Noir (46 page)

The other’s sudden force took McNihil by surprise; dizzied, he felt the Adder clome swing him about in the hotel room’s close space, away from the smoke-outlined door and farther inside.
This is his turf
, McNihil realized, as the Adder clome knocked him back against the doorway leading to a minuscule bathroom. And payback time as well; this was what came from his own violence back at the clinic, when he’d been pressuring answers out of the other man.

“Take a look,” said the Adder clome, “and get an education.” He
grasped both of McNihil’s lapels and yanked him away from the wall. The little dance inside the hotel room had brought the two of them up to the bed shoved into the corner by the broken window. “Tell me what you see, connector.”

McNihil caught his balance as the Adder clome let go of him. On a little bedside table, an antique-looking plastic radio melted and sagged in the fierce heat. The room’s flames had engulfed the bed itself, the sagging mattress transformed into a rectangular inferno, as though a trapdoor had been opened down into the earth’s molten core. Smoke, black and viscous, rolled a choking thundercloud past McNihil’s face, obliterating the ceiling above him. The heat scalded his eyes as he tried to discern the figure silhouetted in fire on the bed.

Something human, or close enough. And alive; the naked limbs slowly moved, writhing not in agony but in dreaming bliss. McNihil could just make out the profile of a woman’s face, masked unrecognizable as his own. Her eyes were closed, the eyelids trembling with the sight of whatever moved inside her private dreams; her mouth parted as though to draw deep inside her throat the flames’ kiss from the burning pillow. Almost a child, the fire sculpting her, luminous and fragile; the fingertips of one hand rested between her negligible breasts, as if she had gathered the bed’s ashy smoke to herself like black-petaled flowers.

Another piece of memory, a real one, linked up with the world in the hotel. He recognized the sleeping, dreaming figure on the bed.
It’s her
, thought McNihil.
The cube bunny
. She looked the way he’d seen in the wet reflection on the coffee percolator, back in the kitchen of his crummy apartment. That saddened him; for her to be here, something bad would’ve had to have happened to her in the world outside.

“Dreams within dreams,” said the Adder clome. He reached past McNihil and stroked the sleeping girl’s hair, brushing what might have been softer flames away from her ear. “And metaphors that don’t end.” The Adder clome turned his head, looking up to see what effect the show was having on McNihil. “How do you like this one?”

“Not really my style.” McNihil shook his head. “You should know that I’m a little more retro in my tastes.”

“Really? She seemed to suit you well enough, at one time. Plus, there’s always certain … novelties, shall we say … that could be of interest.” The Adder clome ran his hand over the cube bunny’s bare
shoulder, then lightly drifted across her slow-motion ribs. “Take a closer look.”

“I’d rather not,” said McNihil. But did anyway. This time, he saw that what he’d assumed were shadows evoked by the flames and deposits of smoke carbon on the girl’s skin were more of the drifting black-ink tattoos, the kind that moved. He watched as the Adder clome left one fingertip on the soft area above the cube bunny’s evident hipbone, pressing just enough to indent the flesh. The images of lightly animated Asian tigers and weeping Latino prison madonnas clustered at that point, as though to suckle from his fingernail.

A moan escaped from the sleeping girl’s lips. McNihil recognized the sound as coming from that place where wordless dreams shed their residual images, stripped down to endorphin flow and the involuntary contraction-and-release of muscle tissue. A shudder ran across the girl’s body, her knees drawing up in fetal position as though the burning mattress’s heat had sizzled some core tendon. Another heat pulsed from the terminus of the cube bunny’s spine; McNihil could smell its radiation in the thick air, the coppery taste lodging at the back of his tongue like a mucus-wet battery.

“You know,” mused the Adder clome, “for all the bitching I do about it, there’s some real advantages to the corporate relationship with DynaZauber. It’s a two-way street. Harrisch and his bunch connect you up the ass financially, but there’s something to be gotten out of it. Those people have got bio-resources up the kazoo. You get access to materials and techniques that are utmost state-of-the-art.”

“I can imagine.” More than the smoke was making McNihil feel woozy.

“No, you can’t. At least you couldn’t until you arrived here this time.” The Adder clome took a step back from the bed, spreading his hands with upturned palms, a parody of blessing. “Take this puppy, for instance.
Look upon my works, ye horny, and despair
. The latest thing—”

“Traveling tattoos? I’ve seen ’em.”

“Don’t be stupid.” The Adder clome looked down with evident admiration at the sleeping girl’s form. “Rev up to the present. Tattoos that move around, that even pass from one body to another—that’s strictly old technology. Been there, done that, had the rusty nails driven through my hands and feet. This is something new. What we’ve got here—” A clinical finger pointed to the markings on the girl; they could
be seen more clearly now that the muscle spasms had started to subside. “It’s essentially a network of implanted receptor sites. In one grand conceptual stroke, we solve the age-old Theodora’s-lament problem. Not enough altars at which to receive libations to the gods, as she put it? What nature didn’t provide, science—or at least industry—can. There’s a lot of unused territory in the human brain, just waiting to be hooked up to something fun. There’s territory that most people are
abandoning
inside their heads—linguistic skills, higher-cognition faculties, emotional levels. Why leave all that just to become cerebral ghost towns, empty buildings, dust inside old closets? If you don’t use ’em, somebody else will. Nothing remains uncolonized for long, not when there’s corporations like DynaZauber around. They’ll be happy to move their furniture inside your head. That’s their business; that’s how they make their money.”

“You don’t have to tell me about DZ business,” said McNihil. “What I don’t know about it, I’m not interested in.”

“You should be.” The Adder clome spoke with sudden vehemence, eyes bright through the smoke. “You’re looking at the future here, pal; the future and the present and the past, all rolled up into one. The goal of commerce is to destroy history, to put its customers into the eternal Now, the big happy theme park of desires that are always at the brink of satisfaction but somehow never get there. Because if they did, the game would be over and everybody would go home. They might even move back inside their own heads and boot the happy corporations out.”

“That’s not going to happen.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t think so, either.” Self-loathing seeped through the Adder clome’s words. “That’s why I sold out to DZ, joined up with them so hard it’d take a titanium crowbar to pry me loose.” He passed his hands, fingers spread wide, a few inches above the sleeping girl, like a magician beginning a levitation act. “Me and the rest of the ones like me, plus everybody at the Snake Medicine™ franchise headquarters—we could see the handwriting on the wall.
Mene mene tekel up-your-ass
. Which is corporate-speak for
You’ve been weighed in the balance and we’ve found you worthwhile enough to buy, so you can either sell out now or go back to selling rubber vibrators at strip-mall discount outlets
. Not much of a choice.”

McNihil had been there as well. “If Harrisch wanted you to have a choice, he’d have given it to you.”

“Exactly.” The Adder clome looked down at the sleeping girl, examining
the naked form more critically now. “So that’s why there’s Snake Medicine™ fingerprints all over this concept; we were
happy
to get the consulting gig with DynaZauber.”

“Let me guess.” Smoke had made McNihil’s voice even raspier, painfully so. He nodded toward the cube bunny and her markings. “This is TIAC?”

“TIAC Mark Two; Two Point Five, actually. The DZ labs took the initial design revisions and did a little fine-tuning on them. Before they pulled the plug on the whole project.”

“Why didn’t they go to Three? Or even beyond that. It was my understanding that Harrisch and his crowd are always looking for new products to push.” McNihil glanced down at the sleeping girl, then back up to the Adder clome. “Didn’t this one work out?”

“Worked out like a champ.” The Adder clome’s own gaze was filled with longing, the girl’s image that of unfulfilled possibilities. “In some ways, better than they wanted it to. Maybe that was the problem; DynaZauber wound up with a kind of refutation of their whole turd-in-a-can marketing concept. Because this baby really delivered. Look here.” The moving tattoos followed the point of the Adder clome’s finger, like tropical fish in a skin aquarium, waiting to be fed. “It’s not just the images, that’s just what you
see
. You do see them, don’t you?”

McNihil nodded. “Go on.”

“There’s a whole system here of transmission and reception, sites and stimuli. The tattoos are triggers for previously implanted neural feed-through points. There’s enough redundant, unused processor space in the human brain’s occipital lobes, the vision centers, that a DZ surgeon—or a Snake Medicine™ clinic technician, for that matter, once the procedure’s been sufficiently dumbed down—can route a subcutaneous perception matrix to the deep limbic sexual areas.” The Adder clome sounded enthusiastic now. “It’s like having eyes all over your body—but a specialized organ; you couldn’t read a book with your big toe or something. More like a frog’s eye, adapted to perceive only a limited range of stimulus. In this case, the patterns of the traveling tattoos. A predetermined library of tattoo designs—some historicals, Rock of Ages–type stuff, some Iban primitivos, a lot of originals and public-domain stuff—is loaded into unconscious memory, using the basic prowler download technology. It’s pretty versatile that way.”

“So I’ve noticed.”

The Adder clome rolled on, words coming faster. “Then you just have to load in the connections, the link between each tattoo and the subarea of the cortex that it should stimulate. All sorts of variations are possible: a basic Arrow-Pierced Heart with Banner Doves image is hooked up to a generalized, low-level stroke of the major pleasure centers, while an early-sixties Hot-Rod Demon, some classic Big Daddy Roth design, has a much higher-voltage, short-duration groin-chakra zap linked to it. The first gets you that warm-and-fuzzy bliss glow that lasts for hours, the other is your classic short-fast-and-hard number, twenty seconds or less standing up, from erection, insertion, and climax like a bullet to the center of the skull. Just like old-fashioned sexual encounters in that way: you don’t necessarily know just what you’re going to get until skin contact’s been made.”

“Sounds,” said McNihil drily, “more like sexual disease than sexual encounters.”

“Yeah, but this is the disease you
want
. Well, maybe not you—but somebody always does. They wouldn’t put their tongues inside prowlers’ mouths if they didn’t want it. But with skin as the active, receptive element …” The Adder clome nodded slowly. “You add the public factor. People know what you’ve got, what you’ve done, what other skin you’ve rubbed up against … and what’s rubbed off on you. Like trading cards, some of the tattoos are rarer than others; some are so rare as to be legendary, things to be whispered and conjectured about. Mysterious, sharp-edged emblems, pseudo-Arabic calligraphy, bleeding hearts-of-Jesus that can trigger cortical pleasure centers that nothing else can, soft gray padlocks that only one key can fit. If somebody’s going to collect the set, they’ll have to put some work in, chase down the missing pieces. There’s a whole collector economy that develops off this system: people become major players by what they’ve got, what they can give you.”

“Just like the regular world.” A lot of this was stuff that McNihil hadn’t heard of before, but it depressed more than surprised him. “It’s all economics. Congratulations—between you and DZ, you’ve managed to complete the process of turning sex into a pure capitalist endeavor.”

“You think so?” The Adder clome’s sweating brow creased. “I see it going the other way. If Harrisch and his bunch hadn’t shut down this project—if they’d gone ahead and put the ultimate TIAC on the market—it would’ve put the free juice back into sex. Taken it out of
the cash registers and sent it on some deep wacko plane, straight out of D. H. Lawrence and Charles Bukowski, you know, those ancient erotic visionaries. Reading people like that was why I got into this business in the first place. I thought you could
do
something with this stuff, something
meaningful
.”

“More fool you, then.” McNihil wasn’t interested in the other man’s aspirations; he’d already lost most of his own. “Wake up and smell the—”

“Yeah, right,” interrupted the Adder clome. “I’ve heard that line already. ‘Burning,’ we’ve got here; ‘corpses’ … maybe not. Prowlers are alive as you are; they just have different agendas. But what I said before is still true. There were possibilities here once.”

“Harrisch hath murdered possibilities. But that’s his job—to reduce possibilities to certainties. Late-generation capitalism isn’t about speculation; it’s all about making
sure
you get the money.”

“Don’t tell me about what I already know.” One of the Adder clome’s ash-smeared hands gestured at the surrounding flames and smoke. “This really doesn’t seem like the place for an economics lecture. You’re more connected-up in the head with Harrisch and his bunch of sub-execs than I am, and I’ve been on his payroll a lot longer. You’re missing the sheer
wonder
of this system, the way all the pieces come together.” He laid the flat of his hand against the sleeping girl’s shoulder blade. The touch didn’t evoke a low moan from her as much as did the Don’t Tread on Me snake image slithering up under the Adder clome’s palm. He glanced over at McNihil. “See that? Now that’s a beautiful thing.” The Adder clome pulled his hand away before the tattoo could migrate onto his skin. “A lot of value there. Maybe more than the DynaZauber corporation wants to deliver for the purchase price; that’s probably why Harrisch and the others nixed it. Because of the repeatability factor: the effect produced by any one pattern diminishes over time, but for quite a while, as long as the subcutaneous optic receptors perceive it moving over the skin from spot to spot, there’s still a measurable thrill derived from it. So memory is taken out of the head and moved onto the body, where it can really be appreciated.” He gestured again toward the girl. “You can’t say she’s not getting something out of all this.”