Altered Carbon (61 page)

Read Altered Carbon Online

Authors: Richard Morgan

“I’m
checking out of the apartment tomorrow,” Elliott told me as she worked.
“You won’t be able to reach me there.”

She was
silent for a couple of moments, whistling through her teeth at odd moments as
she keyed in the images she had constructed. Then she cast a glance at me over
her shoulder.

“You
say I’m earning juice from these guys, doing this. They’re going to
owe me?”

“Yeah,
I’d say so.”

“Then
I’ll contact them. Get me the officer in charge, I’ll talk to
whoever that is. And don’t try to call me at Ember, I won’t be
there either.”

I said
nothing, just looked at her. She turned back to her work.

“I
need some time alone,” she muttered.

Just the words sounded like
a luxury to me.

 

CHAPTER
THIRTY-EIGHT

I watched him pour a drink from the
bottle of fifteen-year-old malt, take it to the phone and seat himself
carefully. The broken ribs had been welded back together in one of the
ambulances, but the whole of that side was still one huge ache, with
occasional, flinty stabs of agony. He sipped at the whisky, gathered himself
visibly and punched out the call.

“Bancroft
residence. With whom do you wish to speak?” It was the severely-suited
woman who had answered last time I called Suntouch House. The same suit, the
same hair, even the same make-up. Maybe she was a phone construct.

“Miriam
Bancroft,” he said.

Once again,
it was the sensation of being a passive observer, the same sensation of
disconnection that I had felt that night in front of the mirror while
Ryker’s sleeve put on its weapons. The frags. Only this time it was much
worse.

“One
moment, please.”

The woman
disappeared from the screen and was replaced by the image of a windblown match
flame in synch with piano music that sounded like autumn leaves being blown
along a cracked and worn pavement. A minute passed, then Miriam Bancroft
appeared, immaculately attired in a formal-looking jacket and blouse. She
raised one perfectly groomed eyebrow.

“Mr.Kovacs.
This is a surprise.”

“Yeah,
well.” He gestured uncomfortably. Even across the comlink, Miriam
Bancroft radiated a sensuality that unbalanced him. “Is this a secure
line?”

“Reasonably
so, yes. What do you want?”

He cleared
his throat. “I’ve been thinking. There are some things I’d
like to discuss with you. I, uh, I may owe you an apology.”

“Indeed?”
This time it was both eyebrows. “When exactly did you have in
mind?”

He
shrugged. “I’m not doing anything right now.”

“Yes.
I, however, am doing something right now, Mr.Kovacs. I am en route to a meeting
in Chicago and will not be back on the coast until tomorrow evening.” The
faintest hint of a smile twitched at the corners of her mouth. “Will you
wait?”

“Sure.”

She leaned
towards the screen, eyes narrowing. “What happened to your face?”

He raised a
hand to one of the emerging facial bruises. In the low light of the room, he
had not expected it to be so noticeable. Nor had he expected Miriam Bancroft to
be so attentive.

“Long
story. Tell you when I see you.”

“Well,
that I can hardly resist,” she said ironically. “I shall send a
limousine to collect you from the Hendrix tomorrow afternoon. Shall we say
about four o’clock? Good. Until then.”

The screen
cleared. He sat, staring at it for a moment, then switched off the phone and
swivelled the chair round to face the window shelf.

“She
makes me nervous,” he said.

“Yeah,
me too. Well, obviously.”

“Very
funny.”

“I
try.”

I got up to
fetch the whisky bottle. As I crossed the room, I caught my reflection in the
mirror beside the bed.

Where
Ryker’s sleeve had the air of a man who had battered his way head first
through life’s trials, the man in the mirror looked as if he would be
able to slip neatly aside at every crisis and watch fate fall clumsily on its
fat face. The body was cat-like in its movements, a smooth and effortless
economy of motion that would have looked good on Anchana Salomao. The thick,
almost blue-black hair fell in a soft cascade to the deceptively slim
shoulders, and the elegantly tilted eyes had a gentle, unconcerned expression
that suggested the universe was a good place to live in.

I had only
been in the tech ninja sleeve a few hours—seven, and forty-two minutes
according to the time display chipped into my upper left field of
vision—but there were none of the usual download side effects. I
collected the whisky bottle with one of the slim brown artist’s hands and
the simple play of muscle and bone was a joy that glowed through me. The
Khumalo neurachem system thrummed continually at the limit of perception, as if
it were singing faintly the myriad possible things the body could do at any
given moment. Never, even during my time with the Envoy Corps, had I worn
anything like it.

I
remembered Carnage’s words and mentally shook my head. If the UN thought
they’d be able to impose a ten-year colonial embargo on
this
,
they were living in another world.

“I
don’t know about you,” he said, “but this feels fucking
weird.”

“Tell
me about it.” I filled my own tumbler and proffered the bottle. He shook
his head. I went back to the window shelf and sat back against the glass.

“How
the fuck did Kadmin stand it? Ortega says he used to work with himself all the
time.”

“Get
used to anything in time, I suppose. Besides, Kadmin was fucking crazy.”

“Oh,
and we’re not?”

I shrugged.
“We didn’t have a choice. Apart from walking away, I mean. Would
that have been better?”

“You
tell me. You’re the one who’s going up against Kawahara. I’m
just the whore around here. Incidentally, I don’t reckon Ortega’s
exactly overjoyed about that part of the deal. I mean, she was confused before,
but now—”


She
’s
confused! How do you think I feel?”

“I
know how you feel, idiot. I am you.”

“Are
you?” I sipped at my drink and gestured with the glass. “How long
do you think it takes before we stop being exactly the same person?”

He
shrugged. “You are what you remember. Right now we only have about seven
or eight hours of separate perceptions. Can’t have made much of a dent
yet, can it?”

“On
forty-odd years of memory? I suppose not. And it’s the early stuff that
builds personality.”

“Yeah,
they say. And while we’re on the subject, tell me something. How do you
feel, I mean how do
we
feel about the Patchwork Man being dead?”

I shifted
uncomfortably. “Do we need to talk about this?”

“We
need to talk about something. We’re stuck here with each other until
tomorrow evening—”

“You
can go out, if you want. Come to that,” I jerked a thumb upward towards
the roof, “I can get out of here the way I came in.”

“You
really don’t want to talk about it that badly, huh?”

“Wasn’t
that tough.”

That, at
least, was true. The original draft of the plan had called for the ninja copy
of me to stay at Ortega’s apartment until the Ryker copy had disappeared
with Miriam Bancroft. Then it occurred to me that we’d need a working
relationship with the Hendrix to bring off the assault on Head in the Clouds,
and that there was no way for the ninja copy of myself to prove its identity to
the hotel, short of submission to a storage scan. It seemed a better idea for
the Ryker copy to introduce the ninja before departing with Miriam Bancroft.
Since the Ryker copy was undoubtedly still under surveillance, at the very
least, by Trepp, walking in through the front door of the Hendrix together
looked like a very bad idea. I borrowed a grav harness and a stealth suit from
Bautista, and just before it started to get light I skimmed in between the
patchy high-level traffic and down onto a sheltered flange on the forty-second
floor. The Hendrix had by this time been advised of my arrival by the Ryker
copy and let me in through a ventilation duct.

With the
Khumalo neurachem, it had been almost as easy as walking in through the front
door.

“Look,”
the Ryker copy said. “I’m you. I know everything you know.
What’s the harm in talking about this stuff?”

“If
you know everything I know, what’s the
point
of talking about
it?”

“Sometimes,
it helps to externalise things. Even if you talk to someone else about it,
you’re usually talking to yourself. The other guy’s just providing
a sounding board. You talk it out.”

I sighed.
“I don’t know. I buried all that shit about Dad a long time ago,
it’s a long time dead.”

“Yeah,
right.”

“I’m
serious.”

“No.”
He flicked a finger at me the way I had pointed at Bancroft when he
didn’t want to face my facts on the balcony of Suntouch House.
“You’re lying to yourself. Remember that pimp we met in
Lazlo’s pipe house the year we joined Shonagon’s Eleven. The one we
nearly killed before they pulled us off him.”

“That
was just chemicals. We were off our head on tetrameth, showing off because of
the Eleven stuff. Fuck, we were only sixteen.”

“Bullshit.
We did it because he looked like Dad.”

“Maybe.”

“Fact.
And we spent the next decade and a half killing authority figures for the same
reason.”

“Oh,
give me a fucking break! We spent that decade and a half killing anyone who got
in the way. It was the military, that’s what we did for a living. And,
anyway, since when is a pimp an authority figure?”

“OK,
maybe it was pimps we spent fifteen years killing. Users. Maybe that’s
what we were paying back.”

“He
never pimped Mum out.”

“Are
you sure? Why were we so hot to hit the Elizabeth Elliott angle like a fucking
tactical nuke? Why the accent on whorehouses in this investigation?”

“Because,”
I said, sinking a finger of whisky, “that is what this investigation has
been about from the beginning. We went after the Elliott angle because it felt
right. Envoy intuition. The way Bancroft treated his wife—”

“Oh,
Miriam Bancroft. Now there’s another whole disc we could spin.”

“Shut
up. Elliott was a pretty fucking good sounding shot. We wouldn’t have got
to Head in the Clouds without that trip to Jerry’s biocabins.”

“Ahhh.”
He made a disgusted gesture and tipped his own glass back. “You believe
what you want. I say the Patchwork Man’s been a metaphor for Dad because
we couldn’t bear to look too closely at the truth and that’s why we
freaked the first time we saw a composite construct in virtual. Remember that,
do you? That rec house on Adoracion. We had rage dreams for a week after that
little show. Waking up with shreds of pillow on your hands. They sent us to the
psychs for that.”

I gestured
irritably. “Yeah, I remember. I remember being shit scared of the
Patchwork Man, not Dad. I remember feeling the same when we met Kadmin in
virtual too.”

“And
now he’s dead? How do we feel now?”

“I
don’t feel anything.”

He pointed
at me again. “That’s a cover.”

“It
is not a cover. The motherfucker got in my way, he threatened me and now
he’s dead. Transmission ends.”

“Remember
anyone else threatening you, do you? When you were small, maybe?”

“I am
not going to talk about this any more.” I reached for the bottle and
filled my glass again. “Pick another subject. What about Ortega? What are
our feelings on that score?”

“Are
you planning to drink that whole bottle?”

“You
want some?”

“No.”

I spread my
hands. “So what’s it to you?”

“Are
you trying to get drunk?”

“Of
course I am. If I’ve got to talk to myself, I don’t see why I
should do it sober. So tell me about Ortega.”

“I
don’t want to talk about that.”

“Why
not?” I asked reasonably. “Got to talk about something, remember.
What’s wrong with Ortega?”

“What’s
wrong is that we don’t feel the same about her. You aren’t wearing
Ryker’s sleeve any more.”

“That
doesn’t—”

“Yes,
it does. What’s between us and Ortega is completely physical. There
hasn’t been time for anything else. That’s why you’re so
happy to talk about her now. In that sleeve, all you’ve got is some vague
nostalgia about that yacht and a bundle of snapshot memories to back it up.
There’s nothing chemical happening to you any more.”

I reached
for something to say, and abruptly found nothing. The suddenly discovered
difference sat between us like a third, unwanted occupant of the room.

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