Transmaniacon Read Online Free PDF Page B

electric-music art form extinct for a century; extinct—but the only known musical structure capable of countering the euphonium.
    Ben didn’t need the cusps; the discipline he’d learned from Old Thorn screened out the muzak’s dampening pulse. His capacity for hostility was both healthy and intact. The muzak did not dull the mind; only the capacity for conflict.
    Ben hadn’t had to explain the euphonium to the bikers, not in any great detail. They had understood it immediately, they were familiar with the twentieth century’s supermarket muzak. Chaldin had developed the euphonium from the muzak principle. Elemental repetitions of subdued rhythms and hypnotically keyed, sanguine chords produced a lulled acquiescence in the listener, especially when it was played at a low volume, as background to other activity, when the tonal arrangement was more likely to penetrate at one’s subconscious levels. Supermarket chains had once utilized muzak to dull shoppers, rendering them suggestible, vulnerable to the claims made for useless, overpriced products.
    Chaldin had perfected this system. His euphonium played near-subsonically, subliminally, twenty-four hours a day--more obviously audible in quieter parts of the palace--while the holo-image of his head twitched and leered at the guests meandering through the social games and the contrived, innocuous conflicts which Chaldin’s activity schedules and peripheral media stimuli subtly introduced into the crowds. The euphonium kept his guests malleable and ignorant, while from some distant Denver sanctum he monitored the palace’s events, combining and recombining them into a thousand variations of the social nucleus. The palace was an experiment in large-scale crowd manipulation.
    The euphonium could be countered by tough rock ’n’ roll and by one other means. A mind influenced by the euphonium was under a sort of mild but sustained pressure. If Ben could incite even a momentary upset he could use the euphonium to reinforce his disturbance. Alcohol is a depressive drug, but under certain circumstances a drunk, normally slow and passive, tends to become violent; the euphonium’s superficial repression of hostility could, with a certain added impetus, suddenly spur the release of unconscious violence. A quiet drunk becomes a killer. It was this principle Ben now set out to apply.
    He waved at the bikers and they began their part in the work. They knew what to do. They set off in separate directions, shoving rudely through the crowd, pushing past people as if they were in a hurry, leaving faint wakes of aggravation which the soothing throbs of the subsonic euphonium immediately quieted. But those brief flashes of annoyance were all Ben required. He sidled swiftly through the crowd, dropping casual but psychologically aimed comments within earshot of those who had been rankled by the bikers. He made his comments from behind, so those who heard didn’t see who’d spoken. He modulated his voice and his pacing into wave-length contours designed to slide between the pacifying pulses of the euphonium.
    Within twenty minutes he had the crowd buzzing with mounting irritation.
    He was careful to stand in no one place for more than thirty seconds. Keep them moving, keep it churning, get the stopped-up anger loose in its socket and throbbing like an infected tooth, seething like berserker’s blood. He fell into the berserker’s trance, becoming identified with unfettered aggression, visualizing himself as a traveling pocket of violence. And so he became a conductor and a transistor for malevolent energies.
    To someone he said: “While Chaldin keeps you here, what occurs with your wife and children?”
    Ben moved on and to someone else he suggested: “Why does Chaldin permit you to leave the palace only after, your invitation has expired? Who gave him the right to detain you?”
    Ben went on.
    â€œWho is that man to your