He knew Lahft was staring at him, puzzled at his sudden confusion. Staring at him, as he stared out into the sky, toward the far edge of the clouds. Out where he saw something he had never seen before.
The clouds were all molten gold and red, turning darker, even to black as he watched.
The sun was setting, vanishing below the rim of the cloud barrier.
Axxter went on staring, as the sun became a slice, then a red point. He had never seen the sun set before. Nobody had.
† † †
He had a long time to think about it. All through a long and cold night, waiting for even the gray shadowlight that would come from the sun rising on Cylinder’s morningside.
By himself; Lahft got hungry, or bored, and went floating off. Axxter figured he’d see her again. In the vertical cradle of his pithons, he hung close to the wall, shivering in the dark winds, working things out inside his head.
He was on the other side. The eveningside – that much was clear. Where nobody – nobody he’d ever heard of, at least – had ever been. Just his luck – a whole new world stretching out in all directions, and he’d landed up in it with nothing but the clothes on his back. In one piece, at least; he had to admit that. The throbbing of his bruises had diminished, the blood ebbing back to his heart. One sharp pain remained in his side, which he’d prodded once with his finger, then promised himself he wouldn’t touch again.
Must’ve been drifting out there for – what? A day, two days? How long would it take to get this far from everything? Axxter gazed out into the darkness, wondering. Unless drifting wasn’t the exact word to be used – maybe Lahft, with him in her arms and her flight membrane distended all the way, had got caught in a ripping current out near the atmosphere’s edge. Out in the jet stream: that would’ve raced them along, right over all the sectors of the morningside, right over Linear Fair, the Right or the Left one. And then – spang – down here in unknown territory.
A new thought wormed its way in. Maybe she’d done it on purpose. Hanging out the way she’d been doing; she wasn’t so stupid as not to have known that he was in major trouble. Time to split, before more of the Havoc Mass ass-kickers arrived on the scene. The farther away from the scene she could deliver him, the better. And there wasn’t any farther than this.
“Christ almighty.” A cramp had bit into his leg. “Shit.” He reached down and massaged his thigh. Without his bivouac gear – all gone cloudward with everything else stowed in the Watsonian sidecar – the night cold became fully evident for the first time in his vertical career. You could freeze to death out here – he let the cramp be, and nestled his arms tight around himself again, drawing the edges of his torn jacket together. He’d be glad to see the first shadowlight filtering gray across the wall – meaning the sun had risen above the cloud barrier on Cylinder’s other side – as then he’d be able to see where he was going, moving to pump up the warmth in his blood. Plus find a place to plug in and make his call to Ask & Receive. Dig up whatever files they had concerning the eveningside. Any scrap of knowledge might be useful. And food – what the hell was he going to do about that? His brain niggled on, each worry marching after the other in time to the grumbling ostinato from his empty stomach. As the pain from his bruises receded, it had revealed that deeper one, growing sharper with time instead.
Impossible to sleep; that had always been difficult enough, even with a securely moored tent to cradle him, a nice cozy little womb to stretch out in. It had taken him a week of increasing red-eyed exhaustion, when he’d first gone out on the wall, to manage it. Now, strapped to the metal by nothing but his boots and belt, Christ only knew how far from anywhere anyone else had ever been, and his butt freezing… He scrunched his head down as far as he could. Got enough sleep, he supposed, when he’d been drifting along in the gas angel’s arms.
His gut panged again. Should’ve eaten at Cripplemaker’s banquet; he hadn’t known that it was going to be his last chance for a while. He closed his eyes and waited for light.
† † †
He spotted it, a little dimple on the building’s edge; a rush of joy blossomed inside his head, enough to squeeze tears stinging in his eyes. The straight line between Cylinder and the sky wavered for a moment.
Panting his thanks, Axxter hauled himself toward the plug-in jack. His arm and leg muscles trembled from the hours of spidering over the building’s surface. Noon already, Cylinder’s noon; the vertical landscape had gone from gray half-light to bright full as the sun had broken over the top far above him That was a sight he had never seen before – a dawn you had to tilt your head back to see – but he’d been too tired to marvel at it. His slow progress, prodded by hunger and a carefully held-down panic, had come close to exhausting him. With his lost motorcycle-and-sidecar rig under him, Cylinder had seemed big enough to him. Now he’d had its immensity beat into the stiffening crooks of his hands.
“You sweet thing. Come on over here.” In the slanting crab-scuttle the pithons at his waist and ankles afforded him, he slid toward the plug-in.
“Gotcha.” There were concentric yellow rings painted around the spot, the plug-in the exact center of the target. Axxter knuckled the tears from his eyes, then probed the hole with his finger. Dust and cobwebby muck; he scraped it out with his nail. He stuck his finger back in, waggling it back and forth to make contact. “Come on, you sonuvabitch…”
An unnerving fear that he hadn’t let himself think about during his search dried his mouth. Maybe the Wire Syndicate lines, the pre-War network it had inherited, maybe they didn’t run all the way to this side of the building. Who knew? Maybe there was no connection to be made, his finger rattling inside a dead hole, no line to the far world of help and money… “Come on -” The dot of bright metal on his fingertip scraped against the side of the hole. He squeezed his eyes closed. “Please -”
Behind his eyelids, a word pulsed on, luminous.
NUMBER?
He could’ve wept. “I need to talk to my bank.” He blinked on his display, his directory reeling across one side of his vision. “Right now.”
NUMBER? The idiot word flashed, on-off, on-off.
Some ancient circuit, built-in at this end. You ran across them sometimes, out in the less-traveled sectors. Christ only knew when was the last time this plug-in had been used. Maybe back before the War. “Goddamn.” Axxter stared at the word printed on the sky. What’d the thing want?
“My number?”
NUMBER? On-off.
There was a registration number for the vanished Norton, and his business license. He could dig those up, but he couldn’t figure why the circuit wanted to know.
It dawned on him. The bank’s number. He opened up the entry on the comm list and let the digits dance in sequence across the center of the field.
DIALING. He let out his breath. PLEASE WAIT.
The Wire Syndicate’s logo flashed by, then the bank’s. Thank God they picked up the charges for inquiry calls. “Give me my balance.” He wanted to know the worst.
It took longer than usual; that made him nervous. Maybe there was some funky lien already slapped on the account, a black hole to suck up anything that might come in. Christ, how big was the fine for cutting that cable? Sweat trickled into the corners of his mouth.