Altered Carbon

  I felt the first climax go through her like clenching, but it was the sight of her looking back at me, up through tumbled hair, lips parted, that slipped the final catches on my own control and molded me against the contours of her back and ass until my spasms were all spent inside her and we collapsed across the bed. I felt myself slide out of her like something being born. I think she was still coming.

  Neither of us said anything for a long time. The ship plowed on its automated way, and around us the dangerous cold of the mirrors lapped inward like an icy tide, threatening to tinge and then drown the intimacy. In a few moments we would be fixing our gazes carefully outward on the images of ourselves, instead of on each other.

  I slid an arm around Ortega’s flank and tilted her gently onto one side, so that we lay like spoons. In the mirror, I found her eyes.

  “Where’re we going?” I asked her gently.

  A shrug, but she used it to snuggle deeper into me. “Programmed cycle, down the coast, out to Hawaii, hook around, and then back.”

  “And no one knows we’re out here?”

  “Only the satellites.”

  “Nice thought. Who does it all belong to?”

  She twisted to look at me over her shoulder. “It’s Ryker’s.”

  “Oops.” I looked elaborately away. “Nice carpet in here.”

  Against the odds, it brought a laugh out of her. She turned fully to face me in the bed. Her hand rose to touch my face softly, as if she thought it might mark easily, or maybe disappear.

  “I told myself,” she murmured. “It was crazy. It was just the body, you know.”

  “Most things are. Conscious thought doesn’t have much to do with this stuff. Doesn’t have much to do with the way we live our lives, period, if you believe the psychologists. A bit of rationalization, most of it with hindsight. Put the rest down to hormonal drives, gene instinct, and pheromones for the fine-tuning. Sad, but true.”

  Her finger followed a line down the side of my face. “I don’t think it’s sad. What we’ve done with the rest of ourselves, that’s sad.”

  “Kristin Ortega.” I took hold of her finger and squeezed it gently. “You are a real fucking Luddite, aren’t you. How in God’s name did you get into this line of work?”

  She shrugged again. “Family of cops. Father was a cop. Grandmother was a cop. You know how it goes.”

  “Not from experience.”

  “No.” She stretched one long leg languidly up toward the mirrored ceiling. “I guess not.”

  I reached across the plain of her belly and slid my hand along the length of thigh to the knee, levering her gently over and bringing my mouth to kiss gently at the shaved bar of pubic hair where it descended into cleft. She resisted fractionally, maybe thinking of the screen in the other room, or maybe just our mingled juices trickling from her body, then relented and spread herself under me. I shifted her other thigh up over my shoulder and lowered my face into her.

  This time, when she came, it was with escalating cries that she locked in her throat each time with powerful flexings of the muscles at the base of her stomach while her whole body eeled back and forth across the bed and her hips bucked upward, grinding the soft flesh into my mouth. At some point she had lapsed into softly uttered Spanish, whose tones stoked my own arousal, and when she finally flopped to stillness, I was able to slide up and into her directly, gathering her under the arms and sinking my tongue into her mouth in the first kiss we’d shared since reaching the bed.

  We moved slowly, trying for the rhythm of the sea outside and the laughter of our first embrace. It seemed to last a long time, time for talking, up the scale from languid murmurs to excited gabbling, for shifts in posture and soft bitings, the clasping of hands, and all the time a feeling of brimming to overflow that hurt my eyes. It was from that last, unbearable pressure as much as any that I finally let go and came into her, feeling her chase the last of my fading hardness to her own shaking finish.

  In the Envoy Corps, you take what is offered, Virginia Vidaura said, somewhere in the corridors of my memory. And that must sometimes be enough.

  As we separated for the second time, the weight of the last twenty-four hours came down on me like one of the heavy rugs in the other room and consciousness slipped gradually away from the increasing warmth beneath it. My last clear impressions were of the long body beside me rearranging itself with breasts pressed into my back, an arm draped over me, and a peculiarly comfortable clasping of feet, mine in hers, like hands. My thought processes were slowing down.

  What is offered. Sometimes. Enough.

  CHAPTEr TWENTY–EIGHT

  When I awoke, she was gone.

  There was sunlight coming into the cabin from a number of unbattened viewports. The pitching of the boat had almost stopped, but there was still enough roll to show me, alternately, a blue sky with horizontal scrapings of cloud and a reasonably calm sea beneath. Somewhere, someone was making coffee and frying smoked meat. I lay still for a while, picking up the scattered garments of my mind and trying to assemble some kind of reasonable outfit from them. What to tell Ortega? How much, and weighted how? The Envoy conditioning offered itself sluggishly, like something dredged out of a swamp. I let it roll over and sink, absorbed in the dappling of sunbeams on the sheets near my head.

  The clinking of glasses from the door brought me around. Ortega was standing in the doorway wearing a NO TO RESOLUTION 653 T-shirt on which the NO had been stylistically daubed out with a red cross and overwritten with a definitive YES in the same color. The columns of her naked legs disappeared under the T-shirt as if they might conceivably go on forever inside. Balanced in her hands was a large tray laden with breakfast for an entire squadroom. Seeing me awake, she tossed hair out of her eyes and grinned crookedly.

  So I told her everything.

  “So what are you going to do?”

  I shrugged and stared out across the water, narrowing my eyes against the glare. The ocean seemed flatter, more ponderous than it does on Harlan’s World. Up on deck, the immensity of it sank in, and the yacht was suddenly a child’s toy. “I’m going to do what Kawahara wants. What Miriam Bancroft wants. What you want. What apparently everyone fucking wants. I’m going to kill the case.”

  “You think Kawahara torched Bancroft?”

  “Seems likely. Or she’s shielding someone who did. Doesn’t matter anymore. She’s got Sarah; that’s all that counts now.”

  “We could hit her with abduction charges. Retention of D.H.P. carries—”

  “Fifty to a hundred, yeah.” I smiled faintly. “I was listening last night. But she won’t be holding directly; it’ll be some subsidiary.”

  “We can get warrants that—”

  “She’s a fucking Meth, Kristin. She’ll beat it all without raising her pulse. Anyway, that’s not the issue here. As soon as I move against her, she’ll slam Sarah into virtual. How long do your far-ranging warrants take to get clearance?”

  “Couple of days, if it’s U.N. expedited.” The gloom crept across Ortega’s face as she was saying it. She leaned on the rail and stared downward.

  “Exactly. That’s the best part of a year in virtual. Sarah isn’t an Envoy; she doesn’t have any kind of conditioning. What Kawahara can do to her in eight or nine virtual months would turn a normal mind into pulp. She’d be screaming insane by the time we pulled her out. If we pulled her out, and anyway I’m not going to even fucking consider putting her through a single second of—”

  “Okay.” Ortega put a hand on my shoulder. “Okay. I’m sorry.”

  I shivered slightly, whether from the sea wind or the thought of Kawahara’s virtual dungeons I couldn’t be sure.

  “Forget it.”

  “I’m a cop. It’s in my nature to look for ways to bust the bad guys. That’s all.”

  I looked up and gave her a bleak smile. “I’m an Envoy. It’s in my nature to look for ways to rip Kawahara’s throat out. I’ve looked. There are no ways.”

  The smile she gave
me back was uneasy, tinged with an ambivalence that I knew was going to get us sooner or later.

  “Look, Kristin. I’ve found a way to do this. To lie convincingly to Bancroft and shut the case down. It’s illegal, very illegal, but no one that matters gets hurt. I don’t have to tell you about it. If you don’t want to know.”

  She thought about it for a while, eyes probing the water alongside the yacht, as if the answer might be swimming there, keeping pace with us. I wandered along the rail to give her time, tilting my head back to scan the blue bowl of the sky overhead and thinking about orbital surveillance systems. Out in the middle of a seemingly endless ocean, cocooned in the high-tech safety of the yacht, it was easy to believe you could hide from the Kawaharas and Bancrofts of this world, but that kind of hiding died centuries ago.

  If they want you, a youngish Quell had once written of the Harlan’s World ruling elite, sooner or later they’ll scoop you up off the globe, like specks of interesting dust off a Martian artifact. Cross the gulf between the stars, and they can come after you. Go into centuries of storage, and they’ll be there waiting for you, clone new, when you resleeve. They are what we once dreamed of as gods, mythical agents of destiny, as inescapable as Death, that poor old peasant laborer, bent over his scythe, no longer is. Poor Death, no match for the mighty altered-carbon technologies of data storage and retrieval arrayed against him. Once we lived in terror of his arrival. Now we flirt outrageously with his somber dignity, and beings like these won’t even let him in the tradesman’s entrance.

  I grimaced. Compared to Kawahara, Death was a three-bout pushover.

  I stopped at the prow and picked a point on the horizon to watch until Ortega made up her mind.

  Suppose you know someone, a long time ago. You share things, drink deeply of each other. Then you drift apart; life takes you in different directions; the bonds are not strong enough. Or maybe you get torn apart by external circumstance. Years later, you meet that person again, in the same sleeve, and you go through it all over again. What’s the attraction? Is this the same person? They probably have the same name, the same approximate physical appearance, but does that make them the same? And if not, does that make the things that have changed unimportant or peripheral? People change, but how much? As a child I’d believed there was an essential person, a sort of core personality around which the surface factors could evolve and change without damaging the integrity of who you were. Later, I started to see that this was an error of perception caused by the metaphors we were used to framing ourselves in. What we thought of as personality was no more than the passing shape of one of the waves in front of me. Or, slowing it down to more human speed, the shape of a sand dune. Form in response to stimulus. Wind, gravity, upbringing. Gene blueprinting. All subject to erosion and change. The only way to beat that was to go on stack forever.

  Just as a primitive sextant functions on the illusion that the sun and stars rotate around the planet we are standing on, our senses give us the illusion of stability in the universe, and we accept it, because without that acceptance, nothing can be done.

  Virginia Vidaura, pacing the seminar room, lost in lecture mode.

  But the fact that a sextant will let you navigate accurately across an ocean does not mean that the sun and stars do rotate around us. For all that we have done, as a civilization, as individuals, the universe is not stable, nor is any single thing within it. Stars consume themselves, the universe itself rushes apart, and we ourselves are composed of matter in constant flux. Colonies of cells in temporary alliance, replicating and decaying, and housed within, an incandescent cloud of electrical impulse and precariously stacked carbon code memory. This is reality, this is self-knowledge, and the perception of it will, of course, make you dizzy. Some of you have served in Vacuum Command, and will no doubt think that out there you have confronted existence vertigo.

  A thin smile.

  I promise you that the Zen moments you may have enjoyed in hard space are not much more than the beginning of what you must learn here. All and anything you achieve as Envoys must be based on the understanding that there is nothing but flux. Anything you wish to even perceive as an Envoy, let alone create or achieve, must be carved out of that flux.

  I wish you all luck.

  If you couldn’t even meet the same person twice in one lifetime, in one sleeve, what did that say about all the families and friends waiting in Download Central for someone they once knew to peer out through the eyes of a stranger? How could that even be close to the same person?

  And where did that leave a woman consumed with passion for a stranger wearing a body she once loved? Was that closer, or further away?

  Where, for that matter, did it leave the stranger who responded?

  I heard her coming along the rail toward me. She stopped a couple of paces away and cleared her throat quietly. I quelled a smile and turned around.

  “I didn’t tell you how Ryker came to have all this, did I?”

  “It didn’t seem the time to ask.”

  “No.” A grin that faded as if swept away by the breeze. “He stole it. A few years back, while he was still working Sleeve Theft. Belonged to some big-time clone marketeer from Sydney. Ryker caught the case because this guy was moving broken-down merchandise through the West Coast clinics. He got co-opted into a local task force, and they tried to take the guy down at his marina. Big firefight, lots of dead people.”

  “And lots of spoils.”

  She nodded. “They do things differently down there. Most of the police work gets picked up by private contractors. The local government handles it by tying payment to the assets of the criminals you bring down.”

  “Interesting incentive,” I said reflectively. “Ought to make for a lot of rich people getting busted.”

  “Yeah, they say it works that way. The yacht was Ryker’s piece. He did a lot of the groundwork on the case, and he was wounded in the firefight.” Her voice was curiously undefensive as she related these details, and for once I felt that Ryker was a long way away. “That’s where he got the scar under the eye, that stuff on his arm. Cable gun.”

  “Nasty.” Despite myself, I felt a slight twinge in the scarred arm. I’d been up against cable fire before, and not enjoyed the encounter very much.

  “Right. Most people reckoned Ryker earned every rivet of this boat. The point is, policy here in Bay City is that officers may not keep gifts, bonuses, or anything else awarded for line-of-duty actions.”

  “I can see the rationale for that.”

  “Yeah, so can I. But Ryker couldn’t. He paid some cut-rate dipper to lose the ship’s records and reregister her through discreet holding. Claimed he needed a safe house, if he ever had to stash someone.”

  I grinned a little. “Thin. But I like his style. Would that be the same dipper who ratted him out in Seattle?”

  “Good memory you’ve got. Yeah, the very same. Nacho the Needle. Bautista tells a well-balanced story, doesn’t he.”

  “Saw that, too, huh?”

  “Yeah. Ordinarily, I’d have ripped Bautista’s fucking head off for that paternal-uncle shit. Like I need emotional sheltering. He’s been through two fucking divorces and he’s not even forty yet.” She stared reflectively out to sea. “I haven’t had the time to confront him yet. Too busy being fucked off with you. Look, Kovacs, reason I’m telling you all this is, Ryker stole the boat, he broke West Coast law. I knew.”

  “And you didn’t do anything,” I guessed.

  “Nothing.” She looked at her hands, palms upturned. “Oh, shit, Kovacs, who are we kidding? I’m no angel myself. I kicked the shit out of Kadmin in police custody. You saw me. I should have busted you for that fight outside Jerry’s and I let you walk.”

  “You were too tired for the paperwork, as I recall.”

  “Yeah, I remember.” She grimaced, then turned to look me in the eyes, searching Ryker’s face for a sign that she could trust me. “You say you’re going to break the law, but no one gets hurt. That’s r
ight?”

  “No one who matters,” I corrected gently.

  She nodded slowly to herself, like someone weighing up a convincing argument that may just change her mind for good.

  “So what do you need?”

  I levered myself off the rail. “A list of whorehouses in the Bay City area, to start with. Places that run virtual stuff. After that, we’d better get back to town. I don’t want to call Kawahara from out here.”

  She blinked. “Virtual whorehouses?”

  “Yeah. And the mixed ones, as well. In fact, make it every place on the West Coast that runs virtual porn. The lower grade the better. I’m going to sell Bancroft a package so filthy he won’t want to look at it close enough to check for cracks. So bad he won’t even want to think about it.”

  CHAPTEr TWENTY–NINE

  Ortega’s list was over two thousand names long, each annotated with a brief surveillance report and any Organic Damage convictions tied to the operators or clientele. In hardcopy format it ran to about two hundred concertina’d sheets, which started to unravel like a long paper scarf as soon as I got past page one. I tried to scan the list in the cab back to Bay City, but gave up when it threatened to overwhelm us both on the backseat. I wasn’t in the mood anyway. Most of me wished I was still bedded down in the stern cabin of Ryker’s yacht, isolated from the rest of humanity and its problems by hundreds of kilometers of trackless blue.

  Back at the Watchtower suite, I put Ortega in the kitchen while I called Kawahara at the number Trepp had given me. It was Trepp who came on-screen first, features smeared with sleep. I wondered if she’d been up all night trying to track me.