Altered Carbon

  I nodded sagely, having no idea what a marine development assessor was. Noting Mrs. Bancroft’s strain seemed to be receding.

  “Routine stuff, huh?”

  “I would think so, yes.” She gave me a weary smile. “Mr. Kovacs, I’m sure the police have transcripts of this kind of information.”

  “I’m sure they do, as well, Mrs. Bancroft. But there’s no reason why they should share them with me. I have no jurisdiction here.”

  “You seemed friendly enough with them when you arrived.” There was a sudden spike of malice in her voice. I looked steadily at her until she dropped her gaze. “Anyway, I’m sure Laurens can get you anything you need.”

  This was going nowhere fast. I backed up.

  “Perhaps I’d better speak to him about that.” I looked around the chart room. “All these maps. How long have you been collecting?”

  Mrs. Bancroft must have sensed that the interview was drawing to a close, because the tension puddled out of her like oil from a cracked sump.

  “Most of my life,” she said. “While Laurens was staring at the stars, some of us kept our eyes on the ground.”

  For some reason I thought of the telescope abandoned on Bancroft’s sundeck. I saw it stranded in angular silhouette against the evening sky, a mute testimony to times and obsessions past and a relic no one wanted. I remembered the way it had wheezed back into alignment after I jarred it, faithful to programming maybe centuries old, briefly awakened the way Miriam Bancroft had stroked the songspire awake in the hall.

  Old.

  With sudden and suffocating pressure, it was all around me, the reek of it pouring off the stones of Suntouch House like damp. Age. I even caught the waft of it from the impossibly young and beautiful woman in front of me, and my throat locked up with a tiny click. Something in me wanted to run, to get out and breathe fresh, new air, to be away from these creatures whose memories stretched back beyond every historical event I had been taught in school.

  “Are you all right, Mr. Kovacs?”

  Download dues.

  I focused with an effort. “Yes, I’m fine.” I cleared my throat and looked into her eyes.

  “Well, I won’t keep you any longer, Mrs. Bancroft. Thank you for your time.”

  She moved toward me. “Would you like—”

  “No, it’s quite all right. I’ll see myself out.”

  The walk out of the chart room seemed to take forever, and my footsteps had developed a sudden echo inside my skull. With every step, and with every displayed map that I passed, I felt those ancient eyes on my spine, watching.

  I badly needed a cigarette.

  CHAPTEr FIVE

  The sky was the texture of old silver and the lights were coming on across Bay City by the time Bancroft’s chauffeur got me back to town. We spiraled in from the sea over an ancient suspension bridge the color of rust, and in amongst the heaped-up buildings of a peninsula hill at more than advisable speed. Curtis the chauffeur was still smarting from his summary detainment by the police. He’d been out of arrest only a couple of hours when Bancroft asked him to run me back, and he’d been sullen and uncommunicative on the journey. He was a muscular young man whose boyish good looks lent themselves well to brooding. My guess was that employees of Laurens Bancroft were unused to government minions interrupting their duties.

  I didn’t complain. My own mood wasn’t far off matching the chauffeur’s. Images of Sarah’s death kept creeping into my mind. It had happened only last night. Subjectively.

  We braked in the sky over a wide thoroughfare, sharply enough for someone above us to broadcast an outraged proximity squawk into the limousine’s comset. Curtis cut off the signal with a slap of one hand across the console, and his face tilted up to glower dangerously through the roof window. We settled down into the flow of ground traffic with a slight bump and immediately made a left into a narrower street. I started to take an interest in what was outside.

  There’s a sameness to streetlife. On every world I’ve ever been, the same underlying patterns play out, flaunt and vaunt, buy and sell, like some distilled essence of human behavior seeping out from under whatever clanking political machine has been dropped on it from above. Bay City, Earth, most ancient of civilized worlds, had won itself no exemptions. From the massive insubstantial holofronts along the antique buildings to the street traders with their catalog broadcast sets nestling on shoulders like clumsy mechanical hawks or outside tumors, everyone was selling something. Cars pulled in and out from the curbside, and supple bodies braced against them, leaning in to negotiate the way they’ve probably been doing as long as there’ve been cars to do it against. Shreds of steam and smoke drifted from food barrows. The limo was sound- and broadcast-proofed, but you could sense the noises through the glass, corner pitch sales chants and modulated music carrying consumer urge subsonics.

  In the Envoy Corps, they reverse humanity. You see the sameness first, the underlying resonance that lets you get a handle on where you are, then you build up difference from the details.

  The Harlan’s World ethnic mix is primarily Slavic and Japanese, although you can get any variant tank-grown at a price. Here, every face was a different cast and color. I saw tall, angular-boned Africans, Mongols, pasty-skinned Nordics, and, once, a girl who looked like Virginia Vidaura, but I lost her in the crowd. They all slid by like natives on the banks of a river.

  Clumsy.

  The impression skipped and flickered across my thoughts like the girl in the crowd. I frowned and caught at it.

  On Harlan’s World, streetlife has a stripped-back elegance to it, an economy of motion and gesture that feels almost like choreography if you’re not used to it. I grew up with it, so the effect doesn’t register until it’s not there anymore.

  I wasn’t seeing it here. The ebb and flow of human commerce beyond the limo’s windows had a quality like choppy water in the space between boats. People pushed and shoved their way along, backing up abruptly to get around tighter knots in the crowd that they apparently hadn’t noticed until it was too late to maneuver. Obvious tensions broke out, necks craned, muscled bodies drew themselves up. Twice I saw the makings of a fight take stumbling shape, only to be swept away on the chop. It was as if the whole place had been sprayed with some pheromonal irritant.

  “Curtis.” I glanced sideways at his impassive profile. “You want to cut the broadcast block for a minute?”

  He looked across at me with a slight curl of the lip. “Sure.”

  I settled back in the seat and fixed my eyes on the street again. “I’m not a tourist, Curtis. This is what I do for a living.”

  The street sellers’ catalogs came aboard like a swarm of delirium-induced hallucinations, slightly diffuse through lack of directed broadcast and blurring swiftly into each other as we glided along, but still an overload by any Harlanite standards. The pimps were the most obvious, a succession of oral and anal acts, digitally retouched to lend an airbrushed sheen to breasts and musculature. Each whore’s name was murmured in throaty voiceover, along with a superimposed facial, coy little girls, dominatrixes, stubbled stallions, and a few from cultural stock that was completely alien to me. Weaving in between were the more subtle chemical lists and surreal scenarios of the drug and implant traders. I caught a couple of religious ’casts amidst it all, images of spiritual calm among mountains, but they were like drowning men in the sea of product.

  The stumbling started to make sense.

  “What does from the Houses mean?” I asked Curtis, trawling the phrase from the ’casts for the third time.

  Curtis sneered. “The mark of quality. The Houses are a cartel—high-class, expensive whorehouses up and down the coast. Get you anything you want, they say. If a girl’s from the Houses, she’s been taught to do stuff most people only ever dream about.” He nodded at the street. “Don’t kid yourself, no one out there ever worked in the Houses.”

  “And Stiff?”

  He shrugged. “Street name. Betathanatine. Kids use it
for near-death experiences. Cheaper than suicide.”

  “I guess.”

  “You don’t got ’thanatine on Harlan’s World?”

  “No.” I’d used it offworld with the corps a couple of times, but there was a ban in fashion back home. “We got suicide, though. You want to put the screen back up?”

  The soft brush of images cut out abruptly, leaving the inside of my head feeling stark, like an unfurnished room. I waited for the feeling to fade and, like most aftereffects, it did.

  “This is Mission Street,” Curtis said. “The next couple of blocks are all hotels. You want me to drop you here?”

  “You recommend anywhere?”

  “Depends what you want.”

  I gave him one of his own shrugs back. “Light. Space. Room service.”

  He squinted thoughtfully. “Try the Hendrix, if you like. They got a tower annex, and the whores they use are clean.” The limousine picked up speed fractionally, and we made a couple of blocks in silence. I neglected to explain I hadn’t meant that kind of room service. Let Curtis draw the conclusions he seemed to want to.

  Unbidden, a freeze frame of Miriam Bancroft’s sweat-dewed cleavage bounced through my mind.

  The limo coasted to a halt outside a well-lit facade in a style I didn’t recognize. I climbed out and stared up at a huge holocast black man, features screwed up presumably in ecstasy at the music he was wringing left-handed from a white guitar. The image had the slightly artificial edges of a remastered two-dimensional image, which made it old. Hoping this might indicate a tradition of service and not just decrepitude, I thanked Curtis, slammed the door, and watched the limousine cruise away. It began to climb almost immediately, and after a moment I lost the taillights in the streams of airborne traffic. I turned to the mirrored glass doors behind me, and they parted slightly jerkily to let me in.

  If the lobby was anything to go by, the Hendrix was certainly going to satisfy the second of my requirements. Curtis could have parked three or four of Bancroft’s limos side by side in it and still have had space to wheel a cleaning robot around them. I wasn’t so sure about the first. The walls and ceiling bore an irregular spacing of illuminum tiles whose half-life was clearly almost up, and their feeble radiance had the sole effect of shoveling the gloom into the center of the room. The street I’d just come in off was the strongest source of light in the place.

  The lobby was deserted, but there was a faint blue glow coming from a counter on the far wall. I picked my way toward it, past low armchairs and shin-hungry metal-edged tables, and found a recessed monitor screen swarming with the random snow of disconnection. In one corner, a command pulsed on and off in English, Spanish, and kanji characters.

  SPEAK.

  I looked around and back at the screen.

  No one.

  I cleared my throat.

  The characters blurred and shifted. SELECT LANGUAGE.

  “I’m looking for a room,” I tried, in Japanese out of pure curiosity.

  The screen jumped into life so dramatically that I took a step backwards. From whirling, multicolored fragments it rapidly assembled a tanned Asian face above a dark collar and tie. The face smiled and changed into a Caucasian female, aged fractionally, and I was facing a blonde thirty-year-old woman in a sober business suit. Having generated my interpersonal ideal, the hotel also decided that I couldn’t speak Japanese after all.

  “Good day, sir. Welcome to the Hotel Hendrix, established 2087 and still here today. How may we serve you?”

  I repeated my request, following the move into Amanglic.

  “Thank you, sir. We have a number of rooms, all fully cabled to the city’s information and entertainment stack. Please indicate your preference for floor and size.”

  “I’d like a tower room, west facing. The biggest you’ve got.”

  The face recoiled into a corner inset, and a three-dimensional skeleton of the hotel’s room structure etched itself into place. A selector pulsed efficiently through the rooms and stopped in one corner, then blew up and rotated the room in question. A column of fine-print data shuttered down on one side of the screen.

  “The Watchtower suite, three rooms, dormitory thirteen point eight seven meters by—”

  “That’s fine, I’ll take it.”

  The three-dimensional map disappeared like a conjuror’s trick, and the woman leapt back to full screen.

  “How many nights will you be with us, sir?”

  “Indefinite.”

  “A deposit is required,” the hotel said diffidently. “For stays of more than fourteen days the sum of six hundred dollars U.N. should be deposited now. In the event of departure before said fourteen days, a proportion of this deposit will be refunded.”

  “Fine.”

  “Thank you, sir.” From the tone of voice, I began to suspect that paying customers were a novelty at the Hotel Hendrix. “How will you be paying?”

  “DNA trace. First Colony Bank of California.”

  The payment details were scrolling out when I felt a cold circle of metal touch the base of my skull.

  “That’s exactly what you think it is,” a calm voice said. “You do the wrong thing, and the cops are going to be picking bits of your cortical stack out of that wall for weeks. I’m talking about real death, friend. Now, lift your hands away from your body.”

  I complied, feeling an unaccustomed chill shoot up my spine to the point the gun muzzle was touching. It was a long time since I’d been threatened with real death.

  “That’s good,” the same calm voice said. “Now, my associate here is going to pad you down. You let her do that, and no sudden moves.”

  “Please key your DNA signature onto the pad beside this screen.” The hotel had accessed First Colony’s database. I waited impassively while a slim black-clad woman in a ski mask stepped around and ran a purring gray scanner over me from head to foot. The gun at my neck never wavered. It was no longer cold. My flesh had warmed it to a more intimate temperature.

  “He’s clean.” Another crisp, professional voice. “Basic neurachem, but it’s inoperative. No hardware.”

  “Really? Traveling kind of light, aren’t you, Kovacs?”

  My heart dropped out of my chest and impacted soggily in my guts. I’d hoped this was just local crime.

  “I don’t know you,” I said cautiously, turning my head a couple of millimeters. The gun jabbed and I stopped.

  “That’s right, you don’t. Now, here’s what’s going to happen. We’re going to walk outside—”

  “Credit access will cease in thirty seconds,” the hotel said patiently. “Please key in your DNA signature now.”

  “Mr. Kovacs won’t be needing his reservation,” the man behind me said, putting a hand on my shoulder. “Come on, Kovacs, we’re going for a ride.”

  “I cannot assume host prerogatives without payment,” the woman on the screen said.

  Something in the tone of that phrase stopped me as I was turning, and on impulse I forced out a sudden, racking cough.

  “What—”

  Bending forward with the force of the cough, I raised a hand to my mouth and licked my thumb.

  “The fuck are you playing at, Kovacs?”

  I straightened again and snapped my hand out to the keypad beside the screen. Traces of fresh spittle smeared over the matte-black receiver. A split second later a calloused palm edge cracked into the left side of my skull, and I collapsed to my hands and knees on the floor. A boot lashed into my face, and I went the rest of the way down.

  “Thank you, sir.” I heard the voice of the hotel through a roaring in my head. “Your account is being processed.”

  I tried to get up and got a second boot in the ribs for the trouble. Blood dripped from my nose onto the carpet. The barrel of the gun ground into my neck.

  “That wasn’t smart, Kovacs.” The voice was marginally less calm. “If you think the cops are going to trace us where you’re going, then the stack must have fucked your brain. Now get up!”


  He was pulling me to my feet when the thunder cut loose.

  Why someone had seen fit to equip the Hendrix’s security systems with twenty-millimeter automatic cannon was beyond me, but they did the job with devastating totality. Out of the corner of one eye I glimpsed the twin-mounted autoturret come snaking down from the ceiling just a moment before it channeled a three-second burst of fire through my primary assailant. Enough firepower to bring down a small aircraft. The noise was deafening.

  The masked woman ran for the doors, and with the echoes of fire still hammering in my ears I saw the turret swivel to follow. She made about a dozen paces through the gloom before a prism of ruby laser light dappled across her back and a fresh fusillade exploded in the confines of the lobby. I clapped both hands over my ears, still on my knees, and the shells punched through her. She went over in a graceless tangle of limbs.

  The firing stopped.

  In the cordite-reeking quiet that followed, nothing moved. The autoturret had gone dormant, barrels slanting at a downward angle, smoke coiling from the breeches. I unclasped my hands from my ears and climbed to my feet, pressing gingerly on my nose and face to ascertain the extent of the damage done. The bleeding seemed to be slowing down, and though there were cuts in my mouth I couldn’t find any loosened teeth. My ribs hurt where the second kick had hit me, but it didn’t feel as if anything was broken. I glanced over at the nearest corpse, and wished I hadn’t. Someone was going to have to get a mop.

  To my left an elevator door opened with a faint chime.

  “Your room is ready, sir,” the hotel said.

  CHAPTEr SIX

  Kristin Ortega was remarkably restrained.

  She came through the hotel doors with a loping stride that bounced one heavily weighted jacket pocket against her thigh, came to a halt in the center of the lobby, and surveyed the carnage with her tongue thrust into one cheek.

  “You do this sort of thing a lot, Kovacs?”

  “I’ve been waiting awhile,” I told her mildly. “I’m not in a great mood.”

  The hotel had placed a call to the Bay City police about the time the autoturret had cut loose, but it was a good half hour before the first cruisers came spiraling down out of the sky traffic. I hadn’t bothered to go to my room, since I knew they were going to drag me out of bed anyway, and once they arrived there was no question of me going anywhere until Ortega got there. A police medic gave me a cursory check, ascertained that I wasn’t suffering from concussion, and left me with a retardant spray to stop the nosebleed, after which I sat in the lobby and let my new sleeve smoke some of the lieutenant’s cigarettes. I was still sitting there an hour later when she arrived.