Noir

by K. W. Jeter

  The DZ flunky stood back, letting McNihil walk in ahead. Nobody said anything, though some of the business suits recognized him, knew him. The business suits in the room would’ve expected that his lip would curl as soon as he walked in. But they wanted me to see it, thought McNihil. Where all the bad stuff came down. Whatever it was.

  Their cold eyes watched as McNihil strode through the room, head down into his shoulders and face set in its bad-mood angles. One of them stuck a hand out, but McNihil avoided it. All these executive types, especially at this level, would have those annoying expanded handshake transmitters wired into their palms. Worse, he had a receptor in his own hand, a souvenir from his old job. Coming in on his skin’s nerve endings, it slid past the optical override-the flunky, when he’d come around to McNihil’s place, had caught him off-guard and had downed on him before McNihil had been able to pull his arm back. For the next five minutes, the tactile printout had itched away at McNihil’s left thigh, the nerve endings tingling with a dot-matrix scan of the flunky’s business card. McNihil had let it flash up inside his eye, but the only thing he’d read from it was the stylized DynaZauber logo and the company motto, something about all men being customers. What did he care what the flunky’s name and real job title were?

  With the execs’ collective gaze on his back, McNihil walked over to the tall view window at the opposite side of the cubapt’s living area.

  He stood with his nose almost touching the window, looked out and saw the Gloss stretched out far below. He licked the tip of his index finger with his tongue, then rubbed wet a spot of the glass. There was no pixel blur; the space was as high up as it appeared to be.

  “You got spit on the window.” Harrisch, a silver-haired senior exec that McNihil had encountered before, stood behind him now. “That’s DynaZauber property. Not even leased; we own this puppy.”

  McNihil glanced over his shoulder. “I like to know where I am. Altitude-wise.”

  “What does it matter?”

  “In case I fall.” He shrugged. “I want to know how long until I hit.”

  “You might find out.” Harrisch matched him in grumpy radiation, even though a smile like an open wound surfaced across his even teeth. “You’re a bad guest. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I try to be. It saves time.”

  He’d actually hoped that things would get this ugly, this fast. If nothing else, it meant that none of the other execs would try to introduce themselves. Which meant he wouldn’t have to fend off any more of those hearty ’spandshakes. The verified rumor was that execs like these had the data circuits wired over to their genitalia, where the nerves were clustered thick enough for almost instantaneous readout. Stuff like that gave a whole new meaning and impetus to the old yuppie concept of networking; less reliable rumors talked about social events jammed tight with suits, all of them shaking hands and exchanging business-card data with each other until their faces shone like rain-wet stoplights and the smell of semen hung in the heavy-breathing air. McNihil didn’t care to give any of the people in the room even part of that kind of thrill.

  “I knew it.” Harrisch looked disgusted, as though the spit on the window were some personal graffitied message about the nature of the universe. “We shouldn’t have asked you to come here.”

  “See? I told you.” McNihil turned all the way around, so he could speak right into the face of the DZ flunky, who’d materialized at his elbow. “Fine by me. I’m gone.” He pushed past both men and headed for the cubapt’s door.

  “But as long as you’re here.” Harrisch snagged him by the arm and deflected him toward the group of other men at the center of the living space. They were all standing around something that looked like a bundle of rags at their feet. “You might as well let us know what you think.”

  Not rags; it never was. Not when the bundle was lying in the middle of a medium-to-expensive gray carpet with tasteful black flecks woven in. Laundry, dirty or not, always migrated to the corners of rooms. Nobody ever stood around laundry or rags, watching with carefully blank-to-hostile expressions as some intruder was steered their way. Two of the suited execs stepped back, partly in deference to their boss’s approach, mainly to let McNihil see what was lying there.

  Which was what he’d expected to see. At least the gaze in the filmed-over eyes didn’t broadcast contempt for everything that still had breath in its lungs, that managed to live without benefit of stock options. The corpse stared up at the ceiling with the patient manner of the truly dead, the ones who weren’t going to return on some battery-driven installment plan. An adult male, younger than anybody else in the room, including McNihil, excluding the overeager corporate rep. Christ would’ve been younger than the creaking execs who watched from the corners of their eyes as McNihil bent over the one who now wasn’t going to get any older.

  “What’s all this shit?” He pointed to the corpse’s open shirt. It’d been unbuttoned and folded back, to show the corpse’s chest equally and neatly opened. An incision ran from under its throat to past its navel, terminated somewhere below the elastic waistband of the plain-white, non-designer underpants. The surgical cut might as well have had buttons and holes along its edges; they had been turned almost bloodlessly away from the bones and connective tissues of the corpse’s sternum. Gurgling pipes and tubes, small machinery like burrowing chrome rats, had snuggled in and nested among the various organs. Selectively permeable gas membranes around the exposed heart and lungs; the human bits glistened and shone like the contents of the plastic trays at an upscale butcher’s counter. The resemblance was extended by the drop in temperature-McNihil could feel it just by holding his palm an inch above the corpse’s chest-carefully regulated by the devices’ programming.

  Stuff like that couldn’t be overlaid; no analogues existed in McNihil’s monochrome world. The little machines continued their work, visibly, like some nightmare of a future that had already arrived.

  McNihil pointed to the busy wound. “Why’s he all prepped for transplant harvesting?”

  “That’s just standard procedure.” The flunky had hesitated a moment before speaking up, in case Harrisch or any of the other brass had felt like explaining. “Procedural standards, for the company.”

  “That’s what we do,” said one of the other execs. His voice was a dog’s growl in a man’s nasopharynx. “That’s the kind of organization we are.”

  “Condition of employment.” Whenever any of the brass spoke, the flunky bounced on the balls of his feet for a moment, as though the invisible leash had been yanked. “Public service sort of thing. Your organs are company property. All the suites and cubes and efficiencies have inbuilt Detect- &-Dissect™ kits keyed to the employees’ vital signs; they drop, you’re popped.” The flunky had settled down, but his quick laugh jerked him up again, marionettelike. “Usable pieces get stitched into deserving orphans.”

  “Why waste ’em?” The one brass rumbled again.

  “True.” McNihil looked the man in the red-rimmed eye. “If nothing else, you could serve them over rice in the executive lunchroom.”

  No laugh or smile. “If we wanted to,” the brass agreed quietly.

  Harrisch, the senior exec, had hung back, letting the lower rankings have a go at the asp-head they’d invited here. Their relative positions on the DZ corporate ladder were obvious to McNihil, just from the density of the swarms of E-mail buzzing around their heads. Some of the execs had only two or three of the tiny holo’d images yattering around them for attention; the bottom rungs had enough that their faces could barely be seen past them. Swatting did no good; every once in a while, one of the junior execs would have to turn away, crouching over in a corner and downing enough of them, muttering quick responses into his Whisper-Throat™ mike, to get a few seconds of relief. Harrisch had none; either the corporation was paying for max’d-out filtration or he was high up enough to have gone on an elite paper-only status. He at least was at no risk of being overloaded, prostrate on the floor and buried under a t
hickening flock of messages, like a dead cowboy beneath vultures in a Western landscape à la John Ford.

  McNihil looked back down at the corpse and poked it with the toe of his shoe. “What was this poor bastard’s name?”

  “Travelt.” The flunky bobbed helpfully at his side. “His name was Travelt.”

  “First name?”

  Silent and unrepeated, the question went around the cubapt’s living space. The execs looked vaguely embarrassed, either from not knowing or knowing and not wanting to admit it.

  A wallet was in the corpse’s jacket pocket; McNihil had spotted the flat rectangular shape. He stood back up, flipping the soft leather open. “William,” he announced, reading it off a company ID card. “In case you were wondering.” The driver’s license was-in McNihil’s vision-a nice overlaid replica of what somebody would’ve been carrying around circa the Eisenhower administration. The tiny photo showed the corpse’s face above an early IBM-white dress shirt and blue-striped tie. In life, the late Travelt had looked like a version-in-training of the older and harder ones standing around watching. At that stage, he’d still looked more human than not.

  McNihil tapped the image with his forefinger. He knew that would trigger the ID codes embedded in the card, over in the hard world beneath the one he saw.

  “Assembling tomorrow today,” spoke a bass-enhanced voice. The words sounded as confident as they would have if the speaker had still been alive. “Add value and evolve-”

  “Whatever.” He flipped the wallet closed. The ID card/driver’s license mumbled for a second longer, then was quiet. He handed the wallet to the flunky, who looked at it as if it were the chilled spleen from the corpse’s viscera. “Obviously not a close friend of yours.”

  “That’s not important,” said Harrisch.

  He made no reply. For a moment, McNihil felt as if the temperature level of the refrigerant devices had seeped out and clamped around his own guts. And from there, across the re-created cubapt’s manicured spaces, through the tall windows and out over the world at large. Though he supposed it had less to do with the dead thing at his feet than with the other ones standing around him, who were still capable of motion and speech, however limited. If his blood had dropped a few degrees, it was their proximity effect that had caused it.

  The corpse’s eyes were shiny enough to make little curved, silvery mirrors. McNihil saw now, as he looked down, that the eyes weren’t just filmed over by death; another film had been laid over them, a chilling membrane like the ones wrapped around the corpse’s heart and kidneys. Preserving the corneas for those lucky orphans. But which now made the dead eyes into even better mirrors, as though polished by silversmiths; he could see his face in them, doubled. The two miniature faces gazing back up at him looked old and tired, the fatigue producing the age rather than the other way around. He wished even more that he hadn’t come here, hadn’t let himself be bullied into coming.

  “So what do you think?” Harrisch loomed up beside him. “Think you can help us on this one?”

  He saw that an edge of the corpse’s opened shirt, only lightly stippled with blood and other fluids, lay across the tip of the exec’s glossy handmade shoes. McNihil looked up and shook his head. “Like I was trying to tell the boy you sent to get me. I don’t do this kind of work.”

  “But you could if you wanted to. If we made it the kind of job you’d want to take on. You’re still on the agency’s list, as a licensed operative.”

  Another shake of the head. “Wake up and smell the burning corpses of your dreams, pal. I don’t know what the connect you’re thinking of. This is way off-zone for me. I don’t take care of this kind of shit; I’ve never taken care of this kind of shit. Even when I was working for the Collection Agency-and I’m not now-” As if they didn’t know that. “But when I was, I never showed up when people were already dead and sorted out their problems. That’s not what asp-heads do. Even if I were one anymore. And I’m not.” McNihil widened his eyes, to ensure that the message went as straight as possible into the other man’s. “Natterkopf bin ich nicht. Got it?”

  Harrisch didn’t give up. “You have special qualifications. You have to admit that-”

  “I don’t have to admit anything. Except I’m ready to say good-bye now.”

  “Oh, please.” Harrisch widened his smile. Now it looked like the result of trying to carve a Hallowe’en pumpkin with a single stroke of a machete. “We’re just starting to enjoy your company. I take back what I said about you before.”

  Harrisch’s eyes, the center of them, were black mirrors instead of silvered, but they showed the same thing as the corpse’s blank gaze. In the two dark curves, McNihil saw his tiny reflections again. If that face looked tired and disgusted, and not easily talked into taking this kind of a job, McNihil figured it had a right to. He’d already been connected over enough in this lifetime, in the world he’d started out in and the one he saw in his taken-apart-and-stitched-together eyes. Maybe the guy on the floor, or what was left of him, had had the same kind of luck. Maybe the guy had connected up. One way or another. It didn’t really matter.

  “Special qualifications,” repeated Harrisch. “That’s why we asked you to come here.”

  Little black mirrors. Like looking straight into the exec’s skull and seeing nothing, or worse than that, the big Nothing with the capital N. The swallower, the negative soul, the extinguishing substance of which was in all the other execs’ eyes. That walked amongst them in the cubapt, slipping between their bodies like laughing smoke, that strode through the corridors of all the other ghost buildings in the chain of cities, that hauled the steel cables of the unnumbered elevators like ringing an empty cathedral’s bells.

  “We asked you to come here because we figured you could help us. We know you can.”

  McNihil pulled himself back from his own bleak musing, focusing his gaze and attention on the senior exec standing in front of him. The centers of Harrisch’s eyes still looked like black holes.

  “I don’t know what kind of ‘special qualifications’ you’re talking about.” He wasn’t having any problem resisting the imploded gravitational pull that the exec was radiating in his direction. “You got one of your lower ranks zipped, that’s not the kind of thing I was ever concerned with. Are you tracking on this?” McNihil tilted his head and peered at the exec from the corner of one eye. Just for sarcastic effect. “Sometimes people get all confused about other people, about what it is they exactly do. I wouldn’t have thought somebody in your exalted position would have that kind of problem, but still. If you think that just because there were dead bodies, or parts of them, left over after I got done with any particular job, that just because of that I must have some kind of general connection to stiff meat… then you’ve really gotten your wires crossed. It doesn’t work that way. Even with asp-heads who are still in the business.” Another tilt of the head, angled down toward the corpse between them. “Why don’t you just get the police to take care of this? They’re cheap enough.”

  “Police don’t have the…” The ugly executive nonsmile appeared again. “The qualifications that you do.”

  “Again with the qualifications.” McNihil shook his head. He glanced toward the cubapt’s tall view window and the gray sky on the other side of the glass. Let the fire fall, he told himself. He’d be willing to let it rain on his own head, if that would’ve meant being able to get out of this sucked-airless space. “If sheer connecting nausea were a qualification”-he let his voice shift into a dull-toothed rasp-“then I’d be your man.”

  “Oh, you’re our man, all right.” Harrisch’s thing-like-a-smile tugged into a snarl at one corner. “You just don’t know it yet.”

  “You will, though.” The little flunky piped up. “Just wait.”

  “If you don’t mind,” said McNihil, “I’ll wait at home.” He turned and headed toward the door.

  Not fast enough. Harrisch caught him again by the arm. “I think,” said the exec, “that if you just took the ti
me to exercise some of those special qualifications-special even for asp-heads-then you’d have a better idea. About why we wanted you to come here.”

  A microsuspicion tickled at the back of McNihil’s skull. The other man had carefully pitched his voice, its faint hinting undertones, not so that it was rich with implications, but just enough to be an appetizer, the bait on the hook. He peeled the other’s hand from him. “What do you mean?”

  “Come on.” Harrisch stepped back and gestured toward the corpse. “You haven’t even really checked it out. Simple dead means nothing. You might as well take a good look. Before we do let the police come and take it away.”

  He knew he should just turn and start walking again, and make it all the way to the door this time. There would be no stopping him; none of the execs would say anything more to him. Harrisch and the rest would scratch him off their list and move on to Plan B, whoever else they figured they could rope in on their problems. Whatever they were.

  McNihil knew that was what he should go ahead and do. But he didn’t.

  “All right.” He was already regretting the impulse, the momentary weakening of resolve. “You win. This much: I’ll check this poor bastard out.”

  He didn’t care if a little triumphant smile got passed around the room, from one smug company exec to another. If it did, he didn’t see it; that was all that mattered. McNihil had already got down on one knee, that much closer to the corpse. And to its face, the empty, gray-silvery gaze focused on nothing. As I am, said the corpse inside McNihil’s thoughts. So will you be. To which McNihil answered, Not me, pal. I’ll kill myself first. Some way that left nothing but ashes.

  Almost a kiss; he had brought his face that near to the corpse’s. McNihil had known what he would find, that there wouldn’t be any surprises. There never were. That was why he’d wanted to leave, to have no part of this. No matter how much the company might have been willing to pay.