Noir (2 page)

Y
ou people shouldn’t have called me.” McNihil stepped over pieces of blackened metal. The shapes littering the sidewalk were the size of dental fillings, with the same odd combinations of rounded curves and ridges. They might have fallen from junkies’ rotting teeth, but he knew they hadn’t. “I don’t do this kind of work anymore.”

The DZ flunky trotted alongside him. The man took the exact same steps as McNihil, at the exact same speed, but looked as if he were running to keep up. If he’d had the end of his own leash clamped in his jaws, it would’ve been perfect. “What kind of work do you do?”

McNihil was aware the question came from no need, no desire other than to make talk, to fulfill the rep’s junior-exec schmooze training. He’d run into the type before.

“I don’t,” he said, “clean up other people’s messes.”

The metal bits of dead airplanes crunched under the soles of his
shoes. Mess was, categorically, one of the basic components of this universe he lived in, like hydrogen atoms. Gray newspapers with significant headlines—
Dewey Defeats Truman; Pearl Harbor Bombed
—moldered in the gutters, or were nudged along the broken sidewalks by the same night wind that cut through McNihil’s jacket.

“Careful,” warned the flunky, but it was already too late. A piece of hard reality poked through the merely optical; McNihil hit his knee on some larger contortion of metal, which hadn’t yet been filtered into his black-and-white vision.

“Thanks.” McNihil gritted his teeth, as the pain ebbed and condensed into a drop of blood trickling down his shin. Now he could see what had done it, a sharp-edged fragment of a wing panel, its glistening alloy crumpled like a soft mirror. It stuck out into his path all the way from where the downed jet had dug a trench through the strata of trash, plowing back the asphalt and concrete below. The singed metal carcass, the biggest piece at least, lay in the street like a barbecued whale. The engine, some fairly recent Boeing-CATIC thrust device, showed the circled fins of its air-intake snout, the merge of Chinese design and American tech resulting in something delicate as that whale’s sifting baleen.

In less than a second, McNihil’s vision rolled an overlay across the broken aircraft, transforming it from the hard world into what he usually saw. A flash of color had reflected off the shiny metal; now that had drained away, down to monochrome. Not even a jet anymore, but a Curtiss P-40, camo-mottled in dark green and desert sand. The propeller blades had snapped where they’d scythed into the street’s asphalt. His eyes worked up the most appropriate images they could; the China suggestion must’ve evoked this Flying Tigers historical.

As McNihil continued walking, limping a bit, long-fingered dwarves, swaddled up in their homemade
chernoberalls
—lead-lined against the residual radiation—and their eyes goggled with aplanatic/achromatic dark-field jeweler’s loupes, crawled out of the littered wreckage’s tight spaces and skittered off to some nearby recycling souk. Leaving the jet’s bones behind for the janitors to sweep up, the janitors that never came. The squat-limbed figures were gone around the corner before McNihil’s eyes could assimilate them into period-detail Hell’s Kitchen ragamuffins.

“Here we are,” announced the DZ flunky. “This is the place.”

“No shit.”

Some things just slid right in, from one world to any other, without any alteration necessary. Even in a moonless night, a building like this one cast a shadow, a black negative ooze across the sidewalk. But not enough to hide the ragged strips of human skin fluttering maypolelike from the exterior walls, stitched into long banners. The office tower looked like a vertical snake, shedding its extorted skin.

At one time—McNihil had seen it—the skin segments, mandatory employee donations, had fit tight on the building. That sort of thing was the apotheosis of the Denkmann book’s management style, which corporate execs were always so keen on. But bad weather and poor taxidermy had taken their toll.

One gossamer pennant draped itself across McNihil’s sleeve. Between the curling edges, he saw a faded tattoo, an initialed heart entwined with a scroll-like banner. Which had, just as he expected, some trite company slogan:
Enthusiasm is job component number
…

He didn’t catch the rest, as the wind fluttered the dangling scrap away from him.

McNihil didn’t look up to see where the building’s needle peak scratched at the stars. “Come on,” he said, pushing open the door into the lobby. Sinister buildings were regular items in the world he saw. “Let’s get this over with.”

Going up in the elevator, McNihil continued brooding about the junk in the street. It helped him give off his own lethal gamma rays, a black aura that curdled the marrow of sensitive little corporate types and further convinced them that he wasn’t happy about being here at all. That it’d been a mistake dragooning him in on this.

“It’s not really a mess.” Fidgeting, all nerves and wetly blinking eyes, the flunky thumbed one of the numbered buttons. “I mean, there’s not like blood and stuff.” The elevator’s machinery, transformed to antiquity in McNihil’s perceptions, clanked and groaned. “And we wouldn’t have called you if it wasn’t important.”

That was the wrong tack to take with him. “If it’s important,” said McNihil, “then it’s a mess.” He knew how these things worked.

A solid minute passed before the elevator doors opened. Which meant nothing, he also knew; they could still be on the ground floor. They could be in the basement, with high-up views of the city dicked onto the windows, with fine-enough resolution almost to be convincing. He loathed that aspect of the building as well.

The elevator had opened onto a standard corridor. “This way,” said the flunky. Like an idiot, as if there were any other way to go. The corridor was lined with doors, to all the cubapts on this level. As McNihil’s eyes moved over them, they turned into the kind with worn brass doorknobs and pebbly windows bearing the names of insurance agencies and dentists in chipped gold leaf. The optical trigger hooked in a keyed olfactum; he caught the evocative perfume of dust-fuzzed ceiling light fixtures, unswept and threadbare hallway carpets, stoic despair, and file-cabinet scotch.

“Here we go.” The flunky pushed at one of the doors.

Which opened onto a room full of people. Or enough of them to make a crowd in the small space. What had looked like some kind of office on the outside—the flaking gold on the glass had read Derrida & Foucault, Certified Public Accountants—was on the inside a luxury cubicle-apartment, nicely enough appointed in the usual corporate style. McNihil loathed spaces like this; these company-supplied cubapts, more artifacts out of the Denkmann book, were one of the things that had always kept him freelancing.

The DZ flunky stood back, letting McNihil walk in ahead. Nobody said anything, though some of the business suits recognized him, knew him. The business suits in the room would’ve expected that his lip would curl as soon as he walked in.
But they wanted me to see it
, thought McNihil.
Where all the bad stuff came down
. Whatever it was.

Their cold eyes watched as McNihil strode through the room, head down into his shoulders and face set in its bad-mood angles. One of them stuck a hand out, but McNihil avoided it. All these executive types, especially at this level, would have those annoying expanded handshake transmitters wired into their palms. Worse, he had a receptor in his own hand, a souvenir from his old job. Coming in on his skin’s nerve endings, it slid past the optical override—the flunky, when he’d come around to McNihil’s place, had caught him off-guard and had downed on him before McNihil had been able to pull his arm back. For the next five minutes, the tactile printout had itched away at McNihil’s left thigh, the nerve endings tingling with a dot-matrix scan of the flunky’s business card. McNihil had let it flash up inside his eye, but the only thing he’d read from it was the stylized DynaZauber logo and the company motto, something about all men being customers. What did he care what the flunky’s name and real job title were?

With the execs’ collective gaze on his back, McNihil walked over to the tall view window at the opposite side of the cubapt’s living area.

He stood with his nose almost touching the window, looked out and saw the Gloss stretched out far below. He licked the tip of his index finger with his tongue, then rubbed wet a spot of the glass. There was no pixel blur; the space was as high up as it appeared to be.

“You got spit on the window.” Harrisch, a silver-haired senior exec that McNihil had encountered before, stood behind him now. “That’s DynaZauber property. Not even leased; we own this puppy.”

McNihil glanced over his shoulder. “I like to know where I am. Altitude-wise.”

“What does it matter?”

“In case I fall.” He shrugged. “I want to know how long until I hit.”

“You might find out.” Harrisch matched him in grumpy radiation, even though a smile like an open wound surfaced across his even teeth. “You’re a bad guest. You know that, don’t you?”

“I try to be. It saves time.”

He’d actually hoped that things would get this ugly, this fast. If nothing else, it meant that none of the other execs would try to introduce themselves. Which meant he wouldn’t have to fend off any more of those hearty ’spandshakes. The verified rumor was that execs like these had the data circuits wired over to their genitalia, where the nerves were clustered thick enough for almost instantaneous readout. Stuff like that gave a whole new meaning and impetus to the old yuppie concept of networking; less reliable rumors talked about social events jammed tight with suits, all of them shaking hands and exchanging business-card data with each other until their faces shone like rain-wet stoplights and the smell of semen hung in the heavy-breathing air. McNihil didn’t care to give any of the people in the room even part of that kind of thrill.

“I knew it.” Harrisch looked disgusted, as though the spit on the window were some personal graffitied message about the nature of the universe. “We shouldn’t have asked you to come here.”

“See? I told you.” McNihil turned all the way around, so he could speak right into the face of the DZ flunky, who’d materialized at his elbow. “Fine by me. I’m gone.” He pushed past both men and headed for the cubapt’s door.

“But as long as you’re here.” Harrisch snagged him by the arm and
deflected him toward the group of other men at the center of the living space. They were all standing around something that looked like a bundle of rags at their feet. “You might as well let us know what you think.”

Not rags; it never was. Not when the bundle was lying in the middle of a medium-to-expensive gray carpet with tasteful black flecks woven in. Laundry, dirty or not, always migrated to the corners of rooms. Nobody ever stood around laundry or rags, watching with carefully blank-to-hostile expressions as some intruder was steered their way. Two of the suited execs stepped back, partly in deference to their boss’s approach, mainly to let McNihil see what was lying there.

Which was what he’d expected to see. At least the gaze in the filmed-over eyes didn’t broadcast contempt for everything that still had breath in its lungs, that managed to live without benefit of stock options. The corpse stared up at the ceiling with the patient manner of the truly dead, the ones who weren’t going to return on some battery-driven installment plan. An adult male, younger than anybody else in the room, including McNihil, excluding the overeager corporate rep. Christ would’ve been younger than the creaking execs who watched from the corners of their eyes as McNihil bent over the one who now wasn’t going to get any older.

“What’s all this shit?” He pointed to the corpse’s open shirt. It’d been unbuttoned and folded back, to show the corpse’s chest equally and neatly opened. An incision ran from under its throat to past its navel, terminated somewhere below the elastic waistband of the plain-white, non-designer underpants. The surgical cut might as well have had buttons and holes along its edges; they had been turned almost bloodlessly away from the bones and connective tissues of the corpse’s sternum. Gurgling pipes and tubes, small machinery like burrowing chrome rats, had snuggled in and nested among the various organs. Selectively permeable gas membranes around the exposed heart and lungs; the human bits glistened and shone like the contents of the plastic trays at an upscale butcher’s counter. The resemblance was extended by the drop in temperature—McNihil could feel it just by holding his palm an inch above the corpse’s chest—carefully regulated by the devices’ programming.

Stuff like that couldn’t be overlaid; no analogues existed in McNihil’s monochrome world. The little machines continued their work, visibly, like some nightmare of a future that had already arrived.

McNihil pointed to the busy wound. “Why’s he all prepped for transplant harvesting?”

“That’s just standard procedure.” The flunky had hesitated a moment before speaking up, in case Harrisch or any of the other brass had felt like explaining. “Procedural standards, for the company.”

“That’s what we do,” said one of the other execs. His voice was a dog’s growl in a man’s nasopharynx. “That’s the kind of organization we are.”

“Condition of employment.” Whenever any of the brass spoke, the flunky bounced on the balls of his feet for a moment, as though the invisible leash had been yanked. “Public service sort of thing. Your organs are company property. All the suites and cubes and efficiencies have inbuilt Detect-&-Dissect™ kits keyed to the employees’ vital signs; they drop, you’re popped.” The flunky had settled down, but his quick laugh jerked him up again, marionettelike. “Usable pieces get stitched into deserving orphans.”

“Why waste ’em?” The one brass rumbled again.

“True.” McNihil looked the man in the red-rimmed eye. “If nothing else, you could serve them over rice in the executive lunchroom.”

No laugh or smile. “If we wanted to,” the brass agreed quietly.

Harrisch, the senior exec, had hung back, letting the lower rankings have a go at the asp-head they’d invited here. Their relative positions on the DZ corporate ladder were obvious to McNihil, just from the density of the swarms of E-mail buzzing around their heads. Some of the execs had only two or three of the tiny holo’d images yattering around them for attention; the bottom rungs had enough that their faces could barely be seen past them. Swatting did no good; every once in a while, one of the junior execs would have to turn away, crouching over in a corner and downing enough of them, muttering quick responses into his Whisper-Throat™ mike, to get a few seconds of relief. Harrisch had none; either the corporation was paying for max’d-out filtration or he was high up enough to have gone on an elite paper-only status. He at least was at no risk of being overloaded, prostrate on the floor and buried under a thickening flock of messages, like a dead cowboy beneath vultures in a Western landscape
à la
John Ford.