Noir

it. You’ll wind up with a nice bloody mess and two dead bodies, a little one and a big one.”

“What are you so worked up about?” McNihil glanced over at the barfly. “I thought that whatever’s going to happen, has already happened. This is all memory, right? From your kiss into my head. That’s what you told me. So it’s all foreordained. Right?” He watched for any reaction from her. “Whether I wind up killing her and Travelt and the prowler or I don’t; it doesn’t matter. Because it’ll be just the way I’m supposed to remember it. Won’t it?”

A sullen expression clouded the barfly’s face. “It doesn’t work that way. There’s some… allowance made. For variables. It’s like a free-will thing.”

“Yeah, right.” Figured as much, McNihil told himself. There was undoubtedly some truth to what she’d told him; just not the whole story. Why should the ultimate barfly be any different from the others? “So let’s just see how it goes, then.”

“What…” Her voice twisted with concern. “What’re you going to do?”

“I don’t need,” said McNihil patiently, “to take this FPC version of the prowler out of her. I don’t have to do that just to talk to what’s left of Travelt.”

“You’re not going to be able to do it with that… that piece of junk. “The barfly pointed to the old radio. “Travelt and the prowler-it doesn’t have any means of communicating with you. There’s no vocal apparatus anymore; nothing that it can signal to you with. It can’t even hear you; that stuff got all taken off in the Full Prince Charles conversion process. You can insert a microphone, a little loudspeaker, anything you want, and it’s not going to work.” She regarded him from the corner of one eye. “So that was your big plan?”

“Not really.” McNihil looked at the sleeping girl, then back to the woman in the doorway. “I knew that if I found what was left of Travelt, I wouldn’t be able to communicate with him in any… ordinary way. I knew I was going to need some kind of interface; something that could hook up with what was inside of the prowler, no matter what kind of condition it was in. A translator; something to go between me and Travelt, with its own intelligence built in. Something that was a cross between a wire and a human nervous system.”

“Wait a minute…” The barfly looked as if she was just about to understand.

“It’s all part of the job.” McNihil pulled his hand out of his jacket pocket. Looped around his fist was the cable he’d ripped out of Turbiner’s stereo system. The trophy that had once been a would-be intellectual-property thief, skinned down and reduced further than any Full Prince Charles number. “And I got just the thing for it.”

TWENTY-TWO

ALL SMOKE AND ICE AND FATAL PERCEPTION

You look like death warmed-over.”

But also heavier than he looked. November slung the asp-head’s arm around her shoulders and managed to get him to his feet. McNihil’s head lolled back, a trickle of blood leaking from the corner of his mouth.

“That’s… funny…” McNihil managed to open his eyes, the lids cranking back partway and then stalling, like defective machinery. “You look… great…”

“Yeah, like you’d know.” No telling what McNihil was actually seeing. Especially now, thought November. His vision had been all connected-up before, and now he looked like somebody had been working him over with a crowbar. “Just shut up and try to walk, okay?”

She’d found him on one of the upper floors of the End Zone Hotel. Just getting up there had been a hazardous enough process. The building was little more than a burnt-out shell at this point, damaged as much by the dousing of the fire as the fire itself, most of the lower floors, above the lobby level filled with the sex-ocean gel, were tangled mazes of collapsed, charred timber and heat-twisted structural girders, their broken ends rooting snout- deep through strata of water-soaked carpeting and acoustic ceiling tiles mounded like crumbling dominoes. A lavalike flow of sodden ash, solidified into black glue, hid the steps of the hotel’s central stairway; November had to clutch the swaying handrail, her careful weight producing groans of nails and bolts pulling free from the walls, and drag herself upward, boots miring and slipping beneath her.

What had kept her heading upstairs, after climbing into the End Zone Hotel from the catwalk outside, was first the impression, then the certainty, that there was someone else in the building. Despite what the cameraman on the boom platform had told her, she could hear voices coming from the dark reaches overhead, faintly at first and then with increasing clarity. She recognized one of the voices. That’s him, November had thought. That’s McNihil. A perfect memory of the asp-head’s voice remained in her head, from when she’d been in the hospital burn ward; somehow it had managed to leak in through the transparent barrier while she’d been floating in the sterile nutrient medium. She’d stood somewhere around the End Zone Hotel’s second or third floor, gripping the stairway’s wobbly handrail while the wet ash had crept across the steel toes of her boots, and had listened. She couldn’t make out what he’d been saying; the words were muffled by distance and the intervening layers of wreckage.

There had been other voices she’d been able to hear as well, faint and fragmentary. A woman’s voice, husky and almost as low-pitched as McNihil’s. For a few seconds, November had wondered if he was watching one of those old movies up above, the kind that had been inserted into his eyes and optic nerves, that made everything look dark and moodily dramatic to him; maybe on a portable monitor and video-player, though she couldn’t imagine what the reason would be for that. Her imagination had provided another scenario, as she had worked her way up the tottering stairs. Maybe the old movies had finally leaked out from McNihil’s private universe to the world at large, so that everyone could see them at last the way he did. And hear them-that was what the woman’s voice had sounded like, even from the distance November had caught it. Like one of those killer broads from the old thrillers-November had watched a few of them, part of her own research on McNihil and how his mind worked. Possessed of a murderous glamor, all smoke and ice and fatal perception. If that was what had happened, if those cinematic archetypes had gotten loose-Then we’re all in trouble, November had thought as she’d climbed the stairs. Even more than we already are.

A third voice, high-pitched and whiny, like a teenage boy’s, had sounded as if it’d been coming over a wire, crackly with static and sunspot interference. That one had been even less intelligible to November, though she’d been able to pick up on the rapid, stammering urgency in its words.

She’d been relieved to find McNihil all by himself. Unconscious, passed out on the shabby bed in one of the rooms nearly to the top of the hotel. A dead radio sat on a little table beside the bed, a thick, metallic-sheathed cable dangling out of its back like a baby boa constrictor with bare, unattached wire for a head. The room itself and the rest of its furnishings were scorched by the long-ago fire, but not completely destroyed; enough of the original carpet showed that November’s ash-muddy boots could leave prints on it. No video equipment, but no mystery woman, either, though a trace of scent, tobacco mixed with a cheaply heady perfume, filtered through the airborne cinders. As November stepped forward from the doorway, the toe of her boot dislodged a cigarette butt from the rubble on the floor. Fresh gray ash fell from the tip. Either somebody had been here with him, or McNihil had taken up smoking since she’d investigated his personal habits. She doubted the latter.

“Let’s go,” said November. “One foot in front of the other.” She pressed a hand against McNihil’s chest, trying to keep him from toppling over on her. “You can do it.”

“Where we going?” The trickle of blood from McNihil’s mouth had gone all the way down his throat and under his shirt collar. “Maybe… I don’t want to go…”

“Sure you do, McNihil.” She pulled him toward the hotel room’s doorway. “This place sucks. Not first-class accommodation at all.”

“Wait a minute.” He halted, planting himself unmovable in the middle of the room. His heavy-lidded eyes gazed at November with half-conscious obstinacy. “How do you know?”

November sighed, feeling his weight growing more oppressive against her. “Know what?”

He touched the side of his mouth, took his hand away, and stared uncomprehending at the blood on his fingertips. His gaze refocused on her. “How do you know… it’s me?”

“What’re you talking about? I’m looking right at you. Of course it’s you.”

“But… I’ve got a mask on…”

“Connect you do.” November swung him around toward the room’s chest of drawers; he swayed unsteadily against her as she halted. “Take a look for yourself.”