Farewell Horizontal

unconfirmed rumors, old historical fragments, whatever already existed in Ask & Receive’s files. He’d have to get it all dumped out, break it down, before he could even get started. One thing to say what you were going to do, another to actually get off your ass and do it.

“They’re gonna want daily reports from you, Ny. Whatever happens to you, whatever you come across. You’ll have to keep an eye out for phone lines in there -”

“Yeah, right; whatever.” Ask & Receive would have to be happy with whatever they got. “Look, Brevis; thanks for setting it up, but I really gotta get cracking now.”

“There’s some other things about the deal you should know about, Ny -”

There were always other things. “I’ll get back in touch with you. Okay? Talk to you later.” He broke the connection to his agent. Time to check in with his bank.

ACCOUNT REACTIVATED. Blinking in a cheery green.

That made him feel better. Even more when his account balance came up, right in the middle of his vision. He looked out across the clouds, counting the zeroes superimposed on the sky.

ELEVEN

There wasn’t a lot to go on. Axxter stared into the darkness, the night sky beyond Cylinder, going over the scraps he’d winnowed out of the Ask & Receive files. He chewed the last of the bread, draining the plastic pouch to wash it down.

Nobody had ever done it before, gone all the way through the building; that much was established. Otherwise Ask & Receive wouldn’t have paid over that nice fat sum, which he’d already spent a good whack of rooting around in their archives. Should’ve asked for some kind of discount – since he was, in effect, working for them. Next time, ha ha. He didn’t feel like laughing. His eyes stung from the luminous words that had been crawling across his sight for hours.

The best piece of info he’d come across – UNCONFIRMED dancing all over it – was cross-compiled from the few reports of those who’d gone even a little way past the usually sealed barriers that kept the horizontal sectors nice and safe from the bad things further inside. Risky shit, that; little wonder that nobody had ever done much more than stick their heads past the barrier, take a quick peek, then jump back and seal up the hole.

The intriguing bit was the repeated speculation that there were tunnels running straight through the building. That the major access sites on the morningside, which allowed one to go back and forth from the building’s horizontal sectors to the vertical world outside, were the former openings of the supposed tunnels. People on the horizontal weren’t much interested in archaeology – from his own days there, Axxter didn’t recall them as being interested in much of anything – but some research had been done, dating the barriers just inside the access sites, finding them to be of a later date than the surrounding walls. The conclusion that beckoned, if one was given to the whole notion of transbuilding tunnels, was sometime, back in those misty War days, somebody had sealed up the openings. And they’d probably had good reason to – Axxter stopped that thought from going any further.

Say the tunnels were still there, though, straight shots from this side to that side. That’d be cool; you could walk from where the sun went down to where it came up. Back home on the morningside. A pleasant little stroll, and a helluva lot easier than clambering hand- over-hand along the building’s exterior without the Norton to make tracks on.

Axxter found a few crumbs in his jacket pocket, rolled them between his thumb and finger and popped the little ball into his mouth. Maybe his phantom benefactor would tie another present to him while he slept – he could use the provisions for when he set out to find some means of access underneath the building’s surface.

He knew where he was, at least. Not learned from Ask & Receive, but the Wire Syndicate. They’d been able to give him a pinpoint on the location of the plug-in jack he’d been using.

So to find an entry point on this side…

Axxter worried a fingernail, nothing else left to chew on. Step by step; he’d already figured out the parameters he was working inside. Assume everything about the tunnels through the building was true, and the entry sites into the horizontal sectors on the morningside had been the mouths of the tunnels before they’d been blocked off inside; then just work back from there. He pulled up a large-scale map of the morningside, with the entry sites indicated by red circles. His drifting odyssey in the gas angel’s arms had brought him almost exactly equidistant from either Linear Fair, the two dividing lines on either side of the building. And two-thirds of the distance down-wall from the toplevel to the cloud barrier below. So draw a line on the map, right down the middle from top to bottom, and another crossing it, then pick out the entry site mark closest to that X-point -

You idiot. Rubbing his eyes; he must’ve been getting tired. To think that was all he had to figure out. The morningside entry sites were where the tunnels used to open out onto Cylinder’s surface; they were sealed up now, just inside the building. What was he going to do, make it all the way through the building and then wind up rapping his knuckles on some steel plug, trying to convince somebody on the horizontal sector on the other side that he wasn’t some Dead Center paying a visit? If there was anybody on the other side to hear him – there were more uninhabited horizontal sectors than otherwise inside Cylinder, and not all of the occupied ones cozied right up to the inner wall that sealed off the building’s spooky core. Even if he let Ask & Receive know ahead of time where he’d be showing up, it wouldn’t be worth it to them to piss off a heavyweight tribe like Mass by assisting him – Ask & Receive kept a strict hands-off policy regarding physical intervention, only recording events, not creating them, precisely to avoid conflicts of interest like that.

Nice going, smart guy. He started over, trying to work it out inside his head, going fuzzy around the edges from fatigue.

What he needed was some place where the seal had been broken, an entry site on the morningside where the tunnel – still assuming there was one – ran straight through to open air.

Where the seal had been broken… A bad memory, a memory of bad things, rose up and connected, socketing in tight to the analytical thought.

The burned-out sector.

His own little discovery, come back around. Some place you’d swear never to go back to; that one look was all you’d need for the rest of your life, every little sensory pulse, every crunch of ashy bone beneath your feet, every scent of blackened flesh, sealed under diamond crystal.

No problem with the seal having been broken between that brightly-lit horizontal world just under the building’s surface and the dark stuff farther inside. And then some. He dug the coordinates for the burned-out sector from his archive, then scanned them across the map filling the center of his sight. A match: one of the little circles marking an entry site lined up.

“There you go -” He nodded to himself, not sure how pleased he should feel about this new discovery. If there were tunnels running through the building, then the end of that one was definitely open. Would’ve been handier if the spot was closer to the crossing of the two lines he’d drawn on the map. It’d take him days to get to the corresponding spot on this side, the other end of the line drawn straight to the building’s center.

That was also assuming that the tunnel was open on this side. Also that the supposed tunnel did run through the center, instead of at some other angle through the building. And a few million other things.

He had the advantage of being up against it, with no other choice. You were absolved of the fear of making the wrong decision. In some ways, Axxter figured, dead men had it easy.

In the morning – morning on the other side, the disconcerting half-light on this – he’d start out for the spot where he’d calculated the tunnel opening should be. In the meantime, there was this night to get through.

You’re a fool. Knowing already what he was going to do. With money in his account, and a phone line handy, he always did the same thing. He reached over and wriggled his finger inside the plug-in jack, made contact, and called up HoloDays.

† † †

He didn’t expect her to be waiting for him. She never was.

He extended a forefinger of the image he was walking around in; the sensor at the side of the door picked up