Transmaniacon Read Online Free Page A

as a benevolent bunch. But man, these dolphins are ruthless… Let’s see, what else belongs in this geography lesson? Atlanta is a city of bandits, mostly copter-pirates, an organized hierarchy of thieves preying on trade routes between city-states...”
    â€œNever mind. Christ, I’ve heard enough,” Fuller protested. “How much farther to this palace?”
    Ben turned to Fuller in alarm. “I thought you were flying this thing.”
    Fuller laughed sourly. “Do you imagine he would leave anything like this up to chance? The navigator is pre-programmed. I activate the nulgrav lift, the navigator takes us there, and back when we’re done. No stops between.”
    â€œWho is he? What does he actually intend to do with this exciter thing?”
    â€œDon’t try to pump me, Rackey. Just do your job. It doesn’t matter what his plans are. You can go back to retirement after this job. ’Til he needs you again.” He took a vial out of a jacket pocket, and sniffed something from it, then put it back, zipping the pocket shut. “Why did you retire, anyway?”
    â€œDon’t try to pump me, Fuller,” Ben replied, grinning. But Fuller’s question triggered recollections. He had tried not to think about his reasons for retiring. But the reasons were there, as stark and as ugly as vultures on a telephone line: He was losing control of his talent. He’d find himself practicing incitement, all the skills Old Thorn had taught him, even when he wasn’t being paid. He found himself promoting needless fights, seeding contentions—always operating beneath a skillfully contrived camouflage of dissembling, always apparently innocent. He was doing it simply for enjoyment, to relieve his own boredom. And he lost his few friends and his lovers. It was when Ella left him-- he knew he had to quit. He made other excuses to himself—the mounting risk that he would be discovered—but part of him had known. He had turned his power against his own life.
    Let this be the last time , he said to himself, and it was the closest he’d ever come to a prayer.
    Something glistened among the stars, something growing and pulsing. “The Chaldin Palace,” Ben announced. “Directly ahead.” Like a coral tracery of crystalline arteries, blooming and enfolding itself, contracting, and blooming again, the forever-revel hung uneasily against the impartial backdrop of the blue-black desert sky. “The palace itself,” Ben explained, “is the cylinder inside the tube ways.”
    It was a thousand yards by three hundred of rotating linkage in plasteel, flexibly jointed at every level; it moved like a snake in its lair through intertwining arteries. The tubeways were transparent, luminous plasglass and the whole affair was supported by monopole gravitational modifiers. Commonly called nulgrav.
    Fuller laughed. “That thing…that’s a palace? Looks like a subway going full-speed through see-through tunnels--tied in a knot!”
    The other three had come from aft and were watching over Ben’s shoulder. “Looks like a roller coaster,” the skull-faced man said.
    Roller-coastering through transparent passageways, the palace was driven by air pressure, following a course dictated by the ever-shifting sculpture of the tubeways. It was a flying flexible tower mingled with a dragon shape. The worm Oroboros, Ben thought. “The passengers are protected from the inertia--gotta be, that thing is moving inside the tubes at three hundred miles an hour. Clusters of nulgrav nodes. It’s a real art to place them. Some of the gravitational increase from acceleration is released to give the passengers a sense of up and down, relative to floors.”
    â€œSatan’s fucktool,” Fuller swore. “I hope we get out of it as easily as we get in. He told me how we’ll do it, more or less. But he didn’t explain why it