Farewell Horizontal

by K. W. Jeter

  The patch of cable behind the Norton’s wheel glowed red, then orange, finally white. Driblets of molten steel trickled down the wall behind. Axxter squinted as he aimed the blue glare, the reflected heat searing his cheeks.

  He could hear them whooping now, their prey in sight, the warriors’ shouts cutting above the thunder of their engines. Looking up from the torch’s flame, Axxter saw the leader raising an ornamented scimitar above his head, face contorted in a manic grin. In a line behind the leader’s machine, the others yelled and brandished their weapons.

  A minute away, or less – he felt like throwing down the torch, climbing back into the Norton’s seat, and rolling the throttle on full. Anything, just to get away, to buy ten more seconds – the chase had hopped up the Mass warriors, made them blood crazy. My blood. He bit his lip and pressed the torch closer to the cable.

  Suddenly, the white-hot section seemed to thin, growing narrower where the flame played on it. The tension on the line that kept it taut against the wall – that was it, he realized. I did it. Stretching thinner, from two hands’ width, to one, then less, the metal and flame becoming one -

  He heard it then, a high-pitched singing note from the cable itself. It drilled through his ears, into the center of the skull, so sharp that he could barely keep the torch in focus, pressing it against the melting steel.

  Come on – come on, you bastard! His teeth buzzed against each other, the scream echoing inside his head.

  And the other sound, the roaring of engines, the wall shimmering with the rolling impact. A shout, loud enough to cut through everything else, and he knew the scimitar was glittering in the light, raised higher, ready to strike, meters away, then less, and he couldn’t look up, his eyes locked on the flame and the glowing metal -

  It snapped.

  He saw, in a frozen moment, the cable suddenly thinning to the width of his finger. Then nothing, just the wall underneath, scorched by the flame; the tension-loading had snapped the ends apart.

  He saw it, the bright line etched in his vision, the image still there when the wall had vanished. For a fraction of a second he wondered about that, about the sudden wind that streamed across his chest and outflung arms, about the welding torch with its blue flame tearing from his grasp, then spiraling away, out of reach. His head filled with a sharp tide of blood, reddening his vision, then sluiced away again, leaving dizzying black spots across the rotating sky.

  Turning in air, he saw the clouds roll below him; then, amazingly – they were above him. Two Havoc Mass warriors, arms and legs swimming against nothing, drifted upward, their mouths wide with curses he somehow couldn’t hear.

  The wind rolled him again. He saw the building now, the wall shrinking away from him. The transit cable, snapped in two, whipped free, flinging the rest of the warriors into the air, their machines and weapons spinning loose.

  He realized then, in perfect immediate knowledge, what had happened. He looked down and saw himself suspended, nothing under him but sky. The other end of the cable, which the Norton’s wheels had been clamped on, writhed snakelike, dragging the motorcycle and sidecar rig in a wide curving arc.

  I should’ve got off – he had time for the one thought before he felt the lines at his belt snap tight, the impact squeezing the air up out of his lungs. I should’ve got off and then cut the cable – you idiot -

  The world sped up and became real again. Axxter twisted his neck, looking over his shoulder. The loose end of the cable was snapping back toward the wall; the Norton was still attached, the grappling lines from its wheels stretched to their limits. The last link, the end of the whip, was himself, hooked by the pithons to the Norton’s seat.

  He hit the wall at an angle, the glancing blow against his shoulder sending sparks across his vision. He felt his hands, outside the shuddering pain, scrabbling at the wall’s metal, trying to find a handhold. Then the building tore away from him again, the snapped cable lashing back out into air.

  He managed to open his eyes and saw the Norton break loose from the cable, the grappling lines peeling away. The rig spun about, the sidecar, split from where it had struck the wall, spilling his gear in a slow constellation against the sky.

  The pithons gave way, strained past their limit; he heard them snap like distant pistol fire. Everything vanished, even the building itself, as the wind filled his hands, spreading him into an X, back arched against nothing. He saw the clouds below, still for a moment, then rushing up bright toward him.

  He hit, and was blind, in a white, featureless world. He could still feel himself falling, turning in the mist heavy against his face.

  Suddenly he could see again, in a soft gray twilight. He turned his head and saw the dark underside of the clouds, above him now.

  Then he heard the singing.

  And saw them, in circles around himself, their faces smiling, marveling at his passage among them.

  He saw the ranks of angels, the sky filled with them, singing in the gray light. Darker as his thoughts ended, his head filling with nothing, his fall pulling the last bit of himself away. But still he heard them singing.

  NINE

  He tried to wake up, then tried harder not to, to go back under the thick woozy dark. But it was too late: he’d already met the pain, the bruised layers that seemed to be piled in wet razor slices from his spine to his breastbone.

  “Jee… zuss… Christ.” He heard himself say it, a distant whisper under the wobbling roar inside one ear. Something inside him, which had been part of him but had been shaken loose, wanted to throw up; he could feel it swelling against the root of his tongue. He’d have let the thing have its way, if he’d known which way he was. If upside down, it probably wasn’t a good idea; he remembered distant warnings about aspirated stomach contents – you could die that route.

  Already, he’d assumed he was still alive. The frayed connection between the aches throbbing in sync with his blood and the trembling flinch inside his head – that was what it must mean. Dead, he wouldn’t feel this bad.

  He opened his eyes. The right eyelid stuck, then peeled open like a stiff zipper. Sky, pinkish around the edges of distant clouds. Seen through a tangle of his own hair, matted black with sweat or blood. He shook his head, gingerly, little needles jabbing at the back of his skull. The dark lines swayed against the cloudscape. Right side up. He could work that much out.

  His jacket and shirt had been torn open; looking down, chin against his chest, he saw raw bruises, his ribs stenciled in ink blue, a red abrasion at the edge of his hip bone for balance. He could see his chest rise with each breath, and match it with a particular rhythmic stab near his heart, unseen but felt like a knifepoint. Definitely alive; that confirmed, he almost regretted it. The throbs rolled their dull weight along his spine. He was amazed, under the numb protective wooze.

  He remembered hitting the wall, at the end of the transit cable’s snapping rubber band. And then falling, the big step. Either one of those should have done the job. He lifted his arm, elbow creaking, and rubbed his hand across his face, letting more light slide under the stiff red fringe. The palm of his hand was red, too, in zebra bands with black grease and dirt. Its sticky wetness smeared across his cheek.

  Grease – that made him think. Of the other poor wayfarer, his traveling companion, which had also gone smack against the wall, the louder clanging of metal against metal. It was probably the Norton’s grease on his hands – hadn’t he grabbed after it as it’d gone spinning away, half to save himself, to grab anything solid and mother-familiar in the empty air curling under his head and feet, half to save it, poor thing? He couldn’t remember. He just saw it rolling away again, in a flat arc toward the atmosphere’s crumpled edge, the wheels bent into bowl-shaped ovals, the grappling lines writhing helplessly around the hubs, frame snapped broken-back and the engine leaking bolts and scraps. The sadness of the memory, the last sighting, bubbled up and broke inside his own leaking chest. You idiot – on the verge of tears, he realized that he’d yet to fee
l anything except pain and grief connected with his discovery of still being alive.

  “Way to go.” Axxter opened his eyes again. There were probably all kinds of shit to take care of, if he was to go on living. He knew he couldn’t just stay nailed to the wall.

  For the first time, he wondered what exactly was holding him up against the building. His familiar nausea – another sign of life – knotted in his throat as he looked down and saw the cloud barrier roiling against the building’s curve, far below his feet. His boot pithons had snugged in tight, locking his heels and ankles against the metal, boot soles otherwise treading on air. The same for his waist, the lines from his belt fanned out and contracted, his butt flattened against Cylinder; the steel’s cold radiated down the backs of his thighs and into his coccyx.

  But there was something else, not alive the way the pithons were. And thicker, a raggy thing of shredded canvas and plastic, knotted around with multicolored wires, their stripped brass ends poking out of the crude rope. He could see it now, looped up through his crotch and across his chest, the sharp bits tickling the raw bruises, a tangled knot sitting on his shoulder, as if the wires were probing for a socket in his ear. Somebody had tied him up here, knitted the awkward rope as a thin saddle for his weight; somebody who didn’t trust the skinny little pithons, who didn’t know just how strong they were – if they’d given out, lost their hold on the wall, he doubted if this straggling mess would have kept him from pitching headfirst down to the clouds. He could feel it parting, the rags and wires slipping out of each other’s clutches, just from his leaning forward to look at it.

  The makeshift rope continued from the knot at his shoulder to a loop around his wrist, his right hand lifted above his head. He looked up to see if there was enough slack to pull his hand free. He saw her then, watching him.

  “Hello. Hi.” Lahft smiled at him, her eyes sleepy, as though his fumbling around had roused her from a snoozing vigil. “Hi-Ny-hi.” The angel’s smile grew bigger.

  Axxter rolled the back of his head against the wall to see her better. A triangular section of the wall’s metal had peeled away from the girder beneath, making a shelf just large enough for her to perch on; her bare legs dangled on either side of the protruding steel tongue. “Hi there.” He nodded and managed a weak imitation of her smile. Now he knew who had knotted the rope around him. To keep him from falling again.

  His hand came loose, and he shook the blood back into it. He remembered more now. Falling, and the motorcycle and sidecar spinning away, the Havoc Mass warriors toppling on down toward the clouds…

  The clouds. The angel’s big smile disappeared for a moment; all he saw were the luminous gray-and-white banks, the slow ocean of hills and crevices, rushing up toward him.

  There had been angels. He remembered that, too. Rows and rows of them, in all directions, in the twilight shade under the cloud barrier. The inflated spheres behind their shoulderblades like muted sunbursts, the traceries of veins all soft blue in the half-light, lace into ash. All around him, in every direction he turned, rolling on his back in air, arms spread wide as he fell, the wind along his ribs, breath solid in his mouth…

  That was the last thing that he remembered. There wasn’t any more after that. He saw Lahft again, leaning forward, her hands gripping the edges of the peeled metal, waiting patiently for him.

  “Okay.” Axxter nodded. “I get it. You… caught me. When I came falling through. Right?”

  She looked away, considering the statement. The little wheels were almost visible inside her skull.

  “Caught.” She pursed her lips, staring out toward the edge of the atmosphere. “Falling…” Her eyes suddenly widened in alarm; she reached down and grabbed Axxter’s wrist, locking it tight in her grip.

  “No… no.” He gently tugged his hand free. “I’m not falling now. I was falling then. Remember?”

  “Then…” Her face clouded with effort. Bright joy broke through: “Catch! Caught!” She hugged herself, pressing some invisible body to her breast. “Caught you then!”

  The angels’ elastic sense of time, first a point too small to be seen, then a rubber ball that filled a hand, but never any more than that. Axxter reached down and tugged the makeshift rope away from his chest. “Yeah, well -” It explained a lot of things. She must’ve been hanging around, the way she had been, outside the Mass camp’s firing distance, when all the shit had come literally down. Or else she’d been consorting with her buddies, all happy angels together, underneath the clouds. And it’d just been his good luck to come crashing through the soft roof of their world, right at the best of all possible spots. At any rate, she’d been there for him; had put the grab on him, a great big hug – he wished he could remember that part; battered as he was, the nude body perched above him, the bare pink feet dangling inches away from his face, still twinged the other living part of him. Incorrigible; he sighed and shook his head. The rope parted, and he dropped the two ends swinging away from him. He twisted about, boots freed for a moment until the pithons took hold in their new positions. Face and chest toward the wall now; he let out the lines from the belt, so that he could lean back in relative comfort and look up at Lahft.

  “Caught me, right. Okay…” Bit by bit, pieces fitting together. “Christ, I must’ve hit you like a ton of bricks.”

  She tilted her head, the smile puzzled.

  “When I hit you.” He slammed one hand into the other to demonstrate. “When you caught me. Boom. Then what happened?” Wasting time, he knew. There was a bunch of shit he should be taking care of, rather than just poking into the exact mechanics of his continued existence. Like finding out where the hell he was, and if it was anywhere close to all those who wanted to kick his ass. That should’ve been priority one. Still -

  “Boom.” Lahft nodded sagely, arms still wrapped around herself. “Then. Falling – right?”

  “Fell.” He could imagine it, his deadweight dropping the hugging angel along with him.

  “Long, long way.” She pointed to the clouds, and whatever was below them. “So I go big.” The translucent sphere behind her shoulders expanded in demonstration; she lifted a bit off the metal seat as the gases inside the membrane made her buoyant. “Then. Not falling.” The smile again.

  “Not falling – right. Then what? Uh – drifting?”

  “Drifting.” She nodded. “Big, and the wind -” She made a pushing gesture with the palm of one hand. “Drifting and drifting. A long way. Then. Here.”

  She wasn’t going to be much help in getting his bearings. Location was probably as fuzzy a concept as time for the angels. No difference out there in the air. They could’ve gone drifting over whole sectors of wall, one angel with her flight membrane ballooned out to the max, and her unconscious payload; until some favorable gust had brought her up against the building’s wall, close enough for her to grab on. His pithons had latched on, triggered by the proximity of steel, and she had knotted together that rope from whatever scraps she’d found nearby. Then waited.

  Axxter looked to either side, leaning back against the pithons’ tension. Bleak, featureless wall stretched out. Gotta find a plug-in jack, he decided. There had to be one around here somewhere. So he could call his bank – before anything else, he had to do that. He had to know how bad his financial situation was. His bank account was probably wiped out by whatever fine he’d been hit with for cutting the transit cable. Maybe even in the absolute red right now; he’d be hustling for years to get it paid off. Still, if Public Works Department had left him with anything at all, he could make a start at finding out what he needed to know. Like where he was, and how many were out looking for him. Ask & Receive – he could place a shielded, anonymous call to the info agency; by the time the Havoc Mass had wangled a trace, he’d be long gone. If he had the money left to pay for the info. Axxter bit his lip, letting his thoughts spin along without brakes. Gotta find some place to hook up so I can make the call; that was the first thing -

  He stopped, his string o
f thought suddenly broken. The light around him had turned red, the building’s wall deepening with it. That puzzled him, and he couldn’t tell why. Except that it had been all bright, well into the day, when he’d come to, found himself hanging here. The red light tinged darker as he stared about; he could see it on the backs of his hands. It was as though time had decided to run backward; it had become as loose and arbitrary for him as it was for the angels. The dawn following the daylight, coming after it rather than before -

  He knew Lahft was staring at him, puzzled at his sudden confusion. Staring at him, as he stared out into the sky, toward the far edge of the clouds. Out where he saw something he had never seen before.

  The clouds were all molten gold and red, turning darker, even to black as he watched.

  The sun was setting, vanishing below the rim of the cloud barrier.

  Axxter went on staring, as the sun became a slice, then a red point. He had never seen the sun set before. Nobody had.

  † † †

  He had a long time to think about it. All through a long and cold night, waiting for even the gray shadowlight that would come from the sun rising on Cylinder’s morningside.

  By himself; Lahft got hungry, or bored, and went floating off. Axxter figured he’d see her again. In the vertical cradle of his pithons, he hung close to the wall, shivering in the dark winds, working things out inside his head.

  He was on the other side. The eveningside – that much was clear. Where nobody – nobody he’d ever heard of, at least – had ever been. Just his luck – a whole new world stretching out in all directions, and he’d landed up in it with nothing but the clothes on his back. In one piece, at least; he had to admit that. The throbbing of his bruises had diminished, the blood ebbing back to his heart. One sharp pain remained in his side, which he’d prodded once with his finger, then promised himself he wouldn’t touch again.

  Must’ve been drifting out there for – what? A day, two days? How long would it take to get this far from everything? Axxter gazed out into the darkness, wondering. Unless drifting wasn’t the exact word to be used – maybe Lahft, with him in her arms and her flight membrane distended all the way, had got caught in a ripping current out near the atmosphere’s edge. Out in the jet stream: that would’ve raced them along, right over all the sectors of the morningside, right over Linear Fair, the Right or the Left one. And then – spang – down here in unknown territory.