Read Online Noir by K. W. Jeter - Free Book Online

business.” It was a big reason why he had such an aversion to executive types, like that DZ bunch with Harrisch at their head. “You can be talking to them,” he mused aloud, “and you’ll be looking at them, right in the face, and they’re looking back at you. And then you see the eyes shifting, like they’re looking past you into the distance, or at some place just past their noses. And you know they’re not really looking at you, they’re reading some market-update numbers that’d just crawled in over the wire.” McNihil shrugged. “I’ve always just found that kind of offensive.”
    “But that’s not what you see.” The cube bunny held her own empty cup enfolded in her hands. “I mean … it’s not some kind of business thing with you.”
    “Well … maybe.” McNihil shook his head. “I don’t really know, anymore. I’ve been seeing things this way for a long time now. I don’t make any distinctions between what it was I wanted to see and …” It was hard to say. “And what it’s useful for me to see. I don’t know if those are two different things.”
    The cube bunny had another question, very serious and important, the way children’s questions are. “Am I … pretty? The way you see me?”
    The way he saw her … the way he saw everything. He supposed there was no way of really telling her. Just what it was that he saw. There wouldn’t be any shared points of reference between himself and a creature of survival-oriented sexuality such as the one sitting in front of him, like some kind of grayed-out butterfly caught in a dingy cardboard box with his name on it. The whole perceptual system of
hard
and
firm
and
soft
reality—he might’ve been able to explain that, with some effort on both their parts. It was really just the difference between the hard components of the world, the things that really existed, that didn’t go away even if you’d wanted them to; and the firm overlay that was programmed in over the hard stuff, that transformed the other world intothe one he felt and saw and smelled and tasted; and the soft, which was all that he could pick up and move around, change and destroy. Just as in that world, the unaltered one, on the other side of the reality line: there were some things you could do something about, and other things you couldn’t.
    “You look fine,” said McNihil truthfully. “You’re absolutely lovely.”
    “Really?”
    “Why should I lie to you?” She did look lovely to him; better than in the smeared, wavering reflection on the side of the coffeepot. He’d paid to see a world that was to his liking. Not beautiful—it was based, after all, on cultural artifacts of more than a century ago, the bleak and brooding crime and thriller movies of the 1930s and forties—but with beautiful things in it. More beautiful, actually, for being surrounded by constant threat and darkness. So that if he could sit in a shabby, too-small room that smelled like dust settling on bare, flickering lightbulbs, if he could sit across from a girl who looked—at least to him—like an actress from those ancient films that nobody watched anymore, a woman with heartbreaking eyes … that was all right by him. And if she looked both sad and desperate, fragile and eternal, a mouth that was softly red even when seen in black and white …
    Then the money he’d paid to the surgeons had been well spent.
    The cube bunny hadn’t said anything, but had smiled at him. McNihil supposed he’d said the right thing. Even if it was the truth. Sometimes it worked out that way.
    He supposed her smile meant something else as well.
You shouldn’t think so much
, McNihil told himself.
About the things you see. The way you see them
.
    “But … you don’t really know.” The cube bunny’s smile faded. “If I’m pretty or not. ’Cause you don’t really see me.” A tear trembled against her lashes. “You just see that stuff that’s in there, inside your eyes.”
    “That’s not how it