K Jeter - Noir

“But… that’s impossible. You wouldn’t even have known you were infected with TOAW. How could you do anything if-”

“Because I did know,” said McNihil simply. “I knew I’d been infected, and I knew how it’d been done. What the vector agent was, that I got TOAW from. The same one you used to give it to Travelt. The comparison of TOAW to a venereal disease, something that’s sexually transmitted from one individual to another, isn’t just a metaphor. Travelt and I caught it from the person that we’d both had intercourse with-that little cube bunny, the one that hung around his cubapt; and then, when you had me come over to look at Travelt’s corpse, she followed me back to my place and put the moves on me. You must’ve had her down at the DZ labs, getting her ready to be a contagion vector, long before you hooked her up with Travelt.” The shake of McNihil’s head was slower and sadder. “Poor little thing. I didn’t even find out her name. She did her job, and she was gone. I suppose you took care of her, too.”

“Like you said. She’d done her job.”

Nice , thought November. She didn’t even know who they were talking about, but she could figure out that whatever had happened was entirely typical of the way Harrisch operated. Somebody - some poor little thing - always gets it .

“But still-”The look of confusion didn’t disappear from Harrisch’s face. “How could you tell you were infected? It doesn’t show; TOAW doesn’t work on a visible basis.”

“Not for you,” said McNihil. “But you forgot. I don’t see things the way you do . Some things that are real and visible for you, I don’t see-and vice versa. TOAW as a contagious disease is a metaphor-and I can see some of those.” McNihil tapped the side of his face. “My eyes are different. You knew that, but you forgot, or you didn’t think it was important. But it is. Because the way I see things, that kind of vision… it translated your TOAW-as-disease metaphor into something visible for me, something I could see. An actual disease, a physical contagion, with symptoms I could see and feel right on my own body.”

“Yeah?” November was both repelled and fascinated. She couldn’t see anything wrong with him. But then , she realized, I wouldn’t be able to. I don’t have his eyes . “What kind of disease?”

“Come on. What do you expect?” McNihil displayed no embarrassment. “The designers at the DynaZauber labs put together TOAW using a venereal-disease model-so naturally I’m going to see it that way. One of the classic varieties; the symptoms are pretty hard to mistake. But just to be sure, I had to get checked out-or tried to.” He glanced over at Harrisch. “That was another reason I wanted to meet with you at the hospital. Killing two birds with one stone. Before I came up to the burn ward for our little conversation, I had time to swing by the communicable-disease clinic on the ground floor; it’s their job to find out who’s come down with what. And they couldn’t find anything. They couldn’t even see it-not the way I could. That just confirmed what I’d already pretty much figured out. That something else was going on. Something that had DZ written all over it.”

“You knew,” marveled Harrisch. “You knew that much-and you still took the job.”

“Why not?” McNihil shrugged. “It was the only way to get you off my ass. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? The cube bunny had done her job, and now I was supposed to do mine. And then everything would’ve been just the way you wanted it, with TOAW successfully inserted into the Wedge. With everybody lining up, to come in and get contaminated. That’s a fine old tradition with these sex-based industries, isn’t it? Historically, you’re going with the flow on that one; even making a profit from disease isn’t that much of an innovation.” The contempt in McNihil’s eyes turned to pure loathing, something that appeared to November as deep and instinctual, the gaze of a human creature toward a particularly noxious arachnid. “It would’ve all worked out so well for you and everybody else at DynaZauber, except for one thing. I found a way to keep the contagion from spreading . There may be diseases in the Wedge, but none of them are TOAW”

“That’s impossible.” Harrisch stared wonderingly at the asp-head. “If you went into the Wedge at all, if you had any contact with anyone there-you would’ve spread it. Sex isn’t necessary for the transmission.”

“Why not before?” The unquieting thought had just occurred to November. She instinctively drew a little farther away from McNihil. “If you were already infected-why wouldn’t you have been passing it on before you went into the Wedge?”

“Because TOAW’s got a lock on it.” McNihil glanced over at her. “You don’t have to worry. The DynaZauber labs wired a bonding inhibitor into TOAW, so they could mess around with it all they wanted back at DZ headquarters and not worry-or at least not much-about anybody catching it there.” He pointed with his thumb toward Harrisch. “That’s why this connector’s not worried about catching it. He’s got the bonding inhibitor as an adjunct to his immune system, like a vaccine. Just another way that TOAW is such an improvement over all those old-fashioned type diseases; with this one, only the right people come down with it.”

“Yeah, well, that’s great for him.” A surge of anger welled up inside November. “But I don’t have any kind of inhibitor.” If I’d have known , she thought viciously, maybe I wouldn’t have come to this little party . “I’m running around here without protection.”

“Simmer down,” McNihil told her. “You don’t have anything to worry about, either. It’s not a problem for anyone. Not now. Like I said, I took care of it.”

“You’re lying.” Trembling, Harrisch rose up on his knees. “There’s no way. At the clinic-the Adder clome showed me the proof that he’d disabled the bonding inhibitor on you. As soon as you walked out his door, you were an active infectious agent. A TOAW vector-”

“He may have taken out the inhibitor-but just doing that wouldn’t make me a vector carrying a transmittable disease. I’m way ahead of that one.” McNihil gave the exec a grim fraction of a smile. “You and the TOAW designers back at DZ headquarters overlooked something. You made TOAW communicable between humans and humans, between prowlers and humans, between prowlers and prowlers-you thought you’d covered all the bases. But it’s still essentially a biological disease. A disease for the living.”

“Wait…” November reached her hand toward his arm, as though there were some way that she might intervene in what had already happened. “Don’t…”

The identical surmise flashed behind Harrisch’s startled gaze. “You’re crazy-”

“Probably. But that doesn’t change things.” With both hands, McNihil pulled open the front of his shirt. “The dead can’t infect the living. Not that way.”

November could see the wound, the bullet hole above and through his heart. He would’ve had to have used his own weapon, that monstrous tannhäuser he was always carrying around, to have done that kind of perfect damage. It looked like it’d stopped bleeding a long time ago, an old wound, something that would’ve decorated the inhabitant of a stainless-steel morgue drawer.

“Of course,” she murmured. “Now it really does make sense…” The pieces had already started to fall together; now they flew toward one another even faster. “That was why you went into hock, to pay for the skin grafts and everything else I got at the hospital. It wasn’t just to keep me alive, to put me back together and out on the street. It was the debt; it wasn’t a drawback to the arrangement. It was what you wanted.” She had talked to the dead before, in another place far from this one; she’d gotten used to it. And to what they said. They always tell the truth , thought November. Maybe because they no longer had anything to lose by it. “To be in debt,” she mused, thinking about McNihil’s words. “To be so far into the hole, owing so much money, that your own death wouldn’t get you off the hook. You’d be one of the indeadted, a walking corpse-like those ones down in the south of the Gloss.”