K Jeter - Farewell Horizontal

“Way to go, ace! Yah! Yah!” The line ghost babbled happily.

“Shut up.” He gritted his teeth – or tried to; the carrier-image fed back no corresponding pressure inside the skull.

The face swung in a short arc as Axxter strode on. “You really told her! It was great!” The rolling eyes filled with delight and admiration.

“Yeah – great.” Never again. He shook the image’s head. Absolutely promise yourself – no more of this shit.

“I can get her for you! Fix her little red wagon but good! ” The face on Axxter’s arm glowed, feverish in its excitement. “Come on – you and me – it’ll be a gas!”

“Goddamn it. Get off me.” He scrabbled at the face with the fingernails of his other hand. A pain signal traveled up the carrier-image’s arm, triggered by the self-inflicted violation.

“You’re no fun.” The face, sulky now, slid off and wavered in space. The grating voice called from behind him: “You stink, and your edges are all blurry… and… and…”

Alone with his own thoughts at last, and the anger still simmering in his guts. Or whatever’s in that place when you’re on hollow time; nothing, I guess. Nothing at all. Here or back in the flesh.

He looked up and saw himself.

A mirror, he thought at first. Right in the middle of the goddamn corridor. But different, he realized; as if it were made of some finer glass that had drawn the fuzzy low-resolution image into sharper focus, the outline razor-edged where it stood facing him. As he stared at it, the image turned its head, leaning a three-quarter profile toward him. Smiling; the centers of its eyes dark, nothing behind.

Ny – It lifted its hand toward him.

I – He heard the echo at his ear. The corridor filled with cold, and he felt afraid. “Okay! HoloDays!” He tilted his face up to the ceiling and shouted, all the while aware of the mirror-image’s hand reaching on a line level with his chest. The odd notion struck him that the more solid image might be able to reach right inside his insubstantial one, to pluck out some luminous fiber that was his heart. “That’s it – terminate the call.”

Don’t go -

O - “Did you hear me?” An edge of panic filtered into his voice.

The corridor disappeared. On his back, lying in the sling out on the wall, he looked up at the agency’s smiling clock centered in the terminal. He pulled himself upright, his spine unkinking with little stabs at each vertebra.

The clock face swam ahead of him, hanging in the dark night. A woman’s voice, a different one, sounded. “We hope you enjoyed your time with us. And that we may again be of service to you in meeting all your recreational needs. Remember: absence may make hearts grow fonder, but with HoloDays -”

“Cut it.” Axxter rubbed his brow; the time spent walking around in the carrier-image had left him hung over, as it had the last time and every time before.

Stiffly: “Will there be anything else?”

He gazed at the totaled charges in the corner of the terminal, and beyond them to the Small Moon in the distance off the building, relaying the signal from the transceiver. Away from the spooky mirror-image – whatever the hell that had been; more line-ghost shit, he supposed; but genuinely spookier – and back out here in his cheerless bivouac, the fear had dissipated. But not the anger; that remained, a dull rock under his breastbone.

That’s a fuck of a lot to pay for no fun at all. As he watched, the total went up another few cents, for keeping the HoloDays agency waiting on the line. A lot, just to have walked into more of that stupid Ree’s shit.

He brooded a moment longer before speaking. “Yeah, there’s something more.” He rubbed his hands across his knees. “First off, I want a guarded line this time…”

† † †

Guyer looked up from the book in her hands when he appeared. “That’s sweet.” Smiling. “You came all this way.”

HoloDays had put his image floating in space, a meter away from the wall. He reached out and grasped the edge of her sling. Somewhere farther away on the vertical metal, the gentle snuffling sounds of her grazing motorcycle came sharp and distinct to his synthed ear.

“I just wanted to see you again.”

She kept her finger in the book to mark her place. “Must’ve cost you.”

He let the carrier-image shrug for him. “They put on a surcharge for having Ask & Receive figure out your location. That’s all.”

The smile saddened. “I don’t usually do anything except real flesh, Ny. Just one of my little preferences. If that’s what you came here for.” She laid the book down on a pillow at the sling’s narrow end. “You know there’s places you could go for that; I could give you some recommendations.”

He shook his head. “No; it’s not important. But… if you wanted to give it a try… I paid for the complete sensory package. With on-line enhancements. I could respond very well.”

Her eyes widened a bit. “Really? You must be feeling pretty flush.”

Tilting the image’s head back, he looked up the dark height of the building, all the way to the distant top, the same black as the surrounding night. “No -” He looked back at her. “No, I just don’t give a shit.”

“Well… in that case…” Guyer reached out and brushed aside his shirt, a film of smoke over his skin. “It’ll cost you a little bit more still. Just on principle, you know.”

“Sure.” He closed his eyes. Her hand felt like fire as it moved down his ribs. “I understand everything.”

† † †

He laid his head on her breast. Lying together in the sling; she held him in her arms, a circle carefully held around the image. “I saw myself.” He tilted his face to look up at her. “Before. Before I came here.”

She made a motion to stroke his hair, the dark strands unreachable beneath her fingertips. “Really?”

“It was like a mirror. Only it moved when I didn’t.”

He could almost feel her stiffen against him. “Ny -” Her gaze was level and no longer playful. “If you see something like that again – and if it says anything to you – don’t listen. Okay? Just don’t. I know about these things.”

The carrier-image lifted up onto its elbows. “What would it say to me? It’s just a ghost on the line.”

With one hand, she reached and pulled a blanket over herself. “Some ghosts are different from others.” She smoothed the blanket across her legs. “They all want to play .” A sour word when she spoke it. “Just in different ways sometimes.”

He said nothing, watching her brush her tangled hair back from the side of her face.

“You’d better go, Ny. This is costing you money.”

He nodded. “What do I owe you?”

“Forget it. I’ll put it on your account; settle up the next time.” She lay back against the pillow and shut her eyes.

Back in his own flesh, he called up his bank account. The night’s little excursions had wiped out his small profits from selling the tapes to Ask & Receive, the angels and the spooky ruins. Under the silver glow of the Small Moon, he looked across Cylinder’s wall to the jagged silhouettes of the ruin zone’s torn metal. Solid black against black now, all the heat had died away.

A dead angel. Another, different dead angel; for a moment Axxter thought that the old Opt Cooder tape, the one he’d watched so often as a kid on the horizontal, had somehow slid from some interior archive and across his vision. He brought the Norton to a halt and gazed down over the handlebars at the sight below. The confused overlay between taped past and bleeding present faded as the delicate corpse lay tangled against the transit cable on which his motorcycle’s wheel had locked.