Transmaniacon by John Shirley Read Free Book Online

severed ends—four people flesh-linked here and four there—snapped back and forth in wild disorientation, slipping on their own blood, falling. “Away! Off me!” screamed a blonde woman with a bloody nose and a black eye as she tore her grafted side free of the man beside her and began the tiresome business of bleeding to death in a writhing heap on the self-cleaning perma-polish floor.
    Two security drones were on to them, closing in twenty feet behind.
    Ben took a last look around. A primitivist man, his implanted wolf-fur matted with sweat, had somehow caught hold of a passing ephemeralist, punctured her protective gel-bubble, and now was savaging her throat with his teeth; the man clothed in living birds was flailing on his back at the birds which had turned on him and were pecking at his eyes; a tall, skeletal transvestite with a blond wig, violet eye shadow, silver lip gloss and a pin-curled blond beard was smothering the young man wearing the skin of a young girl—smothering him with the breasts of the skin.
    Ben leapt over a writhing octuplet duo and dodged into the exit. His companions crowded after him, the door shut, the chamber sank. The door opened and Ben crouched with needler ready. But the hall was empty except for a waiting taxi-globe. He climbed inside the taxi, and when the others had joined him they were whisked down the tunnel and out of the palace, into the glass tubeway. A sense of weightlessness, then crushing gravity, then normal gravity—and a bump. They were back in the hangar. They climbed out of the globe and into their fly-car.
    Fuller awakened the nulgrav generator and the fly rose upward, shot over the other grotesque vehicles, and sped straight for a blank metal wall. Ben was about to grab the control stick when wall exploded outward in splintered fragments and they were propelled out into the desert night.
    Ben sank back into his seat and took a dozen deep breaths; he distributed placidity to his extremities, slowed his pulse, and swallowed.
    â€œJeezis,” the skull-faced man said. Ben glanced at him; the man’s makeup was sweat-smeared and had dripped into a comical distortion that gave him the appearance of a half-rotted jack-o’-lantern.
    Gloria crouched beside Ben, staring wearily into the stars, the landscape rushing by beneath them like a moonlit waterfall. Ben noticed she was tapping her fingers and swaying, and he said, leaning close to her so she could hear him, “You can take the rock ’n’ roll cusps out now.” She and the others removed the cusps and tucked them into their pockets.
    â€œWhat song was it?” Ben asked, mostly for an excuse to speak to her. “That last one?”
    â€œ Sympathy for The Devil, ” she replied, stretching. “By the Rolling Stones.”
    â€œI’m not much up on the history of music. Never heard of them.”
    She shrugged and went to lie down in the rear cabin.
    Ben churned with suspicions. Trying to sound indifferent, he asked, “How did our friend set up the escape route, Fuller? That taxi--if he could penetrate the place to get us out of there like that why didn’t he just steal the damn thing himself?”
    Fuller ignored the question. “Did you get it?”
    Ben hesitated. Then he patted the bulge at his belt. “Yes.” He said at last. “They’re going to follow us, you know.”
    â€œNo, they won’t.” Fuller said with funereal serenity.
    Ben gazed at him, perplexed.
    And then he understood.
    Comprehension became apprehension. He looked over his shoulder, out a small side-window, at the palace hanging in the air behind them like a magnified atom. From here the corruscating involution was luminous violet and the red spiral marking the palace itself, rocketing within the tubeways, was turning a corner, caroming into a straight stretch, cutting another corner, slicing straight up like a roller coaster peaking its