Noir

by K. W. Jeter

  “Aww…” A moan of disappointment escaped from the folded scarecrow figure. He hadn’t been able to see the aberration until it’d been pointed out to him, but now he wouldn’t be able to keep from seeing it. “That sucks.” He glanced toward the simple plywood door behind him. “I oughta get my money back.”

  Like there’s a chance of that. McNihil let his gaze travel around the theater, such as it was. In the dark, smelling of sweat and urine and spilled wet sugar, the screen’s soft radiance fell on just a few scattered faces. And some of those were asleep, or looked so narcotized that if the film had broken and nothing but white light had filled their blank eyes, they wouldn’t have protested. They’d probably just have thought it was their own brain cells imploding into some territory of opiated bliss. McNihil looked back at the kid. “Don’t sweat it.”

  The eyes behind the lenses were glaring at him with real hatred. “You’re a pretty smart guy, aren’t you?”

  McNihil shrugged. “On occasion.”

  “Smart enough to figure out why I wanted you to meet me here? At the movies?”

  A song had started coming out of the theater’s rinky-dink speakers, mounted on the walls with cables dangling. McNihil glanced up at the misshapen screen image, remembering now that this month’s disnannie was a cartoon adaptation of the ancient black-and-white film The Lodger, transformed into something called Jackie Upstairs. A teenage Ripper was serenading a fogbound period London from his boardinghouse window, while a trio of cutely animated viscera-Kidney, Liver, and Uterus-danced and wisecracked around him.

  “Beats me,” said McNihil. He looked back over at the kid. “If you feel like telling me, go ahead.”

  “Because…” The kid leaned across the armrest between the seats. A yellow fleck of popcorn kernel hung on his lower lip. “I figured you might not be on the level, mister. Maybe you’re not a book collector at all. Maybe you’re a copyright thug. What do they call ’em? A snake-head.”

  “Asp-head,” corrected McNihil. “It’s one of those bilingual confusions. Deutsch-lish, German and American muddled together. Asp from the English, kopf the German for head. So you get asp-head; it’s what they call a back-formation, from the name of the old twentieth-century organization ASCAP. They were the ones who used to round up the money for composers and musicians, until the Collection Agency came together from the old software protection and copyright defense outfits, so there was just one rights authority for all intellectual-property forms.”

  The kid goggled at him in distaste. “Did I ask you for some connectin’ historical lecture?”

  “No…” McNihil shook his head. “You didn’t. But you figured asp-heads, or whatever you want to call them, don’t go to the movies?”

  “Connect if I know. But they carry lotsa big clunkin’ metal around with ’em. Guns and stuff. ’Cause they’re bad.” The kid couldn’t keep an excited gleam from appearing in his eyes. “They like to hurt people.”

  “Do they?” McNihil put away his smile. “I better watch out for them, then.”

  “But you don’t have to. Not here. At the movies.” The kid displayed horsey teeth. “You can’t get into the movies, even in a crummy place like this, without walking through the metal detectors. Everything past the front door’s got a detection grid wired around it. If you’d walked in carrying a gun, man, every alarm in the place would’ve gone off.”

  “Really?” McNihil let his own eyes go wide and round. “Gosh.”

  The kid’s expression darkened. “Maybe if they didn’t have to spend so much on security procedures, places like this could get better projection equipment.”

  “Naw…” McNihil shook his head. “They’re probably just cheap-ass bastards in general.” A shrug. “I’m older than you. I don’t have expectations about people anymore.”

  “‘Older.’” The kid nodded appraisingly. “Yeah, an old guy like you… I figured you’d be the kind who’d be interested in this kind of stuff.” He shifted in the broken-hinged theater seat, so he could dig a chip out of his jeans pocket. “Not my kind of thing, but it should be right up your alley.”

  “What the hell’s this?” McNihil took the featureless gray square from the kid and examined it between his thumb and forefinger. “I thought we were talking about bookscans.”

  “Scans? Are you kidding?” The kid sneered at him. “You think I’m gonna walk around with prima facie evidence of copyright violation in my pockets? You’re out of your mind.”

  “I thought you weren’t worried about asp-heads. And all sorts of other bad things.”

  The song on the movie’s soundtrack had ended. The animated uterus, specked with bright cartoon blood, was perched on the young hero’s shoulder, dispensing its feminine wisdom.

  “Not,” said the kid. “I’m just careful.” He tilted his back toward the doors. “That’s another reason for wanting to do the deal in a place with metal detectors. This way, somebody like you-if you were an asp-head or some other kind of uptight intellectual-property freak-you can’t read out what’s there on the merchandise.” The kid smiled even bigger. “You couldn’t get the hardware you need in here. The readers and outside lines.”

  “Huh.” McNihil smiled and nodded in appreciation. “Pretty clever.” You poor bastard. It took some effort to keep his pity for the kid from showing through. The little schmuck wouldn’t know what hit him-except that McNihil would make sure he did. “So what am I supposed to do with this?” McNihil held up the chip. The ghost light from the projector beam made it sparkle like a blank postage stamp. “What good is it to me?”

  The kid’s smile oozed self-satisfaction. “Plenty. If you want those scans of those old Turbiner titles, complete with cover art-” The kid nodded toward the chip in McNihil’s hand. “That’s how you get ’em.”

  Another scene popped up inside McNihil’s head, a little private show, blanking out for a moment the images up in front of the theater’s seats. McNihil could see the book covers the kid meant, all perfect retro, the color version of McNihil’s own black-and-white world. Guns, women, and angst. It all seemed like home to him.

  Those books, the words in them, all sadly out of print-that was the merchandise the kid was peddling. Stolen merchandise. McNihil carefully maintained his pulse and blood pressure at a normal level.

  “Look.” The kid leaned over and took the chip back from McNihil. “Here’s all you have to do,” he said with elaborate faux patience. “You take this, you go home, you pry off the back of your phone-it’s easy, there’s just a little thumbplate there-you take out the regulation bellchip you’ll see there, you pop this baby in its place. You don’t need to know anything about how it works.” The kid had a superior smirk, the attitude that the young and hip always took toward the old and out-of-it. “Then you’ll be able to dial right into a nice little on-line database down in Lima. They’re good people; they got a real commitment to information being free.”

  McNihil knew the site the kid was talking about. What the kid didn’t know was that it was an entrapment front maintained by the Collection Agency.

  The kid handed the chip back to McNihil. “That’s all there is to it.”

  “I don’t quite see it…” McNihil studied the chip, turning it back and forth. “I thought you were being so careful and all. About asp-heads and bad stuff like that.” He held the chip up between himself and the kid. “Now, if you sell this to me… if I give you money for it, an exchange of legal currency for merchandise, and I put it in my pocket…” His words were meant to give the kid every conceivable out, every incentive for backing away from the deal. Not that McNihil figured the kid would; he just didn’t want to have what was about to happen on whatever remained of his own conscience. “Aren’t you violating Alex Turbiner’s copyrights? They’re his books. The writing and all.”

  “No, man…” The kid laughed and shook his head. “Don’t you get it? I’m not selling you any words. I’m selling you a key.” He nodded toward the chip. “There’s no pirated, copyrighted mat
erial on there.” He left the popcorn tub so he could raise his open hands. “There’s no pirated shit on me, period. Nobody’s gonna bust me and trophy me out, just for selling you a phone number. Little bit of trunk-line access code, some block-switching jive… that’s all you’re buying from me.” The chip made black squares in the center of the kid’s glasses. “If the copyright sonsabitches want to send their asp-heads down to Peru, let ’em. That’s the Lima bunch’s lookout. It’s no skin off my ass.” A sneering shake of the head. “Besides, even if you were with the asp-heads, I’d be long gone from here by the time you got through to the data. There’s a delay routine built into that puppy. Forty-eight hours from firing it up, you get your goods, all those crappy old books. You wanna read that shit, it’s up to you. Whatever you want. You just gotta wait a little bit. That’s the deal.”

  McNihil felt even older and sadder. He could hardly believe it, the whole song and dance the kid was going through. Whole generations of freelance pirates must have come and gone, risen up and been scythed down, and left no one to clue the poor child in. McNihil hadn’t heard that spiel about selling a key in decades, since he’d first started working as an asp-head. And that bit about a forty-eight-hour delay, he thought. That had never worked. It didn’t keep someone like this punk off the hook, either legally or in hard practice. It wouldn’t keep the trophy knives away from him. McNihil felt like a killing priest, as though he should lay his cupped palm against the kid’s spotty brow and give him the absolution that idiots earned.

  He thinks he’s so clever. That was the sad part. The kid was doing it, illegally trading in copyrighted material, because he wanted to see if he could do it and get away with it. There wasn’t even that much of a profit to be made, relative to the time and effort the kid had put into this little project. The ego rewards would’ve been the big thing for him, if he were to get away with it. And the scary risk factor, the adrenaline crawl that came with scooting up close to the edge, sailing past the asp-heads’ teeth. However the kid had come into possession of the scanned-in Turbiner books-there were always tiny low-level transactions that even the asp-heads couldn’t keep track of-if he’d just kept his head down, kept them to himself or traded them with other little scurrying rats, he’d probably have gotten away with that much. The risk, the exciting part, was in going commercial, in putting out a carefully worded hook ad on the lines, looking for a buyer. Looking for a cash exchange. A fatal error, like something from a great old fantasy novel, where the character puts on the ring or the Tarnhelm or the cloak of subtler appearance, and becomes invisible to everybody, everything… except the cold annihilating scan that he would otherwise have never been seen by. This kid had raised his head-more than once, less than half a dozen times-and been sighted. He’d gotten a customer with a wallet stuffed with money, every bill of which had a grinning skull where a dead president should be.

  “All right,” said McNihil. “It’s a deal.” He slipped the chip into his jacket pocket, the left outside one where his bag of tricks was built into the lining.

  “Uh-uh.” The kid waggled one of his long, large-knuckled fingers at him. “Not so fast. You gotta pay. Remember that part?”

  McNihil smiled. “What if I just rip you off for it?” He was giving the kid one more chance. Must be getting sentimental in my old age, he thought.

  The kid shrugged, unconcerned. “I phone down to Lima, have ’em yank the base. Forty-eight hours from now, you make your call and there ain’t squat to down. All you got is one ugly cuff link.”

  Little things were working away, which the kid didn’t even know about. McNihil could feel them in his pocket; not in any ordinary tactile sense, but just by knowing. Like ants crawling on a lump of sugar, but so much smaller; it only took seconds for the chip to be engulfed by the swarming, programmed micro-organics, and then just a bit more time for them to link up into their structured layers of membrane.

  “You’re the clever one.” McNihil gave a nod. “You’ve got this one all figured out.” He reached into his hip pocket for his wallet, being careful not to jostle the still-fragile activity in his coat. “If there’d been more guys like you a while back, the asp-heads and all that crowd wouldn’t have gotten very far. You could’ve been the Lenin of an information-access revolution.”

  “Connect that. I’m an independent operator. I look out for my own ass.”

  “Yeah, I can tell.” The micro-organics had finished linking up with each other across the chip’s surface. McNihil could sense a low-level electrical charge seeping out of his pocket. “Dealing with you has been a real education.”

  “It’s not over yet.” One bony-knuckled hand with grease-shiny fingers extended toward McNihil. “You still gotta pay.”

  The wallet held only the cash that had been prepared for this transaction; McNihil hadn’t wanted to contaminate any of his own walking-around money. He extracted the bills, folded them in one hand, then laid the wad on the kid’s palm. “Don’t spend it all on popcorn.”

  “I might.” The kid didn’t even bother to count it. As McNihil had figured, the dollar amount wasn’t important to him. The cash was his own green trophy. “Fun talking to you, old man. You taking off now?”

  Angry shouts, crowd noises, fell from the speakers on the theater’s walls. McNihil turned and looked at the screen again. A mob of cartoon Londoners-fishmongers, cockney pearlies, comical bulb-hatted bobbies-were chasing the tragically misunderstood teenage Ripper through the fogbound streets. The massed chorus number told of how the townspeople’s own sexual frustrations kept them from accepting poor Jack’s attempts at finding love.

  McNihil shook his head. “I think I’ll stick around for a bit.”

  In the kid’s hand, the folded cash had already been activated. Nothing that the kid could sense, but McNihil knew it had happened. When he’d signed on as an asp-head, so long ago, he’d had the skin temperature of his hands surgically lowered-microscopic heat dissipaters, inert threads of directional-flow fibers, ran back through the centers of his forearms. The disadvantage was that up north, any farther around the top of the circle than here in Seattle, or down around the ice floes of the bottom curve, his metacarpals stiffened and ached like sonsabitches. The advantage-the reason for the modification-was that McNihil could hand an evidentiary prop like the treated money to somebody without triggering the heat-release chemicals that the bills had been impregnated with. By now, the kid’s hands, wherever they fell in the cash’s 98.6°-centered range, had sent the self-dispersive substances all the way past his elbows. The stuff went so deep into the pores that it couldn’t be washed off with acetone. Deeper, even; enough seconds had passed for it to have reached the bones. McNihil could haul the kid’s skeleton in and put it under the flickering UV’s-he’d done that to others, back in the old days-and he’d still be able to prove the kid had taken the money. The bait, the hook, the trap. The kid didn’t know it, but he’d already been stamped with the Cain mark of his sin.

  McNihil pointed to the screen. “I want to see how this comes out.”

  “It’s a pretty good one.” The kid had tucked the money into his jeans pocket. “I liked last month’s better, though. Something about oppressed workers of the world…”

  “The Communist Manifesto,” said McNihil. He hadn’t bothered to go see it.

  “Yeah-there were all these little chains with big-eyed faces, dancing and singing around the guys in the factories. It was cool.”

  Pulling himself up in the theater seat, McNihil moved one foot to the side, a measured distance closer to the kid’s feet. Not enough to touch, but to knock over the half-finished soft drink that McNihil had spotted there when he’d sat down. The paper cup spilled its contents, complete with half-melted ice cubes, across the already-sticky floor.

  “Was that yours?” McNihil pulled his foot back, as the kid looked down at the mess. “Sorry-I’ll get you another one. I was heading out to the lobby for a minute, anyway. I’ll be right back.”

  While McNihil w
as in the men’s room-the tiled floor was nearly as sticky as in the theater proper-the micro-organics finished their job in his pocket. The last item on their programmed agenda was to form a tympanum a few molecules away from the pirate chip’s surface, stiffen, then reverse magnetic polarity rapidly and repeatedly enough to sound a tiny, bell-like note, soft and high enough that only the nerve implant in an asp-head’s inner ear could pick it up. That was the only signal that McNihil needed. It meant that the clever little creatures had finished breaking down the chip’s code, the enveloping membrane had run it through a fast-forward simulation of two days’ worth of time, and matched the resulting access key with the checksum already written in the micro-organics’ cores. There was no need to call anywhere in Peru; McNihil’s pocket held enough of the world to hang the kid in.

  At the snack bar, which wasn’t more than a narrow sheet of plywood laid across folding metal sawhorses, he picked up a couple of drinks. The bored-looking girl behind the improvised counter hardly seemed to notice as McNihil took from his other pocket a gelatin capsule, snapped it in two, and poured the white powder into one of the cups. There were no other customers waiting behind him; with a plastic straw, he stirred the contents so that the powder was dispersed and invisible.

  “Here you go.” Setting himself back down in the theater, McNihil handed the drink to the kid. The one he hadn’t messed with he kept for himself.

  “Thanks, man. I’m dying here.” The kid had finished the last of the popcorn, and had thrown the empty tub into the strata of litter on the theater’s floor. “They put too much salt on this stuff. I guess that’s so you’ll spend more money on drinks, huh?”

  You are a clever bastard-McNihil kept his reply silent. He figured the ironic intent would be lost on the kid, anyway. From the corner of his eye, he could see the cartoon figures on the screen, teenage Jack and the one London whore who’d always loved and believed in him, singing a treacly duet. Jack’s cartoon knife glittered like a narrow mirror, as McNihil watched the kid tilt the cup to his mouth.