K Jeter - Noir

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.

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.