Farewell Horizontal

ONE

When he awoke, he saw angels mating overhead.

For a few seconds longer, Axxter watched them, fragments of a dream. The sun broke over the distant edge of the cloud barrier below, tinting red the metal wall against his shoulder. All through the night his body had huddled close to it, as though his acrophobic spine had been trying to burrow through the building’s skin and back to the remembered safety of floors and ceilings. His own dreams were of falling, spinning free of the great curve and impacting into clouds filled with small, biting faces; or, pleasantly, of sleeping itself, cradled by gravity and solid steel. But never of floating, of drifting locked in embrace, turned slowly by a bed of winds. Thus it flashed on him that the angels were real.

“Shit.” Teeth clamped to lip even as he twisted about in the narrow sling, to silence any further outburst. Gas angels were notoriously skittish; they could decouple and split, flight membranes deflated for a parawing dive down-wall and overcurve, before he could get a lens on them. And he needed the money, equally real. The little, biting faces in his dreams were the zeroes on his bank account readout.

He came up with the camera, out of his gear bag grappled onto the cable below the sling – for a dizzying second he had hung half out of the swaying fabric, head down toward the clouds and the big step to them, as he’d fumbled around. Mercenary spirit overrode the usual nausea; he rolled onto his back, the sling’s pithons adjusting to shifting weight, their triangular heads finding and biting into holds tighter than those needed for corpselike slumber.

A scan across, from the upwall bulk of Cylinder to open sky. There they were, centered in the camera’s viewfinder. Axxter sighed, shoulders unknotting. They didn’t hear me. Coital oblivion apparently equal among all species; he focused, hit RECORD, and crawl-zoomed in on the airborne lovers. Hold it right there, you beauties.

The sun had risen far enough that all the air had turned gold. The spherical membranes behind the angels’ shoulders were filled with light, radiant, as though the hemodialyzed gases that kept them aloft had ignited with the friction of the two forms between. Axxter went in closer, his hand trembling at the controls, until the camera filled with intricate red lace, the angels’ veins swelling taut the papery skin.

As if in sympathy, another vein pumped through heavier, gravity-bound flesh. Axxter ignored it; he knew how long he had been vertical, out here hustling business. Knock it off, already; don’t remind me. He went on taping, rolling onto his shoulder to follow the angels’ drift.

The golden-and-pink knot turned, their waists the equator of a bifurcate planet. At the dark margin of his vision, the camera’s data fed through the metal contact on his fingertip to the display feed spliced into his optic nerve: distance to subject ranged between 100 and 125 meters. The red digits effectively tracked the eddy currents at the building’s atmosphere boundary. Axxter, squinting and likewise tracking, wondered if the angels enjoyed that effect. Maybe it enhanced the pleasure, like being tickled all over by invisible fingers. Who knew? – Ask & Receive’s files on angelic sex were pretty thin. Something to think about, though. Christ, not now, he pleaded to his own distracting flesh.

In the distance above, the male’s downward rotation brought the female’s face into the viewfinder. Axxter zoomed in tighter. They did look like angels, what angels should look like, beyond the simple floating in air. Where no vertical or horizontal existed. The fragile bodies, substantial only against the translucent membranes ballooning from nape to buttock; the golden light seemed to pass as well through the female’s small, delicate breasts as she arched back from the other’s chest, her eyes closed and mouth soundlessly open, her small hands gripping the male’s fulcrum hips to her own. A shining trail of kisses and sweat spiraled over her throat and face, and his, that slow moisture being the only response to gravity’s tug as they had turned and pivoted about.

So pretty; Axxter, slung and bound against the metal wall, taped and watched. The thin wands of the angel’s collarbone above her luminous breasts; he could almost believe there was no flesh at all, only fragile and weightless skin, taut with the blood’s tracery, the same as the two buoyant spheres that held the two aloft. In the viewfinder a deeper blush welled up into her face. Her lashes trembled against her cheek. Instinctively, Axxter pulled back, reverse zoom, until there was sky all around the couple. On tape he caught the shudder that ran through their limbs, a shimmer echoing in the inflated membranes behind each of them, a seismic event in that light-permeated world.

They moved apart, drifting on separate currents. Though the male was in sight longer, angling on a slow diagonal out from the building’s face, Axxter kept the camera on the female. A stronger wind lifted her farther overhead; she stretched her thin arms above herself, smiling, eyes still closed. A sleepy nude against the sky. Hair all tangled, dampened black. When she became a speck, untrackable, and then gone, Axxter lowered the camera. The machine had sweated in his hands, but he found – it took him a moment to realize what was missing – that other urgencies had been forgotten. As if the flesh had also been disarmed by the angels’ beauty. “You know -” He spoke aloud, put in a good mood by the morning’s omen, hugging camera to chest. “Maybe – just maybe – you aren’t completely forsaken, after all.” A string of cold electrons ticked over in the camera, downloading to his internal archive; he tucked the machine beside himself in the sling and gazed out over the cloud barrier to the lifting sun.

Feelings of universal benevolence dissolved when he remembered his bank balance. The angels were gone, evaporated back into Cylinder’s surrounding atmosphere. Except on tape, Axxter reminded himself. For which we are truly grateful. That, in itself, was not enough of a break to save him from bankruptcy. But it would put it off awhile longer, in which time all sorts of things could happen. The little gem of hope radiated in his heart, as if a drop of the angels’ sweat had fallen and crystallized there.

The sling rocked uncomfortably as he scrambled to his knees. He had left the deadfilm for his terminal pinned to the building’s metal wall, right where he’d be able to find it first thing in the morning. For most of this excursion he’d been traveling off-line, the Small Moon being over-curve, all signal to or from it being blocked by the building itself. And in this scurfy territory, the building’s exterior desolate and abandoned in every direction, Ask & Receive hadn’t been able to sell him a map of plug-in jacks. So finding this one had been a break, as well. Maybe that’s when my luck started. Axxter rattled his fingertip inside the rust-specked socket; a spark jumped from the tiny patch of metal to the ancient wire running inside the building. Last night, when I found this; maybe it’s all going to just roll on from here. At last.

YES? The single word floated up in the center of his eye, bright against the deadfilm’s black drain of ambient light. More followed. GOOD MORNING. “THE GLORIES OF OUR BLOOD AND STATE/ARE SHADOWS, NOT SUBSTANTIAL THINGS/THERE IS NO ARMOR -”

“Jee-zuss.” Axxter’s gaze flicked to CANCEL at the corner of his eye. The trouble with buying secondhand; his low-budget freelancer’s outfit had all sorts of funky cuteness left on it from its previous owner; he had never been able to edit it out.

VERY WELL. Sniffy, feelings wounded. REQUEST?

He hesitated. For a moment he considered not calling anyone up; just not saying anything about the angels at all. His little secret, a private treasure. That would be something. Something nobody had except me. He nodded, playing back the tape inside his head corresponding to the one inside the camera. So pretty; both of them, but especially the female angel. Slender as a wire. A soft wire. And smiling as she’d drifted away. That smile was locked away, coded into the molecules inside the camera. And in my brain – burned right into the neural fibers. As if soft, dreaming smiles could burn.

It’d be a kick: angel footage rare, of any kind. You had to get out into these wastewall areas of the building’s surface to have a chance of spotting them at all, and just by chance. Elusive; a gas angel expedition, just for that purpose, a ridiculous notion.

Except maybe they hang out here, in this zone. Axxter rubbed his chin, thinking. Like a nest, or something. The great angel rookery? Who knows? Surely they don’t give birth in the air as well? How do they, then? He made a mental note to log the wall coordinates, downwall by left-around, so he could find the place again. Some other time.

Angel stuff being rare also made it valuable, however. Beyond the mere smile. That decided the issue. “Get me Registry.”

After he’d zipped the footage from his archive to Reg and got a File Check, Clear & Confirmed Ownership – thank God that much service came free – he asked if anything else had come in lately under the heading Angels, Gas, Coitus (Real Time). For all he knew, whole orgies had been taking place in the skies around the building’s morningside.

Two cents pinged off the meter panel in the corner of his sight, Registry’s charge for the inquiry. The sight/sound made him wince.

NOTHING, JACK. TOTAL NADA. The Registry interface had a flip personality. YOU MIGHT TRY UNDER HISTORICAL AND/OR POETRY. “I WANDERED LONELY AS A -”

Another eyeflick, to DISCONNECT. He didn’t want to get tagged for another charge. Not for ancient nonsense, some pre-War file dredged out of Registry’s deep vaults. “Screw that.”

PARDON?

“Get me, um… get me Lenny Red.” By contract, Axxter should have called his agent Brevis. But Brevis took a ten-percenter bite; and any idiot working out of a top-level office could peddle hot angel love stuff. I could do it, from here – Axxter knew Ask & Receive had a call out, all angel footage bought top-price. But Ask & Receive also listed their stringers in a public file; if Brevis found out – and he would – he’d take the whole wad paid, not just ten percent. Contractual penalty. So Lenny’s usual five made him a bargain.

SHIELD LINE?

“Naw, don’t bother.” No sense in paying the extra – he had his Reg confirm. “Just call him straight in.”

YOU’RE THE BOSS.

The cranky wire quavered Lenny’s face. “Howdy, Ny.”

He squinted at the image overlaid in his sight. Lenny’s forehead smeared to the left; his mouth was a rippling loop. This far downwall, you took what you could get. “Got something for you.”

“Oh?” Oh? – the line echoed as well. “Like what?” Kwut?

“Angels.”

A distorted eyebrow lifted like an insect leg at the edge of the film “Really.” Lee-ee.

“Catch this.” Axxter engineered a smug smile into his own face. “Angels having sex.”

“Yeah?” No longer bored; Lenny’s hand came into view, tapping a control panel at the edge of his terminal. His face pulled together, brow stacked on top where it should be. It hadn’t been distance/transmit problems at all – he’d taken Axxter’s call through some low-rate line filter. The little shit – Axxter smiled and ate his resentment. Only greed, the push to cover his operating nut, kept him from disconnecting over an insult like that.

“Yeah.” The word tasted good, with its juice of money. “Fresh this morning. I thought of you first, Lenny.”

“Flattered.” Lenny, in sharp focus now, tried to reassemble his dealer’s cool. “I… might… be able to help you out. Possibly.”

“Cut the crap.” Not screwing me on this one. Axxter blinked on PLAYBACK from his archive. “You’re gonna love it.”

Registry’s confirm number shadowed miniscule across the bottom of the image in his eye’s tiny editing segment; Axxter shifted his gaze back to center and caught the small sign of disappointment the Reg number produced on Lenny’s face as he watched the tape on his own terminal. Bastards like him made such precautions necessary.

They watched in silence, image on wire linking them through the building’s vast corpus, thread in subcutaneous mesh. Even in miniature, at the corner of his eye, the entwined figures caught him Floating in their rectangle of recorded sky. Axxter’s heart drained, became hollow, as he gazed. I shouldn’t even have kept it for myself. Mercantile victory soured on his tongue. The angel faces, small dots at this resolution; he couldn’t see the female’s trembling lashes, but remembered them. I should’ve let them go and drift away, off-tape. Just in memory. Need the cash, though. Shit.

He snapped out of his reverie when the image suddenly jittered ahead in time, the taped angels comically flailing and whirling in flat air. Lenny, on-line to the archive, fast-forwarded through the tape, catching a few bits in real time, then running ahead again. Axxter bit his lip. This bastard’s got no soul at all.

End of tape; the square of empty sky vanished as Lenny’s face, at center, came back up. He nodded, not even trying to hide how impressed. “Not bad.”

“Unique.” Axxter smiled around the bone in his throat. Sell, you sonuvabitch; the advice he’d given himself a million times. Be a bastard and eat. “The word is unique.”

“Well…” Lenny’s hand crawled into view and waggled on edge. “There was that Opt Cooder find a few years back. Along the same lines.”

“What? Your ass.” Axxter shook his head in disbelief. “The one Cooder found was dead.”

“Yeah, but Ask & Receive got wild accessing off it. Death tones are always big in the horizontal levels. That tape’s still bringing in money for them.”

True enough; Axxter knew. He’d been on the horizontal himself, saving up his grubstake, when the Cooder tape had gone on market. And he had bought it, too. First the minimum charge for one-time access; then, when he hadn’t been able to get the image of the dead angels out of his mind, paying for permanent zip into personal archive. Through the long months – Christ, years if totaled – of working in the piss-factory types of jobs he could get without signing a lifer contract, and the nights on end of honing his would-be graffex skills, sketching out ideas for warrior decs and military ikons, building up a working archive, buying little scraps of biofoil to practice implanting; sweating every nickel toward the used freelancer gear he’d locked onto – unable to afford superstition about residual bad luck from the guy who’d gone bust running it before – and worrying that some other young hopeful would snatch it up before his account reached the precisely calculated level where he could chance going vertical… through all of that, he remembered watching the Opt Cooder tape of the famous dead gas angel. Watching, thinking, and waiting. Or waiting with no thought at all. Kept me going; Axxter nodded to himself. Maybe because, even dead, the angel had represented a certain freedom. A creature of the air, neither horizontal nor vertical. Cooder, top-rank wanderer that he had been, had lucked out in that find: no sign of violence on the angel’s body. Anyone watching the tape might have thought the female angel was sleeping, until the reverse zoom from her tranquil face revealed the torn and deflated membrane, no longer a sphere behind her shoulders. She had lain swathed in the billowing folds, which when taut with blood-rendered gases would have borne her aloft. Caught by that delicate tissue alone, she would never have remained bound to Cylinder’s wall; as Cooder’s camera had watched, another translucent scrap had torn loose in the wind and fluttered away. But one of the dead hands had snagged in a transit cable loop; Cooder’s lens had moved in on the dried trickle of blood running down from her wrist under the gray metal, just enough to dispel the mystery of how the nude form had come to this rest. If closing his eyes would have blanked out Lenny’s face, Axxter could have replayed it, watched it all over again from memory; it lay parallel and so close to this morning’s living, mating angels that the images had bled into each other, one section of time superimposed over another. As if the lovers had coupled all unconscious of the corpse framed in the same shot with them, tangled in the building’s cables, diagonal from the open air in which they turned and clasped.

Opt Cooder had made the most of the rare chance; no one else had ever gotten so close to one, alive or dead. A certain aesthetic sense that went with his rep, catching the fading light as the sun went over Cylinder and on to the eveningside – so that the red tinge on the angel’s cheek had almost made her seem alive. But sleeping. Because if she had been dead, wouldn’t she have disappeared where all the other dead angels go? And where was that? Something that Axxter still wondered, along with everybody else who watched the scanty archives, over and over. Maybe there was some one spot on an unexplored sector of the building’s surface where all the pretty corpses came to rest. Leaving behind not a whitening layer of bones – those would crumble away like dust, figured Axxter – but of something like tattered silk, gray where the blood had once made the tissue into pink lace.

Or maybe they just fall, he thought. Down through the cloud barrier, and whatever’s below that, if anything. Maybe all the dead angels are still falling.

“So you want me to peddle this stuff for you, or what?”

Axxter refocused, the image resolving back into Lenny Red’s face. For a moment he didn’t speak, then, “Sure. That’s why I called you. What d’you think you can get for it?” Questions like that indict your heart. Sell, you sonuvabitch.

Lenny shrugged, the thin points of his shoulders coming up into the image. “Lemme run it past a few people. I’ll get right back to you.” The face vanished.

He passed the couple of minutes – that’s all it ever took with fast Lenny – looking out across empty sky. The line chirped inside his ear; Lenny’s features could just be made out, light against brighter.

“High quote was two thousand, Ny.” A conspirator’s wink. “But I jacked ’em up to twenty-two-five.”

He stared at the bright, overactive face. “Twenty-two-five? That’s all?” Jeez – now I know I should’ve kept it for myself. “You gotta be kidding.”

“Hey, that’s after my cut, man. That’s all straight to you. Come on,” wheedled Lenny’s image. “You know you want it, you need it – just sign me over the confirm number, and we’ll do the deal.”

The realization hit him. “You’re getting yours on the other end. You’re lowballing me.” Fury welled up in his throat. “Fuckin’ lowballing me.”

That little shrug again. “It’s a fair price, man. None of the scientific data agencies had any interest in it – everybody knows already how angels do it. You’re not making no big contribution to human knowledge, all right? So it has to sell just on aesthetics, I shop it around to Ask & Receive’s entertainment division and their guys go, ‘Ten minutes? Whaddya think we can charge for accessing ten minutes of tape?’” Lenny’s finger, a pink dot, jabbed toward him. “And that’s why two thousand.”

“Twenty-two-five.” It’s what you get, thought Axxter, for dealing with people like this.

“Twenty-two-five was before you pissed me off. Now it’s two thousand.”

“I should’ve gone straight to my own agent.” He looked back out at the sky. Serves me right, I suppose.

In his ear, Lenny’s voice went blunt. “Two thousand is also so your agent doesn’t find out about all this. Non-info costs, just like real info does.”

It’s what I get. Axxter punched out the confirm transfer without looking, screwed it up, then got it right. From a distance he heard some parting shot from Lenny. Should’ve kept it for myself – the thought became bleaker with repetition. To cheer himself, he blinked up his bank account.

The payment had already gone through, zipped in via Lenny. The numbers crawled across his sight, digits kissed by the two thousand wad. He was afloat again, at least for a little while. Maybe that’s what my luck is. The cheerful edge had already worn off the morning’s event. Maybe just getting by, hugging the wall with the wind at the back of my neck. Getting hungry lets you cling even better, spine tight to the metal.

MESSAGE FROM REGISTRY. The words crawled into view. NOTIFICATION, TRANSFER OF OWNERSHIP, FILE BLAH-BLAH-BLAH; YOU DON’T WANT THE REAL NUMBERS, DO YOU?

“No.” Screw it. At least he wouldn’t have to pay to see the mating angels, as everyone else would; the original images were still inside his archive. At least I’ve got that much. “Call up Brevis, okay?”

His agent’s face came up in his sight, in sufficient-enough resolution. In the corner of his eye, the Wire Syndicate’s call charges nibbled away at his bank account.

“Ny – I was just about to call you.” Brevis smiled.

And pay for the call from his end? That’d be the day. “Yeah? Why? – got a lead on some new clients?”

Brevis’s eyes closed above his smile, as though he’d just been nicked by some pleasurable bullet. They opened again. “Working on it, Ny. Promise you – there’s going to be something coming up that’s going to make you very happy. You can count on it.”

“Yeah, right.” Brevis being a smoother, cooler version of Lenny Red; for this he gets ten percent? Axxter heard his own voice harden: “I’ll nip aroundwall to Linear Fair and pick up some supplies I need. When they ask about getting paid, I’ll tell ’em you said they could count on it. How’s that?”

A tilt of the head, acknowledgment of witticism. But still smiling: “Just… be patient a little longer, Ny. You’ll see.”

You’ll starve; for a moment he thought that Brevis had actually said that, until he realized it had been a glitch on the line. Or in his own head, out too long on the vertical. You’re starting to lose it, he warned himself.

“I’m trying.” Axxter kept the hard edge in his voice. It was either that or start whining. “I really am. But I’m cutting it a little thin out here, you know. I’m down to the bone, man. If some money doesn’t come in pretty soon, I could wind up defaulting on my Moon and Wire charges.”

The words emerged from his mouth like all the words before them; in his throat a thick clot of nausea formed.

Pure fear: both of Cylinder’s communications agencies reacted unkindly to defaults. Fat chance of operating as a graffex, or anything else on the vertical, without them. “I need something to come through.” Hard edge gone now, having scared himself.

Brevis’s expression changed to one of woeful sympathy. “What can I say, Ny? None of your holdings have paid a dividend or a bonus in… quite a while.” The smile again, manfully facing up to his client’s imminent ruin.

“Yeah? And whose fault is that? Jesus Christ.” He heard his own voice screeching, worn brake on cable, still unable to stop himself. “Pull up my portfolio.” A quadrant of his sight filled with words and numbers; in the center, Brevis’s gaze shifted to the right, seeing the same data. “Just look at that crap.” The back of Axxter’s hand rapped against the wall, the metal ringing hollow. “That’s why I’m going broke.”

He could watch Brevis’s eyes ticking down the list of holdings. “Ny… what can I say? These are your clients; like you’re my client. I’ve got faith in you; you’ve got to have a little faith in them.”

“These,” said Axxter, “are the flakes you stuck me with. Warriors, my ass. Bunch of wankers, is what they are. They couldn’t rape and pillage their way out of a plastic bag. I mean, of all the tribes in my whole portfolio – tribes that you set me up with – who do you think’s doing the best? Huh? Out of this whole wimpy lot?”

Brevis shrugged. “I suppose… those young guys – what were they called? – Stylish Razorteeth; something like that. They were pretty hot, weren’t they?”

“Mode of Razorback.” Axxter shook his head. “Were hot – precisely. Now they get their butts kicked on a regular basis.” The mention of the tribe’s name grated on his nerves. He had done a full graffex workup for them, from the wall out, all the combat visuals and PR regalia that a brand-new military tribe required. A solid month’s work, without even any upfront money for it – Brevis had sold him so hard on the new tribe’s prospects that he’d swallowed this major inroad into his operating capital. Receiving for his labors a good-sized chunk of the Razorbacks’ initial issuance of stock. Preferred stock, he reminded himself. He’d get his share of whatever loot, ransoms, or other spoils the tribe brought in right at the initial divvying-up, zipped straight into his bank account. A cut of the gross; that was always the condition attached to one of these start-up deals, why the attraction for freelancers – not just graffices like him, but the whole panopoly of caterers, camp followers, tacticians, everything a military tribe needed to operate on Cylinder’s vertical wall. Attractive enough for freelancers still on the hustle – like me, thought Axxter. Hungry for those high returns on the investment of time and labor. Blood and sweat -

“I really worked for those suckers.” He muttered his thoughts aloud.

“I know you did, Ny.” Endless meters of sympathy from Brevis. Part of his job. “First-class work. Terrifying stuff; just terrifying as hell.”

“Yeah, right; terrifying.” His gloom deepened. “All they had to do was go out and terrify somebody with it. You know, get out there and do their job. Act like goddamn warriors. But did they? Tell me – did they?”

“That’s not quite fair, Ny. Their first couple of sorties went pretty well, all in all. For new guys. You made money off them, remember? You didn’t mind that so awfully much, now did you?” A waggling finger, admonishing a sulky child.

Axxter grunted. “About enough to sneeze on. And how’ve they done since then, huh? Eaten their shorts. Give me Stats. What’s the ranking on Razorback, Mode of.”

After a moment’s search came the response: THAT

TRIBE IS UNRANKED AT THIS TIME. UNDER THRESHOLD LEVEL FOR TRADING; INITIAL OFFERING PERIOD ELAPSED.

“Combat, historical quickscan, same tribe.”

PRECEDING SIX MONTHS FROM PRESENT DATE: THREE ENGAGEMENTS; TWO CHALLENGE SKIRMISHES, ONE RAID. LOST BOTH SKIRMISHES, HEAVY EMBARRASSMENT DUE TO FLEEING WALL SECTOR DURING WIRE SYNDICATE’S “UP & COMING” BROADCAST, LEADING TO DUMP OF HOLDINGS BY ALL SPECULATORS, THUS LOSS OF BOARD RANKING. RAID INCONCLUSIVE DUE TO MAP ERROR BASED ON INADEQUATE INFO: HIT UNOCCUPIED SECTOR. MORE DETAIL OR FURTHER BACK?

“Christ, no,” said Axxter.

“Come on, Ny.” Brevis lifted his hands, pleading. “I admit they’ve had some bad luck. They’ll pull out of it.”

Axxter glared at the image. “I doubt it. And they’re the best of the lot I’m stuck with. What about Straight-Line Ravage? Huh? What happened to them?”

Brevis winced. “Please…”

They’d gone over this before, more than once, but like probing a broken tooth, he couldn’t leave it alone. The particular black hole disaster of his freelancer portfolio. All that work down the drain… the thought of it still made him ache with fury. “Right off the board.” Distantly, he heard Brevis’s weary sigh. “Right off the goddamn board.”

Straight-Line Ravage had suffered the final ignominy, the ultimate possible for a military tribe. Too inept to even manage getting killed in a challenge with another tribe, unable to scrape together enough credit to feed themselves, they had sold themselves en masse on a long-term labor contract. Axxter supposed they were making plastic-extruded widgets in some grim horizontal sector factory at this very moment.

“Right off the board.” He said it wonderingly this time, anger having ebbed away. Right off the board and off the exterior of Cylinder itself, wiped from the vertical wall as if they had never existed, had never swayed on the transit lines or hung in their thin bivvy slings, boasting to each other and the open air of all the blood and havoc they were about to wreak on the great building’s unsuspecting inhabitants. Beating their fists on the warror decs that Axxter had worked into their armor and into the very skin over their pectoral muscles, along the swollen biceps. When he had sent the coded animating signal to the Small Moon and the appropriate response had been narrowcast back to the Ravage camp, the decs had writhed through their simple five-second cycle and the tribesmen had howled with an equally simple joy. Well, that’s over; Axxter could almost taste the sourness of the thought. Ain’t no joy in working the lever and pushing the button, putting out those widgets. You proud warriors. He managed to feel sorry for them, beyond the economic loss to himself, their selling out having left him and the other freelancers with shares in an enterprise gone bust. Sorry, and a certain chilling kinship.

Vertical was tough. Anybody could fall off the wall. One way or another; either the big step, right down into the cloud barrier below, or… back the other way, inwall to the horizontal. Where some fuming widget machine waited for him as well.

“Ny…” Brevis’s voice slid under his bleak meditation. “Can we just… put the Ravage thing behind us? And… look ahead?”

“‘Look ahead’ – Jesus.” Axxter turned his gaze toward the sky, managing not even to see it. “I’m looking ahead to starving out here.”

“Hey – it’s not any easier for me, Ny.” Finally, Brevis’s lubricated armor had worn through. His voice rose in pitch. “I got operating costs, too, you know. You’re getting nothing? Fine – I’m getting ten percent of that nothing. My other clients -” Bitter now. “What they bring in isn’t paying the comm charges, either. We’re all hurting, Ny. Can I help it if that Ravage bunch, and all these others, they turned out to be such wimps? They looked good, man; I had scouting reports up the ass on those guys. At the level we’re operating at, we can’t plug into some sure-bet outfit. We have to go with the chancy ones.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know.” He rubbed his brow, feeling a twinge of guilt. I don’t even know why I called him up, except to just bitch and whine. Which doesn’t come free, idiot. “I don’t have to put up with this freelance bullshit. I could’ve gone to work for DeathPix. They said they wanted me.” His oldest whine of all, invariably dredged up when he was feeling sorry for himself. The big topside corporation, which handled not only all the graffex work for the Grievous Amalgam, the ruling tribe of Cylinder, but also for the Havoc Mass, their main rivals for power – he had passed their hiring exam, been offered an entry-level job with them… and had turned it down. So he could go freelance. So bitch about it, asshole.

“Ny… you want to call it quits… you want to see if the DeathPix job’s still open… I’ll understand.” Brevis had recovered his smooth, soft ease again. “I don’t want to lose you, but… I’ll understand. I think you could make it, if you could just see your way to hanging on a little bit longer. But if you don’t think you can… Hey. It’s all right. I know it’s tough out there.”

You slimebag. Axxter knew he was being conned, his own buttons being pushed. But a good con; he knew that as well. Tying right into his own thoughts on the matter. Giving up on the vertical – giving up the whole freelancer shtick, starvation and all – that’s giving up everything I dreamed of. Dreaming while watching the tape of the dead angel, over and over. Dreaming and waiting.

“All you need is the one break, Ny.” Brevis’s soothing patter went on. “Just the one. Your stuff’s good; you’ve really got it.”

“You really think so – don’t you.” He lifted his eyes hopefully, bringing the agent’s image back onto the dead-film. This, he knew, was why he’d called him. Just to get that little pump of life into his heart again.

“You got it, man.” So sincere; radiant with emotion. “All it takes is one tribe with your designs on them; they pull off some heavy shit, get some attention, some good line coverage, and then you are the hot number in the graffex biz. All you need’s the exposure. With your stuff – I guarantee it, Ny. When it happens, we’ll have clients all the way to the top calling us up. You’ll write your own ticket after that. You just gotta hang in there a little longer.”

Foolish hope. And vain desires, thought Axxter. He could still taste them, welling up under his tongue. Well, shit – if you can still be jerked around by a two-bit lube artist like Brevis… then maybe it really is all possible. Or at least you still think it is.

“All right.” He nodded, Brevis’s face sliding up and down his vision. “I didn’t say I was giving up. I’m not at that point yet. I just wanted you to know what my situation is out here, that’s all.”

Brevis’s smile tightened at the corners, wink above, a signal acknowledging this gritty attitude. “I knew you wouldn’t crap out. You got what it takes.”

“Yeah, yeah… you bet.” He glanced at the corner of his vision where the charge for the pointless call racked up, and sighed. “Look, I’ll give you a ring after I get hold of this new bunch – what’re they called -”

“Rowdiness Combine. They look hot, Ny; I wouldn’t bullshit you about this. But they got real blood-lust. They just may be the ones who’re gonna do it for us.”

Simmer down, for Christ’s sake. “We’ll see about that. Catch you later.” Flick to DISCONNECT, letting the Wire Syndicate take its summed-up bite out of his bank account.

The sun had lifted higher over the cloud barrier, moving along the course of the morningside’s day. Full light now, no longer filtered red. Time to get moving on his own small segment of the building’s circumference.

For a moment he considered watching again the tape of the mating angels. No – don’t. Unnecessary, anyway; he could still see them, as if some brighter radiation had burned them into the empty sky, or his own eyes.