Noir

dark lenses over his eyes; the enduring clouds had parted for a moment, bringing up enough light to trigger the glasses’ photochrome. He leaned forward in his perch, one elbow against his knee, his earphones’ coiled wire trailing behind him. “Maybe I was wrong; maybe you should go ahead and step in it. Dive right in and join the party.”

She looked down and saw what the cameraman meant. The thick liquid wasn’t empty; there was more floating in it than just the ashes and dirt that’d been lifted from the streets’ surface and out of the ground-level stories of the fire-blackened buildings. The shapes drifting in the gel were vaguely human in form, but with outlines blurred. People without skins-those words moved inside her head with the same wavering grace. Poor bastards, thought November, with no trace of irony. That was what happened when people got careless; she should know.

It took only a few seconds for the visions to hook up, overlap, and synch together; the one she saw below the narrow planks of the catwalk and the one she carried inside her head. The figures in the gelatinous liquid were the same that she had dreamed of back in the hospital’s burn-ward chamber. She’d been too connected-up then, with the pharmaceuticals dripping into her own veins, to have reacted with anything more than mild, hammered, apathetic curiosity. Now, though, the sight drew her gut into a queasy knot and ran an ice probe up the links of her spine. Past her own reflection on the gel surface, she could discern white bones, whole skeletons turned as rubbery as life-sized novelty items, rib cages wavering like sea-anemone fingers, femurs and ulnas bending into shallow U shapes, as though boiled limp. Tied to the bones by loosened sinews and integuments were the glistening doubled fists and ovoids of the lungs and kidneys, spleen and gall; pericardial tissue shimmered and dulled with each heart’s exposed pulse.

Just the same, thought November. She’d seen exactly the same in her dreaming, the softly eviscerated but still-living human clusters under the slow waves. But not a dream; she realized that now. The cameraman was the tip-off, along with all the other networks’ news-crew gear that she’d seen at the gel’s bounded perimeter. I saw it on TV-that made it even more dreamlike, in a way. There’d been a set in the hospital room, she remembered now, even in the chamber where she’d been floating on the other side of the infectionproof barrier, in the same nutrient-enhanced syrup as this. The video monitor had been up on a white- enameled bracket in the corner of the room, way beyond all the other equipment with its much more urgent and interesting displays of her various vital signs, the blipping tickers and green traces that’d gone up and down with her pulse and breath. Plus, McNihil’s advance payment to the hospital apparently hadn’t stretched as far as dialing in the video set to any of the premium sat-a-wire channels, so there had been nothing on it but the usual hammering dinfomercials and the FCC-mandated news-minutes. That was probably when she’d seen the coverage of this thickening human stew, the dissolving bodies wavering in their sustenant medium like spore colonies in watery agar, the streets of this city zone turned into one gigantic petri dish. The images transmitted by this camera-jockey and the others stationed here by the networks had infiltrated November’s brain while she’d been out of it, her lidless eyes focused on the TV up in the burn-ward chamber’s corner; when that nonsubstantial part of her had finally crept back inside her head, she’d assumed she’d dreamed all those liquid pictures.

“How long is this setup going to last?” Curious, she knelt on the catwalk and reached down to poke the gel with one careful fingertip. The semi-liquid rippled at her touch, the circles widening at a ponderous rate, but her finger didn’t get wet. Just the same as in the hospital’s burn-ward chambers, the transparent membrane encased the fluid, sealing it from both evaporation and infection. “This one’s been here for a while.” She figured that the layout must date from the blaze at the End Zone Hotel and the contagious rutting that had followed; some of the surrounding buildings were still marked with the residue of the fire-dousing foam that’d been used then. “When are you going to shut down and move on?”

“Are you kidding? This is the poly-orgynism of the century.” The cameraman took a hand from the boom’s controls and gestured across the small urban ocean. The far reaches, several blocks away, looked completely placid on the surface, the slowly writhing depths hidden beneath. “The ultimate connection, maybe. It doesn’t get any better than this, at least for people in my business.”

November knew what the cameraman was talking about. She’d never watched any of these real-time pornumentaries, not because she found them boring-just like everything else on the tube-but because she’d been able to calculate the sickly fascination of them. The sheer commercial appeal of this kind of coverage irritated her. Easy to see why the networks-and at least a couple of them were in whole or part owned and operated by DynaZauber-invested the setup expenses and devoted the on-wire time to these things, when and if they occurred. For the DZ subsidiaries, they probably got their share of the materials-the sterile nutrient medium, the barrier membrane-at cost from the mother corporation. The only real outlay was for a stake in the scouting pool with the rest of the networks, the constant search for and immediate response to the sex-fueled events.

If she’d been able to hang around awhile longer at the End Zone Hotel fire, instead of falling through the roof and several stories of burning building, November would’ve been able to watch the setup taking place, the godlike genesis of the poly-orgynism. She’d seen the prebirth, the first coition, the massing and interconnecting of the bodies still with their skins on, the human figures filling the streets around the trashed buildings and the open center area’s downed airliner. The conflagration that the foam put out had started thousands of others, metaphorically speaking; November had seen them from the burning hotel’s roof, looking over the edge while either waiting for McNihil or getting stiff-armed by him. All that straight-on physical connecting, sweating body on body, overlapping each other into all possible variations, daisy chains of filled, swollen and exuding orifices, semen and blood striping flesh like knotted barber poles, the massed radiation from the streets rising up into November’s face as hot as any flames coming up the End Zone Hotel’s stairwells. She remembered the building shivering before a section of its roof had collapsed beneath her, as though the thrashing limbs had triggered some deep seismic fracture. The extinguishing foam sprayed by the low-flying helicopters, nozzles stiff beneath the numbered fuselages, had been all the extra ingredient needed, the only substance not produced by human flesh or imagination, making the connection between connections complete, the many organisms into one compound animal, a colony of undifferentiated sensual function. E pluribus unum was the creature’s motto, translated as “Let’s connect ourselves to oblivion”; its flag was the shredding tatters of skin, blood-edged, that chafed and peeled away from the flesh of its once-separate components. That much heat was produced by friction as well as lust; more skin-on-skin scouring, teeth-bared biting, and engorged piercing than human tissue could endure. Maybe they don’t need scouts, thought November, on the prowl looking for this kind of thing. Maybe all that were needed were some upper-atmosphere satellites, way beyond the reach of the Noh-flies, with thermal-imaging receptors trained on the earth’s surface. Any eruption specifically in the Gloss-if it wasn’t a volcano, then it was worth sending a hit- crew with cameras and broadcast equipment.

Of course, there was more required than just the cameras and the transmission antennae. November saw more of them now, the strategic placement of their derricks and elevated stations becoming apparent as she glanced up from the gel’s surface. The corporate medical teams had been here at the start and were now long gone, maybe coming back every couple of weeks to peel back a section of the barrier membrane and top up the sterile nutrient medium. Plus fish out whatever parts of the poly-orgynism that had finally dissolved their personal gestalt to the point of no longer being capable of maintaining even externally supported life functions.

“Hey, it’s not like I’m not ready to leave.” The network cameraman’s voice broke into November’s thoughts. “I’ve been out here on this particular tour of duty long enough to develop calluses on my ass; I’d love to rotate home for a little R and R. A decent meal and a hot shower would be heaven right about now.”

“A cold shower,” said November, “would probably be more like it.” She could feel the frequency coming off the slow ocean. The Sea of Sex; standing on the catwalk was like being on the shore of some desolate terra incognita, gazing out past where the continental shelf fell off into sunless depths. The Pacific, wherever it was out to the west of this Gloss section, was nothing by comparison. The wind sliding over the gel’s surface membrane cut past the nausea in her gut, softly fingering hormone outlets lower in her groin. This ocean had its trenches in the back reaches of the human mind, which meant infinite. The poor bastards who had dived into this harbor may or may not have known that, but they likely wouldn’t have cared, anyway. “That’s what you get,” murmured November, “when you finally get what you want.”

“What’d you say?”

She ignored the cameraman. The sonuvabitch was just passing the time, she knew, idling like the rest of the crews here until the poly-orgynism worked itself up into another thrash of broadcastable action. Just like the earth’s