Noir

Fred, understanding that he seemed a bleak, sexless person to Harry, tried to prove that Harry had him wrong. He nudged Harry, man-to-man. “Like that, Harry?” he asked.

“Like what?”

“The girl there.”

“That’s not a girl. That’s a piece of paper.”

“Looks like a girl to me.” Fred Rosewater leered.

“Then you’re easily fooled,” said Harry. “It’s done with ink on a piece of paper. That girl isn’t lying there on the counter. She’s thousands of miles away, doesn’t even know we’re alive. If this was a real girl, all I’d have to do for a living would be to stay home and cut out pictures of big fish.”

– KURT VONNEGUT, JR.

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

(Delacorte Press, New York, 1965)

NINE

As she was settling in, starting another vigil, somebody came round to remind November that she had bills coming due.

“You’re always forgetting your friends,” said the big dark shape. The man’s face was hidden by shadow, but she knew what it looked like. “But your friends don’t forget you.”

Shit, thought November. Sonuvabitch. “Maybe you could just stop thinking about me for a while. Every now and then wouldn’t hurt.”

There was no way of getting past the guy, breaking out into the open street beyond; he filled up the alley’s mouth like a fourth expanse of bricks, the cork in the bottle’s neck. She’d stationed herself here with a pony bottle of Minnesota Evian and a pack of acetone-laced Gitanes, watching the doorway of the building her quarry, McNihil, was slated for. Her bruises from the train crash were slowly fading. In the meantime, she didn’t want to lose track of McNihil and the bill-paying score he represented. And now this, she thought. Thinking about the money she owed had summoned up their walking embodiment of debt-load, heavy and nasty.

“How can we?” This one had a sense of humor. “You’re so connectin’ cute.”

November took a last harsh drag off the cigarette she’d had going, reducing it to a stub. She bent down to throw it through the gap between the man’s hip and the alley wall, tensing at the same time to dive through that narrow space and hit the ground with a shoulder-first roll on the other side.

“But not cute enough.” The man’s beefy fist seized onto the collar of her jacket, lifting her up dangling in the air. “Let’s talk some more.”

She let herself be nailed by his one hand up against the damp bricks, her bootsoles inches from the needles and patches strewn across the alley’s floor. “Numbers are always interesting,” he said. “Let’s take a look.”

“You know what the numbers are.” November tried to convey an irritated, tolerance-stretched disgust; it was hard in her present position. “You wouldn’t be talking to me otherwise.”

“Just want to make sure you know what they are.” Still holding her up with one hand, he grabbed her wrist with the other. “Palm-reading time. Let’s have the Gypsies tell your fortune, sweetheart.”

He twisted her arm around hard enough to get an involuntary squeak of pain out of her. I bet you enjoyed that-she kept herself from speaking the words aloud. She knew better than to try anything on him, the kind of stuff that worked so well on her postcoital marks on the trains; not that it wouldn’t work just as well on him, dropping him paralyzed on his back. But that the consequences, when he caught up with her again-and that was guaranteed-would be so much worse than letting him do what he wanted now. That was the problem with being in hock, she’d often reminded herself. It gave other people power over you, and not the enjoyable variety.

“So what do we have here?” He squeezed her trapped wrist, enough to make her fingers splay out trembling. “Your heart line… well, that’s pretty much as to be expected, isn’t it?” His small eyes glanced up to hers. “Kind of a narrow little scratch, that doesn’t lead to much. And your life line…” He pressed his thumb into the middle of her palm. “That one doesn’t look good at all.”

“I’ll do the worrying about that one.”

“Oh, no; we all have to worry. Don’t we?” The wide ball of his thumb rubbed sweat between her skin and his. “Because if something happened to you-then we’d be out quite a bit. We’ve invested a lot of money in you.”

“Right.” November managed to nod her head, scraping against the wall behind her. “And you’ve gotten it back. With interest.”

“Not all of it. And not enough interest-not what you’re down for at least, sweetheart.” The man raised his thumb from her palm. “Let’s add ’em up.”

She said nothing, but watched as he turned her hand toward the light slicing down the alley. The invisible numbers, written in the cup of her palm, were visible to him as well. He had a master filter cut into his eyes-when he’d looked up at her, she’d been able to spot the dull silver worm at the far depth of his pupils. So he could read not only what was there in her hand, but in the hands of all those who’d signed themselves over to his sharkoid employers.

“Honey, you’re way into us.” He sucked his breath in between his teeth. “You taken a look at this lately? I knew we loved your ass, but I didn’t think we loved it this much.”

“I know what it says.” The jacket’s leather, drawn up by the man’s hold, had gathered under her arms; November felt as if she were being softly crucified. “You don’t have to make a big production number out of this.”

He leaned his broad face close to hers. “Then you’re the one who should be tap-dancing.” His breath smelled like hydrogenated fat and Thai peppers. “Just as fast as you can.”

Taking a step backward, he let go of her collar. The back of her head skidded down the wall, the friction enough to snap a match into flame. Her butt hit the ground, jamming her spine upward; it felt as if the topmost vertebrae had crunched against the inside curve of her skull.

She had no time to react; the man jerked her arm up by the wrist he still held. He reached down with his other hand and grabbed a fistful of her hair, rocking her head back.

“Look up here, cunt.” The sweetheart rhetoric was over. “Up here where the numbers are.”

Her throat was stretched so taut that she could barely whisper. “I see them…”

“Oh, take a good look. Because I don’t think you know what they are at all. You must not have checked them very recently, that’s for sure.” He gave a quick rap with the back of her head against the wall. “Otherwise, you’d be a lot more scared than you are now.”

“All right. All right; just give me a moment…” November knew the guy wasn’t playing around now; it didn’t matter whether he might be enjoying this part more than the cute stuff that’d preceded it. She gazed up at her hand, focusing on the numbers written in her palm, just below the little black symbol, just above the knuckled cuff of the thug’s fist. The filter in her eyes rendered the numbers visible to her, the secret history of her accounts…

“Christ.” The single appalled word escaped from her lips. She saw what he’d meant. And just as he’d predicted, she was afraid. “What happened?”

The numbers had always been in red; that meant nothing, just the way the filters made them appear, like legible, luminous blood. But at the bottom of one of the columns, the total blinked on and off, speeding ahead of her pulse. That meant a great deal. None of it good.

“Things can change on you. Really fast.” He looked down at her with a mixture of pity and contempt. “The Djakarta quarterlies-and the peek-ahead from the Vladivostok exchanges-their output figures were way up. The teneviki put out a regulatory call, and the bank conglomerates jacked their prime rates. Get the picture?” He gave her arm a tug, not for pain, just for emphasis. “Your main account, the one in which you’ve been rolling over all the others-you didn’t lock in the interest. You wanted that discount from going with an adjustable. That was stupid of you.”

“It seemed like a good idea.” November still felt a little dazed. The numbers kept on blinking, like intermittent stigmata. “At the time, it did.”

“That was then. This is badly now. Bad for you, sweetheart.” His voice had actually softened. “You got the picture, didn’t you?” He brought her palm down nearer to her face. “We can call in our markers right now. We can foreclose on you. We can have your ass on toast, if that’s what we want.”

She looked up hopefully into his face. “Is it?”

A smile showed at one corner of his mouth. “That’s a tempting offer, sweetheart, but not right now. I don’t mix business with pleasure. And at this particular moment, my business is telling you what the score is.”

“Please… you really don’t have to.” November hoped the guy wasn’t about to go into details, all of which she was familiar enough with. She’d spent enough time down there, south of True Los Angeles, talking with the dead and indeadted, including McNihil’s deceased wife, to know what happened to people who couldn’t pay their bills. Especially the kind she’d run up; the loan sharks were always hardest on speculators and hustlers such as herself. Maybe out of some ruthless Darwinian motivation: weeding out the failures was how a tougher, faster species was bred into existence.

“Look,” said November. Her thoughts had pulled together, enough that she could at least talk, even if she didn’t know what hustling verbiage to use. “Maybe we can work something out…”

“I told you. I’m not interested in that right now.”

“No, no-I mean some kind of, uh, financing arrangement.” She could feel her brain kicking into overdrive; all she needed was some traction on this slippery ground. “You know I’m about to score here. Really. All I need is a little more time.” The words started coming faster and faster. “It’d be a shame, I mean a shame for you people, if you had to write off my account, all that money down the toilet, just because you couldn’t cut me a few extra days-”

“Don’t sweat it.” The man shook his thick-necked head in a combination of amusement and disgust. “We’re not writing you off. You want some more time? Great, that’s what I’m here for.”

She drew back, eyeing him. “What’s the catch?”

“What do you want it to be?”

November frowned in puzzlement. “I didn’t follow that one…”

He used her trapped hand to pull her upright. “Like I said: Whatever you want.” He pushed her palm toward her face, almost touching her nose.” How do you like these numbers? Better?”

The red numbers were so close, she could just bring them into fuzzy focus. But that was enough for November to see that the baleful total wasn’t blinking anymore.

“Does that do your heart good?” The man smiled at her from the other side of the hand in front of her face. “Think you can breathe now?”

“I don’t get it…” The tips of her fingers felt numb, detached. “What did you do…”

“No big thing.” The man let go of her wrist. “I just took care of your problems, that’s all. Or let’s say… they were already taken care of.” He wiped her sweat off against the front of his coat. “You’re a lucky girl. Today, at least.”

They refinanced me, thought November. She moved her hand away, bringing the numbers sharper. Without needing any authorization from her; the sharks had that option, if they wanted to, when somebody’s account went into the foreclosure zone.

“Look, I appreciate this…” November lowered her hand. “But I don’t know if I can take any higher interest rate than what I had already. You’re gonna be slicing my margins pretty tight…”

“I wouldn’t know about tight. Like I said, I’m not interested in that.” The man’s heavy shoulders lifted in a noncommittal shrug. “Besides, you don’t have anything to fret about. We haven’t jacked up your rates. We’re doing you a favor: your terms have been rolled back to what they were when you signed for the adjustable, and we’ve frozen ’em there. Plus we’re cutting you an extension on the due date.”

“What?” November stared at him in amazement. “Nobody does that.”

“So what can I say. We’re connectin’ saints.”

“No, you’re not.” She pressed her hands flat against the alley wall behind her. “I know that much.”

“Well, maybe you’re right about that.” The man looked out at the empty street, then back toward her. “Maybe there is something we want in exchange.” He brought his face close to hers, his exhaled breath as fiery as before. “For being so understanding of your problems.”

She said nothing. Just waited, without moving.

“Don’t fuck up.” No smile, nothing but the black holes of his eyes, capturing the tiny images of her face. “You got that? That’s what we want. Don’t connect up this one.”

His voice, without shouting, had efficiently pinned her to the wall. It’s not about money, realized November. Or at least not about the money I owe them. Something else was going on. Deep shit, with its own negative luminosity, like some dead and malignant sun.

She spoke at last. “I got it,” said November.

“That’s why you don’t have to say thank you.” The man stepped back from her. “It’s not really necessary, is it? Strictly business, that’s all.”

That got a nod from her. “Strictly business.”

“Maybe next time…” His smile floated lazily to the surface once more. “Maybe next time, we can talk about that other business. Between me and you.”

“I don’t think so.” November regarded him coldly. “Like you said; you’re not doing me any favors. So I don’t have to be nice to you. So connect off.”

He laughed, then turned and walked away, steering his wide bulk toward the alley’s mouth.

When he was gone, November turned her gaze back toward the building she’d been watching. Her target, McNihil, would be arriving soon, she knew. She’d kept her vigil; all the time the loan sharks’ man had been harassing her, she’d been able to keep a minimum eye on the building’s doorway.

The connector didn’t know how important he was. For a lot of reasons, and not just for her. She wondered, as she folded her arms across her breast and leaned back against the damp bricks, just what some of those other reasons might be.

McNihil leaned back into the padding of the taxicab’s backseat and watched massive, vaguely Stalinist buildings slide by. For a moment, he wondered if he had actually overshot his destination and wound up in some entirely different segment of the Gloss, over on the Pacific’s Asian shores. He checked his watch; it hadn’t adjusted for moving into a new time zone, so he knew he was still on the West Coast of the North American continent. Plus, he simply hadn’t been traveling long enough to have looped around the Bering Strait and south toward Vladivostok. I may be losing it these days, he thought, but not that much.

He figured this had to be around Sea-Tac, where the international airport had been, back when the Noh-flies hadn’t taken up residence in the gray, endless clouds and people could still take jetliners from one point to another on the earth’s surface. McNihil just hadn’t been up this way for a while-months, at least-and the rate of new construction piling out of Seattle’s core had gotten away from him. The architecture, great brutal slabs and cubes of poured and uptilted ferroconcrete, was the manifested embodiment of the lowering weather and the population’s taste in bloodstream additives. There was a certain smack grandeur, the confluence of De Quincey and Cobain, to such massive, raw vistas. Places where one could be borne to the sepulchre in a crystal, sound-proofed coffin by leering hallucinations of alligators, streets cleaved between towers to the frozen center of the earth, the annihilation by scale of all that was puny and human.

Settled in the cab’s stained upholstery, McNihil let bleak architectural musings seep from his thoughts. He took comfort in the knowledge that he was heading into the center of the old city, that the business he’d come here to take care of was located in a zone of comprehensible and familiar decay.

“Here?” The cabbie sounded incredulous. “This is where you want off? You’re kidding, right?”

The vehicle had come to a stop, after the push and pull of the interstate feeder traffic. McNihil glanced out the window. “Doesn’t look that risky to me.” He’d seen worse places. He lived in one.

“Of course not. It’s just such a tourist trap.” Disappointment filtered into the cabbie’s voice, as well as expectation of a stiffed tip. “I took you for some kind of exec type.”

“Yeah, there’s that kind of aura about me. It’s a curse.” From his wallet, McNihil extracted his debit card and poised it at the slot of the reader mounted on the dividing panel. “What’s the damages?”

A string of blue LED’s blinked on beside the reader. “There’s a hazard add-on.” The cabbie didn’t sound apologetic. “I don’t usually bring people from the station out this way.”

“Don’t worry about it. I take it off my taxes.” He ran the card through the slot, the reader taking a recorded bite from his only operational account. “And it’s not even a scam.” Or not much of one, thought McNihil.

The cabbie gave him a reappraising look. “Maybe you want me to stick around? For when you’re ready to go back?”

McNihil shook his head. He’d gotten out and slammed the passenger door shut. “I’ll take my chances.”

Scanning the area, as the cab’s engine noise faded down the narrow street, McNihil’s gaze took in a withered park, a little urban pocket of dead greenery. Lack of sunshine hadn’t killed it; the buildings surrounding it were ancient nineteenth- and twentieth-century constructs, nowhere near high enough to form a well-like canyon of steel and faux-marble facades. Another channel of light had been cut by a crashed 747, one of the first Noh-fly victims to have its unshielded cockpit electronics HERF’d out and rendered useless. The plane had gone down here as though, in its terminal arc, it had been trying to return to its vanished Boeing birthplace. It had almost made it; a few miles farther south and it would have slept in the factories of its ancestors.

McNihil passed under the skeletal shade of the airliner’s tail section, like tripartite shark fins angled into the air. The swath that the fuselage had dug through the city lay to the west; he could see a wedge of ocean, framed by avalanched brick rubble and twisted steel girders, at the bottom of the city’s slope. He picked his way over the denuded struts of the wing lying tonguelike across the sidewalk and into the cracked asphalt of the street. This close, he could see down into the old subterranean levels of the city, the 747 having torn a stratified hole the way a table knife would have parted an anthill. Scuttling noises, the flicker of battery-operated lights and peering eyes, revealed the presence of the hole’s occupants, charity-resistant scavengers making their homes in the tunnels where tour groups had been led a long time ago. Some of the cave dwellers who were still comfortable with daylight had extended their realm up into the stripped aircraft fuselage, stringing hammocks and clamber-nets between the rows of charred, rain-soaked seat remnants. Whatever baggage survived the crash had been looted and converted into nominal curtain walls, barriers stitched together from business suits and lingerie, the aged rags all fluttering in the salt wind coming off the ocean. The empty suitcases, broken-locked Samsonites and American Touristers, a few shabby imitation Vuittons, had been strung up on the surrounding power lines; they swung and banged like giant castanets.

As he passed by the nose-buried plane wreckage, McNihil saw a cobbled-together gantry arm, corroded sewer pipes hinged with telephone-pole bolts, swing up like an improvised construction crane. Its blind head, guided by a system of rope pulleys, jerked toward him.

“This is an official panhandling station.” An unamplified voice traveled up a duct-taped hose, dangling in loops like throat wattles from the gantry. A funnel was aimed toward McNihil; the other end of the tube ran down into the hole. “Charity expands the heart. Literally-the cardiovascular benefits are immense, buddy.”

“Yeah, I’m sure.” With one hand, McNihil pushed aside the funnel. “Not today.”

“We accept cash, but prefer wire debits.” The gantry’s head, steered by the ropes and pulleys, followed along beside him. “See the reader there? I’m sure you do. You look like a smart sonuvabitch. Just dash the ol’ plastic down the groove, and reap the rewards in the world to come.”

“Pie in the sky.” McNihil could see the scam as well. The card reader was a fake, a slit mouth with either glue at the bottom or some kind of clamp trap, ready to be triggered by another, smaller line running down the gantry neck. No data conduit behind the red-dotted LED’s; the ferrite-sheathed cables were as bogus as the hidden beggar’s pitch. Anybody stupid and tenderhearted enough to fall for the gag would have his card snatched out of his hand, then disappeared back down into the dimly lit tunnel world; the gantry was strung with tensioned elastic, synthetic rubber sliced from the downed 747’s landing gear and depolymerized to a taut and stretchy consistency. The panhandlers wouldn’t have to do anything more than pop the restraining clutch in their grubby hands, to have the thin rectangular prize come flying their way. “I’m not falling for this one,” said McNihil as he walked on.

“Don’t be such a hard case.” The talking funnel floated near his face. “God loves a cheerful giver.”

“I don’t.”

“Come on-” The funnel’s voice continued pleading. “Money is just information, a concept, infinitely replicable without generation loss. That’s the way it is in this new world.”

“Don’t be a connecting idiot,” said McNihil. “Wake up and smell the burning corpses of your dreams, pal.”

“Watch it-” The voice coming through the tube turned huffy. “Connecting isn’t a dirty word around here.” A little shriller: “It’s people like you, with your antiquated anti-connectivity mind-sets, that are going to be dead meat someday! You just watch! Wait and see!”

Blah blah blah. McNihil wasn’t surprised that the broken airliner was a nest of pirasites, that aging-hippie combination of pirate and parasite, with their warped premillennium notions about information, concepts-and concepts about concepts-being as real for them as the world outside their shaggy, graying heads. The business he’d come up here to take care of was with a copyright thief, but at least one who was doing it for money, rather than from some outdated crackpot ideology. That was the kind of thing that ticked him off even more than simple, straightforward larceny.

It was just like these ’net-twit types as well, to have a bug up their collective ass about what’d become the popular usage of the verb connect. These idiots had never gotten it through their soft skulls that the only ones who really believed connecting was an unalloyed good thing were people who had something to sell and rapists, two categories that weren’t that far apart in this world.

McNihil took a knife from his coat pocket, flicked its small blade open, reached over, and sliced through one of the thick black rubber bands. It sounded a pizzicato viola note as it snapped loose, followed by a twanging chorus, a chain reaction all the way down the length of the gantry. The articulated device swooped out of control, hinge pins squealing as the eyeless head jerked up toward the gray-clouded sky. The violent motion ripped loose the phony card reader; it went spinning in a high arc across the street.

McNihil was impressed in spite of himself. With a certain childlike, pure delight in random destruction-You never grow too old, he thought, for this kind of stuff-he watched as the gantry went wild, raking its terminal claw in the airliner’s row of broken-out passenger-section windows. The gantry end snagged in the window hole closest to the raised tail, with enough force to snap loose a few critical bolts and struts. The dead plane shivered and began to disintegrate, the remains of its laminated exterior peeling away like shed snakeskin, the structural elements wrenching loose from one another. The urban scavengers who had been making their homes in the fuselage were revealed as their sheltering curtain rags were torn away, the network of spun ropes snapping and whipping in air. A Brueghelian scene tilted in the midst of the city, of compressed, interwoven sleep and copulation, chemical ingestion and little meals prepared on tinder-fed campfires. Tilted to briefly vertical, the awake and sleeping inhabitants, in narcotized or other dreams, tumbled down the fuselage’s central aisle as the hooked gantry swung the other direction, upsetting the wreckage’s fragile balance. Their screams and surprised shouts echoed off the surrounding buildings.

With a metallic groan, the downed 747’s spine snapped, the rusted cylinder folding in the middle at a ninety-degree angle. Rag-ensembled bodies dropped to the ground below, the fortunate ones being able to shake their dazed heads and scramble to their feet before more debris fell upon them. McNihil had prudently backed away, retreating to the littered sidewalk on the other side of the street. From there, he watched as the broken fuselage now arced sideways, the motion uprooting the nose section from its grave in the tunnels. The operators of the panhandling gantry could be seen behind the cockpit’s shattered windows; a gray-bearded face displayed terror as the figure desperately clung to the useless levers and ropes.

The L-shaped wreckage finished its sideways roll, coming to rest in the middle of the empty street. Creaking metal sounded in basso, accompanied by the smaller, bell-like notes of rivets and bolts clattering through the struts, as the 747 continued to disintegrate in slower motion. The inhabitants, those who were still alive and relatively uninjured, stood in the clouds of billowing dust, commenting upon the loss of their home with emotions that ranged from hysteria to fatalistic amusement.

McNihil checked his watch. The unplanned destruction of the pirasite colony had been entertaining in its way, but a distraction from what he’d come here for. He was already a few minutes late for his appointment, and there were still some details he had to take care of before meeting up with the guy. He shielded his eyes from the dust and partial sunlight, scanning across the street-level fronts of the surrounding buildings. There we go, thought McNihil; he had spotted what he was looking for. Leaving the wreckage behind him, he strode toward a small transient hotel a block away.

“I’m going to be needing a room in a little while.” The jittering neon outside read End Zone Hotel; the place had a pro football motif, yellowing posters of numbered and helmeted players on the walls, from a time when there’d been those kinds of teams anywhere in the Gloss. Now the words seemed to have taken on a different meaning: the hotel’s lobby looked like one of hell’s waiting lounges, for those damned from sheer inertia. Not even half-devils, thought McNihil. Quarter- or eighth-devils, at the most. God probably couldn’t be bothered to hate them. “I’ll pay for it now.” He dropped old-fashioned cash into the battered chrome drawer extruded toward him.

“Then it’s your room right now, buddy.” Behind the overlapping layers of steel grilles, the desk clerk roused himself long enough to pull the drawer back and count the money. “Hour rate works out the same as the day rate. You only get a break if you stay a week or longer.” One yellow-tinged eye regarded him with suspicion. “You don’t look like you’re going to be around that long.”

McNihil glanced over his shoulder at the humpbacked upholstered chairs and sag-spined sofas, Salvation Army castoffs, that furnished the lobby. The furniture’s occupants had assumed the same coloration, the exact tone of dirty-gray putty he knew would be edging the clouded windows upstairs. The chairs and the nominal people in them looked as if they were made of the same substance, as though the sweaty cushions had been caught in the act of giving birth to blank-faced human beings, or the seated figures, legs and crutches sprawled in front of them, were slowly devolving into last century’s seating arrangements. McNihil glanced back at the desk clerk. “You got that one right.”

“Want the key now or when you head back here?”

“It can wait.” McNihil pulled several items out of pockets and deposited them in the tray. “But I need you to hold on to some of my stuff for a while.”

The desk clerk pulled the drawer onto his side of the counter and looked at the objects. “You gotta be kidding, mister.” The biggest and heaviest of them was the black shape of his tannhäuser. “We don’t get involved in that kind of trouble.”

McNihil slid more cash under the bottom edge of the grille.

Nodding, the desk clerk tucked the money into his shirt pocket. “Now we do.”

“Good.” McNihil pushed himself back from the counter. “Take care of everything and see how much better you feel.” He put his wallet away slowly, making sure the clerk could see the other bills’ corners sticking out of it. “Later on.”

As McNihil was heading out of the End Zone Hotel’s lobby, he glanced over again at the figures slumped in the decaying sofa and upholstered chairs. A half-dozen of them, still looking vaguely human, tundra for spiders to begin laying their gray nets over. A bigger web had already been spun: sustenance checks had obviously been pooled, so that a multi-apertured I.V dispenser could be rented. The surgical-steel box sat on the lobby’s threadbare carpet, at the base of a chrome tree with clear, fluid-filled bags hanging from its short branches. An octopus network of tubes ran from the unit’s central control mechanism to the hypodermics of the connectees, the needles taped down to the arms of the ones fortunate enough to still have usable veins there; other lines snaked up trouser legs or were fastened onto necks like long, skinny, reverse-flow vampires. The most decrepit of the figures had the line trailing into his open fly, as though the sharp metal and polyethylene tube were his final lover, searching for any place where his blood still flowed.

From the other tube, the big one of the television mounted on a plywood shelf in the lobby’s upper corner, mumbling junkie dialogue seeped out. McNihil stopped for a moment and glanced up at the screen. On it was the popular hypo opera He’s Never Early, He’s Always Late; transactions involving little folded slips of paper and glassine envelopes were going on among the professionally disreputable-looking actors. A long time ago, back when he’d still been working as an asp-head, McNihil had done some heavy copyright defense for the show’s producers, laying into a Thai cable start-up that had tried to clone the central concept without paying royalties. He was glad to see that the show was still running, though he’d never been able to figure out the charm of it. For the decaying, knocked-out figures sprawled around the lobby, it must have brought back memories of their younger days. As he watched, needle-tip penetrated flesh on the screen; blood flowered up a calibrated cylinder. He turned his head, hearing the steel box click and hum; the thin hoses trembled. The gray faces turned grayer and half-lidded eyes unfocused as the synchronized hit, triggered by a data wire plugged into the back of the TV, rolled up their brainstems.

The show, McNihil knew, prided itself on authenticity, or enough of a simulation of it to get the ratings. On the screen, at the other end of the cable, the actors probably weren’t chipping at the same low-grade opiate as this audience-AFTRA regs usually insisted on blissful fentanyl-but it certainly wasn’t sterile Ringer’s solution being shot up. That’s entertainment, thought McNihil as he headed for the door.

Outside the transient hotel, he found himself thinking of the last dead-really dead-person he’d seen. Which had been the one named Travelt, lying with blank eyes on the carpeted floor of a cubapt farther south on the circle. A little movie with no action unrolled behind his eyes, on the smaller screen of memory. That poor bastard would’ve been exactly the kind of fool to imagine that there was some sort of low-rent glamor to that sad congregation in the hotel lobby, that his sheltered exec life had kept him from all sorts of dark fun. Imagining things like that, and then acting upon them, was what had most likely left Travelt staring up at the ceiling, his breath all clotted blood in his throat. Which was just a little too late to acknowledge the hard lesson he’d been taught.

Unencumbered by the tools he’d left with the desk clerk, McNihil headed toward the movie theater off the little urban park. By now, the dead 747 had finished collapsing, its disjointed wreckage strewn across the grassless raw earth and the surrounding streets. The destructive work that the Noh-flies had begun was complete; the city’s dispossessed who’d made temporary shelter from the fuselage now stood around or scrabbled with their black-clawed hands to drag their meager property from it.

“Hey! That’s the sonuvabitch! That’s the guy!” A voice called after McNihil as he passed by. “He fuckin’ did it!”

He recognized the voice as that of the panhandling gantry’s operator, now undistorted by the tube-and-funnel arrangement. The face behind the beard was cave-pallid from what had probably been years down in the buried nose section of the airliner. Even this zone’s diminished sunlight was enough to force the red eyes into teary, squinty blinking. A dirt-encrusted hand pointed an accusing finger toward McNihil.

Soon there were a dozen or so ragged figures trailing after him on the sidewalk. He stopped and turned around to face their bearded leader.

“Look,” said McNihil. “Too bad about what happened. But I’ve got business to take care of. And you’re cramping my action.”

“Screw that.” The one with the beard hunched over troll-like, as though his confinement in the airliner had permanently bent his spine. “You owe us, man.” A grimy paw, the flesh-and-dirt equivalent of the articulated gantry, extended toward McNihil. The crowd behind the bearded figure emitted a mumbling, angry chorus. “Pay up. Card or cash.”

A familiar adrenaline ticked through McNihil’s bloodstream, as measured and evocative as that produced by the machine back in the hotel lobby. Part of him could sit back inside his skull as his hands grabbed the front of the other man’s shirt, gathering the tattered cloth into his fists, then lifting the other into the air. The line of McNihil’s white knuckles pressed up beneath the bearded figure’s collarbone.

“I tried to tell you.” McNihil turned and slammed the man’s spine against the nearest building wall. “I’m busy. And I don’t like being harassed for small change.”

Pinned between McNihil’s doubled fists and the wall, the bearded figure did a spastic butterfly dance.

“I knocked your squat down because I don’t like you.” McNihil leaned his weight into the other man’s chest, hard enough to make a pink tongue protrude through the beard. “I meant to do it,” he lied. “And I wasn’t nearly as pissed off then as I am now.”

“Urrf.” Mottled patches appeared on what little of the bearded man’s face was visible. “Agk.”

The others, who had been following behind, had now backed off a few meters. Their faces showed that they hadn’t been prepared for the violence level to go up another notch.

“Now I’m going to put you down. And then I’m going to walk in one direction, and you’re going to walk in another. Got me?”

Above McNihil’s fists, the bearded figure nodded.

Wiping the backs of his hands against his trousers, McNihil watched the squatters scurry away. In the distance, back at the block-long park, fires had broken out in the 747’s disassembled wreckage, from overturned camp stoves and the few bits of electrical wire shorting out. Black smoke coiled toward the sky as McNihil turned and headed once more toward the movie theater.

What a putz, thought November. She had watched the whole bit, from her vantage point in a shadowed alley. From here she had been able to see her target, the former asp-head, come striding onto the scene, heading for what he was probably telling everyone was a business appointment. Right-she nodded to herself-same business as before.

The little knot of homeless-more homeless now-were making their way back to the smoldering plane debris. November turned her head, letting the shuffling figures fade from her attention. She hadn’t come here, stationed herself to wait for McNihil’s arrival, on their behalf. They couldn’t pay her tab, they couldn’t even get her close to making the monthly nut that kept the breath in her lungs. Inside her fist, the sweat-damp skin of her palm itched; she could feel the red numbers crawling across her life line, red numbers that she didn’t want to open her hand to look at. She was the only one who could see them, and right now she didn’t need to. Not after that last encounter with her finance company’s representative.

Her gaze swung across the narrow city streets and the boarded-up or burnt-out storefronts. And back to the figure of McNihil, disappearing into a little fly-by-night movie house without a glance behind himself.

Hard to believe this guy had ever had any cop moves at all. November shook her head, reflecting on the teeth of the slow gears, the inexorable machinery of time. They get old, she thought, they lose it. That was probably a big reason she’d put herself on a short leash, become a fast-forward. When she couldn’t cut it, when the numbers in her hand pulsed down to zero and the minuses beyond, it’d be a quick end. She wanted to avoid having that happen just yet, though.

A ticket stub from the little rat-hole theater was in the pocket of her jacket; she’d already been in and discreetly checked that McNihil’s “business” was there, scrunched down in a center-row seat and watching some stupid cartoon with a tub of butteroid popcorn in his lap. McNihil was running late, in risk of blowing the connection he’d come here to make. But he’d have to be late, considering the mess he’d made in the streets.

Real subtle. November sighed, feeling sorry for the poor old bastard. Why not just show up in town and blow up the whole place, like some old vintage Schwarzenegger flick? She smiled at one corner of her mouth, thinking maybe that was the real reason McNihil had gone to the movies, in hope of picking up a few destructive tips.

She didn’t feel like following him into the theater. She knew that he’d be out soon enough, with his “business” in tow.

With the red, invisible numbers ticking down inside her palm, November leaned back against the alley wall and waited.

TEN

BRAIN CELLS IMPLODING INTO SOME TERRITORY OF OPIATED BLISS OR GUNS, WOMEN, AND ANGST

All right,” said the business. His hand rooted around in the grease and unpopped kernels at the popcorn tub’s bottom. “This is a good part. I really wanted to see it again.”

From the next seat over, McNihil glanced up at the screen. This month’s disnannie, all bright cartoon colors and state-of-the-art CGI, was playing. A week ago, it’d been fresh and coming over the wires to the upscale movie houses. Now its earnings had already dropped off enough for it to be printed out on old-fashioned film reels and dumped at flea-pits like this. There hadn’t even been a marquee or a pretense of a ticket window outside, but just an old woman on a folding chair, a debit-card reader and a cashbox on her schmatta’d lap.

“What’s it about?” McNihil pushed away the popcorn tub that the pimply kid extended toward him.

“Beats me.” The kid shrugged. “I never pay attention to that story stuff.”

The kid was in his early twenties; that was what McNihil pegged him at. All skinny arms and legs, folded up in the seat with his knees against the one in front of him, looking like a whooping-crane carcass dressed in T-shirt and faded jeans. The reflection of the movie images made bright, shifting rectangles out of his glasses.

“It’s the visuals,” said the kid. “You just gotta go with that.” His hand operated by itself, feeding more fluffy shrapnel into his mouth. “That’s all that’s important.”

“Really? How can you tell?” In places like this, the standards were always shoddy. McNihil pointed to the wedge of light, filled with dust motes, above their heads. “They’ve got their projector element canted backward. Look at that keystoning on the screen.”

“Huh?” The kid bent forward, spine arched, squinting through his glasses. “What’re you talking about?”

“You can’t see it? The image is wider across the top than the bottom. That’s why everybody looks like some kind of hydrocephalic.”

“Aww…” A moan of disappointment escaped from the folded scarecrow figure. He hadn’t been able to see the aberration until it’d been pointed out to him, but now he wouldn’t be able to keep from seeing it. “That sucks.” He glanced toward the simple plywood door behind him. “I oughta get my money back.”

Like there’s a chance of that. McNihil let his gaze travel around the theater, such as it was. In the dark, smelling of sweat and urine and spilled wet sugar, the screen’s soft radiance fell on just a few scattered faces. And some of those were asleep, or looked so narcotized that if the film had broken and nothing but white light had filled their blank eyes, they wouldn’t have protested. They’d probably just have thought it was their own brain cells imploding into some territory of opiated bliss. McNihil looked back at the kid. “Don’t sweat it.”

The eyes behind the lenses were glaring at him with real hatred. “You’re a pretty smart guy, aren’t you?”

McNihil shrugged. “On occasion.”

“Smart enough to figure out why I wanted you to meet me here? At the movies?”

A song had started coming out of the theater’s rinky-dink speakers, mounted on the walls with cables dangling. McNihil glanced up at the misshapen screen image, remembering now that this month’s disnannie was a cartoon adaptation of the ancient black-and-white film The Lodger, transformed into something called Jackie Upstairs. A teenage Ripper was serenading a fogbound period London from his boardinghouse window, while a trio of cutely animated viscera-Kidney, Liver, and Uterus-danced and wisecracked around him.

“Beats me,” said McNihil. He looked back over at the kid. “If you feel like telling me, go ahead.”

“Because…” The kid leaned across the armrest between the seats. A yellow fleck of popcorn kernel hung on his lower lip. “I figured you might not be on the level, mister. Maybe you’re not a book collector at all. Maybe you’re a copyright thug. What do they call ’em? A snake-head.”

“Asp-head,” corrected McNihil. “It’s one of those bilingual confusions. Deutsch-lish, German and American muddled together. Asp from the English, kopf the German for head. So you get asp-head; it’s what they call a back-formation, from the name of the old twentieth-century organization ASCAP. They were the ones who used to round up the money for composers and musicians, until the Collection Agency came together from the old software protection and copyright defense outfits, so there was just one rights authority for all intellectual-property forms.”

The kid goggled at him in distaste. “Did I ask you for some connectin’ historical lecture?”

“No…” McNihil shook his head. “You didn’t. But you figured asp-heads, or whatever you want to call them, don’t go to the movies?”

“Connect if I know. But they carry lotsa big clunkin’ metal around with ’em. Guns and stuff. ’Cause they’re bad.” The kid couldn’t keep an excited gleam from appearing in his eyes. “They like to hurt people.”

“Do they?” McNihil put away his smile. “I better watch out for them, then.”

“But you don’t have to. Not here. At the movies.” The kid displayed horsey teeth. “You can’t get into the movies, even in a crummy place like this, without walking through the metal detectors. Everything past the front door’s got a detection grid wired around it. If you’d walked in carrying a gun, man, every alarm in the place would’ve gone off.”

“Really?” McNihil let his own eyes go wide and round. “Gosh.”

The kid’s expression darkened. “Maybe if they didn’t have to spend so much on security procedures, places like this could get better projection equipment.”

“Naw…” McNihil shook his head. “They’re probably just cheap-ass bastards in general.” A shrug. “I’m older than you. I don’t have expectations about people anymore.”

“‘Older.’” The kid nodded appraisingly. “Yeah, an old guy like you… I figured you’d be the kind who’d be interested in this kind of stuff.” He shifted in the broken-hinged theater seat, so he could dig a chip out of his jeans pocket. “Not my kind of thing, but it should be right up your alley.”

“What the hell’s this?” McNihil took the featureless gray square from the kid and examined it between his thumb and forefinger. “I thought we were talking about bookscans.”

“Scans? Are you kidding?” The kid sneered at him. “You think I’m gonna walk around with prima facie evidence of copyright violation in my pockets? You’re out of your mind.”

“I thought you weren’t worried about asp-heads. And all sorts of other bad things.”

The song on the movie’s soundtrack had ended. The animated uterus, specked with bright cartoon blood, was perched on the young hero’s shoulder, dispensing its feminine wisdom.

“Not,” said the kid. “I’m just careful.” He tilted his back toward the doors. “That’s another reason for wanting to do the deal in a place with metal detectors. This way, somebody like you-if you were an asp-head or some other kind of uptight intellectual-property freak-you can’t read out what’s there on the merchandise.” The kid smiled even bigger. “You couldn’t get the hardware you need in here. The readers and outside lines.”

“Huh.” McNihil smiled and nodded in appreciation. “Pretty clever.” You poor bastard. It took some effort to keep his pity for the kid from showing through. The little schmuck wouldn’t know what hit him-except that McNihil would make sure he did. “So what am I supposed to do with this?” McNihil held up the chip. The ghost light from the projector beam made it sparkle like a blank postage stamp. “What good is it to me?”

The kid’s smile oozed self-satisfaction. “Plenty. If you want those scans of those old Turbiner titles, complete with cover art-” The kid nodded toward the chip in McNihil’s hand. “That’s how you get ’em.”

Another scene popped up inside McNihil’s head, a little private show, blanking out for a moment the images up in front of the theater’s seats. McNihil could see the book covers the kid meant, all perfect retro, the color version of McNihil’s own black-and-white world. Guns, women, and angst. It all seemed like home to him.

Those books, the words in them, all sadly out of print-that was the merchandise the kid was peddling. Stolen merchandise. McNihil carefully maintained his pulse and blood pressure at a normal level.

“Look.” The kid leaned over and took the chip back from McNihil. “Here’s all you have to do,” he said with elaborate faux patience. “You take this, you go home, you pry off the back of your phone-it’s easy, there’s just a little thumbplate there-you take out the regulation bellchip you’ll see there, you pop this baby in its place. You don’t need to know anything about how it works.” The kid had a superior smirk, the attitude that the young and hip always took toward the old and out-of-it. “Then you’ll be able to dial right into a nice little on-line database down in Lima. They’re good people; they got a real commitment to information being free.”

McNihil knew the site the kid was talking about. What the kid didn’t know was that it was an entrapment front maintained by the Collection Agency.

The kid handed the chip back to McNihil. “That’s all there is to it.”

“I don’t quite see it…” McNihil studied the chip, turning it back and forth. “I thought you were being so careful and all. About asp-heads and bad stuff like that.” He held the chip up between himself and the kid. “Now, if you sell this to me… if I give you money for it, an exchange of legal currency for merchandise, and I put it in my pocket…” His words were meant to give the kid every conceivable out, every incentive for backing away from the deal. Not that McNihil figured the kid would; he just didn’t want to have what was about to happen on whatever remained of his own conscience. “Aren’t you violating Alex Turbiner’s copyrights? They’re his books. The writing and all.”

“No, man…” The kid laughed and shook his head. “Don’t you get it? I’m not selling you any words. I’m selling you a key.” He nodded toward the chip. “There’s no pirated, copyrighted material on there.” He left the popcorn tub so he could raise his open hands. “There’s no pirated shit on me, period. Nobody’s gonna bust me and trophy me out, just for selling you a phone number. Little bit of trunk-line access code, some block-switching jive… that’s all you’re buying from me.” The chip made black squares in the center of the kid’s glasses. “If the copyright sonsabitches want to send their asp-heads down to Peru, let ’em. That’s the Lima bunch’s lookout. It’s no skin off my ass.” A sneering shake of the head. “Besides, even if you were with the asp-heads, I’d be long gone from here by the time you got through to the data. There’s a delay routine built into that puppy. Forty-eight hours from firing it up, you get your goods, all those crappy old books. You wanna read that shit, it’s up to you. Whatever you want. You just gotta wait a little bit. That’s the deal.”

McNihil felt even older and sadder. He could hardly believe it, the whole song and dance the kid was going through. Whole generations of freelance pirates must have come and gone, risen up and been scythed down, and left no one to clue the poor child in. McNihil hadn’t heard that spiel about selling a key in decades, since he’d first started working as an asp-head. And that bit about a forty-eight-hour delay, he thought. That had never worked. It didn’t keep someone like this punk off the hook, either legally or in hard practice. It wouldn’t keep the trophy knives away from him. McNihil felt like a killing priest, as though he should lay his cupped palm against the kid’s spotty brow and give him the absolution that idiots earned.

He thinks he’s so clever. That was the sad part. The kid was doing it, illegally trading in copyrighted material, because he wanted to see if he could do it and get away with it. There wasn’t even that much of a profit to be made, relative to the time and effort the kid had put into this little project. The ego rewards would’ve been the big thing for him, if he were to get away with it. And the scary risk factor, the adrenaline crawl that came with scooting up close to the edge, sailing past the asp-heads’ teeth. However the kid had come into possession of the scanned-in Turbiner books-there were always tiny low-level transactions that even the asp-heads couldn’t keep track of-if he’d just kept his head down, kept them to himself or traded them with other little scurrying rats, he’d probably have gotten away with that much. The risk, the exciting part, was in going commercial, in putting out a carefully worded hook ad on the lines, looking for a buyer. Looking for a cash exchange. A fatal error, like something from a great old fantasy novel, where the character puts on the ring or the Tarnhelm or the cloak of subtler appearance, and becomes invisible to everybody, everything… except the cold annihilating scan that he would otherwise have never been seen by. This kid had raised his head-more than once, less than half a dozen times-and been sighted. He’d gotten a customer with a wallet stuffed with money, every bill of which had a grinning skull where a dead president should be.

“All right,” said McNihil. “It’s a deal.” He slipped the chip into his jacket pocket, the left outside one where his bag of tricks was built into the lining.

“Uh-uh.” The kid waggled one of his long, large-knuckled fingers at him. “Not so fast. You gotta pay. Remember that part?”

McNihil smiled. “What if I just rip you off for it?” He was giving the kid one more chance. Must be getting sentimental in my old age, he thought.

The kid shrugged, unconcerned. “I phone down to Lima, have ’em yank the base. Forty-eight hours from now, you make your call and there ain’t squat to down. All you got is one ugly cuff link.”

Little things were working away, which the kid didn’t even know about. McNihil could feel them in his pocket; not in any ordinary tactile sense, but just by knowing. Like ants crawling on a lump of sugar, but so much smaller; it only took seconds for the chip to be engulfed by the swarming, programmed micro-organics, and then just a bit more time for them to link up into their structured layers of membrane.

“You’re the clever one.” McNihil gave a nod. “You’ve got this one all figured out.” He reached into his hip pocket for his wallet, being careful not to jostle the still-fragile activity in his coat. “If there’d been more guys like you a while back, the asp-heads and all that crowd wouldn’t have gotten very far. You could’ve been the Lenin of an information-access revolution.”

“Connect that. I’m an independent operator. I look out for my own ass.”

“Yeah, I can tell.” The micro-organics had finished linking up with each other across the chip’s surface. McNihil could sense a low-level electrical charge seeping out of his pocket. “Dealing with you has been a real education.”

“It’s not over yet.” One bony-knuckled hand with grease-shiny fingers extended toward McNihil. “You still gotta pay.”

The wallet held only the cash that had been prepared for this transaction; McNihil hadn’t wanted to contaminate any of his own walking-around money. He extracted the bills, folded them in one hand, then laid the wad on the kid’s palm. “Don’t spend it all on popcorn.”

“I might.” The kid didn’t even bother to count it. As McNihil had figured, the dollar amount wasn’t important to him. The cash was his own green trophy. “Fun talking to you, old man. You taking off now?”

Angry shouts, crowd noises, fell from the speakers on the theater’s walls. McNihil turned and looked at the screen again. A mob of cartoon Londoners-fishmongers, cockney pearlies, comical bulb-hatted bobbies-were chasing the tragically misunderstood teenage Ripper through the fogbound streets. The massed chorus number told of how the townspeople’s own sexual frustrations kept them from accepting poor Jack’s attempts at finding love.

McNihil shook his head. “I think I’ll stick around for a bit.”

In the kid’s hand, the folded cash had already been activated. Nothing that the kid could sense, but McNihil knew it had happened. When he’d signed on as an asp-head, so long ago, he’d had the skin temperature of his hands surgically lowered-microscopic heat dissipaters, inert threads of directional-flow fibers, ran back through the centers of his forearms. The disadvantage was that up north, any farther around the top of the circle than here in Seattle, or down around the ice floes of the bottom curve, his metacarpals stiffened and ached like sonsabitches. The advantage-the reason for the modification-was that McNihil could hand an evidentiary prop like the treated money to somebody without triggering the heat-release chemicals that the bills had been impregnated with. By now, the kid’s hands, wherever they fell in the cash’s 98.6°-centered range, had sent the self-dispersive substances all the way past his elbows. The stuff went so deep into the pores that it couldn’t be washed off with acetone. Deeper, even; enough seconds had passed for it to have reached the bones. McNihil could haul the kid’s skeleton in and put it under the flickering UV’s-he’d done that to others, back in the old days-and he’d still be able to prove the kid had taken the money. The bait, the hook, the trap. The kid didn’t know it, but he’d already been stamped with the Cain mark of his sin.

McNihil pointed to the screen. “I want to see how this comes out.”

“It’s a pretty good one.” The kid had tucked the money into his jeans pocket. “I liked last month’s better, though. Something about oppressed workers of the world…”

“The Communist Manifesto,” said McNihil. He hadn’t bothered to go see it.

“Yeah-there were all these little chains with big-eyed faces, dancing and singing around the guys in the factories. It was cool.”

Pulling himself up in the theater seat, McNihil moved one foot to the side, a measured distance closer to the kid’s feet. Not enough to touch, but to knock over the half-finished soft drink that McNihil had spotted there when he’d sat down. The paper cup spilled its contents, complete with half-melted ice cubes, across the already-sticky floor.

“Was that yours?” McNihil pulled his foot back, as the kid looked down at the mess. “Sorry-I’ll get you another one. I was heading out to the lobby for a minute, anyway. I’ll be right back.”

While McNihil was in the men’s room-the tiled floor was nearly as sticky as in the theater proper-the micro-organics finished their job in his pocket. The last item on their programmed agenda was to form a tympanum a few molecules away from the pirate chip’s surface, stiffen, then reverse magnetic polarity rapidly and repeatedly enough to sound a tiny, bell-like note, soft and high enough that only the nerve implant in an asp-head’s inner ear could pick it up. That was the only signal that McNihil needed. It meant that the clever little creatures had finished breaking down the chip’s code, the enveloping membrane had run it through a fast-forward simulation of two days’ worth of time, and matched the resulting access key with the checksum already written in the micro-organics’ cores. There was no need to call anywhere in Peru; McNihil’s pocket held enough of the world to hang the kid in.

At the snack bar, which wasn’t more than a narrow sheet of plywood laid across folding metal sawhorses, he picked up a couple of drinks. The bored-looking girl behind the improvised counter hardly seemed to notice as McNihil took from his other pocket a gelatin capsule, snapped it in two, and poured the white powder into one of the cups. There were no other customers waiting behind him; with a plastic straw, he stirred the contents so that the powder was dispersed and invisible.

“Here you go.” Setting himself back down in the theater, McNihil handed the drink to the kid. The one he hadn’t messed with he kept for himself.

“Thanks, man. I’m dying here.” The kid had finished the last of the popcorn, and had thrown the empty tub into the strata of litter on the theater’s floor. “They put too much salt on this stuff. I guess that’s so you’ll spend more money on drinks, huh?”

You are a clever bastard-McNihil kept his reply silent. He figured the ironic intent would be lost on the kid, anyway. From the corner of his eye, he could see the cartoon figures on the screen, teenage Jack and the one London whore who’d always loved and believed in him, singing a treacly duet. Jack’s cartoon knife glittered like a narrow mirror, as McNihil watched the kid tilt the cup to his mouth.

Nothing for the kid to taste, nothing wrong to detect. The powder was inert, not even as close to living as the programmed micro-organics in McNihil’s coat pocket. From being dispersed through the drink, the powder had been activated, re-formed into a gel, and settled at the bottom of the cup, waiting for its next trigger.

“You know,” mused the kid, “that one last month, with them Communist guys-those people were right. Even if they were cartoons. Everything should be free.”

McNihil set his own drink down on the theater’s sticky floor. “It should, huh?”

“Yeah…” The kid nodded slowly, on to something. “Because it all wants to be free.”

“Does it?”

“Sure. You know… like the way information wants to be free.”

“Information wants to be free, huh?” McNihil didn’t wait for an answer. “Well, here’s some info you can have for nothing.” He swung his fist in a hard, flat arc, landing it straight to the kid’s nose, which exploded in a bright flower of blood.

He caught the kid’s drink before it could spill. The kid had both hands to his face, red leaking between his fingers. McNihil leaned forward, grabbing the T-shirt collar in one hand, bringing the plastic cup up to the kid’s face with the other. The Tanaka hydro-gel with which he’d doped the kid’s drink was keyed to McNihil’s parasympathetic system; the gel would respond to a shift in certain physical indicators, blood pressure and adrenaline level being chief among them. McNihil had been carefully keeping his emotions under control-he had worked so long as an asp-head that it was easy for him-but now he’d let them go. Pumped them up, just by letting the pure loathing he had for copyright infringers come boiling out of the little box he kept inside his skull.

The gel came alive as though it were part of him. He knocked the kid’s bloodied hands aside, as the stuff inside the cup swelled with explosive speed.

There was no time for the kid to react with anything more than the eyes going wide behind the glasses, his mouth taking in a quick gasp of air. His last one, for a while at least; the hydro-gel shot up from the bottom of the cup, spraying the remaining liquid and ice across the kid’s face. It trickled from his ears and down the tendons of his neck as the gel swarmed over all the human skin it was programmed to find. The gel expanded from its compression state, soaking up the spilled drink and moisture from the air, transforming itself into a sticky mass larger than the kid’s head.

McNihil leaned back from the scene he was watching. Dispassionately now; once the hydro-gel had been triggered by his worked-up emotional state, there was no need to maintain it. He let his anger subside, pulling his blood pressure back down with it.

The kid’s scrawny hands were still clawing at the transparent gel enveloping his head, all the way to the back of his skull. It had flowed onto his hands and down onto his wrists, welding them to the suffocating mass. The kid’s mouth was still gaping open; the gel trembled with his scream, but let no sound through.

A few of the other scattered theater patrons had roused themselves and looked over at what was going on. They watched in silence, either unconcerned or grateful that it wasn’t happening to them.

Past the kid’s mired fingers, the face that could be seen through the wavering, inch-thick layer of hydro-gel had turned red, as though even more blood were about to start seeping out of the kid’s pores. McNihil knew what came next, the red turning to black, the lungs laboring for breath that couldn’t penetrate the clear mask, anoxia and death. The heart stopping, and then the delicate cells of the brain collapsing into each other like fruits forgotten and rotting in a refrigerator bin-but faster. McNihil didn’t want that; he wanted the kid alive for at least a while longer. Trophying out a brain-dead corpse yielded unsatisfactory results.

McNihil reached over and grabbed the kid by the neck, his own fingertips sinking partway into the hydro-gel. He didn’t have to worry about it fastening onto his own skin; the gel had already locked onto the kid’s sweat and wasn’t interested in any other human touch now. Something reduced to less than human stared out of the panicking eyes under the gel; the kid’s consciousness had been devoured by animal fright. The scent of warmer liquid rose in the theater’s dark air as the kid’s urine soaked down his jeans leg and mixed with the spilled drink on the floor.

With his other hand, McNihil poked his way through the kid’s hands, caught by the gel. A crooked fingertip was enough to tear open a small breathing hole, right above the kid’s flattened nostrils; the gel had stiffened enough that it wouldn’t flow to refill the little gap. McNihil flicked the dollop of bloodstained matter away from his fingernail; it landed like soft crystal on the back of the next row’s seat, then dribbled snotlike downward.

“Let’s go, pal.” McNihil hauled the kid upright and dragged him toward the theater aisle. “We’ve got more business to take care of. I think you know what kind.”

A whinnying noise, sheer terror, came from the kid’s exposed nasopharynx. That, and the eyes that had managed to open even wider beneath the hydro-gel, was eloquent enough.

The girl behind the improvised snack bar cast a bored gaze at McNihil as he dragged the kid through the lobby and out onto the street. If she hadn’t seen it before in reality, she’d seen it over the wire, and that was close enough.

Strangled, muffled noises continued to be emitted from McNihil’s human parcel as he hit the sidewalk outside the theater. The kid’s urine-damp legs thrashed, heels against the cracked cement. McNihil wished he had torn a slightly smaller hole in the gel; the kid was getting just a bit too much oxygen into his lungs.

In the world outside the theater, time had rolled into its own dark hours. McNihil could see a trace of the dwindling sunset tingeing the petroleum-mottled ocean to the west; the ancient buildings of the city’s center were folding into deeper shadows. Human silhouettes wavered across the empty storefronts and up the alley walls; the bare-dirt park had become one bonfire, the uprooted 747 a skeletal carcass in the middle of the flames, like some sacrificial totem of a forgotten age.

The scene didn’t look good to McNihil. There was a much bigger crowd in the streets than when he had gone into the little fly-by-night theater. Riot time, he judged. The crowd was feeding the fire leaping above their heads; ragged figures hauled scraps of lumber and other fuel, broken furniture and commercial fixtures from the unoccupied buildings surrounding the area, and threw them in with a bright swirl of sparks and cinders. The roar of the fire gave the mob’s instigators something to shout over, to bring their voices to the properly impassioned hoarseness. McNihil spotted the bearded figure who’d operated the panhandling gantry, now standing on an overturned trash dumpsker, upraised fists shaking with every word.

McNihil quickly debated whether he should go back to the End Zone Hotel, where he’d left his gun and tools, all that ponderous metal that would’ve set off the theater’s security devices, or head to the train station with the stifled, struggling kid in tow. He decided against the latter; with this kind of civil disturbance in progress, every cabbie had probably-and wisely-fled to the outskirts of town. It’d be a long walk to the station, especially with an untrophied kid slung over his shoulder.

The crowd gave no attention to anyone dragging a gel-bound captive down the sidewalk. McNihil kept close to the buildings, but was still jostled by newcomers streaming into the action zone. The fire mounting at the center laid a shifting orange glow over the sweating faces, the sparks dancing in their overstimulated eyes.

In the hotel lobby, the television audience spread out on the sagging couch and upholstered chairs hadn’t stirred. The program’s addicts and hustlers were still going through their paces, copping and geezing, while the tubed-together viewers received their sympathetic hits. Whatever glow of the outside flames landed on their gray faces, it wasn’t enough to ignite their interest.

“I’ll take my room key now.” McNihil had dragged the kid up to the lobby desk. He dropped him onto the floor and pinned him with a foot to his spine, so he wouldn’t try running away. “Any’ll do.”

“You’re fuckin’ crazy.” The desk clerk looked aghast behind the heavy mesh screen. His face was radiant with sweat and he had a fire extinguisher cradled in his arms, as though the mob outside were about to burst through the lobby doors. “Get the connect outta here.”

The metal drawer beneath the grille pushed against McNihil’s stomach. He looked down and saw the familiar comforting shape of his tannhäuser and the pack of asp-head tools he’d previously deposited with the clerk. McNihil scooped them up, dropping the gun into his free coat pocket and holding the tools in one hand. “I still need a room. I paid for one, remember?”

“Aw, Christ…” The clerk got the sick, dismayed look that comes with the realization that one has just handed a high-caliber weapon over to another person. He hurriedly pulled money out of a cashbox, shoved it into the drawer and back toward McNihil. “Look, there’s a refund. Now just get moving, pal. I don’t want you around here.”

“Can’t.” McNihil shook his head in a show of regret. “Still got a little business to finish up.” He spread the pack of tools open on the narrow shelf in front of the grille. On a bed of cushioned black leather lay a row of shining surgical instruments, their polished steel and honed cutting edges touched with the fire mounting outside the End Zone Hotel. “I would’ve preferred a little privacy for this part-hey, he probably would-” McNihil nodded toward the struggling figure under his foot. “But if you want it to all happen right out here in the open…” McNihil shrugged and picked up the scalpel with the biggest blade. “I’ve worked under worse conditions.”

The desk clerk looked even more panicked than before. His stare shot past McNihil, to the lobby’s door and windows. None of the crowd had noticed that McNihil was inside the hotel. But it wouldn’t be long before they did.

“All right, all right.” The clerk hurriedly snagged a key off the board behind him and shot it out in the drawer. “Do it, and then just get out of here, for God’s sake. Please-”

McNihil rolled up his tools and picked up the key. “Thanks,” he said as he dragged the kid away from the counter.

The elevator, an antique cage, was out of commission; the kid’s head bounced against each stair as McNihil hauled him two floors up.

He slammed the hotel room’s door shut and turned the lock; leaving the kid squirming in the middle of the floor, McNihil pulled up the dirt-smeared window and looked out. The bonfire permeating the skeletal 747 had grown larger, the flames leaping as high as the surrounding rooftops. The crowd had grown larger as well, having gone well beyond the critical-mass point; McNihil could see the eddies and ripples running through the closely pressed bodies. At the edges of the open space, the street levels of the empty buildings had been broken into, with flames and smoke pouring out of the shattered windows and plywood barriers.

Get to work, McNihil told himself. Fortunately, this part always went fast. Other asp-heads had always admired his speed with the knives.

McNihil knelt down with his tool pack. He rolled the kid facedown, turning the gel-encased head to one side so the exposed nostrils could still draw in some breath; the kid’s lungs weren’t superfluous yet. An agonized scream managed to pierce the clear mask, coming out as a muffled, distant wail, as McNihil jabbed the first sharp-edged tool into the vertebrae between the kid’s shoulder blades. Using anesthetics had never been part of an asp-head’s job description; he had a few bee-sting syringes and quick-dispersion epidermals in the pack, and had used them on occasion, but there was no present need. The shouts and excited cries coming through the window drowned out whatever noises the kid would make.

Blood had started soaking into the T-shirt, as though the white fabric had been wounded rather than cut. McNihil grabbed the edges on either side of the knife and tore the shirt to either side, exposing the kid’s skinny torso. There was no need to look as he reached over to the pack for more of the glittering tools; years of practice in the field had put his hands on autopilot.

From kneeling, he raised himself onto his haunches, to keep the pooling blood from getting on his trousers. The wet red seeped through the worn carpet and beneath the soles of McNihil’s shoes. He balanced himself with one hand against the kid’s bare shoulder, leaning over the torso and guiding the tools as they worked. At one time, when he’d first started out as an asp-head, McNihil had dispensed with any of the autonomic surgical tools, preferring to do everything manually-he’d wanted to get the feel of cracking bone and neatly shearing flesh right into his hands. But, just as the older asp-heads had warned him, he’d started getting twinges of carpal tunnel syndrome in his wrists, and he’d gone to using the clever little machines.

At the back of the kid’s neck, the retractor device had expanded itself crabwise, flaring the gristle and muscle sheathing the spinal column. The miniature plow of the auto-incision knife had worked its way down toward the kid’s waist, steered by a few correcting taps of McNihil’s fingers and the machine’s internal terrain-recognition program. Following behind came the mantislike bone saw, stopping in position over each vertebra and mapping the projected depth and angle of its blade with quick ultrasound pulses. The saw needed a confirm signal before each cut; McNihil checked the grid on a handheld monitor before thumbing the proceed button; a fine spray of blood and bone dust drifted up as the tiny whirling blade descended.

As the devices inched their way farther apart, from nape to buttock, they set up a focused irradiation field, keeping the incision free of contamination. From micropore nozzles in the metal, a yellowish haze of nitromersol spread over the violated flesh, the mercuric compound acting as a backup disinfectant. Even if there hadn’t been a personal element in the favor McNihil was doing, asp-head professionalism would have ensured a neat, antiseptic job.

He glanced up at the room’s open window. Flames higher, shouts louder; glass shattered and rained across the mob-filled streets-McNihil could see, in his mind’s eye, the razorlike fragments nicking the oblivious, upturned faces. The people below would be lapping their own blood as it trickled into the corners of their mouths. Which would, he knew, only make them thirstier for someone else’s. His, mainly.

“Let’s wrap it up.” McNihil spoke aloud, as though the surgical devices were not only clever but sentient. He’d had this set a long time; they were almost to the status of pets, cared for and maintained. As if it could sense the controlled urgency in his voice, the tractor knife gave a last surge, opening up the kid’s back to the base of the spine. The kid had lost all consciousness, as McNihil had expected; there was a limit to what fear could keep awake, before pain temporarily annihilated it. For McNihil, that was just as well; the last segments of the procedure were tricky and delicate enough that he didn’t need the body quivering and jerking around.

He’d already brought out and inserted another pair of retractors like the first, up by the kid’s head. The second one, positioned halfway down the back, pushed its curved claws outward, exposing not just the spine but the viscera clustered below the ribs. Those were of no importance now; the kid had no further use for them. McNihil picked up the auto-incision knife and set it aside, so the last retractor could settle into place and force the bleeding flesh apart.

In a few more seconds, the bone saw had finished its work; McNihil removed it as well. The spider-clawed feet penetrated the blood-soaked carpet as the bright opticals and other sensors faded to empty black.

From the pack of tools, McNihil’s quick hand extracted an inert polymer ring. One pull telescoped it into a flexible tube, open at one end, a tapered bulletlike seal at the other, the whole thing longer than the kid’s split torso. The retractors and saw had exposed the protective meninges encasing the spinal cord, the bundled nerves running through the core of the kid’s torso. The machines went to work again, slicing through the dura mater, then the tangled arachnoid layer beneath. Using their finest, tweezerlike implements, the retractors peeled back the fragile pia mater, revealing raw and naked nerve tissue. With one of the smaller, nonautomated knives, McNihil made a series of cuts, freeing the spine from its elongated nest. He lifted and compressed the blood-specked sacral plexus and slipped it into the open end of the polymer tube. Cutting with one hand and drawing the ring opening up with the other, in less than a minute he had the tender spinal material encased in the tube. The ring rested against the back of the kid’s neck; McNihil pulled the tab inside, releasing another hydro-gel inside the tube. This one had a mesh structure woven into the substance; as it expanded and protectively encased the spine, oxygenated microfilaments formed a temporary life-support for the human tissue. The tube’s outside shell turned stiffer and harder, responding to the gel’s precisely calibrated lowering of temperature. McNihil knew he had a few hours, just time enough to get the trophy to where it needed to be.

The cerebral matter was the last that had to be taken care of. A judgment call for McNihil: he could either do a quick-and-dirty extraction, pulling the entire brain out of the skull and packing it with him, or he could take the time to let the cleverest of his tools pare away the unnecessary segments. The easiest and fastest would have been to just lop off the kid’s head guillotine-style and wrap it in a freezer pack, carry it out of here like a bowling ball in a bag-he’d done that before, in situations less time-pressured than this. It was considered bad form in asp-head circles, though; the microsurgery that was needed to reattach the brain portion to the top of the spine was a lot of work for the agency techs-McNihil still had enough favors to call in that he could get it done, but he didn’t want to deplete his account. Plus, the results were never as good, trophy-wise, as an original, unsevered connection. I may be getting old, thought McNihil, but I’ve still got pride issues to deal with.

He shifted his position closer to the kid’s head. The tiny hotel room’s carpet was now soaked from wall to wall with blood, the sagging bed and battered chest of drawers like islands in a red sea. “Damn,” said McNihil aloud; he’d brushed his knee too close to the kid’s shoulder and gotten a smear on his trousers leg. He hated spending the money for dry cleaners. He reached over and grabbed another pair of tools from his pack.

With a few quick blows from a calibrated chisel, he split the skull open like a thick-shelled egg; the scalp tore from nape to brow, revealing the soft matter beneath. Between the two red, empty hemispheres of bone, McNihil set the big spider-that was what the asp-heads themselves called the device-and let it go to work.

McNihil stood up, knees creaking, and went over to the room’s window. The smell of burning architecture filled the night air. Now he wished he’d given the panhandling gantry a donation; his hopes of coming in here, doing the job, and getting back out with no big excitement had evaporated. Just getting out, with his baggage and trophy intact, was going to be something of a problem. The mob had improvised torches from the fire crackling through the 747 carcass; with all of the unoccupied buildings already lit, the action had spread to the others. McNihil turned from the window and inhaled, trying to detect whether the End Zone Hotel had become part of the action.

He glanced down at the prostrate form on the redly shining carpet. The spider was halfway through its procedures; the steel refrigerant needles had plunged through the brain, their course determined by the device’s initial mapping scan. The drop in temperature and simultaneous oxygen delivery from the fibers radiating out from the probes would prevent any gross cellular decay. The second, more detailed scan was under way-McNihil could tell from the pattern of LED’s flashing across the spider’s mirrorlike carapace. As he watched, the small lights blinked out; the articulated knives lowered from the device’s underside and began carving into the soft, wet tissue beneath.

Wedges of cortex, neatly sliced as though by a butcher’s knife, were expelled from the gaping skull, landing on either side, trembling and seeping into the blood-soaked carpet. From a storage bin in the spider’s thorax, delicate claws plucked out tiny cylindrical memory shunts, each with a self-branching data capacity. The little claws, precise as a watchmaker’s screwdrivers, tapped the shunts into place, soft-welding them to the brain’s neurons and synapses.

Another few minutes crept past, as the spider device continued its surgery. The hotel room was a relatively sterile and quiet environment, compared to the battlefield situations for which the technology had originally been devised. The asp-heads had made their own adaptations to it; they weren’t interested in stabilizing soldiers with head wounds as much as getting trophies reduced down to a convenient traveling size.

The twin piles of discarded brain matter had grown to mounds a couple of inches high, pinkly weeping blood. The core of the subject’s memory and personality, all that had made the kid the punk he was, had been reduced to an oblate sphere the size of a tennis ball. Almost all of the brain stem had been cut away; there was no longer any need for the stilled and equally discardable organs to be regulated. The connection between what was left of the cortex, studded with the shunts and a few other implanted devices, and the tube-encased spine, was pristine and inviolate. McNihil reached into the skull with one hand and lifted the cortical essence; with his other, he took from the pack another gel-filled casing and enveloped the exposed tissue with it. He flipped the activation tab and, as the gel inflated to protect the carved-down brain, sealed the casing to the longer tube.

On the hotel room’s wet floor were the remains of the kid, the gross, unbreathing matter of torso and limbs, the face still sheathed in the first gel that McNihil had used on him, back in the theater. Turned to one side, the kid’s face had a blank, empty gaze, mouth open but silent, as though the tongue were somehow trying to taste blood through the clear barrier. Whatever low-wattage spark had existed behind the dulling eyes had been caught in a jar like some bright, fluttering insect. Dead meat wasn’t trophy material; asp-heads brought back to their clients something a little livelier.

McNihil returned his scattered tools to their slots in the pack, folded it, and stood up. He wiped the pack off against the wall, leaving a long red hieroglyph across an ancient pattern of faded roses. He slipped it into his jacket pocket. Turning and reaching for the trophy container he’d left propped against the front of the dresser-with the spherical casing sealed to the tube, the result looked like a fatter version of a drum major’s baton-McNihil saw smoke laced with sparks rising past the window. The temperature in the room had gone up a few degrees, the heat penetrating from the floors below; much hotter, and the blood soaked into the carpet would begin to boil.

He didn’t bother saying good-bye to the corpse. Some asp-heads, he knew, were in the habit of leaving behind some indication of a mess like this being the result of an agency hit-some went so far as to sign their names and ID numbers with the point of a scalpel on the dead flesh-but McNihil had never seen the need for that. Anybody who couldn’t tell what had gone on from the evidence, the hydro-gel mask and the laid-open spinal column, was beyond educating.

Smoke, thick and black, rolled down the hallway outside the door. McNihil had drenched his jacket sleeve in the room’s tiny efficiency sink; arm raised, he held the wet cloth against his face, his eyes stinging as he made his way down the corridor.

From the landing one flight down, he could see into the lobby of the End Zone Hotel. The mob with its primitive torches had shattered the street-level windows and ripped the door from its hinges. A shrill, clanging alarm sounded above the voices and battering clamor. An iron bar had been used to tear the grille from above the counter; the desk clerk had either fled or been trampled beneath the crowd’s feet. The tethered junkies in front of the lobby’s wall-mounted television hadn’t bothered to move; through the obscuring smoke, the slumped figures on the sofa and upholstered chairs could still be seen, watching the dead screen or languidly rolling their heavy-lidded gazes toward the riot with equal interest. One of the chairs had already caught fire, the edges of the yellow-stained upholstery crawling with a charred red line, gray smoke billowing around the comatose figure sprawled there. The black hookups to the metal drug device writhed snakelike in the heat.

“There!” A voice split the laden air. The vocal cords emitting the words sounded raw with shouting and smoke inhalation. “There he is!”

McNihil recognized the voice as his recently acquired nemesis, the bearded operator of the panhandling gantry. With the encased trophy tucked under one arm, McNihil peered across his other forearm and managed to spot the mob’s leader through the thickening haze. In the face blackened with soot, the red-rimmed eyes glared with a fierce delight; the burning buildings and the excited mob were all to the bearded figure’s liking.

Torches and improvised weapons aloft, the mob surged up the bottom of the open staircase. McNihil backed up a few steps as he dug into his coat pocket, past the folded tool kit, for the hand-filling tannhäuser. He brought it out; barely having to aim, he fired into the center of the welling crowd below.

The gantry operator had the sense not to lead the charge; McNihil saw the bearded figure being toppled backward by the crowd momentarily retreating under the impact of the broken-chested corpse at their head. His fall had sent the gantry operator sprawling across the lobby’s floor, shoulders bumping up against the base of the desk clerk’s counter, the impact enough to knock the torch from his hand. He was still conscious; a shake of the head, and the gantry operator managed to refocus his gaze toward the top of the stairs. His eyes widened at what he saw.

This time, McNihil aimed. Above the heads of the crowd, toward one specific target-not from any hopes of improving the present situation, but just from the personal conviction that people shouldn’t be given extra chances to make trouble. He pulled the trigger and saw, through the smoke filling the lobby, a bright red flower substitute itself for the bearded face. The gantry operator’s body rolled shuddering onto its side.

Won’t hold ’em, figured McNihil. He’d been in crowd situations before; he knew that it would only be a few seconds before whatever panic and good sense that the tannhäuser’s shot had instilled would be overcome by the mob’s bloodlust. Seeing two of their number blown away was like gasoline thrown on the already-existing flames. Tucking the elongated trophy container tighter under his arm, McNihil turned and sprinted down the corridor, away from the stairs and the shouting below.

A well-placed kick broke open one of the room doors. Any occupants of the hotel had either fled or joined the mob below. The tiny space’s window, bright and hot with the flames in the street, was jammed tight. McNihil shattered the glass with the butt of the tannhäuser, then used its muzzle to knock away the remaining shards. He climbed out with the trophy container, onto the rusting metal grid of the fire escape.

The irony of the term wasn’t lost on him, as McNihil scanned the scene beneath. Enough of the surrounding buildings’ contents had been dragged out and thrown onto the fire for it to have spilled from the central open space-the downed and uprooted 747 was by now a twisted, blackened skeleton-and across the streets. One major branch of the fire had rolled right up against the walls of the hotel; the bottom section of the rickety framework on which McNihil stood was engulfed in flames. The heat traveled up the metal and scorched the palm of his hand, as he tried to look past the roiling smoke.

No way down, at least not that he could see here; at the same time, McNihil could hear the sound of the mob, their adrenaline courage revved up again, filling the End Zone Hotel’s darkened interior.

The rusting iron creaked and swayed, bolts pulling loose from the building’s side, as McNihil reached and drew down the narrow ladder above his head. Climbing one-handed, with the gun tucked against the trophy container, he headed toward the roof.

ELEVEN

A DAMP CARNIVAL OF BILLOWING FOAM AND SLIPPERY HUMAN SKIN

Too fucked-up to stay out of trouble, thought November. Too valuable to let suffer the consequences. From an alley tucked safely away from the flames, but close enough to feel the heat rolling in waves across her breast and face, she watched the action over at the End Zone Hotel. She wondered what would be the best moment to go over and save that poor bastard McNihil’s ass.

The mob rampaging around in the open space had made it easier for her to tail him and his incapacitated business, from the movie theater over to where McNihil would complete the job. All the excitement, the crowds and shouts and mounting flames, had obviously distracted McNihil, kept him from doing even the most cursory scan to see who might be following him. She’d watched him dragging along the skinny kid that he’d come up here to meet, the contact’s face swallowed by that hydro-gel glop asp-heads were always so fond of-November admitted it had its uses, but she preferred more direct and obviously violent methods. What was going to happen next to the kid, she’d already known; asp-heads weren’t exactly reticent about publicizing the consequences for copyright infringement. Too bad for the kid trying to peddle those old books-but that was what you got for being a wiseass.

For McNihil as well, it was going to be too bad; he didn’t know what he was getting into. November shifted her position in the alley, going a little closer to its mouth in order to peer toward the lobby of the hotel. The bottom floor of the hotel building was engulfed in flame by now; the crowd with the torches, who’d been so hot for McNihil’s blood, had streamed back outside, leaving their dead and wounded to cook. Maybe I’ve waited a little too long, thought November. She’d been pretty sure that McNihil would be able to take care of himself, but that might have been an overly optimistic prediction, given the present situation. The windows of the hotel’s next floor up had blown out from the heat, raining glass shards on the people below. It wouldn’t be long before the whole building was on fire, from top to bottom. If McNihil was still in there when that happened, her own scheming would take a considerable setback.

November stepped out of the alley, easing her way through the crowd. The mass adrenaline peak had been a few minutes ago; the smell of that hormone-laden sweat hung in the air as an invisible stratum just below the smoke. A certain fatigue level had set in, the result of all the incendiary excitement. The central fire, with the skeleton of the ancient airliner warping and blackening, had begun to die down into ashes and smoldering embers. Most of the crowd had gone into spectator mode, the upraised torches either nothing but charred wood or a few red tongues and brighter sparks, drawn horizontal by the night wind that had sprung up. Necks craned, faces turned in all directions around the totem 747; the gazes took in the surrounding wreckage with pleased smiles, the hard satisfaction of vandalism taken to its limits.

Keeping silent, November rapidly worked her way closer to the burning hotel, shoving her way past the crowd’s backs, knocking away without difficulty the hands of either sex that tried to clutch at her. She lost sight of the hotel until she had reached the curb right in front of it. The rest of the onlookers, pushed away by the heat of the flames, were watching with varying degrees of amusement what was happening in the building’s lobby. The ceiling had started to break up, raining plaster fragments and chunks of wooden beams onto the space below. A few human remnants, dark scarecrow figures, were visible in a semicircle of blazing furniture; it was hard to tell if they had been asphyxiated or were just narcotized to their own ongoing deaths. One, wrapped in flames, had dropped forward onto his hands and knees; under the rolling smoke and sparks, he crawled laboriously, dragging a melting black hose and a toppled-over I.V.-drip device along with him. The burning man’s progress was the main topic of discussion in the crowd; November heard bets being placed behind her. Before the figure reached the hotel’s hinge-smashed door, he fell over onto his side, curling into a fetal position, hissing bones revealed beneath his cracked flesh. When the figure had been still a few seconds, November heard the various wagers being collected.

By then, she had already started to move away from the front of the End Zone Hotel. She had spotted what she was looking for, what she had hoped she would see. What the others in the crowd hadn’t noticed: another figure, above their heads and closer to the building’s corner, climbing up the rickety fire escape. McNihil had completed his business, obviously; she could see that he had an asp-head’s trophy container-a thick, roundheaded tube-clutched tight by one arm against his ribs. With his free hand, he was pulling himself up the creaking, snapping iron construction, the smoke from the flames below obscuring him in its heavy coils. As November watched, head tilted back, a section of the fire escape pulled loose from the building’s exterior wall; loose bricks and bits of rusted metal tumbled into the fire at the hotel’s base, sending up a flurry of sparks that surrounded McNihil like luminous wasps. McNihil’s distant figure hooked one arm into the nearest strut as the grid beneath his feet gave way, dangling as though it were a slotted trapdoor; McNihil clung to the swaying metal, still grasping hard the elongated container.

Another sound, rapid and bass-driven, sounded from past the surrounding buildings. A cursing groan arose from the mob, the multiplex organism aware that its fun was at an end. Not from any city police-a zone like this was redlined by the various rental forces-but from the fire department of the Gloss’s Seattle division: the first of the ’copters, flying low to avoid the stinging attentions of the Noh-flies, appeared above the buildings’ roofs or through the gaps in the low skyline. The black shapes, like armored angels, swooped in close to the still-burning 747, the outstretched nozzle arms dispensing swiftly expanding, smothering foam. The roar of the flames was replaced by a steamlike hiss as the soft wave of the extinguishing agent flowed through the central open space and into the streets around it.

That wasn’t going to help McNihil any, judged November. The FD ’copters weren’t going to hurry to put out the buildings that were already ablaze. In these old sectors of the cities on the Pacific Rim, it was standard practice to incorporate arson into the various urban-redevelopment plans, like forest fires clearing the way for new growth. A second line of airborne equipment had descended into the area beyond the burning buildings, using the foam and other chemicals to keep the flames from spreading toward more valuable real estate.

All of which left McNihil stranded on the side of the End Zone Hotel, with the fire rapidly advancing through the structure’s interior, blowing out the windows with each level it consumed. November could see McNihil on the swaying fire escape, desperately reaching one-handed for the metal struts just beyond his grasp.

Behind her, another party atmosphere had set into the crowd; the incendiary rage had transmuted into a giddy frivolity, a damp carnival of billowing foam and slippery human skin. The smell of wet wood and other debris, floating on the soft whiteness as though it were a slow-motion sea, mingled with pheromone-laden sweat. The streets that had been on fire a minute ago had been turned by the angels’ whup-whup-whupping above into a bed of earth-clinging clouds. A bed fit for general copulation; the scarred flesh of the squatters, the unshelled homeless, the urban gutter tribes, all looked like engraved pearls of every shade from sunless white to African aubergine, as limb tangled with limb, orifices were born and created, sealing lubricant tight upon any possible protuberance, blood-warm or steel-cold. A panting, industrious silence replaced the cries that had echoed off the buildings only a few minutes ago.

That’s all right for them, thought November. What about my plans? The slippery environment was obviously fun for the crowd, taking their minds off the interrupted torching of the city, but it was making McNihil’s situation even more precarious than before. November had a clearer view of him, now that the crowd had spread from vertical to largely horizontal. The foam had been blown outward by the downdraft from the ’copters’ blades; enough of it had landed on the fire escape to slicken the fragile metal. McNihil’s grip on the creaking strut had become even more of a desperate struggle; November noted with some satisfaction that he’d still held on to the elongated trophy container, instead of letting it fall to the street below.

She weighed her options. Even though she already knew what she was going to do; she moved away from the front of the hotel, the lobby behind the shattered windows mainly ashes now, interspersed with charred corpses. The fire was still traveling upward through the building’s floors; even if McNihil managed to hang on to the fire escape outside, he’d either be fatally burnt or in the skin-graft ward of a hospital for so long that his usefulness to her would be zero. He was her door-though he didn’t know it yet-into the whole business with Harrisch and the dead Travelt, so he had to be preserved awhile longer. Once she had walked through that door and gotten to the other side, then it would be just as well if he was off the scene, crisped or in a box, it didn’t matter which. But until then…

Stepping over the writhing bodies, a vision came to November unbidden, of the strictures of form and identity dissolving, the prisoning matter of the city’s heart reverting to some premammalian coitus. The way, she thought, that fish and things that swim around in the ocean do it. Enough cheap black leather, rags and ancient thrift-store finery, jointed crutches and small sharp-pointed weapons, had been shed that skin could be sluiced to some infantile purity by the liquefying foam. The distinction between one body and another was erased, the membrane between the body’s interior and the soft outside world forgotten; she almost envied them. Or it. November supposed it was the oncoming tide of the future, humans finally having gotten tired of bones and jobs to do. She just hadn’t reached that stage yet.

Thinking diminished her attention for a moment, just long enough for a hand to snare her ankle. She fell, hands quickly bracing and catching herself against the white-smeared curb. November rolled onto her back, seeing some wide-eyed, happily grinning face. Which received the heel of her boot at the bridge of his nose; the bare-chested figure toppled backward unconscious and was subsumed into the general mass.

For a moment longer, she couldn’t get up; the foamed street was too slick for her scrabbling hands to get a purchase on. Other hands, without specific intent, clutched at her, limbs and shining torsos pressing at all sides. A breath-stopping panic rose in her, flooding out all thoughts but of escape. A generalized terror, the sense of her own boundaries melting away, the result a horrifying connectedness; this was what she had run from all her life. Even her brief moments of coition aboard the circle’s trains, with the glittery-eyed businessmen in the private spaces between cars-no linkage in those encounters, but instead a sharper sense of the alien, the penetration of the other. The pharmaceuticals she slid beneath the resealable patch of her skin; those packets were always laced with enough amphetamine to render the division between herself and the world as sharp as a razor, even while her higher brain functions were opiated down to lust.

Twisting onto her side, November reached past the wet forms around her and managed to grab the sidewalk’s curb; black ashes slid beneath her fingertips as she clawed her nails into the cracked cement. The foam clutched at her like some reluctantly yielding amniotic fluid; she slowly managed to push herself, shoulders-first, against the base of one of the building’s walls. Her legs curled beneath her in a belated fetal posture, the ankles of her boots just out of reach of the conjoined organism in the streets.

Bracing herself against the smoke-stained bricks, November got to her feet. Her breath returned to her lungs. Time had come to a halt, the line between one second and the next as meaningless as any other division; she had no idea how long she’d been out there. She tilted her head back, wiping a white residue from her eyes, wondering if the distant McNihil was still alive. The figure on the tilting fire escape was there, holding on to both the trophy container and the creaking iron structure. As she watched, another pair of the heavy fastening bolts worked their way free, dropping to the sidewalk a couple of meters away from her. The fire escape, continuing its slow disintegration, peeled its higher sections farther from the building.

The flames and smoke billowing from the shattered windows, close enough to singe McNihil’s trouser legs, indicated that there would still be no path up through the hotel. One building over, an empty storefront had been touched less by the fire; past the boards and torn-aside plywood barriers, the street-level interior held a few smoldering display counters and shelving units. November kicked one obstructing board loose, then ducked her head beneath the next one up and pushed her way inside.

A long sprint up the building’s dark stairwell had brought November to the rooftop. An easy leap landed her on hands and knees, on top of the hotel. The peeling sheets of roofing material felt hot against her palms.

At the rooftop’s edge, she could look out across the foam-drenched street, the extinguished wreckage of the downed airliner rising from the white sea like the empty-eyed ghost of some forgotten technology.

“McNihil!” Clutching the edge of the roof’s low parapet, she leaned out above the swaying fire escape. “Look up here!” she called again.

His hold on the fire escape was several stories below; it took a moment for McNihil to realize where the voice was coming from. Without loosening his grip, he tilted his head back and gazed upward. “Who the hell are you?” His face was set hard with suspicion.

“Right now, I’m your best friend.” Distrustful bastard, thought November. Her eyes stung with the smoke rolling up the side of the building. “Hang on, and I’ll get you out of there.”

“The connect you will.” Below, McNihil looked around, as though there might be some alternate route off the fire escape. A gout of flame, larger than any before, burst through the shattered window nearest him.

“For Christ’s sake,” said November disgustedly. “Don’t be an idiot.” She turned away from the parapet-he wasn’t going anywhere, she knew-and scanned the rooftop for something she could use. A thick black cable, an outmoded video or power feed, dangled from a wooden crossbeam at the roof’s center. November reached up and pulled it loose, wrapping a coil several meters long between her hand and bent elbow.

The cable was long enough to lower a doubled length, knotted into a loop at its end, down to McNihil. “Here’s the deal,” shouted November over the roof’s edge. “Grab it and I’ll brace. You can walk yourself up here.”

Wind from the fire-department ’copters blew into November’s face and rippled the steaming puddle of water that had collected around her bootsoles, the runoff from her foam-wet clothes. If the FD crews were aware of her and McNihil on the burning hotel, they made no sign of it. The ’copters banked and swooped away, toward a couple of flaring hotspots at the open space’s perimeter.

She could see McNihil looking over his shoulder, down to the street, as though he was gauging the impact his body would have on the ones below, mired in their dissolving white blanket. Not enough there to safely break his fall; November wondered if the people in the street would even notice when he hit, or whether his hard death would trigger some massive, longed-for climax through the interlinked organism they had created.

McNihil looked at the black cable dangling near him, then back up at her. “Why’re you doing this?”

“I’m a public-spirited citizen.” November shook her head in disbelief. “What the connect does it matter?”

“Yeah, right.” McNihil made no attempt to grab the cable. “And you just happen to know my name.”

It’d been the first time she’d spoken his name aloud, when she had called to him from over the parapet. Though she had thought McNihil’s name enough times inside her head. November had realized it’d been a mistake, as soon as the three syllables had escaped her lips; she couldn’t bring them back, but she’d been hoping that, given his current circumstances, the significance would’ve zipped right by him. That she knew who he was, when he was supposed to be going about his asp-head business all incognito.

“All right,” said November. So it hadn’t gotten past him. “I want to talk to you. Is that okay? There’s some things we need to discuss, you and I.”

“People who want to talk to me, they can make an appointment.” McNihil seemed unperturbed by the grinding metal joints and swaying of the fire escape. “You know my name, you should have my phone number, too.”

“I do. But this is personal.” She was lying her ass off, but the situation called for improv. “Face-to-face.” The last thing she’d wanted was to talk to the guy, at least right now. “Without anybody listening in.”

McNihil, arm hooked around the fire escape strut, managed a disdainful laugh. “People who want to go private with me, I’ve found that they rarely have my best interests at heart.”

That exasperated her even further. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” November’s hands shoved against the edges of the parapet. “If I wanted something bad to happen to you, I’d just leave you where you are. In a couple of minutes, you’re going to be fried anyway-and you’re arguing with me? Jeez.” And asp-heads were supposed to be so connecting smart. “Grab the wire, goddamn it.”

November figured that it wasn’t her that convinced him, as much as a sudden rush of flame from the window, large and close enough to singe McNihil’s sleeve. The force of it rocked him back against the angled corner of the ladder, the entire vertical length of the fire escape going through a lurching wave. A couple more bolts popped out from the bricks and fell through the smoke to the street below. McNihil let go of the strut on which he’d had a one-handed grip, and seized the dangling black cable beside him.

“You want to talk?” McNihil shouted up to her. “Then pull, already.”

The fire escape collapsed, shearing away from the burning hotel, before November had completely braced herself. McNihil’s weight, suddenly unsupported, slammed her hard against the parapet, the doubled cable cutting deep into her palms. She dropped to her knees, to keep from being yanked over the edge of the rooftop. The raised section was just low enough for her to see over, with one shoulder dug into it. The fire escape, shedding pieces of metal as it went, angled above the streets, the loosened joints shifting and breaking apart. In an agony of high-pitched rust, what was left of the structure, its base still fastened to the bottom level of the End Zone Hotel, fell across the copulating bodies in the street. With a shudder that moved outward in concentric rings, the composite organism reacted as November had seen other pale flesh react, stung by the lash. If the extinguishing foam was now flecked with blood, shining black in the night’s partial spectrum, then a small, painful price had been paid for the orgasmic groan that welled up simultaneously from a thousand throats and a single one.

She paid no attention to that sound; she’d heard it before, if not on quite so large a scale. November, leaning back from the cable tourniqueting both her hands, had managed to get to her feet. The different angle allowed her to see the figure at the other end of the tether, McNihil swinging in a wide arc outward from the building.

“Grab it with both hands, you jerk!” November shouted to him. “You’re going to fall!”

McNihil clung stubbornly to the trophy container, its tapered shape pivoting with momentum in his grasp. He reached the apogee of his horizontal arc and came back into the wall, turning so that he landed with both feet in classic rappel position. As November watched, he struggled to pull the trophy container across his bowed chest, until its smaller end had snagged inside the front of his jacket. He shoved the object downward, releasing his grip on it only when the point protruded from his shirt’s bottom hem. The tube was held diagonally across his torso, the larger, bulbous end hard against one side of his face.

“All right!” McNihil’s shout went past November and into the empty sky. “Hold on!”

He worked himself up the hotel’s wall, hand over hand on the taut cable. As he approached, November let herself slowly sit back on the rooftop’s tarry surface, her legs locked against the parapet. In the gun-sight V of her crotch, McNihil appeared, convulsively snagging first one arm, then the other, onto the low rise at the building’s edge. The trophy container impeded his being able to kick a leg up onto the parapet; he had to take one hand from the cable and pull the tube out from his shirt, then throw it with a heavy clatter on the roof. With one more heave, he landed sprawling on top of November. The weight knocked the cable loose from her hands, setting it free and slithering over the roof’s edge. She heard, but didn’t see, its impact on the mingled crowd below, the lighter stroke producing the sigh that a lover’s kiss might evoke.

“Pardon me.” McNihil rolled off her and got to his feet. He strode over and picked up the trophy container, giving it a quick once-over to make sure that it hadn’t been damaged. He seemed satisfied by the inspection. His gaze moved back to her. “Thanks.”

“Any time.” November pushed herself onto her elbows, then closed and drew up her legs. It had been one of the more strenuous encounters she’d had, in which she’d wound up in more or less this same position. She stood upright, taking a look at her hands. They ached, fingers curling, from the grip she’d had on the cable. She forced her palm open wide, and could see the red numbers there, the ticking away of her accounts. The amount of hours she’d already wasted on this guy irritated her. There wasn’t that much time left now.

“So you want to talk to me, huh?” A few feet away, McNihil wasn’t even looking at her. He was examining the trophy container again, knocking a few smudges of soot from the object, checking that the seal between the head and the elongated body hadn’t been violated. He smiled when he looked back around at her. “I bet you do.”

The blow from the back of his hand took November by surprise; she was cursing herself in fury even before she landed sprawling on her back. Before she could pick herself up, one of her outflung wrists was pinned against the rooftop by the sole of McNihil’s shoe. Her vision cleared, and she found herself looking into a black hole inches away from her face. Behind the hole was the familiar shape of a high-caliber weapon, and behind that, McNihil’s outstretched arm pointing down at her. Behind that was his face, no longer smiling.

Never underestimate these old bastards, vowed November. Now she’d have to find some way to maneuver around him. “What’d you do that for?” she asked. “Fine way to treat somebody who just saved your ass.”

“It’s how I treat people who follow me around.” The gun looked like some unmoving geological outcropping in McNihil’s fist. “And who don’t do a very good job of it.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“Sweetheart, I have blown away people just for coming on all dumb with me.” McNihil could have leaned forward and tapped the gun’s muzzle against her brow. “Figure it out. We’re standing on top of a burning hotel, someplace nobody gives a rat’s ass what happens to it. I can walk off here easily enough. But if the scavengers tomorrow go rooting around through the ashes and they find your bones with a hole drilled through the skull, do you really think anyone will care?”

She said nothing. Her pinned arm was beginning to ache from the pressure of McNihil’s shoe.

“What’s your name?”

No need for lying. “November.”

“Good enough. There’s so little poetry in our lives nowadays.” McNihil shook his head. “Most of the time, it’s just scrabbling around and pointless subterfuge. Like your tailing me. Like your hanging around whenever I was having my little meetings with Harrisch and his pack of execs.”

Shit, thought November. She’d been operating under the impression that she’d pulled that one off, that he hadn’t a clue about her keeping tabs, at least up until that engineered train crash. She wondered how much else he knew. The dismaying prospect came to her that he could be completely ahead of her. That he might’ve known that she would be here waiting for him.

At that moment, an invisible fingertip, with ice under the nail, touched her heart. November looked up at him, with a new understanding and even a degree of admiration. There was a good reason to be afraid of people like him.

“Okay,” she said. The rooftop was uncomfortably warm beneath her, the tarry surface liquefying and seeping into her jacket. “But I already told you-we need to talk. And if I hadn’t been following you…” She nodded toward the parapet. “You’d be all over the street by now.”

In his other hand, McNihil held the trophy container like a staff of office. Smoke billowed behind him, from holes torn in the hotel’s structure. “Talk about what?”

She didn’t see any need to lie about this, either. “Harrisch, of course. All that stuff he’s leaning on you about. It’s not what you think it is.”

McNihil laughed. “As if I care. Since he can lean on me all he wants, and I’m still not having anything to do with it.”

There were also good reasons for feeling sorry for him. He still doesn’t know, thought November. The trap had just about closed tight around him, and he still didn’t feel its teeth.

Which was just as well for her, she figured. One way or another, she was going to move in on his action. The more connected he wound up, the easier it would be.

“You know,” said McNihil, peering at her, “I can see the gears turning around inside your head. You’ve got a nice cold attitude, young lady. Most people, their brains stop when they’re staring into something like this.” McNihil tilted the gun a fraction of an inch, letting it catch bright points of light from the flames licking past the roof’s edge. “You could’ve been an asp-head. But there haven’t been a lot of openings posted by the agency lately. That’s kind of a shame.”

It’s because you’re ancient history. She kept her reply silent. You and all the others. The reasons for the asp-heads’ existence-if there had ever been any-were long gone. Somebody like McNihil could blow away a scamming punk, put his spine and cut-down brain in a long metal jar; big deal. Who needed that anymore? It was what pissed her off about all her own scheming and plotting against McNihil. They should’ve just come to me first, November brooded. Harrisch and his little pack. If they’d done that, instead of thinking they could get some line on their dead colleague by using some old, burnt-out asp-head, they would’ve been off and rolling by now. She could’ve finished the job, found out what they wanted to know-Hell, she thought, I’m already more up-to-speed on what happened to Travelt than this guy could ever be-and pumped the numbers in her palm back up to where they should be. But no, it was never that simple. The standard complaint of freelancers such as herself: you not only had to do the job, you had to get the job first.

“I wear no man’s collar,” said November. “Except for pleasure, and then only on a time-limited basis. What I mean is that I prefer to be an independent operator.”

“That’s ridiculous.” McNihil took his shoe away from her wrist. “When you work for the Collection Agency, you get full medical and dental coverage.” He took a step back. “It’s the benefits, not the salary, that’s important.”

November sat up, massaging the blood back into her hand. “I don’t worry about things like that.”

“You should.” He kept the gun aimed at her, though his grip had relaxed slightly. “Believe it or not, someday you’ll be as old as me.”

“No, I won’t.” If the numbers blinking from her palm got much lower, she wouldn’t have to worry about even getting into her thirties, let alone through them.

“Whatever.” He let her stand up, the gun lowered in his hand. “But as I said before. If you want to talk to me, punch in the number. People who walk in on me while I’m doing business are likely to get hurt.”

“I don’t mind.” November showed him a three-quarter profile, her gaze emitted from the corners of her eyes. “That could be fun, actually.” She stepped closer to him. “Like you also said… I’m young. Flexible, as it were.”

This time, McNihil made no reply.

It’s too easy, thought November. It was always too easy. She wasn’t used to an encounter of this nature, with its familiar accelerating ramp-up and its foreordained conclusion, happening out in the open. But the smoke folding above their heads gave a comforting claustrophiliac illusion, the heat from the burning hotel beneath them completing the sense of giant machinery rushing toward an endlessly receding destination. There were even syringes and pads underfoot, debris left from the tenants who’d preferred to ingest in the stars’ cold view. If she closed her eyes, November could feel the world narrowing in around her shoulders, the corset or casket of desire, as she moved past McNihil’s gun and inside the perimeter of his defenses. Close enough to sense the human temperature of his body, close enough to bring the awareness of her body-she knew-into his machinelike percept systems.

November stood next to him, her narrow hip against the front of his thigh, the curve of one small breast deformed by the pressure against his torso. She looked up into McNihil’s face, then stood on tiptoe, reaching her hand to caress the corner of his brow, the soft touch of her fingers brushing the side of his head. Just as she had done so many times before, with other men, in other places that had collapsed down to the non-space held between her body and his.

She wanted to punish him, just a little bit. For being such a smart-ass, for holding an ugly gun in her face, for standing on her wrist; that still ached somewhat. But mainly to show him that he should pay serious attention to her. She let the localized magnetic-resonance pulse travel through one arm and into her palm, a paralyzing spark leaping from between her heart and life lines and into the sonuvabitch’s skull…

For a moment, the clouds of roiling smoke parted, enough to let her see the cold points of light in the dark sky. If that’s what they were; in another moment, she wondered if she might be gazing into the blackness at the center of McNihil’s eyes.

Then she realized she was lying flat on her back once more, the fire-heated rooftop beneath her spine. Bits and pieces of the world slotted together again, replacing the blank daze inside her head.

November realized that her arm, the one with which she had reached up to McNihil’s face, was numb and trembling; the first pinpricks of sensation had started. They felt as if they were happening to a piece of meat disconnected to her body. She managed to raise her head-the rooftop tilted dizzyingly-and could see her cupped palm, the one without the red numbers written there. A burn mark had been seared into the flesh, as though she had laid hold of a high-voltage cable; the pain from the wound had begun working its way up her stunned arm.

She lifted her gaze from the marked hand to McNihil, standing nearly a meter away from her. The shock must have been powerful enough to launch her through the air, like a crumpled tissue he’d discarded.

“Don’t try that one again.” McNihil had put away the gun. He smiled. “I’m wired, shielded, and all zipped up against your kind of action.”

No shit, thought November. With her still-functioning hand, she rubbed the corner of her brow, feeling a massive traumatic headache coming on. That kind of subcranial block, with a feedback and amplification circuit built in, wasn’t standard asp-head issue; he must have paid for that with his own money, somewhere along the line. Worse, she hadn’t known that McNihil had it, when she’d been operating under the assumption that she had him down cold, all his little details. Now, there was no telling what kind of stuff he had.

That was the kind of surprise for which she had no liking. I’m screwed. All her calculations were meaningless now. And at the same time, she was too far into this situation to abandon it and start over somewhere else. The red numbers in her palm would scroll down to zero before she had a chance of scoring another paying gig. If she had been looking into the centers of McNihil’s eyes, there weren’t any stars there; nothing but empty black, the unknown. For better or worse, her fate was welded to his.

A liquid shiver traced down the center of her spine, as though some central element of her self were being dissected by an asp-head’s clever little knives. A sex twinge, the feeling of things beyond her control, opened below her gut. If she hadn’t been worried about sheer survival, she could almost have been grateful to him.

“Gotta run.” Carrying the trophy container in one hand like an oversized scepter, McNihil moved toward the farther edge of the rooftop. “But like I said. You want to talk? Give me a call.”

November watched as he leapt easily over to the adjacent building. Then he was gone. For a while longer, November stayed where she was, regarding the flames and smoke rising on all sides.

A little too long.

When the rooftop gave way, a section collapsing beneath her as quick as a sprung trap, she found herself falling into smoke and flames. And then she wasn’t falling, and she could only marvel-for a few seconds, before she lost consciousness-at how much it truly hurt.

TWELVE

AMYGDALIC SHUNT OR THUS EVER TO VIOLATORS OF COPYRIGHT

Even after he washed up, he smelled of fire and smoke and burnt things. McNihil came out of the bathroom, into a sonic ambience of vintage Haitink conducting Mahler, the acoustics of the old abandoned Amsterdam Concertgebouw cranked up loud enough to be heard through his whole apartment. He took the towel from across his shoulders and rubbed his gray-flecked hair dry as the contralto came on.

O Röschen roth!

Der Mensch liegt in gröβter Noth!

Der Mensch liegt in gröβter Pein!

Je lieber möcht’ ich im Himmel sein…

Little red rose, thought McNihil. He always agreed with the singer, about preferring to be in heaven. A goal he had come close to achieving, when he’d been out there taking care of business. Like most asp-heads, or at least the ones who weren’t born cold-blooded, McNihil had an amygdalic shunt microsurgeried into his brain, a tiny shutoff valve triggered by the adrenaline levels in his system; when the juices got high enough, fear became an abstract concept. Even the contemplation of his own death-he’d had time to consider it while he’d been hanging on that disintegrating fire escape-seemed like no more than an assemblage of words, something he’d read about in a book. It worked better than a straight hormonal tamp-down; the adrenal fluids kept the body revved and fast-reacting, while the head contents lived up to the agents’ collective nickname.

“Knock knock,” said the door. The sound got only a slight irritated reaction from McNihil.

When he’d moved into this place, forking over the rent and deposits and key money from one of his last bonus checks from the agency, he’d taken his Swiss Army knife to the workings of the hallway security system, trying to dismantle the annoying visitor-announcement protocols, so that if somebody came to see him, on business or pleasure, he’d hear the sound of actual human knuckles on reinforced simulated-wood-grain fiberboard. He’d been defeated, though; the circuits kept repairing themselves, usually while he was out of town on an extended assignment. McNihil would come home, sometimes bleeding and with the crap almost literally beaten out of him-not every piece of business had gone as easily as this last one had-and would find that the circuits had healed over, soft boards and severed wires seeking each other out and knitting themselves back together again. Though usually in some increasingly crippled manner, the announcement sounds devolving through an entire programmed auditory repertoire after McNihil’s attempts at a permanent silence. He and the system had worked their way through lisping trombones, Everett Dirksenoid kazoos, and splintering glass that shouted in Provençal French before arriving at a compromise: the system remained functional, McNihil put away his miniature tools, and the circuits announced visitors with a realistic-enough simulation of knuckles on wood. McNihil no longer cared beyond that point.

“Knock knock,” said the door again. Leaving the towel draped around his neck, McNihil pulled the door open.

A delivery, the one he’d been expecting; McNihil tipped the kid, an agency intern he vaguely recognized, and carried the long package back to the flat’s living area. The package’s contents had weighed more when he’d been hauling them around, freshly harvested, inside his old trophy container. A note had been tagged on the wrappings, signed by the agency’s head prep tech.

Nice job, McN. Haven’t lost your touch. Keep cutting. R.

He placed the package on the flat glass kidney of the Noguchi knockoff coffee table. For a moment, McNihil idly wondered if he should tie a red ribbon around the package’s middle; it was, after all, intended to be something of a gift. A favor, something nice done for a person he admired-the other red ribbons, the shining wet ones that had pooled around the vivisected body, counted for nothing against that sentiment. He finally decided to omit any fancy wrappings, to just leave the completed trophy adorned in its plain, matter-of-fact agency routing-and-shipping labels. The person for whom it was intended went in, McNihil knew, for that kind of procedural detail. It was something left over from when the guy had still been working and writing, cranking out his trashy and sublime thrillers, and always on the lookout for real-life bits he could stick in to establish an air of authenticity.

McNihil had a row of those books himself, in a temperature-and-humidity-controlled shelf unit. Thinking about them, about the chapters and sentences and carefully strung-together words on the pages, put McNihil in a good mood. Or as good a one as he could be in, considering the aches and bruises he’d garnered while bringing this trophy back from the city farther north on the rim. When he’d first gotten back here and stripped off his smoke-ridden, bloodstained clothes, he’d examined himself in the bathroom mirror and had seen the rickety fire escape’s imprint from his chest to his chafed-raw ankle. I’m getting too old for this, he’d told himself. Way too old. Like those characters in the books; McNihil had found out-eventually-what it was like to be tired and more than a little burnt-out, yet still handing people’s asses back to them. Like that smart-ass little number up there on the roof of the en-flamed End Zone Hotel; he’d seen her eyes go wide when he’d come right back at her, knocking her off-balance in more ways than one. That was the part of his condition that felt as good for him as it did for the fictional old bastards in the yellowing pulp novels; he’d enjoyed that.

O glaube: du wardst nicht umsonst geboren!

Hast nicht umsonst gelebt, gelitten!

“Yeah, right.” He spoke aloud his rejoinder to the soprano. Though he didn’t feel cynical at all, not this time, as he finished buttoning his shirt, the cloth dragging across that of the bandages he’d plastered across his ribs. “And I’ll live forever, too.” As it was, he knew he was doing better than that November person. If she was still alive at all; when he’d gotten home, he’d phoned one of his remaining friends at the Collection Agency and asked for some kind of readout on her. The agency’s database already had her logged as being in a hospital burn ward, in one of those sterile-nutrient chambers where the most badly crisped wound up. From long practice, McNihil found it easy to stop thinking about things like that. He pulled on his jacket, picked up the package from the table, and headed for the door.

Still in a good mood, package tucked under his arm like a furled umbrella, when he got to Turbiner’s place. Of the old, yellowing paperbacks on McNihil’s preserving bookshelf, just under a fifth of them had been written by Alex Turbiner. Who was still alive, though his schlock-o literary career had ended a couple of decades ago; the old guy’s color was gray around the edges rather than that browning tinge that low-quality paper developed from time and oxygen. Still alive, which meant that his copyrights were one-hundred-percent enforceable, and a mean bastard, which meant that he’d get a kick out of the present McNihil was about to lay on him. But then, all writers were mean bastards. Must come with the territory, McNihil figured. And approved.

“Anybody home?” McNihil leaned his thumb against the call button beneath a grille of rusted metal. Or what artfully appeared to be rust, made to look that way from the beginning. “Got something for you.”

He stepped back and looked up the building’s facade of perpetually crumbling cement and broken windows interspersed with the ones that people actually lived behind. Turbiner had moved in here during his peak earning years, paying cash outright for a stationary unit; being a freelancer, he never had to put up with that cube-shuffling business that the big corporations put their employees through. The building was a ruin, but deliberately and fashionably so, designed during one of the severer deconstructionist, nostalgie de la boue crazes, when everybody who could afford it wanted to reside in something that looked like an arson-bait crack house.

“Sounds like that evil McNihil.” The speaker grille crackled and spit, just enough, without ever cutting out completely. The old man’s voice would have sounded like a frayed wire even without the additional effects. “Come on up.”

McNihil carried his package down a corridor lined with broken plaster and nondenominational graffiti, chosen for its aesthetics rather than turf-staking capabilities. At one time-McNihil could remember it-there had been programmed mechanical rats scuttling up and down the hallways, even a Mumbling Junkie™ mannequin in the urine-scented stairwell, but the building’s residents had finally voted to stop paying for those decorative services. The rats had kept flipping over on their backs and scrabbling their feet in the air in an unrealistic way, and the partially animated addict had begun declaiming Yeats in a Shakespearean actor’s voice; old, poorly erased programming had risen up from the mannequin’s circuits, like dreams of a former life. To be confronted by a rag-bag, needle-tracked scarecrow expostulating about widening gyres and Bethlehem-ward slouches was considered a bit much by the more fastidious of the building’s residents. There were limits.

The Mahler Second was on Turbiner’s stereo as well, as an example of the universe’s secret, synchronistic workings. Or not: McNihil had just started his up when he’d phoned Turbiner, to tell the old man that he was coming over. Turbiner might’ve heard it in the background, behind McNihil’s voice, and decided he wanted to hear Emmy Loose or Beverly Sills or any of the other celestial voices, long dead and gone, still audible on the ancient recordings. The sopranos and the contraltos and the big, booming choruses stepped through the even more ancient words of the Klopstock ode, and none of them ever died.

Aufersteh’n…

“Good to see you.” Turbiner turned down the volume as his visitor pushed the door shut behind himself. “How ya been keepin’?”

McNihil nodded slowly. “‘You will rise again…’”

“Huh?” Over the tops of his trifocal lenses, Turbiner peered at him with age-clouded eyes. “Oh, yeah; right.” He glanced toward the nearest loudspeaker, listened for a moment, then translated the next line to be sung. “‘You will rise again, my dust, after a short repose…’” When Turbiner shrugged, he looked shambling and diminished, like the most moth-eaten bear in the zoo, the one the keepers debated about-whether it would be a kindness to put him down. “Well, maybe that’s true. Old Gustav M. would know better than I would. For the time being, at least.”

The massed voices, whispering now, surrounded McNihil as he followed Turbiner into the cluttered lair. The flat’s space had grown so tight with the old writer’s possessions-mainly boxes of books and stacked rows of CD’s, tapes, datachips, even some antiquated vinyl-that McNihil had to hold the package vertical against himself, to keep from knocking anything over.

Turbiner’s housekeeping had gone all to shit after his wife had died, ten years back or thereabouts. McNihil remembered her as elegant and sarcastic, and not overly given to sweating the small details like dust, but still with enough ingrained female instincts to keep the disorder somewhat at bay.

Thinking about dead wives, while McNihil stood in the middle of this heavily past-filled space, took his good mood down a few degrees. Guilt had a way of doing that. Turbiner had loved his wife (And didn’t I love mine? thought McNihil glumly), enough to scrape close to the bone a couple of his savings and investment accounts, all to pay off whatever debts she’d had when she died. Thus buying her a quiet grave, free from the reanimating forays of the bill collectors.

Aufersteh’n, my ass-right now, lyrics about the desirability of resurrection weren’t striking McNihil the right way. His wife, when she had died… he hadn’t done as well by her as old Turbiner had. Though he’d meant to, and there was still a chance; it still might happen. Guilt could be bought off. All it took was enough money. More money now than before; he hadn’t been keeping up with even the interest payments on his wife’s debts. The numbers kept ticking upward, compounding like hammer blows, one after another. It would take a lot to pay it all off now, to set his dead wife sleeping in the ground along with the late Mrs. Turbiner, dreaming the endless, empty dreams of the really and truly dead. And I’m good as retired now, thought McNihil. To come up with that kind of money, he’d have to find some way of going back full-time with the Collection Agency, plus hustle up every kind of on-the-side gig he could manage. Instead of doing little favors for old writers that nobody read anymore.

“I’ll make some coffee.” Turbiner was already in the flat’s kitchen area, on the other side of the counter, rinsing a glass pot out at the sink. “That okay by you?”

“Sure.” Horizontal slices of sunlight fell across McNihil’s face, from the barely opened blinds at one side of the flat. “I wasn’t planning on hanging around very long.” He held up the package. “Like I said on the phone, I just wanted to drop something off for you.”

“Yeah, so I see.” Turbiner fiddled with the coffeemaker’s pieces, rinsing them off and putting them back together, watching his hands at work rather than glancing back at McNihil. “It’s amazing, the kinds of things people walk around on the streets with, these days.” The old man turned a thin smile toward his visitor. “What a world we live in.”

McNihil sat on the couch, moving aside a stack of papers and cascading books to make room for himself. He started taking apart the package’s wrappings, figuring that it would take Turbiner a while to get around to it. That was one of the ways you could tell when somebody was really old. Or older than me, thought McNihil. They all acted as if they had forever to do things, rather than a rapidly diminishing remainder of time. He wondered if it was just wishful thinking on Turbiner’s part.

“So what is it you got there?” Gurgling and hissing noises came from the kitchen area; Turbiner had come back around to the flat’s larger open space. “Anything cool?”

The old man knew what was inside the package; it wasn’t a secret. Turbiner himself had been the one to tell McNihil about what was going on in the Gloss a little farther to the north, about the kid ripping off his old copyrights, selling them to the collectors’ market that still existed for that sort of thing. McNihil would’ve despised those sorts of people, even if he’d never worked for the agency. How could you be into something, into it enough that you wanted all you could get of it, and not want to pay for it? Really pay, not in terms of paying lots of money for it, but just making sure that the money went to the right person. The person who’d created it. Written it, composed it, sung it… whatever.

True bastardliness, McNihil had always figured, lay with people-and he’d encountered more than a few of them-who’d shell out nearly the same amount or even more to a pirate, some copyright rip-off specialist, rather than see the same money or even less go to the rightful creator. He’d had a lot of time recently to think about stuff like that, and had started to formulate a general theory of evil, pieced together from those things that he’d just instinctively gotten pissed off about before. The way he saw it now, there were certain people who loved the art-the music, the books, the pictures, whatever it might be-but who actively hated the creators of the same. Hated them from envy, jealousy, spite-from just that gnawing, infuriating sense that the creators could do something they couldn’t, could make something happen on a page or a canvas or with the sequence of one pitched sound after another. The basic criminal mentality says to itself, Why should that person have something that I don’t have? Where’s the justice, the fairness, in that? And thus thievery and vandalism are justified, not only by the brain, but deep in the outraged heart of anyone who can’t get over the notion that he’s not the center of the universe.

So they don’t steal things-McNihil had thought this before-just so they can have them. That would be too simple. When he’d been working for the agency, he’d encountered too many idiots who could’ve easily paid for their stolen desirables. They stole to prove that they could steal, that they had the right to steal. And to punish anyone, particularly the creators, all those smug writers and musicians and artists, all those busy, talented hands and mouths and brains, the possessors of which swaggered around as if God loved them more than those who burned with a righteous envy. To steal from the creators was an act of justified vengeance; it showed them that they couldn’t get away with that infuriating shit. It proved that the books and the music and the paintings and everything else really belonged to the thieves, that it was all theirs by right; in some strange way, the thieves and not the creators had brought it all into being. So it wasn’t really thievery at all, then, was it? It was the returning of stolen property to its rightful owners. Or such was the belief of the thieves, written upon the cracked tablets of their souls.

“Here’s your coffee.”

McNihil heard the voice behind him, and glanced over his shoulder. He saw Turbiner shoving aside a stack of papers on a low table and setting down a nominally washed mug; steam rose from its glistening black contents. Turbiner straightened up somewhat creakily, and headed back into the kitchen area.

“Thanks,” said McNihil. His attention dropped back into present time, into this shuttered space. He’d stopped halfway through unwrapping the package he’d brought for the old man, and had been sightlessly gazing at the crammed bookshelves on the other side of the flat. They stretched from floor to ceiling, running the whole extent of the flat’s longest unbroken wall, and were stuffed with old paperbacks and a few hardbounds. Some of them were Turbiner’s own books, the ones he’d written, including various translations; the rest were the ones that other people had written, that Turbiner had read along the way, that bit by bit he’d constructed the world inside his head from.

Not a particularly nice world, but one that McNihil was comfortable living in. It’d become real for him when he’d had the work done on his eyes, as though the contents of Turbiner’s head and books had seeped out into the larger universe and taken it over. Or maybe it’d been the real world all along, the one that Turbiner and all the writers like him had seen in its true lineaments, and the surgery had merely been an extraction, the removal of some kind of invisible cataracts that had prevented it from being seen in all its dark, annihilating beauty.

He and Turbiner had talked about this before. A little flashback unreeled through McNihil’s brain:

“You see, that’s the way it is, when you’re talking about noir.” Turbiner had been kicking back with the single malt, an inch of Bruichladdich with a stable polymer ice-cube substitute drifting in the glass. “It’s a literature of anxiety. Somebody’s always getting screwed over.”

The word had been floating around in the room, cold and false as the imitation ice. It had come up in the general course of conversation, while McNihil had been slouched down in the armchair opposite the couch, his own nervous system slightly buzzed from the effects of the same bottle that Turbiner had opened. McNihil hadn’t cared where the word came from ultimately, and hadn’t supposed that Turbiner cared, either. French intellectuals talking about low-brow American culture, ages ago, ancient black-and-white movies filled with shadows, garish paperback cover art that seemed equally devoted to guns, lip-dangling cigarettes, and off-the-shoulder cleavage-no one cared anymore. Not about the word itself, which had gotten applied to so many things that it now meant-according to Turbiner-nothing at all.

“You see, that’s where the later variations, especially in the movies, that’s where they all went wrong.” Turbiner had gotten into full lubricated lecture mode. “They mistook the images, the look of some old Billy Wilder masterpiece, and they thought that was the only thing that mattered. Really, it was only the people still cranking out books-like me-that had any fucking notion.” He had taken another swallow, hard enough to rock his head back; from where he sat, McNihil had been able to watch the alcohol rolling down the other man’s tendon-corded neck. “Any fucking notion at all, about what the essence, the soul of noir was all about.” The words themselves had been drunk; no wonder the old writer loved them. “The look, all that darkness and shadow, all those trite rain-slick streets-that was the least of it. That had nothing to do with it.”

McNihil had ingested enough alcohol to make his own eyelids feel like lead-weighted curtains. He’d looked out from underneath them at the old man. “So what was it, then?”

“Oh… it’s betrayal.” Turbiner had taken his glass down to the last brown remnant. “That’s what it’s always been. That’s what makes it so realistic, even when it’s the most dreamlike and shabby, when it looks like it’s happening on some other planet. The one we lost and can’t even remember, but we can see it when we close our eyes…”

The flashback was interrupted as McNihil, on autopilot, took a sip of the coffee that had been set down in front of him. It tasted like hot acid on his tongue, pulling him back into real time. Not unpleasantly so, or at least not unexpectedly.

Listening to the old man, McNihil knew he’d been speaking the truth. It came from somebody who’d loved his dead wife enough to put her in the ground for good, debt-free and gone. Or perhaps she was ashes in a jar, tucked somewhere in the general clutter of Turbiner’s flat; either way, it didn’t matter. The words about betrayal ran knifelike through somebody who’d loved just as much, but hadn’t kept the same faith with the dead.

And the old man had known that, too. McNihil had never spoken to Turbiner about his own domestic affairs, but still, there it was somehow. Maybe from somebody else in the Collection Agency, another asp-head; Turbiner had been having his copyrights protected by the standard means for so long, there were bound to be other operatives with whom he was on a friendly basis. So for Turbiner to be talking about betrayal and things like that… McNihil had to admit, the old man had never claimed to be any kind of a nice guy.

“So what’ve we got here?” Turbiner had sat down in the plush chair with his own cup. He nodded toward the partially unwrapped package. “Not big enough for an automatic rifle, at least not a good one.”

McNihil ignored the comment. He knew the old man was going to dig the present; if nothing else, it would complete the set Turbiner already had.

“Check it out,” said McNihil. He pulled off the rest of the wrappings, balled them up in his fist, and tossed them onto the rubble-strewn floor. An elongated black leatherette case was revealed on the low table; the standard agency presentation job, nothing too fancy-the little metal hinges and clasp were just a cut above cheap and flimsy-but good enough. “A little something for you.”

“How sweet.” Turbiner leaned forward and drew the box around toward himself. “Ah.” He nodded in appreciation as he looked over the contents. “Very, very nice.”

“I figured, the way you’ve got your system set up, you’d need about twelve feet.” McNihil took another sip of coffee. “Think that’ll do you?”

“Perfect.” Turbiner’s voice went down into a pleased murmur, his grayed eyes glazing in happy anticipation. “It’ll be perfect.”

McNihil watched as the old man lifted out the presentation box’s main contents, letting the snakelike object lie dangling across his level palms. It even glistened in a proper herpetoid fashion, the decorative polyethylene sheathing put on by the agency’s techs shimmering with a subtle faceted pattern.

The scale finish was on the outside; what was on the inside was actual human spinal tissue, the last living remains of McNihil’s visit to the city farther north in the Gloss. That was what he’d brought back from the End Zone Hotel, that he’d returned with, safely tucked inside the regulation asp-head trophy container. He’d been worried about it on the trip back, what with all the knocking about it’d gotten, when he’d been scrambling up and then clinging to that disintegrating fire escape. And then the fire itself, up on top of the burning transient hotel, the tarry roof smoking and bubbling beneath him and that would-be severe female who’d rescued him. With all that heat-including the lethal radiation from the young woman’s eyes, when she’d finally caught on that McNihil wasn’t the gratitude-ridden type-the spinal and cerebral matter he’d scooped out of the pirate kid’s carcass might have been cooked inside the long tube he’d been carrying. Stupid broad, thought McNihil, seeing her tough-cookie little face pop up on his mental screen for a moment. She’d saved his ass and kept the trophy intact; the techs, when McNihil had finally dropped it off at the agency, had told him it was in fine shape, nothing to worry about. And what had she gotten out of it, whoever she was? Nada. By this time, McNihil had stopped wondering whether she’d even try to get in touch with him again. If anything, she was probably too embarrassed by an old connect like him having gotten the drop on her. And so easily, too; that thought came to him with a certain measure of satisfaction.

“Absolutely perfect.” Turbiner’s voice held the same bright emotion. Still holding the present across his palms, he looked up at McNihil. “I’ve wanted this for a long time.” He glanced over at the rack of stereo equipment, then back again. “Finally, man; you’re not really optimized until the cables all match.”

Or match close enough; McNihil knew, and was sure the old man knew as well, that there’d be no way that the long, dangling object, with the snakey texture and the gold-plated tips at each end, could perfectly match what he already had in his system. But it was certainly the next best thing.

There was already human spinal tissue in Turbiner’s music setup, two long stretches of it running from his hyper-tweaked power amp, one of the last of the classic Moffatt lithium-flux designs, and out to the big square mirror-imaged Dahlquist DQ-10’s. Each speaker cable had the same glistening snakeskin finish-they looked, in fact, like two swollen anacondas forming horizontal S’s across the threadbare Afghan carpet that was the bottom layer beneath all the other strata of books and sloppily stacked papers. The agency’s trophies had been bulkier back when Turbiner had been presented with those; the techs hadn’t quite gotten down the miniaturization for the cables’ life-support and oxygen-delivery processes, all the silent workings that kept the encased tissue alive.

McNihil figured that those archaic cables must be at least twenty, twenty-five years old; they still had the big grapefruit-sized bulge close to the amp ends, where the scooped-out cerebral matter was lodged in its own thermo-insulated padding. He remembered dropping off to other clients cables and similar trophies, back when he’d first started working for the agency. Nowadays, the techs had come closer to perfecting their microsurgical crafts; the new cable was narrower-it could’ve slid through the circle formed by McNihil’s thumb and forefinger-and the same diameter from end to end, minus the smaller connector spades at the very tips. The new cable held just as much of the brain of a pirate-in this case, the kid that McNihil had worked over up north-only condensed and stripped of any unnecessary synapses and neurons, and dispersed evenly rather than bunched up in one unsightly lump.

Thus ever to violators of copyright, thought McNihil as he watched the other man admiring the trophy. This was the part of the job, when he’d still been working for the agency, that he’d always enjoyed the most.

“The only way it could be better…” Turbiner held the cable up higher, squinting one eye as though examining the object through a magnifying glass. “The only way it could possibly be improved”-his glance and a sly smile darted in McNihil’s direction-“is if the first two guys, and then this one, had been triplets. A three-way identical match, boom-boom-boom with the genetics. Wouldn’t that be a hot-rod rig?”

“To end all rigs,” agreed McNihil. He was starting to get a contact high, partially enhanced by the caffeine, from Turbiner’s obvious enjoyment of the gift. The crack about what would’ve been the perfect rig, the ultimate cable setup for a hard-core music lover’s stereo, wasn’t meant as criticism, McNihil knew. How likely was it that a set of identical triplets would get into copyright piracy? Not if they had one person’s smarts amongst themselves. Turbiner had lucked out as it was, back when the Folichman twins had glommed onto some of his old titles, and had then made the mistake of thinking nobody would catch them if they scanned the yellowing pages, encrypted the digitized results, and offered them for sale through a Djakarta phone-bank front operation that hadn’t been any smarter than they were. Turbiner’s copyrights hadn’t been the only ones infringed, but he’d been near the top of the agency’s list for trophy handout when the hammer had come down on the pirate operation. Plus McNihil had been the agent in charge, so he could pull a few strings, make sure that the top goodies went to his personal heroes. He’d already met Turbiner, at one of the agency’s semiannual PR-banquet functions, and had been into the old guy’s books-when he’d been able to find them-for some time before that. McNihil had assembled nearly a complete set of Turbiner’s backlist, had gotten him to inscribe and sign them, the whole trip; that was when he’d found out about Turbiner’s significant music fixation, particularly in regard to the equipment angle. That also being the moment McNihil had decided on scoring the ultimate upgrade for the old writer, something to put the final cherry gloss on his antique, perfectly preserved stereo setup.

Which was what pirates, copyright violators, were good for. If they could be said to be good for anything. Trophies; the final, tangible, and fitting result of the draconian enforcement of the laws protecting the ownership of creative content and intellectual property. If there were assholes out there stupid enough to attempt violating copyright-and there always were; the Collection Agency would never go out of business-then asp-heads like McNihil had no compunctions about putting the points of their field scalpels into the hinges and locks of the pirates’ skulls. The consequences of screwing around were so well-known-the agency put a lot of effort into its various public-information programs, cluing in the world on how the system’s sharp-edged gears meshed-that most asp-heads, McNihil included, figured their prey were into some sort of self-destruction imperative, sure and certain suicide by means of the law’s swift, implacable enforcers. What else could it be? If any asp-heads had ever had pangs of conscience about the bloody nature of their work-McNihil himself had always slept well enough at night-then the notion that the agency’s operatives were giving the pirates not only what they deserved, but what they wanted as well, should have been enough to ease those feelings.

“Look,” said Turbiner. “I’ve got to hook this up right now. I can’t wait.” He had coiled the trophy cable into a loop around one hand; with the other, he knocked back the last of the coffee in his cup. He stood and moved toward the equipment rack against the wall. “Sorry to drop out of the conversation… but you know how it is.”

McNihil shrugged. “Knock yourself out.”

He watched as Turbiner powered down his stereo gear and pulled the rack out far enough to reach the connections behind. The old man knelt down, already oblivious to anyone else’s presence in the flat, and began unhooking the ordinary, non-trophy cable running from the amp to the massive, refrigerator-shaped subwoofer sitting between the two DQ-10’s. The recording of the Mahler Second had come to an end some time ago-it had been turned down so low that McNihil had barely been conscious of the silence becoming complete inside the flat. In absolute quiet, a combination of the flat’s double glazing and the acoustic interference waves pulsed out from around the windowsills, Turbiner busily unhooked from a monochannel power amp the two gold-plated spades of the cable running to the subwoofer cabinet. Beneath the cable’s clear plastic sheath were the smaller diameter wires of ordinary six-nines copper, insulated black and red, signal and ground; no human tissue involved. Disdain for the non-trophy cable was already showing on Turbiner’s creviced face as he popped loose the spades at the other end.

“There we go.” Just as swiftly, Turbiner worked the screwdriver to tighten down the amp’s and subwoofer’s connectors onto the new cable. He stood up, slipping the screwdriver into his shirt pocket, then brushing his hands off. “Thus we approach audio nirvana.” Turbiner pushed the rack back into place-he had left the curve of the trophy out in front, a thin ribbon snaking across the carpet-then commenced the intricate sequence of powering up all the equipment in the proper order. A fiery glow came from inside the ranks of NOS Sovtek 65512’s, the dome-headed vacuum tubes lined up across the tops of the amps like combustible soldiers. “This oughta be good.”

Turbiner didn’t bother putting in a new disc, but just started up the Mahler Second from the beginning. He settled back in the sweet-spot chair, its leather and underlying padding molded to his frame from long hours of listening. The upholstery was still sighing as the invisible cellos and basses, long distant in space and time, dug into the opening bars.

For a few seconds, the music bore down like all the gears of the world grinding to a halt, the vast machinery of the cosmos snagging upon God’s trapped hand. De profundis outrage, the garments of the angels rippling into the time-stilled fabric of the universe.

“That sounds pretty nice,” said McNihil.

Turbiner made no reply. His crepe-paperish eyelids had lowered, leaving a narrow slit of unfocused vision beneath. In furious concentration, he leaned slightly forward, tension clicking into some deeper, slower state of existence. He looked like a desert turtle going into hibernation, all bodily functions shutting down, except for the tingle of nerves from his cochlea. His ears, everything beyond the stiff cartilage of his pinnae, were the youngest part of his body; McNihil knew that the old man had had cochlear implants put in about a decade ago. All in the service of the music, his only surviving love.

It’ll be a while, McNihil told himself, before the old guy resurfaces. He’d been here before, when Turbiner had gone off into the zone of vibrating air molecules. Pushing himself up from the couch, McNihil wandered back into the flat’s kitchen area. He opened the cupboard over the sink, took out the half-empty bottle of Bruichladdich, and poured himself a shot.

The music washed into the kitchen like a hammering tide. Leaning against the counter and taking a sip, McNihil could see the brown spots on the other man’s skull, lipofuscin deposits underneath the thinning silver hair. Alcohol on top of caffeine added another glow to McNihil’s mood. It didn’t matter-not really-that the new cable, the one with the would-be pirate kid’s brain essence smeared inside, was a bit of a shuck. It brought such obvious pleasure to the old guy; where was the harm?

Of the shuckness of the agency’s trophies, McNihil was something of an expert. When he’d still been with the agency full-time, he’d been rotated out of the field for a while, back into the offices and a design team working on revamping and updating all the stuff that went out the doors. (He remembered thumbing the yes button during one feedback session, registering his professional opinion on the exact spooky snakeskin finish that graced the cable now running between Turbiner’s amp and subwoofer. McNihil felt a little proprietary surge whenever he spotted those glistening scales.) When he’d been on that duty, itching to get back outside and connect up lowlife copyright infringers, the Collection Agency’s top brass had decided on a full-out review of its signature gear, the trophies themselves. McNihil had ended up wading through an entire history of the desired objects, complete with a sideshow memo presentation, an art gallery of vengeful matter.

Just looking at the cable forming an extended S across the flat’s carpet-the gift that McNihil had braved fire and heights to procure for the old man-the history of the Collection Agency’s compensation for larcenous copyright infringement turned slowly inside his head. Like a prismatic hologram, entire to itself and outside the flow of linear time that had produced it; the narrative didn’t need to be gone over by McNihil, not again, for him to know its detail and sequence:

• When it was first determined that death was the appropriate punishment for copyright infringement, the reasoning went more or less along these lines:

• The world had changed, in both the theory and the practice of its economy, to one in which people made their livings-put roofs over their heads and the heads of their children, bread in their and their children’s mouths-from intellectual property. Ideas and/or design and/or content-whatever word, name, label one wanted to use-if that was the most important thing in the world, that which determined whether you ate or starved-

• Then why would it not be defended? How could the ownership of it not be important? The same rule of survival applied to big international corporations, to midlevel localized players and entrepreneurs, to scrabbling, scribbling little content creators, writers in their basement offices and musicians in their one-man-band back-bedroom studios and red-eyed video-makers slamming between cuts on their desktop editing rigs, all of them turning their brains inside out, turning the tiniest neural sparks into words and images, encoded, intelligible, transmittable-to-someone-else thoughts. If they were going to have something to sell, they had to own it-it being the product of their minds and creativity-in the first place.

• And no utopian notions, no weird ’net-twit theorizing, propagandizing, self-serving merchandising of predictions, no half-baked amalgam of late-sixties Summer of Love and Handouts, Diggerish free food in the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park, and Stalinist collectivization, lining up the kulaks and shooting them ’cause they’re in the way of the new world order, nothing had been able to change that. The laws of economics were as immutable as those of physics; once the fringy out-there stuff was dismissed, it still remained that if one flapped one’s arms and jumped off the roof, one landed on one’s butt.

• The arm-flapping maneuvers, the attempts to get around reality, had all burnt out and been discarded, one by one. The “gift-based” economy had been a hippie dream, nice for exchanging information of no value, worthless itself for selling and buying anything worth buying and selling.

• Salvation hadn’t come from advertising revenues, either. The notion of giving away intellectual content, everything on the wire for nothing, like old reruns of Gilligan’s Island, all paid for by the companies sticking their ads all over the monitor screen-that had eventually evaporated like spit on an unventilated power supply as well. There had been no need for anything like ad-stripping programs, going right back to the classic forerunner Privnet IFF, peeling the advertisements off like soggy stick-’em stamps and dropping them into whatever electronic wastebasket caught unseen, never-seen, never-should’ve-bothered bits and bytes. The evolution of the human brain had taken care of the situation. A filter is like an immune system, and vice versa; it hadn’t been too long before a benign mental cataract had been determined to exist, one that spread memelike through the species. Ad-blindness, linked to the refresh rates on visual display units. Any pitch other than hard copy in the real world never made it past the optic nerve.

• If stuff was worth buying and selling-not just hard physical stuff, but intellectual property as well-then it was worth stealing, too. Thieves are always with us, as the mercantile bible might have warned of, but not blessed. For a while, the inchoate, not-yet-coalesced Internet had fostered the kind of informational darkness in which thieves prospered. The so-called anonymous remailing services pleaded an ideological agenda and served as a front for criminals and vandals. The first and most famous, anon.penet.fi, folded in 1996, its spine broken by Finnish court orders. The rest were hunted down and exterminated off the wires-it took a while-on the simple legal principle and mechanism that receiving stolen goods was as much a crime as the theft that produced them. That was what being a fence was all about: there was essentially no difference between a sleazoid pawnshop trafficking in hot, wire-dangling car stereos and an on-line service receiving a stolen, copyrighted piece, whether it was a song digitized into an audio file or a book with all its words OCR’d into zeroes and ones, then stripping off the transmission data that would identify the thief and routing the result to a prearranged buyer. It wasn’t just in the hypothesized merchant’s bible that facilitating theft was considered as much a crime as the theft itself. Christ, McNihil had thought before, you could find that much in the Koran. And in the hearts and minds of decent people everywhere-which was why:

• Nobody really objected to the severe nature of the system, the Collection Agency and its attendant asp-heads, that was eventually set in place to take care of the remaining copyright infringers. (Nobody, that was, except the most foolishly tenderhearted and the irredeemably ideology-ridden, who persisted in confusing intellectual-property issues with censorship and limiting access to information.) A hard world, and getting harder; no sympathy went to a clown who interfered with somebody trying to make an honest buck. When to steal from someone was not to take some expendable, frivolous trinket off them, a van Gogh off the dining-room wall of some bloated plutocrat; but rather to lift some hard-pressed hustling sonuvabitch’s means of survival, the only way he had of turning the contents of his head into the filling of his stomach; when to steal from someone was the same as to murder them-then nobody cried when, through law and custom, executing thieves became the wholly proper thing to do.

• With all intellectual property merchandised or archived on the wires, and accessible with a few keystrokes-it became obviously necessary to find a way to take thieves, copyright infringers, off-line for good. When survival is at stake, no second chances are allowed. Which was why, even back before the last century had ticked over into this one, a general maxim had gone the rounds:

• There’s a hardware solution to intellectual-property theft. It’s called a.357 magnum. No better way for taking pirates off-line. Permanently. Properly applied to the head of any copyright-infringing little bastard, this works.

• Once death was accepted as public policy-murder as the answer to murder, the solution to people who had problems with respecting copyright-then it had just been a matter of properly implementing it. To get the most out of it.

“This sounds great,” said Turbiner. He had pulled himself up from his Mahler-driven, wordless meditations. He turned and looked back toward the flat’s kitchen area. “It was worth the wait, man.”

“Glad you like it.” McNihil splashed a little more scotch into the glass on the counter; he knew Turbiner wouldn’t mind that he’d helped himself. “I’ll let the techs know, back at the agency, that it met with your approval.”

Actually, it did sound better. McNihil had known there would be an improvement, but hadn’t been quite prepared for this order of magnitude. The bass coming out of the subwoofer was deep and clean, with no cheap-’n’-fuzzy boom-box reverb; the drum strokes hammering out from the back of the invisible orchestra were as tight as the heads on the timpani themselves. The old guy had had a good setup before, but now McNihil could sense the actual physical structure of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw responding in synch to the music, a nearly subliminal tremble coming up through the floorboards and into the soles of his shoes.

Pretty good for a shuck, thought McNihil. Which it was:

• For death to be effective public policy, it must be public. If the message to be gotten across is, Connect around with someone else’s copyrights and you die, an emotionally resonant depiction of that truth had to be created.

• Witnessing the death of intellectual-property pirates-taping and broadcasting the various raids and apprehensions, getting the videocam lenses in close for the spattering blood, the wide-eyed look in some jerk’s eyes as the cold circle at the front of some large-caliber tannhäuser was set against the bridge of his nose, his stare going cross-eyed as he watched the trigger being slowly pulled back-that worked at the beginning. High ratings and message through-put, audience retention up above the ninetieth percentile.

• Then the drop-off, wire share falling along with the novelty factor; after the first dozen or so punks have their brains removed out the backs of their skulls, after a few good raids on rogue Chinese factories, with the new, improved Smart-Enuff® bombs sniffing out illicit CD-ROM’s and then scattering polycarbonate and body parts with equal facility; after everybody had seen stuff like that, the message migrated to the subconscious level of people’s minds, instead of staying up top where the Collection Agency and its clients wanted it.

• Plus there was the suicide factor involved. Various jerks, operating out of the same tired ideological agenda and hippie wish-fulfillment dream, who wanted to martyr themselves for the muddled and not-very-well-thought-out cause of “free” information; or the terminally and personally screwed-up, who saw the Collection Agency’s asp-heads as a neat and public way of bringing about their own demise-either way, the threat of death was in fact the promise of death for enough people to be a continuing trouble. Even if minor, it was still something that needed to be dealt with; the agency dealt in absolutes, its net tight enough to allow no one to wriggle through.

• This called for a certain amount of rethinking on the Collection Agency’s part. Did death necessarily = punishment? The main problem with death as a negative motivational factor was that it was over too quickly, and not always painfully enough.

• Obviously, what was needed was to stretch death out in time, take it from a point to an extended process. And pump up the pain and humiliation factors.

Thus, thought McNihil, the creation of the trophy system. It worked even better.

THIRTEEN

A FLUTTERING MOTH IN THE DEVIL’S COIN-PURSE

Here.” McNihil had poured a shot for his host; standing beside the sweet-spot chair, he handed the glass to Turbiner. “Maybe this’ll heighten the effect even more.”

“Thanks.” The old man took the glass and sipped, then nodded in appreciation. He kept his gaze aimed straight ahead, at the place between the two main speakers. “You hear that?” He nodded toward the unseen orchestra. “You clean up the bass, the midrange sorts itself out, too. Just less audible crap in general.”

McNihil placed himself back on the couch, careful not to spill his own refilled glass. From there, he could watch as the other man let himself be drawn back under the music’s engulfing tide. They were already at the third movement, In ruhig flieβender Bewegung. Warmed by the scotch, McNihil listened, admiring the way the new cable brought the subterranean rumble of the basses into the flat. Admiring, despite what he knew of the nature of such trophies:

• The vindictive principle largely determined how the Collection Agency structured its compensation protocols. If someone stole from one of their clients-stole by way of infringing, pirating the client’s copyright-protected material-then the agency saw the pirate’s entire person as being essentially in forfeit to the client. If the client had a right to demand the pirate’s death, then why not the pirate’s life as well? The pirate as a living entity? And more to the purpose of providing an object lesson to anyone thinking about ripping off one of the agency’s clients-as a suffering entity as well.

• Thus, an important evolution in the nature of trophies came about. At the beginning, when physical death was required-absolute physical death, with no parts surviving-trophies took form in less satisfying, less temporally extended ways. McNihil had read about these; they were slightly before his time in the agency-

• One author of romance novels, living somewhere in the English Cotswolds with a posse of beloved felines, had the three on-wire and unauthorized purveyors of her old books delivered to her in the form of canned, vitamin-enhanced cat food, suitably minced and labeled, the bones powdered and stirred in for the extra calcium essential to a healthy animal’s diet;

• A mystery writer in New York City, still maintaining his rooftop garden long after the depopulation of the buildings around him, had a CD-ROM packager-who’d been running a sideline of distributing out-of-print tides for which he hadn’t bothered to pay any royalties-delivered to him in the form of three sacks of bone meal and fertilizer. The roses did very well that year and the next.

• The beginning of the shuckness was in examples such as these. A chopped-up human being was justice, but not necessarily nutrition; the cans with the late pirates’ scowling faces on the label had to have extra soy and fish-farm protein mixed in. Same with the fertilizer, only there the human portion didn’t even hit the fifty-percent mark. As with so many things in life, it was the thought that counted. And the deaths.

• The same principle applied when it was determined that the agency’s trophies, for maximum educational and moral value, should be living and not just dead things. In the cables lacing up AlexTurbiner’s stereo system, there was actual human cerebral tissue, the essential parts of the larcenous brains of those who’d thought it would be either fun or profitable to rip off an old, forgotten scribbler like him. Conceptually attached to the cables, the old ones he’d already had and the new slimmed-down subwoofer cable that McNihil had just delivered to him, was a lot of audio-nerd gabble about the superiority of soft-’n’-wet neural-based technology for high-end sound systems, coherent full-spectrum wave delivery, optimized impedance matching, the transfer function between synapses quicker than that through the crystalline structure of metal conductors, et cetera, et cetera, yadda yadda yadda.

• Only… that was bull. The Collection Agency knew it; everybody who worked for the agency, the administrators and accountants, the techs and asp-heads out in the fields, they all knew the basic shuckness of it. At the center of the cerebral tissue inside Turbiner’s cables, running through it like the digestive tract of a mosquito surrounded by its minute insect brain, was a core of thin-film cryo-insulated stabilized quasi-liquid silver. The precious metal-made even more so by the expensive high tech that had transformed it-had the conductive qualities of ordinary silver, enhanced by the mercurylike room-temperature flow and lack of crystalline-structure inhibitory factors. That was why the cables sounded so good, rolled out bass like the shoes of God, made the percussion section’s tubular bells ring like skinny angels. The brain matter scooped from the skulls of copyright infringers had nothing to do-in truth-with the sound the cables made possible, though the agency’s claim was that it did.

• The brain matter, the still-living remnant of the various pirates, was there for one purpose. To suffer.

McNihil set down his glass and pushed himself up from the depths of the couch. He walked over to the stereo-equipment rack, being careful not to get in between Turbiner and the full impact of the music. Kneeling down beside the new cable’s boalike curve, he dug another piece of asp-head equipment from his jacket pocket, something no bigger than a handheld calculator with a few dangling gold-tipped wires. As the third movement of the Mahler hammered and steamed around him, McNihil inserted the thin metal probes into the matching sockets toward one end of the cable.

The device in his hand was a readout meter for the neural activity encapsulated in agency trophies. When the techs skinned down an apprehended pirate, reducing the brain to its essentials, the biggest part of what remained was the basic personality structure and an ongoing situational awareness. The person was still inside the object, alive and conscious. The techs also grafted on to the stripped sensory receptors a minimal interface structure, just enough for the canned scraps of a human being to know what had happened to it. When the techs finished up their jobs, they left the symbolic-manipulation subset of the personality intact, the brain’s language-formation centers still working.

On the face of the meter, a pair of red LED’s pulsed on, matching those on the cable’s surface, and signaling that the cerebral material inside the cable was up and running. On very rare occasions, a strokelike condition was spontaneously triggered, rapidly reducing the soft tissue connectors to a jellied pulp oozing out of the sheath’s porous wrap like grayed-out strawberry jam. When that happened, there was nothing to do but pull out the trophy and throw it back in its presentation box, return it to the agency labs for the techs to slice out the valuable electronics for recycling. Sad but true: the little bastard would have, in a case like that, escaped the grim immortality that his crimes had earned him. He’d be well and truly, one-hundred-percent dead, the collapsed brain matter fit only for tossing down the garbage chute to join the rest of his previously discarded body.

This guy’s doing just fine, noted McNihil, as he glanced at the numbers displayed below the hot red dots on the meter. The kid, the business that he’d gone north in the Gloss to take care of, was still there in the cable hooked up to Turbiner’s subwoofer. Or all that mattered of the kid was there. McNihil wondered if the agency’s techs had left enough memory circuits for the kid’s bottled personality to have a sensory recall of his last moments as a functioning, walking-around human being: the smell of the run-down theater’s stale popcorn, the quick and clammy flood of the hydro-gel across his face, the rush of panicky adrenaline as he’d struggled for a gulp of shut-off oxygen. He supposed there might be a memory flash floating around in there, of McNihil’s extended fingers poking an airway for the kid to breathe through, and then of his hands picking up the futilely struggling body and dragging it out of the theater. That, plus the kid’s awareness of his crime, what he’d done to get worked over and reduced this thoroughly, was all that was required, a sad little biography boiled down to its essential, remorseful parts.

McNihil held the meter up to his ear. The little wafer-thin speaker inside was just loud enough for him to pick up, without intruding on Turbiner’s enjoyment of the louder music, the verbalized outpouring from the soul inside the cable.

i’m sorry i’m sorry i’m sorry please please please please let me out out out-outoutout dark and cold and wet and stings sorry sorry sorry pleeeeeeeease

At times like this, McNihil felt like Mr. Scratch in the ancient black-and-white film All That Money Can Buy, with old Walter Huston back in 1941, radiating his evil, bright-eyed smile, the visual counterpart to all that creepy Bernard Herrmann soundtrack music. At least in the movie, sinners had to be tempted by a spooky Simone Simon to wind up as a fluttering moth in the devil’s coin-purse. Nowadays, in this modern world, all it took was one’s own stupidity, the kind above the neck rather than in the groin. McNihil took the meter an inch away from his ear, reducing the scrabbling, wailing voice to a distant, indecipherable noise, as though it were no more than RFI static on the dangling wires. All around the rim, and farther beyond, there were similar little voices, shouting inside their small damnations:

• Which was the point. A dead trophy did not have the moral and instructive impact of a living one. Living in the sense of there being the essence of the pirate, the skinned-down soul of the copyright infringer, that bit of brain tissue that held the larcenous personality, embodied in some common household appliance, its functions enhanced by the correct employment of what had once been a human being:

• Toasters were a popular trophy item. There was always a waiting list at the agency headquarters, clients who had put their names down, in case some fool messed with their copyrights. A great sense of satisfaction came with owning a little chrome-and-plastic box with a dial on the side for how dark you wanted the slices to come out-and a little chunk of cerebral matter wired onto the circuit board, making sure that the bread achieved the perfect state of golden crispness.

• Vacuum cleaners and in-sink garbage-disposal units-those were desired as well. The pleasure there came from the sense of someone who had stolen from you now being reduced to sucking up cat hair and miscellaneous lint from the carpet, or, whenever the switch on the kitchen wall was flicked, sluicing the unidentifiable, mold-covered soft objects from the fridge down the plumbing gullet wired to the pirate’s brain tissue. You want something of mine? Try this. Don’t choke, now…

• Other popular items: wall clocks, train sets for the kids, pocket appointment books with little built-in calculators (the recipients of those trophies had to be extra careful to keep fresh batteries in them, or the canned brain tissue would go off and start to smell funny), a new and improved version of the classic “Drinking Bird” toy… the variations were endless, dependent only upon the number of copyright infringers who got nabbed by the Collection Agency.

• Which were, understandably, fewer and fewer. Which was the point of such draconian measures. This was standard policing procedure, going back to and beyond the hard-core, take-no-prisoners attitude of the old, pre-reform LAPD. Plenty of people connected with the agency, McNihil included, believed the notion went back to the actual, nonmythologized frontier of the American West-or even farther, to the first societies to domesticate and herd animals.

• The principle being that if the valuable property was widely dispersed-as with cattle across grazing land, or intellectual property digitized on the wire-and therefore easier to steal, the antitheft forces had to amp up the consequences for theft: death to rustlers and horse thieves, trophy-ization for copyright infringers.

• Draconian measures have something of a life of their own. Plus, the Collection Agency had its own public-relations wing, to make sure that the fate of trophies was broadcast as widely as possible, to make sure that anyone contemplating a little info-larceny would know what would happen to them if they got caught. If you wanted to spend the rest of your life-a long life-as a toaster, it could be arranged.

• A certain immortality could be achieved, though nothing that anyone would want. Self-destruction has its seductive elements, but this was something else again. Purged of the grosser elements of the human body, the essential brain tissue, and the consciousness and personality locked inside the soft wiring, could last decades, perhaps centuries-only a few of the earliest trophies had crapped out in the field. The agency’s packaging, the cellular life-support technology contained in the cable sheathing and the little sealed boxes inside the toasters, was designed for low maintenance and an indefinite run.

• Thus, into the economy inside people’s heads, that private assessment of potential risks and benefits, the element of catastrophic price was introduced. Price beyond death, beyond the notions of desirability for even the terminally self-destructive.

• Nobel prizes in economics had been handed out in the twentieth century for deep thinkers who’d figured out with charts and graphs what cops had known for millennia: people, weighing a course of action, factor in the consequences of success or failure as well as the chances. Amp-up the negative consequences high enough, and you can scare a lot of little bastards from connecting around.

• In that sense, the Collection Agency dealt in sanctioned terrorism. The agency didn’t have a problem with that.

I don’t have a problem with that, McNihil told himself. He pulled the probe tips loose from the cable’s readout sockets, wrapped the wires around the meter, and dropped it back into his pocket. Glancing over his shoulder at Turbiner, he saw the old man still absorbed by the music, the third movement dancing ominously to its close. Turbiner looked drowned, as though the audible tide had taken him down to its depths, the strands of his silver hair drifting like seaweed. Those are pearls that were his eyes-McNihil stood up but didn’t move away from the equipment rack and its glowing power tubes, as though cautious of breaking the spell.

All through the Gloss, in their scrappy or plush flats or other living-spaces, old writers like Alex Turbiner, and composers and musicians, artists and programmers, symbolic manipulators all-they were listening to their bloodily enhanced stereos or dropping slices of bread into their silently screaming toasters, maybe not even thinking about the little thieves canned inside. It didn’t matter. It also didn’t matter whether the writers and others, including Turbiner sitting here, knew as well what a shuck the trophies were. If they knew that the cerebral material, the boiled-down residue of pirates, really didn’t improve the sound any, really didn’t make the toast come out any closer to a perfect golden brown… so what? In an imperfect world, it was not just the thought that counted, but the consequences as well.

Turbiner raised his eyelids a bare fraction of an inch and glanced over as McNihil sat back down on the couch. “You enjoying this?” One eyebrow lifted slightly higher. “You must be.” Turbiner held his glass up in a toast. “My thanks are hereby extended to you. And my congratulations.”

“You’re welcome. My pleasure.” McNihil had drained his glass; he let it dangle at the tips of his fingers. The alcohol had slowed his thought processes; it took a moment for the puzzled frown to draw across his face. “Congratulations for what? Just doing my job…”

“I thought you weren’t working anymore. That you were on the outs with the agency.”

“Somewhat.” McNihil shrugged. “But I can still do a favor for my friends.”

Turbiner picked up the remote control from the arm of the chair and thumbed the mute button. The music vanished between one chord and the next, all harmonic progression left unresolved. “Doing favors for people… that’s a nice thing.” Silence had filled the flat again, the contrast making Turbiner’s voice seem louder than before. “You know, in my world… that one I used to write about… there are no favors. Nobody does favors for other people.”

“I guess we’re lucky,” said McNihil. “That we don’t live there.” He rubbed his thumb across the rim of the empty glass. “We live in this one. Or at least some of the time we do.”

“Maybe that’s the way it is.” Turbiner gave a judicious nod. He looked like a shabby owl dressed in thrift-store feathers. “Some of the time.”

The silence thickened, more oppressive than the music could ever have been. Time, stabbed by alcohol, had congealed in the spaces of the flat.

“Well.” McNihil tried to shake himself free, by leaning forward and setting the glass down on the low table. “I’m glad you like the… present.” It had taken him a few seconds to think of the right word. “Maybe I should be taking off.”

“Not just yet. Stick around for a moment or two.” Turbiner’s words were clipped and precise, as businesslike as the sharp gaze studying his guest. “I wanted to ask you a couple questions. About the… present.”

“Like what?”

Turbiner shifted in the chair, redirecting himself in McNihil’s direction rather than to the point between the main loudspeakers. “The fellow you got this from. The donor, as it might be put.” Turbiner’s voice sounded unusually loud and distinct, as though he were setting each word down in a row of numbered stones. “He was ripping me off, wasn’t he? My copyrights, my old thriller titles, that is. He had some kind of scam going.”

“What’re you talking about? You know that.” McNihil’s puzzlement deepened. “You were the one who told me about it.” That was true: he remembered getting the call from Turbiner a couple of weeks ago. He tried smiling. “Are you starting to forget things?”

“Maybe I am.” The voice held no hesitancy, but was still loud and forceful. “Because I don’t remember telling you anything about some guy like this.”

A few seconds slid by, the flat’s silence weighing upon McNihil’s shoulders. “You know… perhaps I really should leave now.” He felt uncomfortably sober, the scotch doing nothing more than souring the contents of his gut. “I’m not sure where this is headed.”

“Sit down. It’ll all be over soon.”

Something’s going on-he felt stupid, even reaching a conclusion that obvious. At the same time, a degree of tension ebbed out of his muscles, a fatalistic relaxation taking over. So many times, he’d been the agent of enclosure, his own voice the click of the lock snapping shut, the last thing somebody heard with any degree of freedom at all. Autonomy fled, control begun; now he was going to find out what that felt like.

“What’s the deal?” A last measure of resistance was summoned up. “What’s with the weird questions?”

“I just want to make sure.” Turbiner’s shoulders lifted in a shrug. “About the details.”

“Like what?”

“Like your claim that this person-the one you rolled over, the one whose head is inside this cable you just brought me-that this guy was ripping me off. Violating my copyrights.”

“That’s not a claim,” said McNihil. “It’s the truth.”

Turbiner nodded. “And your knowledge of this copyright infringement is based on… what? What I’m supposed to have told you?”

For a moment, McNihil studied the empty glass on the table, then looked back over at the other man. “You’re saying you didn’t tell me?”

“No. I’m just saying you can’t prove I told you anything like that.”

“Well, yeah…” That was true as well. “I’m not in the habit of recording phone calls from my friends.”

“Maybe you should be more careful about that.”

Another shrug. “Or maybe about my friends.”

“Now that’s something-” Turbiner gave an approximation of a smile. “You can’t be too careful about.”

“I’ve got a feeling that it’s a little late for this kind of advice.” The feeling was actually a certainty, like a rock in McNihil’s stomach. “So why would I need to prove anything at all? About what you told me?” He picked up the glass from the table, remembered that it was empty, and set it back down. “This kid was ripping you off. He told me so himself. He was bragging about it.”

“What a foolish young man.” Turbiner glanced over at the cable running to the subwoofer, then slowly shook his head. “He must not’ve actually read those titles he was stealing from me. That’s the problem with those collector and dealer mentalities.” He looked back around at McNihil. “If they ever bothered to read the stuff-especially the old noir classics-they’d know that’s how you get into trouble. By not clamming up when you’ve got the chance. You let your mouth run on, you can talk yourself into the grave.” He nodded toward the snakelike cable. “Or worse.”

“Yeah, well, he wasn’t the smartest one I ever encountered.”

“I suppose not,” said Turbiner. “I don’t suppose you bothered recording your little encounter with him, either. Even though that’s standard agency procedure, isn’t it?”

McNihil made no reply. I should have-instead of doing the job on the cheap, trying to economize on the nonessentials. When he’d still been working for the agency, even the smallest field assignments he’d gone on had been secretly-and expensively-bugged and taped. Some of them, his prize hits, had even been converted by the agency into training videos, instructional adjuncts for getting new hires up to speed on the asp-head way of doing business. But recording cost money, especially with all the masking and counterfeed-suppression technology that had to be added on, to make sure that the pirates, with their funky but effective hair-trigger alarm systems, didn’t catch on to the fact that they were being taped in all their hard-evidence glory. Money that an effectively retired asp-head, doing a favor, might not want to tap into his own pocket to shell out.

“All right,” said McNihil finally. “I didn’t record you, and I didn’t record the kid I worked over. What does it matter? As long as he was stealing from you, as long as he was violating your copyrights, his ass was mine.”

This time, it was Turbiner who kept silent. He shifted in the chair so he could dig his wallet from his back pocket. Flipping the wallet open, he extracted a PDA card; its tiny display panel illuminated when he pressed the top right corner between his thumb and forefinger. With the edge of his nail, Turbiner scrolled down through the listed data.

“You’ve seen this before.” Turbiner had found the entry he’d been looking for; he extended the card toward McNihil. “Standard issue, right?”

Most writers that McNihil had dealt with, or the composers or other creative types, had something similar with which they kept track of their copyrights. He’d had this one in his hand on previous occasions, when he’d been checking Turbiner’s records against the agency’s central database. He glanced at the little screen, tilting it away from the light sifting in through the flat’s window blinds. “So what am I supposed to be looking for?”

“Bottom of the file. Most recent entry.”

A name that McNihil didn’t recognize. “Who’s Kyle Wyvitz?”

“That’s the name,” said Turbiner, “of the kid whose brain is in that cable you just brought me.” The words had been spoken softly, no added emphasis required. “Your latest trophy job.”

“Ah.” He could just about see it all now; the relaxation in McNihil’s bones and muscles was echoed by a similar expansion in time, the appreciable gulf between one second and the next. Just as the would-be pirate kid’s senses must have gone into slow motion as soon as the snaring hydro-gel had leapt up from the plastic cup; the way the small animal in the triggered leg-hold trap must have been able to study every tooth of the metal jaw slicing down toward its pelt and flesh. “And why… just why… would his name be here in your copyright tracking?” As if he couldn’t figure it out, already. “What’s that mean?”

“Other than that you’re totally screwed?” Turbiner sounded almost sympathetic, as though he were in fact sorry to see the trap snapping shut. “But you know that already, don’t you?”

“I know all sorts of things. Some of them I just learned.” He looked at Turbiner, as though seeing him for the first time, unoccluded. In the flat’s musicless silence, McNihil could almost hear the blood singing in his own veins. “I’m just interested in these particular details, that’s all.”

“You can work it out.” Turbiner shrugged. “It’s all there. I keep very accurate records-you know that. Just read the listing.”

He hardly needed to; nothing on the little screen of the card came as a surprise to him. Not now. McNihil scrolled across the tiny words and numbers, the black marks like legible flyspecks beneath his fingernail. Beside the kid’s name was a coded list of properties, old thriller copyrights of Turbiner’s early writing days; McNihil was familiar enough with the account at the agency to recognize them without using the hyperkeys. He knew which tides matched up with the numbers: they were all the ones that the Wyvitz kid had been peddling.

McNihil drew his fingertip to the end of the line. The date for the licensing of the copyrights was barely forty-eight hours ago, the day that he’d gone up north on the rim to take care of this business. To do this favor for Turbiner. There was even a time stamp for the transaction: exactly when he’d been sitting in the theater with the kid.

They were watching me, thought McNihil. “They” being the ones Turbiner had been working with, cooperating on setting up this little sharp-toothed trap. McNihil already had a good idea who they were.

“The kid didn’t know.” McNihil looked up from the card and its info. “Did he? You used him.”

A moment passed before Turbiner gave another nod. “Somebody did.” He reached over to take the card from McNihil. “I wasn’t in on that part.”

“I’ll just bet,” said McNihil, “that the timing is exactly right on this one.” He laid the card in Turbiner’s outstretched hand. “A short-term licensing of your copyrights-what, ninety days?”

Turbiner shook his head. “Thirty. I don’t like to let go of them for too long.” He opened his wallet and tucked the card back inside. “If I can help it.”

“And it was all set up to go through with the push of a button, I imagine. Soon as they saw how the deal was going to go down with the kid.”

A nod this time. “They got it on tape.” The wallet returned to Turbiner’s hip pocket. “I’ve seen it. You know, you really should’ve checked around for surveillance gear. Even before you walked in there.”

“Well, I guess I didn’t know.” McNihil leaned back against the couch’s upholstery. “I didn’t know what I was walking into. I thought I did. But I was wrong.”

“You were wrong.” Turbiner’s agreement was a simple stating of fact, uninflected by emotion.

“Because if your records there are correct-”

“They are,” said Turbiner. “Unfortunately.”

“Then that means I murdered the kid.” He could feel his heart opening up, as though to some perfect, damnable grace. So this is what it feels like, thought McNihil. Absolutely. He could almost understand how people got into it, enjoyed the element of control being stripped away from themselves. At least you know where you stand. It might be rock bottom, but it was certain. In this world-he supposed it was in fact, had been all along, the kind of world that Turbiner and the ones like him had always written about-there was a certain comfort in that knowledge. “And I thought,” said McNihil with the barest fragment of a smile, “that I was doing you a favor. Something I didn’t have to do, but just because I wanted it that way. Por nada-or maybe just because I liked your books.”

“Actually, you did do me a favor.” Turbiner picked up his own glass and then set it, empty now, beside the other one on the low table. “I got paid for the rights. Not by the kid, of course; as you said, he didn’t know what the hell was going on. He got used as much as you did. But the people who set the whole deal up-they had to pay me.”

“Not just for the rights, though. They paid you for keeping quiet. At least until I was through getting connected over.”

“But you’re not through,” said Turbiner. “There’s more to come. Once somebody is in your position, there’s always more to come.”

McNihil didn’t need to be reminded about that. Even though there was still a part of the Wyvitz kid living, the cortical matter imbedded in the trophy cable, the little wanna-be pirate was legally dead. Or illegally, as the case now seemed to be. If the kid had had the rights to the old Turbiner titles licensed over to him-even if the kid hadn’t been aware that he had the rights, even if he mistakenly believed he was a thief and was bragging about it-then carving him up for the desired bits wasn’t a sanctioned agency operation. It was as much murder as if McNihil had gone out on the street and put the muzzle of his tannhäuser against the brow of the first person he ran into, and pulled the trigger.

Real bad news for someone like him; fine distinctions like this made the difference between being an asp-head and an asshole, someone who’d stuck his foot so far into it that there’d be no extraction short of sawing it off at the hip.

“You know… I was ready to leave a while ago.” McNihil pushed himself up from the couch. “Now I’m way ready.” Whatever buzz had been imparted by the alcohol had burned out of his system; a cold sobriety, cheerless as a gray post-insomnia dawn, crept through his veins. “It’s been… interesting talking to you. I don’t think we’ll be doing it again anytime soon.”

“I can understand that.” Turbiner nodded slowly. “This sort of thing is pretty corrosive on friendly relations.”

No shit, thought McNihil. There were other things he wanted to ask the man, things he could’ve said to him. But now there wasn’t time. By the sheer force of will, whether it left him one-legged or not, he’d managed to get both himself and the surrounding universe started up again; McNihil could even sense his heart speeding up, as adrenaline trickled into its fibers. Which meant that if he started running, the things pursuing him would kick into high gear as well.

How much of the actual substance of time was left to him, he didn’t know. McNihil supposed he’d find out soon enough.

“Take care of yourself.” Halfway between the flat’s living area and the front door, McNihil stood and gave a nod toward the other man. “You’ll have to. After this, I won’t be doing it for you.” He buttoned his jacket, as though in expectation of the chill winds he’d find outside. “I’m gone.”

“Don’t leave just yet.” Another voice spoke, from the mouth of the unlit corridor that ran to the back of the flat. “As a matter of fact, we’ll really have to insist on your staying.”

It was the voice he’d been expecting to hear. McNihil brought his gaze up from the figure in the sweet-spot chair. “Harrisch…” He nodded slowly. “Why am I not surprised?”

Still seated, Turbiner glanced back over his shoulder. “Should I take a walk?”

“Why bother?” Bearing his unpleasant knife-blade smile, the exec sauntered out into the living area. “You’ve been so helpful already; I’m sure you won’t be in the way. Besides-” Harrisch gave a shrug. “You live here, after all.”

McNihil heard the front door open; he turned and saw other corporate types, a pair of them, come in. Not execs like Harrisch and the ones who’d been there that other time, standing around the late Travelt’s wide-eyed corpse. But thugs, refrigerator-sized and similarly intelligenced. They came to a halt, forming a wall with cheap suits and badly knotted neckties between McNihil and the exit. Small sullen eyes below bullet-headed brows fastened onto him and waited.

“Well… I’m not going to connect around.” McNihil looked over at the smiling exec. “If I were carrying, it’d be different. But I left the tannhäuser at home.” He tilted his head toward the others, now standing with their arms folded across their bulky chests. “So you don’t need to drop the weight on me.”

“No…” Harrisch made a show of considering the remark. “I don’t need to…”

The thuggish types moved in and proceeded to take McNihil apart. Nothing fancy, sheer muscle and knuckle; knees to the kidneys, sweat-smelling forearms thick and corrugated as tree trunks, hard enough across the face to screw his neck around, a panoramic quick flash of the flat and its inhabitants as the one holding him up let go at last.

He could almost admire their professionalism. Control, came a fragmented thought inside McNihil’s head; spread out on his back, he gazed up at the flat’s conduit-laced ceiling. He was waiting for the blood to fade out of his vision, as though the hallucinated spinning he sensed could draw it away from his eyes. They’d hurt him just enough to make their point-or Harrisch’s-but not so bad that he wouldn’t be able to function again.

Which was Harrisch’s point. The exec leaned over McNihil, looking down at him. “That was for being rude. The last time we got together.” Harrisch let his smile fade, his voice dropping to serious as well. “When I offer somebody a job, I expect that person to give it a lot of thought. And not just lip off to me.”

One of the company thugs gave McNihil a kick in the ribs. He could recognize the nature of the boot, its steel toe reinforced with a lump of depleted uranium; the guy would have to be big to walk around in footwear like that. The impact was enough to shock the contents of McNihil’s gut into his throat, but he managed to hold down the sour rush. Rolling onto his side, he spat a red wad of saliva and a broken tooth fragment out onto the floor.

“And then-” Harrisch squatted down and looked him straight in the eye. “I expect him to take the job.”

McNihil shook the last anesthetic fog out of his head. The bruises sang up along his nervous system, but he could string his thoughts together again. “It’s going to be hard… for me to get much work done for you…” His mouth had filled with blood again; he swallowed thick salt. “If I’m up on murder charges.”

“Don’t worry about that. I’ll take care of your legal problems. You won’t even have to think about them.”

That was what he’d expected the deal to be. If Harrisch and his crew of corporate lawyers couldn’t get him off entirely, they could delay it long enough for him to die of old age. Or at least long enough for him to figure out some other escape plan.

“You know where we are.” Harrisch stood up, holding the thin smile over him again. “We’ll expect you bright and early.”

McNihil closed his eyes and listened to the heavy tread of the pair who’d worked him over, heading toward the door and pulling it open for their boss. The door closed behind them and the flat was silent; another moment, and the stereo started up again. The chorus sang once more of resurrection, but he didn’t believe them.

“What I’m not completely sure about…” McNihil spoke slowly, tasting the trickle of blood down his throat. “Is why you.” He raised one swollen eyelid and brought Turbiner into focus. “Why should you help connect me over.”

In the sweet-spot chair, Turbiner dangled the remote control in one hand. “No special reason.” He gazed toward the invisible orchestra between the speakers, rather than at McNihil. “Or just the usual ones. They made me an offer. I needed the money. I’m not getting a lot of reprints; nobody’s really interested in old books these days.” He shrugged. “You know how it is. You gotta make your copyrights valuable one way or another.”

McNihil lifted himself painfully into a sitting position on the floor. He wiped red onto his palm from his chin. The strange thing was that he couldn’t even manage to hate the guy.

At the door, McNihil stopped as he laid his hand on the metal knob. “You know…” He looked back over his shoulder. “This is why nobody reads your old books…”

Slouching in the chair, Turbiner raised his head. “Why’s that?”

“It’s that noir thing.” McNihil pulled the door open, letting the darkness of the corridor outside stretch out before him. “People don’t have to go into your books for that world anymore. Now they live in it all the time.”

After a moment, Turbiner slowly nodded, then turned back to the music.

McNihil stepped out into the corridor and silence. But only for a moment; then he turned and walked back into Turbiner’s flat.

Silence became total, the music over, when McNihil reached behind the stereo equipment and ripped the new trophy cable loose.

“Now that’s just connecting petty,” said Turbiner, disgusted. “That’s just vindictive.”

“That’s right, pal.” McNihil rolled the cable up into a tight coil and stuck it in his jacket pocket. He didn’t feel any better for having done it, but he didn’t feel any worse.

“You know… that really does belong to me.” The old writer followed him to the door. “It’s from the violation of my copyrights. My books.”

“Yeah?” McNihil halted; he glanced over his shoulder at the other man. “Your books, huh? And what would somebody like me do to you right about now, in one of your books? Tell me that.”

Turbiner didn’t have an answer. Or did, but didn’t want to say it.

“Believe me,” said McNihil. “You’re getting off lucky.” Luckier than me. He pushed the door open and walked out, trying not to limp too much.