Altered Carbon (31 page)

“Yeah.”
Ortega looked across to include me in the conversation, maybe as evidence of
our new co-operation. “Last year the Coastals fished some kid out of the
ocean. Mary Lou Hinchley. Not much left of the body, but they got the stack.
Set it to spin and guess what?”

“Catholic?”

“In
one. That Total Absorb stuff works, huh? Yeah, the first entry scan comes up
with Barred by Reasons of Conscience decals. Usually the end of the line in a
case like that, but El—” She stopped. Restarted. “The
detective in charge wouldn’t let it go. Hinchley was from his
neighbourhood, he knew her when she was growing up. Not well, but—”
she shrugged “—he wouldn’t let it go.”

“Very
tenacious. Elias Ryker?”

She nodded.

“He
pushed the path labs for a month. In the end they found some evidence the body
had been thrown out of an aircar. Organic Damage did some background digging
and came up with a conversion less than ten months old and a hardline Catholic
boyfriend with skills in infotech who might have faked the Vow. The
girl’s family are border-liners, nominally Christian, but mostly not
Catholic. Quite rich as well, with a vault full of stacked ancestors that they
spin out for family births and marriages. The Department’s been in
virtual consultation with the lot of them on and off all of this year.”

“Roll
on Resolution 653, huh?”

“Yeah.”

We both
went back to looking at the ceiling above the couches. The cabin was bottom of
the line bubblefab, blown from a single globe of polyfibre like chicle in a
child’s mouth, doors and windows lasered out and re-attached with epoxy
hinges afterwards. The curved grey ceiling held absolutely nothing of interest.

“Tell
me something, Ortega,” I said after a while. “That tail you had on
me Tuesday afternoon, when I went shopping. How come he was so much worse than
the others? A blind man could have spotted him.”

There was a
pause before she spoke. Then, grudgingly. “All we had. It was a snap
thing, we had to get you covered quick, after you dumped the clothes.”

“The
clothes.” I closed my eyes. “Oh, no. You tagged the suit? That
simple?”

“Yep.”

I threw my
mind back to my first meeting with Ortega. The justice facility, the ride out
to Suntouch House. The total recall ripped through the footage on fast forward.
I saw us standing on the sunlit lawn with Miriam Bancroft. Ortega departing
…

“Got
it!” I snapped my fingers. “You hammered me on the shoulder when
you left. I can’t believe I’m this stupid.”

“Enzyme
bond bleeper,” said Ortega matter-of-factly. “Not much bigger than
a fly’s eye. And we figured, with autumn well set in you wouldn’t
be going many places without your jacket. Course, when you offloaded it into
that skip we thought you’d tipped us.”

“No.
Nothing so bright.”

“That’s
it,” announced Micky suddenly. “Ladies and gentlemen, hold onto
your spinal spiral, we are in the pipe.”

It was a
rougher ride than I’d expected from a government department installation,
but no worse than many jury-rigged virtuals I’d done on the World. First
the hypnos, pulsing their sonocodes until the dull grey ceiling grew abruptly
fascinating with fishtail swirls of light and meaning drained out of the
universe like dirty water from a sink. And then I was. . .

Elsewhere.

It spread
out around me, racing away from my viewpoint in all directions like nothing so
much as a huge magnification of one of the spiral steps we had used to get down
from the gantry. Steel grey, stippled every few metres with a nipple-like
swelling, receding to infinity. The sky above was a paler shade of the same
grey with shiftings that seemed vaguely to suggest bars and antique locks. Nice
psychology, assuming any of the felons interrogated had anything but race
memory of what an actual lock looked like.

In front of
me softly shaped grey furniture was evolving from the floor like a sculpture
from a pool of mercury. A plain metal table first, then two chairs this side,
one opposite. Their edges and surfaces ran liquidly smooth for the final
seconds of their emergence, then snapped solid and geometric as they took on an
existence separate to the floor.

Ortega
appeared beside me, at first a pale pencil sketch of a woman, all flickering
lines and diffident shading. As I watched, pastel colours raced through her and
her movements grew more defined. She was turning to speak to me, one hand
reaching into the pocket of her jacket. I waited and the final gloss of colour
popped out onto her surfaces. She produced her cigarettes.

“Smoke?”

“No
thanks, I—” Realising the futility of worrying about virtual
health, I accepted the packet and shook one out. Ortega lit us both with her
petrol lighter, and the first bite of smoke in my lungs was ecstasy.

I looked up
at the geometric sky. “Is this standard?”

“Pretty
much.” Ortega squinted into the distance. “Resolution looks a bit
higher than usual. Think Micky’s showing off.”

Kadmin
scribbled into existence on the other side of the table. Before the virtual
program had even coloured him in properly, he became aware of us and folded his
arms across his chest. If my appearance in the cell was putting him off balance
as hoped, it didn’t show.

“Again,
lieutenant?” he said when the programme had rendered him complete.
“There is a UN ruling on maximum virtual time for one arrest, you
know.”

“That’s
right, and we’re still a long way off it,” said Ortega. “Why
don’t you sit down, Kadmin.”

“No
thank you.”

“I
said sit, motherfucker.” There was an abrupt undercurrent of steel in the
cop’s voice, and magically Kadmin blinked off and reappeared seated at
the table. His face betrayed a momentary flash of rage at the displacement, but
then it was gone and he unfolded his arms in an ironic gesture.

“You’re
right, it’s so much more comfortable like this. Won’t you both join
me?”

We took our
seats in the more conventional way, and I stared at Kadmin as we did it. It was
the first time I’d seen anything quite like it.

He was the
Patchwork Man.

Most
virtual systems recreate you from self images held in the memory, with a
common-sense sub-routine to prevent your delusions from impinging too much. I
generally come out a little taller and thinner in the face than I usually am.
In this case, the system seemed to have scrambled a myriad different
perceptions from Kadmin’s presumably long list of sleeves. I’d seen
it done before, as a technique, but most of us grow rapidly attached to
whatever sleeve we’re living in, and that form blanks out previous
incarnations. We are, after all, evolved to relate to the physical world.

The man in
front of me was different. His frame was that of a Caucasian Nordic, topping
mine by nearly thirty centimetres, but the face was at odds. It began African,
broad and deep ebony, but the colour ended like a mask under the eyes and the
lower half was divided along the line of the nose, pale copper on the left,
corpse white on the right. The nose was both fleshy and aquiline and mediated
well between the top and bottom halves of the face, but the mouth was a
mismatch of left and right sides that left the lips peculiarly twisted. Long
straight black hair was combed mane-like back from the forehead, shot through
on one side with pure white. The hands, immobile on the metal table, were
equipped with claws similar to the ones I’d seen on the giant freak
fighter in Licktown, hut the fingers were long and sensitive. He had breasts,
impossibly full on a torso so overmuscled. The eyes, set in jet skin, were a
startling pale green. Kadmin had freed himself from conventional perceptions of
the physical. In an earlier age, he would have been a shaman; here, the
centuries of technology had made him more. An electronic demon, a malignant
spirit that dwelled in altered carbon and emerged only to possess flesh and
wreak havoc.

He would
have made a fine Envoy.

“I
take it I don’t have to introduce myself,” I said quietly.

Kadmin
grinned, revealing small teeth and a delicate pointed tongue. “If
you’re a friend of the lieutenant, you don’t have to do anything
you don’t want to here. Only the slobs get their virtuality
edited.”

“Do
you know this man, Kadmin?” asked Ortega.

“Hoping
for a confession, lieutenant?” Kadmin threw back his head and laughed
musically. “Oh, the crudity! This man? This woman, maybe? Or, yes, even a
dog could be trained to say as much as he has said, given the right
tranquillisers of course. They do tend to go pitifully insane when you decant
them if not. But yes, even a dog. We sit here, three silhouettes carved from
electronic sleet in the difference storm, and you talk like a cheap period
drama. Limited vision, lieutenant, limited vision. Where is the voice that said
altered carbon would free us from the cells of our flesh? The vision that said
we would be
angels
.”

“You
tell me, Kadmin. You’re the one with the exalted professional
standing.” Ortega’s tone was detached. She system-magicked a long
scroll of printout into one hand and glanced idly down it. “Pimp, triad
enforcer, virtual interrogator in the corporate wars, it’s all quality
work. Me, I’m just some dumb cop can’t see the light.”

“I’m
not going to quarrel with you there, lieutenant.”

“Says
here you were a wiper for MeritCon a while back, scaring archaeologue miners
off their claims in Syrtis Major. Slaughtering their families by way of
incentive. Nice job.” Ortega tossed the printout back into oblivion.
“We’ve got you cold, Kadmin. Digital footage from the hotel
surveillance system, verifiable simultaneous sleeving, both stacks on ice.
That’s an erasure mandatory, and even if your lawyers dance it down to
Compliance at Machine Error, the sun’s going to be a red dwarf by the
time they let you off stack.”

Kadmin
smiled. “Then what are you here for?”

“Who
sent you?” I asked him softly.

“The
Dog speaks!

Is it a
wolf I hear
,

Howling
his lonely communion

With
the unpiloted stars
,

Or
merely the self importance and servitude

In the
bark of a dog
?

How
many millennia did it take
,

Twisting
and torturing

The
pride from the one

To make
a tool
,

The
other
?”

I inhaled
smoke and nodded. Like most Harlanites, I had Quell’s
Poems and Other
Prevarications
more or less by heart. It was taught in schools in lieu of
the later and weightier political works, most of which were still deemed too
radical to be put in the hands of children. This wasn’t a great
translation, but it captured the essence. More impressive was the fact that
anyone not actually from Harlan’s World could quote such an obscure
volume.

I finished
it for him.

“
And
how do we measure the distance from spirit to spirit
?

And who
do we find to blame
?”

“Have
you come seeking blame, Mr.Kovacs?”

“Among
other things.”

“How
disappointing.”

“You
expected something else?”

“No,”
said Kadmin with another smile. “Expectation is our first mistake. I
meant, how disappointing for you.”

“Maybe.”

He shook
his great piebald head. “Certainly. You will take no names from me. If
you seek blame, I will have to bear it for you.”

“That’s
very generous, but you’ll remember what Quell said about lackeys.”

“
Kill
them along the way, but count your bullets, for there are more worthy targets
.”
Kadmin chuckled deep inside himself. “Are you threatening me in monitored
police storage?”

“No.
I’m just putting things into perspective.” I knocked ash off my
cigarette and watched it sparkle out of existence before it reached the floor.
“Someone’s pulling your strings; that’s who I’m going
to wipe. You’re nothing. You I wouldn’t waste spit on.”

Kadmin
tipped his head back as a stronger tremor ran through the shifting lines in the
sky, like Cubist lightning. It reflected in the dull sheen on the metal table
and seemed to touch his hands for a moment. When he looked down at me again, it
was with a curious light in his eyes.

“I
was not asked to kill you,” he said tonelessly, “unless your
abduction proved inconvenient. But now I will.”

Ortega was
on him as the last syllable left his mouth. The table blinked out of existence
and she kicked him backwards off the chair with one booted foot. As he rolled
back to his feet, the same boot caught him in the mouth and floored him again.
I ran my tongue round the almost healed gashes inside my own mouth, and felt a
distinct lack of sympathy.