Farewell Horizontal

SEVEN

“So we had these guys, see, all rounded up, and we were all still pretty revved up from the battle – you know how you get? – and we were sitting around wondering, well, you know, what could we do with ’em? What could we do with ’em that’d be fun, I mean. So we had the engineers bring over this spool of cable, see, this real heavy-duty stuff, and we -”

“Excuse me.” Axxter held up his hand in front of him, trying to stop the old warrior’s monologue. “Hey… I’m just going to go outside for a minute.” He had to wave his fingers in front of the rheumy yellow eyes to get the man’s attention. “Okay?”

“- and we put it through the first guy’s neck, but that didn’t work, you see, ’cause it just ripped right through when we lifted it up, so we -” The old warrior’s gaze focused on Axxter’s hand as he came back up from memory time. “Huh? Where ya going?”

“I just, uh, need to get some fresh air.” Axxter pointed with his thumb over his shoulder to the tent flap. “We been going at it for a couple of hours now; I just need to clear my head a bit. That all right?” He didn’t like the way the warrior was looking at him.

“Don’tcha want to hear the rest?”

The warrior’s jaw poked forward far enough to hook the points of his bottom teeth over his straggling gray mustache. His eyes burrowed under his lowered brow, leaving just two glints of red.

Axxter reached out and patted the recorder hanging on one of the tent ropes. “No problem. Getting it all right here.” The little box swayed on its knotted strap. “Great stuff – just great.” He felt his stomach rising into his throat again; it had been threatening all the time he’d been listening to the war stories. “You just keep right on talking; I’ll listen to it later.” He turned away and ducked under the tent flap before he got any more argument.

Outside, he climbed over to the closet transit cable and anchored his hip belt to it. He glanced down to make sure he had a clear shot downward, in case he lost it completely; all he needed now was to upchuck on some Havoc Mass sentry posted at the camp’s downwall boundary. Even if he did have privileged artisan status with General Cripplemaker – these bastards were all touchy as hell. Affronts to honor could get you drilled, with no thought given to what brig time they might pull for it. Drilled, or given the big step – or something even worse, along the lines of what that old bastard back in the tent was still gassing on about. Axxter shook his head as he relaxed against the cable, as though he could shake the veteran’s grinning words right back out. Judging from his anecdotes, the guy must have risen in the Mass’s ranks not from any military prowess, but from his bent imagination regarding what to do with any unlucky POWs after a skirmish. What a sick sonuvabitch – Axxter gazed down at the clouds; at the atmosphere’s bonding edge, they roiled up into guts and skulls, tangling around each other. He closed his eyes for a moment, but could still see them, and hear the old warrior’s voice, leering with fond violent memories.

Still, a paying job; the thought soothed his own gut, a warm glow easing outward along his limbs. He gathered the sour taste that had seeped under his tongue and spat; it looped silver, and was gone. Paying job, and not just that: the second one from these good folk. Which meant he’d pulled it off.

I did it. In solid with a major tribe. The major tribe, if you left out the Grievous Amalgam, which had been locked in up at the toplevel for so long it was like air or the vertical wall behind your back, part of the nature of things. But to have cracked the Havoc Mass… to have slid right under the nose of DeathPix, and done it… because he was good, his stuff was just so fucking good… That meant his scrabbling-around days were over. That was worth listening to gruesome after-battle stories, any number of them.

The first commission that he’d gotten from the general – the new death ikon for the megassassin – had just about burnt him out. And his portfolio; he’d been saving up ideas for years, all the time he’d been out on the wall, good bits just waiting for a job worthy of them. Stuff you couldn’t waste on some scrub-ass little gang of hooligans, the kind of gigs he’d been getting up until this had fallen in his lap. But some had leaked out, naturally enough; you couldn’t hold back all the time, if only to keep your skills up. He still wondered what he’d done that had caught the Mass’s eye; maybe one of the deep subliminals for the Gnash Boy Squad, the black teeth hidden in blackness, the rotating and replicating mirror-images in a throat that could swallow you down to your ankles if you looked at the biofoil image long enough. But that had been subtle stuff; those Gnash wankers hadn’t even known what they were getting, just groused about how long it was taking him – a lot more work than they were paying him for. He’d really been doing it just to see if he could pull it off. But somebody here with the Mass had spotted it, or some other neat piece he’d done, and realized its worth; that must mean there was some real aficionado of the art up in the top brass. Cripplemaker himself? Axxter doubted it; the man was strictly blood-and-guts bluster and politics. It must’ve been some behind-the-scenes type, a secret string puller, the kind with a wire running to every little detail, like a spider with a web so fine you didn’t even know you were caught in it. Not that he minded being caught; it was what he’d been hoping for all along. He just wished he could trace out who it was in the Havoc Mass that was responsible, so he could wrap himself up even tighter in the web.

He rubbed his eyes, still fried from the round-the-clock sessions on the death ikon for the megassassin. Fried, but worth it. No tricky sublims on that job; he’d wanted something that would zap Cripplemaker right off, impressive on the percept surface. Repeat-fold macro-tominiatures were best for that; a cheap trick, as long as you were willing to work the details down to those levels, but still a trick that always went over big with the rubes. You could watch them reverting to children – or as much of a childhood as somebody born into a military tribe ever got – as they went staring down into all that mandelbrot jazz-and-dragons. And then when it moved, when you sent the prearranged code up to the Small Moon and they came bouncing back with the animating signal – spasms of pleasure. Grizzled old murderers wriggling like puppies. Got ’em where you wanted ’em.

Fuzzy stars pulsed into the salt rim under his eyelids as he pressed harder with his thumb and fingertips. Now wasn’t the time to crap out; bear down and be set for life. He pulled his hand away, one finger smearing tear leakage across his cheek. Blinking, he scanned out over the clouds. She wasn’t there, this time at least. Maybe she’d finally gotten tired of hanging around, making her own moon out of her wordless crush, or else, more likely, she’d just drifted away with the other angels, off on one of their slow random errands. She’d disappeared from the sky before – the vacuum draining his heart with both a sense of relief and an odd sadness – only to show up again, a distant sphere and figure laced with sun. Smart enough to dangle out there, beyond easy sniping range of one of the Mass warriors lounging around bored. They didn’t like firing and not hitting anything.

His stomach had settled down. You could get used to anything, as long as you were getting paid for it. He unhooked himself from the transit cable and swung back up toward the tent.

He heard the snoring, deep, gelatinous, even before he lifted the flap. Inside, in the cozy filtered light, the old warrior’s hands fumbled at his belly hair, the black-crescented nails tracking some vague itch. The face behind the beard had gone soft, babyish, the pleasure of his dreams seeping out in a wet smile. Axxter didn’t want to know what the old bastard was unwinding inside his head; something disgusting, no doubt.

A chemical smell, the same as always on the old warrior’s breath, but stronger now, filled the tent. An empty bottle rolled in a clattering circle, dislodged by Axxter’s knee as he squatted down. A centimeter of clear pink fluid rolled around the bottom as he picked it up. He was about to sling the bottle out through the tent flap when he realized, looking over his shoulder, that there was someone standing behind him, head bent low against the ridgepole.

“What a grand old fellow.” General Cripplemaker gazed down at the sleeping warrior. He squatted beside Axxter, balancing himself with one hand against the tent’s springy mesh floor. The knuckles of his other hand stroked the warrior’s beard, evoking snuffling noises and one of the dirty paws rising up to brush at an invisible fly.

Cripplemaker nodded. “This old sonuvabitch,” still gazing at the warrior, “he was the one who ran me through my first basic training. Scared the shit out of me, he did.” A glance at Axxter, almost shy, embarrassed at revealing the tender lining of his soul. “End of the course, he’d rape the bottom ten percent of the class. The bottom one percent, he’d rape and eat.” The general’s eyes locked fervently on Axxter’s. “You can’t believe what a desire to excel that instills in you.”

“Yeah… well… I guess it would.” Cripplemaker’s hand had grasped Axxter’s wrist, squeezing hard enough to rub the bones together. He wondered uneasily what that was supposed to mean. The general was dressed all in black, he saw now, an outfit suitable for spies or assassins skulking around in the dark. Every time he’d seen the general before, there had been a double rank of medals dangling on his chest.

“Tradition – that’s important, you know.” The general looked again at the sleeping figure, his nostrils flared as though he could inhale the warrior entire. “There’s nothing we can do without it. We’d be nothing without it – not warriors, just rabble driven by the wind, bellies wrapped against our spines, getting our asses kicked by every little pipsqueak on the wall. That’s what we’d be.” The general’s voice had gone quieter and tighter, a vibrating wire. His eyes moved around to Axxter again, two little sparks inside narrow slits. “That’s why this job we’ve given you is so important. This man -” He let go of Axxter’s wrist and stroked the warrior’s gray hair, tenderly. “This man represents the tribe’s history; he is our history.”

Axxter kept his mouth shut. He’d heard this whole spiel before, when Cripplemaker had given him the new commission – couldn’t quite figure out why he was going through it all again.

“Do you understand me?”

“Well… sure.” Axxter shrugged. “I mean – that’s why I’ve been down here listening to him so much.” I’m not listening to this shit ’cause I dig it – he held that back behind his teeth. “All the campaigns and stuff, the big march, uh, the battles and… um… stuff…” Christ, what else had the grizzled old sadist gone rattling on about? He reached out for the recorder dangling beside their heads. Holding it against his chest, he sent the little glowing numbers dancing back to zero. “Great stuff… I mean – it’s just great material for me to use. You want to hear some of it?” He held up the machine.

“No, no; that’s all right.” The general smiled and patted his knee. “I’m sure you’ve been working very hard.”

“Well… always like to do a good job.” Axxter felt the recorder’s metal grow slick with the sweat from his palms. The general had eaten up all the space in the tent somehow, except for the little bit between them. And that he could gulp down in one swallow.

“A good job… yes…” The general’s face drew tight, skin becoming angles of chiseled stone. Eyes deep in the sun-wrinkled crevices. “But more than that. A, a great job. I know – you can do it.”

Axxter shrugged, as though the skin around his shoulders had gotten uncomfortably tight. “Well… thanks. Give it my best.” He pulled back – slowly – from the other, his spine pushing against the tent fabric.

The two little points followed him. “The whole history of the tribe – that’s what you have to catch.” The general nodded, sinking deeper into his brooding. “On one man.” He stroked the broad curve of the old warrior’s breastplate. “The living embodiment of… of a saga!” The points brightened into sparks.

The guy was sure getting worked up about this deal. Axxter couldn’t figure what the big song-and-dance was for. These historical friezes were a regular cliché in the graffex industry. Every tribe had one, right down to the couple of louts who had nothing more to brag about than a successful shoplifting expedition in the stalls over in Linear Fair. Saga, my ass. He didn’t say it out loud – not with the general in front of him, all worked up – but this was the kind of job that really got on a graffex’s tits. Lots of busy little details to get down, you had to listen – Christ knows – to one grisly war story after another. You usually had about fifty different top brass sticking their noses in, each of them wanting some particularly flattering exploit embroidered into the friggin’ saga… Though Cripplemaker had saved him from that last hassle; it seemed to be a one-man project with him.

Maybe that was why the big leaning-over-my-shoulder number, the pep-talk rerun. The man’s an enthusiast – I can deal with that. Better that than starving out on the wall.

Axxter felt the tent rubbing against the back of his head. “I think… you’ll like it.”

The general smiled. “I’m looking forward to it. At the banquet – are you going to have it done in time?”

The usual push. The customer is always antsy. “No sweat.” If the senile old bastard snoring away between them could be woken up, and the last few good bits tapped out of him. And that was just for color, the little personal bits, frosting on the cake. He’d rung up Ask & Receive days ago, when Cripplemaker had first given him the frieze assignment, and gotten a full historical rundown on the Havoc Mass. On the sly. Clients usually didn’t want you going outside, getting a losses-and-all account, and working from that. Their own PR line was all ups. “It’ll be ready. You don’t have a thing to worry about.” He patted the sleeping warrior’s breastplate, sounding a dull heartbeat from the blank biofoil. No worries at all: he’d have to push it to get it all implanted, but he’d already sketched out the major panels, programmed the routines.

The general straightened up from his crouch, reaching behind himself for the tent flap. “Keep it up.” Smile wider, and a wink that crinkled his face like a finger poked in an eye-socket. The black skulking getup slid out and looped away on the nearest hold.

Whatever that was all about – Axxter rubbed the side of his face, wondering. But not much. He was too tired, the grit under his eyelids getting sharper edges, to worry about it.

The old warrior was still snoring, scratching with one of his grizzled paws at his breastplate. He’d managed to peel up the edge of the biofoil; a hairline trickle of red oozed out from beneath. Axxter had stripped off the old foil from the armor, implanted in all fresh; you could recycle old foil, often did if you had a standing contract, blanking out the old stuff or just coding up new animation signals if the basic patterns were close enough to what you wanted to do. Not for a job like this, though. It smacked of working on the cheap, and the fine details tended to come out blurry. Plus – the big trouble – the coding for the warrior’s old foil was still being carried by the Small Moon Consortium as a DeathPix account, keyed to this locus.

They might not know that the old foil had been stripped off, wadded up, and tossed downwall – but if he’d been stupid enough to try and contract for an override signal, that would’ve been a dead tip-off that he was horning in on one of their clients. At this stage, he couldn’t be sure of the Mass protecting him from DeathPix retaliating for that kind of action. But what they didn’t know… Beyond that, overrides just cost too damn much money; the Small Moon Consortium threw on a prohibitive fee schedule for that sort of thing, to discourage graffices from sabotaging each other’s work and generally giving the industry a bad name.

The old warrior snuffled as Axxter prodded him in the shoulder. The aged baby’s-face contorted against the intrusion of the world outside its delicious remembering. “Hey. Come on. Wake up.” Realizing how tired he was had made Axxter nerveless. The aged bear didn’t scare him now; he just wanted to get the job done.

The warrior’s fingers had smeared the blood across his leather-sheathed ribs. He’d complained – fussily, like a child – that the new foil ‘tickled’; Axxter knew that whatever nerve endings the old boy had left were buried so far down under armor and scar tissue that he couldn’t feel a thing.

Have to reimplant it. Put a bandage or something over it so the old fool couldn’t go picking at it again. He reached into the corner of the tent for his toolkit. As long as the subject was relatively still, sleeping away…

As Axxter bent over his work, the warrior opened his yellow-and-red eyes, beard splaying over his chest as he lifted his head to watch.

“So that’s what happened.” The warrior nodded. “Just like that. I was there, so you can believe it.”

“You bet.” He watched the tip of the soldering gun tracing the edge of the foil. Great; one less stupid anecdote to listen to. The old guy must have been dreaming, talking inside the walls of his head. “That was great.”

He worked on as the warrior closed his eyes and smiled.

† † †

When he called up the Small Moon Consortium and blinked on GRAFFEX SERVICES, then ACCOUNTS (NEW) (CONTINUING), he got his favorite order desk. Somewhere up on the toplevel, where the Consortium had its offices across a thoroughfare from their Wire Syndicate competition, somewhere a body housed that coarse-sand, laughing voice. Axxter took it as a sign of the high tide his luck was running at to hear it now.

“Ny – how ya been?” She coughed, the rasp right in his ear. “Haven’t heard from you in ages. Not since, um…” She was looking up his account, he knew. “Jeez, it’s been a coupla months.”

“Had a slack period.” He shrugged, though she couldn’t see him “You know how it goes.”

“You poor saps.” Her mother routine; it killed him. “You oughta give up this bullshit, get into something that’s worth money.” Every freelancer on the wall, male and female, had the hots for her, the voice alone.

He didn’t even know her name, though he’d experimented in his head with Lauren for fit, on a historical/cultural association basis. “Don’t worry about me. I got a big payday lined up.”

“Yeah?” Sad and laughing at the same time. She’d heard that one before, from all of them. “I really hope you do. You could use it.”

The uploading of the animation coding took a couple of minutes. “My,” she said when it ended. “That’s a big one.”

He had to laugh – she knew all the old lines. “All of mine are big, sweetheart. That’s the kind of guy I am.”

Laugh in return. “Seriously – big job?”

“I told you.” He’d been up for the last twenty-four hours straight, just doing the code. And there’d only been maybe four hours sleep between that and the long stretch working the patterns into the old warrior’s armor and skin foil. Which followed the hours of listening to war stories and then doing the final designs for the frieze. His eyes had now filled with sand, with black stick figures jeering and contorting through rubbery dances at the corners where he could just barely see them. During the last pull, he’d developed the notion that if he’d rubbed his eyes, his fingers would’ve come away with blood. “This one’s a real break for me.”

“Mmm – guess so.” The rasp moved down an octave. “Who ya working for?”

A little warning bell drilled through his fatigue. “Oh… uh, just a start-up outfit. But, uh, they got some heavy financing. Venture capital from up your way.” Best to be careful. He didn’t think she’d finger him – it would’ve broken his heart – but still… Things had a way of getting around if you didn’t keep a lid on them.

The advance from General Cripplemaker had raised his operating account to the highest level it’d ever been. He watched the numbers slide back down at the corner of his vision as he transferred a hefty whack of it over to the Consortium. Enough for the setup costs for the code and a locked/following narrowcast for a six-month period. That still left a nice fat little wad in the bank.

“You want this started up immediately?”

Axxter shook his head. “No – I got a kickoff time for it.” Cripplemaker had already gone over the details of the banquet with him, right down to the presentation ceremony when they’d bring out the old warrior. Ostensibly to hang some concocted veteran’s medal on him – good conduct, low absenteeism, something or other – but really to show off the new frieze. Hit with a pinlight a second before the animation comes to life: oohs and ahhs from all the tables. With these military tribes, you always knew the timing would be dead on. Axxter dug a slip of paper from his jacket pocket and read it off. “Exactly then. On the dot.”

“You got it.” The voice from the order desk swooped down, almost a kiss. “Hey… good luck.”

“Yeah, thanks.” She was already gone, replaced by the charges for the call. One bill for the Wire Syndicate connect at the start, then the rest switched over to the Consortium when the Small Moon itself had rounded the building and come into transceiving angle. He turned his head and saw its metallic glow, bright against the first of the evening stars.

Should get some sleep. He knew that; it was six hours or so until the banquet. They were already setting up the ceremonial tents when he’d slid out of the encampment, rolling his Norton and Watsonian rig downwall for a bit of privacy. Cripplemaker wanted him there for the shindig, honored-guest status. Or at least the bottom rungs of it; there was a limit to how far you could advance in tribal eyes without killing people. A certain respect for artisans, that was about the top.

Absentmindedly, he rubbed the corners of his eyes, then jerked his hand away, seeing with relief the unstained tips of his fingers. He wished he hadn’t cut it so close, finishing up the code and sending it off. A lot of the last few hours had been just fussing, fine-tuning shit you couldn’t see without a scanning microscope. Way beyond the percept level of an audience like this. Just carried away, and afraid to let it go. The big one, the big break.

Sleep. He could just curl up in the sidecar, set the terminal to blast a rouser down his optic nerve in about five hours or so. Plenty of time.

He knew he wouldn’t be able to. Keyed-up the way he was. Heavier than the fatigue.

Hollow time – money in the account; he debated a quick visit to his girlfriend. And decided against it. He didn’t want the fine edge of his mood destroyed by her lacing into him, as he knew she would.

Or he could look up Guyer, wherever she was out on the wall. That’d be nice. You pay, but you get something… nice.

Thinking, dragging the point of his focus across the options laid out at the top of his sight, triggered a spark.

Dreams to none are so fearful…

One of those weird bits the previous owner had programmed in.

… as to those whose accusing private guilt expects mischief every hour for their merit.

Christ, what was that supposed to mean? He let it run on.

Wonderful superstitious are such persons in observing every accident that befalls them; and that their superstition is as good as a hundred furies to torment them. Never in this world shall he enjoy one quiet day that once hath given himself over to be her slave. His ears cannot glow, his nose itch, or his eyes smart, but his destiny stands upon her trial, and till she be acquitted or condemned he is miserable.

The words drizzled away, into silence. Well, fuck – it had left him befuddled.

Crouched down beside the motorcycle, strapped to a transit cable, he let his gaze wander out across the darkening sky. She was there, the angel; he could see her out in the distance. Sparkling with the last of the sun creeping to the other side of the world, a smaller moon whose face he could remember.