Read The Heaven Makers for Free Online Page B

out from the shadowy scene and through the web’s projectors with a billowing insistence. Kelexel had to remind himself that this was story artistry, that it wasn’t real… for him. He was experiencing another creature’s fear caught and preserved on sensitive recorders.
    A running figure, a native woman clad in a loose green gown that billowed around her thighs, fled into the focus on the stage. She gasped and panted as she ran. Her bare feet thudded on the lawn and then on the paving of the driveway. Pursuing her came a squat, moon-faced man carrying a sword whose blade like a silvery snaketrack glittered in the light of the streetlamp.
    Terror radiated from the woman. She gasped: “No! Please, dear God, no!”
    Kelexel held his breath. No matter the number of times he had seen this, the act of violence felt new each time. He was beginning to see what Fraffin might have in this story. The sword was lifted high overhead.
    “Cut!”
    The web went blank, no emotion, nothing. It was like being dropped off a cliff. The stage darkened.
    Kelexel realized then the voice had been Fraffin’s. It had come from far down to the right. A momentary rage at Fraffin’s action surged through Kelexel. It required a moment for the Investigator to reorient himself and still he felt frustrated.
    Lights came on revealing the rising wedge of seats converging on the disc of stage. Kelexel blinked, stared around him at the story cadre. He could still feel the menace from them and from that empty stage. What was the threat here? he wondered. He trusted his instincts in this: there was danger in this room. But what was it?
    The cadre sat around him row on row—trainees and off-duty crewmen at the rear, probationers and specialist observers in the center, the editing crew down near the stage. Taken individually, they appeared such ordinary Chem, but Kelexel remembered what he had felt in the dark—the oneness, an organism bent on harming him, confident of its ability to harm him. He could sense it in the Chem empathy, the all-one-life they shared.
    There was an old stillness to the room now. They were waiting for something. Far down near the stage heads bent together in inaudible conversation.
    Am I imagining things? Kelexel wondered. But surely they must suspect me. Why then do they permit me to sit in here and watch them work?
    The work—that violent death.
    Again, Kelexel felt frustration at the way Fraffin had cut off that scene. To have the vision denied him even when he knew how it went… Kelexel shook his head. He felt confused, excited. Once more he swept his gaze over the cadre. They were a gaming board of colors in the giant room, the hue of each uniform coded to its wearer’s duties—red patches of flitter pilots, the motley orange and black of shooting crewmen, green of story continuity, yellow of servicing and repair, purple of acting and white of wardrobe, and here and there the black punctuation marks of Manipulators, subdirectors. Fraffin’s inner circle.
    The group near the stage broke apart. Fraffin emerged, climbed up onto the stage and to the very center, the bare circle of image focus. It was a deliberate move which identified him with the action which had occupied that space only moments before.
    Kelexel bent forward to study the Director. Fraffin was a gaunt little figure down there in his black cloak, a patch of ebony hair above silver skin, the gashed straightedge mouth with its deep upper lip. He was suddenly something from the shadowy marches of a far and perilous realm that no other Chem had ever glimpsed. There was an arresting individuality to him.
    The sunken eyes looked up and searched out Kelexel.
    A chill went through the Investigator then. He sat back, his thoughts boiling with alarm. It was as though Fraffin had spoken to him, saying: “There’s the foolish Investigator! There he is, ensnared in my net, trapped! Safely caught! Oh, certainly caught!”
    Silence gripped the empatheater now like a held