Noir

by K. W. Jeter

  “What’s your rush?” The cameraman leaned his elbow on the chrome wheel, as though it were the dial to a bank-vault safe. “There’s more than one party possible at a time. Why should we let these folks-or whatever they are-have all the fun?” He nodded to indicate the gel and its interspersed contents. “World enough and time, sweetheart. Why miss the opportunity?”

  “Thanks for the offer.” November could feel her hands beginning to either sweat or bleed. “But I’ve got business to take care of.”

  “Bullshit.” The cameraman’s expression darkened, as though he were coming down from some minor chemical rush. Scowling, he picked up a handheld videocam from the platform by his feet; he held it to his eye, pointing the glassy lens toward November. The image of her face, in real time, showed up on the monitor mounted on top of the boom’s bigger camera. “You see?” He lowered the camera from his face, still keeping her in focus with it. He pointed his thumb toward the monitor screen. “You look like somebody who could use a little relaxation. You’re all tense.”

  “That’s how I like it.” November had managed to grab hold of some kind of cable socket on the side of the boom platform, giving one hand, at least, a secure purchase. “Now stop connecting around and put me down.”

  “All right, bitch.” With one hand, he spun the chrome wheel hard, jerking the boom into a quick horizontal arc. “Your loss.”

  November clung to the edge of the boom until it slammed to a stop, harder than necessary. For a dizzying fraction of a second, she had an unnerving perception of the slow ocean below, blurred in her gaze, but with the things-or thing-inside it undoubtedly gazing up at her with inarticulate lust. The boom deposited her on the other end of the catwalk, closer to the ruins of the End Zone Hotel; the narrow pathway bowed toward the gel when she let go of the platform and dropped the few inches down. “Thanks.”

  “Whatever.” The cameraman appeared seriously disgruntled; pushing a small black-knobbed lever in front of himself, he angled the boom away, without looking back at her. As though picking up on his disappointment, or expressing its own, the slow ocean roiled beneath the catwalk, its internal temperature taken up a notch from its previous simmer.

  The lobby of the burnt hotel was flooded now, the gel extending past the former check-in counter with its steel grille-the open register book floated under the surface membrane like a preserved butterfly-and all the way to the wet stairs at the back. Standing on tiptoe on the swaying catwalk, November managed to reach the sill of one of the second story’s windows. She jumped and scrambled her way in, the front of her jacket scraping across the cindery wood, and landed sprawling in ashes.

  “Here you go, pal. You asked for it; you got it.”

  The ultimate barfly stepped back, pushing the hotel room door farther open behind herself. She smiled and made a sweeping gesture, half inviting bow and half magician’s display, toward the room’s contents.

  McNihil stepped in from the corridor, from the ashes and rubble that filled the core of the End Zone Hotel. He’d followed the barfly here from the other room, the metallic fabric of her dress glittering across the sway of her hips like the sparks of luminous insects, leading him on. Die ewige Weibliche, he’d thought, amused by the literary allusion that had popped inside his head. He doubted if Goethe could have meant anything else but that familiar movement, the kinder incarnation of Tlazoltéotl.

  “Thanks,” said McNihil as he walked in front of the barfly. He could feel her behind him, standing in the doorway, watching him with that look of amusement, both tender and contemptuous, in her golden-veiled gaze.

  This room had the same dimensions as the other one, with the single small window in the exact same position in the wall near the bed. The essential room, McNihil knew, was replicated throughout the hotel, space after space, distinctions annihilated in this world and the other one. He could have been walking on a treadmill out in the hallway, with the numbered doors going by him on some sort of assembly line, a factory where bad dreams were bolted together.

  Same furnishings as well: the narrow bed with its sagging mattress, with the little table and the plastic Philco radio beside it, the chest of drawers with the clouded mirror on top. The fire that had consumed the other rooms seemed to have only penetrated partway into this one; the wallpaper’s scowling cabbage roses, faded to the pink of consumptive lung tissue, could still be deciphered beneath the tapering wipes of smoke damage. The chest of drawers was still standing; McNihil saw the mask of his own face in the angled glass, the peeling silver behind making his image look like some ancient daguerreotype from the first American Civil War. The ashes on the floor were the ones that his own feet had brought in and trampled into the threadbare carpet.

  He stopped in the middle of the room and turned to look back at the barfly. “This is the one?”

  The ultimate barfly stood leaning against the side of the doorway, in a classic pose, a still from the old black-and-white movies that leaked out of McNihil’s eyes. She had another lit cigarette, for his benefit, held down in one hand, her other arm crossing beneath her low cleavage and holding her elbow. “Of course.” Her mocking smile made the image perfect. A wisp of smoke threaded past her breast. “Why would I lie to you?”

  “No reason,” admitted McNihil. “Nobody has to around here, to connect me up.” He turned away from her, looking back toward the bed at the far side of the hotel room.

  Lying on the bed was the same sleeping, dreaming girl as before. The cube bunny’s eyelashes dark against her skin, her parted mouth almost a kiss against the thin pillow. The same girl, but different; it didn’t take McNihil long to see that, even in the cloud-obscured light that seeped into the room. Her skin, from the bare curve of her shoulder to the sharper edge of her ankle, was unmarked. No tattoos, permanent or mobile, showed on her body. Her nakedness glowed, softly radiant, like a candle curtained behind transparencies of pink silk.

  “She’s lovely, isn’t she?”

  McNihil nodded slowly. He reached down and let his fingertips touch the girl, a soft, minimal caress of her shoulder. Don’t wake up, he told her in silence. Keep on dreaming. It would be better that way, if the cube bunny stayed in whatever world she’d found behind her eyelashes. The one outside probably hadn’t been too kind to her.

  He glanced over his shoulder at the woman standing in the hotel room’s doorway. The barfly looked older now, not just in comparison to the sleeping girl on the bed, but in some deeper, absolute sense. As though some part of her, which turned the expression on her face weary with understanding, had connected to a carnal wisdom as old as this world, as old as men’s desires.

  She’s got it all wrong, thought McNihil. There were limits even to that ancient wisdom. A current like electricity, a pale fraction of the spark that had leapt in the barfly’s kiss, passed from the sleeping girl’s skin and into his fingertips. But that was all; the current didn’t move down his spine, didn’t connect with anything below the base of his stomach. He’d come here-to this room, this bed, this girl, this dreaming-to do a job. And that was all.

  “Why this one?”

  The barfly shrugged. “Why not?” She gazed past McNihil to the sleeping figure on the bed. “It had to be someone. It could’ve been anyone. Any of them.” McNihil knew what she meant: Any woman here in the Wedge. “When somebody-some man-comes looking for an FPC job, a Full Prince Charles, the total and terminal-it’s not necessarily with some specific woman that he wants it. It’s with women in general, Woman with a capital W.” Her look of wry amusement showed again, as though she were aware of what’d been in McNihil’s head as she’d led him down the hotel corridor to this room. “The eternal feminine-right?”

  McNihil nodded again. “I guess so.”

  “No guessing about it, pal. You got some major psychological imperatives going on here. Exclusively a male thing; women don’t have to go looking for this, ’cause they’re already carrying it around with them. A guy like this Travelt you’re trying to find, even when his thoug
hts and needs and everything else-his soul, if you want to call it that-even when he’s inside the head of a prowler body, he’s still looking for what every member of the male species is always looking for. Way deep down inside. He’s just brave enough to come out and say it, to ask for what he really wants. What all of you want, eventually. The complete and total reunion of the male and female principles.”

  He wasn’t so sure about that. McNihil had heard the mystical, quasi-Jungian spiel about Full Prince Charles numbers before, all that weird alchemical, revised neo-Platonic line; he’d never been overly impressed by it. Nice place to visit, he’d always thought, but that doesn’t mean I’d want to live there.

  Maybe Travelt hadn’t, either. The fact that the former DZ junior exec, who’d left his real and original body lying dead on the floor of his cubapt, had come all this way into the Wedge riding inside a prowler, had made the right connections and had gotten an FPC done on himself-that didn’t mean the guy had been operating out of some deep primal need. Maybe, thought McNihil, he just didn’t have any alternative. He hadn’t been running so much as he’d been chased here. To the best hiding place Travelt could find; the ultimate, really.

  McNihil stroked the sleeping girl’s bare shoulder; he’d sat down on the edge of the bed, his feet in the ashes smeared across the hotel room’s carpet. The cube bunny’s face was angled into the pillow, her profile hidden by shadows and the dark hair that fell loosened past the pink shell of her ear. This was what he’d come so far to find.

  “You know just how it works, don’t you?” The barfly’s voice came from the doorway. “You’re up-to-speed on what’s involved with one of these?”

  He nodded. Even if he’d never seen a Full Prince Charles before, in reality or dreaming or memory, McNihil knew all about them. When he’d headed the Collection Agency’s abortive investigation into the Wedge, there’d been file cabinets and databases full of reports on what the asp-heads might run into there. The report on FPC’s had even had pictures, color photographs that had managed to filter through McNihil’s black-and-white vision.

  Even the etymology, where the term Full Prince Charles came from-he was hip to that as well. From that poor bastard, the guy who may or may not have become the king of the land he’d inherited from bloodlines and heraldry charts full of other poor bastards, his predecessors, who’d also never quite figured out the world they lived in-McNihil wasn’t sure of the exact history.

  But there had been some details, that he’d read in the Collection Agency’s report on FPC jobs. That some poor bastard other than McNihil, a long time ago and in a kingdom by some other sea, had told his mistress, the royal girlfriend and other woman in the royal marriage, what he’d really wanted. One of the lessons being, Never put it in writing, especially if you were planning on being king someday. Particularly the embarrassing parts. Which was what had been in the prince’s love letters, one of them, at least: his fervently expressed desire to be transformed magically into his girlfriend’s tampon, so that he could be with her forever, constantly in place where he most loved to be. It’d been a joke, McNihil had figured when he read the account in the agency’s report. Ancient history, and maybe an even older joke. The stuff that Wedge lore was made out of, even before there was a Wedge. They probably told this one back in the caves, thought McNihil. The things that the Neanderthals had wanted weren’t any different, though maybe senses of humor had changed over the millennia. Because even if it’d been a joke, the joke of the poor princely bastard who’d gotten tagged with it and a lot of other guys’ joke as well, it was one with a ring of truth to it. What men wanted; palaces and cathedrals were all very well, but the goddess they worshiped was absent from those places, and they knew it. How much better to live inside the goddess herself, absorbed and yet still separate. Or just separate enough to be conscious, to know where you were…

  That was the problem, though. Something else that McNihil was all too aware of. One man’s joke was another man’s wish. Joke, metaphor, or vision; it didn’t matter. That was how McNihil had wound up, he knew, with that particular monochrome glamor inside his own eyes. You take things too seriously, he’d told himself before, and it changes the way you see things. And it changes you. Which was what had happened to that poor bastard Travelt: joke to wish to reality. McNihil doubted-and the Collection Agency report hadn’t told him-whether the other one, for whom the FPC was named, had wound up like that; the surgical and neurological technology hadn’t existed back then, for one thing. But now that it did exist, a lot of things were possible. Or enough.

  McNihil laid his hand full upon the sleeping girl’s shoulder. He could feel through his palm the motion of her pulse and breath, slow and steady, untroubled. And beyond that, another pulse and breath, a separate creature inside her, cradled and rocked in a different sleep, a different blurry wakening. When McNihil had been outside this world, when he’d gone to meet with Harrisch in the hospital burn ward-with another sleeping girl, or what was left of her, charred pieces drifting in the slow gel behind a transparent barrier-he’d passed by the obstetrics ward on another floor, and had glimpsed through a partially open door as a medical technician had moved the device in his hand over a pregnancy-distended abdomen, bringing up a ghostly living image on the ultrasound screen. That was what it felt like to touch this sleeping girl, and sense the form that lived, undeliverable and content, in her soft womb.

  That was what the photographs in the agency report had shown. Somebody must’ve put them in there, just to weird out anyone who read those pages. Like a skinned rabbit, thought McNihil, remembering the flat images. Skin taken off with a butcher’s most delicate knife, instead of by fire. Skinned and reduced, taken down to essentials, the other parts thrown away, trimmed into the scrap bin under the sink. What wasn’t needed could be eliminated; someone having a Full Prince Charles number done wouldn’t need his (or even possibly her) arms and legs, and a good bit of the torso and the rest as well, not where he (or she) was going.

  A lot of the same techniques were used in the Collection Agency’s back rooms, when the techs were slicing down some would-be intellectual-property thief to appropriate trophy size. There wasn’t much of that punk pirate kid in the cable looped into a coil in McNihil’s jacket pocket. Same way with an FPC, though more than straight neural and cortical tissue could be retained; there was usually enough reduced bone and organ mass, according to the agency report he’d read, to make up a fetuslike entity, tucked and folded into a sleek, defenseless shape, tapered for easy insertion and capable of deriving sustenance not through an umbilicus but through its permeable skin casing. Even a little face, wizened as an old man’s or an infant’s, blind sight hidden behind fragile eyelids laced with red veins.

  “He’s in there.” McNihil spoke aloud; he could see now what had been hidden from him before, by the room’s shadows and his own focusing upon the sleeping girl’s face. “I can feel him.” He’d laid his palm gently upon the girl’s rounded abdomen; nothing trembled there but the girl’s own respiration, but he still was sure what he’d said was true. A long time ago, in that other world, he’d looked into Travelt’s dead eyes, the black holes in the human body left behind. A little connection had been made; McNihil had seen something down there, in those empty eyes gazing up at the cubapt ceiling, and he’d taken it with him, along with the data-coded crucifax he’d pocketed. Just enough to make a positive ID, as though he’d known from the beginning that he was going to wind up taking on this job. He’d been this close to the corpse, and now he was just as close to the living man. “Or what,” he murmured, “is left of him…”

  “What was that?” The untouched cigarette was half burnt away in the barfly’s hand. From the doorway, she gazed at McNihil and the sleeping girl. “I didn’t catch what you said.”

  “Nothing important.” He lifted his hand from the girl’s abdomen. Without waking her, though he doubted if anything could have. Dreaming was that strong in this world. McNihil held his hand less than an inch away f
rom the girl’s body, as though its warmth were something he could draw into his own. “I was just thinking…”

  “About what?”

  “The job.” He inhaled deeply, smelling the ashy confines of the room, the burnt reaches in the hallway beyond the woman watching him. “That I came here to do.” Bit by bit, he assembled inside himself the remnants of his strength. There wasn’t much left; he felt as though he’d walked all the way here, across the empty and the bone-filled streets. Fortunately, he was almost there, to the finish line. There was light at the end of the tunnel, even for somebody with eyes like his.

  McNihil turned away from the sleeping girl. He reached over to the little bedside table and switched on the ancient radio. It didn’t surprise him when the round dial lit up, despite the hotel’s wiring having been stripped out and consumed in the fire; the radio was obviously connected to some other, deeper power source. The speaker behind the dial emitted the coruscating atonal scythes of the long-dead Stan Kenton band working through the charts of Graettinger’s City of Glass. McNihil wouldn’t have minded listening to that for a while, but he had work to do. He swiveled the radio around on the bedside table, reached into the open back, and pulled free a couple of wires. The tubes inside the radio stayed lit, but the music died. That was all right; he really just needed a hookup to the speaker.

  The barfly watched his preparations with curiosity. “What’re you doing?”

  “Just getting things ready.” McNihil dug his hand into his jacket pocket. “To do my job. I came here to find out what happened to Travelt. I need to know what he was running away from. So I’m going to have to talk to him.”

  “You’re kidding.” The cigarette dropped from the barfly’s fingers as she tilted her head back to laugh. “That’s great. I can’t believe that.” With the back of her manicured hand, she wiped a tear from one eye. On the floor, the cigarette stub continued to burn, a bright orange spark among the cinders. “You idiot. You can’t talk to him-he’s gone FPC. He’s inside, where you can’t reach him.” The cigarette died, emitting a last thread of silvery gray smoke, rising slowly in the hotel room’s enclosed air. “What’re you going to do?” She pointed to the sleeping girl. “Induce delivery? Have her give birth to him? Take out your jackknife and perform a cesarean?” She shook her head. “The principle of What goes in must come out-it doesn’t apply here. Travelt is no longer a separate organism. That’s a given of a Full Prince Charles number. His physiology is totally dependent upon the host… that’s her, you know. Like a mother and an unborn infant, maybe about the end of the second trimester in size, but a lot more delicate in terms of survival.”