Noir Page 36
A moan escaped from the sleeping girl’s lips. McNihil recognized the sound as coming from that place where wordless dreams shed their residual images, stripped down to endorphin flow and the involuntary contraction-and-release of muscle tissue. A shudder ran across the girl’s body, her knees drawing up in fetal position as though the burning mattress’s heat had sizzled some core tendon. Another heat pulsed from the terminus of the cube bunny’s spine; McNihil could smell its radiation in the thick air, the coppery taste lodging at the back of his tongue like a mucus-wet battery.
“You know,” mused the Adder clome, “for all the bitching I do about it, there’s some real advantages to the corporate relationship with DynaZauber. It’s a two-way street. Harrisch and his bunch connect you up the ass financially, but there’s something to be gotten out of it. Those people have got bio-resources up the kazoo. You get access to materials and techniques that are utmost state-of-the-art.”
“I can imagine.” More than the smoke was making McNihil feel woozy.
“No, you can’t. At least you couldn’t until you arrived here this time.” The Adder clome took a step back from the bed, spreading his hands with upturned palms, a parody of blessing. “Take this puppy, for instance. Look upon my works, ye horny, and despair. The latest thing-”
“Traveling tattoos? I’ve seen ’em.”
“Don’t be stupid.” The Adder clome looked down with evident admiration at the sleeping girl’s form. “Rev up to the present. Tattoos that move around, that even pass from one body to another-that’s strictly old technology. Been there, done that, had the rusty nails driven through my hands and feet. This is something new. What we’ve got here-” A clinical finger pointed to the markings on the girl; they could be seen more clearly now that the muscle spasms had started to subside. “It’s essentially a network of implanted receptor sites. In one grand conceptual stroke, we solve the age-old Theodora’s-lament problem. Not enough altars at which to receive libations to the gods, as she put it? What nature didn’t provide, science-or at least industry-can. There’s a lot of unused territory in the human brain, just waiting to be hooked up to something fun. There’s territory that most people are abandoning inside their heads-linguistic skills, higher-cognition faculties, emotional levels. Why leave all that just to become cerebral ghost towns, empty buildings, dust inside old closets? If you don’t use ’em, somebody else will. Nothing remains uncolonized for long, not when there’s corporations like DynaZauber around. They’ll be happy to move their furniture inside your head. That’s their business; that’s how they make their money.”
“You don’t have to tell me about DZ business,” said McNihil. “What I don’t know about it, I’m not interested in.”
“You should be.” The Adder clome spoke with sudden vehemence, eyes bright through the smoke. “You’re looking at the future here, pal; the future and the present and the past, all rolled up into one. The goal of commerce is to destroy history, to put its customers into the eternal Now, the big happy theme park of desires that are always at the brink of satisfaction but somehow never get there. Because if they did, the game would be over and everybody would go home. They might even move back inside their own heads and boot the happy corporations out.”
“That’s not going to happen.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t think so, either.” Self-loathing seeped through the Adder clome’s words. “That’s why I sold out to DZ, joined up with them so hard it’d take a titanium crowbar to pry me loose.” He passed his hands, fingers spread wide, a few inches above the sleeping girl, like a magician beginning a levitation act. “Me and the rest of the ones like me, plus everybody at the Snake Medicine™ franchise headquarters-we could see the handwriting on the wall. Mene mene tekel up-your-ass. Which is corporate-speak for You’ve been weighed in the balance and we’ve found you worthwhile enough to buy, so you can either sell out now or go back to selling rubber vibrators at strip-mall discount outlets. Not much of a choice.”
McNihil had been there as well. “If Harrisch wanted you to have a choice, he’d have given it to you.”
“Exactly.” The Adder clome looked down at the sleeping girl, examining the naked form more critically now. “So that’s why there’s Snake Medicine™ fingerprints all over this concept; we were happy to get the consulting gig with DynaZauber.”
“Let me guess.” Smoke had made McNihil’s voice even raspier, painfully so. He nodded toward the cube bunny and her markings. “This is TIAC?”
“TIAC Mark Two; Two Point Five, actually. The DZ labs took the initial design revisions and did a little fine-tuning on them. Before they pulled the plug on the whole project.”
“Why didn’t they go to Three? Or even beyond that. It was my understanding that Harrisch and his crowd are always looking for new products to push.” McNihil glanced down at the sleeping girl, then back up to the Adder clome. “Didn’t this one work out?”
“Worked out like a champ.” The Adder clome’s own gaze was filled with longing, the girl’s image that of unfulfilled possibilities. “In some ways, better than they wanted it to. Maybe that was the problem; DynaZauber wound up with a kind of refutation of their whole turd-in-a-can marketing concept. Because this baby really delivered. Look here.” The moving tattoos followed the point of the Adder clome’s finger, like tropical fish in a skin aquarium, waiting to be fed. “It’s not just the images, that’s just what you see. You do see them, don’t you?”
McNihil nodded. “Go on.”
“There’s a whole system here of transmission and reception, sites and stimuli. The tattoos are triggers for previously implanted neural feed-through points. There’s enough redundant, unused processor space in the human brain’s occipital lobes, the vision centers, that a DZ surgeon-or a Snake Medicine™ clinic technician, for that matter, once the procedure’s been sufficiently dumbed down-can route a subcutaneous perception matrix to the deep limbic sexual areas.” The Adder clome sounded enthusiastic now. “It’s like having eyes all over your body-but a specialized organ; you couldn’t read a book with your big toe or something. More like a frog’s eye, adapted to perceive only a limited range of stimulus. In this case, the patterns of the traveling tattoos. A predetermined library of tattoo designs-some historicals, Rock of Ages-type stuff, some Iban primitivos, a lot of originals and public-domain stuff-is loaded into unconscious memory, using the basic prowler download technology. It’s pretty versatile that way.”
“So I’ve noticed.”
The Adder clome rolled on, words coming faster. “Then you just have to load in the connections, the link between each tattoo and the subarea of the cortex that it should stimulate. All sorts of variations are possible: a basic Arrow-Pierced Heart with Banner Doves image is hooked up to a generalized, low-level stroke of the major pleasure centers, while an early-sixties Hot-Rod Demon, some classic Big Daddy Roth design, has a much higher-voltage, short-duration groin-chakra zap linked to it. The first gets you that warm-and-fuzzy bliss glow that lasts for hours, the other is your classic short-fast-and-hard number, twenty seconds or less standing up, from erection, insertion, and climax like a bullet to the center of the skull. Just like old-fashioned sexual encounters in that way: you don’t necessarily know just what you’re going to get until skin contact’s been made.”
“Sounds,” said McNihil drily, “more like sexual disease than sexual encounters.”
“Yeah, but this is the disease you want. Well, maybe not you-but somebody always does. They wouldn’t put their tongues inside prowlers’ mouths if they didn’t want it. But with skin as the active, receptive element…” The Adder clome nodded slowly. “You add the public factor. People know what you’ve got, what you’ve done, what other skin you’ve rubbed up against… and what’s rubbed off on you. Like trading cards, some of the tattoos are rarer than others; some are so rare as to be legendary, things to be whispered and conjectured about. Mysterious, sharp-edged emblems, pseudo-Arabic calligraphy, bleeding hearts-of-Jesus that can trigger cortic
al pleasure centers that nothing else can, soft gray padlocks that only one key can fit. If somebody’s going to collect the set, they’ll have to put some work in, chase down the missing pieces. There’s a whole collector economy that develops off this system: people become major players by what they’ve got, what they can give you.”
“Just like the regular world.” A lot of this was stuff that McNihil hadn’t heard of before, but it depressed more than surprised him. “It’s all economics. Congratulations-between you and DZ, you’ve managed to complete the process of turning sex into a pure capitalist endeavor.”
“You think so?” The Adder clome’s sweating brow creased. “I see it going the other way. If Harrisch and his bunch hadn’t shut down this project-if they’d gone ahead and put the ultimate TIAC on the market-it would’ve put the free juice back into sex. Taken it out of the cash registers and sent it on some deep wacko plane, straight out of D. H. Lawrence and Charles Bukowski, you know, those ancient erotic visionaries. Reading people like that was why I got into this business in the first place. I thought you could do something with this stuff, something meaningful.”
“More fool you, then.” McNihil wasn’t interested in the other man’s aspirations; he’d already lost most of his own. “Wake up and smell the-”
“Yeah, right,” interrupted the Adder clome. “I’ve heard that line already. ‘Burning,’ we’ve got here; ‘corpses’… maybe not. Prowlers are alive as you are; they just have different agendas. But what I said before is still true. There were possibilities here once.”
“Harrisch hath murdered possibilities. But that’s his job-to reduce possibilities to certainties. Late-generation capitalism isn’t about speculation; it’s all about making sure you get the money.”
“Don’t tell me about what I already know.” One of the Adder clome’s ash-smeared hands gestured at the surrounding flames and smoke. “This really doesn’t seem like the place for an economics lecture. You’re more connected-up in the head with Harrisch and his bunch of sub-execs than I am, and I’ve been on his payroll a lot longer. You’re missing the sheer wonder of this system, the way all the pieces come together.” He laid the flat of his hand against the sleeping girl’s shoulder blade. The touch didn’t evoke a low moan from her as much as did the Don’t Tread on Me snake image slithering up under the Adder clome’s palm. He glanced over at McNihil. “See that? Now that’s a beautiful thing.” The Adder clome pulled his hand away before the tattoo could migrate onto his skin. “A lot of value there. Maybe more than the DynaZauber corporation wants to deliver for the purchase price; that’s probably why Harrisch and the others nixed it. Because of the repeatability factor: the effect produced by any one pattern diminishes over time, but for quite a while, as long as the subcutaneous optic receptors perceive it moving over the skin from spot to spot, there’s still a measurable thrill derived from it. So memory is taken out of the head and moved onto the body, where it can really be appreciated.” He gestured again toward the girl. “You can’t say she’s not getting something out of all this.”
McNihil made no reply. His own body felt dehydrated from the heat of the burning hotel, his lungs and heart laden with smoke. The relief of ashes hadn’t come, would never come in this place. The girl on the bed of flames could not even die as much as his dead wife had; she breathed in fire and breathed it out, her breasts like soft glass lit from within; her silken hair twined in the mattress’s flames, like the mating of serpents, two close species coiling around each other. But was not consumed. No death here, thought McNihil. Not even the littlest one. So the Adder clome was wrong. It didn’t have anything to do with sex at all.
“So this was the end of it?” McNihil pointed to the girl, lost in the heat of her own dreaming, wordless and without image, wired to pure coded sensation. “The end of the TIAC project?”
The Adder clome nodded, mired in his own wistful brooding, the contemplation of what might have been.
“But it wasn’t the end,” said McNihil, “of what Harrisch wants to do. Of everything that DynaZauber wants to use the Wedge for. He may have cut you out of the loop-he fires people as well as hires them, or just puts them on eternal hold-but that doesn’t mean he wrapped things up and left. You know how they work. Once DZ has taken over a territory, they don’t just hand it back.”
“True.” Another slow nod from the Adder clome. “The End Zone Hotel-at least this one, in this world-it’s pretty much a DynaZauber property anymore. Owned and operated by, as it were.”
“Harrisch and his bunch didn’t leave; they just switched operations. Didn’t they?” McNihil watched for the other man’s reaction. “From TIAC… to TOAW.”
A look of fright appeared in the Adder clome’s eyes, discernible even through the smoke filling the hotel room. “Maybe you should drop it right there.” The Adder clome’s voice had been scraped down to a whisper. “You don’t want to poke into TOAW. Not if you know what’s good for you.”
McNihil’s laugh felt like a lit match dropped inside his throat. “Even if I ever did know that… I’m past caring. Why would I be here otherwise?”
“It’s your job.” The Adder clome made a simple statement. “Maybe Harrisch forced you to take it, but it’s still your job.”
“I could’ve gotten out of it. There’s ways; there’s always an exit door. You just have to decide which is worse. 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.