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  “Guilt’s hardly what I feel.”

  “Good for you. So welcome back to the real world. The one in which you do what people like me tell you to do.”

  McNihil gazed at him through slitted eyes, the lids puffy from the first injections. “I’ve never left,” he said in a low, taut voice. “Maybe I see a different world-I don’t make any secret about that-but the reason I like it is that over here, where I am, I see things the way they really are. I see you the way you really are.” He visibly swallowed the spit that had gathered under his tongue. “That’s the way it is with dreaming. It’s not dreaming at all. It’s the real world.”

  “Then wake up.” Harrisch leaned his gaze close into the other man’s, almost touching the surgically hardened skin of McNihil’s face. He tilted his head toward the transparent barrier. “Like you’re always saying. And smell the burning corpses of your dreams. Like she has. Whatever dreams she’s having, they’re closer to the way things are in the real world than what’s inside your head.”

  He watched as McNihil silently turned away and looked at the burnt woman. After a few moments, McNihil spoke. “How much longer does she have?”

  “If your eyes hadn’t been so connected with,” said Harrisch contemptuously, “you could read the meters.” He pointed toward the red numbers counting down on the life-support machines, though he knew McNihil couldn’t see them. “This November person’s drawing down the last of her accounts. She was pretty close to tapped out when she came in here, when the ambulances zipped her in from that hotel-in-flames where you left her. That’s the way it is in her line of work: she was betting the farm on getting this job away from you, or on you blowing it so bad that we’d have to give it to her afterward. So she could clean up whatever mess you’d left and have herself a nice, fat payday. Which would’ve taken her out of the red, cleared off everything she’d tapped against her own future, and left her with numbers written in black. A lot of numbers.”

  McNihil glanced over at him. “It’s worth that much to you? Even if she’d been the one taking care of the job, instead of me?”

  “Sure.” Harrisch nodded. “What can I say? Maybe we’re just sentimental types over at DynaZauber. Corporations are heirs to that old military mind-set, now that there are no armies anymore: we take care of our dead, we don’t just leave their corpses out on the battlefield.” He knew he was talking bullshit-McNihil probably knew it as well-but it didn’t matter. The asp-head was already on track, wired into his fate, by this point; there were just a few details to be nailed down before McNihil would be on his way, diving pinkly down into the Wedge. “We would’ve been happy to pay good money-to anyone-for the results we want.”

  “You’ve got a corpse already,” said McNihil. “If that was all that was on your mind, you could’ve buried Travelt and gone on with your business. Your TIAC business. Except it’s not just TIAC anymore, is it?”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “Come on.” McNihil’s shoulder brushed against the contamination barrier, sending ripples through the transparent membrane. “Like I said before. That little Adder clome at the Snake Medicine™ clinic that you sent me over to see-he’s a real talkative sort. More than you might even have expected. He told me all sorts of interesting things.”

  A new sense of unease percolated through Harrisch’s remaining nausea. “Like what?”

  “It’s not TIAC now. Your canned turd is ancient history.” Something less than a smile turned the corner of McNihil’s mouth. “A whole other acronym. A little more exotic-sounding. Almost oriental… but not quite the same. TOAW-with a W on the end. Right?”

  The unease flashed to anger, like a match on spilled gasoline. “You’re not supposed to know about that.”

  “You wanted me to find out stuff.” McNihil glared straight back at him. “You can’t complain now, just because I’m doing the job you wanted me to do. If you want the lid taken off the box, you’d better be happy with what somebody else finds in there.”

  “TOAW,” said Harrisch with teeth-gritted fury, “is not any of your business.”

  “It wasn’t any of your little Adder clome’s business, either. But he knew about it.”

  “I’ll take care of him later.” Connecting sonuvabitch-Harrisch didn’t know exactly to whom he was referring, inside his head. The clench in his gut tightened, a response to the specter of losing control over the situation. “He’s my problem, not yours. Plus…” His brain finally dropped into gear, producing the right line to take. “Let’s face it. The guy was lying to you. He’s deranged; it’s probably one of the inevitable hazards of the business he’s in. Somebody like that, with the kind of work he does-there’s no way he wouldn’t wind up nuts. Inventing stuff to tell people like you. It’s all crap. TOAW-there’s no such thing. Not really.”

  “Sure. That’s why that blue vein on your forehead is about to break open.” McNihil emitted a quick, harsh laugh. “Then again, if you’re going to work yourself into a stroke, you’re in the right place for it. Want me to call a nurse in here?”

  Harrisch ignored the other man. For the time being; his thoughts had sped up, sorting themselves out, in regard to what McNihil had just told him. If some sort of leak had sprung open, in the form of that nonstop blabber over at the Snake Medicine™ clinic, then that would have to be shut down, and soon. When he got back to the DZ offices, he’d have to arrange for a damage-control team, a crew of silent heavies, to make their way to the clinic; whatever was left after their operation, including the Adder clome, would be in pieces small enough to be swept up with a dustpan and broom. No big loss, especially to the DynaZauber bottom line; the division would have another SM clinic-with an Adder who could keep his lips zipped-up and running in a matter of days. The customers would hardly be inconvenienced. Connect ’em anyway, thought Harrisch. The lag time between a bunch of perverts’ desires and fulfillment of the same was not a big issue for him.

  Though what would also have to be determined-Harrisch saw it now-would be where the Adder clome had gotten his information. The TOAW operation files were locked down tight inside DynaZauber, with only a few of Harrisch’s most-trusted subordinates having even the most rudimentary access. If one of them has been talking, vowed Harrisch, his ass is mine. Or the researchers down at the DZ neurology labs-it could’ve been a white-coat directly on the payroll, even though they were all supposedly laced up with various secrecy and nondivulgence agreements. Some of the top researchers, the ones with the most TOAW pieces inside their heads, had death-pact employment contracts-the DZ human-resources department had paid plenty for the constitutional-rights waivers on those-or somewhat grislier surgical-extraction modules already wired into their skulls. Unauthorized talk would bring about tissue-loss results ranging from idiocy to corpse-hood. For somebody in the labs to have spilled, the person would have to be either suicidal-not impossible; long-term TOAW work tended to corrode morale among even the most blithely scientific-or high-pressured by outside forces. One of our competitors? Inside or out?-Harrisch kept a short list inside his head of enemies belonging to other corporations, rivals in the various DZ branches, and divisions not directly under his control or adequately in liege to him. Any one of those names could be seducing or leaning on the TOAW technicians; if somebody inside DZ, they could’ve learned the techniques from watching Harrisch himself, the way he’d cracked McNihil. Harrisch supposed that was something of a personal tribute, but it still meant ferreting out the parties responsible and eliminating them, one way or another, either shipping them off to the Kamchatka regional office or laying them in the ground with bloodied lilies clenched in their teeth.

  Anyway, decided Harrisch, it doesn’t matter right now. That was all housekeeping stuff, things that would have to be cleaned up later. The nausea ebbed lower in his gut, like a brown sea’s low tide, when he considered just how well things were going. If a hospital’s human charcoal ward wasn’t his favorite place for a conference, so what? McNihil wouldn’t even have wanted
to come here to talk if he weren’t caught on this particular hook, too tight to wriggle free.

  “You’re hosed,” said Harrisch aloud. He enjoyed saying it. “Those burning corpses should just about be cinders by now.” The seizure of corporate poetry in his soul overrode any doubts about whether the asp-head still dreamed or not. “You connecting jerk.” Fierce adrenaline was as good as any white-powder pharmaceutical. “I could’ve met up with you in the boneyard, if that was what you wanted, and it still wouldn’t have changed anything.” These psychological-warfare ploys were useless, at least when they were directed at him. “I don’t care what you know about TOAW. If you know anything at all.”

  “Simmer down,” said McNihil. He glanced over his shoulder toward the room’s door. “You’ll have the hospital security up here in a minute.”

  “Who cares?” The seizure had morphed into a spasm of self-congratulatory elation. The feeling returned, the one he’d had when he’d seen McNihil bruised and bleeding on the floor of that old writer’s place. Absolute control, the future on rails, speeding directly into the embrace of his heart. What God feels, thought Harrisch as he closed his eyes. When He’s rolling dice at some infinite Vegas. One of the archangels could’ve handed Harrisch a free drink then, with his life written on the little paper parasol sticking out of it, and he wouldn’t have been surprised. “I can deal with them, the same way I’ve dealt with you.” He wondered vaguely if it was possible to get drunk off repeated hits of adrenaline. If so, it was happening to him; Harrisch felt the same giddiness and lack of regard for whatever happened next. Whatever he might say to this poor sorry bastard standing next to him… it didn’t matter. Because I’ve already won, thought Harrisch. Pleasure beyond smugness filled his body, like the bubbling light of the transfigured saints. And-almost as nice-the other man had lost. McNihil not only didn’t see the way things were in the real world-the asp-head was effectively blinded by his cut-up-and-stitched eyes, with their optical load of crappy old movie sets and shadowy lighting-but he was blind as well to what had happened to himself. He’d been connected over, poisoned and contaminated-And he doesn’t even know it, thought Harrisch with complete satisfaction. McNihil had embraced blindness as a way of life; the real world wasn’t good and darkly poetic enough for him. He had to have something else, see some other world more to his liking, with retro Warner Bros, shadows and-even more retro-tough-outside, tragic-inside women, just as if those had ever existed anywhere at all except in the movies. That was what he’d wanted, and so now he’d have no reason to complain about the consequences of his own self-generated ignorance, the chosen way of life turned to one of death. “You just don’t know…”

  McNihil studied him coldly. “Know what?”

  “Never mind.” Harrisch shook his head, letting his rhapsodic interior monologue fade away. “You’ll find out soon enough. That’s your job, isn’t it? Finding out things. You should be grateful I’ve given you this opportunity, to do what you’re so good at.”

  “Yeah, right.” Beneath McNihil’s hardened features, the now-vestigial muscles shifted, subtly indicating disdain. “You still didn’t answer my question.”

  “My apologies,” said Harrisch, still feeling amused. “Perhaps I didn’t appreciate your burning thirst for knowledge. There’s so much you want to know, isn’t there? What question was it, that I haven’t satisfied your mind about?”

  “What I asked,” growled McNihil, “was how much time does she have? November… how much longer before they pull the plug?”

  “‘Pull the plug’? You can see something like that?” Harrisch laughed. “I thought maybe you’d just have some notion of a nurse or an orderly, maybe even a doctor, coming in here and holding a pillow over her face, just to put her out of her misery. As for how long it’s going to be before that happens…” He glanced again at the numbers running down on the machines’ various gauges and dials, visible on the other side of the contamination barrier. What little money remained in November’s accounts was leaking away as though from a slashed wrist. The image came to Harrisch’s mind of the numbers in November’s palm, the stigmata of all fast-forwards, zipping by so fast that they blurred into a red, illegible smear, seeping through the bandages and dripping onto the floor beneath the chrome-barred bed. “Let’s just say… a ballpark figure… that the next time you’ve got a chance to come by here, when you’ve finished your job, whatever bed you can see will be empty. Or there’ll be some other mummy wrapped in gauze lying in it. That’s what you see right now, isn’t it? Well, it’ll be the same package pretty much-people are always falling into the flames-but it’ll be different contents inside. What’s left of this one will’ve been crumbled up and sluiced down the drain by that time.”

  He watched McNihil silently regarding the human figure hidden beneath the gurgling machines. The stiffened angles of the other man’s face made it impossible to read whatever thoughts might be working through McNihil’s skull.

  “I’ll make you an offer.” A few seconds had passed before McNihil had turned back toward him. “A deal.”

  “You’re hardly in any kind of negotiation position.”

  “This one isn’t negotiable,” said McNihil, voice flat and inexpressive as his face. “You won’t have any problem with it, though.” He gestured toward the burnt woman. “I’ll go her bill.”

  Harrisch stared at the asp-head. “What’re you talking about?”

  “You heard me. Call up the hospital’s accounting department. Or have one of your little minions do it. I’ll put up the cash for November’s therapeutic procedures here. Anything the doctors figure she needs-I’ll pay for it.”

  “With what?” Harrisch barked an incredulous laugh. “You don’t have that kind of money, either. We’re talking about major tissue replacement here. Major, nothing; total is more like it. At least as far as skin goes-she doesn’t have a lot left. Even you should be able to see that. The DNA sample coding, the substrate matrices, accelerated regenerative foster-maps, all that epidermal plate-farming-and that’s just to get the raw materials ready. After that comes all the surgery, the grafting, the stitching, the stitch-ablation work, the laser spackling, the blood-vessel resassignments, the neural patterning… let me tell you, it’s not just some simple tuck-and-roll upholstery job that’s involved with somebody in her condition.”

  “You seem to know an awful lot about the subject.”

  “Connect, yeah.” Harrisch gave a slight shrug. “DynaZauber’s medical-products division makes most of the disposables, the active gels and the tissue-replication forms, that are used in burn wards like this. When they’re used-and we’re talking about a big ‘when.’ We also crank out the billing software for those procedures, so I know what they cost. Your pockets aren’t that deep.”

  McNihil spoke without looking over at him. “What about yours?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You heard me.” McNihil swung his flat gaze around. “There’s a bonus involved, isn’t there? For this job I’m doing for you. You can’t just let me off the hook; you have to pay me as well.”

  “True.” Harrisch nodded. “Technically, you’re still on the Collection Agency’s list of operatives. So compensation has to be according to the agency’s fee schedule. So okay, you’ll get paid for it. Big deal.”

  “It is,” said McNihil. “Big. I already checked into it. This job-matter of fact, anything to do with the Wedge and with Verrity-it’s on the Collection Agency’s red list. Those are the hot tickets; hot in the sense that the agency would rather not pick them up at all. They’d rather have them forgotten, instead of people like you poking into them and risking more embarrassment for everybody concerned. So the agency’s going to charge you a premium-a nice big fat one-on this job. And according to the last labor agreement between the agency and its operatives, ninety percent of that premium comes from the contracting party-that’s you, or DynaZauber, at least-and goes straight to me. When I complete the job.”

  “If you complete
the job.”

  “Ah.” One of McNihil’s eyebrows creaked upward. “That’s not how you talked when you were first pushing me to take this on. Back there at Travelt’s cubapt. That was when you were so confident about me being able to pull this off. Remember?”

  “I remember fine,” Harrisch said grudgingly. “But anything can happen. Anything bad. You’re the right man for the job, but Verrity handed your ass to you before. She can do it again. My hiring you is just a matter of playing the percentages; there’s no sure thing in this universe.”

  “The hospital knows that, too.” With a tilt of his head, McNihil indicated the chamber’s doorway and the brightly lit corridor beyond. “That’s another thing I checked on my way in here. They’re into speculative ventures, at least on a limited basis. Kind of a gambling mentality-for a twenty-five-percent surcharge on all fees and services, they’ll do the full job on November here, the grafts and skinwork, the blood and neural microsurgery hookups, everything. A brand-new skin, shining like a baby’s-that’s a pretty good deal for her. Maybe they’ll give her the dead bits, the ashes in a jar, to keep on her mantelpiece at home.” He managed a brittle laugh. “Snakes get to shed their skins-so I’ve heard; I don’t know from personal experience-so why shouldn’t people? They need it so much more-don’t you think?”

  What the connect… Harrisch gazed at the other man, as the pieces fell into place. Slowly, because he couldn’t believe it. “Let me see if I’ve got this right,” he said. “You want to pay for this person’s skin grafts and all the rest of the stuff they can do for her in this place, and you want to take it out of the bonus for the job you’re doing for me? That’s it?”

  McNihil nodded.