K Jeter: Farewell Horizontal

VERY WELL. Sniffy, feelings wounded. REQUEST?

He hesitated. For a moment he considered not calling anyone up; just not saying anything about the angels at all. His little secret, a private treasure. That would be something. Something nobody had except me. He nodded, playing back the tape inside his head corresponding to the one inside the camera. So pretty; both of them, but especially the female angel. Slender as a wire. A soft wire. And smiling as she’d drifted away. That smile was locked away, coded into the molecules inside the camera. And in my brain – burned right into the neural fibers. As if soft, dreaming smiles could burn.

It’d be a kick: angel footage rare, of any kind. You had to get out into these wastewall areas of the building’s surface to have a chance of spotting them at all, and just by chance. Elusive; a gas angel expedition, just for that purpose, a ridiculous notion.

Except maybe they hang out here, in this zone. Axxter rubbed his chin, thinking. Like a nest, or something. The great angel rookery? Who knows? Surely they don’t give birth in the air as well? How do they, then? He made a mental note to log the wall coordinates, downwall by left-around, so he could find the place again. Some other time.

Angel stuff being rare also made it valuable, however. Beyond the mere smile. That decided the issue. “Get me Registry.”

After he’d zipped the footage from his archive to Reg and got a File Check, Clear & Confirmed Ownership – thank God that much service came free – he asked if anything else had come in lately under the heading Angels, Gas, Coitus (Real Time). For all he knew, whole orgies had been taking place in the skies around the building’s morningside.

Two cents pinged off the meter panel in the corner of his sight, Registry’s charge for the inquiry. The sight/sound made him wince.

NOTHING, JACK. TOTAL NADA. The Registry interface had a flip personality. YOU MIGHT TRY UNDER HISTORICAL AND/OR POETRY. “I WANDERED LONELY AS A -”

Another eyeflick, to DISCONNECT. He didn’t want to get tagged for another charge. Not for ancient nonsense, some pre-War file dredged out of Registry’s deep vaults. “Screw that.”

PARDON?

“Get me, um… get me Lenny Red.” By contract, Axxter should have called his agent Brevis. But Brevis took a ten-percenter bite; and any idiot working out of a top-level office could peddle hot angel love stuff. I could do it, from here – Axxter knew Ask & Receive had a call out, all angel footage bought top-price. But Ask & Receive also listed their stringers in a public file; if Brevis found out – and he would – he’d take the whole wad paid, not just ten percent. Contractual penalty. So Lenny’s usual five made him a bargain.

SHIELD LINE?

“Naw, don’t bother.” No sense in paying the extra – he had his Reg confirm. “Just call him straight in.”

YOU’RE THE BOSS.

The cranky wire quavered Lenny’s face. “Howdy, Ny.”

He squinted at the image overlaid in his sight. Lenny’s forehead smeared to the left; his mouth was a rippling loop. This far downwall, you took what you could get. “Got something for you.”

“Oh?” Oh? – the line echoed as well. “Like what?” Kwut?

“Angels.”

A distorted eyebrow lifted like an insect leg at the edge of the film “Really.” Lee-ee .

“Catch this.” Axxter engineered a smug smile into his own face. “ Angels having sex .”

“Yeah?” No longer bored; Lenny’s hand came into view, tapping a control panel at the edge of his terminal. His face pulled together, brow stacked on top where it should be. It hadn’t been distance/transmit problems at all – he’d taken Axxter’s call through some low-rate line filter. The little shit – Axxter smiled and ate his resentment. Only greed, the push to cover his operating nut, kept him from disconnecting over an insult like that.

“Yeah.” The word tasted good, with its juice of money. “Fresh this morning. I thought of you first, Lenny.”

“Flattered.” Lenny, in sharp focus now, tried to reassemble his dealer’s cool. “I… might … be able to help you out. Possibly.”

“Cut the crap.” Not screwing me on this one. Axxter blinked on PLAYBACK from his archive. “You’re gonna love it.”

Registry’s confirm number shadowed miniscule across the bottom of the image in his eye’s tiny editing segment; Axxter shifted his gaze back to center and caught the small sign of disappointment the Reg number produced on Lenny’s face as he watched the tape on his own terminal. Bastards like him made such precautions necessary.

They watched in silence, image on wire linking them through the building’s vast corpus, thread in subcutaneous mesh. Even in miniature, at the corner of his eye, the entwined figures caught him Floating in their rectangle of recorded sky. Axxter’s heart drained, became hollow, as he gazed. I shouldn’t even have kept it for myself. Mercantile victory soured on his tongue. The angel faces, small dots at this resolution; he couldn’t see the female’s trembling lashes, but remembered them. I should’ve let them go and drift away, off-tape. Just in memory. Need the cash, though. Shit.

He snapped out of his reverie when the image suddenly jittered ahead in time, the taped angels comically flailing and whirling in flat air. Lenny, on-line to the archive, fast-forwarded through the tape, catching a few bits in real time, then running ahead again. Axxter bit his lip. This bastard’s got no soul at all.

End of tape; the square of empty sky vanished as Lenny’s face, at center, came back up. He nodded, not even trying to hide how impressed. “Not bad.”

“ Unique .” Axxter smiled around the bone in his throat. Sell, you sonuvabitch; the advice he’d given himself a million times. Be a bastard and eat. “The word is unique .”

“Well…” Lenny’s hand crawled into view and waggled on edge. “There was that Opt Cooder find a few years back. Along the same lines.”

“What? Your ass.” Axxter shook his head in disbelief. “The one Cooder found was dead .”

“Yeah, but Ask & Receive got wild accessing off it. Death tones are always big in the horizontal levels. That tape’s still bringing in money for them.”

True enough; Axxter knew. He’d been on the horizontal himself, saving up his grubstake, when the Cooder tape had gone on market. And he had bought it, too. First the minimum charge for one-time access; then, when he hadn’t been able to get the image of the dead angels out of his mind, paying for permanent zip into personal archive. Through the long months – Christ, years if totaled – of working in the piss-factory types of jobs he could get without signing a lifer contract, and the nights on end of honing his would-be graffex skills, sketching out ideas for warrior decs and military ikons, building up a working archive, buying little scraps of biofoil to practice implanting; sweating every nickel toward the used freelancer gear he’d locked onto – unable to afford superstition about residual bad luck from the guy who’d gone bust running it before – and worrying that some other young hopeful would snatch it up before his account reached the precisely calculated level where he could chance going vertical… through all of that, he remembered watching the Opt Cooder tape of the famous dead gas angel. Watching, thinking, and waiting. Or waiting with no thought at all. Kept me going; Axxter nodded to himself. Maybe because, even dead, the angel had represented a certain freedom. A creature of the air, neither horizontal nor vertical. Cooder, top-rank wanderer that he had been, had lucked out in that find: no sign of violence on the angel’s body. Anyone watching the tape might have thought the female angel was sleeping, until the reverse zoom from her tranquil face revealed the torn and deflated membrane, no longer a sphere behind her shoulders. She had lain swathed in the billowing folds, which when taut with blood-rendered gases would have borne her aloft. Caught by that delicate tissue alone, she would never have remained bound to Cylinder’s wall; as Cooder’s camera had watched, another translucent scrap had torn loose in the wind and fluttered away. But one of the dead hands had snagged in a transit cable loop; Cooder’s lens had moved in on the dried trickle of blood running down from her wrist under the gray metal, just enough to dispel the mystery of how the nude form had come to this rest. If closing his eyes would have blanked out Lenny’s face, Axxter could have replayed it, watched it all over again from memory; it lay parallel and so close to this morning’s living, mating angels that the images had bled into each other, one section of time superimposed over another. As if the lovers had coupled all unconscious of the corpse framed in the same shot with them, tangled in the building’s cables, diagonal from the open air in which they turned and clasped.