Noir

But, at this birth of the modern world, roamed by predatory men armed with increasingly effective means of killing and traveling at speeds which accelerated each year, most assaults on nature went unheeded, and crimes against humanity remained unpunished. The world was becoming one, the wilderness was being drawn into a single world commercial system, but there was as yet no acknowledged law. Who was to play the world policeman?

– PAUL JOHNSON

The Birth of the Modern:

World Society 1815-1830

(HarperCollins Publishers, New York, 1991)

ONE

At that moment, as the blue spark of sex burned a wire through his tongue, the heavens rained fire. At that moment, all the other moments rushed inside his head. He turned from the kiss that filled his mouth, the hot copper taste of coded flesh, and fell against the glass; the window shivered with fear and mirrored his own ghost face back at him.

He knew what was happening outside the window. That the fear was his alone, as much as the ghost and the kiss were; that the transit authorities had sent another drone aloft, over whatever city lapped around this building like a hectic gray ocean; that the Noh-flies had found the idiot projectile in their airspace-all air was theirs-and were busily devouring it, SCARF’d shards falling on the streets below and the face of anyone stupid enough to look up. Mere coincidence, apocalyptic phenomena synch’d-up with the battery salt leaking through his teeth.

This must be how women feel, thought Travelt.

Not real women, but the women of ideal and dream. Men’s dreams, their dream of women’s dreams. He had felt himself go all weak at the knees, a kinesthetic cliché as much as the racing heart under his breastbone, when the soul kiss had started to eat him up. He’d put his tongue in the other’s mouth, as though his lips were the aggressor’s, the conqueror’s; he’d made the connection inside another’s flesh, that point where electrode and neuron were one fated synapse-

And had been conquered in turn. Battered and ravaged. That dream of rape, in which the raped are dreaming still, in which the dreaming turn their faces upward and see their own faces above them, spread out on a luminous sky like the disintegrating airplanes above the ring of cities and the uncaring, dreaming ocean. Where every hot bit of metal struck and hissed into steam, sharp as his own intake of breath, drifting into unlit depths and turning into adornment for dolphins’ skeletons.

Calm down, Travelt told himself. You’re burning up. The window sweated against his cheek.

Did the other sweat as well? His vision had blurred, everything that close out of focus, and he couldn’t tell if the other’s face was as wet and shining as his own felt. The kiss hadn’t ended, his tongue was still there, locked in bandwidth rapture; the room around him had defocused, the city beyond the window threatened to go any second. Not that it mattered, not now.

No now; all then. Memory and spasm; what had happened, what had been brought back to him. What he tasted in the mercury pool of the other’s tongue. His own tongue lodged in the hinge of the other’s throat, diving toward the other’s heart, as though the secret that drove the sweat through his pores could be read there among the obscure saline atoms.

His legs had turned to gelatin, trembling with desires satiated and yet-hungry. The other had to hold him up, its hands locked in his armpits, pinning him against the glass, the crumbs of the eaten drone sizzling transmuted gold on the other side, an inch from his liquefying spine. His tongue in its mouth, their kiss, his senses and being penetrated by the inrush that left him limp and sweetly crucified. Invisible stigmata blossomed in his palms and groin, the feedback of flesh distant in time and space. The flesh that the other had touched, grasped and squeezed blood and lubricating mucus from, like overripe fruit trickling to the points of his elbows. He felt that now, the other’s gift to him, rape of him.

Slow down-Travelt murmured the subvocal command and plea. Locked so tight in the other’s embrace, its reflected image in the glass next to his, that he could feel the sympathetic flutter of its larynx. As though his words had strummed the other’s vocal cords like taut guitar strings, a chord of surrender and supplication.

It obeyed him, or seemed to; he knew the other’s response was as synchronous and acausal as the heated shrapnel falling outside. But the inrush slowed, torrent to stream, and separated into layers of incident and event, became an inventory of all that the other had gone out to seek and had brought back to him. He had smelled it on the other’s skinlike skin, that muscled substance that passed for its flesh. When it had returned and let itself in to his cubapt, its key imbedded in its stained fingertips-he had smelled it then, as it had walked through one room after another and into this one with the high-luxury window overlooking the anonymous city below. The mingled overlays of sweat and semen, stale cigarette smoke and endorphins breaking down to burning, dysfunctional molecules, the shards of the other’s flight through a sunless sky. Collagen derivatives, pharmaceuticals that tasted like metal and the perspiring of schizophrenics, virginal lipstick and Chernobyl mothers’ milk, original sin and its photocopies-a wind from that other atmosphere, ten degrees lower than his own body temperature, had swept ahead of the other as it had strode toward him.

He had turned from the window where he had stood waiting, turned upon the sense and smell of its arrival-no sound, it walked so softly, silent as that other world-and had seen the smear of blood on its brow, Cain-marked and Lilith-born, the great wisdom of indulgence in its idiot eyes. Which had scanned and judged him, like the lenses of the watching security cameras at every corner of every building. First from across the room, as he had felt the first tremors of fear move out from his gut, then inches away, then less than that as it had stood right in front of him. The other’s eyes had been round dark mirrors in which he had seen himself, perhaps more clearly than ever before.

That was then, just a few minutes ago-or perhaps only seconds. In any death, even the smallest, there was no east or west or other measurement of time, no gauge of stars or the earth’s rotation. In this now, the inrush had slowed and become subject to inventory; he could sort one thing out from the next. What the other had brought back to him. The Christmas morning of the genitals, each bright ribbon-bow coming loose inside his head.

This is what he received from the other’s kiss. What he saw, felt, inhaled in acidic, mingled pheromones:

• A vision of black-ink tattoos that slowly woke and shifted beneath a woman’s skin, pale as unsunned cave fish, white as Bible pages, dimly phosphorescent;

• The swarming of those tattoos, like decorative koi or human-eyed piranha, attracted by the shadow of a man’s hand over the world in which they swam;

• Their nuzzling beneath the palm laid on the woman’s skin, their kisses’ delineated teeth, the tingle of each electric micro-surge, the release of musky encapsuled opiates, the blood warmth of a close-enough approximation of real human flesh;

• All of these and more. The pumped-up techly stuff and the straight old-fashioned, the redheaded idiot in the cave of wonders, the soft wet hand of normal coitus. Normal as it gets.

Thought Travelt: I’ll have to work on this. Now he knew why people started doing this sort of thing. What the attraction was.

Metal fingertips, disconnected from anything but rising tendrils of SCARF smoke, clicked against the window. And fell, pieces of the Noh-eaten drone. The larger pieces, of engine manifold and wing panels, would plummet next, fiery meteors sweeping the streets clean of any watchers.

He was falling as well, the connection between his tongue and the other’s mouth broken, that blue spark snuffed by his pink-tinged saliva. His jaws felt hot and vacant as the other, working off some consumer-protection coding, lowered him gently to the fleece carpet.

Shame, or something like it, turned his face away from the other’s gaze above. He couldn’t bear to be seen, even by something empty and soulless as the autonomic truck that came every morning to change the building’s air hoses. Especially by something as empty as that, as empty as the other standing over him. Judged by machines, by their hard flat scrutiny, the iris of an onrushing train. Iris and inrush; the two words remained inside his head, like prophylactic debris washed up, pearlescent and luminous, on a moonlit beach. Maybe that was how women felt as well; he didn’t know. No way he would. He put his arm up across his face, as though shielding himself from the sun.

The name of the flower had left its image, an intricately petaled construction, in his memory. Maybe one of the tattoos that the other had brought back to show him; he could almost see it opening in the white field of the woman’s skin. Opening the way flesh opened, the dew at the petal’s edge a perfect magnifying lens.

I’m making that part up. That part didn’t happen, thought Travelt. Or maybe it had; he didn’t know.

The other watched him, waited for him, for whatever he might choose to do next. The other was in that part of its operative cycle; it had gone and fetched, it had brought back, and now it waited. With the flat empty gaze of coins, of metal that had been on fire and then extinguished, smoldering to cold lead. He might stand back up on his trembling, bone-loosened legs, stand up and kiss the other again, insert part of himself into the other again, let the blue spark snap and sing piercingly high, into his throat and down along his spine, penetrated by the other and what it had brought him. The iris, the eye and the flower, each opening, flesh opening, the mouths of the tattooed koi nibbling at the other’s palm, the warmth of the dead-white flesh and skin, the ocean in which they swam…

It was all there. Waiting for him. Watching him.

I’ll get better at this. The first time, for anything, was the hardest. He turned on his side, drawing his knees up against his chest. Closing his eyes, so he wouldn’t have to see. Anything but what the other had brought home and bestowed upon him.

On his tear-wet cheek, he felt fire, heat through the window’s glass. The last of the drone plane fell from the sky and rolled its black smoke and insect swarm of sparks along the building’s flank.

TWO

You 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.

McNihil looked back down at the corpse and poked it with the toe of his shoe. “What was this poor bastard’s name?”

“Travelt.” The flunky bobbed helpfully at his side. “His name was Travelt.”

“First name?”

Silent and unrepeated, the question went around the cubapt’s living space. The execs looked vaguely embarrassed, either from not knowing or knowing and not wanting to admit it.

A wallet was in the corpse’s jacket pocket; McNihil had spotted the flat rectangular shape. He stood back up, flipping the soft leather open. “William,” he announced, reading it off a company ID card. “In case you were wondering.” The driver’s license was-in McNihil’s vision-a nice overlaid replica of what somebody would’ve been carrying around circa the Eisenhower administration. The tiny photo showed the corpse’s face above an early IBM-white dress shirt and blue-striped tie. In life, the late Travelt had looked like a version-in-training of the older and harder ones standing around watching. At that stage, he’d still looked more human than not.

McNihil tapped the image with his forefinger. He knew that would trigger the ID codes embedded in the card, over in the hard world beneath the one he saw.

“Assembling tomorrow today,” spoke a bass-enhanced voice. The words sounded as confident as they would have if the speaker had still been alive. “Add value and evolve-”

“Whatever.” He flipped the wallet closed. The ID card/driver’s license mumbled for a second longer, then was quiet. He handed the wallet to the flunky, who looked at it as if it were the chilled spleen from the corpse’s viscera. “Obviously not a close friend of yours.”

“That’s not important,” said Harrisch.

He made no reply. For a moment, McNihil felt as if the temperature level of the refrigerant devices had seeped out and clamped around his own guts. And from there, across the re-created cubapt’s manicured spaces, through the tall windows and out over the world at large. Though he supposed it had less to do with the dead thing at his feet than with the other ones standing around him, who were still capable of motion and speech, however limited. If his blood had dropped a few degrees, it was their proximity effect that had caused it.

The corpse’s eyes were shiny enough to make little curved, silvery mirrors. McNihil saw now, as he looked down, that the eyes weren’t just filmed over by death; another film had been laid over them, a chilling membrane like the ones wrapped around the corpse’s heart and kidneys. Preserving the corneas for those lucky orphans. But which now made the dead eyes into even better mirrors, as though polished by silversmiths; he could see his face in them, doubled. The two miniature faces gazing back up at him looked old and tired, the fatigue producing the age rather than the other way around. He wished even more that he hadn’t come here, hadn’t let himself be bullied into coming.

“So what do you think?” Harrisch loomed up beside him. “Think you can help us on this one?”

He saw that an edge of the corpse’s opened shirt, only lightly stippled with blood and other fluids, lay across the tip of the exec’s glossy handmade shoes. McNihil looked up and shook his head. “Like I was trying to tell the boy you sent to get me. I don’t do this kind of work.”

“But you could if you wanted to. If we made it the kind of job you’d want to take on. You’re still on the agency’s list, as a licensed operative.”

Another shake of the head. “Wake up and smell the burning corpses of your dreams, pal. I don’t know what the connect you’re thinking of. This is way off-zone for me. I don’t take care of this kind of shit; I’ve never taken care of this kind of shit. Even when I was working for the Collection Agency-and I’m not now-” As if they didn’t know that. “But when I was, I never showed up when people were already dead and sorted out their problems. That’s not what asp-heads do. Even if I were one anymore. And I’m not.” McNihil widened his eyes, to ensure that the message went as straight as possible into the other man’s. “Natterkopf bin ich nicht. Got it?”

Harrisch didn’t give up. “You have special qualifications. You have to admit that-”

“I don’t have to admit anything. Except I’m ready to say good-bye now.”

“Oh, please.” Harrisch widened his smile. Now it looked like the result of trying to carve a Hallowe’en pumpkin with a single stroke of a machete. “We’re just starting to enjoy your company. I take back what I said about you before.”

Harrisch’s eyes, the center of them, were black mirrors instead of silvered, but they showed the same thing as the corpse’s blank gaze. In the two dark curves, McNihil saw his tiny reflections again. If that face looked tired and disgusted, and not easily talked into taking this kind of a job, McNihil figured it had a right to. He’d already been connected over enough in this lifetime, in the world he’d started out in and the one he saw in his taken-apart-and-stitched-together eyes. Maybe the guy on the floor, or what was left of him, had had the same kind of luck. Maybe the guy had connected up. One way or another. It didn’t really matter.

“Special qualifications,” repeated Harrisch. “That’s why we asked you to come here.”

Little black mirrors. Like looking straight into the exec’s skull and seeing nothing, or worse than that, the big Nothing with the capital N. The swallower, the negative soul, the extinguishing substance of which was in all the other execs’ eyes. That walked amongst them in the cubapt, slipping between their bodies like laughing smoke, that strode through the corridors of all the other ghost buildings in the chain of cities, that hauled the steel cables of the unnumbered elevators like ringing an empty cathedral’s bells.

“We asked you to come here because we figured you could help us. We know you can.”

McNihil pulled himself back from his own bleak musing, focusing his gaze and attention on the senior exec standing in front of him. The centers of Harrisch’s eyes still looked like black holes.

“I don’t know what kind of ‘special qualifications’ you’re talking about.” He wasn’t having any problem resisting the imploded gravitational pull that the exec was radiating in his direction. “You got one of your lower ranks zipped, that’s not the kind of thing I was ever concerned with. Are you tracking on this?” McNihil tilted his head and peered at the exec from the corner of one eye. Just for sarcastic effect. “Sometimes people get all confused about other people, about what it is they exactly do. I wouldn’t have thought somebody in your exalted position would have that kind of problem, but still. If you think that just because there were dead bodies, or parts of them, left over after I got done with any particular job, that just because of that I must have some kind of general connection to stiff meat… then you’ve really gotten your wires crossed. It doesn’t work that way. Even with asp-heads who are still in the business.” Another tilt of the head, angled down toward the corpse between them. “Why don’t you just get the police to take care of this? They’re cheap enough.”

“Police don’t have the…” The ugly executive nonsmile appeared again. “The qualifications that you do.”

“Again with the qualifications.” McNihil shook his head. He glanced toward the cubapt’s tall view window and the gray sky on the other side of the glass. Let the fire fall, he told himself. He’d be willing to let it rain on his own head, if that would’ve meant being able to get out of this sucked-airless space. “If sheer connecting nausea were a qualification”-he let his voice shift into a dull-toothed rasp-“then I’d be your man.”

“Oh, you’re our man, all right.” Harrisch’s thing-like-a-smile tugged into a snarl at one corner. “You just don’t know it yet.”

“You will, though.” The little flunky piped up. “Just wait.”

“If you don’t mind,” said McNihil, “I’ll wait at home.” He turned and headed toward the door.

Not fast enough. Harrisch caught him again by the arm. “I think,” said the exec, “that if you just took the time to exercise some of those special qualifications-special even for asp-heads-then you’d have a better idea. About why we wanted you to come here.”

A microsuspicion tickled at the back of McNihil’s skull. The other man had carefully pitched his voice, its faint hinting undertones, not so that it was rich with implications, but just enough to be an appetizer, the bait on the hook. He peeled the other’s hand from him. “What do you mean?”

“Come on.” Harrisch stepped back and gestured toward the corpse. “You haven’t even really checked it out. Simple dead means nothing. You might as well take a good look. Before we do let the police come and take it away.”

He knew he should just turn and start walking again, and make it all the way to the door this time. There would be no stopping him; none of the execs would say anything more to him. Harrisch and the rest would scratch him off their list and move on to Plan B, whoever else they figured they could rope in on their problems. Whatever they were.

McNihil knew that was what he should go ahead and do. But he didn’t.

“All right.” He was already regretting the impulse, the momentary weakening of resolve. “You win. This much: I’ll check this poor bastard out.”

He didn’t care if a little triumphant smile got passed around the room, from one smug company exec to another. If it did, he didn’t see it; that was all that mattered. McNihil had already got down on one knee, that much closer to the corpse. And to its face, the empty, gray-silvery gaze focused on nothing. As I am, said the corpse inside McNihil’s thoughts. So will you be. To which McNihil answered, Not me, pal. I’ll kill myself first. Some way that left nothing but ashes.

Almost a kiss; he had brought his face that near to the corpse’s. McNihil had known what he would find, that there wouldn’t be any surprises. There never were. That was why he’d wanted to leave, to have no part of this. No matter how much the company might have been willing to pay.

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

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 unfold 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.”

The dead woman looked up at her. “When it happens,” she said, “when it all comes down… don’t be too hard on him.”

November laid her own hand against the thin, cheap door behind herself. “Why?” She was only mildly curious. “Do you still love him?”

“Of course not.” The dead woman managed a smile. “I never did. But he has his virtues. In his way.”

For a long time after that, after she had left the little room and the place where the dead lived, she wondered what the dead woman had meant by that. Then she decided it wasn’t important.

When she was on one of the trains again, heading north, back to where living people lived, or at least approximately so-she let a little more memory flash unwind inside her head. To the end of the story, or one of the stories, part of the whole that made up the lapidary, carefully assembled history of her name. She couldn’t even remember which one it was, whether it’d been that anonymous tenevik, some currency cowboy out of the Nakhodka FEZ, who’d shown up in the first reel of the flash, that one or some other member of the shadow people working the Dow Jones/nomenklatura overlap in Vladivostok and points west, or a little-dragons personnel enforcer shuttling antique punched-hole loom cards from Djakarta to the Lima child-labor free-enterprise zones… or another one entirely. It didn’t matter which one; they never had faces for her but just cruel, hard, pleasuring hands… which was enough for her purposes.

They only had faces if they made the mistake of following her off the train, in whatever city on the circle she’d decided to make her destination. As if they hadn’t gotten enough of her in that little cramped space rolling across the ocean and the ice floes; as if there were anything more that she was willing to give them. Dream on, loser-she would silently transmit the warning behind herself as she pushed through the crowds in the station, aware of the figure tailing after, erectile tissue transformed into slow heat-seeking missile. She’d been in every station along the Gloss’s edge-the Gloss being the shorthand for Glossolalia, which was either the Greater Los Angeles Inter-Alia or the babel of languages that faded into one another in the almost-complete urban circle around the Pacific, which was to say the world. And every station had its tight private spaces as well, maintenance closets and walk-in fuse boxes and the women’s rest rooms so far off the main drag that they had been annexed into I.V-hype and subcute territory, the needle discards and depleted osmotic skin-pouches all over the floor, the festooned toilet paper freckled with blood specks. She made it easy, or at least faster, on her would-be predators by sliding into one of those obscured nooks, without even a glance over her shoulder, then waiting. It only took a few seconds, the number of steps he’d let stretch out between himself and his prey, the prey that he’d already caught and savored once. That was the brief moment in which she might see one of their faces, if there was light enough.

It didn’t matter whether she did, though. Because she would already be standing with her back against the wall or the divider panel or the tangled ranks of fuses and wiring, she would already be reaching up with one hand as the man pushed the door of the closet or the rest room stall shut behind himself. He would already be smiling, his eyes narrowed to little hungry slits as her hand touched the side of his head, her fingertips sliding through his hair and onto the back of his skull, as though she were going to draw him toward her for a kiss. But the smile would freeze on his face, it would still be there but it would mean something else, it would mean both pleasure and terror at the center of his eyes, one and the same thing, as she and the mark got into serious transcranial magnetic stimulation time. The fields pulsed from the rare-earth devices imbedded in her fingertips, at an exact ten-thousandth-of-a-second cycle, ramping up to 3+ tesla, more than enough to penetrate human scalp and skull, and into the top cortical layers. Tight magnet currents sparked and modulated and found their way to the exact cerebral tissue necessary to produce lock-loop orgasm and a general paralysis, his muscles locking hard onto each other, his body its own ejaculating prison. She had only enough battery power in the system to freeze the poor horny bastard for ten to fifteen seconds. But that was more than enough; she worked fast. And all she really had to do was reach into his jacket and pull out the weight of metal she knew he’d be carrying there, a hammer with fire inside. They all carried heat when they traveled. She’d put it against the mark’s head where her hands had been, his eyes the only part that could still move, flicking to watch her, to bring the big black piece she held into focus. Then she merely had to pull the trigger, the weight cold inside her fist; the implosion muzzle formed a perfect repulsion-edged vacuum in the little zone beyond her wrist, just big enough for the bullet to rush into soundlessly, the anti-acoustic effect lasting just long enough to soak up the telltale bang. The only sound that escaped, that might have been heard outside the maintenance closet or rest room stall, was the crumpling impact of bullet through rounded bone of skull, gentle as an egg being crushed with the poke of a finger. That was how the better grade of silencers worked on guns: you didn’t get absolute silence, the absence of all sound. Instead, you got the revelation of other sounds, the ones beneath the gun’s otherwise masking roar. You got-she got-the crack of skull and the wet swallow of the imploding cerebral tissue beneath, the man’s gasp at this new, virginal penetration. He might’ve been paralyzed but he could still feel. At least for a little while. Until the blood rushed to fill the hole and wash what was left of him out the exit wound on the other side of his head, where the bone splinters, hinged by torn flesh, fanned out like a surgical peony. Resulting in a death bigger than the little one he’d enjoyed before, a death big enough to be the last one needed. She’d let this one, whatever his face had been, fall away from her; the same as the others had fallen, so that she had to step over him to push open the door of the tiny space and stride quickly away. November always left the guns behind; who needed them? The spattered muzzle of the gun would already be soaking a wet spot into the wadded toilet paper on the rest room’s floor as she’d insert herself anonymously into the crowd, the station, and then whatever part of the Gloss lay beyond.

The memory ran out, reached its terminus inside November’s head. She could call it up anytime she wanted, which wasn’t often, and with any face attached, any blurred focus tag as to which particular man it might have been, on which train and in which small space littered with the remnants of other passions. She rarely let it get that specific, though; better to keep that section of her brain’s contents vague and generic, sharp only on those moments when she had pulled the trigger and read the bright tea-leaf pattern on each space’s low ceiling. If the spots of blood and brain tissue spelled out her name, in some red wet braille… she wouldn’t have been surprised. Only mildly annoyed, at having to reach up on tiptoe with a scrap of tissue, to wipe away the betraying signature.

November gazed out the train window. Not at the Antarctic; she was too far north on the circle for that. The train moved slowly through the city’s jumbled outskirts. Strictly a local, for the short ride down to where the dead lived-sort of-and then back up to the True Los Angeles sector of the Gloss. Even now, she wasn’t quite sure why she’d gone down there. To talk to the dead woman, the one who’d been married once upon a time, when she’d been alive, to the poor bastard named McNihil. She hadn’t found out anything; she supposed now that that hadn’t been the point of the journey.

He doesn’t have a prayer…

That was probably true. November looked out at the city and figured she’d find out soon enough.

FOUR

The girl was waiting for him inside his apartment. The cube bunny that he’d spotted lurking around in the corpse’s hallway.

“How’d you get in here?” McNihil would have felt no particular surprise or anger, even if there hadn’t been a slowly dissipating haze of alcohol over his brain. He closed the door, which she’d bypassed somehow, with all its locks and dead bolts in place.

“Oh… you know.” She gave him a shrug and a timid smile, from where she sat over on the crookbacked, threadbare couch. “There’s always ways.”

“I suppose so.” McNihil slipped his rattling keyring into his pocket, his fingertips brushing against an even smaller piece of metal, which hadn’t been there when he’d left this morning. “You want some coffee or something?” With the jacket unbuttoned, hanging shroud-loose from his shoulders, he threaded his way through the apartment’s cramped spaces. “Frankly, I need some.”

“Sure.” The cube bunny sat leaning forward, hands clasped at the corner that her knees made in her worn woolen skirt. The fabric had probably been midnight-blue at one time, but had faded to somewhere closer to nine P.M.; that was the tone of gray it looked like in McNihil’s eyes. “That’d be great.” The girl didn’t draw back as McNihil passed by her, close enough that her skirt was brushed by his trousers leg. She glanced up hopefully. “Would it be real coffee?”

“You’re kidding.” With his forearm, McNihil pushed aside the stacks of dishes and Chinese-restaurant take-out cartons by the sink, giving himself enough room to assemble the battered chrome sections of the percolator. On the kitchen wall, by the oven’s flue outlet, a calendar with days but no year hung, its unlikely mountain scene faded to a curling-edged transparency.

“Mr. Travelt always had real coffee.” A slight tone of resentment sounded in the girl’s voice.

“Yeah, well, there isn’t enough caffeine in the world to get a rise out of him now.” McNihil threaded the plug past the unwashed glasses and into the socket in the linoleum behind them.

“No,” the cube bunny said mournfully. “No, there isn’t.”

He figured he knew what came next. That she would start crying, not in a big emotional show, but just a few effective tears, half from real grief over somebody who’d been nice to her-or as nice as could be expected-and half for the effect it should have on her audience. And would have; he didn’t see things the way he did, this sad and mournfully beautiful world instead of the other one with all the colors, if he weren’t also inclined toward its emotional weather.

McNihil turned his gaze from the doorway and back toward the things on the kitchen counter, as the girl rooted through the little black handbag she’d tucked beside her on the couch. He knew that if he’d gone on watching, he would’ve seen her come up with some little cotton handkerchief with the initials in the corner, which the nonexistent nuns back in the convent school had taught her to hand-embroider. Instead of the plastic-wrapped pack of disposables soaked in heat-activated anti-virals that she’d really have on the other side of the reality line.

He dipped his hand in the water in the sink, then rar his fingertips across the surface of the just-warming coffeepot. The wetness made a slightly shinier mirror out of the curved metal. Shiny things worked better for this than real mirrors; anything big and intentionally reflective got absorbed too quickly into this world’s firmness. But in little bits of chrome and silver, sometimes the back of a spoon or a polished doorknob, he saw a scrap from the other side, a bit of optical leak-through, colors bleeding into the monochrome.

This time, he saw the girl sitting on the couch. McNihil turned the metal pot slightly, angling the wet reflective patch’s shot through the kitchen doorway and toward the apartment’s living room. Seeing her this way, the girl didn’t look like a young Ida Lupino anymore. The curls against her pale cheeks had vanished, along with the general air of brave vulnerability and period early-forties outfit from Raoul Walsh’s High Sierra that’d been laid over her in McNihil’s world. The worn-and-mended woolen skirt, the thin unbuttoned sweater with a zigzag decorative pattern around the bottom and at the cuffs showing her tiny wrists, the plain high-collared blouse… all that McNihil had already seen her in had been replaced, at least in the percolator’s distorted mirror. Replaced by what was sadly real.

More skin; that was what was mainly noticeable. Still in a skirt, of some kind of black plasticky stuff with the slick sheen of fetish enthusiasms. But hiked nearly pudenda-high, with correspondingly bare arms and cleavage. The neoprene highlights shimmered with the slow fever gleam of neon on a rain-wet nocturnal street. Over on the other side, where the colors were, a girl could freeze to death in an outfit like that, not so much from air temperature as the coldly assessing gazes of men.

Just like a cube bunny, thought McNihil. He hadn’t expected anything else. It was no wonder she’d been able to get into his apartment. That was about the only kind of survival skill her species possessed. Beyond, at least, the value of skin and flesh and face.

The little vision, the peek into the girl’s hard-side existence, faded as the coffeepot heated up, evaporating the wetness on its curved chrome flank. Which was all right by McNihil. He preferred things-especially human things-in black and white. Hands against the edge of the counter, he closed his eyes and leaned his weight forward, easing out the kinks in his stiff spine as he waited for the pot to sigh in steam.

Overhead, bare lightbulbs dimmed for a second as the coffeepot gurgled wetly. A cranking mechanical noise came from the rear of the apartment, where all the black cables ran. McNihil’s generator was the envy of the surrounding apartments. A sleek, grease-fed hummer that he kept swaddled in rags to cut down the residual noise, its intestinelike exhaust sphincter duct-taped to a hole he’d punched in the building’s exterior. There were other people in the building who weren’t so fortunate; they got by on batteries or candles, or gave up the desire, the need, for light entirely. Like connecting cave fish, brooded McNihil; it sometimes gave him the creeps to even think about it. Creep being the operative word-he could see them in his brain’s interior optic, moving around in the pitch-black with their big lemur eyes or the holes where their vestigial eyes had been, their fingers radiating out in front of them like cockroach antennae. Like roaches in more ways than that: whenever he came back to the building, if he pushed the ground-level door open fast enough, he could hear them fleeing back into the even-darker recesses where they were blindly comfortable. Some of those people-if that word still applied-were so devolved, the charity agencies didn’t even make personal deliveries anymore, but just sort of pushed food packets at the end of a long stick into the gloom, and let whatever was in there grab them and be gone.

Waiting for the coffee, McNihil reached down and massaged his aching leg. Climbing five flights to get here, through stairwells and landings palely lit by sputtering fluorescent halos, or with nothing but shadows and ammoniacal piss odors seeping into the ankle-deep fast-food trash and discarded subcutaneous-membrane packs-he’d gotten used to it. If he held himself very still, breath stopped and heartbeat slowed, he could hear inside the thin layers of walls and through the buckling floors. Little creatures and the slightly bigger ones that fed on them were scurrying about on their own errands, guided in darkness by the ripe smells of rain-saturated decay. The human inhabitants of the building, and all the similar buildings clustered around it, scuttled through their various agendas the same way, either in the dark or a wavering, battery-fed glow, flashlights duct-taped to the water-stained ceilings.

“Here you go.” McNihil handed a cup, no saucer, to the cube bunny. It was the only cup in the place without a cracked rim.

“Thanks.” She held it cradled in both hands. She managed to conceal her distaste for the ersatz as she took a sip. And even lifted a slightly apologetic smile toward him. “That’s not too bad.”

“Nothing ever is.” McNihil lowered himself into the frayed upholstery of the chair across from her. “Too bad, I mean.” He could see himself in the black mirror of his own heavy restaurant-china cup. “It’s amazing what people can get used to.” He looked the same, he supposed, in this world and the other one. “Take me, for instance. Little while ago, I was inhaling a dead man’s breath. As if the poor bastard could breathe at all. And you know what?” McNihil leaned back, watching for her reaction. “It didn’t bother me at all.”

What he’d said didn’t faze her. The cube bunny’s eyes were tearless, the lashes’ cheap drugstore mascara unsmudged, as she regarded McNihil over the rim of the cup. Which meant, he supposed, that the late Travelt had been more than a meal ticket for her. She’d done her crying in some private place, out on the street. Private meaning that out there, no one would take any notice. Tears now would’ve meant self-pity and the play for her one-on-one audience’s sympathy.

She lowered the cup, setting it down on the low table between them. Leaning forward, she peered into the centers of McNihil’s eyes, as if her lost tears could be found there. “You don’t see me,” she said finally. “I mean… you don’t see me.”

Not stupid, McNihil grudgingly admitted to himself. That was a mistake people made, to think that someone who lived the way she did would be an idiot. A surface phenomenon: a cube bunny’s looks, the way this one looked under the firm overlay he saw, was strictly a survival adaptation. They could be as smart as anyone else. Though that wouldn’t save them, either.

“I see you fine,” said McNihil. His voice sounded stiff and uncomfortable, even to himself. That was his way of handling personal things. “I see you the way I want to. Or at least the way I’m used to.”

“How’s that?” She had leaned so close to him, over the table, that she could’ve kissed him. Inside her eyes, McNihil could see himself, small and duplicated. “I don’t understand.”

She couldn’t tell by looking at him; no one could. Some things were truly invisible. The micron-film inlays inside his eyes-inside the eyes of anyone who’d had the same kind of work done on them-had a refractive index clearer than any air that could be breathed in the Gloss. A scalpel and a set of dentist’s picks would’ve been necessary to dig out the interpreter relays running parallel to his optic nerves. And the stuff farther back, past the optic chiasma and into the soft processors of the occipital gyri and sulci… those dark little rooms were a mystery even before any of the other work had been done.

“But I know,” the cube bunny said softly. “That you don’t. See right. I can tell.”

McNihil wasn’t surprised by that, either. That was what cube bunnies were good at. It wasn’t their major job skill-their skin and flesh was that-but it was a major adjunct, anyway. The ability to tell things about people, to figure out in some deep nonverbal way what the score was. And how to profit thereby.

Girls like her confounded the corporations. That’s what they’d evolved to do. The whole point of cube life, the logical extension of the system of shuffling employees in and out of workplace cubicles at random, had been revealed back at the millennium turn to be psychological warfare on the corporations’ own. What the human-resource managers and company psychs called optimized transience disorientation. It was all straight out of Henry Denkmann’s magnum opus, Connect ’Em Till They Bleed: Pimp-Style Management™ for a New Century, which hadn’t so much revolutionized corporate life as confirmed and blessed what had already been going on. This particular theory being an extension of the old New Orleans whore-hustling motto, that they weren’t completely under your control if they still thought they had names of their own: if employees didn’t have a place to call their own all during the day-if they didn’t scent-mark familiar walls and desks with their family photos and funny plastic figures stuck on top of their computer monitors-then it was that much easier to ream out their heads and stick in whatever behavior patterns the human-resource departments wanted. The only problem being that the employees still went home, to the same home over and over, defeating all the psychs’ good work, keeping bad attitudes high, as indicated in the standard measurements of workplace sabotage, absenteeism and pay agitation, and theft of office supplies. The cubapts solved all that, or at least most of it.

Better a freelancer, McNihil had decided a long time ago. The Collection Agency might’ve wound up connecting him over as well, but it’d at least left most of the contents of his head intact. Shabby as this place was-and he’d had better, back when the agency gigs had been lining his pockets-at least he’d never had to shuffle every evening from one company-assigned anonymous living-space to another, with his clothes and a little box of irreducible personal belongings packed and waiting for him when he got home to the next one. That’d be a stone drag, even at the relatively luxurious levels that an up-and-coming junior exec got shuffled in and out of. The corpse, which McNihil had looked at a little while ago, had been like that. The poor bastard had died on the company farm.

“You’re thinking about him, aren’t you?” The cube bunny was still looking intently into McNihil’s eyes. “I can tell that, too.”

“Yeah, I suppose you can.” The little ways that cube bunnies and others in their low-rent quadrant of the sexual-services industry had. Which drove the corporations’ psychs up the wall. How could you reduce your company’s employees to perfect productive zeroes, with no hindering attachments to things or places, if cube bunnies and the like kept showing up at their doors, or even worse, inside their cubapts, sailing right past all the locks and security devices? And the same cube bunny, or the gender-preferenced equivalent, for each employee. When that goes on, the erosion of nonproductive personality structures-the human-resources goal that management had taken over from the previous century’s old-line drug-rehab programs-and all the other good things that come from a randomized living environment, all that gets kicked out on the street. Or some of it, at least.

The cube bunny smiled at him. “I’m good at what I do.”

“You must be.” There had been a hint in the girl’s voice, about her other job skills. He decided to let that pass for the time being. “You know,” said McNihil, “I see you just fine. I see you the way I’d rather.”

She tilted her head to one side, studying him. “You had that operation, didn’t you?”

“I’ve had several.” McNihil shrugged. “I’ve led a rough life. Or maybe just an unlucky one.”

“No, silly; you know what I mean. That operation. That thing…” The cube bunny hesitated, then pointed to her own face. “With the eyes and stuff. Where they cut ’em open and… put things in ’em.”

“‘Things?’”

“Things you see.”

“Well, sweetheart…” McNihil took another draw on the brackish liquid in the cup. “That’s what they do, all right. They stuff whole worlds in there.” He returned a fragment of the smile she’d given him. “They even put you in there.”

The rest of the smile had faded away. “I don’t understand.” She drew back apprehensively. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Mr. Travelt didn’t have anything like that.”

“That’s because…” McNihil set his cup down on the table. “He was a smarter man than I am. Though it doesn’t seem to have done him much good.”

She didn’t seem to hear the last comment. “Why would you do something like that?” An appalled fascination narrowed her gaze. “Let them do that to you?”

“‘Let them?’” McNihil laughed. “Shit, I paid for it. Didn’t come cheap, either. It was a while back, when I was doing rather better than I am now.” He gestured toward the shabby apartment encasing them. “I could afford to be in at the beginning of a product-introduction cycle.”

“What happened?”

“I came down in the world.” In this one and the other, he thought but didn’t say aloud.

“No,” said the cube bunny, “I mean with the operation. And your eyes. It must’ve gone wrong, huh? I heard they do that. And then you’re… you know… not right.”

“If I am-” One finger tapped the side of the cup in front of McNihil. “It’s not because of my eyes.” He picked the ersatz coffee up and drank. “Besides,” he said, leaning back, “what do you know about it? I wouldn’t have thought there were things like that back in Kansas.”

“There ain’t shit in Kansas.” A little cloud of unsunned memory passed across the cube bunny’s face.

“That’s where you’re from? I was just guessing.” McNihil felt sorry for her. On the other side of the reality line, in that world he’d glimpsed in the wet reflection of the chrome percolator, she had all that other world’s pretty genetics, a child’s face grafted by survival-oriented evolution onto an adult’s body, one that hadn’t needed to be surgically pumped up to achieve its Blakean lineaments of desire. Born that way, thought McNihil. They came out of the rusting wastelands at the center of the continent, boys and girls together, walking the dead roads of Kansas and Ohio all the way to the Pacific Rim cities, True Los Angeles and all around the Gloss to Vladivostok and the Chinese and Southeast Asian zones. Where they had something to sell: themselves and their sheer prettiness, the exact combinations of size of eye, distance between, angle of nose and space to the perfect upper lip. The infantile kink, the baby-sex lure, was seemingly programmed right into the human nervous system. It lodged right down at the base of the spine, where some kundalinic serpent with icy pederast gaze uncoiled and went either wet or stiff at the sight of its prey. Even in his own, he had to admit. Before the vision had faded on the side of the coffeepot, a needle-eyed weasel had smiled at the center of his brain.

Maybe that’s why, thought McNihil. I’d rather see her this way. Safer emotionally, no matter whatever else might happen. He was still a married man, even though his wife was technically dead.

“Mr. Travelt told me about them.” The cube bunny slid past the question about where she’d come from, the dry zone before she’d hit the Gloss. “He knew all about them. In the company he worked for… Dyna-something…”

“Zauber,” said McNihil. “DynaZauber. Like the song.”

That produced a frown. “What song?”

“You know. Beethoven. The Ninth. About how it’s all going to bind uns wieder.”

The cube bunny shook her head. “I wouldn’t know about that.”

“Just as well. The only reason those people want to do any bind-ing is so they can get into our pockets easier. Just another word for connecting.”

A little flinch; the girl he saw in his eyes was probably more sensitive to dirty words than the cube bunny underneath. After a moment, she nodded. “Anyway, he used to work in the division that made that stuff. That’s in your eyes. But that was before he got promoted.”

“Too bad he’s dead, then. Maybe he could’ve told me why my debits keep coming back.” Every month, he wrote out an actual hard-copy paper check, payment for the firmness-overlay maintenance, and every month it came bouncing back with a form letter about the service having been discontinued, thanks for your patronage, be sure and try our other fine enhanced experiential products, blah and more blah.

“Oh?” Mentioning something about money had perked up the cube bunny’s interest.

“This late in the game,” groused McNihil, “you’d think companies could get their billing straight.” He shook his head. “For a while there, I was putting the money away in another account, until I finally figured, screw it, might as well spend it.” That’d been right after he’d gotten bounced off the Collection Agency’s operatives list, and things had gotten tight as an anaconda’s rectum before he’d lined up another paying gig. “They sort it out and want their money, they can come and get it. Fat chance, though.”

The girl didn’t know what he was talking about. She was still fascinated, childlike, by his eyes, peering into them and trying to see what she couldn’t.

“When you look at me,” said the cube bunny after a moment. “What do you see?”

“Another world.”

If not a better one, then at least more to his liking. I’ve gotten used to it, McNihil told himself. Like a dream that you know you’re dreaming, but don’t want to wake up from.

For a few seconds, he let the limits of his vision expand beyond the girl sitting in front of him-the tough little, soft little Lupino clone, one of the compensating gifts that his eyes bestowed on him-and out past the gray walls of the shabby apartment. Past the unlit hallways and the faint smells of dog-bottle alcohol and sweating bedsheets that seeped out from under the doors, and out into the night’s alleys and cracked sidewalks, with their pools of streetlamp glow that didn’t reach from one to the other, that left patches of darkness stitched with buzzing neon above the steps of basement gin mills that you descended like marching into one’s grave.

The world in the shabby apartment, that smelled like burnt coffee and suspicion, and the one outside that McNihil saw-it was real enough for him. That the cube bunny, and everyone else, didn’t see it made no difference.

“You kinda see me, though,” decided the cube bunny. “I mean, I’m real-I’m really here-and you can see that. So that’s a help.”

“Sure is.” That was the difference between what he’d had done and all those old-fashioned total-environment simulations, that unsubtle virtual bunk that simply substituted one gross set of cooked-up sensory feed for what came in unassisted from the real world. The problem with those sim arrangements, and the reason they’d died a quick, merciful death on the consumer market even before the bandwidth and nerve-receptor bugs could be worked out, was that nobody could get any work done with them. Not in the real world, at least.

Whereas the thin-film insertion surgery that he’d paid for-and gotten; McNihil still didn’t regret it-was basically a businessman’s product. He supposed that some of the execs that had been standing around the corpse probably had accessible over-layers inside their own eyes. Controlled by the muscles of the eye socket, the interplay of the rectus lateralis and the superior and inferior oblique muscles, pulling and distorting the spheres of aqueous humor-not to focusing on nearer or farther objects, but activating one inserted layer or another, switching the perceived world into translucent spreadsheets or databases floating above the hard objects of people and other real things.

“That’s how it works for them,” said McNihil. He’d told the cube bunny all about it, as he’d gotten up and poured himself the remainder of the coffee in the pot. He stood leaning against the side of the kitchen doorway, sipping the lukewarm, kerosenelike fluid. “Strictly business.” It was a big reason why he had such an aversion to executive types, like that DZ bunch with Harrisch at their head. “You can be talking to them,” he mused aloud, “and you’ll be looking at them, right in the face, and they’re looking back at you. And then you see the eyes shifting, like they’re looking past you into the distance, or at some place just past their noses. And you know they’re not really looking at you, they’re reading some market-update numbers that’d just crawled in over the wire.” McNihil shrugged. “I’ve always just found that kind of offensive.”

“But that’s not what you see.” The cube bunny held her own empty cup enfolded in her hands. “I mean… it’s not some kind of business thing with you.”

“Well… maybe.” McNihil shook his head. “I don’t really know, anymore. I’ve been seeing things this way for a long time now. I don’t make any distinctions between what it was I wanted to see and…” It was hard to say. “And what it’s useful for me to see. I don’t know if those are two different things.”

The cube bunny had another question, very serious and important, the way children’s questions are. “Am I… pretty? The way you see me?”

The way he saw her… the way he saw everything. He supposed there was no way of really telling her. Just what it was that he saw. There wouldn’t be any shared points of reference between himself and a creature of survival-oriented sexuality such as the one sitting in front of him, like some kind of grayed-out butterfly caught in a dingy cardboard box with his name on it. The whole perceptual system of hard and firm and soft reality-he might’ve been able to explain that, with some effort on both their parts. It was really just the difference between the hard components of the world, the things that really existed, that didn’t go away even if you’d wanted them to; and the firm overlay that was programmed in over the hard stuff, that transformed the other world into the one he felt and saw and smelled and tasted; and the soft, which was all that he could pick up and move around, change and destroy. Just as in that world, the unaltered one, on the other side of the reality line: there were some things you could do something about, and other things you couldn’t.

“You look fine,” said McNihil truthfully. “You’re absolutely lovely.”

“Really?”

“Why should I lie to you?” She did look lovely to him; better than in the smeared, wavering reflection on the side of the coffeepot. He’d paid to see a world that was to his liking. Not beautiful-it was based, after all, on cultural artifacts of more than a century ago, the bleak and brooding crime and thriller movies of the 1930s and forties-but with beautiful things in it. More beautiful, actually, for being surrounded by constant threat and darkness. So that if he could sit in a shabby, too-small room that smelled like dust settling on bare, flickering lightbulbs, if he could sit across from a girl who looked-at least to him-like an actress from those ancient films that nobody watched anymore, a woman with heartbreaking eyes… that was all right by him. And if she looked both sad and desperate, fragile and eternal, a mouth that was softly red even when seen in black and white…

Then the money he’d paid to the surgeons had been well spent.

The cube bunny hadn’t said anything, but had smiled at him. McNihil supposed he’d said the right thing. Even if it was the truth. Sometimes it worked out that way.

He supposed her smile meant something else as well. You shouldn’t think so much, McNihil told himself. About the things you see. The way you see them.

“But… you don’t really know.” The cube bunny’s smile faded. “If I’m pretty or not. ’Cause you don’t really see me.” A tear trembled against her lashes. “You just see that stuff that’s in there, inside your eyes.”

“That’s not how it works.” McNihil set his empty cup down on the counter and walked back out of the kitchen. “It’s a little more subtle than that. It has to be.” He didn’t imagine he had any way of explaining these things to someone like her. The world she’d come out of was too far different from any he lived in, on either side of the firm line. “Only idiots want to inhabit a world separate from anyone else. I mean literally idiots, would-be idiots; you know, from that idios kosmos notion of a private universe.” He could see that he’d lost her on that one. “There’s just no point in thinking that you’re picking up things that don’t exist, or talking to people that are just part of some dummied-up sensory load. That kind of stuff died out back in the mini-theme-park days. Kids standing around with big ugly goggles on, swatting away at nothing. That kind of stuff’s crap. But seeing the same things that everybody else does, but just seeing them differently… hey, that’s the way it is for everyone.”

“It is?”

“Sure,” said McNihil. He was on a roll now. He’d walked over behind the couch, standing just in back of where the cube bunny sat. “There might even be some people who’re so connected up… that they wouldn’t even be able to see how beautiful you are.” Like that other poor bastard, thought McNihil. The dead one. What’d the late Travelt’s problem been, that he’d gotten into that prowler shit? When he had someone like this available and willing. Just went to prove something that McNihil had believed for a long time. That people engineered, with all the craft and will they could summon, their own annihilations.

The cube bunny said nothing. McNihil wondered if she had a name. He supposed he could give her one, something cute and temporary; it only had to last as long as whatever connection existed between them. Which was probably measurable in hours. If that, he thought glumly. She was the loveliest thing that had ever been inside the dark, cramped space of his working and living accommodation. Like some self-destructive flower that had bloomed here, begging to be crushed inside anyone’s fist.

He wondered how much the late Travelt had ever given in to those provoked desires. A little bruise, partly healed and fading, could be seen at the hinge of her jaw, just below her delicate ear. Given the stupid shit that the dead man had gotten into, it was entirely possible that the mark came from him, that the corpse’s thumb and fingers would match up, like an ID handprint to buzz him through the door and into that private space where desires were satisfied.

“Why did you come here?”

She twisted about on the couch and looked back up at him. She shook her head. “I don’t have a reason.”

“People always have a reason,” said McNihil. “At least in the world I live in. The one I see.”

“I… I don’t know.” The cube bunny’s open gaze locked on to his narrower one. “Maybe… I was lonely.”

“You came to the wrong place, then. We’ve already got plenty of that here.” McNihil laid his hands on her shoulders. The warmth of her skin rose through the layers of thin cotton and wool and into his palms. “But Mr. Travelt is dead, isn’t he?”

She nodded. “Yes…”

“Well, I can’t replace him for you.” He let one hand, with its own will, brush softly against the side of her neck. “I don’t have that kind of cash.”

“That’s all right.” The cube bunny gave him an understanding, forgiving smile. “It’d still be okay.”

“Just as long,” said McNihil, “as you understand that.”

The cube bunny nodded again, without speaking.

He came around to the front of the couch and took her hand, pulling her up toward him. When he’d led her down the apartment’s dimly lit hallway, he stopped suddenly at the door of the bedroom. “Wait a second.”

Back in the kitchen, McNihil pulled the plug of the coffeepot. The burnt smell of the residue inside had already tinged the air; it could be tasted at the back of the throat, like the awareness of sin. He reached over and pulled the thin chain dangling in the middle of the kitchen, switching off the light.

“You said you were lonely.” In the bedroom’s darkness, the cube bunny’s softness was still wrapped in the firmed Lupino-like illusion. Close to him, she laid her hand against his chest, as though reading his heartbeat. “Who are you lonely for?”

McNihil knew why she asked. So she could try to be that other person, another layer of illusion, for him. It came with the territory: that was part of her job and survival skills as well.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. Sitting at the edge of a concave mattress, he brought his face close to the hand he’d combed into her dark hair. His lips grazed the skin of her cheekbone. “Probably just my wife.”

The cube bunny drew away from him. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

“Like I said. Don’t worry about it.” McNihil drew the girl down to the field of the thin blanket. “She’s dead.” The same hand stroked the girl’s brow. “When I tell her about things like this… she doesn’t mind at all.”

The girl said nothing, but reached up for him with her bare arms.

Later, when the only illumination in the bedroom was the glow from the cube bunny’s skin-McNihil’s eyes had adjusted to the darkness, so that a naked woman burned like a faint, ghostly lantern-he sat on the edge of the mattress, watching her sleep. She didn’t wake as he drew the thin blanket back from her. Confirming what he’d seen while she’d been in his arms: there was no mark on her body, other than the random bruise.

No tattoos, either moving about or still. The blue-black capital V, with its knife-pointed serifs, that he’d seen embossed over the corpse’s rib cage… if he saw it now, it was only in his memory. The image of the corpse… and ones farther back. He closed his eyes, not to see them better, but so they wouldn’t be superimposed, branded, on the sleeping girl.

In the bathroom at the end of the apartment’s hallway, McNihil heard her gathering up her clothes. He splashed cold water in his face, letting it run down his neck as he raised his head to look at himself in the mirror. Taking his time, giving her time.

She was already gone when McNihil walked out to the kitchen. He pulled the chain dangling from the center of the ceiling, flooding the space with an eye-stinging brilliance. The whole apartment seemed as bare and empty as the specimen freezer in an abandoned morgue.

McNihil leaned back against the sink, arms folded across his chest, the edge of the counter’s cracked tile pressing against the skin just above the waistline of the trousers he’d picked up from the bedroom floor and pulled on. The cold from the linoleum, with its worn-through patches like black islands on an unlabeled map, seeped into his bare feet. From here, he could see out the kitchen’s tiny window with its tattered roller blind, down to the street in front of the building. The homeless were parading by, in strict formation, just as they were supposed to do. In that other world, the one he didn’t see anymore, he knew they were all shellbacks, humping along the personal-sized portable refuges into which they retreated when off-duty. He’d always hated the sequential billboards mounted on the shells’ hardened exterior casings, the lights usually spelling out an ad slogan about some sleazy low-budget operation, like whatever Snake Medicine™ clinic was nearby, with its resident Adder clome offering everything from minor decorative tattoos to Full Prince Charles jobs. McNihil was glad he didn’t see things like that anymore; now the homeless parade looked like a long line of sandwich-board men, trudging down the sidewalk one right after another, like some Depression-era film that had slipped loose in the universe’s projector, stuttering the same frames over and over again.

This time, the sandwich boards hanging in front and back of the shuffling homeless men were advertising something McNihil didn’t recognize. There was just one big alphabet letter on each board; they spelled out, in sequence, the word TLAZOLTÉOTL.

McNihil wondered what the connect that meant. Maybe a new Central American restaurant opening up somewhere in the Gloss. Or maybe nothing at all; maybe the sandwich-board men had gotten mixed up and out of order, creating some random anagram out of the actual word. A back part of McNihil’s brain idly worked on it. After a few seconds, a memory scrap floated to the top of his thoughts. Tlazoltéotl had been the indecipherable word in the banner scroll tattooed on the corpse’s abdomen, right beneath the big initial V.

Probably not a good thing, decided McNihil. He also decided not to think about it anymore.

He didn’t bother drawing down the blind, to shut out the image of the homeless parade going down the street below. Instead, McNihil closed his eyes and thought about the things he’d told the cube bunny. Which were all true, as far as they went.

I’m used to it, McNihil thought. The world he saw… he wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.

There was only one thing he missed.

Just once in a while, he would’ve liked to have seen daylight again. Instead of this world’s eternal, clockless night.

FIVE

RENAISSANCE ANGELS TURNED TO BURROWING MOLES

Some kind of church service was going on underneath the grates. Underground from economic necessity, not from any actual persecution; big spaces, cathedrals vaulted with sewage pipes and bundles of ancient copper wiring, black-sheathed fiber-optic snakes, suitable for large congregations of the faithful. Of whatever denomination:

• subterranean mosques, like minarets laid on their sides, the cries of the muezzin echoing beneath cracked and patched asphalt;

• Holy Rollers, interbred clans, toothless and fervid, calling on Zion and awash in the blood of a pompadoured, lazy-eyed lamb of Memphis grace, wrestling high-voltage cables like Teflon-insulated serpents;

• supply-side Republicans, cutting each other with little razor knives and lapping up red puddles among the discarded condoms;

• post-Reformation Lubavitchers awaiting a messiah with hands of fire.

The man loitering in the alley felt a shiver of disgust roll up his arms, mutating into a sour ball of spit at the back of his tongue. He’d just as soon not have been there at all, listening to multipartite hymnody-was it Latin? Old Tridentine ritual?-wafting up from below his feet, as though Renaissance angels had turned to burrowing moles. Flickering candlelight, from staggered ranks of small yellow flames, streamed up past his legs and across his chest, working his face into a network of spook-pocked shadows. He’d caught a glimpse of himself in a black puddle at the alley’s edge, the thin water shimmering with solvent rainbows; his face looked like a campfire parody, a ghost story with a flashlight under the chin. The anachronism bothered him more than the actual visual effect.

Come on, he called out inside his head. Come on, hurry up. An Asian storm-front, edge leakage from monsoons on the other side of the circle, drizzled under his jacket collar. He thrust his gloved hands deeper into his pockets as a show of irritated impatience. He’d left a black Daimler do Brasil repro of a 1936 Mercedes-Benz 540K Special Cabriolet C, a one-off historic Sindelfingen design, hunkered down at the mouth of the alley, the machine a top-of-the-line product of the maquiladores on the other side of what had once been the Mexican border. They did good work in that arc of the Gloss; the vehicle’s finish, rubbed to a deep brilliance by the nimble hands of ten-year-olds, glistened as though it contained infinite space, as though a piece of the night sky complete with stars had fallen there.

Other black shapes, smaller but with the same basic curvature, had started to gather near the Daimler. They were attracted by the residual engine heat seeping out to the damp air. Connectin’ freeloaders-the appearance of the beetle-armored homeless bugged him even more. The man glowered balefully at the dull black carapaces, made shiny only by the rain, that had been grafted onto the limbs and torsos of the recipients of the do-gooder shelter agencies’ charity. The cracks between segments of the shells opened and closed tight again as the vaguely human figures inside jostled for position against each other, getting nearer to the car’s attractive force with each squatting step.

The loitering man had turned off the car’s various alarms, not so much because there was no point to them-the turtlelike homeless were technically within their rights, moving up on anything left out on the streets-but because he knew that most of them had sonic-energy converters inside their shells. They could suck a few microvolts out of the wailing siren noises that would have otherwise split the air, convert those wisps of energy either into heat for their shoulder-wide homes or battery storage for the Crawlman™ music systems that stoppered their ears.

It’s a welfare scam, he brooded as more of the black domes crept along the oil-spattered sidewalks. One of the hard-shell bastards had come across the cigar stub that the loiterer had discarded when he’d started his wait in the alley. A random find; the rain had snuffed out the last orange spark in the saliva’d tobacco, so there hadn’t been any thermal trail for the crawler to zero in on. As the man watched, the black dome sealed itself down onto the wet asphalt and cement; a moment later, a puff of blue-gray smoke pulsed out of a tiny ventilation hatch. The ripe smell of the Cohiba Eisner y Katzenberg stung the man’s nose; he had to resist the impulse to stride up to the dome, pry it loose and roll it over on its back, and snatch the cigar butt from the scrounging sonuvabitch. An unpleasant vision came to him, that he’d had before, any time he’d been on a nonprivate street; of the black beetle shapes swarming up around him, the way they were doing now with his car, and likewise sucking the heat from him, the way his old granny had told him that cats did with the breath of newborn infants in their cradles. He shuddered from both nausea and moral revulsion.

Luckily, the person for whom he was waiting showed up then, sliding out of a service doorway beside the deactivated dumpskers lining the far pocket of the alley. The big cubist elephant shapes, their dead proboscises rooted in the multistratified trash and garbage they were no longer capable of snuffling up, towered above the girl’s fragile image as she carefully eased the door back into place. The teeth of the vertical row of locks snagged back together, as though nothing more than a shadow had passed through them. That was all part of her talents, the loitering man knew; to go in and out of places she wasn’t supposed to. And to know which places.

“About time.” He let his voice rattle gravel in his throat. “I was just about to leave. I don’t have time to hang around waiting for people like you.”

“Oh, no-” Genuine dismay showed in the cube bunny’s widening eyes. She stepped up close to him and touched his arm with a child’s delicate fingers. “I’m sorry, Mr. Harris-”

“Harrisch,” he corrected. For the hundredth time. “There’s a difference. Try to get it right.”

“Gosh, I really am sorry. I’m so stupid.” The touch turned into something more, her fingers gripping his forearm just tight enough to transfer heat from her skin into his flesh. A tiny electrical charge connected with a spot between his shoulder blades and rolled down his spine. “But he was talking. You know? He wanted to talk to me-”

“Sure.” Harrisch nodded. “Of course he did.” The poor bastard up in one of the building’s filthy live/work spaces-Christ, he thought with a shudder, probably not any better than out here in the street-would naturally have wanted to talk to something like her. A scrabbling down-on-his-luck asp-head didn’t get many chances along those lines. “So you talked.”

Her turn to nod. “Some of the craziest stuff, too.” She had a child’s squeaky little voice as well, all innocence and fun. The sound of it made men’s teeth grow longer in their sockets. “Like you never heard.”

“Really?” Harrisch supposed it was a good idea to know what was going on inside McNihil’s head. That was the problem with using these freelancers; you couldn’t just ring up the human-resources department and get a readout on them. “Such as?”

“Oh… all kinds of things.” The cube bunny shrugged her bare, pretty shoulders. Raindrops made soft jewels on her artfully exposed skin. “Like the way he sees things. He’s got these funny eyes, you know? And the way he saw me. Stuff like that.”

It was pretty much what he expected to hear from her. Sadly so; in this life, there were no surprises. “And you did everything else? That you were supposed to?”

The cube bunny nodded happily, perfect white face and cherry-red lips. “Then I fell asleep-kinda-and he got up and went to the bathroom. That’s what I was waiting for. So I could get away, without him noticing.” An impish glint appeared in her eyes. “Or at least not right away.”

Harrisch smiled back at her. You little conniver, he thought approvingly. He supposed her cute mind was part of her pretty genetics, her way of getting through this world of thorns and lust. Who could stay mad at someone like that? It would be like rage directed at the berry you were about to crush between your teeth.

“That’s fine,” said Harrisch. “It doesn’t really matter, anyway. I’m sure you did a good job.”

The glint in the cube bunny’s eye hardened to steel, or an even hungrier metal. “Does that mean I get paid now?”

“Sure.” He reached into his jacket pocket.

From below them, from the grating beneath his and the cube bunny’s feet, the wavering candlelight poured upward, as though a new sun had been discovered at the center of the earth. How good they sound, thought Harrisch, listening to the hidden chorus. They had shifted keys, to a bright C major, the notes of simple and universal triumph. The basses and tenors had dropped out; the female voices were slowly rising, not toward resurrection but to some even brighter apotheosis. Harrisch felt a little door open inside his heart as he lifted a weight of black metal from his pocket.

“Maybe I could do something like this for you again some time.” The cube bunny didn’t see what he had in his hand. Her childish and seductive gaze was locked on Harrisch’s eyes, looking for some other door to open up inside him. “’Cause it was easy. All I had to do was tell him the truth. About what happened to poor Mr.Travelt. It wasn’t like I had to lie or anything. So it really was easy.”

“Great,” said Harrisch. “Speaking from the viewpoint of upper management, I think it’s good that people get some sense of satisfaction from what they do. Every once in a while, at least.” Actually, he didn’t care. He raised and aimed the gun at a point equidistant between the cube bunny’s small breasts and slightly higher, just below the hollow in her white throat. “But I don’t really think you’ll be working for us again.”

Genuine tears welled at the bottoms of her eyes; the trembling lashes darkened. “That’s not fair,” she said in a small voice, a whisper almost lost against the choir’s gentle murmur.

“No, it’s not.” He had to agree. He could almost regret the tightening of his finger on the gun’s trigger.

“But I did what you asked me to-”

He watched her fly, propelled by the bullet’s imparted grace. The unmuffled shot echoed along the alley’s walls, shivering dust and bird droppings from the ancient bricks. At times like these-Harrisch had done this before; he never left jobs like this to underlings-time smoothly ratchetted down to slow motion. An occasional pleasure in his stressful executive life; I deserve this, he thought. That part at least was fair. For him. The Denkmann book agreed, which was one of the reasons it was popular with high-level execs.

The impact of the bullet had lifted the cube bunny from her feet, tilting her onto her back as though on a feather bed of empty night air, her blond hair coming loose to form a radiant haloed pillow. Her bare arms flung back, as though wings. The petals of an intricate rose spattered against her chin. Then she fell, yards farther from where she had stood in front of Harrisch. She changed from angel to human, a wordless question in her clear eyes, and then to something that had the same shape and thermal signature of human, but wasn’t anymore. The pretty thing sprawled in the alley’s decaying litter, the side of her face turned against the base of the wall.

Harrisch had preregistered the killing, so he didn’t have to wait around if he didn’t want to. But he did; he let the weight of the gun dangle in his hand, its fading warmth traveling up the muscles of his arm and into his shoulder. He walked a few steps, working a crick out of his neck and gazing up at the stars. I should get out more, he thought vaguely. The choir of whatever church was hidden beneath the grating had piled on fortissimo with the gunshot, as though the noise had been the announcement of their redeemer’s return. A little of their holiness, however shabby and subterranean it might have been, resonated inside Harrisch; he felt at peace as the excess adrenaline metabolized out of his system. Get more exercise, he vowed.

Back at DynaZauber headquarters, he knew, some computer in the accounting department was humming almost silently to itself, deducting the minor cost of the girl’s death from the corporation’s stock of pollution credits, specifically on the urban misery index. Every year, DZ’s PR division planted along the roads enough seedlings-most of which died or grew into no more than toxin-stunted weeds-to more than counterbalance necessary operating deaths. Which proved that the system worked, if you let it.

A franchised black-and-white cruised up alongside the Daimler repro at the alley’s mouth. Harrisch scratched his ear with the muzzle of the gun as he watched the cop-only one had shown up on the non-priority scene-examine the dead cube bunny. The cop left a tripoded coroner’s camera, a variable-focus lens and digital frame-storage device, spider-legging around the corpse and clicking away, and strolled over to talk.

“That’s what you used?” The cop nodded toward the weapon in Harrisch’s hand. The cop’s voice was affable and unexcited. “Mind if I take a look at it?”

Harrisch knew he didn’t have to do that, either; the cop had already read off the gun’s bar-code ID with a remote scanner and matched it up with the hit registration on file. But he didn’t mind; he handed the piece over.

“Not bad.” The cop nodded in approval. “These three-fifty-seven parsifals do good work. Neat, as these things go; you don’t have to stand there, pumping away and knocking little bits off your target.” He held the gun back out to Harrisch. “Ever think of using something not quite so cannonlike? Something like that can really climb up in your hand, if you lose control of it.”

“But I don’t,” said Harrisch. “I’ve got a pretty firm grip.”

“I’m sure you do. Hey, no question about that, pal. But why take the chance? The wear and tear on yourself?” The dead cube bunny was forgotten as the cop warmed to his topic. “Personally, I think you could haul something a little more stylish, something a little more in keeping with your, um, position in life. Now, something like a tosca or a lightweight nine-millimeter, a traviata maybe-”

Harrisch felt his face harden into a sneer. “Those Italian pieces are all pussy guns. Those are for girls.”

“Hey… hey, I understand.” The cop backed off, holding up a mollifying hand, palm outward. “You want to carry major weight, that’s cool. I can go with that. It’s nothing Freudian, you know, it’s just an image thing, really. But remember, those aren’t your only choices. You want to stick with the Teutonics, hey, I agree.” The cop gave an admiring shake of the head. “Nothing fills your hand like those babies. But maybe for a change of pace, you’d like to go with a tristan; that’s a sharp piece. Or hey, go bigger; go up to a four-eighty siegfried. Or shit, go all the way to a connectin’ götterdämmerung; you just about need a crane to lift it, but I guarantee you, if you’d popped one of those off here, we’d be picking up the evidence with a push broom and a vacuum cleaner. I tell you-”

“Are we about done?” Harrisch interrupted the cop’s spiel. “Is there anything more we need to take care of?”

“No. I guess not.” The cop looked sullen. He glanced over his shoulder toward the camera at the other end of the alley. “You got what you need?”

“Sure do! Right on!” The camera had a minimal personality interface and the voice of an animated cartoon character. The round blank face of the lens swiveled toward Harrisch and the cop. “We be cookin’!” With fussy arachnoid movements, the tripod picked its way through the low, black dunes of trash.

“Just trying to do a little public service…” Under his breath, the cop muttered just loud enough for Harrisch to hear. “And what do you get for it? Connect…”

The coroner’s office was a low-budget item in the PD’s budget; Harrisch wasn’t surprised to see an antiquated low-rez LCD screen unfold from the camera’s dented and patched thorax. The display blurred through a reconstructive autopsy, extrapolating back from the gridded shots that had just been taken of the dead cube bunny. Her smiling face, near to lifelike, appeared on one side of the screen; the photo that Harrisch had registered before flashed on the other side.

“Pretty good!” pronounced the camera. “Close enough for police work! Everything looks copacetic, folks!”

“I think I’ll be on my way, then.” Harrisch felt tired and regretful. Not over the cube bunny, but on having let himself linger out here, where he could get latched on to by hustlers like this cop. Should’ve just gone straight back to the office, he brooded. Scenes such as this one were the consequence of mixing business with pleasure, even such innocuous ones as listening to the invisible choir’s music with heated metal in his fist. “Call me if there’s any other forms I need to fill out.”

“There won’t be.” The cop visibly shifted his glum mood. “Tell you what, though; why don’t you take my card?” From one of the dark blue uniform’s pockets, he extracted a thin white rectangle. “This is my private sideline business. I’ve got a little dealership thing going-”

“No shit.” Harrisch looked at the card; a 3-D image of a dancing gun winked and pointed to a phone number. He stuck the card inside his jacket, knowing he wouldn’t be able to get rid of the cop, otherwise. “I’ll keep it in mind.”

“Hey, wait a minute.” Another voice, ragged and with slurred consonants, broke into the discussion. “This sucks.”

Both Harrisch and the cop glanced over at the figure that had appeared next to them. One of the shellbacked homeless clustering near the Daimler had gotten to his feet and approached them. The segments of the black carapace soft-welded to his skin-the charity agencies did that, to make sure their clients didn’t lose any of the pieces of their minimal shelters-glistened in the first of a drizzling rain.

“What’s your problem, buddy?” The cop narrowed his gaze to slits. “Why don’t you just take it back out to the street? This doesn’t concern you.”

“The connect it doesn’t.” The man’s face was all bone angles edged with scabs and crusted dirt. His breath was ripe with alcohol and the cheaper grades of paint thinner. “This really sucks.” One plated arm gestured floppily toward the alley’s depths. “Sonuvabitch here just blew away that poor girl.”

As though on a common gear, Harrisch and the cop looked toward the yellow-haired corpse, then back to the homeless figure in his dissembled shell. The cop shrugged. “So?” He looked genuinely puzzled. “What’s your point?”

“Connect, man…” The red-rimmed eyes were filled with the fury of Old Testament saints. “You’re not gonna do anything about it?”

“Of course not,” said the cop, deeply offended.

Harrisch tilted his head back and looked up at the night sky. The patchy clouds, tinged with the city’s luminescence, still let a few long segments of clear stars through. This is what I get. When one’s tenderer sentiments were indulged, payment was exacted. The singing from the choir below had stopped, letting silence fill the alley’s narrow space again. For all he knew, they had given up their church service for the time being and were listening in on his problems.

“The connect you aren’t.” Noisily, segments of the interlocking shell clattering against each other, the turtlelike figure rooted through the various grimy pouches and rope-slung sacks on his torso and around his waist. He came up with a miniature video camera, its silvery plastic smeared with his black fingerprints. “I got it all down. I’ll go witness status. Then you’re in deep doo-doo.”

“Bullshit.” The cop sneered again. “You’re not licensed for that.”

“Yeah?” A gap-toothed smile showed on the gaunt face. “Check it out.” One gnarled hand extended a plastic-laminated card. “You and your little businessman pal here have got the wrong story going.”

“Ah, damn.” The cop examined the card, then handed it back. A sigh born of deep frustration lifted and dropped his shoulders.

“What’s the problem?” Harrisch took one of the cop’s arms and pulled him away from the smirking homeless. “There’s a problem, right?”

The cop tilted his head toward the watching and waiting figure. Beyond, at the mouth of the alley, a few more of the homeless had tilted their shells back, the attraction of the voices’ buzz greater than the car’s dying heat. “There was that traffic-monitoring program about six months ago. Buncha crap, if you ask me. But the transport authorities issued videocams, little cheap throwaway numbers, to a lot of these guys; figured they were already on the street, might as well let them do the counts. The only thing, they had to be granted temporary citizenry levels as well, something high enough that the data they collected could go into the public records. The funding debates on some of these issues are pretty hot right now. But that’s where our problem comes from.” The cop pointed a thumb toward the shellback. “This guy’s temp level hasn’t expired yet; it’s still got three days to run. So technically, at this point in time-but not next week-he could enter testimony against you.”

“On what?” Harrisch’s anger rose. “What charge? I don’t see what his level’s got to do with it.” This was the kind of thing that always pissed him off, little unexpected traps laid in the path of an honest man. “It’s her level; that’s what’s important.” He pointed toward the corpse, gazing up at the clouded sky, flecks of rain tearlike on her soft cheekbones. “She didn’t have any; you know that. I thought that was the whole reason I was able to preregister this hit.”

“You’re right. You’re absolutely right.” The cop tried to calm him down. “So it’s not like you’d get charged with anything major; it’s not a murder or an aggravated-assault rap. You don’t have to worry about that.”

“Damn straight.” Harrisch’s temper had come down a few notches, to a grouchy irritation. “The way I see it, I was doing my civic duty here. She didn’t have any entry permit. You know she didn’t.” Which brought it, he knew but didn’t need to bother explaining to the cop, under the “Invisible Wall” sections of the immigration code. The cube bunny’s looks and charm had been her only passport, her only badge of citizenship-and that had been revocable at a moment’s notice. The parsifal, cold now but still dangling in Harrisch’s fist, had accomplished that much. “So who cares if this dildo saw what happened?”

“Well… it’s a technicality.” The cop looked uncomfortable. “Even with a preregistration like yours… the actual code is that it has to be done in front of a law-enforcement official. Like me. You call up the dispatcher, I come out, you do whatever you’re going to and I check it off; then it’s all kosher. Now, in practice, it’s me and the coroner’s equipment showing up after the fact-that’s usually how it’s done. We can always fudge the time stamp on the hit.” He gave a big sigh and a shake of the head. “But with a certified witness on the scene… that makes it a little harder.”

“Dig it, jerk-off.” With a mottled grin of satisfaction, the homeless figure folded his plated arms across his chest. “I’m the crap sandwich on your menu.”

“All right.” Harrisch’s turn to sigh. He turned away from the cop and toward the other man. He pocketed the parsifal, then took his wallet from inside his jacket. “What’s this going to cost me?”

“Hey…” The cop’s whisper emerged from between clenched teeth. “Don’t let this schmuck hustle you.”

“Right. Like you’ve been so much help.”

“Well, at least get a good price from him.” The cop retreated next to the camera on its tripod.

The corners of the homeless man’s mouth were bright with saliva as he regarded Harrisch’s wallet. Harrisch took out a diamond Amex, his own, not the company’s. “As I said-how much?”

“Depends.” The interlocking plates clacked against each other. “You want to go for straight bribery-you know, buy me off-I could go for a thousand.”

“I don’t bribe. I buy.”

A puzzled look appeared in the other’s eyes.

“Come on.” Harrisch gestured impatiently. “The tape, the disk, whatever you’ve got it on.”

“Oh. Well, that’s gonna run a bit more-”

“Plus your citizenship status.”

“Huh?” The largest armor plate, the one over the surgically curved spine, shifted as the figure hunched forward. “What’re you talking about?”

“Figure it out,” said Harrisch. “You want to be an idiot, fine, but I don’t have to. There’s no way of proving to me that you haven’t already loaded the footage off to some data-store.” He used the corner of his wallet to point to the Mini-Cel™ linkem tucked in with the rest of the welfare agencies’ tracking devices. “Or some tipscanner down at the networks could be going over it right now. But if you don’t have current witness certification, it doesn’t mean jack. And that’s the way I want it.”

“I got ya.” The shellback nodded in understanding. “No wonder you’re some big exec type. You got brains. Okay, but it’ll cost you.”

Harrisch let the other man hit him for a mid-five-figure amount. The shellback returned the card after running it through his handheld scanner. He’d already decided to wait until the homeless figure showed some sign of realization; he knew it wouldn’t take long.

“Cool.” The gaunt-faced man radiated an appreciation of his good fortune. The other black domes, their residents’ eager faces peeping out from beneath their edges, crept closer, anticipating some distribution of the largesse. “Nice doing business with you.” The gap-toothed mouth barked out a laugh. “Only problem is, now I gotta go down to the charity offices in the morning and reregister. You just bought my whole ID, buddy. I can’t even collect my ration tags until I officially exist again…” His voice faded out; in his eyes, a new light faded in. Those eyes widened, staring at Harrisch. “Wait a minute…”

Harrisch said nothing; he didn’t feel like rubbing it in. He saw the shellback’s gaze shift to the gun that he’d brought back out of his jacket. The homeless figure’s pupils looked almost the same size as the black hole at the front of the parsifal’s muzzle. Reflected fire shone bright for the millisecond following Harrisch’s squeeze of the trigger, then was gone as the other arced backward and away.

The black shell cracked and splintered against the pavement, a few feet from the Daimler repro. Denuded of the portable shelter, the homeless figure’s corpse lay on the wet concrete and asphalt like something extracted from an unhatched egg, the artificial curvature of his spine drawing his limbs cocked above his shattered chest. A red puddle, blackened by the night’s limited spectrum and shimmered with the light rain falling, began to spread around what was left of him. The other homeless scurried away, toward darker and safer holes. Most of them speed-crept with their shell’s rims lifted only a fraction of an inch above the ground; a few, the more frightened ones, actually got as upright as they could and ran into the city’s shadows.

“Jeez,” said the cop, shaking his head. “Even I could see that coming. What a dolt.”

Harrisch glanced over his shoulder. “Any problem with this one?” He pointed with the gun toward the dead shellback.

“Nope.” The cop gave a shrug. “The guy’s off the books. There’s nothing to even register.”

With the gun put away, Harrisch took the Amex from his wallet and checked the account readout on the back. The charge to the homeless figure had bounced back, marked Account Canceled. The whole incident had been a freebie.

Which, as far as he was concerned, was as it should be. A signifier of God’s love toward the elect; it was times like this that made the strict interpretations of the Protestant work ethic seem so sensible. If only the choir beneath his feet had started singing again, voices raised in four-part SATB hallelujahs, then the moment would have seemed complete.

The cop took off, leaving the cleanup to the city’s sanitation department. Harrisch was left alone in the alley, in silence.

I want something to remember this by, he thought. He supposed he was getting sentimental in his old age. No need for a scrapbook; just some small item that he could keep for a little while, until its evocative power faded, then throw away.

Harrisch walked over to the dead cube bunny. She was as pretty now as before; he knew that some of his colleagues in the company would have thought her more so. Where there had been a red flower between her small breasts, that the gun had blossomed forth, there was now only a fist-sized hole and a congealing wetness around.

He took a little pasteboard rectangle from his pocket-the cop’s business card-and leaned down closer to the pretty corpse. He pressed his thumb against a bit of exposed, chilling flesh, then against the back of the card. When Harrisch straightened back up, there was an oval red signature, intricate lines and whorls, on the back of the card. He slipped it into his wallet-there were others like it in there, a little collection, one of them fairly recent-and then walked slowly, meditatively, toward the mouth of the alley and the waiting Daimler. The blank eyes of his witness gazed up at him as he stepped over the bits and pieces littering the ground.

SIX

DOWNLOADING THE ACTUAL BODY AND BLOOD OF CHRIST

The Bishop of North America lived in a hole nearly as bad as, or worse than, McNihil’s apartment.

“Not just North America,” said the bishop, hunched over his computer terminal. “The Holy See just added Central America by Proxy to my job description. The appointment-well, elevation’s the right word technically, I think, but that doesn’t really seem right anymore-it fluttered in by E-mail just yesterday morning.”

If that wasn’t the right word, then hole seemed to fit the other well enough. The moldy ceiling of the windowless space came within a half-inch of the top of McNihil’s head. If he’d risen on his toes, he could’ve scraped gray, wet plaster flakes onto his scalp, like some kind of sebaceous organ donation.

“Forgive the mess,” the bishop had said as he’d held open the warped fiberboard door. “I’ve been rather busy of late.” He’d gone right back to the terminal and the ministrations to his flock.

“Me too,” McNihil had answered. Standing in the center of the dingy room, he tried to keep his shoulders away from the damp-rot patches that blossomed on the book spines and disordered stacks of paper lining the swaybacked shelves. With each breath, fungus spores collected in his nostrils like the silt of an invisible, stagnating river. “That’s life these days.”

“It’s so much work,” moaned the bishop. His forehead, with its strands of sweat-pasted black hair, nearly touched the terminal’s screen. “I should never have answered the ad on that matchbook.”

McNihil wondered if he’d really heard that last bit, or if it’d been some overlaid auditory fragment, a piece of his world that he somehow heard rather than saw. He glanced around while the bishop went on tapping and clicking, the little sounds forming a monotonous repeated pattern. He’d been down here a long time ago, with the same bishop or a different one-it didn’t matter. But it’d been before he had the surgery done on his eyes, had this perceived black-and-white world layered in. And the place-he supposed that it was technically a cathedral, no matter how small, since it was the official seat of the bishop-had looked exactly the same. Which meant that it came across the reality line unaltered. Nothing had to be done to it, no visual alterations, to make it fit into the world he saw. The hole and its contents were already dark enough, with all the shabby accoutrements that made it look like one of the ancient German Expressionist film sets that’d preceded the old Warner Bros. B-movie thrillers.

“Think of all the spiritual merit you’re accumulating.” McNihil didn’t care to listen to the bishop’s eternal complaints. There was supposedly another world, brighter than this one or the hard reality that everyone else saw, that the bishop’s carefully tended faith was supposed to evoke. “You’ll get your reward in heaven.”

The bishop sighed, hunched shoulders lifting and then collapsing like a deflated black balloon over his shoulder blades. “Sometimes…” He shook his head. “I don’t think I’m going to make it.”

McNihil wasn’t surprised by the existence of doubting bishops. He would’ve been more surprised by any sign of faith at all.

He turned away from the moldering stacks of papers, and looked over the bishop’s shoulder. On the terminal screen appeared a low-rez image of a stylized human face, without identity or gender. Then a dialogue balloon with tail, straight out of the ancient comic strips, and the words Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.

Mechanically, the bishop went about his pastoral duties, hand shifting back and forth across an old-fashioned clickpad, hitting the download-confession button on the screen and waiting as the communicant’s compressed file zipped over the wire. McNihil wondered where it went from there; maybe to the bishop’s storage unit, or passed along some fiber-optic trunk line to the Vatican bunkers. Surely nobody actually read or listened to these monotonous litanies of transgressions. Maybe the anonymity of the confessional booth was maintained by the wire terminating nowhere, the PVC sheath exposing bare metal at the end, connected to nothing, coiled or slackly dangling in the waste-flow conduits below the Gloss. Maybe, thought McNihil, that’s okay, too. A ubiquitous deity would be able to listen in the sewer as well as anywhere else.

The rest of the communion clicked by. On the terminal screen, the bishop moved the chalice icon over to the cartoon face’s open mouth, then the consecrated-host icon. A final tap on the blessing button-log off in peace-and the communicant’s face disappeared, replaced a split-second later by the next one in the queue.

“Did you come here to ask me something?” The bishop didn’t glance around from the terminal. “It’s all right-we can talk while I’m doing this.”

“Yeah,” said McNihil. “I need some information. Something I need you to take a look at.” He held out the little metal cross, the one he’d palmed off the corpse, dangling from his hand. “This one of yours?”

The bishop turned his head just enough to see the cross. “Probably.” He tapped the clickpad again, and another of the faithful was made one with his or her God. At least for the time being. “I don’t know of any other franchises that’ve been allowed to open up in this area. I wish there were-I could use a smaller congregation.”

“Could you check it out?”

Host halfway to communicant, the bishop paused. He raised one gray-specked frowsy eyebrow as he glanced back at McNihil. “You know,” said the bishop, “that’s not strictly… umm… kosher. The faithful are enjoined to keep their devotions private.”

McNihil shook his head. “This guy isn’t private anymore. He’s dead. And I already know his name. I just want to know a little more.”

“In that case, then, it’s just expensive.” The computer terminal beeped impatiently; barely glancing at the screen, the bishop maneuvered the chalice image to the waiting mouth. “I imagine you expected that, though.”

With the cross’s chain wrapped around his hand, McNihil extracted several hard-currency bills from his wallet. “This’ll have to do,” he said. “I’m on a budget.”

The bishop looked both hungry and disappointed. “Your employers?” His voice arched hopefully. “Maybe they can be approached regarding unforeseen expenses?”

“There are no employers,” said McNihil. “I’m acting on my own, this time.”

“How unusual.” The bishop regarded him thoughtfully. “I didn’t think that was something your kind did. You’re an asp-head, aren’t you?”

“I used to be.” He still was, technically, but it tended to stop questions cold if he said he wasn’t.

The bishop’s face grew heavy with his deliberations, as if his thoughts were some grainy sedimentary substance collecting in the bags under his eyes and in the folds of his throat. “I wonder about that…” He rubbed the bristles of white hairs on his chin. “About that ‘used to be.’ I wonder if it’s as easy as that.” One hand gestured toward the terminal. “You see, I deal a lot with the sinful and the guilty.” The screen crawled with flashing lights, the line into the confessional stacking up. “I’ve gotten so I can smell it on people.” One black-nailed hand patted the top of the monitor. “Even through something like this.”

“Then you should blow your nose,” said McNihil. “People who don’t care for the Collection Agency… they might enjoy imagining people like me suffering all sorts of mental racks. But we don’t. So sniff for what you want somewhere else.”

“Well… it was worth a try.” The bishop brought his gaze back around to the terminal and clicked through a couple more on-line communicants. He held out an open palm for the cross. “Lemme see what you got.”

McNihil dropped the tiny bit of metal into the other’s hand, the fine chain-links piling into a little glistening hill between the ragged life and fate lines.

The bishop swiveled his chair around, holding the crucifax beneath a goose-necked worklamp. “Oh, yes…” He nodded. “Definitely one of mine.”

“How can you tell?”

“It’s a discontinued model-see the little beveling on the ends of the arms?” The bishop dangled the cross from his thumb and forefinger, as though letting McNihil admire it. “Nice touch, but the manufacturer figured the tooling was too expensive for his profit margin. I got a good deal on ’em, down at one of the big trinket liquidators over on La Cienega. I bought all they had; it was a couple gross, complete with mailing envelopes and these little holy cards of Saint Sebastian with the arrows poking out of him. The scriptures on the flip side of the cards were all in some kind of mid-West cracker pidgin-Nebraskonics, I believe-but I didn’t think anybody would mind.”

With one fingernail, McNihil tapped the cross so it swung back and forth on the chain the bishop held. “What’s it say on it?”

“Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum…”

“Not that. The other bit, on the back. The personal code.”

The bishop laid the crucifax in his cupped palm, running the index finger of his other hand across the scratch-blurred area. “Shut up,” he said irritably; the computer terminal had started beeping again. He reached over and three-fingered a group of keys, silencing the machine. “Excuse me,” he said to McNihil. “I haven’t done this in a while.”

“Take your time.” McNihil thrust his hands into his coat pockets. “As I said before, I’m not on the clock.”

As he waited, the bishop rummaged through the nailed-up plastic shelves above the computer terminal, finally taking down a can of WD-40. The bishop sprayed the tip of his index finger, then started to rub away the accumulated dirt and grease with a not-much-cleaner rag.

Personal hygiene held no fascination for McNihil. He looked away, over to the terminal screen. The confessional and altar-rail images had been replaced by numbers. Percentage statements, in a column headed TRAN and another headed CON; as he watched, the numbers following the decimal points shifted, TRAN going up to fifty-three, CON dropping to forty-seven.

“That’s the direct line from the College of Cardinals,” said the bishop as he scrubbed his fingertip. “Well, except that anybody really can log on and vote. The church has gotten very democratic that way. You have to change with the times.”

McNihil nodded toward the screen. “What’s the big debate?”

“Oh, the transubstantiation versus consubstantiation thing.” The bishop held his index finger close to his eyes, dabbing at it with the wet part of the rag. “It’s been going on for a while.”

“Yeah, I guess so. It was on the last time I was here. And that was years ago.”

The bishop shrugged. “Well, the doctrine of the E-charist is a big issue. Personally, I think the consubstantialists are coming pretty connectin’ close to being Protestants; I mean that’s essentially the Lutheran doctrine of the Real Presence. To say that the body and blood of Christ are present ‘in, with, and under’ the electrons moving down the wires…” His voice had risen in anger, before he managed to calm himself. “I suppose you can see where I stand on the issue. I mean, it has to be transubstantiation. The electrons are changed into the holy substance, and the communicant is downloading the actual body and blood of Christ.” The bishop waved the solvent-damp rag in his excitement. “If that’s not the case, then really, it’d mean we were just connecting around here.”

“That’s what it would mean, all right,” said McNihil.

A sulky cloud settled over the weighted landscape of the bishop’s face. “I can tell that these things aren’t important to you.”

“Hey.” McNihil pointed a thumb toward the computer terminal. “You were the one bitching about your job.”

The bishop scrubbed even more determinedly at his fingertip. “I can’t help it if I’ve started to believe.” A dry streambed of tears grated in his voice. “It’s an occupational hazard.”

McNihil took pity on him. “Why don’t you just read the code,” he said softly. “That’s all I came here for.”

From the corner of his eye, McNihil saw the numbers disappear from the monitor screen; enough time had gone by with no clicks or taps, to bring the automatic screen-saver up. He had just a glimpse of the image, a skeletal form with wild eyes and streaming black hair, clothed in pennantlike rags of human skin, before the bishop’s hand shot past him, hitting the monitor’s power button. The image disappeared, replaced by dead blankness.

“You weren’t supposed to see that,” the bishop said stiffly. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell anyone.”

What else McNihil had caught on the monitor screen had been a single word, in letters of fire. Tlazoltéotl. “What is it?”

The bishop drew back, holding the cross against his chest. When he spoke, he sounded abashed and sullen. “I didn’t say what I’ve started to believe.”

McNihil let it drop. He watched as the other man hunched over the little bit of metal.

After a few seconds, the bishop ran his fingertip across the minutely incised coding on the back of the crucifax. “Okay, I’m getting a read on this.” The contact point at the end of the bishop’s index finger shone like a sliver of broken glass. “The guy’s name was… Trummel? Trabble?”

“Something like that.”

Gazing up at the mottled ceiling, the bishop continued to sort out the info. “Pretty recently updated,” he said. “The stats aren’t too bad; received communion on a regular enough basis to get the volume discount. Just the standard five percent, though. That’s a shame, kinda; with a little extra effort, this person could’ve gone up to the platinum Gen-U-Flex™ level, where you start getting the really good merchandise promotions.” The bishop shot a hopeful glance over at McNihil. “The ID card’s good at over ten thousand retail outlets in the central Gloss alone-”

“Don’t bother with the pitch.” McNihil held up a hand to ward off the other’s flow of words. “My credit rating couldn’t take the hit.”

The bishop sighed and went back to deciphering the crucifax. “You can’t blame a guy for trying,” he mumbled. “Gotta keep the flock’s numbers up. I mean, this poor bastard’s not going to be at the rail anymore. You said he was… um… deceased?”

“Dead.”

“I’ll have to log a candle on for him. That’s a freebie; we don’t charge for that.” The bishop’s fingertip moved across the last of the incised code. “Now that’s interesting…”

McNihil looked down at the hand and the cross, as though the tiny marks had been converted into something easily legible. “What’s that?”

“This Trabble person…”

“Travelt, actually.”

“He wasn’t just an on-line communicant.” The bishop peered curiously at the crucifax. “He actually came around here to see me, and received the sacraments directly. Now that’s very unusual. Pretty old-fashioned, if you ask me; hardly anybody does that anymore.” The bishop nodded toward one of the larger tomes on the shelves. “I actually had to look it up in the operating manual, to see how it’s done-live and in person, I mean.” A visible shiver ran across the man’s flesh. “It was kind of creepy, you know? All that touching.”

“Next time it happens,” said McNihil, “put in for hazard pay.” He pointed to the cross in the bishop’s hand. “Would that tell you what he talked about when he was here?”

“Naw…” The bishop shook his head. “There’s not enough room for that kind of content, even if you overwrote the baptismal records. But-come to think of it-I might actually remember this guy. I mean, remember in my head.” The hand without the cross stroked the bishop’s stubbled chin. “I’m trying to recall what he looked like…”

McNihil dug another bill out of his wallet, one of the old kind with a still portrait of a famous dead person on it. “He didn’t look anything like this, I suppose.”

“You’re right; he was younger.” The bishop stuck the bill into a hidden pocket of his vestments. “I can see him plain as day now, though.”

I bet, thought McNihil. “So what did he talk about? He must’ve come to see you for some reason. Some special reason.”

“Of course.” The bishop showed a yellow-toothed smile. “The only reason people would come to see someone like me would be because they’re connected-up. Or more connected-up than usual.”

“And that’s what Travelt was?”

“Connected-up? Oh, yeah.” The smile had gaps in it, through which the bishop’s tongue showed like a wet lizard. “I was B.S.-ing you. Of course I remember the guy. Not just for the rarity of his visit here… but the severity of it. Severe on him, I mean; even before he got here. He looked like quivering hell.” A slow shake of the head. “Or at least that’s what he said he was afraid of.”

“Really?” The poor bastard sounded like an even sorrier case than before. “Of going to hell?”

“No-” A damp glittering had collected around the rims of the bishop’s eyes. “Of going back there.”

“Right,” said McNihil. Like he would’ve known-that was always the problem with these junior-exec types, leading their sheltered lives in their little corporate rabbit warrens. They get a little experience, thought McNihil, and they figure it’s the end of the world. “Not even firsthand experience,” he mused aloud. “The jerk was using a prowler to go out and get his stimulation for him. It’s not like the Wedge ever saw him step inside its limits.”

“Maybe his way of enjoying himself wasn’t as safe as all that.” The bishop spoke in a tone of mild reproof. “The man is-as you’ve said-no longer with us.”

“Just goes to show,” said McNihil. “Accidents will happen.”

One of the disordered eyebrows rose in skepticism, creasing the bishop’s forehead. “Would someone like you be here… if you really thought it was an accident?”

“‘It?’” McNihil’s sharp gaze fastened on the man in front of him. “What ‘it’ do you mean?”

The bishop spread his hands apart, the cross dangling on its chain from his fingers. “Whatever happened. I wouldn’t know-the ways of this world are not my concern. I’m paid to be concerned with matters of the soul.”

“And that’s what Travelt came and talked to you about? His soul?”

“Of course.” The bishop studied the cross’s swaying pendulum. “Like the way people would take their cars into the garage for repairs. They didn’t do that if the machines were working fine. Same way with this poor fellow. Only I’m not sure his could be fixed.”

“That’s what you told him?”

The bishop nodded slowly.

“I thought,” said McNihil, “it was different in your line of work. A matter of doctrine. That all things could be fixed. Washed clean.” With his forefinger, McNihil gave the cross a gentle push, setting it in motion again. “Forgiven.”

“Ah. That used to be doctrinal. But that was a long time ago. Mankind has progressed since then, in so many ways. Including sin.”

“What about guilt?”

The bishop pursed his lips, mulling over the question. “Actually,” he said, “I think guilt’s stayed pretty much the same since the beginning. There’s never really been a lot of incentive to improve on it. Not a lot of market fluctuations there. Whereas with sin… people want to enjoy themselves, don’t they? They just never want to pay the price.”

McNihil knew how that was. From professional-and personal-experience. “Was that this Travelt’s problem?”

“Guilt and sin?” The bishop twirled the cross in a vertical loop. “Man, it looked like he was covered in it. Like he’d been skinny-dipping in the tar pits. Metaphorically, of course; the most you’d have been able to see with your eyes would’ve been the way the guy was sweating and shaking. You know that sick gray look people get just before they disconnect the life-support systems in the hospital, when there’s no more reason to run up the electric bill? Only this poor bastard was still walking around.” Another flip, and the bishop caught the cross in his fist. “But I could see the rest; I’ve got a little expertise in the line. That dark, sticky stuff was spread on his soul an inch thick and rancid.”

Another thing that McNihil knew to be a fact. To his regret. You sleep with the wrong kind of people-he’d told himself this before-and there’s no telling what you’re going to wake up and find on yourself. The corpse on the cubapt’s floor hadn’t learned that lesson until too late. Or, seen another way, the late Travelt had learned it and had checked out early, rather than deal with the consequences. Not having to walk around caked in sin and guilt… maybe the guy hadn’t been so stupid after all.

“Did he talk about… anything specific?” The terminal had switched itself back on; the numbers on the screen tugged at the corner of McNihil’s eyes. Tran or con, substance or accident; it didn’t matter. The dead were still here in this world. The only difference between this Travelt and McNihil’s wife was that he could still talk to her. Whereas Travelt’s silence had to be picked apart, tweezed out of other people’s memories. “Something that he’d done, or had been done to him?”

“He talked about having been someplace, and having seen some things; that he wished he hadn’t gone there, and hadn’t seen whatever it was.” The bishop gave a little round-shouldered shrug, his own admission of guilt. “I suppose I should’ve asked him for the particulars, gotten him to let it out, tell me all about it. That probably would’ve made him feel better. The only problem is that it would’ve made me feel worse. I’m not interested in that sort of stuff.” His gaze moved away from what was hidden inside his fist and over toward McNihil. “And I’m not paid to be, either.”

“That makes two of us.” McNihil felt his own minor remorse, the awareness of wasted time. “I only came here because I was mildly curious about this guy. But I’m not going to take the job.”

“What job?”

“The one this guy’s old bosses are leaning on me to take. They want me to find out what happened to him. Besides bad luck, that is.”

For a moment, the bishop was silent. He laid the chain and cross over the flat of his palms, regarding it as though some reduced metallic pietà had been left in his care. “You’re a wise man,” he said finally. “You may not be a particularly nice one, but a certain degree of wisdom… you’ve got that.”

McNihil lifted the object from the other’s hands, letting the cross and the free end of the chain dangle from the other side of his fist. “Why do you say so?”

“You’re better off,” said the bishop, “not getting involved with this one. Some dead are… cleaner than others. This Travelt person… if he thought he was mired in sin, there’s a reason for it. Some of the things he told me, before he realized I’d stopped listening… or that I was trying not to hear… they weren’t pleasant kinds of things.”

“Like what?” Obvious to McNihil that the bishop had been avoiding the question he’d asked before. Theology was fine enough, but it didn’t provide any answers in this world. “Come on, tell me. That’s what I paid for.”

The bishop looked sulky. “You got enough for your money.”

“Not quite,” said McNihil. “And if I think I’ve got change coming back to me, believe me, you’re not going to enjoy the process.”

A lung-deflating sigh escaped from the other man. “All right. He talked about a woman-”

McNihil seized on those words. “Did he say what her name was?”

The bishop shook his head. “No. Because he was too frightened of her. He tried to, but he couldn’t say her name out loud. That’s why he was shaking so bad.” The bishop let a sickly smile appear on his face. “Isn’t that funny? In a way. Considering that she didn’t even exist.”

“How do you know that?”

“Not hard.” The bishop barked a sharp laugh. “This Travelt guy was obviously losing it.” His finger, still shining from the solvent, tapped the side of his head, close to the network of spider veins curving around his brow. “Up here. Where it counts. He was imagining things. Weird, bad stuff,” said the bishop. “Stuff that just can’t be. About this woman he was so afraid of… and other things.” A shake of the head. “I don’t get out much-I’m just too busy, taking care of my flock-but I can still tell when someone’s undergoing a psychotic break with reality.”

“You can, huh?” McNihil wished he could say the same for himself. Maybe, he thought, it’s because I don’t think it’s such a bad thing. He wouldn’t see the world he did, the one that continuously leaked out of his scalpeled eyes, if he’d been satisfied with the other one. The one that everybody else saw.

Darker thoughts connected with that notion. That he didn’t want to get into right now, or any other time. Maybe the world he saw wasn’t in his eyes, but was farther back, inside his head…

The bishop’s voice pulled McNihil away from that cliff.

“Sure,” said the bishop. “With the kinds of things this Travelt was raving on about, it wasn’t hard. Like that woman he was so afraid of. Catch this: He said what made her so scary was that she was realer than he was.”

McNihil heard that, and a sliver of soft ice threaded through his heart.

“He was afraid that he didn’t even exist at all.” This time, both the sickly smile and a shake of the head from the bishop. “Compared to her, that is. And then the loathsome gynophobic fantasies, all of his talk about contamination and disease. This Travelt guy might as well have been some nineteenth-century French decadent, rhapsodizing about syphilis or something.”

“Stigmata,” murmured McNihil. “He talked about stigmata, didn’t he? Some kind of mark or sign…”

“Yeah, he did, actually. Something that wasn’t just in his blood, but on his skin. Something that he’d caught from this woman, that she’d passed on to him like a black fungus…”

McNihil said nothing. He closed his eyes for a moment, and saw in that darkness a capital letter V, with serifs sharp as teeth, its slanting edges defined with a knife’s-edge precision against dead pale flesh.

“What he said,” continued the bishop, “was that he couldn’t even see himself-if he looked down at his body, or looked in the mirror. ’Cause he wasn’t real anymore; all the realness had been drained out of him. All he could see was this mark she’d left upon him.”

I know how that feels. McNihil opened his eyes, steadying himself against a faint current of stomach-roiling vertigo. An after-image of the black letter, as though burnt by some negative light, floated and ebbed from his vision of the small chamber. The woman’s unseen presence, con- or transubstantiated, bled away as well.

“Know what else he told me? This is good-”

“I thought,” said McNihil, “that you didn’t listen to him.”

The bishop shrugged. “I caught a few things.”

McNihil dropped the cross and thin chain back into his pocket. “Thanks for your time.”

“That’s all right.” The bishop followed him to the damp cement steps that led up to the street. “I shouldn’t even have charged you. It was a pleasant break for me.” He gestured toward the computer terminal. “From my usual routine.”

The bishop caught McNihil’s jacket sleeve, just as he was about to emerge into the nocturnal city. “You know,” said the bishop, “it’s not too late.”

McNihil looked back at him. “For what?”

“For your confession. I’ve got the hang of it now. Of doing it in person, I mean.” The bishop raised himself up, gazing deep into McNihil’s eyes. “It’d be good for you.”

“No, it wouldn’t.” McNihil shook his head. A chilling night wind sifted between the buildings’ unlit shapes. “You’re wrong. It’s too late. It was too late a long time ago.”

“I wonder…” The bishop had already started to draw back down the cellar steps; his form merged with the hole’s shadows. “What you see…”

“When?” He knew he shouldn’t ask, but didn’t stop himself.

“When you look in the mirror,” whispered the bishop. “What do you see?”

The figure disappeared down the steps. McNihil regarded the empty space for a moment, then turned and walked away.

SEVEN

Tell me a story,” said the professional child.

The man sitting by himself-in fact, the only other person on the train-looked up. It seemed to take a little while for him to focus on her, as though there was something wrong with his eyes.

“All right,” said the man after a moment. “How about a Bible story?”

“That’d be fine.” The professional child flounced the ruffly skirt of her party dress over her bare, red-chapped knees. She dangled her shiny black Mary Janes above the train’s littered floor as she sat in the seat next to him. “Whatever you like.” The man looked lonely and a little sad. He needs, the professional child thought, what I have. “Go ahead.”

This is the story he told her.

“‘¹AND IT CAME TO PASS,’” he said, “‘AS THEY JOURNEYED FROM THE EAST, THAT THEY FOUND A PLAIN IN THE LAND OF CALIFORNIA, AND THEY DWELT THERE.

“‘²AND THEY CALLED IT THE LAND OF ORANGES, BECAUSE THAT FRUIT WAS OF PLENTITUDE THERE, AND FREE FOR THE PLUCKING AND EATING.’”

“You’re making this up,” said the professional child.

The man shook his head. “It’s all true. ‘³AND SO PLENTEOUS WAS THE GOLDEN FRUIT, AND SO DIZZYING THE GOLDEN SUNSHINE, THAT THE PEOPLE SAID, “WHY SHOULDST NOT ALL THINGS BE AS FREE AS THESE? ESPECIALLY TO US, WHO ARE SO DESERVING. WHY SHOULDST WE PAY FOR THAT WHICH WE WANT?”’”

“You’re right.” The child scowled darkly; she’d been stiffed a couple of times in her career. “People always say that.”

“‘⁴SO THE PEOPLE OF THE LAND OF ORANGES SENT OUT TO THE PEOPLES OF ALL THE OTHER LANDS, AND SAID UNTO THEM, “GIVE US THAT WHICH WE WANT, AND PUT IT ON OUR TAB.”

“‘⁵THEY SAID, “GIVE US, AND YOU SHALL HAVE OUR SACRED PROMISE THAT WE WILL PAY FOR ALL THESE THINGS. YOU CAN TRUST US.”’”

“Yeah, sure,” said the professional child.

“‘⁶AND SOON,’” continued the man on the train, “‘THE PEOPLE OF THE LAND OF ORANGES HAD PARKS AND LARGE HOUSES, WITH GARAGES OF MANY DOORS; AND THEY HAD BOAT HARBORS AND MULTILANE FREEWAYS AND FIBER-OPTIC CABLES ROOTED THROUGH THE EARTH, SO THAT THEY MIGHT CONVERSE WITH EACH OTHER AND ORDER MORE THINGS FROM ON-LINE CATALOGS.

“‘⁷AND THEY BUILT WALLS AROUND THEIR HOUSES, AND GATES WITH TWENTY-FOUR-HOUR MANNED SECURITY, SO THAT THEY MIGHT NOT HAVE TO SEE ANYONE OTHER THAN THEMSELVES. AND THEY DID LOOK AT EACH OTHER, AND SMIRKED AND SAID, “ARE WE NOT EXCEEDINGLY FINE IN OUR EYES AND GOD’S EYES?”’”

“Then what happened?”

“‘⁸AND THEN THE PEOPLES OF THE OTHER LANDS CAME TO THE PEOPLE OF THE LAND OF ORANGES, AND THEY DIDST HAVE THE BILL IN THEIR HANDS, FOR ALL THE PARKS AND THE FINE BIG HOUSES AND THE BOAT HARBORS AND THE BOATS THEREIN.

“‘⁹AND THE PEOPLE OF THE OTHER LANDS DIDST SAY, “THIS IS HOW MUCH YOU OWE, AND THIS IS WHEN YOU SAID YOU’D PAY UP.”

“‘¹⁰AND THE PEOPLE OF THE LAND OF ORANGES DIDST QUAKE BEHIND THEIR GATED WALLS, AND GREW ANGRY, NOT BECAUSE THEY COULD NOT PAY BUT BECAUSE THEY DID NOT WANT TO PAY.’” The man slowly shook his head, playacting a storyteller’s weary disgust.

“‘¹¹AND THE PEOPLE OF THE LAND OF ORANGES SAID TO THE PEOPLE OF THE OTHER LANDS, “WE WILL NOT PAY. WHY SHOULDST WE? WE ARE TOO FINE AND NOBLE AND TOO CONNECTING WONDERFUL TO HAVE TO PAY A BILL LIKE THAT. YOU CANST TAKE YOUR BILL AND SHOVE IT.”’”

The professional child’s brow creased. “Bastards.”

“‘¹²AND THE PEOPLE OF THE OTHER LANDS, WHO’D PAID FOR ALL THE PARKS AND HOUSES AND BOAT HARBORS, VERY CALMLY SAID, “ALL RIGHT. HAVE IT YOUR WAY. BUT THERE WILL BE CONSEQUENCES.”

“‘¹³AND THE PEOPLE OF THE LAND OF ORANGES LOOKED AT EACH OTHER AND SMIRKED SOME MORE, AND SAID, “WHAT CONSEQUENCES CAN WE POSSIBLY SUFFER? FOR IS NOT OUR GOD A GOD OF GREED, AND ARE WE NOT HIS CHILDREN? HE’LL LOOK OUT FOR US.” AND THEY DIDST WIPE THEIR ASSES WITH THEIR BONDS OF THEIR SACRED PROMISES.’”

“Yeah,” said the professional child, “I think I know the people you’re talking about.”

The man waited a moment before continuing, in a lower, spookier voice. “‘¹⁴BUT THE SKIES DIDST DARKEN OVER THE LAND OF ORANGES, AND THE EARTH GREW SOUR AND DIED, SENDING FORTH ONLY DEAD THINGS.

“‘¹⁵AND THE TIDES CEASED TO ROLL IN THE HARBORS, AND THE SHIT AND WASTE FROM THE SEWERS MIRED THE BOATS AMIDST THE DEAD AND ROTTING FISH.

“‘¹⁶AND THE GATES RUSTED AND FROZE IN THE WALLS AROUND THE FINE HOUSES, SEALING IN THE PEOPLE OF THE LAND OF ORANGES. WHICH WAS NO GREAT LOSS, FOR BY THEN THEY HAD BECOME DEAD THINGS, LIVING-SORT OF-IN A DEAD PLACE.

“‘¹⁷AND THE PEOPLE OF THE OTHER LANDS DIDST SAY TO ONE ANOTHER, “THAT’S HOW IT GOES. THEY BROUGHT IT ON THEMSELVES. WHEN YOU DON’T PAY, YOU CAN’T PLAY.”

“‘¹⁸AND THE PEOPLE OF THE OTHER LANDS HAD DEAD OF THEIR OWN AMONGST THEM, AND THEY DIDST SAY, “NOW WE HAVE SOMEPLACE TO SEND THEM.”

“‘¹⁹AND SO THEY DID.’”

The man fell silent, eyes closed, head tilted back.

“Is that it?”

Raising one eyelid, the man glanced over at the professional child, then nodded.

“Well,” she said, “it’s not a great story. And I don’t think it’s really from the Bible. Is it?”

The man shrugged. “Depends upon whose Bible you’re talking about.”

“But it must mean something important to you, huh? Or otherwise you wouldn’t have told it to me.”

“That’s true, at least.”

“So?” The professional child smoothed her frilly skirt above her knees, and waited.

He didn’t need any more prompting than that. The man shifted in the seat, reaching into the back pocket of his trousers for his wallet.

This sucks, thought McNihil as he gazed out the train’s window. I would rather in heaven be. That just didn’t seem to be an option these days.

Having that conversation with the Bishop of North America (and Central America by Proxy) must have put him in a religious frame of mind. So that making up Bible stories came easily. The little bit of time spent storytelling just now with the professional child had been marginally satisfying, in a melancholy way. McNihil and his wife, when she’d been alive, had never put in for a childbearing license, and now it was too late. Her ova had been harvested long ago and sold to pay off some tiny fraction of her debt load. So for him, a bit of child exposure, even from one whose eyes had been as ancient and cold as a DynaZauber exec’s, had been worth it.

“‘²⁰AND INTO THAT LAND-’” McNihil murmured another piece of the story to himself; there was no one to overhear him in the train. “‘TO CONVERSE WITH THE DEAD, THAT HE MIGHT LEARN OF THEM THAT WHICH WOULD BE TO HIS PROFIT, NAY, SURVIVAL; TO THAT REGION OF THE DEAD CAME A STILL-LIVING MAN, WHO HAD COME THERE BEFORE MANY TIMES ON SIMILAR ERRANDS. BUT IN THIS TIME, THE LIVING MAN’S THOUGHTS WERE OF RELUCTANT NATURE. SO THAT HE DID SAY TO HIMSELF, “CHRIST AL-CONNECTING-MIGHTY, I DON’T WANT TO BE DOING THIS…”’”

But such petition, thought McNihil, availeth not.

Rattling on the poorly maintained tracks, the train made slow progress across the blighted landscape. Slow and southward, leaving the ill-defined outskirts of True Los Angeles behind. There had been a time-McNihil had seen the photos, watched the videos-when L.A. had merged seamlessly with the densely suburbanized zones below it, like a corpse on the slab of God the Mad Doctor, a somewhat living thing stitched together by arteriosclerotic freeways. All flowers die eventually, though, even the ones that are already toxic, and the black blooms wither and curl up on their black stems.

McNihil looked out the window, his breath against the glass, and saw ashes and the charred skeletons of buildings, steel girders twisted by the heat of long-extinguished fires, rows of square, empty eye sockets staring past fields of jewel-like glittering broken glass. A grid of streets remained embossed on the deathscape, with the cracked emblems and nonsense words of what had been backlit plastic signage on tottering or spine-snapped poles, all transformed into an idiot language by having melted into one another. The logo of a defunct international hamburger chain merged with the trademark of what had been the West Coast’s largest retail purveyor of automobile tires, the resultant muddle sliding into the blinded facade of an abandoned full-service Church- &-Shop™, the combination seeming to promise seminutritious grease and small plastic toys served as a holy sacrament inside a steel-belted radial. Overall, the air looked and smelled-it seemed to seep through the solid glass and into McNihil’s nostrils-as if the smoke from the ancient fires had never dissipated, the ocean winds no longer rolling over the petroleum-striped beaches, the clouds heavy and listless above the waves too sullen to crest. The air had yellowed and turned rancid, becoming some sort of breathable cheese, a substance accumulating on one’s alveoli like the stuff found at the bottom of backed-up drains.

This was the one zone where McNihil’s vision matched up perfectly with exterior hard reality. The black-and-white movies inside his eyes might just as well have leaked out and congealed, thick and heavy, on the dark landscape.

He turned away from the window at his side and glanced around the interior of the train. The perceived aspects of the world outside had permeated the train as well. Empty, the seats’ torn vinyl extruded dirty-gray stuffing like infected tongues across the narrow floor’s mounds of rubbish. Spray-can placa, even more stylized than the previous century’s glory-days tags in the prescrub New York subways, flowed across walls, seats, windows, and the more permanent strata of trash, as though some judging angel had crashed a party gone badly wrong. McNihil couldn’t read the scrawled, looping words; he’d always found third-generation Huichol slang in Cyrillic characters somewhat beyond him. Mene mene tekel upharsin-he wouldn’t have been surprised if that was how it translated, given the nature of the territory they had entered. Weighed in the balance, thought McNihil glumly, and tossed out.

The meter-high graffiti included a psychotic drawing that didn’t need to be translated. In rapidly shaded Day-Glo, the artist had sketched a malevolently grinning skull, complete with dangling bony vertebrae for a throat. Some minimal animation had even been done, if that term could be applied to a depiction of corpse pieces. Enough sulfurous daylight slid in through the windows on the opposite side to trigger the paint’s remaining shutter-pixels, cycling the image through its program of one empty bone-orbit closing and reopening in a leering wink. The skull’s white forehead was splintered open, with uprooted male genitalia thrust through the chasm; a drop of bloodied semen sparkled and faded, over and over, like a false and deceptive pearl.

McNihil didn’t know, and didn’t care, whether the skull was the vanished artist’s self-portrait or an iconic homage to the passing landscape’s ruling deity. He was going down to see and to talk to his dead wife. Slumping lower in the seat, he folded his arms across his chest, though there was no chill in the air. On the contrary: the climate just south of L.A. was an unvarying hell, unbroken by either grace or rain.

“Don’t forget the mesolimbic dopamine system,” said a little voice right behind his ear.

He turned and saw no one. Which was all right with McNihil; he preferred the occasional random auditory hallucination to sharing a train car with the low-level businesspersons encountered farther north along the Gloss’s edge. Those could creep him out the most; he hated watching them busy in their seats, as they worked with the muscles and nerve endings from their brows to their chins converted to interfaces for their built-in databases and spreadsheets. A trainful of those types looked like a clinic for terminal Bell’s palsy victims, all of them winking and grimacing and twitching away. Some of them, McNihil had always suspected, were frauds, poor bastards who’d gotten downsized out of their jobs but kept up their fronts regardless, going through endless facial spasms to give the impression of productive labor.

Even that was better than seeing some of the graying oldsters, tapping away on their antiquated laptops. Especially the ones whose companies had made them have the Tiny Biz-y Hands™ manual-abatement operation. The sight of those particular poor bastards, with their squirrel-sized paws sticking out from their shirtcuffs, infant-sized fingers skittering across the hundreds of ideograms on combined English-Mandarin keyboards, always put a sour rock in McNihil’s stomach.

The little voice spoke again: “If you correlate the info from the ventral tegmental area scans… implications are clear…”

This time, McNihil caught the source. Literally: his hand darted up and grabbed a fluttering black image just above his head. The holo’d piece of E-mail stayed trapped in his fist just as though it were made of something more physical than intersecting beams from the geosynchronous satellites over the Gloss.

He could tell it was a data-scrap, something too broken and damaged to live much longer, the minute strength ebbing away as it scrabbled at his palm. Not even addressed to him; he didn’t pay for any accounts that covered a service area extending this far south. On a hunch, McNihil dug into his jacket pocket with his other hand and came up with the little cross on a chain that he’d shown the Bishop of North America. The E-mail scrap struggled harder in his fist, trying to reach the bit of cheap gold-toned metal.

The E-mail was Travelt’s. It orbited the cross dangling from McNihil’s hand, responding to some faint emanation of its dead addressee. The lack of any security encryption made him suspect that Travelt had written it to himself, a little personal-reminder memo. Of what?

Hard to say; the recorded voice had faded down to near-inaudibility. “… axons narrow… engine of addiction…” McNihil couldn’t be sure of the squeaking words. “… the hand on the valve…”

There was no point in trying to figure it out. McNihil pushed open the window beside him, just far enough to fling the chain and the cross outside. The fading, crippled E-mail darted after it and was gone, vanished from sight like a fleck of ash churned up by the iron wheels below. McNihil rolled his head back against the seat and closed his eyes.

A few minutes later, he felt the train come to a stop, the outmoded diesels up ahead wheezing and shuddering. In this segment of the Gloss, on a local milk run, the Rail Amalgam didn’t put its shiny new or newish rolling stock, its sleek maglevs and other high-speed bullets. Transit for visiting the dead called for rolling antiques, bolted-together retrofits, rust and grime that could be sent along the tracks more or less in formation, the heavy ghosts of industrial society. Unmanned, either by passengers or crew; a few black boxes had been wired to the engines, the embedded piloting systems linking up with whatever sensors and bar-code readers were still operational along the right-of-way. That was enough for the job; if any of the trains ceased functioning en route and couldn’t be fixed with more than a change of fuses or a simple board-swap, it was bulldozed off the tracks and left as a long parallel corpse, to decay into the underlying mulch of corroded metal.

McNihil hoped that wasn’t going to be the case right now; he didn’t want to get out and walk the rest of the way to his destination. He could hear, rattling through the train’s loose-jointed steel bones, the various servo-mechanisms desultorily futzing around with the engines, trying to get them going again. Something clanked, metal on metal, one blow after another; the image came to him of some articulated iron arm, speckled with rust and oil spots, swinging a sledgehammer or a giant boilermaker’s wrench against the dented side of the ancient diesels, a last low-tech resort.

The clanging sounds continued as McNihil gazed out the window. Ordinarily, he wouldn’t have minded the prospect of hoofing it the couple of hours it would take to get to his dead wife. Even in a depressing territory like this, the notion of seeing her again would have made the trek semibearable. Those were other times, Jack, he told himself. Coming down here before, he’d been on no other mission except seeing her, for no reason but to twist tighter the little knot of guilt that lay beneath his heart. If not pleasure, there was always a certain broken-tooth satisfaction to be gotten out of such a grim excursion, the confirming knowledge of just how much of a sonuvabitch one could be. And had been.

On the other side of the dust-mottled glass, a few slowly moving figures could be seen, going about their business in the rubble and ashes. The vaguely human shapes-they were so hunched over in their rags that it was difficult to make out their true forms-had devolved much farther down the scale than their beggarly counterparts in the cities elsewhere in the Gloss. The communard panhandlers and hustlers that McNihil usually encountered on his travels still had some detectable barrier between themselves and their surroundings, an envelope on one side of which was the however-loathsome definition of human, and on the other side was insentient matter. In this bleak territory, that border phenomenon had been erased: here, whatever looked and/or acted more-or-less human-usually less-did so as a point on a continuum that ran back down into the trash and rubble filling the streets and burnt-out building hulks. As if muck and sun-withered debris had become such a basic constituent of this part of the universe, the way hydrogen atoms abounded everywhere else, that it could have begun its own hobbled evolution, knitting together creatures from scraps of old, greasy fast-food wrappers and flaccid, discarded condoms. Instead of dead things, perhaps they were the yet-to-be-alive, lifting their soft faces from the rotting Eden they were to inherit, prepared for them by a God of Discards…

A sudden jolt snapped through the seat and into McNihil’s spine; the train lumbered into motion, as though pulling itself from the mire that had trapped other great beasts. The scene outside the window began to slide farther back along the rails. A small breath of gratitude eased from beneath McNihil’s breastbone. Another few moments and the rag-picking shamblers, the bottom stratum of this zone’s animated dead, would have looked up and spotted his face. They would have lifted their hollow-eyed gaze to his, then nodded slowly. Saying without words: Pass on, Traveler. As we are, so shall you be.

“How was your trip?” His dead wife looked up at him as he walked through the door. “Was it all right getting here?”

From his shoulder, McNihil eased the strap of the bag he’d brought with him. The train from the land of the nominally living to that of the officially dead had finally creaked and wheezed into the local station, like a senile long-distance runner clutching his chest and expiring as he collapses across the finish line. The station, the same one at which McNihil always disembarked when he visited his wife, was really just the place where the tracks came together from different directions, including the no-longer-functioning ones that ran into the east, into the center of the continent. Whatever came out of here, the pretty boys and girls who were the heartland gene pool’s only viable export, arrived on foot. As had McNihil at the place where his wife existed-the word lived was too cruel a misnomer to be applied in her situation.

“It was okay. About like usual.” He sat the bag down on the kitchen table, a rickety construct of plywood sheeting with reinforced fiberboard boxes for legs. As with most things in this territory, it survived from day to day, caught somewhere in the process of collapse and dissolution. The table wobbled and bent under the slight weight of the shoulder bag; the nails-which McNihil himself had hammered in-gave small, harsh cries as the loose joints twisted against each other. “Nothing happened on the way, at least.” He turned a minimal smile in his dead wife’s direction. “For me, that makes it a nice trip.”

She said nothing, but went on watching him with her ’d-out eyes. Empty, but not in the way that living persons’ eyes so often were, when they had let their souls ratchet down into a state of pure mercantile hunger. Hungry, McNihil had told himself more than once, is not her problem. Not anymore. In that sense, she had an advantage over both the living and the other dead. He could console himself with the notion that he’d done that much for her, at least.

“I suppose you brought me stuff.” She sat beside the table, in an only slightly less fragile chair. If she’d possessed more mass than was typical for the long-term, animated dead, the chair might have collapsed beneath her; as it was, she had no more effect on it than a ghost or living memory would have. “You always bring me these little things.” In one hand, held near her face, a cigarette slowly drifted a gray trail through the dusty air. The pack had been one of the gifts McNihil had brought her the last time he’d come down here. She didn’t smoke, not in the sense of drawing anything into her motionless lungs. But the spark and ash were reminders of her previous existence. And of mine, brooded McNihil. “I appreciate your thoughtfulness,” his dead wife said.

He would’ve preferred it if she had screamed like some sudden banshee and buried a knife in his heart, one of physical metal to match the invisible one whose blade he felt turning there. But perhaps that was why, he knew, she didn’t do any such thing. Besides not being her style, it would have made it all too easy-and over-for him. She still loved him enough to torture him.

Nodding slowly, McNihil zipped open the shoulder bag and started pulling its contents out onto the flimsy table. The items were all bright and shiny and new, things from the land of the living. They didn’t have to be expensive, he knew, though sometimes he spent the money anyway, just as one of the milder forms of self-laceration available to him. Stuff that wasn’t even anything his wife had cared for when she’d been alive:

• fast food in self-heating structural-foam containers, with full-motion figurines from this week’s disnannie dancing on top;

• collect-the-set chocolate bars with the twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh installments of an updated Story of Job on the wrapper, the little 3-D panels filled with images of a multi-car pileup on some anachronistic freeway and garishly bright blood pooling on the floor of a hospital triage room;

• postliterate romance novels with audio chips sighing and moaning in synch with the nearest ovulation cycle that the built-in hormone sensors could pick up.

Downscale consumer goods, effluvia from the cheap-’n’-nastiverse, glittering with an enticing pseudo-life. Which was already dying, even before the tiny microbatteries, lightsucks, and other power sources could be exhausted. McNihil looked at the bright things that he had carried down here, and saw them visibly fading, the little dancing figures hobbled in their paso dobles and quadrilles, slowing down and going inert in hunched-over postures, like a miniature gallery of terminal osteoporosis.

He gazed down into the illusory depth of the romance covers, like windows into a nobler, more sun-filled world, tilted ninety degrees and laid out flat. The optic traps caught sight of his irises and responded by deepening the images, the red-streaked oceans stretching out even farther to impossible sunsets, the great doors of the Regency ballrooms swinging open to reveal curve-swept grand staircases, high arched windows overlooking Capability Brown gardens silvered with perfect moonlight. Designed to entice: a part of McNihil wanted to dive into those soft vistas and fall gravityless through them forever. But even as he looked into them, the liveried, bewigged footmen holding back the brocade curtains were growing old and shriveled, their faces crepe-paper masks. The buccaneer oceans filmed over with toxic oil slicks, the slow waves washing anoxic, aborted creatures against the ships’ rotted wood. Lovers gazed into each other’s hollow eye sockets, yellowed skull-teeth visible through the papery skin of their withering faces. Their embraces had become huddling refuges from the chill winds sliding through broken glass and brownly corrupted palm fronds; their kisses had been delayed too long, and now could only be consummated in the skin-deep grave between their hearts.

McNihil’s dead wife brushed a hand across the once-bright things he had brought her. ”I don’t really know why you do this, though.” The cigarette in her other hand continued to burn on its own, maintaining its brief spark of life. “It must be sad for you. You come all this way, and you give me this stuff… and look.” She pushed one of the fast-food containers with the tip of a thin finger. Its imbedded power sources had already run out of juice, leaving the cartoon images gray and drained of what little pseudo-life they’d had. A slow shake of the head: “That’s what happens down here.” McNihil’s dead wife looked up at him. “That’s what happened to me. Isn’t it?”

He said nothing to contradict her, though technically she was wrong. The once bright and now fading bits of the other world-their life, or imitation of such, had still been in motion when McNihil had crossed the border of this territory. Whereas she’d been dead already when she’d been brought here, her lungs gutted out by viral mesothelioma to the point where that other world’s life-support machines-what a laugh-hadn’t been doing anything more than inflating, deflating, reinflating a cold flesh balloon with her empty-eyed face attached.

“It didn’t happen to you,” lied McNihil. “You didn’t fade.” The impulse hit him, to sweep the rapidly dulling trash from the table with his forearm. “You’re still beautiful.”

She smiled indulgently. “In my way, I suppose.” She put the cigarette to her pale lips, though the smoke wasn’t drawn in, trickling slowly by her ashen cheek instead. “How does the old poem have it? The Coleridge-is it ‘Life-in-Death’ or ‘Death-in-Life?’”

“I don’t remember.” Though in fact, he could hear some of the lines being recited in his head. Her lips were red, her looks were free, / Her locks were yellow as gold: / Her skin was white as leprosy, / The nightmare Life-in-Death was she, / Who thicks man’s blood with cold… If McNihil looked at her in a hard way, without the blurring overlay of memory, that was what she reminded him of. It wasn’t pleasant; he preferred to let his mental vision go subtly out of focus, to turn his head and see, from the corner of his eye, something closer to the woman who was alive in the unforgotten past.

“You didn’t come down here to discuss poetry. At least, not this time.” McNihil’s dead wife leaned an elbow on the wobbling table. Gray ashes drifted across the stricken lovers on the romance novels. “You’re in trouble, aren’t you?”

That was how it was, dealing with the dead; they always knew stuff. The virtue, the advantage of death; their vision wasn’t occluded, betrayed by simple things like memory, dreams, hope. McNihil wasn’t the first to discover that the dead were wired into cold reality, in a way that the living could never be.

The entire economy of the dead-the indeadted-and of the dead territory in which they existed, depended on that relationship. Which varied: there were high-functioning corpses such as McNihil’s wife, and low-level scrabblers such as the ones he had seen from the window of the train coming down here. A lot resulted from whatever shape the particular deceased was in when the reanimating transition was made. If some poor bastard had scoured out his neural pathways with various pharmaceuticals, reduced the cortex in his skull to a red sponge squeezed down to its last endorphins and catecholamines, then all the batteries and add-on sensors and motivational prods that could be retrofitted onto his chill-cased spinal column weren’t going to make him into anything more than a shambling scrap-picker. The little scattered herd of unfortunates out along the tracks used their low-grade but effective skills to pluck out recyclable metals or anything else of possible value from the rubbish heaps that the garbage-laden trains dumped off twice a day. Cheaper to let the idiot dead scavenge and collect, in their slow, hunched way, than spend the money for automated scanning machinery to do the same thing.

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.

“Oh, I would’ve wanted the cremation.” His dead wife nodded as she reached for a book of matches. “Definitely. Even before finding out what I know now. About what happens after things die.” She lit the cigarette. “It’s so much cleaner.”

It was more or less the same conversation they wound up having every time he came down here. Not so much because she wanted to talk about these things-from the beginning, she had displayed a casual acceptance about her transformed condition that had left him somewhat stunned and mystified, until he’d figured out why she was doing it. All the better to twist the knife inside him. Which was the same reason McNihil thought and talked about these things. As the ancient sage had said, As long as you use a knife, there’s still some love left. It just depended on whether you used the knife on yourself or not.

That was the trouble with death and money combined. They could be either evil or innocuous on their own, but when they were wrapped up together, when they slept in the same coldly burning bed, that was when things got messy and weird.

“Connect this,” said McNihil. “This isn’t getting me anywhere.” Some other time, when he wasn’t being leaned on by Harrisch and his crew, he could dig the past up from its unsilent grave, and dissect with his dead wife how he’d screwed her over, spent the insurance payout on his asp-head gear, and somehow never got far enough ahead on his Collection Agency salary and bonuses to pay off her living debts and stick her ashes in that little jar she coveted for her final residence. “Right now,” he said aloud, “I’ve got other things on my mind.”

“Sure.” His dead wife let the new cigarette burn, without bringing it to her pale lips. “You came here for advice. Analysis of the situation you’re in. People have been calling on the dead for these services, for a long time now. Before, though, they usually didn’t get any answers.”

“Lucky for them.” A grim mood had descended upon McNihil. It was easier to deal with guilt and the past than the present situation. He knew where he was with the past.

“Didn’t I tell you enough? You know more than when you came here.” His dead wife shrugged, cigarette held aloft. “I can’t figure out everything for you. Even if I could… why should I?”

She dealt in fragments, he knew, fragmentary info, fragmentary answers. The scraps and pieces that came drifting on hidden, subterranean currents into the dead territory. Proof that she was on a much higher functioning level than the scavengers he’d spotted so many times from the train windows. Her existence, this little bubble of ersatz bourgeois comfort amidst the rubble and decay, was financed from her earnings as an analyst of discarded data banks, medical records, consumer surveys of products that had been taken off the market decades ago, bins full of old credit-card receipts; all the informational flotsam that washed up on this terminal shore. A couple of small-time research services, including one university sociology/ethnobiology department, kept her and a few dead colleagues on minuscule retainers and piece-work schedules. That brought in enough to pay the interest on her debts and even chip away a little on the principal amounts. At the rate she was going, sometime in the next century she might be able to keep her long-delayed appointment at the crematorium.

“Why should you?” An old question. “Maybe just because you love me. Still.”

“Do I?” Her dark, empty eyes regarded him.

“Maybe.” His turn to shrug. “You tell me.”

Her gaze shifted to the spark at the tip of the cigarette. “That’s one of the things I’m not ever going to tell you.” A speck of ash touched her wrist, then drifted the rest of the way down to the table. “It’d be just too easy on you.”

“Fine,” said McNihil. “I’m way beyond needing anyone to be that kind. So why don’t you just tell me instead, something about what I came down here to find out?”

“These people you’re dealing with? What more do you need to know?” The smoke drew a smudged gray line beside her face. “You know enough to be cautious.”

“I knew that before I came down here.” He couldn’t tell if she was jerking him around or not. Sometimes, from the random backwash of information into the dead territory, she extracted worthwhile answers; other times, not. The luck of the draw. “I could use something a little more practical. Something that would help save my ass.”

“Is that all?” His dead wife smiled behind the cigarette. “Might be rather late for that. Like I said. They’ve been scheming on you for a while.”

“Then I’ll have to take my chances. I don’t have anything to lose.”

“Fine.” She set the cigarette down on the edge of the table, inside a row of small burn marks. Unsmiling, she leaned toward him. “You want something more? Something you can use? I’ll tell you right now. What you probably know already, because if you don’t, you’re too stupid to live.” Her voice grated harsh, as though sand were caught in her corded throat. “It’s not that guy Harrisch and the rest of those corporate types that you have to worry about. They’re nothing. They’ve got their plans for you-there’s something they want from you, something different from what they’ve said-but you might be able to handle that. You’ve got a chance. But where you’re connected-and you are; you know that, don’t you?-that’s nothing much to do with them. It’s what they want you to get involved in. That’s the problem for you. Where they want you to go.” She picked up the cigarette again and held it aloft. When she spoke again, it was in a quieter, scarier voice. “And who’s waiting for you there.”

It took a few moments before McNihil was able to ask the next question. “And who’s that? Who’s waiting?”

“Come on.” His dead wife shook her head in mock exasperation. “You know perfectly well. The same thing that’s always been your downfall. You’re just one of those guys who’s cursed by women. It wasn’t just me that you have problems with. There’s always some other woman that you have to deal with, that you can’t deal with. One that decides your fate. And you know who it is.”

“You mean…” McNihil frowned, trying to puzzle out her words. “There’s one that’s been tailing me around; a young one. I don’t know why she’s doing it. Is that the one you’re talking about?”

“For Christ’s connecting sake.” Genuine anger flashed from his wife’s deep-socketed eyes. “Stop messing around. You’re wasting time you don’t have. If you want to pull your ass out of the fire, you’d better get your mind straight. For once. I don’t know anything about some ‘young one.’” The anger darkened, as though transmuting for a moment into sexual jealousy, an emotion that even death hadn’t managed to render out of her. “You idiot. God knows what you’re imagining now.” She managed an actual draw on the cigarette, pulling the smoke deep into her inert lungs, then exhaling a dragonish cloud. “You know who it is. The same one as before. The same one who screwed you over as badly as you did to me.” The tobacco haze slowly dispersed in the airless room. “It’s Verrity. It’s always been her.”

Rage beyond anger blossomed inside his heart, a fist shattering his breastbone from inside, as though some rapid feedback loop had taken her disdain and amplified it toward murder. As if the dead could be killed again-if so, he would have lunged across the table and seized her neck in his hands, pressed his thumbs against her throat until small bones had snapped like dry wood. It was how he knew she still hated him as much as she loved him-She wouldn’t have said that name to me, otherwise.

“You’re wrong.” Whatever emotion was inside his dead wife, it had compressed itself into a coldly hardened gaze. “I’d say that name to you, no matter what. Because you know it’s true.”

The fury dwindled as quickly as it had sprung up at his core, leaving an ashen hollow there. McNihil opened his fists, laying his hands flat against the table to control their residual trembling. He nodded slowly.

“I know,” he said. Defeated, for now if not forever. “Like you said… I’ve always known.” Just who was waiting for him, in that place he’d been before. And didn’t want to go to, ever again. “It’s her. It’s always been her.”

EIGHT

When the explosions hit the train, McNihil thought to himself, I should’ve walked home.

Loud enough that there were no longer words after the first reaction: the derailing charges made a hammer out of the air, ringing McNihil’s lungs like soft percussion instruments. He found himself suspended, thrown loose from any mooring or balance as the passenger car tilted around him. His arms reached backward instinctively, hands level with his head, to catch the dizzily tumbling wall, to keep it from shattering his spine.

“Shit…” Spoken through clenched teeth, blood oozing salt from his bitten lower lip; McNihil was more irritated than afraid, even as one of the metal window surrounds struck him in the small of the back. Whatever breath had been left in his lungs was expelled in a last raw-throated semi-word. The catch holding the door between cars had disintegrated, the round-tipped metal claw twisting like a broken finger as the mating latch rotated and deformed; the door slid open with enough violence to splinter the passenger car’s interior panels, sending soft daggers of foam-core insulation tumbling through the space. Through the doorway, as though it were a suddenly exposed video billboard, could be seen the dark outlines of the world outside, spinning on multiple axes. For a second, McNihil had the kinesthetic hallucination that the train was still, gravityless, and the landscape beyond had erupted into chaos.

A warm black velvet filled McNihil’s sight; he blinked it away, and saw blurred light piercing the thin fabric. The light focused itself into stars; for a moment, he wondered how they had wound up scattered across the rubbish dunes of the dead territory through which he’d been traveling, heading back toward the inhabited zones of the Gloss-inhabited by the living-and his own tiny apartment therein. Maybe the sky exploded, he thought. And all the pieces had landed on the ground; that could account for it.

Gravity reasserted itself, along with his perception of it; he realized he was lying on his back now, with the open doorway of the baggage car above him. The view of the night stars was veiled by drifting smoke, which he supposed was connected to the acrid burning smell in his nostrils. One foot and leg were pinned by debris; he managed to kick himself loose without leaving more than tatters of cloth and a few square centimeters of bloodied skin behind.

Silence had replaced the explosion’s shock wave; his own breath and pulse, and the hissing of something like steam, were all McNihil heard as he climbed toward the doorway above. The derailed train, or at least this section of it, had landed at less than a ninety-degree displacement, leaving him an off-vertical slope to claw his fingers into.

He managed to get his elbows up over what had been the lower sill of the baggage car’s sliding door. The bent metal tracks cut into the flesh of McNihil’s arms as he let himself hang for a minute, catching his breath. Smoke and the burning smell hung low in the air, forming a thick knot at the back of his throat as he breathed it in.

The salt of his own blood trickled into the corner of McNihil’s mouth. A billow of smoke, invisible in the darkness, stung his eyes; he wiped them clear against his shoulder, then hoisted himself farther onto the doorway’s tilted sill. Another shove with his feet, and he toppled out and onto the loose gravel lining the tracks below.

As soon as he’d managed to get to his knees, the sharp-edged stones cutting through the stained and torn trousers, he could hear the soft human sound of ragged breath and preconscious moaning. He got to his feet and stumbled a few meters alongside the overturned cars. His eyes had adjusted well enough that he could see the starlight glistening off the iron wheels, some of them still slowly turning, hubs thrust higher than his head. Flakes of rust peeled off and drifted snowlike into the spreading pools of oil; the glossy liquid mirrored the stars and smoke as though it were polished obsidian.

He found the source of the human noises. A female, condition not good: she lay on her back, arms outstretched, blind face and neck darkened with red that shone like ink in the partial illumination. A piece of one of the broken cars, a beam studded with rivets and twined cables, lay diagonally across her breast, its weight crushing the ribs beneath the grease-smeared leather of her jacket.

For a few moments longer, McNihil stood beside her, letting his own breath and pulse slow, and whatever strength he had left settle back into his limbs. Shouldn’t even bother, he told himself. He’d already figured out that, whoever she was, she was the one who’d been following him on the sly. Otherwise, she would’ve been inside the train’s passenger car with him.

“Hey.” McNihil knelt down, bending close to her red-webbed face. “You still with us?”

The young woman blinked, her eyes focused at some point past him; one pupil dilated large and black, the other small and trembling. “Connect you,” she said. A blood-streaked bubble popped on her lower lip. “Goddamn… idiot…”

“Yeah, I’m charmed as well.” He set his fingertips against the side of her throat, gauging her fluttering pulse. “You’re in a bad way. You know that, don’t you?”

She made no answer. Her eyes rolled back in their sockets, showing only white, as though the effort of answering him had knocked her out.

“She’ll be all right.” A voice came from behind McNihil. “Or maybe she won’t. It doesn’t really matter much, either way.”

Still crouching beside her, McNihil turned his head and looked up at the figure standing only a few feet away. Though actually, not standing; he saw that now. More like hovering. A familiar face, with a too-familiar smile. “For Christ’s sake,” said McNihil, shaking his head in disgust. “What’re you doing here?”

“Pretty much the same as you.” Harrisch’s voice was mockingly gentle. “Looking to make some kind of connection.” He used the word in its nonslang form. “Aren’t we all?”

McNihil already regretted at least one of his own words. The DZ exec was obviously on some kind of redeemer-image kick, without needing it pointed out to him. Harrisch, in his sharp Arma-Ni-Lite™ suit, stood with arms stretched straight out to the sides and ankles overlapped, fastened to a glistening white crucifix. Which in turn was mounted on a circle equally luminous; the top of his head, the tips of his palm-outward fingers, and the soles of his well-shod feet were just grazed by the circumference. Harrisch could just as well have been modeling one of the positions of da Vinci’s measurement of man as parodying any ancient Nazarene.

“Like it?” Some of the silvery glow caught on the teeth in Harrisch’s smile. “I hope you do.”

“Yeah, it’s great.” The soft light had made its little internal adjustments to McNihil’s vision; he could make out now the way in which the cross-imposed circle was suspended a few feet above the rubble-strewn ground. “Real impressive.” Some kind of minor-league earth-moving equipment, with caterpillar treads and a bored DynaZauber employee at the levers, had crept out of the low hills. An articulated crane arm dangled the circle and its occupant on a length of heavy-linked chain. The operator had his name stitched above the DZ logo on his grease-stained jumpsuit’s breast pocket; he nudged one of the control sticks, the chain clanked and retracted, lifting Harrisch another meter higher in the air. “But really,” said McNihil, looking up at him. “You shouldn’t have gone to the effort.”

“It’s no trouble.” Even with his arms pinioned out, Harrisch managed a nonchalant shrug. “And… you know… I even rather like it.”

I bet, thought McNihil. He nodded toward the cross and circle. “Your own creation?”

“This old thing?” Harrisch laughed. “I inherited it. Or let’s say… the company did. Look.” He turned his head, glancing up at the rim just above his head. “Can’t you see the letters there?” His gaze darted back toward McNihil. “Stuff like this doesn’t have a corporate emblem on it. It has insignia. There’s a difference.”

He saw what the exec was talking about. The letters R and A, stylized in an echt Teutonic manner, intertwined with each other so their legs stuck out at broken forty-five degree angles; the result was halfway between a Manx triskelion and a deformed swastika.

“The Rail Amalgam,” said McNihil. “What, they’ve been absorbed by DynaZauber? They’re one of your corporate divisions now?”

“They wish.” A sneer formed on Harrisch’s face. “DZ wouldn’t have them; we have our standards. Those people are all talk and no action. Strictly yesterday’s news.”

That might or might not be the case. Like most people in the Gloss-or at least those who weren’t sunk too far into their own bleak, inner L.A.-McNihil heard various rumors about what was going on with their world’s circular lifeline, the extended skein of rail lines reaching around the Pacific Ocean, from the old True Los Angeles core, up through where the urban metastasis thinned out in Alaska, across the fragile Bering Strait connections and down toward the Vladivostok financial centers and the transformed eastern edge of China, the little and now-aging dragons of Myanmar and Brunei, then back around the even more fragile and dangerous southern crossing, frozen tracks running across the floes and crevasses of the Ross Ice Shelf, in the shadows of the Transantarctic Mountains, and up the spine of South and Latin America, picking up maquiladoristas and boutique organic white-powder drugs before hitting the impacted Hispanic sprawl of Baja Los Angeles.

“Does that thing work?”

“You bet,” said Harrisch. “Check it out.” His middle finger pressed a button in the center of his palm, right where a rusted iron nail would have fit. The circle surrounding the cross grew brighter, sending hard-edged shadows, McNihil’s included, from the spot. “You see it?” Harrisch looked up at the rim above his head. “Great, huh?”

What McNihil saw, as he stood before the elevated cross, was the crawl of smaller, more intricate lights around the circle in which the DZ exec hung suspended. Blinking symbols and scurrying numbers, all tracking the progress of traffic-freight, people, whatever-along the greater circle of the Gloss’s rail links. A kludge of whatever had existed before the advent of the Noh-flies, which had forced everything in the air to creep along the ground, and the new stuff that had been brought on-line-literally-to complete the loop.

A red dot blinked on a line horizontal with Harrisch’s left knee. McNihil supposed that was the kink in the circuit that had been created by the train derailment, right here in the dead territory. Other red and yellow lights, all along the glowing circle, flickered at different rates and intensities. Trouble all along the line, figured McNihil. Which was to be expected; there was everything in the rail-transport system, from steam-powered cog-wheelers cranking through the thin-aired Andes, to sleek maglev bullet trains tearing through the flat, smoky guts of California. In some places parallel to each other; at the inevitable bottlenecks, track gauges of wildly differing dimensions were crammed into each other. Plus sabotage and other industrial/political squabbles, ice shifts near the poles, earthquakes anywhere along the edges of the ocean’s submerged tectonic plates-given that degree of barely contained chaos, it was a miracle that the circle surrounding Harrisch didn’t light up as fiercely red as a biblical wheel of fire.

Or maybe it had, one time; McNihil wondered if that was how Harrisch had inherited the circle and the cross. The old, powerful Rail Amalgam had been run by a high-mysterioso figure named l’Etatbrut… or that at least had been the rumor. If he’d existed at all, perhaps he’d been consumed, annihilated, turned to sifting ash by all the red alarm lights going on at once, his outflung hands gripping a rolling inferno of catastrophe data. If that hadn’t been enough to burn the mythic l’Etatbrut to cinders, it still might have been a sufficient adrenaline rush to unplug his heart from the cage of his ribs.

“You’d better watch out,” warned McNihil. “There are other people who might want to be hanging where you are.”

The smile shifted to sneer again. “Such as?”

One word: “Ouroboros.”

“Bullshit.” Harrisch’s sneer became uglier-McNihil wouldn’t have thought that was possible-and tinged with an unhidable nervousness. “At least the Rail Amalgam exists… or it did. Ouroboros… there never was such a thing. That’s all legend.”

“Maybe,” conceded McNihil. He had no way of knowing for sure. Maybe no one except those inside Ouroboros-if it existed at all-had that certainty. It was an entity wrapped inside darkness deeper than this night could ever have achieved. A true shadow corporation, summoned into being by the Rail Amalgam itself. The Gloss’s great circle of a railway was put together into one operating unit by government confiscation of various independent railway systems; some of them didn’t like that. Something called Ouroboros, taking on the symbology of the snake swallowing its own tail, supposedly represented the conspiratorial interests of those systems’ now-dispossessed owners. In its nocturnal sphere, Ouroboros would have needed to operate on a much more concealed basis than the Rail Amalgam ever had. No wonder there was so much disagreement among the daylight world’s police agencies and the underground’s denizens as to whether Ouroboros was real or just some deeply spooky imagining.

Maybe that was what Travelt found out, thought McNihil. That was the other part of the legends and rumors circulating around Ouroboros like overlapping, partially legible scales. That the shadow corporation was the delivery service, the rail line, that serviced the unlit, steamy environs of the Wedge. The theory being that the amalgam’s fascist purity made some things streng verboten, way off-limits. Not sex so much-like most fascist organizations, the Rail Amalgam was fueled by erotic tension-but the kind of sex that the Wedge and its occupants dealt in. The kind that a shadow corporation like Ouroboros would be only too happy to move along its underground tracks. Underground being, perhaps, both literal and metaphorical; if no one knew whether Ouroboros existed or not, then by logic, anyone or anything could be part of it. Which led the farthest-out conspiracy theoreticians to posit that the Rail Amalgam and Ouroboros were the same thing, their spheres of identity and operation coexistent with each other. When the Gloss’s brownish-yellow sun was out, Ouroboros was reduced to a shade, a silhouette of the Rail Amalgam, a nothingness sliding across the ground. But when darkness fell, then it was the Amalgam that disappeared, and Ouroboros that became both invisible and omnipresent. Like God, thought McNihil. Or its opposite.

The area around the train’s wreckage grew brighter, as though McNihil’s unvoiced notion had been the cue for a theatrical dawn. He glanced over his shoulder and saw the bright, blue-white glare of generator-driven worklights flickering on, turning the tracks and displaced machinery into color-drained ghosts of themselves. Big shadows wavered into the darkness of the surrounding rubbish dunes; McNihil could see other figures, presumably fully alive, stationing themselves along the shattered metal. The sparks of an arc-welding torch hissed in the farther distance, accompanied by the deeper groans of heavy-equipment jacks being levered into place.

He turned and looked back up at the suspended figure. “I suppose it’s your funeral,” said McNihil. “If the Rail Amalgam comes back and wants its property returned, or if Ouroboros shows up and kicks your ass…” He shrugged. “Not my problem.”

“Funerals?” Something amused Harrisch, enough for a quick laugh. “You know, I’m not worried about them, either. There’s a psychological advantage to taking a posture like this.” He rocked his head back against the cross on which he was bound. “You figure, whatever’s the worst that can happen to you-three days later, they roll away the stone and you’re as good as new.”

“As long as you’re feeling that way…” McNihil tilted his head toward the unconscious girl on the ground. He hadn’t forgotten, even during the whole conversation with Harrisch. “I’m a little concerned about her.”

“Really?” The other man appeared both wondering and somehow pleased. “I’m surprised. Doesn’t seem to be your style.”

“I’m trying to cultivate a sympathetic attitude these days.”

“Is it working?”

“Not in your case,” said McNihil.

Another muted groan, as though from the midst of troubled sleep, sounded from the body laid out on the ground. McNihil nodded toward the girl. “How about doing something for her?”

“I’m touched by your concern. That speaks of some innate kindness in you that I wouldn’t have otherwise suspected.” Harrisch called over his shoulder to the DZ flunky at the controls of the crane. “Get some medical attention for this unfortunate person. Find out if she’s going to live or die, at least.” He glanced again toward McNihil. “There’s nothing you or I can do for her. Not right now. Why don’t we get out of the way? There’s a few things I’d like to discuss with you.” With a nod of his head, Harrisch signaled to the crane’s operator, who kept his bored expression as he put the equipment into gear.

McNihil followed alongside the crane, its caterpillar treads moving parallel to the railroad tracks and the wreckage of the train. “I don’t,” he said, “feel much like talking now.”

“Really?” The other’s smile glistened in the worklights’ bright radiation. “But there’s so much we need to talk about.”

McNihil rubbed his brow with the butt of one palm, smearing the blood from the minor wound. The sting nudged him back toward full consciousness; for a moment, from the effort of walking, he’d felt somewhat woozy. It’s not her, the thought came to him, that’s having the bad dreams. It’s me. The train, turned over on its side, emitting ghostlike billows of smoke and the hisses of small creatures writhing in damnation, rolled past the corner of his vision as though it were the painted backdrop for some elaborate hallucination. The glare from the suspended worklights and the DynaZauber crews’ welding torches bounced around inside McNihil’s eyes like raw electricity converted to some kind of straight optical feed.

“Don’t worry about the girl.” As they continued alongside the steaming wreckage, Harrisch had the circled cross brought down closer to McNihil, the better to impart confidences. “I’ve got an emergency medical crew here on the scene. My people will do whatever’s possible for her. And if there isn’t anything that can be done…” He shrugged. “Then you needn’t have wasted your time worrying.”

“Thanks.” The exec’s presence repelled McNihil like a magnetic pole constructed of razor blazes. “I appreciate that.”

The smile eased into place again. “All part of the job.”

“Maybe you should look for another job.”

“Ah.” With mock ruefulness, Harrisch gave a slow shake of the head. “But I think I’m getting pretty good at this. And with the Rail Amalgam out of commission, who else is going to take care of the trains?”

McNihil glanced past the toppled cars. “You call this ‘taking care’?” It’d been obvious to him, as soon as the other man had popped up in front of him like some kind of Kristallnacht jack-in-the-box, that Harrisch had been responsible for the derailing explosions. “No wonder I’m concerned about the girl.”

“All minor and easily fixed. Readily assimilated into the overall plan.” The crane moved past McNihil and started up one of the nearby rubbish dunes. “Come up here where you can get a better view.”

As he followed the dangling exec out of the illuminated zone, McNihil’s footsteps ground into shards of ancient circuit boards and the softer detritus of empty gum wrappers. At the hill’s crest, he stopped and turned around, looking where the other’s nod directed his attention.

“You see?” Harrisch’s gaze swept across the vista. “All rubber-or might as well be.” A smirk of self-satisfaction moved over Harrisch’s leanly angled face. “We use the same SCARF weapons technology that the Noh-flies do, but in a noncatastrophic way. If you rein it in, it can be really quite benign.”

He saw what Harrisch meant. From here, McNihil could see that the explosions hadn’t ripped apart the railroad tracks. The rails themselves, where they weren’t obscured by the toppled engine and cars, seemed like a demonstration of wave activity frozen at one moment in time. Ripples in the lines of rusted iron, the largest extending higher than any of the surrounding work crews, had turned the tracks into ribbons of vertical S-curves, tapering down into progressively smaller hillocks and bumps. Beyond the last car, the tracks smoothed back down into level, undisrupted parallel lines.

“Very clever.” McNihil didn’t care much, what exact techniques might have been used. He supposed that DynaZauber had found some way of ramping down the SCARF transmutation effects, the narrow-beamed quasi-alchemy that turned aircraft parts into metallic forms too soft to function. That plus enough explosive charges to deform the resulting elasticity, and they could have all the remediable train crashes they wanted. “But you wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble of devising these methods, if you weren’t going to use them on a regular basis.”

“Regular enough,” conceded Harrisch. “It’s not just an issue of managing the corporation; you have to manage the customers as well. Which in our case is the world. Or at least the Gloss-not that there’s any other part of the world that matters. What some people at DynaZauber believe, is that if it isn’t L.A., it ain’t shit. That language is a little more colorful than what I’d use. But the agreed-upon principle is the same: the Pacific is the new Mediterranean. The omphalos, the middle of the earth. It has been for a long time. The great middle ocean, the navel, the solar plexus. Who cares what goes on in Kansas or Ulan Bator? I mean, if there is a Kansas or an Ulan Bator any longer.”

“There’d have to be.” McNihil watched the crews bashing away at the deformed rails. Under the worklights’ glare, the lengths of iron reddened as the welding torches and SCARF invectors continued their assault. “All that flesh on the streets comes from somewhere.”

“As I said: Who cares?” The expression on Harrisch’s face was all politeness and charm. “It comes from somewhere. So do cockroaches. But it doesn’t ride these trains to get here.” He looked even more pleased with himself. “Kansas and Ulan Bator aren’t on the schedule.”

“Nobody is, if you keep taking out the tracks.”

“That’s how they learn to appreciate us.” The smile remained, but Harrisch’s gaze had hardened to simulated diamond. “The Rail Amalgam was too soft on them. We have to put the squeeze on every once in a while. Remind the paying public of all we do for them. How we make their world possible. If we don’t do that, they mistakenly assume that the railroad, the great circle of transport around the rim, is something fixed and eternal, that they can depend upon to be there always, like gravity keeping their feet glued to the earth.”

“Silly bastards,” said McNihil.

“Exactly.” The other man pretended not to notice the sarcasm. “There was a time when they thought that about air travel. Or, to be more precise, they didn’t think about it at all. But their unspoken assumption was wrong. As the world found out.” The glint in Harrisch’s eyes was one of scary earnestness. “How wrong they were-the Noh-flies showed them that. Which was, of course, a good thing. It’s always best to find out the truth, no matter how painful.”

“Or profitable.”

“Oh, admitted.” Harrisch smiled again. “DynaZauber gains thereby-and why shouldn’t we? The truth, the new world, brought us into existence. Therefore, we’re necessary. Therefore, the world should appreciate us, and all we do for it.”

Past the overturned engine and cars, past the crews bashing away beneath the banks of worklights, past the dunelike heaps of rubble mottled with the embers of the dead scavengers’ campfires, a thread of violet had seeped around the edges of the true hills to the east. McNihil was grateful for that vision, the little bit that his own night-filled eyes allowed him to see. It meant that eventually the night would be over in that other world and some form of day would roll across the earth. At least for everybody else, thought McNihil.

“So what do you want from everybody?” He glanced over at Harrisch hanging on the cross beside him. “A letter of thanks? A testimonial dinner?”

“Of course not.” The smile faded a little. “Those kinds of things are always lies. Because they’re made up of words, aren’t they? And thus they would have to be lies, wouldn’t they?”

“I don’t know.” McNihil shrugged. “You tell me.”

“More words. When all that really counts is money.” In the flares of light coming from the base of the rubbled hill, Harrisch’s eyes looked ancient and cold. “It takes a lot of money, both officially and under the table, to keep everything rolling along. It costs a great deal to put things where they need to be. Real things, that is; but that’s all that matters, finally.” White-and-blue marbles of ice filled Harrisch’s eye sockets. “All that cute blather people talked about a while back, about how the future would be nothing but little bits of information being zipped back and forth, the whole world on-line and freed of the constraints of gross materiality-that didn’t come to pass. Atoms endure, Mr. McNihil; they have a tendency to do that. Solid things are built out of them. Whereas information is mainly lies. Nacht und Nebel; night and fog. So in that sense, it’s not even information at all. Misinformation, disinformation; something like that. Therefore, it doesn’t exist at all, for the most part.”

What the hell. McNihil rubbed the dried blood on his forehead. He hadn’t followed that at all. Or even why Harrisch had bothered laying it on him. Maybe when the sun came up, when the shadows of the hills would gradually shrink like detumescing male genitalia, maybe Harrisch would disappear as well, as though his dark image were constructed of the Nacht he spoke of, encasing the pale Nebel of his flesh, which would burn off with the day’s first heat.

“You see,” continued Harrisch, “it’s important to concern ourselves with what’s real. What’s really real. Who was the wise man who said that reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it’s still there?”

“Beats the connect out of me.” McNihil brushed his own dried blood from his fingertips as he glanced over at the other man. “I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”

“That’s a shame. Because it really is important.” The mad spark at the dark centers of Harrisch’s eyes was as ice-cold as their surroundings. “I’m talking about how the world is constructed. Our world, Mr. McNihil, the one in which we exist, for good or ill.”

Mainly the latter, thought McNihil.

“You know,” continued Harrisch, “I share some sentiments with your little friend, back there on the ground. I know a lot about what she thinks and feels. She has the same coital phobia, the disgust and rage that come with all that sticky, messy wiring-up and networking. The erosion of one’s sharply defined outlines, the loss of one’s individuality, subsumed into the great puddinglike mass.” He shook his head. “After all, I didn’t become such as I am by having any great fondness for ego loss. But November-that’s her name, I believe-she thinks the ocean is just sex. Whereas I…” The narrow face’s expression darkened, generating its own shadows in its etched crevices. “I take a considerably wider view. A definition of greater compass. One that takes in all the world, and not just that smaller one bound by sweating skin and mucosal emissions.”

“I either don’t know what the connect you’re talking about,” said McNihil, “or else I just don’t care.” A glyph of ash had been smeared across the back of his hand, sometime during the extended, steel-crumpling crash; he rubbed it away with the ball of his other thumb. “Either way, it doesn’t matter.”

“Perhaps not, Mr. McNihil.” The sharp gaze regarded him, as though he were some small creature suspended on needles. “Why don’t you tell me what does matter to you, then.”

“Look, uh, you have to understand something.” McNihil pointed across the bleak landscape gradually forming out of darkness. “I made my living out in the field, working for the Collection Agency; I’m an operative, not an ideologue. People like you, you start going on about some big cosmic notions, and then I just want to go home and lie down. Lick my wounds, crank up the music, wake up with an empty bottle beside me. I don’t have time or inclination to listen to your theories about how the universe is stitched together. Why don’t you try giving me some kind of clue? About why you wanted to talk to me so much. And this job you’re so hot for me to take on. About looking into what happened to your boy Travelt.” His bruises and bone-aches, from being thrown around inside the toppled passenger car, twinged as he looked at the exec. “I can’t imagine you start off all your appointments this way.”

“Perhaps not.” From above, Harrisch bestowed an indulgent smile. “But you have to admit that it got your attention.”

“Right now, you could have my attention. In exchange for aspirin and morphine.” McNihil shifted his aching bones inside his jacket. “And that was before the unscheduled stop.”

“You’ll be on your way soon.” The other man nodded toward the work crews, farther back along the rails. Between the sizzling sparks of the welding torches and the softer blue of the anti-SCARF generators, the thin lengths of rust-colored metal had been restored, straightened into level functionality. “Our times together are brief, though I hope this one will prove at least… memorable to you. Even after your scars heal.” A slight signal passed from Harrisch to the dark-uniformed assistant at the crane’s levers; the circle and cross dipped hoveringly closer. “Tell me, Mr. McNihil. What do you know about TIAC?”

“‘Kayak?’” Out of the blue; that puzzled him. “You mean, like Eskimos used to paddle around in?”

“Bigger than that.” Amused, Harrisch shook his head. “It’s an acronym. Tee… eye… ae… see. Any idea what that is?”

“Not a one.”

“You should,” said Harrisch. “It has to do with your new job. With the late Travelt. And a lot to do with what happened to him.”

“Ah.” Could’ve guessed that much, thought McNihil. “So I take it that this TIAC thing… it’s got something to do with DynaZauber? Maybe it’s a DZ project of some kind? That seems like the kind of code designation that you and your friends would be fond of.”

“Very good,” Harrisch nodded. “It’s DynaZauber’s baby, all right. And mine, in particular. I’ve been in charge of it for a long time. Exclusively; I don’t have any other corporate responsibilities at the moment.” A shrug. “Well, almost none.”

“Really?” With one hand, McNihil gestured over toward the tracks. “What about all this rail stuff?”

“A little diversion, is all. I’ll be handing it back to the exec who’s actually in charge.” Harrisch’s smile widened. “Let’s just say I borrowed it for a little while. Just to make a grand entrance.”

“Whatever.” McNihil felt more weary than amused. “So this TIAC thing. The letters. So what do they stand for?”

“Actually,” said Harrisch, “you have no need to know. And in fact, perhaps it’s just as well that you don’t know.” The smile disappeared. “All you really need to know is that it’s something that belongs to us. To DynaZauber. And we don’t like losing things that belong to us. Or having them taken.”

“Really?” McNihil wasn’t surprised by that. “How’d you lose it? Or to put it another way… who took it?”

“Those are very good questions.” Harrisch turned his cold gaze around, like aiming a gun. “That’s the reason we hired you, Mr. McNihil. To find out exactly that.” The two black holes at the centers of his eyes were as deep and reflectionless as the surrounding night. “We figured-or I did, at least-that it would be the kind of thing you’d be very good at finding out. Somewhat perfect, actually.”

“Why’s that?”

“Simple.” A few empty seconds passed while Harrisch regarded him. “Where it’s lost, is someplace you’ve been. Someplace you know all about. Rather a specialized area of knowledge for you.”

McNihil said nothing. He had a premonition of where this was all going.

“The Wedge.”

He looked over at Harrisch. “You’ve been misinformed,” said McNihil. He kept his voice quiet and controlled. “I don’t go there.”

“Not anymore?”

“Ever.”

“How interesting.” One of Harrisch’s eyebrows lifted in mock surprise. “My sources are very reliable. And they tell it differently. You had some big times in that little district. Famous times. People are still talking.” The bad smile again. “You don’t hear them, but they are.”

McNihil felt his own anger stacking up inside himself. At this point, after those words, he didn’t care if the other man had his corporate flunkies and thugs all around. I’ll unload on him, swore McNihil, letting the hands dangling at his sides tense in fists. I don’t care what happens. Not anymore…

“I seem to have upset you,” said Harrisch smoothly. “My apologies.”

“Don’t bother.” McNihil supposed that the vein he could sense pulsing at the corner of his brow was the dead giveaway about his emotional state. “You can go back and congratulate your sources. They’ve got it right this time.”

Ancient history. It felt that way, like something engraved on rock-faced stelae on the mountainsides, the records of fallen empires. Though the only thing that had fallen was McNihil himself. A bad fall, the kind that you survive. But I wish I hadn’t, he brooded. Another night, older and deeper than this one, folded around him.

The truth of the matter: any line McNihil handed out about not working as an asp-head anymore was pure shuck and jive. He knew the score; it was burned into not only his personnel file back at the Collection Agency, but into the file he carried around inside his head. The file marked both Learn to Forget and Not to Be Forgotten.

“You have to expect things like this.” Harrisch’s voice slid into his thoughts. “You have to expect that I’d know all about what happened. Back then.”

“Big deal,” growled McNihil. “So you know I didn’t leave the agency voluntarily.”

“That’s one way of putting it. Another would be to say that they canned your ass.”

“Whatever.”

“Look at it this way.” The exec’s voice needled farther under McNihil’s skin. “Forced out of one job, forced into another one-it’s a wash. I’m giving you a golden opportunity.”

He turned a heavy-lidded glare toward Harrisch. “To do what?”

“To finish what you started.” The smile went lopsided as Harrisch tilted his head. “That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

McNihil went silent again. A few seconds ticked away before he spoke. Then, quietly: “How would you know what I want?”

“Come on,” said Harrisch. He spread his unstigmatic hands apart. “It’s human nature. You might not think I know anything about that, but I do.” One hand lifted, as though in preparation for laying a benediction on McNihil. “More than you might imagine, as a matter of fact; it’s kind of a speciality of mine. So when I say that you’re still pissed about what happened to you-what went down in the Wedge-I’m pretty sure I’m right.”

The man was right; that was the problem. McNihil coldly regarded the DZ exec. “Human nature,” said McNihil, “isn’t the problem with the Wedge. It’s the inhuman parts that screw people up. You think you’re clued in on that as well?”

“Enough. Enough to know what happened to you.” Harrisch’s voice went monotone and level, a deliberately flattened recitation of facts. “You were the head of the Collection Agency team that was going to sort out the Wedge. That’s how high up in the agency you were; you had total control over-and responsibility for-the operation.”

“That’s right.” McNihil nodded. “I reported straight to the agency director. No levels, no organizational hierarchy, between me and the top.”

“You even initiated the operation. It was your idea. So when things went wrong-and they did, badly-there was nobody to take the fall except you. Nobody to blame but yourself.”

Also true. The Wedge, that amorphous zone of sexual license, existing everywhere and nowhere simultaneously, in the human mind and in flesh and somewhere in between-it was only to be expected that a place and a concept like that would become the home for other excesses, other crimes. If not against nature, then at least against property. Specifically, the kind that the Collection Agency was supposed to protect. Copyright infringement as sexual stimulation; that was to be expected as well. One perversion always led to another. Where Eros linked up with Thanatos; the fact that in the daylight world, the social universe outside the Wedge, that kind of screwing around led inevitably to one’s death, or worse, only ratchetted the thrills up even further.

“All right,” said McNihil. “That’s all true. I took the fall… and I deserved to. If for no other reason than because I was the guy in charge. But I don’t have any regrets about it. I’m sorry about the way it turned out, but I still believe we had to do it. We had to give it a shot.”

“‘Sorry’?” That got a laugh from Harrisch. “You’re sorry? Hey, there were people who died in that little fiasco. I’ve seen the body count. Your fellow agents; some of them came back in bags, others didn’t come back at all. No wonder your reputation went to shit inside the Collection Agency.”

“They knew what they were getting into.”

“Did they?” Harrisch peered closer at him. “Did you?”

“There were some… surprises,” admitted McNihil. “Things we weren’t expecting.”

“I’ll say.” Nodding, Harrisch folded his arms across his chest. “There’s one thing in particular you didn’t expect. Or should I say ‘someone’?”

He knew what Harrisch was going to say next, the name that would be spoken.

“You weren’t expecting Verrity, were you?”

“No,” said McNihil. “We weren’t. We didn’t know. We’d heard of her-at least I had-but nobody thought she was real. I thought she was just… legendary. Just the kind of myth that grows in places like the Wedge.”

“So she took you by surprise.” Harrisch’s gaze was close to pitying. “When you found out she was real.”

“That was… the last thing I expected.”

“Not just real,” corrected Harrisch. “More to it than that, wasn’t there? More to her. Realer than real-at least inside the Wedge. And that’s all that matters, isn’t it? That’s enough of a world for Verrity to be queen of. Enough of a world to kick your ass in.”

“Not just mine.” McNihil’s turn for a grim smile. “You’re the one who’s complaining about someone having your valuable missing property.”

“True.” Harrisch nodded. “So you see-we do have something in common, you and I.A common enemy. Verrity has something of mine-something that belongs to DynaZauber-and she also has something of yours. Your past, a great big bloody piece of it. Which translates to your pride. Your self-respect.”

“That’s where you’re wrong.” McNihil shook his head. “I don’t have any of those things. I never did. They’re not important.”

“So you say. But if that’s the case-” The needle of Harrisch’s gaze probed deeper. “Then why do you want revenge? Why do you want to get back at her so badly?”

For a few seconds, McNihil made no reply. Then: “Because. Like you said”-simply and quietly-“I just want to finish the job. The one that I started.”

“And that’s why you’ll take this one,” said Harrisch. “The one for us. Finding out what happened to Travelt. You could’ve gotten out of it; there are ways. A person like you would know how to just… disappear. Where you couldn’t be found, even by the regular police. But you didn’t.”

“I didn’t want to. I’m way too tired for that kind of shit.” Another shake of the head, more ruefully intended. “Like the old lines go: Better to die where you stand.”

“Dying would be one of your easier options.” Harrisch didn’t appear impressed. “Easier than going up against Verrity again.”

McNihil knew what the DZ exec was talking about. When the Collection Agency’s operation into the Wedge had gone down, the operation he’d planned and overseen, he hadn’t been there. In the Wedge-even the agents who’d died, the ones who’d taken the big hit, the one you didn’t stand up from afterward; they hadn’t gone into the Wedge, either. There was no need to… or at least that was how the reasoning had gone. Nothing made of human flesh went into that zone; that was what the prowlers were for. To go and fetch, like human-shaped dogs in artificial skins, the physical equivalent of the so-called intelligent agents that’d been created before the end of the century, those software entities programmed to scour the old on-line networks for desired info. Prowlers, on the other hand, were really real; they went out into the Wedge and brought back another kind of hot blue info, for the remote-and safe-consumption by their masters. The Collection Agency troops who ventured into the Wedge may have done so for reasons other than those of the zone’s habitués-to extinguish rather than experience-but they did so using the same means. Not their flesh at risk, but their surrogates’; the Collection Agency’s own little squad of purpose-built prowlers.

The agency’s prowlers went into the Wedge, and found the hot blue zone wherever it faded from mental concept into physical reality; only sometimes, they went in and didn’t come back out. A few did, and brought back death with them. The asp-heads who’d been working for the agency back then, the ones who’d volunteered for McNihil’s clean-up-the-Wedge squad, wound up sticking their tongues into those wet red sockets… and had received a fatal communion in their bloodied saliva.

“But you knew-you found out-who was responsible.” Harrisch’s voice crept through all those old memories, as though he had some direct line into the skull that held them. “Didn’t you?”

McNihil remained silent, knowing that there wasn’t any answer required. The other man was way ahead of him. He must’ve been rooting through the agency files, thought McNihil. Or else DynaZauber itself had a direct line; maybe DZ had bought out the Collection Agency somehow, and was operating it as a wholly owned subsidiary, just as they were apparently doing now with the rail network. It could happen; Dyna-Zauber was one of the big predators in the corporate world, and the Collection Agency was going through a headquarters shake-up, at least according to McNihil’s own longtime contacts inside.

There was another possibility. Maybe, thought McNihil, the information came from the other side. That was something to be considered: that DZ was forming its partnerships and strategic alliances from among the bad guys, the technically, legally bad guys. Wouldn’t be the first time-McNihil dredged up a reference from ancient history. It’d be like some sort of Hitler-Stalin pact of the intellectual-property sphere, the collusion of entities that were supposed to be at each other’s throats.

“Whatever.” He turned away and looked across the rubbish-strewn landscape. His distaste for the conversation extended, permeating everything he saw before him like a bad smell. This is what I get, thought McNihil grimly. For getting involved-for letting himself get involved-with all this happy horseshit. Enough morning sunlight spilled over the distant mountains that the world’s details were even more depressingly revealed to him. The scavenger dead were already out, creeping away from the ashes of their tiny, perfunctory campfires; the scrabbling, black-nailed hands had begun their owners’ hunchbacked rituals of turning over each crumbling leaf of trash, looking for something, anything, that could be converted to the usual small profit. McNihil felt as if he had already joined their number.

Then again… maybe he wasn’t the only one. He looked over at Harrisch, having suddenly realized something else. “You wouldn’t be talking about Verrity,” said McNihil, “unless she was important to you, too. If you’ve lost something… she must be the one who has it.”

Hanging on the cross, Harrisch looked even more uncomfortable. “Well. We don’t know that for sure.”

“But that’s what you suspect.”

The exec shrugged. That was answer enough.

“So what is it,” said McNihil, “that she’s got of yours? You must want it back awfully badly. Or otherwise you wouldn’t be putting up with my shit.”

“God, that’s true enough.” Harrisch rolled his eyes up toward the sky, then sighed. “What we lost is one of our own. We lost Travelt.”

“No, you didn’t. We were all standing around looking at him, back there at his cubapt.”

Harrisch shook his head impatiently. “That’s what’s left of him. The outside part. We lost the inside part of him. That’s what we want back.”

For a few seconds, McNihil mulled that over. “Why?” he asked at last. “What’s so valuable about a junior exec? They’re not that hard to replace. Promote one out of the copy room, you need one so badly.”

“Look, pal. You don’t need to know why we want him back. Maybe we’re sentimental at DZ-”

That’ll be the day, thought McNihil.

“All you need to know,” continued Harrisch, “is what. And where. You go and do the rest.”

Dream on, connector. “Just what inside part of Travelt do you think I should go looking for? The package I saw back there at the cubapt seemed just about ready to be picked apart.”

“Shouldn’t be all that difficult.” Harrisch’s irritation appeared to have simmered down. “For somebody of your talents and experience. Except that it’s still walking around. Not in the Gloss per se. But in the Wedge.”

McNihil wasn’t surprised. “What you’re talking about,” he said, “is a prowler. You want me to go find the prowler that your little junior exec was using. Gone missing, has it?”

“That’s right.”

“So what?” McNihil had started to get a crick in his neck from looking up at the exec on the cross. “It probably didn’t come wandering home, because there’s no reason for it to do so. Its user is dead. Who’s it going to come back and down to? The refrigerator?”

“We don’t care if it downs to anybody-or anything.” Harrisch was way past smiling anymore. “Matter of fact, we’d prefer if it didn’t. If it just disappeared into the Wedge-if it disappeared off the face of the connecting planet-that’d be fine by us. But unfortunately, it’s still out there somewhere. And it’s causing us a little embarrassment.”

“I don’t see why. Prowlers are legal. Technically.” McNihil reached up and rubbed the back of his aching neck. He wondered if this idiot’s arranged train wreck had given him whiplash. “As long as you don’t get caught doing something stupid with one. If you think it’s bad for the DynaZauber corporate image that one of your junior execs got himself one-” As if anybody cares. “Hey.” McNihil dropped his hand and shrugged. “Tell ’em you fired the guy’s ass before he got into trouble.”

“Travelt didn’t ‘get’ himself a prowler. He was given it. By me.”

“Ah.” That didn’t particularly surprise McNihil, either. “That was nice of you. Seems to have wound up getting the poor bastard killed, but what the heck. Does everybody at DZ get one? Must really play hell with the personnel department.”

“It was a present,” said Harrisch stiffly. “A bonus. A little token of my esteem. Travelt had done… particularly well on some of his assignments at DynaZauber.”

“I bet.”

“So he’d earned himself… a little something extra. And at the same time… he needed it.” Harrisch made the words sound reasonable enough. “Travelt was a hard worker; perhaps a little too hard. Too serious. All work and no play. He needed something… for relaxing. Bringing a little… variety into his life. He was valuable enough that I didn’t want him burning out on me too soon.”

“Of course not,” said McNihil. “Just soon enough.” Nothing in the exec’s spiel surprised him. Why he had me check out the corpse-so it would be obvious that prowler usage was involved. And even… approved of, as Harrisch might say in that arch manner of his. Because they’re all doing it. All of Harrisch’s flacks and flunkies, the various ranks of business suits that had been hovering around there at the cubapt-they’d all had that look about them, smug and conspiratorial, in on something good. Something better than regular people ever had. It was the same look that baggies and other chem’d-out types radiated, at least on the upslope of their crash-and-burn biographies. They’d all had it… except for Harrisch himself. He was on to something even better. Control was the best drug, the spark better than anything that could be gotten out of a prowler’s mouth.

“I didn’t think… he could hurt himself with it.” A little actorly remorse slid across Harrisch’s face. “For most people… they’re harmless.”

“Sure they are. And for other people… they’re even profitable.”

Harrisch drew his head back against the top of the cross. “What do you mean?”

“Come on. Prowlers are manufactured by a DZ subsidiary. If nothing else, you got it at cost.” Cheap bastard, thought McNihil. “A box of chocolates would’ve run you more.”

“Maybe you’re right,” said Harrisch. “Maybe that’s what I should’ve done. But it’s too late now. And besides… we were sandbagged. Somebody connected with the prowler that I gave to Travelt. Altered it, outside of its original specifications. That’s where the trouble comes from.”

“How do you know that?”

“Perhaps if I gave you proof?” Harrisch’s voice resumed its usual oily ease. “Or at least some evidence. Then maybe you’d give some proper consideration to what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

“Sure.” McNihil glanced up at the other man. “Lay it on me.” He didn’t have very high hopes.

With a nod of his head, Harrisch signaled to an assistant lurking nearby, possibly the same flunky that had led McNihil to the dead man’s cubapt; he couldn’t tell any of them apart. The assistant walked over to McNihil and dug inside his jacket, finally extracting a couple of sheets of paper, which he deposited in McNihil’s hand.

“What’s all this?” The papers had the look and feel of inexpensive photocopies. McNihil unfolded them and turned them right side around. “Receipts? For what?”

“You can read,” the assistant said sourly.

McNihil held the papers toward the advancing sunlight. Now he could make out the logo and words at the top of the first sheet of paper. “That’s great.” He shook his head; this, at least, he hadn’t been expecting. The receipt was from the central L.A. branch of the Snake Medicine™ franchise. McNihil held the papers out at arm’s length, not so much to read what was on them, as from some instinctive, deeply rooted aversion. Cheesy sexual services, he thought glumly. At the low end of the business, which was probably where the company made most of its profits. “What’s this for? The little novelty items for the Christmas office party?” McNihil wondered if the Adder clomes at the SM clinic handled that sort of thing; streamers and other decorations, little party hats, all with some sort of grossly obscene motif. He didn’t know; he’d never been inside one of the shops, or boutiques, or whatever they were called. A fragmentary image came into his thoughts, of Harrisch and his coterie of ass-kissing junior execs, bedecked with wobbling phallic headgear-at best-and blowing hideous flesh-colored noisemakers at each other. “You know… I wasn’t aware that you and your bunch were such fun guys.”

“We’re not. Take a closer look.”

McNihil saw now what the exec meant. This particular receipt was obviously for some kind of high-end merchandise; McNihil glanced at the dollar amount at the bottom of the right-hand column, and was impressed despite himself. “Was all this for you, or one of your friends?” He tried to hand the papers back to the assistant, but without success.

“Come on.” Harrisch didn’t rise to the bait. “Look at the address. Where the merchandise was delivered.”

“Travelt’s cubapt.” It took less than a second for him to make the connection. “So this is for the prowler you gave to him.”

“Correct. As you said, chocolates would’ve been more expensive. But that’s not what I wanted you to see. Read the next page.”

McNihil shuffled the two pieces of paper, bringing the second one up on top. This one also had the Snake Medicine™ franchise logo on top, and the same order reference number as the other paper. “What’s all this?” The additional words and numbers didn’t make any particular sense to him. “Am I supposed to know what this means?”

“I’ll tell you,” said Harrisch. “It’s the catalog information for the modifications that were made on the prowler, before it was delivered to Travelt. Modifications I didn’t order.”

“What were they?”

“That… I don’t know.” A spark of anger flared up in the exec’s voice again. “The numbers don’t correspond to anything in the regular SM catalog. Or the secret one, which they don’t even keep under the counter. The one they make available to just their top corporate customers.”

“Like you.”

“Like me,” said Harrisch.

What the connect could it’ve been? wondered McNihil. Hard to imagine; the commercial clomes at the Snake Medicine™ clinics, the owner-operators fronting the business establishments, made a point of advertising their full range of services. That was their shtick, why they were all surgically altered into the idealized sleazy image from some old semiforgotten book, the doctor with the knife sharp enough to deliver whatever the customer wanted, sex-wise. From a simple stay-in-one-place tattoo, all the way to a Full Prince Charles job; you made the appointment with whatever Adder clome had set up shop in a low-rent storefront in your zone of the Gloss, and as long as you had the money for it, you could have your own little doorway into the Wedge carved into your body. The Snake Medicine™ clinics were even more legally tolerated than prowler usage, though the Adder clomes always tried to make it seem that they were operating right on the edge of the law, at least in part. McNihil had always figured that was just the usual faux rebellious ad spin on the clinics’ regulated, safe-’n’-sane merchandise and services.

“Why not call them up?” McNihil lowered the sheets of paper in his hand. “Talk to the clome in charge. Ask him what these modifications were. If you’re paying the bill, you’ve got a right to know.”

“No can do.” On the cross, Harrisch shook his head. “This item was paid for out of a corporate slush fund. If I initiate a billing-error inquiry, all hell breaks loose in the accounting department. Believe me, it’s easier to go outside the loop, have somebody like you poke into the matter. Besides-I don’t need to know exactly how this particular mess was created. I just need it cleaned up.”

“Your lost property?”

“Exactly. The sooner it’s back in my hands, the happier I’ll be.” Harrisch’s ugly smile reappeared. “And when I’m happy… I make sure everybody else gets happy, too.”

I’d be happy, thought McNihil, if you’d get off my ass. “You still haven’t told me what this inside part of Travelt is, that you’ve lost.”

“Travelt… knew things.” Harrisch nodded, slowly and thoughtfully. “He’d have to have, he’d worked himself up in the corporation pretty well. He really knew the TIAC project inside and out. Close to being my right-hand man on it. As a matter of fact…” The exec shifted uncomfortably on the cross. “There were some things only Travelt was completely knowledgeable about.”

“For somebody who wound up dead,” remarked McNihil, “he sounds pretty smart. There’s nothing like making yourself indispensable.”

“True. He wasn’t an idiot. As it turned out… neither was the prowler I gave him.”

McNihil tilted his head, trying to catch an angle into the other man’s eyes. “What do you mean?”

“Something happened,” said Harrisch. “Between Travelt and the prowler. That we weren’t expecting. It’s always a very… tight relationship between a user and his prowler; intimate, you might say. And the one between Travelt and his prowler became more than tight; it apparently started to overlap. Big time. Instead of an essential separation between the two, a unity started to form. Transference occurred.”

“That’s what’s supposed to happen.” Something was hidden in the exec’s gaze, that McNihil wasn’t yet able to make out. “That’s what a prowler is designed to do. It goes out and gets a certain kind of information and transfers it to the user in the form of memory.”

“Sure-but that’s a one-way street. The information goes from the prowler to the user. Not the other way around.” Harrisch’s voice went up a notch. “Something else happened with Travelt and his prowler. That’s what the unauthorized modification must’ve been about. Something to make the overlap possible, to change the one-way street into a two-way. The information went the other direction-something from Travelt wound up inside the prowler’s head.”

Now McNihil got it. “The TIAC information. Whatever it was.” The exec hadn’t told him the details. “It transferred over into the prowler. Right?”

“Exactly.”

“Along with what else?”

“That’s… hard to say.” Harrisch’s shoulders lifted, then fell. “It may be safer just to assume that everything crossed over, from Travelt’s head to the prowler’s. The whole personality structure, memories, ideas, information… the whole gestalt of Travelt got downed into the prowler.”

“How do you know?”

“There’ve been… indications. Little bits and pieces showing up. Details about the TIAC project, personal things-all sorts of stuff. Stuff that shouldn’t be turning up at all, especially if the person who had them in his head is deceased now. It’s a leakage phenomenon. When other prowlers go into the Wedge, and they bring back things for their users to enjoy…” Harrisch inhaled deeply, then breathed out. “That’s how I know. Because the other execs, the ones who also have prowlers, report these things to me. He’s out there, all right.”

“You mean,” said McNihil, “the prowler is.”

“It’s the same thing.” A fierce possessiveness tinged Harrisch’s words. “The prowler I gave him has gone missing, and it’s got Travelt inside. Or enough of him, at any rate. And enough of him is my property. DynaZauber property. Every detail about the TIAC project-that’s ours. And I want it back.”

McNihil looked away from the angry figure on the cross. He didn’t know how much of Harrisch’s story to believe. And I don’t care, he thought. “Maybe you should climb down from there.” He glanced back over to the elevated Harrisch. “And go looking for it yourself. Because I’m not going to.”

Before Harrisch, face darkening, could say anything, one of the first-aid techs, in a green scrub uniform, showed up at the foot of the circle-enclosed cross. “Sorry to interrupt.” The tech stripped latex gloves from his hands. “But I figured you’d want a report on that woman. The one from the crash, that you were having us take care of.”

Harrisch’s annoyance was visible in his furious expression. “What about her?”

“She’s fine. Bruised and banged up, but nothing more than that.” The first-aid tech wadded up the gloves and held them in one hand. “As a matter of fact, she’s so fine she’s gone.”

“What’re you talking about?”

The tech shrugged. “She took a powder. Got off the stretcher, unhooked the monitors, and went for a walk. Guess she didn’t want to hang around.” The tech started to head back toward the rail line. “Like I said, just thought you should know.”

“That’s how it is for me, too.” McNihil looked up at the exec. “If the train’s ready to roll, so am I.”

“What about the job?” Harrisch looked like he was about to decrucify himself, to jump down from the apparatus and go face-to-face with the asp-head. “Now you know all about it. So you’re ready to take it on, right?”

McNihil shook his head. “Sorry. The answer’s the same as before. Not interested.” He turned away and headed toward the train, set right once more on its tracks. The repair crews were wrapping up the last details.

The exec shouted after him. “Why the connect not?”

“I’m busy.” McNihil stopped for a moment and glanced back over his shoulder. “I’ve already got a job to take care of.”