Farewell Horizontal

anywhere close to all those who wanted to kick his ass. That should’ve been priority one. Still -

“Boom.” Lahft nodded sagely, arms still wrapped around herself. “Then. Falling – right?”

“Fell.” He could imagine it, his deadweight dropping the hugging angel along with him.

“Long, long way.” She pointed to the clouds, and whatever was below them. “So I go big.” The translucent sphere behind her shoulders expanded in demonstration; she lifted a bit off the metal seat as the gases inside the membrane made her buoyant. “Then. Not falling.” The smile again.

“Not falling – right. Then what? Uh – drifting?”

“Drifting.” She nodded. “Big, and the wind -” She made a pushing gesture with the palm of one hand. “Drifting and drifting. A long way. Then. Here.”

She wasn’t going to be much help in getting his bearings. Location was probably as fuzzy a concept as time for the angels. No difference out there in the air. They could’ve gone drifting over whole sectors of wall, one angel with her flight membrane ballooned out to the max, and her unconscious payload; until some favorable gust had brought her up against the building’s wall, close enough for her to grab on. His pithons had latched on, triggered by the proximity of steel, and she had knotted together that rope from whatever scraps she’d found nearby. Then waited.

Axxter looked to either side, leaning back against the pithons’ tension. Bleak, featureless wall stretched out. Gotta find a plug-in jack, he decided. There had to be one around here somewhere. So he could call his bank – before anything else, he had to do that. He had to know how bad his financial situation was. His bank account was probably wiped out by whatever fine he’d been hit with for cutting the transit cable. Maybe even in the absolute red right now; he’d be hustling for years to get it paid off. Still, if Public Works Department had left him with anything at all, he could make a start at finding out what he needed to know. Like where he was, and how many were out looking for him. Ask & Receive – he could place a shielded, anonymous call to the info agency; by the time the Havoc Mass had wangled a trace, he’d be long gone. If he had the money left to pay for the info. Axxter bit his lip, letting his thoughts spin along without brakes. Gotta find some place to hook up so I can make the call; that was the first thing -

He stopped, his string of thought suddenly broken. The light around him had turned red, the building’s wall deepening with it. That puzzled him, and he couldn’t tell why. Except that it had been all bright, well into the day, when he’d come to, found himself hanging here. The red light tinged darker as he stared about; he could see it on the backs of his hands. It was as though time had decided to run backward; it had become as loose and arbitrary for him as it was for the angels. The dawn following the daylight, coming after it rather than before -

He knew Lahft was staring at him, puzzled at his sudden confusion. Staring at him, as he stared out into the sky, toward the far edge of the clouds. Out where he saw something he had never seen before.

The clouds were all molten gold and red, turning darker, even to black as he watched.

The sun was setting, vanishing below the rim of the cloud barrier.

Axxter went on staring, as the sun became a slice, then a red point. He had never seen the sun set before. Nobody had.

† † †

He had a long time to think about it. All through a long and cold night, waiting for even the gray shadowlight that would come from the sun rising on Cylinder’s morningside.

By himself; Lahft got hungry, or bored, and went floating off. Axxter figured he’d see her again. In the vertical cradle of his pithons, he hung close to the wall, shivering in the dark winds, working things out inside his head.

He was on the other side. The eveningside – that much was clear. Where nobody – nobody he’d ever heard of, at least – had ever been. Just his luck – a whole new world stretching out in all directions, and he’d landed up in it with nothing but the clothes on his back. In one piece, at least; he had to admit that. The throbbing of his bruises had diminished, the blood ebbing back to his heart. One sharp pain remained in his side, which he’d prodded once with his finger, then promised himself he wouldn’t touch again.

Must’ve been drifting out there for – what? A day, two days? How long would it take to get this far from everything? Axxter gazed out into the darkness, wondering. Unless drifting wasn’t the exact word to be used – maybe Lahft, with him in her arms and her flight membrane distended all the way, had got caught in a ripping current out near the atmosphere’s edge. Out in the jet stream: that would’ve raced them along, right over all the sectors of the morningside, right over Linear Fair, the Right or the Left one. And then – spang – down here in unknown territory.

A new thought wormed its way in. Maybe she’d done it on purpose. Hanging out the way she’d been doing; she wasn’t so stupid as not to have known that he was in major trouble. Time to split, before more of the Havoc Mass ass-kickers arrived on the scene. The farther away from the scene she could deliver him, the better. And there wasn’t any farther than this.

“Christ almighty.” A cramp had bit into his leg. “Shit.” He reached down and massaged his thigh. Without his bivouac gear – all gone cloudward with everything else stowed in the Watsonian sidecar – the night cold became fully evident for the first time in his vertical career. You could freeze to death out here – he let the cramp be, and nestled his arms tight around himself again, drawing the edges of his torn jacket together. He’d be glad to see the first shadowlight filtering gray across the wall – meaning the sun had risen above the cloud barrier on Cylinder’s other side – as then he’d be able to see where he was going, moving to pump up the warmth in his blood. Plus find a place to plug in and make his call to Ask & Receive. Dig up whatever files they had concerning the eveningside. Any scrap of knowledge might be useful. And food – what the hell was he going to do about that? His brain niggled on, each worry marching after the other in time to the grumbling ostinato from his empty stomach. As the pain from his bruises receded, it had revealed that deeper one, growing sharper with time instead.

Impossible to sleep; that had always been difficult enough, even with a securely moored tent to cradle him, a nice cozy little womb to stretch out in. It had taken him a week of increasing red-eyed exhaustion, when he’d first gone out on the wall, to manage it. Now, strapped to the metal by nothing but his boots and belt, Christ only knew how far from anywhere anyone else had ever been, and his butt freezing… He scrunched his head down as far as he could. Got enough sleep, he supposed, when he’d been drifting along in the gas angel’s arms.

His gut panged again. Should’ve eaten at Cripplemaker’s banquet; he hadn’t known that it was going to be his last chance for a while. He closed his eyes and waited for light.

† † †

He spotted it, a little dimple on the building’s edge; a rush of joy blossomed inside his head, enough to squeeze tears stinging in his eyes. The straight line between Cylinder and the sky wavered for a moment.

Panting his thanks, Axxter hauled himself toward the plug-in jack. His arm and leg muscles trembled from the hours of spidering over the building’s surface. Noon already, Cylinder’s noon; the vertical landscape had gone from gray half-light to bright full as the sun had broken over the top far above him That was a sight he had never seen before – a dawn you had to tilt your head back to see – but he’d been too tired to marvel at it. His slow progress, prodded by hunger and a carefully held-down panic, had come close to exhausting him. With his lost motorcycle- and-sidecar rig under him, Cylinder had seemed big enough to him. Now he’d had its immensity beat into the stiffening crooks of his hands.

“You sweet thing. Come on over here.” In the slanting crab-scuttle the pithons at his waist and ankles afforded him, he slid toward the plug-in.

“Gotcha.” There were concentric yellow rings painted around the spot, the plug-in the exact center of the target. Axxter knuckled the tears from his eyes, then probed the hole with his finger. Dust and cobwebby muck; he scraped it out with his nail. He stuck his finger back in, waggling it back and forth to make contact. “Come on, you sonuvabitch…”

An unnerving fear that he hadn’t let himself think about during his search dried his mouth. Maybe the Wire Syndicate lines, the pre-War network it had inherited, maybe they didn’t run all the way to this side of the building. Who knew? Maybe there was no connection to be made, his finger rattling inside a dead hole, no line to the far world of help and money… “Come on -” The dot of bright metal on his fingertip scraped against the side of the hole. He squeezed his eyes closed. “Please -”