Farewell Horizontal (10 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Funny. But pretty –
beee-fore
.”

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

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

“Huh? Why what?”

Again: “Why?”

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

“You do?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Pretty.”

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

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

“You make the pictures?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“
Forget
about those assholes! They’re dead
meat!
Who needs ’em?”

He had never seen Brevis this worked up before. Axxter regarded the overexcited features of his agent, bright in his vision. “I thought we needed them. That’s why I’m looking for them.”

“Small potatoes, man – don’t you get what I’m saying?” Brevis’s hand chopped the air beside his face. “
It came through
. What I been tellin’ ya would. A really big deal. You don’t have to go scrabbling after some penny-ante start-up buncha clowns. This is the
big
one, Ny – I told you I’d come through for ya.”

Sitting cross-legged in the bivouac sling, Axxter rubbed sleep from the corners of his eyes. Hell of a way to be woken up, with Brevis – at least the agent had used his
own
nickel to put the call through, a small comfort – yammering away at him. Something about knocking off the search for the Rowdiness bunch that he’d spent solid days on already. Right when I’m about to catch up with them, too – can feel ’em, somewhere close by. “So what’s this big deal?”

Brevis’s face grew, as though he could lean closer and dive right through the building’s wires and out of the display. “
Havoc wants you
.”

A moment to sink in. “What?” He tapped at his ear; the voice inside must’ve been garbled. “Did you say Havoc? As in Havoc Mass?”

“Yeah, yeah – come on, who the hell else?” Brevis bounced up and down, his excitement increasing. “I
told
you it was a big deal.”

“Jeez.” Well, I’ll be dipped, as someone else had recently said. The numero two-o military tribe on the whole friggin’ building – soon to be number one, right at the toplevel, if Guyer and a whole bunch of other usually-know-what-they’re-talking-about people are correct. And even if they didn’t wind up swarming over the Grievous Amalgam’s gates, rowdy barbarians that they were, and just stayed locked in that tight balance of power, the mutual chokehold situation that endured on Cylinder for the last couple of decades; still – Axxter felt the digits of his heart’s greediest sector ticking over and mounting up – still, to be in with the Havoc Mass, with its massive bank accounts, controlled turf, overlapping stock ownership and directorate memberships with other, lesser – but nevertheless heavyweight – tribes; all the alliances, fidelities, intermarriages, tributes, outright extortion, all mirroring the Amalgam’s own Byzantine arrangements propping up its long-held power . . . Fuck it; Axxter had gotten dizzy just thinking about it. Who cares who wins? If anyone ever does. Just to get that close to all that sweet at the top, the heavy money, right at the source – instead of scrabbling around this far down on Cylinder’s surface, where precious fuck-all of the honey comes trickling past all the other greedy mouths open to lap it in. I wouldn’t be a dumb-shit freelancer, scrambling around looking for the big break. I’d have a
major contract
; major money for providing a service to a major tribe, like the other major contractors –

A darker thought struck him, pulling him back from the few seconds of pleasant reverie. “Hey.” Staring suspiciously at Brevis’s image. “What about DeathPix? What happened to them? I thought they did graffex for Havoc Mass.”

Brevis’s vibrating enthusiasm ebbed, replaced by a more familiar expression. The uplifted hand cautiously stroked the air. “Uh . . . you don’t have to worry about them, Ny. This doesn’t really have anything to do with DeathPix. You know?”

“Yeah, I know.” Thanks a lot. You asshole. The grand estimate of the Havoc Mass wealth, and his tiny but juicy sliver of it, dwindled away. This is your
big deal?
Cutting in on DeathPix’s action? He shook his head. “Great – you really earn your commission on this one, all right. When DeathPix sends over some of their pet thugs to cut off my nuts, I’ll tell ’em to just do it ninety percent, and the other ten percent’s for you. Okay?”

“Ny . . . come on.” The voice displayed its wounds. “You’re my
client
. Would I set you up for something like that?”

“No, I don’t think you’d set me up. You’re just a stupid dumb fucker who doesn’t
know
what he’s doing. Jesus.” He couldn’t believe this. Everybody knew what a stupid idea – stupid to the point of merrily embraced self-destruction – cutting in on DeathPix’s business was. It was common knowledge among freelance graffices, one of those little bits of info that the old-timers were happy to pass along to the new guys. Complete with grisly accounts of what had happened to those foolish enough to have succumbed to that temptation. Accounts that, even shorn of the embroidery years of retelling had given them, still contained a hard stone of truth: that DeathPix was nothing to screw around with. It had the true arrogance of power, blithely servicing the Havoc Mass
and
the Grievous Amalgam, and any other tribe that could afford its fees. DeathPix was an organization big and powerful enough, with more revenue than most B-list tribes, to be considered a tribe itself. Except not as much fun; its gray hierarchy had put Axxter off the idea of accepting the job he’d been offered with them. It wouldn’t have seemed like going vertical at all; just one dud prison in exchange for the other. Grubbing away in some little cubicle and maybe three whole steps up the corporate ladder before he died, or got pensioned off good as dead. When he’d turned down the job, handing the contract back to the DeathPix recruiter, he’d thought it’d be better to starve out on some wastewall sector than to sign up for a life like that. He’d had occasion to think about that decision since; not quite so sure, now.