Farewell Horizontal (24 page)

Axxter glanced up the wall, along the length of the cable. He could see where it emerged from a peeled-back section of the wall, just large enough for someone to wriggle through.
Work on this one
 – anybody who had working knowledge of things like that was worth cultivating.

“You’re a line-ghost?”

“‘Line-ghost’ – give me a break.” She looked at him disgustedly. “Line-ghosts are just phenomena, like static or something. They’re just echoes on the wire. You should be able to tell the difference between a ghost and a circuit rider.”

“Oh.” He nodded. “So, uh, what’s a circuit rider?”

A pitying smile. “Circuit riders are people like me, people who can do things. Do things with the wires, man. We’re into the systems. People like you, you make a call, you go over the wire, through the grid, little dot-dot-dots moving along. But you’re like a rat that’s got its way through the maze memorized; all you see are the little walls in front of your rat nose. The trick is to get above the maze, get your hands on it, make it do what you want.”

“I get you.” He couldn’t hide his disappointment. “You mean phone phreaking. Hacking and stuff.”

“Hey, fuck you, man.” Felony seemed genuinely offended. “Don’t give me that. That’s ancient stuff – people were doing that shit before the War. Those punks, that D:Fex bunch and the other network families, they can waste their time that way if they want to; gaming each other and breaking into restricted access files and kid shit like that. I’ve got more important business to take care of. I’ve got
territory
.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Keep her talking.

“I’ll tell you what it means. It means I don’t have to band together with a bunch of other circuit riders, just to have somebody to watch my ass while I’m out working the wires. M:Pulse is a lone-wolf network, fella; it’s nobody but me.” A broad smile accompanied the swagger in her voice. “I got circuits that nobody can get on except me. That was why I got so pissed when I found you on that line, making your call. I don’t handle encroachment well, it just burns me up, man. Those wires are
mine
.”

He figured she was referring to some part of the phone grid running through the building. Out here, in the middle of nowhere. “So what makes them yours? Just because nobody else uses them?”

Felony shook her head, still smiling. “No, man, it’s more than that; a
lot
more. I’ve cracked the interface; I was born able to do it, I just had to learn how much I could do. And I can do anything on the wires. I mean, anybody can get into the wires – that’s what having a terminal inside your head is all about. The trick is to get back out and come up inside
somebody else’s head
. When you can do that, there ain’t shit that can stop you.”

She really was just a kid, he realized. Easy enough to bait her into bragging about stuff like that. That was what living on ‘the wires,’ as she put it, spending your whole existence messing about inside a maze of electronic circuits, did to you. Nothing but games, a sealed Peter Pan existence. Everybody, on the vertical or the horizontal, knew of that little world just on the other side of the phone. You could dabble your toe in it easily enough – there was always a standing invitation to ‘come in and play,’ more kid mentality – with the accompanying risk of getting your whole head sucked in. And spending the rest of your life there, your body a vestigial organ in reality, the real you stripped down to the infantile wiggle on the circuits, looking for fun among the electrons.

“That’s the trick, huh?” It sounded like some nutball thing; she might be crazy. “How do you do something like that?” He had to find out what he could from her – like her access under the building’s surface, and other handy stuff – and get moving again.

She looked smug, pleased with herself. “I just do it. The trick is to get somebody up close enough to a jack I’ve got exclusive control of, so I can catch ’em. Like this body.” She pressed her thumb against her breastbone. “This ain’t mine. Well, it is
now
, but it’s not the one I started out with. I got several of ’em, about a dozen, all stashed in various places around the building. It keeps me hopping, making the rounds and taking care of them all; they gotta be fed and stuff. This one’s the only eveningsider I got. It took a long time to catch her; I used some old pre-War music I got out of an archive I broke open. I looped it and kept it playing from a jack I found over here that had an audio output; must’ve been part of some old public-address system. I just hung around for days, lurking in the wire, waiting for one of ’em to come along, hear the music, and lean up close to the jack. I’d just about given up, when this one wandered by. Soon as she had her head up close, I made the jump, and zap, she was mine.”

Weird shit, whether it was true or not. Talking about the leap from being a cold signal on a wire into warm, living flesh. If she could do that . . . Good thing it was impossible. He didn’t want to let on that that was what he thought. “What happened to her? The person who used to be inside the body?”

Felony shrugged. “Died, I guess. You take over somebody else’s body, you gotta spend a little time getting control, rooting ’em out. Then they just aren’t there anymore.”

“Yeah, but a dozen of them? What do you need so many for?”

“I told you – I’m a loner. I don’t need a bunch of other circuit riders tagging along, cramping my action. This way, I got
physical control
of the jacks I use, plus some great big sections of the wire itself, whole subnets. I can cut ’em in and out of the grid whenever I want, so none of those little jerks can get into ’em when I’m not looking. If I tried to do that with just one body, I’d be hiking my ass all over this damn building. Twelve bodies, in twelve locations, I can just zip from one to the other, pop in as long as I need to do my housekeeping, and split to the next one. Cuts the travel time down to nothing, so I got more time to do what I want.” Her smile went wicked.

“Yeah, I bet.” The surreal nature of the conversation finally seeped in. Hanging on the wall a million miles from home, with all sorts of bad news hot on his tail, having a chat with some loony girl with the notion that she could pop in and out of bodies like changing her clothes. The world had assumed this quality since he’d fallen through the clouds.
Maybe I never came back up
. The usual comforting notion, assumed when things got too strange:
Maybe I’m still falling, dreaming in the bed of air
. He opened his eyes and the woman was still there.

“I suppose . . . you’re going to take
me
over now. Add my body to your collection. Is that it?”

She looked at him scornfully. “Why would I want you? Don’t flatter yourself. I already got one body, this one, right here in this locale. Another one would be just something else I’d have to look after. Besides, I got my standards. If they aren’t young and in good shape – better than you – and female, then I’m not much interested. Why should I go back to some ugly guy’s body? I had one to begin with, and I was glad when I got rid of it.”

More nuts stuff. He had humored her long enough; time to get some practical info.

“Say, as long as you’re here, think you could tell me if –”

She was already climbing back up the rope, with monkeylike agility. She looked back down at him. “Sorry, mac, but like I said, I’m a busy person. Maybe I’ll come by again some time, see how you’re doing.”

In a few seconds, she was at the small opening in the wall, and vanished inside. Axxter stared after her for a moment, then shook his head and resumed his slow travel.

He spotted him coming. Even in the night, he could see the figure in the distance, working its way toward him.

When it had gotten too dark to go on traveling, his arm and leg muscles cramping up, Axxter had drawn the pithons in tight, setting himself as close to the wall as possible. For sleeping; or at least to look as though he were.

He’d been expecting that the mysterious benefactor, the person who’d laid the bread on him, would show up sometime after the sun had gone down beyond the cloud barrier. All the time he’d been traveling across the wall, he’d had the sense that somebody else was out there, tailing him. Not the loony girl – he figured whether she was nuts or not, she had some crazed variety of errands to run. Or the Havoc Mass’s megassassin; if it had been close enough for him to detect, it would’ve already barrel-assed the rest of the way, locked on target, and made mincemeat of him. Unless there was more than one spooky cat lurking around in this sector, it had to be the one with the food. He hoped it was; a day’s worth of his hard-working progress had gotten him to the point of starving again.

There it was again. Hunger and ongoing weirdness had sharpened his senses. He could hear it, something moving closer, little clicks of metal against metal, a sidling scrape against the wall. He closed his eyes, waiting.

Breath, quiet and unhurried. Axxter felt the stirring in the air. Until it was right next to him –

He twisted about and grabbed. For a moment, he had his arm around the figure’s waist, pulling it to him. It gave a heavy grunt, half from surprise, half wind knocked out by Axxter’s forehead butting into its stomach.

“Sonuva
bitch
 –” A fist landed against the side of Axxter’s head, hard enough to dizzy him His grip on the figure’s ribs broke, and he slumped back into the pithons’ slack.

A flashlight went on, glaring in his face. He shielded his eyes; past his hand’s edge, he saw the other man dimly lit by the beam bouncing off the wall.

The man straightened up, sucking in a ragged gulp of breath. “Jeez –” Another gulp. “Try to do somebody a favor. The thanks you get.”

Axxter could see a narrow, sharp-angled face, long, spiderlike hands holding the flashlight. Like a club, in case of any more action.

“Nice way to act.” The man probed at the edge of his ribcage. “You could’ve killed me.”

It wasn’t just his hands, Axxter saw now. They were fitted with some sort of fanned hooks, strapped to his forearm and extending beyond his fingers. Not metal, but something black that bent like rubber against the man’s jacket.

“Sorry.” Axxter shook his head, trying to get rid of a ringing noise in his ears. “But you were the one sneaking around.”

“Of course I was sneaking around. I expected this kind of reaction. You morningsiders are all alike – you’re just ready for a punch-out all the time.”

You morningsiders
 – easy to figure out the rest. “You’re from this side?”

“Born and bred. Name’s Sai. Here, I figured you could use this.” He dug into a pack looped around one shoulder and held something out.

More of the flat round bread. Axxter took it and tore a piece off. But before taking a bite – “How come?”

“How come what? The food, you mean? I just knew you’d need it. Stuck out over here like this. I didn’t want to see you starve to death before you had a chance to get back home to the other side.” He took a pouch of water from the bag and drank before handing it over as well. “That’d seem kind of cruel. To go that way, and all. I mean, if you’re willing to take your shot at going straight through the building, you should get a real chance at it.”

Axxter chewed and swallowed. “What do you know about that?”

A shrug. “I know all kinds of stuff. I know more about you – and where you come from – than you know about me, and the way things are around here. But you see, that goes back to deep psychic divisions in your head, of which the building can be seen as an exteriorized representation, a mirror-image grown large. The morningside is all light and surface, and action all the time; whereas over here it gets underneath appearances, and into thinking and knowing. Very broody.”

Another loony
. This territory seemed to be crawling with them. The bread was all right, though.

“Hey, don’t give me that look.” Sai had picked up on his thoughts. “The fact that you don’t know what I’m talking about just goes to show that you’re a real morningsider.”

“Maybe so.” Axxter had finished half of one of the flat loaves. “I just don’t have a lot of time for discussion. I got a lot of problems right now.”

“This is true. Hope you don’t mind, but I listened in on your agent’s call. Tapped the line. That business with the megassassin is going to be a bitch. Those guys are built for speed.” Sai scratched himself with one of the rubbery hooks. “It’s going to be on top of your ass before you know it.”

This loony seemed to be more helpful than the last. Or at least concerned. “Well, I’m trying to make some speed, but . . . it’s slow going.”

“That’s ’cause you people let yourselves get dependent on those motorbikes. You think as long as you’re making noise, you’re getting somewhere.” Sai held up one hand, shining the flashlight on the hooked contraption. “Simpler the better. You can make really good time with a set of these.” The shoulderpack hung empty after he’d taken out another pair of the devices. The leather straps and buckles dangled from the stiff armatures behind the hooks. “Can’t really show you how to work ’em until we’ve got some better light. They can be kind of tricky until you get the knack.”