Altered Carbon (18 page)

“It
also occurred to me that Mrs.Bancroft is probably here in connection with the
matter of her husband’s death, which you are investigating. I thought you
would prefer to speak to her if possible, and she was not amenable to waiting
in the lobby.”

I sighed,
and unpinned my hand from the elevator’s stop button.

“No,
I bet she wasn’t.”

She was
seated in the window, nursing a tall, ice-filled glass and watching the lights
of the traffic below. The room was in darkness broken only by the soft glow of
the service hatch and the tricoloured neon-frame drinks cabinet. Enough to see
that she wore some kind of shawl over work trousers and a body-moulded leotard.
She didn’t turn her head when I let myself in, so I advanced across the
room into her field of vision.

“The
hotel told me you were here,” I said. “In case you were wondering
why I didn’t unsleeve myself in shock.”

She looked
up at me and shook hair back from her face.

“Very
dry, Mr.Kovacs. Should I applaud?”

I shrugged.
“You might say thank you for the drink.”

She
examined the top of her glass thoughtfully for a moment, then flicked her eyes
up again.

“Thank
you for the drink.”

“Don’t
mention it.” I went to the cabinet and surveyed the bottles racked there.
A bottle of fifteen-year-old single malt suggested itself. I uncorked it,
sniffed at the neck of the bottle and picked out a tumbler. Keeping my eyes on
my hands as they poured, I said,“Have you been waiting long?”

“About
an hour. Oumou Prescott told me you’d gone to Licktown, so I guessed
you’d be back late. Did you have some trouble?”

I held onto
the first of mouthful of whisky, felt it sear the internal cuts where Kadmin
had put the boot in and swallowed hastily. I grimaced.

“Now
why would you think that, Mrs.Bancroft?”

She made an
elegant gesture with one hand. “No reason. Do you not want to talk about
it?”

“Not
particularly.” I sank into a huge lounger bag at the foot of the crimson
bed and sat staring across the room at her. Silence descended. From where I was
sitting she was backlit by the window and her face was deep in shadow. I kept
my eyes levelled on the faint gleam that might have been her left eye. After a
while she shifted in her seat and the ice in her glass clicked.

“Well.”
She cleared her throat. “What would you like to talk about?”

I waved my
glass at her. “Let’s start with why you’re here.”

“I
want to know what progress you’ve made.”

“You
can get a progress report from me tomorrow morning. I’ll file one with
Oumou Prescott before I go out. Come
on
, Mrs.Bancroft. It’s
late. You can do better than that.”

For a
moment I thought she might leave, the way she twitched. But then she took her
glass in both hands, bent her head over it as if in search of inspiration and
after a long moment looked up again.

“I
want you to stop,” she said.

I let the
words sink into the darkened room.

“Why?”

I saw her
lips part in the smile, heard the sound her mouth made as it split.

“Why
not?” she said.

“Well.”
I sipped at my drink, sluicing the alcohol around the cuts in my mouth to shut
down my hormones. “To begin with, there’s your husband. He’s
made it pretty clear that cutting and running could seriously damage my health,
Then there’s the hundred thousand dollars. And after that, well, then we
get into the ethereal realm of things like promises and my word. And to be
honest, I’m
curious
.”

“A
hundred thousand isn’t so much money,” she said carefully.
“And the Protectorate is big. I could give you the money. Find a place
for you to go where Laurens would never find you.”

“Yes.
That leaves my word, and my curiosity.”

She sat
forward over her drink. “Let’s not pretend, Mr.Kovacs. Laurens
didn’t contract you, he dragged you here. He locked you into a deal you
had no choice but to accept. No one could say you were honour bound.”

“I’m
still curious.”

“Maybe
I could satisfy that,” she said softly.

I swallowed
more whisky. “Yeah? Did you kill your husband, Mrs.Bancroft?”

She made an
impatient gesture. “I’m not talking about your game of detectives.
You are … curious about other things, are you not?”

“I’m
sorry?” I looked at her over the rim of my glass.

Miriam
Bancroft pushed herself off the window shelf and set her hips against it. She
set down the glass with exaggerated care and leaned back on her hands so that
her shoulders lifted. It changed the shape of her breasts, moving them beneath
the sheer material of her leotard.

“Do
you know what Merge Nine is?” she asked, a little unsteadily.

“Empathin?”
I dug the name out from somewhere. Some thoroughly armed robbery crew I knew
back on Harlan’s World, friends of Virginia Vidaura’s. The Little
Blue Bugs. They did all their work on Merge Nine. Said it welded them into a
tighter team. Bunch of fucking psychos.

“Yes,
empathin. Empathin derivatives, tailed with Satyron and Ghedin enhancers. This
sleeve…” She gestured down at herself, spread fingers brushing the
curves. “This is state-of-the-art biochemtech, out of the Nakamura Labs.
I secrete Merge Nine, when … aroused. In my sweat, in my saliva, in my
cunt, Mr.Kovacs.”

And she
came off the shelf, shawl sliding off her shoulders to the floor. It puddled
silkenly around her feet and she stepped over it towards me.

Well,
there’s Alain Marriott, honourable and strong in all his myriad experia
incarnations; and then there’s reality. In reality, and whatever it
costs, there are some things you don’t turn away from.

I met her
halfway across the room. Merge Nine was already in the air, in the scent of her
body and the water vapour on her breath. I drew in a deep breath and felt the
chemical triggers go off like plucked strings in the pit of my stomach. My
drink was gone, set aside somewhere, and the hand that had held it was moulded
around one of Miriam Bancroft’s jutting breasts. She drew my head down
with hands on either side and I found it there again, Merge Nine in the beads
of sweat webbed in the soft down that ran in a line down her cleavage. I tugged
at the seam of the leotard, untrapping the breasts pressed beneath it, tracing
and finding one nipple with my mouth.

Above me I
felt her mouth gasp open, and knew the empathin was working its way into my
sleeve’s brain, tripping dormant telepath instincts and sending out
feelers for the intense aura of arousal that this woman was generating. Knew as
well that she would be beginning to taste the flesh of her own breast in my
mouth. Once triggered, the empathin rush was like a volleyed tennis ball,
building intensity with every rebound from one inflamed sensorium to the other,
until the merge reached a climax just short of unbearable.

Miriam
Bancroft was beginning to moan now, as we sank to the floor and I moved back
and forth between her breasts, rubbing their springy resistance over my face.
Her hands had turned hungry, grasping and digging softly with nails at my
flanks and the swollen ache between my legs. We scrabbled feverishly at each
other’s clothing, mouths trembling with the need to fill themselves, and
when we had shed everything we wore the rug beneath us seemed to lay individual
strands of heat on our skin. I settled over her and my stubble rasped faintly
over the sprung smoothness of her belly, my mouth making wet Os on its path
downward. Then there was the deep salt taste as my tongue tracked down the
creases of her cunt, soaking up Merge Nine with her juices and coming back to
press and flick at the tiny bud of her clitoris. Somewhere, at the other end of
the world, my penis was pulsing in her hand. A mouth closed over the head, and
sucked gently.

Blending,
our climaxes built rapidly and with unerring concurrence, and the mixed signals
of the Merge Nine union blurred until I could find no distinction between the
excruciating tautness of the prick between her fingers and the pressure of my
own tongue somewhere indistinct up beyond its feasible reach inside her. Her
thighs clamped around my head. There was a grunting sound, but whose throat it
came from I was no longer aware. Separateness melted away into mutual sensory
overload, tension building layer after layer, peak after peak, and then
suddenly she was laughing at the warm, salty splash over her face and fingers
and I was clamped against her corkscrewing hips as her own simultaneous crest
swept her away.

For a while
there was trembling release, in which the slightest movement, the sliding of
flesh against flesh brought sobbing spasms from us both. Then, gift of the long
period my sleeve had been in the tank, the sweaty images of Anenome pressed
against the glass of the bio-cabin, my penis twitched and began to tighten
again. Miriam Bancroft nudged at it with her nose, ran the tip of her tongue
along and around it, licking off the stickiness until it was smooth and taut
against her cheek, then swung around and straddled me. Reaching back for
balance and hold, she sank down, impaling herself on the shaft with a long,
warm groan. She leaned over me, breasts swinging, and I craned and sucked
hungrily at the elusive globes. My hands came up to grasp her thighs where they
were spread on either side of my body.

And then the
motion.

The second
time took longer, and the empathin lent it an air that was more aesthetic than
sexual. Taking her cue from the signals gusting out of my sensorium, Miriam
Bancroft settled into a slow churning motion while I watched her taut belly and
outthrust breasts with detached lust. For no reason I could discern, the
Hendrix piped a slow, deep ragga beat in from the corners of the room, and a
lighting effect patterned the ceiling above us with swirling blotches of red
and purple. When the effect tilted and the swirling stars came to dapple our
bodies, I felt my mind tilting with it and my perceptions slid sideways out of
focus. There was only the grinding of Miriam Bancroft’s hips over me, and
fragmented glimpses of her body and face wrapped in coloured light. When I
came, it was a distant explosion that seemed to have more to do with the woman
shuddering to a halt astride me than with my own sleeve.

Later, as
we lay side by side, hands milking each other through further inconclusive
peaks and troughs, she said, “What do you think of me?”

I looked
down the length of my body to what her hand was doing, and cleared my throat.

“Is
that a trick question?”

She
laughed, the same throaty cough that I had warmed to in the chart room at
Suntouch House.

“No. I
want to know.”

“Do
you care?” It was not said harshly, and somehow the Merge Nine leached it
of its brutal overtones.

“You
think that’s what it is to be a Meth?” The word sounded strange on
her lips, as though she were not talking about herself. “You think we
don’t care about anything young?”

“I
don’t know,” I said truthfully. “It’s a point of view
that I’ve heard. Living three hundred years is bound to change your
perspectives.”

“Yes,
it does.” Her breath caught slightly as my fingers slid inside her.
“Yes, like that. But you don’t stop caring. You see it. All sliding
past you. And all you want to do is grab on, hold on to something, to stop it
all. Draining away.”

“Is
that right?”

“Yes,
it is. So what do you think of me?”

I leaned
over her and looked at the young woman’s body she inhabited, the fine
lines of her face and the old, old eyes. I was still stoned on the Merge Nine,
and I couldn’t find a flaw anywhere in her. She was the most beautiful
thing I had ever seen. I gave up the struggle for objectivity and bowed my head
to kiss her on one breast.

“Miriam
Bancroft, you are a wonder to behold, and I would willingly trade my soul to
possess you.”

She staved
off a chuckle. “I’m serious. Do you like me?”

“What
kind of a question—”

“I’m
serious.” The words were grounded deeper than the empathin. I pulled in
some control and looked her in the eyes.

“Yes,”
I said simply. “I like you.”

Her voice
lowered into her throat. “Do you like what we did?”

“Yes,
I like what we did.”

“Do
you want more?”

“Yes,
I want more.”

She sat up
to face me. The milking motions of her hand grew harder, more demanding. Her
voice hardened to match. “Say it again.”

“I
want more. Of you.”

She pushed
me down with a hand flat on my chest and leaned over me. I was growing back to
somewhere near a full erection. She started to time her strokes, slow and
sharp.

“Out
west,” she murmured, “about five hours away by cruiser,
there’s an island. It’s mine. No one goes there, there’s a
fifty-kilometre exclusion umbrella, satellite patrolled, but it’s beautiful.
I’ve built a complex there, with a clone bank and a re-sleeving
facility.” Her voice got that uneven edge in it again. “I sometimes
decant the clones. Sleeve copies of myself. To play. Do you understand what
I’m offering you?”