Farewell Horizontal

TWELVE

He spotted him coming. Even in the night, he could see the figure in the distance, working its way toward him.

When it had gotten too dark to go on traveling, his arm and leg muscles cramping up, Axxter had drawn the pithons in tight, setting himself as close to the wall as possible. For sleeping; or at least to look as though he were.

He’d been expecting that the mysterious benefactor, the person who’d laid the bread on him, would show up sometime after the sun had gone down beyond the cloud barrier. All the time he’d been traveling across the wall, he’d had the sense that somebody else was out there, tailing him. Not the loony girl – he figured whether she was nuts or not, she had some crazed variety of errands to run. Or the Havoc Mass’s megassassin; if it had been close enough for him to detect, it would’ve already barrel-assed the rest of the way, locked on target, and made mincemeat of him. Unless there was more than one spooky cat lurking around in this sector, it had to be the one with the food. He hoped it was; a day’s worth of his hard-working progress had gotten him to the point of starving again.

There it was again. Hunger and ongoing weirdness had sharpened his senses. He could hear it, something moving closer, little clicks of metal against metal, a sidling scrape against the wall. He closed his eyes, waiting.

Breath, quiet and unhurried. Axxter felt the stirring in the air. Until it was right next to him -

He twisted about and grabbed. For a moment, he had his arm around the figure’s waist, pulling it to him. It gave a heavy grunt, half from surprise, half wind knocked out by Axxter’s forehead butting into its stomach.

“Sonuvabitch -” A fist landed against the side of Axxter’s head, hard enough to dizzy him His grip on the figure’s ribs broke, and he slumped back into the pithons’ slack.

A flashlight went on, glaring in his face. He shielded his eyes; past his hand’s edge, he saw the other man dimly lit by the beam bouncing off the wall.

The man straightened up, sucking in a ragged gulp of breath. “Jeez -” Another gulp. “Try to do somebody a favor. The thanks you get.”

Axxter could see a narrow, sharp-angled face, long, spiderlike hands holding the flashlight. Like a club, in case of any more action.

“Nice way to act.” The man probed at the edge of his ribcage. “You could’ve killed me.”

It wasn’t just his hands, Axxter saw now. They were fitted with some sort of fanned hooks, strapped to his forearm and extending beyond his fingers. Not metal, but something black that bent like rubber against the man’s jacket.

“Sorry.” Axxter shook his head, trying to get rid of a ringing noise in his ears. “But you were the one sneaking around.”

“Of course I was sneaking around. I expected this kind of reaction. You morningsiders are all alike – you’re just ready for a punch-out all the time.”

You morningsiders – easy to figure out the rest. “You’re from this side?”

“Born and bred. Name’s Sai. Here, I figured you could use this.” He dug into a pack looped around one shoulder and held something out.

More of the flat round bread. Axxter took it and tore a piece off. But before taking a bite – “How come?”

“How come what? The food, you mean? I just knew you’d need it. Stuck out over here like this. I didn’t want to see you starve to death before you had a chance to get back home to the other side.” He took a pouch of water from the bag and drank before handing it over as well. “That’d seem kind of cruel. To go that way, and all. I mean, if you’re willing to take your shot at going straight through the building, you should get a real chance at it.”

Axxter chewed and swallowed. “What do you know about that?”

A shrug. “I know all kinds of stuff. I know more about you – and where you come from – than you know about me, and the way things are around here. But you see, that goes back to deep psychic divisions in your head, of which the building can be seen as an exteriorized representation, a mirror-image grown large. The morningside is all light and surface, and action all the time; whereas over here it gets underneath appearances, and into thinking and knowing. Very broody.”

Another loony. This territory seemed to be crawling with them. The bread was all right, though.

“Hey, don’t give me that look.” Sai had picked up on his thoughts. “The fact that you don’t know what I’m talking about just goes to show that you’re a real morningsider.”

“Maybe so.” Axxter had finished half of one of the flat loaves. “I just don’t have a lot of time for discussion. I got a lot of problems right now.”

“This is true. Hope you don’t mind, but I listened in on your agent’s call. Tapped the line. That business with the megassassin is going to be a bitch. Those guys are built for speed.” Sai scratched himself with one of the rubbery hooks. “It’s going to be on top of your ass before you know it.”

This loony seemed to be more helpful than the last. Or at least concerned. “Well, I’m trying to make some speed, but… it’s slow going.”

“That’s ’cause you people let yourselves get dependent on those motorbikes. You think as long as you’re making noise, you’re getting somewhere.” Sai held up one hand, shining the flashlight on the hooked contraption. “Simpler the better. You can make really good time with a set of these.” The shoulderpack hung empty after he’d taken out another pair of the devices. The leather straps and buckles dangled from the stiff armatures behind the hooks. “Can’t really show you how to work ’em until we’ve got some better light. They can be kind of tricky until you get the knack.”

Axxter examined the hooks; they had little sensors at the tips, similar to the ones on his pithons.

“Get some sleep.” Sai pulled the lines from his belt up across his chest and fastened them to the wall. “We’ll head out soon as we can see.” He folded his arms and closed his eyes.

“I don’t get it.” Axxter fastened the hooked devices onto his own belt. “What’re you doing all this for? What’s the deal for you?”

One eye opened and regarded him “You’re the most interesting thing that’s happened around here. In a long time. You don’t know it, but you’re something… historic.” The eye closed; he lowered his chin onto his chest. “You’ll see.”

Axxter reached into his jacket and tore off a small piece of bread. For a while longer, he chewed and watched the figure sleeping next to him.

† † †

“Come on, you gotta let ’em take your weight. Get a little swing going.” Sai, several meters ahead and upwall, looked back, waiting for him to catch up.

The travelhooks – as Sai called them – had been scary at first. Axxter clung to the wall, his hands flat against the cold metal, catching his breath. In the half-morning, when Sai had first strapped the devices onto his arms, it’d taken an act of wild faith for him to turn off the pithons, letting the lines retract into his belt and boots so only their triangular heads showed. His safety lines; the old nausea and fear came back that he’d known when he’d first gone out on the vertical. His head had swum, the immovable building seeming to tilt and rock as he’d looked over his shoulder, down toward the cloud barrier below. That had passed, but it had still been several minutes before he’d worked up the courage to use the hooks as Sai had shown him, anchoring himself with one of the devices while swinging monkeylike, twisting back to front, to reach for the next hold with the other.

Even with his hesitancy, they were fast; by the time the sun came over the top of the building, Axxter figured that he and Sai had covered twice the distance he’d made in his previous traveling. Once the rhythm was established, the peculiar torsion of the hooks as they anchored and then bent around themselves… The few times Axxter had screwed up and missed catching the next hold, his gut had clenched in fear as the image of himself falling snapped into his head. Then Sai had taken pity on him and explained the devices’ interlock system; the previous anchoring point wasn’t released until a microsecond after the new one was locked onto.

“Come on -” Sai’s voice called back to him “You don’t have time to lose, man.”

Another hour of traveling; Axxter caught up to where Sai had snugged himself in close to the wall. Axxter’s arms ached, deep into his shoulders; he rubbed them in turn after reeling out the pithons and latching himself secure.

“You’ll get used to it.” Sai nodded toward Axxter’s hand kneading his bicep. “It’s more the novelty of the motion than anything else. The hooks really do most of the work.” He took bread and water from his shoulder-bag. “Break time.”

Munching away, Sai pointed out to the sky. “Hey, there’s your little friend.”

Axxter turned his head and saw the distant figure of the gas angel. Lahft; as she came closer, he recognized her, smiling happily.

She dangled in air next to him, close enough to touch. “Hi. Hello. Falling?”

He leaned back against the pithons, and shook his head. “No. Not yet, at any rate.”

With little swimming motions, she turned around. She looked over her shoulder and the top of the spherical membrane. “Do more. Do the pretty.”

The designs he’d programmed into the biofoil he’d implanted into her were still there. She’s gotten bored with them. One of the unfortunate qualities of time: everything got old eventually. He wondered if he’d done her a favor by letting her know that, ending even that small bit of her innocence.

“I guess I can…” He hadn’t tried sending out any signal from his transceiver; since the Small Moon’s orbit didn’t include this side of the building, there hadn’t seemed any point. But with the target right in front of him – “Okay. How’s this?” He pulled a tiger playing with a butterfly up from his archive, coded and sent it over the distance of less than a meter. As the screen display dropped from his vision, he saw the image blossoming across Lahft’s membrane.

“Nice.” She turned from admiring herself and looked at him.

“Yeah, it’s nice.” The sunlight coming through the membrane made it radiant, a smooth glowing rose. “That’s the best display I’ve ever had.”

Beside him, Sai nodded. “It’s kind of a shame that all this stuff usually just gets wasted on a bunch of big ugly guys.”

Lahft wasn’t listening to them, letting the breeze slowly draw her away.

“Hey -” Axxter called out to her. “Come back around again sometime – whenever you want – and I’ll do another one for you.”

She considered this, putting a finger to her chin. Then that same unalloyed smile appeared. “When you want. You here, and me -” She flung her arm out to indicate some distant point in the sky. “You make you – like a pretty, but you – on me. Then I come here. To you.” She had floated several meters away and had to shout the last words. Before she was gone entirely, dwindling to a far speck.

Sai yawned, stretching out his arms in front of him “Angels are okay. You could do a lot worse than being on a friendly basis with them.”

He realized for the first time that Lahft had shown none of the usual angelic shyness around Sai. As if she was used to him, or just not scared of him.

“I suppose. I don’t see what good it’ll ever do me, though.”

Sai shrugged. “It’s like those old stories, you know, fairy tales and stuff, where the kid befriends the ants and the birds. And they wind up saving his ass somehow on the last page. You just never know.”

It wasn’t the first time Axxter didn’t know what the hell somebody was talking about. “What about that other one? That girl?” He assumed that Sai, with his spying around, had witnessed that encounter. “I suppose she’s got her uses, too.”

“That circuit-rider broad?” Sai snorted. “You’d be smart to steer well clear of her. People like that can cause a lot of trouble.”

“Yeah, she seemed pretty demented. Talking some crazy stuff about switching around into different bodies. Like she had a wardrobe of them, or something.”

Sai shook his head. “That’s not what I meant. If she were crazy, then she wouldn’t have such a potential for trouble. But she can really do all that stuff – that’s why she’s such bad news.” He tightened the straps on his travelhooks. “Come on. We gotta get moving.”

† † †

“There. That’s it.” Sai pointed ahead of them.

Catching his breath, Axxter looked across the wall. The building’s surface was tinged red by the sun setting at the limit of the clouds. The entry site appeared as a black hole in the middle of reflected fire.

Sai had been pushing to reach the spot before sundown. The speed of their travel, accelerated by his own growing skill with the hooks, left Axxter dizzy, his arms aching underneath the leather straps.

“Told you I’d get you here.” Sai clapped him on the shoulder. “Come on.”

He led the way to the curved edge of the site. Axxter grasped the lip and peered inside. Nothing but dark.

“There should be some of my buddies around. I told them to wait for me here.” Sai leaned his head inside and let out a high-pitched, whistling cry. It echoed inside the building for several seconds. After it died away, yelping whoops came bouncing back in reply. “All right – let’s go on in.” He unstrapped the travelhooks from his arms.

Axxter pulled away from him “Wait a minute. Your friends – people like you – are inside there?” He glanced again at the darkness inside the building.

Sai slung the hooks onto his belt. “Well, sure. Where else?”

He pulled away, a sudden horror prickling across his scalp and arms. “I thought… I thought you were an eveningsider. I thought you lived out here.” He gestured around at the building’s exterior.

“So?” Sai peered at him. “What difference does it make?”

Then he knew. “You’re from in there.” He pushed himself back from the other, the words Dead Center unspeakable, filling his mouth. This one, the smiling figure who’d popped up from nowhere, and all the ones like him, inside, calling back and forth like wolves -

Sai reached for him. “Come on – don’t be an idiot -” Axxter slashed at him with the travelhooks. Sai jerked back to avoid their sharp-pointed tips.

“Stay away from me.” Axxter crawled backward, his belt pithons securing him to the wall. He kept the hooks lifted between himself and Sai, as though he were brandishing a knife. “Don’t come near me. I know what you are. I know what you want.”

Sai looked at him in disgust. “You don’t know shit.” He shook his head, then turned and slipped inside the entry site, into the dark.

† † †

“That was one of your dumber moves.”

The voice came from behind him; startled, Axxter turned his head and saw Felony latched to the wall, regarding him with her level gaze.

She nodded toward the entry site where Sai had disappeared. “What’d you flip out on that guy for? He was doing you a favor. Bringing you all the way here, and stuff.”

Axxter glanced at the dark hole, then back to her. “Isn’t he… isn’t he one of them?”

“‘One of them’ – one of them what?”

“You know.” He still didn’t want to say it aloud. “You mean, the Dead Centers?”

He nodded.

“Christ almighty.” Felony rolled her eyes upward. “Is that what you’re all freaked out about? What if he is? You’re spooking yourself for no reason, man. Those Dead Center folks aren’t anything to worry about. They’re harmless.”

Proves she’s nuts. Or ignorant – she hadn’t seen some of the things that he had, such as the burned-out sector over on the other side. “Well… I know different.”

That got a derisive snort. “There’s a bunch of stuff you think you know. And none of it’s true.”

Irritated, Axxter looked away from her, scanning the building’s surface. The last of the twilight was fading, the clouds ebbing to a darker red. He wanted to get well clear of the entry site, but still close enough to keep it in view; if Sai and his Dark Center buddies came swarming out, he wanted to have as much warning as possible.

Plus, there was other business he needed to take care of. His fright at discovering Sai’s true nature had also ebbed away. “You know where I can find a plug-in jack around here?”

“Gotta make a call? No problem. I know where all the jacks are.”

He followed her on a diagonal upwall; she seemed much clumsier moving with her pithons, as if she’d spent little time with them on the building’s surface. A kilometer away from the entry site, he spotted the jack’s concentric yellow markings.

“Here you go.” She secured herself close to the jack.

A taped call was waiting for him as soon as he inserted his finger. NY – YOU CAN GET MEGASSASSIN LOCATION INFO DIRECT FROM A & R. KEEP IN TOUCH. BREVIS. That was cool; his agent had known exactly what he needed to find out. The Havoc Mass was probably making the megassassin’s progress public, just to work up audience interest and add to their reputation: You can run, but you can’t hide – that always played well.

Ringing up Ask & Receive revealed that the megassassin was only a little ways out from the Left Linear Fair, having crossed through the day before.

That’s weird. Axxter broke the connection and leaned back against the pithons. He’d figured the megassassin would’ve been much closer than that; he wouldn’t have been happy to find out that it was just about to clear the curve of the building, spot him, and come barreling across the wall to kick his ass, but he wouldn’t have been surprised. Weren’t those big fuckers supposed to be faster than that? He’d always heard that once they got going, they were unstoppable, building up speed, creaming their target as much by force of impact as by all the other goodies grafted into their formerly human bodies. This one seemed to be taking some kind of tourist route to get to him.

“So what’s the problem?” Felony had managed to listen in. “Just means you got a little breathing space.”

Axxter worked at a fingernail. “It just doesn’t make sense. If the Havoc Mass wants to dramatize their lethal effectiveness, they’d want that thing to be on top of me fast. Not sauntering around out there on the wall somewhere.”

“And you’re the guy who knows so much. You didn’t get filled in on this one, did you?”

“Meaning what?”

She spread her hands out, palms upward. “Hey – maybe these megassassins aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Or maybe they are rough, but they’re deficient in some other skills. Like they’re not the world’s greatest trackers, maybe. It might be having a hard time picking up your trail – you arrived on this side by air, remember.”

He shook his head. “It should’ve had my last location pinpointed by the plug-in jack I used. Still doesn’t make sense.”

“Sense, shmense; you gonna worry about every little thing, good or bad? Just consider yourself lucky. For the time being, at least.”

Easy for her to say – Axxter regarded her. “Hey, how long were you trailing along after us?”

A shrug. “Long enough.”

“Did you hear what we were talking about?”

“You mean, did I hear what that Sai character said about me? Yeah, I heard. So what?” Her smile broadened. “The guy’s right. I’m not crazy – but I could be trouble.” She reached out, grabbing a new hold. “I got business to take care of. I’ll see you around.”

† † †

Through the night, he debated calling up Ask & Receive again, in case any more handy info had come in. Finally deciding against it – he already had enough to go on; anything else would probably have confused him even more.

As soon as it was light enough to see, he headed back toward the entry site. Through the hours of waiting in the dark, he had listened for any sound of Sai or the other Dead Centers, their high-pitched wailing calls to each other; there had been nothing but the building’s eternal silence. Now, leaning over the lip of the site, he peered into the darkness, searching for any sign of movement within.

Still nothing. Go on. The rounded metal edge grew slick with his perspiration. Go on in and see what you find.

Maybe the girl Felony was right; maybe the Dead Centers were nothing to be afraid of. She seemed to know more about what was going on around here, on the eveningside, than he did. Her ‘business’ brought her here, brought her – maybe – to a lot of places around Cylinder; she was in some ways an authority. If she’s not crazy – the other possibility. He only had Sai’s word that she wasn’t crazy, that all of her wild talk wasn’t just the wind whistling through the cracks in her skull. But if Sai was a Dead Center, then how much of what he said could be trusted? Maybe Sai had his own weird reasons for wanting him to believe that Felony could do those things; some spooky mindbend that he hadn’t figured out yet. And if you didn’t trust what Sai said about Felony – and why should you? – then you couldn’t trust what Felony said about the Dead Centers…

It went around and around, not in a circle, but more of a spiral, into a darkness as deep as the entry-site hole. He’d have to either trust both of them, Sai and Felony, or neither of them.

He was wasting time, he knew, trying to work it out. Either way, he was still on this side of the building, and everything he wanted – his whole life – was on the other, with a long walk in between. Worrying about who was lying to him – as if that were some novel state of affairs – was just a way of avoiding climbing into the entry site’s shivery black. Out of the light, as much of it as there was at the this hour of the eveningside’s half-dawn, and into the night inside the building, which never ended. Heavy spook territory.

Or he could starve to death out here. Axxter sucked in his breath and pulled himself into the entry site. He slowly got to his feet and stood up, feeling a solid horizontal surface under his feet; it had been a long time. The constant tension of moving around in the vertical world ebbed out of his spine, a sensation so pleasant that it sapped away most of his fear.

Cautiously, he walked forward, away from the circular light of the opening. Whatever the intentions of Sai and the other Dead Centers might have been toward him awhile ago, he probably hadn’t improved the situation by chasing Sai off with the travelhooks. That sort of thing could piss off the friendliest person, especially when it came in return for various favors performed. He’d have to watch out.

That worry aside, it wasn’t so bad inside the building. There was even light, parallel rows of faint blue radiance up on the ceiling; he hadn’t been able to see them from outside.

Maybe I’ll make it. He thought about that as he walked. Maybe he just had to keep putting one foot in front of the other, keep going; maybe he’d find some Dead Center cache of groceries, a big pile of those round loaves, or Sai or one of the others would take a liking to him again and drop off little presents while he slept. He rolled that thought around as the entry site’s opening grew smaller and smaller behind him.

He smelled it first, coming from a smaller tunnel branching off the main one. Like gasoline, sharp and pungent. Pushed into the air by a wave of heat. Some kind of machine; he only had a second to consider what that meant, when it came out of the dark beside him and hit a blow straight to his chest. He fell backward, flying for a moment, until the back of his head and his shoulder struck the floor of the tunnel. He shook his head, dazed, eyes refocusing. In front of him was the megassassin.

He didn’t know it could smile.

All black, darkness inside darkness, a raw machine stench of oil and heated metal, and at the same time, the human smells of sweat and shit. From Axxter’s angle sprawled on the floor, the thing’s bulk blotted out everything else, as though its massive shoulders rubbed against the limits of the tunnel’s ceiling.

It looked down at him, with the little red dots that had been its eyes, and smiled as its chest opened to reveal the sharp and the blunt things moving into readiness. At the center was the death ikon, the image spiraling into view.

At least it’s not mine. Somebody else’s work, a mandala of skull-headed black maggots, grinning with needle teeth as they writhed around a thorned heart. It would’ve been too much to be killed by something with his work on it.

Then again – his brain had dropped into an odd lucidity, tranquil and slow – it might’ve been nice. To have his own stuff be the last thing he ever saw.

He looked up into the megassassin’s grin. The whirling devices at the end of its arms converged toward him.

Then the explosion hit, and all he saw was flame and smoke.

“What the fuck -” The floor of the tunnel had rocked hard enough to knock the megassassin off its feet. Axxter found himself slung against the wall, a curved section split open beside him.

A hand came through the smoke and grabbed his arm. “Come on -” A voice he’d heard before. “This way -”

He let himself be pulled through the jagged opening. Felony’s grip tugged him into a staggering run. Behind him, he heard the grinding howl of the megassassin echoing through the building.