It stopped. Just the wind sliding past his ears; Axxter rolled onto his side and looked back at the angel on the table. The smile returned to her face, but different. A tilt of her brows, the gaze no longer wide-open. Not as dumb as you think, turkey. Unsteady, he managed to get onto his knees, then his feet. Two parallel lines of medical tools marked his flight across the platform.
“You saw it, then? What happened?” Axxter stood beside the table again. She must’ve seen it just hanging out there in the air, the way angels do, when the Dead Centers blew open the wall, in the process of reaming out the foolish horizontal collaborators. Saw it, and watched: more amusing things, doing amusing things. Bright, fiery light and an interesting noise. Curiosity had its inevitable price, though.
She paid no attention to him. Looking over her shoulder, she was again absorbed in examining the mended flight membrane. The silvery biofoil reflected her intent expression.
All right, toots. He reached under the table, past the dangling bare legs, and fetched out his graffex gear. Now a little surprise for you.
A starburst blossomed on the taut biofoil, swirling and dancing, blotting out the angel’s reflected face. She gasped, pulling her head away from her own shoulder and, behind it, the thin metal that had replaced her own skin. The startled face snapped around, staring at Axxter.
He tapped the side of his head; in his own vision, the graffex programming display overlaid her face. “Sharp, huh?” He didn’t care if she understood how it worked or not. She could still see what he did. He blinked CANCEL and the simple test sequence disappeared. “Look at it now,” he told her.
Her suspicious gaze slowly left his face, turning back over her shoulder. The grafted biofoil, blank again, mirrored her face, unadorned. She looked at him, at the box in his hands, the smile replaced by the signal of further thought.
“You liked that?” He enjoyed this small power his skill gave him. Little bit of graffex magic; not often you found an audience this unsophisticated to spring it on. “Pretty great, don’t you think?”
Lahft tilted her head, regarding him. One corner of her smile returned. “Was,” she said. “Was… impressive.”
“Oh… I see.” He nodded, returning the half-smile. “Was,’ huh. Check this out, then.” He had a number of demos sequenced; he blinked one up. The signal went direct to the biofoil – he could’ve reached over her shoulder and touched it if he’d wanted – and was not bounced off the Small Moon to a distant location somewhere else on Cylinder’s surface; thus, the pattern came up immediately on the angel’s flight membrane.
As if she could feel the black dots forming another picture, she looked over her shoulder without any further command. A cartoon face, recognizably a man’s, showed on the biofoil, its broad neck terminated in a ragged collar and tie. The face’s big oval eyes grew larger, as if in astonishment; a speech balloon appeared above, its tail tapering to the flapping mouth.
WILMA! YOU… AND BARNEY?! WELL, I’LL BE DIPPED!
There was no way of telling if she could read the words emanating from the ancient, mythic face. Probably enough that angels can even talk – I might be the only person who ever knew that.
The flight membrane had grown larger, the gases dialyzed from Lahft’s blood inflating it. The cartoon face grew larger, more pattern dots filling in to keep the image sharp and black. Axxter looked over the angel’s shoulder with a professional, critical eye. The flesh-to-biofoil seams were all holding against the increased tension; he took pride in the thoroughness he could apply to the mechanics of his craft. The foil itself had greater elastic strength than the thin flesh it had replaced – no danger of it tearing or bursting.
He put the face into REPEAT cycle. She looked around at him, smiling with pure pleasure. Entertained; all the amusing things in her world. He had become one of them.
“You did.” She reached over her shoulder and touched the membrane, her hand muffling the cartoon face. “You made it be.” She gazed admiringly at him.
“Yeah… I did.” He’d figured out something else about her, or angels in general. It wasn’t that they didn’t have any concept of time – easy to catch the past tense did and made, on top of all the other little verbal clues – but maybe they just didn’t care about it. For them, it was a disposable dimension. She was playing around with me. With that dumb act. “Did you like it?”
“Funny. But pretty – beee-fore.”
“Oh. I gotcha.” CANCEL the face; then he brought back the starburst test pattern. Her laugh chimed over the clap of her hands.
She looked at him again, cocking her head to one side. “Why?”
“Huh? Why what?”
Again: “Why?”
He scratched the side of his face. “You mean… why… I can do this? That it?” He got the same wide-eyed, smiling gaze in reply. “Well, you see, it’s my job; it’s my trade, it’s what I do.”
“You do?”
Maybe not a dumb act; who could tell? Might as well run with it. “You see, I’m a graffex. That’s what I do to earn a living.” What would angels know about that? They live on sex and air, apparently.
She looked from him to the starburst looping on the flight membrane, then back to him. “Graffex… is?”
He wasn’t sure how to explain it, or at least not from scratch. “Well… there’re certain types of people who live out here on the building – you know the ones I mean? The military tribes?” No response. “People, uh… big bunches of them. Or little bunches. You’ve seen them. Anyway, they fight each other. Fight – you know what I mean?” Of course she doesn’t, idiot. “Anyway, they like to scare each other when they, uh, fight. You know, like making… scary faces. Shit.” Might as well be whistling and barking, for all I’m getting through. Desperate, he crooked his forefingers in the corners of his mouth and stuck out his tongue. “Yarrgh. Li’ tha’.”
Her laugh was even louder than before; deflated, he gave up on that front.
“So they hire me – people like me – to make scary faces for them. And other scary pictures. That’s what a graffex does.” Somewhat humbling to think of it like that, even if accurate. “And we use that stuff – that shiny stuff, there.” He pointed to the thin metal he had implanted in her flight membrane. “That’s what we call biofoil.”
“Pretty.”
“Yes, very pretty. But it’s like skin – that’s why I was able to use it to patch you up. Where you were hurt.”
Maybe she’d already forgotten that as well. “And I can graft it – put it into real skin – of warriors… you know, the people who like to fight and make scary faces at each other. But it’s not really skin; it’s metal… well, it’s mostly metal, but with a polymer substrate that’s got a pattern-mimesis capability on a molecular level. So it can form itself into blood-vessel and nerve pseudo-tissue; plus a narrow-band immuno-suppressant adapt, so it doesn’t just fall off the host tissue…” He became aware again of her uncomprehending gaze. “Hey. That’s all right; I don’t understand it, either.” Maybe nobody did; small comfort there. Just ancient technology, from those long-ago days before the War.
“You make the pictures?”
He nodded, lifting the programmer box. “I can shift the refraction index of the biofoil, on a molecule-by-molecule basis – you must just like hearing me rattle on. Is that it? You like the sound of my voice? Okay. That’s how I make the pictures. But the people I make them for – the scary-face people – they might not pay me – give me money; forget it – if the pictures were there, like permanently, right there in the biofoil. Because they’re supposed to go on paying for the service. If they could get away with it, they’d just kill the graffex and keep the work he’d done for them.” Unfortunately true. You couldn’t always trust warrior types, with their innate contempt for all other forms of life. The system-protecting graffices, and anybody else servicing the military tribes, had evolved to compensate for that characteristic. “So the signal that makes the pictures appear on the foil has to be zapped out on a regular basis and picked up by the foil, or else there’s no picture, just dots scrambling around. I encode the signal and send it to the Small Moon Consortium – they’re the ones who operate the little one, not the real moon, but the one that’s smaller and closer to us. And as long as the tribe that I made the scary faces for pays me the money they should, then I pay the consortium the fee to send out the signal, and the signal makes the pictures appear. That’s how it works.”