Farewell Horizontal

hours had been just fussing, fine-tuning shit you couldn’t see without a scanning microscope. Way beyond the percept level of an audience like this. Just carried away, and afraid to let it go. The big one, the big break.

Sleep. He could just curl up in the sidecar, set the terminal to blast a rouser down his optic nerve in about five hours or so. Plenty of time.

He knew he wouldn’t be able to. Keyed-up the way he was. Heavier than the fatigue.

Hollow time – money in the account; he debated a quick visit to his girlfriend. And decided against it. He didn’t want the fine edge of his mood destroyed by her lacing into him, as he knew she would.

Or he could look up Guyer, wherever she was out on the wall. That’d be nice. You pay, but you get something… nice.

Thinking, dragging the point of his focus across the options laid out at the top of his sight, triggered a spark.

Dreams to none are so fearful…

One of those weird bits the previous owner had programmed in.

… as to those whose accusing private guilt expects mischief every hour for their merit.

Christ, what was that supposed to mean? He let it run on.

Wonderful superstitious are such persons in observing every accident that befalls them; and that their superstition is as good as a hundred furies to torment them. Never in this world shall he enjoy one quiet day that once hath given himself over to be her slave. His ears cannot glow, his nose itch, or his eyes smart, but his destiny stands upon her trial, and till she be acquitted or condemned he is miserable.

The words drizzled away, into silence. Well, fuck – it had left him befuddled.

Crouched down beside the motorcycle, strapped to a transit cable, he let his gaze wander out across the darkening sky. She was there, the angel; he could see her out in the distance. Sparkling with the last of the sun creeping to the other side of the world, a smaller moon whose face he could remember.

EIGHT

The General nabbed him just as he worked free of the crowd and got inside the ceremonial tent. General Cripplemaker shouted into his ear against the din of ragged fanfares and drum paroxysms.

“Where the hell you been!” Axxter felt a spit fleck hit his earlobe. “You got ten minutes! Till it goes!”

“I had to go back out to -”

“What!” The general’s face was red, laced with straining blood vessels. “Speak up!”

A conga line of warriors almost pulled him away; he had to peel a hairy arm from around his waist. The line stamped and writhed through the crowd, fists pummeling into laughing faces.

Axxter leaned closer to the general. “I had to go out to my rig.” The general nodded; a section of the bandstand had collapsed, spilling the horn players into the crowd and taking the screeching top edge off the din inside the tent.

Axxter fluttered the cardboard square he held. “To get my invitation. Security – uhff – security wouldn’t let me in without it.” He rubbed the small of his back, where something round and hard, like a human head, had jarred his spine. A serious fight, with glints of steel in fists, had broken out; he stepped around to the general’s side to get out of the widening shockwave.

Fetching the invite wouldn’t have taken so long if he hadn’t had to go all the way out of the encampment to get it. When he’d woken up, in the dark, his heart had gone racing into a panic before he blinked on the clock and saw that he just had time to scramble into a clean outfit and make it to the banquet. Looking upwall, he’d seen the crowd around the guards at the entrance, besieging the great striped bulk of tent on its platform cantilevered out into space. He’d figured it would be easier to leave the motorcycle and sidecar where it was and just swing on up the transit cable on his own. A good decision, he’d realized when he’d seen the ranks of vehicles, scooter fleets to half-track howdah pavilions, piled up around the tent; the Havoc Mass had sent out invitations to all its allied tribes and several grudging but nonthreatening rivals. There wouldn’t have been room for the Norton in the tangle of wheels and cables.

Even though the sentry at the tent’s entrance recognized him, he still couldn’t get in without the little rectangle – gilt lettering on black: Nunc est bibendum, nunc pede libero mura pulsanda – in his hand. So another whole trip outside the camp, keeping his head low to avoid fists and missiles, weaseling between sweating backs and legs. He was just now getting his wind back, his good jacket torn, a suspicious-looking beige stain clotting on his boots.

Cripplemaker wrapped an arm around his shoulders and pulled him toward the center of the tent. “But you made it! Great!” Axxter flinched against the general’s roar.

There was a seat waiting for him near the central dais. Junior ranks and a few hereditary dignitaries on either side of him, the closest on the left facedown in a pool of wine dribbling off the edge of the table, one hand still locked on the handle of the jug. “You’re who?” demanded the bleary face on his right.

In the corner of the tent, the horns had climbed back onto the bandstand and were duking it out with the percussion. “Just a hired hand,” said Axxter, pacific smile, as he lifted his elbow from the wine spill. “Little graffex work here and there.”

“Yeah, yeah; great.” The other looked away, down the length of the table, and snagged another pitcher. He drank and stared heavy-lidded in front of himself, ignoring everyone else.

Axxter craned his neck, looking up toward the dais. Pretty sure he’d missed out on the food; the waiters were clearing away greasy plates with gnawed bones on them. He had no appetite, anyway: his stomach was bouncing up and down in expectation.

He could see Cripplemaker in the center of the dignitaries’ table, reseated and talking – laughing, shoulder- clapping – with the men on either side of him. They weren’t in Havoc Mass formal dress; some high mucketymucks from the major allied tribes, Axxter figured. The big guns – old, grizzled bastards with that same narrow, gunslit gaze the general had, the long stare of command and slaughter. When they laughed, it was like steel-jawed traps creaking apart to show the hair-trigger mechanisms within. Cripplemaker leaned back in his chair, drawing on a torpedo-size cigar; his gaze intercepted Axxter’s. The general’s thumbs-up sign showed through an exhaled barrage of smoke.

The alarm clock Axxter had set in the terminal trilled inside his ear, a little red dial ticking at the corner of his vision. Three minutes to showtime, and counting. The band left off their internecine combat and segued into a major-key ostinato, growing less ragged with each da capo. Waiters with cattle prods began clearing the floor in front of the dais.

A corridor formed through the crowd, bodies held back by the Havoc Mass sentries linking arms, digging into the platform surface with their heels. Behind them, the party mob, compressed into a smaller space, frothed and howled, worked up by the band modulating through minor seconds. Axxter could see one of them chewing a sentry’s ear into red gristle; an elbow to his throat sent him tumbling back under the feet of his comrades.

The horns held and vamped a half-step short of resolving the octave; the drums kicked into a double-time accelerando. The tentlights dropped, except for a single spot lancing through the dark, picking out a figure at the far end of the tunnels of faces.

They oiled him good – Axxter barely recognized the old warrior as he strode toward the center of the tent. The medestheticians, the Mass’s own or some freelancers brought in for the occasion, had pumped the old boy full of something that had straightened his spine and put a fierce glitter in his deep-set eyes. Beard washed and combed, then braided and tied with black ribbons, some of them long enough to flutter over his shoulders as he walked, planting a silver-headed staff tall as himself with each step, a contact mike at its tip to snap a bullet report over the mounting din. An embroidered cape hung to the tops of his glistening boots, concealing the armor beneath.

The band’s chord resolved as the old warrior hit the middle of the space cleared for him. He stopped and threw back his head, arm locked to thrust forward the head of the staff. He surveyed the crowd, his yellow teeth showing as he relished the collective gaze fastened on him

The horns and drums cut; miraculously, there was silence. Axxter felt his head vibrating from the battering