Noir

by K. W. Jeter

  What McNihil saw, as he stood before the elevated cross, was the crawl of smaller, more intricate lights around the circle in which the DZ exec hung suspended. Blinking symbols and scurrying numbers, all tracking the progress of traffic-freight, people, whatever-along the greater circle of the Gloss’s rail links. A kludge of whatever had existed before the advent of the Noh-flies, which had forced everything in the air to creep along the ground, and the new stuff that had been brought on-line-literally-to complete the loop.

  A red dot blinked on a line horizontal with Harrisch’s left knee. McNihil supposed that was the kink in the circuit that had been created by the train derailment, right here in the dead territory. Other red and yellow lights, all along the glowing circle, flickered at different rates and intensities. Trouble all along the line, figured McNihil. Which was to be expected; there was everything in the rail-transport system, from steam-powered cog-wheelers cranking through the thin-aired Andes, to sleek maglev bullet trains tearing through the flat, smoky guts of California. In some places parallel to each other; at the inevitable bottlenecks, track gauges of wildly differing dimensions were crammed into each other. Plus sabotage and other industrial/political squabbles, ice shifts near the poles, earthquakes anywhere along the edges of the ocean’s submerged tectonic plates-given that degree of barely contained chaos, it was a miracle that the circle surrounding Harrisch didn’t light up as fiercely red as a biblical wheel of fire.

  Or maybe it had, one time; McNihil wondered if that was how Harrisch had inherited the circle and the cross. The old, powerful Rail Amalgam had been run by a high-mysterioso figure named l’Etatbrut… or that at least had been the rumor. If he’d existed at all, perhaps he’d been consumed, annihilated, turned to sifting ash by all the red alarm lights going on at once, his outflung hands gripping a rolling inferno of catastrophe data. If that hadn’t been enough to burn the mythic l’Etatbrut to cinders, it still might have been a sufficient adrenaline rush to unplug his heart from the cage of his ribs.

  “You’d better watch out,” warned McNihil. “There are other people who might want to be hanging where you are.”

  The smile shifted to sneer again. “Such as?”

  One word: “Ouroboros.”

  “Bullshit.” Harrisch’s sneer became uglier-McNihil wouldn’t have thought that was possible-and tinged with an unhidable nervousness. “At least the Rail Amalgam exists… or it did. Ouroboros… there never was such a thing. That’s all legend.”

  “Maybe,” conceded McNihil. He had no way of knowing for sure. Maybe no one except those inside Ouroboros-if it existed at all-had that certainty. It was an entity wrapped inside darkness deeper than this night could ever have achieved. A true shadow corporation, summoned into being by the Rail Amalgam itself. The Gloss’s great circle of a railway was put together into one operating unit by government confiscation of various independent railway systems; some of them didn’t like that. Something called Ouroboros, taking on the symbology of the snake swallowing its own tail, supposedly represented the conspiratorial interests of those systems’ now-dispossessed owners. In its nocturnal sphere, Ouroboros would have needed to operate on a much more concealed basis than the Rail Amalgam ever had. No wonder there was so much disagreement among the daylight world’s police agencies and the underground’s denizens as to whether Ouroboros was real or just some deeply spooky imagining.

  Maybe that was what Travelt found out, thought McNihil. That was the other part of the legends and rumors circulating around Ouroboros like overlapping, partially legible scales. That the shadow corporation was the delivery service, the rail line, that serviced the unlit, steamy environs of the Wedge. The theory being that the amalgam’s fascist purity made some things streng verboten, way off-limits. Not sex so much-like most fascist organizations, the Rail Amalgam was fueled by erotic tension-but the kind of sex that the Wedge and its occupants dealt in. The kind that a shadow corporation like Ouroboros would be only too happy to move along its underground tracks. Underground being, perhaps, both literal and metaphorical; if no one knew whether Ouroboros existed or not, then by logic, anyone or anything could be part of it. Which led the farthest-out conspiracy theoreticians to posit that the Rail Amalgam and Ouroboros were the same thing, their spheres of identity and operation coexistent with each other. When the Gloss’s brownish-yellow sun was out, Ouroboros was reduced to a shade, a silhouette of the Rail Amalgam, a nothingness sliding across the ground. But when darkness fell, then it was the Amalgam that disappeared, and Ouroboros that became both invisible and omnipresent. Like God, thought McNihil. Or its opposite.

  The area around the train’s wreckage grew brighter, as though McNihil’s unvoiced notion had been the cue for a theatrical dawn. He glanced over his shoulder and saw the bright, blue-white glare of generator-driven worklights flickering on, turning the tracks and displaced machinery into color-drained ghosts of themselves. Big shadows wavered into the darkness of the surrounding rubbish dunes; McNihil could see other figures, presumably fully alive, stationing themselves along the shattered metal. The sparks of an arc-welding torch hissed in the farther distance, accompanied by the deeper groans of heavy-equipment jacks being levered into place.

  He turned and looked back up at the suspended figure. “I suppose it’s your funeral,” said McNihil. “If the Rail Amalgam comes back and wants its property returned, or if Ouroboros shows up and kicks your ass…” He shrugged. “Not my problem.”

  “Funerals?” Something amused Harrisch, enough for a quick laugh. “You know, I’m not worried about them, either. There’s a psychological advantage to taking a posture like this.” He rocked his head back against the cross on which he was bound. “You figure, whatever’s the worst that can happen to you-three days later, they roll away the stone and you’re as good as new.”

  “As long as you’re feeling that way…” McNihil tilted his head toward the unconscious girl on the ground. He hadn’t forgotten, even during the whole conversation with Harrisch. “I’m a little concerned about her.”

  “Really?” The other man appeared both wondering and somehow pleased. “I’m surprised. Doesn’t seem to be your style.”

  “I’m trying to cultivate a sympathetic attitude these days.”

  “Is it working?”

  “Not in your case,” said McNihil.

  Another muted groan, as though from the midst of troubled sleep, sounded from the body laid out on the ground. McNihil nodded toward the girl. “How about doing something for her?”

  “I’m touched by your concern. That speaks of some innate kindness in you that I wouldn’t have otherwise suspected.” Harrisch called over his shoulder to the DZ flunky at the controls of the crane. “Get some medical attention for this unfortunate person. Find out if she’s going to live or die, at least.” He glanced again toward McNihil. “There’s nothing you or I can do for her. Not right now. Why don’t we get out of the way? There’s a few things I’d like to discuss with you.” With a nod of his head, Harrisch signaled to the crane’s operator, who kept his bored expression as he put the equipment into gear.

  McNihil followed alongside the crane, its caterpillar treads moving parallel to the railroad tracks and the wreckage of the train. “I don’t,” he said, “feel much like talking now.”

  “Really?” The other’s smile glistened in the worklights’ bright radiation. “But there’s so much we need to talk about.”

  McNihil rubbed his brow with the butt of one palm, smearing the blood from the minor wound. The sting nudged him back toward full consciousness; for a moment, from the effort of walking, he’d felt somewhat woozy. It’s not her, the thought came to him, that’s having the bad dreams. It’s me. The train, turned over on its side, emitting ghostlike billows of smoke and the hisses of small creatures writhing in damnation, rolled past the corner of his vision as though it were the painted backdrop for some elaborate hallucination. The glare from the suspended worklights and the DynaZauber crews’ welding torches bounced around insi
de McNihil’s eyes like raw electricity converted to some kind of straight optical feed.

  “Don’t worry about the girl.” As they continued alongside the steaming wreckage, Harrisch had the circled cross brought down closer to McNihil, the better to impart confidences. “I’ve got an emergency medical crew here on the scene. My people will do whatever’s possible for her. And if there isn’t anything that can be done…” He shrugged. “Then you needn’t have wasted your time worrying.”

  “Thanks.” The exec’s presence repelled McNihil like a magnetic pole constructed of razor blazes. “I appreciate that.”

  The smile eased into place again. “All part of the job.”

  “Maybe you should look for another job.”

  “Ah.” With mock ruefulness, Harrisch gave a slow shake of the head. “But I think I’m getting pretty good at this. And with the Rail Amalgam out of commission, who else is going to take care of the trains?”

  McNihil glanced past the toppled cars. “You call this ‘taking care’?” It’d been obvious to him, as soon as the other man had popped up in front of him like some kind of Kristallnacht jack-in-the-box, that Harrisch had been responsible for the derailing explosions. “No wonder I’m concerned about the girl.”

  “All minor and easily fixed. Readily assimilated into the overall plan.” The crane moved past McNihil and started up one of the nearby rubbish dunes. “Come up here where you can get a better view.”

  As he followed the dangling exec out of the illuminated zone, McNihil’s footsteps ground into shards of ancient circuit boards and the softer detritus of empty gum wrappers. At the hill’s crest, he stopped and turned around, looking where the other’s nod directed his attention.

  “You see?” Harrisch’s gaze swept across the vista. “All rubber-or might as well be.” A smirk of self-satisfaction moved over Harrisch’s leanly angled face. “We use the same SCARF weapons technology that the Noh-flies do, but in a noncatastrophic way. If you rein it in, it can be really quite benign.”

  He saw what Harrisch meant. From here, McNihil could see that the explosions hadn’t ripped apart the railroad tracks. The rails themselves, where they weren’t obscured by the toppled engine and cars, seemed like a demonstration of wave activity frozen at one moment in time. Ripples in the lines of rusted iron, the largest extending higher than any of the surrounding work crews, had turned the tracks into ribbons of vertical S-curves, tapering down into progressively smaller hillocks and bumps. Beyond the last car, the tracks smoothed back down into level, undisrupted parallel lines.

  “Very clever.” McNihil didn’t care much, what exact techniques might have been used. He supposed that DynaZauber had found some way of ramping down the SCARF transmutation effects, the narrow-beamed quasi-alchemy that turned aircraft parts into metallic forms too soft to function. That plus enough explosive charges to deform the resulting elasticity, and they could have all the remediable train crashes they wanted. “But you wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble of devising these methods, if you weren’t going to use them on a regular basis.”

  “Regular enough,” conceded Harrisch. “It’s not just an issue of managing the corporation; you have to manage the customers as well. Which in our case is the world. Or at least the Gloss-not that there’s any other part of the world that matters. What some people at DynaZauber believe, is that if it isn’t L.A., it ain’t shit. That language is a little more colorful than what I’d use. But the agreed-upon principle is the same: the Pacific is the new Mediterranean. The omphalos, the middle of the earth. It has been for a long time. The great middle ocean, the navel, the solar plexus. Who cares what goes on in Kansas or Ulan Bator? I mean, if there is a Kansas or an Ulan Bator any longer.”

  “There’d have to be.” McNihil watched the crews bashing away at the deformed rails. Under the worklights’ glare, the lengths of iron reddened as the welding torches and SCARF invectors continued their assault. “All that flesh on the streets comes from somewhere.”

  “As I said: Who cares?” The expression on Harrisch’s face was all politeness and charm. “It comes from somewhere. So do cockroaches. But it doesn’t ride these trains to get here.” He looked even more pleased with himself. “Kansas and Ulan Bator aren’t on the schedule.”

  “Nobody is, if you keep taking out the tracks.”

  “That’s how they learn to appreciate us.” The smile remained, but Harrisch’s gaze had hardened to simulated diamond. “The Rail Amalgam was too soft on them. We have to put the squeeze on every once in a while. Remind the paying public of all we do for them. How we make their world possible. If we don’t do that, they mistakenly assume that the railroad, the great circle of transport around the rim, is something fixed and eternal, that they can depend upon to be there always, like gravity keeping their feet glued to the earth.”

  “Silly bastards,” said McNihil.

  “Exactly.” The other man pretended not to notice the sarcasm. “There was a time when they thought that about air travel. Or, to be more precise, they didn’t think about it at all. But their unspoken assumption was wrong. As the world found out.” The glint in Harrisch’s eyes was one of scary earnestness. “How wrong they were-the Noh-flies showed them that. Which was, of course, a good thing. It’s always best to find out the truth, no matter how painful.”

  “Or profitable.”

  “Oh, admitted.” Harrisch smiled again. “DynaZauber gains thereby-and why shouldn’t we? The truth, the new world, brought us into existence. Therefore, we’re necessary. Therefore, the world should appreciate us, and all we do for it.”

  Past the overturned engine and cars, past the crews bashing away beneath the banks of worklights, past the dunelike heaps of rubble mottled with the embers of the dead scavengers’ campfires, a thread of violet had seeped around the edges of the true hills to the east. McNihil was grateful for that vision, the little bit that his own night-filled eyes allowed him to see. It meant that eventually the night would be over in that other world and some form of day would roll across the earth. At least for everybody else, thought McNihil.

  “So what do you want from everybody?” He glanced over at Harrisch hanging on the cross beside him. “A letter of thanks? A testimonial dinner?”

  “Of course not.” The smile faded a little. “Those kinds of things are always lies. Because they’re made up of words, aren’t they? And thus they would have to be lies, wouldn’t they?”

  “I don’t know.” McNihil shrugged. “You tell me.”

  “More words. When all that really counts is money.” In the flares of light coming from the base of the rubbled hill, Harrisch’s eyes looked ancient and cold. “It takes a lot of money, both officially and under the table, to keep everything rolling along. It costs a great deal to put things where they need to be. Real things, that is; but that’s all that matters, finally.” White-and-blue marbles of ice filled Harrisch’s eye sockets. “All that cute blather people talked about a while back, about how the future would be nothing but little bits of information being zipped back and forth, the whole world on-line and freed of the constraints of gross materiality-that didn’t come to pass. Atoms endure, Mr. McNihil; they have a tendency to do that. Solid things are built out of them. Whereas information is mainly lies. Nacht und Nebel; night and fog. So in that sense, it’s not even information at all. Misinformation, disinformation; something like that. Therefore, it doesn’t exist at all, for the most part.”

  What the hell. McNihil rubbed the dried blood on his forehead. He hadn’t followed that at all. Or even why Harrisch had bothered laying it on him. Maybe when the sun came up, when the shadows of the hills would gradually shrink like detumescing male genitalia, maybe Harrisch would disappear as well, as though his dark image were constructed of the Nacht he spoke of, encasing the pale Nebel of his flesh, which would burn off with the day’s first heat.

  “You see,” continued Harrisch, “it’s important to concern ourselves with what’s real. What’s really real. Who was the wise man who sai
d that reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it’s still there?”

  “Beats the connect out of me.” McNihil brushed his own dried blood from his fingertips as he glanced over at the other man. “I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”

  “That’s a shame. Because it really is important.” The mad spark at the dark centers of Harrisch’s eyes was as ice-cold as their surroundings. “I’m talking about how the world is constructed. Our world, Mr. McNihil, the one in which we exist, for good or ill.”

  Mainly the latter, thought McNihil.

  “You know,” continued Harrisch, “I share some sentiments with your little friend, back there on the ground. I know a lot about what she thinks and feels. She has the same coital phobia, the disgust and rage that come with all that sticky, messy wiring-up and networking. The erosion of one’s sharply defined outlines, the loss of one’s individuality, subsumed into the great puddinglike mass.” He shook his head. “After all, I didn’t become such as I am by having any great fondness for ego loss. But November-that’s her name, I believe-she thinks the ocean is just sex. Whereas I…” The narrow face’s expression darkened, generating its own shadows in its etched crevices. “I take a considerably wider view. A definition of greater compass. One that takes in all the world, and not just that smaller one bound by sweating skin and mucosal emissions.”

  “I either don’t know what the connect you’re talking about,” said McNihil, “or else I just don’t care.” A glyph of ash had been smeared across the back of his hand, sometime during the extended, steel-crumpling crash; he rubbed it away with the ball of his other thumb. “Either way, it doesn’t matter.”

  “Perhaps not, Mr. McNihil.” The sharp gaze regarded him, as though he were some small creature suspended on needles. “Why don’t you tell me what does matter to you, then.”