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.”
Axxter examined the hooks; they had little sensors at the tips, similar to the ones on his pithons.
“Get some sleep.” Sai pulled the lines from his belt up across his chest and fastened them to the wall. “We’ll head out soon as we can see.” He folded his arms and closed his eyes.
“I don’t get it.” Axxter fastened the hooked devices onto his own belt. “What’re you doing all this for? What’s the deal for you?”
One eye opened and regarded him “You’re the most interesting thing that’s happened around here. In a long time. You don’t know it, but you’re something… historic.” The eye closed; he lowered his chin onto his chest. “You’ll see.”
Axxter reached into his jacket and tore off a small piece of bread. For a while longer, he chewed and watched the figure sleeping next to him.
† † †
“Come on, you gotta let ’em take your weight. Get a little swing going.” Sai, several meters ahead and upwall, looked back, waiting for him to catch up.
The travelhooks – as Sai called them – had been scary at first. Axxter clung to the wall, his hands flat against the cold metal, catching his breath. In the half-morning, when Sai had first strapped the devices onto his arms, it’d taken an act of wild faith for him to turn off the pithons, letting the lines retract into his belt and boots so only their triangular heads showed. His safety lines; the old nausea and fear came back that he’d known when he’d first gone out on the vertical. His head had swum, the immovable building seeming to tilt and rock as he’d looked over his shoulder, down toward the cloud barrier below. That had passed, but it had still been several minutes before he’d worked up the courage to use the hooks as Sai had shown him, anchoring himself with one of the devices while swinging monkeylike, twisting back to front, to reach for the next hold with the other.
Even with his hesitancy, they were fast; by the time the sun came over the top of the building, Axxter figured that he and Sai had covered twice the distance he’d made in his previous traveling. Once the rhythm was established, the peculiar torsion of the hooks as they anchored and then bent around themselves… The few times Axxter had screwed up and missed catching the next hold, his gut had clenched in fear as the image of himself falling snapped into his head. Then Sai had taken pity on him and explained the devices’ interlock system; the previous anchoring point wasn’t released until a microsecond after the new one was locked onto.
“Come on -” Sai’s voice called back to him “You don’t have time to lose, man.”
Another hour of traveling; Axxter caught up to where Sai had snugged himself in close to the wall. Axxter’s arms ached, deep into his shoulders; he rubbed them in turn after reeling out the pithons and latching himself secure.
“You’ll get used to it.” Sai nodded toward Axxter’s hand kneading his bicep. “It’s more the novelty of the motion than anything else. The hooks really do most of the work.” He took bread and water from his shoulder-bag. “Break time.”
Munching away, Sai pointed out to the sky. “Hey, there’s your little friend.”
Axxter turned his head and saw the distant figure of the gas angel. Lahft; as she came closer, he recognized her, smiling happily.
She dangled in air next to him, close enough to touch. “Hi. Hello. Falling?”
He leaned back against the pithons, and shook his head. “No. Not yet, at any rate.”
With little swimming motions, she turned around. She looked over her shoulder and the top of the spherical membrane. “Do more. Do the pretty.”
The designs he’d programmed into the biofoil he’d implanted into her were still there. She’s gotten bored with them. One of the unfortunate qualities of time: everything got old eventually. He wondered if he’d done her a favor by letting her know that, ending even that small bit of her innocence.
“I guess I can…” He hadn’t tried sending out any signal from his transceiver; since the Small Moon’s orbit didn’t include this side of the building, there hadn’t seemed any point. But with the target right in front of him – “Okay. How’s this?” He pulled a tiger playing with a butterfly up from his archive, coded and sent it over the distance of less than a meter. As the screen display dropped from his vision, he saw the image blossoming across Lahft’s membrane.
“Nice.” She turned from admiring herself and looked at him.
“Yeah, it’s nice.” The sunlight coming through the membrane made it radiant, a smooth glowing rose. “That’s the best display I’ve ever had.”
Beside him, Sai nodded. “It’s kind of a shame that all this stuff usually just gets wasted on a bunch of big ugly guys.”
Lahft wasn’t listening to them, letting the breeze slowly draw her away.
“Hey -” Axxter called out to her. “Come back around again sometime – whenever you want – and I’ll do another one for you.”
She considered this, putting a finger to her chin. Then that same unalloyed smile appeared. “When you want. You here, and me -” She flung her arm out to indicate some distant point in the sky. “You make you – like a pretty, but you – on me. Then I come here. To you.” She had floated several meters away and had to shout the last words. Before she was gone entirely, dwindling to a far speck.
Sai yawned, stretching out his arms in front of him “Angels are okay. You could do a lot worse than being on a friendly basis with them.”
He realized for the first time that Lahft had shown none of the usual angelic shyness around Sai. As if she was used to him, or just not scared of him.
“I suppose. I don’t see what good it’ll ever do me, though.”
Sai shrugged. “It’s like those old stories, you know, fairy tales and stuff, where the kid befriends the ants and the birds. And they wind up saving his ass somehow on the last page. You just never know.”