Farewell Horizontal

The poor fuck – the old warrior, weeping, had been bowled over by the mob’s slow tide. The angry figures nearest him were diverted, an eddy in the middle of the advancing wave, by the task of stripping the offensive armor off the old man. Foil and skin ripped, red seeping from broad patches of raw skin. Axxter felt bad about that: it wasn’t the old man’s fault. Much less so than his own. The old guy had been a pawn used to spear another pawn. He’d wind up spending a lot of time in the Mass hospital, getting new armor grafted on. Not that there would be any remedy for his senile broken heart.

The human wave hit, snapping Axxter back into real time. He toppled back in his chair as the edge of the table slammed into his stomach. The table itself rose, turning on its long axis, as the front of the mob surged against it. Axxter, knocked breathless, looked up in time to see the table come crashing down on him.

Or almost. The top edge caught against the tent fabric behind him, forming a triangular space with the platform underneath. Axxter uncurled from his knees-drawn-up egg, unlacing his fingers from the top of his head. He could hear the outraged Havoc Mass warriors foaming and scrabbling at the underside of the table, as though their black fingernails could scrape right through to him.

Jesuschristfuckingshit – the lofty, time-dilated perspective snapped away from him. On hands and knees, he listened to the shouts coming from the other side of the capsized table. The sonsabitches were going to kill him. If I’m lucky – once they got their hands on him, they had all sorts of ingenious ways to salve their wounded pride, at the expense of his flesh and nervous system. And that prickly emotion had been revved flat-out inside their breasts – being made mock of, like that, in front of the ambassadors and hangers-on from all their allied tribes – and by some little outside freelancer punk like him – they all had major payback to deal out.

The table shivered with the blows raining against it. The angle between it, the platform, and the tent wall formed a narrow tunnel; none of the crazed mob had thought yet of going around to either end, crawling in, and pulling him out. There were probably only a few more seconds before the crowd backed up enough to let the table be pulled away, exposing him.

One chance – the thought, of all those whirling through Axxter’s head, stood out – of saving his life, or at least enough little spark of it to get through the beating-plus that was going to come crashing down on him. If he could scoot down the triangular tunnel, pop out at the open end a few meters away, and make a dash up to the dignitaries’ table, get there before any of the mob spotted him and collared him with a hairy forearm around his neck… throw his arms around General Cripplemaker’s knees – then he could make a chattel declaration to the tribe. And then he’d be under their protection, or at least a little bit, enough; they couldn’t kill him, by the usual rules, though he knew they’d come as close as they could.

The plan, and the consequences – of becoming an owned thing, no longer human, an object – zipped through his mind without words.

He looked down the tunnel; he had a clear shot to the dais. Everyone on the floor seemed to have come around to join in the assault on the overturned table. What looked like the bottom half of Cripplemaker’s dress uniform, shining black trouser legs striped with red, appeared in the distance, a chair knocked over behind the standing figure.

Go! He started crawling, the heel of his hand crunching on a broken glass. Just go, for Christ’s sake -

“Uhff -” The muffled sound of blows came through the table. “Get back, ya asshole -” Somebody out there was finally taking charge. “Come on, move it back, goddammit!”

Axxter froze, staring down to the triangular opening ahead of him. And beyond; he didn’t see the chaos of tables and chairs, and the general’s legs. Something else, like looking down the wall at night, into dark without bottom.

“Get back, get back; come on, come on, move it -” The commanding voice barked, and the table creaked in response, relieved of the weight pressed against it.

The narrow tunnel lengthened and spiraled as Axxter gazed down into its depths.

Fingers appeared around the edge of the table. “Ya got it? No, over there, come on – get outta the way – okay, pull -”

The table crashed over, its legs sticking up in the air.

General Cripplemaker had climbed on top of a chair on the dais, to get a better view of the operations. The little graffex bastard was going to pay; he’d make sure of that. For making a fool out of him…

“Well?” The general shouted down to the men swarming over the table. “You got him?”

The sergeant who’d been directing the operation pulled a pair of men back by their shoulders. Down the length of the upside-down table, the rest stood back.

“Where is he?” The sergeant looked to either side and got shrugs and upraised palms in reply. “Where’d he go?” A couple of the Havoc Mass warriors pried the edge of the table up from the platform, as though the graffex might have been squashed flat underneath. The baffled sergeant looked up at the general.

Axxter could hear them, swearing and stomping around, through the platform. He swayed in open air, the big step down the wall gaping below him; he kept a white-knuckled grip on the ropes slung beneath the ceremonial tent. He’d have to move fast now, or his one slick move would have been in vain. A glance down to the cloud barrier far below brought his stomach up in his throat. He gripped the rope tighter, his ankles locked around its length farther along, and started inching himself toward the wall.

In the expanded seconds just before the Mass warriors had pulled the table back over, he’d had a vision. A peek down the line into the future. His future. After he’d made his chattel declaration to the general, and after that, when he was finally out of whatever medical facility was deemed appropriate for someone – something – who’d made himself into the tribe’s disposable property. His human status being the traditional price for hanging onto his life, breath and heartbeat being the only things his new owners wouldn’t pry out of him. In that dismal future line, once he was put back together – mostly – the tribe would’ve sold him off on a long-term, open-ended – meaning endless – labor contract to some horizontal production plant, way deep inside Cylinder’s metal skin. A long way from the rotation of sun and night, and into the perpetual glare of jittering fluorescents, the tiny slice of the visible spectrum that made everybody walking around in it look like corpses. An accurate perception, that: to get locked into one of those interior factories, with the proverbial key thrown away, was to be dead, your life over, the fun parts of it at any rate. Sleeping next to some plastics extrusion machine for four hours – or what you’d be told was four hours; no way to tell, since objects don’t own other objects, like watches or terminals – and then punching out widgets for the next twenty, over and over, until there was nothing left in your head except the platonic ideal of a widget. You might as well be a widget then; the transformation into object would be complete.

That so bad? You’d be alive, at least. And not so different from any other poor bastard pulling some gig on the horizontal, high-paying or slave labor; it was all a life where you knew that every day was going to be exactly like the one before. That was the nature of horizontal existence. It was what he’d come from, his polyethylene roots; only fitting, the closing of the arc, to go back to it.

Back to it… Those had been the only words going through his head, in the seconds when he’d been crouching on his hands and knees, staring down the dark tunnel stretching ahead of him, the hands of the Havoc Mass warriors prying back the table over his spine. Everything else, down at the bottom of that tunnel, just pictures and the sense of dead time. Back to it…

Until he’d turned his head, a bright flash catching the corner of his eye, and he’d seen a thin sliver of sky, down by his left hand. He’d seen what had happened: when the table had gone flying and its edge had hit the tent behind where he’d been sitting, it had torn the stiff fabric loose from the rivets binding it to the platform. A little gap, flapping in the wind this far out from the building’s wall; he’d caught the cold air in his teeth and nostrils. Air, and a section of distant cloud, far off in space.

Air or the tunnel. The table had started to topple back, pulled by the hands on the other side.

And when it fell back, he was gone. Stuck his head out through the gap and wriggled through, the snapped rivets raking his shoulders. Not even caring what was on the other side, a handhold or not, the edge of the platform or the big step below.

There was a rope, one of the tension lines for the big tent. Luckily, as grabbing it had been all that had kept him from plunging headfirst off the platform as he came wriggling out through the gap. For a dizzy second, he goggled at the fleecy ranks of clouds far downwall, one leg dangling over the edge, his other hand gripping the sharp corner of the platform. Behind him, he heard the voices of the mob booming against the fabric. A quick glance