by K. W. Jeter
The Norton swerved as it approached, circling below the sling and then turning upwall by one of the sling’s anchor points so that the sidecar was within easy reach. It halted there, headlight pointing toward Cylinder’s far-distant toplevel, engine idling with a throaty murmur. Axxter gripped the ridge of the sidecar’s hatch and pulled himself up to see the gauges between the handlebars. The perfect resemblance to a real, ancient 850 Interstate ended beneath the instruments’ circular glass: a row of LCD readouts indicated the state of the machine’s internal processes. That, and the thin black pithon cords that had whipped out of the hubs of the spoked wheels as the Norton sped across the building’s surface, the triangular heads at the ends of the lines striking anchor points on the transit cables and the pitted metal surface of the wall beneath them, holding and then releasing when each line reached full extension; snapping back into the hub and darting out again… Like nests of hyperactive snakes, it had seemed to Axxter, the first time he had seen, in some kiddie TV show, a freelancer rig scooting, gravity-defying, along Cylinder’s exterior.
Nearly a full tank. He pushed himself back from the gauges. All through the morningside’s night, while the sun had been on the other side of the building, while Axxter had slept, the Norton, with a machine’s faithfulness, had scoured the nearby sections of wall, scraping up with its extended butterfly proboscis the thin green fur and overlapping plates of lichen. From somewhere in the motorcycle’s ovoid tank came the soft gurgle and hiss of conversion, organic matter into fuel. In his gear, Axxter had a kit for rendering the green into something edible, or at least nutritious. The remembered taste of the distilled slime made him shudder. If death itself had a taste, he thought, it would be something like that. One more reason for praying that some more money came in before his current stock of supplies ran out.
As he began loading his gear from the sling into the sidecar, strapping everything into place with bungee cords, he heard a sound rising over the Norton’s idle. Another engine, barking and rasping, and, up in treble, the singing of pithon lines zipping around transit cables. Axxter looked over the edge of the sling and saw another freelancer heading upwall toward him.
“Hey! Sonofabitch!” A shout and gloved hand waving above the approaching motorcycle’s handlebars. “How ya doin’, Ny?”
He had thought he recognized the clatter of her ill-tuned Indian replica. “Guyer – where’d the hell you come from?”
She pulled the Indian and sidecar rig up alongside the sling’s other anchor. The words GUYER GIMBLE – I DELIVER were painted on the sidecar’s flank; on the motorcycle’s tank, a three-quarter profile of her when younger and the most in-demand camp follower anywhere on Cylinder’s surface. Or at least the known morningside of the building. The years since then had pared her face down to a more intimidating sexuality, as if leaning into the wind of her full-throttle passage had stripped away all but the most necessary flesh. One knot loosened at the base of Axxter’s gut while another tightened with a pleasurable fear.
Guyer leaned away from the Indian’s handlebars, her silver hair thus coursing straight back from her knifelike profile. “Here and there.” She smiled sideways at him. “Just making my rounds. You trying’ to run down that Rowdiness bunch?”
“Yeah – you seen them?”
“’Bout a week ago.” Her eyes shifted, following some interior calculation. “Yeah, that’s right. They should still be downwall from here.” One hand waved toward that quadrant. “Gonna try and sign ’em up?”
Axxter shrugged. “What else?” Guyer had inside sources, having become well-known for her key position on the freelancers’ gossip net. Though you wouldn’t need that, he thought, to figure out what I’m doing in these parts. “What’d you think of them?”
The smile extended, turned upside-down by her position. “Nice boys. Hey – at this stage, who can tell? They all talk tough when they’re starting out. Gonna set the whole building on fire.” She leaned forward, spreading her hands on the motorcycle’s tank. “They’re worth a shot – I picked up a couple shares of their initial offering, and an option for a block later.”
That explained her feline aura of self-satisfaction. A woman who enjoyed her business. And the Rowdiness bunch wasn’t a week’s travel away from here – Axxter looked into her hooded eyes and got a confirm. She’d serviced them yesterday; he could almost smell it on her, not an odor but an echo of adrenaline charges going off under her practiced hands. The itch moved across his shoulders, to get his Norton loaded up, to track down the tribe for his own business proposition. Maybe they’re just hours from here; they could be.
Another impulse sparked against the first. “Hey, Guyer – you want to see something neat?”
She swung one leg over the Indian’s tank and ambled toward him. The easy grace of a long-time freelancer, born on the vertical: a twinge of disorientation nausea clenched Axxter’s stomach as he watched her walk, perpendicular to the wall, the pithons from her boots catching and releasing with each stride, whip lines from just below her knees to the metal surface. Under her skin the muscles tightened to keep her straight as a flag in wind.
He dug the camera out of the sidecar and brought up from his archive the tape he’d shot that morning. He watched her screening it in the camera’s tiny viewfinder; kneeling above him, her hair just tracing across his own cheek – in the center of her pupils the figures twined and drifted across two small skies.
“’S nice.” She straightened, away from the edge of the sling, and smiled at him.
His hands fumbled with the camera, the power LEDs winking out. He didn’t know why he had wanted to show the tape of the mating angels to Guyer. Maybe I was hoping for something. The usual action, I suppose. A repeat of his initial encounter with her, when he’d first been making slow and nervous progress across Cylinder’s exterior, a few kilometers downwall from his exit point. It was well known that Guyer had long ago built up her portfolio to the point of comfortable retirement; she did what she wanted now, including such nonmercantile acts of initiation. A welcome to the vertical.
The memory of it faded as Axxter gazed at the dead camera. The replay of the angels, reflected in the woman’s eyes, stilled that ordinary desire. He turned away from her, stowing the camera back in the sidecar’s hatch.
Guyer could read some tendon’s semaphore in the back of his neck. He felt the warm sympathy of her regard, even before her hand stroked the hinge at the top of his spine. She hadn’t gotten to the toplevel of her field without these more tender abilities. How many warriors had lain in those thin arms, listening to the percolation of blood beneath her minimal breasts, watching the stars in their slow revolve around the building? More than I could guess, thought Axxter.
“Guess where I’ve been.” Distracting him. “Over at the Fair.”
“Yeah? Which one?” Not that it mattered; the prospect of hot rumors from either Linear Fair, the twin rivers of commerce and gossip running down the sides of the building, was sufficiently enticing. The Fairs’ merchants, sitting on the demarcation lines between the known world and all the mysterious eveningside, heard everything.
Guyer signaled with a tilt of her head. “The Left.” The gesture went to her own right, perched upside down as she was. “Heard all kinds of good stuff.”
“Like what?” Angels forgotten for the moment.
She leaned down, closer to him. “The Havoc Mass.” Her voice a whisper, for the sheer pleasure of conspiracy; they were alone on the barren sector wall. “They’re putting on a big recruiting push. For the grand alliance they’re building up. Signing up all sorts of little tribes, two-man outfits, battalions, everything. Cutting deals all over the place, to get ’em signed on. You talk to this Rowdiness bunch when you finally run ’em down: betcha even they’ve been approached.” She rocked back on her haunches, butt in the web of her boots’ pithons. “The Mass -” Her eyes narrowed, as though she was savoring the word. “They’re making their move. At last.”
The sudden fervor in
her voice unnerved him What’s it matter to her? All that heavy squabbling for control of Cylinder’s toplevel seemed distant in more ways than one to Axxter. Like the passage of the sun over the apex of the building, casting the morningside into deep shade and then deeper night, when the cloud barrier below the eveningside swallowed up all light. Not much you could do about it – you lived within the constraints of light and dark like everyone else on the vertical exterior. If the Havoc Mass wanted to square off against the Grievous Amalgam, who had been squatting on top of Cylinder since long before Axxter, or Guyer, had been born – hey, let ’em, he figured. Cynical enough to believe that it wouldn’t make a rat’s ass difference to him personally, yet the sight of Guyer with her eyes closed, dreaming of some golden future, made him wonder.
“Yeah, well -” He shrugged. “Best of luck to ’em, I guess.”
She looked at him with a sad reproof. “You really have to care more about it than that, Ny. It’s important.”
The maternal tone irritated him “What’s important to me is hustling up some business, getting some real earners into my portfolio. Right? I’m gonna be out here on the wall doing that, no matter what happens between Grievous and Havoc up on top. They don’t mean shit to me, sweetheart.”
Guyer said something back to him, but he didn’t hear it, overridden by the shout of his own thoughts. Important to me. Money, always money. The Havoc Mass had plenty of it, being the roughest and toughest military tribe currently operating, and good politicians with overlapping layers of alliances and treaties among all the other hard-case tribes. Collective force pressing up against the Grievous Amalgam – generations away from being the military tribe they had started out as. Now into the sheer Byzantry of power, raking the big license fees in from the toplevel agencies such as Ask & Receive, the Wire Syndicate, and the Small Moon Consortium. Mucho bucks there. A throughflow, to pay for the legions of mercenaries, the diplomatic and intelligence corps, all the machinery to keep the Amalgam court, in all its glittering pathology, right up where it had been for so long. The meaning-heavy phrase mucho bucks circled around in his thoughts again. If I could just squeeze out a few dimes of it – then I’d be happy. Christ, I don’t want it all. Or much. Just enough. And dimes were dimes, no matter who ate the dollars.
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.
