Farewell Horizontal

FOURTEEN

“She’s not here.” The voice came from behind him “She had her little errands to run.”

Axxter turned and saw Sai leaning against the wall of the space.

“What?”

Sai smiled and spread his hands. “You’re not going to pick up something and hit me over the head with it? Scream and run? I was looking forward to a little more action from you.”

He shook his head, watching and waiting.

“Good.” Sai nodded, visibly pleased. “Now maybe we can carry on a discussion like sane people. You know, that’s the main advantage of finding out exactly what kind of a shitty situation you’re in: that kind of knowledge lessens the otherwise freewheeling activity of your imagination. You’re less likely to go making weird accusations against people who’re just trying to do you a favor.”

“I had my reasons.”

“Yeah, but they weren’t good reasons. Just a lot of crap other people have told you, that you’ve heard so many times that you believed ’em without thinking them through. Everything you thought you knew… You gotta be careful about stuff like that.” Sai pointed with his thumb behind himself. “You’ve already screwed it up with a whole bunch of folks who could’ve done you some good. Not everybody around here is as interested in your case as I am. Dead Centers – as you call us; I think the term’s a little offensive, myself – they’ve generally got enough to keep them busy.”

Axxter was tired, his brain frazzled with trying to squeeze in all the new, upside-down, and backward info he’d gotten off the line. Sai’s cool, rational voice soothed him; he could listen to it for hours. He knew there wasn’t that much time left for him, though.

Sai knew it, too. “You’ll have to think about these things later. If there is a later for you. It doesn’t do any good to save your ass if you just go through life being an ignorant fuck and not thinking about the important things.”

Axxter opened his eyes. “Like what?”

“That’s the problem with you.” Sai shook his head. “Not just you, but all of you morningsiders. There’s so much that you don’t know – so much that you’ve forgotten – that you don’t even know where to begin, what to think about, what questions to ask. You guys out on the vertical are as bad as the ones on the horizontal. You think you’re hip or something just because you’re out there scrambling around, chasing up and down the wall, and you don’t know what’s going to happen from one day to the next – but you’re still just as ignorant.”

Hectoring rather than soothing; it had gotten under his skin. “You know so much, then? Why don’t you tell me? If you feel so bad for me, and all.”

“It wouldn’t do any good. We can’t teach the blind to see. I mean, you don’t even look around you; you never have. Like this building, Cylinder itself.” Sai gestured toward the walls, and all the ones beyond. “You live in it, or on it, but you never think about it. It’s obviously constructed, a thing put together, but you never wonder why, or by whom.”

Axxter shrugged. “That was all done before the War.”

“There you go again. If there’s anything you don’t know, you can just say before the War, and you’re off the hook. You don’t even know anything about this so-called War – it’s just a handy way of getting rid of all the stuff you don’t want to think about.”

“So what’d be the point? Dinking around with a lot of old crap like that isn’t going to help me with my problems. And I had enough of them before all this other shit happened.”

“Correction.” Sai pointed a finger toward him. “You had all the problems you wanted. Wanted, man. You liked having them, so you wouldn’t have time on your hands and wind up thinking about all that other stuff, the big stuff that you’ve forgotten. Cylinder was built for a reason; its construction and ongoing operation violates at least a dozen laws of physics – the thermal problems alone connected with a structure of this size are pretty unbelievable. The air you breathe, if you think about it at all, you spout some mumbo jumbo about atmospheric bonding, as if knowing the words means you understand how it works. Now, the physical transgressions in themselves are no big thing – anything can be worked around, if somebody knows what they’re doing – but you still gotta ask why they bothered. It’s not easy, doing impossible stuff.”

“If it’s impossible, how could they do it?” This sonuvabitch wanted to play word games, fine.

Sai’s wolfish smile returned. “Maybe you just think they did it. Maybe they just did something to make you think a building big as a world exists, and that you’re living in it or outside of it.”

Axxter could taste his own disgust. “Screw that. I hate shit like that. Looking at your own navel until you fall in. I’ve got lots more important business to take care of. Hate to remind you, but there is some huge ugly bastard clanking around here, looking to smear me into jelly. I gotta worry about what I’m going to do about that before I can sit on my can and screw around with bullshit philosophical questions. All right?”

The other shrugged. “Have it your way. That’s why I came back around here – just to give you a helping hand. What’d you think of that stuff you found in the dumps?”

He touched the bare wire beside him. “You were tapped in?”

Sai nodded. “But I knew all that stuff already. I just wanted to see if you’d stumble across it. Pretty interesting, though, wasn’t it?”

“Pretty dangerous, you mean – for them. Why would they leave shit like that lying around, where anybody could stumble across it?”

Sai smiled. “Because they don’t know they’ve left it lying around. One of the problems with big organizations like the Mass – to survive, they have to compartmentalize more and more of their actions, make them routine and automatic. The mechanism for dumping tapes like that was set up before they got involved in dinking around with Ask & Receive. Nobody in the Mass exec levels has caught on to this leak until now because nobody but a bunch of adolescent-mentality circuit riders has ever come sniffing around it. You’re the first who has some reason to make real use of it.”

“Yeah? Like what? I don’t see how it helps me any. It just means I’m in deeper shit than I already thought I was.”

“Eh, just hang on to it. Having info like that – real info – you might be surprised the use you’ll find for it sometime.” Sai pushed himself away from the wall. “You want practical? I’ll give you practical – come with me.”

He led Axxter down a low-ceilinged tunnel. “You got a bit of a break, being in here. Those megassassins aren’t equipped for tracking in this kind of environment – there’s a lot of heat and electromagnetic sources that throw their sensors all off. This one that’s tracking you is still recalibrating itself, learning the ropes. Soon as it knows which end’s up, though, it’ll stop blundering around and be right on your tail. So we really ought to stop jerking off and see about getting you on the road.” He stopped beside an empty panel in the tunnel wall and drew back a tattered, oil-stained cloth hung in the opening. “Take a look.”

Axxter lowered his head, eyes straining in the darkness; after a few seconds, he made out Felony, curled up on a bed of rags. Her breathing was slow and shallow.

“That’s not her.” Sai let the curtain fall back into place. “Like they used to say about dead people: she’s not here anymore. She just left her body behind. One of them, at any rate. See?” He pointed to a phone line running under the curtain. “She’s off taking care of business over on the other side, in one of the other bodies she’s glommed into her stable. She’s quite a collector. If she found out I know about this little hiding place of hers, she’d be righteously pissed.”

“Is this what you wanted to show me?”

“Naw – just something I thought you’d be interested in, is all. Come on.”

After following Sai long enough to feel his back going into spasms, Axxter was finally able to stand straight up. They’d stepped out of the low tunnel into a larger space, the ceiling, if there was one, beyond his sight.

“How’s that?” Sai’s voice echoed off the nearest wall. “What is it?” He watched the beam of Sai’s flashlight moving across a flank of metal.

“Transport, man. Wheels – well, sort of; in the metaphoric sense, at least. It actually works on mag-lev technology, just zooms along, no friction. If you’re into pre-War high technology, this one’s a beauty; it’s the fastest thing in or on Cylinder.” Sai looked around and caught Axxter’s uncomprehending look. “It’s a train, man – that’s what things like this were called. Runs on tracks. See?” The flashlight beam played along two massive girders, tall as a man, stretching out in front of the machine’s bullet nose. “Like transit cables, only on the horizontal – you understand that much?”

“Yeah, I guess.” Axxter looked up at the windows set flush in the train’s front cabin. “Where’s it go to?”

Sai smiled. “This is your lucky day. Finally. You’re looking at part of Cylinder’s former transportation network. There used to be hundreds of these babies running straight through the building. That’s how people and stuff used to get from one side to the other.”

“Wait a minute. This thing – right here – goes to the other side? The morningside? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Yeah, it’ll get you within a couple kilometers of the surface. The tracks run right up to where the barriers were constructed. You’d have to hoof it the rest of the way from there.”

“But it’s out of commission – is that the deal? It doesn’t work anymore, it’s just a hunk of rust sitting here.”

“Oh, no. It works fine.” Sai stepped over to the train and rapped it with his fist. “We’ve kept it in good shape – me and a couple of my friends. It wasn’t hard to do. It’s got a lot of autonomic maintenance equipment built in.”

Axxter looked at him in amazement. “You mean to say, you’ve got this thing sitting right here, it’s ready to go, it can zip me back to the other side now – and you’ve been wasting my time, gassing on about a bunch of weird metaphysical junk? I don’t believe this.”

“‘Gassing on’ -” Sai snorted. “You know, you got this problem: people try to do you favors, and this is how you act in return. Saying rude things. That other stuff is important, too. More than you know. You’re going to have to think about it sometime.”

“Yeah, right; anything you say.” Axxter stood on tiptoe, trying to peer into the train’s window. “How does this thing work?”

“It’s simple, practically runs itself. You’ll have no problem with it. People like you have a knack for ripping off other people’s technology. You’re like magpies with brains, or something. If it’s metal and flashy, you glom right onto it.”

Axxter ignored him, walking around the front of the train to the other side. “What’s this other stuff over here?”

Sai followed him “You know, just getting over to the other side isn’t going to solve all your problems. You’re still going to have the same people looking to kill you. More now than you originally thought you had gunning for you.”

“I’ll worry about that when I get there. I can only deal with all this one step at a time.” Axxter squatted down beside another machine, a smaller one. “What’s this?”

The flashlight beam played over it, revealing the lineaments of wheels and engine, chrome and black enamel. A motorcycle of a make – either the original or a replica – that Axxter didn’t recognize. There was no emblem painted on its tank, or other identifying mark. The machine hulked, brutish and dangerous-looking, in the darkness.

“What’s it look like?” Sai pointed the flashlight away from it, down a line of other machines. “There’s tons of this pre-War technology around here. See what you’ve all been missing by being afraid to come inside and look around? Think of all the fun you could’ve been having with this stuff.” The sarcasm was plain in his voice.

“Does this thing run, too?”

Sai reached past him and pressed a starter switch below the handlebars. The engine roared into life. “Pretty big displacement -” Sai shouted over the noise. “This thing’s built for speed.” He switched off the engine. “Probably not a good idea to call attention to where we are.”

Axxter ran his hands over the motorcycle’s tank. “I could use this. Over on the other side.” The memory of his poor Norton, crumpled and spinning through the air, was still strong. “I’d have to get it adapted, get the grappling wheels put on and stuff…”

“You’re getting way ahead of yourself. You’re not at the point where you need to be scoping out a new set of wheels. You can bet that the Havoc Mass has already figured out your plan of action and where you’re going to pop out on the morningside. It’s a sure thing they’ve sent their own megassassin around to that entry site you’re aiming for. You show your head over there, and you’ll be hash in a minute, It won’t matter that you’ve managed to get away from the Grievous Amalgam megassassin that’s stomping around over here.”

He knew it was true. Deflated, Axxter leaned his weight against the motorcycle. It was exactly the sort of thing that General Cripplemaker and the rest of the Havoc Mass would think was funny, to stake out the entry site with the megassassin that he’d worked on.

Sai switched off the flashlight, leaving them in the gloom provided by the intermittent blue fixtures above. “What you need – right now – is some way of getting the Havoc Mass off your ass. Then you could head on out of here, and you’d be home free.”

“Sure -” He nodded glumly. “That’d be real fine. But you can’t talk with people like that. They’re all nuts, and hopped up all the time. A simple apology, or an explanation or whatever, isn’t going to cut it with them.”

“So? You just have to come up with something else. Something that’s so valuable to them that it wipes out whatever grudge they’ve got simmering against you. Think about it.”

Think – His brain shifted reluctantly into gear. It’d be so much easier to just lie down on the floor and wait for whatever was going to happen. Even if it was going to be gruesomely unpleasant. All the stuff he’d found out had fatigued his head, as though it had been crammed to the bursting point with useless knowledge. What good did it to do to discover these things?…

He saw it then, perfect and luminous, right in front of him He raised his head, looking straight at Sai. “They don’t know. The Havoc Mass – they don’t know. They don’t know what’s going on. And I do. About the Grievous Amalgam screwing around with Ask & Receive. About all the information they rely on being contaminated. And I’m the only one who can tell them.”

In the darkness, he saw Sai’s smile.

Axxter looked above him, as though the idea had become buoyant, floating over their heads. “And if I told them that – then they’d believe me, about being set up.”

Another realization had hit him. “Because it wasn’t DeathPix that screwed me over, that overrode the animating signal for the graffex work I did. It was the Grievous Amalgam. They wanted to snuff me, to shut me up about whatever I might’ve seen where they raided that entry site, only they couldn’t get to me inside the Havoc Mass camp. But they found a way; they just had to get the Mass pissed off enough at me, and the Mass would kill me. They’d have done the Amalgam’s work for them.”

Sai nodded, pleased. “It takes you awhile, but you get there eventually. You still don’t know everything you need to know, but you got the process started, at least.”

The little light going on inside his head had carried its own sparking circuit, a trickle of excitement, seeing one small bit more clearly. “Right – I still don’t know why. I mean, why they did it in the first place, what the Grievous Amalgam got out of sneaking around and burning out that sector -”

“That’s unimportant; that’s not what you need to know. Stuff like that, the reason shit happens, you can just make your assumptions and let ’em ride. Maybe the people in that sector you ran across had gotten a little uppity and needed their chain given its ultimate yank; or else whatever factory they ran had been working under contract, and it was easier for the Amalgam to pay ’em off like that. Plus, you got to remember that the Grievous Amalgam’s an old organization; they’ve been sitting up on the toplevel for a long time. Long enough to get fat and lazy, to lose that warrior’s edge, the hungry feeling, that put them up there. They’ve got to substitute cunning for what they’ve lost, if they’re going to hang on. You don’t know how long they’ve been pulling this shit, and on how many people; they’ve got a lot of alliances to keep in line. And good PR is ninety percent of that process. For all you know, the Amalgam might’ve been generating false reports of all the battles they’ve won, opposing tribes subdued, areas conquered – all of them nonexistent. Then they use Ask & Receive to distribute the phony accounts, and everybody else thinks it’s fact, just because they got the info from a supposedly impartial source. And who’s going to find them out? You’re talking a lot of territory; practically anything – or nothing – could be going on, and nobody would know the difference. The only ones likely to discover that something’s not quite kosher are freelancers like yourself; you’re the only ones who might blunder into a sector reportedly raided by the Grievous Amalgam and find a completely different reality from the one everybody’s been handed by Ask & Receive. You might not be the first poor bastard who’s gotten into this kind of deep shit – you just might be the first one to have gotten this much of a run out of it.”

That was a chilling thought. There were always stories going around in the loose fraternity of freelancers about one or more of their number whom nobody had seen in a long time, too long a time. The final assumption being that something had happened to them – unspecified as to what – or else they had taken the big step of their own free will, cutting free from the wall and embracing the clouds below, depressed at some negative turn in their ramshackle careers. You just never saw them again, never knew. But this meant that the spooky Something might not have been accident or suicide, but murder.

“Yeah, well, that may be for all I know -” Axxter peered closer at the other. “But what do you know? I mean, if you knew what I was going to find in that dump… and you’ve got so much stuff figured out… then what else do you know?”

Sai laughed. “You’re wishing for something, but I don’t think I can give it to you.”

“Come on. The way you know what’s going on… how you can just tap in on whatever lines people are using… how the building works, all this high-tech stuff you and your friends keep running… You must be able to do it.”

“Do what? That hacking shit? Go on-line and break into restricted access files – is that what you’re talking about?”

Axxter nodded.

“As they used to say in another time, another place – boy, I despair of you.” Pity in Sai’s voice. “It just goes to show how hard old mythology dies. Especially myths that serve somebody’s purpose, and that key right into some little need inside people’s heads. That hacking bullshit goes back a long way – not just before the War, but before Cylinder itself. You gotta ask yourself, who did it benefit to have people believing that restricted-access data files and operating systems could be broken into by some bright thirteen-year-old with a dime-store terminal and a fast hand on the keyboard? That was a line of crap from the beginning; the only basis for it was a brief historical period right at the beginning, before the really good methods of locking up stuff were invented. Some little hacker punk would manage to get into someplace on-line where he wasn’t supposed to be, and then go around bragging about it. But it was like somebody going to a sector where everybody leaves their doors unlocked, and then claiming to be a master burglar because you lifted somebody’s toaster. Soon as everybody started locking their doors, that penny-ante stuff was over. But it was an interesting coincidence that right at the time when that kind of information-handling technology was taking over the world, a bunch of stuff started showing up in the popular media that depicted it as essentially harmless because teenage kids could crack it open – so what’s there to worry about, right? People were less likely to worry about the files being kept on them in massive, cross-linked data banks as long as they could be made to believe that the machines running the info were just kinda cuddly and easily fucked with.”

Axxter shook his head. “You lost me there somewhere. All this ancient history jazz -”

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to give you a lecture. Just one of my pet subjects, is all. I wonder about the people who got involved in handing out that line of crap – there were so many of them, they couldn’t all have been on the payroll. Some of them, maybe most of them – hell, maybe even all of them – must’ve actually believed that bullshit. Because they wanted to. So they wouldn’t have to deal with the scary stuff that was actually happening.” Sai switched the flashlight on again, drawing a circle with its beam across the train. “So anyway, you don’t get some magic key to everybody’s deepest secrets. You’ll just have to do with what you know already.”