Altered Carbon

  “Where would you like to start? I assume you’ve brought sophisticated bomb-detection equipment with you.”

  Ortega ignored him. She took a couple of steps closer to the decanting tank and looked up into the wash of cool green light it cast down into the gloom. “This one of tonight’s whores?” she asked.

  Carnage sniffed. “In not so many words, it is. I do wish you’d understand the difference between what they peddle in those greasy little shops down the coast, and this.”

  “So do I,” Ortega told him, eyes still upward on the body. “Where’d you get this one from, then?”

  “How should I know?” Carnage made a show of studying the plastic nails on his right hand. “Oh, we have the bill of sale somewhere, if you must look. By the look of him, I’d say this one’s out of Nippon Organics, or one of the Pacific Rim combines. Does it really matter?”

  I went to the wall and stared up at the floating sleeve. Slim, hard looking, and brown, with the delicately lifted Japanese eyes on the shelf of unscalably high cheekbones, a thick, straight drift of impenetrably black hair like seaweed in the tank fluid. Gracefully flexible with the long hands of an artist, but muscled for speed combat. It was the body of a tech ninja, the body I’d dreamed about having at fifteen, on dreary rain-filled days in Newpest. It wasn’t far off the sleeve they’d given me to fight the Sharya war in. It was a variation on the sleeve I’d bought with my first big payoff in Millsport, the sleeve I’d met Sarah in.

  It was like looking at myself under glass. The self I’d built somewhere in the coils of memory that trail all the way back to childhood. Suddenly I stood, exiled into Caucasian flesh, on the wrong side of the mirror.

  Carnage came up to me and slapped the glass. “You approve, Detective Ryker?” When I said nothing, he went on. “I’m sure you do, someone with your appetite for, well, brawling. The specs are quite remarkable. Reinforced chassis, the bones are all culture-grown marrow alloy jointed with polybond ligamenting, carbon-reinforced tendons, Khumalo neurachem—”

  “Got neurachem,” I said, for something to say.

  “I know all about your neurachem, Detective Ryker.” Even through the poor-quality voice, I thought I could hear a soft, sticky delight. “The fightdrome scanned your specs when you were on stack. There was some talk of buying you up, you know. Physically, I mean. It was thought your sleeve could be used in a humiliation bout. Faked, of course, we would never dream of the actual thing here. That would be, well, criminal.” Carnage paused dramatically. “But then it was decided that humiliation fights were not the, uh, the spirit of the establishment. A lowering of tone, you understand. Not a real contest. Shame really, with all the friends you’ve made, it would have been a big crowd puller.”

  I wasn’t really listening to him, but it dawned on me that Ryker was being insulted, and I pivoted away from the glass to fix Carnage with what seemed like an appropriate glare.

  “But I digress,” the synthetic went on smoothly. “What I meant to say is that your neurachem is to this system as my voice is to that of Anchana Salomao. This—” He gestured once more at the tank. “—is Khumalo neurachem, patented by Cape Neuronics only last year. A development of almost spiritual proportions. There are no synaptic chemical amplifiers, no servo chips or implanted wiring. The system is grown in, and it responds directly to thought. Consider that, Detective. No one offworld has it yet. The U.N. is thought to be considering a ten-year colonial embargo, though I myself doubt the efficacy of such—”

  “Carnage.” Ortega drifted in behind him, impatiently. “Why haven’t you decanted the other fighter yet?”

  “But we are, Lieutenant.” Carnage waved one hand at the rack of body tubes on the left. From behind them came the sound of prowling heavy machinery. I peered into the gloom and made out a big automated forklift unit rolling down the rows of containers. As we watched, it locked to a stop and bright directed lighting sprang up on its frame. The forks reached and clamped on a tube, extracting it from the chained cradle while smaller servos disconnected the cabling from it. Separation complete, the machine withdrew slightly, swiveled about, and trundled back along the rows toward the empty decanting tank.

  “The system is entirely automated,” Carnage said superfluously.

  Below the tank, I now noticed a line of three circular openings, like the forward discharge ports of an IP dreadnought. The forklift rose up a little on hydraulic pistons and loaded the tube it was carrying smoothly into the center port. The tube fit snugly, the visible end rotating through about ninety degrees before a steel baffle slammed down over it. Its task completed, the forklift sank back down on its hydraulics, and its engines died.

  I watched the tank.

  It seemed like a while, but in fact probably took less than a minute. A hatch broke open in the floor of the tank, and a silvery shoal of bubbles erupted upward. Drifting after them came the body. It bobbed fetally for a moment, turning this way and that in the eddies caused by the air, then its arms and legs began to unfold, aided by the gently tugging monitor wires secured at wrist and ankle. It was bigger boned than the Khumalo sleeve, blocky and more heavily muscled, but similar in color. A strong-boned, hawk-nosed visage tipped lazily toward us as the thin wires pulled it upright.

  “Sharyan Right Hand of God martyr,” Carnage said beamingly. “Not really, of course, but the race type’s accurate and it’s got an authentic Will of God enhanced response system.” He nodded at the other tank. “The marines on Sharya were multiracial, but there were enough Jap types there to make it believable.”

  “Not much of a contest, is it,” I said. “State-of-the-art neurachem against century-old Sharyan biomech.”

  Carnage grinned with his slack silicoflesh face. “Well, that will depend on the fighters. I’m told the Khumalo system takes a bit of getting used to, and to be honest it isn’t always the best sleeve that wins. It’s more about psychology. Endurance, pain tolerance . . .”

  “Savagery,” Ortega added. “Lack of empathy.”

  “Things like that,” the synthetic agreed. “That’s what makes it exciting, of course. If you’d care to come tonight, Lieutenant, Detective, I’m sure I can find you a couple of remaindered seats near the back.”

  “You’ll be commentating,” I surmised, already hearing the specs-rich vocabulary that Carnage used come tumbling out over the loudspeaker, the killing ring drenched in focused white light, the roaring, surging crowd in the darkened seating, the smell of sweat and bloodlust.

  “Of course I will.” Carnage’s logo’d eyes narrowed. “You haven’t been away so long, you know.”

  “Are we going to look for these bombs?” Ortega said loudly.

  It took us over an hour to go over the hold, looking for imaginary bombs, while Carnage looked on with poorly veiled amusement. Up above, the two sleeves destined for slaughter in the arena looked down on us from their green-lit glass-sided wombs, and their presences weighed no less heavily for their closed eyes and dreaming visages.

  CHAPTEr TWENTY

  Ortega dropped me on Mission Street as evening was falling over the city. She’d been withdrawn and monosyllabic on the flight back from the fightdrome, and I guessed the strain of reminding herself I was not Ryker was beginning to take a toll. But when I made a production out of brushing off my shoulders as I got out of the cruiser, she laughed impulsively.

  “Stick around the Hendrix tomorrow,” she said. “There’s someone I want you to talk to, but it’ll take a while to set up.”

  “Fair enough.” I turned to go.

  “Kovacs.”

  I turned back. She was leaning across to look up and out of the open door at me. I put an arm on the uplifted door wing of the cruiser and looked down. There was a longish pause during which I could feel my blood beginning to adrenalize gently.

  “Yes?”

  She hesitated a moment longer, then said, “Carnage was hiding something back there, right?”

  “From the amount he talked, I’d say yes.”

 
“That’s what I thought.” She prodded hurriedly at the control console, and the door began to slide back down. “See you tomorrow.”

  I watched the cruiser lift into the sky and sighed. I was reasonably sure that going to Ortega openly had been a good move, but I hadn’t expected it to be so messy. However long she and Ryker had been together, the chemistry must have been devastating. I remembered reading somewhere how the initial pheromones of attraction between bodies appeared to undergo a form of encoding the longer said bodies were in proximity, binding them increasingly close. None of the biochemists interviewed appeared to really understand the process, but there had been some attempts to play with it in labs. Speeding up or interrupting had met with mixed results, one of which was empathin and its derivatives.

  Chemicals. I was still reeling from the cocktail of Miriam Bancroft, and I didn’t need this. I told myself, in no uncertain terms, I didn’t need this.

  Up ahead, over the heads of the evening’s scattered pedestrians, I saw the holographic bulk of the left-handed guitar player outside the Hendrix. I sighed again and started walking.

  Halfway up the block, a bulky automated vehicle rolled past me, hugging the curb. It looked pretty much like the robocrawlers that cleaned the streets of Millsport, so I paid no attention to it as it drew level. Seconds later, I was drenched in the machine’s imagecast.

  . . . from the Houses from the Houses from the Houses from the Houses from the Houses from the Houses . . .

  The voices groaned and murmured, male, female, overlaid. It was like a choir in the throes of orgasm. The images were inescapable, varying across a broad spectrum of sexual preference. A whirlwind of fleeting sensory impressions.

  Genuine . . .

  Uncut . . .

  Full-sense repro . . .

  Tailored . . .

  As if to prove this last, the random images thinned out into a stream of heterosex combinations. They must have scanned my response to the blur of options and fed directly back to the broadcast unit. Very high tech.

  The flow ended with a phone number in glowing numerals and an erect penis in the hands of a woman with long dark hair and a crimson-lipped smile. She looked into the lens. I could feel her fingers.

  Head in the Clouds, she breathed. This is what it’s like. Maybe you can’t afford to come up here, but you can certainly afford this.

  Her head dipped; her lips slid down over the penis. Like it was happening to me. Then the long black hair curtained in from either side and inked the image out. I was back on the street, swaying, coated in a thin sheen of sweat. The autocaster grumbled away down the street behind me, some of the more streetwise pedestrians skipping sharply sideways out of its ’cast radius.

  I found I could recall the phone number with gleaming clarity.

  The sweat cooled rapidly to a shiver. I flexed my shoulders and started walking, trying not to notice the knowing looks of the people around me. I was almost into a full stride again when a gap opened in the strollers ahead and I saw the long, low limousine parked outside the Hendrix’s front doors.

  Jangling nerves sent my hand leaping toward the holstered Nemex before I recognized the vehicle as Bancroft’s. Forcing out a deep breath, I circled the limousine and ascertained that the driver’s compartment was empty. I was still wondering what to do when the rear compartment hatch cracked open and Curtis unfolded himself from the seating inside.

  “We need to talk, Kovacs,” he said in a man-to-man sort of voice that put me on the edge of a slightly hysterical giggle. “Decision time.”

  I looked him up and down, reckoned from the tiny eddies in his stance and demeanor that he was chemically augmented at the moment, and decided to humor him.

  “Sure. In the limo?”

  “ ’S cramped in there. How about you ask me up to your room?”

  My eyes narrowed. There was an unmistakable hostility in the chauffeur’s voice, and a just as unmistakable hard-on pressing at the front of his immaculate chinos. Granted, I had a similar, if detumescing, lump of my own, but I remembered distinctly that Bancroft’s limo had shielding against the street ’casts. This was something else.

  I nodded at the hotel entrance.

  “Okay, let’s go.”

  The doors parted to let us in, and the Hendrix came to life.

  “Good evening, sir. You have no visitors this evening—”

  Curtis snorted. “Disappointed, hah, Kovacs.”

  “—nor any calls since you left.” The hotel continued smoothly. “Do you wish this person admitted as a guest?”

  “Yeah, sure. You got a bar we can go to?”

  “I said your room,” Curtis growled behind me, then yelped as he barked his shin on one of the lobby’s low, metal-edged tables.

  “The Midnight Lamp bar is located on this floor,” the hotel said doubtfully. “But it has not been used for a considerable time.”

  “I said—”

  “Shut up, Curtis. Didn’t anyone ever tell you not to rush a first date? The Midnight Lamp is fine. Fire it up for us.”

  Across the lobby, adjacent to the check-in console, a wide section of the back wall slid grudgingly aside, and lights flickered on in the space beyond. With Curtis making sneering sounds behind me, I went to the opening and peered down a short flight of steps into the Midnight Lamp bar.

  “This’ll do fine. Come on.”

  Someone overliteral in imagination had done the interior decoration of the Midnight Lamp bar. The walls, themselves psychedelic whirls of midnight blues and purples, were festooned with a variety of clock faces showing either the declared hour or a few minutes to, interwoven with every form of lamp known to man, from clay prehistoric to enzyme-decay light canisters. There was indented bench seating along both walls, clock-face tables, and in the center of the room a circular bar in the shape of a countdown dial. A robot composed entirely of clocks and lamps waited immobile just beside the dial’s twelve mark.

  It was all the more eerie for the complete absence of any other customers, and as we made our way toward the waiting robot, I could feel Curtis’s earlier mood quiet a little.

  “What will it be, gentlemen?” the machine said unexpectedly, from no apparent vocal outlet. Its face was an antique white analog clock with spider-thin baroque hands and the hours marked off in Roman numerals. A little unnerved, I turned back to Curtis, whose face was showing signs of unwilling sobriety.

  “Vodka,” he said shortly. “Subzero.”

  “And a whiskey. Whatever it is I’ve been drinking out of the cabinet in my room. At room temperature, please. Both on my tab.”

  The clock face inclined slightly, and one multijointed arm swung up to select glasses from an overhead rack. The other arm, which ended in a lamp with a forest of small spouts, trickled the requested spirits into the glasses.

  Curtis picked up his glass and threw a generous portion of the vodka down his throat. He drew breath hard through his teeth and made a satisfied growling noise. I sipped at my own glass a little more circumspectly, wondering how long it had been since liquid last flowed through the bar’s tubes and spigots. My fears proved unfounded, so I deepened the sip and let the whiskey melt its way down into my stomach.

  Curtis banged down his glass.

  “Now you ready to talk?”

  “All right, Curtis,” I said slowly, looking into my drink. “I imagine you have a message for me.”

  “Sure have.” His voice was cranked to snapping point. “The lady says, you going to take her very generous offer, or not. Just that. I’m supposed to give you time to make up your mind, so I’ll finish my drink.”

  I fixed my gaze on a Martian sand lamp hanging from the opposite wall. Curtis’s mood was beginning to make some sense.

  “Muscling in on your territory, am I?”

  “Don’t push your luck, Kovacs.” There was a desperate edge to the words. “You say the wrong thing here, and I’ll—”

  “You’ll what?” I set my glass down and turned to face him. He was less than h
alf my subjective age, young and muscled and chemically wound up in the illusion that he was dangerous. He reminded me so much of myself at the same age it was maddening. I wanted to shake him. “You’ll what?”

  Curtis gulped. “I was in the provincial marines.”

  “What as, a pinup?” I went to push him in the chest with one stiffened hand, then dropped it, ashamed. I lowered my voice. “Listen, Curtis. Don’t do this to us both.”

  “You think you’re pretty fucking tough, don’t you?”

  “This isn’t about tough, C-urtis.” I’d almost called him kid. It seemed as if part of me wanted the fight after all. “This is about two different species. What did they teach you in the provincial marines? Hand-to-hand combat? Twenty-seven ways to kill a man with your hands? Underneath it all you’re still a man. I’m an Envoy, Curtis. It’s not the same.”

  He came for me anyway, leading with a straight jab that was supposed to distract me while the following roundhouse kick scythed in from the side at head height. It was a skull cracker if it landed, but it was hopelessly overdramatic. Maybe it was the chemicals he’d dressed up in that night. No one in their right mind throws kicks above waist height in a real fight. I ducked the jab and the kick in the same movement and grabbed his foot. A sharp twist and Curtis tipped, staggered, and landed spread-eagled on the bartop. I smashed his face against the unyielding surface and held him there with my hand knotted in his hair.

  “See what I mean?”

  He made muffled noises and thrashed impotently about while the clock-faced bartender stood immobile. Blood from his broken nose was streaked across the bar’s surface. I studied the patterns it had made while I brought my breathing back down. The lock I had on my conditioning was making me pant. Shifting my grip to his right arm, I jerked it up high into the small of his back. The thrashing stopped.

  “Good. Now you keep still or I’ll break it. I’m not in the mood for this.” As I spoke, I was feeling rapidly through his pockets. In the inner breast pouch of his jacket I found a small plastic tube. “Aha. So what little delights have we got tubing around your system tonight? Hormone enhancers, by the look of that hard-on.” I held the tube up to the dim light and saw thousands of tiny crystal slivers inside it. “Military format. Where did you get this stuff, Curtis? Discharge freebie from the marines, was it?” I recommenced my search and came up with the delivery system—a tiny skeletal gun with a sliding chamber and a magnetic coil. Tip the crystals into the breech and close it, the magnetic field aligns them and the accelerator spits them out at penetrative speed. Not so different from Sarah’s shard pistol. For battlefield medics, they were a hardy and consequently very popular alternative to hyposprays.