily dashed at their discovery and capture. A stupid mistake, an avoidable mistake. The wrong ship. Infantile! he derided himself. But now, immersed in the aura of the sea, some of his confidence was returning. This was home base for Ben Rackey. He was doing it all for the sea. To drop the Barrier and free the sea. The sea would know; he felt it, intuitively. The sea would succor its own. The sea would kill for him.
Like sentient, defiant chess-kings they appraised one another. The taller Frater, on the left of where Ben and Gloria sat chained beside the pool, wore a red cocked hat worked with gold lace and faced with the shining Eye of Horus. Already, in ritual preparation, his left eye was blanked by a black eye-patch. His remaining pale blue eye was cold but penetrating. A black hipskirt was his only garment, and a red mandala was painted gaudily on his thin chest. The other Frater, a dwarf, was thirty yards from his opponent at the opposite corner of the great hexagonal pool sunk in the tile floor of the center dome. White tile, polished black stone walls, waters more serenely blue than the Frater’s troubled eye. The dwarf’s white skirt and jet-and-silver braided hat held between them a torso stunted and twisted like a weather-strained oceanside tree. But an intensity in his white bearded face identified him as an adeptus.
Both men were knee-deep in sparkling sea water. Their bare feet were firmly planted amid the copper intaglio designs flooring the pool.
Ben and Gloria were sitting cross-legged, their ankles shackled with silver chains linked to rods that were embedded in the stone tiles. Three dolphins lay in their coolant harnesses on a stone platform, beside the entranceway, observing the proceedings silently. They were flanked by four impassive guards.
Speaking low, Ben said, “Gloria, the big man with the red hair has the keys to our chains. That’s what we need first. But in order to confuse things so I can obtain the keys-- I’ll have to use the exciter. If the guard is out of our reach after I’ve begun the mania transfer, then we’re sunk. So to speak. I’ve got the outlines of a plan—”
“Sure, you’ve always got a plan. Some time it’s going to fall through. Like your plan to get us to Detroit. There has to be an easier way to get there. Listen, you won’t mind, I hope, if I have a hand in this plan? Clue me in on the proceedings here so I know what�
��s going on, and 'maybe I can come up with something.”
Ben chuckled. His confidence was still there and it was still irrational. They were chained to stone on the floor of a temple containing only enemies, thirty feet beneath the sea, in the harbor of a city-state which also contained only enemies. The chances for escape seemed infinitesimally small. Confidence and optimism in such a situation were ludicrous. Ben, however, felt both rising within him with the inexorable certainty of the tides.
But to Gloria he said, “Okay. Listen, the copper intaglios are supposed to be material realizations of the priest’s subconscious landscapes. Sort of like the ancient mandalas. The variations in mounds, swells, declivities, and spirals in the copper relief map represent the unconscious mind of each contender.
The model acts as an amplifier for psychic energies which animate the water images, in much the same way that the resonance from a violin makes its characteristic pattern on loose sand—”
“For a guy who’s never been here you sure know a lot about it…and, what water images?”
“I know only what Old Thorn told me about it. Part of my Professional Irritant training was to memorize the low-down on the various city-state cultures. And the water images—well, you’ll see. They’re manifestations of the Will of the Frater, in a ritual supposedly representing the will of God altering the shape of reality.”
“I think you’re making it all up so you’ll sound worldly,” Gloria muttered.
Ben stared into the water. Shadows. Sepulchral intimations in the ripplings; shadows, accepting and dispelling form.
About the two men facing off in the pool a haze was gathering, a milky glow that glimmered and was gone. The men stood statue still, their eyes locked. Then, a small ripple unfolded from the water between the knees of each Frater, two ripples formed at once, speeding toward one another, as if marking the courses of torpedoes. But there was nothing beneath the clear water that might have set up such a rippling. Nothing there but a few fluttering shadows. The watery beams slowed and stopped, hanging suspended, rising a few inches from the otherwise calm surface. The ends of the vanes began to bubble faintly, and seemed to round off. A node of fountaining water reared up at the prow of each rail, spouting seven feet in the air.
The watery pillars, still connected to the Fraters by unbroken vanes, hovered a yard apart like crystal axes. Then the geysers began to take recognizable shapes, sculpting themselves from the inside out. Horses. They became full-scale war-horses, three dimensional, glossy-blue, and translucent. They peeled back their lips in silent whinnies, their nostrils flaring and steaming, manes of white foam swirling, sprays for tails, hooves of rose-quartz, furious sapphire eyes, muscles rolling like the tides. They champed and reared, their hind hooves planted and levering on the water’s surface as if it were the firmest earth. They struck at each other with bright front hooves and gemlike teeth. Where the hooves made impact the water dimpled but didn’t splash.
In a flail of translucent hooves the horse on Ben’s right was driven back and toppled to its knees. But as the other horse sprang forward it was met by the lance of a rider who had instantaneously fabricated itself out of the newly saddled back of the fallen water image. The liquid-man was a medieval knight, a muscular figure barely visible beneath his bubble-molded suit of armor. His helm concealed his face. The lance propped in his right arm drove through the chest of the other horse. The wounded phantasm twisted, frenzied, throwing its long head back on a neck thick with veins, veins standing out with blood that wasn’t there. Ben could almost hear the horse’s scream. There was no blood, but the horse lost its shape like a pierced water balloon viewed in slow motion, then dissolving into mist.
But now a second knight sprang up, lathed from the twist-devil of the waters that flowed from the collapsing horse. The horse melted, vanished; the armored knight afoot was linked to its Frater by a pipeline of protruding water extending back from his left ankle. He was armed with a circular shield and a half-visible sword that glistened and roiled, and he drove it to the hilt between the ribs of the surviving horse. The horse deflated and its rider fell to one side, dropping his lance which instantly vaporized. The armed knight swung his glassy blade overhead where it "snagged the light and threw wheeling prisms onto the inky walls. He swung for the killing blow, but a third vane had shot out from the drowned knight’s patron and another warrior rose from the water. He leapt from the still surface to intercept the sword of the armed knight with his own. Water versus water. There was no audible sound as the blades struck, but Ben was aware of a ringing shrillness on the bones of his inner ear. The knights silently clashed, even as a fourth vane sent reinforcement to the third warrior, while the remaining warrior forged for himself a blade from the waters. Now four knights contended and flashed hummingbird-wing blades wildly, though not a ripple stirred the pool’s surface.
The muted reverberations rattled the bones of Ben’s head, growing more insistent as the blades met more often. He covered his eyes. But he had seen shadows in the corners of the pool, feeding on the Frater’s shadows, seeming to grow denser, to become angular, to take the form of a human skeleton. There, off in that corner of the pool, welling inkiness gave way to white lace; a white skeleton, constructed of breaker foam, with eye-sockets shining like beacons took shape as Ben stared.
He understood with certainty, now, the part he and Gloria played here. They were prizes. The contest would determine the owner of the captive slaves. And the winning Frater would do with them as he pleased.
The exciter pulsed alive within him, cold and hard and vibrating like an inner blade. He concentrated on the newest water image. The skeleton grew. The skeleton was his own mental projection, amplified by the exciter. His entry into the contest.
The Fraters had tranced to rigidity, their eyes rolled back with only the whites showing, their expressions hard but impassive. But now, sensing the intervention of a third party, their mouths curled in snarls.
The skeleton, Ben’s spectral extension, stepped between the battling knights and seemed to be holding them apart and docile with outstretched arms. The knights paused, their swords lowered, as the specter’s dangling jaw moved up and down in silent query. It was looking at Ben, asking him a question.
Ben was soaked in sweat, the tensions were shaking him from within. But he kept his eyes locked on the glowing lanterns of the skull’s eyes, and he commanded. The skeleton nodded—and collapsed. Its foam-waters fell, splashed, spread outward, as if to infect the knights with its own virulent substance. Ben concentrated, Ben commanded.
Like stiff, clockwork men, moving upstream against the will of the Fraters, the four knights turned their backs to their former opponents. They moved slowly back up the vanes toward their progenitors, swords poised offensively.
Two on one, they reached the holy men and raised refracting blades. The adeptus dwarf made a supreme effort. His face, in its strained etching, matched the pattern of the copper flooring beneath him. The two knights facing him were exploded, spraying showers of droplets down on the assemblage. The dolphins shrilled apprehensively, the guards muttered.
But the taller Frater was frozen in terror of his own creations. The watery knights facing him raised their argent blades—and the blades turned to ice at Ben’s command. The blades fell, the ice edges slashed at the trembling man from either side, meeting in his throat. He gurgled, jerked, and slid into the water, his eyes still staring. His blood colored the water like a tropical sunset.
The dwarf had climbed from the pool and was consulting with the two other Fraters and the dolphins in the viewbox, all chattering excitedly. The dwarf was pointing at Ben insistently. The others found it hard to believe the interference had come from an outlander.
The blood was radiating from the corpse in the pool, forming scarlet aureoles. It colored half the pool with its questing fingers of red. Ben was vaguely aware that someone was firing questions at him.
He ignored them. He was watching the blood. He was concentrating.
Ben nudged Gloria. They stood. Ben glared at the Dwarf and pointed at his chains.
The dwarf shook his head.
Ben pointed at the pool and slowly drew a finger across his throat. He smiled. The dwarf nodded.
The Frater spoke sharply to the guard with the keys. Eyeing Ben suspiciously, the guard came to them and bent, unlocked the chains.
The dwarf waddled near and began, “Now we have freed you, reverse the tide! I know what you have done. We’ve got to stop it now, I cannot—”
“No,” said Ben. “Can’t do it. I don’t see any point in drowning Houston but I can’t stop it now. It’s feeding on long-time smoldering resentments of the city’s subjugated humanity, Frater. You’ve got them well-controlled, but the anger is there, buried within them. And I’ve liberated that anger. Even now—” They looked toward the pool. The stained water from the slain Frater had elongated, stretched wide and formed the outline of a human bloodstream.
The outline rose and absorbed the waters to form a sheath of transparent flesh. The thing seemed to inhale the water from which it sprang into itself, growing. The pool was fed by a channel to the sea outside, so there was no limit to the giant’s size. It would grow until the repressed hostility that fed it was satiated. It will grow and thrive on the darker wellsprings of this city-state’s collective unconscious, Ben thought. It will grow and grow until—
But Gloria was dragging Ben backwards by the arm. He resisted, involuntarily fascinated by the glassy behemoth. “C’mon, asshole, we got to beat it!” Gloria shouted at him, wrenching him back. Ben gazed in admiration at his creation. It’s not mine any longer, he thought suddenly. There was a crest on its smooth reddish cranium, gills where its nose should be, a blue-white glow instead of eyes, flat legs without feet. It looked down at them from a hundred eighty feet, already hunched against the lofty ceiling of the crystal dome which emerged from the surface of the sea fifty feet out of the waters.
