Altered Carbon

  Bancroft had either not noticed my ineptitude or was being polite about it.

  “Yours?” I asked him, jerking a thumb at the instrument. He glanced at it absently.

  “Once. It was an enthusiasm I had. Back when the stars were still something to stare at. You wouldn’t remember how that felt.” It was said without conscious pretension or arrogance, almost inconsequentially. His voice lost some of its focus, like a transmission fading out. “Last time I looked through that lens was nearly two centuries ago. A lot of the colony ships were still in flight then. We were still waiting to find out if they’d make it. Waiting for the needle beams to come back to us. Like lighthouse beacons.”

  He was losing me. I brought him back to reality. “Perspective?” I reminded him gently.

  “Perspective.” He nodded and swung an arm out over his property. “You see that tree. Just beyond the tennis courts.”

  I could hardly miss it. A gnarled old monster taller than the house, casting shade over an area the size of a tennis court in itself. I nodded.

  “That tree is over seven hundred years old. When I bought this property, I hired a design engineer and he wanted to chop it down. He was planning to build the house further up the rise, and the tree was spoiling the sea view. I sacked him.”

  Bancroft turned to make sure his point was getting across.

  “You see, Mr. Kovacs, that engineer was a man in his thirties, and to him the tree was just an inconvenience. It was in his way. The fact it had been part of the world for over twenty times the length of his own life didn’t seem to bother him. He had no respect.”

  “So you’re the tree.”

  “Just so,” Bancroft said equably. “I am the tree. The police would like to chop me down, just like that engineer. I am inconvenient to them, and they have no respect.”

  I went back to my seat to chew this over. Kristin Ortega’s attitude was beginning to make some sense at last. If Bancroft thought he was outside the normal requirements of good citizenship, he wasn’t likely to make many friends in uniform. There would have been little point trying to explain to him that for Ortega there was another tree called the Law and that in her eyes he was banging a few profane nails into it himself. I’d seen this kind of thing from both sides, and there just isn’t any solution except to do what my own ancestors had done. When you don’t like the laws, you go somewhere they can’t touch you.

  And then you make up some of your own.

  Bancroft stayed at the rail. Perhaps he was communing with the tree. I decided to shelve this line of inquiry for a while.

  “What’s the last thing you remember?”

  “Tuesday, fourteenth August,” he said promptly. “Going to bed at about midnight.”

  “That was the last remote update.”

  “Yes, the needlecast would have gone through about four in the morning, but obviously I was asleep by then.”

  “So almost a full forty-eight hours before your death.”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  Optimally bad. In forty-eight hours, almost anything can happen. Bancroft could have been to the moon and back in that time. I rubbed at the scar under my eye again, wondering absently how it had got there.

  “And there’s nothing before that time that could suggest to you why someone might want to kill you.”

  Bancroft was still leaning on the rail, looking out, but I saw how he smiled.

  “Did I say something amusing?”

  He had the grace to come back to his seat.

  “No, Mr. Kovacs. There is nothing amusing about this situation. Someone out there wants me dead, and that’s not a comfortable feeling. But you must understand that for a man in my position, enmity and even death threats are part and parcel of everyday existence. People envy me, people hate me. It is the price of success.”

  This was news to me. People hate me on a dozen different worlds, and I’ve never considered myself a successful man.

  “Had any interesting ones recently? Death threats, I mean.”

  He shrugged. “Perhaps. I don’t make a habit of screening them. Ms. Prescott handles that for me.”

  “You don’t consider death threats worth your attention?”

  “Mr. Kovacs, I am an entrepreneur. Opportunities arise, crises present themselves, and I deal with them. Life goes on. I hire managers to deal with that.”

  “Very convenient for you. But in view of the circumstances, I find it hard to believe neither you nor the police have consulted Ms. Prescott’s files.”

  Bancroft waved a hand. “Of course, the police conducted their own cursory inquiry. Oumou Prescott told them exactly what she had already told me. That nothing out of the ordinary had been received in the last six months. I have enough faith in her not to need to check beyond that. You’ll probably want to look at the files yourself, though.”

  The thought of scrolling through hundreds of meters of incoherent vitriol from the lost and losers of this antique world was quite sufficient to uncap my weariness again. A profound lack of interest in Bancroft’s problems washed through me. I mastered it with an effort worthy of Virginia Vidaura’s approval.

  “Well, I’ll certainly need to talk to Oumou Prescott, anyway.”

  “I’ll make the appointment immediately.” Bancroft’s eyes took on the inward glaze of someone consulting internal hardware. “What time would suit you?”

  I held up a hand. “Probably better if I do that myself. Just let her know I’ll be in touch. And I’ll need to see the resleeving facility at PsychaSec.”

  “Certainly. In fact, I’ll get Prescott to take you there. She knows the director. Anything else?”

  “A line of credit.”

  “Of course. My bank has already allocated a DNA-coded account to you. I understand they have the same system on Harlan’s World.”

  I licked my thumb and held it up queryingly. Bancroft nodded.

  “Just the same here. You will find there are areas of Bay City where cash is still the only negotiable currency. Hopefully you won’t have to spend much time in those parts, but if you do, you can draw actual currency against your account at any bank outlet. Will you require a weapon?”

  “Not at the moment, no.” One of Virginia Vidaura’s cardinal rules had always been find out the nature of your task before you choose your tools. That single sweep of charred stucco on Bancroft’s wall looked too elegant for this to be a shoot-’em-up carnival.

  “Well.” Bancroft seemed almost perplexed by my response. He had been on the point of reaching into his shirt pocket, and now he completed the action awkwardly. He held out an inscribed card to me. “This is my gunmaker. I’ve told them to expect you.”

  I took the card and looked at it. The ornate script read LARKIN AND GREEN—ARMORERS SINCE 2203. Quaint. Below was a single string of numbers. I pocketed the card.

  “This might be useful later on,” I admitted. “But for the moment I want to make a soft landing. Sit back and wait for the dust to settle. I think you can appreciate the need for that.”

  “Yes, of course. Whatever you think best. I trust your judgment.” Bancroft caught my gaze and held it. “You’ll bear in mind the terms of our agreement, though. I am paying for a service. I don’t react well to abuse of trust, Mr. Kovacs.”

  “No, I don’t suppose you do,” I said tiredly. I remembered the way Reileen Kawahara had dealt with two unfaithful minions. The animal sounds they had made came back to me in dreams for a long time afterwards. Reileen’s argument, framed as she peeled an apple against the backdrop of those screams, was that since no one really dies anymore, punishment can come only through suffering. I felt my new face twitch, even now, with the memory.

  “For what it’s worth, the line the corps fed you about me is so much shit on a prick. My word’s as good as it ever was.”

  I stood up.

  “Can you recommend a place to stay back in the city? Somewhere quiet, midrange.”

  “Yes, there are places like that on Mission Street. I’ll have
someone ferry you back there. Curtis, if he’s out of arrest by then.” Bancroft climbed to his feet, as well. “I take it you intend to interview Miriam now. She really knows more about those last forty-eight hours than I do, so you’ll want to speak to her quite closely.”

  I thought about those ancient eyes in that pneumatic teenager’s body, and the idea of carrying on a conversation with Miriam Bancroft was suddenly repellent. At the same time a cold hand strummed taut chords in the pit of my stomach and the head of my penis swelled abruptly with blood. Classy.

  “Oh, yes,” I said unenthusiastically. “I’d like to do that.”

  CHAPTEr FOUr

  “You seem ill at ease, Mr. Kovacs. Are you?”

  I looked over my shoulder at the maid who had shown me in, then back at Miriam Bancroft. Their bodies were about the same age.

  “No,” I said, more coarsely than I’d intended.

  She curved her mouth briefly down at the corners and went back to rolling up the map she’d been studying when I arrived. Behind me the maid pulled the chart room door closed with a heavy click. Bancroft hadn’t seen fit to accompany me into the presence of his wife. Perhaps one encounter a day was as much as they allowed themselves. Instead, the maid had appeared as if by magic as we came down from the balcony in the seaward lounge. Bancroft paid her about as much attention as he had last time.

  When I left, he was standing by the mirrorwood desk, staring at the blast mark on the wall.

  Mrs. Bancroft deftly tightened the roll on the map in her hands and began to slide it into a long protective tube.

  “Well,” she said, without looking up. “Ask me your questions, then.”

  “Where were you when it happened?”

  “I was in bed.” She looked up at me this time. “Please don’t ask me to corroborate that. I was alone.”

  The chart room was long and airy under an arched roof that someone had tiled with illuminum. The map racks were waist high, each topped with a glassed-in display and set out in rows like exhibit cases in a museum. I moved out of the center aisle, putting one of the racks between Mrs. Bancroft and myself. It felt a little like taking cover.

  “Mrs. Bancroft, you seem to be under some misapprehension here. I’m not the police. I’m interested in information, not guilt.”

  She slid the wrapped map away in its holder and leaned back against the rack with both hands behind her. She had left her fresh young sweat and tennis clothes in some elegant bathroom while I was talking to her husband. Now she was immaculately fastened up in black slacks and something born of a union between a dinner jacket and a bodice. Her sleeves were pushed casually up almost to the elbow, her wrists unadorned with jewelry.

  “Do I sound guilty, Mr. Kovacs?” she asked me.

  “You seem overanxious to assert your fidelity to a complete stranger.”

  She laughed. It was a pleasant, throaty sound, and her shoulders rose and fell as she let it out. A laugh I could get to like.

  “How very indirect you are.”

  I looked down at the map displayed on the top of the rack in front of me. It was dated in the top left-hand corner, a year four centuries before I was born. The names marked on it were in a script I couldn’t read.

  “Where I come from, directness is not considered a great virtue, Mrs. Bancroft.”

  “No? Then what is?”

  I shrugged. “Politeness. Control. Avoidance of embarrassment for all parties.”

  “Sounds boring. I think you’re going to have a few shocks here, Mr. Kovacs.”

  “I didn’t say I was a good citizen where I come from, Mrs. Bancroft.”

  “Oh.” She pushed herself off the rack and moved toward me. “Yes, Laurens told me a little about you. It seems you’re thought of as a dangerous man on Harlan’s World.”

  I shrugged again.

  “It’s Russian.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “The script.” She came around the rack and stood beside me, looking down at the map. “This is a Russian computer-generated chart of moon landing sites. Very rare. I got it at an auction. Do you like it?”

  “It’s very nice. What time did you go to sleep the night your husband was shot?”

  She stared at me. “Early. I told you, I was alone.” She forced the edge out of her voice, and her tone became almost light again. “Oh, and if that sounds like guilt, Mr. Kovacs, it’s not. It’s resignation. With a twist of bitterness.”

  “You feel bitter about your husband?”

  She smiled. “I thought I said resigned.”

  “You said both.”

  “Are you saying you think I killed my husband?”

  “I don’t think anything yet. But it is a possibility.”

  “Is it?”

  “You had access to the safe. You were inside the house defenses when it happened. And now it sounds as if you might have some emotional motives.”

  Still smiling, she said, “Building a case, are we, Mr. Kovacs?”

  I looked back at her. “If the heart pumps. Yeah.”

  “The police had a similar theory for a while. They decided the heart didn’t pump. I’d prefer it if you didn’t smoke in here.”

  I looked down at my hands and found they had quite unconsciously taken out Kristin Ortega’s cigarettes. I was in the middle of tapping one out of the pack. Nerves. Feeling oddly betrayed by my new sleeve, I put the pack away.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. It’s a question of climate control. A lot of the maps in here are very sensitive to pollution. You couldn’t know.”

  She somehow managed to make it sound as if only a complete moron wouldn’t have realized. I could feel my grip on the interview sliding out of sight.

  “What made the police—”

  “Ask them.” She turned her back and walked away from me as if making a decision. “How old are you, Mr. Kovacs?”

  “Subjectively? Forty-one. The years on Harlan’s World are a little longer than here, but there isn’t much in it.”

  “And objectively?” she asked, mocking my tone.

  “I’ve had about a century in the tank. You tend to lose track.” That was a lie. I knew to the day how long each of my terms in storage had been. I’d worked it out one night, and now the number wouldn’t go away. Every time I went down again, I added on.

  “How alone you must be by now.”

  I sighed and turned to examine the nearest map rack. Each rolled chart was labeled at the end. The notation was archaeological. SYRTIS MINOR; 3RD EXCAVATION, EAST QUARTER. BRADBURY; ABORIGINAL RUINS. I started to tug one of the rolls free.

  “Mrs. Bancroft, how I feel is not at issue here. Can you think of any reason why your husband might have tried to kill himself?”

  She whirled on me almost before I had finished speaking, and her face was tight with anger.

  “My husband did not kill himself,” she said freezingly.

  “You seem very sure of that.” I looked up from the map and gave her a smile. “For someone who wasn’t awake, I mean.”

  “Put that back,” she cried, starting toward me. “You have no idea how valuable—”

  She stopped, brought up short as I slid the map back into the rack. She swallowed and brought the flush in her cheeks under control.

  “Are you trying to make me angry, Mr. Kovacs?”

  “I’m just trying to get some attention.”

  We looked at each other for a pair of seconds. Mrs. Bancroft lowered her gaze.

  “I’ve told you, I was asleep when it happened. What else can I tell you?”

  “Where had your husband gone that night?”

  She bit her lip. “I’m not sure. He went to Osaka that day, for a meeting.”

  “Osaka is where?”

  She looked at me in surprise.

  “I’m not from here,” I said patiently.

  “Osaka’s in Japan. I thought—”

  “Yeah, Harlan’s World was settled by a Japanese keiretsu using East European labor. It was a lo
ng time ago, and I wasn’t around.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. You probably don’t know much about what your ancestors were doing three centuries ago either.”

  I stopped. Mrs. Bancroft was looking at me strangely. My own words hit me a moment later. Download dues. I was going to have to sleep soon, before I said or did something really stupid.

  “I am over three centuries old, Mr. Kovacs.” There was a small smile playing around her mouth as she said it. She’d taken back the advantage as smoothly as a bottleback diving. “Appearances are deceptive. This is my eleventh body.”

  The way she held herself said that I was supposed to take a look. I flickered my gaze across the Slavic-boned cheeks, down to the décolletage and then to the tilt of her hips, the half-shrouded lines of her thighs, all the time affecting a detachment that neither I nor my recently roused sleeve had any right to.

  “It’s very nice. A little young for my tastes, but as I said, I’m not from here. Can we get back to your husband, please? He’d been to Osaka during the day, but he came back. I assume he didn’t go physically.”

  “No, of course not. He has a transit clone on ice there. He was due back about six that evening, but—”

  “Yes?”

  She shifted her posture slightly and opened a palm at me. I got the impression she was forcibly composing herself. “Well, he was late coming back. Laurens often stays out late after closing a deal.”

  “And no one has any idea where he went on this occasion? Curtis, for example?”

  The strain on her face was still there, like weathered rocks under a thin mantle of snow. “He didn’t send for Curtis. I assume he took a taxi from the sleeving station. I’m not his keeper, Mr. Kovacs.”

  “This meeting was crucial? The one in Osaka?”

  “Oh . . . no, I don’t think so. We’ve talked about it. Of course, he doesn’t remember, but we’ve been over the contracts and it’s something he’d had time-tabled for a while. A marine development company called Pacificon, based in Japan. Leasing renewal, that kind of thing. It’s usually all taken care of here in Bay City, but there was some call for an extraordinary assessors’ meeting, and it’s always best to handle that sort of thing close to the source.”