Noir

skeleton of the ancient airliner warping and blackening, had begun to die down into ashes and smoldering embers. Most of the crowd had gone into spectator mode, the upraised torches either nothing but charred wood or a few red tongues and brighter sparks, drawn horizontal by the night wind that had sprung up. Necks craned, faces turned in all directions around the totem 747; the gazes took in the surrounding wreckage with pleased smiles, the hard satisfaction of vandalism taken to its limits.

Keeping silent, November rapidly worked her way closer to the burning hotel, shoving her way past the crowd’s backs, knocking away without difficulty the hands of either sex that tried to clutch at her. She lost sight of the hotel until she had reached the curb right in front of it. The rest of the onlookers, pushed away by the heat of the flames, were watching with varying degrees of amusement what was happening in the building’s lobby. The ceiling had started to break up, raining plaster fragments and chunks of wooden beams onto the space below. A few human remnants, dark scarecrow figures, were visible in a semicircle of blazing furniture; it was hard to tell if they had been asphyxiated or were just narcotized to their own ongoing deaths. One, wrapped in flames, had dropped forward onto his hands and knees; under the rolling smoke and sparks, he crawled laboriously, dragging a melting black hose and a toppled-over I.V.-drip device along with him. The burning man’s progress was the main topic of discussion in the crowd; November heard bets being placed behind her. Before the figure reached the hotel’s hinge-smashed door, he fell over onto his side, curling into a fetal position, hissing bones revealed beneath his cracked flesh. When the figure had been still a few seconds, November heard the various wagers being collected.

By then, she had already started to move away from the front of the End Zone Hotel. She had spotted what she was looking for, what she had hoped she would see. What the others in the crowd hadn’t noticed: another figure, above their heads and closer to the building’s corner, climbing up the rickety fire escape. McNihil had completed his business, obviously; she could see that he had an asp-head’s trophy container-a thick, roundheaded tube-clutched tight by one arm against his ribs. With his free hand, he was pulling himself up the creaking, snapping iron construction, the smoke from the flames below obscuring him in its heavy coils. As November watched, head tilted back, a section of the fire escape pulled loose from the building’s exterior wall; loose bricks and bits of rusted metal tumbled into the fire at the hotel’s base, sending up a flurry of sparks that surrounded McNihil like luminous wasps. McNihil’s distant figure hooked one arm into the nearest strut as the grid beneath his feet gave way, dangling as though it were a slotted trapdoor; McNihil clung to the swaying metal, still grasping hard the elongated container.

Another sound, rapid and bass-driven, sounded from past the surrounding buildings. A cursing groan arose from the mob, the multiplex organism aware that its fun was at an end. Not from any city police-a zone like this was redlined by the various rental forces-but from the fire department of the Gloss’s Seattle division: the first of the ’copters, flying low to avoid the stinging attentions of the Noh-flies, appeared above the buildings’ roofs or through the gaps in the low skyline. The black shapes, like armored angels, swooped in close to the still-burning 747, the outstretched nozzle arms dispensing swiftly expanding, smothering foam. The roar of the flames was replaced by a steamlike hiss as the soft wave of the extinguishing agent flowed through the central open space and into the streets around it.

That wasn’t going to help McNihil any, judged November. The FD ’copters weren’t going to hurry to put out the buildings that were already ablaze. In these old sectors of the cities on the Pacific Rim, it was standard practice to incorporate arson into the various urban-redevelopment plans, like forest fires clearing the way for new growth. A second line of airborne equipment had descended into the area beyond the burning buildings, using the foam and other chemicals to keep the flames from spreading toward more valuable real estate.

All of which left McNihil stranded on the side of the End Zone Hotel, with the fire rapidly advancing through the structure’s interior, blowing out the windows with each level it consumed. November could see McNihil on the swaying fire escape, desperately reaching one-handed for the metal struts just beyond his grasp.

Behind her, another party atmosphere had set into the crowd; the incendiary rage had transmuted into a giddy frivolity, a damp carnival of billowing foam and slippery human skin. The smell of wet wood and other debris, floating on the soft whiteness as though it were a slow-motion sea, mingled with pheromone-laden sweat. The streets that had been on fire a minute ago had been turned by the angels’ whup-whup-whupping above into a bed of earth-clinging clouds. A bed fit for general copulation; the scarred flesh of the squatters, the unshelled homeless, the urban gutter tribes, all looked like engraved pearls of every shade from sunless white to African aubergine, as limb tangled with limb, orifices were born and created, sealing lubricant tight upon any possible protuberance, blood-warm or steel-cold. A panting, industrious silence replaced the cries that had echoed off the buildings only a few minutes ago.

That’s all right for them, thought November. What about my plans? The slippery environment was obviously fun for the crowd, taking their minds off the interrupted torching of the city, but it was making McNihil’s situation even more precarious than before. November had a clearer view of him, now that the crowd had spread from vertical to largely horizontal. The foam had been blown outward by the downdraft from the ’copters’ blades; enough of it had landed on the fire escape to slicken the fragile metal. McNihil’s grip on the creaking strut had become even more of a desperate struggle; November noted with some satisfaction that he’d still held on to the elongated trophy container, instead of letting it fall to the street below.

She weighed her options. Even though she already knew what she was going to do; she moved away from the front of the hotel, the lobby behind the shattered windows mainly ashes now, interspersed with charred corpses. The fire was still traveling upward through the building’s floors; even if McNihil managed to hang on to the fire escape outside, he’d either be fatally burnt or in the skin-graft ward of a hospital for so long that his usefulness to her would be zero. He was her door-though he didn’t know it yet-into the whole business with Harrisch and the dead Travelt, so he had to be preserved awhile longer. Once she had walked through that door and gotten to the other side, then it would be just as well if he was off the scene, crisped or in a box, it didn’t matter which. But until then…

Stepping over the writhing bodies, a vision came to November unbidden, of the strictures of form and identity dissolving, the prisoning matter of the city’s heart reverting to some premammalian coitus. The way, she thought, that fish and things that swim around in the ocean do it. Enough cheap black leather, rags and ancient thrift-store finery, jointed crutches and small sharp-pointed weapons, had been shed that skin could be sluiced to some infantile purity by the liquefying foam. The distinction between one body and another was erased, the membrane between the body’s interior and the soft outside world forgotten; she almost envied them. Or it. November supposed it was the oncoming tide of the future, humans finally having gotten tired of bones and jobs to do. She just hadn’t reached that stage yet.

Thinking diminished her attention for a moment, just long enough for a hand to snare her ankle. She fell, hands quickly bracing and catching herself against the white-smeared curb. November rolled onto her back, seeing some wide-eyed, happily grinning face. Which received the heel of her boot at the bridge of his nose; the bare-chested figure toppled backward unconscious and was subsumed into the general mass.

For a moment longer, she couldn’t get up; the foamed street was too slick for her scrabbling hands to get a purchase on. Other hands, without specific intent, clutched at her, limbs and shining torsos pressing at all sides. A breath-stopping panic rose in her, flooding out all thoughts but of escape. A generalized terror, the sense of her own boundaries melting away, the result a horrifying connectedness; this was what she had run from all her life. Even her brief moments of coition aboard the circle’s trains, with the glittery-eyed businessmen in the private spaces between cars-no linkage in those encounters, but instead a sharper sense of the alien, the penetration of the other. The pharmaceuticals she slid beneath the resealable patch of her skin; those packets were always laced with enough amphetamine to render the division between herself and the world as sharp as a razor, even while her higher brain functions were opiated down to lust.

Twisting onto her side, November reached past the wet forms around her and managed to grab the sidewalk’s curb; black ashes slid beneath her fingertips as she clawed her nails into the cracked cement. The foam clutched at her like some reluctantly yielding amniotic fluid; she slowly managed to push herself, shoulders-first, against the base of one of the building’s walls. Her legs curled beneath her in a belated fetal posture, the ankles of her boots just out of reach of the conjoined organism in the streets.

Bracing herself against the smoke-stained bricks, November got to her feet. Her breath returned to her lungs. Time had come to a halt, the line between one second and the next as meaningless as any other division; she had no idea how long she’d been out there. She tilted her head back, wiping a white residue from her eyes, wondering if