Altered Carbon

  “Uh. Yes. It, uh, it happens if—”

  “A woman you paid?”

  “Well, sometimes. Not especially. I—” I remembered his wife’s abandoned laughter as I exploded into and around her mouth, come trickling down over her knuckles like foam from a popped champagne bottle. “I don’t really remember. It’s not a special fetish of mine, and—”

  “Nor of mine,” the man in front of me snapped, with rather too much emphasis. “I choose it merely as an example. There are things, desires, in all of us that are . . . better suppressed. Or at least, that cannot be expressed in a civilized context.”

  “I’d hardly counterpose civilization with spilling semen.”

  “You come from another place,” Bancroft said broodingly. “A brash, young, colonial culture. You can have no concept of how the centuries of tradition have molded us here on Earth. The young of spirit, the adventurous, all left on the ships in droves. They were encouraged to leave. Those who stayed were the stolid, the obedient, the limited. I watched it happen, and at the time I was glad, because it made carving out an empire so much easier. Now I wonder if it was worth the price we paid. Culture fell in on itself, grappled after norms to live by, settled for the old and familiar. Rigid morality, rigid law. The U.N. declarations fossilized into global conformity. There was a—” He gestured. “—a sort of supracultural straitjacket, and with an inherent fear of what might be born from the colonies, the Protectorate arose while the ships were still in flight. When the first of them made planetfall, their stored peoples woke into a prepared tyranny.”

  “You talk as if you stood outside it. With this much vision, you still can’t fight your way free?”

  Bancroft smiled thinly. “Culture is like a smog. To live within it, you must breathe some of it in and, inevitably, be contaminated. And in any case, what does free mean in this context? Free to spill semen on my wife’s face and breasts? Free to have her masturbate in front of me, to share the use of her flesh with other men and women? Two hundred and fifty years is a long time, Mr. Kovacs, time enough for a very long list of dirty, degrading fantasies to infest the mind and titillate the hormones of each fresh sleeve you wear, while all the time your finer feelings grow purer and more rarified. Do you have any concept of what happens to emotional bonds over such a period?”

  I opened my mouth, but he held up his hand for silence and I let him have it. It’s not every day you get to hear the outpourings of a soul centuries old, and Bancroft was in full flow.

  “No,” he answered his own question. “How could you? Just as your culture is too shallow to appreciate what it is to live on Earth, your life experience cannot possibly encompass what it is to love the same person for two hundred and fifty years. In the end, if you endure, if you beat the traps of boredom and complacency, in the end what you are left with is not love. It is almost veneration. How then to match that respect, that veneration, with the sordid desires of whatever flesh you are wearing at the time? I tell you, you cannot.”

  “So instead you vent yourself on prostitutes?”

  The thin smile returned. “I am not proud of myself, Mr. Kovacs. But you do not live this long without accepting yourself in every facet, however distasteful. The women are there. They satisfy a market need, and are recompensed accordingly. And in this way I purge myself.”

  “Does your wife know this?”

  “Of course. And has for a very considerable time. Oumou informs me that you are already aware of the facts regarding Leila Begin. Miriam has calmed down a lot since then. I’m sure she has . . . adventures of her own.”

  “How sure?”

  Bancroft made an irritated gesture. “Is this relevant? I don’t have my wife monitored, if that’s what you mean, but I know her. She has her appetites to contend with just as I do.”

  “And this doesn’t bother you?”

  “Mr. Kovacs, I am many things, but I am not a hypocrite. It is the flesh, nothing more. Miriam and I understand this. And now, since this line of questioning doesn’t seem to be leading anywhere, can we please get back on track? In the absence of any guilt on the part of Elliott, what else do you have?”

  I made a decision then that came up from levels of instinct way below conscious thought. I shook my head. “There’s nothing yet.”

  “But there will be?”

  “Yes. You can write Ortega off to this sleeve, but there’s still Kadmin. He wasn’t after Ryker. He knew me. Something’s going on.”

  Bancroft nodded in satisfaction. “Are you going to speak to Kadmin?”

  “If Ortega lets me.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning the police will have run whatever satellite footage they’ve got over Oakland this morning, which means they can probably identify me leaving the clinic. There must have been something overhead at the time. I don’t suppose they’ll be at their most cooperative.”

  Bancroft permitted himself another of his splintered smiles. “Very astute, Mr. Kovacs. But you need have nothing to fear on that count. The Wei Clinic—what little you left of it—is reluctant to either release internal video footage or press charges against anyone. They have more to fear in any investigation than you do. Of course, whether they choose to seek more private reprisals is, shall we say, a more protracted question.”

  “And Jerry’s?”

  A shrug. “The same. With the proprietor dead, a managing interest has stepped in.”

  “Very tidy.”

  “I’m glad you appreciate it.” Bancroft got to his feet. “As I said, it has been a busy morning, and negotiations are by no means at an end. I would be grateful if you could limit your depredations somewhat in the future. It has been . . . costly.”

  Getting to my feet, just for a moment I had the traceries of fire at Innenin across the back of my vision, the screaming deaths heard at a level that was bone deep, and suddenly Bancroft’s elegant understatement rang sickly and grotesque, like the antiseptic words of General MacIntyre’s damage reports . . . for securing the Innenin beachhead, a price well worth paying . . . Like Bancroft, MacIntyre had been a man of power, and like all men of power, when he talked of prices worth paying, you could be sure of one thing.

  Someone else was paying.

  CHAPTEr SEVENTEEN

  The Fell Street station was an unassuming block done out in a style I assumed must be Martian Baroque. Whether it had been planned that way as a police station or taken over after the fact was difficult to decide. The place was, potentially, a fortress. The mock-eroded rubystone facings and hooded buttresses provided a series of natural niches in which were set high, stained-glass windows edged by the unobtrusive nubs of shield generators. Below the windows, the abrasive red surface of the stonework was sculpted into jagged obstructions that caught the morning light and turned it bloody. I couldn’t tell whether the steps up to the arched entrance were deliberately uneven or just well worn.

  Inside, stained light from a window and a peculiar calm fell on me simultaneously. Subsonics, I guessed, casting a glance around at the human flotsam waiting submissively on the benches. If these were arrested suspects, they had been rendered remarkably unconcerned by something and I doubted it would be the Zen Populist murals that someone had commissioned for the hall. I crossed the patch of colored light cast by the window, picked my way through small knots of people conversing in lowered tones more appropriate to a library than a holding center, and found myself at a reception counter. A uniformed cop, presumably the desk sergeant, blinked kindly back at me—the subsonics were obviously getting to him, as well.

  “Lieutenant Ortega,” I told him. “Organic Damage.”

  “Who shall I say it is?”

  “Tell her it’s Elias Ryker.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw another uniform turn at the sound of the name, but nothing was said. The desk sergeant spoke into his phone, listened, then turned back to me.

  “She’s sending someone down. Are you armed?”

  I nodded and reached under my jacket for
the Nemex.

  “Please surrender the weapon carefully,” he added with a gentle smile. “Our security software is a little touchy, and it’s apt to stun you if you look like you’re pulling something.”

  I slowed my movements to frame advance, dumped the Nemex on the desk, and set about unstrapping the Tebbit knife from my arm. When I was finished, the sergeant beamed beatifically at me.

  “Thank you. It’ll all be returned to you when you leave the building.”

  The words were barely out of his mouth when two of the mohicans appeared through a door at the back of the hall and directed themselves rapidly toward me. Their faces were painted with identical glowers that the subsonics apparently made little impact on in the short time it took them to reach me. They went for an arm apiece.

  “I wouldn’t,” I told them.

  “Hey, he’s not under arrest, you know,” the desk sergeant said pacifically. One of the mohicans jerked a glance at him and snorted in exasperation. The other one just stared at me the whole time as if he hadn’t eaten red meat recently. I met the stare with a gentle smile. Following the meeting with Bancroft I had gone back to the Hendrix and slept for almost twenty hours. I was rested, neurachemically alert, and feeling a cordial dislike of authority of which Quell herself would have been proud.

  It must have shown. The mohicans abandoned their attempts to paw me, and the three of us rode up four floors in silence broken only by the creak of the ancient elevator.

  Ortega’s office had one of the stained-glass windows, or more precisely the bottom half of one, before it was bisected horizontally by the ceiling. Presumably the remainder rose missilelike from the floor of the office above. I began to see some evidence for the original building having been converted to its present use. The other walls of the office were environment formatted with a tropical sunset over water and islands. The combination of stained glass and sunset meant that the office was filled with a soft orange light in which you could see the drifting of dust motes.

  The lieutenant was seated behind a heavy wooden desk as if caged there. Chin propped on one cupped hand, one shin and knee pressed hard against the edge of the desk, she was brooding over the scrolldown of an antique laptop when we came through the door. Aside from the machine, the only items on the desktop were a battered-looking heavy-caliber Smith & Wesson and a plastic cup of coffee, heating tab still unpulled. She dismissed the mohicans with a nod.

  “Sit down, Kovacs.”

  I glanced around, saw a frame chair under the window, and hooked it up to the desk. The late-afternoon light in the office was disorienting.

  “You work the night shift?”

  Her eyes flared. “What kind of crack is that?”

  “Hey, nothing.” I held up my hands and gestured at the low light. “I just thought you might have cycled the walls for it. You know, it’s ten o’clock in the morning outside.”

  “Oh, that.” Ortega grunted, and her eyes swiveled back down to the screen display. It was hard to tell in the tropical sunset, but I thought they might be gray-green, like the sea around the maelstrom. “It’s out of synch. The department got it cheap from someplace in El Paso–Juárez. Jams up completely sometimes.”

  “That’s tough.”

  “Yeah, sometimes I’ll just turn it off, but the neons are—” She looked up abruptly. “What the fuck am I—Kovacs, do you know how close you are to a storage rack right now?”

  I made a span of my right index finger and thumb, and looked at her through it. “About the width of a testimony from the Wei Clinic, was what I heard.”

  “We can put you there, Kovacs. Seven forty-three yesterday morning, walking out the front door larger than life.”

  I shrugged.

  “And don’t think your Meth connections are going to keep you organic forever. There’s a Wei Clinic limo driver telling interesting stories about hijack and real death. Maybe he’ll have something to say about you.”

  “Impound his vehicle, did you?” I asked casually. “Or did Wei reclaim it before you could run tests?”

  Ortega’s mouth compressed into a hard line.

  I nodded. “Thought so. And the driver will say precisely zero until Wei springs him, I imagine.”

  “Listen, Kovacs. I keep pushing, something’s got to give. It’s a matter of time, motherfucker. Strictly that.”

  “Admirable tenacity,” I said. “Shame you didn’t have some of that for the Bancroft case.”

  “There is no fucking Bancroft case.”

  Ortega was on her feet, palms hard down on the desktop, eyes slitted in rage and disgust. I waited, nerves sprung in case Bay City police stations were as prone to accidental suspect injury as some others I had known. Finally, the lieutenant drew a deep breath and lowered herself joint by joint back into her seat. The anger had smoothed off her face, but the disgust was still there, caught in the fine lines at the corners of her eyes and the set of her wide mouth. She looked at her nails.

  “Do you know what we found at the Wei Clinic yesterday?”

  “Black-market spare parts? Virtual torture programs? Or didn’t they let you stay that long?”

  “We found seventeen bodies with their cortical stacks burnt out. Unarmed. Seventeen dead people. Really dead.”

  She looked up at me again, the disgust still there.

  “You’ll have to pardon my lack of reaction,” I said coldly. “I saw a lot worse when I was in uniform. In fact, I did a lot worse when I was fighting the Protectorate’s battles for them.”

  “That was war.”

  “Oh, please.”

  She said nothing. I leaned forward across the desk.

  “And don’t tell me those seventeen bodies are what you’re on fire about, either.” I gestured at my own face. “This is your problem. You don’t like the idea of someone carving this up.”

  She sat silent for a moment, thinking, then reached into a drawer of the desk and took out a pack of cigarettes. She offered them to me automatically, and I shook my head with clenched determination.

  “I quit.”

  “Did you?” There was genuine surprise in her voice, as she fed herself a cigarette and lit it. “Good for you. I’m impressed.”

  “Yeah, Ryker should be pleased, too, when he gets off stack.”

  She paused behind the veil of smoke, then dropped the pack back into the drawer and palm-heeled it shut.

  “What do you want?” she asked flatly.

  The holding racks were five floors down in a double-story basement where it was easier to regulate temperatures. Compared to PsychaSec, it was a toilet.

  “I don’t see that this is going to change anything,” Ortega said as we followed a yawning technician along the steel gantry to slot 3089b. “What’s Kadmin going to tell you that he hasn’t told us?”

  “Look.” I stopped and turned to face her, hands spread and held low. On the narrow gantry we were uncomfortably close. Something chemical happened, and the geometries of Ortega’s stance seemed suddenly fluid, dangerously tactile. I felt my mouth dry up.

  “I—” she said.

  “3089b,” the technician called, hefting the big, thirty-centimeter disk out of its slot. “This the one you wanted, Lieutenant?”

  Ortega pushed hurriedly past me. “That’s it, Micky. Can you set us up with a virtual?”

  “Sure.” Micky jerked a thumb at one of the spiral staircases collared in at intervals along the gantry. “You want to go down to Five, slap on the ’trodes. Take about five minutes.”

  “The point is,” I said, as the three of us clattered down the steel steps, “you’re the Sia. Kadmin knows you; he’s been dealing with you all his professional life. It’s part of what he does. I’m an unknown. If he’s never been extrasystem, the chances are he’s never met an Envoy before. And they tell nasty stories about the corps most places I’ve been.”

  Ortega gave me a skeptical look over her shoulder. “You’re going to frighten him into a statement? Dimitri Kadmin? I don’t think so.”

/>   “He’ll be off balance, and when people are off balance they give things away. Don’t forget, this guy’s working for someone who wants me dead. Someone who is scared of me, at least superficially. Some of that may rub off on Kadmin.”

  “And this is supposed to convince me that someone murdered Bancroft after all?”

  “Ortega, it doesn’t matter whether you believe it or not. We’ve been through this already. You want Ryker’s sleeve back in the tank ASAP, out of harm’s way. The sooner we get to whatever bottom there is to Bancroft’s death, the sooner that happens. And I’m a lot less likely to incur substantial organic damage if I’m not stumbling around in the dark. If I have your help, in fact. You don’t want this sleeve to get written off in another firefight, do you?”

  “Another firefight?” It had taken nearly half an hour of heated discussion to hammer the sense of the new relationship into Ortega, and the policewoman in her still hadn’t gone to sleep on me.

  “Yeah, after the Hendrix,” I improvised rapidly, cursing the face-to-face chemical interlock that had put me off balance. “I picked up some bad bruising there. Could have been a lot worse.”

  She shot me another, longer glance over her shoulder.

  The virtual interrogation system was housed in a series of bubblefab cabins at one side of the basement floor. Micky settled both of us onto weary-looking automold couches that were slow to respond to our forms, applied the electrodes and hypnophones, then kicked in the power with a concert pianist’s sweep of one arm across two of the utilitarian consoles. He studied the screens as they blinked on.

  “Traffic,” he said, and hawked congestion into the back of his throat with disgust. “Commissioner’s hooked in with some kind of conference environment, and it’s soaking up half the system. Got to wait till someone else gets off.” He glanced back at Ortega. “Hey, that the Mary Lou Hinchley thing?”