Altered Carbon

  Five minutes later Sheryl Bostock appeared around the edge of the door, dressed in a loose kaftan. Her synthetic sleeve was even more expressionless than her son had been, but it was a slack-muscled blankness that had nothing to do with attitude. Small muscle groups take a while to warm up from sleep on the cheaper-model synthetics, and this was definitely a model from the cut-price end of the market.

  “You want to see me?” the synth voice asked unevenly. “What for?”

  “I’m a private investigator working for Laurens Bancroft,” I said as gently as I could. “I’d like to ask you a few questions about your duties at PsychaSec. May I come in?”

  She made a small noise, one that made me think she’d probably tried to shut doors in men’s faces before without success.

  “It won’t take long.”

  She shrugged, and opened the door wide. I passed her and stepped into a tidily kept but threadbare room whose most important feature was clearly a sleek black entertainment deck. The system reared off the carpeting in the far corner like an obscure machine god’s idol, and the remaining furniture had been rearranged around it in obeisance. Like the microcopter’s paint job, it looked new.

  Daryl had disappeared from view.

  “Nice deck,” I said, going over to examine the machine’s raked display front. “When did you get it?”

  “A while ago.” Sheryl Bostock closed the door and came to stand uncertainly in the center of the room. Her face was waking up, and now its expression hovered midway between sleep and suspicion. “What do you want to ask me?”

  “May I sit down?”

  She motioned me wordlessly to one of the brutally used armchairs and seated herself opposite me on a lounger. In the gaps left by the kaftan, her synthetic flesh looked pinkish and unreal. I looked at her for a while, wondering if I wanted to go through with this after all.

  “Well?” She jerked her hand at me nervously. “What do you want to ask me? You wake me up after the night shift, you’d better have a good goddamn reason for this.”

  “On Tuesday the fourteenth of August you went into the Bancroft family’s sleeving chamber and injected a Laurens Bancroft clone with a full hypospray of something. I’d like to know what it was, Sheryl.”

  The result was more dramatic than I would have imagined possible. Sheryl Bostock’s artificial features flinched violently, and she recoiled as if I’d threatened her with a riot prod.

  “That’s a part of my usual duties,” she cried shrilly. “I’m authorized to perform chemical input on the clones.”

  It didn’t sound like her speaking. It sounded like something someone had told her to memorize.

  “Was it synamorphesterone?” I asked quietly.

  Cheap synths don’t blush or go pale, but the look on her face conveyed the message just as effectively. She looked like a frightened animal, betrayed by its owner.

  “How do you know that? Who told you that?” Her voice scaled to a high sobbing. “You can’t know that. She said no one would know.”

  She collapsed onto the sofa, weeping into her hands. Daryl emerged from another room at the sound of his mother crying, hesitated in the doorway, and evidently deciding that he couldn’t or shouldn’t do anything, stayed there watching me with a frightened expression on his face. I compressed a sigh and nodded at him, trying to look as unthreatening as possible. He went cautiously to the sofa and put a hand on his mother’s shoulder, making her start as if from a blow. Ripples of memory stirred in me, and I could feel my own expression turning cold and grim. I tried to smile across the room at them, but it was farcical.

  I cleared my throat. “I’m not here to do anything to you,” I said. “I just want to know.”

  It took a minute or so for the words to get through the cobwebby veils of terror and sink into Sheryl Bostock’s consciousness. It took even longer for her to get her tears under control and look up at me. Beside her, Daryl stroked her head doubtfully. I gritted my teeth and tried to stop the memories of my own eleventh year welling up in my head. I waited.

  “It was her,” she said finally.

  Curtis intercepted me as I came around the seaward wing of Suntouch House. His face was darkened with anger, and his hands were curled into fists at his sides.

  “She doesn’t want to talk to you,” he snarled at me.

  “Get out of my way, Curtis,” I said evenly. “Or you’re going to get hurt.”

  His arms snapped up into a karate guard. “I said, she does—”

  At that point I kicked him in the knee, and he collapsed at my feet. A second kick rolled him a couple of meters down the slope toward the tennis courts. By the time he came out of the roll, I was on him. I jammed a knee into the small of his back and pulled his head up by the hair.

  “I’m not having a great day,” I told him patiently. “And you’re making it worse. Now, I’m going up there to talk to your boss. It’ll take about ten minutes, and then I’ll be gone. If you’re wise, you’ll stay out of the way.”

  “You fuck—”

  I pulled his hair harder, and he yelped. “If you come in there after me, Curtis, I’m going to hurt you. Badly. Do you understand? I’m not in the mood for swampsuck grifters like you today.”

  “Leave him alone, Mr. Kovacs. Weren’t you ever nineteen?”

  I glanced over my shoulder to where Miriam Bancroft stood with her hands in the pockets of a loose, desert-colored ensemble apparently modeled on Sharyan haremwear. Her long hair was caught up under a swath of the ochre cloth, and her eyes glinted in the sun. I remembered suddenly what Ortega had said about Nakamura. They use her face and body to sell the stuff. Now I could see it, the casual poise of a fashion house sleeve demonstrator.

  I let go of Curtis’s hair and stood back while he climbed to his feet. “I wasn’t this stupid at any age,” I said untruthfully. “Do you want to tell him to back off, instead? Maybe he’ll listen to you.”

  “Curtis, go and wait for me in the limousine. I won’t be long.”

  “Are you going to let him—”

  “Curtis!” There was a cordial astonishment in her tone, as if there must be some mistake, as if answering back just wasn’t on the menu. Curtis’s face flushed when he heard it, and he stalked away from us with tears of consternation standing in his eyes. I watched him out of sight, still not convinced I shouldn’t have hit him again. Miriam Bancroft must have read the thought on my face.

  “I would have thought even your appetite for violence had been sated by now,” she said quietly. “Are you still looking for targets?”

  “Who says I’m looking for targets?”

  “You did.”

  I looked quickly at her. “I don’t remember that.”

  “How convenient.”

  “No, you don’t understand.” I lifted my open hands toward her. “I don’t remember it. Everything we did together . . . is gone. I don’t have those memories. It’s been wiped.”

  She flinched as if I’d struck her.

  “But you . . .” she said in pieces. “I thought . . . You look—”

  “The same.” I looked down at myself, at Ryker’s sleeve. “Well, there wasn’t much left of the other sleeve when they fished me out of the sea. This was the only option. And the U.N. investigators point-blank refused to allow another double-sleeving. Don’t blame them, really. It’s going to be hard enough to justify the one we did as it is.”

  “But how did you—”

  “Decide?” I smiled without much enthusiasm. “Shall we go inside and talk about this?”

  I let her lead me back up to the conservatory, where someone had set out a jug and tall stemmed glasses on the ornamental table beneath the martyrweed stands. The jug was filled with a liquid the color of sunsets. We took seats opposite each other without exchanging words or glances. She poured herself a glass without offering me one, a tiny casualness that spoke volumes about what had happened between Miriam Bancroft and my other self.

  “I’m afraid I don’t have much time,” she sai
d absently. “As I told you on the phone, Laurens has asked me to come to New York immediately. I was actually on my way out when you called.”

  I said nothing, waiting, and when she had finished pouring I got my own glass. The move felt bone-deep wrong, and my awkwardness must have shown. She started with realization.

  “Oh, I—”

  “Forget it.” I settled back into my seat and sipped at the drink. It had a faint bite beneath the mellowness. “You wanted to know how we decided? We gambled. Paper, scissors, stone. Of course, we talked around it for hours first. They had us in a virtual forum over in New York, very high ratio, discretion shielded while we made up our minds. No expense spared for the heroes of the hour.”

  I found an edge of bitterness creeping into my voice, and I had to stop to dump it. I took a longer pull at my drink.

  “Like I said, we talked. A lot. We thought of a lot of different ways to decide, some of them were maybe even viable, but in the end we kept coming back to it. Scissors, paper, stone. Best of five. Why not?”

  I shrugged, but it was not the casual gesture I hoped it would appear. I was still trying to shake off the cold that crept through me whenever I thought about the game, trying to second-guess myself with my own existence at stake. The best of five, and it had gone to two all. My heart was beating like the junk rhythm in Jerry’s Closed Quarters, and I was dizzy with adrenaline. Even facing Kawahara hadn’t been this hard.

  When he lost the last round—stone to my paper—we both stared at our two extended hands for what seemed like a long time. Then he’d got up with a faint smile and cocked his thumb and forefinger at his own head, somewhere midway between a salute and a burlesque of suicide.

  “Anything I should tell Jimmy when I see him?”

  I shook my head wordlessly.

  “Well, have a nice life,” he said, and left the sunlit room, closing the door gently behind him. Part of me was still screaming inside that he had somehow thrown the last game.

  They resleeved me the next day.

  I looked up again. “Now I guess you’re wondering why I bothered coming here.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “It concerns Sheryl Bostock,” I said.

  “Who?”

  I sighed. “Miriam, please. Don’t make this any tougher than it already is. Sheryl Bostock is shit scared you’re going to have her torched because of what she knows. I’ve come here to have you convince me she’s wrong, because that’s what I promised her.”

  Miriam Bancroft looked at me for a moment, eyes widening, and then, convulsively, she threw her drink in my face.

  “You arrogant little man,” she hissed. “How dare you? How dare you?”

  I wiped drink out of my eyes and stared at her. I’d expected a reaction but it wasn’t this. I raked surplus cocktail from my hair.

  “Excuse me?”

  “How dare you walk in here, telling me this is difficult for you. Do you have any idea what my husband is going through at this moment?”

  “Well, let’s see.” I wiped my hands clean on my shirt, frowning. “Right now he’s the five-star guest of a U.N. Special Inquiry in New York. What do you reckon, the marital separation’s getting to him? Can’t be that hard to find a whorehouse in New York.”

  Miriam Bancroft’s jaw clenched.

  “You are cruel,” she whispered.

  “And you’re dangerous.” I felt a little steam wisping off the surface of my own control. “I’m not the one who kicked an unborn child to death in San Diego. I’m not the one who dosed her own husband’s clone with synamorphesterone while he was away in Osaka, knowing full well what he’d do to the first woman he fucked in that state. Knowing that woman wouldn’t be you, of course. It’s no wonder Sheryl Bostock’s terrified. Just looking at you, I’m wondering whether I’ll live past the front gates.”

  “Stop it.” She drew a deep, shuddering breath. “Stop it. Please.”

  I stopped. We both sat in silence, she with her head bowed.

  “Tell me what happened,” I said finally. “I got most of it from Kawahara. I know why Laurens torched himself—”

  “Do you?” Her voice was quiet now, but there were still traces of her previous venom in the question. “Tell me, what do you know? That he killed himself to escape blackmail. That’s what they’re saying in New York, isn’t it.”

  “It’s a reasonable assumption, Miriam,” I said quietly. “Kawahara had him in a lock. Vote down Resolution 653 or face exposure as a murderer. Killing himself before the needlecast went through to PsychaSec was the only way out of it. If he hadn’t been so bloody minded about the suicide verdict, he might have got away with it.”

  “Yes. If you hadn’t come.”

  I made a gesture that felt unfairly defensive. “It wasn’t my idea.”

  “And what about guilt,” she said into the quiet. “Did you stop to consider that? Did you stop to think how Laurens must have felt when he realized what he’d done, when they told him that girl Rentang was a Catholic, a girl who could never have her life back, even if Resolution 653 did force her back into temporary existence to testify against him? Don’t you think when he put the gun against his own throat and pulled the trigger, that he was punishing himself for what he’d done? Did you ever consider that maybe he was not trying to get away with it, as you put it?”

  I thought about Bancroft, turning the idea over in my mind, and it wasn’t entirely difficult to say what Miriam Bancroft wanted to hear.

  “It’s a possibility,” I said.

  She choked a laugh. “It’s more than a possibility, Mr. Kovacs. You forget, I was here that night. I watched him from the stairs when he came in. I saw his face. I saw the pain on his face. He paid for what he’d done. He judged and executed himself for it. He paid, he destroyed the man who committed the crime, and now a man who has no memory of that crime, a man who did not commit that crime, is living with the guilt again. Are you satisfied, Mr. Kovacs?”

  The bitter echoes of her voice were leached out of the room by the martyrweed. The silence thickened.

  “Why’d you do it?” I asked, when she showed no sign of speaking again. “Why did Marla Rentang have to pay for your husband’s infidelities?”

  She looked at me as if I had asked her for some major spiritual truth and shook her head helplessly.

  “It was the only way I could think of to hurt him,” she murmured.

  No different from Kawahara in the end, I thought with carefully manufactured savagery. Just another Meth, moving the little people around like pieces in a puzzle.

  “Did you know Curtis was working for Kawahara?” I asked tonelessly.

  “I guessed. Afterwards.” She lifted a hand. “But I had no way of proving it. How did you work it out?”

  “Retrospectively. He took me to the Hendrix, recommended it to me. Kadmin turned up five minutes after I went in, on Kawahara’s orders. That’s too close for a coincidence.”

  “Yes,” she said distantly. “It fits.”

  “Curtis got the synamorphesterone for you?”

  She nodded.

  “Through Kawahara, I imagine. A liberal supply, as well. He was dosed to the eyes the night you sent him to see me. Did he suggest spiking the clone before the Osaka trip?”

  “No. That was Kawahara.” Miriam Bancroft cleared her throat. “We had an unusually . . . candid conversation a few days before. Looking back, she must have been engineering the whole thing around Osaka.”

  “Yeah, Reileen’s pretty thorough. Was pretty thorough. She would have known there was an even chance Laurens would refuse to back her. So you bribed Sheryl Bostock with a visit to the island funhouse, just like me. Only instead of getting to play with the glorious Miriam Bancroft body like me, she got to wear it. A handful of cash, and the promise she could come back and play again some day. Poor cow, she was in paradise for thirty-six hours and now she’s like a junkie in withdrawal. Were you ever going to take her back there?”

  “I am a woman of my word.”
br />   “Yeah? Well, as a favor to me, do it soon.”

  “And the rest? You have evidence? You intend to tell Laurens about my part in this?”

  I reached into my pocket and produced a matte-black disk. “Footage of the injection,” I said, holding it up. “Composite footage of Sheryl Bostock leaving PsychaSec and flying to a meeting with your limousine, which subsequently heads out to sea. Without this, there’s nothing to say your husband didn’t kill Marla Rentang chemically unassisted, but they’re probably going to assume Kawahara dosed him aboard Head in the Clouds. There’s no evidence, but it’s expedient.”

  “How did you know?” She was looking into a corner of the conservatory, voice small and distant. “How did you get to Bostock?”

  “Intuition, mostly. You saw me looking through the telescope?”

  She nodded and cleared her throat. “I thought you were playing with me. I thought you’d told him.”

  “No.” I felt a faint stab of anger. “Kawahara was still holding my friend in virtual. And threatening to torture her into insanity.”

  She looked sideways at me, then looked away. “I didn’t know that,” she said quietly.

  “Yeah, well.” I shrugged. “The telescope gave me half of it. Your husband aboard Head in the Clouds just before he killed himself. So then I started thinking about all the unpleasant stuff Kawahara had to play with up there, and I wondered if your husband could have been induced to kill himself. Chemically, or through some kind of virtual program. I’ve seen it done before.”

  “Yes. I’m sure you have.” She sounded tired now, drifting away. “So why look for it at PsychaSec and not Head in the Clouds?”

  “I’m not sure. Intuition, like I said. Maybe because chemical mugging aboard an aerial whorehouse just didn’t seem like Kawahara’s style. Too headlong, too crude. She’s a chess player, not a brawler. Was. Or maybe just because I had no way to get into the Head in the Clouds surveillance stack the way I could with PsychaSec, and I wanted to do something immediate. In any case, I told the Hendrix to go in and survey standard medical procedures for the clones, then backtrack for any irregularities. That gave me Sheryl Bostock.”