Noir

clinging to that disintegrating fire escape. And then the fire itself, up on top of the burning transient hotel, the tarry roof smoking and bubbling beneath him and that would-be severe female who’d rescued him. With all that heat- including the lethal radiation from the young woman’s eyes, when she’d finally caught on that McNihil wasn’t the gratitude-ridden type-the spinal and cerebral matter he’d scooped out of the pirate kid’s carcass might have been cooked inside the long tube he’d been carrying. Stupid broad, thought McNihil, seeing her tough-cookie little face pop up on his mental screen for a moment. She’d saved his ass and kept the trophy intact; the techs, when McNihil had finally dropped it off at the agency, had told him it was in fine shape, nothing to worry about. And what had she gotten out of it, whoever she was? Nada. By this time, McNihil had stopped wondering whether she’d even try to get in touch with him again. If anything, she was probably too embarrassed by an old connect like him having gotten the drop on her. And so easily, too; that thought came to him with a certain measure of satisfaction.

“Absolutely perfect.” Turbiner’s voice held the same bright emotion. Still holding the present across his palms, he looked up at McNihil. “I’ve wanted this for a long time.” He glanced over at the rack of stereo equipment, then back again. “Finally, man; you’re not really optimized until the cables all match.”

Or match close enough; McNihil knew, and was sure the old man knew as well, that there’d be no way that the long, dangling object, with the snakey texture and the gold-plated tips at each end, could perfectly match what he already had in his system. But it was certainly the next best thing.

There was already human spinal tissue in Turbiner’s music setup, two long stretches of it running from his hyper-tweaked power amp, one of the last of the classic Moffatt lithium-flux designs, and out to the big square mirror-imaged Dahlquist DQ-10’s. Each speaker cable had the same glistening snakeskin finish-they looked, in fact, like two swollen anacondas forming horizontal S’s across the threadbare Afghan carpet that was the bottom layer beneath all the other strata of books and sloppily stacked papers. The agency’s trophies had been bulkier back when Turbiner had been presented with those; the techs hadn’t quite gotten down the miniaturization for the cables’ life-support and oxygen-delivery processes, all the silent workings that kept the encased tissue alive.

McNihil figured that those archaic cables must be at least twenty, twenty-five years old; they still had the big grapefruit-sized bulge close to the amp ends, where the scooped-out cerebral matter was lodged in its own thermo-insulated padding. He remembered dropping off to other clients cables and similar trophies, back when he’d first started working for the agency. Nowadays, the techs had come closer to perfecting their microsurgical crafts; the new cable was narrower-it could’ve slid through the circle formed by McNihil’s thumb and forefinger-and the same diameter from end to end, minus the smaller connector spades at the very tips. The new cable held just as much of the brain of a pirate-in this case, the kid that McNihil had worked over up north-only condensed and stripped of any unnecessary synapses and neurons, and dispersed evenly rather than bunched up in one unsightly lump.

Thus ever to violators of copyright, thought McNihil as he watched the other man admiring the trophy. This was the part of the job, when he’d still been working for the agency, that he’d always enjoyed the most.

“The only way it could be better…” Turbiner held the cable up higher, squinting one eye as though examining the object through a magnifying glass. “The only way it could possibly be improved”-his glance and a sly smile darted in McNihil’s direction-“is if the first two guys, and then this one, had been triplets. A three-way identical match, boom-boom-boom with the genetics. Wouldn’t that be a hot-rod rig?”

“To end all rigs,” agreed McNihil. He was starting to get a contact high, partially enhanced by the caffeine, from Turbiner’s obvious enjoyment of the gift. The crack about what would’ve been the perfect rig, the ultimate cable setup for a hard-core music lover’s stereo, wasn’t meant as criticism, McNihil knew. How likely was it that a set of identical triplets would get into copyright piracy? Not if they had one person’s smarts amongst themselves. Turbiner had lucked out as it was, back when the Folichman twins had glommed onto some of his old titles, and had then made the mistake of thinking nobody would catch them if they scanned the yellowing pages, encrypted the digitized results, and offered them for sale through a Djakarta phone-bank front operation that hadn’t been any smarter than they were. Turbiner’s copyrights hadn’t been the only ones infringed, but he’d been near the top of the agency’s list for trophy handout when the hammer had come down on the pirate operation. Plus McNihil had been the agent in charge, so he could pull a few strings, make sure that the top goodies went to his personal heroes. He’d already met Turbiner, at one of the agency’s semiannual PR-banquet functions, and had been into the old guy’s books-when he’d been able to find them-for some time before that. McNihil had assembled nearly a complete set of Turbiner’s backlist, had gotten him to inscribe and sign them, the whole trip; that was when he’d found out about Turbiner’s significant music fixation, particularly in regard to the equipment angle. That also being the moment McNihil had decided on scoring the ultimate upgrade for the old writer, something to put the final cherry gloss on his antique, perfectly preserved stereo setup.

Which was what pirates, copyright violators, were good for. If they could be said to be good for anything. Trophies; the final, tangible, and fitting result of the draconian enforcement of the laws protecting the ownership of creative content and intellectual property. If there were assholes out there stupid enough to attempt violating copyright-and there always were; the Collection Agency would never go out of business-then asp-heads like McNihil had no compunctions about putting the points of their field scalpels into the hinges and locks of the pirates’ skulls. The consequences of screwing around were so well-known-the agency put a lot of effort into its various public- information programs, cluing in the world on how the system’s sharp-edged gears meshed-that most asp-heads, McNihil included, figured their prey were into some sort of self-destruction imperative, sure and certain suicide by means of the law’s swift, implacable enforcers. What else could it be? If any asp-heads had ever had pangs of conscience about the bloody nature of their work-McNihil himself had always slept well enough at night-then the notion that the agency’s operatives were giving the pirates not only what they deserved, but what they wanted as well, should have been enough to ease those feelings.

“Look,” said Turbiner. “I’ve got to hook this up right now. I can’t wait.” He had coiled the trophy cable into a loop around one hand; with the other, he knocked back the last of the coffee in his cup. He stood and moved toward the equipment rack against the wall. “Sorry to drop out of the conversation… but you know how it is.”

McNihil shrugged. “Knock yourself out.”

He watched as Turbiner powered down his stereo gear and pulled the rack out far enough to reach the connections behind. The old man knelt down, already oblivious to anyone else’s presence in the flat, and began unhooking the ordinary, non-trophy cable running from the amp to the massive, refrigerator-shaped subwoofer sitting between the two DQ-10’s. The recording of the Mahler Second had come to an end some time ago-it had been turned down so low that McNihil had barely been conscious of the silence becoming complete inside the flat. In absolute quiet, a combination of the flat’s double glazing and the acoustic interference waves pulsed out from around the windowsills, Turbiner busily unhooked from a monochannel power amp the two gold-plated spades of the cable running to the subwoofer cabinet. Beneath the cable’s clear plastic sheath were the smaller diameter wires of ordinary six-nines copper, insulated black and red, signal and ground; no human tissue involved. Disdain for the non-trophy cable was already showing on Turbiner’s creviced face as he popped loose the spades at the other end.

“There we go.” Just as swiftly, Turbiner worked the screwdriver to tighten down the amp’s and subwoofer’s connectors onto the new cable. He stood up, slipping the screwdriver into his shirt pocket, then brushing his hands off. “Thus we approach audio nirvana.” Turbiner pushed the rack back into place-he had left the curve of the trophy out in front, a thin ribbon snaking across the carpet-then commenced the intricate sequence of powering up all the equipment in the proper order. A fiery glow came from inside the ranks of NOS Sovtek 65512’s, the dome-headed vacuum tubes lined up across the tops of the amps like combustible soldiers. “This oughta be good.”

Turbiner didn’t bother putting in a new disc, but just started up the Mahler Second from the beginning. He settled back in the sweet-spot chair, its leather and underlying padding molded to his frame from long hours of listening. The upholstery was still sighing as the invisible cellos and basses, long distant in space and time, dug into the opening bars.

For a few seconds, the music bore down like all the gears of the world grinding to a halt, the vast machinery of the cosmos snagging upon God’s trapped hand. De profundis outrage, the garments of the angels rippling into the time-stilled fabric of the universe.

“That sounds pretty nice,” said McNihil.