Noir

by K. W. Jeter

I am not the one whom you see living;

  The shadow am I of one who died.

  Mistress, I am not he

  Who enjoyed our glories;

  The memory of me is lost

  And dwells in another world.

  I am not the one who was and will be yours;

  The shadow am I of one who died.

  – ANONYMOUS RENAISSANCE LYRIC

  NINETEEN

  TO KEEP PEOPLE WITHOUT SKINS ALIVE

  Careful. You don’t want to step in that.”

  November heard the cameraman’s warning. She looked down at the catwalk below her feet, a narrow path without handrails or any other protective barrier. The interlocking planks were made of nubbly-surfaced recycled plastic, suspended a couple of meters above the street. At first, when the DZ limo had dropped her off as close as it could get to this zone, she’d thought that the city blocks had been flooded for some obscure purpose, an urban ocean bound in by a ring of prefab emergency dikework. Now she saw the slow, gelatinous nature of the substance filling all the spaces between the gutted buildings; the sight of it brought back recent memories of dreaming. The blackened nose of a burnt-out 747 carcass poked through the transparent membrane covering the gel.

  “What the hell is this shit?” A wave with no crest, rolling heavily under the lake’s surface, had splattered through a break near the edge of the catwalk, enough to leave a few rounded, snotlike drops on the toe of November’s boot before subsiding. “It’s disgusting…”

  “Sterile nutrient medium.” The cameraman rode with his equipment on a small boom platform, angled out from a cross-girdered pier planted in the middle of the street, the gel substance rising and falling in slow motion around the base. “Like they use in hospitals. To keep people without skins alive.”

  That’s where I saw it before. Not just in dreams, but in the hospital reality, in the burn ward. And from the inside out; she’d been floating in the stuff, her own charred body slowly dissolving toward death. Whatever consciousness occasionally sparked under the weight of the anesthetics, it had looked out at the world through a vertical stratum of this stuff.

  “What’s it doing here?” November had no option but to wrap her arms around herself, trying to hold in her own body heat against the chill wind sliding past the buildings. The unseen Pacific was somewhere to the west side of the city; she’d caught a glimpse of it as the DZ limo had driven her out from the rail station. “So much of it…”

  “It’s only got one use, lady.” The cameraman looked even younger than she did, as though his cocky network attitude postdated her own baby-new skin. “Just like I said: keeping people alive.” The wet expanse glittered in the dark lenses over his eyes; the enduring clouds had parted for a moment, bringing up enough light to trigger the glasses’ photochrome. He leaned forward in his perch, one elbow against his knee, his earphones’ coiled wire trailing behind him. “Maybe I was wrong; maybe you should go ahead and step in it. Dive right in and join the party.”

  She looked down and saw what the cameraman meant. The thick liquid wasn’t empty; there was more floating in it than just the ashes and dirt that’d been lifted from the streets’ surface and out of the ground-level stories of the fire-blackened buildings. The shapes drifting in the gel were vaguely human in form, but with outlines blurred. People without skins-those words moved inside her head with the same wavering grace. Poor bastards, thought November, with no trace of irony. That was what happened when people got careless; she should know.

  It took only a few seconds for the visions to hook up, overlap, and synch together; the one she saw below the narrow planks of the catwalk and the one she carried inside her head. The figures in the gelatinous liquid were the same that she had dreamed of back in the hospital’s burn-ward chamber. She’d been too connected-up then, with the pharmaceuticals dripping into her own veins, to have reacted with anything more than mild, hammered, apathetic curiosity. Now, though, the sight drew her gut into a queasy knot and ran an ice probe up the links of her spine. Past her own reflection on the gel surface, she could discern white bones, whole skeletons turned as rubbery as life-sized novelty items, rib cages wavering like sea-anemone fingers, femurs and ulnas bending into shallow U shapes, as though boiled limp. Tied to the bones by loosened sinews and integuments were the glistening doubled fists and ovoids of the lungs and kidneys, spleen and gall; pericardial tissue shimmered and dulled with each heart’s exposed pulse.

  Just the same, thought November. She’d seen exactly the same in her dreaming, the softly eviscerated but still-living human clusters under the slow waves. But not a dream; she realized that now. The cameraman was the tip-off, along with all the other networks’ news-crew gear that she’d seen at the gel’s bounded perimeter. I saw it on TV-that made it even more dreamlike, in a way. There’d been a set in the hospital room, she remembered now, even in the chamber where she’d been floating on the other side of the infectionproof barrier, in the same nutrient-enhanced syrup as this. The video monitor had been up on a white-enameled bracket in the corner of the room, way beyond all the other equipment with its much more urgent and interesting displays of her various vital signs, the blipping tickers and green traces that’d gone up and down with her pulse and breath. Plus, McNihil’s advance payment to the hospital apparently hadn’t stretched as far as dialing in the video set to any of the premium sat-a-wire channels, so there had been nothing on it but the usual hammering dinfomercials and the FCC-mandated news-minutes. That was probably when she’d seen the coverage of this thickening human stew, the dissolving bodies wavering in their sustenant medium like spore colonies in watery agar, the streets of this city zone turned into one gigantic petri dish. The images transmitted by this camera-jockey and the others stationed here by the networks had infiltrated November’s brain while she’d been out of it, her lidless eyes focused on the TV up in the burn-ward chamber’s corner; when that nonsubstantial part of her had finally crept back inside her head, she’d assumed she’d dreamed all those liquid pictures.

  “How long is this setup going to last?” Curious, she knelt on the catwalk and reached down to poke the gel with one careful fingertip. The semi-liquid rippled at her touch, the circles widening at a ponderous rate, but her finger didn’t get wet. Just the same as in the hospital’s burn-ward chambers, the transparent membrane encased the fluid, sealing it from both evaporation and infection. “This one’s been here for a while.” She figured that the layout must date from the blaze at the End Zone Hotel and the contagious rutting that had followed; some of the surrounding buildings were still marked with the residue of the fire-dousing foam that’d been used then. “When are you going to shut down and move on?”

  “Are you kidding? This is the poly-orgynism of the century.” The cameraman took a hand from the boom’s controls and gestured across the small urban ocean. The far reaches, several blocks away, looked completely placid on the surface, the slowly writhing depths hidden beneath. “The ultimate connection, maybe. It doesn’t get any better than this, at least for people in my business.”

  November knew what the cameraman was talking about. She’d never watched any of these real-time pornumentaries, not because she found them boring-just like everything else on the tube-but because she’d been able to calculate the sickly fascination of them. The sheer commercial appeal of this kind of coverage irritated her. Easy to see why the networks-and at least a couple of them were in whole or part owned and operated by DynaZauber-invested the setup expenses and devoted the on-wire time to these things, when and if they occurred. For the DZ subsidiaries, they probably got their share of the materials-the sterile nutrient medium, the barrier membrane-at cost from the mother corporation. The only real outlay was for a stake in the scouting pool with the rest of the networks, the constant search for and immediate response to the sex-fueled events.

  If she’d been able to hang around awhile longer at the End Zone Hotel fire, instead of falling through the roof and several stories of burning building, November w
ould’ve been able to watch the setup taking place, the godlike genesis of the poly-orgynism. She’d seen the prebirth, the first coition, the massing and interconnecting of the bodies still with their skins on, the human figures filling the streets around the trashed buildings and the open center area’s downed airliner. The conflagration that the foam put out had started thousands of others, metaphorically speaking; November had seen them from the burning hotel’s roof, looking over the edge while either waiting for McNihil or getting stiff-armed by him. All that straight-on physical connecting, sweating body on body, overlapping each other into all possible variations, daisy chains of filled, swollen and exuding orifices, semen and blood striping flesh like knotted barber poles, the massed radiation from the streets rising up into November’s face as hot as any flames coming up the End Zone Hotel’s stairwells. She remembered the building shivering before a section of its roof had collapsed beneath her, as though the thrashing limbs had triggered some deep seismic fracture. The extinguishing foam sprayed by the low-flying helicopters, nozzles stiff beneath the numbered fuselages, had been all the extra ingredient needed, the only substance not produced by human flesh or imagination, making the connection between connections complete, the many organisms into one compound animal, a colony of undifferentiated sensual function. E pluribus unum was the creature’s motto, translated as “Let’s connect ourselves to oblivion”; its flag was the shredding tatters of skin, blood-edged, that chafed and peeled away from the flesh of its once-separate components. That much heat was produced by friction as well as lust; more skin-on-skin scouring, teeth-bared biting, and engorged piercing than human tissue could endure. Maybe they don’t need scouts, thought November, on the prowl looking for this kind of thing. Maybe all that were needed were some upper-atmosphere satellites, way beyond the reach of the Noh-flies, with thermal-imaging receptors trained on the earth’s surface. Any eruption specifically in the Gloss-if it wasn’t a volcano, then it was worth sending a hit-crew with cameras and broadcast equipment.

  Of course, there was more required than just the cameras and the transmission antennae. November saw more of them now, the strategic placement of their derricks and elevated stations becoming apparent as she glanced up from the gel’s surface. The corporate medical teams had been here at the start and were now long gone, maybe coming back every couple of weeks to peel back a section of the barrier membrane and top up the sterile nutrient medium. Plus fish out whatever parts of the poly-orgynism that had finally dissolved their personal gestalt to the point of no longer being capable of maintaining even externally supported life functions.

  “Hey, it’s not like I’m not ready to leave.” The network cameraman’s voice broke into November’s thoughts. “I’ve been out here on this particular tour of duty long enough to develop calluses on my ass; I’d love to rotate home for a little R and R. A decent meal and a hot shower would be heaven right about now.”

  “A cold shower,” said November, “would probably be more like it.” She could feel the frequency coming off the slow ocean. The Sea of Sex; standing on the catwalk was like being on the shore of some desolate terra incognita, gazing out past where the continental shelf fell off into sunless depths. The Pacific, wherever it was out to the west of this Gloss section, was nothing by comparison. The wind sliding over the gel’s surface membrane cut past the nausea in her gut, softly fingering hormone outlets lower in her groin. This ocean had its trenches in the back reaches of the human mind, which meant infinite. The poor bastards who had dived into this harbor may or may not have known that, but they likely wouldn’t have cared, anyway. “That’s what you get,” murmured November, “when you finally get what you want.”

  “What’d you say?”

  She ignored the cameraman. The sonuvabitch was just passing the time, she knew, idling like the rest of the crews here until the poly-orgynism worked itself up into another thrash of broadcastable action. Just like the earth’s oceans, ones like this alternated between storm and doldrums; the DynaZauber limo, the transport arranged by Harrisch, had let her off here at a relatively quiet moment. The skinless, partially dissolved once-were-humans under the membrane drifted on slow currents through the gel, mingling their soft bones and loose organs with each other in lazy pre- and postcoital suspension. What in other waters might have been tangles of seaweed, November discerned as the branching nets of nerve endings, hooked up and knitted together from one dike wall to the farthest. Some of the neural systems still retained a rough human outline, like a scrawled ink sketch surrounding the appropriate bones and organs; others, propelled by an innate longing, had disengaged from their origins and entangled themselves with others, threading throughout in an endless chain. That was what made the streets’ contents a single entity: the boundaries between one body and the next had been erased, with no ability to tell where one left off and another began in the resulting soup.

  They must put something in there, figured November. The corporations’ so-called medical teams. Something to speed up the dissolution process, to hasten the shedding of the pink and yellow and brown rags, no longer necessary and impediments to requited desire. Or perhaps they didn’t have to add anything at all; that was a scary thought. That given half a chance, people would slough off the soft, thin barriers between themselves and achieve a nakedness of the exposed flesh, perfect for nonstop connecting. What was that old song? ’Tain’t no sin/To take off your skin/And dance around in your bones, your bones/And dance around in your bones… Might as well forget the bones, too; they weren’t needed for this horizontal tango.

  She stood up on the catwalk and wiped her fingertip against her trousers, though nothing wet and sticky had gotten on it. Just the nearness of the thing in the thick liquid-she’d already dropped the plural in her own mind-the spark coming through the membrane, half warning (As we are, so could you be) and half invitation (So why not join us today?), evoked an uneasy response in her gut and spine. The sun had lifted a little higher, pooling her shadow around her boots; now she saw thin black shapes, like clots of ashes, sliding between the top membrane and the poly-orgynism a few centimeters farther down. An arrow-pierced heart with a Mom banner beneath, a cartoon devil riding a pair of dice-The tattoos, realized November. The permanent ones and those that traveled from body to body; the skins might’ve dissolved, but not the images that had been inked upon them. A side effect of the poly-orgynism’s creation: the tattoos had been set free, achieving a new life in the habitat of the sterile nutrient medium. They swam about now like pilot fish, cutting knifelike through the gel, darting among the blind kidneys and lungs, past the loose ropes of nerve tissue. Another realization, a little glimpse of the future: Someday they’ll breed. She could see it now, the intermingling of design and motivating codes. Another generation, and the laughing devil with rolling-dice eyes would climb up on the Rock of Ages, the neoprimitivist tribal tiger stripes would tie themselves into Celtic knots, the banner toted by mourning doves would read out the name of a yet-unnamed god…

  “Stick around,” said the cameraman. “If you can.” He’d gotten a cigarette going, dangling from the corner of his mouth, and was amusing himself by flicking lit matches onto the surface of the sex ocean. The little flames, before they died, left puckered scars on the barrier membrane; a visible shiver ran through the interlinked components of the poly-orgynism beneath. “Me and some of the other guys-” The cameraman gestured toward the other boom-platforms’ derricks, with their almost-identical network crew members watching from behind their dark lenses. “We’ve got a break coming up in a few hours; union regulations. We could skip the catering wagons and go straight to dessert, if you know what I mean.”

  “I was born knowing,” said November. She couldn’t even be bothered to make a display of weariness, recognizing the variations on the same old lines. The stuff she’d gotten from the businessmen on the trains, back when she’d been into all that, back in her previous life. “Maybe you and your pals should go for seconds this time.” Sad to think that no
thing ever really changed, for most people, anyway. These network guys were probably getting all sweaty from watching the poly-orgynism’s action for so long. “Because,” said November, “there isn’t going to be anything else happening. Not with me, at least.”

  “Why not, sweetheart?” The cameraman leaned his elbow on the controls of his equipment. He knew he’d been blown off, but didn’t mind making light conversation to pass the time. “Could be fun.”

  “Could be.” November copped a line from McNihil. “But I’ve got a job to do.” She started down the catwalk to the burnt-out shell of the End Zone Hotel. Harrisch and the exec crew at DynaZauber had some reason for ferrying her up here in a private car; she might as well find out what it was. “Catch you later.”

  “If you’re lucky.”

  She didn’t look back. As she walked, the surface of the gelatinous liquid rippled, as though the spread-out multi-creature below were scratching at the underside of the membrane, trying to tell her something.

  TWENTY

  THE DEATH SCENE IN LA TRAVIATA

  Wake up and-”

  McNihil opened his eyes and gazed up at the charred ceiling. “I don’t need to hear the rest of it.” He rolled onto one arm, then managed to sit up, pulling himself together piece by piece. He’d heard the woman’s voice, but couldn’t tell where she was just yet. “Besides… all my dreams were incinerated a long time ago.”

  “That’s what you think,” said the ultimate barfly. “Seems like there was enough to get this place going again.”

  He turned his head and found her sitting on the edge of a sagging mattress, blackened but no longer burning. She sat with her legs elegantly crossed, regarding him with cold and casual amusement. A thread of smoke drifted from the cigarette held aloft in one hand.