by K. W. Jeter
“Theodora,” said McNihil, unamused. “Sixth century A.D. The wife of Justinian, in Constantinople. A lot of people think it was Messalina, the wife of the earlier Claudius, but they’re wrong. It was Theodora.”
“Very good.” The Adder clome nodded, impressed. “You have a historical sense. That’s pretty uncommon these days. Most people I see in here think that the world started with their first orgasm.”
No, thought McNihil. They’re wrong. That’s when it ends. He could hear the gates of Eden clanging shut, never to reopen.
“Or maybe,” continued the Adder clome, “you’d prefer not wearing history on your body. Keep it all up here.” One finger tapped the side of his head. “Perhaps you’d prefer something a little more purely fictional. All of In a Budding Grove-or something shorter? Les Fleurs du mal; that’s a popular choice. Or perhaps something more esoteric.” The Adder clome’s voice shrilled higher and tighter. “The Tragical History of McNihil, and How His Wife Died, Kind Of. That might be one you’d find entertaining.”
McNihil’s heart slowed with the weight of the murderous impulse it carried. “That’s good,” he said slowly. “Harrisch must’ve told you an awful lot about me. You know… I’m almost flattered. By all the attention.”
“You’re not, actually-I know that much, too-but never mind.” The Adder clome’s words were still sharp-edged. “You’re more of a private person. We can accommodate that in our services as well. We could do you up with all sorts of advanced materials. Inks that would appear only under certain light spectra, or that would phase-change into visibility at certain times of the day… or hours of the night. Whatever suits you best. We could insert pixel devices in your skin, with their own little batteries and programming, that would flicker at staggered subliminal rates just right, so that only the filters in your eyes would be able to decipher them. Now that should be right up your alley. Harrisch told me about how you like to see things that other people don’t.”
“If you saw what I’m seeing now,” said McNihil, “you wouldn’t be flattered.”
The Adder clome didn’t appear to have heard him. “Something more elaborate?” The mocking sales pitch rolled on. “Something that moves? Animation is easy for this kind of thing. You could have the empresses Messalina and Theodora getting it in every orifice, full-motion rock ’n’ roll with digitized close-ups and a soundtrack with adjustable gain and auto-muting, for when you get tired of all the moans and groans. You could have the Bayeux tapestry marching down your spine, if you wanted, done in early Chuck Jones style. Whatever you want.” The Adder clome gestured expansively. “Perhaps you want something for people to remember you by. Something that rubs off on them, like the smell of your sweat. We can do that. Your tattoos don’t have to just stay on your own body, not anymore.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“Then you’ve heard right,” said the Adder clome. “We can put an imprint cloning function in the design itself, hard or soft.”
That last detail was new to McNihil. “What’s the difference?”
“Hard is, anybody you sleep with-anybody you go skin-to-skin with-they walk away with a permanent transfer of your tattoo onto them. Permanent, at least, until they come to someone like me to take it off. Different with the soft ones; those fade on their own, on whatever schedule you have me set. Something for the ladies… or the boys. Or whatever. Your choice. Though that’s not the end of the possible variations. Your chosen design, whatever you have us embed in your skin, could pass from your body to your lover’s, leaving your skin a blank slate again. And that other person could pass it on to a third, like a message on a slip of paper, going from hand to hand, body to body. A black ghost, molecule-thin, traveling the world. Perhaps with a little alteration with each exchange, a little play on Newton’s third law of thermodynamics and its application to information theory. So that when it comes back to you, eventually, you don’t recognize it and you do, all at the same time.”
“I’ve already seen ones like that,” said McNihil. In bars like the one he’d left a little while ago, establishments that served as the floating front doors, entrance points into the Wedge. A dimly lit vestibule into that darker world, inhabited by its own retinue of circling regulars, like low-rent cosmic debris unable to escape the gravity tug of a sweat-smelling black hole. Too fascinated by what was down inside there, that they couldn’t slip off the barstools and push open the yieldingly padded doors and walk out into the pitying sunlight; too scared by the same, too scared to take the pink dive in their own fragile flesh and find out what was at the bottom. “It was a sacred heart of Jesus-at least that must’ve been what it started out as.” McNihil could see it in his memory, on the biceps of some informant the Collection Agency had been working with a long time ago. “The guy told me it’d had a ‘Mom’ banner unfurled below. But when it came back to him-hard to say how many other bodies it’d swum across-it wasn’t a heart crowned with thorns anymore, it was a kidney wrapped in an extension cord, and the banner had become a three-word testimonial for hemorrhoid suppositories.”
“That guy was luckier than most.” The Adder clome laughed. “I’ve seen worse.”
A few more bad examples floated across the screen of McNihil’s memory. Not all of them had been warmed by blood; the morgue technicians at the Collection Agency had always complained of one of the risks in handling corpses taken from anywhere near the Wedge, the cold remains of those who’d dabbled in that lifestyle. Death-style, corrected McNihil. The techs took all the latex-gloved precautions possible, to keep any traveling tattoos with still-active battery charges from swarming off the decorated stiffs and onto their own hands and forearms.
Something even less substantial, the memory of rumor: he’d also heard that some of the morgue techs, inclined by their profession to ghoulish enthusiasms, had found ways of coaxing the tattoos, like flat black spiders, into big autopsy specimen jars, the kind with lids that screwed down tight. There was supposedly a storage room in the Collection Agency headquarters’ basement, with shelves lined full of the jars, the thin-film images of the harvested tattoos slowly turning and writhing in their half-lives. A glass library of heavy neo-primitivist abstract designs, Sea Dayak and Maori, and traditionalist hearts and flowers and the mournful Rock of Ages, withering like plucked blossoms, black and fragile…
“Though somehow,” said the Adder clome, “I don’t think you came here for a tattoo. Of any kind. You’re not the type that wants to achieve even that much immortality.”
“So why did I come here?” McNihil left his hands flat upon the arms of the chair. “You seem to know so much more than I do.”
“Why don’t you go back to Harrisch and ask him? He gave you the job.” Another shrug from the Adder clome. “He should tell you what it is he wants. Or… maybe he already did. Maybe he showed you.”
What Harrisch had shown him; that was something else that came up in memory, from someplace just under the surface, where it had been cruising like a patient shark. A shark with a capital letter V upturned for its mouth, teeth black instead of glistening white, the angled point and serifs sharp enough to cut flesh. My flesh, brooded McNihil. The same way the dead Travelt’s flesh had been sliced. Sliced and marked…
“No,” said McNihil. “Forget Harrisch for a moment. Let’s go on raking over what you like to talk about. You and these complicated tattoos that you do here at the clinic. Your specialty, I take it.”
“Like I said. We do all sorts of things here.” The Adder clome leaned down, putting his hand on one of the desk’s drawer handles. “I could give you a brochure and a price list, if you wanted.”
“These tattoos… the traveling ones. That go from person to person. You do them just on human skin, or do you do them on prowlers as well?”
The Adder clome straightened back up in his chair. “I do them on both. Real or fake, human or prowler; it’s basically the same technique.”
“So if it was the right kind of tattoo, a human could pick one up from
a prowler. The image, whatever it was, could pass from a prowler’s skin and migrate over to a human’s.”
“No.” The Adder clome smiled tolerantly and shook his head. “It doesn’t work that way. Same technique, different materials; just because a prowler looks like a human being, that doesn’t mean it’s made out of the same stuff. You can’t use the same inks and pixel embeds, the same programming and energy sources. You use the human stuff on a prowler, it’ll just fall off like carbon dust, make a nice little mess on the clinic floor. On human skin, prowler tattoo materials go septic; they die and rot off like some kind of dermatitis or leprosy. A traveling tattoo has a basic self-preservation instinct wired into it, down at the molecular level. It looks for a suitable environment to migrate to, a place where it can go on living, in its own way. So a human tattoo wouldn’t even be tempted to cross over to a prowler, and vice versa. Like two different species; you can’t just cut and paste from one to the other.”
“I didn’t think you could,” said McNihil. “I thought that was the way it worked.” He leaned forward, hands against his side of the desk. “So tell me-” His voice stayed level and drained of emotion. “What was the tattoo you put on Travelt?”
“I didn’t.” The Adder clome spoke without hesitation. “I’ve got a pretty fair recollection of that client. And he never stepped into this clinic. I really never saw him at all. Harrisch ordered up the prowler for him, and when it was ready, we sent it on to the address we’d been given. And there weren’t any tattoos on it, either. I remember that much.”
“So why was there a tattoo-a big one-on Travelt’s body, when Harrisch showed it to me?”
“The guy must’ve wanted one.” The Adder clome looked unimpressed. “Plenty of places where he could’ve gotten one put on. Could’ve gotten it at some other Snake Medicine™ franchise, for that matter. He didn’t have to come here to get something like that.”
“You’re right. I bet Travelt didn’t come here.” McNihil leaned farther across the desk. “But I also think you know where that tattoo came from.” One hand shot forward and grabbed the front of the Adder clome’s shirt, bunching the thin fabric into the center of McNihil’s fist. McNihil drew his arm back, dragging the Adder clome across the top of the desk. “And how he got it, who gave it to him-the whole thing.”
“What-what’re you talking about?” The Adder clome struggled like a gaffed fish. “I don’t know anything-”
“Now you’re really pissing me off.” McNihil lifted his white-knuckled fist up against the Adder clome’s chin, rocking back the terrified face. “Tell me. What was the tattoo? What did it look like?”
“You’re crazy-” Papers and a cup full of pens scattered across the floor, as the Adder clome’s arms flailed out to the sides. He gasped for breath. “You-you’re out of your mind-”
“I’ve been told that before,” said McNihil. “And that was before your pal Harrisch started leaning on me. So now you should be really scared about what I might do.” The chair fell back as McNihil stood up, dragging the other man flopping the rest of the way across the desk. “You should’ve been scared before you started jerking me around.”
The Adder clome’s hands scrabbled futilely at the knee pressing him to the office’s floor. “I don’t-I don’t know anything about the tattoo-”
“I’ll give you a hint.” McNihil still had his fist tight beneath the Adder clome’s throat; with cold precision, he lifted his other one and brought it hard across the side of the man’s head. “Does that work for you?” He wiped the spattered dots of red from his knuckles, onto the lapels of the white coat. “It’s a memory thing, isn’t it?”
“All right… all right…” Both of the Adder clome’s hands had seized onto McNihil’s wrists, holding fast as though to keep from drowning. “I’ll tell you…” A red bubble swelled and burst at his lower lip. “It was a letter…”
“That’s right,” said McNihil. With the ball of his thumb, he smeared the blood across the Adder clome’s chin. There was enough to have written the letter on the man’s face, if he’d wanted. “A great big letter.”
“V,” said the Adder clome. “It was the letter V.” He gasped and swallowed, the hard labor of his lungs slowing. The panic in his eyes went down a notch, as though he’d surmised that McNihil wasn’t actually going to kill him. “Done in a rather… ornate style…”
“You don’t have to describe it.” McNihil shifted his crouching weight back, easing up on the other man. “I’ve seen it. I just wanted to know whether you had.” He unclenched his fist; the back of the Adder clome’s head thumped against the clinic office’s floor. “And if you didn’t put it there on Travelt-and I believe that part, all right-then it would follow that you’re in thicker with Harrisch than either you or he would like me to know about.”
“That’s it,” the Adder clome said hurriedly. He nodded as he propped himself up on his elbows. “Harrisch showed the tattoo to me-”
“Where? When?”
A trace of the ebbing panic showed again in the other man’s eyes. “He… he didn’t actually show me. Harrisch told me about the tattoo, what it looked like…”
“Bullshit.” McNihil backhanded the Adder clome, hard enough to snap his head to the side and push his shoulders up against the angle of the wall. “If you were in so tight with Harrisch, you wouldn’t have hesitated to tell me. You don’t do much to avoid self-promotion.” McNihil stood up, looking down at the Adder clome. A tooth in the other man’s mouth had cut one of McNihil’s knuckles; he wiped the saliva and blood against his trousers. “So there must be somebody else you’re in with. Somebody you wouldn’t want me-or Harrisch-to know about.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” A sullen defiance tightened the Adder clome’s discolored face. He hunched himself into a sitting position, back to the office’s wall. “I’ve got a nice little business going here.” He rubbed his palm against his swelling lip. “Why would I want to get involved with anybody else?” He managed a ghastly, red-specked smile. “I’ve got enough troubles already.”
“Not as many as you will have,” said McNihil, “if you don’t come straight with me.” He fell silent for a moment, a few seconds that stretched on through the hands of the clock on the wall and returned to fill the space between one heartbeat and the next. It had happened before, usually in connection with some surge of adrenaline in his bloodstream, like that produced by taking the Adder clome to the floor. Suddenly, McNihil had the sense of the world he saw, the black-and-white vision capsuled in his eyes, having become realer than real, truer than the dull world beneath the perceptual overlay. The opaque film, the net of bits and pieces from ancient thriller movies, deepened as McNihil stood in the middle of the Adder clome’s office; he could feel it stretching out past the door and beyond the clinic’s walls, a tide of bleak, rich images flooding through the streets and lapping up against the shadowed buildings. No, he told himself. It’s the other way around. An ebbing tide, a false ocean being drained; the world he no longer cared to see was swirling down into a subterranean reservoir of lies, as the real world emerged with a few wet strands of seaweed clinging to the rocks.
If they had eyes to see, thought McNihil. He was almost convinced that anyone could have looked out of the window at this moment, and seen this darkly perfect world. But they’re still blinded. Real time had ended somewhere in the early 1940s; this other stuff, the shoddy substance of the cheap-’n’-nastiverse that people so foolishly believed in… what did it matter? McNihil felt as though his hand had poked through a curtain made of some flimsy synthetic fabric and had found coarse wool and smooth cotton beneath, the stitchery of God’s tailor shop.
“Are… are you all right?”
McNihil didn’t open his eyes so much as let his interior sight shift focus, from the gelling world outside to the clinic office’s rummaged interior. He saw the Adder clome looking up from where he crouched on the floor; the expression on the man’s face showed he was wondering whether McNi
hil was about to flip out even more violently, or whether he was connected-up enough that a quick escape was possible.
“I’m fine.” McNihil reached down and, as reassuringly as possible, took the Adder clome’s hand, pulling him upright. The vision he’d been granted was already fading, leaving him with a certain exhausted peace. “Don’t worry about it.” He stood the Adder clome up in front of himself and patted him gently on the cheek. “But I’d like to think that we understand each other better now. That’s important.”
“Oh…” The Adder clome rubbed his throat, where McNihil’s fist had been jammed. “Oh, yeah. Right.” He quickly nodded. “Yeah, we understand each other.”
“Because what I’m getting from you-” McNihil held a single finger in front of the other man’s eyes. “Is that you really do know more than you’ve been letting on. To either me or Harrisch. Now… Harrisch isn’t here. Right? So we don’t have to worry about him for the moment. About what he thinks. And you don’t have to worry about me getting you in trouble with him. I don’t work that way. Besides…” He let his own smile show. “What would there be in it for me? Better we should let our little… understanding remain a secret. Right?”
The Adder clome didn’t look any less scared because of McNihil’s soothing tone, as he gave another fast nod. “Sure-”
“Good.” Even with the adrenaline leaching out of his bloodstream, the world McNihil saw still seemed real, or at least real enough to work with. “So why don’t we start by you telling me exactly how you know what some dead guy’s tattoo looked like. Where-or maybe who-you got that info from.”
Silence. Another fear shifted behind the Adder clome’s eyes.
“But I know that already,” said McNihil. “You found out from her. From Verrity.” McNihil tilted his head, studying the figure in front of him. “Naturally, you would-because you’re working with her. And that’s what you don’t want Harrisch to know.”