Farewell Horizontal

TEN

Maybe his agent would front him some money. He had to. If Brevis wouldn’t do that much for him, what with his being stuck out here starving in the ass-end of nowhere, then what the hell good was he? The sonuvabitch.

Axxter reversed the charges, praying that Brevis would accept a collect call. Just this once.

WHAT NAME (CALLING PARTY)? The Wire Syndicate logo waited for his reply.

“Uh – tell him it’s Ny. Ny Axxter.”

He listened to the distant ringing, a world away. The wire from the plug-in jack ran all the way through the building and up to the toplevel; his only link.

Then he heard Brevis’s voice. “Yeah, I’ll take it. Give him to me.”

Sweet Jesus. “Brevis -” he blurted out.

The agent cut him off. “Listen, mac – whoever you are – I don’t appreciate little jokes like this. You got a sick sense of humor to try something like this. Now fuck off, and don’t -”

“Brevis – hey, no, it’s really me -”

“Yeah, right, very funny; now go get -”

All he could think of was the agent hanging up, breaking the connection. Desperate: “It’s really me, for Christ’s sake, this isn’t a joke. I’m not dead. Brevis, you gotta believe me.”

Silence. But at least not a click and a buzz.

“Ny?” Brevis’s voice was half skeptical, half wondering. “That’s you? How -”

Keep him on the line. “Brevis, I swear it.” Don’t let him get away. “I know what you probably heard, but it’s not true. I’m not dead. This is really Ny Axxter talking to you.”

Another beat of silence. “Prove it. I mean, prove it’s you.”

“For Christ’s sake, what do you want me to do?” He studied his finger in the plug-in jack, as though it might be possible to squeeze himself through the hole and confront the agent. “I’m talking to you, aren’t I?”

“Could be anybody.” The skeptical tone hardened. “Sounds like it’s Axxter – but that’s easy enough to fake.”

“Okay. Okay, just hold on a second.” His thoughts sped up. “All right, how’s this: the first thing I ever did, the first piece after I signed on with you. It was a commission from a little band, about a dozen guys, they’re all dead now, they were called – um -” He snapped his fingers. “Abrasion Surtax. Right? And the piece I did, I went blank and I couldn’t think of anything, so I ripped off a dragon spreadeagle from a collection of old tattoo flash that Howe Drafe lent me. Only the Abrasion guys found out about it, and they were all pissed off ’cause they’d paid for an original, so you had to give ’em their money back plus ten percent, which you deducted from my next job, only it wasn’t true, they hadn’t dinged you for any ten percent penalty at all -”

“Jeez – you still remember that? Christ, talk about carrying a grudge.”

Axxter allowed himself a smile. “So is it me, or not?”

“Well, yeah; I suppose so.” No skepticism now in Brevis’s voice, just baffled wondering. “But how come you’re not dead?”

“Just lucky, I guess.”

“No, no; I mean it. What the hell’s going on?”

He shrugged. “I’m still alive. That’s all there is to it. Whatever you heard -”

“‘Heard’ ain’t it. I saw it, man. There’s a tape of you heading for the clouds. After getting all whammed to shit against the wall. The Havoc Mass – that bunch had a telephoto trained on the whole thing; they had one of their archives men right behind the thugs who were on your tail. He was sending the signal back on a tightbeam to the camp; that was the only way it got recorded, because he bit it along with the rest of them when the cable went boing. Whose bright idea was that, anyway?”

“I had help. All right? I didn’t think of it all by myself.” The agent’s old-womanish hectoring got under his skin. He would’ve thought Brevis would be happy just to know he was alive.

“Yeah, well, that little number cost you, Jack. The Public Works Department was in here so fast, sucking out your account… They took the wad, buddy. That tape was prima facie evidence. When it got broadcast, and everybody from the toplevel on down saw it -”

“What? Who saw it -”

“Everybody; that’s what I’m telling you.” Brevis’s voice went shrill. “The Havoc Mass sold the tape to Ask & Receive’s entertainment division – it was on the air while you were supposedly still falling through the cloud barrier. A bunch like the Mass doesn’t need the money they got for it; they just enjoy making people they don’t like look like assholes.”

“Jeez..” Everybody on or in Cylinder had seen him sawing away at the transit cable, like an idiot. The kind of thing you saw in an ancient kiddy cartoon, the cat cutting off the tree limb he’s sitting on. His girlfriend had no doubt seen it, too. Her last memory of him, on the ‘Here’s a cutie for you’ segment of the evening news. Great.

“So how do you think I feel about it? You think it does an agent any good to have the whole world know you got clients with shit for brains? You ever try to do business with people, they gotta ring off and get back to you later, ’cause they’re laughing too hard?”

That was the problem in dealing with Brevis: no one had ever suffered the way he had.

“Okay, okay; look, you don’t have to tell me it wasn’t a great idea.” Axxter tried to get the call back on track. “I was under a lot of pressure at the time. Those guys were trying to kill me. All right?”

“Yeah, well, just don’t do it again. Jesus Christ!” Brevis’s voice broke into a yelp. “Do you know what this call is costing me? Where the hell are you calling me from?”

He must’ve seen the Wire Syndicate’s charges piling up. “Look, Brevis, you’re going to find this hard to believe, but I’m a long way away from you -”

“I’ll bet – mother of God -”

“ – I’m on the other side. Of the building. I’m on Cylinder’s eveningside. You understand? I’m on the other side.”

Brevis was silent for a moment. “Jeez, Ny, you’re full of surprises today. Am I supposed to believe that? Just because I believed you’re alive?”

“It’s true, I swear it. Look, have the Wire Syndicate run a locate on this jack. You’ll need to get the number anyway, so you can call me back.”

“What the hell should I call you back for? You’re broke, you’re officially dead, and as a client you’re a liability, not an asset. I should get the Havoc Mass looking to cut my nuts off, too?”

Axxter felt his palm sweating, his finger trembling in the plug-in. If Brevis should hang up… “You’re gonna want to call me back. Because I can make money – big money – for you.”

“Yeah?” Skeptical again. “How?”

“I’m talking big money now.” He had to give himself time to think. “The biggest deal you’ve ever done; I mean, this is the one that’ll put you right up in the front rank of agents -” Come on, come on, think. “Top dollar; top dollar, Brevis -” Blank, blank, blank.

Then it popped out, all in a piece. The words came spinning out, effortless.

“I may not be worth much as a graffex – not right now, at any rate – but we got something else to sell. I’m on the other side. Don’t you see? I’m someplace no one else has ever been, at least no one who’s ever talked about it. We got info-gathering here, tons of fresh data, stuff we can unload to Ask & Receive for whatever price we ask. Plus – there’s the entertainment value. This is real-time adventure we got going here, Brevis. This isn’t some little stroll around some diddly-shit morningside sector that everybody’s seen a million times before. I’m going to hike all the way across some unknown wallscape – without even a rig to carry me – and encounter God knows what – there could be fuckin’ anything out here, man – then cross over through whichever Linear Fair I come to – all that just to make it home. What more could you want? That’s a goddamn odyssey, for Christ’s sake.”

“Hm.” Brevis, mulling it over, couldn’t hide his interest. “Yeah, but… you’d have to make it all the way back. Like you said, you don’t know what you’re going to come across out there. Or what’s going to come across you.”

“So? Even better. That’s exactly why you’ll have people getting hooked on the story, following my progress – the suspense factor. Half the audience will be hoping I don’t make it. If I starve to death, or something worse happens, then it’s a big tragedy for everybody else. Real sob stuff. Either way, you get your ten percent.”

“Twenty percent. This is outside the usual range of what I handle. It’d fall under a special provision in your contract with the agency.”

“Ten, twenty, who gives a fuck.” Axxter knew he had him hooked. “It’ll be tons of money for both of us.”

“Mm – could be. I’d have to run it by some people, see what they think. But… it’s not bad, Ny; not bad at all. It has some possibilities.” Brevis’s voice moved up a gear. “Yeah, I think we could get an offer on it.”

Bingo. “We gotta have an advance on it, though; a good-sized one. There’s stuff I gotta pay for, info to dig out. I’ll need to get my location pinpointed, get whatever files or maps exist about this side, I don’t care what shape; we’ll have to get a search done for every fragment, no matter how small. I’m going to need all the help I can get, if I’m going to pull this off.”

“All right; all right, let me work on it.” Little tongue-clicking noises came over the line, the sound of the agent revving up. “It’s going to take some time, though. Look, just sit tight where you are, okay -”

“Where the hell else am I going to go?”

“Just hang on. I think this is a genuine hot one. I’ll get the locate on this call soon as you hang up, and then I’ll get back to you soon as we’ve got an offer. Like I said, though, it’ll take a little time.”

Axxter’s stomach had become a brass-lined vacuum. “How long?”

“You gotta give me twenty-four hours at least.”

He sucked in his breath through his teeth. “All right. Just do it, okay? I really need you to come through on this one.”

“Hey. Trust me.”

After Brevis rang off and the line went dead, Axxter stood up to ease the cramp from his spider crouch by the plug-in jack. His belt pithons reeled out, bracing him in full extension against the wind. In all directions, this sector of eveningside wall looked as bare and empty as when he’d been slowly crawling over it.

A few more hours of sunlight, this side’s real day, he calculated. He could go looking around – for what? A nice big cache of dehydrates that some other poor bastard had left behind? His mouth watered hard enough to sting under his tongue. The fantasy rolled in his head, unstoppable: some other poor bastard who’d been luckless enough to land over here somehow – no, he’d planned it, a wanderer, like Opt Cooder, that’s why he had such nice big supplies of food with him. Then something happened to him -

He didn’t like the way that was going. Whatever’d happened to the nice wanderer could happen to him, too. Better to just think about the food and the canned water and the other good things in life. He’d found some rainwater earlier in the half-morning collected in pockmarks a few inches deep in the building’s surface; the water tasted like metal, but was better than nothing. It enabled him to salivate, running the fantasy’s best moments over again.

Just as he was ready to pull himself back into a more comfortable position hanging close to the wall, he noticed two things. One was that his usual dizzy nausea at moving around in the vertical world, standing perpendicular and the like, was absent. The feeling had abated from his first long-ago days out on the wall, but had never completely vanished. Until now. Shows how far gone I am. When you’re this far out, even your body doesn’t give a fuck anymore. He wrapped his hand around the pithon lines, then saw the other thing.

There was something moving, out at the limit of his sight, silhouetted at the far edge of the wall.

Axxter felt his empty gut clench around itself. There had been no sign of any living thing all the time he’d been clambering around the wall, looking for a plug-in, but that didn’t prove anything. All sorts of sectors over on the morningside were just as barren; you could be crossing some bleak territory, and the next thing you knew, be right in some amazing mess – the memory was still sharp of the ripped-open steel and the burned-out horizontal community underneath that he’d stumbled upon. The smell of charred flesh, and the stink of his own fear seeping from his sweat glands, haunted him Something could always be hiding under the surface, ready to jump out, boogedy-shoop, and get you, like those poor bastards. Out of the dark, the Dead Centers. Maybe you never saw them because they spent all their time over on this side, frolicking around and sharpening their teeth.

He strained his sight toward the spot, but the thing, whatever it’d been, was gone. Nothing moving on the building’s straight vertical line. It didn’t make him feel better.

Could’ve been anything. He tucked himself back into the wall. Or nothing. That rope that Lahft had rummaged together from the bits of trash and wire – there had been rags in that big enough to have caught a stray wind, gone lifting and waving about. He thought he’d gone farther than that on his search; the spot where he’d woken up should’ve been well hidden by the building’s curve. Still, something like that; just junk, scraps banging around. Nothing to worry about.

Nothing at all. He kept telling himself that, all through the rest of the daylight hours, until another sunset – it still astonished him, if not quite as much – and it was dark enough to catch some sleep. The dull ache of his bruises had him exhausted.

He couldn’t even close his eyes. He went on staring into the dark, at the distant spot on the wall.

† † †

The gray seepage of the shadowlight woke him up with a start, his spine jerking tight and his forehead bouncing against one of the splayed-out pithons.

He rubbed a crust from the corner of his eye. It took awhile to work up enough spit to swallow the evil taste in his mouth. The sleep, however much he’d gotten – no memory of when he’d finally nodded off in his dangling sling – didn’t seem to have done much good. His arms ached down into the sides of his fists, as though he’d been punching them into the wall all night long.

Another surprise, a new thing, when he’d finally managed to pry his eyes all the way open. A package wrapped up in gray paper and crisscrossed with twine. Somebody, something – had managed to sneak up on him while he’d been unconscious, and leave it, tied onto one of the pithons with the same rough cord.

He reached over and prodded it with a finger. Nothing happened; his fingertip poked into something soft under the paper.

“I’ll be damned.” Awake enough now to catch the faint smell, an aroma trace that jerked his stomach into a knot rattling against his spine. He pulled the package loose – the twine’s knots slipped free with his tug – and held it against himself, tearing the paper loose.

Some kind of bread, two flat rounds; they wobbled up and down in his hands. Also a plastic pouch filled with water, or something equally clear. Axxter eyed everything with caution. Lahft wouldn’t have come round and left him something like this – who’d ever seen angels carrying things? What other friends did he have over on this side?

“Well, shit -” He tore off a piece of the spongy bread and stuffed it in his mouth. He’d be just as dead, eventually, if he didn’t eat it. He chewed and swallowed, then tore off the corner of the pouch and drank, tilting his head back.

He left half the water, knotting the top of the pouch to keep it from leaking, and a handful of the bread, rolled up and tucked inside his shirt. It might be awhile until more presents showed up. He supposed it was connected to whatever he’d seen before, moving around in the distance. Fattening me up, probably. A full gut only took the edge off his worrying.

When Brevis called, it jerked him awake; the happy working of his gut had lulled him out. He nearly pulled his finger out of the plug-in jack, breaking the connection.

“Ny – hey, man, how you doing?” Brevis’s voice burbled in his ear. “How’s things out there?”

Axxter’s heart sank. He knew the range of his agent’s tones by now. Rattling excitement meant he had a deal cooking; that bright chirpy hello meant shit.

“I’m fine. Couldn’t be better.” Axxter shaded his eyes. The sun had just come over the top of the building. “So. What’s happening?”

Brevis’s voice went soft and apologetic. “Well, it doesn’t look too good right now, Ny. I wasn’t able to sell the rights for you.”

“Why not?” He jabbed his finger harder into the jack. “What the fuck do they want?”

“Hey – don’t jump down my throat, man. I was on the phone for hours, right up to the top buyers at Ask & Receive. Both the research and the entertainment divisions came down against the package. They just weren’t interested.”

He couldn’t believe it. “For Christ’s sake, why? This is a hot idea – when would they ever have another opportunity for something like this again -”

“Ny – what it is, is that they just don’t think you’re gonna make it. If it was just that you were going to make it back around to the morningside, I could’ve worked the tragic odyssey angle harder, gone for the sob appeal. But they don’t think you’re going to make it very far at all; at least not enough to build up some kind of audience. They think your ass is grass, right where you’re sitting.”

He felt the sweat chill between his shoulderblades, a cold wind across the empty wall. “All right.” Carefully, slowly. “What’s the deal? What’s happening that makes them so sure I won’t make it?”

Brevis was silent for a moment. “It really doesn’t look too good, Ny. You’re really in the middle of nowhere; you’re a long ways from either one of the Linear Fairs.”

“So I got a hike in front of me. Big deal. No, I want to know what else there is. Come on, lay it on me.”

“I didn’t want to make it any rougher on you, Ny, but if you really gotta know – you’re still in deep shit with the Havoc Mass. Somehow the word got around to them that you’re still alive. I figure once I started negotiating with Ask & Receive, they contacted the Mass to see what they had to say about the whole thing. And it wasn’t good. That Havoc bunch is still major pissed at you. They’ve already sent some hit teams out to the Linear Fairs, plus put an open bounty out on your head. You come waltzing into either Fair, trying to cross through it to the morningside – if you make it that far – and any little thug can just nail you and collect a nice bit of change. The Ask & Receive people didn’t figure there was much entertainment value in seeing some fool walk into a slaughterhouse with his name on it. I mean, there’s no suspense. Let’s face it, Ny – you’re a dead man right now.”

“All right. Fine.” Those fuckers – his anger purged every other emotion; he could feel the blood pumping up into his face, stinging across the bridge of his nose. “They think they got me nailed – fine. They think they can leave me hanging out here to dry? I got news for ’em.” The words seethed through his teeth. “If I can’t make it back by going around the building, I’ll get there another way.”

“Ny -” Sad. “There isn’t any other way.”

“Oh? Is that right? Well, how’s this, then – I won’t come around the building. I’ll go through it.”

Silence, the seconds ticking by, adding up to a full minute before Brevis replied. “What – what’re you talking about?”

“You heard me.” Axxter had heard himself, the words still turning and shining inside his head. Now that he’d cooled off a bit, he could admire the idea in all its simplicity. Why screw around? You just head in the straightest line possible to where you want to go. “I’ll go through Cylinder, right through the middle. I won’t have to dink around crawling all over the surface, and I won’t have to worry about a bunch of hardcases waiting for me at Linear Fair. I’ll just head straight from here over to the morningside; all I gotta do is find some entry around here and get onto the horizontal levels inside. Hey, if nothing else, I’ll save myself a lot of time and traveling. And screw the Havoc Mass – I can work it so I pop up on the other side in some sector controlled by the Grievous Amalgam. They’ll think I’m a fucking hero for making the Mass look like a bunch of idiots. Those guys think that tape they sold to Ask & Receive was funny? Wait till this little stunt gets broadcast.” That was a pleasant thought: Har har har on you, turkeys.

“Jeez, Ny – I gotta hand it to you.” Brevis was probably shaking his head in amazement. “That’s a hell of an idea you got there. It’s not a very good idea, but you get points for the concept, you really do.”

“What’s not good about it?”

“Ny – you’re talking about going through the center of the building. Not just right under the wall, in some cozy little horizontal sectors. We’re talking right smack in the middle of Cylinder. You know, there are reasons why people don’t just go for little Sunday strolls in there.” Under the joking edge in Brevis’s voice something darker showed through. “Bad reasons, Ny. I mean, good reasons, but bad shit. You know what I’m talking about?”

“I know.” Words neither one of them wanted to say aloud, yet they sat there on the line between them like a lead weight. The Dead Centers. The thought of them screwed with his brain more than they ever could with Brevis’s; he’d seen – in real time, not just off some tape replay – what the dark skulkers could do. He’d already walked around in their cold footsteps – if feet was what they had; the unbidden image of giant snail trails, smearing ashes, and slobbered bones crawled inside his head. The smell of the burned-out horizontal sector he’d stumbled on was always there, ready to come bubbling up at any spooky moment.

“Brevis – I know all that stuff.” Voice level, down to the fundamental rock. “But I don’t have any other choice. Do I? And what do I have to lose, anyway? Like you said, right where I’m sitting now, I’m a dead man.”

The agent took a moment to think it over. “I suppose you’re right. You know, it’s wild enough, maybe they’d go for it. Let me run it past ’em. Can you hang tight for about an hour?”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

It was half an hour. Brevis’s voice jumped out over the wire.

“They went for it, Ny. We got a deal. Ask & Receive is cutting the transfer of funds right now. They went apeshit for the bit about going straight through the building. I mean, the odds are even worse on your making it all the way, but they figure they’ll recoup their upfront money to you and go into profits just on the research data you’ll generate. The entertainment value of seeing just how far you go before you get snuffed, that’s just gravy.”

“How nice for them.” Axxter’s thoughts started ticking over again. All the stuff he’d need; whatever maps, data, unconfirmed rumors, old historical fragments, whatever already existed in Ask & Receive’s files. He’d have to get it all dumped out, break it down, before he could even get started. One thing to say what you were going to do, another to actually get off your ass and do it.

“They’re gonna want daily reports from you, Ny. Whatever happens to you, whatever you come across. You’ll have to keep an eye out for phone lines in there -”

“Yeah, right; whatever.” Ask & Receive would have to be happy with whatever they got. “Look, Brevis; thanks for setting it up, but I really gotta get cracking now.”

“There’s some other things about the deal you should know about, Ny -”

There were always other things. “I’ll get back in touch with you. Okay? Talk to you later.” He broke the connection to his agent. Time to check in with his bank.

ACCOUNT REACTIVATED. Blinking in a cheery green.

That made him feel better. Even more when his account balance came up, right in the middle of his vision. He looked out across the clouds, counting the zeroes superimposed on the sky.