“Oh, yeah? Just so they don’t interfere with my right of eminent domain.”
He shrugged. “Just be careful. I don’t care if they want a cut. Like maybe a clump of garlic.”
I blinked. “Nobody cuts my cargo. Nobody.”
“Not even Dactyl?”
“Dactyl’s never bothered me. He’s just a kid.”
Lenny shrugged. “He’s sent his share down. You get yourself pushed off and we’ll have to find someone else to do the runs. Just be careful.”
“Careful is what I do best.”
* * *
Fran lived around the corner, on the east face. She grew flowers, took in sewing, and did laundry. When she had the daylight for her solar panel, she watched TV.
“Why don’t you live inside, Fran. You could watch TV twenty-four hours a day.”
She grinned at me, a not unpleasant event. “Nah. Then I’d pork up to about a hundred kilos eating that syntha crap and not getting any exercise and I’d have to have a permit to grow even one flower in my cubicle and a dispensation for the wattage for a grow light and so on and so forth. When they put me in a coffin, I want to be dead.”
“Hey, they have exercise rooms and indoor tracks and the rec balconies.”
“Big deal. Shut up for a second while I see if Bob is still mad at Sue because he found out about Marilyn’s connection with her mother’s surgeon. When the commercial comes I’ll cut and bundle some daisies.”
She turned her head back to the flat screen. I looked at her blue bonnets and pansies while I waited.
“There, I was right. Marilyn is sleeping with Sue’s mother. That will make everything okay.” She tucked the TV in a pocket and prepared the daisies for me. “I’m going to have peonies next week.” I laced the wrapped flowers on the outside of the pack to avoid crushing the petals. While I was doing that Fran moved closer. “Stop over on the way back?”
“Maybe,” I said. “Of course I’ll drop your script off.”
She withdrew a little.
“I want to, Fran, honest. But I want to get some fresh fruit for Mad Molly’s birthday tomorrow and I don’t know where I’ll have to go to get it.”
She turned away and shrugged. I stood there for a moment, then left, irritated. When I looked back she was watching the TV again.
* * *
The Howlers had claimed ten floors and the entire circumference of the Le Bab Tower between those floors. That’s an area of forty meters by 250 meters per side or 40,000 square meters total. The tower is over a kilometer on a side at the base but it tapers in stages until its only twenty meters square at three thousand meters.
Their greediness was to my advantage because there’s only thirty-five or so Howlers and that’s a lot of area to cover. As I rappelled down to 529 I slowly worked my way around the building. There was a bunch of them in hammocks on the south face, sunbathing. I saw one or two on the east face but most of them were on the west face. Only one person was on the north side.
I moved down to 521 on the north face well away from the one guy and doubled my longest line. It was a hundred meter blue line twelve millimeters thick. I coiled it carefully on a roughing cube after wrapping the halfway point of the rope around another roughing cube one complete circuit, each end trailing down. I pushed it close into the building so it wouldn’t slip. Then I clipped my brake bars around the doubled line.
The guy at the other corner noticed me now and started working his way from roughing cube to roughing cube, curious. I kicked the rope off the cube and it fell cleanly with no snarls, no snags. He shouted. I jumped, a gloved hand on the rope where it came out of the brake bars. I did the forty meters in five jumps, a total of ten seconds. Halfway down I heard him shout for help and heard others come around the corner. At 518 I braked and swung into the building. The closest Howler was still fifteen meters or so away from my rope, but he was speeding up. I leaned against the building and flicked the right hand rope hard, sending a sinusoidal wave traveling up the line. It reached the top and the now loose rope flicked off the cube above and fell. I sat down and braced. A hundred meter rope weighs in at eight kilos and the shock of it pulling up short could have pulled me from the cube.
They shouted things after me, but none of them followed. I heard one of them call out, “Quit’cha bitchin. He’s got to pass us on his way home. We’ll educate him then.”
* * *
All the rec guards deal. It’s a good job to have if you’re inside. Even things that originate inside the tower end up traveling the outside pipeline. Ain’t no corridor checks out here. No TV cameras or sniffers either. The Howlers do a lot of that sort of work.
Murry is different from the other guards, though. He doesn’t deal slice or spike or any of the other nasty pharmoddities, and he treats us outsiders like humans. He says he was outside once. I believe him.
“So, Murry, what’s with your wife? She had that baby yet?”
“Nah. And boy is she tired of being pregnant. She’s, like, out to here.” He held his hands out. “You tell Fran I want something special when she finally dominoes. Like roses.”
“Christ, Murry. You know Fran can’t do roses. Not in friggin pots. Maybe day lilies. I’ll ask her.” I sat in my seat harness, hanging outside the cage that’s around the rec balcony. Murry stood inside smelling the daisies. There were some kids kicking a soccer ball on the far side of the balcony and several adults standing at the railing looking out through the bars. Several people stared at me. I ignored them.
Murry counted out the script for the load and passed it through the bars. I zipped it in a pocket. Then he pulled out the provisions I’d ordered the last run and I dropped them, item by item, into the pack.
“You ever get any fresh fruit in there, Murry?”
“What do I look like, guy, a millionaire? The guys that get that sort of stuff live up there above 750. Hell, I once had this escort job up to 752 and while the honcho I escorted was talking to the resident, they had me wait out on this patio. This guy had apples and peaches and cherries for crissakes! Cherries!” He shook his head. ‘It was weird, too. None of this cage crap.” He rapped on the bars with his fist. “He had a chest high railing and that was it.”
“Well of course. What with the barrier at 650 he doesn’t have to worry about us. I’ll bet there’s lots of open balconies up that way.” I paused. “Well, I gotta go. I’ve got a long way to climb.”
“Better you than me. Don’t forget to tell Fran about the special flowers.”
“Right.”
* * *
They were waiting for me, all the Howlers sitting on the south face, silent, intent. I stopped four stories below 520 and rested. While I rested I coiled my belay line and packed it in my pack. I sat there, fifteen kilos of supplies and climbing paraphernalia on my back, and looked out on the world.
The wind had shifted more to the southwest and was less damp than the morning air. It had also strengthened but the boundary layer created by the roughing cubes kept the really high winds out from the face of the tower.
Sometime during the day the low clouds below had broken into patches, letting the ground below show through. I perched on the roughing cube, unbelayed and contemplated the fall. 516 is just over two kilometers from the ground. That’s quite a drop—though in low winds the odds were I’d smack into one of the rec balconies where the tower widened below. In a decent southerly wind you can depend on hitting the swamps instead.
What I had to do now was rough.
I had to free ascend.
No ropes, no nets, no second chances. If I lost it the only thing I had to worry about was whether or not to scream on the way down.
The Howlers were not going to leave me time for the niceties.
For the most part the Howlers were so-so climbers, but they had a few people capable of technical ascents. I had to separate the good from the bad and then out-climb the good.
I stood on the roughing cube and started off at a run, leaping two meters at a time
from roughing cube to roughing cube moving sideways across the south face. Above me I heard shouts but I didn’t look up. I didn’t dare. The mind was blank, letting the body do the work without hindrance. The eyes saw, the body did, the mind coasted.
I slowed as I neared the corner, and stopped, nearly falling when I overbalanced, but saving myself by dropping my center of gravity.
There weren’t nearly as many of them above me now. Maybe six of them had kept up with me. The others were trying to do it by the numbers, roping from point to point. I climbed two stories quickly, chimneying between a disused fractional distillation stack and a cooling tower. Then I moved around the corner and ran again.
When I stopped to move up two more stories there were only two of them above me. The other four were trying for more altitude rather than trying to keep pace horizontally.
I ran almost to the northwest corner, then moved straight up.
The first one decided to drop kick me dear Jesus through the goal posts of life. He pulled his line out, fixed it to something convenient and rappelled out with big jumps, planning, no doubt, to come swinging into me with his feet when he reached my level. I ignored him until the last minute when I let myself collapse onto a roughing cube. His feet slammed into the wall above me then rebounded out.
As he swung back out from the face I leaped after him.
His face went white. Whatever he was expecting me to do, he wasn’t expecting that! I latched onto him like a monkey, my legs going around his waist. One of my hands grabbed his rope, the other punched with all my might into his face. I felt his jaw go and his body went slack. He released the rope below the brake bars and started sliding down the rope. I scissored him with my legs and held onto the rope with both hands. My shoulders creaked as I took the strain but he stopped sliding. Then we swung back into the wall and I sagged onto a cube astride him.
His buddy was dropping down more slowly. He was belayed but he’d seen what I’d done and wasn’t going to try the airborne approach. He was still a floor or two above me so I tied his friend off so he wouldn’t sleepwalk and took off sideways, running again.
I heard him shout but I didn’t hear him moving. When I paused again he was bent over my friend with the broken jaw. I reached an external exhaust duct and headed for the sky as fast as I could climb.
At this point I was halfway through Howler territory. Off to my right the group that had opted for height was now moving sideways to cut me off. I kept climbing, breathing hard now but not desperate. I could climb at my current speed for another half hour without a break and I thought there was only one other outsider that could keep up that sort of pace. I wondered if he was up above.
I looked.
He was.
He wasn’t on the wall.
He didn’t seem to be roped on.
And he was dropping.
I tried to throw myself to the side, in the only direction I could go, but I was only partially successful. His foot caught me a glancing blow to my head and I fell three meters to the next roughing cube. I landed hard on the cube, staggered, bumped into the wall, and fell outward, off the cube. The drop was sudden, gut wrenching, and terrifying. I caught the edge of the cube with both hands, wrenching my shoulders and banging my elbow. My head ached, the sky spun in circles and I knew that there was over a kilometer of empty space beneath my feet.
Dactyl had stopped somehow, several stories below me, and, as I hung there, I could see the metallic gleam of some sort of wire, stretched taut down the face of the tower.
I chinned myself up onto the cube and traversed away from the wire, moving and climbing fast. I ignored the pain in my shoulders and the throbbing of my head and even the stomach churning fear and sudden clammy sweat.
There was a whirring sound and the hint of movement behind me. I turned around and caught the flash of gray moving up the face. I looked up.
He was waiting, up on the edge of Howler territory, just watching. Closer were the three clowns who were trying to get above me before I passed them. I eyed the gap, thought about it, and then went into overdrive. They didn’t make it. I passed them before they reached the exhaust duct. For a few stories they tried to pursue and one of them even threw a grapple that fell short.
That left only Dactyl.
He was directly overhead when I reached 530. I paused and glanced down. The others had stopped and were looking up. Even the clothesliners had made it around the corner and were watching. I looked back up. Dactyl moved aside about five meters and sat down on a ledge. I climbed up even with him and sat too.
Dactyl showed up one day in the middle of Howler territory. Three Howlers took the long dive before it was decided that maybe the Howler should ignore Dactyl before there were no Howlers left. He’s a loner who does a mixed bag: some free ascent, some rope work, and some fancy mech stuff.
There was something about him that made him hard to see, almost. Not really, but he did blend into the building. His nylons, his climbing shoes, his harness were gray like the roughing cube he sat on. His harness was strung with gray boxes and pouches of varying sizes, front and back, giving his torso a bulky appearance, sort of like a turtle with long arms. He was younger than I’d thought he’d be, perhaps twenty, but then I’d only seen him at a distance before now. His eyes looked straight at me, steady and hard. He wasn’t sweating a bit.
“Why?” I said.
He shrugged. “Be natural, become a part of your environment. Who said that?”
“Lot’s of people said that. Even I said that.”
Dactyl nodded. “So, like I’m doing that thing. I’m becoming a part of the environment. One thing you should know by now, dude…”
“What’s that?” I asked warily.
“The environment is hostile.”
I looked out, away from him. In the far distance I saw white sails in Galveston bay. I turned back. “What did I ever do to you?”
He smiled. “You take it too personal. It’s more random than that. Think of me as an extra-somatic evolutionary factor. You’ve got to evolve. You’ve got to adapt. Mano a Mano shit like that.”
I let that stew for a while. The Howlers were gathering below, inside their territory. They were discussing something with much hand waving and punctuated gestures.
“So,” I finally said. “You ever walk through downtown Houston?”
He blinked, opened his mouth to say something, then closed it. Finally, almost unwillingly, he said, “On the ground? No. They eat people down there.”
I shrugged. “Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don’t. Last time I was in Tranquillity Park they were eating alligator tail with Siamese peanut sauce. Except when the alligators were eating them.”
“Oh.”
“You even been down below at all?”
“I was born inside.”
“Well, don’t let it bother you,” I said as I stood up.
He frowned slightly. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
I grinned. “It’s not where you were born that matters,” I said. “It’s where you die.”
I started climbing.
* * *
The first half-hour was evenly paced. He waited about a minute before he started after me and for the the next seventy floors it was as if there was an invisible fifteen meter rope stretched between us. About 600 he lowered the gap to ten meters. I picked up the pace a little, but the gap stayed the same for the next ten floors.
I was breathing hard now and feeling the burn in my thighs and arms. My clothes were soaked in sweat but my hands were dry and I was in rhythm, climbing smooth and steady.
Dactyl was also climbing fast, but jerky, his movements inefficient. The gap was still ten meters but I could tell he was straining.
I doubled my speed.
The universe contracted. There was only the wall, the next purchase, the next breath. There were no peaches, no birthdays, no flowers, and no Dactyl. There was no thought.
But there was pain.
My thighs wen
t from burning to screaming. I started taking up some of the slack with my arms and they joined the chorus. I climbed through the red haze for fifteen more stories and then collapsed on a roughing cube.
The world reeled as I gasped for the first breaths. I felt incipient cramps lurking in my thighs and I wanted those muscle cells to have all the oxygen I could give them. Then, as the universe steadied, I looked down for Dactyl.
He wasn’t on the north face.
Had he given up?
I didn’t know and it bothered me.
Five stories above was the barrier—a black, ten meter overhang perpendicular to the face. It was perfectly smooth, made of metal, its welds ground flush. I didn’t know what was above it. There were rumors about automatic lasers, armed guards, and computer monitored imaging devices. I’d worry about them when I got past that overhang.
I was two stories short of it when Dactyl appeared at the northeast corner of the building.
Above me.
It wasn’t possible. I almost quit then but something made me go on. I tried to blank my mind and began running toward the west face, doing the squirrel hopping from block to block, even though my muscles weren’t up to it. I almost lost it twice, once when my mind dwelt too much on how Dactyl had passed me and once when my quadriceps gave way.
I stopped at the corner, gasping, and looked back. Dactyl was working his way leisurely after me, slowly, almost labored. I ducked around and climbed again, until I was crouched on a roughing cube, the dark overhang touching my head. I peeked around the corner. Dactyl had paused, apparently resting.
I took off my pack and pulled out a thirty-meter length of two-ton-test line, a half-meter piece of ten-kilo-test monofilament, and a grapple. I tied the monofilament between the heavier line and the grapple.
I peeked around the corner again. Dactyl was moving again, but slowly, carefully. He was still two-hundred meters across the face. I dropped down two meters and stepped back around the corner. Dactyl stopped when he saw me, but I ignored him, playing out the grapple and line until it hung about fifteen meters below me. Then I started swinging it.
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Sixth Annual Collection Page 15
