Transmaniacon Read Online Free

Los Angeles, left it a flaming ruin…”
    â€œYou 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!”
    â€œBeautiful?” 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.
    â€œThere 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.”
    â€œChicago?” 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…”
    â€œIs San Francisco still—?”
    â€œStill there. Run by the Cult of Dis. A suicide cult.”
    â€œI heard warnings about Houston…”
    â€œGo 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.”
    â€œDolphins . . . rule Houston?” Fuller repeated, struggling to comprehend. “Run that one by me again.”
    â€œYou 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