K Jeter: Farewell Horizontal

As soon as he waggled his finger in the socket, the words zipped into his vision.

WHERE YOU BEEN? GOT ASK & RECEIVE HOT FOR YOU.

“Oh – yeah. Right.” He blinked away a bit more sleep muddle. Dark enough in the corridor, the exterior visible through the torn-open wall already fallen into deepshade, that he didn’t need the deadfilm. From the time readout in the corner of his gaze, he made a quick calculation: he’d only been asleep and locked into the dream for a couple of minutes or so. He’d called Brevis – no way of avoiding him, since the info value of the find depended on giving the ruined zone’s location – and Brevis must have called, as a good agent should, the numero-uno toplevel data agency. And sold it for a lot of money, Axxter hoped. “Put ’em through.”

Ask & Receive’s animated logo – hand with mouth in palm, then eye, then mouth again – came up on the terminal. Followed by a softly modulated female voice: “Please send location coordinates. Will credit to your account the sum of -” A male voice broke in, clipped and bored: “Two hundred dollars.”

“What?” Axxter stared at the mouth, eye, mouth pattern.

The words looped in repeat. “Two hundred dollars.”

“You must be joking.”

The male voice came again, a real-time override. “The price was worked out by your agent, fella. You want to check with him -”

“You bet your ass I’m checking with him. Hold this sucker,” Axxter instructed the line. “And get me Brevis.”

His agent’s face came up, one pacifying hand already stroking the air. “I know, I know -”

“Two hundred – what are you doing to me, for Christ’s sake?”

Brevis’s other hand rose, warding his client away from his throat. “That’s all they’ll pay, Ny. Believe me. They don’t even want your tape, man. Somebody beat you to it.”

“Somebody what?”

“Somebody else already got the info to Ask & Receive. And copped the initial report fee for it. Two hundred bucks is the standard payment for a confirming report from a second-on-the-scene. There isn’t any money for anybody who comes after you, Ny.”

“Two hundred bucks.” Axxter gritted his teeth, bitter spit under his tongue. They’re screwing me. First the angels tape, now this. He looked around, Brevis’s face floating superimposed over the charred corpses, the walls bowed and blackened by explosion, the torn skin of Cylinder itself. He had climbed in and taped it all, greed circuits kicking in at the sight of so much destruction. You get paid – you’re supposed to get paid – lots for info like this. The unprofitable corpses went on grinning at him.

“They’re screwing me.” Out loud. “There’s no one else around here who could’ve reported it. I’m the only one out in these sectors.” Except maybe Guyer Gimble, he noted to himself. And she would’ve told me if she’d spotted anything like this. “And the metal was still hot . From… whatever happened.” Still reluctant to speak it, the name the skull had shouted. “Nobody else could’ve come across it before me. They’re cheating me of the initial report fee.”

“Hey.” Another wave of Brevis’s professional sympathy. “I know that. You know that. But what do you want to do, get a bad rep with Ask & Receive? You’re gonna have to deal with these people long after this. They want to cheap out on you – just let it slide, Ny. You won’t be able to get as much money from anyone else.”

“They’re screwing me.” Axxter closed his eyes, but Brevis’s face didn’t go away. “Shit.”

“Take the money, Ny.”

The voice behind Ask & Receive’s logo sounded smug when Axxter got back to him. “Two hundred dollars all right, then?”

“Yeah, sure.” Your ass. He read out the coordinates for the zone and logged off. Not even bothering to check his account for the deposit of the fee.

It was a moment before his spirits rose again. “Not yet,” he replied to the nearest corpse’s grinning comment. “Soon enough, but not just yet.” Hadn’t been a total waste of a day. Two thousand for the mating angels, another two hundred – those fuckers – for coming across this place… Not bad; not really. “Puts me ahead of you.” A fly in search of unscorched nourishment crawled over the white face.

The dream came back to him as he reached across the floor and retrieved the gun. I get it now. The spooky lecturer, the hole in the top of his own skull, the darkness running down inside. Everything except the point of it all. He stood up, the gun heavy in his jacket pocket, and started walking back toward the exterior, the deepshade lighter than the ruined interior. His boots, pithons nulled on the horizontal, raised little clouds of gray dust.

At the jagged floor edge, the welcoming corpse lay across his path, white face turned toward where he had spotted it in his camera’s viewfinder. He stepped over it – bony hand reaching for his ankle, unable to grasp it – and looked back inside. He could still smell the burnt odor.

That’s what happens. Stupid shits – gave your lives for me, and all I got out of it was two hundred bucks. The people who had lived in this horizontal sector – bumpkins, this far from toplevel; machine tenders – had made their little deal with the Dead Centers – the name finally spoken inside Axxter’s head, the dream skull having broken the ice – and had made their final payment for it. That’s what happens. Even if you don’t think it’s going to happen to you.

He wondered what had made them decide to do it.

How long they had thought about it, talking during their lunch breaks at the widget factory, first sotto voce , then right out loud when everybody in the sector had been in on it. What had the Dead Centers said to them – the blandishments of things you’ve never seen, have only wondered about, moving in their secret ways in the great darkness at the building’s core and in your bad dreams. The whispering voices that had come through the thick, sealed walls way far inside; maybe a signal override on any Wire Syndicate transmissions coming in, just a crawl of words across the bottom of their terminals; maybe little rolled notes floating up in their toilet bowls, spidery handwriting, smeared sticky ink…

You’re so wise and good, dear people . The whispers through the wall. So clever and smart. Yet oppressed by those old lies, slanders against those who would befriend you. Let us come to you, and we’ll give you… everything… everything…

Everything, thought Axxter, looking down to where the scorched walls merged with the dark. What would that include? Who knows… all sorts of elaborate pre-War high-tech, no doubt. The Dead Centers were supposed to have inherited all of that stuff. Wonders upon wonders, hidden away in the building’s core. Maybe it had even been watching that old Opt Cooder tape, of the dead gas angel tangled in the exterior transit cable, that had worked away on the poor horizontal suckers’ imaginations. Common belief that the angels were the remnant of some military genetic technology, bred for some now-unfathomable strategic use. Forgotten the same as everything else connected with that ancient event. Maybe the Dead Centers themselves were what was left of one of the warring factions. Maybe the War itself… some effect of the other guys’ weapons, or their own… had changed them … left them crouching in the dark at the building’s core… whispering to those who could still stand the light…

Just let us come to you. Why should you let those ones above you push you around, cheat you of all you so richly deserve? We’ll help you… just let us come to you…

A shiver ran under Axxter’s skin. Fuckin’ spooked myself. The image came of the sector’s inhabitants, when they’d had flesh over their grins, drawing back the heavy bolts, cutting through the heavy steel plates, boring a hole through whatever stood between them and the darkness at Cylinder’s core… their minds made up after a unanimous vote at the sector meeting… or just made up, without a word spoken, silent greed flashing round from eye to eye -