Farewell Horizontal

closer to the good sweet things that power brought. Not slaughtering defenseless people who stayed on the horizontal precisely to be safe, to stay out of harm’s way. Those were the rules; anybody breaking them was playing a harder game, one that stopped at nothing. Including the secret taking-over of the one sure rock that everybody depended on, the supposedly impartial Ask & Receive? Once you break one rule, you might as well break them all.

He played the last tape in the file. The raiding party, work done, went back out to the building’s surface. Framed in the now-jagged entry site opening was a gas angel, suspended in air and smiling curiously at the scene inside. He winced when he saw her familiar face; a gout of flame from one of the men’s weapons knocked her out of the sky. Laughter on the soundtrack.

On the tape, an equipment vehicle was parked on the wall, waiting for the men. Easy, relaxed joking-around as they stripped off the black uniforms and slid into olive-drab fatigues. Axxter zoomed in on the commanding officer, on his shoulder patch turned toward the camera. The rocker bar below the main patch read RECONNAISSANCE. Above that, circled around a golden sunburst, were the words GRIEVOUS AMALGAM.

That can’t be – Axxter stared at the image in his sight. No, they’re Havoc Mass; they have to be. Because of the death ikon on the megassassin’s chest, on the tape; if it was the same as the one that was over here chasing him, and it was the Havoc Mass that wanted him dead, then a megassassin bearing that ikon had to belong to the Havoc Mass. It was the only way it made sense.

Unless – a new, chilling thought crept into his head – unless the Grievous Amalgam also wanted him dead. And they’d sent their own megassassin to do the job.

Work it out. Why would the Grievous Amalgam want to kill some poor schmuck graffex who hadn’t done shit to them? Maybe for the same reason their raiding party would shoot some inquisitive little gas angel out of the sky for poking her pretty face into something they wanted to keep secret. If they’d wanted people to know it was the Grievous Amalgam doing it, they wouldn’t have been wearing the black uniforms. And if some freelance graffex comes strolling into the scene, lah-dee-dah, while the metal’s still hot, there’s no telling what clues he might glom onto as to who did it – best to ice him, too. The Amalgam had probably been wanting to kill him for some time now, ever since he’d reported his finding of the burned-out sector to Ask & Receive and they’d realized that somebody had stumbled across the aftermath of the raid. His getting the commission, and landing up in the Havoc Mass camp where the Amalgam couldn’t get at him easily, was probably the only thing that had kept him alive. Until they’d heard he was over here on the eveningside; then they’d sent the heavyweight gun over to snuff him, to keep him from blabbing any giveaway he might have spotted at the burned-out sector that would pin it on the Amalgam. Of course, nobody would have known that; so Brevis, when he’d heard the report of a megassassin crossing over Linear Fair to the eveningside, had naturally assumed it was the Havoc Mass’s machine, coming to settle their grudge against him.

The thoughts whirled faster in his head, too fast to catch. Then it’s not the Havoc Mass that’s taken over Ask & Receive; it’s the Grievous Amalgam. That’s how they stay in power -

Too much to work out now. He’d have to think about all this, if he lived long enough. Once he’d loaded all the files on the raid into his own archives, he broke the connection.

“Felony?” He looked around the cramped space. She wasn’t there.

FOURTEEN

“She’s not here.” The voice came from behind him “She had her little errands to run.”

Axxter turned and saw Sai leaning against the wall of the space.

“What?”

Sai smiled and spread his hands. “You’re not going to pick up something and hit me over the head with it? Scream and run? I was looking forward to a little more action from you.”

He shook his head, watching and waiting.

“Good.” Sai nodded, visibly pleased. “Now maybe we can carry on a discussion like sane people. You know, that’s the main advantage of finding out exactly what kind of a shitty situation you’re in: that kind of knowledge lessens the otherwise freewheeling activity of your imagination. You’re less likely to go making weird accusations against people who’re just trying to do you a favor.”

“I had my reasons.”

“Yeah, but they weren’t good reasons. Just a lot of crap other people have told you, that you’ve heard so many times that you believed ’em without thinking them through. Everything you thought you knew… You gotta be careful about stuff like that.” Sai pointed with his thumb behind himself. “You’ve already screwed it up with a whole bunch of folks who could’ve done you some good. Not everybody around here is as interested in your case as I am. Dead Centers – as you call us; I think the term’s a little offensive, myself – they’ve generally got enough to keep them busy.”

Axxter was tired, his brain frazzled with trying to squeeze in all the new, upside-down, and backward info he’d gotten off the line. Sai’s cool, rational voice soothed him; he could listen to it for hours. He knew there wasn’t that much time left for him, though.

Sai knew it, too. “You’ll have to think about these things later. If there is a later for you. It doesn’t do any good to save your ass if you just go through life being an ignorant fuck and not thinking about the important things.”

Axxter opened his eyes. “Like what?”

“That’s the problem with you.” Sai shook his head. “Not just you, but all of you morningsiders. There’s so much that you don’t know – so much that you’ve forgotten – that you don’t even know where to begin, what to think about, what questions to ask. You guys out on the vertical are as bad as the ones on the horizontal. You think you’re hip or something just because you’re out there scrambling around, chasing up and down the wall, and you don’t know what’s going to happen from one day to the next – but you’re still just as ignorant.”

Hectoring rather than soothing; it had gotten under his skin. “You know so much, then? Why don’t you tell me? If you feel so bad for me, and all.”

“It wouldn’t do any good. We can’t teach the blind to see. I mean, you don’t even look around you; you never have. Like this building, Cylinder itself.” Sai gestured toward the walls, and all the ones beyond. “You live in it, or on it, but you never think about it. It’s obviously constructed, a thing put together, but you never wonder why, or by whom.”

Axxter shrugged. “That was all done before the War.”

“There you go again. If there’s anything you don’t know, you can just say before the War, and you’re off the hook. You don’t even know anything about this so-called War – it’s just a handy way of getting rid of all the stuff you don’t want to think about.”

“So what’d be the point? Dinking around with a lot of old crap like that isn’t going to help me with my problems. And I had enough of them before all this other shit happened.”

“Correction.” Sai pointed a finger toward him. “You had all the problems you wanted. Wanted, man. You liked having them, so you wouldn’t have time on your hands and wind up thinking about all that other stuff, the big stuff that you’ve forgotten. Cylinder was built for a reason; its construction and ongoing operation violates at least a dozen laws of physics – the thermal problems alone connected with a structure of this size are pretty unbelievable. The air you breathe, if you think about it at all, you spout some mumbo jumbo about atmospheric bonding, as if knowing the words means you understand how it works. Now, the physical transgressions in themselves are no big thing – anything can be worked around, if somebody knows what they’re doing – but you still gotta ask why they bothered. It’s not easy, doing impossible stuff.”

“If it’s impossible, how could they do it?” This sonuvabitch wanted to play word games, fine.

Sai’s wolfish smile returned. “Maybe you just think they did it. Maybe they just did something to make you think a building big as a world exists, and that you’re living in it or outside of it.”

Axxter could taste his own disgust. “Screw that. I hate shit like that. Looking at your own navel until you fall in. I’ve got lots more important business to take care of. Hate to remind you, but there is some huge ugly bastard clanking around here, looking to smear me into jelly. I gotta worry about what I’m going to do about