Noir (52 page)

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 from 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.”

With the thumbnail of his other hand, McNihil scraped the decayed insulation from the tips of the radio’s wires. “I’ve figured out what I’m going to do. You don’t have to worry about it.”

“You’ve figured it out, huh? I don’t think you got what I’m talking about. Even if you’ve got some great idea, God knows what, of yanking what’s left of Travelt and his prowler out of her, it’s not going to help you any. It’ll kill him. Her too, probably.” The barfly’s voice became tighter and more severe; she had pushed herself away from the side of the doorway. “Do you understand that? If you want to add murder to your job résumé, that’s the way to do it. You’ll wind up with a nice bloody mess and two dead bodies, a little one and a big one.”

“What are you so worked up about?” McNihil glanced over at the barfly. “I thought that whatever’s going to happen, has already happened. This is all memory, right? From your kiss into my head. That’s what you told me. So it’s all foreordained. Right?” He watched for any reaction from her. “Whether I wind up killing her and Travelt and the prowler or I don’t; it doesn’t matter. Because it’ll be just the way I’m supposed to remember it. Won’t it?”

A sullen expression clouded the barfly’s face. “It doesn’t work that way. There’s some … allowance made. For variables. It’s like a free-will thing.”

“Yeah, right.”
Figured as much
, McNihil told himself. There was undoubtedly some truth to what she’d told him; just not the whole story. Why should the ultimate barfly be any different from the others? “So let’s just see how it goes, then.”

“What …” Her voice twisted with concern. “What’re you going to do?”

“I don’t need,” said McNihil patiently, “to take this FPC version of the prowler out of her. I don’t have to do that just to talk to what’s left of Travelt.”

“You’re not going to be able to do it with that … that piece of junk. “The barfly pointed to the old radio. “Travelt and the prowler—it
doesn’t have any means of communicating with you. There’s no vocal apparatus anymore; nothing that it can signal to you with. It can’t even hear you; that stuff got all taken off in the Full Prince Charles conversion process. You can insert a microphone, a little loudspeaker, anything you want, and it’s not going to work.” She regarded him from the corner of one eye. “So that was your big plan?”

“Not really.” McNihil looked at the sleeping girl, then back to the woman in the doorway. “I knew that if I found what was left of Travelt, I wouldn’t be able to communicate with him in any …
ordinary
way. I knew I was going to need some kind of interface; something that could hook up with what was inside of the prowler, no matter what kind of condition it was in. A translator; something to go between me and Travelt, with its own intelligence built in. Something that was a cross between a wire and a human nervous system.”

“Wait a minute …” The barfly looked as if she was just about to understand.

“It’s all part of the job.” McNihil pulled his hand out of his jacket pocket. Looped around his fist was the cable he’d ripped out of Turbiner’s stereo system. The trophy that had once been a would-be intellectual-property thief, skinned down and reduced further than any Full Prince Charles number. “And I got just the thing for it.”

Y
ou look like death warmed-over.”

But also heavier than he looked. November slung the asp-head’s arm around her shoulders and managed to get him to his feet. McNihil’s head lolled back, a trickle of blood leaking from the corner of his mouth.

“That’s … funny …” McNihil managed to open his eyes, the lids cranking back partway and then stalling, like defective machinery. “You look … great …”

“Yeah, like you’d know.” No telling what McNihil was actually seeing.
Especially now
, thought November. His vision had been all connected-up before, and now he looked like somebody had been working him over with a crowbar. “Just shut up and try to walk, okay?”

She’d found him on one of the upper floors of the End Zone Hotel.
Just getting up there had been a hazardous enough process. The building was little more than a burnt-out shell at this point, damaged as much by the dousing of the fire as the fire itself, most of the lower floors, above the lobby level filled with the sex-ocean gel, were tangled mazes of collapsed, charred timber and heat-twisted structural girders, their broken ends rooting snout-deep through strata of water-soaked carpeting and acoustic ceiling tiles mounded like crumbling dominoes. A lavalike flow of sodden ash, solidified into black glue, hid the steps of the hotel’s central stairway; November had to clutch the swaying handrail, her careful weight producing groans of nails and bolts pulling free from the walls, and drag herself upward, boots miring and slipping beneath her.

What had kept her heading upstairs, after climbing into the End Zone Hotel from the catwalk outside, was first the impression, then the certainty, that there was someone else in the building. Despite what the cameraman on the boom platform had told her, she could hear voices coming from the dark reaches overhead, faintly at first and then with increasing clarity. She recognized one of the voices.
That’s him
, November had thought.
That’s McNihil
. A perfect memory of the asp-head’s voice remained in her head, from when she’d been in the hospital burn ward; somehow it had managed to leak in through the transparent barrier while she’d been floating in the sterile nutrient medium. She’d stood somewhere around the End Zone Hotel’s second or third floor, gripping the stairway’s wobbly handrail while the wet ash had crept across the steel toes of her boots, and had listened. She couldn’t make out what he’d been saying; the words were muffled by distance and the intervening layers of wreckage.