Farewell Horizontal (2 page)

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?”