Altered Carbon (46 page)

“Fuck,
hold still will you!”

“What’d
she say?”

Trepp
peeled back my eyelids again, frowning with concentration.

“Called
us both beautiful. Fucking junkie, probably after a handout.”

In a
wood-panelled toilet somewhere, I stared into a fragmented mirror at the face I
was wearing as if it had committed a crime against me. Or as if I was waiting
for someone else to emerge from behind the seamed features. My hands were
braced on the filthy metal basin below, and the epoxy strips bonding the thing
to the wall emitted minute tearing sounds under my weight.

I had no
idea how long I’d been there.

I had no
idea where there was. Or how many theres we had already been through tonight.

None of
this seemed to matter because …

The mirror
didn’t fit its frame—there were pointed jags dug into the plastic
edges holding the star-shaped centre precariously in place.

Too many
edges, I muttered to myself. None of this fucking fits together.

The words
seemed significant, like an accidental rhythm and rhyme in ordinary speech. I
didn’t think I’d ever be able to repair this mirror. I was going to
cut my fingers to shreds, just trying. Fuck that.

I left
Ryker’s face in the mirror, and staggered back out to a table piled high
with candles where Trepp was sipping at a long ivory pipe.

“Micky
Nozawa? Are you serious?”

“Fuck,
yes.” Trepp nodded vigorously. “
The Fist of the Fleet
,
right? Seen it four times at least. New York experia chains get a lot of
imported colonial stuff. It’s getting to be quite chic. That bit where he
takes the harpoonist out with the flying kick. You feel it right down to the
bone, the way he delivers that fucking kick. Beautiful. Poetry in motion. Hey,
you know he did some holoporn stuff when he was younger.”

“Bullshit.
Micky Nozawa never did porn. He didn’t need to.”

“Who
said anything about need. The couple of bimb-ettes he was playing around with,
I would have played around with them for free.”

“Bull.
Shit.”

“I
swear to God. That sleeve with the sort of Caucasian nose and eyes, the one he
wrote off in that cruiser wreck. Real early stuff.”

There was a
bar, where the walls and ceiling were hung with absurd hybrid musical
instruments and the shelves behind the bar were stacked solid with antique
bottles, intricately worked statuettes and other nameless junk. The noise level
was comparatively low and I was drinking something that didn’t taste as
if it was doing my system too much immediate harm. There was a faint musk in
the air and small trays of sweetmeats on the tables.

“Why
the fuck do you do it?”

“What?”
Trepp shook her head muzzily. “Keep cats? I like ca—”

“Work
for fucking Kawahara. She’s a fucking abortion of a human being, a fucked
up Meth cunt not worth the slag of a stack, why do you—”

Trepp
grabbed the arm I was gesturing with, and for a moment I thought there was
going to be violence. The neurachem surged soggily.

Instead,
she took the arm and draped it affectionately over her own shoulders, pulling
my face closer to her own. She blinked owlishly at me.

“Listen.”

There was a
longish pause. I listened, while Trepp frowned with concentration, took a long
slug from her glass and set it down with exaggerated care. She wagged a finger
at me.

“Judge
not lest ye be judged,” she slurred.

Another
street, sloping downward. Walking was suddenly easier.

Above, the
stars were out in force, clearer than I had seen them all week in Bay City. I
lurched to a halt at the sight, looking for the Horned Horse.

Something.
Wrong here.

Alien. Not
a single pattern I recognised. A cold sweat broke along the insides of my arms,
and suddenly the clear points of fire seemed like an armada from the Outside,
massing for a planetary bombardment. The Martians returned. I thought I could
see them moving ponderously across the narrow slice of sky above us …

“Whoa.”
Trepp caught me as I fell, laughing. “What you looking for up there,
grasshopper?”

Not my sky.

It’s
getting bad
.

In
another toilet, painfully brightly lit, I’m trying to stuff some powder
Trepp gave me up my nose. My nasal passages are already seared dry and it keeps
falling back down, as if this body has definitively had enough. A cubicle
flushes behind me and I glance up into the big mirror
.

Jimmy
de Soto emerges from the cubicle, combat fatigues smudged with Innenin mud. In
the hard bathroom light his face is looking particularly bad
.

“
All
right, pal
?”

“
Not
especially
.”
I scratch at the inside of my nose, which is
beginning to feel inflamed
. “
You
?”

He
makes a mustn’t-grumble gesture and moves forward in the mirror to stand
beside me. Water fountains from the light-sensitive tap as he leans over the
basin, and he begins to rinse his hands. Mud and gore dissolve off his skin and
form a rich soup, pouring away down the tiny maelstrom of the plughole. I can
sense his bulk at my shoulder, but his one remaining eye has me pinned to the
image in the mirror and I cannot, or don’t want to, turn
.

“
Is
this a dream
?”

He
shrugs and goes on scrubbing at his hands
. “
It’s the edge
,”
he says
.

“
The
edge of what
?”

“
Everything
.”
His expression suggests that this much is obvious
.

“
I
thought you only turned up in my dreams
,”
I say, casually
glancing at his hands. There is something wrong with them; however much filth
Jimmy scrubs off, there is more underneath. The basin is splattered with the
stuff
.

“
Well,
that’s one way of putting it, pal. Dreams, high stress hallucinations, or
just wrecking your own head like this. It’s all the edge, see. The cracks
down the sides of reality. Where stupid bastards like me end up
.”

“
Jimmy,
you’re dead. I’m getting tired of telling you that
.”

“
Uhuh
.”
He shakes his head
. “
But you got to get right down in those
cracks to access me
.”

The
soup of blood and soil in the basin is thinning out and I know suddenly that
when it is gone, Jimmy will be too
.

“
You’re
saying—
”

He
shakes his head sadly
. “
Too
flicking complicated to go through now. You think we’ve got the handle on
reality, just ‘cause we can record bits of it. More to it than that, pal.
More to it than that
.”

“
Jimmy
,”
I make a helpless gesture
, “
what the fuck am I going to do
?”

He
steps back from the basin and his ruined face grins garishly at me
.

“
Viral
Strike
,”
he says clearly. I go cold as I remember my own scream
taken up along the beachhead
. “
Recall that mother, do you
?”

And,
flicking water from his hands, he vanishes like a conjuror’s trick
.

“Look,”
said Trepp reasonably, “Kadmin had to check into the tank to get sleeved
in an artificial. I figure that gives you the best part of a day before he even
knows if he killed you or not.”

“If
he wasn’t already double-sleeved again.”

“No.
Think about it. He’s cut loose from Kawahara. Man, he doesn’t have
the resources for that kind of stuff right now. He’s fucking out there on
his own, and with Kawahara gunning for him, he’s a strictly limited item.
Kadmin’s sell-by date is coming up, you’ll see.”

“Kawahara’s
going to keep him on tap for just as long as she needs him to drive me.”

“Yeah,
well.” Trepp looked at her drink, embarrassed. “Maybe.”

There was
another place, called Cable or something synonymous, where the walls were
racked with colour-coded conduits out of whose designer-cracked casings wires
sprouted like stiff copper hair. At intervals along the bar were hooks draped
with thin, lethal-looking cables that ended in gleaming silver minijacks. In
the air above the bar, a huge holographic jack and socket flicked spasmodically
to the off-beat music that filled the place like water. At times, the
components seemed to change into sex organs, but that could he been
tetrameth-induced hallucination on my part.

I was
sitting at the bar, something sweet smouldering in an ashtray at my elbow. From
the sludgy feeling in my lungs and throat, I’d been smoking it. The bar
was crowded but I suffered the strange conviction I was alone.

On either
side of me, the other customers at the bar were jacked into the thin cables,
eyes flickering beneath lids that seemed bruised, mouths twitched into dreamy
half smiles. One of them was Trepp.

I was
alone.

Things that
might have been thoughts were tugging at the abraded underside of my mind. I
picked up the cigarette and drew on it, grimly. Now was no time for thinking.

No time
for—

Viral
Strike
!!!

—thinking.

Streets
passing beneath my feet the way the rubble of Innenin passed under
Jimmy’s boots as he walked along beside me in my dreams. So
that’s
how he does it
.

The
crimson-lipped woman who—

Maybe
you can’t
—

What?
What
???

Jack and
socket.

Trying
to tell you some
—

No time
for—

No
time—

No—

And away,
like water in the maelstrom, like the soup of mud and gore pouring off
Jimmy’s hands and into the hole at the bottom of the sink …

Gone again.

But
thought, like the dawn, was inevitable and it found me, with the dawn, on a set
of white stone steps that led down into murky water. Grandiose architecture
reared vaguely behind us and on the far side of the water I could make out
trees in the rapidly greying darkness. We were in a park.

Trepp
leaned over my shoulder and offered me a lit cigarette. I took it reflexively,
drew once and then let smoke dribble up through my slack lips. Trepp settled
into a crouch next to me. An unfeasibly large fish flopped in the water at my
feet. I was too eroded to react.

“Mutant,”
said Trepp inconsequentially.

“Same
to you.”

The little
shreds of conversation drifted away over the water.

“Going
to need painkillers?”

“Probably.”
I felt around inside my head. “Yeah.”

She handed
me a wafer of impressively-coloured capsules without comment.

“What
you going to do?”

I shrugged. “Going to
go back. Going to do what I’m told.”

(VIRAL CORRUPT)

I changed cabs three times on the way
from the airport, paying each one in currency, and then booked into an all-night
flophouse in Oakland. Anyone tailing me electronically was going to take a
little while to catch up, and I was reasonably sure that I hadn’t been
actually followed. It seemed a bit like paranoia—after all, I was working
for the bad guys now, so they had no need to tail me. But I hadn’t liked
Trepp’s ironic
keep in touch
as she saw me off from the Bay City
terminal. Also, I wasn’t sure exactly what I was going to do yet, and if
I didn’t know, I certainly didn’t want anyone else knowing either.

The flophouse
room had seven hundred and eighty-six screen channels, holoporn and current
affairs both advertised in lurid colours on the standby display, a hinged,
self-cleansing double bed that stank of disinfectant and a self-contained
shower stall that was beginning to list away from the wall it had once been
epoxied to. I peered out of the single grimy window. It was the middle of the
night in Bay City, and there was a fine, misty rain falling. My deadline with
Ortega was running out.

The window
gave onto a sloping fibrecrete roof about ten metres below. The street was as
far below again. Overhead, a pagoda-like upper level screened the lower roof
and street under long eaves. Covered space. After a moment’s debate, I
pressed the last of Trepp’s hangover capsules out of the foil and
swallowed it, then opened the window as quietly as I could, swung out and hung
by my fingers from the lower frame. Fully extended, I still had the best part
of eight metres to fall.