Authors: Richard Morgan
“Well
then.” Sullivan seemed to have lost a bit of his iron.
“You’re a lucky man, Kovacs. Don’t waste the
opportunity.”
Don’t
they ever get tired of saying it?
I folded up
my bits of paper without speaking and stuffed them into my pocket next to the
letter. I was turning to leave when the doctor stood up and held out a small
white card to me.
“Mr.Kovacs.”
I paused.
“There
shouldn’t be any major problems with adjusting,” she said.
“This is a healthy body, and you are used to this. If there
is
anything major. Call this number.”
I put out
an arm and lifted the little rectangle of card with a machined precision that I
hadn’t noticed before. The neurachem was kicking in. My hand delivered
the card to the same pocket as the rest of the paperwork and I was gone,
crossing the reception and pushing open the door without a word. Ungracious
maybe, but I didn’t think anyone in that building had earnt my gratitude
yet.
You’re a lucky
man, Kovacs
. Sure. A hundred and eighty
light years from home, wearing another man’s body on a six-week rental
agreement. Freighted in to do a job that the local police wouldn’t touch
with a riot prod. Fail and go back into storage. I felt so lucky I could have
burst into song as I walked out the door.
The hall outside was huge, and all but
deserted. It looked like nothing so much as the Millsport rail terminal back
home. Beneath a tilted roof of long transparent panels, the fused glass paving
of the floor shone amber in the afternoon sun. A couple of children were
playing with the automatic doors at the exit, and there was a solitary cleaning
robot sniffing along in the shade at one wall. Nothing else moved. Marooned in
the glow on benches of old wood, a scattering of humanity waited in silence for
friends or family to ride in from their altered carbon exiles.
Download
Central.
These
people wouldn’t recognise their loved ones in their new sleeves;
recognition would be left to the home-comers, and for those who awaited them
the anticipation of reunion would be tempered with a cool dread at what face
and body they might have to learn to love. Or maybe they were a couple of
generations down the line, waiting for relatives who were no more to them now
than a vague childhood memory or a family legend. I knew one guy in the Corps,
Murakami, who was waiting on the release of a great-grandfather put away over a
century back. Was going up to Newpest with a litre of whisky and a pool cue for
homecoming gifts. He’d been brought up on stories of his
great-grandfather in the Kanagawa pool halls. The guy had been put away before
Murakami was even born.
I spotted
my reception committee as I went down the steps into the body of the hall.
Three tall silhouettes were gathered around one of the benches, shifting
restlessly in the slanting rays of sunlight and creating eddies in the dust
motes that floated there. A fourth figure sat on the bench, arms folded and
legs stretched out. All four of them were wearing reflective sunglasses that at
a distance turned their faces into identical masks.
Already on
course for the door, I made no attempt to detour in their direction and this
must have occurred to them only when I was halfway across the hall. Two of them
drifted over to intercept me with the easy calm of big cats that had been fed
recently. Bulky and tough-looking with neatly groomed crimson mohicans, they
arrived in my path a couple of metres ahead, forcing me either to stop in turn
or cut an abrupt circle around them. I stopped. Newly arrived and newly sleeved
is the wrong state to be in if you plan to piss off the local militia. I tried
on my second smile of the day.
“Something
I can do for you?”
The older of
the two waved a badge negligently in my direction, then put it away as if it
might tarnish in the open air.
“Bay
City police. The lieutenant wants to talk to you.” The sentence sounded
bitten off, as if he was resisting the urge to add some epithet to the end of
it. I made an attempt to look as if I was seriously considering whether or not
to go along with them, but they had me and they knew it. An hour out of the
tank, you don’t know enough about your new body to be getting into brawls
with it. I shut down my images of Sarah’s death and let myself be
shepherded back to the seated cop.
The
lieutenant was a woman in her thirties. Under the golden discs of her shades,
she wore cheekbones from some Amerindian ancestor and a wide slash of a mouth
that was currently set in a sardonic line. The sunglasses were jammed on a nose
you could have opened cans on. Short, untidy hair framed the whole face, stuck
up in spikes at the front. She had wrapped herself in an outsize combat jacket
but the long, black-encased legs that protruded from its lower edge were a
clear hint of the lithe body within. She looked up at me with her arms folded
on her chest for nearly a minute before anyone spoke.
“It’s
Kovacs, right?”
“Yes.”
“Takeshi
Kovacs?” Her pronunciation was perfect. “Out of Harlan’s
World? Millsport via the Kanagawa storage facility?”
“Tell
you what, I’ll just stop you when you get one wrong.”
There was a
long, mirror-lensed pause. The lieutenant unfolded fractionally and examined
the blade of one hand.
“You
got a licence for that sense of humour, Kovacs?”
“Sorry.
Left it at home.”
“And
what brings you to Earth?”
I gestured
impatiently. “You know all this already, otherwise you wouldn’t be
here. Have you got something to say to me, or did you just bring these kids along
for educational purposes?”
I felt a
hand fasten on my upper arm and tensed. The lieutenant made a barely
perceptible motion with her head and the cop behind me let go again.
“Cool
down, Kovacs. I’m just making conversation here. Yeah, I know Laurens Bancroft
sprung you. Matter of fact, I’m here to offer you a lift up to the
Bancroft residence.” She sat forward suddenly, and stood up. On her feet
she was almost as tall as my new sleeve. “I’m Kristin Ortega,
Organic Damage Division. Bancroft was my case.”
“Was?”
She nodded.
“Case is closed, Kovacs.”
“Is
that a warning?”
“No,
it’s just the facts. Open-and-shut suicide.”
“Bancroft
doesn’t seem to think so. He claims he was murdered.”
“Yeah,
so I hear.” Ortega shrugged. “Well, that’s his prerogative. I
guess it might be difficult for a man like that to believe he’d blow his
own head clean off.”
“A
man like what?”
“Oh
come—” She stopped herself and gave me a small smile. ”Sorry,
I keep forgetting.”
“Forgetting
what?”
Another
pause, but this time Kristin Ortega seemed to be off balance for the first time
in our brief acquaintance. There was hesitancy blurring her tone when she spoke
again. “You’re not from here.”
“So?”
“So
anyone from here would know what kind of man Laurens Bancroft is. That’s
all.”
Fascinated
at why someone would lie so ineptly to a total stranger, I tried to put her
back at her ease. “A rich man,” I hazarded. “A powerful
man.”
She smiled
thinly. “You’ll see. Now do you want this lift or not?”
The letter
in my pocket said a chauffeur would be outside the terminal to pick me up.
Bancroft had made no mention of the police. I shrugged.
“I’ve
never turned down a free ride yet.”
“Good.
Then shall we go?”
They
flanked me to the door and stepped out ahead like bodyguards, heads tilted back
and lensed eyes scanning. Ortega and I stepped through the gap together and the
warmth of the sunlight hit me in the face. I screwed up my new eyes against the
glare and made out angular buildings behind real wire fences on the other side
of a badly-kept landing lot. Sterile, and off-white, quite possibly original
pre-millennial structures. Between the oddly monochrome walls, I could see
sections of a grey iron bridge that came vaulting in to land somewhere hidden
from view. A similarly drab collection of sky and ground cruisers sat about in
not particularly neat lines. The wind gusted abruptly and I caught the faint
odour of some flowering weed growing along the cracks in the landing lot. In
the distance was the familiar hum of traffic, but everything else felt like a
period drama set piece.
“…and
I tell you there is only
one
judge! Do not believe the men of science
when they tell you…”
The squawk
of the poorly operated ampbox hit us as we went down the steps from the exit. I
glanced across the landing area and saw a crowd assembled around a black-clad
man on a packing crate. Holographic placards wove erratically in the air above
the heads of the listeners. NO TO RESOLUTION 653!! ONLY
GOD
CAN
RESURRECT!! D.H.F. = D.E.A.T.H. Cheers drowned out the speaker.
“What’s
this?”
“Catholics,”
said Ortega, lip curling. “Old-time religious sect.”
“Yeah?
Never heard of them.”
“No.
You wouldn’t have. They don’t believe you can digitise a human
being without losing the soul.”
“Not
a widespread faith then.”
“Just
on Earth,” she said sourly. “I think the Vatican—that’s
their central church—financed a couple of cryoships to Starfall and
Latimer—”
“I’ve
been to Latimer, I never ran into anything like this.”
“The
ships only left at the turn of the century, Kovacs. They won’t get there
for a couple more decades yet.”
We skirted
the gathering, and a young woman with her hair pulled severely back thrust a
leaflet at me. The gesture was so abrupt that it tripped my sleeve’s
unsettled reflexes and I made a blocking motion before I got it under control.
Hard-eyed, the woman stood with the leaflet out and I took it with a placating
smile.
“They
have no right,” the woman said.
“Oh,
I agree…”
“Only
the Lord our God can save your soul.”
“I—”
But by this time Kristin Ortega was steering me firmly away, one hand on my
arm, in a manner that suggested a lot of practice. I shook her off politely but
equally firmly.
“Are
we in some kind of hurry?”
“I
think we both have better things to do, yes,” she said, tight lipped,
looking back to where her colleagues were engaged in fending off leaflets of
their own.
“I
might have wanted to talk to her.”
“Yeah?
Looked to me like you wanted to throat-chop her.”
“That’s
just the sleeve. I think it had some neurachem conditioning way back when, and
she tripped it. You know, most people lie down for a few hours after
downloading. I’m a little on edge.”
I stared at
the leaflet in my hands. CAN A MACHINE SAVE YOUR SOUL? it demanded of me
rhetorically. The word ‘machine’ had been printed in script
designed to resemble an archaic computer display. ‘Soul’ was in
flowing stereographic letters that danced all over the page. I turned over for
the answer.
NO!!!!!
“So
cryogenic suspension is okay, but digitised human freight isn’t.
Interesting.” I looked back at the glowing placards, musing.
“What’s Resolution 653?”
“It’s
a test case going through the UN Court,” said Ortega shortly. “Bay
City public prosecutor’s office want to subpoena a Catholic who’s
in storage. Pivotal witness. The Vatican say she’s already dead and in the
hands of God. They’re calling it blasphemy.”
“I
see. So your loyalties are pretty undivided here.”
She stopped
and turned to face me.
“Kovacs,
I hate these goddamn freaks. They’ve been grinding us down for the best
part of two and a half thousand years. They’ve been responsible for more
misery than any other organisation in history. You know they won’t even
let their adherents practise
birth control
, for Christ’s sake,
and they’ve stood against every significant medical advance of the last
five centuries. Practically the only thing you can say in their favour is that
this d.h.f. thing has stopped them from spreading with the rest of
humanity.”
My lift
turned out to be a battered but undeniably rakish-looking Lockheed-Mitoma
transport decked out in what were presumably police colours. I’d flown
Lock-Mits on Sharya, but they’d been a dull radar-reflective black all
over. The red and white stripes on this one looked garish by comparison. A
pilot in sunglasses to match the rest of Ortega’s little gang sat
motionless in the cockpit. The hatch into the belly of the cruiser was already
hinged up. Ortega banged on the hatch coaming as we climbed aboard and the
turbines awoke with a whispery sound.
I helped
one of the mohicans manhandle the hatch down, steadied myself against the lift
of the cruiser and found my way to a window seat. As we spiralled up, I craned
my neck to keep the crowd below in sight. The transport straightened out about
a hundred metres up and dropped its nose slightly. I sank back into the arms of
the automould and found Ortega watching me.