K Jeter: Farewell Horizontal

Guyer’s voice broke in. “So that’s why I did it.”

“Did what?”

She regarded his blinking, up from fog, and sighed. “Cashed in all my Amalgam holdings, the preferred, the options, every single blue chip – and sank it into the Mass.”

“Jeez.” Heard twice, and still unbelievable. She must mean it. Beyond mere faith – talking money now. One thing for her to dream of A Better Age, when those clean and hard-limbed warriors have kicked out the effete, sneaky politicos – Guyer being nuts, in a sweet way, he had decided long ago, with her still traveling and doing her business out in these godforsaken wastewall sectors. But for her to roll up her entire wad and bet in on that rosy prospect… Axxter shook his head, whistling his breath in through clenched teeth. Thought she was smarter than that. Just never know about people.

“Gotta split. Catch you later.”

He looked up to see her standing, perpendicular to the wall. From his crouch in the sling, he had to tilt his head back to meet her gaze. She turned and strode to her rig.

From back aboard the Indian, its headlight pointed straight up: “Give us a good-bye kiss, Ny.” And the same indulgent smile as before.

He knew what she wanted, the kiss a pretext. She had seen him before, when he’d been a hundred percent new to vertical. Clinging white-knuckled, chest against the wall like a flattened spider, pithons taut from shoulder and hip. Pitied him, gave him something… Now she wants to see how I’m getting along with it. A little test. He swallowed against the pulse in his throat and pulled himself up out of the sling.

In his kneecaps he felt the snap of his boots’ pithons catching their holds on the wall as he stood up. Straight out, his shoulder to the cloud barrier far below. One line from his belt for balance, but that was all right; nothing uncool about that. Walk and don’t think, he told himself. All there is to it. Pithons stretched as he lifted his foot, the leader lines releasing and whipping ahead for the next grip. All there is.

All there was. Axxter stood beside the Indian, pulse still high. But there. He regarded her narrow face for a moment before he bent down to kiss her.

He felt the brush of her lashes and the shift of her gaze. He leaned back and turned his head to see what it was she saw.

One hand had locked onto the nearest transit cable, every tendon in his wrist drawn tight as the metal line. Holding on, shameless, against the fear of gravity.

Axxter looked back into Guyer’s smile. The Indian’s motor coughed as she twisted the throttle.

“Take care, Ny.” A wink. “See ya again sometime.”

The engine’s rasp came to his ear long after she had disappeared upwall by leftaround. On her ceaseless errands. He gripped the cable with both hands, no one to see him now, and pressed his burning cheek against the cool metal, only a little harder than the woman’s face and kiss.

† † †

Just before breaking camp, he went back online, calling up Ask & Receive. The Small Moon, in its orbit around Cylinder, had finally appeared, a silver nail-paring coming around the building’s leftedge. Cheaper to connect when only enough relay surface for audio signal; that was all he needed. He blinked on his transceiver.

“Update on previous request.” His jawbone buzzed with the echo of his own voice. “Estimate of current position, Rowdiness Combine, military tribe. Scale reliability down to… oh… twenty-five percent.” An old trick that he’d picked up from the more experienced freelancers. If you took a high enough reliability on initial location requests, seventy-five percent or higher, you could cheap out on the updates. You’d still get close enough to your target to do a physical scan of the sector. Though twenty-five, he knew, was pushing it.

The info agency ran through its location factors – previous sightings, speed of travel and direction, analysis of raiding strategies. Rowdiness hadn’t reached the point – might never – of having a PR service advertising its whereabouts, recruitment points, the big-league stuff; otherwise he would’ve dinged them for the call and info.

At twenty-five percent reliability, it didn’t take long. Axxter detected, or imagined, a condescending tone to the coordinates reeled out in his ear.

“All right.” As if addressing the Norton, no one else on the empty wall. He pulled the transceiver lead free from his wrist, folded up the dish and stowed it in the sidecar. His boot pithons came free as he mounted onto the motorcycle, the seat line zipping around his waist. A moment of vertigo as he gripped the handlebars and looked straight down the building’s long vertical fall. “Time to roll.”

He didn’t stop until the motorcycle’s shadow stretched down Cylinder as far as he could see. Hours of traveling: sun right overhead, the leading edge sliced off by the building’s top rim. Only a bit more pure light before the sun’s zenith and the deepshade falling over the morningside. Whatever lay on the eveningside could come creeping out into the light then, on whatever unknown circuits might be pursued there. Axxter stood up on the pegs, easing the cramp in his butt, the vibration fatigue in both his thighs. The cloud barrier looked as far below as ever.

Making good time, he figured. The transit cable the bike had locked onto had run free and clear all the way down here. And farther: the cable, thick around as his head where the wheels grappled onto it, dwindled down to spider-silk before disappearing into the clouds. A few kilometers more – he gazed around, estimating his position – and he could steer the Norton off the cable, tacking left. Lateral travel, across the vertical cables, always slower. The Rowdiness bunch should be pretty close, though; might not find ’em before dark, but tomorrow I will.

He settled back down in the seat and gunned the engine. Satisfied with a day’s travel, almost completed; the angels had proved a good omen, besides the cash into his account. A certain representation of freedom. That’s why you became a freelancer. That, and starving to death. He let out the clutch and rolled again, picking up speed downwall.

Shadows on the wall. He spotted them, half a kilometer to the right of his own lengthening smear. All dimming; he glanced over his shoulder at the sun, three-quarters obscured by the top rim. He’d be on whatever threw the shadows before they were swallowed up by the advancing deepshade.

His heart sped up, as his fist rolled back on the Norton’s throttle, when he spotted the jagged edges of metal curling up from the wall. A solid darkness lay inside, just visible past the ripped segments of wall.

This is a bad scene, Axxter. Just turn round and… roll away. His warning sounded inside his head as he halted the Norton at the edge of the torn zone. A section of wall, twisted and blackened, reached out into the sky, its sharpest point circling back on a line even with his head. It looked mean enough to rip open any angel that might chance to drift by.

Split on out of here. These War sites, cold and abandoned echoes of that ancient violence that had wracked the building, always spooked him. He hadn’t known that there was one out here; some of these wastewall sectors had zero files on them, producing just question marks and a refund of your money when you queried Ask & Receive. Some people got off on them; the ancient battle sites nearest to the heavily populated horizontal sectors drew a certain number of tourists. Some people got off on anything. Axxter heard the wind whistling past the jagged point in the sky and shivered. A papery, skeletal note a hungry bird might make. Fat chance of getting a good night’s sleep, conducive to effective business negotiations, around here. Time to split. Go make your camp somewhere else, a long ways somewhere else.