K Jeter: Farewell Horizontal

He shook his head, watching and waiting.

“Good.” Sai nodded, visibly pleased. “Now maybe we can carry on a discussion like sane people. You know, that’s the main advantage of finding out exactly what kind of a shitty situation you’re in: that kind of knowledge lessens the otherwise freewheeling activity of your imagination. You’re less likely to go making weird accusations against people who’re just trying to do you a favor.”

“I had my reasons.”

“Yeah, but they weren’t good reasons. Just a lot of crap other people have told you, that you’ve heard so many times that you believed ’em without thinking them through. Everything you thought you knew… You gotta be careful about stuff like that.” Sai pointed with his thumb behind himself. “You’ve already screwed it up with a whole bunch of folks who could’ve done you some good. Not everybody around here is as interested in your case as I am. Dead Centers – as you call us; I think the term’s a little offensive, myself – they’ve generally got enough to keep them busy.”

Axxter was tired, his brain frazzled with trying to squeeze in all the new, upside-down, and backward info he’d gotten off the line. Sai’s cool, rational voice soothed him; he could listen to it for hours. He knew there wasn’t that much time left for him, though.

Sai knew it, too. “You’ll have to think about these things later. If there is a later for you. It doesn’t do any good to save your ass if you just go through life being an ignorant fuck and not thinking about the important things.”

Axxter opened his eyes. “Like what?”

“That’s the problem with you.” Sai shook his head. “Not just you, but all of you morningsiders. There’s so much that you don’t know – so much that you’ve forgotten – that you don’t even know where to begin, what to think about, what questions to ask. You guys out on the vertical are as bad as the ones on the horizontal. You think you’re hip or something just because you’re out there scrambling around, chasing up and down the wall, and you don’t know what’s going to happen from one day to the next – but you’re still just as ignorant.”

Hectoring rather than soothing; it had gotten under his skin. “You know so much, then? Why don’t you tell me? If you feel so bad for me, and all.”

“It wouldn’t do any good. We can’t teach the blind to see. I mean, you don’t even look around you; you never have. Like this building, Cylinder itself.” Sai gestured toward the walls, and all the ones beyond. “You live in it, or on it, but you never think about it. It’s obviously constructed, a thing put together, but you never wonder why, or by whom.”

Axxter shrugged. “That was all done before the War.”

“There you go again. If there’s anything you don’t know, you can just say before the War , and you’re off the hook. You don’t even know anything about this so-called War – it’s just a handy way of getting rid of all the stuff you don’t want to think about.”

“So what’d be the point? Dinking around with a lot of old crap like that isn’t going to help me with my problems. And I had enough of them before all this other shit happened.”

“Correction.” Sai pointed a finger toward him. “You had all the problems you wanted. Wanted , man. You liked having them, so you wouldn’t have time on your hands and wind up thinking about all that other stuff, the big stuff that you’ve forgotten. Cylinder was built for a reason; its construction and ongoing operation violates at least a dozen laws of physics – the thermal problems alone connected with a structure of this size are pretty unbelievable. The air you breathe, if you think about it at all, you spout some mumbo jumbo about atmospheric bonding , as if knowing the words means you understand how it works. Now, the physical transgressions in themselves are no big thing – anything can be worked around, if somebody knows what they’re doing – but you still gotta ask why they bothered. It’s not easy, doing impossible stuff.”

“If it’s impossible, how could they do it?” This sonuvabitch wanted to play word games, fine.

Sai’s wolfish smile returned. “Maybe you just think they did it. Maybe they just did something to make you think a building big as a world exists, and that you’re living in it or outside of it.”

Axxter could taste his own disgust. “Screw that. I hate shit like that. Looking at your own navel until you fall in. I’ve got lots more important business to take care of. Hate to remind you, but there is some huge ugly bastard clanking around here, looking to smear me into jelly. I gotta worry about what I’m going to do about that before I can sit on my can and screw around with bullshit philosophical questions. All right?”

The other shrugged. “Have it your way. That’s why I came back around here – just to give you a helping hand. What’d you think of that stuff you found in the dumps?”

He touched the bare wire beside him. “You were tapped in?”

Sai nodded. “But I knew all that stuff already. I just wanted to see if you’d stumble across it. Pretty interesting, though, wasn’t it?”

“Pretty dangerous, you mean – for them. Why would they leave shit like that lying around, where anybody could stumble across it?”

Sai smiled. “Because they don’t know they’ve left it lying around. One of the problems with big organizations like the Mass – to survive, they have to compartmentalize more and more of their actions, make them routine and automatic. The mechanism for dumping tapes like that was set up before they got involved in dinking around with Ask & Receive. Nobody in the Mass exec levels has caught on to this leak until now because nobody but a bunch of adolescent-mentality circuit riders has ever come sniffing around it. You’re the first who has some reason to make real use of it.”

“Yeah? Like what? I don’t see how it helps me any. It just means I’m in deeper shit than I already thought I was.”

“Eh, just hang on to it. Having info like that – real info – you might be surprised the use you’ll find for it sometime.” Sai pushed himself away from the wall. “You want practical? I’ll give you practical – come with me.”

He led Axxter down a low-ceilinged tunnel. “You got a bit of a break, being in here. Those megassassins aren’t equipped for tracking in this kind of environment – there’s a lot of heat and electromagnetic sources that throw their sensors all off. This one that’s tracking you is still recalibrating itself, learning the ropes. Soon as it knows which end’s up, though, it’ll stop blundering around and be right on your tail. So we really ought to stop jerking off and see about getting you on the road.” He stopped beside an empty panel in the tunnel wall and drew back a tattered, oil-stained cloth hung in the opening. “Take a look.”

Axxter lowered his head, eyes straining in the darkness; after a few seconds, he made out Felony, curled up on a bed of rags. Her breathing was slow and shallow.

“That’s not her.” Sai let the curtain fall back into place. “Like they used to say about dead people: she’s not here anymore. She just left her body behind. One of them, at any rate. See?” He pointed to a phone line running under the curtain. “She’s off taking care of business over on the other side, in one of the other bodies she’s glommed into her stable. She’s quite a collector. If she found out I know about this little hiding place of hers, she’d be righteously pissed.”

“Is this what you wanted to show me?”

“Naw – just something I thought you’d be interested in, is all. Come on.”