Altered Carbon

  A black steel face appeared over the gallery rail. Green photoreceptors burned in place of eyes. “May I be of assistance, sir?”

  “I’m Takeshi Kovacs. I’m here from Laurens Bancroft,” I said, tipping my head back to meet the mandroid’s gaze. “I’m looking for some hardware.”

  “Of course, sir.” The voice was smoothly male and devoid of any sales subsonics I could detect. “Mr. Bancroft told us to expect you. I am with a client, but I shall be down presently. Please make yourself at home. There are chairs to your left and a refreshments cabinet. Please help yourself.”

  The head disappeared, and a murmured conversation I had vaguely registered when I came in was resumed. I located the refreshments cabinet, found it stocked with alcohol and cigars, and closed it hurriedly. The painkillers had taken the edge off the Merge Nine hangover, but I was in no fit state for further abuse. With a light shock, I realized I’d gone through the day so far without a cigarette. I wandered over to the nearest display case and looked in at a selection of samurai swords. There were date tickets attached to the scabbards. Some of them were older than me.

  The next case held a rack of brown and gray projectile weapons that seemed to have been grown rather than machined. The barrels sprouted from organically curved wrappings that flared gently back to the stock. These, too, were dated back into the last century. I was trying to decipher the curled engraving on a barrel, when I heard a metallic tread on the staircase behind me.

  “Has sir found anything to his liking?”

  I turned to face the approaching mandroid. Its entire body was the same polished gunmetal, molded into the muscle configuration of an archetypal human male. Only the genitals were absent. The face was long and thin, fine featured enough to hold attention despite its immobility. The head was carved into furrows to represent thick, back-combed hair. Stamped across the chest was the almost eroded legend MARS EXPO 2076.

  “Just looking,” I said, and gestured back at the guns. “Are these made of wood?”

  The green photoreceptor gaze regarded me gravely. “That is correct, sir. The stocks are a beech hybrid. They are all handmade weapons. Kalashnikov, Purdey, and Beretta. We stock all the European houses here. Which was sir interested in?”

  I looked back. There was a curious poetry to the forms, something slung partway between functional bluntness and organic grace, something that cried out to be cradled. To be used.

  “They’re a bit ornate for me. I had in mind something a little more practical.”

  “Certainly, sir. Can we assume sir is not a novice in this field?”

  I grinned at the machine. “We can assume that.”

  “Then perhaps sir would care to tell me what his preferences in the past have been.”

  “Smith and Wesson eleven-millimeter magnum. Ingram 40 flechette gun. Sunjet particle thrower. But that wasn’t in this sleeve.”

  The green receptors glowed. No comment. Perhaps it hadn’t been programmed for light conversation with Envoys.

  “And what exactly is sir looking for in this sleeve?”

  I shrugged. “Something subtle. Something not. Projectile weapons. And a blade. The heavy one needs to be something like the Smith.”

  The mandroid became quite still. I could almost hear the whirring of data retrieval. I wondered briefly how a machine like this had come to wind up here. It had clearly not been designed for the job. On Harlan’s World, you don’t see many mandroids. They’re expensive to build, compared to a synthetic or even a clone, and most jobs that require a human form are better done by those organic alternatives. The truth is that a robot human is a pointless collision of two disparate functions: artificial intelligence, which really works better strung out on a mainframe, and hard-wearing, hazard-proof bodywork, which most cyberengineering firms designed to spec for the task at hand. The last robot I’d seen on the World was a gardening crab.

  The photoreceptors brightened slightly, and the thing’s posture unlocked. “If sir would care to come this way, I believe I have the right combination.”

  I followed the machine through a door that blended so well with the decor of the back wall that I hadn’t seen it and down a short corridor. Beyond was a long, low room whose unpainted plaster walls were lined with raw fiberglass packing cases. There were a number of people working quietly at points up and down the room. The air carried the businesslike rattle of hardware in practiced hands. The mandroid led me to a small, gray-haired man dressed in grease-streaked coveralls who was stripping down an electromag bolt thrower as if it were a roast chicken. He looked up as we approached.

  “Chip?” He nodded at the machine and ignored me.

  “Clive, this is Takeshi Kovacs. He’s a friend of Mr. Bancroft, looking for equipment. I’d like you to show him the Nemex and a Philips gun, and then pass him on to Sheila for a blade weapon.”

  Clive nodded again and set aside the electromag.

  “This way,” he said.

  The mandroid touched my arm lightly. “Should sir require anything further, I shall be in the showroom.”

  It bowed fractionally and left. I followed Clive along the rows of packing cases to where a variety of handguns were laid out on piles of plastic confetti. He selected one and turned back to me with it in his hands.

  “Second series Nemesis X,” he said, holding out the gun. “The Nemex. Manufactured under license for Mannlicher-Schoenauer. Fires a jacketed slug with a customized propellant called Druck 31. Very powerful, very accurate. The magazine takes eighteen shells in a staggered clip. Bit bulky but worth it in a firefight. Feel the weight.”

  I took the weapon and turned it over in my hands. It was a big, heavy-barreled pistol, slightly longer than the Smith & Wesson but well balanced. I swapped it hand to hand for a while, getting the feel of it, squinted down the sight. Clive waited beside me patiently.

  “All right.” I handed it back. “And something subtle?”

  “Philips squeeze gun.” Clive reached into an open packing case and dug inside the confetti until he came up with a slim gray pistol almost half the size of the Nemex. “A solid steel load. Uses an electromagnetic accelerator. Completely silent, accurate up to about twenty meters. No recoil, and you’ve got a reverse field option on the generator that means the slugs can be retrieved from the target afterwards. Takes ten.”

  “Batteries?”

  “Specs are for between forty and fifty discharges. After that, you’re losing muzzle velocity with every shot. You get two replacement batteries included in the price and a recharging kit compatible with household power outlets.”

  “Do you have a firing range? Somewhere I can try these out?”

  “Out the back. But both these babies come with a virtual combat practice disk, and that’s perfect parity between virtual and actual performance. Warranty guarantees it.”

  “All right, fine.” Collecting on a guarantee like that might prove a slow process if some cowboy used the resulting unhandiness to put a bullet through your skull. No telling when you might get resleeved, if at all. But by now the ache in my head was beginning to get through the painkillers. Maybe target practice wasn’t the thing right at that moment. I didn’t bother asking the price either. It wasn’t my money I was spending. “Ammunition?”

  “Comes in boxes of five, both guns, but you get a free clip with the Nemex. Sort of a promotion for the new line. That going to be enough?”

  “Not really. Give me two five-packs for both guns.”

  “Ten clips each?” There was a dubious respect in Clive’s voice. Ten clips is a lot of ammunition for a handgun, but I’d discovered that there were times when being able to fill the air with bullets was worth a lot more than actually hitting anything. “And you wanted a blade, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Sheila!” Clive turned away down the long room and called out to a tall woman with crewcut blonde hair who was sitting cross-legged on a crate with her hands in her lap and the matte-gray of a virtual set masking her face. She
looked around when she heard her name, remembered the mask, and tipped it off, blinking. Clive waved at her, and she uncoiled herself from the crate, swaying slightly from the shift back to reality as she got up.

  “Sheila, this guy’s looking for steel. You want to help him out?”

  “Sure.” The woman reached out a lanky arm. “Name’s Sheila Sorenson. What kind of steel you looking for?”

  I matched her grip. “Takeshi Kovacs. I need something I can throw in a hurry, but it’s got to be small. Something I can strap to a forearm.”

  “All right,” she said amiably. “Want to come with me? You finished here?”

  Clive nodded at me. “I’ll take this stuff out to Chip, and he’ll package it up for you. You want it for delivery or carryout?”

  “Carryout.”

  “Thought so.”

  Sheila’s end of the business turned out to be a small rectangular room with a couple of silhouette cork targets on one wall and an array of weapons ranging from stilettos to machetes hung on the other three. She selected a flat black knife with a gray metal blade about fifteen centimeters long and took it down.

  “Tebbit knife,” she said inconsequentially. “Very nasty.”

  And with every appearance of casualness she turned and unleashed the weapon at the left-hand target. It skipped through the air like something alive and buried itself in the silhouette’s head. “Tantalum steel alloy blade, webbed carbon hilt. There’s a flint set in the pommel for weighting, and of course you can bash them over the head with that if you don’t get them with the sharp end.”

  I stepped across to the target and freed the knife. The blade was narrow and honed to a razor’s edge on each side. A shallow gutter ran down the center, delineated with a thin red line that had tiny, intricate characters etched into it. I tilted the weapon in an attempt to read the engraving, but it was in a code I didn’t recognize. Light glinted dully off the gray metal.

  “What’s this?”

  “What?” Sheila moved to stand beside me. “Oh, yeah. Bioweapon coding. The runnel is coated with C-381. Produces cyanide compounds on contact with hemoglobin. Well away from the edges, so if you cut yourself there’s no problem, but if you sink it in anything with blood . . .”

  “Charming.”

  “Told you it was nasty, didn’t I.” There was pride in her voice.

  “I’ll take it.”

  Back out on the street, weighed down with my purchases, it occurred to me I’d need a jacket after all, if only to conceal the newly acquired arsenal. I cast a glance upward in search of an autocab and decided instead that there was enough sun in the sky to justify walking. I thought, at last, that my hangover was beginning to recede.

  I was three blocks down the hill before I realized I was being tailed.

  It was the Envoy conditioning, stirring sluggishly to life in the wake of the Merge Nine, that told me. Enhanced proximity sense, the faintest shiver, and a figure in the corner of my eye once too often. This one was good. In a more crowded part of town I might have missed it, but here the pedestrians were too thin on the ground to provide much camouflage.

  The Tebbit knife was strapped to my left forearm in a soft leather sheath with neural spring-load, but neither of the guns were accessible without making it obvious that I’d spotted my shadow. I debated trying to lose the tail, but abandoned the idea almost as soon as it occurred to me. It wasn’t my town, I felt sludgy with chemicals, and anyway I was carrying too much. Let whoever it was come shopping with me. I picked up my pace a little and worked my way gradually down into the commercial center, where I found an expensive thigh-length red and blue wool coat with Inuit-inspired totem pole figures chasing each other in lines across it. It wasn’t quite what I’d had in mind, but it was warm and had numerous capacious pockets. Paying for it at the shop’s glass front, I managed to catch a glimpse of my tail’s face. Young, Caucasian, dark hair. I didn’t know him.

  The two of us crossed Union Square, pausing to take in another Resolution 653 demonstration that had stalled in a corner and was gradually wearing thin. The chants wavered, people drifted away, and the metallic bark of the PA system was beginning to sound plaintive. There was a good chance I could have slipped away in the crowd, but by now I couldn’t be bothered. If the tail had been going to do anything other than watch, he’d had his chance back in the leafy seclusion of the hills. There was too much going on here for a hit. I steered my way through the remnants of the demonstration, brushing aside the odd leaflet, and then headed south toward Mission Street and the Hendrix.

  On my way down Mission, I stepped inadvertently into the cast radius of a street seller. Instantly, my head flooded with images. I was moving along an alley full of women whose clothing was designed to display more than they would have shown of themselves naked. Boots that turned legs into slices of consumer flesh above the knee, thighs with arrow-shaped bands pointing the way, structural support lifting and pressing breasts out for view, heavy rounded pendants nestling glanlike in sweat-beaded cleavages. Tongues flickered out, licked across lips painted cherry red or tomb black, teeth bared in challenge.

  A tide of cool swept in across me, erasing the sweaty need and turning the posturing bodies into an abstract expression of womanhood. I found myself tracking angles and the circumferences of bulges like a machine, mapping the geometry of flesh and bone as if the women were a species of plant.

  Betathanatine. The Reaper.

  Final offspring of an extended chemical family engineered for near-death research projects early in the millennium, betathanatine brought the human body as close to flat-line status as was feasible without gross cellular damage. At the same time, control stimulants in the Reaper molecule induced a clinical functioning of intellect, which had enabled researchers to go through artificially induced death experiences without the overwhelming sense of emotion and wonder that might mar their data perception. Used in smaller doses, Reaper produced a depth of cool indifference to such things as pain, arousal, joy, and grief. All the detachment that men had pretended for centuries before the naked female form was there for the taking, in capsule. It was almost custom built for the male adolescent market.

  It was also an ideal military drug. Riding the Reaper, a Godwin’s Dream renouncer monk could torch a village full of women and children and feel nothing but fascination for the way the flames melted flesh from bone.

  The last time I’d used betathanatine had been in street battles on Sharya. A full dose, designed to bring body temperature down to room normal and slow my heart to a fractional rate. Tricks to beat the antipersonnel detectors on Sharyan spider tanks. With no register on infrared, you could get up close, scale a leg, and crack the hatches with termite grenades. Concussed by the shockwave, the crew usually slaughtered as easily as newborn kittens.

  “Got Stiff, man,” a hoarse voice said redundantly. I blinked away the broadcast and found myself looking at a pale Caucasian face beneath a gray cowl. The broadcast unit sat on his shoulder, tiny red active lights winking at me like bat eyes. On the World there are very tight laws regulating the use of direct-to-head dissemination, and even accidental broadcasts can generate the same kind of violence as spilling someone’s drink in a wharf-front bar. I shot out one arm and shoved the dealer hard in the chest. He staggered against a shopfront.

  “Hey—”

  “Don’t piss in my head, friend. I don’t like it.”

  I saw his hand snake down to a unit at his waist and guessed what was coming. Retargeting, I got the soft of his eyes under my stiffened fingers . . .

  And was face-to-face with a hissing mound of wet membranous flesh nearly two meters tall. Tentacles writhed at me, and my hand was reaching into a phlegm-streaked hollow framed with thick black cilia. My gorge rose and my throat closed up. Riding out a shudder of revulsion, I pushed into the seething cilia and felt the slimy flesh give.

  “You want to go on seeing, you’ll unplug that shit,” I said tightly.

  The mound of flesh vanished, and I
was back with the dealer, fingers still pressed hard onto the upper curves of his eyeballs.

  “All right, man, all right.” He held up his hands, palms out. “You don’t want the stuff, don’t buy it. I’m just trying to make a living here.”

  I stepped back and gave him the space to get off the shopfront he was pinned to.

  “Where I come from, you don’t go into people’s heads on the street,” I offered by way of explanation. But he’d already sensed my retreat from the confrontation, and he just made a gesture with his thumb that I assumed was obscene.

  “I give a fuck where you’re from? Fucking grasshopper? Get out of my face.”

  I left him there, wondering idly as I crossed the street if there was any moral difference between him and the genetic designers who had built Merge Nine into Miriam Bancroft’s sleeve.

  I paused on a corner and bent my head to kindle a cigarette.

  Midafternoon. My first of the day.

  CHAPTEr TWELVE

  As I dressed in front of the mirror that night, I suffered the hard-edged conviction that someone else was wearing my sleeve and that I had been reduced to the role of a passenger in the observation car behind the eyes.

  Psychoentirety rejection, they call it. Or just fragmenting. It’s not unusual to get some tremors, even when you’re an experienced sleeve changer, but this was the worst case I’d had for years. For long moments, I was literally terrified to have a detailed thought, in case the man in the mirror noticed my presence. Frozen, I watched him adjust the Tebbit knife in its neurospring sheath, pick up the Nemex and the Philips gun one by one and check the load of each weapon. The slug guns had both come equipped with cheap fibergrip holsters that enzyme-bonded to clothing wherever they were pressed. The man in the mirror settled the Nemex under his left arm where it would be hidden by his jacket and stowed the Philips gun in the small of his back. He practiced snatching the guns from their holsters a couple of times, throwing them out at his reflection, but there was no need. The virtual practice disks had lived up to Clive’s promises. He was ready to kill someone with either weapon.