by K. W. Jeter
He took the photos and looked at them. Something big and black, squatting down, as wide as it was high, with little red dots for eyes; a megassassin. He’d seen one before – on tape, that had been bad enough – but this one was different. Its chest panels were open, revealing the death ikon inside. A corny but effective design, typical of DeathPix, all daggers and teeth. But then again, it didn’t have to be the world’s most memorable design; it was meant to be the last thing you saw before you got your head ripped off. To see the ikon was to have the last few seconds of your life snuffed by grim inevitability; that was the whole psychology of it. Fear of the image being somehow greater than the fear of what would follow.
But this one’s history now. “I think… I’ll be able to give you what you want. Something really… special.”
“Well, good. I’m glad to hear it.” The general patted the desktop, catching the tempo of the distant music. “’Cause the new megassassin is also going to be something special. I’ve seen the designs for the battle gear; the grafting surgery’s supposed to start any day now. He’s going to be a a hundred percent bad-ass piece of fighting hardware. And we want your ikon on him.” A wobbling finger jabbed toward Axxter’s chest. “Your design is going to be the last thing a whole bunch of people ever see.”
“Yeah… great. Can’t wait to get started.” He found himself rising from the chair. Looking down, he saw a grizzled hand cupping his elbow. The old warrior had returned, summoned to guide him back out. The audience with the general had ended.
“That’s the ticket.” Cripplemaker rocked back in his own chair, hands clasped behind his head. “I’ll be talking to you. There’ll be more jobs than just this one. That’s a promise.”
† † †
They gave him a pass to go in and out of the camp. The noise level outside the muffling layers of the generalissimo’s tent had swelled to the deafening point; in the sprawling compound of the machine shop, the clatter and snarl of engines crescendoed over the hammers’ ostinatic beat. The lounging off-duty warriors compensated by increasing the ferocity of their revels. Heading for the camp’s exit, Axxter squeezed past a mock battle, scarred, sweating forms stripped down to ribbons of chiming bells, all thwacking each other over the head with aluminum poles and laughing in demented glee. One of the watching camp followers snaked a hand around his thigh and tugged him toward the rope sling she sat on, meanwhile barking an invitation drowned in the general hubbub. The woman pantomimed her intent; startled, Axxter pulled his arm free and quickly scrambled down to a point where he could regain his pithon-assisted stance on the building. The uproar, on top of Cripplemaker’s booze, had his head throbbing in sync with his crawling pulse.
The guards at the exit took a bored glance at his pass, then waved him on through. “Comin’ back in later?” The sun had already passed over the top of the building, setting the wall into shade.
He shook his head, immediately wincing and regretting it. “No – I got some stuff to do. Things to get. I’ll be back in the morning.” Really just needed some place he could hear his own thoughts. “That okay?”
A shrug as the big hands looped the chains back over the gate’s bar. “Suit yourself.”
He found the Norton grazing a half-kilometer from where he’d left it, climbed into the sidecar, doused a rag with water from a canteen, and plastered it to his forehead. What a bunch of fuckin’ animals. The feeling he always got when he left the lonesome purity of wandering – and going broke and starving; that had to be admitted – out on Cylinder’s emptier wall sectors, and had to get down to the actual business of his trade. Maybe after this job, all those wandering and starving days would be over. A depressing thought, in some ways.
Leaning his head back against the sidecar’s rim, he looked up into the dimming sky. The speck he’d seen before was there again, floating in the air.
“Aw, Christ.” He knew; no zoom lens necessary. By now some invisible link had been set up between them, a kite string by which he could detect her presence on the other end. She followed me here. The stupid thing. This being no territory for angels… especially one who’d already been winged once, by somebody. Or something.
He stood up in the sidecar, holding onto its windshield for balance. “Get out of here!” The shout smeared in the wind; he knew she couldn’t hear him. But shouted again, waving his arms. “Go away!”
The angel, the little speck, hung at the limit of his vision. And didn’t go away.
SEVEN
“So we had these guys, see, all rounded up, and we were all still pretty revved up from the battle – you know how you get? – and we were sitting around wondering, well, you know, what could we do with ’em? What could we do with ’em that’d be fun, I mean. So we had the engineers bring over this spool of cable, see, this real heavy-duty stuff, and we -”
“Excuse me.” Axxter held up his hand in front of him, trying to stop the old warrior’s monologue. “Hey… I’m just going to go outside for a minute.” He had to wave his fingers in front of the rheumy yellow eyes to get the man’s attention. “Okay?”
“- and we put it through the first guy’s neck, but that didn’t work, you see, ’cause it just ripped right through when we lifted it up, so we -” The old warrior’s gaze focused on Axxter’s hand as he came back up from memory time. “Huh? Where ya going?”
“I just, uh, need to get some fresh air.” Axxter pointed with his thumb over his shoulder to the tent flap. “We been going at it for a couple of hours now; I just need to clear my head a bit. That all right?” He didn’t like the way the warrior was looking at him.
“Don’tcha want to hear the rest?”
The warrior’s jaw poked forward far enough to hook the points of his bottom teeth over his straggling gray mustache. His eyes burrowed under his lowered brow, leaving just two glints of red.
Axxter reached out and patted the recorder hanging on one of the tent ropes. “No problem. Getting it all right here.” The little box swayed on its knotted strap. “Great stuff – just great.” He felt his stomach rising into his throat again; it had been threatening all the time he’d been listening to the war stories. “You just keep right on talking; I’ll listen to it later.” He turned away and ducked under the tent flap before he got any more argument.
Outside, he climbed over to the closet transit cable and anchored his hip belt to it. He glanced down to make sure he had a clear shot downward, in case he lost it completely; all he needed now was to upchuck on some Havoc Mass sentry posted at the camp’s downwall boundary. Even if he did have privileged artisan status with General Cripplemaker – these bastards were all touchy as hell. Affronts to honor could get you drilled, with no thought given to what brig time they might pull for it. Drilled, or given the big step – or something even worse, along the lines of what that old bastard back in the tent was still gassing on about. Axxter shook his head as he relaxed against the cable, as though he could shake the veteran’s grinning words right back out. Judging from his anecdotes, the guy must have risen in the Mass’s ranks not from any military prowess, but from his bent imagination regarding what to do with any unlucky POWs after a skirmish. What a sick sonuvabitch – Axxter gazed down at the clouds; at the atmosphere’s bonding edge, they roiled up into guts and skulls, tangling around each other. He closed his eyes for a moment, but could still see them, and hear the old warrior’s voice, leering with fond violent memories.
Still, a paying job; the thought soothed his own gut, a warm glow easing outward along his limbs. He gathered the sour taste that had seeped under his tongue and spat; it looped silver, and was gone. Paying job, and not just that: the second one from these good folk. Which meant he’d pulled it off.
I did it. In solid with a major tribe. The major tribe, if you left out the Grievous Amalgam, which had been locked in up at the toplevel for so long it was like air or the vertical wall behind your back, part of the nature of things. But to have cracked the Havoc Mass… to have slid right under the nose of DeathPix,
and done it… because he was good, his stuff was just so fucking good… That meant his scrabbling-around days were over. That was worth listening to gruesome after-battle stories, any number of them.
The first commission that he’d gotten from the general – the new death ikon for the megassassin – had just about burnt him out. And his portfolio; he’d been saving up ideas for years, all the time he’d been out on the wall, good bits just waiting for a job worthy of them. Stuff you couldn’t waste on some scrub-ass little gang of hooligans, the kind of gigs he’d been getting up until this had fallen in his lap. But some had leaked out, naturally enough; you couldn’t hold back all the time, if only to keep your skills up. He still wondered what he’d done that had caught the Mass’s eye; maybe one of the deep subliminals for the Gnash Boy Squad, the black teeth hidden in blackness, the rotating and replicating mirror-images in a throat that could swallow you down to your ankles if you looked at the biofoil image long enough. But that had been subtle stuff; those Gnash wankers hadn’t even known what they were getting, just groused about how long it was taking him – a lot more work than they were paying him for. He’d really been doing it just to see if he could pull it off. But somebody here with the Mass had spotted it, or some other neat piece he’d done, and realized its worth; that must mean there was some real aficionado of the art up in the top brass. Cripplemaker himself? Axxter doubted it; the man was strictly blood-and-guts bluster and politics. It must’ve been some behind-the-scenes type, a secret string puller, the kind with a wire running to every little detail, like a spider with a web so fine you didn’t even know you were caught in it. Not that he minded being caught; it was what he’d been hoping for all along. He just wished he could trace out who it was in the Havoc Mass that was responsible, so he could wrap himself up even tighter in the web.
He rubbed his eyes, still fried from the round-the-clock sessions on the death ikon for the megassassin. Fried, but worth it. No tricky sublims on that job; he’d wanted something that would zap Cripplemaker right off, impressive on the percept surface. Repeat-fold macro-tominiatures were best for that; a cheap trick, as long as you were willing to work the details down to those levels, but still a trick that always went over big with the rubes. You could watch them reverting to children – or as much of a childhood as somebody born into a military tribe ever got – as they went staring down into all that mandelbrot jazz-and-dragons. And then when it moved, when you sent the prearranged code up to the Small Moon and they came bouncing back with the animating signal – spasms of pleasure. Grizzled old murderers wriggling like puppies. Got ’em where you wanted ’em.
Fuzzy stars pulsed into the salt rim under his eyelids as he pressed harder with his thumb and fingertips. Now wasn’t the time to crap out; bear down and be set for life. He pulled his hand away, one finger smearing tear leakage across his cheek. Blinking, he scanned out over the clouds. She wasn’t there, this time at least. Maybe she’d finally gotten tired of hanging around, making her own moon out of her wordless crush, or else, more likely, she’d just drifted away with the other angels, off on one of their slow random errands. She’d disappeared from the sky before – the vacuum draining his heart with both a sense of relief and an odd sadness – only to show up again, a distant sphere and figure laced with sun. Smart enough to dangle out there, beyond easy sniping range of one of the Mass warriors lounging around bored. They didn’t like firing and not hitting anything.
His stomach had settled down. You could get used to anything, as long as you were getting paid for it. He unhooked himself from the transit cable and swung back up toward the tent.
He heard the snoring, deep, gelatinous, even before he lifted the flap. Inside, in the cozy filtered light, the old warrior’s hands fumbled at his belly hair, the black-crescented nails tracking some vague itch. The face behind the beard had gone soft, babyish, the pleasure of his dreams seeping out in a wet smile. Axxter didn’t want to know what the old bastard was unwinding inside his head; something disgusting, no doubt.
A chemical smell, the same as always on the old warrior’s breath, but stronger now, filled the tent. An empty bottle rolled in a clattering circle, dislodged by Axxter’s knee as he squatted down. A centimeter of clear pink fluid rolled around the bottom as he picked it up. He was about to sling the bottle out through the tent flap when he realized, looking over his shoulder, that there was someone standing behind him, head bent low against the ridgepole.
“What a grand old fellow.” General Cripplemaker gazed down at the sleeping warrior. He squatted beside Axxter, balancing himself with one hand against the tent’s springy mesh floor. The knuckles of his other hand stroked the warrior’s beard, evoking snuffling noises and one of the dirty paws rising up to brush at an invisible fly.
Cripplemaker nodded. “This old sonuvabitch,” still gazing at the warrior, “he was the one who ran me through my first basic training. Scared the shit out of me, he did.” A glance at Axxter, almost shy, embarrassed at revealing the tender lining of his soul. “End of the course, he’d rape the bottom ten percent of the class. The bottom one percent, he’d rape and eat.” The general’s eyes locked fervently on Axxter’s. “You can’t believe what a desire to excel that instills in you.”
“Yeah… well… I guess it would.” Cripplemaker’s hand had grasped Axxter’s wrist, squeezing hard enough to rub the bones together. He wondered uneasily what that was supposed to mean. The general was dressed all in black, he saw now, an outfit suitable for spies or assassins skulking around in the dark. Every time he’d seen the general before, there had been a double rank of medals dangling on his chest.
“Tradition – that’s important, you know.” The general looked again at the sleeping figure, his nostrils flared as though he could inhale the warrior entire. “There’s nothing we can do without it. We’d be nothing without it – not warriors, just rabble driven by the wind, bellies wrapped against our spines, getting our asses kicked by every little pipsqueak on the wall. That’s what we’d be.” The general’s voice had gone quieter and tighter, a vibrating wire. His eyes moved around to Axxter again, two little sparks inside narrow slits. “That’s why this job we’ve given you is so important. This man -” He let go of Axxter’s wrist and stroked the warrior’s gray hair, tenderly. “This man represents the tribe’s history; he is our history.”
Axxter kept his mouth shut. He’d heard this whole spiel before, when Cripplemaker had given him the new commission – couldn’t quite figure out why he was going through it all again.
“Do you understand me?”
“Well… sure.” Axxter shrugged. “I mean – that’s why I’ve been down here listening to him so much.” I’m not listening to this shit ’cause I dig it – he held that back behind his teeth. “All the campaigns and stuff, the big march, uh, the battles and… um… stuff…” Christ, what else had the grizzled old sadist gone rattling on about? He reached out for the recorder dangling beside their heads. Holding it against his chest, he sent the little glowing numbers dancing back to zero. “Great stuff… I mean – it’s just great material for me to use. You want to hear some of it?” He held up the machine.
“No, no; that’s all right.” The general smiled and patted his knee. “I’m sure you’ve been working very hard.”
“Well… always like to do a good job.” Axxter felt the recorder’s metal grow slick with the sweat from his palms. The general had eaten up all the space in the tent somehow, except for the little bit between them. And that he could gulp down in one swallow.
“A good job… yes…” The general’s face drew tight, skin becoming angles of chiseled stone. Eyes deep in the sun-wrinkled crevices. “But more than that. A, a great job. I know – you can do it.”
Axxter shrugged, as though the skin around his shoulders had gotten uncomfortably tight. “Well… thanks. Give it my best.” He pulled back – slowly – from the other, his spine pushing against the tent fabric.
The two little points followed him. “The whole histor
y of the tribe – that’s what you have to catch.” The general nodded, sinking deeper into his brooding. “On one man.” He stroked the broad curve of the old warrior’s breastplate. “The living embodiment of… of a saga!” The points brightened into sparks.
The guy was sure getting worked up about this deal. Axxter couldn’t figure what the big song-and-dance was for. These historical friezes were a regular cliché in the graffex industry. Every tribe had one, right down to the couple of louts who had nothing more to brag about than a successful shoplifting expedition in the stalls over in Linear Fair. Saga, my ass. He didn’t say it out loud – not with the general in front of him, all worked up – but this was the kind of job that really got on a graffex’s tits. Lots of busy little details to get down, you had to listen – Christ knows – to one grisly war story after another. You usually had about fifty different top brass sticking their noses in, each of them wanting some particularly flattering exploit embroidered into the friggin’ saga… Though Cripplemaker had saved him from that last hassle; it seemed to be a one-man project with him.
Maybe that was why the big leaning-over-my-shoulder number, the pep-talk rerun. The man’s an enthusiast – I can deal with that. Better that than starving out on the wall.
Axxter felt the tent rubbing against the back of his head. “I think… you’ll like it.”
The general smiled. “I’m looking forward to it. At the banquet – are you going to have it done in time?”
The usual push. The customer is always antsy. “No sweat.” If the senile old bastard snoring away between them could be woken up, and the last few good bits tapped out of him. And that was just for color, the little personal bits, frosting on the cake. He’d rung up Ask & Receive days ago, when Cripplemaker had first given him the frieze assignment, and gotten a full historical rundown on the Havoc Mass. On the sly. Clients usually didn’t want you going outside, getting a losses-and-all account, and working from that. Their own PR line was all ups. “It’ll be ready. You don’t have a thing to worry about.” He patted the sleeping warrior’s breastplate, sounding a dull heartbeat from the blank biofoil. No worries at all: he’d have to push it to get it all implanted, but he’d already sketched out the major panels, programmed the routines.