Farewell Horizontal

FOUR

A dead angel. Another, different dead angel; for a moment Axxter thought that the old Opt Cooder tape, the one he’d watched so often as a kid on the horizontal, had somehow slid from some interior archive and across his vision. He brought the Norton to a halt and gazed down over the handlebars at the sight below. The confused overlay between taped past and bleeding present faded as the delicate corpse lay tangled against the transit cable on which his motorcycle’s wheel had locked.

She – female; he saw one small breast distorted against the steel wall – lay unmoving, cradled by the deflated membrane behind her shoulders. The thin tissue no longer spheroid with the lifting gases, but now a gray shroud, with a tattered fringe sifted by the wind. Blackened: as Axxter watched, one ashy streamer tore free from the membrane’s charred edges and fluttered twisting into the atmosphere. Different from Cooder’s celebrated tape, where the corpse had been undamaged, the membrane limp due to the stilled blood no longer replenishing its contents. And that one, long ago, had been blond, the hair pale, almost translucent. This one was dark; he gazed down at the black tangle over her shoulder and along her arm, high contrast against the white skin.

The wind caught a fold of the membrane, billowing it behind the angel’s head. Her face turned from its kiss against the wall, the rise of the chin stretching the slender throat. The face returned his gaze, the unseeing eyes half-shaded by the dark lashes. His chest hollowed as he recognized the dead angel.

It’s her. He knew it, the memory sharp; no need to call the tape file out of the camera’s archive. I’ll be goddamned; he reached down and shut off the Norton’s engine, the murmuring idle an intrusion on the scene and his thoughts. The face he had last seen, the lashes trembling, mouth opening in a small cry; head thrown back, dark hair a pennant in open air; her hands straining against the male’s chest, the taut spheres behind their shoulders filled with dawn light… he had seen the face then, in the camera’s viewfinder, lens tracking the mating angels as they had turned far from Cylinder’s steel wall. Now the same face lay below him, beyond the motorcycle’s wheel, the torn membrane a pillow for a longer sleep.

He knew why the hollow in his chest. Irrational: I shouldn’t have taped her. Them. Stole all their life, right when they weren’t watching, busy at those other things. Way to go, champ; stole it and sold it, and the obliging world snared the husk and left it here for him to find. Just to make me feel like a shit.

Disgust stifled the mercenary notion of taking out the camera again and taping the corpse. Fuck ’em; the hungry eyes stacked up inside the building already had one dead angel to look at.

Axxter swung his legs off the Norton and let his boot pithons snap onto the wall. With one hand grasping the transit cable, he awkwardly clambered down to where the angel hung. The silklike tissue of the deflated membrane wrapped around his arm as he reached down toward her. He wanted to pull her loose from the angle of cable that had snagged the light body and let her fall free of the building, down through the cloud layer to whatever place all other dead angels went. His hand strayed for a moment, a centimeter from her face. In the cup of his palm, he felt a faint motion of air, warmer than the wind curling over his back. It disappeared, then came again, a breath shallower than the one he’d felt a moment before.

“Christ!” His hand slid to the side of her throat. A feeble pulse touched his fingertips. The angel’s head lolled to one side as he pulled his hand back.

Alive, barely – whatever had torn and burned the spherical membrane (a memory, the dark place behind the ripped metal the smell of burnt things, moved behind his thoughts) had left a small living thread inside the fragile body. But not for long, obviously. The flesh that had glowed with its own heat when he’d taped it two mornings ago now grayed with the dull tint of the silklike stuff fluttering around her limbs. He guessed shock, maybe some internal injury that he hadn’t discerned yet. The loss of blood seemed minimal, with no break that he could see in the naked skin. The burn damage had mercifully cauterized most of the blood vessels feeding into the torn membrane.

“Shit.” The word slid around one gnawed thumbnail. Dead had been one thing, bad enough; a dying angel was even worse. What are you supposed to do with something like that? That nobody – not out here, at least – would know what you’d done made it no easier. Can’t just push her off into the clouds now… so then what? Watch and wait until she is dead? “Goddamn -” Gotta do something for her. And how easy would that be? Or likely to do any good? His medical skills, rudimentary by even freelancer standards… and were gas angels even human? They looked like it, if perhaps a bit on the childlike, ethereal side, bird bones thin and light enough to be carried through the air… Shit, maybe they are birds, featherless ones. Or something entirely different, cooked up by the endlessly clever people who lived before the War. Axxter shook his head, worrying the thumbnail farther down.

“Well -” The wind carried away his voice. Can’t kill her any deader, can you? He tightened his grip on the cable and lowered himself closer to the angel.

The wind had picked up in the span of minutes since he had spotted her. A rapid flutter came from the blackened edges of the tattered membrane, the wind’s force tearing off the longer ribbons. The angel sagged lower in the shroudlike cradle formed by her own dead tissue, one thin arm dangling down toward the clouds far below. Her slight weight tugged at the point where the membrane had become entangled with the transit cable, the twisted silk fraying into strings.

Axxter drew a pithon from his belt, letting its triangular head seek out an anchor point on the building’s rough surface. He kept one hand on the taut line, sliding it through his fingers, an inelegant, squatting rappel, his free hand reaching down to gather up the angel. Her bare shoulders fit into the crook of his arm, her head lolling back against the point of his shoulder. Almost weightless, like picking up someone from hollow time, it seemed to him, a figure only perceptible by the eyes. That impression lasted only a second: his lifting the fragile body loosed a fold of the membrane that had been trapped against the wall. The wind caught it, a cupped sail; the line burned through his fingers’ crook as he was jerked away from the building.

For a moment, clutching the angel to his chest in a reflex spasm, he saw the massed clouds skirting the wall far below, the angel’s dark hair a net over his face, the strands twisting on his tongue as he gasped for breath. Another gust of wind, the membrane flapping and billowing around them, and he felt his boots strain against the pithons’ hold. His fist tightened, the safety line a knife-edge in his grip, but stopping him perpendicular to the wall, leaning back against the air.

“Fucking A.” He looked into the angel’s face. She seemed asleep, cheek cuddling against a lover’s collarbone, in naked ease. Axxter felt the warmth from whatever life residual in her, seeping through his shirt, and… The old joke; the persistent flesh. Goddamn it; you’re disgusting, he told himself. Ass hanging out over the big step, straight down to the clouds – and that’s all you can think of? Jesus H. Christ. Wearily, he lifted his hand, a less offensive member, from the angel’s spine and reached across her to the safety line. He began pulling himself up to the wall, his arms holding the angel against himself. The drag from the membrane’s sail lessened as it compressed back against the building.

Once he’d regained the vertical, the angel was light enough for him to carry with one arm, hers dangling limp over his shoulders, as he climbed back up to the Norton. He placed her in the sidecar, secured with a bungee cord sash from hip to armpit. Leaning over her, he felt her breath against his palm – shallower? He couldn’t tell. From behind her, he pulled out his graffex gear and his collapsible work platform.

Wherever the platform was set up and anchored, it gave him space enough to go completely around whatever stretched-out warrior he was working on; the slender form of the angel barely took up half that much room. Axxter drew the curtains to shut out the wind and bent over the unconscious figure.

In the half-light filtering through the fabric curving above his head, Axxter watched the slight rise and fall of the angel’s shallow breathing. He could have slapped some vital-signs monitoring equipment on her – he had the stuff somewhere at the bottom of his med kit – but figured there was no use. I wouldn’t know what it meant, anyway, human or otherwise. No injuries visible, except for a few bruises, the largest along the ribcage showing the imprint of the transit cable’s twisted steel strands. He lifted each limb, checking methodically for broken bones, before turning her over.

Out of the wind now, he could lift up the flight membrane and see the extent of the damage. The translucent tissue had more resilience than he expected, a thin film stretching between his hands, the network of capillaries expanding like a net. Only where the membrane was charred black had the wind and the angel’s weight been able to tear it. He lowered the membrane, a gauzy cape to the base of the angel’s spine, and knelt down to rummage through his med kit.

With a half-dozen bungee cords snagged onto the overhead curtain struts, the other ends hooked into the handle loops of a brace of hemostats clamped to the angel’s flight membrane, Axxter spread the tissue into a sagging tent. Now he could see the actual dimensions of the burn wound. Whatever tongue of fire had hit her – the acrid smell from the ruin zone, behind the smell of charred flesh, rose in his memory – who, or whatever, had aimed it, had vaporized an oval section of the membrane. Over a third of the total tissue area, Axxter estimated, peering at the draped skin. Leaving a black 0 slanting from the angel’s left hip up to the nape of her neck. The band of burned tissue was widest toward the bottom curve, narrowing to a few centimeters at the top. Studying the wound, Axxter could visualize the shot that had zeroed the membrane section out to ash, a blowtorch to a paper balloon.

She must’ve been there. He poked at the burned edge; a black flake adhered to his fingertip. Floating around out in the air, with that silly sweet smile on her face, when the Dead Centers blew open that whole section of the wall. All that screaming and various other loud noises as those horizontal suckers got crisped; plus big bright explosions – must’ve looked just fascinating to her. Axxter shook his head, grimacing at more than the burned smell rendered on his tongue. And then those fuckers – he meant the Dead Centers, even without the name forming inside his head – they looked out past the blown-open wall, out into the sky, and there’s some beautiful naked female apparition bobbing around out there, with her little smiling face looking in all curious to see what was going on, and a great big butterfly sphere filled with light behind her… So they just naturally lift their flame-spitting weapons at her – or just look at her with their dead eyes, all flint and steel. And just zap her out of the sky. Bad fuckers. An angel doesn’t stand a chance in this bad world.

“That’s what you get for being curious, sweetheart.” Axxter looked down at the angel’s sleeping face, turned to one side against the table, but there was no sign that she’d heard. It’s what I’ll probably get someday, too; remembering his little stroll around the ruin zone, the burn stench in his nostrils and the empty gazes of the horizontal dead on his back.

She was still breathing; inside the curtained-off space he could even hear the slight motion of air. Just getting her off the wall and into a secure space had postponed her death. Axxter scratched the side of his face, wondering what to do next. Probably won’t even die from the torn-open membrane, he supposed. But just kinda… starve to death, go into a moping decline or something, from not being able to float around in the air and do whatever it is angels do. Like a wing-clipped bird, a big one; what he imagined an eagle would be like. Have to hand-feed them for the rest of their lives, which wouldn’t be long, but would be sad. Shit; kinder to just kill her – he could dig enough anaesthetic dermal patches out of the med kit to do the job. Just slather them on the naked body and watch the heartbeat flutter and go still, under the massed chemical weight.

Or – the mercenary consideration; always that – I could just call up ol’ Ask & Receive. Tell them what I have here on the table; they’d have a pickup squad zooming down the wall in seconds, right to this spot. Take her right back to their toplevel research labs, and -

He shook his head. You get to go to hell – someplace down below the clouds, he imagined – for something like that. Being responsible for angel dissection. If there isn’t a hell, then there should be one, just for cases like that.

For a couple of minutes he stood by the table, gazing at the angel. Then he pushed through the curtains and clambered up the wall to where he’d left the Norton. He returned with his graffex gear. Setting it on the floor, he began pulling out the things he’d need.

† † †

He had strapped himself into the Norton’s sidecar, and even managed to fall asleep in that awkward position, legs angled out over the side. Not wanting to be there in the curtained-off work space when the angel awoke; there’d been enough bad shit happen to her, he’d figured, without her finding some gross, scary human being beside her.

An alarm beeped inside his ear, pulling him up from sleep. It took him a moment, blinking and running his tongue over sour-tasting teeth, before he realized what it was. “She’s up?” He had left a mike pinned to the curtains, set to detect any small sound.

I SUPPOSE. The letters moved across his gaze. EITHER THAT OR SOMETHING ELSE IN THERE.

Axxter climbed down to the platform. When he parted the curtains, he saw the angel sitting on the edge of the table, feet dangling. Her dark hair fell across her shoulders, one ribbon of it curling over her breast.

She looked straight at him. “Hello.” No fear in her face or voice.

He stood on the platform’s edge, curtain in each hand. “Uh -” His own voice had gotten lost for a moment. “Hello.”

A smile, radiant and heartbreaking. “Lahft’s my name. Angel’s my game.”

That threw him. Physically: he held tighter to the curtains to keep from swaying back from the platform’s edge. Who knew they could speak at all? Let alone anything you could understand. “Loft,” he repeated, unable to think of anything else.

She shook her head, the dark hair lifting from her shoulders. “Lahft. Lah-ah-ah-ahft.” Again the smile, waiting.

A fierce, dizzy joy swept across him, which he had to marvel at even as it passed. This was why he’d left the horizontal, gone vertical, stared down the wall and felt his guts rise in his throat, just to wake up and see that… all of that. To be standing, gazing at this female thing. But not that; that wasn’t it at all. An angel smiling at him. For her to be there, to be here… in a little space, nothing but the curtains and the echoing platform between him and the great empty air. If it only happened once, that was enough. Then it would always be happening, somewhere. Out here.

“Laaahhft. How’s that – okay?”

She nodded, then laughed when he told her his name. “Ny.” She looked upward, considering the sound. “Nigh, near, nearest. No such word as nearer. In a way.”

Her voice so bright, madly cheerful – considering what had happened to her, the condition he’d found her in – he wondered how much she actually understood of what she said, and how much was just parrot tape loops cycling around. Where’d she get it from, then? Eavesdropping – on whom? He let it slide, one of life’s mysteries. He stepped farther onto the platform, letting the curtains fall behind him; something small and metallic clattered away from the edge of his shoe. Looking down, he saw one of the scalpels he’d used to cut away the burnt edges of the angel’s flight membrane. All of the med kit’s implements were on the platform, arranged in lines and starbursts; the empty kit lay tucked under the table. She’d done all that, carefully and silently, before some small inadvertent noise had triggered the alarm mike.

He stepped over the surgical tools and stood by the table. The black leather satchel with his graffex gear inside was stowed beneath; with a real freelancer’s instinctive caution about the tools of his trade, he had put them out of harm’s reach.

The angel didn’t look at him, but went on gazing at the spoked curtains above her head. “The sky’s so small here.” She sounded puzzled.

“Oh – hang on.” He reached over to the nearest panel of fabric, unsnapped the fastener, and drew the curtain rattling to one side. The angel watched his actions with interest and gave a little delighted laugh when the open air was revealed.

“There you go.” Axxter grasped the edge of the table, bracing himself against the wind that now coursed over the platform. She looked at him, the same sweet smile indicating her incomprehension. You beautiful idiot; a sad twinge inside himself. How would she know anything, about anything at all? “You see – that wasn’t the sky. You were inside. You understand? Before I pulled the curtain back.”

“Before..” Lahft’s gaze wandered from his face. “Beee… fore.” Looking placidly at the sky. “Forbear. Four bears.”

Christ; maybe Guyer’s spoiled all this for me. The angel sat on the edge of the table, her hands folded in her lap, the wind tracing her hair over her bare shoulders. Axxter watched her with diminishing lust. Impossible to keep up a carnal interest in anyone – anything – this dim. Like raping a puppy. Enough bad payback there to last you for the rest of your life.

Or – he considered another possibility – maybe she’s smarter than you think. In the kinds of things that angels would know. And with just… a different sense of time. If any at all – he wondered how much it would be logical for angels to know about something like that.

She had caught sight of something over her shoulder and had twisted her slender neck to look at it. The flight membrane – whole and spheroid again, not the tattered rag Axxter had found her wrapped in – reflected her distorted face in the shiny metallic surface.

“Uh – I did that.” Axxter didn’t know if he was apologizing or bragging. “I had to, ’cause it was such a mess. That’s why it’s different now.”

“Different?”

No different without before. “This -” He reached above her shoulder and poked the flight membrane, his fingertip dimpling the biofoil he had implanted to replace the burnt-away tissue. “This isn’t the way it was…” He stopped, seeing her smiling, uncomprehending gaze. Was; what good did that do? Like teaching higher mathematics to a cat. He didn’t even know why he was trying to explain.

He tried again. “Look.” She obediently followed his lifted finger. “The sky – right?” A nod from her. She understands something, at least. “Okay, that’s the way it is now.” He reached for the curtain edge and drew it around, shutting off the view beyond the platform, enclosing them again in the protected space. The sunlight filtered dimly through the curtain fabric. “Now it’s all small again. Like it was.” The last word desperate; I’m blowing it, he thought. Not even getting close. He flicked the curtain partway open again, revealing an angled wedge of the sky. “Is.” Closed again, in half-light. “Was.” Shaking his head, a sigh; forget it. Somebody, a professional semanticist maybe, might be able to bridge this gap; he couldn’t.

She still smiled at him, Which only made him feel more frustrated. An amusing thing, in a world full of amusing things. A wonder that she hadn’t just broken out laughing at him. Maybe that’s the benefit of being an angel; all the sad things are in that other world, of before and was. She doesn’t have to worry about any of that. If she worries about anything at all.

He wondered how much she remembered of whatever had happened to her. Remembered – that was a laugh. Probably dropped like a stone through the clouds below, to whatever oblivion lay beneath them. He bent down and picked up a small battery torch from the tools scattered across the platform floor. The glowing ball of flame danced in her eyes as he held the torch in front of her and flicked it on. For a moment, Lahft smiled at the tiny spark – pretty light – then her face clouded. She drew back, hands pushing against the edge of the table.

Well, well. There’s something there after all – maybe right down in the cells, the organism’s own deep memory. Axxter snapped the flame off – the distress in the angel’s eyes made it seem uncomfortably like torture – and dropped the torch.

“Not… here.” She sounded almost thoughtful, gazing away from him, tilting her head to look up the expanse of wall above the platform. “A bright place. Like that.” She pointed to where the torch’s flame had been.

No time, no difference between then and now… She thinks it’s still happening somewhere. Always happening, without end, in that bright place. “Up there?” He indicated the wall sector from which he himself had been traveling.

“Yes.” Lahft nodded, the smile gone for a moment, brow creased with an effort at comprehension. “All bright… and loud.”

“Loud?”

Her head tilted back again, this time with her eyes closed. She screamed.

It sounded as if every death in the ruin zone, all the charred faces gaping against the blackened walls, had been taped, dubbed into one stack, and dubbed into a loop feeding back into itself. If God were a parrot… the hell of his lungs, tongue, broken spine. The platform’s curtains flapped as if they could rub into sympathetic fire.

The scream battered against Axxter. It didn’t stop; the cords in the angel’s neck tightened, vibrating. He stepped backward, the sonic wave pushing him away. His foot caught the torch he’d discarded, and he went down, landing on hip and elbow. He scrabbled to get away from the scream at his back, and found himself gazing over the platform’s edge. Beyond his fingertips clenching into space, he saw the clouds massing against the building’s curve. Even falling, hands outstretched, he wouldn’t escape the noise raking up his spine.

It stopped. Just the wind sliding past his ears; Axxter rolled onto his side and looked back at the angel on the table. The smile returned to her face, but different. A tilt of her brows, the gaze no longer wide-open. Not as dumb as you think, turkey. Unsteady, he managed to get onto his knees, then his feet. Two parallel lines of medical tools marked his flight across the platform.

“You saw it, then? What happened?” Axxter stood beside the table again. She must’ve seen it just hanging out there in the air, the way angels do, when the Dead Centers blew open the wall, in the process of reaming out the foolish horizontal collaborators. Saw it, and watched: more amusing things, doing amusing things. Bright, fiery light and an interesting noise. Curiosity had its inevitable price, though.

She paid no attention to him. Looking over her shoulder, she was again absorbed in examining the mended flight membrane. The silvery biofoil reflected her intent expression.

All right, toots. He reached under the table, past the dangling bare legs, and fetched out his graffex gear. Now a little surprise for you.

A starburst blossomed on the taut biofoil, swirling and dancing, blotting out the angel’s reflected face. She gasped, pulling her head away from her own shoulder and, behind it, the thin metal that had replaced her own skin. The startled face snapped around, staring at Axxter.

He tapped the side of his head; in his own vision, the graffex programming display overlaid her face. “Sharp, huh?” He didn’t care if she understood how it worked or not. She could still see what he did. He blinked CANCEL and the simple test sequence disappeared. “Look at it now,” he told her.

Her suspicious gaze slowly left his face, turning back over her shoulder. The grafted biofoil, blank again, mirrored her face, unadorned. She looked at him, at the box in his hands, the smile replaced by the signal of further thought.

“You liked that?” He enjoyed this small power his skill gave him. Little bit of graffex magic; not often you found an audience this unsophisticated to spring it on. “Pretty great, don’t you think?”

Lahft tilted her head, regarding him. One corner of her smile returned. “Was,” she said. “Was… impressive.”

“Oh… I see.” He nodded, returning the half-smile. “Was,’ huh. Check this out, then.” He had a number of demos sequenced; he blinked one up. The signal went direct to the biofoil – he could’ve reached over her shoulder and touched it if he’d wanted – and was not bounced off the Small Moon to a distant location somewhere else on Cylinder’s surface; thus, the pattern came up immediately on the angel’s flight membrane.

As if she could feel the black dots forming another picture, she looked over her shoulder without any further command. A cartoon face, recognizably a man’s, showed on the biofoil, its broad neck terminated in a ragged collar and tie. The face’s big oval eyes grew larger, as if in astonishment; a speech balloon appeared above, its tail tapering to the flapping mouth.

WILMA! YOU… AND BARNEY?! WELL, I’LL BE DIPPED!

There was no way of telling if she could read the words emanating from the ancient, mythic face. Probably enough that angels can even talk – I might be the only person who ever knew that.

The flight membrane had grown larger, the gases dialyzed from Lahft’s blood inflating it. The cartoon face grew larger, more pattern dots filling in to keep the image sharp and black. Axxter looked over the angel’s shoulder with a professional, critical eye. The flesh-to-biofoil seams were all holding against the increased tension; he took pride in the thoroughness he could apply to the mechanics of his craft. The foil itself had greater elastic strength than the thin flesh it had replaced – no danger of it tearing or bursting.

He put the face into REPEAT cycle. She looked around at him, smiling with pure pleasure. Entertained; all the amusing things in her world. He had become one of them.

“You did.” She reached over her shoulder and touched the membrane, her hand muffling the cartoon face. “You made it be.” She gazed admiringly at him.

“Yeah… I did.” He’d figured out something else about her, or angels in general. It wasn’t that they didn’t have any concept of time – easy to catch the past tense did and made, on top of all the other little verbal clues – but maybe they just didn’t care about it. For them, it was a disposable dimension. She was playing around with me. With that dumb act. “Did you like it?”

“Funny. But pretty – beee-fore.”

“Oh. I gotcha.” CANCEL the face; then he brought back the starburst test pattern. Her laugh chimed over the clap of her hands.

She looked at him again, cocking her head to one side. “Why?”

“Huh? Why what?”

Again: “Why?”

He scratched the side of his face. “You mean… why… I can do this? That it?” He got the same wide-eyed, smiling gaze in reply. “Well, you see, it’s my job; it’s my trade, it’s what I do.”

“You do?”

Maybe not a dumb act; who could tell? Might as well run with it. “You see, I’m a graffex. That’s what I do to earn a living.” What would angels know about that? They live on sex and air, apparently.

She looked from him to the starburst looping on the flight membrane, then back to him. “Graffex… is?”

He wasn’t sure how to explain it, or at least not from scratch. “Well… there’re certain types of people who live out here on the building – you know the ones I mean? The military tribes?” No response. “People, uh… big bunches of them. Or little bunches. You’ve seen them. Anyway, they fight each other. Fight – you know what I mean?” Of course she doesn’t, idiot. “Anyway, they like to scare each other when they, uh, fight. You know, like making… scary faces. Shit.” Might as well be whistling and barking, for all I’m getting through. Desperate, he crooked his forefingers in the corners of his mouth and stuck out his tongue. “Yarrgh. Li’ tha’.”

Her laugh was even louder than before; deflated, he gave up on that front.

“So they hire me – people like me – to make scary faces for them. And other scary pictures. That’s what a graffex does.” Somewhat humbling to think of it like that, even if accurate. “And we use that stuff – that shiny stuff, there.” He pointed to the thin metal he had implanted in her flight membrane. “That’s what we call biofoil.”

“Pretty.”

“Yes, very pretty. But it’s like skin – that’s why I was able to use it to patch you up. Where you were hurt.”

Maybe she’d already forgotten that as well. “And I can graft it – put it into real skin – of warriors… you know, the people who like to fight and make scary faces at each other. But it’s not really skin; it’s metal… well, it’s mostly metal, but with a polymer substrate that’s got a pattern-mimesis capability on a molecular level. So it can form itself into blood-vessel and nerve pseudo-tissue; plus a narrow-band immuno-suppressant adapt, so it doesn’t just fall off the host tissue…” He became aware again of her uncomprehending gaze. “Hey. That’s all right; I don’t understand it, either.” Maybe nobody did; small comfort there. Just ancient technology, from those long-ago days before the War.

“You make the pictures?”

He nodded, lifting the programmer box. “I can shift the refraction index of the biofoil, on a molecule-by-molecule basis – you must just like hearing me rattle on. Is that it? You like the sound of my voice? Okay. That’s how I make the pictures. But the people I make them for – the scary-face people – they might not pay me – give me money; forget it – if the pictures were there, like permanently, right there in the biofoil. Because they’re supposed to go on paying for the service. If they could get away with it, they’d just kill the graffex and keep the work he’d done for them.” Unfortunately true. You couldn’t always trust warrior types, with their innate contempt for all other forms of life. The system-protecting graffices, and anybody else servicing the military tribes, had evolved to compensate for that characteristic. “So the signal that makes the pictures appear on the foil has to be zapped out on a regular basis and picked up by the foil, or else there’s no picture, just dots scrambling around. I encode the signal and send it to the Small Moon Consortium – they’re the ones who operate the little one, not the real moon, but the one that’s smaller and closer to us. And as long as the tribe that I made the scary faces for pays me the money they should, then I pay the consortium the fee to send out the signal, and the signal makes the pictures appear. That’s how it works.”

He hadn’t expected her to understand. At least she had sat patiently – more or less, her gaze sliding toward the open sky – through it. He knew he had worn through whatever odd charm his babbling voice had held for her. A lecture of no meaning, uncomprehended.

She slid off the table; on tiptoe, she held onto the edge, against the lift of the membrane and the wind catching its curved surface. “‘Bye,” she chirped. “Adios. See you around.”

That’s it. The thought made him sad. Her attention covered only a moment, with nothing before or after it. I saw it, had it, this brief visitation of grace… she’ll exist for me, but I’m already forgotten.

The sun passed over the top of the building, the platform falling into shade. He watched her step into air; he went on watching until she was a small, humanlike figure a long ways out from the building.

A last ray of sunlight, passing through some notch at the toplevel, struck the metal skin, the new piece of the angel, and sent a bright flamelike spark back to his eye.