Noir

by K. W. Jeter

  Which proved that being in trouble was a relative thing. McNihil felt an old horror, familiar enough to be almost comfortable, deep at the floor of his gut, when he saw the pickers and scavengers going about their black-fingered rounds, like crows minus even a bird’s intelligence. But they didn’t seem to mind it. Rooting around for scraps of aluminum foil, the still-shiny tracings off busted circuit boards, probably didn’t even bring in enough to service the interest on whatever debt load they had died carrying. “Died” in that other world, the one the officially living inhabited. So most of them-short of coming across some lucky find, maybe an ancient collectible Lone Ranger and Trigger lunch-box at the bottom of some unexplored slag-pile-were actually just scrabbling themselves deeper into debt, becoming more truly indeadted with every bent-spined raking of splintered fingernails across the mulching discards of the world they were no longer part of.

  They could go like that for decades, McNihil knew. With no cellular regeneration, the scavengers would wear away their hands against the corrosive, sharp-edged trash, until they were poking through it with the stumps of their forearms, their backs permanently fused into perfect half-circles. And beyond: dismaying rumors circulated, of the torsos of unlucky deadtors scrubbed free of all limbs, chests dryly flayed to breastbones and spidery ribs, the exposed batteries draining down to the last feeble amperage fraction.

  “You shouldn’t think about these things,” said McNihil’s dead wife. She smiled; even when alive, before acquiring the skills that came with death, she’d been in the habit of reading his mind. “You’re just spooking yourself.”

  “Sorry. Can’t help it.” Being in the territory of corpses made it difficult to put away the grim images. Of worse things yet, of poor bastards worn down to ragged skulls, trailing an umbilicus of batteries after them as they inched their way across the bleak landscape with little motions of their dirty-white jawbones. Digging out glittery bits of old gum wrappers with their eroded incisors, nudging like dung beetles their little wads of recyclable detritus to the redemption center at the zone’s border, making another meaningless nick at the tab they’d accumulated in that other, pre-death life. Like Marley’s ghost, dragging around a chain whose links were instead forged out of the enticing perishables of the cheap-’n’-nastiverse, bright junk like the stuff that McNihil had laid out on the table between himself and his wife.

  “It’s not so bad.” The cigarette in her hand was half gone. “Don’t blame yourself. It’s the thought that counts.”

  She was correct about that as well. As with so many things. This was why they were still married. What death could not put asunder: he had never stopped thinking about her, in love and guilt, even long after it would’ve been better for him to have done so. Though there were advantages to the arrangement as well, to having her dead and communicating. Better than a Ouija board, for getting messages from the other side, he received the word face-to-face, rather than having to wonder if it came from his own imaginings.

  “You’re right,” said McNihil. He had pulled the other chair out and sat down at the table, across from her. “I’m in trouble. More than usual.”

  “The usual… that’s just what you bring on yourself.” His dead wife nodded slowly, thoughtfully. “Just from your usual bad attitude. For more than that, other people are required.”

  Nothing he didn’t already know. Even who the other people were: McNihil had gotten on the train and come down here to the territory of the dead, even though he had an existing job to take care of, a favor for an old friend. Because he needed to find out what the deal was with Harrisch and all the rest of that DynaZauber bunch. Plus the mystery of how Travelt the rising young corporate junior exec had become that empty-eyed clay gazing up at the ceiling. If all that hadn’t been the most interesting thing in the world to McNihil before, it stood a good chance of going that way.

  “I don’t need analysis of my personal shortcomings right now.” McNihil laid his forearms across the tabletop, leaning toward her, close enough to see into the little black ’s of her eyes, but not close enough for a kiss. “Tell me something else.”

  “If you want to know about the trouble you’re in…” His dead wife gave a shrug. “It’d be simpler to just wait. You’ll find out soon enough.”

  “Probably so. But I’d rather know right now.”

  “Why?” The same question she always asked, whenever her still-living husband came here, wanting to find out things. “Now… or then… what difference does it make?”

  “You’re forgetting.” It was McNihil’s turn to give a little indulgent smile. “Where I just came from, time still matters. One way or another. That’s why they call it timing. These people I’m dealing with… I just don’t want to be caught surprised by them.”

  She shook her head. “You poor thing. Someday… you’ll be over all that.”

  The way she said it, gently, with pity and no malice, chilled the sweat on his skin. “Maybe so,” said McNihil, after a moment. “But in the meantime… it’s like I said. I’ve still got to take care of business.”

  “And like I said. You poor thing.”

  No reply from him; all McNihil had to do at this moment was wait. In a small dark room, in a house in dead territory, a declining construct that had been abandoned by the living a long time ago. Abandoned, then reinhabited, taken over by the dead. Who take over everything, thought McNihil, eventually. The prefab walls leaked formaldehyde, appropriately enough; the windows cracked beneath layers of dust; some archaic god of burials alone knew what was in the closets of the bedrooms down the hall. McNihil had been here before, sitting at this table in a kerosene lantern’s pool of light; he had waited then as he waited now. What was the point in trying to hurry the dead?

  His dead wife closed her eyes. The cigarette had burned down close to the backs of her fingers; McNihil leaned forward and plucked it away, then ground the stub out against the table leg beside him. She didn’t appear to notice what he’d done, just as she wouldn’t have noticed her dead flesh being singed by the small fire. There were already a couple of careless burn marks between her knuckles. As with the others inhabiting this territory, her sense of pain, the boundary between herself and the dead world around her, had dwindled almost to the point of nonexistence.

  That was McNihil’s own personal theory of how dead knowledge, the knowingness of the dead, worked: they had given up the useless distinctions between themselves and any other thing, so they were open to all the information, raw and unfiltered, in the dead world and the living. A salvageable gum wrapper buried in street muck was as evident to their percept systems as the prick of a knifepoint against their cold skin. It was a characteristic of the dead, to be so well connected, to be wired into everything. Only the living maintained defenses and filters and immune systems, tried to unhook and disconnect themselves from the world; an attempt that was doomed to failure, inasmuch as they would all wind up as ashes or worm food eventually, or at least if they were lucky. But a brave and necessary attempt, regardless.

  “They’ve been leaning on you,” said McNihil’s dead wife, “for a long time now.” She spoke without opening her eyes, the cold, battery-juiced brain behind the bruised eye sockets tuned into frequencies faint and invisible as radio waves. “Putting the pressure on. For you to do something for them.”

  McNihil knew where she was getting that much from. Right out of my head, he thought. She’d been wired into there even before she’d died. Perhaps a little more tightly now; “leaning on you” was his language, not hers. That mirror-gazing effect was something to be expected when hanging out with the deceased.

  “I know that.” McNihil regarded the stubbed-out cigarette butt at his fingertips. “Just about everyone in the world seems to.”

  A scowl creased his dead wife’s brow. “Something about a corpse?” She tilted her head, as though listening to a ghost’s whisper. “A real one, I mean. Really dead.”

  “Yeah, and not going to move around anymore, either.” McNihil
tossed the cigarette butt onto the floor, with all the others scattered there. His wife’s housekeeping, as he’d noticed before, had gone all to hell since her death. “Even if this Travelt guy-that’s the corpse’s name, by the way-even if he’d been in debt when he was croaked, they wouldn’t have been able to power him up, get him walking and talking again.” The finance companies and loan sharks monitored their debtors’ health, even to the point of radio-tagging their vital signs with detector implants; that way, their postmortem surgical teams could swoop in on someone who’d died with an account in arrears and splice in the thermal packs and batteries before the cortex decayed into unrecoverable mush. Really and truly dead, mused McNihil. Lucky bastard Travelt had died with money in the bank; lucky for him, too bad for Harrisch and the rest of his executive-suite cronies, who could’ve otherwise pumped Travelt’s animated corpse for the answers as to how he’d died.

  “Hard luck for you as well,” said McNihil’s dead wife.

  “Yeah…” He nodded. “If they’d been able to get the info straight from the corpse’s mouth, they wouldn’t have had to come around and bother me. It’s not as if I wanted to get dragged into this sorry-ass loop.”

  “Oh, no-” She opened her dark-filled eyes, gazing straight at him. “It’s not because of the corpse. That wasn’t the start of it all. They wanted you even before he died.”

  McNihil said nothing. He leaned back in the chair, letting his own brain silently pick away at what he’d just been told. This was something new, something he hadn’t known or even suspected before.

  “Why should you have known about it?” The dead woman continued her calm regard. “They wanted you, but they hadn’t come round for you yet. But as soon as they had a reason to…”

  “Not a reason.” McNihil gave another slow nod. “You mean, an excuse.”

  His dead wife shrugged, bones visibly articulating beneath the surface of her skin. “Whatever.”

  It put a different light on things, he had to admit. If his wife was right-and McNihil had no call to doubt her, and plenty for belief-then the implications were even deeper and spookier than before. If Harrisch and the rest of DynaZauber had been scheming on him, trying to find a way to drag him into its net, then Travelt’s death was suspiciously convenient. And not just the poor sonuvabitch’s death, thought McNihil. Everything leading up to it.

  “Which would mean-” McNihil spoke his next thoughts aloud. “That they connected him over. Harrisch and his buddies at the company. They set Travelt up.”

  “Possibly.”

  He studied his dead wife, as though he could see the workings behind her eyes. “You don’t know?”

  “If I did,” she said, “I’d tell you.”

  “Would you really?” McNihil brushed his hand across the cover of one of the romance novels on the table. “Considering… what it would mean…” The bare-chested adventurer, with flowing blond hair as long as that of the brunette temptress in his arms, had collapsed with her skeletal form across the oil-stained beach. The mingled, graying strands floated like seaweed in the tired waves. McNihil looked up at his wife. “Because if they set him up… one of their own…”

  “They’d be just as happy to set you up.” The idea didn’t seem to have any emotional impact on her, one way or the other.” For whatever reasons they might have.”

  I knew, thought McNihil, I didn’t like that asshole. The image of Harrisch’s smiling face floated by on the screen inside his head. There’d been an instinctive aversion on his part toward the exec, more than McNihil usually felt when dealing with high-level corporate types. The one lying on the floor, looking up with empty eyes, was his notion of the only good executive type. Too bad that Harrisch didn’t fit-at least, not yet-that terminal description as well. Loathing for the man had been the main reason that McNihil had turned down any job offer. He could’ve used the money, might even have enjoyed finding out how the late Travelt got stiffed, but without even reasoning out why, he’d let the rising of his stomach up into his throat tell him that he’d wanted nothing to do with the whole creepy setup.

  And now, what his dead wife had just told him-that confirmed the wisdom of his initial reaction.

  “You were right,” she said. “From the beginning. Sometimes you are, you know. You don’t need me to tell you everything.”

  “No… I suppose not.” The business with Harrisch and the corpse, all of which he’d now been pressured into making his own business, faded from his thoughts for a moment. He studied his dead wife, looking at her with that same slow contemplation as when, in the middle of the night, back when she’d still been alive, he would raise himself up on one elbow in the bed they’d shared then, and in the muted darkness watch her sleeping. The rise of her breasts against the sheets, the draw and exhale at her slightly parted lips, the flutter of her dark eyelashes as some unshared dream traced her vision… that was all a long time ago. A long time, and another world away. Everything about her now was as still as the empty bed he looked back at every night, the one perpetual night, from the door of the room in which he tried to sleep.

  Death hadn’t been as hard on her, as far as looks were concerned, as it had been for the slowly decaying scavengers out in this territory’s cold fields. The transition had perhaps leaned her down, lost her the few pounds she hadn’t really needed to lose when alive; now she had both a fashion-model thinness and pallor, even to the dark, bruised-looking eye sockets. Her hair had been untouched by gray; it fell black as he remembered, past her shoulders, to that place along her back where he still had a tactile memory of his hand resting. Death, at least in the sense of physical beauty, had done her some good; he knew she had a certain vanity about that. She’d looked worse in the hospital, when she’d been dying, making the change from one state of being to another; that’d been the roughest, on both of them. And the most corrosive of feeling: he might not have done what he’d wound up doing, gotten into the betrayal mode so heavily. That was where I connected up, thought McNihil as he gazed at his dead wife.

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself.” She extracted another cigarette from the pack on the table. “You got something out of it. And that’s all that matters, isn’t it?”

  Moments like this, when she made little remarks so close to the bone, he could almost hate her. The other side of the guilt equation, the handle she had on his soul: he had profited by her death, in more ways than one. She doesn’t have to remind me, thought McNihil bitterly. That was what had enabled him to make his place in the Collection Agency, scrabble his way up the ranks of the asp-heads. It was a competitive field, in which a career could stall out from either a lack of guts or the right equipment. The agency itself only paid for the essentials, thus keeping its basic operating costs down, passing on the bulk of the royalties to its clients, the artists and content creators. To get the plum assignments, which was where the excitement was, and the resultant bounties and bonuses-small, but they added up eventually-a hustling young asp-head had to trick himself out with some expensive goodies, paid for from his own pocket. There was a valve at the center of his head, the installation of which hadn’t come cheap.

  And had been worth it; not all the pirate types that he’d wound up dealing with had been candy-ass pushover types. Some serious bad people got into copyright violation, theft of intellectual property, on-wire counterfeiting and password-forgery scams, ID shadowing and third-party bucket relays. Operations of that sort, whether it was a fly-by-night anonymous remailer setting up shop in the New Guinea jungles or a Fortune 500 heavyweight trying to muscle in on just a little bit of a competitor’s crypt’d-up patents, took substantial capital investments to get up and running. People like that, with that kind of money sunk into their illegal enterprises, and with the kind of payoff they were hoping for in mind, didn’t enjoy the Collection Agency fouling up their plans. An asp-head, the visible embodiment of the agency, was in for a major-and final-ass-kicking if he couldn’t take care of himself. Which happened sometimes, the result being
a small box arriving at the agency headquarters, a box that leaked from the bottom and smelled like the dumpsker behind a butcher shop by the time it got opened and the pieces identified for a proper burial. McNihil, just starting with the agency and totally green, had been in on the tail end of the raids on the last Guangzhou holdouts, deep inside the Guangdong FEZ in the Chinese mainland-data forgery, mastering and distribution facilities so entrenched that they had their own military, way beyond Beijing control. A lot of older asp-heads had gone home in crates before that had been wrapped up; McNihil owed at least part of his rise in the agency to the holes that had been shot through the ranks above him. Also his caution, and his more-than-willingness to keep his chops and equipment up-to-date. But that cost money.

  “The good things in life always do,” said the dead woman sitting across from him. “That’s the difference between life and death. When you’re the way I am… prices really don’t matter anymore.”

  “How the hell should I know?” McNihil didn’t feel like smiling back at her. “I’m not dead yet. I’m trying to avoid that.”

  “Because you’re smart. Smarter than I was, at any rate.” She contemplated the unlit cigarette in her hand. “Inasmuch as I trusted you.”

  Which she shouldn’t have. For both our sakes, thought McNihil. He supposed he could’ve quit the Collection Agency, gotten some other job where the consequences for failure weren’t quite so grim. Or if he had to stick it out as an asp-head, for whatever reasons he carried around in the dark rooms of his head and heart, he could’ve found some other way to finance the upward motion of his career there. Some other way besides spending the insurance payout that fell into his hands upon his wife’s death. The payout that would have otherwise wiped off her indeadted status and bought her a nice, quiet resting place in the ground or a crematory urn.