point of comfortable retirement; she did what she wanted now, including such nonmercantile acts of initiation. A welcome to the vertical.
The memory of it faded as Axxter gazed at the dead camera. The replay of the angels, reflected in the woman’s eyes, stilled that ordinary desire. He turned away from her, stowing the camera back in the sidecar’s hatch.
Guyer could read some tendon’s semaphore in the back of his neck. He felt the warm sympathy of her regard, even before her hand stroked the hinge at the top of his spine. She hadn’t gotten to the toplevel of her field without these more tender abilities. How many warriors had lain in those thin arms, listening to the percolation of blood beneath her minimal breasts, watching the stars in their slow revolve around the building? More than I could guess, thought Axxter.
“Guess where I’ve been.” Distracting him. “Over at the Fair.”
“Yeah? Which one?” Not that it mattered; the prospect of hot rumors from either Linear Fair, the twin rivers of commerce and gossip running down the sides of the building, was sufficiently enticing. The Fairs’ merchants, sitting on the demarcation lines between the known world and all the mysterious eveningside, heard everything.
Guyer signaled with a tilt of her head. “The Left.” The gesture went to her own right, perched upside down as she was. “Heard all kinds of good stuff.”
“Like what?” Angels forgotten for the moment.
She leaned down, closer to him. “The Havoc Mass.” Her voice a whisper, for the sheer pleasure of conspiracy; they were alone on the barren sector wall. “They’re putting on a big recruiting push. For the grand alliance they’re building up. Signing up all sorts of little tribes, two-man outfits, battalions, everything. Cutting deals all over the place, to get ’em signed on. You talk to this Rowdiness bunch when you finally run ’em down: betcha even they’ve been approached.” She rocked back on her haunches, butt in the web of her boots’ pithons. “The Mass -” Her eyes narrowed, as though she was savoring the word. “They’re making their move. At last.”
The sudden fervor in her voice unnerved him What’s it matter to her? All that heavy squabbling for control of Cylinder’s toplevel seemed distant in more ways than one to Axxter. Like the passage of the sun over the apex of the building, casting the morningside into deep shade and then deeper night, when the cloud barrier below the eveningside swallowed up all light. Not much you could do about it – you lived within the constraints of light and dark like everyone else on the vertical exterior. If the Havoc Mass wanted to square off against the Grievous Amalgam, who had been squatting on top of Cylinder since long before Axxter, or Guyer, had been born – hey, let ’em, he figured. Cynical enough to believe that it wouldn’t make a rat’s ass difference to him personally, yet the sight of Guyer with her eyes closed, dreaming of some golden future, made him wonder.
“Yeah, well -” He shrugged. “Best of luck to ’em, I guess.”
She looked at him with a sad reproof. “You really have to care more about it than that, Ny. It’s important.”
The maternal tone irritated him “What’s important to me is hustling up some business, getting some real earners into my portfolio. Right? I’m gonna be out here on the wall doing that, no matter what happens between Grievous and Havoc up on top. They don’t mean shit to me, sweetheart.”
Guyer said something back to him, but he didn’t hear it, overridden by the shout of his own thoughts.
Guyer’s voice broke in. “So that’s why I did it.”
“Did what?”
She regarded his blinking, up from fog, and sighed. “Cashed in all my Amalgam holdings, the preferred, the options, every single blue chip – and sank it into the Mass.”
“Jeez.” Heard twice, and still unbelievable. She must
“Gotta split. Catch you later.”
He looked up to see her standing, perpendicular to the wall. From his crouch in the sling, he had to tilt his head back to meet her gaze. She turned and strode to her rig.
From back aboard the Indian, its headlight pointed straight up: “Give us a good-bye kiss, Ny.” And the same indulgent smile as before.
He knew what she wanted, the kiss a pretext. She had seen him before, when he’d been a hundred percent new to vertical. Clinging white-knuckled, chest against the wall like a flattened spider, pithons taut from shoulder and hip. Pitied him, gave him something… Now she wants to see how I’m getting along with it. A little test. He swallowed against the pulse in his throat and pulled himself up out of the sling.
In his kneecaps he felt the snap of his boots’ pithons catching their holds on the wall as he stood up. Straight out, his shoulder to the cloud barrier far below. One line from his belt for balance, but that was all right; nothing uncool about that. Walk and don’t think, he told himself. All there is to it. Pithons stretched as he lifted his foot, the leader lines releasing and whipping ahead for the next grip. All there is.
All there was. Axxter stood beside the Indian, pulse still high. But there. He regarded her narrow face for a moment before he bent down to kiss her.
He felt the brush of her lashes and the shift of her gaze. He leaned back and turned his head to see what it was she saw.
One hand had locked onto the nearest transit cable, every tendon in his wrist drawn tight as the metal line. Holding on, shameless, against the fear of gravity.
Axxter looked back into Guyer’s smile. The Indian’s motor coughed as she twisted the throttle.
“Take care, Ny.” A wink. “See ya again sometime.”
The engine’s rasp came to his ear long after she had disappeared upwall by leftaround. On her ceaseless errands. He gripped the cable with both hands, no one to see him now, and pressed his burning cheek against the cool metal, only a little harder than the woman’s face and kiss.
† † †
Just before breaking camp, he went back online, calling up Ask & Receive. The Small Moon, in its orbit around Cylinder, had finally appeared, a silver nail-paring coming around the building’s leftedge. Cheaper to connect when only enough relay surface for audio signal; that was all he needed. He blinked on his transceiver.
“Update on previous request.” His jawbone buzzed with the echo of his own voice. “Estimate of current position, Rowdiness Combine, military tribe. Scale reliability down to… oh… twenty-five percent.” An old trick that he’d picked up from the more experienced freelancers. If you took a high enough reliability on initial location requests, seventy-five percent or higher, you could cheap out on the updates. You’d still get close enough to your target to do a physical scan of the sector. Though twenty-five, he knew, was pushing it.
The info agency ran through its location factors – previous sightings, speed of travel and direction, analysis of raiding strategies. Rowdiness hadn’t reached the point – might never – of having a PR service advertising its whereabouts, recruitment points, the big-league stuff; otherwise he would’ve dinged them for the call and info.
At twenty-five percent reliability, it didn’t take long. Axxter detected, or imagined, a condescending tone to the coordinates reeled out in his ear.
“All right.” As if addressing the Norton, no one else on the empty wall. He pulled the transceiver lead free from his wrist, folded up the dish and stowed it in the sidecar. His boot pithons came free as he mounted onto the motorcycle, the seat line zipping around his waist. A moment of vertigo as he gripped the handlebars and looked
