Farewell Horizontal

by K. W. Jeter

  “Yeah, I bet.” The surreal nature of the conversation finally seeped in. Hanging on the wall a million miles from home, with all sorts of bad news hot on his tail, having a chat with some loony girl with the notion that she could pop in and out of bodies like changing her clothes. The world had assumed this quality since he’d fallen through the clouds. Maybe I never came back up. The usual comforting notion, assumed when things got too strange: Maybe I’m still falling, dreaming in the bed of air. He opened his eyes and the woman was still there.

  “I suppose… you’re going to take me over now. Add my body to your collection. Is that it?”

  She looked at him scornfully. “Why would I want you? Don’t flatter yourself. I already got one body, this one, right here in this locale. Another one would be just something else I’d have to look after. Besides, I got my standards. If they aren’t young and in good shape – better than you – and female, then I’m not much interested. Why should I go back to some ugly guy’s body? I had one to begin with, and I was glad when I got rid of it.”

  More nuts stuff. He had humored her long enough; time to get some practical info.

  “Say, as long as you’re here, think you could tell me if -”

  She was already climbing back up the rope, with monkeylike agility. She looked back down at him. “Sorry, mac, but like I said, I’m a busy person. Maybe I’ll come by again some time, see how you’re doing.”

  In a few seconds, she was at the small opening in the wall, and vanished inside. Axxter stared after her for a moment, then shook his head and resumed his slow travel.

  TWELVE

  He spotted him coming. Even in the night, he could see the figure in the distance, working its way toward him.

  When it had gotten too dark to go on traveling, his arm and leg muscles cramping up, Axxter had drawn the pithons in tight, setting himself as close to the wall as possible. For sleeping; or at least to look as though he were.

  He’d been expecting that the mysterious benefactor, the person who’d laid the bread on him, would show up sometime after the sun had gone down beyond the cloud barrier. All the time he’d been traveling across the wall, he’d had the sense that somebody else was out there, tailing him. Not the loony girl – he figured whether she was nuts or not, she had some crazed variety of errands to run. Or the Havoc Mass’s megassassin; if it had been close enough for him to detect, it would’ve already barrel-assed the rest of the way, locked on target, and made mincemeat of him. Unless there was more than one spooky cat lurking around in this sector, it had to be the one with the food. He hoped it was; a day’s worth of his hard-working progress had gotten him to the point of starving again.

  There it was again. Hunger and ongoing weirdness had sharpened his senses. He could hear it, something moving closer, little clicks of metal against metal, a sidling scrape against the wall. He closed his eyes, waiting.

  Breath, quiet and unhurried. Axxter felt the stirring in the air. Until it was right next to him -

  He twisted about and grabbed. For a moment, he had his arm around the figure’s waist, pulling it to him. It gave a heavy grunt, half from surprise, half wind knocked out by Axxter’s forehead butting into its stomach.

  “Sonuvabitch -” A fist landed against the side of Axxter’s head, hard enough to dizzy him His grip on the figure’s ribs broke, and he slumped back into the pithons’ slack.

  A flashlight went on, glaring in his face. He shielded his eyes; past his hand’s edge, he saw the other man dimly lit by the beam bouncing off the wall.

  The man straightened up, sucking in a ragged gulp of breath. “Jeez -” Another gulp. “Try to do somebody a favor. The thanks you get.”

  Axxter could see a narrow, sharp-angled face, long, spiderlike hands holding the flashlight. Like a club, in case of any more action.

  “Nice way to act.” The man probed at the edge of his ribcage. “You could’ve killed me.”

  It wasn’t just his hands, Axxter saw now. They were fitted with some sort of fanned hooks, strapped to his forearm and extending beyond his fingers. Not metal, but something black that bent like rubber against the man’s jacket.

  “Sorry.” Axxter shook his head, trying to get rid of a ringing noise in his ears. “But you were the one sneaking around.”

  “Of course I was sneaking around. I expected this kind of reaction. You morningsiders are all alike – you’re just ready for a punch-out all the time.”

  You morningsiders – easy to figure out the rest. “You’re from this side?”

  “Born and bred. Name’s Sai. Here, I figured you could use this.” He dug into a pack looped around one shoulder and held something out.

  More of the flat round bread. Axxter took it and tore a piece off. But before taking a bite – “How come?”

  “How come what? The food, you mean? I just knew you’d need it. Stuck out over here like this. I didn’t want to see you starve to death before you had a chance to get back home to the other side.” He took a pouch of water from the bag and drank before handing it over as well. “That’d seem kind of cruel. To go that way, and all. I mean, if you’re willing to take your shot at going straight through the building, you should get a real chance at it.”

  Axxter chewed and swallowed. “What do you know about that?”

  A shrug. “I know all kinds of stuff. I know more about you – and where you come from – than you know about me, and the way things are around here. But you see, that goes back to deep psychic divisions in your head, of which the building can be seen as an exteriorized representation, a mirror-image grown large. The morningside is all light and surface, and action all the time; whereas over here it gets underneath appearances, and into thinking and knowing. Very broody.”

  Another loony. This territory seemed to be crawling with them. The bread was all right, though.

  “Hey, don’t give me that look.” Sai had picked up on his thoughts. “The fact that you don’t know what I’m talking about just goes to show that you’re a real morningsider.”

  “Maybe so.” Axxter had finished half of one of the flat loaves. “I just don’t have a lot of time for discussion. I got a lot of problems right now.”

  “This is true. Hope you don’t mind, but I listened in on your agent’s call. Tapped the line. That business with the megassassin is going to be a bitch. Those guys are built for speed.” Sai scratched himself with one of the rubbery hooks. “It’s going to be on top of your ass before you know it.”

  This loony seemed to be more helpful than the last. Or at least concerned. “Well, I’m trying to make some speed, but… it’s slow going.”

  “That’s ’cause you people let yourselves get dependent on those motorbikes. You think as long as you’re making noise, you’re getting somewhere.” Sai held up one hand, shining the flashlight on the hooked contraption. “Simpler the better. You can make really good time with a set of these.” The shoulderpack hung empty after he’d taken out another pair of the devices. The leather straps and buckles dangled from the stiff armatures behind the hooks. “Can’t really show you how to work ’em until we’ve got some better light. They can be kind of tricky until you get the knack.”

  Axxter examined the hooks; they had little sensors at the tips, similar to the ones on his pithons.

  “Get some sleep.” Sai pulled the lines from his belt up across his chest and fastened them to the wall. “We’ll head out soon as we can see.” He folded his arms and closed his eyes.

  “I don’t get it.” Axxter fastened the hooked devices onto his own belt. “What’re you doing all this for? What’s the deal for you?”

  One eye opened and regarded him “You’re the most interesting thing that’s happened around here. In a long time. You don’t know it, but you’re something… historic.” The eye closed; he lowered his chin onto his chest. “You’ll see.”

  Axxter reached into his jacket and tore off a small piece of bread. For a while longer, he chewed and watched the figure sleeping next to him.
r />   † † †

  “Come on, you gotta let ’em take your weight. Get a little swing going.” Sai, several meters ahead and upwall, looked back, waiting for him to catch up.

  The travelhooks – as Sai called them – had been scary at first. Axxter clung to the wall, his hands flat against the cold metal, catching his breath. In the half-morning, when Sai had first strapped the devices onto his arms, it’d taken an act of wild faith for him to turn off the pithons, letting the lines retract into his belt and boots so only their triangular heads showed. His safety lines; the old nausea and fear came back that he’d known when he’d first gone out on the vertical. His head had swum, the immovable building seeming to tilt and rock as he’d looked over his shoulder, down toward the cloud barrier below. That had passed, but it had still been several minutes before he’d worked up the courage to use the hooks as Sai had shown him, anchoring himself with one of the devices while swinging monkeylike, twisting back to front, to reach for the next hold with the other.

  Even with his hesitancy, they were fast; by the time the sun came over the top of the building, Axxter figured that he and Sai had covered twice the distance he’d made in his previous traveling. Once the rhythm was established, the peculiar torsion of the hooks as they anchored and then bent around themselves… The few times Axxter had screwed up and missed catching the next hold, his gut had clenched in fear as the image of himself falling snapped into his head. Then Sai had taken pity on him and explained the devices’ interlock system; the previous anchoring point wasn’t released until a microsecond after the new one was locked onto.

  “Come on -” Sai’s voice called back to him “You don’t have time to lose, man.”

  Another hour of traveling; Axxter caught up to where Sai had snugged himself in close to the wall. Axxter’s arms ached, deep into his shoulders; he rubbed them in turn after reeling out the pithons and latching himself secure.

  “You’ll get used to it.” Sai nodded toward Axxter’s hand kneading his bicep. “It’s more the novelty of the motion than anything else. The hooks really do most of the work.” He took bread and water from his shoulder-bag. “Break time.”

  Munching away, Sai pointed out to the sky. “Hey, there’s your little friend.”

  Axxter turned his head and saw the distant figure of the gas angel. Lahft; as she came closer, he recognized her, smiling happily.

  She dangled in air next to him, close enough to touch. “Hi. Hello. Falling?”

  He leaned back against the pithons, and shook his head. “No. Not yet, at any rate.”

  With little swimming motions, she turned around. She looked over her shoulder and the top of the spherical membrane. “Do more. Do the pretty.”

  The designs he’d programmed into the biofoil he’d implanted into her were still there. She’s gotten bored with them. One of the unfortunate qualities of time: everything got old eventually. He wondered if he’d done her a favor by letting her know that, ending even that small bit of her innocence.

  “I guess I can…” He hadn’t tried sending out any signal from his transceiver; since the Small Moon’s orbit didn’t include this side of the building, there hadn’t seemed any point. But with the target right in front of him – “Okay. How’s this?” He pulled a tiger playing with a butterfly up from his archive, coded and sent it over the distance of less than a meter. As the screen display dropped from his vision, he saw the image blossoming across Lahft’s membrane.

  “Nice.” She turned from admiring herself and looked at him.

  “Yeah, it’s nice.” The sunlight coming through the membrane made it radiant, a smooth glowing rose. “That’s the best display I’ve ever had.”

  Beside him, Sai nodded. “It’s kind of a shame that all this stuff usually just gets wasted on a bunch of big ugly guys.”

  Lahft wasn’t listening to them, letting the breeze slowly draw her away.

  “Hey -” Axxter called out to her. “Come back around again sometime – whenever you want – and I’ll do another one for you.”

  She considered this, putting a finger to her chin. Then that same unalloyed smile appeared. “When you want. You here, and me -” She flung her arm out to indicate some distant point in the sky. “You make you – like a pretty, but you – on me. Then I come here. To you.” She had floated several meters away and had to shout the last words. Before she was gone entirely, dwindling to a far speck.

  Sai yawned, stretching out his arms in front of him “Angels are okay. You could do a lot worse than being on a friendly basis with them.”

  He realized for the first time that Lahft had shown none of the usual angelic shyness around Sai. As if she was used to him, or just not scared of him.

  “I suppose. I don’t see what good it’ll ever do me, though.”

  Sai shrugged. “It’s like those old stories, you know, fairy tales and stuff, where the kid befriends the ants and the birds. And they wind up saving his ass somehow on the last page. You just never know.”

  It wasn’t the first time Axxter didn’t know what the hell somebody was talking about. “What about that other one? That girl?” He assumed that Sai, with his spying around, had witnessed that encounter. “I suppose she’s got her uses, too.”

  “That circuit-rider broad?” Sai snorted. “You’d be smart to steer well clear of her. People like that can cause a lot of trouble.”

  “Yeah, she seemed pretty demented. Talking some crazy stuff about switching around into different bodies. Like she had a wardrobe of them, or something.”

  Sai shook his head. “That’s not what I meant. If she were crazy, then she wouldn’t have such a potential for trouble. But she can really do all that stuff – that’s why she’s such bad news.” He tightened the straps on his travelhooks. “Come on. We gotta get moving.”

  † † †

  “There. That’s it.” Sai pointed ahead of them.

  Catching his breath, Axxter looked across the wall. The building’s surface was tinged red by the sun setting at the limit of the clouds. The entry site appeared as a black hole in the middle of reflected fire.

  Sai had been pushing to reach the spot before sundown. The speed of their travel, accelerated by his own growing skill with the hooks, left Axxter dizzy, his arms aching underneath the leather straps.

  “Told you I’d get you here.” Sai clapped him on the shoulder. “Come on.”

  He led the way to the curved edge of the site. Axxter grasped the lip and peered inside. Nothing but dark.

  “There should be some of my buddies around. I told them to wait for me here.” Sai leaned his head inside and let out a high-pitched, whistling cry. It echoed inside the building for several seconds. After it died away, yelping whoops came bouncing back in reply. “All right – let’s go on in.” He unstrapped the travelhooks from his arms.

  Axxter pulled away from him “Wait a minute. Your friends – people like you – are inside there?” He glanced again at the darkness inside the building.

  Sai slung the hooks onto his belt. “Well, sure. Where else?”

  He pulled away, a sudden horror prickling across his scalp and arms. “I thought… I thought you were an eveningsider. I thought you lived out here.” He gestured around at the building’s exterior.

  “So?” Sai peered at him. “What difference does it make?”

  Then he knew. “You’re from in there.” He pushed himself back from the other, the words Dead Center unspeakable, filling his mouth. This one, the smiling figure who’d popped up from nowhere, and all the ones like him, inside, calling back and forth like wolves -

  Sai reached for him. “Come on – don’t be an idiot -” Axxter slashed at him with the travelhooks. Sai jerked back to avoid their sharp-pointed tips.

  “Stay away from me.” Axxter crawled backward, his belt pithons securing him to the wall. He kept the hooks lifted between himself and Sai, as though he were brandishing a knife. “Don’t come near me. I know what you are. I know what you want.”

  Sai
looked at him in disgust. “You don’t know shit.” He shook his head, then turned and slipped inside the entry site, into the dark.

  † † †

  “That was one of your dumber moves.”

  The voice came from behind him; startled, Axxter turned his head and saw Felony latched to the wall, regarding him with her level gaze.

  She nodded toward the entry site where Sai had disappeared. “What’d you flip out on that guy for? He was doing you a favor. Bringing you all the way here, and stuff.”

  Axxter glanced at the dark hole, then back to her. “Isn’t he… isn’t he one of them?”

  “‘One of them’ – one of them what?”

  “You know.” He still didn’t want to say it aloud. “You mean, the Dead Centers?”

  He nodded.

  “Christ almighty.” Felony rolled her eyes upward. “Is that what you’re all freaked out about? What if he is? You’re spooking yourself for no reason, man. Those Dead Center folks aren’t anything to worry about. They’re harmless.”

  Proves she’s nuts. Or ignorant – she hadn’t seen some of the things that he had, such as the burned-out sector over on the other side. “Well… I know different.”

  That got a derisive snort. “There’s a bunch of stuff you think you know. And none of it’s true.”

  Irritated, Axxter looked away from her, scanning the building’s surface. The last of the twilight was fading, the clouds ebbing to a darker red. He wanted to get well clear of the entry site, but still close enough to keep it in view; if Sai and his Dark Center buddies came swarming out, he wanted to have as much warning as possible.

  Plus, there was other business he needed to take care of. His fright at discovering Sai’s true nature had also ebbed away. “You know where I can find a plug-in jack around here?”

  “Gotta make a call? No problem. I know where all the jacks are.”

  He followed her on a diagonal upwall; she seemed much clumsier moving with her pithons, as if she’d spent little time with them on the building’s surface. A kilometer away from the entry site, he spotted the jack’s concentric yellow markings.