by K. W. Jeter
He lifted his head, raising the glass at the same time and using the watered dregs in it to sluice away the vision of his dead wife’s face. The lock on the door of the little room inside him remained keyless. “Great,” said McNihil. The single drink, combined with some percolating residue of the Adder clome’s injections and his own self-generated toxins, turned a different key in a different lock. A doorway through which he knew he was going to step, though he already knew what was on the other side. The glass splintered into shards in his fist as he slammed it back onto the bar. “Let’s get going.”
“Oh,” said the barfly in a voice only half-tinged with sarcasm. “I love a man who knows what he wants.” Her hand seized his once again. Tight around his wrist; tight enough to force apart his fingers. The bits of glass dropped like dice, altered to transparency and razor edges, around his elbow. The barfly leaned forward, blond hair trailing through the pool of melting liquid; a red drop fell from McNihil’s wounded palm, diffusing into blurred pink. She caught the next one on the tip of her scarred tongue; the blood glistened her lipstick as she kissed the center of his hand.
“I know, all right…”
“Like I said-you came to the right place.” In a predator crouch, the ultimate barfly looked up at him through her lashes. The red looked like black, smeared on her chin. “I can do a lot for you, baby.”
McNihil nodded, letting the key turn another click farther in his heart. “I bet you can.”
The mirror of her eyes held him. “We’ve been waiting for you,” she whispered. “We’ve been waiting for you… for a long time.” She used the back of his hand to wipe away the blood below her lip. “It’ll be worth it.”
Something between fear and disgust pushed McNihil’s gaze away from hers; something in which those terms no longer had a negative connotation. He just didn’t want to see that appetite in her eyes, in case it was a reflection from his own. McNihil looked across the bar, across the perceived but still-hidden figures in the shadows. He could discern them well enough that he could see both male and female prowlers returning his own scrutiny. That’s what they’re made to do, he reminded himself. Just like me. What he’d been before, and what he’d become once again-there really wasn’t that much difference between a prowler and an asp-head. They went out looking for something, the sensory treasure they’d been programmed to sniff out, and they brought it back to their masters. Just like me, he thought once more. Answers rather than thrills, Harrisch’s lost property rather than a collection of scars and tattoos that crawled over one’s skin like the black-clawed shadows of sea creatures-no difference at all, it now seemed to him.
He squeezed his fist tighter, the blood oozing wetly between his fingers. He gazed at the trickle running down his wrist like spilled ink, wondering if he’d achieved some evolutionary apotheosis by combining asp-head with prowler. Either the zenith, thought McNihil, or the nadir-it was something else that didn’t matter. Further proof that everything evolved, or at least changed, one way or another. He wondered if Harrisch, if anybody over at DynaZauber, knew about this. The world of the prowlers, the subterritory of the Wedge, might be getting out of their control faster than they knew. Maybe Travelt hadn’t been the first to have undergone that transference effect, the shifting of his human nature into the mask-faced, artificial receptacles. It didn’t appear that the late junior exec had been the last.
“I’m glad,” said McNihil, looking over again at the woman next to him. “That you’ve been waiting for me.” All irony had been drained from his words. “It’s nice to be wanted.”
“We’re not the only ones.” The other’s presence was so close and unfolding that a perfume of body-temperature latex and soft industrial resins had drifted in the air between them. “There’s somebody else waiting.” The barfly both kissed and whispered into his ear. “She’s waiting, too.”
McNihil didn’t need to ask her. There was only one possibility. “I’m ready,” he said. The glass had been drained and then shattered; what more was left? “Let’s go.”
“You first.” The woman looked straight into his eyes, the way someone about to plunge into a dark, still lake would. “You know how…”
He hesitated only a second. Then brought his hand along the side of her head, the blood from his palm seeping lines through her blond hair. He pulled her even closer and kissed her.
The woman drew back suddenly, her gaze turned to both wonder and almost frightened concern. “Your heart’s stopped.” She had placed her own hand against his chest, as though helping him to keep his balance in the gap between her barstool and his. “I can’t feel it beating…”
“Don’t worry about it.” He couldn’t keep himself away from her. “Not important,” said McNihil, pulling the woman harder toward himself and his mouth.
It took a moment for the inside contact to be completed. McNihil could hear behind himself the silence of the bar’s shadows and the prowlers’ mingled, expectant breathing. Just what they want-there was time only for that thought fragment, before the spark hit.
He’d felt the woman’s tiny scars with the tip of his own tongue, like deciphering a wet braille that chaptered down her throat. If he’d known how to read it, a biography in stitched flesh or a warning:
Abandon all hope
Blue lightning sizzled the insides of his eyelids, like the frayed curtains of his apartment bursting into flame.
Ye who enter here
Image rather than words filled his head, a newspaper photo of an electric-chair execution a long time ago, where flames had burst from underneath the cloth mask as soon as the switch had been thrown. In a sliced-apart microsecond, he wondered if he looked as well as felt like that, his skull wrapped in the incendiary halo of a martyred saint, fire-laced smoke rising to the bar’s low ceiling.
“You gave me… too much…” Talking like one of the spidered-together junkies in the lobby of the End Zone Hotel; he’d felt, been dimly aware through the rush of sensation and memory data, the woman grabbing the front of his shirt to keep him from toppling off the barstool. McNihil’s tongue felt burnt and swollen, as though he’d licked it across the terminals of a live battery. “That was… too big a hit…”
Other hands grasped him under the shoulders, lowering him to the bar’s floor. Far away, in the anteroom of the world he’d just left, he’d heard chairs toppling over as the seizure had snapped his muscles tight, and more than one of the watching prowlers running forward to catch him.
They laid him out corpselike, the back of his hand flopped against the stool’s chrome leg. He gazed up, still able to discern a fragment of real time through all the hurtling images that had risen into his eyes from the woman’s kiss.
“I should’ve known…” McNihil couldn’t tell if he’d managed to mumble the words aloud. “I should’ve known it was you…”
“That’s all right,” said Verrity. Her blood-streaked hair tumbled over her bare shoulder as she looked down at him. “You did know.”
“I had the strangest dream,” said the burnt woman. Or formerly burnt woman; that part hadn’t been in her dream, but had been real. I nearly died, thought November with a calm lack of emotion. A good deal of the peace that passeth understanding-at least for right now, in her case-came from the medication she was still on. She recognized that icy-warm feeling, all sharp edges reduced to fuzzy nubs, that came from a skin-pouch trickling its magic into her veins. “I was floating…”
“Not a dream,” said one of the med technicians, leaning over the arm he and the others were working on. “You were in the tank. Remember?” He looked up from his ’scope and micro-waldo’d needles, and smiled and winked at her. “You didn’t look so good then. Now you’re looking fine, fine, fine.”
November rolled her head back onto the hospital’s paper-covered pillow. She’d caught a glimpse of herself in the chrome flank of one of the machines-different machines than the ones she remembered from before, less scary-and had seen that she’d lost most of her close-cropped b
lack hair. A little soft fuzz was starting to show on her patchwork scalp. As long as they’re doing all this work, she mused, I should’ve asked for a makeover. They could’ve given her a cascade of shimmering Botticelli-red hair down to her butt; anything. She’d heard about the money that was making it all possible…
“Tell us about your dream.” One of the other white-suited technicians spoke without taking his gaze from his fiber-optic eyepiece. “Passes the time. We’re going to be here awhile.”
She raised her other arm, the one they’d already finished. Does look nice-the skin on it was all new, soft and white as a Caucasian baby’s. Since genetically it was her own skin, cooked up in the hospital’s tissue labs for grafting, it would have to be. With a fentanyl-induced smile on her face, November admired the craftsmanship; the stitches only showed if she imagined them. And when she opened her eyes wider, raising her new eyelids, the stitches faded entirely from sight.
“What I dreamed…” She laid the finished arm back down upon the snowy white bedsheet. “While I was floating… I know the difference… I dreamed I was falling…”
“Yeah, like we pulled the drain plug on you or something.” The med technicians exchanged buddy-ish grins with each other. “So you’d run down the pipes, all the way from here on the twentieth floor.”
“That’s not it… I wasn’t even here at all…” She hauled the pieces of the dream out of recent memory; they were already falling apart, as though the touch of her reborn fingertips were enough to reduce them to sugary dust. “First I was back at the hotel… you know, where I got burnt so bad…”
“Do tell.” The technicians continued with their work, stretching the freshly grafted skin and laser-polishing the joins between sections down to nothing. “How utterly fascinating.”
She didn’t mind their gentle teasing. More than the casing of her material form had been renewed by the surgery and all the other expensive therapies. It’s the drugs, she reminded herself. But maybe something else as well: there had been a moment when the anesthetics had thinned out in her nervous system’s receptor sites, when the nurses had been switching her from one I.V.-drip regimen to another, and the pain had rolled over her like a train screaming its heated engine apart, pulling her bones and sinews to tatters with it. And I didn’t even get mad-the way she would’ve before. She’d lain there, wide-eyed and gasping for breath, waiting as patiently as possible for the next batch of opiates to hammer her into diminished consciousness. That was the beginning of some kind of wisdom, she’d supposed. Or maybe some other part of her, inside the baby-new skin she’d been given, had gotten older. It amounted to the same thing.
“And I was falling there…” November went on recounting her dream. “Through the flames and all the beams and stuff breaking away… so I guess I was just remembering that part…” She couldn’t be sure; when the burning hotel’s roof had given way beneath her, she’d struck her head on a rusted iron girder that had seemed to come leaping up at her from the churning interior. Things had been mostly blank after that, a well-erased tape, until the med techs had removed her from the sustaining bath in which she’d been floating. That had been just like being born all over again, and present time starting up once more. “And then… and then…”
“Then what, honey?”
The next part was harder to figure out, to pull away from the surrounding blackness inside her head. Because I wasn’t remembering, November told herself. Not dreaming, either-she realized that she had been seeing something that was happening right now.
“I saw somebody else falling…” Into some other darkness, some other flames. Flames that burned but consumed not-or if they did, consumed something other than flesh for tinder. Flames that ran cold inside one’s veins, rather than with heat. “It was… him…”
The technicians exchanged glances with each other, their latex-sheathed hands stilled for a moment upon her arm. One of them looked over at her. “Who’s that?”
“You know…” She didn’t want to say his name aloud. She didn’t know why, whether it had become sacred or just personal. “The guy… who paid for all this…”
The med tech smiled. “Your secret admirer.”
“No… I don’t think so…” A paper-shuffler from the hospital’s accounting department had come by the burn ward, to explain to her the financial arrangements that had been made-but she still didn’t understand. She knew how close she had come to the bottom of her accounts; the last thought when she’d fallen through the roof of the burning hotel had been, How the hell am I going to pay for this? Knowing that there was no way in any hell she’d be able to, that when her money was drained away, the burn ward’s sterile tank would be as well, its softly charred contents flushed down some convenient drain. And one fragmentary thought beyond that, just the hope that whatever she hit on the way down would be enough to kill her fast and clean, so the money or the lack of it wouldn’t even be an issue.
That McNihil the asp-head was picking up the tab for her was clear enough-but not why he was doing it. Just a nice guy? It didn’t seem in his repertoire of tunes, from what she’d been able, before the burning fall, to find out about him. And she was sure that he wasn’t interested in her in any kind of physical/sexual way. He had that thing going for his dead wife, way beyond mere necrophilia. That was something November couldn’t crack, only envy. Though there was some comfort in knowing that McNihil couldn’t have cracked it, either, even if he’d wanted to.
She thought some more about the puzzle, while the med techs bent over their work. Whim? He always has reasons for what he does-they might not be good reasons, but they existed. November idly wondered what they might be, and if she’d eventually find out, when they let her go from the hospital. In the meantime, she decided not to think about the falling dream, to play it back when she closed her eyes. With the anesthetics’ help, she could will perfect black clouds for sleeping, whenever she wanted.
“There you go.”
November opened her eyes, lifting her head a bit on the pillow so she could see the technicians. “You’re done?”
The technicians laughed, like chiming bells. “Don’t be silly,” said the main one. “There’s a lot more to do. It’ll be a while yet before you’re out of here and heading home.” He and the others started packing up their tools, generating more tiny metal-on-metal sounds. “But don’t worry about it, sweetie. Everything’s paid for, already. You know that.”
“Sure…” She watched them wheeling their shining cart out of the burn-ward chamber. They’d be back tomorrow, November supposed. She went back to thinking about her strange dream.
First her falling-but that was just remembering-and then McNihil’s… but falling where? She had an idea about that, but she didn’t want to pursue it down into the scarier darknesses. There had been something strange about his face, too, even though she had still been able to recognize him somehow. Not so much different as just… erased. She had an idea of what that meant as well. They got to him, thought November glumly. Harrisch and that pack of his over at DynaZauber-she’d picked up on enough of their plans for the asp-head, their plans beyond just getting him to take the Travelt job, that she could tell he’d wound up pretty well connected over. Poor bastard…
The way she felt now, even beyond the sweet drugs slow-rolling from vein to spine and back out again, she would’ve been sorry for him. Even if he hadn’t picked up the tab for the skin grafts and all the other bodily reconstruction she was undergoing. You’ve gotten soft, she chided herself. Just as well your fast-forward days are over…
She’d already decided that. You don’t get a chance like this very often. A whole new skin, a new life, maybe even a new town-if she could find some place beyond the Gloss, or at least a part of the constantly metastasizing city that was sufficiently different from the rest. Everything that had happened to her… it really was like being reborn, out of the wet womb and into the hands of doctors. Even the tumbling, vertiginous passage through fire; if she beat up the meta
phor a little, she could make it fit some pre-uterine notion of sexual passion, heated and consuming and all the rest. My own? wondered November. If so, it was
• the first time that meant anything, really, and
• some weird sign that she had given birth to herself.
Another decision, not to think about any of that, now or ever. Too weird, actually-she closed her eyes, letting the drowsy weight of her shorn head sink into the pillow. The lights of the chamber dimmed in response, pushing her back toward sleep.
Before that could happen, November’s eyes flicked open again. She could feel a little tingling sensation returning to her arm, the one that the med techs had been working on. She pushed herself up on her other elbow, raising her newly reconstructed wrist and turning the tender flesh of her palm toward her gaze.
She didn’t know what she’d see there. What they’d left from before, if there had been anything left from that other life, that other body and world she’d lived in. The stigmata of her own autocrucifixion-If you can birth yourself, why not death yourself as well? But in this case at least, the nails had been pulled out, letting her drop to the muddy ground at the foot of the cross.
The little black symbol was still there, but changed from to. But that was all that showed; now her palm was empty of numbers.
There might’ve been a red zero, if the surgeons and the med techs had left the fast-forward implants under the skin of her hand. All her accounts, her debts and credits, taken to nothing, canceled out and put back to the beginning. If a newborn baby-a real one-had a number in its little pudgy, wrinkled mitt, that’s what it would’ve been.
Take it as a sign, November told herself. An anti-sign, a true zero, an absence as important as anything that could’ve shown there. For all she knew, the number was still on her hand. She didn’t know how deep the fast-forward implants ran in the flesh; she’d been connected out of her mind when she’d had that little job done. The med techs could’ve left it there as a souvenir. Maybe it’s my eyes now, thought November, that’re different. There had been some work done on them, she knew; they’d been pretty badly damaged by the flames. The tiny knives and needles might’ve taken out the wolf filters that had let her see the numbers in her hand, the ups and downs of her razoring career, the cliff’s-edge dancing before the fall…