Farewell Horizontal

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 -

A darker thought struck him, pulling him back from the few seconds of pleasant reverie. “Hey.” Staring suspiciously at Brevis’s image. “What about DeathPix? What happened to them? I thought they did graffex for Havoc Mass.”

Brevis’s vibrating enthusiasm ebbed, replaced by a more familiar expression. The uplifted hand cautiously stroked the air. “Uh… you don’t have to worry about them, Ny. This doesn’t really have anything to do with DeathPix. You know?”

“Yeah, I know.” Thanks a lot. You asshole. The grand estimate of the Havoc Mass wealth, and his tiny but juicy sliver of it, dwindled away. This is your big deal? Cutting in on DeathPix’s action? He shook his head. “Great – you really earn your commission on this one, all right. When DeathPix sends over some of their pet thugs to cut off my nuts, I’ll tell ’em to just do it ninety percent, and the other ten percent’s for you. Okay?”

“Ny… come on.” The voice displayed its wounds. “You’re my client. Would I set you up for something like that?”

“No, I don’t think you’d set me up. You’re just a stupid dumb fucker who doesn’t know what he’s doing. Jesus.” He couldn’t believe this. Everybody knew what a stupid idea – stupid to the point of merrily embraced self-destruction – cutting in on DeathPix’s business was. It was common knowledge among freelance graffices, one of those little bits of info that the old-timers were happy to pass along to the new guys. Complete with grisly accounts of what had happened to those foolish enough to have succumbed to that temptation. Accounts that, even shorn of the embroidery years of retelling had given them, still contained a hard stone of truth: that DeathPix was nothing to screw around with. It had the true arrogance of power, blithely servicing the Havoc Mass and the Grievous Amalgam, and any other tribe that could afford its fees. DeathPix was an organization big and powerful enough, with more revenue than most B- list tribes, to be considered a tribe itself. Except not as much fun; its gray hierarchy had put Axxter off the idea of accepting the job he’d been offered with them. It wouldn’t have seemed like going vertical at all; just one dud prison in exchange for the other. Grubbing away in some little cubicle and maybe three whole steps up the corporate ladder before he died, or got pensioned off good as dead. When he’d turned down the job, handing the contract back to the DeathPix recruiter, he’d thought it’d be better to starve out on some wastewall sector than to sign up for a life like that. He’d had occasion to think about that decision since; not quite so sure, now.

“Ny, believe me – I know what you’re thinking, and it’s not like that.” Brevis patiently worked his line. “I’m not trying to get you to go up there just to cut in on DeathPix’s business and get your butt kicked. It’s something different. And it’s something you’re gonna have to keep your mouth shut about, too, okay? You got me?”

Secrets, no less. “This better be good.”

“I promise you.” Brevis’s voice went lower, confidential. “There’s some big changes coming up. I mean really big. The Havoc Mass is thinking of dumping DeathPix altogether. I mean, boot them right out the flippin’ window.” He leaned back, eyeing Axxter’s reaction.

Genuinely impressed – Axxter bit his lip and drew in a hissing breath. Sweet Jesus – maybe Guyer is right, with all her talk of revolution in the air. Big changes, indeed. If not a complete inversion of Cylinder’s top power rankings – what Guyer’s messianic faith was given over to – it was still a fundamental change in the organizational fabric binding Mass and Amalgam. As if one of them had decided to switch over to some other atmospheric constituent for respiratory purposes; about on that level. Big changes; Axxter rolled them over in his mind. And big money. A great big wad of it, no longer handed over by the Mass straight to DeathPix’s accounts. It loomed in Axxter’s imagination, a great big, spinning golden sphere, shedding a warm radiance over the whole building’s uplifted faces, like some new, unsetting sun. When something that big came loose from the hands that had grasped it so tight, all sorts of little pieces came shooting off, to be snatched up by smaller, faster ones. That’s what big changes meant.

Still. You had to be careful. Nobody lets go that easy. “Why would the Havoc Mass want to dump DeathPix?” The logical question; DP had graffex resources unmatched by anyone else – designers, techs, terrorist shrinks up the butt. And all those years of accumulated expertise; hard to get that same level of service elsewhere. There were reasons why DeathPix charged so much.

Brevis shrugged. “You want my guess?”

“No, I don’t want your fucking guess. I want what you know.”

“Okay, Ny; but if you spill any of this, neither one of us will be worrying about our nuts, or anything else. Got me?”

“Yeah, yeah.” He shifted position in the sling. All this mysterioso talk had eaten up enough time to have given him cramps in his legs. “Just lay it on me.”

All the pitch machinery faded from Brevis’s voice. “This is the deal, Ny. The Havoc Mass is making its move. Finally. They’ve been building up to it for a long time, and now they’re finally gonna do it. Not today, not tomorrow, not next week or next month. Not this year, and probably not next year, either. But the gears are in motion, Ny. The process has been started; they think the time has come for them to go straight for the top. They’ve got the numbers; they’ve got the alliances – man, they’ve got secret alliances that nobody’s gonna be-lieve, until they see it all come down. Maybe they’re gonna be able to knock the Grievous Amalgam off the toplevel, or maybe they’ll go bust trying for it. But the time’s come. Simple as that.”

The time has come. That goddamned Guyer. Axxter had to shake his head in admiration. She knew. Something in the air that she could taste with all of her finely honed senses. She could just stick out her tongue and lick the insurrectionary molecules off the wind coursing down the building’s surface. Plus all the little rumors and whispers, the intimacies to which a person in her trade is privy. One way or another, she’d known something was up, and had told him so. Still -

“Well… that’s all fine. More power to ’em, I guess.” Axxter studied the other’s image for any further clues. “But what’s all this got to do with me?”

“Coming to that, man. This is the deal: the Mass wants to do two things in getting ready for the big push. They want to completely revamp their visuals – rank insignia, trophy decs, psych-outs, ikons – the whole schmazzola. Head-to-toe redesign. And they want to plug any possible leak of their plans to the Grievous Amalgam. When they roll, they want all their military imagery to take the Amalgam and any of its allies by surprise. Get the picture?”

Axxter scratched his face. “I don’t know… I don’t see why the Mass would want to dump DeathPix. I mean, if that’s what they want. DeathPix can do a complete redesign for them; Christ, they’ve done it three or four times already.” When he’d been working and saving up to go freelance, boning up on notable graffex achievements had been part of his preparation. You had to know what had gone down before, in order to come up with your own originals; plus it’d been cheap research, with nothing to pay but the Wire Syndicate access time to the toplevel copyright office. Some of the DeathPix redesigns for the Havoc Mass were considered classics, big conceptual advances in the graffex art – ten years ago, the “Bleeder/ Eater” ikon set had been the first to use optic phase-shift subliminals; that alone had been credited with bringing the pivotal Knives of God tribe into the Mass fold; the Grievous Amalgam had had to order up whole new graffex work to avoid any more defections. DeathPix had been the real winner of that little image skirmish, with big fees raked in from both sides and an even more solidly cemented reputation. So why would any tribe who could afford it want to bump a contractor like that? The absolute best – he couldn’t figure it.

Brevis shook his head. “They’ve gotten stale, Ny. What have they done lately? Nothing but the same old shit. The Havoc Mass wants fresh blood. They want something nobody’s ever seen before.”

“Yeah, well… maybe.” In spite of himself, he felt a little trickle of excitement wend past his skeptical defenses. It would be a wild thing… Some of the stuff he had in his design archives, the off-the-wall things he worked and reworked, getting every line and effect perfect, just waiting for the day… Some crazy things in there. Maybe the time had come. In more ways than one. “But what was that other bit? About the Havoc Mass not wanting any of this leaked to the Amalgam?”