Noir

“This old thing?” Harrisch laughed. “I inherited it. Or let’s say… the company did. Look.” He turned his head, glancing up at the rim just above his head. “Can’t you see the letters there?” His gaze darted back toward McNihil. “Stuff like this doesn’t have a corporate emblem on it. It has insignia. There’s a difference.”

He saw what the exec was talking about. The letters R and A, stylized in an echt Teutonic manner, intertwined with each other so their legs stuck out at broken forty-five degree angles; the result was halfway between a Manx triskelion and a deformed swastika.

“The Rail Amalgam,” said McNihil. “What, they’ve been absorbed by DynaZauber? They’re one of your corporate divisions now?”

“They wish.” A sneer formed on Harrisch’s face. “DZ wouldn’t have them; we have our standards. Those people are all talk and no action. Strictly yesterday’s news.”

That might or might not be the case. Like most people in the Gloss-or at least those who weren’t sunk too far into their own bleak, inner L.A.-McNihil heard various rumors about what was going on with their world’s circular lifeline, the extended skein of rail lines reaching around the Pacific Ocean, from the old True Los Angeles core, up through where the urban metastasis thinned out in Alaska, across the fragile Bering Strait connections and down toward the Vladivostok financial centers and the transformed eastern edge of China, the little and now-aging dragons of Myanmar and Brunei, then back around the even more fragile and dangerous southern crossing, frozen tracks running across the floes and crevasses of the Ross Ice Shelf, in the shadows of the Transantarctic Mountains, and up the spine of South and Latin America, picking up maquiladoristas and boutique organic white-powder drugs before hitting the impacted Hispanic sprawl of Baja Los Angeles.

“Does that thing work?”

“You bet,” said Harrisch. “Check it out.” His middle finger pressed a button in the center of his palm, right where a rusted iron nail would have fit. The circle surrounding the cross grew brighter, sending hard-edged shadows, McNihil’s included, from the spot. “You see it?” Harrisch looked up at the rim above his head. “Great, huh?”

What McNihil saw, as he stood before the elevated cross, was the crawl of smaller, more intricate lights around the circle in which the DZ exec hung suspended. Blinking symbols and scurrying numbers, all tracking the progress of traffic-freight, people, whatever-along the greater circle of the Gloss’s rail links. A kludge of whatever had existed before the advent of the Noh-flies, which had forced everything in the air to creep along the ground, and the new stuff that had been brought on-line-literally-to complete the loop.

A red dot blinked on a line horizontal with Harrisch’s left knee. McNihil supposed that was the kink in the circuit that had been created by the train derailment, right here in the dead territory. Other red and yellow lights, all along the glowing circle, flickered at different rates and intensities. Trouble all along the line, figured McNihil. Which was to be expected; there was everything in the rail-transport system, from steam-powered cog-wheelers cranking through the thin-aired Andes, to sleek maglev bullet trains tearing through the flat, smoky guts of California. In some places parallel to each other; at the inevitable bottlenecks, track gauges of wildly differing dimensions were crammed into each other. Plus sabotage and other industrial/political squabbles, ice shifts near the poles, earthquakes anywhere along the edges of the ocean’s submerged tectonic plates-given that degree of barely contained chaos, it was a miracle that the circle surrounding Harrisch didn’t light up as fiercely red as a biblical wheel of fire.

Or maybe it had, one time; McNihil wondered if that was how Harrisch had inherited the circle and the cross. The old, powerful Rail Amalgam had been run by a high-mysterioso figure named l’Etatbrut… or that at least had been the rumor. If he’d existed at all, perhaps he’d been consumed, annihilated, turned to sifting ash by all the red alarm lights going on at once, his outflung hands gripping a rolling inferno of catastrophe data. If that hadn’t been enough to burn the mythic l’Etatbrut to cinders, it still might have been a sufficient adrenaline rush to unplug his heart from the cage of his ribs.

“You’d better watch out,” warned McNihil. “There are other people who might want to be hanging where you are.”

The smile shifted to sneer again. “Such as?”

One word: “Ouroboros.”

“Bullshit.” Harrisch’s sneer became uglier-McNihil wouldn’t have thought that was possible-and tinged with an unhidable nervousness. “At least the Rail Amalgam exists… or it did. Ouroboros… there never was such a thing. That’s all legend.”

“Maybe,” conceded McNihil. He had no way of knowing for sure. Maybe no one except those inside Ouroboros-if it existed at all-had that certainty. It was an entity wrapped inside darkness deeper than this night could ever have achieved. A true shadow corporation, summoned into being by the Rail Amalgam itself. The Gloss’s great circle of a railway was put together into one operating unit by government confiscation of various independent railway systems; some of them didn’t like that. Something called Ouroboros, taking on the symbology of the snake swallowing its own tail, supposedly represented the conspiratorial interests of those systems’ now-dispossessed owners. In its nocturnal sphere, Ouroboros would have needed to operate on a much more concealed basis than the Rail Amalgam ever had. No wonder there was so much disagreement among the daylight world’s police agencies and the underground’s denizens as to whether Ouroboros was real or just some deeply spooky imagining.

Maybe that was what Travelt found out, thought McNihil. That was the other part of the legends and rumors circulating around Ouroboros like overlapping, partially legible scales. That the shadow corporation was the delivery service, the rail line, that serviced the unlit, steamy environs of the Wedge. The theory being that the amalgam’s fascist purity made some things streng verboten, way off-limits. Not sex so much-like most fascist organizations, the Rail Amalgam was fueled by erotic tension-but the kind of sex that the Wedge and its occupants dealt in. The kind that a shadow corporation like Ouroboros would be only too happy to move along its underground tracks. Underground being, perhaps, both literal and metaphorical; if no one knew whether Ouroboros existed or not, then by logic, anyone or anything could be part of it. Which led the farthest-out conspiracy theoreticians to posit that the Rail Amalgam and Ouroboros were the same thing, their spheres of identity and operation coexistent with each other. When the Gloss’s brownish-yellow sun was out, Ouroboros was reduced to a shade, a silhouette of the Rail Amalgam, a nothingness sliding across the ground. But when darkness fell, then it was the Amalgam that disappeared, and Ouroboros that became both invisible and omnipresent. Like God, thought McNihil. Or its opposite.

The area around the train’s wreckage grew brighter, as though McNihil’s unvoiced notion had been the cue for a theatrical dawn. He glanced over his shoulder and saw the bright, blue-white glare of generator-driven worklights flickering on, turning the tracks and displaced machinery into color-drained ghosts of themselves. Big shadows wavered into the darkness of the surrounding rubbish dunes; McNihil could see other figures, presumably fully alive, stationing themselves along the shattered metal. The sparks of an arc-welding torch hissed in the farther distance, accompanied by the deeper groans of heavy-equipment jacks being levered into place.

He turned and looked back up at the suspended figure. “I suppose it’s your funeral,” said McNihil. “If the Rail Amalgam comes back and wants its property returned, or if Ouroboros shows up and kicks your ass…” He shrugged. “Not my problem.”

“Funerals?” Something amused Harrisch, enough for a quick laugh. “You know, I’m not worried about them, either. There’s a psychological advantage to taking a posture like this.” He rocked his head back against the cross on which he was bound. “You figure, whatever’s the worst that can happen to you-three days later, they roll away the stone and you’re as good as new.”

“As long as you’re feeling that way…” McNihil tilted his head toward the unconscious girl on the ground. He hadn’t forgotten, even during the whole conversation with Harrisch. “I’m a little concerned about her.”

“Really?” The other man appeared both wondering and somehow pleased. “I’m surprised. Doesn’t seem to be your style.”

“I’m trying to cultivate a sympathetic attitude these days.”

“Is it working?”

“Not in your case,” said McNihil.

Another muted groan, as though from the midst of troubled sleep, sounded from the body laid out on the ground. McNihil nodded toward the girl. “How about doing something for her?”

“I’m touched by your concern. That speaks of some innate kindness in you that I wouldn’t have otherwise