by K. W. Jeter
Her voice so bright, madly cheerful – considering what had happened to her, the condition he’d found her in – he wondered how much she actually understood of what she said, and how much was just parrot tape loops cycling around. Where’d she get it from, then? Eavesdropping – on whom? He let it slide, one of life’s mysteries. He stepped farther onto the platform, letting the curtains fall behind him; something small and metallic clattered away from the edge of his shoe. Looking down, he saw one of the scalpels he’d used to cut away the burnt edges of the angel’s flight membrane. All of the med kit’s implements were on the platform, arranged in lines and starbursts; the empty kit lay tucked under the table. She’d done all that, carefully and silently, before some small inadvertent noise had triggered the alarm mike.
He stepped over the surgical tools and stood by the table. The black leather satchel with his graffex gear inside was stowed beneath; with a real freelancer’s instinctive caution about the tools of his trade, he had put them out of harm’s reach.
The angel didn’t look at him, but went on gazing at the spoked curtains above her head. “The sky’s so small here.” She sounded puzzled.
“Oh – hang on.” He reached over to the nearest panel of fabric, unsnapped the fastener, and drew the curtain rattling to one side. The angel watched his actions with interest and gave a little delighted laugh when the open air was revealed.
“There you go.” Axxter grasped the edge of the table, bracing himself against the wind that now coursed over the platform. She looked at him, the same sweet smile indicating her incomprehension. You beautiful idiot; a sad twinge inside himself. How would she know anything, about anything at all? “You see – that wasn’t the sky. You were inside. You understand? Before I pulled the curtain back.”
“Before..” Lahft’s gaze wandered from his face. “Beee… fore.” Looking placidly at the sky. “Forbear. Four bears.”
Christ; maybe Guyer’s spoiled all this for me. The angel sat on the edge of the table, her hands folded in her lap, the wind tracing her hair over her bare shoulders. Axxter watched her with diminishing lust. Impossible to keep up a carnal interest in anyone – anything – this dim. Like raping a puppy. Enough bad payback there to last you for the rest of your life.
Or – he considered another possibility – maybe she’s smarter than you think. In the kinds of things that angels would know. And with just… a different sense of time. If any at all – he wondered how much it would be logical for angels to know about something like that.
She had caught sight of something over her shoulder and had twisted her slender neck to look at it. The flight membrane – whole and spheroid again, not the tattered rag Axxter had found her wrapped in – reflected her distorted face in the shiny metallic surface.
“Uh – I did that.” Axxter didn’t know if he was apologizing or bragging. “I had to, ’cause it was such a mess. That’s why it’s different now.”
“Different?”
No different without before. “This -” He reached above her shoulder and poked the flight membrane, his fingertip dimpling the biofoil he had implanted to replace the burnt-away tissue. “This isn’t the way it was…” He stopped, seeing her smiling, uncomprehending gaze. Was; what good did that do? Like teaching higher mathematics to a cat. He didn’t even know why he was trying to explain.
He tried again. “Look.” She obediently followed his lifted finger. “The sky – right?” A nod from her. She understands something, at least. “Okay, that’s the way it is now.” He reached for the curtain edge and drew it around, shutting off the view beyond the platform, enclosing them again in the protected space. The sunlight filtered dimly through the curtain fabric. “Now it’s all small again. Like it was.” The last word desperate; I’m blowing it, he thought. Not even getting close. He flicked the curtain partway open again, revealing an angled wedge of the sky. “Is.” Closed again, in half-light. “Was.” Shaking his head, a sigh; forget it. Somebody, a professional semanticist maybe, might be able to bridge this gap; he couldn’t.
She still smiled at him, Which only made him feel more frustrated. An amusing thing, in a world full of amusing things. A wonder that she hadn’t just broken out laughing at him. Maybe that’s the benefit of being an angel; all the sad things are in that other world, of before and was. She doesn’t have to worry about any of that. If she worries about anything at all.
He wondered how much she remembered of whatever had happened to her. Remembered – that was a laugh. Probably dropped like a stone through the clouds below, to whatever oblivion lay beneath them. He bent down and picked up a small battery torch from the tools scattered across the platform floor. The glowing ball of flame danced in her eyes as he held the torch in front of her and flicked it on. For a moment, Lahft smiled at the tiny spark – pretty light – then her face clouded. She drew back, hands pushing against the edge of the table.
Well, well. There’s something there after all – maybe right down in the cells, the organism’s own deep memory. Axxter snapped the flame off – the distress in the angel’s eyes made it seem uncomfortably like torture – and dropped the torch.
“Not… here.” She sounded almost thoughtful, gazing away from him, tilting her head to look up the expanse of wall above the platform. “A bright place. Like that.” She pointed to where the torch’s flame had been.
No time, no difference between then and now… She thinks it’s still happening somewhere. Always happening, without end, in that bright place. “Up there?” He indicated the wall sector from which he himself had been traveling.
“Yes.” Lahft nodded, the smile gone for a moment, brow creased with an effort at comprehension. “All bright… and loud.”
“Loud?”
Her head tilted back again, this time with her eyes closed. She screamed.
It sounded as if every death in the ruin zone, all the charred faces gaping against the blackened walls, had been taped, dubbed into one stack, and dubbed into a loop feeding back into itself. If God were a parrot… the hell of his lungs, tongue, broken spine. The platform’s curtains flapped as if they could rub into sympathetic fire.
The scream battered against Axxter. It didn’t stop; the cords in the angel’s neck tightened, vibrating. He stepped backward, the sonic wave pushing him away. His foot caught the torch he’d discarded, and he went down, landing on hip and elbow. He scrabbled to get away from the scream at his back, and found himself gazing over the platform’s edge. Beyond his fingertips clenching into space, he saw the clouds massing against the building’s curve. Even falling, hands outstretched, he wouldn’t escape the noise raking up his spine.
It stopped. Just the wind sliding past his ears; Axxter rolled onto his side and looked back at the angel on the table. The smile returned to her face, but different. A tilt of her brows, the gaze no longer wide-open. Not as dumb as you think, turkey. Unsteady, he managed to get onto his knees, then his feet. Two parallel lines of medical tools marked his flight across the platform.
“You saw it, then? What happened?” Axxter stood beside the table again. She must’ve seen it just hanging out there in the air, the way angels do, when the Dead Centers blew open the wall, in the process of reaming out the foolish horizontal collaborators. Saw it, and watched: more amusing things, doing amusing things. Bright, fiery light and an interesting noise. Curiosity had its inevitable price, though.
She paid no attention to him. Looking over her shoulder, she was again absorbed in examining the mended flight membrane. The silvery biofoil reflected her intent expression.
All right, toots. He reached under the table, past the dangling bare legs, and fetched out his graffex gear. Now a little surprise for you.
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 h
is 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, stru
ck the metal skin, the new piece of the angel, and sent a bright flamelike spark back to his eye.
FIVE
“ 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 -