by K. W. Jeter
“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 kn
ow, 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 segmen
t 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.
TWO
Methodically, with elaborate care, Axxter broke down his small camp. Taking more pains than necessary; I know, he told himself once more, as he watched his hands going through routine. Mind working on two levels about the subject. On top, right up against curve of skull, the old subvocal litany: Careful; have to be careful; weren’t born out here like some of them; until you get your wall-legs, better, smarter to be careful still. But underneath, not even words: fear, not caution, slowed his movements. As narrow and cramped as the confines of the bivouac sling were, it was at least something underneath him, a bowed floor of reinforced canvas and plastic beneath his knees as he knelt, or shoulder and hip when he slept, and the empty air beneath. That was as safe, he knew, as you got on the vertical. He could have stayed in the sling forever, hanging on the wall. Money, the lack of it, compelled otherwise.
Eventually everything – not much – was packed into two panniers and a larger amorphous bundle. He closed his eyes for a moment, gathering strength, then stood up, the sling’s fabric stretching beneath his feet. He whistled for his motorcycle.
For close to a minute, as he leaned against the building’s wall, holding onto a transit cable for balance, he heard nothing, no answering roar of the engine as the motorcycle came wheeling back to his summons. Thin green on this sector of the wall; something to do with Cylinder’s weather pattern, Axxter figured. The motorcycle would have to have grazed for some distance to have filled its tank. Just as he was about to whistle again, he heard the rasp of its motor, growing louder as it approached.
Over the building’s vertical curve, due rightaround from where he stood in the bivouac sling, the headlight and handlebars of a Norton Interstate 850 first appeared, then the spoked front wheel and the rest of the machine behind. Bolted to the motorcycle’s left side – the uppermost side now, as the machine moved perpendicular to the metal wall – the classic blunt-nosed shape of a Watsonian Monza sidecar came with the motorcycle, its wheel the parallel third of the whole assemblage. A typical freelancer’s rolling stock; he had eyeballed it for so long back on the horizontal, when he’d been saving up his grubstake, that he’d memorized every bolt before he’d ever actually wrapped his fist around the black throttle grip. Even now, after this long out on the vertical, the sight of the riderless motorcycle heading toward him – accelerating as if impelled by love, though he knew it had only taken a visual lock on his position – affected him, rolled on a sympathetic throttle inside his chest. A notion of freedom, as much so as angels, living or dead.