Noir

Besides…” McNihil held his palm just above the sleeping girl’s hip and watched the smaller tattoos begin drifting toward it. “Maybe I’ve gotten to the point where I’m the one who wants to know.”

“About that poor bastard Travelt? And the prowler that’s got him inside?” The Adder clome shook his head. “Give it up. It’s gone someplace where, even if you do locate it, you’re not going to be able to communicate with whatever’s left of the human part. You’re never going to find out what you want.” A sour, gloating tinge entered the Adder clome’s voice. “You might as well go back to Harrisch and tell him that it’s a wild-goose chase. It doesn’t matter whether there’s anything of Travelt that’s not dead yet. There are some places that are even farther away than that.”

“Like where?”

“Don’t bother. Don’t even try threatening me.” Another shake of the head, the Adder clome obviously savoring the moment. “You can do whatever you want, wipe up the floor with me-in a place like this, that might actually be fun-and it’s not going to help you now. Because there isn’t any now. This is something you’re remembering. Remember?” That made the Adder clome smile evilly. “It’s out of your control-just like everything else.”

“Maybe so.” Unperturbed, McNihil let one fingertip touch the sleeping girl’s skin. The tattooed image of a single tear collected under his finger, like a black raindrop that all the fires couldn’t evaporate. “But that doesn’t mean it’s under your control.”

The Adder clome stiffened, drawing away from him. “What do you mean?”

“Just what I said. Somebody else is running this show.” McNihil took away his hand from the cube bunny. “You know it. And I know it.”

A moan sounded, less of pleasure and more of pain. The flames rose higher from the bed, catching McNihil’s hand, sending a hot, quick stab through his arm. On the engulfed mattress, the sleeping girl writhed, barely visible through the fire that had finally penetrated her dreams. Inside her open mouth, the kiss-notched tongue drew back from the scalding teeth. Thicker black smoke billowed up into McNihil’s face, the sudden pressure enough to push him into the center of the hotel room.

“You think you’re so smart.” The figure of the Adder clome and his glaring eyes could be seen past the flames that had suddenly vaulted from the floor to the charred ceiling. “I tried to help you-to warn you-but you wouldn’t listen to me.” A storm of ashes, black and etched with hot sparks, swirled through the hotel room; the last fragments of glass in the broken windows spat through the stifling air as oxygen rushed from the night outside. McNihil guarded the mask of his face with his hands as the sharp flecks stung his shoulders and upraised arm. “So have it the way you want,” came the Adder clome’s voice. “You want to talk to whoever’s in charge? Fine. Just don’t blame me if you don’t like what you hear.”

The firestorm knocked McNihil from his feet. He felt the heat of the burning carpet through his arched back, spearing his heart on the point of its white-hot tongue and straining it against the melting plastic of his shirt buttons. The flames rolled over him like a red tide, obliterating his sight of the hotel room. For a moment, his vision doubled; he could see, superimposed upon the wavering afterimage of the room’s walls and ceiling, another space, darker and torn open to a night sky without churning columns of smoke. The glimpse of the bar where some other, more physical, part of him lay, evaporated into steam off his eyes.

In this room, at the End Zone Hotel, charred bones toppled to the floor beside McNihil, as the bed collapsed into itself. The moans of the sleeping girl had ended seconds before, as though she had passed into deeper, dreamless sleep. McNihil turned his face away, squeezing his eyelids shut as the tattoos, freed of any skin, rose like heavy ash, edges curling in the heat.

“Say hello to her for me.” The Adder clome’s sneering voice came from somewhere beyond the flames. “It’s been a while-but that’s the way I want to keep it.” The voice faded under the roar of the firestorm. “Better you than me, pal…”

PART FOUR

No soy yo quien veis vivir

sombra soy de quien murio.

Senora, ya no soy ya

quien gozaba nuestra gloria;

ya es perdido mi memoria,

que en el otro mundo esta.

El que fue veustro y sera,

sombra soy de quien murio.

I am not the one whom you see living;

The shadow am I of one who died.

Mistress, I am not he

Who enjoyed our glories;

The memory of me is lost

And dwells in another world.

I am not the one who was and will be yours;

The shadow am I of one who died.

– ANONYMOUS RENAISSANCE LYRIC

NINETEEN

TO KEEP PEOPLE WITHOUT SKINS ALIVE

Careful. You don’t want to step in that.”

November heard the cameraman’s warning. She looked down at the catwalk below her feet, a narrow path without handrails or any other protective barrier. The interlocking planks were made of nubbly-surfaced recycled plastic, suspended a couple of meters above the street. At first, when the DZ limo had dropped her off as close as it could get to this zone, she’d thought that the city blocks had been flooded for some obscure purpose, an urban ocean bound in by a ring of prefab emergency dikework. Now she saw the slow, gelatinous nature of the substance filling all the spaces between the gutted buildings; the sight of it brought back recent memories of dreaming. The blackened nose of a burnt-out 747 carcass poked through the transparent membrane covering the gel.

“What the hell is this shit?” A wave with no crest, rolling heavily under the lake’s surface, had splattered through a break near the edge of the catwalk, enough to leave a few rounded, snotlike drops on the toe of November’s boot before subsiding. “It’s disgusting…”

“Sterile nutrient medium.” The cameraman rode with his equipment on a small boom platform, angled out from a cross-girdered pier planted in the middle of the street, the gel substance rising and falling in slow motion around the base. “Like they use in hospitals. To keep people without skins alive.”

That’s where I saw it before. Not just in dreams, but in the hospital reality, in the burn ward. And from the inside out; she’d been floating in the stuff, her own charred body slowly dissolving toward death. Whatever consciousness occasionally sparked under the weight of the anesthetics, it had looked out at the world through a vertical stratum of this stuff.

“What’s it doing here?” November had no option but to wrap her arms around herself, trying to hold in her own body heat against the chill wind sliding past the buildings. The unseen Pacific was somewhere to the west side of the city; she’d caught a glimpse of it as the DZ limo had driven her out from the rail station. “So much of it…”

“It’s only got one use, lady.” The cameraman looked even younger than she did, as though his cocky network attitude postdated her own baby-new skin. “Just like I said: keeping people alive.” The wet expanse glittered in the