Noir

by K. W. Jeter

  “We don’t care if it downs to anybody-or anything.” Harrisch was way past smiling anymore. “Matter of fact, we’d prefer if it didn’t. If it just disappeared into the Wedge-if it disappeared off the face of the connecting planet-that’d be fine by us. But unfortunately, it’s still out there somewhere. And it’s causing us a little embarrassment.”

  “I don’t see why. Prowlers are legal. Technically.” McNihil reached up and rubbed the back of his aching neck. He wondered if this idiot’s arranged train wreck had given him whiplash. “As long as you don’t get caught doing something stupid with one. If you think it’s bad for the DynaZauber corporate image that one of your junior execs got himself one-” As if anybody cares. “Hey.” McNihil dropped his hand and shrugged. “Tell ’em you fired the guy’s ass before he got into trouble.”

  “Travelt didn’t ‘get’ himself a prowler. He was given it. By me.”

  “Ah.” That didn’t particularly surprise McNihil, either. “That was nice of you. Seems to have wound up getting the poor bastard killed, but what the heck. Does everybody at DZ get one? Must really play hell with the personnel department.”

  “It was a present,” said Harrisch stiffly. “A bonus. A little token of my esteem. Travelt had done… particularly well on some of his assignments at DynaZauber.”

  “I bet.”

  “So he’d earned himself… a little something extra. And at the same time… he needed it.” Harrisch made the words sound reasonable enough. “Travelt was a hard worker; perhaps a little too hard. Too serious. All work and no play. He needed something… for relaxing. Bringing a little… variety into his life. He was valuable enough that I didn’t want him burning out on me too soon.”

  “Of course not,” said McNihil. “Just soon enough.” Nothing in the exec’s spiel surprised him. Why he had me check out the corpse-so it would be obvious that prowler usage was involved. And even… approved of, as Harrisch might say in that arch manner of his. Because they’re all doing it. All of Harrisch’s flacks and flunkies, the various ranks of business suits that had been hovering around there at the cubapt-they’d all had that look about them, smug and conspiratorial, in on something good. Something better than regular people ever had. It was the same look that baggies and other chem’d-out types radiated, at least on the upslope of their crash-and-burn biographies. They’d all had it… except for Harrisch himself. He was on to something even better. Control was the best drug, the spark better than anything that could be gotten out of a prowler’s mouth.

  “I didn’t think… he could hurt himself with it.” A little actorly remorse slid across Harrisch’s face. “For most people… they’re harmless.”

  “Sure they are. And for other people… they’re even profitable.”

  Harrisch drew his head back against the top of the cross. “What do you mean?”

  “Come on. Prowlers are manufactured by a DZ subsidiary. If nothing else, you got it at cost.” Cheap bastard, thought McNihil. “A box of chocolates would’ve run you more.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” said Harrisch. “Maybe that’s what I should’ve done. But it’s too late now. And besides… we were sandbagged. Somebody connected with the prowler that I gave to Travelt. Altered it, outside of its original specifications. That’s where the trouble comes from.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Perhaps if I gave you proof?” Harrisch’s voice resumed its usual oily ease. “Or at least some evidence. Then maybe you’d give some proper consideration to what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

  “Sure.” McNihil glanced up at the other man. “Lay it on me.” He didn’t have very high hopes.

  With a nod of his head, Harrisch signaled to an assistant lurking nearby, possibly the same flunky that had led McNihil to the dead man’s cubapt; he couldn’t tell any of them apart. The assistant walked over to McNihil and dug inside his jacket, finally extracting a couple of sheets of paper, which he deposited in McNihil’s hand.

  “What’s all this?” The papers had the look and feel of inexpensive photocopies. McNihil unfolded them and turned them right side around. “Receipts? For what?”

  “You can read,” the assistant said sourly.

  McNihil held the papers toward the advancing sunlight. Now he could make out the logo and words at the top of the first sheet of paper. “That’s great.” He shook his head; this, at least, he hadn’t been expecting. The receipt was from the central L.A. branch of the Snake Medicine™ franchise. McNihil held the papers out at arm’s length, not so much to read what was on them, as from some instinctive, deeply rooted aversion. Cheesy sexual services, he thought glumly. At the low end of the business, which was probably where the company made most of its profits. “What’s this for? The little novelty items for the Christmas office party?” McNihil wondered if the Adder clomes at the SM clinic handled that sort of thing; streamers and other decorations, little party hats, all with some sort of grossly obscene motif. He didn’t know; he’d never been inside one of the shops, or boutiques, or whatever they were called. A fragmentary image came into his thoughts, of Harrisch and his coterie of ass-kissing junior execs, bedecked with wobbling phallic headgear-at best-and blowing hideous flesh-colored noisemakers at each other. “You know… I wasn’t aware that you and your bunch were such fun guys.”

  “We’re not. Take a closer look.”

  McNihil saw now what the exec meant. This particular receipt was obviously for some kind of high-end merchandise; McNihil glanced at the dollar amount at the bottom of the right-hand column, and was impressed despite himself. “Was all this for you, or one of your friends?” He tried to hand the papers back to the assistant, but without success.

  “Come on.” Harrisch didn’t rise to the bait. “Look at the address. Where the merchandise was delivered.”

  “Travelt’s cubapt.” It took less than a second for him to make the connection. “So this is for the prowler you gave to him.”

  “Correct. As you said, chocolates would’ve been more expensive. But that’s not what I wanted you to see. Read the next page.”

  McNihil shuffled the two pieces of paper, bringing the second one up on top. This one also had the Snake Medicine™ franchise logo on top, and the same order reference number as the other paper. “What’s all this?” The additional words and numbers didn’t make any particular sense to him. “Am I supposed to know what this means?”

  “I’ll tell you,” said Harrisch. “It’s the catalog information for the modifications that were made on the prowler, before it was delivered to Travelt. Modifications I didn’t order.”

  “What were they?”

  “That… I don’t know.” A spark of anger flared up in the exec’s voice again. “The numbers don’t correspond to anything in the regular SM catalog. Or the secret one, which they don’t even keep under the counter. The one they make available to just their top corporate customers.”

  “Like you.”

  “Like me,” said Harrisch.

  What the connect could it’ve been? wondered McNihil. Hard to imagine; the commercial clomes at the Snake Medicine™ clinics, the owner-operators fronting the business establishments, made a point of advertising their full range of services. That was their shtick, why they were all surgically altered into the idealized sleazy image from some old semiforgotten book, the doctor with the knife sharp enough to deliver whatever the customer wanted, sex-wise. From a simple stay-in-one-place tattoo, all the way to a Full Prince Charles job; you made the appointment with whatever Adder clome had set up shop in a low-rent storefront in your zone of the Gloss, and as long as you had the money for it, you could have your own little doorway into the Wedge carved into your body. The Snake Medicine™ clinics were even more legally tolerated than prowler usage, though the Adder clomes always tried to make it seem that they were operating right on the edge of the law, at least in part. McNihil had always figured that was just the usual faux rebellious ad spin on the clinics’ regulated, safe-’n’-sane merchandise an
d services.

  “Why not call them up?” McNihil lowered the sheets of paper in his hand. “Talk to the clome in charge. Ask him what these modifications were. If you’re paying the bill, you’ve got a right to know.”

  “No can do.” On the cross, Harrisch shook his head. “This item was paid for out of a corporate slush fund. If I initiate a billing-error inquiry, all hell breaks loose in the accounting department. Believe me, it’s easier to go outside the loop, have somebody like you poke into the matter. Besides-I don’t need to know exactly how this particular mess was created. I just need it cleaned up.”

  “Your lost property?”

  “Exactly. The sooner it’s back in my hands, the happier I’ll be.” Harrisch’s ugly smile reappeared. “And when I’m happy… I make sure everybody else gets happy, too.”

  I’d be happy, thought McNihil, if you’d get off my ass. “You still haven’t told me what this inside part of Travelt is, that you’ve lost.”

  “Travelt… knew things.” Harrisch nodded, slowly and thoughtfully. “He’d have to have, he’d worked himself up in the corporation pretty well. He really knew the TIAC project inside and out. Close to being my right-hand man on it. As a matter of fact…” The exec shifted uncomfortably on the cross. “There were some things only Travelt was completely knowledgeable about.”

  “For somebody who wound up dead,” remarked McNihil, “he sounds pretty smart. There’s nothing like making yourself indispensable.”

  “True. He wasn’t an idiot. As it turned out… neither was the prowler I gave him.”

  McNihil tilted his head, trying to catch an angle into the other man’s eyes. “What do you mean?”

  “Something happened,” said Harrisch. “Between Travelt and the prowler. That we weren’t expecting. It’s always a very… tight relationship between a user and his prowler; intimate, you might say. And the one between Travelt and his prowler became more than tight; it apparently started to overlap. Big time. Instead of an essential separation between the two, a unity started to form. Transference occurred.”

  “That’s what’s supposed to happen.” Something was hidden in the exec’s gaze, that McNihil wasn’t yet able to make out. “That’s what a prowler is designed to do. It goes out and gets a certain kind of information and transfers it to the user in the form of memory.”

  “Sure-but that’s a one-way street. The information goes from the prowler to the user. Not the other way around.” Harrisch’s voice went up a notch. “Something else happened with Travelt and his prowler. That’s what the unauthorized modification must’ve been about. Something to make the overlap possible, to change the one-way street into a two-way. The information went the other direction-something from Travelt wound up inside the prowler’s head.”

  Now McNihil got it. “The TIAC information. Whatever it was.” The exec hadn’t told him the details. “It transferred over into the prowler. Right?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Along with what else?”

  “That’s… hard to say.” Harrisch’s shoulders lifted, then fell. “It may be safer just to assume that everything crossed over, from Travelt’s head to the prowler’s. The whole personality structure, memories, ideas, information… the whole gestalt of Travelt got downed into the prowler.”

  “How do you know?”

  “There’ve been… indications. Little bits and pieces showing up. Details about the TIAC project, personal things-all sorts of stuff. Stuff that shouldn’t be turning up at all, especially if the person who had them in his head is deceased now. It’s a leakage phenomenon. When other prowlers go into the Wedge, and they bring back things for their users to enjoy…” Harrisch inhaled deeply, then breathed out. “That’s how I know. Because the other execs, the ones who also have prowlers, report these things to me. He’s out there, all right.”

  “You mean,” said McNihil, “the prowler is.”

  “It’s the same thing.” A fierce possessiveness tinged Harrisch’s words. “The prowler I gave him has gone missing, and it’s got Travelt inside. Or enough of him, at any rate. And enough of him is my property. DynaZauber property. Every detail about the TIAC project-that’s ours. And I want it back.”

  McNihil looked away from the angry figure on the cross. He didn’t know how much of Harrisch’s story to believe. And I don’t care, he thought. “Maybe you should climb down from there.” He glanced back over to the elevated Harrisch. “And go looking for it yourself. Because I’m not going to.”

  Before Harrisch, face darkening, could say anything, one of the first-aid techs, in a green scrub uniform, showed up at the foot of the circle-enclosed cross. “Sorry to interrupt.” The tech stripped latex gloves from his hands. “But I figured you’d want a report on that woman. The one from the crash, that you were having us take care of.”

  Harrisch’s annoyance was visible in his furious expression. “What about her?”

  “She’s fine. Bruised and banged up, but nothing more than that.” The first-aid tech wadded up the gloves and held them in one hand. “As a matter of fact, she’s so fine she’s gone.”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  The tech shrugged. “She took a powder. Got off the stretcher, unhooked the monitors, and went for a walk. Guess she didn’t want to hang around.” The tech started to head back toward the rail line. “Like I said, just thought you should know.”

  “That’s how it is for me, too.” McNihil looked up at the exec. “If the train’s ready to roll, so am I.”

  “What about the job?” Harrisch looked like he was about to decrucify himself, to jump down from the apparatus and go face-to-face with the asp-head. “Now you know all about it. So you’re ready to take it on, right?”

  McNihil shook his head. “Sorry. The answer’s the same as before. Not interested.” He turned away and headed toward the train, set right once more on its tracks. The repair crews were wrapping up the last details.

  The exec shouted after him. “Why the connect not?”

  “I’m busy.” McNihil stopped for a moment and glanced back over his shoulder. “I’ve already got a job to take care of.”

  PART TWO

  Fred, understanding that he seemed a bleak, sexless person to Harry, tried to prove that Harry had him wrong. He nudged Harry, man-to-man. “Like that, Harry?” he asked.

  “Like what?”

  “The girl there.”

  “That’s not a girl. That’s a piece of paper.”

  “Looks like a girl to me.” Fred Rosewater leered.

  “Then you’re easily fooled,” said Harry. “It’s done with ink on a piece of paper. That girl isn’t lying there on the counter. She’s thousands of miles away, doesn’t even know we’re alive. If this was a real girl, all I’d have to do for a living would be to stay home and cut out pictures of big fish.”

  – KURT VONNEGUT, JR.

  God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

  (Delacorte Press, New York, 1965)

  NINE

  THE NUMBERS WRITTEN IN HER PALM

  As she was settling in, starting another vigil, somebody came round to remind November that she had bills coming due.

  “You’re always forgetting your friends,” said the big dark shape. The man’s face was hidden by shadow, but she knew what it looked like. “But your friends don’t forget you.”

  Shit, thought November. Sonuvabitch. “Maybe you could just stop thinking about me for a while. Every now and then wouldn’t hurt.”

  There was no way of getting past the guy, breaking out into the open street beyond; he filled up the alley’s mouth like a fourth expanse of bricks, the cork in the bottle’s neck. She’d stationed herself here with a pony bottle of Minnesota Evian and a pack of acetone-laced Gitanes, watching the doorway of the building her quarry, McNihil, was slated for. Her bruises from the train crash were slowly fading. In the meantime, she didn’t want to lose track of McNihil and the bill-paying score he represented. And now this, she thought. Thinking about the money she owed
had summoned up their walking embodiment of debt-load, heavy and nasty.

  “How can we?” This one had a sense of humor. “You’re so connectin’ cute.”

  November took a last harsh drag off the cigarette she’d had going, reducing it to a stub. She bent down to throw it through the gap between the man’s hip and the alley wall, tensing at the same time to dive through that narrow space and hit the ground with a shoulder-first roll on the other side.

  “But not cute enough.” The man’s beefy fist seized onto the collar of her jacket, lifting her up dangling in the air. “Let’s talk some more.”

  She let herself be nailed by his one hand up against the damp bricks, her bootsoles inches from the needles and patches strewn across the alley’s floor. “Numbers are always interesting,” he said. “Let’s take a look.”

  “You know what the numbers are.” November tried to convey an irritated, tolerance-stretched disgust; it was hard in her present position. “You wouldn’t be talking to me otherwise.”

  “Just want to make sure you know what they are.” Still holding her up with one hand, he grabbed her wrist with the other. “Palm-reading time. Let’s have the Gypsies tell your fortune, sweetheart.”

  He twisted her arm around hard enough to get an involuntary squeak of pain out of her. I bet you enjoyed that-she kept herself from speaking the words aloud. She knew better than to try anything on him, the kind of stuff that worked so well on her postcoital marks on the trains; not that it wouldn’t work just as well on him, dropping him paralyzed on his back. But that the consequences, when he caught up with her again-and that was guaranteed-would be so much worse than letting him do what he wanted now. That was the problem with being in hock, she’d often reminded herself. It gave other people power over you, and not the enjoyable variety.