by K. W. Jeter
“I just wanted to see you again.”
She kept her finger in the book to mark her place. “Must’ve cost you.”
He let the carrier-image shrug for him. “They put on a surcharge for having Ask & Receive figure out your location. That’s all.”
The smile saddened. “I don’t usually do anything except real flesh, Ny. Just one of my little preferences. If that’s what you came here for.” She laid the book down on a pillow at the sling’s narrow end. “You know there’s places you could go for that; I could give you some recommendations.”
He shook his head. “No; it’s not important. But… if you wanted to give it a try… I paid for the complete sensory package. With on-line enhancements. I could respond very well.”
Her eyes widened a bit. “Really? You must be feeling pretty flush.”
Tilting the image’s head back, he looked up the dark height of the building, all the way to the distant top, the same black as the surrounding night. “No -” He looked back at her. “No, I just don’t give a shit.”
“Well… in that case…” Guyer reached out and brushed aside his shirt, a film of smoke over his skin. “It’ll cost you a little bit more still. Just on principle, you know.”
“Sure.” He closed his eyes. Her hand felt like fire as it moved down his ribs. “I understand everything.”
† † †
He laid his head on her breast. Lying together in the sling; she held him in her arms, a circle carefully held around the image. “I saw myself.” He tilted his face to look up at her. “Before. Before I came here.”
She made a motion to stroke his hair, the dark strands unreachable beneath her fingertips. “Really?”
“It was like a mirror. Only it moved when I didn’t.”
He could almost feel her stiffen against him. “Ny -” Her gaze was level and no longer playful. “If you see something like that again – and if it says anything to you – don’t listen. Okay? Just don’t. I know about these things.”
The carrier-image lifted up onto its elbows. “What would it say to me? It’s just a ghost on the line.”
With one hand, she reached and pulled a blanket over herself. “Some ghosts are different from others.” She smoothed the blanket across her legs. “They all want to play.” A sour word when she spoke it. “Just in different ways sometimes.”
He said nothing, watching her brush her tangled hair back from the side of her face.
“You’d better go, Ny. This is costing you money.”
He nodded. “What do I owe you?”
“Forget it. I’ll put it on your account; settle up the next time.” She lay back against the pillow and shut her eyes.
Back in his own flesh, he called up his bank account. The night’s little excursions had wiped out his small profits from selling the tapes to Ask & Receive, the angels and the spooky ruins. Under the silver glow of the Small Moon, he looked across Cylinder’s wall to the jagged silhouettes of the ruin zone’s torn metal. Solid black against black now, all the heat had died away.
FOUR
A dead angel. Another, different dead angel; for a moment Axxter thought that the old Opt Cooder tape, the one he’d watched so often as a kid on the horizontal, had somehow slid from some interior archive and across his vision. He brought the Norton to a halt and gazed down over the handlebars at the sight below. The confused overlay between taped past and bleeding present faded as the delicate corpse lay tangled against the transit cable on which his motorcycle’s wheel had locked.
She – female; he saw one small breast distorted against the steel wall – lay unmoving, cradled by the deflated membrane behind her shoulders. The thin tissue no longer spheroid with the lifting gases, but now a gray shroud, with a tattered fringe sifted by the wind. Blackened: as Axxter watched, one ashy streamer tore free from the membrane’s charred edges and fluttered twisting into the atmosphere. Different from Cooder’s celebrated tape, where the corpse had been undamaged, the membrane limp due to the stilled blood no longer replenishing its contents. And that one, long ago, had been blond, the hair pale, almost translucent. This one was dark; he gazed down at the black tangle over her shoulder and along her arm, high contrast against the white skin.
The wind caught a fold of the membrane, billowing it behind the angel’s head. Her face turned from its kiss against the wall, the rise of the chin stretching the slender throat. The face returned his gaze, the unseeing eyes half-shaded by the dark lashes. His chest hollowed as he recognized the dead angel.
It’s her. He knew it, the memory sharp; no need to call the tape file out of the camera’s archive. I’ll be goddamned; he reached down and shut off the Norton’s engine, the murmuring idle an intrusion on the scene and his thoughts. The face he had last seen, the lashes trembling, mouth opening in a small cry; head thrown back, dark hair a pennant in open air; her hands straining against the male’s chest, the taut spheres behind their shoulders filled with dawn light… he had seen the face then, in the camera’s viewfinder, lens tracking the mating angels as they had turned far from Cylinder’s steel wall. Now the same face lay below him, beyond the motorcycle’s wheel, the torn membrane a pillow for a longer sleep.
He knew why the hollow in his chest. Irrational: I shouldn’t have taped her. Them. Stole all their life, right when they weren’t watching, busy at those other things. Way to go, champ; stole it and sold it, and the obliging world snared the husk and left it here for him to find. Just to make me feel like a shit.
Disgust stifled the mercenary notion of taking out the camera again and taping the corpse. Fuck ’em; the hungry eyes stacked up inside the building already had one dead angel to look at.
Axxter swung his legs off the Norton and let his boot pithons snap onto the wall. With one hand grasping the transit cable, he awkwardly clambered down to where the angel hung. The silklike tissue of the deflated membrane wrapped around his arm as he reached down toward her. He wanted to pull her loose from the angle of cable that had snagged the light body and let her fall free of the building, down through the cloud layer to whatever place all other dead angels went. His hand strayed for a moment, a centimeter from her face. In the cup of his palm, he felt a faint motion of air, warmer than the wind curling over his back. It disappeared, then came again, a breath shallower than the one he’d felt a moment before.
“Christ!” His hand slid to the side of her throat. A feeble pulse touched his fingertips. The angel’s head lolled to one side as he pulled his hand back.
Alive, barely – whatever had torn and burned the spherical membrane (a memory, the dark place behind the ripped metal the smell of burnt things, moved behind his thoughts) had left a small living thread inside the fragile body. But not for long, obviously. The flesh that had glowed with its own heat when he’d taped it two mornings ago now grayed with the dull tint of the silklike stuff fluttering around her limbs. He guessed shock, maybe some internal injury that he hadn’t discerned yet. The loss of blood seemed minimal, with no break that he could see in the naked skin. The burn damage had mercifully cauterized most of the blood vessels feeding into the torn membrane.
“Shit.” The word slid around one gnawed thumbnail. Dead had been one thing, bad enough; a dying angel was even worse. What are you supposed to do with something like that? That nobody – not out here, at least – would know what you’d done made it no easier. Can’t just push her off into the clouds now… so then what? Watch and wait until she is dead? “Goddamn -” Gotta do something for her. And how easy would that be? Or likely to do any good? His medical skills, rudimentary by even freelancer standards… and were gas angels even human? They looked like it, if perhaps a bit on the childlike, ethereal side, bird bones thin and light enough to be carried through the air… Shit, maybe they are birds, featherless ones. Or something entirely different, cooked up by the endlessly clever people who lived before the War. Axxter shook his head, worrying the thumbnail farther down.
“Well -” The wind carried away his voice. Can’
t kill her any deader, can you? He tightened his grip on the cable and lowered himself closer to the angel.
The wind had picked up in the span of minutes since he had spotted her. A rapid flutter came from the blackened edges of the tattered membrane, the wind’s force tearing off the longer ribbons. The angel sagged lower in the shroudlike cradle formed by her own dead tissue, one thin arm dangling down toward the clouds far below. Her slight weight tugged at the point where the membrane had become entangled with the transit cable, the twisted silk fraying into strings.
Axxter drew a pithon from his belt, letting its triangular head seek out an anchor point on the building’s rough surface. He kept one hand on the taut line, sliding it through his fingers, an inelegant, squatting rappel, his free hand reaching down to gather up the angel. Her bare shoulders fit into the crook of his arm, her head lolling back against the point of his shoulder. Almost weightless, like picking up someone from hollow time, it seemed to him, a figure only perceptible by the eyes. That impression lasted only a second: his lifting the fragile body loosed a fold of the membrane that had been trapped against the wall. The wind caught it, a cupped sail; the line burned through his fingers’ crook as he was jerked away from the building.
For a moment, clutching the angel to his chest in a reflex spasm, he saw the massed clouds skirting the wall far below, the angel’s dark hair a net over his face, the strands twisting on his tongue as he gasped for breath. Another gust of wind, the membrane flapping and billowing around them, and he felt his boots strain against the pithons’ hold. His fist tightened, the safety line a knife-edge in his grip, but stopping him perpendicular to the wall, leaning back against the air.
“Fucking A.” He looked into the angel’s face. She seemed asleep, cheek cuddling against a lover’s collarbone, in naked ease. Axxter felt the warmth from whatever life residual in her, seeping through his shirt, and… The old joke; the persistent flesh. Goddamn it; you’re disgusting, he told himself. Ass hanging out over the big step, straight down to the clouds – and that’s all you can think of? Jesus H. Christ. Wearily, he lifted his hand, a less offensive member, from the angel’s spine and reached across her to the safety line. He began pulling himself up to the wall, his arms holding the angel against himself. The drag from the membrane’s sail lessened as it compressed back against the building.
Once he’d regained the vertical, the angel was light enough for him to carry with one arm, hers dangling limp over his shoulders, as he climbed back up to the Norton. He placed her in the sidecar, secured with a bungee cord sash from hip to armpit. Leaning over her, he felt her breath against his palm – shallower? He couldn’t tell. From behind her, he pulled out his graffex gear and his collapsible work platform.
Wherever the platform was set up and anchored, it gave him space enough to go completely around whatever stretched-out warrior he was working on; the slender form of the angel barely took up half that much room. Axxter drew the curtains to shut out the wind and bent over the unconscious figure.
In the half-light filtering through the fabric curving above his head, Axxter watched the slight rise and fall of the angel’s shallow breathing. He could have slapped some vital-signs monitoring equipment on her – he had the stuff somewhere at the bottom of his med kit – but figured there was no use. I wouldn’t know what it meant, anyway, human or otherwise. No injuries visible, except for a few bruises, the largest along the ribcage showing the imprint of the transit cable’s twisted steel strands. He lifted each limb, checking methodically for broken bones, before turning her over.
Out of the wind now, he could lift up the flight membrane and see the extent of the damage. The translucent tissue had more resilience than he expected, a thin film stretching between his hands, the network of capillaries expanding like a net. Only where the membrane was charred black had the wind and the angel’s weight been able to tear it. He lowered the membrane, a gauzy cape to the base of the angel’s spine, and knelt down to rummage through his med kit.
With a half-dozen bungee cords snagged onto the overhead curtain struts, the other ends hooked into the handle loops of a brace of hemostats clamped to the angel’s flight membrane, Axxter spread the tissue into a sagging tent. Now he could see the actual dimensions of the burn wound. Whatever tongue of fire had hit her – the acrid smell from the ruin zone, behind the smell of charred flesh, rose in his memory – who, or whatever, had aimed it, had vaporized an oval section of the membrane. Over a third of the total tissue area, Axxter estimated, peering at the draped skin. Leaving a black 0 slanting from the angel’s left hip up to the nape of her neck. The band of burned tissue was widest toward the bottom curve, narrowing to a few centimeters at the top. Studying the wound, Axxter could visualize the shot that had zeroed the membrane section out to ash, a blowtorch to a paper balloon.
She must’ve been there. He poked at the burned edge; a black flake adhered to his fingertip. Floating around out in the air, with that silly sweet smile on her face, when the Dead Centers blew open that whole section of the wall. All that screaming and various other loud noises as those horizontal suckers got crisped; plus big bright explosions – must’ve looked just fascinating to her. Axxter shook his head, grimacing at more than the burned smell rendered on his tongue. And then those fuckers – he meant the Dead Centers, even without the name forming inside his head – they looked out past the blown-open wall, out into the sky, and there’s some beautiful naked female apparition bobbing around out there, with her little smiling face looking in all curious to see what was going on, and a great big butterfly sphere filled with light behind her… So they just naturally lift their flame-spitting weapons at her – or just look at her with their dead eyes, all flint and steel. And just zap her out of the sky. Bad fuckers. An angel doesn’t stand a chance in this bad world.
“That’s what you get for being curious, sweetheart.” Axxter looked down at the angel’s sleeping face, turned to one side against the table, but there was no sign that she’d heard. It’s what I’ll probably get someday, too; remembering his little stroll around the ruin zone, the burn stench in his nostrils and the empty gazes of the horizontal dead on his back.
She was still breathing; inside the curtained-off space he could even hear the slight motion of air. Just getting her off the wall and into a secure space had postponed her death. Axxter scratched the side of his face, wondering what to do next. Probably won’t even die from the torn-open membrane, he supposed. But just kinda… starve to death, go into a moping decline or something, from not being able to float around in the air and do whatever it is angels do. Like a wing-clipped bird, a big one; what he imagined an eagle would be like. Have to hand-feed them for the rest of their lives, which wouldn’t be long, but would be sad. Shit; kinder to just kill her – he could dig enough anaesthetic dermal patches out of the med kit to do the job. Just slather them on the naked body and watch the heartbeat flutter and go still, under the massed chemical weight.
Or – the mercenary consideration; always that – I could just call up ol’ Ask & Receive. Tell them what I have here on the table; they’d have a pickup squad zooming down the wall in seconds, right to this spot. Take her right back to their toplevel research labs, and -
He shook his head. You get to go to hell – someplace down below the clouds, he imagined – for something like that. Being responsible for angel dissection. If there isn’t a hell, then there should be one, just for cases like that.
For a couple of minutes he stood by the table, gazing at the angel. Then he pushed through the curtains and clambered up the wall to where he’d left the Norton. He returned with his graffex gear. Setting it on the floor, he began pulling out the things he’d need.
† † †
He had strapped himself into the Norton’s sidecar, and even managed to fall asleep in that awkward position, legs angled out over the side. Not wanting to be there in the curtained-off work space when the angel awoke; there’d been enough bad shit happen to her, he’d figured, without h
er finding some gross, scary human being beside her.
An alarm beeped inside his ear, pulling him up from sleep. It took him a moment, blinking and running his tongue over sour-tasting teeth, before he realized what it was. “She’s up?” He had left a mike pinned to the curtains, set to detect any small sound.
I SUPPOSE. The letters moved across his gaze. EITHER THAT OR SOMETHING ELSE IN THERE.
Axxter climbed down to the platform. When he parted the curtains, he saw the angel sitting on the edge of the table, feet dangling. Her dark hair fell across her shoulders, one ribbon of it curling over her breast.
She looked straight at him. “Hello.” No fear in her face or voice.
He stood on the platform’s edge, curtain in each hand. “Uh -” His own voice had gotten lost for a moment. “Hello.”
A smile, radiant and heartbreaking. “Lahft’s my name. Angel’s my game.”
That threw him. Physically: he held tighter to the curtains to keep from swaying back from the platform’s edge. Who knew they could speak at all? Let alone anything you could understand. “Loft,” he repeated, unable to think of anything else.
She shook her head, the dark hair lifting from her shoulders. “Lahft. Lah-ah-ah-ahft.” Again the smile, waiting.
A fierce, dizzy joy swept across him, which he had to marvel at even as it passed. This was why he’d left the horizontal, gone vertical, stared down the wall and felt his guts rise in his throat, just to wake up and see that… all of that. To be standing, gazing at this female thing. But not that; that wasn’t it at all. An angel smiling at him. For her to be there, to be here… in a little space, nothing but the curtains and the echoing platform between him and the great empty air. If it only happened once, that was enough. Then it would always be happening, somewhere. Out here.
“Laaahhft. How’s that – okay?”
She nodded, then laughed when he told her his name. “Ny.” She looked upward, considering the sound. “Nigh, near, nearest. No such word as nearer. In a way.”
