K Jeter - Farewell Horizontal

Copyright © 1989 by K. W. Jeter

When he awoke, he saw angels mating overhead.

For a few seconds longer, Axxter watched them, fragments of a dream. The sun broke over the distant edge of the cloud barrier below, tinting red the metal wall against his shoulder. All through the night his body had huddled close to it, as though his acrophobic spine had been trying to burrow through the building’s skin and back to the remembered safety of floors and ceilings. His own dreams were of falling, spinning free of the great curve and impacting into clouds filled with small, biting faces; or, pleasantly, of sleeping itself, cradled by gravity and solid steel. But never of floating, of drifting locked in embrace, turned slowly by a bed of winds. Thus it flashed on him that the angels were real.

“Shit.” Teeth clamped to lip even as he twisted about in the narrow sling, to silence any further outburst. Gas angels were notoriously skittish; they could decouple and split, flight membranes deflated for a parawing dive down-wall and overcurve, before he could get a lens on them. And he needed the money, equally real. The little, biting faces in his dreams were the zeroes on his bank account readout.

He came up with the camera, out of his gear bag grappled onto the cable below the sling – for a dizzying second he had hung half out of the swaying fabric, head down toward the clouds and the big step to them, as he’d fumbled around. Mercenary spirit overrode the usual nausea; he rolled onto his back, the sling’s pithons adjusting to shifting weight, their triangular heads finding and biting into holds tighter than those needed for corpselike slumber.

A scan across, from the upwall bulk of Cylinder to open sky. There they were, centered in the camera’s viewfinder. Axxter sighed, shoulders unknotting. They didn’t hear me. Coital oblivion apparently equal among all species; he focused, hit RECORD, and crawl-zoomed in on the airborne lovers. Hold it right there, you beauties.

The sun had risen far enough that all the air had turned gold. The spherical membranes behind the angels’ shoulders were filled with light, radiant, as though the hemodialyzed gases that kept them aloft had ignited with the friction of the two forms between. Axxter went in closer, his hand trembling at the controls, until the camera filled with intricate red lace, the angels’ veins swelling taut the papery skin.

As if in sympathy, another vein pumped through heavier, gravity-bound flesh. Axxter ignored it; he knew how long he had been vertical, out here hustling business. Knock it off, already; don’t remind me . He went on taping, rolling onto his shoulder to follow the angels’ drift.

The golden-and-pink knot turned, their waists the equator of a bifurcate planet. At the dark margin of his vision, the camera’s data fed through the metal contact on his fingertip to the display feed spliced into his optic nerve: distance to subject ranged between 100 and 125 meters. The red digits effectively tracked the eddy currents at the building’s atmosphere boundary. Axxter, squinting and likewise tracking, wondered if the angels enjoyed that effect. Maybe it enhanced the pleasure, like being tickled all over by invisible fingers. Who knew? – Ask & Receive’s files on angelic sex were pretty thin. Something to think about, though. Christ, not now, he pleaded to his own distracting flesh.

In the distance above, the male’s downward rotation brought the female’s face into the viewfinder. Axxter zoomed in tighter. They did look like angels, what angels should look like, beyond the simple floating in air. Where no vertical or horizontal existed. The fragile bodies, substantial only against the translucent membranes ballooning from nape to buttock; the golden light seemed to pass as well through the female’s small, delicate breasts as she arched back from the other’s chest, her eyes closed and mouth soundlessly open, her small hands gripping the male’s fulcrum hips to her own. A shining trail of kisses and sweat spiraled over her throat and face, and his, that slow moisture being the only response to gravity’s tug as they had turned and pivoted about.

So pretty; Axxter, slung and bound against the metal wall, taped and watched. The thin wands of the angel’s collarbone above her luminous breasts; he could almost believe there was no flesh at all, only fragile and weightless skin, taut with the blood’s tracery, the same as the two buoyant spheres that held the two aloft. In the viewfinder a deeper blush welled up into her face. Her lashes trembled against her cheek. Instinctively, Axxter pulled back, reverse zoom, until there was sky all around the couple. On tape he caught the shudder that ran through their limbs, a shimmer echoing in the inflated membranes behind each of them, a seismic event in that light-permeated world.

They moved apart, drifting on separate currents. Though the male was in sight longer, angling on a slow diagonal out from the building’s face, Axxter kept the camera on the female. A stronger wind lifted her farther overhead; she stretched her thin arms above herself, smiling, eyes still closed. A sleepy nude against the sky. Hair all tangled, dampened black. When she became a speck, untrackable, and then gone, Axxter lowered the camera. The machine had sweated in his hands, but he found – it took him a moment to realize what was missing – that other urgencies had been forgotten. As if the flesh had also been disarmed by the angels’ beauty. “You know -” He spoke aloud, put in a good mood by the morning’s omen, hugging camera to chest. “Maybe – just maybe – you aren’t completely forsaken, after all.” A string of cold electrons ticked over in the camera, downloading to his internal archive; he tucked the machine beside himself in the sling and gazed out over the cloud barrier to the lifting sun.

Feelings of universal benevolence dissolved when he remembered his bank balance. The angels were gone, evaporated back into Cylinder’s surrounding atmosphere. Except on tape, Axxter reminded himself. For which we are truly grateful. That, in itself, was not enough of a break to save him from bankruptcy. But it would put it off awhile longer, in which time all sorts of things could happen. The little gem of hope radiated in his heart, as if a drop of the angels’ sweat had fallen and crystallized there.

The sling rocked uncomfortably as he scrambled to his knees. He had left the deadfilm for his terminal pinned to the building’s metal wall, right where he’d be able to find it first thing in the morning. For most of this excursion he’d been traveling off-line, the Small Moon being over-curve, all signal to or from it being blocked by the building itself. And in this scurfy territory, the building’s exterior desolate and abandoned in every direction, Ask & Receive hadn’t been able to sell him a map of plug-in jacks. So finding this one had been a break, as well. Maybe that’s when my luck started. Axxter rattled his fingertip inside the rust-specked socket; a spark jumped from the tiny patch of metal to the ancient wire running inside the building. Last night, when I found this; maybe it’s all going to just roll on from here. At last.

YES? The single word floated up in the center of his eye, bright against the deadfilm’s black drain of ambient light. More followed. GOOD MORNING. “THE GLORIES OF OUR BLOOD AND STATE/ARE SHADOWS, NOT SUBSTANTIAL THINGS/THERE IS NO ARMOR -”

“Jee-zuss.” Axxter’s gaze flicked to CANCEL at the corner of his eye. The trouble with buying secondhand; his low-budget freelancer’s outfit had all sorts of funky cuteness left on it from its previous owner; he had never been able to edit it out.