Farewell Horizontal

by K. W. Jeter

  “Yeah, it’ll get you within a couple kilometers of the surface. The tracks run right up to where the barriers were constructed. You’d have to hoof it the rest of the way from there.”

  “But it’s out of commission – is that the deal? It doesn’t work anymore, it’s just a hunk of rust sitting here.”

  “Oh, no. It works fine.” Sai stepped over to the train and rapped it with his fist. “We’ve kept it in good shape – me and a couple of my friends. It wasn’t hard to do. It’s got a lot of autonomic maintenance equipment built in.”

  Axxter looked at him in amazement. “You mean to say, you’ve got this thing sitting right here, it’s ready to go, it can zip me back to the other side now – and you’ve been wasting my time, gassing on about a bunch of weird metaphysical junk? I don’t believe this.”

  “‘Gassing on’ -” Sai snorted. “You know, you got this problem: people try to do you favors, and this is how you act in return. Saying rude things. That other stuff is important, too. More than you know. You’re going to have to think about it sometime.”

  “Yeah, right; anything you say.” Axxter stood on tiptoe, trying to peer into the train’s window. “How does this thing work?”

  “It’s simple, practically runs itself. You’ll have no problem with it. People like you have a knack for ripping off other people’s technology. You’re like magpies with brains, or something. If it’s metal and flashy, you glom right onto it.”

  Axxter ignored him, walking around the front of the train to the other side. “What’s this other stuff over here?”

  Sai followed him “You know, just getting over to the other side isn’t going to solve all your problems. You’re still going to have the same people looking to kill you. More now than you originally thought you had gunning for you.”

  “I’ll worry about that when I get there. I can only deal with all this one step at a time.” Axxter squatted down beside another machine, a smaller one. “What’s this?”

  The flashlight beam played over it, revealing the lineaments of wheels and engine, chrome and black enamel. A motorcycle of a make – either the original or a replica – that Axxter didn’t recognize. There was no emblem painted on its tank, or other identifying mark. The machine hulked, brutish and dangerous-looking, in the darkness.

  “What’s it look like?” Sai pointed the flashlight away from it, down a line of other machines. “There’s tons of this pre-War technology around here. See what you’ve all been missing by being afraid to come inside and look around? Think of all the fun you could’ve been having with this stuff.” The sarcasm was plain in his voice.

  “Does this thing run, too?”

  Sai reached past him and pressed a starter switch below the handlebars. The engine roared into life. “Pretty big displacement -” Sai shouted over the noise. “This thing’s built for speed.” He switched off the engine. “Probably not a good idea to call attention to where we are.”

  Axxter ran his hands over the motorcycle’s tank. “I could use this. Over on the other side.” The memory of his poor Norton, crumpled and spinning through the air, was still strong. “I’d have to get it adapted, get the grappling wheels put on and stuff…”

  “You’re getting way ahead of yourself. You’re not at the point where you need to be scoping out a new set of wheels. You can bet that the Havoc Mass has already figured out your plan of action and where you’re going to pop out on the morningside. It’s a sure thing they’ve sent their own megassassin around to that entry site you’re aiming for. You show your head over there, and you’ll be hash in a minute, It won’t matter that you’ve managed to get away from the Grievous Amalgam megassassin that’s stomping around over here.”

  He knew it was true. Deflated, Axxter leaned his weight against the motorcycle. It was exactly the sort of thing that General Cripplemaker and the rest of the Havoc Mass would think was funny, to stake out the entry site with the megassassin that he’d worked on.

  Sai switched off the flashlight, leaving them in the gloom provided by the intermittent blue fixtures above. “What you need – right now – is some way of getting the Havoc Mass off your ass. Then you could head on out of here, and you’d be home free.”

  “Sure -” He nodded glumly. “That’d be real fine. But you can’t talk with people like that. They’re all nuts, and hopped up all the time. A simple apology, or an explanation or whatever, isn’t going to cut it with them.”

  “So? You just have to come up with something else. Something that’s so valuable to them that it wipes out whatever grudge they’ve got simmering against you. Think about it.”

  Think – His brain shifted reluctantly into gear. It’d be so much easier to just lie down on the floor and wait for whatever was going to happen. Even if it was going to be gruesomely unpleasant. All the stuff he’d found out had fatigued his head, as though it had been crammed to the bursting point with useless knowledge. What good did it to do to discover these things?…

  He saw it then, perfect and luminous, right in front of him He raised his head, looking straight at Sai. “They don’t know. The Havoc Mass – they don’t know. They don’t know what’s going on. And I do. About the Grievous Amalgam screwing around with Ask & Receive. About all the information they rely on being contaminated. And I’m the only one who can tell them.”

  In the darkness, he saw Sai’s smile.

  Axxter looked above him, as though the idea had become buoyant, floating over their heads. “And if I told them that – then they’d believe me, about being set up.”

  Another realization had hit him. “Because it wasn’t DeathPix that screwed me over, that overrode the animating signal for the graffex work I did. It was the Grievous Amalgam. They wanted to snuff me, to shut me up about whatever I might’ve seen where they raided that entry site, only they couldn’t get to me inside the Havoc Mass camp. But they found a way; they just had to get the Mass pissed off enough at me, and the Mass would kill me. They’d have done the Amalgam’s work for them.”

  Sai nodded, pleased. “It takes you awhile, but you get there eventually. You still don’t know everything you need to know, but you got the process started, at least.”

  The little light going on inside his head had carried its own sparking circuit, a trickle of excitement, seeing one small bit more clearly. “Right – I still don’t know why. I mean, why they did it in the first place, what the Grievous Amalgam got out of sneaking around and burning out that sector -”

  “That’s unimportant; that’s not what you need to know. Stuff like that, the reason shit happens, you can just make your assumptions and let ’em ride. Maybe the people in that sector you ran across had gotten a little uppity and needed their chain given its ultimate yank; or else whatever factory they ran had been working under contract, and it was easier for the Amalgam to pay ’em off like that. Plus, you got to remember that the Grievous Amalgam’s an old organization; they’ve been sitting up on the toplevel for a long time. Long enough to get fat and lazy, to lose that warrior’s edge, the hungry feeling, that put them up there. They’ve got to substitute cunning for what they’ve lost, if they’re going to hang on. You don’t know how long they’ve been pulling this shit, and on how many people; they’ve got a lot of alliances to keep in line. And good PR is ninety percent of that process. For all you know, the Amalgam might’ve been generating false reports of all the battles they’ve won, opposing tribes subdued, areas conquered – all of them nonexistent. Then they use Ask & Receive to distribute the phony accounts, and everybody else thinks it’s fact, just because they got the info from a supposedly impartial source. And who’s going to find them out? You’re talking a lot of territory; practically anything – or nothing – could be going on, and nobody would know the difference. The only ones likely to discover that something’s not quite kosher are freelancers like yourself; you’re the only ones who might blunder into a sector reportedly raided by the Grievous Amalgam and find a completely different reality from the one everybody’
s been handed by Ask & Receive. You might not be the first poor bastard who’s gotten into this kind of deep shit – you just might be the first one to have gotten this much of a run out of it.”

  That was a chilling thought. There were always stories going around in the loose fraternity of freelancers about one or more of their number whom nobody had seen in a long time, too long a time. The final assumption being that something had happened to them – unspecified as to what – or else they had taken the big step of their own free will, cutting free from the wall and embracing the clouds below, depressed at some negative turn in their ramshackle careers. You just never saw them again, never knew. But this meant that the spooky Something might not have been accident or suicide, but murder.

  “Yeah, well, that may be for all I know -” Axxter peered closer at the other. “But what do you know? I mean, if you knew what I was going to find in that dump… and you’ve got so much stuff figured out… then what else do you know?”

  Sai laughed. “You’re wishing for something, but I don’t think I can give it to you.”

  “Come on. The way you know what’s going on… how you can just tap in on whatever lines people are using… how the building works, all this high-tech stuff you and your friends keep running… You must be able to do it.”

  “Do what? That hacking shit? Go on-line and break into restricted access files – is that what you’re talking about?”

  Axxter nodded.

  “As they used to say in another time, another place – boy, I despair of you.” Pity in Sai’s voice. “It just goes to show how hard old mythology dies. Especially myths that serve somebody’s purpose, and that key right into some little need inside people’s heads. That hacking bullshit goes back a long way – not just before the War, but before Cylinder itself. You gotta ask yourself, who did it benefit to have people believing that restricted-access data files and operating systems could be broken into by some bright thirteen-year-old with a dime-store terminal and a fast hand on the keyboard? That was a line of crap from the beginning; the only basis for it was a brief historical period right at the beginning, before the really good methods of locking up stuff were invented. Some little hacker punk would manage to get into someplace on-line where he wasn’t supposed to be, and then go around bragging about it. But it was like somebody going to a sector where everybody leaves their doors unlocked, and then claiming to be a master burglar because you lifted somebody’s toaster. Soon as everybody started locking their doors, that penny-ante stuff was over. But it was an interesting coincidence that right at the time when that kind of information-handling technology was taking over the world, a bunch of stuff started showing up in the popular media that depicted it as essentially harmless because teenage kids could crack it open – so what’s there to worry about, right? People were less likely to worry about the files being kept on them in massive, cross-linked data banks as long as they could be made to believe that the machines running the info were just kinda cuddly and easily fucked with.”

  Axxter shook his head. “You lost me there somewhere. All this ancient history jazz -”

  “Sorry. Didn’t mean to give you a lecture. Just one of my pet subjects, is all. I wonder about the people who got involved in handing out that line of crap – there were so many of them, they couldn’t all have been on the payroll. Some of them, maybe most of them – hell, maybe even all of them – must’ve actually believed that bullshit. Because they wanted to. So they wouldn’t have to deal with the scary stuff that was actually happening.” Sai switched the flashlight on again, drawing a circle with its beam across the train. “So anyway, you don’t get some magic key to everybody’s deepest secrets. You’ll just have to do with what you know already.”

  FIFTEEN

  He had to laugh. At the way things had worked out, the set of the teeth in the vise around his ankle.

  “I’m sorry -” Axxter wiped his eyes. His laughter had bounced wildly back and forth in the high-ceilinged space. “It just all seems so funny. I’m not only sitting on the info that would save my own ass, but it’d also blow everything on the other side to pieces – I mean, stuff like this would go off like a bomb right in the middle of the Grievous Amalgam hegemony – I’ve got all that tucked right inside my head, and there’s no way I can use it. Eventually, their megassassin is going to track me down and waste me, and that’ll be the end of it. I might just as well have never found out what’s going on at all.”

  “Is it as bad as all that?”

  Axxter stared at him. “Are you joking? I can’t just call up the Havoc Mass and tell ’em, can I? If I get on the phone line again, the Grievous Amalgam megassassin will pinpoint my location, and it’ll be all over – I might have enough time to blat out some of what I know, which I’m sure the Havoc Mass will appreciate knowing, but a fat lot of good that’ll do me. And if I climb on board this thing here and head straight for the other side, without telling the Havoc Mass what I’ve found out and getting off the hook with them, then their megassassin creams me. Either way, I’m dead.”

  “What you need is some other way of getting hold of the Havoc Mass. Instead of the phone line.”

  He grunted. “Yeah – too bad they’re the only game in town.”

  A smile in Sai’s voice. “Sure about that?”

  All this hinting around was getting on his nerves. “Yeah, I’m sure. The Small Moon relay satellite doesn’t come around on this side of the building; it’s stationed permanently over on the other side. Otherwise, I could possibly transmit a signal and bounce it off, get it to the Mass that way. But since the Small Moon doesn’t come in sight here, that just can’t be done.”

  “What about using something else besides the Small Moon to bounce your signal off?”

  Axxter sighed. “You’re driving me crazy – there isn’t anything else.”

  “Come on, man – you gotta think about the ants.” Maybe he wasn’t the one who had gone crazy. “Ants? What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Like in the story – when you befriend the ants, they do you a favor in return. Come on, think; for whom did you, once you got past your cynical self-interest jive, ever do a good deed? Hm?”

  It took a second to remember. “You mean – the gas angel? Is that what you’re talking about? What the hell good is that?”

  “You could use her to send a message.”

  “Oh, yeah, sure; that’d work just great. Let a gas angel play mailman – are you out of your mind? How long do you think it’d take her to go drifting around on the wind currents from here all the way over to the Havoc Mass camp? I don’t have that kind of time; that megassassin is on my tail right now. Plus I can just imagine her bobbing into the camp – if there were some way of telling her how to find it – with a letter from me in her hand; I’m sure she’d get a fine reception from those guys.” Axxter shook his head in disgust. “If this is your idea of helping me out, you might as well just forget it.”

  “You’re still not thinking, man; that’s not what I meant at all. Show some imagination. You could use the angel the same way you’d use the Small Moon, if it were available: as a relay satellite, something to bounce your signal off to get it where you want it to go. Think about it: the Small Moon’s not much more than a reflective metal surface, suspended out in the atmosphere. Same thing with that angel, after you grafted that foil onto her – granted, she doesn’t have the encoding and narrowcasting facilities that the Small Moon does, but the principle is the same. All you’d have to do is have her station herself at the right spot out there, and you’d be able to clear the curve of the building and bounce a signal off her for the Havoc Mass to pick up. It’s simple.”

  “Yeah, it’s simple – simpleminded. You’re forgetting one little thing. The signals that get relayed by the Small Moon are encoded to channel them to the person you want to talk to. You can’t just throw a raw signal out in the air and expect it to trigger the reception mode on the right party’s comm line.”

  Sai spoke slowly
, patiently. “But you don’t need their comm line. You’ve got another way of communicating with the Havoc Mass. The graffex work you did for the Mass – you control the animating signal for it, as long as something like the Grievous Amalgam isn’t overriding it. And they’re long done with that now. All you have to do is change that animating signal to incorporate your message, transmit it, bounce it off the angel, and it’ll get picked up by your graffex work at the Havoc Mass camp. They’ll be able to read what you have to say to them in the patterns on the biofoil; hell, you could include sections from the tapes you loaded out of the dumps. Whoever’s wearing that foil you worked on will be turned into a walking video receiver.”

  He stood speechless for a moment. “That’s the most absurd plan I’ve ever heard in my life. There’s about a dozen different reasons something like that wouldn’t work. I’d have to depend upon the angel getting into exactly the right position out there; the Mass might’ve already had all that work I did for them torn out and replaced – they weren’t exactly thrilled with it to begin with, remember? – so even if I got the signal bounced to them, there might not be anything to pick it up…”

  “Sure -” Sai seemed unfazed by the objections. “You don’t want to do it, fine. I wasn’t offering it as some kind of foolproof suggestion. I’m just telling you: it’s the only option you got. Other than just curling up and waiting for the megassassin to find you.”

  “You know, I’ve gotten really sick of people telling me I’ve got no other choice. I seem to hear that a lot.”

  “You got some other bright idea? Let’s hear it, then.”

  He didn’t. The pisser was that there never was one.

  Sai waited for him to speak, seconds ticking into a full minute, then finally nodded. “Okay, look – if you’re going to do this, you’re going to have to work fast. You’re not going to have much time: that megassassin has been having a hard time tracking you down inside here, but you get out on the surface, it’ll be right on you before you know it. That’s what its sensors are geared for. You’re going to have to have your message to the Havoc Mass all taped and ready to go, so you can just let it rip as soon as the angel’s in the right position. So you sit down right now and work that up – make it the pitch of your life. Fast and snappy, but with everything in it, all the evidence you got out of the dump. You do that, and I’ll go check out the territory between here and the surface, see if we’re all clear to proceed.” He switched on the flashlight, the beam darting ahead as he moved away. “See you in a bit.”