K Jeter: Farewell Horizontal

She pulled the Indian and sidecar rig up alongside the sling’s other anchor. The words GUYER GIMBLE – I DELIVER were painted on the sidecar’s flank; on the motorcycle’s tank, a three-quarter profile of her when younger and the most in-demand camp follower anywhere on Cylinder’s surface. Or at least the known morningside of the building. The years since then had pared her face down to a more intimidating sexuality, as if leaning into the wind of her full-throttle passage had stripped away all but the most necessary flesh. One knot loosened at the base of Axxter’s gut while another tightened with a pleasurable fear.

Guyer leaned away from the Indian’s handlebars, her silver hair thus coursing straight back from her knifelike profile. “Here and there.” She smiled sideways at him. “Just making my rounds. You trying’ to run down that Rowdiness bunch?”

“Yeah – you seen them?”

“’Bout a week ago.” Her eyes shifted, following some interior calculation. “Yeah, that’s right. They should still be downwall from here.” One hand waved toward that quadrant. “Gonna try and sign ’em up?”

Axxter shrugged. “What else?” Guyer had inside sources, having become well-known for her key position on the freelancers’ gossip net. Though you wouldn’t need that, he thought, to figure out what I’m doing in these parts. “What’d you think of them?”

The smile extended, turned upside-down by her position. “Nice boys. Hey – at this stage, who can tell? They all talk tough when they’re starting out. Gonna set the whole building on fire.” She leaned forward, spreading her hands on the motorcycle’s tank. “They’re worth a shot – I picked up a couple shares of their initial offering, and an option for a block later.”

That explained her feline aura of self-satisfaction. A woman who enjoyed her business. And the Rowdiness bunch wasn’t a week’s travel away from here – Axxter looked into her hooded eyes and got a confirm. She’d serviced them yesterday; he could almost smell it on her, not an odor but an echo of adrenaline charges going off under her practiced hands. The itch moved across his shoulders, to get his Norton loaded up, to track down the tribe for his own business proposition. Maybe they’re just hours from here; they could be.

Another impulse sparked against the first. “Hey, Guyer – you want to see something neat?”

She swung one leg over the Indian’s tank and ambled toward him. The easy grace of a long-time freelancer, born on the vertical: a twinge of disorientation nausea clenched Axxter’s stomach as he watched her walk, perpendicular to the wall, the pithons from her boots catching and releasing with each stride, whip lines from just below her knees to the metal surface. Under her skin the muscles tightened to keep her straight as a flag in wind.

He dug the camera out of the sidecar and brought up from his archive the tape he’d shot that morning. He watched her screening it in the camera’s tiny viewfinder; kneeling above him, her hair just tracing across his own cheek – in the center of her pupils the figures twined and drifted across two small skies.

“’S nice.” She straightened, away from the edge of the sling, and smiled at him.

His hands fumbled with the camera, the power LEDs winking out. He didn’t know why he had wanted to show the tape of the mating angels to Guyer. Maybe I was hoping for something. The usual action, I suppose. A repeat of his initial encounter with her, when he’d first been making slow and nervous progress across Cylinder’s exterior, a few kilometers downwall from his exit point. It was well known that Guyer had long ago built up her portfolio to the point of comfortable retirement; she did what she wanted now, including such nonmercantile acts of initiation. A welcome to the vertical.

The memory of it faded as Axxter gazed at the dead camera. The replay of the angels, reflected in the woman’s eyes, stilled that ordinary desire. He turned away from her, stowing the camera back in the sidecar’s hatch.

Guyer could read some tendon’s semaphore in the back of his neck. He felt the warm sympathy of her regard, even before her hand stroked the hinge at the top of his spine. She hadn’t gotten to the toplevel of her field without these more tender abilities. How many warriors had lain in those thin arms, listening to the percolation of blood beneath her minimal breasts, watching the stars in their slow revolve around the building? More than I could guess, thought Axxter.

“Guess where I’ve been.” Distracting him. “Over at the Fair.”

“Yeah? Which one?” Not that it mattered; the prospect of hot rumors from either Linear Fair, the twin rivers of commerce and gossip running down the sides of the building, was sufficiently enticing. The Fairs’ merchants, sitting on the demarcation lines between the known world and all the mysterious eveningside, heard everything.

Guyer signaled with a tilt of her head. “The Left.” The gesture went to her own right, perched upside down as she was. “Heard all kinds of good stuff.”

“Like what?” Angels forgotten for the moment.

She leaned down, closer to him. “The Havoc Mass.” Her voice a whisper, for the sheer pleasure of conspiracy; they were alone on the barren sector wall. “They’re putting on a big recruiting push. For the grand alliance they’re building up. Signing up all sorts of little tribes, two-man outfits, battalions, everything. Cutting deals all over the place, to get ’em signed on. You talk to this Rowdiness bunch when you finally run ’em down: betcha even they’ve been approached.” She rocked back on her haunches, butt in the web of her boots’ pithons. “The Mass -” Her eyes narrowed, as though she was savoring the word. “They’re making their move. At last.”

The sudden fervor in her voice unnerved him What’s it matter to her? All that heavy squabbling for control of Cylinder’s toplevel seemed distant in more ways than one to Axxter. Like the passage of the sun over the apex of the building, casting the morningside into deep shade and then deeper night, when the cloud barrier below the eveningside swallowed up all light. Not much you could do about it – you lived within the constraints of light and dark like everyone else on the vertical exterior. If the Havoc Mass wanted to square off against the Grievous Amalgam, who had been squatting on top of Cylinder since long before Axxter, or Guyer, had been born – hey, let ’em, he figured. Cynical enough to believe that it wouldn’t make a rat’s ass difference to him personally, yet the sight of Guyer with her eyes closed, dreaming of some golden future, made him wonder.

“Yeah, well -” He shrugged. “Best of luck to ’em, I guess.”

She looked at him with a sad reproof. “You really have to care more about it than that, Ny. It’s important.”

The maternal tone irritated him “What’s important to me is hustling up some business, getting some real earners into my portfolio. Right? I’m gonna be out here on the wall doing that, no matter what happens between Grievous and Havoc up on top. They don’t mean shit to me, sweetheart.”

Guyer said something back to him, but he didn’t hear it, overridden by the shout of his own thoughts. Important to me . Money, always money. The Havoc Mass had plenty of it, being the roughest and toughest military tribe currently operating, and good politicians with overlapping layers of alliances and treaties among all the other hard-case tribes. Collective force pressing up against the Grievous Amalgam – generations away from being the military tribe they had started out as. Now into the sheer Byzantry of power, raking the big license fees in from the toplevel agencies such as Ask & Receive, the Wire Syndicate, and the Small Moon Consortium. Mucho bucks there. A throughflow, to pay for the legions of mercenaries, the diplomatic and intelligence corps, all the machinery to keep the Amalgam court, in all its glittering pathology, right up where it had been for so long. The meaning-heavy phrase mucho bucks circled around in his thoughts again. If I could just squeeze out a few dimes of it – then I’d be happy. Christ, I don’t want it all. Or much. Just enough. And dimes were dimes, no matter who ate the dollars.