K Jeter: Farewell Horizontal

“All you need is the one break, Ny.” Brevis’s soothing patter went on. “Just the one. Your stuff’s good ; you’ve really got it.”

“You really think so – don’t you.” He lifted his eyes hopefully, bringing the agent’s image back onto the dead-film. This, he knew, was why he’d called him. Just to get that little pump of life into his heart again.

“You got it, man.” So sincere; radiant with emotion. “All it takes is one tribe with your designs on them; they pull off some heavy shit, get some attention, some good line coverage, and then you are the hot number in the graffex biz. All you need’s the exposure. With your stuff – I guarantee it, Ny. When it happens, we’ll have clients all the way to the top calling us up. You’ll write your own ticket after that. You just gotta hang in there a little longer.”

Foolish hope. And vain desires, thought Axxter. He could still taste them, welling up under his tongue. Well, shit – if you can still be jerked around by a two-bit lube artist like Brevis… then maybe it really is all possible. Or at least you still think it is.

“All right.” He nodded, Brevis’s face sliding up and down his vision. “I didn’t say I was giving up. I’m not at that point yet. I just wanted you to know what my situation is out here, that’s all.”

Brevis’s smile tightened at the corners, wink above, a signal acknowledging this gritty attitude. “I knew you wouldn’t crap out. You got what it takes.”

“Yeah, yeah… you bet.” He glanced at the corner of his vision where the charge for the pointless call racked up, and sighed. “Look, I’ll give you a ring after I get hold of this new bunch – what’re they called -”

“Rowdiness Combine. They look hot, Ny; I wouldn’t bullshit you about this. But they got real blood-lust. They just may be the ones who’re gonna do it for us.”

Simmer down, for Christ’s sake. “We’ll see about that. Catch you later.” Flick to DISCONNECT, letting the Wire Syndicate take its summed-up bite out of his bank account.

The sun had lifted higher over the cloud barrier, moving along the course of the morningside’s day. Full light now, no longer filtered red. Time to get moving on his own small segment of the building’s circumference.

For a moment he considered watching again the tape of the mating angels. No – don’t. Unnecessary, anyway; he could still see them, as if some brighter radiation had burned them into the empty sky, or his own eyes.

Methodically, with elaborate care, Axxter broke down his small camp. Taking more pains than necessary; I know, he told himself once more, as he watched his hands going through routine. Mind working on two levels about the subject. On top, right up against curve of skull, the old subvocal litany: Careful; have to be careful; weren’t born out here like some of them; until you get your wall-legs, better, smarter to be careful still . But underneath, not even words: fear, not caution, slowed his movements. As narrow and cramped as the confines of the bivouac sling were, it was at least something underneath him, a bowed floor of reinforced canvas and plastic beneath his knees as he knelt, or shoulder and hip when he slept, and the empty air beneath. That was as safe, he knew, as you got on the vertical. He could have stayed in the sling forever, hanging on the wall. Money, the lack of it, compelled otherwise.

Eventually everything – not much – was packed into two panniers and a larger amorphous bundle. He closed his eyes for a moment, gathering strength, then stood up, the sling’s fabric stretching beneath his feet. He whistled for his motorcycle.

For close to a minute, as he leaned against the building’s wall, holding onto a transit cable for balance, he heard nothing, no answering roar of the engine as the motorcycle came wheeling back to his summons. Thin green on this sector of the wall; something to do with Cylinder’s weather pattern, Axxter figured. The motorcycle would have to have grazed for some distance to have filled its tank. Just as he was about to whistle again, he heard the rasp of its motor, growing louder as it approached.

Over the building’s vertical curve, due rightaround from where he stood in the bivouac sling, the headlight and handlebars of a Norton Interstate 850 first appeared, then the spoked front wheel and the rest of the machine behind. Bolted to the motorcycle’s left side – the uppermost side now, as the machine moved perpendicular to the metal wall – the classic blunt-nosed shape of a Watsonian Monza sidecar came with the motorcycle, its wheel the parallel third of the whole assemblage. A typical freelancer’s rolling stock; he had eyeballed it for so long back on the horizontal, when he’d been saving up his grubstake, that he’d memorized every bolt before he’d ever actually wrapped his fist around the black throttle grip. Even now, after this long out on the vertical, the sight of the riderless motorcycle heading toward him – accelerating as if impelled by love, though he knew it had only taken a visual lock on his position – affected him, rolled on a sympathetic throttle inside his chest. A notion of freedom, as much so as angels, living or dead.

The Norton swerved as it approached, circling below the sling and then turning upwall by one of the sling’s anchor points so that the sidecar was within easy reach. It halted there, headlight pointing toward Cylinder’s far-distant toplevel, engine idling with a throaty murmur. Axxter gripped the ridge of the sidecar’s hatch and pulled himself up to see the gauges between the handlebars. The perfect resemblance to a real, ancient 850 Interstate ended beneath the instruments’ circular glass: a row of LCD readouts indicated the state of the machine’s internal processes. That, and the thin black pithon cords that had whipped out of the hubs of the spoked wheels as the Norton sped across the building’s surface, the triangular heads at the ends of the lines striking anchor points on the transit cables and the pitted metal surface of the wall beneath them, holding and then releasing when each line reached full extension; snapping back into the hub and darting out again… Like nests of hyperactive snakes, it had seemed to Axxter, the first time he had seen, in some kiddie TV show, a freelancer rig scooting, gravity-defying, along Cylinder’s exterior.

Nearly a full tank. He pushed himself back from the gauges. All through the morningside’s night, while the sun had been on the other side of the building, while Axxter had slept, the Norton, with a machine’s faithfulness, had scoured the nearby sections of wall, scraping up with its extended butterfly proboscis the thin green fur and overlapping plates of lichen. From somewhere in the motorcycle’s ovoid tank came the soft gurgle and hiss of conversion, organic matter into fuel. In his gear, Axxter had a kit for rendering the green into something edible, or at least nutritious. The remembered taste of the distilled slime made him shudder. If death itself had a taste, he thought, it would be something like that. One more reason for praying that some more money came in before his current stock of supplies ran out.

As he began loading his gear from the sling into the sidecar, strapping everything into place with bungee cords, he heard a sound rising over the Norton’s idle. Another engine, barking and rasping, and, up in treble, the singing of pithon lines zipping around transit cables. Axxter looked over the edge of the sling and saw another freelancer heading upwall toward him.

“Hey! Sonofa bitch! ” A shout and gloved hand waving above the approaching motorcycle’s handlebars. “How ya doin’, Ny?”

He had thought he recognized the clatter of her ill-tuned Indian replica. “Guyer – where’d the hell you come from?”