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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 bitch! ” A shout and gloved hand waving above the approaching motorcycle’s handlebars. “How ya doin’, Ny?”
     
    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