K Jeter: Noir

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You people shouldn’t have called me.” McNihil stepped over pieces of blackened metal. The shapes littering the sidewalk were the size of dental fillings, with the same odd combinations of rounded curves and ridges. They might have fallen from junkies’ rotting teeth, but he knew they hadn’t. “I don’t do this kind of work anymore.”

The DZ flunky trotted alongside him. The man took the exact same steps as McNihil, at the exact same speed, but looked as if he were running to keep up. If he’d had the end of his own leash clamped in his jaws, it would’ve been perfect. “What kind of work do you do?”

McNihil was aware the question came from no need, no desire other than to make talk, to fulfill the rep’s junior-exec schmooze training. He’d run into the type before.

“I don’t,” he said, “clean up other people’s messes.”

The metal bits of dead airplanes crunched under the soles of his shoes. Mess was, categorically, one of the basic components of this universe he lived in, like hydrogen atoms. Gray newspapers with significant headlines- Dewey Defeats Truman; Pearl Harbor Bombed -moldered in the gutters, or were nudged along the broken sidewalks by the same night wind that cut through McNihil’s jacket.

“Careful,” warned the flunky, but it was already too late. A piece of hard reality poked through the merely optical; McNihil hit his knee on some larger contortion of metal, which hadn’t yet been filtered into his black-and-white vision.

“Thanks.” McNihil gritted his teeth, as the pain ebbed and condensed into a drop of blood trickling down his shin. Now he could see what had done it, a sharp-edged fragment of a wing panel, its glistening alloy crumpled like a soft mirror. It stuck out into his path all the way from where the downed jet had dug a trench through the strata of trash, plowing back the asphalt and concrete below. The singed metal carcass, the biggest piece at least, lay in the street like a barbecued whale. The engine, some fairly recent Boeing-CATIC thrust device, showed the circled fins of its air-intake snout, the merge of Chinese design and American tech resulting in something delicate as that whale’s sifting baleen.

In less than a second, McNihil’s vision rolled an overlay across the broken aircraft, transforming it from the hard world into what he usually saw. A flash of color had reflected off the shiny metal; now that had drained away, down to monochrome. Not even a jet anymore, but a Curtiss P-40, camo-mottled in dark green and desert sand. The propeller blades had snapped where they’d scythed into the street’s asphalt. His eyes worked up the most appropriate images they could; the China suggestion must’ve evoked this Flying Tigers historical.

As McNihil continued walking, limping a bit, long-fingered dwarves, swaddled up in their homemade chernoberalls -lead-lined against the residual radiation-and their eyes goggled with aplanatic/achromatic dark-field jeweler’s loupes, crawled out of the littered wreckage’s tight spaces and skittered off to some nearby recycling souk. Leaving the jet’s bones behind for the janitors to sweep up, the janitors that never came. The squat-limbed figures were gone around the corner before McNihil’s eyes could assimilate them into period-detail Hell’s Kitchen ragamuffins.

“Here we are,” announced the DZ flunky. “This is the place.”

“No shit.”

Some things just slid right in, from one world to any other, without any alteration necessary. Even in a moonless night, a building like this one cast a shadow, a black negative ooze across the sidewalk. But not enough to hide the ragged strips of human skin fluttering maypolelike from the exterior walls, stitched into long banners. The office tower looked like a vertical snake, shedding its extorted skin.

At one time-McNihil had seen it-the skin segments, mandatory employee donations, had fit tight on the building. That sort of thing was the apotheosis of the Denkmann book’s management style, which corporate execs were always so keen on. But bad weather and poor taxidermy had taken their toll.

One gossamer pennant draped itself across McNihil’s sleeve. Between the curling edges, he saw a faded tattoo, an initialed heart entwined with a scroll-like banner. Which had, just as he expected, some trite company slogan: Enthusiasm is job component number …