Altered Carbon

  The muscle under my eye jumped violently.

  “I’ll kill you,” I whispered. “I’ll rip your fucking heart out and eat it. I’ll bring this place down around you—”

  Kawahara leaned in until our faces were almost touching. Her breath smelled faintly of mint and oregano. “No, you won’t,” she said. “You’ll do exactly as I say, and you’ll do it within ten days. Because if you don’t, your friend Sachilowska will be starting her own private tour of hell without redemption.”

  She stepped back and lifted her hands. “Kovacs, you should be thanking whatever deities they’ve got on Harlan’s World that I’m not some kind of sadist. I mean, I’ve given you an either/or. We could just as easily be negotiating exactly how much agony I put Sachilowska through. I mean, I could start now. That would give you an incentive to wrap things up speedily, wouldn’t it? Ten days in most virtuals adds up to about three or four years. You were in the Wei Clinic; do you think she could stand three years of that? I think she’d probably go insane, don’t you?”

  The effort it cost me to contain my hate was like a rupture down behind my eyeballs and into my chest. I forced the words out.

  “Terms. How do I know you’ll release her?”

  “Because I give you my word.” Kawahara let her arms fall to her sides. “I believe you’ve had some experience of its validity in the past.”

  I nodded slowly.

  “Subsequent to Bancroft’s acceptance that the case is closed, and your own disappearance from view, I will D.H.F. Sachilowska back to Harlan’s World to complete her sentence.” Kawahara bent to pick up the holofile I’d dropped and held it up. She tipped it deftly a couple of times to flick through the pages. “I think you can see here that there is a reversal clause written into the contract. I will of course forfeit a large proportion of the original fee paid, but under the circumstances, I’m prepared to do that.” She smiled faintly. “But please bear in mind that a reversal can work in both directions. What I return, I can always buy again. So if you were considering skulking in the undergrowth for a while and then running back to Bancroft, please abandon the idea now. This is a hand that you cannot win.”

  The gun barrel lifted away from my neck, and Trepp stepped back. The neurachem held me upright like a paraplegic’s mobility suit. I stared numbly at Kawahara.

  “Why the fuck did you do all this?” I whispered. “Why involve me at all, if you didn’t want Bancroft to find his answers?”

  “Because you are an Envoy, Kovacs.” Kawahara spoke slowly, as if talking to a child. “Because if anybody can convince Laurens Bancroft that he died by his own hand, it is you. And because I knew you well enough to predict your moves. I arranged to have you brought to me almost as soon as you arrived, but the hotel intervened. And then, when chance brought you to the Wei Clinic I endeavored to bring you here once again.”

  “I bluffed my way out of the Wei Clinic.”

  “Oh, yes. Your biopirate story. You really think you sold them that second-rate experia rubbish? Be reasonable, Kovacs. You might have backed them up a couple of steps while they thought about it, but the reason, the only reason, you got out of the Wei Clinic intact was because I told them to send you that way.” She shrugged. “But then you insisted upon escaping. It has been a messy week, and I blame myself as much as anyone else. I feel like a behaviorist who has designed her rat’s maze poorly.”

  “All right.” I noted vaguely that I was trembling. “I’ll do it.”

  “Yes. Of course you will.”

  I searched for something else to say, but it felt as if I had been clinically drained of the potential for resistance. The cold of the basilica seemed to be creeping into my bones. I mastered the trembling with an effort and turned to go. Trepp moved silently forward to join me. We had gone about a dozen steps when Kawahara called out behind me.

  “Oh, Kovacs—”

  I turned as if in a dream. She was smiling.

  “If you do manage to wrap it up cleanly, and very quickly, I might consider some kind of cash incentive. A bonus, so to speak. Negotiable. Trepp will give you a contact number.”

  I turned away again, numb to a degree I hadn’t felt since the smoking ruins of Innenin. Vaguely, I felt Trepp clap me on the shoulder.

  “Come on,” she said companionably. “Let’s get out of here.”

  I followed her out under the soul-bruising architecture, beneath the sneering smiles of the hooded guardians, and I knew that from among her gray-wombed clones, Kawahara was watching me all the way with a similar smile. It seemed to take forever to leave the hall, and when the huge steel portals cracked open to reveal the outside world, the light that spilled inward was an infusion of life that I grabbed at like a drowning man. All at once, the basilica was a vertical, a cold depth of ocean out of which I was reaching for the sun on the rippled surface. As we left the shadows, my body sucked up the warmth on offer as if it were solid sustenance. Very gradually, the shivering began to leave me.

  But as I walked away, beneath the brooding power of the cross, I could still feel the presence of the place like a cold hand on the nape of my neck.

  CHAPTEr TWENTY–SIX

  That night was a blur. Later, when I tried to get it back, even Envoy recall would give me only fragments.

  Trepp wanted a night on the town. The best nightlife in Europe, she maintained, was only minutes away, and she had all the right addresses.

  I wanted my thought processes stopped dead in their tracks.

  We started in a hotel room on a street I could not pronounce. Some tetrameth analog fired through the whites of our eyes by needlespray. I sat passively in a chair by the window and let Trepp shoot me up, trying to not think about Sarah and the room in Millsport. Trying not to think at all. Two-tone holographics outside the window cast Trepp’s concentrated features in shades of red and bronze, a demon in the act of sealing the pact. I felt the insidious tilt at the corners of perception as the tetrameth went barreling along my synapses, and when it was my turn to do Trepp I almost got lost in the geometries of her face. This was very good stuff. . . .

  There were murals of the Christian hell, flames leaping like clawed fingers over a procession of screaming, naked sinners. At one end of the room, where the figures on the walls seemed to blend with the denizens of the bar in smoke and noise, a girl danced on a rotating platform. A cupped petal of black glass scythed around with the platform, and each time it passed between audience and dancer, the girl was gone and a skeleton danced grinning in her place.

  “This place is called All Flesh Will Perish,” Trepp yelled above the noise as we forced our way in through the crowd. She pointed to the girl and then to the black glass rings on her fingers. “Where I got the idea for these. Great effect, isn’t it.”

  I got drinks, quickly.

  The human race has dreamed of heaven and hell for millennia. Pleasure or pain unending, undiminished, and uncurtailed by the strictures of life or death. Thanks to virtual formatting, these fantasies can now exist. All that is needed is an industrial-capacity power generator. We have indeed made hell—and heaven—on earth.

  “Sounds a bit epic, Angin Chandra’s outward-bound valediction-to-the-people sort of thing,” Trepp shouted. “But I take your point.”

  Evidently the words that had been running through my mind were also running out of my mouth. If it was a quote, I didn’t know where it was from. Certainly not a Quellism; she would have slapped anyone making that kind of speech.

  “Thing is,” Trepp was still yelling, “you’ve got ten days.”

  Reality tilts, flows sideways in gobs of flame-colored light. Music. Motion and laughter. The rim of a glass under my teeth. A warm thigh pressed against my own, which I think is Trepp’s, but when I turn, another woman with long straight black hair and crimson lips is grinning at me. Her look of open invitation reminds me vaguely of something I’ve seen recently—

  Street scene:

  Tiered balconies on either side, tongues of light and sound splash
ed out onto pavements from the myriad tiny bars, the street itself knotted with people. I walked beside the woman I had killed last week and tried to hold up my end of a conversation about cats.

  There was something I had forgotten. Something clouded.

  Something impor—

  “You can’t fucking believe something like that,” Trepp burst out. Or in, into my skull at the moment I had almost crystalized what I—

  Was she doing it deliberately? I couldn’t even remember what it was I’d believed so strongly about cats a moment ago.

  Dancing, somewhere.

  More ’meth, eye-shot on a street corner, leaning against a wall. Someone walked past, called something out to us. I blinked and tried to look.

  “Fuck, hold still, will you!”

  “What’d she say?”

  Trepp peeled back my eyelids again, frowning with concentration.

  “Called us both beautiful. Fucking junkie, probably after a handout.”

  In a wood-paneled toilet somewhere, I stared into a fragmented mirror at the face I was wearing as if it had committed a crime against me. Or as if I was waiting for someone else to emerge from behind the seamed features. My hands were braced on the filthy metal basin below, and the epoxy strips bonding the thing to the wall emitted minute tearing sounds under my weight.

  I had no idea how long I’d been there.

  I had no idea where there was. Or how many theres we had already been through tonight.

  None of this seemed to matter because . . .

  The mirror didn’t fit its frame; there were pointed jags dug into the plastic edges, holding the star-shaped center precariously in place.

  Too many edges, I muttered to myself. None of this fucking fits together.

  The words seemed significant, like an accidental rhythm and rhyme in ordinary speech. I didn’t think I’d ever be able to repair this mirror. I was going to cut my fingers to shreds, just trying. Fuck that.

  I left Ryker’s face in the mirror and staggered back out to a table piled high with candles, where Trepp was sipping at a long ivory pipe.

  “Micky Nozawa? Are you serious?”

  “Fuck, yes.” Trepp nodded vigorously. “The Fist of the Fleet, right? Seen it four times at least. New York experia chains get a lot of imported colonial stuff. It’s getting to be quite chic. That bit where he takes the harpoonist out with the flying kick. You feel it right down to the bone, the way he delivers that fucking kick. Beautiful. Poetry in motion. Hey, you know he did some holoporn stuff when he was younger.”

  “Bullshit. Micky Nozawa never did porn. He didn’t need to.”

  “Who said anything about need? The couple of bimbettes he was playing around with, I would have played around with them for free.”

  “Bull. Shit.”

  “I swear to God. That sleeve with the sort of Caucasian nose and eyes, the one he wrote off in that cruiser wreck. Real early stuff.”

  There was a bar, where the walls and ceiling were hung with absurd hybrid musical instruments and the shelves behind the bar were stacked solid with antique bottles, intricately worked statuettes, and other nameless junk. The noise level was comparatively low, and I was drinking something that didn’t taste as if it was doing my system too much immediate harm. There was a faint musk in the air and small trays of sweetmeats on the tables.

  “Why the fuck do you do it?”

  “What?” Trepp shook her head muzzily. “Keep cats? I like ca—”

  “Work for fucking Kawahara. She’s a fucking abortion of a human being, a fucked-up Meth cunt not worth the slag of a stack, why do you—”

  Trepp grabbed the arm I was gesturing with, and for a moment I thought there was going to be violence. The neurachem surged soggily.

  Instead, she took the arm and draped it affectionately over her own shoulders, pulling my face closer to her own. She blinked owlishly at me.

  “Listen.”

  There was a longish pause. I listened, while Trepp frowned with concentration, took a long slug from her glass, and set it down with exaggerated care. She wagged a finger at me.

  “Judge not lest ye be judged,” she slurred.

  Another street, sloping downward. Walking was suddenly easier.

  Above, the stars were out in force, clearer than I had seen them all week in Bay City. I lurched to a halt at the sight, looking for the Horned Horse.

  Something. Wrong here.

  Alien. Not a single pattern I recognized. A cold sweat broke along the insides of my arms, and suddenly the clear points of fire seemed like an armada from the Outside, massing for a planetary bombardment. The Martians returned. I thought I could see them moving ponderously across the narrow slice of sky above us. . . .

  “Whoa.” Trepp caught me as I fell, laughing. “What you looking for up there, grasshopper?”

  Not my sky.

  It’s getting bad.

  In another toilet, painfully brightly lit, I’m trying to stuff some powder Trepp gave me up my nose. My nasal passages are already seared dry, and it keeps falling back down, as if this body has definitively had enough. A cubicle flushes behind me, and I glance up into the big mirror.

  Jimmy de Soto emerges from the cubicle, combat fatigues smudged with Innenin mud. In the hard bathroom light, his face is looking particularly bad.

  “All right, pal?”

  “Not especially.” I scratch at the inside of my nose, which is beginning to feel inflamed.

  “You?”

  He makes a mustn’t-grumble gesture and moves forward in the mirror to stand beside me. Water fountains from the light-sensitive tap as he leans over the basin, and he begins to rinse his hands. Mud and gore dissolve off his skin and form a rich soup, pouring away down the tiny maelstrom of the plughole. I can sense his bulk at my shoulder, but his one remaining eye has me pinned to the image in the mirror and I cannot, or don’t want to, turn.

  “Is this a dream?”

  He shrugs and goes on scrubbing at his hands. “It’s the edge,” he says.

  “The edge of what?”

  “Everything.” His expression suggests that this much is obvious.

  “I thought you only turned up in my dreams,” I say, casually glancing at his hands. There is something wrong with them; however much filth Jimmy scrubs off, there is more underneath. The basin is splattered with the stuff.

  “Well, that’s one way of putting it, pal. Dreams, high-stress hallucinations, or just wrecking your own head like this. It’s all the edge, see. The cracks down the sides of reality. Where stupid bastards like me end up.”

  “Jimmy, you’re dead. I’m getting tired of telling you that.”

  “Uh-uh.” He shakes his head. “But you got to get right down in those cracks to access me.”

  The soup of blood and soil in the basin is thinning out, and I know suddenly that when it is gone, Jimmy will be, too.

  “You’re saying—”

  He shakes his head sadly. “Too fucking complicated to go through now. You think we’ve got the handle on reality, just ’cause we can record bits of it. More to it than that, pal. More to it than that.”

  “Jimmy.” I make a helpless gesture. “What the fuck am I going to do?”

  He steps back from the basin, and his ruined face grins garishly at me.

  “Viral strike,” he says clearly. I go cold as I remember my own scream taken up along the beachhead. “Recall that mother, do you?”

  And, flicking water from his hands, he vanishes like a conjuror’s trick.

  “Look,” Trepp said reasonably. “Kadmin had to check into the tank to get sleeved in an artificial. I figure that gives you the best part of a day before he even knows if he killed you or not.”

  “If he wasn’t already double-sleeved again.”

  “No. Think about it. He’s cut loose from Kawahara. Man, he doesn’t have the resources for that kind of stuff right now. He’s fucking out there on his own, and with Kawahara gunning for him, he’s a strictly limited item. Kadmin’s sell-by
date is coming up, you’ll see.”

  “Kawahara’s going to keep him on tap for just as long as she needs him to drive me.”

  “Yeah, well.” Trepp looked at her drink, embarrassed. “Maybe.”

  There was another place, called Cable or something synonymous, where the walls were racked with color-coded conduits out of whose designer-cracked casings wires sprouted like stiff copper hair. At intervals along the bar were hooks draped with thin, lethal-looking cables that ended in gleaming silver minijacks. In the air above the bar, a huge holographic jack and socket fucked spasmodically to the offbeat music that filled the place like water. At times, the components seemed to change into sex organs, but that could have been tetrameth-induced hallucination on my part.

  I was sitting at the bar, something sweet smoldering in an ashtray at my elbow. From the sludgy feeling in my lungs and throat, I’d been smoking it. The bar was crowded, but I suffered the strange conviction I was alone.

  On either side of me, the other customers at the bar were jacked into the thin cables, eyes flickering beneath lids that seemed bruised, mouths twitched into dreamy half smiles. One of them was Trepp.

  I was alone.

  Things that might have been thoughts were tugging at the abraded underside of my mind. I picked up the sweetly smoldering cigarette and drew on it, grimly. Now was no time for thinking.

  No time for—

  Viral strike!

  —thinking.

  Streets passing beneath my feet the way the rubble of Innenin passed under Jimmy’s boots as he walked along beside me in my dreams. So that’s how he does it.

  The crimson-lipped woman who—

  Maybe you can’t—

  What? What?

  Jack and socket.

  Trying to tell you some—

  No time for—

  No time—

  No—

  And away, like water in the maelstrom, like the soup of mud and gore pouring off Jimmy’s hands and into the hole at the bottom of the sink. . . .