Altered Carbon

“Heard of it.” Ortega dug absently at the sand with the toe of one boot. It was still damp from the tide’s retreat, and our footprints welled soggily behind us. In either direction the curve of the beach was deserted. We were alone apart from the gulls that wheeled in geometric formations high overhead.

  “Well, since we’re waiting, you want to fill me in?”

  “Harem drug.” When I looked blank, Ortega puffed out her cheeks impatiently. She was acting like someone who hadn’t slept well.

  “I’m not from here.”

  “You were on Sharya, you told me.”

  “Yeah. In a military capacity. There wasn’t all that much time for cultural awareness. We were too busy killing people.”

  This last wasn’t quite true. Following the sack of Zihicce, the Envoys had been steeped in the mechanics of engineering a regime compliant to the Protectorate. Troublemakers were rooted out, cells of resistance infiltrated and then crushed, collaborators plugged into the political edifice. In the process we’d learned quite a lot about local culture.

  I’d asked for an early transfer out.

  Ortega shaded her eyes and scanned the beach in both directions. Nothing stirred. She sighed. “It’s a male response enhancer. Boosts aggression, sexual prowess, confidence. On the street in the Middle East and Europe they call it Stallion, in the south it’s Toro. We don’t get much of it here; street mood’s more ambient. Which I’m glad about. From what I hear, it can be very nasty. You run across some last night?”

  “Sort of.” This was pretty much what I’d learned from the Hendrix database last night, but more concise and with less chemistry. And Curtis’s behavior ran the checklist of symptoms and side effects like a model. “Suppose I wanted to get hold of some of this stuff, where could I pick it up? Easily, I mean.”

  Ortega gave me a sharp look, and picked her way back up the beach onto dryer sand. “Like I said, we don’t get much of it here,” she said in time with her labored, sinking footsteps. “You’d have to ask around. Someone with better than local connections. Or get it synthesized locally. But I don’t know. With designer hormones, that’s likely to be more expensive than just buying it in from down south.”

  She paused at the crest of the dune and looked around again.

  “Where the hell is she?”

  “Maybe she’s not coming,” I suggested morosely. I hadn’t slept all that well myself. Most of the night after Rodrigo Bautista’s departure had been spent brooding over the uncooperatively jagged pieces of the Bancroft jigsaw and fighting off the urge to smoke. My head seemed barely to have hit the pillow when the Hendrix buzzed me awake with Ortega’s call. It was still obscenely early in the morning.

  “She’ll come,” Ortega said. “The link’s booked through to her personal pickup. Call’s probably delayed at incoming security. We’ve been in here only about ten seconds, real time.”

  I shivered in the cold wind from offshore and said nothing. Overhead, the gulls repeated their geometry. The virtuality was cheap, not designed for long stay.

  “Got any cigarettes?”

  I was seated in the cold sand, smoking with a kind of mechanical intensity, when something moved on the extreme right of the bay. I straightened up and narrowed my eyes, then laid a hand on Ortega’s arm. The motion resolved itself into a plume of sand or water, ripped into the air by a fast-moving surface vehicle that was tearing around the curve of the beach toward us.

  “Told you she’d come.”

  “Or someone would,” I muttered, getting to my feet and reaching for the Nemex, which was, of course, not there. Not many virtual forums allowed firearms in their constructs. Instead, I brushed sand from my clothes and moved down the beach, still trying to rid myself of the brooding feeling that I was wasting my time here.

  The vehicle was close enough now to be visible, a dark dot at the front of the pluming wake. I could hear its engine, a shrill whine over the melancholy carping of the gulls. I turned to Ortega, who was watching the approaching craft impassively at my side.

  “Bit excessive for a phone call, isn’t it?” I said nastily.

  Ortega shrugged and spun her cigarette away into the sand. “Money doesn’t automatically mean taste,” she said.

  The speeding dot became a stubby, finned one-man ground jet, painted iridescent pink. It was plowing along through the shallow surf at the water’s edge, flinging water and wet sand indiscriminately behind it, but a few hundred meters away the pilot must have seen us, because the little craft veered out across the deeper water and cut a spray tail twice its own height toward us.

  “Pink?”

  Ortega shrugged again.

  The ground jet beached about ten meters away and shuddered to a halt, ripped-up gobbets of wet sand splattering down around it. When the storm of its arrival had died, a hatch was flung back and a black-clad, helmeted figure clambered out. That the figure was a woman was abundantly clear from the formfitting flight suit, a suit that ended in boots inlaid with curling silver tracery from heel to toe.

  I sighed and followed Ortega up to the craft.

  The woman in the flight suit jumped down into the shallow water and splashed up to meet us, tugging at the seals on her helmet. As we met, the helmet came off and long, coppery hair spilled out over the suit’s shoulders. The woman put her head back and shook out the hair, revealing a wide-boned face with large, expressive eyes the color of flecked onyx, a delicately arched nose, and a generously sculpted mouth.

  The old, ghostly hint of Miriam Bancroft’s beauty this woman had once owned had been scrubbed out utterly.

  “Kovacs, this is Leila Begin,” Ortega said formally. “Ms. Begin, this is Takeshi Kovacs, Laurens Bancroft’s retained investigator.”

  The large eyes appraised me frankly.

  “You’re from offworld?” she asked me.

  “That’s correct. Harlan’s World.”

  “Yes, the lieutenant mentioned it.” There was a well-designed huskiness to Leila Begin’s voice, and an accent that suggested she was unused to speaking Amanglic. “I can only hope that means you have an open mind.”

  “Open to what?”

  “The truth.” Begin gave me a surprised look. “Lieutenant Ortega tells me you are interested in the truth. Shall we walk?”

  Without waiting for a response, she set off parallel with the surf. I exchanged a glance with Ortega, who gestured with her thumb but showed no signs of moving herself. I hesitated for a couple of moments, then went after Begin.

  “What’s all this about the truth?” I asked, catching her up.

  “You have been retained to discover who killed Laurens Bancroft,” she said intensely, without looking around. “You wish to know the truth of what transpired the night he died. Is this not so?”

  “You don’t think it was suicide, then?”

  “Do you?”

  “I asked first.”

  I saw a faint smile cross her lips. “No. I don’t.”

  “Let me guess. You’re pinning it on Miriam Bancroft.”

  Leila Begin stopped and turned on one of her ornate heels. “Are you mocking me, Mr. Kovacs?”

  There was something in her eyes that drained the irritable amusement out of me on the spot. I shook my head.

  “No, I’m not mocking you. But I’m right, aren’t I?”

  “Have you met Miriam Bancroft?”

  “Briefly, yes.”

  “You found her charming, no doubt.”

  I shrugged evasively. “A bit abrasive at times, but generally, yes. Charming would do it.”

  Begin looked me in the eyes. “She is a psychopath,” she said seriously.

  She resumed walking. After a moment I followed her.

  “Psychopath’s not a narrow term anymore,” I said carefully. “I’ve heard it applied to whole cultures on occasion. It’s even been applied to me once or twice. Reality is so flexible these days, it’s hard to tell who’s disconnected from it and who isn’t. You might even say it’s a pointless distinction.”

&nb
sp; “Mr. Kovacs.” There was an impatient note in the woman’s voice now. “Miriam Bancroft assaulted me when I was pregnant, and murdered my unborn child. She was aware that I was pregnant. She acted with intention. Have you ever been seven months pregnant?”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “That is too bad. It’s an experience we should all be required to go through at least once.”

  “Kind of hard to legislate.”

  Begin looked at me sidelong. “In that sleeve, you look like a man acquainted with loss, but that’s the surface. Are you what you appear, Mr. Kovacs? Are you acquainted with loss? Irretrievable loss, we’re discussing. Are you acquainted with that?”

  “I think so,” I said, more stiffly than I’d intended.

  “Then you will understand my feelings about Miriam Bancroft. On Earth, cortical stacks are fitted after birth.”

  “Where I come from, too.”

  “I lost that child. No amount of technology will bring it back.”

  I couldn’t tell if the rising tide of emotion in Leila Begin’s voice was real or contrived, but I was losing focus. I cut back to start.

  “That doesn’t give Miriam Bancroft a motive for killing her husband.”

  “Of course it does.” Begin favored me with the sidelong glance again, and there was another bitter smile on her face. “I was not an isolated incident in Laurens Bancroft’s life. How do you think he met me?”

  “In Oakland, I heard.”

  The smile blossomed into a hard laugh. “Very euphemistic. Yes, he certainly met me in Oakland. He met me on what they used to call the Meat Rack. Not a very classy place. Laurens needed to degrade, Mr. Kovacs. That’s what made him hard. He’d been doing it for decades before me, and I don’t see why he would have stopped afterwards.”

  “So Miriam decides, suddenly, enough’s enough and ventilates him?”

  “She’s capable of it.”

  “I’m sure she is.” Begin’s theory was as full of holes as a captured Sharyan deserter, but I wasn’t about to elaborate the details of what I knew to this woman. “You harbor no feelings about Bancroft himself, I suppose? Good or bad.”

  The smile again. “I was a whore, Mr. Kovacs. A good one. A good whore feels what the client wants her to feel. There’s no room for anything else.”

  “You telling me you can shut your feelings down just like that?”

  “You telling me you can’t?” she retorted.

  “All right, what did Laurens Bancroft want you to feel?”

  She stopped and faced me slowly. I felt uncomfortably as if I had just slapped her. Her face had gone masklike with remembrance.

  “Animal abandonment,” she said finally. “And then abject gratitude. And I stopped feeling them both as soon as he stopped paying me.”

  “And what do you feel now?”

  “Now?” Leila Begin looked out to sea, as if testing the temperature of the breeze against what was inside her. “Now I feel nothing, Mr. Kovacs.”

  “You agreed to talk to me. You must have had a reason.”

  Begin made a dismissive gesture. “The lieutenant asked me to.”

  “Very public spirited of you.”

  The woman’s gaze came back to me. “You know what happened after my miscarriage?”

  “I heard you were paid off.”

  “Yes. Unpleasant sounding, isn’t it? But that’s what happened. I took Bancroft’s money and I shut up. It was a lot of money. But I didn’t forget where I came from. I still get back to Oakland two or three times a year. I know the girls who work the Rack now. Lieutenant Ortega has a good name there. Many of the girls owe her. You might say I am paying off some favors.”

  “And revenge on Miriam Bancroft doesn’t come into it?”

  “What revenge,” Leila Begin laughed her hard little laugh again. “I am giving you information because the lieutenant has asked me to. You won’t be able to do anything to Miriam Bancroft. She is a Meth. She is untouchable.”

  “No one’s untouchable. Not even Meths.”

  Begin looked at me sadly.

  “You are not from here,” she said. “And it shows.”

  Begin’s call had been routed through a Caribbean linkage broker, and the virtual time rented out of a Chinatown forum provider. Cheap, Ortega told me on the way in, and probably as secure as anywhere. Bancroft wants privacy, he spends half a million on discretion systems. Me, I just go talk where no one’s listening.

  It was also cramped. Slotted in between a pagoda-shaped bank and a steamy-windowed restaurant frontage, space was at a premium. The reception area was reached by filing up a narrow steel staircase and along a gantry pinned to one wing of the pagoda’s middle tier. A lavish seven or eight square meters of fused sand flooring under a cheap glass viewdome provided prospective clients with a waiting area, natural light, and two pairs of seats that looked as if they had been torn out of a decommissioned jetliner. Adjacent to the seats, an ancient Asian woman sat behind a battery of secretarial equipment, most of which appeared to be switched off, and guarded a flight of access steps into the bowels of the building. Down below, it was all hairpin corridors racked with cable conduits and piping. Each length of corridor was lined with the doors of the service cubicles. The ’trode couches were set into the cubicles at a sharp upright angle to economize on floor space and surrounded on all sides by blinking, dusty-faced instrument panels. You strapped yourself in, ’troded up, and then tapped the code number given to you at reception into the arm of the couch. Then the machine came and got your mind.

  Returning from the wide-open horizon of the beach virtuality was a shock. Opening my eyes on the banks of instrumentation just above my head, I suffered a momentary flashback to Harlan’s World. Thirteen years old and waking up in a virtual arcade after my first porn format. A low-ratio forum where two minutes of real time got me an experiential hour and a half in the company of two pneumatically breasted playmates whose bodies bore more resemblance to cartoons than real women. The scenario had been a candy-scented room of pink cushions and fake fur rugs with windows that gave poor resolution onto a nighttime cityscape. When I started running with the gangs and making more money, the ratio and resolution went up, and the scenarios got more imaginative, but the thing that never changed was the stale smell and the tackiness of the ’trodes on your skin when you surfaced afterwards between the cramped walls of the coffin.

  “Kovacs?”

  I blinked and reached for the straps. Shouldering my way out of the cubicle, I found Ortega already waiting in the pipe-lined corridor.

  “So what do you think?”

  “I think she’s full of shit.” I raised my hands to forestall Ortega’s outburst. “No, listen, I buy Miriam Bancroft as scary. I’ve got no argument with that. But there are about half a hundred reasons why she doesn’t fit the bill. Ortega, you polygraphed her, for fuck’s sake.”

  “Yeah, I know.” Ortega followed me down the corridor. “But that’s what I’ve been thinking about. You know, she volunteered to take that test. I mean, it’s witness mandatory anyway, but she was demanding it practically as soon as I got to the scene. No weeping-partner shit, not even a tear, she just slammed into the incident cruiser and asked for the wires.”

  “So?”

  “So I’m thinking about that stuff you pulled with Rutherford. You said if they polygraphed you while you were doing that, you wouldn’t register, now—”

  “Ortega, that’s Envoy conditioning. Pure mind discipline. It’s not physical. You can’t buy stuff like that off the rack at SleeveMart.”

  “Miriam Bancroft wears state-of-the-art Nakamura. They use her face and body to sell the stuff—”

  “Does Nakamura do something that’ll beat a police polygraph?”

  “Not officially.”

  “Well, there you—”

  “Don’t be so fucking obtuse. You never heard of custom biochem?”

  I paused at the foot of the stairs up to reception and shook my head. “I don’t buy it. Torch he
r husband with a weapon only she and he have access to. No one’s that stupid.”

  We went upstairs, Ortega at my heels.

  “Think about it, Kovacs. I’m not saying it was premeditated—”

  “And what about the remote storage? It was a pointless crime—”

  “—not saying it was even rational, but you’ve got to—”

  “—got to be someone who didn’t know—”

  “Fuck! Kovacs!”

  Ortega’s voice, up a full octave.

  We were into the reception zone by now. Still two clients waiting on the left, a man and a woman deep in discussion of a large paper-wrapped package. On the right a peripheral flicker of crimson where there should have been none. I was looking at blood.

  The ancient Asian receptionist was dead, throat cut with something that glinted metallic deep within the wound around her neck. Her head rested in a shiny pool of her own blood on the desk in front of her.

  My hand leapt for the Nemex. Beside me, I heard the snap as Ortega chambered the first slug in her Smith & Wesson. I swung toward the two waiting clients and their paper-wrapped package.

  Time turned dreamlike. The neurachem made everything impossibly slow, separate images drifting to the floor of my vision like autumn leaves.

  The package had fallen apart. The woman was holding a compact Sunjet, the man a machine pistol. I cleared the Nemex and started firing from the hip.

  The door to the gantry burst open, and another figure stood in the opening, brandishing a pistol in each fist.

  Beside me, Ortega’s Smith & Wesson boomed and blew the new arrival back through the door like a reversed film sequence of his entrance.

  My first shot ruptured the headrest of the woman’s seat, showering her with white padding. The Saberlite sizzled, the beam went wide. The second slug exploded her head and turned the drifting white flecks red.

  Ortega yelled in fury. She was still firing—upward, my peripheral sense told me. Somewhere above us, her shots splintered glass.

  The machine gunner had struggled to his feet. I registered the bland features of a synth and put a pair of slugs into him. He staggered back against the wall, still raising the gun. I dived for the floor.