Altered Carbon

  “That’s enough,” I snapped, a little unsteadily. The sleeve’s neurachem wiring was a rougher piece of work than the corps systems I’d used in the past, and in overdrive, the overwhelming impression was of being slung around in a subcutaneous bag of chicken wire.

  I looked down at Elliott.

  His eyes were a handbreadth from mine, and despite the grip I had on his throat they were still burning with rage. Breath whistled in his teeth as he clawed after the strength to break my grip and damage me.

  I yanked him off the rail and propped him away from me with a cautionary arm.

  “Listen, I’m passing no judgments here. I just want to know. What makes you think she has any connection to Bancroft?”

  “Because she told me, motherfucker.” The sentence hissed out of him. “She told me what he’d done.”

  “And what was that?”

  He blinked rapidly, the undischarged rage condensing into tears. “Dirty things,” he said. “She said he needed them. Badly enough to come back. Badly enough to pay.”

  Meal ticket. Don’t worry, Daddy, when I’m rich we’ll buy Mummy back. Easy enough mistake to make when you’re young. But nothing comes that easy.

  “You think that’s why she died?”

  He turned his head and looked at me as if I was a particularly poisonous species of spider on his kitchen floor.

  “She didn’t die, mister. Someone killed her. Someone took a razor and cut her up.”

  “Trial transcript says it was a client. Not Bancroft.”

  “How would they know?” he said dully. “They name a body, who knows who’s inside it. Who’s paying for it all.”

  “They find him yet?”

  “Biocabin whore’s killer? What do you think? It ain’t exactly like she worked for the Houses, right?”

  “That’s not what I meant, Elliott. You say she turned Bancroft in Jerry’s, I’ll believe you. But you’ve got to admit it doesn’t sound like Bancroft’s style. I’ve met the man, and slumming?” I shook my head. “He doesn’t read that way to me.”

  Elliott turned away.

  “Flesh,” he said. “What you going to read in a Meth’s flesh?”

  It was nearly full dark. Out across the water on the sloping deck of the warship, the performance had started. We both stared at the lights for a while, heard the bright snatches of music, like transmissions from a world that we were forever locked out of.

  “Elizabeth’s still on stack,” I said quietly.

  “Yeah, so what? Resleeving policy lapsed four years ago, when we sank all the money we had into some lawyer said he could crack Irene’s case.” He gestured back at the dimly lit frontage of his offices. “I look like the kind of guy’s going to come into some money real soon?”

  There was nothing to say after that. I left him watching the lights and walked back to the car. He was still there when I drove back past him on the way out of the little town. He didn’t look around.

  PART TWO

  rEACTION

  (INTRUSION CONFLICT)

  CHAPTEr NINE

  I called Prescott from the car. Her face looked mildly irritated as it scribbled into focus on the dusty little screen set into the dashboard.

  “Kovacs. Did you find what you were looking for?”

  “Still don’t really know what I’m looking for,” I said cheerfully. “You think Bancroft ever does the biocabins?”

  She pulled a face. “Oh, please.”

  “All right, here’s another one. Did Leila Begin ever work biocabin joints?”

  “I really have no idea, Kovacs.”

  “Well, look it up, then. I’ll hold.” My voice came out stony. Prescott’s well-bred distaste wasn’t sitting too well beside Victor Elliott’s anguish for his daughter.

  I drummed my fingers on the wheel while the lawyer went offscreen, and found myself muttering a Millsport fisherman’s rap to the rhythm. Outside, the coast slid by in the night, but the scents and sounds of the sea were suddenly all wrong. Too muted, not a trace of belaweed on the wind.

  “Here we are.” Prescott settled herself back within range of the phone scanner, looking slightly uncomfortable. “Begin’s Oakland records show two stints in biocabins, before she got tenure in one of the San Diego Houses. She must have had an entrée, unless it was a talent scout who spotted her out.”

  Bancroft would have been quite an entrée to anywhere. I resisted the temptation to say it.

  “You got an image there?”

  “Of Begin?” Prescott shrugged. “Only a 2-D. You want me to send it?”

  “Please.”

  The ancient car phone fizzled a bit as it adjusted to the change of incoming signal, and then Leila Begin’s features emerged from the static. I leaned closer, scanning them for the truth. It took a moment or two to find, but it was there.

  “Right. Now, can you get me the address of that place Elizabeth Elliott worked? Jerry’s Closed Quarters. It’s on a street called Mariposa.”

  “Mariposa and San Bruno,” Prescott’s disembodied voice came back from behind Leila Begin’s full-service pout. “Jesus, it’s right under the old expressway. That’s got to be a safety violation.”

  “Can you send me a map, route marked through from the bridge?”

  “You’re going there? Tonight?”

  “Prescott, these places don’t do a lot of business during the day,” I said patiently. “Of course I’m going there tonight.”

  There was a slight hesitation on the other end of the line.

  “It’s not a recommended area, Kovacs. You need to be careful.”

  This time I couldn’t be bothered to stifle the snort of amusement. It was like listening to someone tell a surgeon to be careful and not get his hands bloody. She must have heard me.

  “I’m sending the map,” she said stiffly.

  Leila Begin’s face blinked out, and a tracery of grid-patterned streets inked themselves into the place she had been. I didn’t need her anymore. Her hair had been iridescent crimson, her throat choked with a steel collar, and her eyes made up with startle lines, but it was the lines of the face below it all that stayed with me. The same lines faintly emergent in Victor Elliott’s kodakristal of his daughter. The understated but undeniable similarity.

  Miriam Bancroft.

  There was rain in the air when I got back to the city, a fine drizzle sifting down from the darkened sky. Parked across the street from Jerry’s, I watched the blinking neon CLUB sign through the streaks and beads of water on the windshield of the ground car. Somewhere in the gloom below the concrete bones of the expressway a holo of a woman danced in a cocktail glass, but there was a fault in the ’caster and the image kept fizzling out.

  I’d been worried about the ground car drawing attention, but it seemed that I’d come to the right part of town with it. Most of the vehicles around Jerry’s were flightless; the only exceptions to the rule were the autocabs that occasionally spiraled down to disgorge or collect passengers and then sprang back up into the aerial traffic flow with inhuman accuracy and speed. With their arrays of red, blue, and white navigation lights they seemed like jeweled visitors from another world, barely touching the cracked and litter-strewn paving while their charges alighted or climbed aboard.

  I watched for an hour. The club did brisk business, varied clientele but mostly male. They were checked at the door by a security robot that resembled nothing so much as a concertina’d octopus strung from the lintel of the main entrance. Some had to divest themselves of concealed items, presumably weapons, and one or two were turned away. There were no protests—you can’t argue with a robot. Outside, people parked, climbed in and out of cars, and did deals with merchandise too small to make out at this distance. Once, two men started a knife fight in the shadows between two of the expressway’s support pillars, but it didn’t come to much. One combatant limped off, clutching a slashed arm, and the other returned to the club’s interior as if he’d done no more than go out to relieve himself.

  I
climbed out of the car, made sure it was alarmed, and wandered across the street. A couple of the dealers were seated cross-legged on the hood of a car, shielded from the rain by a static repulsion unit set up between their feet, and they glanced up as I approached.

  “Sell you a disk, man? Hot spinners out of Ulan Bator, House quality.”

  I gave them one smooth sweep, shook my head unhurriedly.

  “Stiff?”

  Another shake. I reached the robot, paused as its multiple arms snaked down to frisk me, then tried to walk over the threshold as the cheap synth voice said, “Clear.” One of the arms prodded me gently back at chest height.

  “Do you want cabins or bar?”

  I hesitated, pretending to weigh it up. “What’s the deal in the bar?”

  “Ha ha ha.” Someone had programmed a laugh into the robot. It sounded like a fat man drowning in syrup. It cut off abruptly. “The bar is look, but don’t touch. No money down, no hands on. House rule. That applies to other customers, too.”

  “Cabins,” I said, anxious to get away from the mechanical barker’s software. The street dealers on the car had been positively warm by comparison.

  “Down the stairs, to the left. Take a towel from the pile.”

  I went down the short metal-railed flight and turned left along a corridor lit from the ceiling by rotating red lights like the ones on the autocabs outside. Incessant junk rhythm music thrashed the air as if this was the ventricle of some massive heart on tetrameth. As promised, there was a pile of fresh white towels in an alcove and beyond it the doors to the cabins. I walked past the first four, two of which were occupied, and stepped into the fifth.

  The floor was satin-sheened padding, about two meters by three. If it was stained, it didn’t show, because the only illumination came from a single rotating cherry like the ones in the corridor. The air was warm and stale. Under the sweeping shadows cast by the light a battered-looking credit console stood in one corner, stalk painted matte black, red LED digital display at the top. There was a slot for cards and cash. No pad for DNA credit. The far wall was frosted glass.

  I’d seen this one coming and drawn a sheaf of currency through an autobank on the way down through the city. I selected one of the large-denomination plasticized notes and fed it into the slot. Punched the commence button. My credit flashed up in LED red. The door hinged smoothly shut behind me, muffling the music, and a body thudded against the frosted glass ahead with an abruptness that made me twitch. The display digits flickered to life. Minimal expenditure so far. I studied the body pressed against the glass. Heavy breasts pressed flat, a woman’s profile and the indistinct lines of hips and thighs. Piped moaning came softly through hidden speakers. A voice gusted.

  “Do you want to see me see me see me. . . ?”

  Cheap echo box on the vocoder.

  I pressed the button again. The glass unfrosted, and the woman on the other side became visible. She shifted, side to side, showing herself to me, worked-out body, augmented breasts, leaned forward and licked the glass with the tip of her tongue, breath misting it again. Her eyes locked onto mine.

  “Do you want to touch me touch me touch me. . . ?”

  Whether the cabins used subsonics or not, I was getting a definite reaction from it all. My penis thickened and stirred. I locked down the throbbing, forced the blood back out and into my muscles the way a combat call would do. I needed to be limp for this scene. I reached for the debit button again. The glass screen slid aside, and she stepped through, like someone coming out of a shower. She moved up to me; one hand slid out, cupping.

  “Tell me what you want, honey,” she said from somewhere in the base of her throat. The voice seemed hard edged, deprived of the vocoder effect.

  I cleared my throat. “What’s your name?”

  “Anemone. Want to know why they call me that?”

  Her hand worked. Behind her, the meter was clicking over softly.

  “You remember a girl used to work here?” I asked.

  She was working on my belt now. “Honey, any girl used to work here ain’t going to do for you what I am. Now, how would you—”

  “She was called Elizabeth. Her real name. Elizabeth Elliott.”

  Her hands fell abruptly away, and the mask of arousal slid off her face as if it was greased underneath.

  “What the fuck is this? You the Sia?”

  “The what?”

  “Sia. The heat.” Her voice was rising. She stepped away from me. “We had this, man—”

  “No.” I took a step toward her, and she dropped into a competent-looking defensive crouch. I backed up again, voice low. “No, I’m her mother.”

  Taut silence. She glared at me.

  “Bullshit. Lizzie’s ma’s in the store.”

  “No.” I pulled her hand back to my groin. “Feel. There’s nothing there. They sleeved me in this, but I’m a woman. I don’t, I couldn’t . . .”

  She unbent fractionally from her crouch, hands tugging almost unwillingly down. “That looks like prime tank flesh to me,” she said untrustingly. “You just come out of the store, how come you’re not paroled in some bone bag junkie’s sleeve?”

  “It’s not parole.” The corps’ deep-cover training came rocketing in across my mind like a flight of low-level strike jets, spinning vapor-trail lies on the edge of plausibility and half-known detail. Something inside me tilted with the joy of mission time. “You know what I went down for?”

  “Lizzie said mindbites, something—”

  “Yeah. Dipping. You know who I dipped?”

  “No. Lizzie never talked much about—”

  “Elizabeth didn’t know. And it never came out on the wires.”

  The heavy-breasted girl put her hands on her hips. “So who—”

  I skinned her a smile. “Better you don’t know. Someone powerful. Someone with enough pull to unstack me, and give me this.”

  “Not powerful enough to get you back in something with a pussy, though.” Anemone’s voice was still doubtful, but the conviction was coming up fast, like a bottleback school under reef water. She wanted to believe this fairy-tale mother come looking for her lost daughter. “How come you’re cross-sleeved?”

  “There’s a deal,” I told her, gliding near the truth to flesh out the story. “This . . . person . . . gets me out, and I have to do something for them. Something that needs a man’s body. If I do it, I get a new sleeve for me and Elizabeth.”

  “That so? So why you here?” There was an edge of bitterness in her voice that told me her parents would never come to this place looking for her. And that she believed me. I laid the last pieces of the lie.

  “There’s a problem with resleeving Elizabeth. Someone’s blocking the procedure. I want to know who it is, and why. You know who cut her up?”

  She shook her head, face turned down.

  “A lot of the girls get hurt,” she said quietly. “But Jerry’s got insurance to cover that. He’s real good about it, even puts us into store if it’s going to take a long time to heal. But whoever did Lizzie wasn’t a regular.”

  “Did Elizabeth have regulars? Anyone important? Anyone strange?”

  She looked up at me, pity showing in the corners of her eyes. I’d played Irene Elliott to the hilt. “Mrs. Elliott, all the people who come here are strange. They wouldn’t be here if they weren’t.”

  I made myself wince. “Anyone important?”

  “I don’t know. Look, Mrs. Elliott, I liked Lizzie. She was real kind to me a coupla times when I got down, but we never got close. She was close with Chloe and—” She paused, and added hurriedly, “Nothing like that, you know, but her and Chloe, and Mac, they used to share things, you know, talk and everything.”

  “Can I talk to them?”

  Her eyes flickered to the corners of the cabin, as if she had just heard an inexplicable noise. She looked hunted.

  “It’s better if you don’t. Jerry, you know, he doesn’t like us talking to the public. If he catches us . . .”
r />   I put every ounce of Envoy persuasiveness into stance and tone. “Well, maybe you could ask for me. . . .”

  The hunted look deepened, but her voice firmed up.

  “Sure. I’ll ask around. But not now. You’ve got to go. Come back tomorrow the same time. Same cabin. I’ll stay free for this time. Say you made an appointment.”

  I took her hand in both of mine. “Thank you, Anemone.”

  “My name’s not Anemone,” she said abruptly. “I’m called Louise. Call me Louise.”

  “Thank you, Louise.” I held on to her hand. “Thank you for doing this—”

  “Look, I’m not promising anything,” she said with an attempt at roughness. “Like I said, I’ll ask. That’s all. Now, you go. Please.”

  She showed me how to cancel the remainder of my payment on the credit console, and the door hinged immediately open. No change. I didn’t say anything else. I didn’t try to touch her again. I walked out through the open door and left her standing there with her arms wrapped around her chest and her head down, staring at the satin-padded floor of the cabin as if she was seeing it for the first time.

  Lit in red.

  Outside, the street was unchanged. The two dealers were still there, deep in negotiations with a huge Mongol who was leaning on the hood of the car, looking at something between his hands. The octopus arched its arms to let me pass, and I stepped into the drizzle. The Mongol looked up as I passed, and a flinch of recognition passed over his face.

  I stopped, turning in midstep, and he dropped his gaze again, muttering something to the dealers. The neurachem came on-line like a shiver of cold water inside. I moved across the space to the car, and the sparse conversation between the three men dried up instantly. Hands slid into pouches and pockets. Something was pushing me, something that had very little to do with the look the Mongol had given me. Something dark that had spread its wings on the low-key misery of the cabin, something uncontrolled that Virginia Vidaura would have bawled me out for. I could hear Jimmy de Soto whispering in my ear.