Farewell Horizontal

by K. W. Jeter

  “What good does that do me? A bunch of raw footage of warrior skirmishes?”

  She nodded sagely. “Well – I’ve done a little checking around of my own. Just because I’m interested in your… unusual situation. And it seems to me that all the shit you’re in started after you came across that sector over on the other side, where some heavy action had just happened. If I were you, I’d want to know all I could about that little scene.”

  He shook his head. “There wouldn’t be footage of that in there. That didn’t have anything to do with any of the warrior tribes, so there wasn’t any coverage prearranged for it.”

  “Oh?” She leaned back, smiling “You’re sure about that?”

  “Don’t get all mysterious with me. Not now. Just tell me what you’re talking about.”

  “Hey – like I said – the time’s come for you to check some things out on your own.”

  † † †

  He watched as she hooked one alligator clip onto a length of bare wire, the other clip pinching the end of his finger.

  “What I’m going to do -” Felony licked the end of her own finger and dabbed spit on the connections. “I’m going to go on-line myself, and then patch you in. That way, anything that’s looking for you – like Mr. Big-and-Ugly out there – won’t know it’s you on the line and come stomping in here. At least not right away.”

  “How am I going to find what I’m looking for?” He was starting to get cramps in his legs from squatting so long in the tiny space.

  “It’s just a simple chrono stack, no fancy indexing or anything. You’ll just have to go back to the date when you found that place and root around from there.” She hooked a couple of wires together. “Good luck.”

  † † †

  This is hopeless. A loop of numbers had crawled up across Axxter’s vision. He scanned down the list of dates, finally tagging a clutch of them.

  The first file he opened up was a collection of outtakes from a low-intensity raiding party; the participants, a couple of nothing gangs he’d never heard of, seemed more interested in making faces at each other than in actual bloodshed.

  He opened the second file. It was the raid on the burned-out sector. He recognized the sharp edge of the metal, the way the explosion had twisted it out into the air. A glance up at the map coordinates in the corner confirmed it.

  Jesus – Axxter stared at the scene. Smoke and red light billowed out of the opening. This wasn’t supposed to be here. All of this stuff. There was a lot of it, taped from several different angles; he fast-forwarded through it, the recorded screams having raised the hairs on his arms and back of his neck. He stopped at a good shot of the raiders, froze the scene, and zoomed in on them. All in black uniforms that he didn’t recognize, without any insignia. They operated with cold, destructive efficiency rather than the usual warrior swagger and guffawing laughter. Two megassassins, towering over the rest of the cohort, were in the middle of the slaughter, clanking forward with grim inevitability.

  He went back to the start of the file. Before any explosion or smoke or flames: the black uniforms were gathering, checking out their weapons and setting up equipment… on the outside of the building. Axxter watched in amazement as one of the camera angles shifted, revealing the edge of the building, dawn light breaking over the clouds. At a signal from a commanding officer, the raiders swarmed toward the smooth, unscarred lip of an entry site. The explosion followed a few seconds later, ripping the metal into the great jagged edges that dangled out into the air.

  They came from outside. Axxter stopped the tape. That meant -

  He zipped toward the end of the file. Everybody dead now, the horizontal sector’s inhabitants reduced to ash and blackened meat. And, at the farthest awaylight limit, an unbroken barrier wall to the building’s center regions. Which was soon taken care of: more explosions, then a team of the raiders grabbing hold of the smoldering metal and bending the shards out toward them.

  So it would look like they came from inside the building. That’s what it meant. Axxter stared at nothing, thinking it through. They set it up that way. Who?

  Back into the file. He found the best shot of one of the two megassassins; for a moment, there had been three separate cameras trained on it. He switched through the angles. The last one was a full-on frontal shot. Its chest panels were open, revealing the death ikon. Death’s-head cobras writhing in a circle. The same as he’d seen here, less than a meter away, looming over him in the tunnel.

  Well, well, well – an interesting discovery. Axxter rested his chin on his knees, arms folded around his shins. The things you find out. The Havoc Mass was going around blowing open horizontal sectors and letting those old boogeymen the Dark Centers take the rap. Bad business – military tribes weren’t supposed to do shit like that. They were supposed to stay out on the vertical, bashing each other’s heads and having a rollicking good time scheming for control of the toplevel, or a little farther up the wall, closer to the good sweet things that power brought. Not slaughtering defenseless people who stayed on the horizontal precisely to be safe, to stay out of harm’s way. Those were the rules; anybody breaking them was playing a harder game, one that stopped at nothing. Including the secret taking-over of the one sure rock that everybody depended on, the supposedly impartial Ask & Receive? Once you break one rule, you might as well break them all.

  He played the last tape in the file. The raiding party, work done, went back out to the building’s surface. Framed in the now-jagged entry site opening was a gas angel, suspended in air and smiling curiously at the scene inside. He winced when he saw her familiar face; a gout of flame from one of the men’s weapons knocked her out of the sky. Laughter on the soundtrack.

  On the tape, an equipment vehicle was parked on the wall, waiting for the men. Easy, relaxed joking-around as they stripped off the black uniforms and slid into olive-drab fatigues. Axxter zoomed in on the commanding officer, on his shoulder patch turned toward the camera. The rocker bar below the main patch read RECONNAISSANCE. Above that, circled around a golden sunburst, were the words GRIEVOUS AMALGAM.

  That can’t be – Axxter stared at the image in his sight. No, they’re Havoc Mass; they have to be. Because of the death ikon on the megassassin’s chest, on the tape; if it was the same as the one that was over here chasing him, and it was the Havoc Mass that wanted him dead, then a megassassin bearing that ikon had to belong to the Havoc Mass. It was the only way it made sense.

  Unless – a new, chilling thought crept into his head – unless the Grievous Amalgam also wanted him dead. And they’d sent their own megassassin to do the job.

  Work it out. Why would the Grievous Amalgam want to kill some poor schmuck graffex who hadn’t done shit to them? Maybe for the same reason their raiding party would shoot some inquisitive little gas angel out of the sky for poking her pretty face into something they wanted to keep secret. If they’d wanted people to know it was the Grievous Amalgam doing it, they wouldn’t have been wearing the black uniforms. And if some freelance graffex comes strolling into the scene, lah-dee-dah, while the metal’s still hot, there’s no telling what clues he might glom onto as to who did it – best to ice him, too. The Amalgam had probably been wanting to kill him for some time now, ever since he’d reported his finding of the burned-out sector to Ask & Receive and they’d realized that somebody had stumbled across the aftermath of the raid. His getting the commission, and landing up in the Havoc Mass camp where the Amalgam couldn’t get at him easily, was probably the only thing that had kept him alive. Until they’d heard he was over here on the eveningside; then they’d sent the heavyweight gun over to snuff him, to keep him from blabbing any giveaway he might have spotted at the burned-out sector that would pin it on the Amalgam. Of course, nobody would have known that; so Brevis, when he’d heard the report of a megassassin crossing over Linear Fair to the eveningside, had naturally assumed it was the Havoc Mass’s machine, coming to settle their grudge against him.

  The thoughts whirled fast
er in his head, too fast to catch. Then it’s not the Havoc Mass that’s taken over Ask & Receive; it’s the Grievous Amalgam. That’s how they stay in power -

  Too much to work out now. He’d have to think about all this, if he lived long enough. Once he’d loaded all the files on the raid into his own archives, he broke the connection.

  “Felony?” He looked around the cramped space. She wasn’t there.

  FOURTEEN

  “She’s not here.” The voice came from behind him “She had her little errands to run.”

  Axxter turned and saw Sai leaning against the wall of the space.

  “What?”

  Sai smiled and spread his hands. “You’re not going to pick up something and hit me over the head with it? Scream and run? I was looking forward to a little more action from you.”

  He shook his head, watching and waiting.

  “Good.” Sai nodded, visibly pleased. “Now maybe we can carry on a discussion like sane people. You know, that’s the main advantage of finding out exactly what kind of a shitty situation you’re in: that kind of knowledge lessens the otherwise freewheeling activity of your imagination. You’re less likely to go making weird accusations against people who’re just trying to do you a favor.”

  “I had my reasons.”

  “Yeah, but they weren’t good reasons. Just a lot of crap other people have told you, that you’ve heard so many times that you believed ’em without thinking them through. Everything you thought you knew… You gotta be careful about stuff like that.” Sai pointed with his thumb behind himself. “You’ve already screwed it up with a whole bunch of folks who could’ve done you some good. Not everybody around here is as interested in your case as I am. Dead Centers – as you call us; I think the term’s a little offensive, myself – they’ve generally got enough to keep them busy.”

  Axxter was tired, his brain frazzled with trying to squeeze in all the new, upside-down, and backward info he’d gotten off the line. Sai’s cool, rational voice soothed him; he could listen to it for hours. He knew there wasn’t that much time left for him, though.

  Sai knew it, too. “You’ll have to think about these things later. If there is a later for you. It doesn’t do any good to save your ass if you just go through life being an ignorant fuck and not thinking about the important things.”

  Axxter opened his eyes. “Like what?”

  “That’s the problem with you.” Sai shook his head. “Not just you, but all of you morningsiders. There’s so much that you don’t know – so much that you’ve forgotten – that you don’t even know where to begin, what to think about, what questions to ask. You guys out on the vertical are as bad as the ones on the horizontal. You think you’re hip or something just because you’re out there scrambling around, chasing up and down the wall, and you don’t know what’s going to happen from one day to the next – but you’re still just as ignorant.”

  Hectoring rather than soothing; it had gotten under his skin. “You know so much, then? Why don’t you tell me? If you feel so bad for me, and all.”

  “It wouldn’t do any good. We can’t teach the blind to see. I mean, you don’t even look around you; you never have. Like this building, Cylinder itself.” Sai gestured toward the walls, and all the ones beyond. “You live in it, or on it, but you never think about it. It’s obviously constructed, a thing put together, but you never wonder why, or by whom.”

  Axxter shrugged. “That was all done before the War.”

  “There you go again. If there’s anything you don’t know, you can just say before the War, and you’re off the hook. You don’t even know anything about this so-called War – it’s just a handy way of getting rid of all the stuff you don’t want to think about.”

  “So what’d be the point? Dinking around with a lot of old crap like that isn’t going to help me with my problems. And I had enough of them before all this other shit happened.”

  “Correction.” Sai pointed a finger toward him. “You had all the problems you wanted. Wanted, man. You liked having them, so you wouldn’t have time on your hands and wind up thinking about all that other stuff, the big stuff that you’ve forgotten. Cylinder was built for a reason; its construction and ongoing operation violates at least a dozen laws of physics – the thermal problems alone connected with a structure of this size are pretty unbelievable. The air you breathe, if you think about it at all, you spout some mumbo jumbo about atmospheric bonding, as if knowing the words means you understand how it works. Now, the physical transgressions in themselves are no big thing – anything can be worked around, if somebody knows what they’re doing – but you still gotta ask why they bothered. It’s not easy, doing impossible stuff.”

  “If it’s impossible, how could they do it?” This sonuvabitch wanted to play word games, fine.

  Sai’s wolfish smile returned. “Maybe you just think they did it. Maybe they just did something to make you think a building big as a world exists, and that you’re living in it or outside of it.”

  Axxter could taste his own disgust. “Screw that. I hate shit like that. Looking at your own navel until you fall in. I’ve got lots more important business to take care of. Hate to remind you, but there is some huge ugly bastard clanking around here, looking to smear me into jelly. I gotta worry about what I’m going to do about that before I can sit on my can and screw around with bullshit philosophical questions. All right?”

  The other shrugged. “Have it your way. That’s why I came back around here – just to give you a helping hand. What’d you think of that stuff you found in the dumps?”

  He touched the bare wire beside him. “You were tapped in?”

  Sai nodded. “But I knew all that stuff already. I just wanted to see if you’d stumble across it. Pretty interesting, though, wasn’t it?”

  “Pretty dangerous, you mean – for them. Why would they leave shit like that lying around, where anybody could stumble across it?”

  Sai smiled. “Because they don’t know they’ve left it lying around. One of the problems with big organizations like the Mass – to survive, they have to compartmentalize more and more of their actions, make them routine and automatic. The mechanism for dumping tapes like that was set up before they got involved in dinking around with Ask & Receive. Nobody in the Mass exec levels has caught on to this leak until now because nobody but a bunch of adolescent-mentality circuit riders has ever come sniffing around it. You’re the first who has some reason to make real use of it.”

  “Yeah? Like what? I don’t see how it helps me any. It just means I’m in deeper shit than I already thought I was.”

  “Eh, just hang on to it. Having info like that – real info – you might be surprised the use you’ll find for it sometime.” Sai pushed himself away from the wall. “You want practical? I’ll give you practical – come with me.”

  He led Axxter down a low-ceilinged tunnel. “You got a bit of a break, being in here. Those megassassins aren’t equipped for tracking in this kind of environment – there’s a lot of heat and electromagnetic sources that throw their sensors all off. This one that’s tracking you is still recalibrating itself, learning the ropes. Soon as it knows which end’s up, though, it’ll stop blundering around and be right on your tail. So we really ought to stop jerking off and see about getting you on the road.” He stopped beside an empty panel in the tunnel wall and drew back a tattered, oil-stained cloth hung in the opening. “Take a look.”

  Axxter lowered his head, eyes straining in the darkness; after a few seconds, he made out Felony, curled up on a bed of rags. Her breathing was slow and shallow.

  “That’s not her.” Sai let the curtain fall back into place. “Like they used to say about dead people: she’s not here anymore. She just left her body behind. One of them, at any rate. See?” He pointed to a phone line running under the curtain. “She’s off taking care of business over on the other side, in one of the other bodies she’s glommed into her stable. She’s quite a collector. If she found out I know about this li
ttle hiding place of hers, she’d be righteously pissed.”

  “Is this what you wanted to show me?”

  “Naw – just something I thought you’d be interested in, is all. Come on.”

  After following Sai long enough to feel his back going into spasms, Axxter was finally able to stand straight up. They’d stepped out of the low tunnel into a larger space, the ceiling, if there was one, beyond his sight.

  “How’s that?” Sai’s voice echoed off the nearest wall. “What is it?” He watched the beam of Sai’s flashlight moving across a flank of metal.

  “Transport, man. Wheels – well, sort of; in the metaphoric sense, at least. It actually works on mag-lev technology, just zooms along, no friction. If you’re into pre-War high technology, this one’s a beauty; it’s the fastest thing in or on Cylinder.” Sai looked around and caught Axxter’s uncomprehending look. “It’s a train, man – that’s what things like this were called. Runs on tracks. See?” The flashlight beam played along two massive girders, tall as a man, stretching out in front of the machine’s bullet nose. “Like transit cables, only on the horizontal – you understand that much?”

  “Yeah, I guess.” Axxter looked up at the windows set flush in the train’s front cabin. “Where’s it go to?”

  Sai smiled. “This is your lucky day. Finally. You’re looking at part of Cylinder’s former transportation network. There used to be hundreds of these babies running straight through the building. That’s how people and stuff used to get from one side to the other.”

  “Wait a minute. This thing – right here – goes to the other side? The morningside? Is that what you’re saying?”