Noir

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

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 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 oceans, ones like this alternated between storm and doldrums; the DynaZauber limo, the transport arranged by Harrisch, had let her off here at a relatively quiet moment. The skinless, partially dissolved once-were-humans under the membrane drifted on slow currents through the gel, mingling their soft bones and loose organs with each other in lazy pre- and postcoital suspension. What in other waters might have been tangles of seaweed, November discerned as the branching nets of nerve endings, hooked up and knitted together from one dike wall to the farthest. Some of the neural systems still retained a rough human outline, like a scrawled ink sketch surrounding the appropriate bones and organs; others, propelled by an innate longing, had disengaged from their origins and entangled themselves with others, threading throughout in an endless chain. That was what made the streets’ contents a single entity: the boundaries between one body and the next had been erased, with no ability to tell where one left off and another began in the resulting soup.

They must put something in there, figured November. The corporations’ so-called medical teams. Something to speed up the dissolution process, to hasten the shedding of the pink and yellow and brown rags, no longer necessary and impediments to requited desire. Or perhaps they didn’t have to add anything at all; that was a scary thought. That given half a chance, people would slough off the soft, thin barriers between themselves and achieve a nakedness of the exposed flesh, perfect for nonstop connecting. What was that old song? ’Tain’t no sin/To take off your skin/And dance around in your bones, your bones/And dance around in your bones… Might as well forget the bones, too; they weren’t needed for this horizontal tango.

She stood up on the catwalk and wiped her fingertip against her trousers, though nothing wet and sticky had gotten on it. Just the nearness of the thing in the thick liquid-she’d already dropped the plural in her own mind-the spark coming through the membrane, half warning (As we are, so could you be) and half invitation (So why not join us today?), evoked an uneasy response in her gut and spine. The sun had lifted a little higher, pooling her shadow around her boots; now she saw thin black shapes, like clots of ashes, sliding between the top membrane and the poly-orgynism a few centimeters farther down. An arrow-pierced heart with a Mom banner beneath, a cartoon devil riding a pair of dice-The tattoos, realized November. The permanent ones and those that traveled from body to body; the skins might’ve dissolved, but not the images that had been inked upon them. A side effect of the poly-orgynism’s creation: the tattoos had been set free, achieving a new life in the habitat of the sterile nutrient medium. They swam about now like pilot fish, cutting knifelike through the gel, darting among the blind kidneys and lungs, past the loose ropes of nerve tissue. Another realization, a little glimpse of the future: Someday they’ll breed. She could see it now, the intermingling of design and motivating codes. Another generation, and the laughing devil with rolling-dice eyes would climb up on the Rock of Ages, the neoprimitivist tribal tiger stripes would tie themselves into Celtic knots, the banner toted by mourning doves would read out the name of a yet-unnamed god…

“Stick around,” said the cameraman. “If you can.” He’d gotten a cigarette going, dangling from the corner of his mouth, and was amusing himself by flicking lit matches onto the surface of the sex ocean. The little flames, before they died, left puckered scars on the barrier membrane; a visible shiver ran through the interlinked components of the poly-orgynism beneath. “Me and some of the other guys-” The cameraman gestured toward the other boom-platforms’ derricks, with their almost-identical network crew members watching from behind their dark lenses. “We’ve got a break coming up in a few hours; union regulations. We could skip the catering wagons and go straight to dessert, if you know what I mean.”

“I was born knowing,” said November. She couldn’t even be bothered to make a display of weariness, recognizing the variations on the same old lines. The stuff she’d gotten from the businessmen on the trains, back when she’d been into all that, back in her previous life. “Maybe you and your pals should go for seconds this time.” Sad to think that nothing ever really changed, for most people, anyway. These network guys were probably getting all sweaty from watching the poly-orgynism’s action for so long. “Because,” said November, “there isn’t going to be anything else happening. Not with me, at least.”

“Why not, sweetheart?” The cameraman leaned his elbow on the controls of his equipment. He knew he’d been blown off, but didn’t mind making light conversation to pass the time. “Could be fun.”

“Could be.” November copped a line from McNihil. “But I’ve got a job to do.” She started down the catwalk to the burnt-out shell of the End Zone Hotel. Harrisch and the exec crew at DynaZauber had some reason for ferrying her up here in a private car; she might as well find out what it was. “Catch you later.”

“If you’re lucky.”

She didn’t look back. As she walked, the surface of the gelatinous liquid rippled, as though the spread-out multi-creature below were scratching at the underside of the membrane, trying to tell her something.

TWENTY

Wake up and-”

McNihil opened his eyes and gazed up at the charred ceiling. “I don’t need to hear the rest of it.” He rolled onto one arm, then managed to sit up, pulling himself together piece by piece. He’d heard the woman’s voice, but couldn’t tell where she was just yet. “Besides… all my dreams were incinerated a long time ago.”

“That’s what you think,” said the ultimate barfly. “Seems like there was enough to get this place going again.”

He turned his head and found her sitting on the edge of a sagging mattress, blackened but no longer burning. She sat with her legs elegantly crossed, regarding him with cold and casual amusement. A thread of smoke drifted from the cigarette held aloft in one hand.

“I thought you didn’t smoke.” McNihil pulled his legs up and slapped dust and ashes from his trousers. “That’s what you told me in the bar.”

“That’s right, I don’t.” The barfly made no move to take a draw from the cigarette. “I’m just doing it for your sake. To set the scene. Complete the picture.”

“Don’t bother.” The floor was covered thick in ash, the hotel room’s walls broken open by the long-ago fire, shattered plaster revealing the burnt beams and studs of the framing inside. The door stood open, showing its brass number in the center and an expanse of similarly damaged hallway. “I’ve got these.” With a smudged fingertip, McNihil tapped the corner of his eye. “They already show me things pretty much the way I want them.”

“Thank God.” The barfly stubbed the cigarette out against the narrow bed-frame. “It’s a filthy habit.” She flicked the dead cigarette out into the rubble in the middle of the floor, then tossed her golden hair back behind her shoulder. “I wouldn’t have made it back then, in those old movies. All that smoking all the time-looks great, a real air of mystery, but I would’ve started coughing and wouldn’t have been able to stop.” The barfly smiled at him, eyes half-lidded. “Not very glamorous, huh?”

“Depends.” He wasn’t making much progress in cleaning himself up. His clothes looked as if he’d been rolling in the ashes and charred bits of wood for hours, like some rummy undergoing the DT’s in an abandoned building. “There might be a few lung specialists in the audience. They always get a thrill out of the death scene in La Traviata.”

“Yeah, I love that part where she says she feels so much better, and then she croaks.”

McNihil looked around the ruins of the End Zone Hotel. “This is stuff I’m remembering-right? From when I kissed you.” He figured this room must be on one of the upper floors; the brass number on the door started with a five. “I like it better this way. That fire shit was making me nervous.”

The barfly shook her head in mock exasperation. “We work so hard on your behalf, and what do we get? Complaints. You should hear yourself sometimes. Bitch, bitch, bitch.”

He ignored that comment. “What happened to the other one? The Adder clome?” McNihil stood up; he leaned over in a futile attempt to brush more gray ash from the knees of his trousers, then straightened. “He still around here?”

“That guy? The connector’s a stone nuisance.” On the barfly’s face, the exasperation was genuine this time. “Always hanging around here-”

“What? In my memories?”

“No, you idiot.” The barfly shook her head. “In the place where your memories came from-these memories, at least.”

“Where’s that?” McNihil tried to wipe the black traces of ash from his hands. “The Wedge?”

“Bigger than that,” replied the woman. “Bigger and older. Come on-you know all about it. You must, or you wouldn’t be here. You wouldn’t have come around looking for me.” She smiled, as if enjoying her own reminiscence. “You wouldn’t have found me. And we wouldn’t have had that kiss.” A tilt of the head, the golden hair falling past one flirty eye. “I enjoyed it.”

“I bet you did. Leaving men on the floor must be a kick.”

Her smile broadened. “Maybe you should try it sometime.”

“Yeah, in my next life.” McNihil straightened out his jacket. He could feel the weight of the coiled cable dragging it to one side; he rummaged with one hand in the pocket, to check if everything he’d been carrying with him was still there. With all the banging around and getting decked senseless he’d gone through recently, there was a chance it might have fallen out along the way. “If I get one.”

“Shouldn’t be that hard.” The barfly shrugged. “All you gotta do is finish up the job you came here for… and then you can go wherever you want. And do whatever you want to do.”

“Where’s ‘here’? The Wedge? The ur-Wedge? Wedge Beyond Wedge?” He couldn’t think of anything else to call it. “Or just the End Zone Hotel?”

“Like I’ve been trying to tell you.” She leaned back, balancing herself against the charred mattress with one hand; her gaze radiated sultry languor. “We’re very accommodating here. You can have it however you want.”

“That sounds like the pitch the Adder clome was making to me.”

The barfly’s gaze hardened. “I told you: that guy’s a nuisance. At least he is around here. We only tolerate him because we have to.”

“Why’s that?”

“He’s got the right.” The barfly gave a shrug. “Somebody like that… he stands outside the gates of the palace. Typical male mentality; half worshiper, half guardian. So he serves a function, in his own way. Both here and on the outside, out in that other world. He’s the first circle you have to pass through to get to where you want to go. If you can’t get past him-if you find the things you see at a Snake Medicine™ clinic too scary or too disgusting to deal with, or maybe you find them too fascinating to get past-then you’re not ready for the real thing. It takes a little courage. Even a little wisdom.” Her free hand gestured lazily toward McNihil. “That’s why you’re here. You must have what it takes. Even if you don’t know it.”

“I’ll take it on faith,” said McNihil.

“You pretty much have to. There aren’t any other options. Not around here.” The barfly pointed to the room’s single window. “Take a look outside. Tell me what you see.”

McNihil picked his way across the rubble-strewn floor, over water-soaked scraps of wall plaster, timbers that had fallen from the ceiling, carpeting that had once been industrial gray and threadbare and was now crisped black, an empty bureau that had toppled over in the fire, spilling its drawers like a stack of lidless boxes lined with yellowing newspaper. The glass had shattered out of the window frame, leaving jagged splinters that crunched beneath McNihil’s steps. He brushed any sharp bits from the blackened sill and leaned his hands on it.

Outside was the urban zone, a slice of remote-north Gloss, that he remembered from before-from the world outside, his real memories-when he’d come up here to take care of another job, icing the would-be pirate kid. Like coming home: the remains of the kid, a living length of neural and cortical tissue, were now the fat coiled loop in McNihil’s jacket pocket. The buildings looked the same, at least; McNihil could see the one a couple of blocks down that had the shabby movie theater on the ground floor, where he’d done the hit on the kid, and from where he’d dragged the face-muffled and squirming body back here to the End Zone Hotel. And farther away, past the corner of the tallest building McNihil could see, was the open space where he’d gotten panhandled via remote control from the burnt-out ’net-twit headcases in the downed jetliner…

“Pretty good view from up here, huh?” The barfly’s voice was soft and patient. “You can see all sorts of things… if you try.”

The woman was right about that. McNihil’s eyes felt tense in their sockets, as though the pupils were somehow being overwhelmed with the rush of optical information from outside. A fierce clarity seemed to fill the air, as though the smoke from the hotel fire had managed to scrub the constant, obscuring impurities that had hung between each atom of oxygen and the next. I can see for miles and miles, thought McNihil. It had been a long time since that had been the case. If the End Zone Hotel had been tall enough, or if the Noh-flies would’ve let him ascend into the sky, he could have seen all the way across the Pacific, to the far shores of the Gloss, Kamchatka and Xinjiang. The godlike headiness of the sensation rushed through McNihil’s body like pharmaceutical-grade amphetamine, sparking every cell and setting his heart stumbling until it hit the right up-tempo beat. This is what Harrisch wanted, he realized. When he climbed up on that cross. To see everything at once, all the universal data flowing into the receptors in your palms, like reverse stigmata. Jesus bled for the world; Harrisch and the rest of the execs at DynaZauber would improve on that, and let the world bleed for them.

“Yes…” McNihil’s voice was a murmur, words tinged with awe. “I can see… everything…”

“Except for what’s different. About how you see.” From behind him, the barfly pushed another hint in McNihil’s direction. “It’s not just what you see. Come on. You gotta think about it, pal.”

Then he did see it. McNihil looked up to the sky, just as the heavy, dark-gray-bellied clouds parted, as if on cue to help him along, a hand parting the curtain. His gaze dropped back to the zone’s surrounding buildings; their shadows etched sharp and knifelike across the streets and against each other in a way that he hadn’t seen for a long time. Long enough to have forgotten.

“It’s daylight,” said McNihil. The realization struck him with wonder. Ash slid under his palms as he gripped the windowsill tighter, as though the view beyond it might slip away if not held to him. “That’s what it is. The sun’s out.” He turned his head, glancing back over his shoulder toward the woman sitting on the bed. “I haven’t seen that… in years.” How long had it been? That was lost as well, along with so many other things. “Because of…”

“I know, sweetheart.” The barfly regarded him with outright sympathy. “Because of the eye thing. What you had them do to you. And the way you see. All that eternal-night business. But that was what you wanted, wasn’t it?”

“Back then.” McNihil slowly nodded, looking out at the bright window’s view again. The direction of the building’s shadows indicated early morning. That makes sense, he thought. Just as if a real night had ended. Hours or centuries could’ve passed while he’d been wandering around in this version of the End Zone Hotel; millennia-or seconds-since he’d met up with the barfly in that dive at the Wedge’s neon-lit perimeter. For all he knew, he was still lying on the floor of the bar, hammered beneath the memory load her scarred tongue had given him. His lips could be just parting from hers, the blue spark of contact fading into the taste of battery metal in his own mouth. He didn’t know. Just like a lot of things, he mused. “You think you know,” he said aloud. “What you want. And then you change your mind.” He turned back toward the woman behind him. “Or you have it changed for you.”

“You should be grateful.” She gave a small shrug. “Most people aren’t so lucky. They don’t get the opportunity. They have to live with what they decide on. Usually, there’s no going back.”

The hotel room’s window faced east; McNihil could see his own shadow now, black cast across the ashes and rubble. The top of his shadow, his head, just barely reached the tip of one of the barfly’s spike-heeled shoes, as though genuflecting there. Not in worship of her, the vessel, the instrument of transmission. But what was behind her. The other one, that he’d had that momentary glimpse of, back in the bar. Verrity-he’d never thought he’d actually see her. And for good reason.

“There shouldn’t have been for me, either.” The implications of what had happened, what he was able to see now, had started to work themselves out inside McNihil’s head. With one fingertip, he touched the corner of his eye. “There’s no way you should’ve been able to get inside here. It’s private. It’s locked in. What’s in here-” He tapped the curve of bone at the side of his face. “It’s not in this world… or the other. It’s all my own, the way I see things.”

“You should’ve known better than that.” The barfly looked unimpressed. “You underestimate what-and who-you’re dealing with. At least the other guy, the Adder clome, is up to speed on the situation.”

“Really? So who am I dealing with?” McNihil knew he’d have to ask just this question, eventually. “If it’s Verrity, then I’ve been here before.”

“That’s one name she goes by.” The unsmiling gaze of the barfly annihilated the space between herself and McNihil. “There’s hundreds of others. She’s been around for a long time.”

“But not going by the name of Verrity.” It was McNihil’s turn to smile, both grim and rueful. “That’s something I know for sure.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because I made Verrity up,” said McNihil. “She never existed. She was a lie. A fiction. The excuse I gave to the Collection Agency, about why my team of asp-heads and our investigation of the Wedge went wrong. Why we wound up getting our asses handed back to us.” The words rasped in McNihil’s throat. “And some of us worse than others. Some of the asp-heads-a lot of them-they died out here.”

“And after all that happened… that many of your friends getting killed… and you thought that Verrity didn’t exist?” The barfly shook her head in amazement. “What would it take to convince you?”

“It’s kind of hard to believe in something when you know you thought it up yourself.” Telling his secret history was oddly painless for McNihil; the story had lain next to his heart for so long that it had developed its own calluses and system of anesthesia. “And that’s what I had done-way before the Wedge investigation went wrong.” The words came easily, as though well rehearsed; he’d told them to himself often enough, lying awake in the dark of his crummy apartment, in a room not much bigger than this one, all through those hours of the endless night. “I knew it was going to go wrong, that there was no way we were going to pull it off-”

“Because you knew it was bogus,” said the barfly. “From the beginning. It was a fraud, a number you were running on the agency.”

McNihil gave a quick, humorless laugh. “You must’ve heard this story already.”

“It’s not much of a secret. Not from the side I come from, that is.” The barfly made a gesture with one hand that took in all of the End Zone Hotel beyond the little room, and beyond. “You may have fooled everyone you worked for, everyone at the Collection Agency… but over here in the Wedge, we knew what the score was. You were in over your head, weren’t you?”

He nodded slowly, keeping his silence.

“How far in debt?” The barfly peered closer at him. “How much did you owe?”

McNihil shrugged. “Plenty. It doesn’t matter.” He didn’t want to talk about that part of the story, the bit about his dead wife and how he’d connected her over. Leaving her not quite dead enough. He hoped that the barfly, and the others on this side, didn’t know about that part. Not because he cared what they thought about him. I just don’t want to hear it, thought McNihil. Not in their mouths. “There’s always some way to owe money, and not be able to pay it.”

“So you found a way,” said the barfly, coolly and evenly. “To make the money. All you had to do was lie and hand a wad of bullshit off to the Collection Agency. You were smart enough to do that, at least. Fabricate the evidence that something was going on in the Wedge, that down among the perverts and prowlers, there was major copyright infringement going on, that the agency’s clients were getting ripped off in a big way. Big enough to be worth doing something about.”

“It was easy.” Talking about this part wasn’t so bad; he could still manage a certain feeling of self-congratulation, even though he knew how it’d all turned out, eventually. “Fooling the Collection Agency doesn’t take much work at all. Or much brains. Because the agency wants to be fooled. That’s its fatal flaw. The agency exists for the sole purpose of looking for copyright infringement, for theft of intellectual property; if it doesn’t find that, it ceases to exist. So I wasn’t the only one in trouble, if there wasn’t enough work for us asp-heads. As a matter of fact, you could say I was doing the agency a favor by lying to it. In my own way-I was keeping the Collection Agency alive.”

“You… and how many others like you?” The barfly looked both amused and disgusted. “How many other asp-heads were doing the same thing, all through the agency? Going out and finding evidence of copyrights being messed with, agency clients not getting paid for use of their property, all of that, from little punks with a modem and a hokey encryption program to some bootleg polycarbonate being cranked out in the basement of the Gtsug-lag-khang in Lhasa. Once the bullshit starts, it’s hard to say where it ends, isn’t it?”

McNihil nodded. That had been one of his meager comforts, in those endless nights back in his apartment, with the water stains on the ceiling etching themselves into his sleepless eyes. The comfort of knowing that he wasn’t the only one, that there were others caught up in lies as deeply as he’d buried himself. Lies going both ways: the asp-heads lied to the Collection Agency, which in turn smiled its collective smile, and lied and said that it believed them. For all either side of the equation knew, the game would be over if it weren’t for the mutual quasi-deceptions, the lies that the liars and the lied-to tacitly agreed not to expose. At this point, there might not be enough copyright infringement going on anywhere in the Gloss to justify the agency’s continued existence and the asp-heads’ continued employment. Maybe the Collection Agency and its asp-heads had done their job too well; now, to find anybody stupid enough to violate intellectual-property rights, given the lethal consequences, they were reduced to scraping up idiot punk kids like the one whose strung-out brains McNihil was carrying in his pocket.

The big copyright-protection battles-the shutting-down of the Chinese bootleg factories, the absorption of the Vladivostok bourse and their teneviki holding corporations into the millennial Geneva agreements-had been fought and won; the wars were over. Or at least for the time being. Which was, McNihil knew, the age-old problem of the garrison state, applied to matters of intellectual property and its protection. Just because the war was over, that didn’t mean you could disband the military; if that happened, there wouldn’t be a convenient army of asp-heads to call on when the pirates, the big ones, saw a whole new world of opportunity lying before them, property rights that couldn’t be defended against depredation. At the same time, if a standing army was going to be maintained, something had to be found for it to do; an unused gun turns to rust. So if the asp-heads, on their own initiative, concocted their own assignments out of thin air, all the better as far as the Collection Agency was concerned. Anything went wrong, the agency could deny responsibility, and the individual asp-head, the lying prime motivator of the fraud, was left hanging out to dry. Just like I was, thought McNihil. There might not have been anyone fooled at all, by what he’d told them.

“Except in your case, things went way bad.” The barfly had read his thoughts as though they had gone scrolling down the blank mask of his face. “People-or at least other asp-heads-they died. Right here in the Wedge. And not very prettily, either.” She casually examined the deep scarlet nails of her hand. “They were the ones who paid the price. Not you.”

“I didn’t know,” said McNihil. “That there was going to be one.”

“Then you’re even stupider than you look. Even with your original face.” The barfly’s voice hardened, contemptuous. “You should’ve known, but you were too much of a smart-ass for that. What did you think you were connecting around with down here? A bunch of losers and perverts, all just banging away at each other all night long? Just so we could provide lots of sensory raw material for the prowlers to come down and pick up, so they could take it home to their owners? Real nice for them, I suppose, if that’d been the way it was; all the fun and none of the risks. But then, that’s how the guy you’re working for, that’s how he pitches the arrangement, isn’t it?”

“Pretty much.” A slow nod. “That’s how somebody else got roped in. Name of Travelt.”

“You don’t have to tell me about him,” said the barfly. “I know all about that story. More than you do.”

“That’s why I came here. To find out what I don’t know.”

“How flattering.” With a wry grimace, the barfly shook her head. “Really, pal-you don’t have to come right out and tell a girl that you’ve got some other reason for putting the moves on her. Like I didn’t know, or something. Like I’m as dumb as you are. You couldn’t let me keep a few illusions?”

“Why should I?” McNihil let the mask of his face show a thin smile. “Why should you get to keep them, when nobody else does?”

“You seem to still have a few of yours. That’s either a tribute to your stubbornness… or your stupidity. Even that Travelt guy learned his lesson after a while.”

“And what was that? What did he learn?”

“He learned,” said the barfly, “that there wasn’t anything he could do here. Not in this world. His bosses over on the other side-the same ones you’re working for-they may have let him think he was a big deal, a take-charge kind of guy, somebody who got things done. But he was way out of his league here. Out of his league, and off his turf. The Wedge, and what’s beyond it-that doesn’t belong to the DynaZauber corporation, or to the Collection Agency, or anything from that other world you came from.” The scorn in the woman’s voice became more withering with each syllable she spoke, like acid going through a reverse titration process. “You’re in our territory now, pal. The Wedge-everything over here-it belongs to itself.”

“What about the other one I saw? What about… Verrity?”

“Who?” A wicked malice showed in the barfly’s smile. “I thought she didn’t exist. I thought you made her up.”

“That’s what I thought, too.” McNihil spread his hands apart, a small gesture of surrender. “But I’ve changed my mind.”

“Good. That shows you’re learning. There’s hope for you yet. Maybe that’s why the Wedge is being so nice to you, letting you off the hook. Maybe…” With a tilt of her head to one side, the barfly gave him a newly appraising look. “Maybe you’ll be as lucky as the other one. Maybe she’ll do something… nice… for you. Like she did for that Travelt guy.”

“What’d she do for him?” McNihil asked, though he already knew what the answer was going to be.

“Come on,” chided the barfly. “I know you know. Your head’s not too hard to get into… at least, not for somebody like me. I can walk around inside your skull like it’s the hotel lobby. Easier, in fact, considering the present state of things around here. All this stage-setting, the heavy symbolism and shit-it really gets in the way, sometimes.”

“How was it when Travelt came here?”

A dismissive shake of the head. “I don’t even remember. It’s hard to keep track of these things, when everybody’s walking around with the same face, that prowler mask.” She gestured with one hand toward McNihil. “Except it wasn’t a mask for that Travelt guy, the way it is for you; the Adder clome told me about the services he did for you.”

“That’s true.” McNihil had expected that the barfly would be up-to-speed on that matter. “Travelt was actually inside his prowler. The transference had taken place. Enough of him had passed from one to the other. That corpse I was shown-there really wasn’t anything left of him in there.”

“Lucky for him. In a lot of ways.” The barfly gave a slow nod. “He got a second chance. To become real. How many people even get one chance at something like that?” Her gaze weighed and judged McNihil. “That must be why you came here. Because you knew it was your big opportunity.”

“You might be surprised,” said McNihil. “I already had my chance.” And I took it, he said to himself. There were some things that the barfly didn’t know, despite this being her turf. Even when she’d kissed him, she hadn’t been able to tell. The spark had passed from her mouth to his, this memory into his head; that was all that mattered. They think there’s only one mask possible-they didn’t know what he’d done to prepare himself for this journey. The ultimate mask, which concealed a difference greater than that between the human and the fake; no one had found him out so far. He might pull it off yet.

“Maybe you did… and maybe you didn’t.” The barfly drew her head back, studying McNihil as if seeing him for the first time. “I don’t know; I’m not the one to decide. But if you’re hiding something-if there’s something you think you can keep from being found out-then you’re playing a dangerous game, pal.”

“Who am I playing against?”

“What?” The barfly raised an eyebrow. “Verrity isn’t enough of a name for you?”

“No…” McNihil shook his head. “Not if it isn’t the real one.”

“Real, schmeal-that sort of thing just doesn’t apply here. Not as far as names go, at least. There’s a thousand different names for her, just like there are for the Wedge. It just depends on where you’re coming from.” The barfly’s gesture pointed beyond McNihil. “Take another look out the window. A good look, this time.”

The light had shifted outside; looking up as he stood at the window, McNihil saw the dark streaks of clouds cutting beneath the sun. Around the buildings, the shadows had diminished and grown less distinct, a slow fade into the graying daylight.

“Tell me what you see.”

He didn’t answer the barfly. McNihil leaned his hands against the charred windowsill, bringing his face past the shards of glass still embedded in the frame. The remains of the buildings’ shadows had drawn his gaze downward. Now he saw what lay in the streets.

“I told you.” The barfly’s voice was a soft whisper from behind him. “I warned you. This isn’t anywhere you want to be playing games. She plays for keeps.”

When he’d been at the End Zone Hotel before, in that other world he’d left behind, he’d looked down from the rooftop. The building had been in flames then, real ones that consumed both architecture and flesh. But past the fire and billowing smoke, McNihil had been able to see the mass overlapping and interconnecting copulation that had been taking place down at ground level, the bodies writhing and seeking each other’s heat in the wet, sticky bounds of the fire-dousing foam. All that motion had ceased, along with any warmth, either fiery or body temperature.

The foam had been sluiced away, down the street’s gutters and out to this world’s hidden sea, by endless centuries of storms. Leaving behind the remains, in this world, of what had been alive in that other one. Whitening bones were knitted together, a stiff tapestry of static coitus. The human skeletons reached as far as McNihil could see, as though a tide had receded from among the buildings, revealing coral reefs at their base. Empty eye sockets gazed back at him, darkness and silence inside the bone, hollow grins fixed in transports of idiot delight. We came here, said the skeletons to McNihil, in more ways than one. He could hear them inside his head. And it was worth it.

“Sometimes she dances,” the barfly said softly, “arrayed in skulls. Those ornaments have to come from somewhere, don’t they?”

“I suppose so.” This was part of the memory, he knew. That they had given him in the barfly’s kiss-This is what they want me to see, thought McNihil. “I guess it’s all part of the gig.”

“She has one name when she’s like that. And one dreadful visage. Probably better-for you, that is-if you don’t see her in that form.”

McNihil glanced back over his shoulder. “Do I have a choice?”

“No…” The barfly shook her head. “Not really. Not here. But you have luck; at least for a little while. You’re lucky you’re from the Gloss, the real one outside. That’s where her worshipers know her as Tlazoltéotl. Also Ixcuina, or Tlaelquani, depending upon whether you want the Nahuatl, the pure Aztec, or the original Huaxtec.”

He’d seen that name, the first one, before. On the sandwich-board advertisements of the homeless marching single-file in nocturnal alleys, on a bishop’s monitor and a dead man’s stomach, revealed and hidden. McNihil supposed it’d been inevitable that he’d meet up with her someday. But not just yet.

“It doesn’t feel like luck,” said McNihil.

“You don’t even know.” The ultimate barfly slowly shook her head. “To have any encounter with Tlazoltéotl at all, to have seen her in my face the way you did, and still be walking… you’re a totally lucky bastard.”

“Why? Who is she?”

“Like I said.” The barfly gave a shrug. “Different names, different forms. But always the Filth Deity-that’s what the name means-the goddess of sexual impurity and deep, bad, annihilating sin. First a seductress, with no thought in her immaculate head other than connecting. Then comes her first destructive form, the one dedicated to gambling, risking and daring everything, including your own life. Then the redemptress, the form that can absorb and absolve human sin. That form can forgive sinners and remove all the world’s corruption. But it’s not her last form. The last form is the hag with teeth of iron, the destroyer of pretty youths and all innocence. Like I said-everybody meets up with her eventually. But not many walk away.”

“She’s the one with the wild black hair? The crazy eyes?”

“Very good,” said the barfly. “You’ll know her when you see her again. The wild hair, the crazy eyes-and wearing the flayed skin of one of her victims.” The barfly smiled. “Rather appropriate for around here, I think you’d have to say.”

“And this is her world,” said McNihil. “Isn’t it?”

“Of course it is.” The barfly regarded him with amusement. “What else could it be? This business with the prowlers, people trying to protect themselves from the dark and scary stuff… what good does it do? Nothing at all. The prowlers can’t help you. Nothing can. Just because you created a world without Tlazoltéotl in it doesn’t mean it was ever going to remain that way. The doors will be broken down and the dark, scary stuff will come flooding in.” One of her hands flicked a tiny gesture toward him. “Same way with your own little world. Yeah, you made up Verrity… but it didn’t end there. You made her up-and then you made her real. You made the place for her, out of your own lusts and fears. And Verrity came to fill it. You should’ve known that was going to happen.”

He knew she was right. But he still had a job to do.

“What about Travelt?” McNihil turned away from the window. “That’s who I came here to find. That’s my job. You said she did something nice for him. So I take it he’s still alive?”

“Sure,” said the barfly. “But that’s not going to help you.”

“You mean because of him being inside his prowler? I can deal with that.”

The barfly shook her head and laughed. “He’s gone way beyond that. He was looking for a place to hide. From everything. Just walking around inside a prowler wasn’t going to do it for him. He knew they could still find him. Somebody like you could find him.” She leaned back, smiling. “So he’s gone where you won’t be able to reach him. He had a Full Prince Charles done on himself. That’s what she did for Travelt: he got it for free. On the house, as it were.”

That was just what McNihil had expected. If somebody was going to run, they might as well run all the way.

“All right,” said McNihil. He’d come prepared; that was what the stuff in his jacket pocket was for. “Take me to him. To where he is.”

The barfly stopped smiling, and regarded him for a few moments in silence. “You’re the boss,” she said with a shrug, and stood up from the bed.

TWENTY-ONE

Nothing going on in there.”

November turned and looked behind her. “What did you say?”

“You heard me.” Another cameraman, different from the one she’d talked to at this slow ocean’s perimeter, but with the same lazy-and-hip attitude-he watched her from behind an identical pair of dark-lensed glasses. November wondered if they were part of some network-issued uniform. “That wreck’s all burnt out.” He was perched in the molded plastic seat of a camera boom, extending across the expanse of gelatinous liquid and the catwalks below like the neck of some mechanical brachiosaur; the visual echo of a small microphone arced from his headphones. The cameraman pointed to the End Zone Hotel, or what had been the hotel before the fire. “Nothing’s going on, because there’s nobody inside. Gone, gone, gone-a long time ago.”

“Yeah, I know.” November had walked all the way across this contained sea, like Christ keeping his feet dry at Galilee. Around the catwalks’ and derricks’ pilings, little ripples and gurgles sounded, the sighs of bubbles that flowered, broke open, and disappeared with the heavy glacial quality of magma as she’d made her progress along the planks. “I was here when it happened.”

“So was I.” The cameraman tilted his head to listen to something in his ’phones, made a sotto voce reply into the mike, then redirected his attention to the woman standing in front of him. He’d angled the camera boom to impede, if not totally block, her way. “I was one of the first on the scene when the word went out. The combine had me up here so fast, I still had my toothbrush in my mouth and I was rolling tape. Been a while since the last big poly-org outbreak-that was the Goose-Pimpler up by the Bering Strait. I was on that one, too. We had to wire the whole place up with space heaters to keep the thing from freezing over and turning any exposed flesh blue. Got so hot up above that me and the rest of the crew were riding our gear in shorts and T-shirts. Like a summer day with melting glaciers all around.”

“How nice for you.” She hadn’t come all this way-not just across the catwalks, but the hitch up from the hospital down south-to wind up listening to this idiot brag. At the same time, she didn’t want to blow him off too fast, maybe arouse his suspicions about what she was doing here. There was probably some kind of security detail around here, sleeping on the job at the moment, but capable of being roused. “You don’t seem to have that kind of a problem.”

“Nah-this is the perfect setup.” The cameraman turned a small chromed wheel, and the boom edged a few inches closer to November, as though the brachiosaur head had come awake to sniff her human scent. “Nice, big one; getting some good shots off it.” He patted the complicated flank of his videocamera equipment. “I’ve seen some of the ratings. Worldwide, this is beating the pack. Those enhanced Lucy reruns, with the Tarantino dialogue filters and the Peckinpah slo-mo death scenes-those were a good idea, but they just really can’t compete. People are just too hip to those reconstruct jobs; you can’t just add four minutes of ceegee’d special effects and have people plotz like in the old days.” He gave an appreciative nod. “You want the numbers, you gotta have something happening in real time. You get that event factor, people think they’re watching the news.” The cameraman shrugged. “Plus sex, of course. That always helps.”

“I’m sure it does.” November put her hands on the forward edge of the boom, balancing herself as she tried to slide around it on the catwalk. If she looked down, she could see the soft bones, loose collections of vital organs, and skeins of nervous tissue floating in the gel. “Give the people what they want.”

“Yeah, right.” The cameraman angled his head so he could look at November over the top of his glasses. His eyes had the red corners and pinpoint pupils of someone who had no way of remembering what sleep felt like. “Couldn’t have come at a better time, either. Sweeps week, you know.” He radiated a sweating intensity, excitement translating into a vein ticking at the corner of his forehead, as though November had laid her hands on a portion of his carnal anatomy, instead of just the machinery he controlled. “Sometimes it makes you wonder… like whether they plan it that way…”

She didn’t make a reply. She’d gotten to the point where she was half off the catwalk, holding on to the camera boom rather than just using it for balance.

“So like I said. No point in going in there.” The cameraman smiled and made another, tinier adjustment to the little chrome wheel. “All the action’s out here.”

The camera boom nudged her in the chest, pushing her all the way off the catwalk. November held on to the device’s platform, both hands digging into the various bolts and flanges. Her boots dangled a few inches above the gel’s surface membrane. Underneath, the outlines of the perpetually copulating forms grew more tangled and numerous, as though her shadow on the slow waves were a newly tattooed image, one that they hadn’t seen before.

“Cute-” November looked up into the face of the cameraman above her. “But not very.” It was made even more clear to her that she hadn’t fully recovered from her hospital stay. The delicate new skin of her fingertips and palms felt as if it were about to shred apart from her desperate clutching of the boom platform. Plus, she was too weak to climb up and kick this smirking sonuvabitch’s ass. “I’d appreciate it… if you’d put me down…”

“What’s your rush?” The cameraman leaned his elbow on the chrome wheel, as though it were the dial to a bank-vault safe. “There’s more than one party possible at a time. Why should we let these folks-or whatever they are-have all the fun?” He nodded to indicate the gel and its interspersed contents. “World enough and time, sweetheart. Why miss the opportunity?”

“Thanks for the offer.” November could feel her hands beginning to either sweat or bleed. “But I’ve got business to take care of.”

“Bullshit.” The cameraman’s expression darkened, as though he were coming down from some minor chemical rush. Scowling, he picked up a handheld videocam from the platform by his feet; he held it to his eye, pointing the glassy lens toward November. The image of her face, in real time, showed up on the monitor mounted on top of the boom’s bigger camera. “You see?” He lowered the camera from his face, still keeping her in focus with it. He pointed his thumb toward the monitor screen. “You look like somebody who could use a little relaxation. You’re all tense.”

“That’s how I like it.” November had managed to grab hold of some kind of cable socket on the side of the boom platform, giving one hand, at least, a secure purchase. “Now stop connecting around and put me down.”

“All right, bitch.” With one hand, he spun the chrome wheel hard, jerking the boom into a quick horizontal arc. “Your loss.”

November clung to the edge of the boom until it slammed to a stop, harder than necessary. For a dizzying fraction of a second, she had an unnerving perception of the slow ocean below, blurred in her gaze, but with the things-or thing-inside it undoubtedly gazing up at her with inarticulate lust. The boom deposited her on the other end of the catwalk, closer to the ruins of the End Zone Hotel; the narrow pathway bowed toward the gel when she let go of the platform and dropped the few inches down. “Thanks.”

“Whatever.” The cameraman appeared seriously disgruntled; pushing a small black-knobbed lever in front of himself, he angled the boom away, without looking back at her. As though picking up on his disappointment, or expressing its own, the slow ocean roiled beneath the catwalk, its internal temperature taken up a notch from its previous simmer.

The lobby of the burnt hotel was flooded now, the gel extending past the former check-in counter with its steel grille-the open register book floated under the surface membrane like a preserved butterfly-and all the way to the wet stairs at the back. Standing on tiptoe on the swaying catwalk, November managed to reach the sill of one of the second story’s windows. She jumped and scrambled her way in, the front of her jacket scraping across the cindery wood, and landed sprawling in ashes.

“Here you go, pal. You asked for it; you got it.”

The ultimate barfly stepped back, pushing the hotel room door farther open behind herself. She smiled and made a sweeping gesture, half inviting bow and half magician’s display, toward the room’s contents.

McNihil stepped in from the corridor, from the ashes and rubble that filled the core of the End Zone Hotel. He’d followed the barfly here from the other room, the metallic fabric of her dress glittering across the sway of her hips like the sparks of luminous insects, leading him on. Die ewige Weibliche, he’d thought, amused by the literary allusion that had popped inside his head. He doubted if Goethe could have meant anything else but that familiar movement, the kinder incarnation of Tlazoltéotl.

“Thanks,” said McNihil as he walked in front of the barfly. He could feel her behind him, standing in the doorway, watching him with that look of amusement, both tender and contemptuous, in her golden-veiled gaze.

This room had the same dimensions as the other one, with the single small window in the exact same position in the wall near the bed. The essential room, McNihil knew, was replicated throughout the hotel, space after space, distinctions annihilated in this world and the other one. He could have been walking on a treadmill out in the hallway, with the numbered doors going by him on some sort of assembly line, a factory where bad dreams were bolted together.

Same furnishings as well: the narrow bed with its sagging mattress, with the little table and the plastic Philco radio beside it, the chest of drawers with the clouded mirror on top. The fire that had consumed the other rooms seemed to have only penetrated partway into this one; the wallpaper’s scowling cabbage roses, faded to the pink of consumptive lung tissue, could still be deciphered beneath the tapering wipes of smoke damage. The chest of drawers was still standing; McNihil saw the mask of his own face in the angled glass, the peeling silver behind making his image look like some ancient daguerreotype from the first American Civil War. The ashes on the floor were the ones that his own feet had brought in and trampled into the threadbare carpet.

He stopped in the middle of the room and turned to look back at the barfly. “This is the one?”

The ultimate barfly stood leaning against the side of the doorway, in a classic pose, a still from the old black-and-white movies that leaked out of McNihil’s eyes. She had another lit cigarette, for his benefit, held down in one hand, her other arm crossing beneath her low cleavage and holding her elbow. “Of course.” Her mocking smile made the image perfect. A wisp of smoke threaded past her breast. “Why would I lie to you?”

“No reason,” admitted McNihil. “Nobody has to around here, to connect me up.” He turned away from her, looking back toward the bed at the far side of the hotel room.

Lying on the bed was the same sleeping, dreaming girl as before. The cube bunny’s eyelashes dark against her skin, her parted mouth almost a kiss against the thin pillow. The same girl, but different; it didn’t take McNihil long to see that, even in the cloud-obscured light that seeped into the room. Her skin, from the bare curve of her shoulder to the sharper edge of her ankle, was unmarked. No tattoos, permanent or mobile, showed on her body. Her nakedness glowed, softly radiant, like a candle curtained behind transparencies of pink silk.

“She’s lovely, isn’t she?”

McNihil nodded slowly. He reached down and let his fingertips touch the girl, a soft, minimal caress of her shoulder. Don’t wake up, he told her in silence. Keep on dreaming. It would be better that way, if the cube bunny stayed in whatever world she’d found behind her eyelashes. The one outside probably hadn’t been too kind to her.

He glanced over his shoulder at the woman standing in the hotel room’s doorway. The barfly looked older now, not just in comparison to the sleeping girl on the bed, but in some deeper, absolute sense. As though some part of her, which turned the expression on her face weary with understanding, had connected to a carnal wisdom as old as this world, as old as men’s desires.

She’s got it all wrong, thought McNihil. There were limits even to that ancient wisdom. A current like electricity, a pale fraction of the spark that had leapt in the barfly’s kiss, passed from the sleeping girl’s skin and into his fingertips. But that was all; the current didn’t move down his spine, didn’t connect with anything below the base of his stomach. He’d come here-to this room, this bed, this girl, this dreaming-to do a job. And that was all.

“Why this one?”

The barfly shrugged. “Why not?” She gazed past McNihil to the sleeping figure on the bed. “It had to be someone. It could’ve been anyone. Any of them.” McNihil knew what she meant: Any woman here in the Wedge. “When somebody-some man-comes looking for an FPC job, a Full Prince Charles, the total and terminal-it’s not necessarily with some specific woman that he wants it. It’s with women in general, Woman with a capital W.” Her look of wry amusement showed again, as though she were aware of what’d been in McNihil’s head as she’d led him down the hotel corridor to this room. “The eternal feminine-right?”

McNihil nodded again. “I guess so.”

“No guessing about it, pal. You got some major psychological imperatives going on here. Exclusively a male thing; women don’t have to go looking for this, ’cause they’re already carrying it around with them. A guy like this Travelt you’re trying to find, even when his thoughts and needs and everything else-his soul, if you want to call it that-even when he’s inside the head of a prowler body, he’s still looking for what every member of the male species is always looking for. Way deep down inside. He’s just brave enough to come out and say it, to ask for what he really wants. What all of you want, eventually. The complete and total reunion of the male and female principles.”

He wasn’t so sure about that. McNihil had heard the mystical, quasi-Jungian spiel about Full Prince Charles numbers before, all that weird alchemical, revised neo-Platonic line; he’d never been overly impressed by it. Nice place to visit, he’d always thought, but that doesn’t mean I’d want to live there.

Maybe Travelt hadn’t, either. The fact that the former DZ junior exec, who’d left his real and original body lying dead on the floor of his cubapt, had come all this way into the Wedge riding inside a prowler, had made the right connections and had gotten an FPC done on himself-that didn’t mean the guy had been operating out of some deep primal need. Maybe, thought McNihil, he just didn’t have any alternative. He hadn’t been running so much as he’d been chased here. To the best hiding place Travelt could find; the ultimate, really.

McNihil stroked the sleeping girl’s bare shoulder; he’d sat down on the edge of the bed, his feet in the ashes smeared across the hotel room’s carpet. The cube bunny’s face was angled into the pillow, her profile hidden by shadows and the dark hair that fell loosened past the pink shell of her ear. This was what he’d come so far to find.

“You know just how it works, don’t you?” The barfly’s voice came from the doorway. “You’re up-to-speed on what’s involved with one of these?”

He nodded. Even if he’d never seen a Full Prince Charles before, in reality or dreaming or memory, McNihil knew all about them. When he’d headed the Collection Agency’s abortive investigation into the Wedge, there’d been file cabinets and databases full of reports on what the asp-heads might run into there. The report on FPC’s had even had pictures, color photographs that had managed to filter through McNihil’s black-and-white vision.

Even the etymology, where the term Full Prince Charles came from-he was hip to that as well. From that poor bastard, the guy who may or may not have become the king of the land he’d inherited from bloodlines and heraldry charts full of other poor bastards, his predecessors, who’d also never quite figured out the world they lived in-McNihil wasn’t sure of the exact history.

But there had been some details, that he’d read in the Collection Agency’s report on FPC jobs. That some poor bastard other than McNihil, a long time ago and in a kingdom by some other sea, had told his mistress, the royal girlfriend and other woman in the royal marriage, what he’d really wanted. One of the lessons being, Never put it in writing, especially if you were planning on being king someday. Particularly the embarrassing parts. Which was what had been in the prince’s love letters, one of them, at least: his fervently expressed desire to be transformed magically into his girlfriend’s tampon, so that he could be with her forever, constantly in place where he most loved to be. It’d been a joke, McNihil had figured when he read the account in the agency’s report. Ancient history, and maybe an even older joke. The stuff that Wedge lore was made out of, even before there was a Wedge. They probably told this one back in the caves, thought McNihil. The things that the Neanderthals had wanted weren’t any different, though maybe senses of humor had changed over the millennia. Because even if it’d been a joke, the joke of the poor princely bastard who’d gotten tagged with it and a lot of other guys’ joke as well, it was one with a ring of truth to it. What men wanted; palaces and cathedrals were all very well, but the goddess they worshiped was absent from those places, and they knew it. How much better to live inside the goddess herself, absorbed and yet still separate. Or just separate enough to be conscious, to know where you were…

That was the problem, though. Something else that McNihil was all too aware of. One man’s joke was another man’s wish. Joke, metaphor, or vision; it didn’t matter. That was how McNihil had wound up, he knew, with that particular monochrome glamor inside his own eyes. You take things too seriously, he’d told himself before, and it changes the way you see things. And it changes you. Which was what had happened to that poor bastard Travelt: joke to wish to reality. McNihil doubted-and the Collection Agency report hadn’t told him-whether the other one, for whom the FPC was named, had wound up like that; the surgical and neurological technology hadn’t existed back then, for one thing. But now that it did exist, a lot of things were possible. Or enough.

McNihil laid his hand full upon the sleeping girl’s shoulder. He could feel through his palm the motion of her pulse and breath, slow and steady, untroubled. And beyond that, another pulse and breath, a separate creature inside her, cradled and rocked in a different sleep, a different blurry wakening. When McNihil had been outside this world, when he’d gone to meet with Harrisch in the hospital burn ward-with another sleeping girl, or what was left of her, charred pieces drifting in the slow gel behind a transparent barrier-he’d passed by the obstetrics ward on another floor, and had glimpsed through a partially open door as a medical technician had moved the device in his hand over a pregnancy-distended abdomen, bringing up a ghostly living image on the ultrasound screen. That was what it felt like to touch this sleeping girl, and sense the form that lived, undeliverable and content, in her soft womb.

That was what the photographs in the agency report had shown. Somebody must’ve put them in there, just to weird out anyone who read those pages. Like a skinned rabbit, thought McNihil, remembering the flat images. Skin taken off with a butcher’s most delicate knife, instead of by fire. Skinned and reduced, taken down to essentials, the other parts thrown away, trimmed into the scrap bin under the sink. What wasn’t needed could be eliminated; someone having a Full Prince Charles number done wouldn’t need his (or even possibly her) arms and legs, and a good bit of the torso and the rest as well, not where he (or she) was going.

A lot of the same techniques were used in the Collection Agency’s back rooms, when the techs were slicing down some would-be intellectual-property thief to appropriate trophy size. There wasn’t much of that punk pirate kid in the cable looped into a coil in McNihil’s jacket pocket. Same way with an FPC, though more than straight neural and cortical tissue could be retained; there was usually enough reduced bone and organ mass, according to the agency report he’d read, to make up a fetuslike entity, tucked and folded into a sleek, defenseless shape, tapered for easy insertion and capable of deriving sustenance not through an umbilicus but through its permeable skin casing. Even a little face, wizened as an old man’s or an infant’s, blind sight hidden behind fragile eyelids laced with red veins.

“He’s in there.” McNihil spoke aloud; he could see now what had been hidden from him before, by the room’s shadows and his own focusing upon the sleeping girl’s face. “I can feel him.” He’d laid his palm gently upon the girl’s rounded abdomen; nothing trembled there but the girl’s own respiration, but he still was sure what he’d said was true. A long time ago, in that other world, he’d looked into Travelt’s dead eyes, the black holes in the human body left behind. A little connection had been made; McNihil had seen something down there, in those empty eyes gazing up at the cubapt ceiling, and he’d taken it with him, along with the data-coded crucifax he’d pocketed. Just enough to make a positive ID, as though he’d known from the beginning that he was going to wind up taking on this job. He’d been this close to the corpse, and now he was just as close to the living man. “Or what,” he murmured, “is left of him…”

“What was that?” The untouched cigarette was half burnt away in the barfly’s hand. From the doorway, she gazed at McNihil and the sleeping girl. “I didn’t catch what you said.”

“Nothing important.” He lifted his hand from the girl’s abdomen. Without waking her, though he doubted if anything could have. Dreaming was that strong in this world. McNihil held his hand less than an inch away from the girl’s body, as though its warmth were something he could draw into his own. “I was just thinking…”

“About what?”

“The job.” He inhaled deeply, smelling the ashy confines of the room, the burnt reaches in the hallway beyond the woman watching him. “That I came here to do.” Bit by bit, he assembled inside himself the remnants of his strength. There wasn’t much left; he felt as though he’d walked all the way here, across the empty and the bone-filled streets. Fortunately, he was almost there, to the finish line. There was light at the end of the tunnel, even for somebody with eyes like his.

McNihil turned away from the sleeping girl. He reached over to the little bedside table and switched on the ancient radio. It didn’t surprise him when the round dial lit up, despite the hotel’s wiring having been stripped out and consumed in the fire; the radio was obviously connected to some other, deeper power source. The speaker behind the dial emitted the coruscating atonal scythes of the long-dead Stan Kenton band working through the charts of Graettinger’s City of Glass. McNihil wouldn’t have minded listening to that for a while, but he had work to do. He swiveled the radio around on the bedside table, reached into the open back, and pulled free a couple of wires. The tubes inside the radio stayed lit, but the music died. That was all right; he really just needed a hookup to the speaker.

The barfly watched his preparations with curiosity. “What’re you doing?”

“Just getting things ready.” McNihil dug his hand into his jacket pocket. “To do my job. I came here to find out what happened to Travelt. I need to know what he was running away from. So I’m going to have to talk to him.”

“You’re kidding.” The cigarette dropped from the barfly’s fingers as she tilted her head back to laugh. “That’s great. I can’t believe that.” With the back of her manicured hand, she wiped a tear from one eye. On the floor, the cigarette stub continued to burn, a bright orange spark among the cinders. “You idiot. You can’t talk to him-he’s gone FPC. He’s inside, where you can’t reach him.” The cigarette died, emitting a last thread of silvery gray smoke, rising slowly in the hotel room’s enclosed air. “What’re you going to do?” She pointed to the sleeping girl. “Induce delivery? Have her give birth to him? Take out your jackknife and perform a cesarean?” She shook her head. “The principle of What goes in must come out-it doesn’t apply here. Travelt is no longer a separate organism. That’s a given of a Full Prince Charles number. His physiology is totally dependent upon the host… that’s her, you know. Like a mother and an unborn infant, maybe about the end of the second trimester in size, but a lot more delicate in terms of survival.”

With the thumbnail of his other hand, McNihil scraped the decayed insulation from the tips of the radio’s wires. “I’ve figured out what I’m going to do. You don’t have to worry about it.”

“You’ve figured it out, huh? I don’t think you got what I’m talking about. Even if you’ve got some great idea, God knows what, of yanking what’s left of Travelt and his prowler out of her, it’s not going to help you any. It’ll kill him. Her too, probably.” The barfly’s voice became tighter and more severe; she had pushed herself away from the side of the doorway. “Do you understand that? If you want to add murder to your job résumé, that’s the way to do 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

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.”

The mirror mounted on the chest was just clear enough to reflect McNihil’s image back at him. The asp-heads on either side of the glass peered at each other, bending slightly forward, eyes narrowing to slits. Suddenly, McNihil tilted his head back and laughed, hard enough to make the mirror shiver.

“Those sonsabitches…” He wiped his mouth, smearing the blood across his chin and fingers. “That’s really good. They really had me going there…”

November braced herself, keeping McNihil upright. “Who? I don’t know what you’re-”

“It’s what you get for going to a Snake Medicine™ clinic. You wind up getting connected, one way or another.” McNihil pulled himself up straight, maintaining his own balance for a moment. “That sneaky little Adder clome-he was in on it, along with everybody else on that side.”

“That side of what?”

“Never mind.” McNihil shook his head. “It’s a Wedge thing. You don’t need to understand.”

November figured she understood already. I was born knowing. If not the specific details, then the general picture.

“The anesthesia’s worn off,” said McNihil. With one hand, he poked himself in the side of his face, fingernail digging in to leave a little bloodless crescent-moon mark. He winced-unnecessarily-at the self-inflicted pain. “That I got shot up with at the clinic.”

“I don’t see any marks.” November still had his arm slung around her shoulders. “Except what you’re doing to yourself.”

“That’s the way it always is.” The eyes in McNihil’s face had cranked open another couple of increments, though the gaze inside them didn’t look much less muddled. “You remember stuff happening-they make you remember-and that’s supposed to be enough.” He looked over at November close to him, bringing her into focus. His expression turned puzzled, as though he were trying to remember who she was. “Why’d you come here?”

“I’m beginning to wonder,” said November sourly. The guy was getting on her nerves again, the way he had before, when she’d had any contact with him at all. Her skin might’ve been replaced at the hospital burn ward, but nothing had been done to her own memories, the ones that were coming back to her, like the furnishings of the ruined hotel. It didn’t make any difference that the skin she wore was McNihil’s money transubstantiated-it was still too thin to keep her from feeling annoyed. “Why I bothered. I was told there was some bad shit that was about to happen to you. That you didn’t even know what kind of trouble you were in-”

“Maybe.” McNihil rubbed his thumb across his bloodied fingertips. “But I found out soon enough.”

“I must’ve thought I owed you one.” She watched him smear the blood off onto the front of his shirt. “You bought this much help from me.”

“Who told you I was in trouble? Was it Harrisch?”

She nodded. “At the hospital-he came by to brag, among other things.”

“Yeah, well, he’d know, all right.” McNihil gave his head a shake, as though trying to dislodge the last remnants of sleep. “Since most of this particular bad shit comes from him.” He almost had to admire how thoroughly the DZ exec had made himself the latest incarnation of a long line of corporate evil-mongers. There’ll be others after him, thought McNihil. “Though this much bad shit-Harrisch must have problems keeping track of it sometimes.”

“Not when I talked to him.” November slid out from beneath McNihil’s arm. The guy still looked wobbly, but at least he didn’t appear to need help standing up anymore. “Harrisch seemed pretty on top of his affairs. At least to hear him tell it.”

“How long ago was that?”

November shrugged. “Maybe… about twelve hours or so ago.” She’d lost track; the only way she could calculate it was by figuring how long the journey up to this section of the Gloss might’ve taken. “Something like that.”

“Then he should be showing up pretty soon.” Using the sleeve of his jacket, McNihil wiped the rest of the blood from his chin and the side of his mouth. He turned away and spat a red wad out into the rubble on the floor. “Count on it.”

She believed it as well, but wanted to hear how McNihil could be so sure. “How do you know?”

“Because,” said McNihil simply, “the job’s done. That I came here to take care of for Harrisch. It’s all nailed down for him, but he’ll still want to hear all about it. That’s how his mind works. He wants to look straight into my eyes and have me tell him. That’s his kind of trophy. Bragging rights. He can’t just have what he wants; everybody’s gotta know about it, too.”

That was also true, November figured; it was probably part of the reason that Harrisch had come by the hospital and bent her ears about what he was planning on doing. Something wasn’t quite right about the explanation, though.

“Wait a minute.” November set her hands on her hips. “How would Harrisch know that you succeeded? The job he wanted you to do was to find out what happened to that Travelt person-the whole business with his prowler and where it disappeared to.” She studied the figure in front of her more closely. “Even if you did find Travelt’s prowler-how would Harrisch know that?” November’s gaze swept around the hotel room. “Is this place wired or something? Hidden watchcams?” She didn’t see any signs of it, any telltale lenses glinting among the cinders. “Or did Harrisch put some kind of tracking device on you, a bug so he’d know what you were doing?”

“No bug.” McNihil smiled and shook his head. “Harrisch would know better than to try and hook me up with something like that. Asp-heads don’t like being followed when they’re going about their work; cramps our style. We’ve got ways of finding those little devices and getting rid of them. All you gotta do is flush ’em down the toilet and then all the people on the other end are listening to is the gas bubbles popping down in the sewer.”

“Then what?”

“You’re underestimating our mutual friend Harrisch.” McNihil still looked weary and beat-up, but he managed to keep the smile from completely fading away, as though it were some ragged medal he’d won on the battlefield. “There’s things you don’t know about this little job of his. If you had known, you wouldn’t have wanted it so badly, no matter what it payed. If Harrisch had told you, he wouldn’t have had his backup system ready, in case he wasn’t able to push me into taking it on.”

“So?” November was unimpressed. “They never tell you everything about the job. Nobody does. They always want to connect more out of you than what they pay you for.”

“This one,” said McNihil, “would’ve connected you right into the ground.”

“Really?” That pissed her off. Even with this delicate new skin of hers-I could kick your ass, she thought. “And you pulled it off, I suppose, because you’re so much connecting tougher than I am.”

“No…” The last of the smile faded as McNihil shook his head. “It nailed me into the ground, too. Even before I started the job.”

She wondered what the hell that was supposed to mean. But she didn’t get a chance to ask him. A shudder ran through the End Zone Hotel, as though the remnants of its structure were giving way at last. Ash and ancient dust sifted down from the ceiling; November could hear, out in the hallway beyond the room, a few of the beams pulling free and crashing in the darkness.

“What’s going on?” November pushed past the asp-head and looked out the single window. “Shit-” Past the jagged fragments of glass in the frame, she could see what was going on down below at street level. The gelatinous sea, which had appeared so relatively peaceful when she had traversed the catwalks over it, had changed since she had climbed up into the building’s ruins and found McNihil.

Now the slow ocean looked storm-tossed, with swells rising beneath the transparent surface membrane, high enough to rip the catwalk sections loose from each other; the sections of broken pathway tumbled down the gel’s nearly vertical flanks like the timbers of a capsized ship. Around the sea’s perimeter, just visible beyond the farthest buildings, the booms of the networks’ video equipment tilted upward, the cameramen on the platforms furiously working the position controls to stay out of the swells’ mounting reach. Scattered throughout the gel, the derricks between the buildings swayed with each ponderous roll of the surrounding element, the camera operators riding out the dizzying, nausea-producing motions at their perches; they desperately clutched their vid equipment, both for safety and to swing the lenses down toward the furious action below.

“Check it out.” Standing behind her, McNihil pointed toward the scene surrounding the hotel. “That’s what’s causing it all.”

It took a moment for November to see what he was talking about. A wave larger than all the others had slammed in slow motion against the building; a section of the hotel’s brick facing, charred and weakened by the long-ago fire, sheared away from the structure and crashed across the sea’s membrane. The impact vibrating through the hotel’s fragile structure threw November against the wall beside the window; her knuckles snapped out a splinter of smoke-darkened glass as she grabbed the frame for balance.

She held on and saw what McNihil had meant. The surface of the gel was being peppered with fiery bits of metal, white-hot shrapnel raining down from the skies above. The pieces hit the gel’s surface like incendiary bullets, sending sharper ripples across the membrane from the partially melted impact scars. Underneath, the exposed, intertwined nervous systems of the poly-orgynism visibly responded, overloaded synapses sparking and neurons writhing in excitement both painful and pleasurable. The swarms of free-swimming tattoos darted about, as though the shadows of the heated metal bits had struck and passed through the membrane, taking on a new life of their own.

November leaned out the window, turning her head to see where the shrapnel was coming from. A jagged bit, trailing fire, tumbled within inches, its momentary heat perceptible against her face. Up above the urban zone’s buildings, and beneath the churning, dark-bellied clouds mirroring the sea below, the air was filled with the darting forms of Noh-flies. November heard now their keening, nasally whining shrieks; their demon faces, like a European’s nightmare remembrance of a bad night at the Peking Opera, flashed across her vision. “Jeez…” The sight appalled her. “I’ve never seen so many of them at once…”

“That’s because you’ve never seen them down this low before.” Standing behind her, McNihil sounded calm enough. “Usually, they make their attacks higher up in the atmosphere. They must’ve been tracking a low-flying jet, something with a state-of-the-art margin control system, so it can zip among the buildings and do all the necessary evasive maneuvers.”

“Plus-it’s got drones.” November spotted the other shapes, bigger and slower than the Noh-flies. “Decoys.” Most of the hot metal fragments were coming from those, as the little terrors screamed and swarmed over them. As she watched, a couple of the drones came apart under the aerial siege, engines and ragged wing sections arcing toward the ground. “Those must cost.”

“Yeah, they don’t come cheap. So you know it’s a high-level exec appearance. Just the kind that Harrisch likes to make. He should be showing up any second, now that his flying defense systems have cleared a path for him.”

There wasn’t time to watch for the approach of any DynaZauber corporate jet. The rain of hot metal had whipped the gelatinous sea around the bases of the buildings to a greater frenzy. November was thrown backward from the window, toppling against McNihil, as another swell hit the End Zone Hotel, the wave’s bone- and nerve-filled mass coming several stories up the side of the charred structure. The exterior wall collapsed completely, taking the window frame and a good portion of the hotel room with it. McNihil pulled her back from the tilting precipice that had suddenly appeared beneath her feet, as the dresser toppled over onto the buckling floor with a crash of glass and splintering wood. The bed slammed against November’s legs as it came sliding away from the farther wall, winding up dangling halfway out the opened face of the building.

“Come on-” McNihil shoved past her and grabbed the thick cable dangling from the back of the silent radio. With his thumbnail, he split the metallic sheath near the exposed brass tip, then ripped the cable further open. With his crooked forefinger, McNihil dug out what looked like a set of miniature batteries and other small electronic components. A set of LED’s on the cable’s surface blinked and died as McNihil snapped the hard, metallic bits away from something wetter and softer inside. “The guy earned a reprieve,” said McNihil in response to November’s puzzled glance. He gave no further explanation, but threw the dead cable across the bed’s upturned edge, just before it toppled and fell out the window. The dingy mattress was pelted with the hot shrapnel rain as it turned end over end, sheets fluttering and catching fire. McNihil pushed November toward the door. “Time to move.”

Outside the hotel room, the corridor whiplashed around them, the floor rolling in exact echo of the next wave that hit the building; the numbered doors swung open or ripped free of their hinges as the blackened walls came apart like a cheap film set being struck, shooting over. McNihil’s shoulder broke through water-soaked plaster as he was thrown against the baseboards; a distorting web of burnt timbers and beams opened around him. November grabbed his forearm and yanked him to his feet. Keeping her head down against the clouds of dust and ash, she shoved him toward the unseen stairway.

TWENTY-THREE

There they are.”

The pilot, one of the best in the DynaZauber transport pool, nodded toward the cockpit’s windshield. He took one hand from the controls and pointed.

Harrisch followed the direction of the gesture, leaning forward from the seat behind the pilot’s. The interior of the jet was a cylindrical coffin, cramped and unluxurious; the craft was built for speed and low detectability, not comfort. “I don’t see anybody…”

“Right there.” The pilot pointed again, indicating the roof of the burnt-out End Zone Hotel. “By the stairwell exit.” Large sections of the roof were gone, caved downward into the building’s ruined floors below; the remaining areas were being pelted with new fire, debris from the jet’s accompanying drones as they were shredded by the Noh-flies. “They just came up.”

Coming out of a banking turn, the jet avoided an ugly-faced contingent of the antiaircraft devices. Harrisch looked through the side of the cockpit at the tilting urban scene, this time spotting the two human figures on the hotel’s roof. They hung back in the small sloping structure with the sprung door, peering out at the bits of fiery metal coming from the sky, as though waiting for the storm to pass.

That’s a relief, thought Harrisch. He would’ve hated to have come all this way, and under such hazardous conditions, for nothing. To get here and find that McNihil hadn’t made it all the way through, finished his job and survived, would’ve been somewhat depressing. Not that it would’ve changed anything; McNihil had been connected as soon as he’d taken the job, and if he’d died in the performance of it, the results would have been the same for DynaZauber. Because that’s the way we like it-Harrisch didn’t have to remind himself of that. He’d constructed the operation, the whole TOAW project, that way. Other people had to deal with win-or-lose situations; he’d made sure that his own contained no possibilities other than winning.

“So you can put me down there?” Harrisch nodded to indicate the rooftop, now swung back toward the front of the jet. “There’s enough room?”

“Not a problem.” The pilot pushed the jet’s rudder forward. “I can do a vertical drop, and then hover long enough for you to get out. As long as I don’t actually touch down, it should be okay.” The ruins of the End Zone Hotel were fast approaching. “But I won’t be able to hang around. These little connectors-” He meant the Noh-flies swarming in the air around them. “They’ve already latched on to me. I’ll have to swing out and pick up another fleet of drones. Just hit my pager number when you’re ready, and I’ll be back for you.”

The wash from the jet’s flow-directed nozzles was enough to bend the roof of the hotel ruins; Harrisch felt the structure flexing upward again as the jet ascended from where it’d deposited him. Beneath his feet, the burnt-out building continued to shift even after the corporate jet moved off horizontally, dragging the remaining drones and the shrieking Noh-flies along with it. The hotel trembled as though from a giant hammer, the impact stretching through a few seconds. It’s the sea, realized Harrisch. For a disoriented moment, he’d thought he’d missed something when he’d been up in the jet, that the actual Pacific had somehow gone tsunami, a tidal wave thundering this far inland and inundating the streets. Then he’d remembered the poly-orgynism that had been established in the zone; he’d seen the network ratings on the DynaZauber morning balance sheet, the viewer figures and advertising revenues. That was as much of the creation as he was interested in.

Another wave hit, almost knocking Harrisch from his feet on the hotel roof, smelling of tar heated up by the bits of molten metal strewn around. If the mess of gel and interconnected human tissue down below was getting agitated-and the last wave had been bigger than the first one he’d felt-he supposed that would be good for the corporation’s numbers. Just what the Gloss-wide audience liked. Maybe not so good for me, thought Harrisch. Not at the moment. He was starting to entertain some misgivings about having gotten out of the jet.

“Come on-ride it out!” A voice called to him from across the rooftop. “Don’t be such a pussy.”

He looked over and saw McNihil. The asp-head had stepped out from the small stairwall enclosure; the former burn victim and fast-forward November stood behind him. She had to keep one hand on the open doorway to keep from being knocked over by the increasingly violent shock waves running through the structure. McNihil, on the other hand, stood with his arms folded across his chest, legs slightly spread as though bracing himself like a sailor on a storm-tossed ship.

“Well… good to see you.” Through sheer force of will, Harrisch swallowed down his own nausea and apprehension. “Glad you made it.”

“You didn’t have to worry about me.” The dark clouds overhead let through just enough light to reveal the angles of McNihil’s face. His real one-if there had been a mask at one time, it was gone now. “You should spend your time worrying about your own ass.”

The self-assured tone in McNihil’s voice had the opposite effect on Harrisch. Something’s up, he thought. What could’ve gone wrong? By now, the asp-head should’ve known just how badly he’d been connected over-in degree, if not in detail. But McNihil was acting like he was completely in charge of the situation; he even looked bigger, as though the skies’ dramatic backdrop were some special-effects number out of the movies, magnifying McNihil’s shadowed outline.

“Big talk.” Harrisch felt his own pulse revving up, pushed by fear and adrenaline. “You don’t-” A section of the rooftop, inches from his feet, split open, the ancient tar paper ripping apart to show the blackened planks and beams underneath. Harrisch managed to keep back from the gaping hole, holding his arms out for balance. “You don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

“The job,” said McNihil flatly. “The job’s done.” He didn’t even sway as another deep tremor ran across the rooftop. “Now it’s payday.”

Harrisch heard other voices, shouting in the distance. He realized that it was the cameramen and all the other network technicians, down on the equipment platforms at street level. They were shouting to each other over the basso groans of the gel and its thunderous impacts against the mired buildings. Harrisch couldn’t make out their words, but he knew what was happening: they were abandoning their posts, leaving the toppling camera derricks and booms, scrambling across the buckling catwalks to safety at the sea’s bounded perimeter.

From the corner of his eye, he saw a section of the roof’s raised edge crumble away, the bricks and mortar sliding guillotinelike down the hotel’s shattered front. He looked back toward McNihil, who’d taken a few steps away from the stairwell enclosure, out into the center of the rooftop.

“We pay off on performance,” said Harrisch, converting some of the adrenaline inside himself to courage. “Did you find Travelt?”

“Oh, I found him, all right.” McNihil’s voice turned harder. “Whether you wanted me to or not.”

“What… what’re you talking about?” Another wave hit the building, sending Harrisch sprawling onto his hands and knees. He looked up to see McNihil walking forward, stepping across the open patches of roof, until the asp-head loomed right in front of him.

“It didn’t matter,” said McNihil, voice grating like stone on stone. “Whether I found the prowler that still had Travelt inside it. Because either way… you got what you wanted.”

“You’re crazy.” But he knew the asp-head was fearsomely sane. Inside himself, Harrisch felt the molecules of adrenaline breaking into some other, frightened chemical, oozing out of his pores and draining into his bladder. Time to go, the still-thinking portion of his brain announced to the rest. “Maybe we should talk about this later.” Much later. “I’ll make an appointment for you.” Harrisch let his words go rattling on, unhooked from any thought processes, hoping that McNihil would be sufficiently distracted. He reached inside his coat and started punching a familiar number into his tight-cell phone. “You can tell me all about it-”

“Not a good idea.” McNihil leaned down, his hand striking and grabbing Harrisch’s wrist. “You’re pissing me off.” Without straining, McNihil pulled the captured hand toward himself, the phone loosening in Harrisch’s grasp. McNihil took the phone, letting Harrisch fall back onto the rooftop’s rolling surface. “Looks like something on the DZ switchboard.” McNihil looked at the digits on the device’s LCD readout, then back down at Harrisch. “Calling for a ride home?”

Something in the look in the other’s eyes terrified Harrisch; his spinal column contracted like a spring-driven mechanical device. It was only a momentary relief when McNihil turned and slung the phone in an underhand pitch, back to November. She caught it in both hands.

“Hang on to that,” instructed McNihil. “Don’t hit the connect button just yet.”

November had followed McNihil’s example, managing to let go of the stairwell enclosure’s support. Standing near the center of the rooftop, surrounded by the gaping holes that had already been torn in the structure, she rode out the building’s shuddering motions, knees slightly bent for shock absorbers. “All right-” She’d glanced at the phone before tucking it inside her jacket. “You need help with him?”

This has all gone wrong, thought Harrisch, somewhat dazed. Control of the situation had slipped out of his grasp, or had been snatched away as easily as the tight-cell phone. I wasn’t expecting this. The notion of having a final confrontation, all by himself here with McNihil, was seeming less of a good idea by the second. Obvious now, but he still wasn’t sure how it’d come apart like this. There had only been, at best, a fifty-fifty chance that McNihil would still be alive now, let alone in any kind of functioning condition; Harrisch had actually entertained the notion that he might have to bring along some kind of medical crew, a first-aid team to scrape up whatever might’ve been left of the asp-head, inject him with whatever cardiac and cerebral stimulators were necessary to bring him to even partial consciousness. But that would’ve brought on the scene more potential witnesses than Harrisch would’ve been prepared to deal with; he’d been glad that it’d worked out that the DZ corporate pilot had had to split for the time being, leaving him here on his own. It was one thing to have somebody like that November person around as a witness; she could be eliminated if she somehow became trouble afterward. But if he’d had to take out people on the DynaZauber payroll, like pilots and med techs, the corporation’s human-resources department would’ve given him more grief than it would’ve been worth.

“Naw-” McNihil shook his head as he called over his shoulder to November. “But thanks for asking.” He turned back to Harrisch at his feet, reached down, and pulled the DZ exec upright. “Me and this guy go back a ways. We know how much-how far-we can trust each other.”

“You’re not scaring me-”

November watched as Harrisch snarled at the asp-head. McNihil’s fist at his collar choked some fragment of determination through the exec’s throat. She didn’t figure that what he’d said was true, but it looked as if Harrisch was at least determined not to let McNihil walk over him without a show of struggle.

“You don’t-” Harrisch gasped for breath. “You don’t even know-”

“Know what?” McNihil lifted the exec up onto tiptoe, then back down a couple of inches, relaxing the pressure against Harrisch’s windpipe. “What is it you think I don’t know? Because by now, believe me, I know a lot of things.”

“You idiot.” Chin thrust back by the asp-head’s knuckles, Harrisch still managed to get a sneer up and running on his own face. “You don’t know just how badly you’ve been connected over. By me. You were connected even before you took the job.”

“What’s he talking about?” November came up beside McNihil, maneuvering her way across the bucking rooftop. The moans and shuddering low-octave noises from the street level grew in volume and intensity, like a real ocean scudding into white-topped waves, as she peered at Harrisch. “He told me the same stuff, about you and this job, back at the hospital.”

“It’s TOAW.” McNihil didn’t look over at her as he spelled out the acronym. “That’s what it’s been all along. That’s what the job was about all along.” He let go of Harrisch, shoving him a step backward. “His big secret, that he didn’t think I’d be able to figure out.”

“What if you did?” Rubbing his bruised throat, Harrisch glared venomously at McNihil. “Even if you did find out, there’s nothing you can do about it. Not now.” A wild sense of triumph seemed to surge up inside Harrisch’s chest. “It’s too late. And you made it happen that way, just the way I wanted it to. Just by your being here-that was all you had to do.”

“‘TOAW’?” That puzzled November. “What’s that supposed to be?”

“His big secret,” said McNihil disgustedly. “And his little joke. It’s the kind of thing that these high-level corporate minds think is funny. It’s connecting hilarious, all right.” He nodded toward Harrisch. “You want to tell her what it stands for? Or should I?”

“Be my guest.” Harrisch left his own hand at his throat. “Why should I care?”

“It’s what came after DynaZauber’s TIAC project,” said McNihil. “You know that one?”

November nodded. “Heard something about it.”

“They got this fixation at DZ. Schoolyard humor.” McNihil shook his head. “TIAC stood for ‘turd in a can.’ It was DZ’s notion-at least back then-of their ultimate consumer strategy. A general principle, to just make sure that the customers get the least amount of goods or services for their money. Max out the packaging and you can forget about the actual contents. But it wasn’t enough.” He’d glanced over at November beside him, then turned his gaze back to Harrisch. “Was it? There’s always room for improvement; their kind of ‘improvement,’ at any rate. Thus, we go from TIAC to TOAW. The T stands for the same thing-you guys down at DZ must’ve thought all that was hilarious, huh?”

Harrisch shrugged. “Anything that gets the point across is good communication. Short and sweet.”

“Short, maybe; sweet, I’m not so sure about. Since the whole thing stands for ‘turd on a wire.’” McNihil gave a tilt of the head toward November. “Maybe a little poetic reference there as well; these aren’t totally uncultured people, you know-”

Suddenly, the whole building seemed to turn onto a pitched angle. Catching herself against the asp-head’s shoulder, November saw Harrisch being thrown onto one side, sliding across the roof’s crumbling sheets of tar paper; the exec managed to dig his fingers in, stopping himself just short of one of the broken gaps, as the echoes of the wave that had slapped the building rumbled away.

“Maybe,” said November, “we should talk about all this at some other time. And place.”

“Call the jet-” Harrisch pushed himself into a sitting position at the gap’s edge. “You’ve got the phone. The number’s already punched in, just do it-” He sounded as though he was verging on hysteria. “This thing’s going to go any minute-”

“Oh, I think we’ve got time.” McNihil pushed November away from himself. “There’s always time for the important things. And this won’t take long, anyway. It’s really pretty simple.”

“We’ll all be dead before you finish talking.”

“Maybe.” McNihil reached inside his jacket and pulled out a fistful of weighty black metal. “But let’s see if I can hold your attention, anyway.” He aimed the tannhäuser at Harrisch’s forehead.

“You are nuts.” Harrisch gaped at the weapon extended toward him. “You really are.”

“No…” McNihil shook his head. “Maybe just overly given to classicism. This is the way my old friend Turbiner would’ve done it in one of his books. Having long conversations at gunpoint is such a perfect noir thing.”

“You connecting idiot-”

McNihil ignored his last comment. “The good folks at DynaZauber had a great idea, you see.” The asp-head spoke calmly, despite the sounds coming up from the street level and the ongoing collapse of the End Zone Hotel. “It’s not enough-it doesn’t achieve ultimate profits-to sell people shit in a shiny can. Metaphorically speaking; shit being all those products that get sold in the cheap-’n’-nastiverse. Because even shit costs something to produce, and the can-the advertising and all the rest of the pretty package-that doesn’t come free. If DynaZauber’s going to achieve the perfect ratio between price and product-which, of course, is one hundred percent to nothing-they needed to come up with something even more of a scam-job than their previous TIAC program.”

“Hey.” That seemed to piss Harrisch off, enough to cut through the panic enveloping him. Smart-ass sonuvabitch, he thought. “It’s a competitive business environment we live in, pal. You can’t stay still and just hope to survive.”

“Survival’s another issue,” said McNihil sourly. “We’ll get to that.” McNihil glanced over at November. “So when our friend here, and the others like him at DynaZauber, put together the next level, when they created TOAW, they went to the best business model they could think of. Which, of course, was pushing addictive drugs, licit and illicit.”

“How’s that an improvement?” November frowned. “For them, I mean. Drugs cost, just like any other consumer product. Believe me, I’d know.” For the moment, she let her earlier concern, about the building collapsing underneath them, fade to the background. “And not just for the end user,” she said. “The manufacturer and the distributor have to shell out something. You never get down to absolute zero.”

“You do, if you’re DynaZauber. And you’ve got smart people like this one running the show.” McNihil gestured toward the exec still sitting on the rooftop. “Or at least that’s what you can shoot for. A lot of the research that went into the TOAW project goes back to before the turn of the century. DynaZauber bought it out and has been working on it for years.”

“If we hadn’t,” said Harrisch stiffly, “one of our competitors would’ve.”

“What research?” November’s impatience manifested itself. “What’re you talking about?”

“I can just about cite you chapter and verse.” Legs braced against the hotel’s motion, McNihil looked down at Harrisch. “The mesolimbic dopamine system, right? That’s where the action is. That’s where TOAW gets rolling, isn’t it?”

Harrisch stared in amazement at McNihil. “Where did you…”

“It’s all connected,” continued McNihil. “From the specialized structures in the human orbital frontal cortex, up near the top, to the amygdala, that little almond-shaped bit in the center. And further, to the nucleus accumbens-that’s one so small, it doesn’t even show up in positron-emission tomography scans, does it?”

“No…” The words produced a deep fascination in Harrisch. “That’s what the old researchers used a long time ago. But we’ve got better methods now…”

“I bet you do.” McNihil gave a disgusted shake of the head. “Who says mankind doesn’t progress? Every day brings us whole new methods of connecting people over.”

“Wait a minute,” said November. “What’s all this brain stuff got to do with anything?”

“And the ventral tegmental area…” Harrisch spoke with a woozy dreaminess. “Don’t forget that. That’s the most important part…”

“He’s right about that,” McNihil said to her. “This is all deep-level addiction research. Like I said, it goes back a long way before DZ ever got hold of it. But those silly-ass scientists back then, they didn’t know what they had. They thought they might find some deep biochemical cure for addiction. And where’s the money in that? You want to go for the long-term profits, the ultimate merchandise-the turd on the wire-you want to see about enhancing addiction. Making it perfect, a thing in itself, completely separate from any substance, any production or distribution cost.”

Just from hearing the asp-head talk about it, a radiant joy seemed to burst inside Harrisch’s heart; his face suffused with sudden rapture. “And that’s what we did. We found it. The final product.” The waves of the gelatinous sex-ocean below sang along, a heavenly chorus fallen out of the skies. “All profit and no cost, not to us, at any rate. It doesn’t get any better than that.”

“They found the neural engine,” said McNihil. His voice sounded flat and emotionless. “That drives addiction. That chemicals-pharmaceuticals, white powders, whatever-are just crude hammers to evoke. Like banging on the rear bumper of a car with a fifty-pound sledge, to get it to move. How much more efficient, when you think about it, to find the key to the car’s ignition-the key to the brain-and get in and switch it on, and just drive it down the highway until the wheels fall off. Or until the money’s all gone.”

“The wire.” Harrisch appeared to be musing from blissful memory. “That’s the axon from the ventral tegmental area neuron to the nucleus accumbens neuron. A wire or a highway-it’s all the same. A little passage for information, billions of little passageways. Stuffed with neuro-filaments like pavement, the dopamine path. Which can be made wider or narrower-if you know how. That’s really where the action is; that’s the ultimate valve of commerce. You get inside people’s heads, squeeze those axons down or shut them off completely, a state of absolute dopamine deprivation…” A shudder ran through Harrisch’s frame, the effects of his rhapsody as strong as the forces battering the End Zone Hotel. “Then you’ve got ’em. That’s when you’ve got your customers right where you want them. And no production or distribution costs at all. You’re right-it’s perfect.”

“That’s what the DZ labs found. What they’d been looking for.” McNihil turned his face toward November. “The way to separate the dopamine flow down the axons from any physical source. A technology of regulation; the hand on the valve, the key in the ignition. So that all DynaZauber would have to do would be send out the right signals, on whatever wavelength they chose, and the customers would respond. Turn the valve one way-send the shutoff signal-and the axons between the ventral tegmental area and the nucleus accumbens start to narrow, constrict the dopamine flow from one neuron to the next, even close down completely. The result being the classic symptoms of drug-addicted systemic collapse, the crash of the individual neurosystem below normal operating levels. And the resultant urge, the overwhelming drive to reestablish homeostasis, to pay any price just to feel back to normal again.”

November gave a slow nod; enlightenment was beginning to come. “Been there,” she said. “Done that.” Threw up on my shoes-

“Everybody has. It’s the basic algebra of need.” With his thumb, McNihil pointed to Harrisch. “But what he and his bunch found was a way of reducing their side of the equation-what they’d have to supply-down to zero, and still having their customers’ numbers crunch out the same. They tried it before, with the whole push to get people on the telecommunications wire, have them value bits of information as much or more than the atoms of the real world, have them pay to be mesmerized by the pretty colored lights on their computer screens. That would’ve taken the suppliers’ costs down to zero as well. Only that equation didn’t work out; eventually, the boredom factor sets in with the customers, and their interest in the colored lights drifts down to zero as well. What DynaZauber finally put together was TOAW, the perfect equation.”

“You have to admit-it’s a cool thing.” Harrisch drew his legs up, resting his folded arms on his knees. Watching him, November figured that back at the boardroom, and in the DZ executive lunchroom, he and the rest of his bunch must’ve been fascinated by discussing the philosophical fine points of this TOAW project. “It’s really the refutation through economics of established physics principles. The laws of thermodynamics, all that stuff, they no longer apply. We’ve transcended reality-we’ve found a way of generating something from nothing. TOAW is not just a new stage in human evolution, it’s a transformation of the universe itself. It’s what the wired-up telecommunication theorists were trying to achieve, but could never pull off. Well, we did it.” Harrisch raised his chin defiantly. “And proud of it.”

“I don’t get it,” said November. “How’s it supposed to work?”

“It’s a replicating system.” McNihil continued his flat recitation of the facts. “Operates on basic viral-contagion lines. Plus some more brain-research material that DynaZauber bought up. More stuff before the turn of the century: the way people think can produce actual physiological changes in the structures of the brain. In this case, one of them is the orbital frontal cortex.” McNihil tapped the side of his head with a finger. “It’s right over the rear of the eye socket; it basically functions as the error-detection circuit for the rest of the brain. I already knew about it, because it’s part of what was changed inside my own head, so the way I wanted to see the world wouldn’t get automatically rejected by the rest of my mental processes. But what TOAW does is hook that up to things way inside the human brain, the caudate nucleus and the cingulate gyrus structures. Those are a couple of your basic fear and anxiety circuits. TOAW sets up a feedback loop among those brain structures, which gets stronger every time the brain takes in and processes information.”

“Until it’s unbreakable.” Listening to the asp-head, Harrisch couldn’t refrain from boasting. “That’s the beauty of it. Or part of the beauty, at least.”

“Yeah, it’s connecting lovely, all right. Especially when it’s hooked up to the other loop, the one running through the axons from the ventral tegmental area to the nucleus accumbens. Because then you don’t just have a valve, you’ve got a stranglehold on the human brain and how it works-and what it wants. The classic junkie neural engine, driving all behavior, minus the necessity of actually having to shovel the drugs into the system. Because with TOAW, all that’s needed is a signal, a pretty colored light, a bit-and you get a response in the infected human neural system that’s stronger than what anything in physical reality could have produced. The axons narrow or shut off, the caudate nucleus and the cingulate gyrus structures fire up and go into a feedback spiral, and you just have to have a slot in the corporation’s front door for the customers to shove their money into-they’ll do anything to get the countersignal, the counterbit sent out, to get those axons loosened up again, to get the fear dogs inside their heads to let go for even just a little while. Until the signal is sent out once more, setting off the process all over again.”

“Oh, it’s better than that,” said Harrisch smugly; the discussion also appeared to have drained his fear away, for the time being. This place could fall out from beneath him, thought November, like some massive practical joke, and he wouldn’t care. Not now. “TOAW’s got it all,” continued Harrisch. “The feedback loop it sets up inside the head contains its own signal-generating ability, which doesn’t require any further input from us. The infected brain produces its own signals and countersignals; it’s the translation into reality of all those Foucauldian theories of self-surveillance. The brain watches itself and administers its own stimuli and rewards, with DynaZauber as the beneficiary. And really-let’s face it-money is just a crude bookkeeping device in a system like this. Money is for people who have options, and the whole point of TOAW is to eliminate options. It’s the height of mercantile capitalism: you chain your customers to their lathes and running-shoe assembly lines, and you throw the key to the padlock down the black hole you’ve put inside their heads. So who needs even the concept of money? All you really need is enough of an uninfected elite at the executive level to rake off the profits, and the whole thing runs itself.” Harrisch unfolded his arms, spreading his hands apart. “What could be more beautiful than that?”

Another wave hit the building at street level; a far corner of the rooftop disappeared with a rumbling crash, bricks and structural beams tearing loose to fall down the hotel’s flank. “Maybe I better make that call,” said November, looking nervously over her shoulder at the increasing damage. “This isn’t looking so good-”

“Never looked better,” said McNihil. “To me, that is. This is one of those classic situations, right out of the old movies inside my eyes. It’s what you’re always supposed to get at the end: a nice long explanation of everybody’s crimes.”

“I’m sure that’d be fine, but I don’t think we have time for that.” November glanced around the rooftop, or what was left of it. “You know?”

“There’s always time.” The asp-head’s voice sounded eerily confident. “Plenty of it. Once you get to a certain state. Nothing but time, you might say.”

“Excuse me, but… I’m beginning to agree with her.” Harrisch pointed to November. His face appeared gray and anxious, as though the pleasant high that came with recounting TOAW’s details had started to fade. “This is an untenable situation, in my opinion.”

“Really?” The look in McNihil’s eyes was further evidence that whatever had happened to him out here had been enough to take him over the edge. “I’m enjoying it.”

“You shouldn’t be,” said Harrisch. “Since you lost. It’s all over; you might as well admit that. We’ve got a vision, and it’s not just limited to DynaZauber; it’s all of us.” The exec’s voice heightened to a fervent pitch. “What was it Orwell said would be the future? A vision of a human face, and a boot stamping on it forever. He was wrong, of course. The future is a bloodied human mouth, with a cock shoved down its throat, the perfect connection forever and ever, world without end. Amen, asshole. And you helped make it all come true. Like I said before, you were connected over before you began.” Harrisch’s thin smile looked even uglier and more woundlike. “You realize that, don’t you? So it shouldn’t surprise you too much, if I’ve decided that your usefulness to us is at an end.” Harrisch suddenly reached inside his jacket, to the other side from where he’d kept the cell phone. His hand came out with a darker and heavier device. He aimed the weapon, a snub-nosed parsifal, straight at McNihil. “Consider yourself unemployed.”

The shots leapt out of the gun, one after another, a tight pattern in the center of McNihil’s chest. The first knocked McNihil off his feet; he landed hard on one shoulder, the hole the bullet had torn in his shirt and chest exposed. A few yards away, the tannhäuser skidded to a stop, knocked from McNihil’s outflung hand. Harrisch continued to fire until his own gun was empty. The repeated impact of the bullets, in a tight pattern around the first one, shoved McNihil back against an aluminum ventilation duct.

When there was silence again, the noise of the weapon fading into the smoke-heavy air, Harrisch lowered the empty weapon in his grasp; he stared, aghast and amazed, at the figure across from him-who was still alive. Slowly, McNihil stood up.

November had already turned, following the bright tracery of the parsifal’s bullets. Now she gazed at the torn front of McNihil’s shirt and jacket, the fabric ripped by the bullets, a few shreds dangling like frayed ribbons. There wasn’t even any blood, though enough of McNihil’s flesh was exposed to show that he hadn’t been wearing any body armor, Kevlar mesh, or anything capable of stopping the hot, fast metal.

Her gaze moved up to McNihil’s face. A simmering anger showed there.

“That really pisses me off,” grated McNihil’s voice. “When you do something stupid like that. I’m trying to keep it together. For a little while longer, at least.”

TWENTY-FOUR

You shouldn’t be standing…” Harrisch gazed up in fear at the figure looming in front of him. “Not anymore…”

Standing, hell. November had watched in amazement as the asp-head had strode across the hotel’s buckling, crumbling rooftop. He shouldn’t even be moving, she thought. McNihil looked in even worse shape now, with the front of his shirt all torn up from the bullets out of Harrisch’s weapon, than when she had found him downstairs in the hotel.

McNihil reached down and plucked the emptied weapon out of the exec’s trembling hands. “You don’t need this,” said McNihil. He flung it away, over the side of the collapsing hotel, past where his own tannhäuser had skittered across the roof. “You should’ve asked, before you started going off like that. I could’ve saved you the trouble.”

“Wait a minute.” November’s gaze moved between the two men. Or man and whatever McNihil had become. A corpse? she wondered. Corpses kick ass like this? “What’s going on?”

“It’s simple.” McNihil glanced over at her. “All this stuff about the job-that was all crap. It was never the important thing.” He gave Harrisch a sharp nudge in the shoulder, jabbing a fingertip at the other man. “Was it?”

Harrisch shrank back into himself. He nodded, as though trying to mollify the specter standing before him. “That’s true,” he said in a quavering voice. “What we wanted out of you wasn’t the job-we didn’t care whether you completed it or not. Just your taking it on was enough for us to win. All you ever amounted to was a delivery system.”

“I know all about that.” McNihil showed his version, even uglier, of the other’s smile. “I know that I wasn’t the first, either. The first one was Travelt, wasn’t it? Only he found out what you were doing with him; he figured out that you’d made him into the vector, the infectious agent for the TOAW project. That was the only reason you gave him the prowler he used. The transference of his personality, his core essence, into the prowler wasn’t an accident, something that wasn’t supposed to happen; it was planned that way from the beginning. His prowler was specifically designed that way, to receive Travelt’s essence and carry it into the Wedge. Because he’d already been infected with TOAW. With Travelt aboard, the prowler could sneak TOAW in past whatever defenses the Wedge might’ve had, infect and spread TOAW throughout the whole Wedge until it was one big vector pool. Like a venereal disease, only a custom-built one. Anybody going in or out of the Wedge, whether they were using a prowler to have their fun or doing it in their own skin, would be infected. Pretty neat.”

“True…” Harrisch gave a weak shrug. “The Wedge and its… inhabitants, let’s say… they were our pilot project. The idea was to see how it worked out with that subject population, assess the results, and refine the technology, see how we wanted to go on from there.”

“But it didn’t work out that way.” A measure of satisfaction sounded in McNihil’s voice. “Travelt’s prowler, with Travelt’s contaminated essence, went into the Wedge-but nothing came back out. It didn’t matter whether Travelt or the prowler ever showed up again, and it was just as well if they didn’t. As a matter of fact, you made sure it was a one-way trip for him; once the transference between Travelt and the prowler had been made, you had his original body killed, right there in his cubapt. Or did you do it yourself?”

“That’s not important.” Harrisch’s expression turned to a scowl. “But you know there are some things better left… undelegated.”

“Doesn’t matter to me,” said McNihil. “And the result was the same for Travelt. But what you weren’t expecting was that there was no indication of TOAW having been delivered into the Wedge by Travelt’s prowler. Within days, there should’ve been some signs of infection spreading. The first victims should’ve been turning up, both inside the Wedge and outside, all through the Gloss. But nothing happened. That’s when you knew something had gone wrong. That’s when you figured you’d need another delivery system.” McNihil’s voice tightened, harder than it ever had before. “And that’s when you came to me.”

“We wouldn’t have had to,” muttered Harrisch, “if that little connector Travelt had done things right.”

“What you mean is, if he’d done what you’d wanted him to. But somehow he figured out what was going on, that he’d been infected with TOAW, that he’d been turned into a vector for spreading the contagion. And he found a way of containing it. Of not spreading it. So you had to come to me. Not because you wanted me to locate Travelt’s prowler, or find out what’d happened to him, or any of that line you handed to me. Like you said, all I had to do was take the job, just go into the Wedge and try to find out what happened to Travelt, and that’d be enough. Because you’d made sure I was infected as well, that I’d become a TOAW vector the same as Travelt and his prowler had been. You figured that somebody-or some thing-in the Wedge had caught Travelt’s prowler on the way in and eliminated it, so it wouldn’t spread its contagion. But you knew I’d be smarter and tougher than Travelt and his prowler, and I’d get past whatever barrier had been put up for the Wedge to defend itself. That would’ve been a real good plan,” said McNihil with grim vehemence. “If it’d worked.”

“What do you mean?” A new apprehension appeared to rise inside Harrisch. “Of course it worked. It had to. You went into the Wedge-you were carrying the TOAW infection-”

“You dumb connector.” McNihil’s voice tinged darker with contempt. “You screwed up with Travelt because you didn’t realize that the prowler you laid on him would also give the game away. There was something in the Wedge, all right; something that could figure out what you were trying to do. Something a lot older and smarter than all of your corporation put together. It read out Travelt’s prowler and what it was carrying like a neon sign on a dark night; you could’ve put it on a billboard and it wouldn’t have been any plainer. So even before the transference took place between him and the prowler, he knew something was up. He knew you’d connected him. And he found someplace to go.” McNihil’s voice softened, as though still impressed. “Someplace where the contagion would be locked up, where TOAW wouldn’t spread from him to the Wedge. Someplace where you wouldn’t be able to find him, where he’d be… safe. And even happy. Someplace where you’d never be able to find him. But I found him, all right. And he told me all about it. Everything. Some of it I knew before. And the rest? It just confirmed all my suspicions, about you and DynaZauber and TOAW, about all of it. Believe me; there weren’t many secrets left when Travelt and I got done talking.”

“Then you should’ve realized,” said Harrisch, “that you’re the one who’s connected. Just by being here, you’ve spread TOAW into the Wedge. And from here, it’ll go everywhere. The Wedge is now the perfect vector pool for us-”

“That’d be true… if I hadn’t taken a few little precautions. To keep the contagion from spreading. To eliminate my vector potential.”

“How could you do that?” The asp-head’s words seemed to baffle Harrisch. “If you didn’t find out about it until you went into the Wedge and found Travelt, and talked to him-it’d be too late by then!”

McNihil slowly shook his head. “You’re assuming too much. I knew enough about it-about the contagion-before I got to the Wedge. When I came and met up with you at the hospital, I had already taken care of it. It was too late for you then. I had already done what I needed to do.”

“But… that’s impossible. You wouldn’t even have known you were infected with TOAW. How could you do anything if-”

“Because I did know,” said McNihil simply. “I knew I’d been infected, and I knew how it’d been done. What the vector agent was, that I got TOAW from. The same one you used to give it to Travelt. The comparison of TOAW to a venereal disease, something that’s sexually transmitted from one individual to another, isn’t just a metaphor. Travelt and I caught it from the person that we’d both had intercourse with-that little cube bunny, the one that hung around his cubapt; and then, when you had me come over to look at Travelt’s corpse, she followed me back to my place and put the moves on me. You must’ve had her down at the DZ labs, getting her ready to be a contagion vector, long before you hooked her up with Travelt.” The shake of McNihil’s head was slower and sadder. “Poor little thing. I didn’t even find out her name. She did her job, and she was gone. I suppose you took care of her, too.”

“Like you said. She’d done her job.”

Nice, thought November. She didn’t even know who they were talking about, but she could figure out that whatever had happened was entirely typical of the way Harrisch operated. Somebody-some poor little thing-always gets it.

“But still-”The look of confusion didn’t disappear from Harrisch’s face. “How could you tell you were infected? It doesn’t show; TOAW doesn’t work on a visible basis.”

“Not for you,” said McNihil. “But you forgot. I don’t see things the way you do. Some things that are real and visible for you, I don’t see-and vice versa. TOAW as a contagious disease is a metaphor-and I can see some of those.” McNihil tapped the side of his face. “My eyes are different. You knew that, but you forgot, or you didn’t think it was important. But it is. Because the way I see things, that kind of vision… it translated your TOAW-as-disease metaphor into something visible for me, something I could see. An actual disease, a physical contagion, with symptoms I could see and feel right on my own body.”

“Yeah?” November was both repelled and fascinated. She couldn’t see anything wrong with him. But then, she realized, I wouldn’t be able to. I don’t have his eyes. “What kind of disease?”

“Come on. What do you expect?” McNihil displayed no embarrassment. “The designers at the DynaZauber labs put together TOAW using a venereal-disease model-so naturally I’m going to see it that way. One of the classic varieties; the symptoms are pretty hard to mistake. But just to be sure, I had to get checked out-or tried to.” He glanced over at Harrisch. “That was another reason I wanted to meet with you at the hospital. Killing two birds with one stone. Before I came up to the burn ward for our little conversation, I had time to swing by the communicable-disease clinic on the ground floor; it’s their job to find out who’s come down with what. And they couldn’t find anything. They couldn’t even see it-not the way I could. That just confirmed what I’d already pretty much figured out. That something else was going on. Something that had DZ written all over it.”

“You knew,” marveled Harrisch. “You knew that much-and you still took the job.”

“Why not?” McNihil shrugged. “It was the only way to get you off my ass. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? The cube bunny had done her job, and now I was supposed to do mine. And then everything would’ve been just the way you wanted it, with TOAW successfully inserted into the Wedge. With everybody lining up, to come in and get contaminated. That’s a fine old tradition with these sex-based industries, isn’t it? Historically, you’re going with the flow on that one; even making a profit from disease isn’t that much of an innovation.” The contempt in McNihil’s eyes turned to pure loathing, something that appeared to November as deep and instinctual, the gaze of a human creature toward a particularly noxious arachnid. “It would’ve all worked out so well for you and everybody else at DynaZauber, except for one thing. I found a way to keep the contagion from spreading. There may be diseases in the Wedge, but none of them are TOAW”

“That’s impossible.” Harrisch stared wonderingly at the asp-head. “If you went into the Wedge at all, if you had any contact with anyone there-you would’ve spread it. Sex isn’t necessary for the transmission.”

“Why not before?” The unquieting thought had just occurred to November. She instinctively drew a little farther away from McNihil. “If you were already infected-why wouldn’t you have been passing it on before you went into the Wedge?”

“Because TOAW’s got a lock on it.” McNihil glanced over at her. “You don’t have to worry. The DynaZauber labs wired a bonding inhibitor into TOAW, so they could mess around with it all they wanted back at DZ headquarters and not worry-or at least not much-about anybody catching it there.” He pointed with his thumb toward Harrisch. “That’s why this connector’s not worried about catching it. He’s got the bonding inhibitor as an adjunct to his immune system, like a vaccine. Just another way that TOAW is such an improvement over all those old-fashioned type diseases; with this one, only the right people come down with it.”

“Yeah, well, that’s great for him.” A surge of anger welled up inside November. “But I don’t have any kind of inhibitor.” If I’d have known, she thought viciously, maybe I wouldn’t have come to this little party. “I’m running around here without protection.”

“Simmer down,” McNihil told her. “You don’t have anything to worry about, either. It’s not a problem for anyone. Not now. Like I said, I took care of it.”

“You’re lying.” Trembling, Harrisch rose up on his knees. “There’s no way. At the clinic-the Adder clome showed me the proof that he’d disabled the bonding inhibitor on you. As soon as you walked out his door, you were an active infectious agent. A TOAW vector-”

“He may have taken out the inhibitor-but just doing that wouldn’t make me a vector carrying a transmittable disease. I’m way ahead of that one.” McNihil gave the exec a grim fraction of a smile. “You and the TOAW designers back at DZ headquarters overlooked something. You made TOAW communicable between humans and humans, between prowlers and humans, between prowlers and prowlers-you thought you’d covered all the bases. But it’s still essentially a biological disease. A disease for the living.”

“Wait…” November reached her hand toward his arm, as though there were some way that she might intervene in what had already happened. “Don’t…”

The identical surmise flashed behind Harrisch’s startled gaze. “You’re crazy-”

“Probably. But that doesn’t change things.” With both hands, McNihil pulled open the front of his shirt. “The dead can’t infect the living. Not that way.”

November could see the wound, the bullet hole above and through his heart. He would’ve had to have used his own weapon, that monstrous tannhäuser he was always carrying around, to have done that kind of perfect damage. It looked like it’d stopped bleeding a long time ago, an old wound, something that would’ve decorated the inhabitant of a stainless-steel morgue drawer.

“Of course,” she murmured. “Now it really does make sense…” The pieces had already started to fall together; now they flew toward one another even faster. “That was why you went into hock, to pay for the skin grafts and everything else I got at the hospital. It wasn’t just to keep me alive, to put me back together and out on the street. It was the debt; it wasn’t a drawback to the arrangement. It was what you wanted.” She had talked to the dead before, in another place far from this one; she’d gotten used to it. And to what they said. They always tell the truth, thought November. Maybe because they no longer had anything to lose by it. “To be in debt,” she mused, thinking about McNihil’s words. “To be so far into the hole, owing so much money, that your own death wouldn’t get you off the hook. You’d be one of the indeadted, a walking corpse-like those ones down in the south of the Gloss.”

“Exactly.” McNihil gave a quick nod. “And when you’re reanimated because of outstanding debts, you’re automatically assigned to whatever ongoing job you might have that has the highest possibility of making enough money to pay off what you owe. I already had this gig with DynaZauber, so I was allowed to go ahead with it. Only the job I had been given was to find out what happened to Travelt and his prowler-and I did that. It’s not my problem if what these people really wanted was for me to infect the Wedge with their TOAW project. Because that didn’t happen; the vector modeling after a venereal disease was too close; it can only be transmitted from one living thing, a human or a prowler, to another. They forgot about the dead. But that’s all right.” This nod was slower, with obvious satisfaction. “I didn’t forget about them.”

“You didn’t do it for me at all.” November was amazed at how much clearer that made things. “You just needed to rack up the debt-and doing it at a hospital is the fastest way. Everybody knows that.”

“It’s nothing personal,” said McNihil. “And you got something out of it.”

“No, no-it’s okay. I don’t mind.” The thought struck her, that he’d already been dead, entering into the land of the dead and making it his own, when she’d been coming back from it. He must’ve done it, she thought, right after he finished talking with Harrisch at the hospital. When he’d been by himself again, up in that shabby little apartment of his. Just took out his gun and-did it. When they’d been putting her back together, fitting a new skin to her, he’d already had a hole drilled through his heart. A real one at last, to match the metaphorical one. “As long as… it’s what you wanted.”

“Connect this.” Harrisch’s snarling voice broke in. “I don’t care if you think you did the job we hired you for or not-you’re not getting paid. You’re not getting a penny from us. That debt you’re carrying around? It’s yours for good. If you think you’re headed for a quiet grave, that you’re not going to be indeadted forever-you’re really connected. Anybody connects around with us, gets a long time to regret it.”

“Maybe so.” McNihil’s voice softened. “I’ll have a long time, all right. All that skin didn’t come cheap; what I owe now, I can’t even generate the interest payments on. But I don’t know about regrets-”

His voice was drowned out. For a few moments, November had forgotten about the slow sea, the gel filled with soft bones and human neural tissue, surrounding the building, extending out farther than she could see. The rooftop of the End Zone Hotel had become a little world in itself, the place where the last words were being spoken, the final explanations given. As if they-or it-were listening, the poly-orgynism had quieted itself, the waves subsiding for a time. In that quiet, the clouds overhead had grown darker and heavier, another ceiling rolling nearly within reach. The next rain wouldn’t be fire, but ice and steam mingled together. The sound that swallowed up McNihil’s voice was like thunder and earthquake, the coming together of earth and sky.

The flat world tilted, the rooftop with its gaping holes and solid sections swiveling into a forty-five-degree angle as one entire side of the building collapsed. Falling, November heard the rumble of bricks and girders sliding in chaos onto the gel below. Her spine hit tar paper that flexed like a drumhead with her impact, the edges tearing loose from the surrounding material. She rolled onto her side, head downward, scrabbling desperately for anything to hold on to. Grabbing on to the broken end of a structural beam, jutting out from the collapsing depths of the hotel like the bowsprit of a foundering ship, November found herself shoulder-to-shoulder with McNihil. The dead asp-head’s fingers had clawed a purchase onto the sharp knife’s-edge of a ripped-open ventilation duct; with a kick of his legs, he got his chest up onto the corner of the thin metal.

“I think… she got tired of waiting…” There was no need anymore, for McNihil to gasp for breath. “She can get… impatient…”

“What?” November stared at him. “Who are you talking-”

She didn’t get to finish the question. She’d braced herself for the slam of another wave building up in the slow ocean beneath him, but was unprepared for the butt of a human hand striking her between the eyes. Her head rocked back, as her fingers gripped tighter on their own accord. Through a net of her own blood, November saw Harrisch above her, one of his hands grasping an insulated electrical cable like a mountain climber’s belaying rope. His thin, ugly smile showed as his other hand reached and fumbled inside November’s jacket.

“It’s been great talking to you.” Harrisch’s voice spat out the words, as his hand came up with the tight-cell phone. “But I’ve got another agenda to take care of.”

November heard the tiny beep of the phone’s send button being hit, as Harrisch clambered up the cable with furious agility. The far edge of the rooftop had reared up, a straight-line peak against the darkening clouds. Storm winds hit the DZ exec full-force, but he managed to let go of the cable and jump, clinging to the highest point; the phone, no longer needed, tumbled like a smooth stone down the roof’s skewed surface.

Beside her, McNihil tried to clamber farther onto the ventilation duct, but the flat aluminum was too slick for him to work his fingertips into. “Relax,” said November. She’d managed to get one bootsole onto the edge of the gap behind and below her; with that and the beam, she got herself back on the slanting roof. What was left of it shook beneath her hands and knees, as more of the shattered building fell away. “I’ll settle his account.”

Harrisch was too busy watching the skies, looking for the corporate jet that had brought him to the End Zone Hotel. He didn’t hear November’s clawing approach, masked by the gel’s rumbling impact, until it was too late. Using one of the smaller gaps as a handhold, she reached up and grabbed his ankle, jerking him back down from the rooftop’s edge.

Startled, he managed to hang on, sliding only a couple of feet down toward her. His kick caught her on the chin, loosening her grasp for a few seconds, letting him scramble back up, farther than he’d been before. Enough to push himself upright into the open air. Beyond him, November saw fiery sparks falling in the distance. The DynaZauber jet, surrounded by drones and swarming Noh-flies, banked into its approach run.

November made another grab for the exec’s ankle, but missed. Her handhold gave way, letting her slide painfully across the rooftop’s jagged surface before she could dig in and stop herself.

She looked up and saw Harrisch, out of her reach, climbing up onto the exposed crest of the roof’s highest angle. He took one hand away from the ridge, signaling frantically to the still-distant jet. That was enough; that, and the next wave that rose up and hit the building. Hot scraps of metal swept across the rooftop as it rolled with the impact. November flinched, shielding her face against one shoulder; she saw only a glimpse of Harrisch’s face as he lost balance and fell over the building’s side.

When she reached the edge, fingertips digging into the crumbling tar paper, November looked down and saw where the exec had hit. The gel of the soft, slow ocean had cushioned Harrisch’s impact; he was still alive and moving, legs and arms splayed out, dazed face looking up unfocused at the dark sky. Across the surface membrane were the scattered pieces of the network crews’ catwalks and equipment booms; none of the cameramen were in sight. You’re missing it, November told them inside her head.

The bits of half-molten shrapnel had weakened the slow ocean’s surface, the membrane studded with scars and hissing, cooling bits of metal. She could see that Harrisch had hit with enough force to split the transparent layer underneath him; the gel oozed up through the narrow opening. Below, the gel swarmed thicker with the tangled, interconnected form of the poly-orgynism; the new sensation, like a whiplash sharp enough to draw blood, had drawn the strands and knots of the excited neural tissue, the thin black tattoos darting among the nerves and cortical material like quick shadows.

Silently, the tear in the surface membrane lengthened, like Harrisch’s own thin, ugly smile. The exec had recovered enough consciousness to roll onto his side and try to grab the retreating edge of the opening, as the gelatinous liquid welled up around his legs and torso. His fingertips missed; the shallow wave that rolled through the slow ocean was enough to slide him under the other side of the membrane.

Clinging to the rooftop’s edge, November watched, wondering how long it would take for the exec’s skin to start dissolving. Maybe it already is. She couldn’t tell; she’d only been able to see Harrisch struggling for a couple of minutes, before the stranded net of the poly-orgynism, shivering with the advent of an addition to its substance, had pulled Harrisch deeper and out of view.

“Here. Take this.”

November turned her head and saw McNihil beside her. He held on with one arm over the rooftop’s crest; with his other hand, he extended the black shape of his tannhäuser toward her. The asp-head’s face was wet; she realized that real rain had begun, the storm clouds’ contents hissing downward with the hot metal bits.

“Take it,” repeated McNihil. “When the jet gets here, put it up against the pilot’s head, and have him take you wherever you want to go. I don’t think he’ll give you any argument.”

Obediently, she took the weapon. “But what about you?” November watched as the asp-head began working his way back down the angled rooftop. The heaving motions of the slow ocean below had subsided; the building still trembled and shook, but held its remnants together. “Where are you going?”

McNihil had reached a gap large enough to lower himself down into the unlit reaches of the hotel. He stopped and looked back up at her. “Don’t worry about me,” he said. “I’ve got someplace else to go to.” He smiled. “I’ve always had it.”

He dropped down inside the building, where she could no longer see him. November could hear him for a few moments, then those faint sounds were gone as well. She turned away and looked up, watching the jet as it approached, surrounded with fire.