Noir

Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen,

Tod und Verzweiflung flammet um mich her!…

Zertrümmert sei’n auf ewig all Bande der Natur…

Hell’s revenge boils in my heart,

Death and Despair blaze all around me!…

Let all ties of Nature be forever broken…

– The Queen of the Night’s Aria, from Die Zauberflöte

by WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART, libretto by

EMANUEL SCHIKANEDER

(1791)

FOURTEEN

Are you sure this is where you want to be?”

“That’s funny.” McNihil found that funny, because the place looked like a doctor’s office. A real one, the way doctors’ offices looked in the movies stitched inside his eyes. He could’ve used a doctor, even though forty-eight hours or more-hard to tell in the perpetual night McNihil saw-had passed since Harrisch’s thugs had handed his ass to him. He’d spent the time since that occasion lying on top of the narrow bed in his unkempt apartment, in the same clothes he’d been wearing then and was wearing now. Every once in a while, he’d gotten up and headed down the hallway to the bathroom, he’d had to lean his arm and forehead against the wall above the toilet to remain standing. His urine had gradually faded from the color of cabernet to a light rosé. Even now, his bones and a good deal of his bruise-darkened flesh still ached; it’d been a big accomplishment to even try shaving before venturing out and coming to this place.

There was another reason he found the question funny. “Somebody else,” said McNihil, “asked me that exact same question, just a few minutes ago.”

“Really?” The man sitting on the other side of the desk wasn’t a doctor, not a real one; not even an imitation of a fake one. He was just an Adder clome, the commercial cloned replica of the maybe-fictional character that was always found running one of these Snake Medicine™ franchises. For his costume, the Adder clome wore a doctor’s white examining-room coat and had a prop stethoscope tucked in the breast pocket. The brow of his hatchetlike face, the surgical embodiment of the corporate image, was encircled by a headband with that mysterious metal disk on it, which always indicated somebody was a doctor in the old movies. “Who was it?” the Adder clome asked.

“You’re not really interested…”

“No,” said the Adder clome. “But tell me anyway.”

“It was a woman,” said McNihil. “In a bar.” He didn’t need to tell what kind of a bar it’d been. He wasn’t sure, himself. He’d let himself fall so far beneath the opacity of his vision, into the world leaking out of his eyes, that any details from the other world had been completely obscured. There wasn’t any less pain to feel that way, but it seemed more appropriate, at least. He could exist as a beat-up operative on a cracked leatherette barstool, downing a shot and a chaser, in a place with beer spilled on the floor and neon flickering like ionic discharge in the mirror behind the nameless bottles. “Ironic discharge,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“Nothing,” said McNihil. “A misfire in the brain. Some of the connections are still loose.” The woman in the bar had offered to tighten them for him. Or a similar service. She’d sat down on the stool next to his, so close that he’d been able to tell the difference between her flesh and his, through the thin layers of his trousers and her skirt. Which was all right; it fit in perfectly with the world he saw, that he preferred to see. McNihil had brought his gaze up from the depths of his glass and looked over at her. What he’d seen had made him both remember and forget the cube bunny that had so briefly visited his shabby apartment. The woman had been the ultimate barfly, a movie vision of glamour and lust, like the dream of what nameless women in a dive bar should look like. Complete with luminous golden hair in a soft curve along one side of her face, à la Veronica Lake. But with a radiation as bemusedly intelligent as Lizabeth Scott, giving a hard time to Humphrey Bogart in the ’47 classic Dead Reckoning. Her gaze, the unhidden part of it that McNihil had been able to see, was colder than his dead wife’s.

“You have to watch out for ones like that,” said the Adder clome. “It’d be better if they wanted money. Then you could deal with them. But all they want is trouble.”

McNihil couldn’t tell if he’d spoken anything else aloud. About the woman or the bar. But then, the man on the other side of the desk, sitting beneath nonsensical framed diplomas-he was supposed to know. It was his business to know things like that. If someone possessed bad longings, kundalinic warps, guiltily sweating desires, this was the place to have them read out. As though the non-doctor could spread one’s heart open on his palms and decipher the quivering lines that spelled out life and destiny.

“That must be why she came my way.” McNihil leaned back in the office’s smaller chair, lacing his fingers together across his stomach. “She figured I had enough to spare.”

“Why did you come here?”

McNihil didn’t answer. He was wishing himself back in the bar, preferring it to this place, with its smells of disinfectant-swabbed chrome and blood-soaked cloths thrown in the plastic bags marked For Biological Waste Only. Which was what he felt like at the moment, but he was trying to maintain.

The ultimate barfly, the woman with the cold dead gaze, had asked him the same thing. To which he’d replied, I’ve got an appointment nearby. Just killing time till then. Her hand had smelled of nicotine and lust as she’d touched him, stroking the side of his neck as she’d leaned toward him. Is that, she’d asked, all that you want to kill?

“I asked you a question.” The Adder clome’s voice tapped at McNihil’s ear. “We’re not going to get very far if you don’t tell me.”

McNihil pulled his darkened gaze away from memory and toward the white-coated figure. “You know already,” he said. “Why I’m here. Harrisch told me to come and see you.”

“Oh, well… sure.” The Adder clome shrugged. “I’ve done a lot of work for Harrisch over the years. Him and the rest of his pals over there at DynaZauber. Regular customers. Anything they want, from one of those silly little iris tattoos on a secretary’s ankle, to a Full Prince Charles job, we’re happy to provide. We’ve got a corporate account set up and everything.”

“I bet you do.”

“Standard business practice.” Leaning back in his leather-clad swivel chair, the Adder clome made a cage of his elongated fingers. “There’s a certain natural… shall we say?… interface between their operations and mine.”

“‘Natural,’” said McNihil, “isn’t the word I would’ve used.”

“Already with the sarcasm.” A slow shake of the head. “And we hardly know each other.”

“I know you well enough.” Slouched in the smaller chair, McNihil gestured at the office’s confines, at the ersatz medical diplomas and the regrettably accurate photographs of procedures and results. “I’ve been inside a Snake Medicine™ franchise before. You Adders are all alike.”

“From one reptile to another, then.” The white-coated figure’s gaze sharpened, stripped of a layer of civility. “I suppose an asp-head such as yourself has a certain… authority in these matters. You should already know, then, that if we’re all alike, it’s because we’re supposed to be that way. There are standards we have to maintain that come right down from the SM headquarters itself. Not just hygiene requirements and surgical quotas and the advertisements we run on the shellbacks-all that stuff.” Whatever nerve had been struck was wired to simmering grievances. The Adder clome’s voice tightened to a rasp. “The only reason I’m taking the time to meet with you at all is because DynaZauber bought out a fifty-one-percent share in the SM holding company. Now that Harrisch is on our board of directors, all of the franchisees have got his boot on their necks. We either produce or the head office’s goons will come out and strip the signs off the building.”

“I’m bleeding for you.” McNihil was past taking consolation in other people’s miseries. “So we’re working for the same guy. Do I look overjoyed about it?”

The Adder clome moodily pushed a blunted scalpel around on the desk. “All right; so Harrisch sent you here. And I’m supposed to talk to you. About what?”

“Beats me,” said McNihil. “I wasn’t provided with an agenda for the meeting.”

“What’s the job you’re doing for Harrisch? Maybe that’d help, if I knew that.” The Adder clome picked up the metal instrument and pointed it toward McNihil. “You at least know that much, don’t you?”

“I’m looking for something…”

“Everybody who comes in here says that. One way or another.”

“Something that belongs to Harrisch. Or to DynaZauber.” McNihil saw a triangular section of his own face reflected in the scalpel’s blade. “There doesn’t seem to be much of a distinction between those two anymore.” The polished metal made his face look just as bright and hard. “But it’s something he lost. Or it got lost for him. And he wants it back.”

“Oh?” The Adder clome showed no sign of doubting him. “Mr. Harrisch does, indeed, set great store at not losing… things. Just what kind of thing are we talking about?”

McNihil shook his head. “You don’t need to know.”

“Now that,” said the Adder clome, “is very much like Harrisch. Rather a private individual. Where did this certain item get lost?”

“That’s why I’m talking to you.” McNihil tilted his head back, a gesture indicating the office’s door and the nocturnal world beyond the Snake Medicine™ franchise. “It’s out there in the Wedge. That’s where it got lost.”

“Ah.” An understanding nod. “Lots of things get lost there. That’s where things go to get lost. Badly lost. You know what I mean.”

For a moment, McNihil wondered if that was some kind of personal comment. How much would some Adder clome, a scrabbling sexual-services franchisee, know about what had happened years ago? Not much, maybe even nothing at all, unless their mutual employer had filled him in.

“I’m a little surprised, though,” continued the Adder clome. “I wouldn’t have thought Harrisch would be hanging around that particular zone. Either in person, or by proxy. So to speak.”

“Knock it off.” Irritation filtered through McNihil’s voice. “I don’t need all the cute stuff from you.”

“Doesn’t cost anything extra.” The Adder clome had a creepy nonsmile that he could easily have picked up at the DZ executive suites. “I throw it in as a bonus, as part of my operating-table-side manner. You might as well try to enjoy it; like a lot of things in this world, there’s no escaping.”

“That’s why I don’t live in this world.” The faces in the framed photos regarded McNihil with a blank absence of envy. “Or at least I try not to.”

“I thought that was the case.” Leaning across the desk, the Adder clome studied McNihil’s eyes as though they were soft, inanimate objects. “When you’re in the business like I am-the surgical business-there’s little signs, indicators that professionals can pick up on.” He sat back in his chair. “You must’ve had it done a while back.”

“How can you tell?”

“The work’s too good. You can hardly see the stitches around the corneas.” The Adder clome sighted through his tangent fingertips. “The only problem is the one you already know about. This world is what you can’t escape from. It always comes seeping back into your little private existence.”

McNihil had said as much to the cube bunny not too long ago. So it must be true, he thought now. Or true enough-he’d had that proved to him at the last place he’d been before walking into the SM clinic with Harrisch’s card tucked in his jacket pocket.

“That woman,” said McNihil. “At the watering hole down the block. Sitting on the barstool next to me.” The whole dimly lit space had been empty except for the two of them, as she’d leaned her cigarette breath and decaying-rose scent toward him-she’d been proof enough. Even in that black-and-white gloom, with the shadows leaking out of McNihil’s eyes and stacking up in the bar’s corners like strata of negative ghosts, the ultimate barfly’s unsunned flesh had glowed with pale mycologic fire. But not all her flesh; some of it had been cut away and replaced, probably right here at this SM franchise, perhaps with the scalpel with which the Adder clome idly played. An oval window, in that space bounded by her throat and her naked shoulders, the bottom edge touching the first swell of her breasts; a soft window, made of some bio-mimetic polymer that was so expensive it got weighed out by the microgram like all the better or at least more effective drugs. McNihil had seen the price sheets on that kind of thing; the woman’s elective surgery hadn’t come cheap. She was either seriously in hock or rich enough to enjoy trolling around the Wedge’s blurred circumference.

“Yeah, that’s one of mine.” The Adder clome nodded when McNihil reached that part of the description. “I’ve done a lot of work on her.” He smiled. “She loves it.”

“I could’ve guessed that much.” McNihil had known, as he’d looked at the woman in the bar, his gaze moving away from her dead empty eyes, down to the window above her breasts, that if he’d touched that transparent substance, it would’ve felt as warm and soft as real flesh. That if he’d closed his eyes, his hand at least might’ve been fooled. But he didn’t close his eyes. McNihil had left them open, and had seen, like smooth white coral under the slow rising and falling of a blood-temperature ocean, the woman’s bones. Faintly luminous, laced with fine red threads: manubrium, clavicle, trachea, and farther behind, deeper in that soft ocean, the herpetoid segments of her spine.

Or would you rather be somewhere else? The next thing the woman in the bar said to him, with a turn of her head and a lowering of her dark lashes over the cold emptiness of her gaze, so that the message being radiated in a tight beam at him was made even clearer.

McNihil hadn’t replied, but had gone on looking into the depths of her exposed body. To where the elegant, blackened engraving had turned her bones into fragile scrimshaw. The black, swirling lines were only slightly wavered by the flesh substitute’s gelatinous layers. Rococo motifs, thorned rose stems and sickly fin-de-siècle lilies twined to frame a motto written in an antique Teutonic font.

I RUNNE TO DEATH, AND DEATH MEETS ME AS FAST

He’d let himself be drawn closer to her, so that he could bring his lips close to her ear.

“‘And all my pleasures,’” he’d whispered, “‘are like yesterday.’”

The remembered darkness of the bar ebbed a little, as the Adder clome’s voice cracked the thin eggshell of McNihil’s thoughts. “Quoting John Donne to barflies-” The voice was brittle with sarcasm. “There’s a wasted effort.”

“Is it?” McNihil looked up. “It’s always worked really well for me.”

“Gotten you this far.” With one finger, the Adder clome balanced the scalpel against the desktop. “I suppose that’s a good thing.” The scalpel dug into the already marked-up wood. “You should’ve picked up on that number at the bar. She’s not the kind that needs a lot of sweet talk. Some of my other clients have told me that she’s a real experience. The kind that leaves marks. Inside your skull.”

“Sounds great. But I’m working right now.” McNihil felt like knocking the scalpel skittering across the desk. “Maybe some other time.”

“And that’s why you came here. Not to reminisce about the chances you’ve let fall out of your hands. So get on with it.” The Adder clome used the scalpel as a pointer again. “Ask me a question, why don’t you?”

“All right,” said McNihil quietly. “Why did Harrisch tell me to come here?”

“I told you already. I don’t know.” The Adder clome scratched the side of his face with the blade’s point, leaving a white mark on the skin. “Obviously, it wasn’t to get information from me. You know too much already.”

“What’s ‘too much’?”

“More than I know,” said the Adder clome. “That’s too much. You haven’t even told me the name of this person. The one who lost Harrisch’s precious whatever-it-is. Or what happened to him.”

“He’s dead. And his name was Travelt.”

“Ah.” The doctor admired his reflection in the scalpel. “Now it becomes a little clearer. I do believe I remember something about a certain Travelt; one of Harrisch’s associates, a junior exec over at DynaZauber. Right?”

McNihil nodded. “You’ve got that one.”

“I did a little job for this Travelt-”

“He came in here?”

“No,” said the Adder clome. “I don’t think I ever set eyes on the man. No, I did something for him. A commission on his behalf, a business gift ordered up by another party. By Harrisch, in fact.”

“You put together the prowler.” That made sense to McNihil. “That Harrisch and the other DZ execs gave to Travelt.”

“That’s right. Though I don’t know how much anyone else at DynaZauber had to do with it.” The Adder clome gave a shrug. “It all seemed like Harrisch’s little project. A personal thing. Harrisch is, as you might’ve already noticed, a hands-on kind of executive.”

“That’s him, all right.” McNihil regarded the other man with a flat, level gaze. “But you’re not telling me anything I don’t already know.”

“Well. There you go.” Another false smile floated up on the narrowly angled face. “You see? It’s just like I told you. You know too much already. Or if not enough-that’s not my problem. You’re the one who’s supposed to be finding out things. That’s your job, isn’t it? What Harrisch is paying you for. Why should I make it any easier for you? Even if I could.” The smile curdled into a sneer. “I don’t think that’s what Harrisch is paying me for, why he’s underwriting our time together-”

“He’s paying you? For this?”

“Of course. He’s a businessman who understands a fellow businessman’s problems, the need for a little cash flow. There was a transfer of funds-nothing too big; nothing I can retire on-before you came over here. For unnamed services to be performed for a certain individual named McNihil.” The Adder clome rolled the blunt scalpel between his palms. “That’s you, right? You told me as much. So what is it you’d like me to do for you?”

McNihil looked at the man with welling distaste. “There’s nothing you can do for me.”

“Oh, I think otherwise.” The Adder clome’s voice took on a steel edge, as though by some transference of essence from the surgical tool. “You’re underestimating the range of services we provide in this establishment.” Even his eyes glittered as brightly. “Maybe it’s been a while since you’ve paid one of our franchises a visit. There’s all the old classics… and some new ones.”

The Adder clome’s spiel washed up against McNihil, like the waves of a polluted ocean.

“Frankly,” said the Adder clome, “you look rather unmarked to me. For somebody who’s had all your, shall we say, life experiences. You’re a blank slate. But that was always the word in old-fashioned tattoo parlors, sailor. We can do so much more for you now. Just in terms of your skin. We can put your biography on your flesh, in as many animated chapters as you’d like-so you could read yourself in the mirror, if you wanted to. Everybody’s favorite book. Wouldn’t that be nice?”

“Not particularly.” McNihil glared back at the other man. “There are plenty of parts I’m still trying to forget.”

“Then we’ll make shit up for you. Whatever you want. The rise and fall of the Roman Empire, in detail so fine you’ll need a microscope to shave. Actually, I’ve done that before; more than once. It’s more popular than you might think among the extreme crowd, especially some of the later chapters where the decadence gets way rotten and shiny. Who was the empress who regretted that she only had three altars at which she could receive libations for the gods?”

“Theodora,” said McNihil, unamused. “Sixth century A.D. The wife of Justinian, in Constantinople. A lot of people think it was Messalina, the wife of the earlier Claudius, but they’re wrong. It was Theodora.”

“Very good.” The Adder clome nodded, impressed. “You have a historical sense. That’s pretty uncommon these days. Most people I see in here think that the world started with their first orgasm.”

No, thought McNihil. They’re wrong. That’s when it ends. He could hear the gates of Eden clanging shut, never to reopen.

“Or maybe,” continued the Adder clome, “you’d prefer not wearing history on your body. Keep it all up here.” One finger tapped the side of his head. “Perhaps you’d prefer something a little more purely fictional. All of In a Budding Grove-or something shorter? Les Fleurs du mal; that’s a popular choice. Or perhaps something more esoteric.” The Adder clome’s voice shrilled higher and tighter. “The Tragical History of McNihil, and How His Wife Died, Kind Of. That might be one you’d find entertaining.”

McNihil’s heart slowed with the weight of the murderous impulse it carried. “That’s good,” he said slowly. “Harrisch must’ve told you an awful lot about me. You know… I’m almost flattered. By all the attention.”

“You’re not, actually-I know that much, too-but never mind.” The Adder clome’s words were still sharp-edged. “You’re more of a private person. We can accommodate that in our services as well. We could do you up with all sorts of advanced materials. Inks that would appear only under certain light spectra, or that would phase-change into visibility at certain times of the day… or hours of the night. Whatever suits you best. We could insert pixel devices in your skin, with their own little batteries and programming, that would flicker at staggered subliminal rates just right, so that only the filters in your eyes would be able to decipher them. Now that should be right up your alley. Harrisch told me about how you like to see things that other people don’t.”

“If you saw what I’m seeing now,” said McNihil, “you wouldn’t be flattered.”

The Adder clome didn’t appear to have heard him. “Something more elaborate?” The mocking sales pitch rolled on. “Something that moves? Animation is easy for this kind of thing. You could have the empresses Messalina and Theodora getting it in every orifice, full-motion rock ’n’ roll with digitized close-ups and a soundtrack with adjustable gain and auto-muting, for when you get tired of all the moans and groans. You could have the Bayeux tapestry marching down your spine, if you wanted, done in early Chuck Jones style. Whatever you want.” The Adder clome gestured expansively. “Perhaps you want something for people to remember you by. Something that rubs off on them, like the smell of your sweat. We can do that. Your tattoos don’t have to just stay on your own body, not anymore.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“Then you’ve heard right,” said the Adder clome. “We can put an imprint cloning function in the design itself, hard or soft.”

That last detail was new to McNihil. “What’s the difference?”

“Hard is, anybody you sleep with-anybody you go skin-to-skin with-they walk away with a permanent transfer of your tattoo onto them. Permanent, at least, until they come to someone like me to take it off. Different with the soft ones; those fade on their own, on whatever schedule you have me set. Something for the ladies… or the boys. Or whatever. Your choice. Though that’s not the end of the possible variations. Your chosen design, whatever you have us embed in your skin, could pass from your body to your lover’s, leaving your skin a blank slate again. And that other person could pass it on to a third, like a message on a slip of paper, going from hand to hand, body to body. A black ghost, molecule-thin, traveling the world. Perhaps with a little alteration with each exchange, a little play on Newton’s third law of thermodynamics and its application to information theory. So that when it comes back to you, eventually, you don’t recognize it and you do, all at the same time.”

“I’ve already seen ones like that,” said McNihil. In bars like the one he’d left a little while ago, establishments that served as the floating front doors, entrance points into the Wedge. A dimly lit vestibule into that darker world, inhabited by its own retinue of circling regulars, like low-rent cosmic debris unable to escape the gravity tug of a sweat-smelling black hole. Too fascinated by what was down inside there, that they couldn’t slip off the barstools and push open the yieldingly padded doors and walk out into the pitying sunlight; too scared by the same, too scared to take the pink dive in their own fragile flesh and find out what was at the bottom. “It was a sacred heart of Jesus-at least that must’ve been what it started out as.” McNihil could see it in his memory, on the biceps of some informant the Collection Agency had been working with a long time ago. “The guy told me it’d had a ‘Mom’ banner unfurled below. But when it came back to him-hard to say how many other bodies it’d swum across-it wasn’t a heart crowned with thorns anymore, it was a kidney wrapped in an extension cord, and the banner had become a three-word testimonial for hemorrhoid suppositories.”

“That guy was luckier than most.” The Adder clome laughed. “I’ve seen worse.”

A few more bad examples floated across the screen of McNihil’s memory. Not all of them had been warmed by blood; the morgue technicians at the Collection Agency had always complained of one of the risks in handling corpses taken from anywhere near the Wedge, the cold remains of those who’d dabbled in that lifestyle. Death-style, corrected McNihil. The techs took all the latex-gloved precautions possible, to keep any traveling tattoos with still-active battery charges from swarming off the decorated stiffs and onto their own hands and forearms.

Something even less substantial, the memory of rumor: he’d also heard that some of the morgue techs, inclined by their profession to ghoulish enthusiasms, had found ways of coaxing the tattoos, like flat black spiders, into big autopsy specimen jars, the kind with lids that screwed down tight. There was supposedly a storage room in the Collection Agency headquarters’ basement, with shelves lined full of the jars, the thin-film images of the harvested tattoos slowly turning and writhing in their half-lives. A glass library of heavy neo-primitivist abstract designs, Sea Dayak and Maori, and traditionalist hearts and flowers and the mournful Rock of Ages, withering like plucked blossoms, black and fragile…

“Though somehow,” said the Adder clome, “I don’t think you came here for a tattoo. Of any kind. You’re not the type that wants to achieve even that much immortality.”

“So why did I come here?” McNihil left his hands flat upon the arms of the chair. “You seem to know so much more than I do.”

“Why don’t you go back to Harrisch and ask him? He gave you the job.” Another shrug from the Adder clome. “He should tell you what it is he wants. Or… maybe he already did. Maybe he showed you.”

What Harrisch had shown him; that was something else that came up in memory, from someplace just under the surface, where it had been cruising like a patient shark. A shark with a capital letter V upturned for its mouth, teeth black instead of glistening white, the angled point and serifs sharp enough to cut flesh. My flesh, brooded McNihil. The same way the dead Travelt’s flesh had been sliced. Sliced and marked…

“No,” said McNihil. “Forget Harrisch for a moment. Let’s go on raking over what you like to talk about. You and these complicated tattoos that you do here at the clinic. Your specialty, I take it.”

“Like I said. We do all sorts of things here.” The Adder clome leaned down, putting his hand on one of the desk’s drawer handles. “I could give you a brochure and a price list, if you wanted.”

“These tattoos… the traveling ones. That go from person to person. You do them just on human skin, or do you do them on prowlers as well?”

The Adder clome straightened back up in his chair. “I do them on both. Real or fake, human or prowler; it’s basically the same technique.”

“So if it was the right kind of tattoo, a human could pick one up from a prowler. The image, whatever it was, could pass from a prowler’s skin and migrate over to a human’s.”

“No.” The Adder clome smiled tolerantly and shook his head. “It doesn’t work that way. Same technique, different materials; just because a prowler looks like a human being, that doesn’t mean it’s made out of the same stuff. You can’t use the same inks and pixel embeds, the same programming and energy sources. You use the human stuff on a prowler, it’ll just fall off like carbon dust, make a nice little mess on the clinic floor. On human skin, prowler tattoo materials go septic; they die and rot off like some kind of dermatitis or leprosy. A traveling tattoo has a basic self-preservation instinct wired into it, down at the molecular level. It looks for a suitable environment to migrate to, a place where it can go on living, in its own way. So a human tattoo wouldn’t even be tempted to cross over to a prowler, and vice versa. Like two different species; you can’t just cut and paste from one to the other.”

“I didn’t think you could,” said McNihil. “I thought that was the way it worked.” He leaned forward, hands against his side of the desk. “So tell me-” His voice stayed level and drained of emotion. “What was the tattoo you put on Travelt?”

“I didn’t.” The Adder clome spoke without hesitation. “I’ve got a pretty fair recollection of that client. And he never stepped into this clinic. I really never saw him at all. Harrisch ordered up the prowler for him, and when it was ready, we sent it on to the address we’d been given. And there weren’t any tattoos on it, either. I remember that much.”

“So why was there a tattoo-a big one-on Travelt’s body, when Harrisch showed it to me?”

“The guy must’ve wanted one.” The Adder clome looked unimpressed. “Plenty of places where he could’ve gotten one put on. Could’ve gotten it at some other Snake Medicine™ franchise, for that matter. He didn’t have to come here to get something like that.”

“You’re right. I bet Travelt didn’t come here.” McNihil leaned farther across the desk. “But I also think you know where that tattoo came from.” One hand shot forward and grabbed the front of the Adder clome’s shirt, bunching the thin fabric into the center of McNihil’s fist. McNihil drew his arm back, dragging the Adder clome across the top of the desk. “And how he got it, who gave it to him-the whole thing.”

“What-what’re you talking about?” The Adder clome struggled like a gaffed fish. “I don’t know anything-”

“Now you’re really pissing me off.” McNihil lifted his white-knuckled fist up against the Adder clome’s chin, rocking back the terrified face. “Tell me. What was the tattoo? What did it look like?”

“You’re crazy-” Papers and a cup full of pens scattered across the floor, as the Adder clome’s arms flailed out to the sides. He gasped for breath. “You-you’re out of your mind-”

“I’ve been told that before,” said McNihil. “And that was before your pal Harrisch started leaning on me. So now you should be really scared about what I might do.” The chair fell back as McNihil stood up, dragging the other man flopping the rest of the way across the desk. “You should’ve been scared before you started jerking me around.”

The Adder clome’s hands scrabbled futilely at the knee pressing him to the office’s floor. “I don’t-I don’t know anything about the tattoo-”

“I’ll give you a hint.” McNihil still had his fist tight beneath the Adder clome’s throat; with cold precision, he lifted his other one and brought it hard across the side of the man’s head. “Does that work for you?” He wiped the spattered dots of red from his knuckles, onto the lapels of the white coat. “It’s a memory thing, isn’t it?”

“All right… all right…” Both of the Adder clome’s hands had seized onto McNihil’s wrists, holding fast as though to keep from drowning. “I’ll tell you…” A red bubble swelled and burst at his lower lip. “It was a letter…”

“That’s right,” said McNihil. With the ball of his thumb, he smeared the blood across the Adder clome’s chin. There was enough to have written the letter on the man’s face, if he’d wanted. “A great big letter.”

“V,” said the Adder clome. “It was the letter V.” He gasped and swallowed, the hard labor of his lungs slowing. The panic in his eyes went down a notch, as though he’d surmised that McNihil wasn’t actually going to kill him. “Done in a rather… ornate style…”

“You don’t have to describe it.” McNihil shifted his crouching weight back, easing up on the other man. “I’ve seen it. I just wanted to know whether you had.” He unclenched his fist; the back of the Adder clome’s head thumped against the clinic office’s floor. “And if you didn’t put it there on Travelt-and I believe that part, all right-then it would follow that you’re in thicker with Harrisch than either you or he would like me to know about.”

“That’s it,” the Adder clome said hurriedly. He nodded as he propped himself up on his elbows. “Harrisch showed the tattoo to me-”

“Where? When?”

A trace of the ebbing panic showed again in the other man’s eyes. “He… he didn’t actually show me. Harrisch told me about the tattoo, what it looked like…”

“Bullshit.” McNihil backhanded the Adder clome, hard enough to snap his head to the side and push his shoulders up against the angle of the wall. “If you were in so tight with Harrisch, you wouldn’t have hesitated to tell me. You don’t do much to avoid self-promotion.” McNihil stood up, looking down at the Adder clome. A tooth in the other man’s mouth had cut one of McNihil’s knuckles; he wiped the saliva and blood against his trousers. “So there must be somebody else you’re in with. Somebody you wouldn’t want me-or Harrisch-to know about.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” A sullen defiance tightened the Adder clome’s discolored face. He hunched himself into a sitting position, back to the office’s wall. “I’ve got a nice little business going here.” He rubbed his palm against his swelling lip. “Why would I want to get involved with anybody else?” He managed a ghastly, red-specked smile. “I’ve got enough troubles already.”

“Not as many as you will have,” said McNihil, “if you don’t come straight with me.” He fell silent for a moment, a few seconds that stretched on through the hands of the clock on the wall and returned to fill the space between one heartbeat and the next. It had happened before, usually in connection with some surge of adrenaline in his bloodstream, like that produced by taking the Adder clome to the floor. Suddenly, McNihil had the sense of the world he saw, the black-and-white vision capsuled in his eyes, having become realer than real, truer than the dull world beneath the perceptual overlay. The opaque film, the net of bits and pieces from ancient thriller movies, deepened as McNihil stood in the middle of the Adder clome’s office; he could feel it stretching out past the door and beyond the clinic’s walls, a tide of bleak, rich images flooding through the streets and lapping up against the shadowed buildings. No, he told himself. It’s the other way around. An ebbing tide, a false ocean being drained; the world he no longer cared to see was swirling down into a subterranean reservoir of lies, as the real world emerged with a few wet strands of seaweed clinging to the rocks.

If they had eyes to see, thought McNihil. He was almost convinced that anyone could have looked out of the window at this moment, and seen this darkly perfect world. But they’re still blinded. Real time had ended somewhere in the early 1940s; this other stuff, the shoddy substance of the cheap-’n’-nastiverse that people so foolishly believed in… what did it matter? McNihil felt as though his hand had poked through a curtain made of some flimsy synthetic fabric and had found coarse wool and smooth cotton beneath, the stitchery of God’s tailor shop.

“Are… are you all right?”

McNihil didn’t open his eyes so much as let his interior sight shift focus, from the gelling world outside to the clinic office’s rummaged interior. He saw the Adder clome looking up from where he crouched on the floor; the expression on the man’s face showed he was wondering whether McNihil was about to flip out even more violently, or whether he was connected-up enough that a quick escape was possible.

“I’m fine.” McNihil reached down and, as reassuringly as possible, took the Adder clome’s hand, pulling him upright. The vision he’d been granted was already fading, leaving him with a certain exhausted peace. “Don’t worry about it.” He stood the Adder clome up in front of himself and patted him gently on the cheek. “But I’d like to think that we understand each other better now. That’s important.”

“Oh…” The Adder clome rubbed his throat, where McNihil’s fist had been jammed. “Oh, yeah. Right.” He quickly nodded. “Yeah, we understand each other.”

“Because what I’m getting from you-” McNihil held a single finger in front of the other man’s eyes. “Is that you really do know more than you’ve been letting on. To either me or Harrisch. Now… Harrisch isn’t here. Right? So we don’t have to worry about him for the moment. About what he thinks. And you don’t have to worry about me getting you in trouble with him. I don’t work that way. Besides…” He let his own smile show. “What would there be in it for me? Better we should let our little… understanding remain a secret. Right?”

The Adder clome didn’t look any less scared because of McNihil’s soothing tone, as he gave another fast nod. “Sure-”

“Good.” Even with the adrenaline leaching out of his bloodstream, the world McNihil saw still seemed real, or at least real enough to work with. “So why don’t we start by you telling me exactly how you know what some dead guy’s tattoo looked like. Where-or maybe who-you got that info from.”

Silence. Another fear shifted behind the Adder clome’s eyes.

“But I know that already,” said McNihil. “You found out from her. From Verrity.” McNihil tilted his head, studying the figure in front of him. “Naturally, you would-because you’re working with her. And that’s what you don’t want Harrisch to know.”

“If DynaZauber hadn’t put the screws on,” the Adder clome said sullenly, “I wouldn’t have had to go with her. But DZ’s cut the margins so tight-”

“You don’t have to explain it to me.” McNihil shrugged. “Either I understand already, or I don’t care. All the same to me. Besides… I don’t really think it’s a money issue. People get involved with Verrity for other reasons besides profit. That’d be too rational. Verrity deals with the irrational side of things.”

“True enough,” said the Adder clome. “I wish… I’d known that sooner.”

McNihil could hear the bitterness of regret in the other man’s voice; it touched a string tuned to the same pitch inside himself. “I know how you feel. I found out too late, myself. That’s the problem with self-destructive behavior. All the benefits are front-loaded; the bad shit comes after.” He brushed a dark speck of dirt from the shoulder of the Adder clome’s white coat. “But getting back to specifics,” he said. “This is why you were connecting around with me, isn’t it? All that talk of figuring out why Harrisch sent me here in the first place, and then your little list of services and products-that was all just stalling for time. Right? You were hoping maybe I’d get so tired and disgusted that I’d just go away. Without getting what Harrisch had already ordered up.”

“You’re so sure about that.” The Adder clome had regained some of his composure. After dabbing away a trace of blood below his mouth, he smoothed his jacket’s lapels. “If that’s the case, why don’t you tell me what Harrisch wanted you to get from me. Or maybe you don’t really know.”

“Oh, I know well enough. I know what Harrisch is pushing for. What he’s been pushing for all along.” McNihil felt a cold rock form and harden in his chest. “That’s what the real job is. Harrisch knows that the only way to find out what happened to Travelt-what happened to Travelt’s prowler-is for somebody to go where the prowler went. Down in the Wedge.”

The Adder clome’s gaze shifted away nervously, then inched back toward McNihil. “That’s right,” he said. “Harrisch wants you to do the pink dive. He wants you to go down there, in your own body. Your own flesh. Not by way of some proxy; not with a prowler bringing back the information to you.” The Adder clome’s voice went low and intense, as he laid a hand on McNihil’s arm. “This is what you’d use.” The hand squeezed tight through the sleeve. “Nothing between you and the Wedge.”

McNihil didn’t push away the other man’s grip. “That’s not a very inviting prospect.”

“Some people-some of my customers-would love to do it. If they weren’t afraid.”

“They’ve got good reason to be.”

Inside the office of the Snake Medicine™ clinic, the air temperature seemed to drop a few degrees, as though from a night breeze too soft to be felt. McNihil’s skin prickled at the sound of his own words, the skin of his arm contracting tighter beneath the Adder clome’s hand. Good reason… He and the Adder clome knew what that was. Death, mainly, and not in a particularly pleasant way. McNihil’s colleagues at the Collection Agency, the ones who’d been part of the operation years back against Verrity, weren’t the only ones who’d gotten chewed up by the Wedge’s seductive teeth. There were still bloodied bits and pieces washing up on the shore of McNihil’s memory, if not his conscience.

The Adder clome dropped his hand. “You’re right, though.” He nodded slowly. “That’s what Harrisch has wanted all along. Or at least since Travelt was found dead. How else is he going to find out what happened? Or get back his… property.”

“More that than the other,” said McNihil wryly. “Harrisch couldn’t give a rat’s ass about what happened to Travelt. Something of his got lost, and he wants it back. That’s all. And he thinks I can go get it for him.”

“But not without my help. Not without what he paid me to do for you.”

One more thing I know. McNihil regarded the Adder clome for a moment longer. “There was something else… about Travelt’s tattoo. It wasn’t just a letter V. There was a banner with a word, some kind of a name in it.” McNihil tilted his head to one side, watching the other man. “Tlazoltéotl. You know what that means?”

The Adder clome returned a gaze somewhere between suspicion and offense. “Maybe… there are some things you shouldn’t try to investigate.”

The clome’s response brought back a memory. Of a room even darker than this one, with himself and one other in it. McNihil had gone to the Bishop of North America and Central America by Proxy, asking questions and getting not much in the way of answers. The word Tlazoltéotl had turned up there as well, on the screen of the bishop’s monitor. With the same attitude on the part of the bishop as McNihil had caught just now from the Adder clome. Like some religion, it seemed to him, with observances both shame-filled and fiercely devout.

“I don’t have a choice,” said McNihil. “About whether I investigate or not. I have a call.”

That hit the mark. He saw the resentment behind the Adder clome’s eyes shift to grudging acceptance. “Maybe you do. I’m not the one who’d decide about that.”

“And who would be? Tlazoltéotl?”

The Adder clome was silent for a few seconds. Then his words were soft, almost a whisper. “You’re a lucky man, McNihil. More than you know. You’ll come out on the other side of your questions… or you won’t. Either way, things will be different for you.”

“I already knew that,” said McNihil. “But you still haven’t told me what the word means.”

“Don’t worry.” The Adder clome smiled. “Where you’re going, you’re likely to find out.”

“All right.” McNihil knew there weren’t any more answers here. “Get out your knives.”

FIFTEEN

The burn ward at the hospital smelled of disinfectant and the pumping cylinders of sterile machines. I wonder what it smells like to him, thought Harrisch, watching the asp-head walk down the white corridor toward him. In that world that McNihil walked around in, saw all around himself, the deep monochromatics of old and forgotten movies layered over the bright, shiny, and uninteresting real world… Harrisch supposed the hospital odors might be translated to simple carbolic acid and iodine and hot, soapy water. The new stuff, most of which was manufactured in some DZ subsidiary factory, worked almost as well.

“You tracked me down,” said Harrisch, smiling as the other man approached. “See? I knew you still had it.”

“I’m not in the habit of losing things.” McNihil looked tired, his face stiff and puffy, as though from bad sleep and an alcohol-toxic liver. “Unlike some people.”

Harrisch felt his own brain stall, unable to produce even a minimal retort. The hospital’s whispering silence and industrial atmosphere oppressed him; he would rather have met up with McNihil anywhere but a place like this. McNihil’s suggestion; it struck Harrisch as being typical of the gloomy bastard. Corporations like DynaZauber, and the execs in the boardrooms, couldn’t afford to be as dark and antilife as some twisted little independent operator with a history and agenda of self-defeat. It’s a Darwinian thing, Harrisch figured. Only the corporations and the execs who embraced life, swallowing it whole in their sharklike, all-devouring mouths, survived in this world. Any other one, he wasn’t interested in.

“You look like hell,” said Harrisch.

“That’s how I feel, pretty much.” McNihil prodded the side of his face with one fingertip, like a sculptor testing the consistency of wet clay. “I thought maybe around here, I could bribe a nurse and score a little relief. Maybe a little morphine or fentanyl. Even paraldehyde would take the edge off.”

“You gotta be kidding.” With a quick laugh, Harrisch shook his head. “You’re talking ancient history. Nobody makes that stuff anymore. There’s no money in it.” The DZ pharmaceutical division worked full shifts every quarter, tagging different atoms on their old formulas, generating new patentables one step ahead of the knockoff communes down in Belize. “And morphine,” he mused aloud. “Jeez…” Years ago, routine shots from the commercial rent-a-spy satellites had passed across Harrisch’s desk. Sand and airborne rust drifted through the withered Afghani and Southeast Asian opium fields, the dry poppy stalks victims of Sahara-like desertification and market-demand shifts profounder than any changes in global weather patterns. “You’ll have to update your habits, if that’s what you’re into.”

“I’ve found a new kick.” Rainwater dripped from the bottom of McNihil’s coat; a few clear drops clung to his waxy face. “Over at that little establishment you sent me to.”

“Ah.” Harrisch nodded, a degree of satisfaction cutting the unease the hospital evoked in him. “You’ve been talking to the good doctor. You must have found him to be… helpful.”

“Very.”

Harrisch leaned forward, examining the other man’s face more closely. “You know,” he said after a moment, “I was hoping for rather better results than this. I can still see you. I mean… if I look away from you…” He shifted his gaze to the corridor wall as if to demonstrate, then looked back toward McNihil. “Then I’ve still got a clear picture of you in my mind. That’s not how it’s supposed to work.”

“We’re not done yet.” McNihil rubbed the side of his face; he looked like somebody just risen from the dentist’s chair, flesh numbed by Novocain. Harrisch wondered if the guy was feeling any pain at all, or whether that had been all talk for sympathy. “Your doctor just got started,” said McNihil. “There’s a time gap between the first setup and the final stages. Just enough time, actually, for me to take care of a little business. Like coming over here to talk to you.”

“What’s there to talk about? You know what your job is.”

“True enough.” McNihil gave a slight nod. “But maybe we need to talk about payment.”

You poor stupid bastard-Harrisch tried to keep pity out of his own gaze. For people to get paid, they had to be alive after the job was done. He hadn’t even bothered filling out a petty-cash voucher on McNihil’s account.

“No need to worry,” said Harrisch. “You’ll be taken care of.”

He didn’t expect a smile from McNihil, and he didn’t get one. “Let’s go in here and talk.” McNihil pushed open the door to one of the burn ward’s intensive-care chambers.

“You know… I don’t find this a good working atmosphere.” Harrisch had let himself be shepherded into the cramped space, as though the other man’s suggestion had held some inarguable force. As the door sealed shut behind them, he’d started to find it hard to breathe the filtered air, his lungs binding from some deep atavistic dread. “Maybe we could find someplace else… like down in the cafeteria or something…”

“Don’t let it get to you.” In the room’s semidarkness, McNihil stood right behind him, voice whispering almost directly into his ear. “Somebody getting traumatically connected-up is just a natural part of life. It’s no big deal.”

“Easy for you to say.” Harrisch felt nausea moving around in his guts like a wet rat. The sonuvabitch probably wasn’t even aware of the burn-ward chamber, experiencing it, in anything close to its dismal reality. In that other world inside McNihil’s eyes, the whole hospital probably looked like some benign and comforting environment, with white-suited doctors with stethoscopes dangling around their necks, nurses with air-pillow shoes and wing-starched hats, all trotting around dispensing their healing mercies. He doesn’t see, thought Harrisch with a sudden rush of envy. The medical technicians in their full moon-suit antibiocontamination gear, square faceplates tinted dark and unidentifiable, moving around a factory with anesthetized bodies for workstations, shadowed by the similarly masked insurance agents and HMO accountants with their key-membrane clipboards and expenditure-review videocams, whispering on tight-link headsets with the cold-eyed financial triage nurses monitoring the taxi-meter gauges on the respirators and other clicking, sighing pieces of life-support equipment-the corridors were so thick with the cash-cure-or-kill types that it was amazing that the reality-blind McNihil could even make his way past them.

And what did he see on the other side of the transparent infection barrier? Some old-fashioned hospital bed, probably, with a crank at the footboard and a paper chart with a hand-drawn red line, a jagged little mountain range, hanging from a hook. And in the bed, something else from those crappy old movies that nobody watched anymore, a human form wrapped up head-to-toe in white bandages like a mummy, de-sexed, depersonalized, even somewhat funny-looking, a joke thing…

“This her?” McNihil nodded toward whatever it was he did see.

Involuntarily, as though his own head were fastened to a gently tugged wire, Harrisch looked at the living and mechanical aggregate on the other side of the barrier. Just enough of the human part’s charred flesh showed, glistening with an antiseptic nurturant gel, to start Harrisch’s stomach climbing into his throat.

“You know something?” He turned toward McNihil standing beside him. “You’re a sick puppy. In your own unique way. You don’t even know this stupid broad-not really-and this is where you want to have a little meeting.” Harrisch shook his head. “Why? Is this the kind of thing you enjoy? Maybe you just like making people uncomfortable.”

“I know her well enough,” said McNihil, in a voice as emotionless as his in-progress face. “Or let’s say I know enough about her. She told me her name was November; I suppose she picked that out herself. Something she probably thought suited her image. That’s all I really needed to know. The rest I could figure out.”

“Like what?” From the corner of his eye, Harrisch could still see the breathing human form inside the machines. “What did you figure out?”

“That she was your backup system. In case I didn’t work out.” With his thumb, McNihil pointed to the unconscious figure. “She would’ve taken on your little job, the Travelt thing, if you hadn’t been able to push me into doing it.”

“But I did.” Harrisch didn’t feel like smiling, but dredged one up, regardless. “Or let’s say you did. You saw reason. An offer like the one I made to you isn’t anything to sneer at, these days.” The smile became genuine as he regarded the other man’s stiffened features. “Now you’re just about ready to go. So I don’t really need a backup anymore, do I?”

“Guess not.” McNihil glanced toward the narcotized woman. “So this one’s expendable.”

“Expendable enough. It’s not like there’s a shortage of fast-forwards. We keep a list over at DZ, of people like her on call, for various little jobs that come up. It’s a short list, with names falling off it all the time-let’s face it, hers is just about to be scratched.” Harrisch tilted his head toward the transparent barrier, still trying to avoid the sight beyond it. “Too bad, because she was right at the top. She’d worked her way up. First to be tapped. But we get new names. New volunteers. Wanna-be freelancers. It must be an attractive type of business. There’s the basic fast-forward rush that comes with drawing on your future-I’ve never tried it-plus you get to run around and do violent things.”

McNihil nodded. “That’s a kick right there.”

You’d know, thought Harrisch. “Plus,” he said, “there’s always the added bonus of engineering your own self-destruction.”

“Maybe.” McNihil glanced over at him. “But I don’t think she’s enjoying that part right now.”

“Nobody ever does. Suicide is one of the best drugs, from a mercantile standpoint. All the pleasure is in the anticipation, and none in the realization. Regret and payment are simultaneous, but by then it’s already too late.”

“You’ve put some thinking into this.” McNihil raised an eyebrow, slowly, as though mechanically cranking it into place. “Business philosophy, over there at DZ headquarters?” An equally stiff smile lifted one corner of his mouth. “The essence of TIAC-right?”

“Very good. You’ve been doing your research,” said Harrisch approvingly. “I was hoping you would. Maybe it’ll improve your chances.”

“I doubt it.”

“So who were you talking to about TIAC?”

“Come on,” said McNihil. “You sent me there to talk to the guy. Over at the Snake Medicine™ clinic. Your pet Adder clome. He’s kind of a chatty guy, when you get to know him.”

“Good.” Harrisch gave a single nod. “I figured the two of you would hit it off. You both… have some things in common.” He let his own smile widen. “Don’t you think?”

“Connect you.” McNihil’s voice grated deep in his throat. “Even if we did… I’d rather be twins with somebody like that, then have to admit being in the same species with you and the rest of your DZ exec crowd. He told me all about TIAC. More than you’d probably care for me to know.”

“Hey…” Wounded, Harrisch spread his open hands apart. “Did I hide anything from you? About TIAC or anything else? You could come down to my office and live in my file cabinet, root through my personal hard disk like a pig after truffles, for all I care. And you still wouldn’t find out anything more about TIAC than I’d already told you. So it stands for ‘turd in a can’; so it’s a formulation of the ultimate capitalist drive, to always deliver less than what the customer believes he’s paying for. So what?” Harrisch could hear his voice tensing with a righteous indignation. “That’s what people like me are supposed to do. In the marketplace, at least, rape is the natural order of things. And remarkably popular, too, on both sides of the exchange. People hand over their money, their lives, to DynaZauber or any other corporation, they know what they’re getting. They want to get connected; the customers are always bottoms looking to get topped, the harder and bloodier, the better. That’s the dirty little secret that corporations know. The successful ones, that is.”

“Whatever.” McNihil shook his head in disgust. “I’m not doubting it.”

“Fine. Because it’s true. You might as well get used to it.” A thrill of vindictive triumph flashed up from Harrisch’s knotted gut. One hand’s gesture took in both the burnt woman and the standing asp-head. “That’s what people like you work for, whether you like it or not. At least she didn’t walk around suffering from these boring guilt pangs-”

“Guilt’s hardly what I feel.”

“Good for you. So welcome back to the real world. The one in which you do what people like me tell you to do.”

McNihil gazed at him through slitted eyes, the lids puffy from the first injections. “I’ve never left,” he said in a low, taut voice. “Maybe I see a different world-I don’t make any secret about that-but the reason I like it is that over here, where I am, I see things the way they really are. I see you the way you really are.” He visibly swallowed the spit that had gathered under his tongue. “That’s the way it is with dreaming. It’s not dreaming at all. It’s the real world.”

“Then wake up.” Harrisch leaned his gaze close into the other man’s, almost touching the surgically hardened skin of McNihil’s face. He tilted his head toward the transparent barrier. “Like you’re always saying. And smell the burning corpses of your dreams. Like she has. Whatever dreams she’s having, they’re closer to the way things are in the real world than what’s inside your head.”

He watched as McNihil silently turned away and looked at the burnt woman. After a few moments, McNihil spoke. “How much longer does she have?”

“If your eyes hadn’t been so connected with,” said Harrisch contemptuously, “you could read the meters.” He pointed toward the red numbers counting down on the life-support machines, though he knew McNihil couldn’t see them. “This November person’s drawing down the last of her accounts. She was pretty close to tapped out when she came in here, when the ambulances zipped her in from that hotel-in-flames where you left her. That’s the way it is in her line of work: she was betting the farm on getting this job away from you, or on you blowing it so bad that we’d have to give it to her afterward. So she could clean up whatever mess you’d left and have herself a nice, fat payday. Which would’ve taken her out of the red, cleared off everything she’d tapped against her own future, and left her with numbers written in black. A lot of numbers.”

McNihil glanced over at him. “It’s worth that much to you? Even if she’d been the one taking care of the job, instead of me?”

“Sure.” Harrisch nodded. “What can I say? Maybe we’re just sentimental types over at DynaZauber. Corporations are heirs to that old military mind-set, now that there are no armies anymore: we take care of our dead, we don’t just leave their corpses out on the battlefield.” He knew he was talking bullshit-McNihil probably knew it as well-but it didn’t matter. The asp-head was already on track, wired into his fate, by this point; there were just a few details to be nailed down before McNihil would be on his way, diving pinkly down into the Wedge. “We would’ve been happy to pay good money-to anyone-for the results we want.”

“You’ve got a corpse already,” said McNihil. “If that was all that was on your mind, you could’ve buried Travelt and gone on with your business. Your TIAC business. Except it’s not just TIAC anymore, is it?”

“What’re you talking about?”

“Come on.” McNihil’s shoulder brushed against the contamination barrier, sending ripples through the transparent membrane. “Like I said before. That little Adder clome at the Snake Medicine™ clinic that you sent me over to see-he’s a real talkative sort. More than you might even have expected. He told me all sorts of interesting things.”

A new sense of unease percolated through Harrisch’s remaining nausea. “Like what?”

“It’s not TIAC now. Your canned turd is ancient history.” Something less than a smile turned the corner of McNihil’s mouth. “A whole other acronym. A little more exotic-sounding. Almost oriental… but not quite the same. TOAW-with a W on the end. Right?”

The unease flashed to anger, like a match on spilled gasoline. “You’re not supposed to know about that.”

“You wanted me to find out stuff.” McNihil glared straight back at him. “You can’t complain now, just because I’m doing the job you wanted me to do. If you want the lid taken off the box, you’d better be happy with what somebody else finds in there.”

“TOAW,” said Harrisch with teeth-gritted fury, “is not any of your business.”

“It wasn’t any of your little Adder clome’s business, either. But he knew about it.”

“I’ll take care of him later.” Connecting sonuvabitch-Harrisch didn’t know exactly to whom he was referring, inside his head. The clench in his gut tightened, a response to the specter of losing control over the situation. “He’s my problem, not yours. Plus…” His brain finally dropped into gear, producing the right line to take. “Let’s face it. The guy was lying to you. He’s deranged; it’s probably one of the inevitable hazards of the business he’s in. Somebody like that, with the kind of work he does-there’s no way he wouldn’t wind up nuts. Inventing stuff to tell people like you. It’s all crap. TOAW-there’s no such thing. Not really.”

“Sure. That’s why that blue vein on your forehead is about to break open.” McNihil emitted a quick, harsh laugh. “Then again, if you’re going to work yourself into a stroke, you’re in the right place for it. Want me to call a nurse in here?”

Harrisch ignored the other man. For the time being; his thoughts had sped up, sorting themselves out, in regard to what McNihil had just told him. If some sort of leak had sprung open, in the form of that nonstop blabber over at the Snake Medicine™ clinic, then that would have to be shut down, and soon. When he got back to the DZ offices, he’d have to arrange for a damage-control team, a crew of silent heavies, to make their way to the clinic; whatever was left after their operation, including the Adder clome, would be in pieces small enough to be swept up with a dustpan and broom. No big loss, especially to the DynaZauber bottom line; the division would have another SM clinic-with an Adder who could keep his lips zipped-up and running in a matter of days. The customers would hardly be inconvenienced. Connect ’em anyway, thought Harrisch. The lag time between a bunch of perverts’ desires and fulfillment of the same was not a big issue for him.

Though what would also have to be determined-Harrisch saw it now-would be where the Adder clome had gotten his information. The TOAW operation files were locked down tight inside DynaZauber, with only a few of Harrisch’s most-trusted subordinates having even the most rudimentary access. If one of them has been talking, vowed Harrisch, his ass is mine. Or the researchers down at the DZ neurology labs-it could’ve been a white-coat directly on the payroll, even though they were all supposedly laced up with various secrecy and nondivulgence agreements. Some of the top researchers, the ones with the most TOAW pieces inside their heads, had death-pact employment contracts-the DZ human-resources department had paid plenty for the constitutional-rights waivers on those-or somewhat grislier surgical-extraction modules already wired into their skulls. Unauthorized talk would bring about tissue-loss results ranging from idiocy to corpse-hood. For somebody in the labs to have spilled, the person would have to be either suicidal-not impossible; long-term TOAW work tended to corrode morale among even the most blithely scientific-or high-pressured by outside forces. One of our competitors? Inside or out?-Harrisch kept a short list inside his head of enemies belonging to other corporations, rivals in the various DZ branches, and divisions not directly under his control or adequately in liege to him. Any one of those names could be seducing or leaning on the TOAW technicians; if somebody inside DZ, they could’ve learned the techniques from watching Harrisch himself, the way he’d cracked McNihil. Harrisch supposed that was something of a personal tribute, but it still meant ferreting out the parties responsible and eliminating them, one way or another, either shipping them off to the Kamchatka regional office or laying them in the ground with bloodied lilies clenched in their teeth.

Anyway, decided Harrisch, it doesn’t matter right now. That was all housekeeping stuff, things that would have to be cleaned up later. The nausea ebbed lower in his gut, like a brown sea’s low tide, when he considered just how well things were going. If a hospital’s human charcoal ward wasn’t his favorite place for a conference, so what? McNihil wouldn’t even have wanted to come here to talk if he weren’t caught on this particular hook, too tight to wriggle free.

“You’re hosed,” said Harrisch aloud. He enjoyed saying it. “Those burning corpses should just about be cinders by now.” The seizure of corporate poetry in his soul overrode any doubts about whether the asp-head still dreamed or not. “You connecting jerk.” Fierce adrenaline was as good as any white-powder pharmaceutical. “I could’ve met up with you in the boneyard, if that was what you wanted, and it still wouldn’t have changed anything.” These psychological-warfare ploys were useless, at least when they were directed at him. “I don’t care what you know about TOAW. If you know anything at all.”

“Simmer down,” said McNihil. He glanced over his shoulder toward the room’s door. “You’ll have the hospital security up here in a minute.”

“Who cares?” The seizure had morphed into a spasm of self-congratulatory elation. The feeling returned, the one he’d had when he’d seen McNihil bruised and bleeding on the floor of that old writer’s place. Absolute control, the future on rails, speeding directly into the embrace of his heart. What God feels, thought Harrisch as he closed his eyes. When He’s rolling dice at some infinite Vegas. One of the archangels could’ve handed Harrisch a free drink then, with his life written on the little paper parasol sticking out of it, and he wouldn’t have been surprised. “I can deal with them, the same way I’ve dealt with you.” He wondered vaguely if it was possible to get drunk off repeated hits of adrenaline. If so, it was happening to him; Harrisch felt the same giddiness and lack of regard for whatever happened next. Whatever he might say to this poor sorry bastard standing next to him… it didn’t matter. Because I’ve already won, thought Harrisch. Pleasure beyond smugness filled his body, like the bubbling light of the transfigured saints. And-almost as nice-the other man had lost. McNihil not only didn’t see the way things were in the real world-the asp-head was effectively blinded by his cut-up-and-stitched eyes, with their optical load of crappy old movie sets and shadowy lighting-but he was blind as well to what had happened to himself. He’d been connected over, poisoned and contaminated-And he doesn’t even know it, thought Harrisch with complete satisfaction. McNihil had embraced blindness as a way of life; the real world wasn’t good and darkly poetic enough for him. He had to have something else, see some other world more to his liking, with retro Warner Bros, shadows and-even more retro-tough-outside, tragic-inside women, just as if those had ever existed anywhere at all except in the movies. That was what he’d wanted, and so now he’d have no reason to complain about the consequences of his own self-generated ignorance, the chosen way of life turned to one of death. “You just don’t know…”

McNihil studied him coldly. “Know what?”

“Never mind.” Harrisch shook his head, letting his rhapsodic interior monologue fade away. “You’ll find out soon enough. That’s your job, isn’t it? Finding out things. You should be grateful I’ve given you this opportunity, to do what you’re so good at.”

“Yeah, right.” Beneath McNihil’s hardened features, the now-vestigial muscles shifted, subtly indicating disdain. “You still didn’t answer my question.”

“My apologies,” said Harrisch, still feeling amused. “Perhaps I didn’t appreciate your burning thirst for knowledge. There’s so much you want to know, isn’t there? What question was it, that I haven’t satisfied your mind about?”

“What I asked,” growled McNihil, “was how much time does she have? November… how much longer before they pull the plug?”

“‘Pull the plug’? You can see something like that?” Harrisch laughed. “I thought maybe you’d just have some notion of a nurse or an orderly, maybe even a doctor, coming in here and holding a pillow over her face, just to put her out of her misery. As for how long it’s going to be before that happens…” He glanced again at the numbers running down on the machines’ various gauges and dials, visible on the other side of the contamination barrier. What little money remained in November’s accounts was leaking away as though from a slashed wrist. The image came to Harrisch’s mind of the numbers in November’s palm, the stigmata of all fast-forwards, zipping by so fast that they blurred into a red, illegible smear, seeping through the bandages and dripping onto the floor beneath the chrome-barred bed. “Let’s just say… a ballpark figure… that the next time you’ve got a chance to come by here, when you’ve finished your job, whatever bed you can see will be empty. Or there’ll be some other mummy wrapped in gauze lying in it. That’s what you see right now, isn’t it? Well, it’ll be the same package pretty much-people are always falling into the flames-but it’ll be different contents inside. What’s left of this one will’ve been crumbled up and sluiced down the drain by that time.”

He watched McNihil silently regarding the human figure hidden beneath the gurgling machines. The stiffened angles of the other man’s face made it impossible to read whatever thoughts might be working through McNihil’s skull.

“I’ll make you an offer.” A few seconds had passed before McNihil had turned back toward him. “A deal.”

“You’re hardly in any kind of negotiation position.”

“This one isn’t negotiable,” said McNihil, voice flat and inexpressive as his face. “You won’t have any problem with it, though.” He gestured toward the burnt woman. “I’ll go her bill.”

Harrisch stared at the asp-head. “What’re you talking about?”

“You heard me. Call up the hospital’s accounting department. Or have one of your little minions do it. I’ll put up the cash for November’s therapeutic procedures here. Anything the doctors figure she needs-I’ll pay for it.”

“With what?” Harrisch barked an incredulous laugh. “You don’t have that kind of money, either. We’re talking about major tissue replacement here. Major, nothing; total is more like it. At least as far as skin goes-she doesn’t have a lot left. Even you should be able to see that. The DNA sample coding, the substrate matrices, accelerated regenerative foster-maps, all that epidermal plate-farming-and that’s just to get the raw materials ready. After that comes all the surgery, the grafting, the stitching, the stitch-ablation work, the laser spackling, the blood-vessel resassignments, the neural patterning… let me tell you, it’s not just some simple tuck-and-roll upholstery job that’s involved with somebody in her condition.”

“You seem to know an awful lot about the subject.”

“Connect, yeah.” Harrisch gave a slight shrug. “DynaZauber’s medical-products division makes most of the disposables, the active gels and the tissue-replication forms, that are used in burn wards like this. When they’re used-and we’re talking about a big ‘when.’ We also crank out the billing software for those procedures, so I know what they cost. Your pockets aren’t that deep.”

McNihil spoke without looking over at him. “What about yours?”

“What do you mean?”

“You heard me.” McNihil swung his flat gaze around. “There’s a bonus involved, isn’t there? For this job I’m doing for you. You can’t just let me off the hook; you have to pay me as well.”

“True.” Harrisch nodded. “Technically, you’re still on the Collection Agency’s list of operatives. So compensation has to be according to the agency’s fee schedule. So okay, you’ll get paid for it. Big deal.”

“It is,” said McNihil. “Big. I already checked into it. This job-matter of fact, anything to do with the Wedge and with Verrity-it’s on the Collection Agency’s red list. Those are the hot tickets; hot in the sense that the agency would rather not pick them up at all. They’d rather have them forgotten, instead of people like you poking into them and risking more embarrassment for everybody concerned. So the agency’s going to charge you a premium-a nice big fat one-on this job. And according to the last labor agreement between the agency and its operatives, ninety percent of that premium comes from the contracting party-that’s you, or DynaZauber, at least-and goes straight to me. When I complete the job.”

“If you complete the job.”

“Ah.” One of McNihil’s eyebrows creaked upward. “That’s not how you talked when you were first pushing me to take this on. Back there at Travelt’s cubapt. That was when you were so confident about me being able to pull this off. Remember?”

“I remember fine,” Harrisch said grudgingly. “But anything can happen. Anything bad. You’re the right man for the job, but Verrity handed your ass to you before. She can do it again. My hiring you is just a matter of playing the percentages; there’s no sure thing in this universe.”

“The hospital knows that, too.” With a tilt of his head, McNihil indicated the chamber’s doorway and the brightly lit corridor beyond. “That’s another thing I checked on my way in here. They’re into speculative ventures, at least on a limited basis. Kind of a gambling mentality-for a twenty-five-percent surcharge on all fees and services, they’ll do the full job on November here, the grafts and skinwork, the blood and neural microsurgery hookups, everything. A brand-new skin, shining like a baby’s-that’s a pretty good deal for her. Maybe they’ll give her the dead bits, the ashes in a jar, to keep on her mantelpiece at home.” He managed a brittle laugh. “Snakes get to shed their skins-so I’ve heard; I don’t know from personal experience-so why shouldn’t people? They need it so much more-don’t you think?”

What the connect… Harrisch gazed at the other man, as the pieces fell into place. Slowly, because he couldn’t believe it. “Let me see if I’ve got this right,” he said. “You want to pay for this person’s skin grafts and all the rest of the stuff they can do for her in this place, and you want to take it out of the bonus for the job you’re doing for me? That’s it?”

McNihil nodded.

“You’ve gotta be crazy.” Harrisch stared at him in amazement. How could anyone be so connecting stupid? “You realize what that would mean?”

“Of course,” said McNihil, voice calm. “It means that when I’m done with this job for you, there won’t be a lot of cash going into my pocket because of it. The money will already have been spent here at the hospital, on this November person’s skin grafts and therapy.”

“That’s what happens, all right… if you pull it off.” A fierce glee seized Harrisch, as the implications unfolded to him. “You’ll have everything riding on this, McNihil. Because as soon as I sign over the bonus payment to the hospital, and they accept it and do their work on spec, then your ass is mine. Totally-way more than it is already.” He had difficulty restraining the triumphant emotions compressing the breath from his lungs. “Because from that moment, you’ll be in debt to me-”

“To DynaZauber, actually.”

“Whatever,” said Harrisch impatiently. “Believe me, your fate’ll be in my hands and nobody else’s. I’ll have your file welded to my desk. Because of my deep personal interest in you, pal. Either way that it goes with you on this job, whether you track down and return our missing property or whether you slam straight into Verrity again and she takes you apart like a cheap watch-either way, I’ve got you. Succeed or fail, I’ll get my money’s worth out of you.”

“Then I guess,” said McNihil with a cool absence of emotion, “that I better succeed. Just to keep you off my ass.”

Like there’s any chance of that, thought Harrisch as he took his tight-cell phone out of his coat pocket. The poor bastard just didn’t know. “Yeah.” He spoke after dialing. “I’m going to need a contract notary up here. Immediately.”

He’d left a couple of assistants sitting in the car, over in the hospital’s multileveled parking garage. Within minutes, the elevator doors at the end of the corridor slid open, and the DZ flunkies had crowded into the burn-ward chamber. “You won’t be able to say you didn’t know what you were doing.” Harrisch watched as the new document, a three-way agreement between the asp-head, DynaZauber, and the hospital, was recorded and sealed. “This is as close to full disclosure as it gets.” Or as it needed to; he figured that McNihil would find out soon enough how thoroughly he’d been connected. That in fact and potential there had never been any way for him to win. All he could do, thought Harrisch with satisfaction, was make things worse for himself. He’d seen people engineer their own defeats before-the late Travelt was a perfect example of that-but never to such a complete degree as this. It was like watching someone screw down the lid of his coffin from the inside.

As soon as the contract was registered, the numbers on the financial-status monitor gauges changed, scrambling up into the high digits of temporary solvency. On the other side of the transparent contamination barrier, the readouts flicked from red to green, indicating a surgical Go condition. The almost-subliminal murmur of the pumps and tube-connected machines went up in tempo and pitch, getting ready for long-delayed action; from the corner of his eye, Harrisch could see the burnt woman’s body contract, the large muscles tightening with the first unconscious rush of injected adrenaline, then relaxing as better and more expensive opiates ticked up in synch. Submerged in junkie oblivion, she awaited the knife. Harrisch heard the prep carts approaching, their black wheels rattling on the outside corridor’s hard and glossy floor.

“That’s fine.” McNihil spoke first. He turned away from the contamination barrier and its dreaming captive. “I’d love to stand here and talk with you some more. But I’ve got work to do.”

Harrisch stepped, letting the other man slide in front of him, toward the door. The two flunkies had already retreated out into the brighter light; they watched in silence as the asp-head strode past them.

“Good luck,” called Harrisch. His raised voice trembled small waves on the vertical barrier. “You’ll need it.”

McNihil’s hardened face glanced back at him. “No, I won’t,” he said. He turned and continued walking toward the elevators.

SIXTEEN

You’re back.” The woman smiled at him. “I kind of expected you would be.”

The smile of the ultimate barfly was part of the establishment’s furniture, as much as the dim lights reflected in the mirror behind the bottles, as much as the long-enclosed air that crawled in and out of McNihil’s throat. “Where else could I go?” His thumb sank into faux leather as he pulled out a stool and sat next to her. “This is the only game in town.”

She laughed, holding up a glass with ice cubes rattling like polished bones, their round square curves melting into brown alcohol. “You got that right, pal.”

McNihil sipped at the drink that had been placed in front of him, without his needing to ask. Bad scotch, as though from the well of indifferent souls, trickled near his heart. In the mirror, flecked with dust and something more deliberate, he could see himself and the bar’s space, both endless and claustrophobic. The black-and-white world in his eyes had set up tight and hard, shutting out anything more recent. No future, thought McNihil, for me. The obliging deity of the universe he saw had heard that decision, made even before he’d gone into the hospital and formalized it in front of the burnt November, floating at the altar like a charred bridesmaid, tubes and oxygenated hoses trailing like the ribbons of a bouquet crushed to what was left of her small breasts. That particular god had heard and had obliged far beyond what the stingy, nonexistent object of the Bishop of North America’s worship would’ve given: McNihil’s present as well as his future had been extinguished, leaving just this dark past, both threatening and oddly comfortable. Just what I always wanted…

The barfly nudged his shoulder with her bare arm. “I wonder,” she said softly, her mouth close to his ear, “just what game you’re talking about.”

He drew his finger through the small puddle that had been jostled from his glass. “There’s all kinds… aren’t there?”

“No.” She took his hand-the darkly shining polish of her fingernails caught sparks from the mirror-and brought it to her mouth. “There’s only one.” Gazing up at him through her eyelashes, she licked the smoky drop of alcohol from his fingertip. “You know that.”

McNihil let his hand stay caught in both of hers, like a small animal too stupid to run away, even as the trap was folding around it. His eyes had adjusted to the bar’s shadows enough that he had been able to catch a glimpse inside the woman’s mouth, past the diminished-spectrum red of her lipstick and white, unsharpened teeth. He’d seen the scars along the surface of her tongue, the minute roughened and healed abrasions, as though from needles that had been held in a match flame. McNihil had seen the same marks before, and often. But the last time had been in the mouth of a corpse, lying on the floor of a lux cubapt, as he’d knelt on the deep-pile carpet to make his quick, disinterested examination. Scars indicating prowler usage, the wet flesh, all muscle and sensors inserted pluglike into the socket of that other mouth, that face like a mask opening and fused to knowledge.

Face like mine, thought McNihil; if he’d taken his hand away from the woman’s, he could’ve touched his own inert flesh, skin yielding just slightly more than the bone beneath. On the way from the hospital to this bar, he’d stopped in at the Snake Medicine™ clinic and finished up the antitherapeutic course, the needles and tiny knives, that made his face the unmemorable equivalent of a prowler’s. “There you go,” the Adder clome had said, sorting out his bloodied tools into their chrome trays. “The full job, on DZ’s tab-you don’t owe me a nickel. I’ll send the bill to Harrisch.” The Adder clome had glanced over his white-coated shoulder, and had smiled with satisfaction at his work. “Just as well somebody else is paying,” he’d said. “The way you are now, I could never track you down for my money.”

In the bar’s dark spaces, McNihil drew back, bringing the woman beside him into focus. He wondered just what she saw, if anything, when she looked at him. His gaze shifted to one side, from long automatic habit, looking for some bright, shiny surface that would give him a glimpse of that other world, the one he’d gladly vacated. The bartender had left a knife beside a halved lemon; in the glistening metal, McNihil saw the same image reflected as in the mirror. A face visible as long as you were looking straight at it, but that as soon as you glanced away, dropped out of memory like a stone beneath the surface of unrippled water. I’ve eliminated myself, thought McNihil. Without regret; he would’ve paid for himself, if he’d had to. Should’ve done it a long time ago…

“Honey,” said the barfly, reading his thoughts, “you look fine to me. Better than fine. Anyway-I wouldn’t have remembered what you looked like, no matter what happens. In this world, memory’s dead-weight. We can do without it.” One of her hands stroked the back of his. “Real memory, that is. And the other kind… we send out for it.”

That word we was another stroke, lighter and more chilling; McNihil felt his skin tighten along his arms. In the bar’s enclosed silence, his hearing sharpened, attuned to his breath and the woman’s. And beyond that, to the previously undetectable signals of other human presences. Or close enough to human, he thought. He felt like someone exploring a cave deep inside the earth, the little beam of his attention sweeping across cold stalactites and water-smoothed rock, miles removed from any living thing, his own clouded breath the only sign of warmth and motion-and then suddenly, the explorer is aware of a thousand unseen eyes in the darkness, all watching him.

McNihil turned on the leatherette-padded stool and looked back across the bar. He’d gotten the impression before, somehow, that the place was empty, as though he’d managed to slide in after some hypothetical closing hour, with just himself and the barfly keeping the faith. Though he knew that nothing ever really closed in this timeless zone; the flickering neon wrote its partial hieroglyphics on the streets’ wet obsidian through all the motion of clocks without hands. The doors were never locked; the dismal happy hour never ended. The ghostlike bartender, impeccable in his nonperceived state, set them up without even being asked, leaving the drinks and the faint smell of a damp bar-towel drawn across the overlapped circles of the previous round. It was like the Platonic ideal of a drinking hole, someplace different from where you lived, but with no one to intrude upon the slow march and collapse of your thoughts.

Now, though, he saw the others. That McNihil hadn’t seen before; he leaned his elbow on the edge of the bar and let the fit of the cave-explorer analogy settle across the floor and walls of the establishment. Birds rather than bats, though; they sat hunched forward, hands folded around their own stingily nursed drinks, silent and watchful as crows under storm-clouding skies. Watching me, realized McNihil; the collective gaze emerging from the bar’s shadows pressed against him like a slow tide, hours away from receding.

“They knew, too.” The barfly leaned close to McNihil’s ear and whispered. “That you’d be back. Or maybe they were just hoping you would be.”

He realized that now as well. That expectancy was what put so much tonnage into the dark figures’ watching. Waiting for me-another handless clock was shared out amongst them, its numbers slowly pecked away. In a place like this, time was that dead substance consumed but never extinguished.

“All right.” McNihil turned toward the woman sitting beside him. “What do they think I’m going to do?”

“What did you come here to do?”

“I came here…” He had to think about that. Not because he didn’t know. But because it would be easier to say something else. I came in here for a drink-that’d be good. And true in its own way. Because that was the other option, that always existed in this world, the one that had leaked out of his eyes and taken tactile as well as optical form. You watched those old movies, those black-and-white visions of the past, truer than history, and it was always noticeable how alcohol ran through and beneath every scene, like an underground river. Those people always had the option of drinking their problems away, or engineering their own dooms in an even more convincing and final way by fishing with their tongues for the key that lay at the glass’s bottom-Why shouldn’t I? He’d always wanted to live in and not just see this world; maybe that was how to do it. Dive in and drown.

McNihil set his own half-empty glass back on the bar, without having touched it to his lips. It was an option, all right-just one he didn’t have at the moment. “I’m working,” he said simply. “Believe it or not.” He waited for some scornful reaction from the barfly, but didn’t get one. “I’ve got a job to do. That’s what I came in here for.”

“Everybody here is working.” She held her glass up like a crystalline trophy. “In our own way. We all have our little. jobs to do. That’s why we’re here.”

He had come a little closer to understanding, or admitting to himself what he already knew. “Of course,” said McNihil. “You’re all prowlers.”

A silence fell over the bar, as though all the oxygen had been sucked out through some hidden mechanism to the night’s vacuum beyond. He could feel the gaze of the shadowed figures at the tables sharpening, penetrating and judging him even more thoroughly.

“That’s right, sweetheart.” The barfly gave McNihil a smile of alcohol-blurred delight. “You’ve come to the right place. This is where you belong-you know that, don’t you?”

“I know.” That’s why I didn’t see them before, he told himself. I didn’t see them because I couldn’t. He hadn’t been ready to; but now he was. He brought his hand to the side of his face, prodding the skin. Either the anesthetics he’d received at the Snake Medicine™ clinic hadn’t worn off yet, or the dulling of sensation was a permanent effect of the little Adder clome’s work on him. “That’s funny,” he murmured aloud. “I thought my senses were supposed to get sharper…”

“Don’t worry about it,” said the barfly. “That’s only for real prowlers. Not a phony like you.”

“I’m not fooling anyone?”

“You don’t have to. You never did.” She reached up and placed a gentle, disturbing fingertip where McNihil had dropped his hand. “You could’ve come here in your own face, the one you gave up, and nothing bad would’ve happened to you.”

He laughed. “I find that hard to believe.”

“Well…” The barfly gave a shrug of her bare shoulders. “Maybe nothing different would’ve happened to you. From what was already going to happen.”

“Don’t tell me,” said McNihil. “You’ll spoil the fun.” He looked away from the woman, back toward the space leading to the diamond-padded door. Though his eyes had fully adjusted to the darkness, he couldn’t make the watching faces become any clearer, any more sharply focused than they already had been. She’s right, he thought. I’m not really one of them. Not yet. He supposed if the Adder clome had had some way of transforming his entire being, from human to something-like-human, his percept systems would’ve been completely altered as well. But just having his face worked on, the minimum hallucination and anti-gestalting cues surgically implanted-that apparently wasn’t enough. Even though the clome hadn’t touched McNihil’s eyes with all the clinic’s bright scalpels and wetly glistening hypodermics-he’d forbidden that, staying awake through the entire procedure to make sure that the black-and-white world wasn’t nicked and leached out of his eye sockets-something had happened to his vision. A change; the making visible of the previously unseen. Like ghosts dipped in glue and flour, he thought. If somebody had invented black wheat-the odd notion struck him that maybe bread the color of ink was what they ate in this world he’d entered through the bar’s tightly sealed doors.

“I wouldn’t want to do that.” The woman’s dark red fingernails clicked like insect shells against her glass. “Fun’s our whole reason for being. That’s why God put us here.” She smiled, lazily and sure. “Isn’t it?”

“Some god did.” McNihil caught sight of himself in the mirror behind the stacked bottles. He could make out his own face, all right, perhaps even clearer than before. Before I even went to the clinic in the first place. He nodded slowly. “Now I understand.”

“Understand what, honey?”

“What I’ve become. What I was always trying to become.” McNihil picked up his own glass and used it to point toward the mirror. “An extra. Like in the old movies. That real world I was always trying to crawl into. Because it was real.” He glanced over at the woman beside him. “You see them and you don’t see them-the extras, I mean. They exist in that world, they’re even necessary-but you don’t remember them. Just like prowlers that way; there’s nothing in their faces to snag onto normal people’s memories.”

“Our faces,” said the woman. “And yours.”

“Exactly. And that’s just what I always wanted.” The words were fervent in McNihil’s mouth. “To be there-to be here-and to exist and watch and maybe even have a few lines to speak. You know; to tell a real person which way to Fourth and Main, to maybe even light a cigarette for a real woman, the one the movie’s about…” He closed his eyes, imagining all he’d spoken of. “That’d be all right.”

“I don’t smoke,” the barfly said drily. “Otherwise I’d let you light my cigarette. If that’s what you’d get off on.”

McNihil stayed silent, knowing he shouldn’t have said anything at all. Not about this, at least-it was too close to some other dark place, a little unentered room inside himself. He folded both hands around the almost-empty glass, and thought about his dead wife. Thinking without words; just the image of her face. Which was not just snagged, but stitched with iron threads, to his own memory.

“Like I said before…” The barfly stroked the back of McNihil’s neck with her cold fingertips. “It’s nothing you have to worry about. Everything’s going to happen just the way it was meant to.” She used one nail to draw a knifelike incision, just short of opening the skin at the top of his spine. “And that’ll be fun. Loads of it. I promise you.”

He lifted his head, raising the glass at the same time and using the watered dregs in it to sluice away the vision of his dead wife’s face. The lock on the door of the little room inside him remained keyless. “Great,” said McNihil. The single drink, combined with some percolating residue of the Adder clome’s injections and his own self-generated toxins, turned a different key in a different lock. A doorway through which he knew he was going to step, though he already knew what was on the other side. The glass splintered into shards in his fist as he slammed it back onto the bar. “Let’s get going.”

“Oh,” said the barfly in a voice only half-tinged with sarcasm. “I love a man who knows what he wants.” Her hand seized his once again. Tight around his wrist; tight enough to force apart his fingers. The bits of glass dropped like dice, altered to transparency and razor edges, around his elbow. The barfly leaned forward, blond hair trailing through the pool of melting liquid; a red drop fell from McNihil’s wounded palm, diffusing into blurred pink. She caught the next one on the tip of her scarred tongue; the blood glistened her lipstick as she kissed the center of his hand.

“I know, all right…”

“Like I said-you came to the right place.” In a predator crouch, the ultimate barfly looked up at him through her lashes. The red looked like black, smeared on her chin. “I can do a lot for you, baby.”

McNihil nodded, letting the key turn another click farther in his heart. “I bet you can.”

The mirror of her eyes held him. “We’ve been waiting for you,” she whispered. “We’ve been waiting for you… for a long time.” She used the back of his hand to wipe away the blood below her lip. “It’ll be worth it.”

Something between fear and disgust pushed McNihil’s gaze away from hers; something in which those terms no longer had a negative connotation. He just didn’t want to see that appetite in her eyes, in case it was a reflection from his own. McNihil looked across the bar, across the perceived but still-hidden figures in the shadows. He could discern them well enough that he could see both male and female prowlers returning his own scrutiny. That’s what they’re made to do, he reminded himself. Just like me. What he’d been before, and what he’d become once again-there really wasn’t that much difference between a prowler and an asp-head. They went out looking for something, the sensory treasure they’d been programmed to sniff out, and they brought it back to their masters. Just like me, he thought once more. Answers rather than thrills, Harrisch’s lost property rather than a collection of scars and tattoos that crawled over one’s skin like the black-clawed shadows of sea creatures-no difference at all, it now seemed to him.

He squeezed his fist tighter, the blood oozing wetly between his fingers. He gazed at the trickle running down his wrist like spilled ink, wondering if he’d achieved some evolutionary apotheosis by combining asp-head with prowler. Either the zenith, thought McNihil, or the nadir-it was something else that didn’t matter. Further proof that everything evolved, or at least changed, one way or another. He wondered if Harrisch, if anybody over at DynaZauber, knew about this. The world of the prowlers, the subterritory of the Wedge, might be getting out of their control faster than they knew. Maybe Travelt hadn’t been the first to have undergone that transference effect, the shifting of his human nature into the mask-faced, artificial receptacles. It didn’t appear that the late junior exec had been the last.

“I’m glad,” said McNihil, looking over again at the woman next to him. “That you’ve been waiting for me.” All irony had been drained from his words. “It’s nice to be wanted.”

“We’re not the only ones.” The other’s presence was so close and unfolding that a perfume of body-temperature latex and soft industrial resins had drifted in the air between them. “There’s somebody else waiting.” The barfly both kissed and whispered into his ear. “She’s waiting, too.”

McNihil didn’t need to ask her. There was only one possibility. “I’m ready,” he said. The glass had been drained and then shattered; what more was left? “Let’s go.”

“You first.” The woman looked straight into his eyes, the way someone about to plunge into a dark, still lake would. “You know how…”

He hesitated only a second. Then brought his hand along the side of her head, the blood from his palm seeping lines through her blond hair. He pulled her even closer and kissed her.

The woman drew back suddenly, her gaze turned to both wonder and almost frightened concern. “Your heart’s stopped.” She had placed her own hand against his chest, as though helping him to keep his balance in the gap between her barstool and his. “I can’t feel it beating…”

“Don’t worry about it.” He couldn’t keep himself away from her. “Not important,” said McNihil, pulling the woman harder toward himself and his mouth.

It took a moment for the inside contact to be completed. McNihil could hear behind himself the silence of the bar’s shadows and the prowlers’ mingled, expectant breathing. Just what they want-there was time only for that thought fragment, before the spark hit.

He’d felt the woman’s tiny scars with the tip of his own tongue, like deciphering a wet braille that chaptered down her throat. If he’d known how to read it, a biography in stitched flesh or a warning:

Abandon all hope

Blue lightning sizzled the insides of his eyelids, like the frayed curtains of his apartment bursting into flame.

Ye who enter here

Image rather than words filled his head, a newspaper photo of an electric-chair execution a long time ago, where flames had burst from underneath the cloth mask as soon as the switch had been thrown. In a sliced-apart microsecond, he wondered if he looked as well as felt like that, his skull wrapped in the incendiary halo of a martyred saint, fire-laced smoke rising to the bar’s low ceiling.

“You gave me… too much…” Talking like one of the spidered-together junkies in the lobby of the End Zone Hotel; he’d felt, been dimly aware through the rush of sensation and memory data, the woman grabbing the front of his shirt to keep him from toppling off the barstool. McNihil’s tongue felt burnt and swollen, as though he’d licked it across the terminals of a live battery. “That was… too big a hit…”

Other hands grasped him under the shoulders, lowering him to the bar’s floor. Far away, in the anteroom of the world he’d just left, he’d heard chairs toppling over as the seizure had snapped his muscles tight, and more than one of the watching prowlers running forward to catch him.

They laid him out corpselike, the back of his hand flopped against the stool’s chrome leg. He gazed up, still able to discern a fragment of real time through all the hurtling images that had risen into his eyes from the woman’s kiss.

“I should’ve known…” McNihil couldn’t tell if he’d managed to mumble the words aloud. “I should’ve known it was you…”

“That’s all right,” said Verrity. Her blood-streaked hair tumbled over her bare shoulder as she looked down at him. “You did know.”

“I had the strangest dream,” said the burnt woman. Or formerly burnt woman; that part hadn’t been in her dream, but had been real. I nearly died, thought November with a calm lack of emotion. A good deal of the peace that passeth understanding-at least for right now, in her case-came from the medication she was still on. She recognized that icy-warm feeling, all sharp edges reduced to fuzzy nubs, that came from a skin-pouch trickling its magic into her veins. “I was floating…”

“Not a dream,” said one of the med technicians, leaning over the arm he and the others were working on. “You were in the tank. Remember?” He looked up from his ’scope and micro-waldo’d needles, and smiled and winked at her. “You didn’t look so good then. Now you’re looking fine, fine, fine.”

November rolled her head back onto the hospital’s paper-covered pillow. She’d caught a glimpse of herself in the chrome flank of one of the machines-different machines than the ones she remembered from before, less scary-and had seen that she’d lost most of her close-cropped black hair. A little soft fuzz was starting to show on her patchwork scalp. As long as they’re doing all this work, she mused, I should’ve asked for a makeover. They could’ve given her a cascade of shimmering Botticelli-red hair down to her butt; anything. She’d heard about the money that was making it all possible…

“Tell us about your dream.” One of the other white-suited technicians spoke without taking his gaze from his fiber-optic eyepiece. “Passes the time. We’re going to be here awhile.”

She raised her other arm, the one they’d already finished. Does look nice-the skin on it was all new, soft and white as a Caucasian baby’s. Since genetically it was her own skin, cooked up in the hospital’s tissue labs for grafting, it would have to be. With a fentanyl-induced smile on her face, November admired the craftsmanship; the stitches only showed if she imagined them. And when she opened her eyes wider, raising her new eyelids, the stitches faded entirely from sight.

“What I dreamed…” She laid the finished arm back down upon the snowy white bedsheet. “While I was floating… I know the difference… I dreamed I was falling…”

“Yeah, like we pulled the drain plug on you or something.” The med technicians exchanged buddy-ish grins with each other. “So you’d run down the pipes, all the way from here on the twentieth floor.”

“That’s not it… I wasn’t even here at all…” She hauled the pieces of the dream out of recent memory; they were already falling apart, as though the touch of her reborn fingertips were enough to reduce them to sugary dust. “First I was back at the hotel… you know, where I got burnt so bad…”

“Do tell.” The technicians continued with their work, stretching the freshly grafted skin and laser-polishing the joins between sections down to nothing. “How utterly fascinating.”

She didn’t mind their gentle teasing. More than the casing of her material form had been renewed by the surgery and all the other expensive therapies. It’s the drugs, she reminded herself. But maybe something else as well: there had been a moment when the anesthetics had thinned out in her nervous system’s receptor sites, when the nurses had been switching her from one I.V.-drip regimen to another, and the pain had rolled over her like a train screaming its heated engine apart, pulling her bones and sinews to tatters with it. And I didn’t even get mad-the way she would’ve before. She’d lain there, wide-eyed and gasping for breath, waiting as patiently as possible for the next batch of opiates to hammer her into diminished consciousness. That was the beginning of some kind of wisdom, she’d supposed. Or maybe some other part of her, inside the baby-new skin she’d been given, had gotten older. It amounted to the same thing.

“And I was falling there…” November went on recounting her dream. “Through the flames and all the beams and stuff breaking away… so I guess I was just remembering that part…” She couldn’t be sure; when the burning hotel’s roof had given way beneath her, she’d struck her head on a rusted iron girder that had seemed to come leaping up at her from the churning interior. Things had been mostly blank after that, a well-erased tape, until the med techs had removed her from the sustaining bath in which she’d been floating. That had been just like being born all over again, and present time starting up once more. “And then… and then…”

“Then what, honey?”

The next part was harder to figure out, to pull away from the surrounding blackness inside her head. Because I wasn’t remembering, November told herself. Not dreaming, either-she realized that she had been seeing something that was happening right now.

“I saw somebody else falling…” Into some other darkness, some other flames. Flames that burned but consumed not-or if they did, consumed something other than flesh for tinder. Flames that ran cold inside one’s veins, rather than with heat. “It was… him…”

The technicians exchanged glances with each other, their latex-sheathed hands stilled for a moment upon her arm. One of them looked over at her. “Who’s that?”

“You know…” She didn’t want to say his name aloud. She didn’t know why, whether it had become sacred or just personal. “The guy… who paid for all this…”

The med tech smiled. “Your secret admirer.”

“No… I don’t think so…” A paper-shuffler from the hospital’s accounting department had come by the burn ward, to explain to her the financial arrangements that had been made-but she still didn’t understand. She knew how close she had come to the bottom of her accounts; the last thought when she’d fallen through the roof of the burning hotel had been, How the hell am I going to pay for this? Knowing that there was no way in any hell she’d be able to, that when her money was drained away, the burn ward’s sterile tank would be as well, its softly charred contents flushed down some convenient drain. And one fragmentary thought beyond that, just the hope that whatever she hit on the way down would be enough to kill her fast and clean, so the money or the lack of it wouldn’t even be an issue.

That McNihil the asp-head was picking up the tab for her was clear enough-but not why he was doing it. Just a nice guy? It didn’t seem in his repertoire of tunes, from what she’d been able, before the burning fall, to find out about him. And she was sure that he wasn’t interested in her in any kind of physical/sexual way. He had that thing going for his dead wife, way beyond mere necrophilia. That was something November couldn’t crack, only envy. Though there was some comfort in knowing that McNihil couldn’t have cracked it, either, even if he’d wanted to.

She thought some more about the puzzle, while the med techs bent over their work. Whim? He always has reasons for what he does-they might not be good reasons, but they existed. November idly wondered what they might be, and if she’d eventually find out, when they let her go from the hospital. In the meantime, she decided not to think about the falling dream, to play it back when she closed her eyes. With the anesthetics’ help, she could will perfect black clouds for sleeping, whenever she wanted.

“There you go.”

November opened her eyes, lifting her head a bit on the pillow so she could see the technicians. “You’re done?”

The technicians laughed, like chiming bells. “Don’t be silly,” said the main one. “There’s a lot more to do. It’ll be a while yet before you’re out of here and heading home.” He and the others started packing up their tools, generating more tiny metal-on-metal sounds. “But don’t worry about it, sweetie. Everything’s paid for, already. You know that.”

“Sure…” She watched them wheeling their shining cart out of the burn-ward chamber. They’d be back tomorrow, November supposed. She went back to thinking about her strange dream.

First her falling-but that was just remembering-and then McNihil’s… but falling where? She had an idea about that, but she didn’t want to pursue it down into the scarier darknesses. There had been something strange about his face, too, even though she had still been able to recognize him somehow. Not so much different as just… erased. She had an idea of what that meant as well. They got to him, thought November glumly. Harrisch and that pack of his over at DynaZauber-she’d picked up on enough of their plans for the asp-head, their plans beyond just getting him to take the Travelt job, that she could tell he’d wound up pretty well connected over. Poor bastard…

The way she felt now, even beyond the sweet drugs slow-rolling from vein to spine and back out again, she would’ve been sorry for him. Even if he hadn’t picked up the tab for the skin grafts and all the other bodily reconstruction she was undergoing. You’ve gotten soft, she chided herself. Just as well your fast-forward days are over…

She’d already decided that. You don’t get a chance like this very often. A whole new skin, a new life, maybe even a new town-if she could find some place beyond the Gloss, or at least a part of the constantly metastasizing city that was sufficiently different from the rest. Everything that had happened to her… it really was like being reborn, out of the wet womb and into the hands of doctors. Even the tumbling, vertiginous passage through fire; if she beat up the metaphor a little, she could make it fit some pre-uterine notion of sexual passion, heated and consuming and all the rest. My own? wondered November. If so, it was

• the first time that meant anything, really, and

• some weird sign that she had given birth to herself.

Another decision, not to think about any of that, now or ever. Too weird, actually-she closed her eyes, letting the drowsy weight of her shorn head sink into the pillow. The lights of the chamber dimmed in response, pushing her back toward sleep.

Before that could happen, November’s eyes flicked open again. She could feel a little tingling sensation returning to her arm, the one that the med techs had been working on. She pushed herself up on her other elbow, raising her newly reconstructed wrist and turning the tender flesh of her palm toward her gaze.

She didn’t know what she’d see there. What they’d left from before, if there had been anything left from that other life, that other body and world she’d lived in. The stigmata of her own autocrucifixion-If you can birth yourself, why not death yourself as well? But in this case at least, the nails had been pulled out, letting her drop to the muddy ground at the foot of the cross.

The little black symbol was still there, but changed from to. But that was all that showed; now her palm was empty of numbers.

There might’ve been a red zero, if the surgeons and the med techs had left the fast-forward implants under the skin of her hand. All her accounts, her debts and credits, taken to nothing, canceled out and put back to the beginning. If a newborn baby-a real one-had a number in its little pudgy, wrinkled mitt, that’s what it would’ve been.

Take it as a sign, November told herself. An anti-sign, a true zero, an absence as important as anything that could’ve shown there. For all she knew, the number was still on her hand. She didn’t know how deep the fast-forward implants ran in the flesh; she’d been connected out of her mind when she’d had that little job done. The med techs could’ve left it there as a souvenir. Maybe it’s my eyes now, thought November, that’re different. There had been some work done on them, she knew; they’d been pretty badly damaged by the flames. The tiny knives and needles might’ve taken out the wolf filters that had let her see the numbers in her hand, the ups and downs of her razoring career, the cliff’s-edge dancing before the fall…

Or maybe, she thought, I just don’t need to see them anymore. That was why the numbers were gone. Both she and the world had changed. When you were in the zero, the grace of the zero, you didn’t need to look at your accounts to know how well you were doing.

She let that notion drift away, joining the others in the darkness past her fingertips as she lay back down. It was easy to. The techs had put a long-term pouch under her ribs; the device had a photoelectric cell wired into its outermost membrane, and it responded to the dimming of the light with a little surging pulse of drowsy endorphins. November floated on the wave, to a point on the warm, gelatinous ocean inside her, where she could see the last part of the dream she’d had.

That was the strangest part. She spread her hands out on the cool, sterile bedsheet at her sides, her new fingertips counting every fine thread. The man she’d watched falling in her dream, that she’d known was the asp-head McNihil despite his not having a face anymore-in the last part of the dream, he did have a face. But it wasn’t his. And he wasn’t falling, but had landed, not on the ground or in the wreckage of the burning hotel’s lobby-but in an ocean different from the one in which she floated and dreamed. A thick, heavy ocean, without waves but only slow ripples across its expanse when something, a human form, fell and struck its surface; the water was so ponderous that it didn’t even splash, but slowly hollowed under the man’s weight and parted, drawing him beneath the shimmering membrane…

Of course, thought November. She felt so stupid for not realizing it before. The heavy ocean in her dream was the sterile tank of the burn-ward chamber, which she herself had been floating in, her ashes and blackened bits slowly dissolving, before McNihil had paid her tab. Things-the real and unreal, the remembered and envisioned-always got jumbled up in dreams. That was why she wasn’t surprised when she finally worked out whose face it’d been, when the falling man had hit the gelatinous sea.

It’d been Harrisch. She recognized him even without his usual sharky smile, even with the furious rage that his darkened features had shown. Nothing, November told herself. Doesn’t mean anything…

Her eyes were already closed; behind them, she stepped through the rooms inside her head, shutting the rest of the doors and sealing in the sleep that was already there.

SEVENTEEN

Did you like that?” The woman’s voice sounded far away. “Then here’s another.”

McNihil looked up from where he lay paralyzed on the floor of the bar. From this angle, he didn’t have tunnel vision so much as something like an optical elevator shaft, a dark elongated space stretching up to whatever night sky existed above. His mouth tasted the way blown-out fuses smell, electrical and singed metallic; beyond his spastically clawing fingertips were the shoes of some of the prowlers who had gotten up from the little tables and come over to watch. He was just vaguely aware of the humanlike figures standing at the fuzzed limits of his sight.

Smiling, the ultimate barfly looked down at McNihil; her blond hair tumbled alongside her face like slowly unfolding staircases of gold. She knelt beside him, her face shifting in and out of focus as McNihil’s eyes, feeling loose and wobbly in their sockets, tried to adjust. Although he knew that she was as she’d been before, and no longer transformed into the one he’d caught that single glimpse of. That vision had already faded, the image of Verrity disappearing back into the darkness behind the woman’s eyes.

He had never seen Verrity before. He wasn’t sure what it meant that he’d been allowed to now.

The barfly’s kiss descended on him as though he were pinned at the bottom of the shaft, and all this world’s softly grinding machinery were about to crush him into a new state of being. Or non, thought McNihil as he felt the woman’s lips press against his own. He was still connected-up from the first kiss; his tongue had wedged inside his mouth like a small animal convulsed in its dying.

“Here you go, sweetheart.” The barfly’s words brushed her lips against his; she inhaled whatever deranged molecules were released in his breath. “A little maintenance dose. Just something to top you up.”

The kiss had unknotted his tongue, enough that McNihil could speak. “I could’ve…” It was like sorting out words onto a tray, assembling them from the fragments left inside his head. “Done without…”

“Sure…” The barfly stroked his sweating brow. “But what fun would that be? Think of all you’d miss.”

Right now, it didn’t seem as though he were missing anything at all. The first kiss, the slip of the tongue, had sparked and made contact in a big way, an explosion from the roof of his mouth to the cellar doors of his throat. The inrush of the memory load-what every prowler bestowed as its personal homecoming gift-had been what had laid him out on the floor.

No wonder, a distant part of McNihil thought, it knocked out that little wimp Travelt. Stuff like this would flatten anybody. Though he figured-one brain cell slowly hooking up with another-that what he’d just gotten was stronger than the usual. The barfly-or somebody-must’ve cooked up a sampler for him, of all that could be found down in the Wedge, in that world she and the other prowlers walked around in on a regular basis. The images and other sensory data were just beginning to decompress and sort themselves out along his scalded neurons:

• A black-ink tattoo, a two-dimensional face whose carbon pixels pulled the mouth open into a silent howl of fury, as it crept across a woman’s naked back (Whose? wondered McNihil);

• On the woman’s flesh, between the small bumps of her spine and the angle of her right shoulder blade, a bubble of skin rose, as though blistered by some laser-tight application of heat; the bubble grew wide as a man’s hand, a perfect glossy hemisphere tinged with pinkish blood; the thin membrane shimmered like a frog’s pale throat, an artificial tympanum driven by a faint sound growing louder;

• Loud enough that McNihil could decipher the words it spoke, synch’d to the flat motions of the tattooed face’s open mouth; the bubble sang, in a woman’s crooning alto voice; the song was a down-tempo bluesy rendition of the old standard Taking a Chance on Love, the pitch-bending rubato husky as though the nonexistent vocal cords were writhed in blue cigarette smoke;

• That song the echo-warped, trance-mix soundtrack to the next vision and the ones after that; the lyrics devolved into melismatic Latin, then Sanskrit, then the nonverbal cries of human-faced animals in love with the moon and the slow shiver of their self-lubricating convulsions;

• The voice went on singing even after the bubble of skin snapped into pink-edged rags, burst by the woman turning over on an antique divan of acidic green, the watered silk darkening as the blood seeped from the now-hidden tattoo; the song was inside McNihil’s head, his own palate trembling in sympathetic vibration as the woman smiled with drowsy lust and reached up for him;

• You see? said the ultimate barfly, wrapping her naked arms around him, her blond hair tangling across his sweat-bright face; I knew you’d like it here…

“I’d really… rather not…” McNihil pressed his hands flat against the floor of the bar. His singed tongue scraped painfully against his teeth as he spoke. “I’ve got… work to do…”

“Oh, I know you do, sweetheart.” Outside of the kiss-induced visions, the barfly was untinged by any reddening wounds. “I’m just trying to help you along.”

“You should let him go…” Another voice spoke, male and flattened monotonic. “Verrity’s waiting for him…”

McNihil shifted the wobbly focus of his gaze, and made out one of the other prowlers standing next to the barfly. The face could’ve been his own, or nothing at all; the same thing, he supposed.

“That’s right,” said McNihil. The paralysis had started to ebb, leaving his large muscles jittering as though in electroshock aftermath. All that shivering made him feel cold, as though drained of his own blood. “Listen to that guy…”

The male prowler spoke again. “You’re just connecting around with him.”

“Shut up,” said the barfly, more amused than angry. “I know what I’m doing.” She nudged McNihil with her shoe. The pointed toe of the vampy five-inch-heeled number was almost sharp enough to penetrate his ribs. “You don’t have any complaints, do you, pal?”

“The hell I don’t.” McNihil had managed to roll over onto his side; he felt his own weight pressing against the tannhäuser inside his jacket. He gathered and spat an evil-tasting substance out of his mouth, the residue of the kiss’s transmission of gathered memory. “This… this is just uncalled for.” Lying on one shoulder, McNihil fumbled his hand across the buttons of his shirt, trying to get his stiffened fingers onto the weapon, not caring whether they were watching him. “Not… friendly at all…”

He was starting to wonder if he’d misjudged the situation into which he’d wandered. Maybe they don’t want me to find out, thought McNihil. Prowlers obviously had more secrets than he’d known of… and maybe the prowlers wanted them to stay secrets. If there’d been time, and some way of clearing his head of the stuff the barfly’s kiss had put in there-the memory download went on unfolding like a toxic flower, each petal made of human skin-he might have tried figuring out what it meant. Something was going on, that was way outside the original prowler design parameters. Even the barfly-She shouldn’t have been able to pass for human, he decided. At least not so easily. The transference effect that Harrisch had told him about-maybe that hadn’t been just an isolated occurrence between the late Travelt and his prowler. Maybe it had been going on all along, with all the prowlers and their users. And maybe, the thought struck him, maybe Harrisch knew about it. Perhaps from the beginning; and not because something was going wrong, at least from the viewpoint of that DZ executive bunch.

Another flower threaded its black stem through McNihil’s skull. One that he was going to let remain unopened, rather than forcing the hothouse blossom of revealed conspiracies. That was a particular garden path he didn’t want to go down, at least not at the moment: the possibility that whatever was going on with the prowlers wasn’t something outside the original design parameters… but inside. If they were becoming human, in whole or part, soaking up their owners’ thoughts, minds, maybe even souls-maybe that was just what they were designed to do.

Those considerations tumbled through the murk inside McNihil’s head, as though his fingertips were reading tactile Morse code on the tannhäuser’s checked grip. I’ll think about ’em later-he seized the weapon and dragged it out of his jacket.

“Oh, great,” said the male prowler standing nearby. “Now look-he’s packing.” An anxious hubbub rose from the others at the little tables scattered through the bar. “Somebody should’ve taken that thing away from him.”

“But you didn’t,” said McNihil. His legs still didn’t seem to be functioning, as though some link down his spine had been snapped by the barfly’s kiss. He managed to push himself up on one elbow, raising the tannhäuser in the other hand. “Lucky for me.” The gun wobbled as he swung its pendulumlike weight toward each of the hovering onlookers in turn. “Sorry… it’s not in your plans…”

“It’s your own that you’re connecting up.” The barfly looked down at him with mingled contempt and pity. “You came here to do a job-to get that job done and over with-and we’re just trying to help you out, pal.” The tough-girl persona from the old movies firmed up around her like a suit of armor, one made of cheap silky stuff molded to her ribs and hinged down the seams of her smoky-dark stockings. “Come on-that’s why you came here in the first place. Because you knew that we could do that for you.” Her smile held legions of superior wisdom. “Because you know that this is the door in.”

“I changed my mind.” McNihil flopped back against the bar’s padded flank. He held the tannhäuser in both hands, trying to steady it. The implications about the prowlers-what they were, what they’d become-had gone spiraling out, despite his intent not to think about that. “I gotta fall back… and punt. I thought… I knew what was going on. Or at least part of it.” The weapon had started sweating in his tight grip. “Plus what… I was going to do about it.” The conceptual territory had shifted beneath his feet, as though the edges of one of the tectonic plates underlying the Gloss had broken through the asphalt and concrete, totally rearranging the map he’d stood on. “So it’s been nice, but…” A little tingling sensation had returned to McNihil’s legs; he made a tentative effort at getting them beneath himself. “I think I better be running along…”

“I don’t think so,” announced the barfly. Contempt outweighed pity in her gaze. “You shouldn’t make appointments you don’t plan on keeping. There’s somebody waiting for you.”

“Somebody important.” The male prowler loomed ominously above McNihil. Behind the prowler, the others had left their places at the bar’s small tables and had assembled in rough, anonymous formation; the crowd of extras had morphed into an ugly mob scene, their muttering anger directed at the figure sprawled between the stools. “Somebody…”-the prowler’s flat voice ratchetted down into a growl-“somebody you’ve needed to meet for a long time.”

The words inside McNihil’s head, the few that had been left after the power surge of the barfly’s kiss, were replaced by quick, overriding panic. In instinctive self-defense, he raised his clasped hands up in front of his chest, the tannhäuser cranking into position as though on an invisible hoist line.

“Don’t be stupid.” The barfly shook her head in disgust. “That’s not going to help.”

McNihil let the tannhäuser take the initiative, whatever small mind it had inside its works substituting for his own exhausted one. The weapon spoke in true operatic fashion, a Wagnerian basso roar hitting the bar’s walls as an orange gout of flame spat out of the muzzle.

“You dumb shit.” In the fuzzy mists beyond him, the voice that spoke sounded like the male prowler who’d been getting so ugly with him. He’s still standing? wondered McNihil. “There’s a time,” said the voice, “and a place for everything. This ain’t it.”

With the back of his head against the padding, McNihil opened his eyes as wide as possible, the furrows of his brow enough to bring the bar’s contents into a discernible order. Only roughly so: between the aftereffects of the barfly’s kiss, the engorged memories popping out from each other like an infinite series of Chinese boxes, and the still-echoing wallop of the tannhäuser, the things inside his head felt marginally connected, if at all, the synapses as ragged and wet as used tissue paper. The world of ancient movies encoded inside McNihil’s eyes went soft and transparent, like a molecule-thick permeable membrane letting in the other behind it, the more-or-less real one. The gearing of his brain revved into a bone-held fever, trying to sort out the overlapping data and reassemble them into a coherent whole.

McNihil pressed his clenched hands, weighted with the tannhäuser, against his eyes, trying to shield himself from the chaotic stimulus rush. Even through his eyelids he could see what had been the bar, the dark hole both comfortable and threatening, with its diamond-padded door and leatherette-topped seats, the neon cocktail sign sizzling in the night air beyond, the rain slowly leaking down the stairs from the wet streets and sidewalks jeweled with the moon’s shattering reflection… and over and mingled with that a bleak metal warehouse, industrial end-of-millennium chic, all exposed bolts and scrubbed-bare sheet steel, black anaconda cables looped over the girders and crawling around the space’s litter-thick perimeter. Seeing even that much put a miasma of chemical sweat and twitching O.D. vomitus into McNihil’s nostrils, the smell of grim fun aftermath. Places like this were why he’d left one world for another, the annihilating real for the endurable gone.

Wake up, he told himself, and smell the burning corpses of your dreams. McNihil lowered the weapon in his hands and looked up at the prowler standing before him.

The barfly had draped herself around the humanlike figure’s shoulders, clinging like erotic seaweed to a jagged shoreline rock. As though a wave had broken over the prowler and drawn away only a few seconds ago; the front of the figure’s dark jacket was shining wet, blood seeping from the hole torn through the upper chest.

As McNihil watched, and as the barfly smiled and watched him in turn, the male prowler reached up and hooked a forefinger in the bullet hole. The jacket’s fabric ripped away as easily as damp paper, exposing the pallid flesh beneath. No wonder, thought McNihil, it didn’t fall down…

Like a rock dropped into a gelatinous sea, the bullet hadn’t created a wound, but rather a rippling distortion, a faint bull’s-eye pattern that had spread over the prowler’s torso and faded. The bullet’s entry point had been transformed by the black-ink tattoos that had swarmed and inched their way from the prowler’s abdomen and back, like blind fish and bottom-feeding ocean creatures, attracted by a sudden food source. The hole itself, edged with a small wreath of pinkish erectile tissue, exuded a fluid clearer than blood, but just as viscid and blood-warm, glistening like silvery snail tracks in a moonlit garden. When the prowler’s fingertips stroked the soft rim of the swollen non-wound, a tiny brass sun rose in its depths, just south of the ridge of collarbone. Shining wet, the flat end of the tannhäuser’s bullet slid with minor grace from the hole, the surrounding pink-to-red tissue enfolding its steel-jacketed shaft. The prowler’s thumb and fingertip grasped the exposed end of the cylinder; the humanlike figure’s flat gaze shifted from where it had examined, chin tucked against throat, its adaptive flesh, up to McNihil’s eyes.

“You see?” The male prowler spoke, its voice unaltered by pain or shock. “It’s no big deal.” The gathering tattoos, black hearts and black flowers, the names of martyred saints, nibbled at his fingertips. “As long as you’re… ready for it.” Slowly, the prowler slid the wet bullet back and forth in its receptacle of softly lubricated flesh. The black holes of his eyes, apertures in the mask that concealed no other face, narrowed as though savoring the slight penetration, the caress of the nerve endings just beneath the surface of the skin. “Just like you’re ready.” The prowler withdrew the bullet, slick with transparent mucus, and held it up before himself. “Whether you like it or not.”

“You don’t,” murmured the smiling barfly, “have much of a choice.” Her bruised-looking eyelids had drawn down to an expression of postcoital satiety. “Do you?” The barfly peeled her languorous form away from the male prowler; she stepped forward and knelt down directly in front of McNihil. “Because… it’s all memory now. That’s what we deal in here. We don’t have any other merchandise… and we don’t need any.” She reached forward, past the tannhäuser in McNihil’s doubled grip, and placed her fingertips on his brow, as though in blessing. “It’s what you gave us. All of you; it’s what we were created for. You wanted memories, memories other than your own, memories of things that hadn’t happened to you, but that you wanted to have happen to you. All the pleasures of remembering and none of the risks.” The barfly stroked his sweat-damp hair back from his forehead. “Maybe that wasn’t such a good deal, though. Maybe you gave us more than you got back in turn. Maybe you really didn’t get anything at all… and we got part of you.” She wasn’t smiling now; her voice had turned harsh and grating. “The ability to feel, and suffer… and remember. Everything that made you human, that made you different from the things you created… that’s what you gave us.” The barfly’s hand pressed harder against McNihil’s brow, as though her lacquered nails could pierce the wall of bone. “It wasn’t,” she whispered, “a good deal for us, either.”

He tried to push himself away from her, his spine indenting the padded surface behind him. “I’m sorry…” McNihil raised the tannhäuser between himself and the woman. “But I wasn’t the one… who did it…”

“No… you’re not.” The barfly gave a slow nod. “But you’re the one who’s here. So you’ll do.”

The bullet had dropped from the male prowler’s fingertips and rolled against the toe of McNihil’s boot. In the bullet’s wetly polished metal, he could see himself-his real face, the one without the mask that had been stitched on at the clinic; his face in that other world he’d left behind. That was what small, shining things had always done for him: mirror reflections that didn’t synch up with all the rest that his eyes saw. Just as though the bullet had left another hole, which let the other world leak through.

There’s more where that came from, thought McNihil. He placed the tannhäuser’s muzzle against the kneeling barfly’s forehead, the blond curve of her hair trailing across the barrel’s black metal. “You know… I’d do this…” He folded one finger across the weapon’s trigger. “If I weren’t such a nice guy…”

“But you are.” The barfly didn’t draw away from the cold circle resting just above her half-lidded eyes. “You’re too nice. That’s your problem.”

“Maybe.” McNihil lifted the tannhäuser from the woman’s head, angling the muzzle toward the bar’s low ceiling. “But I’m working on it.”

Her gaze followed the weapon’s new trajectory. “That’s not a good idea,” she warned.

“They’re my memories,” said McNihil. “At least they are now. So I can do what I want with them.”

“We can’t let you do that.” The male prowler, non-wound still exposed on his upper chest, stepped forward, reaching for the tannhäuser. “It’s not allowed-”

“But you must have.” McNihil squeezed the weapon tight in his fists. “Otherwise, it wouldn’t be happening. Or have happened-doesn’t matter which. I wouldn’t remember it happening.” He managed a smile of his own. “But I can see it plain as day.”

The tannhäuser roared again, as though it had suddenly recalled the second verse of its low-pitched aria. McNihil’s spine jolted as the recoil knocked him back; a blinding spark, the same color as the flash from the tannhäuser’s muzzle, jumped across the contacts inside his head.

“Watch out-”

He couldn’t tell which of them shouted that. The barfly had scrambled away from him as soon as he’d pulled the trigger, as though she was desperate for shelter. Any kind of shelter; McNihil’s eyes focused well enough that he could see where the bullet had struck the bar’s ceiling. Fierce light poured through the hole, the radiance filling his vision and piercing all the way to the back of his skull. The doors of the small dark rooms inside his head shattered and tore from their iron hinges.

Above him, the ceiling grew more luminous, heat pressing against his face like a new kiss. The annihilating light flooded in as the bullet hole ripped open wider, the ceiling giving way like the cheap fabric of the male prowler’s jacket. McNihil could no longer see that figure, or the barfly or any of the others. The tannhäuser grew too hot for him to keep in his hands; it fell and clattered away on the floor, pitching and tilting now with the sudden upheaval of the earth. His empty hands shielded his eyes, but with no effect; the light passed through red flesh and shadow bones, relentless.

He could just make out the bar’s ceiling falling away in tatters, as a sky of flames broke over him.

“Now we’re making progress.”

She heard the medical technician speak, somewhere over by the vital-signs monitor. November opened her eyes; she had already propped herself up against the hospital-bed pillows, so she could watch whatever the techs and doctors and nurses were doing, if she’d wanted to.

The tech glanced over at her. “Dreaming again?”

She nodded yes. The lights from the corridor outside the room seemed unusually bright to her. Because it was night, thought November. In the dream. She’d been someplace where it was always night. Both inside and out…

There was only one of the med technicians in the room this time; each visit the burn-ward crew had made, there had been fewer of them. She supposed that was a good sign. This one didn’t ask about whatever dream she’d been having, but just went about his work, reading off numbers from the various gauges and indices on the equipment screens, then punching them into the little handheld data transmitter he carried. He even hummed a little tune, barely distinguishable from the sighing of one of the machines.

November laid her head back against the pillow. The dream was still somewhat intact inside her head, the images and general sense not as fractured as when she’d been pumped full of the major anesthetics. Woozy drug sleep had given way to fifteen-minute catnaps, which ended abruptly when she felt her newly grafted skin tightening over her flesh. She missed being hammered underneath the big drugs; those pharmaceuticals had seemed to cancel gravity, sequentiality, guilt… everything unpleasant turned to sweet, filtered air. Getting detoxed from them, her bloodstream flushed out, the red contents scrubbed clean in something that looked like a miniature clothes washer and then I.V.’d back into her-that had been like returning to the orbit of some planet she wouldn’t have minded seeing the last of.

The dream… With her eyes closed, November could view its basic setup. She carefully held her breath, fearing that any exhalation would shimmer and dissolve the image.

Not an ocean this time, or anything to do with falling: she’d dreamed of a building, a big one, an old one with rows of windows from top to bottom. It took a little while for her to recognize it, as she let her vision zoom in, movielike. The hotel, thought November. What was it called? Something terminal… the End Zone Hotel; that was it. Her spine contracted in a full-body flinch reaction, as the dream hooked up with her own memories. She remembered just enough-it was encoded in the deep layers of her nervous system-to sense again the heat of the flames, scorching down into her lungs. Even before the hotel’s roof had given way beneath her, and sent her falling down inside, the place had been an exact hell. Even before the fire, she thought; just a different, bleaker kind.

Strangely, in the dream-she could see it now, in retrospect-the End Zone Hotel burned but was not consumed, as though some Old Testament deity had checked in. From her floating point of view, November could see the flames rising behind the grime-thickened windows, the glass either intact or shattered by the heat into shards diving like transparent knives to the street below. The tattered curtains went up in lacework of smoke and sparks; she could look past them just a little bit, enough to see a few of the sagging beds combusting, the smoldering mattresses coughing up the heavier, darker clouds of hourly rate passion. She couldn’t see anyone there, though, whether sleeping in flames or beating a wiser retreat from the ongoing, apparently endless inferno. That made her wonder where they had all gone. The dark ocean she had seen before, maybe, with its gelled waves slowly lapping against the hotel’s lobby doors…

“Won’t be long now.”

November’s eyes snapped open. “What?”

“For you getting out of here.” The med tech held up the black rectangle of the data unit. “See?” Green numbers tagged with a little happy-face symbol marched across the one-line screen. “You’re rated in the top ten percent of all serious burn recoveries in the Gloss, or at least at the hospitals linked on this system.”

“How nice. Does that mean you guys get a bonus or something?”

“Maybe.” The med tech gave a noncommittal shrug. “Depends upon the year-end review for the whole division, and if the performance ratio comes in under the insurance companies’ cost-efficiency targets. We’re not doing too bad so far.” He regarded the data unit with obvious satisfaction. “They’re crunching your numbers down in Accounting right now; that’ll probably perk up the averages quite a bit.”

“So soon?”

“So soon what, sweetheart?”

She nodded toward the device in the tech’s hand, as though the numbers had already spelled out good-bye. “I’m leaving here?”

“Of course. Did you think you were going to be here forever?” The med tech shook his head. “You’re all put back together, believe it or not-”

“I don’t.” November instinctively wrapped her arms around herself, as though there were pieces that might fall off otherwise. “I feel like I’ve got needles all over my skin, the kind that aren’t any fun-”

“That’s a good sign. Means all the neuro work went off okay. It’ll settle down after a while.”

“And I’m still on that thing.” She pointed to the I.V. drip; a clear tube ran from it to the bandaged patch on her arm. “How would I feel if that wasn’t pumping away?”

“Honey, aspirin’s stronger than what you’re getting off on right now.” The tech glanced at the label dangling from the dispenser’s hook. “Baby stuff. You know the drill: you’re at the point where if you want anything good, you’re going to have to get it on the street.”

The thought of it made her hands sweat, with both fear and anticipation. As good as the stuff in the hospital was, there was better walking around beneath the metal-raining skies. “I’m still not sure… that I’m ready…”

“Ready or not, you gotta trot.” The med tech started punching off the displays on the gauges and monitors. “Your boyfriend, or whoever it was, didn’t pay for you to become a permanent resident here. Even if he’d wanted to-” The latex-gloved hands tossed the data unit into the air spinning, and caught it again. “That’s just not available. This is a hospital, not a hotel.”

Hotel. She kept thinking about the one in the dream, her own internalized End Zone, after the med tech had left. Every time she closed her eyes, she could see it burning; the real one, she supposed, would’ve been ashes by now.

She heard someone’s footsteps come into the room-probably another tech or the same one as before-and didn’t bother to look. Maybe it was someone from the accounting department; she’d sensed the machines around her switching off one by one, the clicking and sighing noises falling silent, the electrical presence diminishing as the final data was processed down in the hospital’s insurance computers.

The footsteps stopped by the side of the bed. “They told me-” The man’s voice startled her when it spoke aloud. “That you’re just about to roll. Right on out of here.”

“Christ… it’s you.” She found herself staring up into the encompassing gaze and unpleasant smile of Harrisch. The burning hotel’s afterimage evaporated like steam; November hadn’t even been aware of the transition from closed eyes to open. For a confused half-second, she had wondered how the DynaZauber exec had come to be looking out from one of the End Zone Hotel’s flame-shrouded windows, before she’d realized he was there with her, outside any dreaming. “What the…” November reacted by reaching up for the call buzzer that the nurses had pinned to the side of her pillows.

“Looking for this?” Harrisch held up the little box with the big red button, the wire dangling down to the floor. “There’s really no need for it.” He laid the buzzer down on top of one of the machines, well beyond November’s reach. “I’m just here for a bit of conversation. I imagine you’re feeling well enough for that. Aren’t you?”

November pushed herself up higher on the pillows, drawing as far back from the exec as possible. “What do you want?”

“Why so nervous?” Spreading his empty hands apart, Harrisch let his smile fade. “Is there something I’m doing that’s making you afraid? What is it?”

“You gotta be kidding-” November looked around herself for something she could throw at the exec, something hard rather than soft, that would do real damage. Musing about dreams and their meanings was over for the time being. “Get the connect out of here.” She wondered if she could scream or shout loud enough to get the attention of anybody passing by in the corridor beyond. That’s the problem with hospitals, November thought grimly. They were so damn loud, nobody ever knew what was going on. No wonder people die here. “Just get out,” she said again. “I don’t want to talk to you.”

“That’s a rotten attitude to take.” Harrisch appeared genuinely wounded. “What did I do to deserve that from you? Employed you, paid you… made your whole life possible, the way you wanted to live it. If it weren’t for people like me, farming out the work outside the corporation, freelancers like you wouldn’t exist. You oughta thank me.”

“Your ass, connect-head.” November’s initial panic had been replaced with a simmering anger, the way it always was, given enough time. “I wasn’t even working for you this time-you were just stringing me on with the possibility of a job-and you nearly got me killed.” She reconsidered the words. “‘Nearly’… shit. You did get me killed. Cooked up like a connecting flounder.”

“Seems rather a harsh way to put it…”

“Deal with it, pal.” November felt the back of the hospital gown pull open against the pillow as she folded her arms across her breast. “You left me hanging out there, looking like yesterday’s burnt toast. The only reason I’m alive-the only reason I’ve been brought back from the dead at all-is because somebody else popped for the bill here. Somebody who had a lot less reason to do it than you should have.”

“Please.” Harrisch sighed elaborately. “You might like to try to see these issues from my perspective. DynaZauber corporate practice is a strict implementation of Denkmann’s Pimp-Style Management™ philosophy-or to put it another way, PSM is the codification of what we just do as a matter of course. We really wrote the book on a lot of those things, almost more than Denkmann did. The ego annihilation, the perpetual screw; all that stuff.” A note of pride sounded in Harrisch’s voice. “So you can just dispense with any notions about loyalty being anything other than a one-way street when you deal with DZ. We take, we don’t give-even when you’re on the payroll, that’s how it works out. Anything else would violate the essential sadomasochistic underpinnings of our management style, and then the whole system falls apart. And we’ve got too much invested in it to let that happen.”

“Aw, man. Spare me.” I’m lying here with a new skin stitched on because of these jerks-she didn’t need a lecture on why getting connected by them was supposed to be such a wonderful thing. “If getting connected by you people comes without lubricant… I’m a big girl now. I’ll deal with it. Easier than listening to you sonsabitches.”

“You know-” Harrisch sat down on a corner of the bed; November had to draw her feet up beneath the blanket to avoid him. “Some people come through experiences such as you’ve been through… and they’re better people for it.”

“Oh, I am; believe me.” November glared at him. “I’m just not going to waste it on you.”

“I see.” The expression on the exec’s face was one of sly assessment. “And who does get the benefit of your transformed nature? Or let’s put it another way: who are you hoping will get it?” Harrisch leaned closer to her; he smelled of expensive cologne and adding-machine printouts. “Maybe it’s that poor bastard McNihil. Because you’re so grateful to him.”

“Hardly.” November wished she had found something to throw at this smiling apparition. “He’s taken-remember? Even if I was interested in him, which I’m not. He’s got that major bent for his dead wife. Not exactly the kind of thing it’s possible to walk in on.”

“True.” Harrisch gave a shrug. “Unless… he wanted you to.”

“Give it up.” Her short laugh held contempt. “This shows why you were having such a hard time recruiting him. You don’t know how his mind works.”

“And I suppose you do? Tell me then: why’d McNihil pay your bill, for the skin grafts and all the rest of it? He must’ve had a reason.”

She regarded the DZ exec warily, then shook her head. “I don’t know why.”

Harrisch slowly nodded, deep in his own thoughts. “I don’t, either,” he said after a moment. “Kind of a mystery. I was really hoping that you might be able to clue me in on it. Because there’s always a reason.”

Like there is for your coming around here. The act wasn’t fooling November. She could see inside Harrisch’s skull with the same abstract X rays she used to turn on the men in the trains, the ones who’d wanted to press themselves on and into her previous skin. They always want something, she thought. Harrisch was no different in his wanting, his lust for connection, even if his eventual orgasm was wired into something other than his fleshy genitals, some part whose up-and-down movements were more accurately charted on a stockbroker’s report.

“Like I said.” November wasn’t scared of the exec any longer; the twinge of fear had been rooted in some vestigial organ of her own body, childish and irrational; it would probably be a long time before a lit match wouldn’t make her bladder tremble. “I don’t know why he did it. Maybe McNihil thought he was responsible for what happened to me-”

“I doubt it,” said Harrisch. “Asp-heads don’t feel guilt. Everything’s justified to them.”

“Then he really should’ve gone to work for you. Without being pushed.” She regarded the exec without flinching. “But I don’t know the why of that, either. If the guy’s got his reasons, he keeps them to himself. After all-” She tilted her head and looked at Harrisch from the corner of her eye. “He didn’t tell you why he was picking up my tab, did he? He just did it, that’s all.”

“True.” Harrisch watched his own hand smoothing out a section of the bedsheet, then glanced back up at her. “But you’d like to know, wouldn’t you?”

She felt as though she were looking down at the exec from some lofty mountaintop. “And somehow you’re going to make that possible, I take it.”

“Perhaps.” Harrisch shrugged. “I just came to offer you a little… travel assistance. To go somewhere… interesting.”

“With you?”

“Not necessarily.”

Her eyes narrowed, as though sharpening her gaze enough to see into the DZ exec. “Is this a job offer? Because if it is, you’re wasting your time.” November had already made her decision, before this clown had shown up. “I’m not doing any kind of work you might be looking for. Not anymore.”

“No-this is a freebie. Both ways.” Harrisch stood up from the bed. “Let’s just say that I’m the kind of person who likes to have things witnessed. Sometimes important things. Sometimes just…” He let his unpleasant smile show again. “Sometimes just personal things.”

November’s skin had stopped prickling; the sharp-pointed needles had gathered into a ball near her heart. “Which is it this time?”

The smile didn’t fade. “It’s both.” Harrisch stepped around to the side of the bed, closer to her than when he’d been sitting down. “Of course,” he said, “we can make it as personal as you want.” He leaned down toward her, before she could react. One arm encircled November’s shoulders, pulling her up from the stacked pillows; Harrisch brought his face right up against her, tight enough that she could feel his teeth through the thin lips pressing against hers. Harrisch drew back just a fraction of an inch. “Or it can be a job. You pick.”

Her movement was one of instinct. She seized Harrisch’s skull, hands on either side above his ears. November pressed as hard as she could, her eyes squeezing tight with effort, but nothing happened. Except Harrisch’s laughter.

“Come on.” He pushed himself away; standing beside the bed, brushing off his jacket lapels, he regarded her with amusement. “As long as that much work was being done on you, I didn’t mind paying for a little extra. A little something to be removed. A pretty girl like you shouldn’t have those kinds of nasty toys wired into her.” Harrisch nodded slowly and judiciously. “Gives people the wrong impression about you.”

Shit, thought November as she looked at her hands, with their now-ineffectual fingertips. “I spent a lot of money for those TMS implants-”

“Well, then.” Harrisch shrugged. “Maybe you will be interested in a job. Or… some other arrangement.” His ugly smile was like a bad kiss, overly familiar and nauseating. He stepped toward the room’s door, pulled it open, then glanced back at her. “Soon as you’re out, give me a call. Even if you just want to do a little traveling. You know where to find me.”

Not where you should be, jerk. She went on glaring at the closed door long after the man was gone.

When November finally closed her eyes-it made more sense to get as much rest as she could, before they booted her out of the hospital-she saw again, without dreaming, the burning End Zone Hotel. This time, she realized something about it that she’d missed before.

That’s where he is, thought November. One way or another-the burning hotel was where McNihil was at. Whether the hotel even existed or not; it didn’t matter. That was why she’d dreamed about the hotel, seen it burning as it had been long ago, caught in that fiery moment. Maybe, she thought, when he paid my bill, he bought my dreams as well…

Not dreams, but visions. She knew that now. With her eyes closed, she could feel the distant heat on her face. And was afraid…

But not for herself.

EIGHTEEN

TERRITORY THAT MOST PEOPLE ARE ABANDONING INSIDE THEIR HEADS OR THE GIRL ON THE BED OF FLAMES

You pretty much expected I’d be here, didn’t you?”

McNihil looked at the Adder clome. Then nodded. “Yeah,” admitted McNihil. “I pretty much did.” To himself he thought, There’s no getting rid of some things.

The two of them stood in the shabby corridor of the End Zone Hotel lined with numbered doors. For a few moments, when he’d first found himself here, McNihil had thought he might’ve been back at the cubapt building where he’d gone to see a corpse, a long time ago, in another world. That world, that building, had been transformed by the black-and-white vision in his eyes into something more or less like this one: a place of numbered doors and deep shadows, the cobwebbed lights overhead barely able to cut through the optical gloom. Which was made even worse in this case by the black smoke leaking out from beneath the doors and rolling across the threadbare carpeting, then spilling down the stairs at the end of the hallway. Traces of the smoke rose into the dense air, stinging McNihil’s eyes and gathering at the back of his throat, thick enough to choke him. He could barely discern the image of the other man, the clome from the Snake Medicine™ clinic, standing in front of him; the clome’s voice, soft and insinuating, had identified him more than anything else.

“But then…” The Adder clome spread his hands and looked about the smoke-filled corridor-“this is the kind of place that I’m always at. In some deep, fundamental sense.”

“Big words.” The air in the building had been baked dry by the mounting flames; McNihil could feel his lungs shriveling as the heat seeped inside him.

“They’re true, though.” The Adder clome tilted his head, studying McNihil’s reactions. “Do you remember the name of this place? From when you were here before-out in the other world, the world that isn’t just memories that’ve been kissed into your head.”

“Sure.” That much was a real memory for him; it had actually happened. “The End Zone Hotel has always been a real charming place.” McNihil coughed and wiped his stinging eyes. “I had a lot of fun there. Believe me. So how could I forget?”

“You should’ve learned to,” said the Adder clome. “It would’ve made it easier for you all along. And easier for us as well. Your head’s so packed with things-real things, plus all that stuff that those messed-up eyes of yours make you see-that it was hard for us to find room in there, to put the things that we wanted you to remember. That you need to remember. Even if they didn’t happen to you-” The Adder clome stopped and scratched his chin, as though momentarily confused. “Wait a minute. I’m not sure I’m getting that across right. Well, I suppose it doesn’t really matter.” He brightened. “If you remember it happening-if you remember all this-” Both his hands gestured toward the narrowly spaced walls, barely visible behind the smoke. “Then it’s just the same as if it happened. Or is happening. Or will happen. You see, that’s one of the big breakthroughs we’ve made on this side. We’ve eliminated the notion of sequence as it applies to experience. No past, no present, just the eternal now. As in the sexual act itself.” He sounded pleased with himself, as though personally responsible. “It’s like doing away with gravity. All kinds of things are possible here.”

“That’s exactly what I’d be worried about.” McNihil’s throat felt raw from the smoke. “Maybe it’s not a good idea to let some people’s imaginations run free.”

“Don’t worry about it.” The Adder clome acknowledged the personal remark with a shrug. “There’s less to be concerned about than you might think. Even over on this side, there’s limits. Anarchy-even the anarchy of the senses-runs eventually into a certain wall.”

“Which is?”

“You’d know, if you were in the same business I am.” With a tilt of his head, the Adder clome regarded his visitor with amusement. “Come on.” One hand reached out and took McNihil’s arm. “I’ll show you around, and you’ll see what I mean.”

McNihil shook his head. “I don’t have time for that. I came here to do a job.”

“Au contraire. You have plenty of time. Or enough, at least. Since we don’t deal in real time here-memory never does-nobody has any more time than you do.” One of the Adder clome’s eyebrows raised. “So it really doesn’t matter, does it?”

McNihil let himself be tugged toward one of the hallway’s numbered doors. The brass digits couldn’t be read through the curtain of gray smoke that rose up from the doorsill, though the heat blistering the paint had turned the metal into dully glowing insignia. The Adder clome pushed the door open and stepped back, giving a partial, inviting bow. McNihil hesitated a moment-Relax, he told himself, it’s only memories, not even real ones (You’re sure? asked another part inside his head)-then stepped through the narrow doorway.

“You see?” The Adder clome’s voice came from behind him. “Nothing to worry about. This could be anyplace. It doesn’t have to be the End Zone Hotel-that’s just a convenient metaphor we’ve decided to adopt. Just for you; a personal touch.”

The ragged carpet was in flames beneath McNihil’s feet. Smoke billowed up along his legs, swathing his abdomen and chest, its subtle rising force collecting under his chin. The hotel room was small enough that he could have spread his arms and put his hands flat against wallpaper writhing as though with fiery salamanders. An old-fashioned wooden bureau sagged and buckled as the flames leapt from drawer to drawer; the mirror hinged at the top looked like a bevel-edged slice of the sun’s heart, but only for a moment. The glass’s silver backing darkened and cracked, then shattered bomblike, mixing brighter slivers with the bits of broken window already scattered across the floor.

McNihil had raised one arm, the back of his hand shielding his eyes. Just as before, his flesh might as well have been altered to some redly translucent substance; he could see the room and its fire-lit, smoke-clotted contents as well or even better than if his eyes had been wide open. As an experiment, he took his forearm away from his face and reached out to the nearest wall, closing his fist upon the lapping flames. Rivulets of fire squeezed between his knuckles; McNihil felt the heat at the center of his palm, etching the lines written in the skin as though with a honed needle. The bloodless pain ran up his arm and burst inside his skull, the glare rendering him without sight for a moment. When he could see again, his hand was still clenched, undamaged and trembling, in the flames.

“Burns,” said the Adder clome, “but is not consumed.” He nodded toward McNihil’s fist against the wall. “That’s the territory you’re in. That’s the territory you’re part of-or at least your memories, the ones we gave you. And besides…” His smile showed, Cheshire-cat-like, through the smoke and quick tongues of flame that moved between him and McNihil. “It’s such a good metaphor, isn’t it? All dreams and memories are metaphors at last, mere functions of language. Even without words-they still just exist in your head, in one of those little silent rooms you keep the key to.”

“Metaphor…” McNihil drew his hand back from the burning wall and looked at it. The pain slowly ebbed from the soot-blackened flesh, as he let the intact fingers uncurl of their accord. “For what?” He pressed his hand flat against his shirt, leaving its dark imprint above his heart. He glanced over at the Adder clome. “What’s it supposed to stand for?”

“Come on. You know.” This time, the Adder clome spread his arms out in cruciform posture. The flames and smoke billowed across him, like the tide of a red ocean turned vertical. “This world, the one that you always called the Wedge-but it’s so much bigger than that. Bigger and older. Older than anything. What you thought was just the Wedge-some crummy bars and the places behind them, the rooms and streets where the prowlers hang out-you couldn’t see those places for what they really are.” The Adder clome’s voice tightened fervently. “Temples and doorways. Doorways into another world, this world. But you couldn’t see that. Because of the dark that you saw instead.” Slowly lowering his arms, the Adder clome shook his head, as though struck with futile regret. “It wasn’t just the darkness in your eyes, McNihil. It’s in everyone’s eyes. Everyone human, that is.”

“Yeah, whatever.” Unimpressed by the other’s language, McNihil rubbed the rest of the fire’s soot off against his trousers. “If we keep it dark, it’s because we like it that way. We don’t need to see some of this shit. That’s what we have prowlers for.” He realized where his own words were putting him: I’m defending them, thought McNihil. All of them, Harrisch and Travelt and all the rest. He didn’t care. Some part of him supposed that he had more in common-still-with the humans than with the others, the ones whose masks just looked that way. “Let the prowlers walk around here,” said McNihil with sudden vehemence. “It’s their place, not mine.”

“Not anymore.” A certain triumph sounded in the Adder clome’s voice. “You belong here now as much as they do. You’ve earned the right, pal. Enjoy it.”

“I’m just visiting. And even that’s under false pretenses.” McNihil had managed to rub enough of the black from his hand, that he could see again the lined flesh of his palm. “Right now, I’m really just looking for the exit door.”

“You don’t have that option,” the Adder clome sneered. “You came here to do a job-that’s what you said, remember?-and you can’t leave until it’s finished.” He reached out and gathered the lapel of McNihil’s jacket into his own tightly clenched fist. “There’s things you want to find out, aren’t there? Connect Harrisch and his connecting job. Let’s satisfy your curiosity, pal.” The Adder clome bent his arm, nearly pulling McNihil from his feet. “You might as well have the whole tour. Or at least as much of it as you can stand.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Traveling tattoos? I’ve seen ’em.”

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

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

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

“That’s not going to happen.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

McNihil nodded. “Go on.”

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

“So I’ve noticed.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

McNihil made no reply. His own body felt dehydrated from the heat of the burning hotel, his lungs and heart laden with smoke. The relief of ashes hadn’t come, would never come in this place. The girl on the bed of flames could not even die as much as his dead wife had; she breathed in fire and breathed it out, her breasts like soft glass lit from within; her silken hair twined in the mattress’s flames, like the mating of serpents, two close species coiling around each other. But was not consumed. No death here, thought McNihil. Not even the littlest one. So the Adder clome was wrong. It didn’t have anything to do with sex at all.

“So this was the end of it?” McNihil pointed to the girl, lost in the heat of her own dreaming, wordless and without image, wired to pure coded sensation. “The end of the TIAC project?”

The Adder clome nodded, mired in his own wistful brooding, the contemplation of what might have been.

“But it wasn’t the end,” said McNihil, “of what Harrisch wants to do. Of everything that DynaZauber wants to use the Wedge for. He may have cut you out of the loop-he fires people as well as hires them, or just puts them on eternal hold-but that doesn’t mean he wrapped things up and left. You know how they work. Once DZ has taken over a territory, they don’t just hand it back.”

“True.” Another slow nod from the Adder clome. “The End Zone Hotel-at least this one, in this world-it’s pretty much a DynaZauber property anymore. Owned and operated by, as it were.”

“Harrisch and his bunch didn’t leave; they just switched operations. Didn’t they?” McNihil watched for the other man’s reaction. “From TIAC… to TOAW.”

A look of fright appeared in the Adder clome’s eyes, discernible even through the smoke filling the hotel room. “Maybe you should drop it right there.” The Adder clome’s voice had been scraped down to a whisper. “You don’t want to poke into TOAW. Not if you know what’s good for you.”

McNihil’s laugh felt like a lit match dropped inside his throat. “Even if I ever did know that… I’m past caring. Why would I be here otherwise?”

“It’s your job.” The Adder clome made a simple statement. “Maybe Harrisch forced you to take it, but it’s still your job.”

“I could’ve gotten out of it. There’s ways; there’s always an exit door. You just have to decide which is worse. Besides…” McNihil held his palm just above the sleeping girl’s hip and watched the smaller tattoos begin drifting toward it. “Maybe I’ve gotten to the point where I’m the one who wants to know.”

“About that poor bastard Travelt? And the prowler that’s got him inside?” The Adder clome shook his head. “Give it up. It’s gone someplace where, even if you do locate it, you’re not going to be able to communicate with whatever’s left of the human part. You’re never going to find out what you want.” A sour, gloating tinge entered the Adder clome’s voice. “You might as well go back to Harrisch and tell him that it’s a wild-goose chase. It doesn’t matter whether there’s anything of Travelt that’s not dead yet. There are some places that are even farther away than that.”

“Like where?”

“Don’t bother. Don’t even try threatening me.” Another shake of the head, the Adder clome obviously savoring the moment. “You can do whatever you want, wipe up the floor with me-in a place like this, that might actually be fun-and it’s not going to help you now. Because there isn’t any now. This is something you’re remembering. Remember?” That made the Adder clome smile evilly. “It’s out of your control-just like everything else.”

“Maybe so.” Unperturbed, McNihil let one fingertip touch the sleeping girl’s skin. The tattooed image of a single tear collected under his finger, like a black raindrop that all the fires couldn’t evaporate. “But that doesn’t mean it’s under your control.”

The Adder clome stiffened, drawing away from him. “What do you mean?”

“Just what I said. Somebody else is running this show.” McNihil took away his hand from the cube bunny. “You know it. And I know it.”

A moan sounded, less of pleasure and more of pain. The flames rose higher from the bed, catching McNihil’s hand, sending a hot, quick stab through his arm. On the engulfed mattress, the sleeping girl writhed, barely visible through the fire that had finally penetrated her dreams. Inside her open mouth, the kiss-notched tongue drew back from the scalding teeth. Thicker black smoke billowed up into McNihil’s face, the sudden pressure enough to push him into the center of the hotel room.

“You think you’re so smart.” The figure of the Adder clome and his glaring eyes could be seen past the flames that had suddenly vaulted from the floor to the charred ceiling. “I tried to help you-to warn you-but you wouldn’t listen to me.” A storm of ashes, black and etched with hot sparks, swirled through the hotel room; the last fragments of glass in the broken windows spat through the stifling air as oxygen rushed from the night outside. McNihil guarded the mask of his face with his hands as the sharp flecks stung his shoulders and upraised arm. “So have it the way you want,” came the Adder clome’s voice. “You want to talk to whoever’s in charge? Fine. Just don’t blame me if you don’t like what you hear.”

The firestorm knocked McNihil from his feet. He felt the heat of the burning carpet through his arched back, spearing his heart on the point of its white-hot tongue and straining it against the melting plastic of his shirt buttons. The flames rolled over him like a red tide, obliterating his sight of the hotel room. For a moment, his vision doubled; he could see, superimposed upon the wavering afterimage of the room’s walls and ceiling, another space, darker and torn open to a night sky without churning columns of smoke. The glimpse of the bar where some other, more physical, part of him lay, evaporated into steam off his eyes.

In this room, at the End Zone Hotel, charred bones toppled to the floor beside McNihil, as the bed collapsed into itself. The moans of the sleeping girl had ended seconds before, as though she had passed into deeper, dreamless sleep. McNihil turned his face away, squeezing his eyelids shut as the tattoos, freed of any skin, rose like heavy ash, edges curling in the heat.

“Say hello to her for me.” The Adder clome’s sneering voice came from somewhere beyond the flames. “It’s been a while-but that’s the way I want to keep it.” The voice faded under the roar of the firestorm. “Better you than me, pal…”