by K. W. Jeter
A new thought wormed its way in. Maybe she’d done it on purpose. Hanging out the way she’d been doing; she wasn’t so stupid as not to have known that he was in major trouble. Time to split, before more of the Havoc Mass ass-kickers arrived on the scene. The farther away from the scene she could deliver him, the better. And there wasn’t any farther than this.
“Christ almighty.” A cramp had bit into his leg. “Shit.” He reached down and massaged his thigh. Without his bivouac gear – all gone cloudward with everything else stowed in the Watsonian sidecar – the night cold became fully evident for the first time in his vertical career. You could freeze to death out here – he let the cramp be, and nestled his arms tight around himself again, drawing the edges of his torn jacket together. He’d be glad to see the first shadowlight filtering gray across the wall – meaning the sun had risen above the cloud barrier on Cylinder’s other side – as then he’d be able to see where he was going, moving to pump up the warmth in his blood. Plus find a place to plug in and make his call to Ask & Receive. Dig up whatever files they had concerning the eveningside. Any scrap of knowledge might be useful. And food – what the hell was he going to do about that? His brain niggled on, each worry marching after the other in time to the grumbling ostinato from his empty stomach. As the pain from his bruises receded, it had revealed that deeper one, growing sharper with time instead.
Impossible to sleep; that had always been difficult enough, even with a securely moored tent to cradle him, a nice cozy little womb to stretch out in. It had taken him a week of increasing red-eyed exhaustion, when he’d first gone out on the wall, to manage it. Now, strapped to the metal by nothing but his boots and belt, Christ only knew how far from anywhere anyone else had ever been, and his butt freezing… He scrunched his head down as far as he could. Got enough sleep, he supposed, when he’d been drifting along in the gas angel’s arms.
His gut panged again. Should’ve eaten at Cripplemaker’s banquet; he hadn’t known that it was going to be his last chance for a while. He closed his eyes and waited for light.
† † †
He spotted it, a little dimple on the building’s edge; a rush of joy blossomed inside his head, enough to squeeze tears stinging in his eyes. The straight line between Cylinder and the sky wavered for a moment.
Panting his thanks, Axxter hauled himself toward the plug-in jack. His arm and leg muscles trembled from the hours of spidering over the building’s surface. Noon already, Cylinder’s noon; the vertical landscape had gone from gray half-light to bright full as the sun had broken over the top far above him That was a sight he had never seen before – a dawn you had to tilt your head back to see – but he’d been too tired to marvel at it. His slow progress, prodded by hunger and a carefully held-down panic, had come close to exhausting him. With his lost motorcycle-and-sidecar rig under him, Cylinder had seemed big enough to him. Now he’d had its immensity beat into the stiffening crooks of his hands.
“You sweet thing. Come on over here.” In the slanting crab-scuttle the pithons at his waist and ankles afforded him, he slid toward the plug-in.
“Gotcha.” There were concentric yellow rings painted around the spot, the plug-in the exact center of the target. Axxter knuckled the tears from his eyes, then probed the hole with his finger. Dust and cobwebby muck; he scraped it out with his nail. He stuck his finger back in, waggling it back and forth to make contact. “Come on, you sonuvabitch…”
An unnerving fear that he hadn’t let himself think about during his search dried his mouth. Maybe the Wire Syndicate lines, the pre-War network it had inherited, maybe they didn’t run all the way to this side of the building. Who knew? Maybe there was no connection to be made, his finger rattling inside a dead hole, no line to the far world of help and money… “Come on -” The dot of bright metal on his fingertip scraped against the side of the hole. He squeezed his eyes closed. “Please -”
Behind his eyelids, a word pulsed on, luminous.
NUMBER?
He could’ve wept. “I need to talk to my bank.” He blinked on his display, his directory reeling across one side of his vision. “Right now.”
NUMBER? The idiot word flashed, on-off, on-off.
Some ancient circuit, built-in at this end. You ran across them sometimes, out in the less-traveled sectors. Christ only knew when was the last time this plug-in had been used. Maybe back before the War. “Goddamn.” Axxter stared at the word printed on the sky. What’d the thing want?
“My number?”
NUMBER? On-off.
There was a registration number for the vanished Norton, and his business license. He could dig those up, but he couldn’t figure why the circuit wanted to know.
It dawned on him. The bank’s number. He opened up the entry on the comm list and let the digits dance in sequence across the center of the field.
DIALING. He let out his breath. PLEASE WAIT.
The Wire Syndicate’s logo flashed by, then the bank’s. Thank God they picked up the charges for inquiry calls. “Give me my balance.” He wanted to know the worst.
It took longer than usual; that made him nervous. Maybe there was some funky lien already slapped on the account, a black hole to suck up anything that might come in. Christ, how big was the fine for cutting that cable? Sweat trickled into the corners of his mouth.
His vision filled with a blinking red square. He’d never seen that before, either. And didn’t want to now. It spelled trouble.
ACCOUNT CLOSED. Red, black, red; the words stayed hanging there.
“What?” He’d expected zero; that would’ve made sense.
ACCOUNT CLOSED. CLIENT DECEASED.
Something cold, with ice teeth frozen to diamonds, seized his heart. “What -” His voice caught in his throat. “What do you mean?”
CLIENT AXXTER (NY) DECEASED. Red. Black. ACCOUNT CLOSED.
“But – that’s me; I’m Ny Axx -”
DECEASED. INQUIRY TERMINATED.
Then it was just black.
TEN
Maybe his agent would front him some money. He had to. If Brevis wouldn’t do that much for him, what with his being stuck out here starving in the ass-end of nowhere, then what the hell good was he? The sonuvabitch.
Axxter reversed the charges, praying that Brevis would accept a collect call. Just this once.
WHAT NAME (CALLING PARTY)? The Wire Syndicate logo waited for his reply.
“Uh – tell him it’s Ny. Ny Axxter.”
He listened to the distant ringing, a world away. The wire from the plug-in jack ran all the way through the building and up to the toplevel; his only link.
Then he heard Brevis’s voice. “Yeah, I’ll take it. Give him to me.”
Sweet Jesus. “Brevis -” he blurted out.
The agent cut him off. “Listen, mac – whoever you are – I don’t appreciate little jokes like this. You got a sick sense of humor to try something like this. Now fuck off, and don’t -”
“Brevis – hey, no, it’s really me -”
“Yeah, right, very funny; now go get -”
All he could think of was the agent hanging up, breaking the connection. Desperate: “It’s really me, for Christ’s sake, this isn’t a joke. I’m not dead. Brevis, you gotta believe me.”
Silence. But at least not a click and a buzz.
“Ny?” Brevis’s voice was half skeptical, half wondering. “That’s you? How -”
Keep him on the line. “Brevis, I swear it.” Don’t let him get away. “I know what you probably heard, but it’s not true. I’m not dead. This is really Ny Axxter talking to you.”
Another beat of silence. “Prove it. I mean, prove it’s you.”
“For Christ’s sake, what do you want me to do?” He studied his finger in the plug-in jack, as though it might be possible to squeeze himself through the hole and confront the agent. “I’m talking to you, aren’t I?”
“Could be anybody.” The skeptical tone hardened. “Sounds like it’s Axxter – but that’s ea
sy enough to fake.”
“Okay. Okay, just hold on a second.” His thoughts sped up. “All right, how’s this: the first thing I ever did, the first piece after I signed on with you. It was a commission from a little band, about a dozen guys, they’re all dead now, they were called – um -” He snapped his fingers. “Abrasion Surtax. Right? And the piece I did, I went blank and I couldn’t think of anything, so I ripped off a dragon spreadeagle from a collection of old tattoo flash that Howe Drafe lent me. Only the Abrasion guys found out about it, and they were all pissed off ’cause they’d paid for an original, so you had to give ’em their money back plus ten percent, which you deducted from my next job, only it wasn’t true, they hadn’t dinged you for any ten percent penalty at all -”
“Jeez – you still remember that? Christ, talk about carrying a grudge.”
Axxter allowed himself a smile. “So is it me, or not?”
“Well, yeah; I suppose so.” No skepticism now in Brevis’s voice, just baffled wondering. “But how come you’re not dead?”
“Just lucky, I guess.”
“No, no; I mean it. What the hell’s going on?”
He shrugged. “I’m still alive. That’s all there is to it. Whatever you heard -”
“‘Heard’ ain’t it. I saw it, man. There’s a tape of you heading for the clouds. After getting all whammed to shit against the wall. The Havoc Mass – that bunch had a telephoto trained on the whole thing; they had one of their archives men right behind the thugs who were on your tail. He was sending the signal back on a tightbeam to the camp; that was the only way it got recorded, because he bit it along with the rest of them when the cable went boing. Whose bright idea was that, anyway?”
“I had help. All right? I didn’t think of it all by myself.” The agent’s old-womanish hectoring got under his skin. He would’ve thought Brevis would be happy just to know he was alive.
“Yeah, well, that little number cost you, Jack. The Public Works Department was in here so fast, sucking out your account… They took the wad, buddy. That tape was prima facie evidence. When it got broadcast, and everybody from the toplevel on down saw it -”
“What? Who saw it -”
“Everybody; that’s what I’m telling you.” Brevis’s voice went shrill. “The Havoc Mass sold the tape to Ask & Receive’s entertainment division – it was on the air while you were supposedly still falling through the cloud barrier. A bunch like the Mass doesn’t need the money they got for it; they just enjoy making people they don’t like look like assholes.”
“Jeez..” Everybody on or in Cylinder had seen him sawing away at the transit cable, like an idiot. The kind of thing you saw in an ancient kiddy cartoon, the cat cutting off the tree limb he’s sitting on. His girlfriend had no doubt seen it, too. Her last memory of him, on the ‘Here’s a cutie for you’ segment of the evening news. Great.
“So how do you think I feel about it? You think it does an agent any good to have the whole world know you got clients with shit for brains? You ever try to do business with people, they gotta ring off and get back to you later, ’cause they’re laughing too hard?”
That was the problem in dealing with Brevis: no one had ever suffered the way he had.
“Okay, okay; look, you don’t have to tell me it wasn’t a great idea.” Axxter tried to get the call back on track. “I was under a lot of pressure at the time. Those guys were trying to kill me. All right?”
“Yeah, well, just don’t do it again. Jesus Christ!” Brevis’s voice broke into a yelp. “Do you know what this call is costing me? Where the hell are you calling me from?”
He must’ve seen the Wire Syndicate’s charges piling up. “Look, Brevis, you’re going to find this hard to believe, but I’m a long way away from you -”
“I’ll bet – mother of God -”
“ – I’m on the other side. Of the building. I’m on Cylinder’s eveningside. You understand? I’m on the other side.”
Brevis was silent for a moment. “Jeez, Ny, you’re full of surprises today. Am I supposed to believe that? Just because I believed you’re alive?”
“It’s true, I swear it. Look, have the Wire Syndicate run a locate on this jack. You’ll need to get the number anyway, so you can call me back.”
“What the hell should I call you back for? You’re broke, you’re officially dead, and as a client you’re a liability, not an asset. I should get the Havoc Mass looking to cut my nuts off, too?”
Axxter felt his palm sweating, his finger trembling in the plug-in. If Brevis should hang up… “You’re gonna want to call me back. Because I can make money – big money – for you.”
“Yeah?” Skeptical again. “How?”
“I’m talking big money now.” He had to give himself time to think. “The biggest deal you’ve ever done; I mean, this is the one that’ll put you right up in the front rank of agents -” Come on, come on, think. “Top dollar; top dollar, Brevis -” Blank, blank, blank.
Then it popped out, all in a piece. The words came spinning out, effortless.
“I may not be worth much as a graffex – not right now, at any rate – but we got something else to sell. I’m on the other side. Don’t you see? I’m someplace no one else has ever been, at least no one who’s ever talked about it. We got info-gathering here, tons of fresh data, stuff we can unload to Ask & Receive for whatever price we ask. Plus – there’s the entertainment value. This is real-time adventure we got going here, Brevis. This isn’t some little stroll around some diddly-shit morningside sector that everybody’s seen a million times before. I’m going to hike all the way across some unknown wallscape – without even a rig to carry me – and encounter God knows what – there could be fuckin’ anything out here, man – then cross over through whichever Linear Fair I come to – all that just to make it home. What more could you want? That’s a goddamn odyssey, for Christ’s sake.”
“Hm.” Brevis, mulling it over, couldn’t hide his interest. “Yeah, but… you’d have to make it all the way back. Like you said, you don’t know what you’re going to come across out there. Or what’s going to come across you.”
“So? Even better. That’s exactly why you’ll have people getting hooked on the story, following my progress – the suspense factor. Half the audience will be hoping I don’t make it. If I starve to death, or something worse happens, then it’s a big tragedy for everybody else. Real sob stuff. Either way, you get your ten percent.”
“Twenty percent. This is outside the usual range of what I handle. It’d fall under a special provision in your contract with the agency.”
“Ten, twenty, who gives a fuck.” Axxter knew he had him hooked. “It’ll be tons of money for both of us.”
“Mm – could be. I’d have to run it by some people, see what they think. But… it’s not bad, Ny; not bad at all. It has some possibilities.” Brevis’s voice moved up a gear. “Yeah, I think we could get an offer on it.”
Bingo. “We gotta have an advance on it, though; a good-sized one. There’s stuff I gotta pay for, info to dig out. I’ll need to get my location pinpointed, get whatever files or maps exist about this side, I don’t care what shape; we’ll have to get a search done for every fragment, no matter how small. I’m going to need all the help I can get, if I’m going to pull this off.”
“All right; all right, let me work on it.” Little tongue-clicking noises came over the line, the sound of the agent revving up. “It’s going to take some time, though. Look, just sit tight where you are, okay -”
“Where the hell else am I going to go?”
“Just hang on. I think this is a genuine hot one. I’ll get the locate on this call soon as you hang up, and then I’ll get back to you soon as we’ve got an offer. Like I said, though, it’ll take a little time.”
Axxter’s stomach had become a brass-lined vacuum. “How long?”
“You gotta give me twenty-four hours at least.”
He sucked in his breath through his teeth. “All right. Just do it, oka
y? I really need you to come through on this one.”
“Hey. Trust me.”
After Brevis rang off and the line went dead, Axxter stood up to ease the cramp from his spider crouch by the plug-in jack. His belt pithons reeled out, bracing him in full extension against the wind. In all directions, this sector of eveningside wall looked as bare and empty as when he’d been slowly crawling over it.
A few more hours of sunlight, this side’s real day, he calculated. He could go looking around – for what? A nice big cache of dehydrates that some other poor bastard had left behind? His mouth watered hard enough to sting under his tongue. The fantasy rolled in his head, unstoppable: some other poor bastard who’d been luckless enough to land over here somehow – no, he’d planned it, a wanderer, like Opt Cooder, that’s why he had such nice big supplies of food with him. Then something happened to him -
He didn’t like the way that was going. Whatever’d happened to the nice wanderer could happen to him, too. Better to just think about the food and the canned water and the other good things in life. He’d found some rainwater earlier in the half-morning collected in pockmarks a few inches deep in the building’s surface; the water tasted like metal, but was better than nothing. It enabled him to salivate, running the fantasy’s best moments over again.
Just as he was ready to pull himself back into a more comfortable position hanging close to the wall, he noticed two things. One was that his usual dizzy nausea at moving around in the vertical world, standing perpendicular and the like, was absent. The feeling had abated from his first long-ago days out on the wall, but had never completely vanished. Until now. Shows how far gone I am. When you’re this far out, even your body doesn’t give a fuck anymore. He wrapped his hand around the pithon lines, then saw the other thing.
