For a moment he considered watching again the tape of the mating angels. No – don’t. Unnecessary, anyway; he could still see them, as if some brighter radiation had burned them into the empty sky, or his own eyes.
TWO
Methodically, with elaborate care, Axxter broke down his small camp. Taking more pains than necessary; I know, he told himself once more, as he watched his hands going through routine. Mind working on two levels about the subject. On top, right up against curve of skull, the old subvocal litany:
Eventually everything – not much – was packed into two panniers and a larger amorphous bundle. He closed his eyes for a moment, gathering strength, then stood up, the sling’s fabric stretching beneath his feet. He whistled for his motorcycle.
For close to a minute, as he leaned against the building’s wall, holding onto a transit cable for balance, he heard nothing, no answering roar of the engine as the motorcycle came wheeling back to his summons. Thin green on this sector of the wall; something to do with Cylinder’s weather pattern, Axxter figured. The motorcycle would have to have grazed for some distance to have filled its tank. Just as he was about to whistle again, he heard the rasp of its motor, growing louder as it approached.
Over the building’s vertical curve, due rightaround from where he stood in the bivouac sling, the headlight and handlebars of a Norton Interstate 850 first appeared, then the spoked front wheel and the rest of the machine behind. Bolted to the motorcycle’s left side – the uppermost side now, as the machine moved perpendicular to the metal wall – the classic blunt-nosed shape of a Watsonian Monza sidecar came with the motorcycle, its wheel the parallel third of the whole assemblage. A typical freelancer’s rolling stock; he had eyeballed it for so long back on the horizontal, when he’d been saving up his grubstake, that he’d memorized every bolt before he’d ever actually wrapped his fist around the black throttle grip. Even now, after this long out on the vertical, the sight of the riderless motorcycle heading toward him – accelerating as if impelled by love, though he knew it had only taken a visual lock on his position – affected him, rolled on a sympathetic throttle inside his chest. A notion of freedom, as much so as angels, living or dead.
The Norton swerved as it approached, circling below the sling and then turning upwall by one of the sling’s anchor points so that the sidecar was within easy reach. It halted there, headlight pointing toward Cylinder’s far- distant toplevel, engine idling with a throaty murmur. Axxter gripped the ridge of the sidecar’s hatch and pulled himself up to see the gauges between the handlebars. The perfect resemblance to a real, ancient 850 Interstate ended beneath the instruments’ circular glass: a row of LCD readouts indicated the state of the machine’s internal processes. That, and the thin black pithon cords that had whipped out of the hubs of the spoked wheels as the Norton sped across the building’s surface, the triangular heads at the ends of the lines striking anchor points on the transit cables and the pitted metal surface of the wall beneath them, holding and then releasing when each line reached full extension; snapping back into the hub and darting out again… Like nests of hyperactive snakes, it had seemed to Axxter, the first time he had seen, in some kiddie TV show, a freelancer rig scooting, gravity-defying, along Cylinder’s exterior.
Nearly a full tank. He pushed himself back from the gauges. All through the morningside’s night, while the sun had been on the other side of the building, while Axxter had slept, the Norton, with a machine’s faithfulness, had scoured the nearby sections of wall, scraping up with its extended butterfly proboscis the thin green fur and overlapping plates of lichen. From somewhere in the motorcycle’s ovoid tank came the soft gurgle and hiss of conversion, organic matter into fuel. In his gear, Axxter had a kit for rendering the green into something edible, or at least nutritious. The remembered taste of the distilled slime made him shudder. If death itself had a taste, he thought, it would be something like that. One more reason for praying that some more money came in before his current stock of supplies ran out.
As he began loading his gear from the sling into the sidecar, strapping everything into place with bungee cords, he heard a sound rising over the Norton’s idle. Another engine, barking and rasping, and, up in treble, the singing of pithon lines zipping around transit cables. Axxter looked over the edge of the sling and saw another freelancer heading upwall toward him.
“Hey! Sonofa
He had thought he recognized the clatter of her ill-tuned Indian replica. “Guyer – where’d the hell you come from?”
She pulled the Indian and sidecar rig up alongside the sling’s other anchor. The words GUYER GIMBLE – I DELIVER were painted on the sidecar’s flank; on the motorcycle’s tank, a three-quarter profile of her when younger and the most in-demand camp follower anywhere on Cylinder’s surface. Or at least the known morningside of the building. The years since then had pared her face down to a more intimidating sexuality, as if leaning into the wind of her full-throttle passage had stripped away all but the most necessary flesh. One knot loosened at the base of Axxter’s gut while another tightened with a pleasurable fear.
Guyer leaned away from the Indian’s handlebars, her silver hair thus coursing straight back from her knifelike profile. “Here and there.” She smiled sideways at him. “Just making my rounds. You trying’ to run down that Rowdiness bunch?”
“Yeah – you seen them?”
“’Bout a week ago.” Her eyes shifted, following some interior calculation. “Yeah, that’s right. They should still be downwall from here.” One hand waved toward that quadrant. “Gonna try and sign ’em up?”
Axxter shrugged. “What else?” Guyer had inside sources, having become well-known for her key position on the freelancers’ gossip net. Though you wouldn’t need that, he thought, to figure out what I’m doing in these parts. “What’d you think of them?”
The smile extended, turned upside-down by her position. “Nice boys. Hey – at this stage, who can tell? They all talk tough when they’re starting out. Gonna set the whole building on fire.” She leaned forward, spreading her hands on the motorcycle’s tank. “They’re worth a shot – I picked up a couple shares of their initial offering, and an option for a block later.”
That explained her feline aura of self-satisfaction. A woman who enjoyed her business. And the Rowdiness bunch wasn’t a week’s travel away from here – Axxter looked into her hooded eyes and got a confirm. She’d serviced them yesterday; he could almost smell it on her, not an odor but an echo of adrenaline charges going off under her practiced hands. The itch moved across his shoulders, to get his Norton loaded up, to track down the tribe for his own business proposition. Maybe they’re just hours from here; they could be.
Another impulse sparked against the first. “Hey, Guyer – you want to see something neat?”
She swung one leg over the Indian’s tank and ambled toward him. The easy grace of a long-time freelancer, born on the vertical: a twinge of disorientation nausea clenched Axxter’s stomach as he watched her walk, perpendicular to the wall, the pithons from her boots catching and releasing with each stride, whip lines from just below her knees to the metal surface. Under her skin the muscles tightened to keep her straight as a flag in wind.
He dug the camera out of the sidecar and brought up from his archive the tape he’d shot that morning. He watched her screening it in the camera’s tiny viewfinder; kneeling above him, her hair just tracing across his own cheek – in the center of her pupils the figures twined and drifted across two small skies.
“’S nice.” She straightened, away from the edge of the sling, and smiled at him.
His hands fumbled with the camera, the power LEDs winking out. He didn’t know why he had wanted to show the tape of the mating angels to Guyer. Maybe I was hoping for something. The usual action, I suppose. A repeat of his initial encounter with her, when he’d first been making slow and nervous progress across Cylinder’s exterior, a few kilometers downwall from his exit point. It was well known that Guyer had long ago built up her portfolio to the
