Farewell Horizontal

NINE

He tried to wake up, then tried harder not to, to go back under the thick woozy dark. But it was too late: he’d already met the pain, the bruised layers that seemed to be piled in wet razor slices from his spine to his breastbone.

“Jee… zuss… Christ.” He heard himself say it, a distant whisper under the wobbling roar inside one ear. Something inside him, which had been part of him but had been shaken loose, wanted to throw up; he could feel it swelling against the root of his tongue. He’d have let the thing have its way, if he’d known which way he was. If upside down, it probably wasn’t a good idea; he remembered distant warnings about aspirated stomach contents – you could die that route.

Already, he’d assumed he was still alive. The frayed connection between the aches throbbing in sync with his blood and the trembling flinch inside his head – that was what it must mean. Dead, he wouldn’t feel this bad.

He opened his eyes. The right eyelid stuck, then peeled open like a stiff zipper. Sky, pinkish around the edges of distant clouds. Seen through a tangle of his own hair, matted black with sweat or blood. He shook his head, gingerly, little needles jabbing at the back of his skull. The dark lines swayed against the cloudscape. Right side up. He could work that much out.

His jacket and shirt had been torn open; looking down, chin against his chest, he saw raw bruises, his ribs stenciled in ink blue, a red abrasion at the edge of his hip bone for balance. He could see his chest rise with each breath, and match it with a particular rhythmic stab near his heart, unseen but felt like a knifepoint. Definitely alive; that confirmed, he almost regretted it. The throbs rolled their dull weight along his spine. He was amazed, under the numb protective wooze.

He remembered hitting the wall, at the end of the transit cable’s snapping rubber band. And then falling, the big step. Either one of those should have done the job. He lifted his arm, elbow creaking, and rubbed his hand across his face, letting more light slide under the stiff red fringe. The palm of his hand was red, too, in zebra bands with black grease and dirt. Its sticky wetness smeared across his cheek.

Grease – that made him think. Of the other poor wayfarer, his traveling companion, which had also gone smack against the wall, the louder clanging of metal against metal. It was probably the Norton’s grease on his hands – hadn’t he grabbed after it as it’d gone spinning away, half to save himself, to grab anything solid and mother-familiar in the empty air curling under his head and feet, half to save it, poor thing? He couldn’t remember. He just saw it rolling away again, in a flat arc toward the atmosphere’s crumpled edge, the wheels bent into bowl-shaped ovals, the grappling lines writhing helplessly around the hubs, frame snapped broken-back and the engine leaking bolts and scraps. The sadness of the memory, the last sighting, bubbled up and broke inside his own leaking chest. You idiot – on the verge of tears, he realized that he’d yet to feel anything except pain and grief connected with his discovery of still being alive.

“Way to go.” Axxter opened his eyes again. There were probably all kinds of shit to take care of, if he was to go on living. He knew he couldn’t just stay nailed to the wall.

For the first time, he wondered what exactly was holding him up against the building. His familiar nausea – another sign of life – knotted in his throat as he looked down and saw the cloud barrier roiling against the building’s curve, far below his feet. His boot pithons had snugged in tight, locking his heels and ankles against the metal, boot soles otherwise treading on air. The same for his waist, the lines from his belt fanned out and contracted, his butt flattened against Cylinder; the steel’s cold radiated down the backs of his thighs and into his coccyx.

But there was something else, not alive the way the pithons were. And thicker, a raggy thing of shredded canvas and plastic, knotted around with multicolored wires, their stripped brass ends poking out of the crude rope. He could see it now, looped up through his crotch and across his chest, the sharp bits tickling the raw bruises, a tangled knot sitting on his shoulder, as if the wires were probing for a socket in his ear. Somebody had tied him up here, knitted the awkward rope as a thin saddle for his weight; somebody who didn’t trust the skinny little pithons, who didn’t know just how strong they were – if they’d given out, lost their hold on the wall, he doubted if this straggling mess would have kept him from pitching headfirst down to the clouds. He could feel it parting, the rags and wires slipping out of each other’s clutches, just from his leaning forward to look at it.

The makeshift rope continued from the knot at his shoulder to a loop around his wrist, his right hand lifted above his head. He looked up to see if there was enough slack to pull his hand free. He saw her then, watching him.

“Hello. Hi.” Lahft smiled at him, her eyes sleepy, as though his fumbling around had roused her from a snoozing vigil. “Hi-Ny-hi.” The angel’s smile grew bigger.

Axxter rolled the back of his head against the wall to see her better. A triangular section of the wall’s metal had peeled away from the girder beneath, making a shelf just large enough for her to perch on; her bare legs dangled on either side of the protruding steel tongue. “Hi there.” He nodded and managed a weak imitation of her smile. Now he knew who had knotted the rope around him. To keep him from falling again.

His hand came loose, and he shook the blood back into it. He remembered more now. Falling, and the motorcycle and sidecar spinning away, the Havoc Mass warriors toppling on down toward the clouds…

The clouds. The angel’s big smile disappeared for a moment; all he saw were the luminous gray-and-white banks, the slow ocean of hills and crevices, rushing up toward him.

There had been angels. He remembered that, too. Rows and rows of them, in all directions, in the twilight shade under the cloud barrier. The inflated spheres behind their shoulderblades like muted sunbursts, the traceries of veins all soft blue in the half-light, lace into ash. All around him, in every direction he turned, rolling on his back in air, arms spread wide as he fell, the wind along his ribs, breath solid in his mouth…

That was the last thing that he remembered. There wasn’t any more after that. He saw Lahft again, leaning forward, her hands gripping the edges of the peeled metal, waiting patiently for him.

“Okay.” Axxter nodded. “I get it. You… caught me. When I came falling through. Right?”

She looked away, considering the statement. The little wheels were almost visible inside her skull.

“Caught.” She pursed her lips, staring out toward the edge of the atmosphere. “Falling…” Her eyes suddenly widened in alarm; she reached down and grabbed Axxter’s wrist, locking it tight in her grip.

“No… no.” He gently tugged his hand free. “I’m not falling now. I was falling then. Remember?”

“Then…” Her face clouded with effort. Bright joy broke through: “Catch! Caught!” She hugged herself, pressing some invisible body to her breast. “Caught you then!”

The angels’ elastic sense of time, first a point too small to be seen, then a rubber ball that filled a hand, but never any more than that. Axxter reached down and tugged the makeshift rope away from his chest. “Yeah, well -” It explained a lot of things. She must’ve been hanging around, the way she had been, outside the Mass camp’s firing distance, when all the shit had come literally down. Or else she’d been consorting with her buddies, all happy angels together, underneath the clouds. And it’d just been his good luck to come crashing through the soft roof of their world, right at the best of all possible spots. At any rate, she’d been there for him; had put the grab on him, a great big hug – he wished he could remember that part; battered as he was, the nude body perched above him, the bare pink feet dangling inches away from his face, still twinged the other living part of him. Incorrigible; he sighed and shook his head. The rope parted, and he dropped the two ends swinging away from him. He twisted about, boots freed for a moment until the pithons took hold in their new positions. Face and chest toward the wall now; he let out the lines from the belt, so that he could lean back in relative comfort and look up at Lahft.

“Caught me, right. Okay…” Bit by bit, pieces fitting together. “Christ, I must’ve hit you like a ton of bricks.”

She tilted her head, the smile puzzled.

“When I hit you.” He slammed one hand into the other to demonstrate. “When you caught me. Boom. Then what happened?” Wasting time, he knew. There was a bunch of shit he should be taking care of, rather than just poking into the exact mechanics of his continued existence. Like finding out where the hell he was, and if it was anywhere close to all those who wanted to kick his ass. That should’ve been priority one. Still -

“Boom.” Lahft nodded sagely, arms still wrapped around herself. “Then. Falling – right?”

“Fell.” He could imagine it, his deadweight dropping the hugging angel along with him.

“Long, long way.” She pointed to the clouds, and whatever was below them. “So I go big.” The translucent sphere behind her shoulders expanded in demonstration; she lifted a bit off the metal seat as the gases inside the membrane made her buoyant. “Then. Not falling.” The smile again.

“Not falling – right. Then what? Uh – drifting?”

“Drifting.” She nodded. “Big, and the wind -” She made a pushing gesture with the palm of one hand. “Drifting and drifting. A long way. Then. Here.”

She wasn’t going to be much help in getting his bearings. Location was probably as fuzzy a concept as time for the angels. No difference out there in the air. They could’ve gone drifting over whole sectors of wall, one angel with her flight membrane ballooned out to the max, and her unconscious payload; until some favorable gust had brought her up against the building’s wall, close enough for her to grab on. His pithons had latched on, triggered by the proximity of steel, and she had knotted together that rope from whatever scraps she’d found nearby. Then waited.

Axxter looked to either side, leaning back against the pithons’ tension. Bleak, featureless wall stretched out. Gotta find a plug-in jack, he decided. There had to be one around here somewhere. So he could call his bank – before anything else, he had to do that. He had to know how bad his financial situation was. His bank account was probably wiped out by whatever fine he’d been hit with for cutting the transit cable. Maybe even in the absolute red right now; he’d be hustling for years to get it paid off. Still, if Public Works Department had left him with anything at all, he could make a start at finding out what he needed to know. Like where he was, and how many were out looking for him. Ask & Receive – he could place a shielded, anonymous call to the info agency; by the time the Havoc Mass had wangled a trace, he’d be long gone. If he had the money left to pay for the info. Axxter bit his lip, letting his thoughts spin along without brakes. Gotta find some place to hook up so I can make the call; that was the first thing -

He stopped, his string of thought suddenly broken. The light around him had turned red, the building’s wall deepening with it. That puzzled him, and he couldn’t tell why. Except that it had been all bright, well into the day, when he’d come to, found himself hanging here. The red light tinged darker as he stared about; he could see it on the backs of his hands. It was as though time had decided to run backward; it had become as loose and arbitrary for him as it was for the angels. The dawn following the daylight, coming after it rather than before -

He knew Lahft was staring at him, puzzled at his sudden confusion. Staring at him, as he stared out into the sky, toward the far edge of the clouds. Out where he saw something he had never seen before.

The clouds were all molten gold and red, turning darker, even to black as he watched.

The sun was setting, vanishing below the rim of the cloud barrier.

Axxter went on staring, as the sun became a slice, then a red point. He had never seen the sun set before. Nobody had.

† † †

He had a long time to think about it. All through a long and cold night, waiting for even the gray shadowlight that would come from the sun rising on Cylinder’s morningside.

By himself; Lahft got hungry, or bored, and went floating off. Axxter figured he’d see her again. In the vertical cradle of his pithons, he hung close to the wall, shivering in the dark winds, working things out inside his head.

He was on the other side. The eveningside – that much was clear. Where nobody – nobody he’d ever heard of, at least – had ever been. Just his luck – a whole new world stretching out in all directions, and he’d landed up in it with nothing but the clothes on his back. In one piece, at least; he had to admit that. The throbbing of his bruises had diminished, the blood ebbing back to his heart. One sharp pain remained in his side, which he’d prodded once with his finger, then promised himself he wouldn’t touch again.

Must’ve been drifting out there for – what? A day, two days? How long would it take to get this far from everything? Axxter gazed out into the darkness, wondering. Unless drifting wasn’t the exact word to be used – maybe Lahft, with him in her arms and her flight membrane distended all the way, had got caught in a ripping current out near the atmosphere’s edge. Out in the jet stream: that would’ve raced them along, right over all the sectors of the morningside, right over Linear Fair, the Right or the Left one. And then – spang – down here in unknown territory.

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.