by K. W. Jeter
Then he hit. For a moment he felt the megassassin’s fingers folding over his spine, as the motorcycle’s front wheel crumpled and sparked against the thing’s chest. Then he was surrounded by light and air, wind rushing against his arms and legs, and he knew he was sliding beyond the megassassin’s grasp. It howled, and he heard it; not rage, but fear and shock as it spun and fell, knocked clear of the entry site’s edge. It had thought it could never die.
Red webbed over Axxter’s eyes; some metal piece from the motorcycle had torn loose and stung his brow. He held on, wrapping his arms around the tank. The motorcycle kept on its course, flying straight out from the building.
The motorcycle twisted about; he could see back toward Cylinder. The steel cable slowly lost its slack, becoming a straight line. Then for a moment it was straight, a dark perfect line incised through the air. He gripped the motorcycle tighter, arms and legs squeezing hard onto the crumpled metal. If he could hold on, if the cable held, if he survived the arc back down to the wall -
With a sharp bell note, louder than the roaring wind, the cable snapped.
He pushed himself away from the motorcycle. The megassassin was long gone, falling toward the clouds; now he wanted to be free of everything else. He opened his arms wide, head tilted back, the heart beneath his breastbone pulling him on with a sudden joy.
Another figure, its form silhouetted against a halo of light, rushed from the clouds to meet him He reached out for her, though she was so far away, and fell.
SIXTEEN
He was making progress, slow but steady, heading upwall, when he heard the motorcycle from down below. He looked over his shoulder – wincing – and saw a familiar face smiling over a set of handlebars.
“Hey, Ny!” Guyer Gimble lifted one hand and waved. “Hold it right there!” She leaned over the motorcycle’s gauges and gunned toward him.
She pulled up alongside him and killed the engine. Her smile grew even wider and fiercer in complete delight. “Christ, Ny, I was hoping I’d find you out here. How the hell are ya?”
He leaned back against the pithons, shrugged, and managed a smile. “I’m okay, I guess. In one piece, at least.” He hadn’t felt that way when he’d come to, strapped to the wall, the day before; every part of him had seemed to have come loose, held together only by the bag of his skin. That was the aftereffect of his head-on impact with the megassassin. He’d been glad when there hadn’t been any more blood welling up in his mouth to spit out.
“You sly sonuvabitch – you been having adventures right and left, haven’t you? You got any idea how famous you are?”
He shook his head. “You mean for coming all the way through the building?” She must have been following the story, he figured, watching the entertainment broadcasts.
Guyer barked out a laugh. “That, plus other things. You heading up to the toplevel?”
“Yeah.” Axxter nodded, the motion sparking a flare of red in his eyes. “Gotta see my agent.” He’d already come across a plug-in jack and tried making a call, but had gotten only dead silence. All this slamming around had put something out of commission.
“It’ll take you a long time, crawling up there like that. Come on, get in; I’ll give you a ride. That’s where I’m heading, too.”
He managed to climb into the sidecar and strap himself in. Guyer eyed the mottled bruise covering one side of his ribcage, revealed when his jacket rode up.
“You okay? You look kinda messed up.”
“I’m okay.” He wedged his legs down among her stowed gear. “Mostly.”
She started up the motorcycle and headed upwall. Axxter looked back over his shoulder. He hadn’t gotten very far from where he’d started. He could still spot the dangling, ragged lines with which Lahft – or maybe another angel; he hadn’t been conscious when he’d been helped – had fastened him to the wall. Maybe it had become some kind of sport among them, catching him every time he came falling toward the clouds. Twice was lucky enough; he didn’t feel like trying it a third time.
“You’re gonna be strolling into some heavy action, Ny.” Guyer shouted over the engine noise and the rush of wind. “The whole building’s in an uproar, from the top-level all the way down the wall. Everything’s upside down now, man.”
He leaned toward her. “Why? What’s going on?”
She grinned. “You’ll see, man. When you get there. Your agent will fill you in.”
His head ached too much to try to figure anything out. He sat back, gazing straight up the wall, and closed his eyes.
† † †
“Ny – Jesus Christ, it’s good to see you.” Brevis came around the side of his desk and grabbed Axxter’s hand. “I didn’t know what the hell had happened to you, whether you were dead or what. But I kept hoping.”
He let his agent deposit him in a chair. “What the hell’s going on out there?” He pointed his thumb toward the door. “It’s like a riot or something.” Not like, but was, he knew; getting from where Guyer had dropped him off to Brevis’s office had been harder than he’d expected, with shouting crowds surging in waves, and the crackle of distant gunfire and explosions. He’d spotted at least a dozen different military tribes, all engaged in freestyle grappling with each other. Sticking close to any handy walls and sidling through had seemed the wisest course of action. Something big was up, obviously.
“Haven’t you heard?” Brevis sat back down behind his desk. “Uh, guess you wouldn’t have… what with your being in transit, as it were.” He gestured toward the walls with both hands. “This is it, Ny: the big one. Revolution time. Everything’s up for grabs. Cylinder’s whole structure of power has collapsed. Alliances, treaties… everything. There’s going to be a lot of scrambling around for a while.” He leaned back, hands clasped behind his head. “No matter what happens to you personally, Ny, at least you’ll always have the satisfaction of knowing you made an impact on the way things work.”
“Me? What’d I do? I didn’t do anything to cause all this.” He tilted his head toward the door; from beyond the sounds of the rioting could be heard.
“Nobody’s told you? It was your little broadcast, Ny. I mean, that was a great idea about bouncing your signal off that angel – when the signal hit this side, everybody wondered what was going on, so they traced back and figured out what you’d done. And when I say everybody, I mean everybody; every military tribe that’d ever had graffex work done for them, or anybody else with access to programmed biofoil.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“Don’t you see, Ny?” Brevis smiled. “You didn’t just send that little transmission you’d cooked up to the Havoc Mass; you sent it to everybody. The signal wasn’t encoded the way that the Small Moon encodes everything it sends out – the coding is what limits the signal’s reception to the intended target. Without that coding, your signal went completely wide-band. Every piece of active biofoil on this side of the building got its usual programming overridden and started showing all that stuff you’d put together, those tapes and everything. It wasn’t some little secret between you and the Havoc Mass anymore; everybody saw the proof about the conspiracy between the Havoc Mass and the Grievous Amalgam. Soon as their respective allies and treaty partners saw that, then the game was up. Thus all this foofarah going on outside.”
“Jeez.” A vague wonder moved inside Axxter’s chest; all he’d been trying to do was save his own ass. And all this had come about because of it… “So what’s going to happen now?”
“Oh, some new order will emerge. Eventually. That’s how things always go. The only thing that’s certain is that it won’t be either the Grievous Amalgam or the Havoc Mass calling the shots up here. They’ve already gone through mass defections, all their ranks scrambling around for position with somebody else. If they can; a lot of old grudges are going to get settled at their expense.”
Cripplemaker would probably do all right, sneaky shit that he was. But the general’s fate wasn’t of any concern to Axxter. “Well… wh
atever comes down, money’s always going to come in handy. Right? Now that I made it on through, it’s time to rake it in. What’s the payoff come to?”
Brevis’s smile disappeared. He looked sadly at Axxter. “There isn’t any payoff, Ny.”
His heart went cold. “What do you mean?”
“No payoff. No money, no nothing. That was the other effect of your broadcast. Remember? Your evidence completely indicted Ask & Receive, too. They’re bankrupt, washed up, kaput. They were completely liable for the validity of the info they had been supplying, so now everybody’s got a suit against them. Fat lot of good it’ll do, though, since they’ve already rolled over.”
“But – my money -”
“Ny – you sold the rights to Ask & Receive. I’ve been telling you: they’re bankrupt. Those rights you sold them are part of the assets that the vultures are picking clean. When they get done – if they ever get done; a mess like this takes years to clear up – you’ll be lucky if you realize enough out of it to buy a sandwich.”
Inside his head, some cool lobe, separate from the rest, admired the rigorous efficiency: to get back here, to collect the money for getting back here, he’d had to destroy the thing that would pay him the money. That’s marvelous. Perfect in its way.
He got up out of the chair.
“Hey – where you going?”
The noise outside rushed over him as he pushed open the door. “I’m going for a little walk. I’ll see you later.”
† † †
There was no answer. He pushed the button beside Ree’s door again, and got only silence in return. Plenty of silence down in the horizontal sectors, far removed from the uproar at the toplevel. Things always stayed the same on the horizontal.
“She’s not there, man.”
Axxter turned around and saw a woman standing behind him in the corridor. Dark-haired, almost pretty; he’d never seen her before. “Do you know where she went?”
The woman smiled. “I think she’s gone for good, fella. She got married.”
“Oh.” Somehow he’d never expected that.
“Ny -” The woman leaned against the corridor wall, regarding him. “Don’t you know who this is? Who I am?”
She’d known his name. That, plus her voice, lower in pitch but with the same laughing inflection in the words. “Felony…?”
She nodded. “You got it. Inside here, at least. This is the body I keep around these parts.”
“I didn’t know if I’d see you again -”
“I asked around, decided to look you up; figured you’d come around here. Your neighbors where you used to live told me where. I just wanted to see what kind of shape you were in, after all that.”
Axxter returned her smile. “What kind of shape am I in?”
She shrugged. “Same as before, I guess. By the way, Sai told me to say hello. He’s a little dinged up, but basically all right.”
“Glad to hear it.”
Felony pointed her thumb toward the door. “Your girlfriend’s run out on you?”
He nodded. “I guess she had somebody else on the line and decided to go with that when she found out I wasn’t going to be getting the big bucks.”
“Well… I did a little checking around on my own; just public record stuff. Here, take a look.” She dug out a folded sheet of paper and handed it to him. “That’s a printout from the registry office.”
He found himself looking at the date of Ree’s marriage. It took him a moment to figure it out. “Oh. That was while I was still over there. On the eveningside.”
“That’s right. Before she knew whether you were going to make it back, alive or not. Nice, huh?”
He crumpled up the paper and threw it away. All along the corridor the doors were shut, silent. “I guess that makes sense. She’s just that kind of person.”
“Hey – so no loss, huh?” Felony pushed herself away from the wall. “I gotta run; things to do. You take care of yourself, okay?”
“Sure.” He watched her striding away, not looking back at him.
† † †
He walked and walked, until there wasn’t any place to walk. Until he was outside again. On the vertical.
Smoke and flame, and distant shouting from far above, as he climbed out the small exit site. It was the first one he’d come to.
His boot-pithons sang out and locked onto the wall’s surface as he stood up. Straight out, perpendicular to the building’s steel skin, tilting his head back to look across the sky and the cloud barrier below. His hand touched his belt, but then drew away, leaving the pithons at his waist still coiled inside their little nests. He didn’t need them now.
He stood on the wall, the old fear and nausea gone. He stood and gazed down, over the curved empty territory of the vertical world. A bright, cold wind surged against his face, stinging his throat and lungs as he drank it in. The clouds boiled silver, tearing his eyes.
His arms spread wide, hands gathering in even more air.
A long time to get there, but now he was home.
K. W. JETER
***
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