Transmaniacon Read Online Free PDF

multimedia exposition, the orgy rooms, the autoerotic solitude booths, and the restroom. Then the drone rolled away to other duties and the pasty face within jerked slightly with inertia as it wheeled sharply to the right.
    The huge ballroom was a latitudinal cross-section of the encompassing cylinder, like the interior of a tin can with its inhabitants, the proverbial can of worms, standing on the curved walls at right angles to what would be the bottom of a can. Consequently, the crowd was ranked in a complete circle up what seemed to be the walls to the ceiling so that, from a distance, they looked like dangling stalactites. They were held topsy-turvy to one another by nulgrav and centrifugal force in an unseemly cooperation.
    Over it all Chaldin’s face stared, giggling, from the two flat ends of the tube, as though to survey everything below; he was slowly turning, one head one way, one the other, so sometimes the giant holo busts were upside down from one another.
    The leather-jacketed Transmaniacs did not arouse sustained interest. They were given chilly glances, mumbled amenities. Then the party-goers turned back to their conversations and debates, gambling and meditative self-disciplines, love-making and sportive wrestling. About four hundred crowded the circular room, costumes and cosmetics as varied as the vehicles in which they’d arrived.
    ...A woman whose sole garb was a flexible sheath of polished chrome, resembling mirror-glass poured into the mold of a bald and naked Venus ... A young man wearing a mesh to which clung threescore trained hummingbirds and canaries; they fluttered when he sat, twittering and hopping from his rear to another perch . . . An old woman garbed in a billowy gown of liquid film held in place by an electric field, rippling and changing colors at her slightest gesture . . . Men in the skins of real and imaginary animals; and in the skins of other men—a young man wearing the slack but whole and seamless skin of a young woman, the sagging empty head laid back over his shoulders like a cowl, the empty breasts and arms drooping but preserved in their original texture and luster… Costumes from the past—astronauts, legendary rock stars, gangsters, tourists in Miami beach, golden flesh-simulations caked on delicate frames to resemble surfers and muscle-men…
    A sprinkling of nudity and subtle, tasteful cloth gowns, plain white robes and somber suits. Some revelers were nude except for cosmetically simulated wounds gaping in symmetrical, arabesque patterns; others, with skin dyed or tattooed, wore only painted replicas of tuxedos and gowns, the dye so skillfully applied it appeared that their hands and genitals were sewn on over their garments.
    Transvestites and transsexuals danced with self-conscious delicacy. Silver-wrought dildos suspended from g-strings, speed butches strutted, accompanied by lovers fitted out in spikes and black leather.
    Primitivists crawled on hands and knees through the polychromatic forest of limbs, sniffing hinds and marking out territory. Overhead, a few fey ephemeralists watched listlessly; the ephemeralists permitted nothing to touch them, nothing and no one, until death, except the nutrient blue-white gel that enclosed them in slug-like sarcophagi and the magnetic vibrations of the nulgrav currents in which they were forever suspended.
    Ben smiled. He liked parties.
    There was just a suggestion, a vague and faint, of distant drone underlying the thudding electro-rock…It was the euphonium, which kept some semblance of order here, and induced something akin to a trance state; the euphonium tones played almost subliminally, a cunning, manipulative muzak underlying the dance music.
    Then Ben remembered the euphonium. “Your bafflers,” he whispered to Fuller and friends. They took small plastic black cusps from their pockets and inserted them in their ears. The cusps played tapes of heavy-metal rock ’n’ roll, an