Transmaniacon Read Free Page A

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.
    â€œI 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.
    â€œHow long you been awake?” Ben asked, settling into the starboard of the two seats and strapping himself in.
    â€œA 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