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:
He didn’t catch the rest, as the wind fluttered the dangling scrap away from him.
McNihil didn’t look up to see where the building’s needle peak scratched at the stars. “Come on,” he said, pushing open the door into the lobby. Sinister buildings were regular items in the world he saw. “Let’s get this over with.”
Going up in the elevator, McNihil continued brooding about the junk in the street. It helped him give off his own lethal gamma rays, a black aura that curdled the marrow of sensitive little corporate types and further convinced them that he wasn’t happy about being here at all. That it’d been a mistake dragooning him in on this.
“It’s not really a mess.” Fidgeting, all nerves and wetly blinking eyes, the flunky thumbed one of the numbered buttons. “I mean, there’s not like blood and stuff.” The elevator’s machinery, transformed to antiquity in McNihil’s perceptions, clanked and groaned. “And we wouldn’t have called you if it wasn’t important.”
That was the wrong tack to take with him. “If it’s important,” said McNihil, “then it’s a mess.” He knew how these things worked.
A solid minute passed before the elevator doors opened. Which meant nothing, he also knew; they could still be on the ground floor. They could be in the basement, with high-up views of the city dicked onto the windows, with fine-enough resolution almost to be convincing. He loathed that aspect of the building as well.
The elevator had opened onto a standard corridor. “This way,” said the flunky. Like an idiot, as if there were any other way to go. The corridor was lined with doors, to all the cubapts on this level. As McNihil’s eyes moved over them, they turned into the kind with worn brass doorknobs and pebbly windows bearing the names of insurance agencies and dentists in chipped gold leaf. The optical trigger hooked in a keyed olfactum; he caught the evocative perfume of dust-fuzzed ceiling light fixtures, unswept and threadbare hallway carpets, stoic despair, and file-cabinet scotch.
“Here we go.” The flunky pushed at one of the doors.
Which opened onto a room full of people. Or enough of them to make a crowd in the small space. What had looked like some kind of office on the outside-the flaking gold on the glass had read Derrida & Foucault, Certified Public Accountants-was on the inside a luxury cubicle-apartment, nicely enough appointed in the usual corporate style. McNihil loathed spaces like this; these company-supplied cubapts, more artifacts out of the Denkmann book, were one of the things that had always kept him freelancing.
The DZ flunky stood back, letting McNihil walk in ahead. Nobody said anything, though some of the business suits recognized him, knew him. The business suits in the room would’ve expected that his lip would curl as soon as he walked in.
Their cold eyes watched as McNihil strode through the room, head down into his shoulders and face set in its bad-mood angles. One of them stuck a hand out, but McNihil avoided it. All these executive types, especially at this level, would have those annoying expanded handshake transmitters wired into their palms. Worse, he had a receptor in his own hand, a souvenir from his old job. Coming in on his skin’s nerve endings, it slid past the optical override-the flunky, when he’d come around to McNihil’s place, had caught him off-guard and had downed on him before McNihil had been able to pull his arm back. For the next five minutes, the tactile printout had itched away at McNihil’s left thigh, the nerve endings tingling with a dot-matrix scan of the flunky’s business card. McNihil had let it flash up inside his eye, but the only thing he’d read from it was the stylized DynaZauber logo and the company motto, something about all men being customers. What did he care what the flunky’s name and real job title were?
With the execs’ collective gaze on his back, McNihil walked over to the tall view window at the opposite side of the cubapt’s living area.
He stood with his nose almost touching the window, looked out and saw the Gloss stretched out far below. He licked the tip of his index finger with his tongue, then rubbed wet a spot of the glass. There was no pixel blur; the space was as high up as it appeared to be.
“You got spit on the window.” Harrisch, a silver-haired senior exec that McNihil had encountered before, stood behind him now. “That’s DynaZauber property. Not even leased; we own this puppy.”
McNihil glanced over his shoulder. “I like to know where I am. Altitude-wise.”
“What does it matter?”
“In case I fall.” He shrugged. “I want to know how long until I hit.”
“You might find out.” Harrisch matched him in grumpy radiation, even though a smile like an open wound surfaced across his even teeth. “You’re a bad guest. You know that, don’t you?”
“I try to be. It saves time.”
He’d actually hoped that things would get this ugly, this fast. If nothing else, it meant that none of the other execs would try to introduce themselves. Which meant he wouldn’t have to fend off any more of those hearty ’spandshakes. The verified rumor was that execs like these had the data circuits wired over to their genitalia, where the nerves were clustered thick enough for almost instantaneous readout. Stuff like that gave a whole new meaning and impetus to the old yuppie concept of networking; less reliable rumors talked about social events jammed tight with suits, all of them shaking hands and exchanging business-card data with each other until their faces shone like rain-wet stoplights and the smell of semen hung in the heavy-breathing air. McNihil didn’t care to give any of the people in the room even part of that kind of thrill.
“I knew it.” Harrisch looked disgusted, as though the spit on the window were some personal graffitied message about the nature of the universe. “We shouldn’t have asked you to come here.”
“See? I told you.” McNihil turned all the way around, so he could speak right into the face of the DZ flunky, who’d materialized at his elbow. “Fine by me. I’m gone.” He pushed past both men and headed for the cubapt’s door.
“But as long as you’re here.” Harrisch snagged him by the arm and deflected him toward the group of other men at the center of the living space. They were all standing around something that looked like a bundle of rags at their feet. “You might as well let us know what you think.”
Not rags; it never was. Not when the bundle was lying in the middle of a medium-to-expensive gray carpet with tasteful black flecks woven in. Laundry, dirty or not, always migrated to the corners of rooms. Nobody ever stood around laundry or rags, watching with carefully blank-to-hostile expressions as some intruder was steered their way. Two of the suited execs stepped back, partly in deference to their boss’s approach, mainly to let McNihil see what was lying there.
Which was what he’d expected to see. At least the gaze in the filmed-over eyes didn’t broadcast contempt for everything that still had breath in its lungs, that managed to live without benefit of stock options. The corpse stared up at the ceiling with the patient manner of the truly dead, the ones who weren’t going to return on some battery- driven installment plan. An adult male, younger than anybody else in the room, including McNihil, excluding the overeager corporate rep. Christ would’ve been younger than the creaking execs who watched from the corners of their eyes as McNihil bent over the one who now wasn’t going to get any older.
“What’s all this shit?” He pointed to the corpse’s open shirt. It’d been unbuttoned and folded back, to show the corpse’s chest equally and neatly opened. An incision ran from under its throat to past its navel, terminated somewhere below the elastic waistband of the plain-white, non-designer underpants. The surgical cut might as well have had buttons and holes along its edges; they had been turned almost bloodlessly away from the bones and
