Noir

“Not particularly.” McNihil glared back at the other man. “There are plenty of parts I’m still trying to forget.”

“Then we’ll make shit up for you. Whatever you want. The rise and fall of the Roman Empire, in detail so fine you’ll need a microscope to shave. Actually, I’ve done that before; more than once. It’s more popular than you might think among the extreme crowd, especially some of the later chapters where the decadence gets way rotten and shiny. Who was the empress who regretted that she only had three altars at which she could receive libations for the gods?”

“Theodora,” said McNihil, unamused. “Sixth century A.D. The wife of Justinian, in Constantinople. A lot of people think it was Messalina, the wife of the earlier Claudius, but they’re wrong. It was Theodora.”

“Very good.” The Adder clome nodded, impressed. “You have a historical sense. That’s pretty uncommon these days. Most people I see in here think that the world started with their first orgasm.”

No, thought McNihil. They’re wrong. That’s when it ends. He could hear the gates of Eden clanging shut, never to reopen.

“Or maybe,” continued the Adder clome, “you’d prefer not wearing history on your body. Keep it all up here.” One finger tapped the side of his head. “Perhaps you’d prefer something a little more purely fictional. All of In a Budding Grove-or something shorter? Les Fleurs du mal; that’s a popular choice. Or perhaps something more esoteric.” The Adder clome’s voice shrilled higher and tighter. “The Tragical History of McNihil, and How His Wife Died, Kind Of. That might be one you’d find entertaining.”

McNihil’s heart slowed with the weight of the murderous impulse it carried. “That’s good,” he said slowly. “Harrisch must’ve told you an awful lot about me. You know… I’m almost flattered. By all the attention.”

“You’re not, actually-I know that much, too-but never mind.” The Adder clome’s words were still sharp-edged. “You’re more of a private person. We can accommodate that in our services as well. We could do you up with all sorts of advanced materials. Inks that would appear only under certain light spectra, or that would phase-change into visibility at certain times of the day… or hours of the night. Whatever suits you best. We could insert pixel devices in your skin, with their own little batteries and programming, that would flicker at staggered subliminal rates just right, so that only the filters in your eyes would be able to decipher them. Now that should be right up your alley. Harrisch told me about how you like to see things that other people don’t.”

“If you saw what I’m seeing now,” said McNihil, “you wouldn’t be flattered.”

The Adder clome didn’t appear to have heard him. “Something more elaborate?” The mocking sales pitch rolled on. “Something that moves? Animation is easy for this kind of thing. You could have the empresses Messalina and Theodora getting it in every orifice, full-motion rock ’n’ roll with digitized close-ups and a soundtrack with adjustable gain and auto-muting, for when you get tired of all the moans and groans. You could have the Bayeux tapestry marching down your spine, if you wanted, done in early Chuck Jones style. Whatever you want.” The Adder clome gestured expansively. “Perhaps you want something for people to remember you by. Something that rubs off on them, like the smell of your sweat. We can do that. Your tattoos don’t have to just stay on your own body, not anymore.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“Then you’ve heard right,” said the Adder clome. “We can put an imprint cloning function in the design itself, hard or soft.”

That last detail was new to McNihil. “What’s the difference?”

“Hard is, anybody you sleep with-anybody you go skin-to-skin with-they walk away with a permanent transfer of your tattoo onto them. Permanent, at least, until they come to someone like me to take it off. Different with the soft ones; those fade on their own, on whatever schedule you have me set. Something for the ladies… or the boys. Or whatever. Your choice. Though that’s not the end of the possible variations. Your chosen design, whatever you have us embed in your skin, could pass from your body to your lover’s, leaving your skin a blank slate again. And that other person could pass it on to a third, like a message on a slip of paper, going from hand to hand, body to body. A black ghost, molecule-thin, traveling the world. Perhaps with a little alteration with each exchange, a little play on Newton’s third law of thermodynamics and its application to information theory. So that when it comes back to you, eventually, you don’t recognize it and you do, all at the same time.”

“I’ve already seen ones like that,” said McNihil. In bars like the one he’d left a little while ago, establishments that served as the floating front doors, entrance points into the Wedge. A dimly lit vestibule into that darker world, inhabited by its own retinue of circling regulars, like low-rent cosmic debris unable to escape the gravity tug of a sweat-smelling black hole. Too fascinated by what was down inside there, that they couldn’t slip off the barstools and push open the yieldingly padded doors and walk out into the pitying sunlight; too scared by the same, too scared to take the pink dive in their own fragile flesh and find out what was at the bottom. “It was a sacred heart of Jesus-at least that must’ve been what it started out as.” McNihil could see it in his memory, on the biceps of some informant the Collection Agency had been working with a long time ago. “The guy told me it’d had a ‘Mom’ banner unfurled below. But when it came back to him-hard to say how many other bodies it’d swum across-it wasn’t a heart crowned with thorns anymore, it was a kidney wrapped in an extension cord, and the banner had become a three-word testimonial for hemorrhoid suppositories.”

“That guy was luckier than most.” The Adder clome laughed. “I’ve seen worse.”

A few more bad examples floated across the screen of McNihil’s memory. Not all of them had been warmed by blood; the morgue technicians at the Collection Agency had always complained of one of the risks in handling corpses taken from anywhere near the Wedge, the cold remains of those who’d dabbled in that lifestyle. Death-style, corrected McNihil. The techs took all the latex-gloved precautions possible, to keep any traveling tattoos with still-active battery charges from swarming off the decorated stiffs and onto their own hands and forearms.

Something even less substantial, the memory of rumor: he’d also heard that some of the morgue techs, inclined by their profession to ghoulish enthusiasms, had found ways of coaxing the tattoos, like flat black spiders, into big autopsy specimen jars, the kind with lids that screwed down tight. There was supposedly a storage room in the Collection Agency headquarters’ basement, with shelves lined full of the jars, the thin-film images of the harvested tattoos slowly turning and writhing in their half-lives. A glass library of heavy neo-primitivist abstract designs, Sea Dayak and Maori, and traditionalist hearts and flowers and the mournful Rock of Ages, withering like plucked blossoms, black and fragile…

“Though somehow,” said the Adder clome, “I don’t think you came here for a tattoo. Of any kind. You’re not the type that wants to achieve even that much immortality.”

“So why did I come here?” McNihil left his hands flat upon the arms of the chair. “You seem to know so much more than I do.”

“Why don’t you go back to Harrisch and ask him? He gave you the job.” Another shrug from the Adder clome. “He should tell you what it is he wants. Or… maybe he already did. Maybe he showed you.”

What Harrisch had shown him; that was something else that came up in memory, from someplace just under the surface, where it had been cruising like a patient shark. A shark with a capital letter V upturned for its mouth, teeth black instead of glistening white, the angled point and serifs sharp enough to cut flesh. My flesh, brooded McNihil. The same way the dead Travelt’s flesh had been sliced. Sliced and marked…

“No,” said McNihil. “Forget Harrisch for a moment. Let’s go on raking over what you like to talk about. You and these complicated tattoos that you do here at the clinic. Your specialty, I take it.”

“Like I said. We do all sorts of things here.” The Adder clome leaned down, putting his hand on one of the desk’s drawer handles. “I could give you a brochure and a price list, if you wanted.”

“These tattoos… the traveling ones. That go from person to person. You do them just on human skin, or do you do them on prowlers as well?”

The Adder clome straightened back up in his chair. “I do them on both. Real or fake, human or prowler; it’s basically the same technique.”

“So if it was the right kind of tattoo, a human could pick one up from a prowler. The image, whatever it was, could pass from a prowler’s skin and migrate over to a human’s.”

“No.” The Adder clome smiled tolerantly and shook his head. “It doesn’t work that way. Same technique, different materials; just because a prowler looks like a human being, that doesn’t mean it’s made out of the same stuff. You can’t use the same inks and pixel embeds, the same programming and energy