Noir

by K. W. Jeter

  Or maybe, she thought, I just don’t need to see them anymore. That was why the numbers were gone. Both she and the world had changed. When you were in the zero, the grace of the zero, you didn’t need to look at your accounts to know how well you were doing.

  She let that notion drift away, joining the others in the darkness past her fingertips as she lay back down. It was easy to. The techs had put a long-term pouch under her ribs; the device had a photoelectric cell wired into its outermost membrane, and it responded to the dimming of the light with a little surging pulse of drowsy endorphins. November floated on the wave, to a point on the warm, gelatinous ocean inside her, where she could see the last part of the dream she’d had.

  That was the strangest part. She spread her hands out on the cool, sterile bedsheet at her sides, her new fingertips counting every fine thread. The man she’d watched falling in her dream, that she’d known was the asp-head McNihil despite his not having a face anymore-in the last part of the dream, he did have a face. But it wasn’t his. And he wasn’t falling, but had landed, not on the ground or in the wreckage of the burning hotel’s lobby-but in an ocean different from the one in which she floated and dreamed. A thick, heavy ocean, without waves but only slow ripples across its expanse when something, a human form, fell and struck its surface; the water was so ponderous that it didn’t even splash, but slowly hollowed under the man’s weight and parted, drawing him beneath the shimmering membrane…

  Of course, thought November. She felt so stupid for not realizing it before. The heavy ocean in her dream was the sterile tank of the burn-ward chamber, which she herself had been floating in, her ashes and blackened bits slowly dissolving, before McNihil had paid her tab. Things-the real and unreal, the remembered and envisioned-always got jumbled up in dreams. That was why she wasn’t surprised when she finally worked out whose face it’d been, when the falling man had hit the gelatinous sea.

  It’d been Harrisch. She recognized him even without his usual sharky smile, even with the furious rage that his darkened features had shown. Nothing, November told herself. Doesn’t mean anything…

  Her eyes were already closed; behind them, she stepped through the rooms inside her head, shutting the rest of the doors and sealing in the sleep that was already there.

  SEVENTEEN

  TAKING A CHANCE ON LOVE

  Did you like that?” The woman’s voice sounded far away. “Then here’s another.”

  McNihil looked up from where he lay paralyzed on the floor of the bar. From this angle, he didn’t have tunnel vision so much as something like an optical elevator shaft, a dark elongated space stretching up to whatever night sky existed above. His mouth tasted the way blown-out fuses smell, electrical and singed metallic; beyond his spastically clawing fingertips were the shoes of some of the prowlers who had gotten up from the little tables and come over to watch. He was just vaguely aware of the humanlike figures standing at the fuzzed limits of his sight.

  Smiling, the ultimate barfly looked down at McNihil; her blond hair tumbled alongside her face like slowly unfolding staircases of gold. She knelt beside him, her face shifting in and out of focus as McNihil’s eyes, feeling loose and wobbly in their sockets, tried to adjust. Although he knew that she was as she’d been before, and no longer transformed into the one he’d caught that single glimpse of. That vision had already faded, the image of Verrity disappearing back into the darkness behind the woman’s eyes.

  He had never seen Verrity before. He wasn’t sure what it meant that he’d been allowed to now.

  The barfly’s kiss descended on him as though he were pinned at the bottom of the shaft, and all this world’s softly grinding machinery were about to crush him into a new state of being. Or non, thought McNihil as he felt the woman’s lips press against his own. He was still connected-up from the first kiss; his tongue had wedged inside his mouth like a small animal convulsed in its dying.

  “Here you go, sweetheart.” The barfly’s words brushed her lips against his; she inhaled whatever deranged molecules were released in his breath. “A little maintenance dose. Just something to top you up.”

  The kiss had unknotted his tongue, enough that McNihil could speak. “I could’ve…” It was like sorting out words onto a tray, assembling them from the fragments left inside his head. “Done without…”

  “Sure…” The barfly stroked his sweating brow. “But what fun would that be? Think of all you’d miss.”

  Right now, it didn’t seem as though he were missing anything at all. The first kiss, the slip of the tongue, had sparked and made contact in a big way, an explosion from the roof of his mouth to the cellar doors of his throat. The inrush of the memory load-what every prowler bestowed as its personal homecoming gift-had been what had laid him out on the floor.

  No wonder, a distant part of McNihil thought, it knocked out that little wimp Travelt. Stuff like this would flatten anybody. Though he figured-one brain cell slowly hooking up with another-that what he’d just gotten was stronger than the usual. The barfly-or somebody-must’ve cooked up a sampler for him, of all that could be found down in the Wedge, in that world she and the other prowlers walked around in on a regular basis. The images and other sensory data were just beginning to decompress and sort themselves out along his scalded neurons:

  • A black-ink tattoo, a two-dimensional face whose carbon pixels pulled the mouth open into a silent howl of fury, as it crept across a woman’s naked back (Whose? wondered McNihil);

  • On the woman’s flesh, between the small bumps of her spine and the angle of her right shoulder blade, a bubble of skin rose, as though blistered by some laser-tight application of heat; the bubble grew wide as a man’s hand, a perfect glossy hemisphere tinged with pinkish blood; the thin membrane shimmered like a frog’s pale throat, an artificial tympanum driven by a faint sound growing louder;

  • Loud enough that McNihil could decipher the words it spoke, synch’d to the flat motions of the tattooed face’s open mouth; the bubble sang, in a woman’s crooning alto voice; the song was a down-tempo bluesy rendition of the old standard Taking a Chance on Love, the pitch-bending rubato husky as though the nonexistent vocal cords were writhed in blue cigarette smoke;

  • That song the echo-warped, trance-mix soundtrack to the next vision and the ones after that; the lyrics devolved into melismatic Latin, then Sanskrit, then the nonverbal cries of human-faced animals in love with the moon and the slow shiver of their self-lubricating convulsions;

  • The voice went on singing even after the bubble of skin snapped into pink-edged rags, burst by the woman turning over on an antique divan of acidic green, the watered silk darkening as the blood seeped from the now-hidden tattoo; the song was inside McNihil’s head, his own palate trembling in sympathetic vibration as the woman smiled with drowsy lust and reached up for him;

  • You see? said the ultimate barfly, wrapping her naked arms around him, her blond hair tangling across his sweat-bright face; I knew you’d like it here…

  “I’d really… rather not…” McNihil pressed his hands flat against the floor of the bar. His singed tongue scraped painfully against his teeth as he spoke. “I’ve got… work to do…”

  “Oh, I know you do, sweetheart.” Outside of the kiss-induced visions, the barfly was untinged by any reddening wounds. “I’m just trying to help you along.”

  “You should let him go…” Another voice spoke, male and flattened monotonic. “Verrity’s waiting for him…”

  McNihil shifted the wobbly focus of his gaze, and made out one of the other prowlers standing next to the barfly. The face could’ve been his own, or nothing at all; the same thing, he supposed.

  “That’s right,” said McNihil. The paralysis had started to ebb, leaving his large muscles jittering as though in electroshock aftermath. All that shivering made him feel cold, as though drained of his own blood. “Listen to that guy…”

  The male prowler spoke again. “You’re just connecting around with him.”

&nbs
p; “Shut up,” said the barfly, more amused than angry. “I know what I’m doing.” She nudged McNihil with her shoe. The pointed toe of the vampy five-inch-heeled number was almost sharp enough to penetrate his ribs. “You don’t have any complaints, do you, pal?”

  “The hell I don’t.” McNihil had managed to roll over onto his side; he felt his own weight pressing against the tannhäuser inside his jacket. He gathered and spat an evil-tasting substance out of his mouth, the residue of the kiss’s transmission of gathered memory. “This… this is just uncalled for.” Lying on one shoulder, McNihil fumbled his hand across the buttons of his shirt, trying to get his stiffened fingers onto the weapon, not caring whether they were watching him. “Not… friendly at all…”

  He was starting to wonder if he’d misjudged the situation into which he’d wandered. Maybe they don’t want me to find out, thought McNihil. Prowlers obviously had more secrets than he’d known of… and maybe the prowlers wanted them to stay secrets. If there’d been time, and some way of clearing his head of the stuff the barfly’s kiss had put in there-the memory download went on unfolding like a toxic flower, each petal made of human skin-he might have tried figuring out what it meant. Something was going on, that was way outside the original prowler design parameters. Even the barfly-She shouldn’t have been able to pass for human, he decided. At least not so easily. The transference effect that Harrisch had told him about-maybe that hadn’t been just an isolated occurrence between the late Travelt and his prowler. Maybe it had been going on all along, with all the prowlers and their users. And maybe, the thought struck him, maybe Harrisch knew about it. Perhaps from the beginning; and not because something was going wrong, at least from the viewpoint of that DZ executive bunch.

  Another flower threaded its black stem through McNihil’s skull. One that he was going to let remain unopened, rather than forcing the hothouse blossom of revealed conspiracies. That was a particular garden path he didn’t want to go down, at least not at the moment: the possibility that whatever was going on with the prowlers wasn’t something outside the original design parameters… but inside. If they were becoming human, in whole or part, soaking up their owners’ thoughts, minds, maybe even souls-maybe that was just what they were designed to do.

  Those considerations tumbled through the murk inside McNihil’s head, as though his fingertips were reading tactile Morse code on the tannhäuser’s checked grip. I’ll think about ’em later-he seized the weapon and dragged it out of his jacket.

  “Oh, great,” said the male prowler standing nearby. “Now look-he’s packing.” An anxious hubbub rose from the others at the little tables scattered through the bar. “Somebody should’ve taken that thing away from him.”

  “But you didn’t,” said McNihil. His legs still didn’t seem to be functioning, as though some link down his spine had been snapped by the barfly’s kiss. He managed to push himself up on one elbow, raising the tannhäuser in the other hand. “Lucky for me.” The gun wobbled as he swung its pendulumlike weight toward each of the hovering onlookers in turn. “Sorry… it’s not in your plans…”

  “It’s your own that you’re connecting up.” The barfly looked down at him with mingled contempt and pity. “You came here to do a job-to get that job done and over with-and we’re just trying to help you out, pal.” The tough-girl persona from the old movies firmed up around her like a suit of armor, one made of cheap silky stuff molded to her ribs and hinged down the seams of her smoky-dark stockings. “Come on-that’s why you came here in the first place. Because you knew that we could do that for you.” Her smile held legions of superior wisdom. “Because you know that this is the door in.”

  “I changed my mind.” McNihil flopped back against the bar’s padded flank. He held the tannhäuser in both hands, trying to steady it. The implications about the prowlers-what they were, what they’d become-had gone spiraling out, despite his intent not to think about that. “I gotta fall back… and punt. I thought… I knew what was going on. Or at least part of it.” The weapon had started sweating in his tight grip. “Plus what… I was going to do about it.” The conceptual territory had shifted beneath his feet, as though the edges of one of the tectonic plates underlying the Gloss had broken through the asphalt and concrete, totally rearranging the map he’d stood on. “So it’s been nice, but…” A little tingling sensation had returned to McNihil’s legs; he made a tentative effort at getting them beneath himself. “I think I better be running along…”

  “I don’t think so,” announced the barfly. Contempt outweighed pity in her gaze. “You shouldn’t make appointments you don’t plan on keeping. There’s somebody waiting for you.”

  “Somebody important.” The male prowler loomed ominously above McNihil. Behind the prowler, the others had left their places at the bar’s small tables and had assembled in rough, anonymous formation; the crowd of extras had morphed into an ugly mob scene, their muttering anger directed at the figure sprawled between the stools. “Somebody…”-the prowler’s flat voice ratchetted down into a growl-“somebody you’ve needed to meet for a long time.”

  The words inside McNihil’s head, the few that had been left after the power surge of the barfly’s kiss, were replaced by quick, overriding panic. In instinctive self-defense, he raised his clasped hands up in front of his chest, the tannhäuser cranking into position as though on an invisible hoist line.

  “Don’t be stupid.” The barfly shook her head in disgust. “That’s not going to help.”

  McNihil let the tannhäuser take the initiative, whatever small mind it had inside its works substituting for his own exhausted one. The weapon spoke in true operatic fashion, a Wagnerian basso roar hitting the bar’s walls as an orange gout of flame spat out of the muzzle.

  “You dumb shit.” In the fuzzy mists beyond him, the voice that spoke sounded like the male prowler who’d been getting so ugly with him. He’s still standing? wondered McNihil. “There’s a time,” said the voice, “and a place for everything. This ain’t it.”

  With the back of his head against the padding, McNihil opened his eyes as wide as possible, the furrows of his brow enough to bring the bar’s contents into a discernible order. Only roughly so: between the aftereffects of the barfly’s kiss, the engorged memories popping out from each other like an infinite series of Chinese boxes, and the still-echoing wallop of the tannhäuser, the things inside his head felt marginally connected, if at all, the synapses as ragged and wet as used tissue paper. The world of ancient movies encoded inside McNihil’s eyes went soft and transparent, like a molecule-thick permeable membrane letting in the other behind it, the more-or-less real one. The gearing of his brain revved into a bone-held fever, trying to sort out the overlapping data and reassemble them into a coherent whole.

  McNihil pressed his clenched hands, weighted with the tannhäuser, against his eyes, trying to shield himself from the chaotic stimulus rush. Even through his eyelids he could see what had been the bar, the dark hole both comfortable and threatening, with its diamond-padded door and leatherette-topped seats, the neon cocktail sign sizzling in the night air beyond, the rain slowly leaking down the stairs from the wet streets and sidewalks jeweled with the moon’s shattering reflection… and over and mingled with that a bleak metal warehouse, industrial end-of-millennium chic, all exposed bolts and scrubbed-bare sheet steel, black anaconda cables looped over the girders and crawling around the space’s litter-thick perimeter. Seeing even that much put a miasma of chemical sweat and twitching O.D. vomitus into McNihil’s nostrils, the smell of grim fun aftermath. Places like this were why he’d left one world for another, the annihilating real for the endurable gone.

  Wake up, he told himself, and smell the burning corpses of your dreams. McNihil lowered the weapon in his hands and looked up at the prowler standing before him.

  The barfly had draped herself around the humanlike figure’s shoulders, clinging like erotic seaweed to a jagged shoreline rock. As though a wave had broken over the prowler and drawn away
only a few seconds ago; the front of the figure’s dark jacket was shining wet, blood seeping from the hole torn through the upper chest.

  As McNihil watched, and as the barfly smiled and watched him in turn, the male prowler reached up and hooked a forefinger in the bullet hole. The jacket’s fabric ripped away as easily as damp paper, exposing the pallid flesh beneath. No wonder, thought McNihil, it didn’t fall down…

  Like a rock dropped into a gelatinous sea, the bullet hadn’t created a wound, but rather a rippling distortion, a faint bull’s-eye pattern that had spread over the prowler’s torso and faded. The bullet’s entry point had been transformed by the black-ink tattoos that had swarmed and inched their way from the prowler’s abdomen and back, like blind fish and bottom-feeding ocean creatures, attracted by a sudden food source. The hole itself, edged with a small wreath of pinkish erectile tissue, exuded a fluid clearer than blood, but just as viscid and blood-warm, glistening like silvery snail tracks in a moonlit garden. When the prowler’s fingertips stroked the soft rim of the swollen non-wound, a tiny brass sun rose in its depths, just south of the ridge of collarbone. Shining wet, the flat end of the tannhäuser’s bullet slid with minor grace from the hole, the surrounding pink-to-red tissue enfolding its steel-jacketed shaft. The prowler’s thumb and fingertip grasped the exposed end of the cylinder; the humanlike figure’s flat gaze shifted from where it had examined, chin tucked against throat, its adaptive flesh, up to McNihil’s eyes.

  “You see?” The male prowler spoke, its voice unaltered by pain or shock. “It’s no big deal.” The gathering tattoos, black hearts and black flowers, the names of martyred saints, nibbled at his fingertips. “As long as you’re… ready for it.” Slowly, the prowler slid the wet bullet back and forth in its receptacle of softly lubricated flesh. The black holes of his eyes, apertures in the mask that concealed no other face, narrowed as though savoring the slight penetration, the caress of the nerve endings just beneath the surface of the skin. “Just like you’re ready.” The prowler withdrew the bullet, slick with transparent mucus, and held it up before himself. “Whether you like it or not.”