by K. W. Jeter
He reached out and gripped the edge of the metal curling up alongside the Norton. The chill inside him died, fell away into a hole under his gut.
The metal was warm, hot at its core. The retained heat of the violence that had torn the wall open passed into his palm.
He jerked his hand back, the fright finally penetrating through his surprise. “Jee… zuss.” No more than a whisper. When he breathed again, he smelt the trace of smoke drifting out of the darkness ringed by the ripped wall sections.
If they were still here – the ones (and you know who, he told himself) who had blown open the building’s skin, and had put that sickening smell into the wind, sickening with the knowledge of what it was even if you had never smelled it before – if they’re still here, thought Axxter, inside there, it’s no use pouring on the throttle and splitting on out of here. Because they don’t work that way. How far would he get before he felt the same heat that had charred and twisted the metal wall on his own back? Not far enough – Christ, he thought, sick with dismay. What happened to all that good luck?
Of course, they might not still be here. Watching him from inside the gaping hole, with their hard little eyes, or whatever they might have instead of eyes. In which case, by their absence, he would be allowed to scurry away with his deeply treasured little life.
In which case, also – the thought rose unbidden, an automatic mercantile reflex – you might as well see what’s in there. In as in information. Which can be peddled; that’s what being out here on the vertical does to you, thought Axxter, amazed at the track of his mind
Greed beats fear anytime. Axxter slung one leg over the Norton’s tank and let his boot pithons snap onto the wall’s surface.
Cautiously – though he knew there was no point – he gripped the torn edge of the metal and peered around it. The heat inside the metal soaked through his jacket to the skin of his stomach. Lying on the curved shelf the wall segment formed, he could look across the gaping hole torn into the building. Or out of – the explosion, or whatever it had been, had come bursting from inside. That alone proved it hadn’t been the work of any military tribe rampaging around on Cylinder’s exterior, but something else.
Through the viewfinder, Axxter estimated the jag-rimmed hole at over a kilometer across, a gaping cavity in the building’s side. Turning the camera to the interior, he taped the twisted girders of a horizontal flooring level jutting out. Farther inside, only blackness, the walls of the broken corridors blackened with smoke.
He reattached the camera to his belt, right behind where the gun’s handle protruded. A lot of footage, more than he needed. If he was going to sell this – and there was no question of that; he needed all the cash into which other people’s misfortunes might translate – it wouldn’t be on the basis of aesthetic appeal. The thought of what had done this would be, as for him, just a little too much for people to bear. That thing that everybody’s afraid of, back in the darkness, way inside the building – Axxter shivered. Maybe that’s why I like it out here, one way or another. At least it’s out here. Away from that. He craned his neck and looked back inside the charred hole.
Something looked at him. He felt it before he caught sight of it. A white face, right at the edge of what had been a floor. He lifted the camera and zoomed in on it.
He lost it in the viewfinder, panned across the black metal, and found it again. He felt no surprise, nausea more than fear.
Empty eye sockets gazed toward the camera. Flame-scabbed remnants of another stuff, the odor the outside winds hadn’t yet cleansed from the atmosphere, blackened the withered neck and cage of ribs behind the skull. A hand, unmarked, clutched the broken edge of steel.
You too. The skull grinned as it spoke inside Axxter’s head. Watch out. The smile licked out and relished the knot in the still-living gut. Watch out, watch out, watch out…
THREE
He’d fallen asleep among corpses. His fatigue had caught up with him, in the burnt-out sector. Dreaming of bad things; Axxter cradled his head on his wrist, back of hand against ashes and concrete. The familiar comfort of sleeping on a horizontal floor, no matter how torn where it ended in air. An even more comforting weight of metal on his chest, finger curled against sickle trigger. A space cleared among the grinning things, so they wouldn’t whisper in his ear. But he was dreaming of them nonetheless.
“You too!” Dancing in a circle around him “Even as we are! You too will be!” From their white faces and spider ribs the charred-tissue remnants flutter, black rags. (In sleep, Axxter moaned, clutched the gun tighter.) A skull squared off with a mortarboard cap turns to its audience, hand rattling like dice, the thin end of the pointer tapping on Axxter’s breastbone. The lecture-hall lights come up, blinding him, standing naked on the podium.
The pointer flicks his nose, then draws a line down to his navel. “We see the front side.” The skull’s voice is Guyer’s, oddly, but no longer kind. “The sun comes up on this side. We see this side, we know this side.”
“We see! We are! Will be!” White grins swaying in the seats. (The crosshatched handle sweats in Axxter’s grip.) “You too!”
“The sun goes up and over -” The pointer traces vertical between Axxter’s eyes, bisects his forehead. He strains to hear the skull’s words; some analogy here, but he can’t make it out. “Then it’s on the other side, the rear side. We don’t see that side, we don’t know what’s on it – we don’t even care!”
“Don’t care!”
“But ah! The center! The core!” A flourish, and an overhead mirror lights up. Axxter rolls his eyes brow-ward, to see what the pointer stabs at. And observes, with sick surprise, the reflection of a circular hole at the top of his own head. A flat hat of darkness that drops away into a hole parallel to his spine. The reflected light falls into it, with only a few glimmers as echoes. “That we know – something about!”
“We know!”
(Sleeps and draws a bead, but all the grinning things outside the dream stay prudently quiet.)
Skull, Guyer’s voice: “Something we don’t want to know! Something inside – where it’s dark!”
“Dark! Dark! You too! Dark!”
(Twitches and mumbles, sweating.)
Dream-Axxter stares at the hole revealed in the mirror, the darkness running down inside him, the hollow core.
The lecture goes on. “Something – it’s where they are! The -”
He shouts at the voice, just a grin behind the glare of the lights, warning it to shut up. But it doesn’t, he knows with dream-certainty that it won’t. It’s going to say the name.
Chorus: “You too! You too!”
“… the -”
Then the gun is right there in the dream – you’re never completely naked with one – and he squeezes it with both hands as the white face screams in triumph.
“ – the Dead Centers!”
In the corridor of ruins the gunshot slapped against the wall and bounced back into Axxter’s ears. He jerked awake, the gun in his hand scraping across the floor as he scrambled upright, just in time to hear the bullet’s clanging echo against the wall.
“Shit!” He ducked instinctively, head down between shoulders. “God-damn.” The bullet clattered into silence somewhere along the corridor. Gun warmth seeped into his palm; he dropped it with a start, as if seeing the weapon for the first time. Looking down, he saw a burn mark across the front of his jacket. Prodding his ribs, he found nothing amiss. A mutter, as he shook his head: “Fuckin’ dreams.” Could’ve killed myself. What I get for falling asleep, down here, of all places. His hand still shook as he reached for the terminal jack he’d found when first looking about the place.
As soon as he waggled his finger in the socket, the words zipped into his vision.
WHERE YOU BEEN? GOT ASK & RECEIVE HOT FOR YOU.
“Oh – yeah. Right.” He blinked away a bit more sleep muddle. Dark enough in the corridor, the exterior visible through the torn-open wall already fallen into deepshade, that he didn’
t need the deadfilm. From the time readout in the corner of his gaze, he made a quick calculation: he’d only been asleep and locked into the dream for a couple of minutes or so. He’d called Brevis – no way of avoiding him, since the info value of the find depended on giving the ruined zone’s location – and Brevis must have called, as a good agent should, the numero-uno toplevel data agency. And sold it for a lot of money, Axxter hoped. “Put ’em through.”
Ask & Receive’s animated logo – hand with mouth in palm, then eye, then mouth again – came up on the terminal. Followed by a softly modulated female voice: “Please send location coordinates. Will credit to your account the sum of -” A male voice broke in, clipped and bored: “Two hundred dollars.”
“What?” Axxter stared at the mouth, eye, mouth pattern.
The words looped in repeat. “Two hundred dollars.”
“You must be joking.”
The male voice came again, a real-time override. “The price was worked out by your agent, fella. You want to check with him -”
“You bet your ass I’m checking with him. Hold this sucker,” Axxter instructed the line. “And get me Brevis.”
His agent’s face came up, one pacifying hand already stroking the air. “I know, I know -”
“Two hundred – what are you doing to me, for Christ’s sake?”
Brevis’s other hand rose, warding his client away from his throat. “That’s all they’ll pay, Ny. Believe me. They don’t even want your tape, man. Somebody beat you to it.”
“Somebody what?”
“Somebody else already got the info to Ask & Receive. And copped the initial report fee for it. Two hundred bucks is the standard payment for a confirming report from a second-on-the-scene. There isn’t any money for anybody who comes after you, Ny.”
“Two hundred bucks.” Axxter gritted his teeth, bitter spit under his tongue. They’re screwing me. First the angels tape, now this. He looked around, Brevis’s face floating superimposed over the charred corpses, the walls bowed and blackened by explosion, the torn skin of Cylinder itself. He had climbed in and taped it all, greed circuits kicking in at the sight of so much destruction. You get paid – you’re supposed to get paid – lots for info like this. The unprofitable corpses went on grinning at him.
“They’re screwing me.” Out loud. “There’s no one else around here who could’ve reported it. I’m the only one out in these sectors.” Except maybe Guyer Gimble, he noted to himself. And she would’ve told me if she’d spotted anything like this. “And the metal was still hot. From… whatever happened.” Still reluctant to speak it, the name the skull had shouted. “Nobody else could’ve come across it before me. They’re cheating me of the initial report fee.”
“Hey.” Another wave of Brevis’s professional sympathy. “I know that. You know that. But what do you want to do, get a bad rep with Ask & Receive? You’re gonna have to deal with these people long after this. They want to cheap out on you – just let it slide, Ny. You won’t be able to get as much money from anyone else.”
“They’re screwing me.” Axxter closed his eyes, but Brevis’s face didn’t go away. “Shit.”
“Take the money, Ny.”
The voice behind Ask & Receive’s logo sounded smug when Axxter got back to him. “Two hundred dollars all right, then?”
“Yeah, sure.” Your ass. He read out the coordinates for the zone and logged off. Not even bothering to check his account for the deposit of the fee.
It was a moment before his spirits rose again. “Not yet,” he replied to the nearest corpse’s grinning comment. “Soon enough, but not just yet.” Hadn’t been a total waste of a day. Two thousand for the mating angels, another two hundred – those fuckers – for coming across this place… Not bad; not really. “Puts me ahead of you.” A fly in search of unscorched nourishment crawled over the white face.
The dream came back to him as he reached across the floor and retrieved the gun. I get it now. The spooky lecturer, the hole in the top of his own skull, the darkness running down inside. Everything except the point of it all. He stood up, the gun heavy in his jacket pocket, and started walking back toward the exterior, the deepshade lighter than the ruined interior. His boots, pithons nulled on the horizontal, raised little clouds of gray dust.
At the jagged floor edge, the welcoming corpse lay across his path, white face turned toward where he had spotted it in his camera’s viewfinder. He stepped over it – bony hand reaching for his ankle, unable to grasp it – and looked back inside. He could still smell the burnt odor.
That’s what happens. Stupid shits – gave your lives for me, and all I got out of it was two hundred bucks. The people who had lived in this horizontal sector – bumpkins, this far from toplevel; machine tenders – had made their little deal with the Dead Centers – the name finally spoken inside Axxter’s head, the dream skull having broken the ice – and had made their final payment for it. That’s what happens. Even if you don’t think it’s going to happen to you.
He wondered what had made them decide to do it.
How long they had thought about it, talking during their lunch breaks at the widget factory, first sotto voce, then right out loud when everybody in the sector had been in on it. What had the Dead Centers said to them – the blandishments of things you’ve never seen, have only wondered about, moving in their secret ways in the great darkness at the building’s core and in your bad dreams. The whispering voices that had come through the thick, sealed walls way far inside; maybe a signal override on any Wire Syndicate transmissions coming in, just a crawl of words across the bottom of their terminals; maybe little rolled notes floating up in their toilet bowls, spidery handwriting, smeared sticky ink…
You’re so wise and good, dear people. The whispers through the wall. So clever and smart. Yet oppressed by those old lies, slanders against those who would befriend you. Let us come to you, and we’ll give you… everything… everything…
Everything, thought Axxter, looking down to where the scorched walls merged with the dark. What would that include? Who knows… all sorts of elaborate pre-War high-tech, no doubt. The Dead Centers were supposed to have inherited all of that stuff. Wonders upon wonders, hidden away in the building’s core. Maybe it had even been watching that old Opt Cooder tape, of the dead gas angel tangled in the exterior transit cable, that had worked away on the poor horizontal suckers’ imaginations. Common belief that the angels were the remnant of some military genetic technology, bred for some now-unfathomable strategic use. Forgotten the same as everything else connected with that ancient event. Maybe the Dead Centers themselves were what was left of one of the warring factions. Maybe the War itself… some effect of the other guys’ weapons, or their own… had changed them… left them crouching in the dark at the building’s core… whispering to those who could still stand the light…
Just let us come to you. Why should you let those ones above you push you around, cheat you of all you so richly deserve? We’ll help you… just let us come to you…
A shiver ran under Axxter’s skin. Fuckin’ spooked myself. The image came of the sector’s inhabitants, when they’d had flesh over their grins, drawing back the heavy bolts, cutting through the heavy steel plates, boring a hole through whatever stood between them and the darkness at Cylinder’s core… their minds made up after a unanimous vote at the sector meeting… or just made up, without a word spoken, silent greed flashing round from eye to eye -
They’d had a big surprise then. Wonder how long they had to think, Not such a great idea, after all. Not too cool.
At least they got to satisfy their curiosity. About what the Dead Centers even looked like. Toads with jewels in their foreheads, or nothing but shining rods of light, or small golden-haired children with dead eyes – the scary stories of childhood romped behind Axxter’s eyes. At least I listened to those tales; these poor suckers must not’ve. And look what they got.
Axxter’s gaze came back to the burnt zone, the smell in his nostrils. He
turned toward the jagged edge of metal curling beside him, grasped it, and hoisted himself back out onto the vertical.
† † †
Deepshade to night. Axxter made camp as far away from the ruins zone as he could get before dark set in.
Even at a distance of several kilometers, the torn metal remained visible, a rim of jagged teeth biting at the stars.
Other than that, a peaceful scene, as he lay in the securely anchored bivouac, hands behind head, rehydrated food inching warm through his gut. The Norton grazed a few meters away, scraping up the wall’s vegetation with its extruded proboscis. My cup runneth over, or at least closer to the rim – Axxter scratched his stomach in deep meditation. Weird day; small profits, smaller than I deserved, but still – profits. A section of his lower intestine gurgled assent, echoing the noises from the motorcycle’s conversion tank.
Overhead, out from the wall, a circle of dark silver: the Small Moon rounding the building, catching only trace light from the toplevel and the thin ribbons of the Linear Fairs’ perpetual activity. He’d kept the transceiver on, angling his head to catch the weak bounce of a free-access station. Ancient music – the Liebeslieder Waltzes, somebody (-thing?) called Tampa Red’s “She Don’t Know My Mind, Part Two” – seeped up the wire to his finger and then inside to his ear. Interspersed with commercials – enlistment bonuses from the Havoc Mass (made him think of Guyer’s surprising faith), new stuff online to buy and watch (maybe the mating angels were already in the catalog) – all of which he ignored. Or tried to; the image of the figures in the bright sky kept seeping into his thoughts.