Read Online Transmaniacon by John Shirley - Free Book Online Page A

that’s why he built the palance in the first place...” He sipped some coffee. It tasted real; it felt real. Close enough. “Suppose he’s been planning a move, for a long time--a campaign to extend his control to every city within the Barrier. Certain people would put up resistance along the way. If those people were lured to the forever-revel and disposed of, then the path is almost cleared for him. Chances are he monitored our part in its destruction, had it transmitted to his lab, and he keeps it as a record. If the local bosses challenge him, he can show them the footage--we go down, not him. He’s safe, his enemies are out of the way. But he put the exciter in my hands. Maybe it’s a dummy. Why should he risk the real thing? Maybe there’s no such machine, maybe it was a story he told me to get me involved with him.” He shook his head. “Thinking about it makes me bone-tired. Guest rooms are down the hall there--I’m gonna use one.”
    Ben went to the guest-room and lay down on the bare mattress, in the adobe coolness. Almost instantly, he was asleep.
    He awakened suddenly. Someone was sitting on the bed. He rolled over. Gloria was there, legs crossed, her elbows propped on a knee, her chin cupped in a palm. She twitched the end of her left foot and swayed to some impatient inner rhythm as she asked, “What did Lenny mean about you deserving to lose her--and your friends?”
    Ben lay back, one arm over his eyes, studying the swirling lights under his eyelids. “I’ve been using my ability…indiscriminately. When there was no need to disrupt things. Without even thinking. I don’t know why. Maybe boredom. Maybe the reason I started the whole thing in the first place took me over--just anger. I was always kind of angry at people...” He broke off, amazed that he’d shared that with her. He cleared his throat. “I don’t know. But...I pretended someone was interested in the lover of a close friend of mine. I spread some rumors, knowing that my…friend was in a critical period. I knew it and played on it, and a fight started. He challenged the man I had led him to believe was after his wife. One of them died that night, and only when he fell onto the floor with the hole in his chest. And Ella left me...”
    He trailed off, again wondering why he was unburdening himself to this woman. Ordinarily he refused to speak freely about himself. He hadn’t confided in Ella about his desire to sail the seas until he’d known her for three years. Maybe it was because Gloria belonged to another era and couldn’t judge him according to the rules of this time. Or maybe because she was so uncaring, so dispassionate, so uncritical. She had, after all, complacently accepted association with Fuller the Slayer.
    â€œThere’s something I’d better tell you,” the woman said.
    He lowered his arm from his eyes and looked at her.
    In the shadows she looked like a half-starved little girl. Her eyes were hollow, her mouth assumed the laxity of despair.
    â€œFuller isn’t dead.” said Gloria.
    Ben sat bolt upright. “I shot him from six inches away!”
    â€œHe musta been moving some. You musta just grazed him. Because it was only a scratch on the side of his head. After I dragged him out of the fly-car he opened his eyes and looked at me. I ran back to the fly-car and we took off.”
    â€œWhy didn’t you tell me?” Even in his own ears Ben’s voice was cold as metal. He realized he was gripping one of her arms. There was pain in her moist eyes. He let go.
    Rubbing her bicep and regarding him with a cryptic half-smile she said, “I didn’t care if he was alive. He never did nothing to me. During the trial he tried to tell ’em I didn’t kill anybody. I’m in no hurry to see him dead.” She made a gesture of dismissal with her limp and delicate fingers.
    Shakily, Ben stood and