Noir

by K. W. Jeter

  He smelled it. Not how the man had died. McNihil didn’t care about that. But what this Travelt person had been doing when he was alive. That mattered.

  A slow exhalation, the way the dead breathed; so slow, the air didn’t stir, but hung suspended in their mouths. The corpse’s bluish lips were slightly parted, as though it wanted to whisper something more to the face above its own.

  It didn’t need to speak. McNihil had already caught the trace, the sparse molecules inhaled down his throat, past the receptors of taste and scent and into his memory. He’d smelled it before. Something like wet metal, sulphuric corrosion on battery terminals, the ion discharge of aroused and insatiable desire. He could taste the metal on his tongue, as though he could spit out a bright rolling bead of mercury.

  He hooked a thumb behind the corpse’s teeth and pried its stiff jaw open. Wide enough that McNihil could run the tips of two fingers across its tongue. Through the film of congealed saliva, he felt the tiny scars, as though the wet flesh had been nicked again and again with the corner of a razor blade. They weren’t scars; he knew what they were. The living Travelt’s habits had evoked new sensory channels from his own flesh, at the center of his head, close as possible to the red jelly of his brain. It wasn’t the worst case McNihil had ever encountered; he’d come across other corpses where the tongues had felt like some kind of stitched and restitched corduroy, the channel tracks wide as the tip of his little finger. Those were the ones who’d indulged themselves for so long that they might just as well have rewired their entire nervous systems, like ancient embroideries from which the word human had been picked out and some new, unreadable word needlepointed in.

  The space around him had subtly diminished; McNihil looked up and saw Harrisch and the other company execs, even the little corporate rep, standing closer to him. Their faces formed a circle, the base of an inverted cone, with its point set right between his own eyes.

  “So?” Harrisch smiled as unpleasantly as before. “What did you find out?”

  A bit of metal glittered at the corpse’s throat. Four-armed and golden, bilaterally symmetrical, strung on a thin chain. McNihil passed his hand across the cold skin, shielding his movements with his own back. When he took his hand away, the bit was gone, the broken chain slithered out from the white shirt collar.

  McNihil stood up; the cone collapsed into a circle, his head at the center, the watching execs all around the circumference. Every one of them had the same hungry dark inside his eyes. The little black mirrors: McNihil could have turned slowly around and seen the tiny reflection of his face, over and over…

  If only, he thought. If his own face were all that he saw. It was their faces that bothered him. And what he saw there.

  He saw the same thing, of which he’d caught the scent on the corpse’s non-breath. Tasted on the back of his tongue when he’d inhaled. Metal and spit, mercury and a blue dancing spark. It was in the glistening of their lips, the knowing half-smiles, the smug certainty that badged a brotherhood of the senses.

  They’re all in on it, thought McNihil. It hadn’t been just the late Travelt, the corpse at the bottom of the well their expensive suits and corporate white shirts formed. That was why Harrisch and the other execs had wanted him to check it out, to kneel down and bring his special qualifications to bear on the dead thing in their midst. So he’d have that scent in his nostrils, that inhaled taste at the back of his mouth, when he’d stood back up and looked at them.

  “You see?” Harrisch’s voice poked at him again. “It really is the kind of job for which you have a special knack. It fits into your realm of experience. If not professionally, then personally. Or perhaps at that point where professional and personal meet.”

  Hated the guy before, hated him even more now; McNihil weighed the consequences of just leaning back and cocking his fist, unloading it in the exec’s face. Satisfaction would be high, the grief afterward higher, the payment at the end close to total. People like Harrisch walked around inviolable, secure in their perch on the ladder. They invited fists, they hung their faces out like smiling targets, asking for it. Knowing that if you fired one off, the blow your arm ached to deliver, they had ways of paying you back a thousandfold. And if you didn’t, if you just let your white-knuckled fist hang at your side like a rock extracted from the sweating core of the earth, the knot in your gut was their reward. They got you either way.

  That was how they worked it. McNihil knew that. He’d worked for Harrisch, and for people just like him. The only thing to do was to turn and walk away, to push past the encircling wall of suits and carry your fist, heavy as lead, out the door and down the unnumbered elevator, all the way to the little space called home. Where you could soak your fist in alcohol and morphine, applied from the inside out, through gut and vein. Until you forgot, or forgot enough.

  They wanted me to know, thought McNihil. What they do for fun. They weren’t ashamed; on the contrary. Harrisch and the other company execs had wanted him to know, had wanted McNihil to catch the same scent from them as he had from the corpse’s mouth. Spit and mercury and blood. All of that and more, and none of it. The only marks on their bodies would be the scars on their tongues, the channel tracks, the contact points, the rain-wet battery terminals of their pleasures. The place where the blue spark leapt from emissary to recipient. The kiss, he thought, that passeth understanding. From one to the other, from the other to the one.

  He let his fist unclench itself. These things didn’t bother him so much anymore; they just made him feel older and more tired and disgusted. McNihil scanned across the faces of the execs waiting for his answer.

  “Well?” Harrisch smiled at him. And didn’t smile.

  “Connect you, mother-connector.” McNihil felt even more disgusted than before. “I’m outta here.” He turned and walked. The circle broke, the nearest execs stepping back out of his way, before he could even shove them aside. Depriving him of that justifiable pleasure.

  Harrisch called after him. “There’s some details you should know about. Before you make your final decision.”

  Fingers touching the door’s brass knob, McNihil stopped and glanced over his shoulder. “I already have.”

  “Perhaps.” The smile didn’t waver. “Though there’s one more thing you should see. One more detail.” He stepped back and reached down to the corpse, his hand drawing away the tousled shirt from one side, where the skin was still intact above the curve of ribs. “Our late friend seems to have gotten around.” Harrisch watched for McNihil’s reaction. “Quite a lot, wouldn’t you say?”

  He could see what the exec was showing him, from all the way across the room. A tattoo, the old-fashioned kind that didn’t move around. Big and dark enough that McNihil, standing by the door, could easily make out what it was.

  A classic banner scroll, curling around at each end, with some name or word that McNihil couldn’t make out inscribed inside. That wasn’t the important part; what mattered was the emblem above the banner. An ornate capital V, its point at the corpse’s bottom rib, the serifed arms reaching to either side of his armpit. Exact and intricately detailed, as though the artist had completed half of a slanting cross, redeemer to be added later…

  All of McNihil’s restraining wisdom evaporated. When the red haze had flared, then faded behind his eyes, he saw Harrisch sprawled awkwardly across the corpse. The exec pushed himself up on one arm and rubbed his jaw, smearing the blood leaking out of the corner of his mouth.

  That was what they really wanted me to see. McNihil wiped his torn knuckles against his shirt. Nobody in the room had taken a step closer, laid a hand on him. They had gotten what they wanted.

  “You’re the one, all right.” Harrisch sat up, balancing himself with one hand on the corpse’s chest. His smile showed red around the edges. “You’re the one we want.”

  McNihil pulled open the door.

  “Don’t call me,” said McNihil. “And I won’t call you.”

  In the corridor outside the cubapt,
he sensed someone else watching him, as he turned and headed toward the elevator. A glance over his shoulder and he saw her, down at the end of the hallway’s flickering yellow pools of light. McNihil wasn’t surprised; there was always one, sometimes several in these buildings. A cube bunny, this one prettier than most, and with large, sad eyes reddened with weeping. For Travelt, he figured; she must know that the object of her mercantile affections was dead.

  McNihil could also tell that the cube bunny wanted to talk to him, that she’d been waiting there in the building’s hallway to do just that. The girl looked up at him and started to say something; but he didn’t feel like talking. Not just now. McNihil kept walking toward the elevator at the opposite end of the hallway, and thumbed the down button soon as he reached it.

  The machinery groaned, rising toward him. He pulled the rattling cage open and stepped inside. Falling slowly and out of sight, McNihil dug into his pocket and took out the little golden pendant he’d palmed off the corpse.

  A bit of metal like this might have its uses. The kind of thing that would tell him what Harrisch might not want him to know.

  McNihil turned the cross-shaped crucifax over at the tips of his fingers and rubbed his thumb along the tiny bar code incised into the metal. In the row of lines, more delicate than his own thumbprint, he could almost read the dead man’s profession of faith.

  He wondered if-at the end, when the poor bastard’s mouth had filled with ashes-it’d done any good at all.

  Maybe, thought McNihil. He closed his eyes and let the grinding chain continue lowering him to the earth.

  THREE

  LOVELY THE WAY THE DEAD ARE

  He doesn’t have a prayer.” The living woman spoke to the dead woman. “They’ll get him. And then he’ll have to do what they want.”

  The other woman was only somewhat dead. Technically so. At the center of her eyes, where other people, the living ones, had darkness, she had white and two little black The corneas the woman had when she’d been alive, officially so, had been sliced out and sold when there’d been an upward tick in that segment of the organ market. Now she looked out at the world through crosses tilted on their sides, cheap Taiwanese knockoffs, low-resolution scanning lenses.

  “I don’t know.” The dead woman shrugged. Her hollowed cheekbones had edges sharp as dull knives. “I know him better than you. I was married to him for years and years. He’s pretty clever. In his way. He could always find another option.”

  “Like what?”

  The dead woman turned her lovely face-lovely the way the dead are-toward the living one. “He could always kill himself.”

  “Ah.”

  The dead woman laid a cold hand on the living one’s cheek. “What’s your name, child?”

  She knows that. The living woman’s name was November. Not the name her mother had given her, but the one she’d given herself and that her friends, when she’d still had a pack to run with, had endorsed as fitting. Snow touched her brow, whiter than the yellow-tinged bone beneath the dead woman’s parchment skin. Ice walked through the ventricles of her heart and down her pale arms, not as an indication of cruelty-for she wasn’t cruel, even when her living came at the price of others’ breath-but as the metaphor of sadness. When she had nothing better to do-when she was far enough ahead in her accounts that she didn’t have to worry about her own death, at least for a little while-she could ride down to the bottom of the Gloss, to the Pacific Rim’s southern crossing, where the trains worked their way across ice floes and polar fields, past the great sliding glaciers and over the storm-lashed seas. She could lean her forehead against one of the luxury cars’ triple-sealed windows, feeling through the layers of glass and vacuum the cold of that world outside, seeping through her skin and into her flesh, meeting blood that seemed almost the same temperature. Across the tiny unfolded table in front of her seat would be twists of paper and scraps of metal foil, the snowy contents unwrapped and ingested in any appropriate way, molecules unlocking under a Velcro’d patch of skin, or gums and mucosa stinging under the attack of microscopic drill-bits tugging bad-attitude atoms behind them. Getting to her feet as the first shivering rush hit her, eons of glacial motion compressed into seconds as her spine was measured by endorphins and rage; knocking over the champagne flute of the man sitting next to her, spilling wet prickling stars into his lap; stumbling out blind into the swaying center aisle, the magnified thunder of her pulse knocking her off-balance more than the train’s motion as it tilted through the banked maglev tracks, under cliffs of ice, her heart seizing as though its hinges had snagged on hard crystals, lurching into the next beat by some lower brain-stem force of will-

  He could always kill himself.

  The dead woman’s words echoed inside November’s skull; she could close her eyes and still hear them, rolling like thunder in the air and the iron wheels of the oldest trains that ran the circle. She supposed the dead woman was right. Though there were different ways of killing yourself, ways that efficiently and tidily left you still alive afterward.

  Ways like those in the memory flash that had blossomed inside her head, thinking about her own name. What came after the stumbling out into the train’s aisle: pushing her way past the backs of the plush seats, her vision opened into a blur-rimmed tunnel, tight enough that she didn’t have to see the faces turning up toward her, didn’t have to see anything except the auto-sliding door that led between cars and the door that didn’t open by itself, a smaller one, some kind of maintenance access, which opened into one of those spaces that people with a desperate need for privacy and little need for comfort could always find. The cross-treaded metal was always littered with orange plastic hypodermic caps, like thimbles for depraved faery folk, the needles themselves crackling underfoot like the blood-specked ground of a steel forest. The Antarctic cold crawled in sharper here, her exhaled breath nebulous in front of her face, inhaled ice burning down into her trachea. Pinpoint metal scratched her knees when some teneviki arbitrageur from the Gloss’s Vladivostok zone followed her into the narrow space, put his capitalist hands on her shoulders, and pushed her down. The one whose champagne she’d spilled; his crotch still darkly stained and smelling of wine, the teeth of the zipper and his polished fingernails glistening wet, his other hand already tangled in her hair and drawing her closer, his back against the hidden door, the world tight as a refrigerated coffin.

  He doesn’t have a prayer…

  None of them ever did. She knew that was why she was named November. Even when she was alone again, kneeling in that little space, the side of her head against the metal separating her from the snow and ice sailing by outside, with the taste of salt and chlorine at the back of her throat. In the world outside, the great big empty one, the ice beheaded the gray waves, the ground split open in white fissures, the bones of ancient wooden ships were picked over by the wind. The train rolled on, or flew a millimeter above the charged tracks, and through some window that opened inside her skull, she could see the empty snowscapes, the oceans that chilled drowning men’s hearts to a standstill within thirty seconds; she could see all that without looking outside, she could see it without opening her eyes. She could spit out the taste of the tenevik, a clouded wet thing glistening on the needles around her; she could stand up, a little steadier on her legs as her muscles recongealed into usability, stand and straighten out her clothes that the hard, manicured hands had dislodged through the neckline of her blouse, a simple white button snapped free and rolling through the hypodermic paraphernalia on the metal floor. Stand and push open the hidden door that led back into the train’s heated spaces, where her breath would no longer be a visible and fading thing, and walk back to her seat in the luxury car, slide past the elegant chalk-stripe knees of the man’s trousers, the spilled champagne already evaporated from his lap. He wouldn’t even look up from the rows of numbers in the folded-open Bangkok edition of The Wall Street Journal. Which was as she preferred it as she sat back in the plush seat and watched Antarctica unfo
ld outside the insulated windows. It wasn’t the chemicals slowly evaporating from her bloodstream that had kept her from feeling anything.

  “You know my name,” she said aloud.

  The dead woman made no reply. The white-centered eyes with the little crosses in them gazed on some interior landscape, some territory where the man she’d been married to, and who was still alive, was all unknowingly getting into deeper shit.

  The poor bastard, thought November. She felt sorry for the man-his name was McNihil-in her usual, nonempathic way. An intellectual process, like watching one ice floe grind implacably against another, the white fields cracking and splintering as though alive but not sentient. It didn’t make her feel sad-nothing did, or at least not any sadder-but it was still something that had to be figured into her own calculations. He might get in her way, impede the run of her business activities. That was what she felt sorry about. She otherwise felt no hostility toward him. To be fatal and noncaring at the same time; it just worked that way. The ice surged and hammered against itself.

  November zipped up her jacket, sealing a chrome-dotted leather skin around herself. Not to keep out the cold-this wasn’t the Antarctic; here, in the territory of the dead, the sun beat down like sulphurous cake frosting-but to keep her own coldness bottled around her heart.

  Even her being here, the fact of her coming to the dead land and talking to the dead woman-that was part of the troubles circling and closing around McNihil. He didn’t know yet, but he would.

  “I’m leaving now.” She bent down, bringing her face close to the dead woman’s, looking right into the black-and-white eyes. The room, a tiny space filled with untidily stacked, yellowing papers, windows filmed with dust, ate up her words without echoes. Exactly the sort of room the dead would be expected to live in, or at least exist. She had been in ones just like it, before this; the dead were always a good source of information. It was their business. November straightened up; she could still feel the dead woman’s hand where the pale fingers had touched her cheek. “Thanks for everything.”