Transmaniacon Read Online Free Page B

works.”
    â€œSuppose we’ll have to trust our employer,” Ben ventured. “He leaves us no choice. And perhaps having to trust him makes him seem trustworthy, but–”
    â€œI didn’t think you’d try the provocateur stuff on me so quickly, Rackey.” Fuller’s tone was icy as he added, “Cease.”
    Ben shrugged. Can’t blame a guy for trying.
    The palace loomed on them, the auto-navigator drew them in toward the translucent blister extruding from one end. The hangar doors opened—they were sucked in—and it closed behind them.
    Inside: A vast parking lot containing several hundred other vehicles, most of them air-cars with rotors on their bellies; in the fashion of the Denver aristocracy most of the crafts were modeled on flying animals or insects. The fly-car set down between a huge metallic grasshopper in chrome-flake green and silver trim, and a giant bat, with outstretched wings of simulated leather over aluminum bone-struts and genuine brown fur on its bulbous torso. Ahead, someone had parked a huge bee, complete in every detail. Ben made out gigantic yellow and black wasps, four-passenger moths, an open-air touring butterfly, and a sporty swallow, all with their rotors and fuselage so artfully concealed they seemed ready to perk up their various outsize heads and leap into willful flight.
    But only a few of the cars were nulgrav driven. That was reserved for the grossly affluent.
    Overhead: Curved, gray metal roof; a slick green floor below.
    Ben was startled by a voice crackling from their radio . “Identify via reservation code.”
    Fuller cleared his throat and quoted, “‘We’re pain, we’re steel, we’re a plot of knives.’”
    â€œCode acknowledged, invitation valid. Voiceprint checks. Professor Chaldin welcomes you. Please take advantage of the taxi unit waiting outside your vehicle.”
    Followed by the erstwhile bikers, Fuller and Ben climbed from the fly’s thorax, down the ladder, and stepped into the cushioned interior of the spherical taxi.
    The hatch squeezed shut, and Ben was looking into the eyes of the dark woman who’d come with Fuller. The faint limn seeping from the walls invested her pale skin with an unseemly glow. He braced his feet on the resilient floor, hooked his arm through a stability strap, and asked her, “What’s your name?”
    â€œGloria.” Her brown eyes hardened as she examined him critically. “That’s what it was. Gloria. I don’t know what it is anymore. That was my name while I was alive.”
    â€œShut up, Gloria,” the thin man at her side interrupted. “Stop with that bullshit. You’re alive. Frozen ain’t always dead.”
    There was no sense of passage as the unit sped through the tubeways, matched the palace’s velocity and sidled into its hangar as if for an orbital linkup. The trip was over, the curved door rolled back, and they emerged into a hallway. The globe fell away down the hall as if it was dropped into a shaft, and vanished round a corner. They were joined by a drone-cyber: a cylinder on a basketball-sized bearing, polished chrome to its waist where, on a cushion and fed with tubes, shaved and wired through the cranium, rested a man’s severed head. The eyes were open and alert, the rest of the face was dead. It was encased in a glass tube flush with the metal cylinder. Above the glass-cased head, a metal top separated into jointed utility extensions, now folded like an umbrella. Fuller sneered when he saw the drone. Gloria looked faintly annoyed.
    One of the bikers said, “Jeez.”
    The head, cheeks sunken, nose beaked, deep-set green eyes flashing with electricity, rotated on its turntable to examine them.
    Ben was used to the drones: condemned criminals with personality and volition removed, their brains and eyes directing the machinery, their activities programmed. A hospitable voice from the