K Jeter - Noir

“How long is this setup going to last?” Curious, she knelt on the catwalk and reached down to poke the gel with one careful fingertip. The semi-liquid rippled at her touch, the circles widening at a ponderous rate, but her finger didn’t get wet. Just the same as in the hospital’s burn-ward chambers, the transparent membrane encased the fluid, sealing it from both evaporation and infection. “This one’s been here for a while.” She figured that the layout must date from the blaze at the End Zone Hotel and the contagious rutting that had followed; some of the surrounding buildings were still marked with the residue of the fire-dousing foam that’d been used then. “When are you going to shut down and move on?”

“Are you kidding? This is the poly-orgynism of the century.” The cameraman took a hand from the boom’s controls and gestured across the small urban ocean. The far reaches, several blocks away, looked completely placid on the surface, the slowly writhing depths hidden beneath. “The ultimate connection, maybe. It doesn’t get any better than this, at least for people in my business.”

November knew what the cameraman was talking about. She’d never watched any of these real-time pornumentaries, not because she found them boring-just like everything else on the tube-but because she’d been able to calculate the sickly fascination of them. The sheer commercial appeal of this kind of coverage irritated her. Easy to see why the networks-and at least a couple of them were in whole or part owned and operated by DynaZauber-invested the setup expenses and devoted the on-wire time to these things, when and if they occurred. For the DZ subsidiaries, they probably got their share of the materials-the sterile nutrient medium, the barrier membrane-at cost from the mother corporation. The only real outlay was for a stake in the scouting pool with the rest of the networks, the constant search for and immediate response to the sex-fueled events.

If she’d been able to hang around awhile longer at the End Zone Hotel fire, instead of falling through the roof and several stories of burning building, November would’ve been able to watch the setup taking place, the godlike genesis of the poly-orgynism. She’d seen the prebirth, the first coition, the massing and interconnecting of the bodies still with their skins on, the human figures filling the streets around the trashed buildings and the open center area’s downed airliner. The conflagration that the foam put out had started thousands of others, metaphorically speaking; November had seen them from the burning hotel’s roof, looking over the edge while either waiting for McNihil or getting stiff-armed by him. All that straight-on physical connecting, sweating body on body, overlapping each other into all possible variations, daisy chains of filled, swollen and exuding orifices, semen and blood striping flesh like knotted barber poles, the massed radiation from the streets rising up into November’s face as hot as any flames coming up the End Zone Hotel’s stairwells. She remembered the building shivering before a section of its roof had collapsed beneath her, as though the thrashing limbs had triggered some deep seismic fracture. The extinguishing foam sprayed by the low-flying helicopters, nozzles stiff beneath the numbered fuselages, had been all the extra ingredient needed, the only substance not produced by human flesh or imagination, making the connection between connections complete, the many organisms into one compound animal, a colony of undifferentiated sensual function. E pluribus unum was the creature’s motto, translated as “Let’s connect ourselves to oblivion”; its flag was the shredding tatters of skin, blood-edged, that chafed and peeled away from the flesh of its once-separate components. That much heat was produced by friction as well as lust; more skin-on-skin scouring, teeth-bared biting, and engorged piercing than human tissue could endure. Maybe they don’t need scouts , thought November, on the prowl looking for this kind of thing . Maybe all that were needed were some upper-atmosphere satellites, way beyond the reach of the Noh -flies, with thermal-imaging receptors trained on the earth’s surface. Any eruption specifically in the Gloss-if it wasn’t a volcano, then it was worth sending a hit-crew with cameras and broadcast equipment.

Of course, there was more required than just the cameras and the transmission antennae. November saw more of them now, the strategic placement of their derricks and elevated stations becoming apparent as she glanced up from the gel’s surface. The corporate medical teams had been here at the start and were now long gone, maybe coming back every couple of weeks to peel back a section of the barrier membrane and top up the sterile nutrient medium. Plus fish out whatever parts of the poly-orgynism that had finally dissolved their personal gestalt to the point of no longer being capable of maintaining even externally supported life functions.

“Hey, it’s not like I’m not ready to leave.” The network cameraman’s voice broke into November’s thoughts. “I’ve been out here on this particular tour of duty long enough to develop calluses on my ass; I’d love to rotate home for a little R and R. A decent meal and a hot shower would be heaven right about now.”

“A cold shower,” said November, “would probably be more like it.” She could feel the frequency coming off the slow ocean. The Sea of Sex; standing on the catwalk was like being on the shore of some desolate terra incognita, gazing out past where the continental shelf fell off into sunless depths. The Pacific, wherever it was out to the west of this Gloss section, was nothing by comparison. The wind sliding over the gel’s surface membrane cut past the nausea in her gut, softly fingering hormone outlets lower in her groin. This ocean had its trenches in the back reaches of the human mind, which meant infinite. The poor bastards who had dived into this harbor may or may not have known that, but they likely wouldn’t have cared, anyway. “That’s what you get,” murmured November, “when you finally get what you want.”

“What’d you say?”

She ignored the cameraman. The sonuvabitch was just passing the time, she knew, idling like the rest of the crews here until the poly-orgynism worked itself up into another thrash of broadcastable action. Just like the earth’s oceans, ones like this alternated between storm and doldrums; the DynaZauber limo, the transport arranged by Harrisch, had let her off here at a relatively quiet moment. The skinless, partially dissolved once-were-humans under the membrane drifted on slow currents through the gel, mingling their soft bones and loose organs with each other in lazy pre- and postcoital suspension. What in other waters might have been tangles of seaweed, November discerned as the branching nets of nerve endings, hooked up and knitted together from one dike wall to the farthest. Some of the neural systems still retained a rough human outline, like a scrawled ink sketch surrounding the appropriate bones and organs; others, propelled by an innate longing, had disengaged from their origins and entangled themselves with others, threading throughout in an endless chain. That was what made the streets’ contents a single entity: the boundaries between one body and the next had been erased, with no ability to tell where one left off and another began in the resulting soup.

They must put something in there , figured November. The corporations’ so-called medical teams . Something to speed up the dissolution process, to hasten the shedding of the pink and yellow and brown rags, no longer necessary and impediments to requited desire. Or perhaps they didn’t have to add anything at all; that was a scary thought. That given half a chance, people would slough off the soft, thin barriers between themselves and achieve a nakedness of the exposed flesh, perfect for nonstop connecting. What was that old song? ’ Tain’t no sin/To take off your skin/And dance around in your bones, your bones/And dance around in your bones … Might as well forget the bones, too; they weren’t needed for this horizontal tango.