Farewell Horizontal

by K. W. Jeter

  Farewell Horizontal

  K W Jeter

  'The Cylinder is a massive structure rising miles above the surface of an unknown future Earth. Axxter, the hero of Farewell Horizontal, has forsaken the dull, nine-to-five life of Cylinder's Horizontal levels to go where the action is – the Vertical, where freelancers, warring tribes and other nomadic types live along the slings and cables of Cylinder's outer edge. His dream is to be a successful graffex artist, designing armour and ikons for the various tribes – and, like all citizens, he is linked by a microchip in his brain to the complex computer system that runs the economy. But when Axxter accepts a really big job – creating all-new military imagery for one of Cylinder's most powerful tribes – he begins a dangerous journey that will take him to the far side of Cylinder – and beyond.

  K W Jeter

  Farewell Horizontal

  Copyright © 1989 by K. W. Jeter

  For Les & Rita Escott

  ONE

  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. Mor
e 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.

  VERY WELL. Sniffy, feelings wounded. REQUEST?

  He hesitated. For a moment he considered not calling anyone up; just not saying anything about the angels at all. His little secret, a private treasure. That would be something. Something nobody had except me. He nodded, playing back the tape inside his head corresponding to the one inside the camera. So pretty; both of them, but especially the female angel. Slender as a wire. A soft wire. And smiling as she’d drifted away. That smile was locked away, coded into the molecules inside the camera. And in my brain – burned right into the neural fibers. As if soft, dreaming smiles could burn.

  It’d be a kick: angel footage rare, of any kind. You had to get out into these wastewall areas of the building’s surface to have a chance of spotting them at all, and just by chance. Elusive; a gas angel expedition, just for that purpose, a ridiculous notion.

  Except maybe they hang out here, in this zone. Axxter rubbed his chin, thinking. Like a nest, or something. The great angel rookery? Who knows? Surely they don’t give birth in the air as well? How do they, then? He made a mental note to log the wall coordinates, downwall by left-around, so he could find the place again. Some other time.

  Angel stuff being rare also made it valuable, however. Beyond the mere smile. That decided the issue. “Get me Registry.”

  After he’d zipped the footage from his archive to Reg and got a File Check, Clear & Confirmed Ownership – thank God that much service came free – he asked if anything else had come in lately under the heading Angels, Gas, Coitus (Real Time). For all he knew, whole orgies had been taking place in the skies around the building’s morningside.

  Two cents pinged off the meter panel in the corner of his sight, Registry’s charge for the inquiry. The sight/sound made him wince.

  NOTHING, JACK. TOTAL NADA. The Registry interface had a flip personality. YOU MIGHT TRY UNDER HISTORICAL AND/OR POETRY. “I WANDERED LONELY AS A -”

  Another eyeflick, to DISCONNECT. He didn’t want to get tagged for another charge. Not for ancient nonsense, some pre-War file dredged out of Registry’s deep vaults. “Screw that.”

  PARDON?

  “Get me, um… get me Lenny Red.” By contract, Axxter should have called his agent Brevis. But Brevis took a ten-percenter bite; and any idiot working out of a top-level office could peddle hot angel love stuff. I could do it, from here – Axxter knew Ask & Receive had a call out, all angel footage bought top-price. But Ask & Receive also listed their stringers in a public file; if Brevis found out – and he would – he’d take the whole wad paid, not just ten percent. Contractual penalty. So Lenny’s usual five made him a bargain.

  SHIELD LINE?

  “Naw, don’t bother.” No sense in paying the extra – he had his Reg confirm. “Just call him straight in.”

  YOU’RE THE BOSS.

  The cranky wire quavered Lenny’s face. “Howdy, Ny.”

  He squinted at the image overlaid in his sight. Lenny’s forehead smeared to the left; his mouth was a rippling loop. This far downwall, you took what you could get. “Got something for you.”

  “Oh?” Oh? – the line echoed as well. “Like what?” Kwut?

  “Angels.”

  A distorted eyebrow lifted like an insect leg at the edge of the film “Really.” Lee-ee.

  “Catch this.” Axxter engineered a smug smile into his own face. “Angels having sex.”

  “Yeah?” No longer bored; Lenny’s hand came into view, tapping a control panel at the edge of his terminal. His face pulled together, brow stacked on top where it should be. It hadn’t been distance/transmit problems at all – he’d taken Axxter’s call through some low-rate line filter. The little shit – Axxter smiled and ate his resentment. Only greed, the push to cover his operating nut, kept him from disconnecting over an insult like that.

  “Yeah.” The word tasted good, with its juice of money. “Fresh this morning. I thought of you first, Lenny.”

  “Flattered.” Lenny, in sharp focus now, tried to reassemble his dealer’s cool. “I… might… be able to help you out. Possibly.”

  “Cut the crap.” Not screwing me on this one. Axxter blinked on PLAYBACK from his archive. “You’re gonna love it.”

  Registry’s confirm number shadowed miniscule across the bottom of the image in his eye’s tiny editing segment; Axxter shifted his gaze back to center and caught the small sign of disappointment the Reg number produced on Lenny’s face as he watched the tape on his own terminal. Bastards like him made such precautions necessary.

  They watched in silence, image on wire linking them through the building’s vast corpus, thread in subcutaneous mesh. Even in miniature, at the corner of his eye, the entwined figures caught him Floating in their rectangle of recorded sky. Axxter’s heart drained, became hollow, as he gazed. I shouldn’t even have kept it for myself. Mercantile victory soured on his tongue. The angel faces, small dots at this resolution; he couldn’t see the female’s trembling lashes, but remembered them. I should’ve let them go and drift away, off-tape. Just in memory. Need the cash, though. Shit.

  He snapped out of his reverie when the image suddenly jittered ahead in time, the taped angels comically flailing and whirling in flat air. Lenny, on-line to the archive, fast-forwarded through the tape, catching a few bits in real time, then running ahead again. Axxter bit his lip. This bastard’s got no soul at all.

  End of tape; the square of empty sky vanished as Lenny’s face, at center, came back up. He nodded, not even trying to hide how impressed. “Not bad.”

  “Unique.” Axxter smiled around the bone in his throat. Sell, you sonuvabitch; the advice he’d given himself a million times. Be a bastard and eat. “The word is unique.”

  “Well…” Lenny’s hand crawled into view and waggled on edge. “There was that Opt Cooder find a few years back. Along the same lines.”

  “What? Your ass.” Axxter shook his head in disbelief. “The one Cooder found was dead.”

  “Yeah, but Ask & Receive got wild accessing off it. Death tones are always big in the horizontal levels. That tape’s still bringing in money for them.”

  True enough; Axxter knew. He’d been on the horizontal himself, saving up his grubstake, when the Cooder tape had gone on market. And he had bought it, too. First the minimum charge for one-time access; then, when he hadn’t been able to get the image of the dead angels out of his mind, paying for permanent zip into personal archive. Through the long months – Christ, years if totaled – of working in the piss-factory types of jobs he could get without signing a lifer contract, and the nights on end of honing his would-be graffex skills, sketching out ideas for warrior decs and military ikons, building up a working archive, buying little scraps of biofoil to practice implanting; sweating every nickel toward the used freelancer gear he’d locked onto – unable to afford superstition about residual bad luck from the guy who’d gone bust running it before – and worrying that some other young hopeful would snatch it up before his account reached the precisely calculated level where he could chance going vertical… through all of that, he remembered watching the Opt Cooder tape of the famous dead gas angel. Watching, thinking, and waiting. Or waiting with no thought at all. Kept me going; Axxter nodded to himself. Maybe because, even dead, the angel had represented a certain freedom. A creature of the air, neither horizontal nor vertical. Cooder, top-rank wanderer that he had been, had lucked out in that find: no sign of violence on the angel’s body. Anyone watching the tape might have thought the female angel was sleeping, until the reverse zoom from her tranquil face revealed the torn and deflated membrane, no longer a sphere behind her shoulders. She had lain swathed in the billowing folds, w
hich when taut with blood-rendered gases would have borne her aloft. Caught by that delicate tissue alone, she would never have remained bound to Cylinder’s wall; as Cooder’s camera had watched, another translucent scrap had torn loose in the wind and fluttered away. But one of the dead hands had snagged in a transit cable loop; Cooder’s lens had moved in on the dried trickle of blood running down from her wrist under the gray metal, just enough to dispel the mystery of how the nude form had come to this rest. If closing his eyes would have blanked out Lenny’s face, Axxter could have replayed it, watched it all over again from memory; it lay parallel and so close to this morning’s living, mating angels that the images had bled into each other, one section of time superimposed over another. As if the lovers had coupled all unconscious of the corpse framed in the same shot with them, tangled in the building’s cables, diagonal from the open air in which they turned and clasped.

  Opt Cooder had made the most of the rare chance; no one else had ever gotten so close to one, alive or dead. A certain aesthetic sense that went with his rep, catching the fading light as the sun went over Cylinder and on to the eveningside – so that the red tinge on the angel’s cheek had almost made her seem alive. But sleeping. Because if she had been dead, wouldn’t she have disappeared where all the other dead angels go? And where was that? Something that Axxter still wondered, along with everybody else who watched the scanty archives, over and over. Maybe there was some one spot on an unexplored sector of the building’s surface where all the pretty corpses came to rest. Leaving behind not a whitening layer of bones – those would crumble away like dust, figured Axxter – but of something like tattered silk, gray where the blood had once made the tissue into pink lace.

  Or maybe they just fall, he thought. Down through the cloud barrier, and whatever’s below that, if anything. Maybe all the dead angels are still falling.