K Jeter - Farewell Horizontal

“No, no; that’s all right.” The general smiled and patted his knee. “I’m sure you’ve been working very hard.”

“Well… always like to do a good job.” Axxter felt the recorder’s metal grow slick with the sweat from his palms. The general had eaten up all the space in the tent somehow, except for the little bit between them. And that he could gulp down in one swallow.

“A good job… yes…” The general’s face drew tight, skin becoming angles of chiseled stone. Eyes deep in the sun-wrinkled crevices. “But more than that. A, a great job. I know – you can do it.”

Axxter shrugged, as though the skin around his shoulders had gotten uncomfortably tight. “Well… thanks. Give it my best.” He pulled back – slowly – from the other, his spine pushing against the tent fabric.

The two little points followed him. “The whole history of the tribe – that’s what you have to catch.” The general nodded, sinking deeper into his brooding. “On one man.” He stroked the broad curve of the old warrior’s breastplate. “The living embodiment of… of a saga! ” The points brightened into sparks.

The guy was sure getting worked up about this deal. Axxter couldn’t figure what the big song-and-dance was for. These historical friezes were a regular cliché in the graffex industry. Every tribe had one, right down to the couple of louts who had nothing more to brag about than a successful shoplifting expedition in the stalls over in Linear Fair. Saga, my ass. He didn’t say it out loud – not with the general in front of him, all worked up – but this was the kind of job that really got on a graffex’s tits. Lots of busy little details to get down, you had to listen – Christ knows – to one grisly war story after another. You usually had about fifty different top brass sticking their noses in, each of them wanting some particularly flattering exploit embroidered into the friggin’ saga … Though Cripplemaker had saved him from that last hassle; it seemed to be a one-man project with him.

Maybe that was why the big leaning-over-my-shoulder number, the pep-talk rerun. The man’s an enthusiast – I can deal with that. Better that than starving out on the wall.

Axxter felt the tent rubbing against the back of his head. “I think… you’ll like it.”

The general smiled. “I’m looking forward to it. At the banquet – are you going to have it done in time?”

The usual push. The customer is always antsy. “No sweat.” If the senile old bastard snoring away between them could be woken up, and the last few good bits tapped out of him. And that was just for color, the little personal bits, frosting on the cake. He’d rung up Ask & Receive days ago, when Cripplemaker had first given him the frieze assignment, and gotten a full historical rundown on the Havoc Mass. On the sly. Clients usually didn’t want you going outside, getting a losses-and-all account, and working from that. Their own PR line was all ups. “It’ll be ready. You don’t have a thing to worry about.” He patted the sleeping warrior’s breastplate, sounding a dull heartbeat from the blank biofoil. No worries at all: he’d have to push it to get it all implanted, but he’d already sketched out the major panels, programmed the routines.

The general straightened up from his crouch, reaching behind himself for the tent flap. “Keep it up.” Smile wider, and a wink that crinkled his face like a finger poked in an eye-socket. The black skulking getup slid out and looped away on the nearest hold.

Whatever that was all about – Axxter rubbed the side of his face, wondering. But not much. He was too tired, the grit under his eyelids getting sharper edges, to worry about it.

The old warrior was still snoring, scratching with one of his grizzled paws at his breastplate. He’d managed to peel up the edge of the biofoil; a hairline trickle of red oozed out from beneath. Axxter had stripped off the old foil from the armor, implanted in all fresh; you could recycle old foil, often did if you had a standing contract, blanking out the old stuff or just coding up new animation signals if the basic patterns were close enough to what you wanted to do. Not for a job like this, though. It smacked of working on the cheap, and the fine details tended to come out blurry. Plus – the big trouble – the coding for the warrior’s old foil was still being carried by the Small Moon Consortium as a DeathPix account, keyed to this locus.

They might not know that the old foil had been stripped off, wadded up, and tossed downwall – but if he’d been stupid enough to try and contract for an override signal, that would’ve been a dead tip-off that he was horning in on one of their clients. At this stage, he couldn’t be sure of the Mass protecting him from DeathPix retaliating for that kind of action. But what they didn’t know… Beyond that, overrides just cost too damn much money; the Small Moon Consortium threw on a prohibitive fee schedule for that sort of thing, to discourage graffices from sabotaging each other’s work and generally giving the industry a bad name.

The old warrior snuffled as Axxter prodded him in the shoulder. The aged baby’s-face contorted against the intrusion of the world outside its delicious remembering. “Hey. Come on. Wake up.” Realizing how tired he was had made Axxter nerveless. The aged bear didn’t scare him now; he just wanted to get the job done.

The warrior’s fingers had smeared the blood across his leather-sheathed ribs. He’d complained – fussily, like a child – that the new foil ‘tickled’; Axxter knew that whatever nerve endings the old boy had left were buried so far down under armor and scar tissue that he couldn’t feel a thing.

Have to reimplant it. Put a bandage or something over it so the old fool couldn’t go picking at it again. He reached into the corner of the tent for his toolkit. As long as the subject was relatively still, sleeping away…

As Axxter bent over his work, the warrior opened his yellow-and-red eyes, beard splaying over his chest as he lifted his head to watch.

“So that’s what happened.” The warrior nodded. “Just like that. I was there, so you can believe it.”

“You bet.” He watched the tip of the soldering gun tracing the edge of the foil. Great; one less stupid anecdote to listen to . The old guy must have been dreaming, talking inside the walls of his head. “That was great.”

He worked on as the warrior closed his eyes and smiled.

† † †

When he called up the Small Moon Consortium and blinked on GRAFFEX SERVICES, then ACCOUNTS (NEW) (CONTINUING), he got his favorite order desk. Somewhere up on the toplevel, where the Consortium had its offices across a thoroughfare from their Wire Syndicate competition, somewhere a body housed that coarse-sand, laughing voice. Axxter took it as a sign of the high tide his luck was running at to hear it now.

“Ny – how ya been?” She coughed, the rasp right in his ear. “Haven’t heard from you in ages. Not since, um…” She was looking up his account, he knew. “Jeez, it’s been a coupla months.”

“Had a slack period.” He shrugged, though she couldn’t see him “You know how it goes.”

“You poor saps.” Her mother routine; it killed him. “You oughta give up this bullshit, get into something that’s worth money.” Every freelancer on the wall, male and female, had the hots for her, the voice alone.

He didn’t even know her name, though he’d experimented in his head with Lauren for fit, on a historical/cultural association basis. “Don’t worry about me. I got a big payday lined up.”

“Yeah?” Sad and laughing at the same time. She’d heard that one before, from all of them. “I really hope you do. You could use it.”