“I’m not fooling anyone?”
“You don’t have to. You never did.” She reached up and placed a gentle, disturbing fingertip where McNihil had dropped his hand. “You could’ve come here in your own face, the one you gave up, and nothing bad would’ve happened to you.”
He laughed. “I find that hard to believe.”
“Well…” The barfly gave a shrug of her bare shoulders. “Maybe nothing different would’ve happened to you. From what was already going to happen.”
“Don’t tell me,” said McNihil. “You’ll spoil the fun.” He looked away from the woman, back toward the space leading to the diamond-padded door. Though his eyes had fully adjusted to the darkness, he couldn’t make the watching faces become any clearer, any more sharply focused than they already had been. She’s right, he thought. I’m not really one of them. Not yet. He supposed if the Adder clome had had some way of transforming his entire being, from human to something-like-human, his percept systems would’ve been completely altered as well. But just having his face worked on, the minimum hallucination and anti-gestalting cues surgically implanted-that apparently wasn’t enough. Even though the clome hadn’t touched McNihil’s eyes with all the clinic’s bright scalpels and wetly glistening hypodermics-he’d forbidden that, staying awake through the entire procedure to make sure that the black-and-white world wasn’t nicked and leached out of his eye sockets-something had happened to his vision. A change; the making visible of the previously unseen. Like ghosts dipped in glue and flour, he thought. If somebody had invented black wheat-the odd notion struck him that maybe bread the color of ink was what they ate in this world he’d entered through the bar’s tightly sealed doors.
“I wouldn’t want to do that.” The woman’s dark red fingernails clicked like insect shells against her glass. “Fun’s our whole reason for being. That’s why God put us here.” She smiled, lazily and sure. “Isn’t it?”
“Some god did.” McNihil caught sight of himself in the mirror behind the stacked bottles. He could make out his own face, all right, perhaps even clearer than before. Before I even went to the clinic in the first place. He nodded slowly. “Now I understand.”
“Understand what, honey?”
“What I’ve become. What I was always trying to become.” McNihil picked up his own glass and used it to point toward the mirror. “An extra. Like in the old movies. That real world I was always trying to crawl into. Because it was real.” He glanced over at the woman beside him. “You see them and you don’t see them-the extras, I mean. They exist in that world, they’re even necessary-but you don’t remember them. Just like prowlers that way; there’s nothing in their faces to snag onto normal people’s memories.”
“Our faces,” said the woman. “And yours.”
“Exactly. And that’s just what I always wanted.” The words were fervent in McNihil’s mouth. “To be there-to be here-and to exist and watch and maybe even have a few lines to speak. You know; to tell a real person which way to Fourth and Main, to maybe even light a cigarette for a real woman, the one the movie’s about…” He closed his eyes, imagining all he’d spoken of. “That’d be all right.”
“I don’t smoke,” the barfly said drily. “Otherwise I’d let you light my cigarette. If that’s what you’d get off on.”
McNihil stayed silent, knowing he shouldn’t have said anything at all. Not about this, at least-it was too close to some other dark place, a little unentered room inside himself. He folded both hands around the almost-empty glass, and thought about his dead wife. Thinking without words; just the image of her face. Which was not just snagged, but stitched with iron threads, to his own memory.
“Like I said before…” The barfly stroked the back of McNihil’s neck with her cold fingertips. “It’s nothing you have to worry about. Everything’s going to happen just the way it was meant to.” She used one nail to draw a knifelike incision, just short of opening the skin at the top of his spine. “And that’ll be fun. Loads of it. I promise you.”
He lifted his head, raising the glass at the same time and using the watered dregs in it to sluice away the vision of his dead wife’s face. The lock on the door of the little room inside him remained keyless. “Great,” said McNihil. The single drink, combined with some percolating residue of the Adder clome’s injections and his own self-generated toxins, turned a different key in a different lock. A doorway through which he knew he was going to step, though he already knew what was on the other side. The glass splintered into shards in his fist as he slammed it back onto the bar. “Let’s get going.”
“Oh,” said the barfly in a voice only half-tinged with sarcasm. “I love a man who knows what he wants.” Her hand seized his once again. Tight around his wrist; tight enough to force apart his fingers. The bits of glass dropped like dice, altered to transparency and razor edges, around his elbow. The barfly leaned forward, blond hair trailing through the pool of melting liquid; a red drop fell from McNihil’s wounded palm, diffusing into blurred pink. She caught the next one on the tip of her scarred tongue; the blood glistened her lipstick as she kissed the center of his hand.
“I know, all right…”
“Like I said-you came to the right place.” In a predator crouch, the ultimate barfly looked up at him through her lashes. The red looked like black, smeared on her chin. “I can do a lot for you, baby.”
McNihil nodded, letting the key turn another click farther in his heart. “I bet you can.”
The mirror of her eyes held him. “We’ve been waiting for you,” she whispered. “We’ve been waiting for you… for a long time.” She used the back of his hand to wipe away the blood below her lip. “It’ll be worth it.”
Something between fear and disgust pushed McNihil’s gaze away from hers; something in which those terms no longer had a negative connotation. He just didn’t want to see that appetite in her eyes, in case it was a reflection from his own. McNihil looked across the bar, across the perceived but still-hidden figures in the shadows. He could discern them well enough that he could see both male and female prowlers returning his own scrutiny. That’s what they’re made to do, he reminded himself. Just like me. What he’d been before, and what he’d become once again-there really wasn’t that much difference between a prowler and an asp-head. They went out looking for something, the sensory treasure they’d been programmed to sniff out, and they brought it back to their masters. Just like me, he thought once more. Answers rather than thrills, Harrisch’s lost property rather than a collection of scars and tattoos that crawled over one’s skin like the black-clawed shadows of sea creatures-no difference at all, it now seemed to him.
He squeezed his fist tighter, the blood oozing wetly between his fingers. He gazed at the trickle running down his wrist like spilled ink, wondering if he’d achieved some evolutionary apotheosis by combining asp-head with prowler. Either the zenith, thought McNihil, or the nadir-it was something else that didn’t matter. Further proof that everything evolved, or at least changed, one way or another. He wondered if Harrisch, if anybody over at DynaZauber, knew about this. The world of the prowlers, the subterritory of the Wedge, might be getting out of their control faster than they knew. Maybe Travelt hadn’t been the first to have undergone that transference effect, the shifting of his human nature into the mask-faced, artificial receptacles. It didn’t appear that the late junior exec had been the last.