Farewell Horizontal Read Online Free PDF

the metal surface. Under her skin the muscles tightened to keep her straight as a flag in wind.
     
    He dug the camera out of the sidecar and brought up from his archive the tape he’d shot that morning. He watched her screening it in the camera’s tiny viewfinder; kneeling above him, her hair just tracing across his own cheek – in the center of her pupils the figures twined and drifted across two small skies.
     
    “’S nice.” She straightened, away from the edge of the sling, and smiled at him.
     
    His hands fumbled with the camera, the power LEDs winking out. He didn’t know why he had wanted to show the tape of the mating angels to Guyer. Maybe I was hoping for something. The usual action, I suppose. A repeat of his initial encounter with her, when he’d first been making slow and nervous progress across Cylinder’s exterior, a few kilometers downwall from his exit point. It was well known that Guyer had long ago built up her portfolio to the 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,