Farewell Horizontal Read Free

deflated membrane, no longer a sphere behind her shoulders. She had lain swathed in the billowing folds, which when taut with blood-rendered gases would have borne her aloft. Caught by that delicate tissue alone, she would never have remained bound to Cylinder’s wall; as Cooder’s camera had watched, another translucent scrap had torn loose in the wind and fluttered away. But one of the dead hands had snagged in a transit cable loop; Cooder’s lens had moved in on the dried trickle of blood running down from her wrist under the gray metal, just enough to dispel the mystery of how the nude form had come to this rest. If closing his eyes would have blanked out Lenny’s face, Axxter could have replayed it, watched it all over again from memory; it lay parallel and so close to this morning’s living, mating angels that the images had bled into each other, one section of time superimposed over another. As if the lovers had coupled all unconscious of the corpse framed in the same shot with them, tangled in the building’s cables, diagonal from the open air in which they turned and clasped.
     
    Opt Cooder had made the most of the rare chance; no one else had ever gotten so close to one, alive or dead. A certain aesthetic sense that went with his rep, catching the fading light as the sun went over Cylinder and on to the eveningside – so that the red tinge on the angel’s cheek had almost made her seem alive. But sleeping. Because if she had been dead, wouldn’t she have disappeared where all the other dead angels go? And where was that? Something that Axxter still wondered, along with everybody else who watched the scanty archives, over and over. Maybe there was some one spot on an unexplored sector of the building’s surface where all the pretty corpses came to rest. Leaving behind not a whitening layer of bones – those would crumble away like dust, figured Axxter – but of something like tattered silk, gray where the blood had once made the tissue into pink lace.
     
    Or maybe they just fall, he thought. Down through the cloud barrier, and whatever’s below that, if anything. Maybe all the dead angels are still falling.
     
    “So you want me to peddle this stuff for you, or what?”
     
    Axxter refocused, the image resolving back into Lenny Red’s face. For a moment he didn’t speak, then, “Sure. That’s why I called you. What d’you think you can get for it?” Questions like that indict your heart. Sell, you sonuvabitch.
     
    Lenny shrugged, the thin points of his shoulders coming up into the image. “Lemme run it past a few people. I’ll get right back to you.” The face vanished.
     
    He passed the couple of minutes – that’s all it ever took with fast Lenny – looking out across empty sky. The line chirped inside his ear; Lenny’s features could just be made out, light against brighter.
     
    “High quote was two thousand, Ny.” A conspirator’s wink. “But I jacked ’em up to twenty-two-five.”
     
    He stared at the bright, overactive face. “Twenty-two-five? That’s all?” Jeez – now I know I should’ve kept it for myself. “You gotta be kidding.”
     
    “Hey, that’s after my cut, man. That’s all straight to you. Come on,” wheedled Lenny’s image. “You know you want it, you need it – just sign me over the confirm number, and we’ll do the deal.”
     
    The realization hit him. “You’re getting yours on the other end. You’re lowballing me.” Fury welled up in his throat. “Fuckin’ lowballing me.”
     
    That little shrug again. “It’s a fair price, man. None of the scientific data agencies had any interest in it – everybody knows already how angels do it. You’re not making no big contribution to human knowledge, all right? So it has to sell just on aesthetics, I shop it around to Ask & Receive’s entertainment division and their guys go, ‘ Ten minutes? Whaddya think we can charge for accessing ten minutes of tape? ’” Lenny’s finger, a