Altered Carbon (8 page)

“No,
of course not. He has a transit clone on ice there. He was due back about six
that evening, but—”

“Yes?”

She shifted
her posture slightly, and opened a palm at me. I got the impression she was
forcibly composing herself. “Well, he was late coming back. Laurens often
stays out late after closing a deal.”

“And
no one has any idea where he went on this occasion? Curtis, for example?”

The strain
on her face was still there, like weathered rocks under a thin mantle of snow.
“He didn’t send for Curtis. I assume he took a taxi from the
sleeving station. I’m not his keeper, Mr.Kovacs.”

“This
meeting was crucial? The one in Osaka?”

“Oh
… no, I don’t think so. We’ve talked about it. Of course, he
doesn’t remember, but we’ve been over the contracts and it’s
something he’d had timetabled for a while. A marine development company
called Pacificon, based in Japan. Leasing renewal, that kind of thing.
It’s usually all taken care of here in Bay City, but there was some call
for an extraordinary assessors’ meeting, and it’s always best to
handle that sort of thing close to source.”

I nodded
sagely, having no idea what a marine development assessor was. Noting
Mrs.Bancroft’s strain seemed to be receding.

“Routine
stuff, huh?”

“I
would think so, yes.” She gave me a weary smile. “Mr.Kovacs,
I’m sure the police have transcripts of this kind of information.”

“I’m
sure they do as well, Mrs.Bancroft. But there’s no reason why they should
share them with me. I have no jurisdiction here.”

“You
seemed friendly enough with them when you arrived.” There was a sudden
spike of malice in her voice. I looked steadily at her until she dropped her
gaze. “Anyway, I’m sure Laurens can get you anything you
need.”

This was
going nowhere fast. I backed up.

“Perhaps
I’d better speak to him about that.” I looked around the chart
room. “All these maps. How long have you been collecting?”

Mrs.Bancroft
must have sensed that the interview was drawing to a close, because the tension
puddled out of her like oil from a cracked sump.

“Most
of my life,” she said. “While Laurens was staring at the stars,
some of us kept our eyes on the ground.”

For some
reason I thought of the telescope abandoned on Bancroft’s sundeck. I saw
it stranded in angular silhouette against the evening sky, a mute testimony to
times and obsessions past and a relic no one wanted. I remembered the way it
had wheezed back into alignment after I jarred it, faithful to programming
maybe centuries old, briefly awakened the way Miriam Bancroft had stroked the
Songspire awake in the hall.

Old.

With sudden
and suffocating pressure, it was all around me, the reek of it pouring off the
stones of Suntouch House like damp. Age. I even caught the waft of it from the
impossibly young and beautiful woman in front of me and my throat locked up
with a tiny click. Something in me wanted to nm, to get out and breathe fresh,
new air, to be away from these creatures whose memories stretched back beyond
every historical event I had been taught in school.

“Are
you all right, Mr.Kovacs?”

Download
dues.

I focused
with an effort. “Yes, I’m fine.” I cleared my throat and
looked into her eyes. “Well, I won’t keep you any longer,
Mrs.Bancroft. Thank you for your time.”

She moved
towards me. “Would you like—”

“No,
it’s quite all right. I’ll see myself out.”

The walk
out of the chart room seemed to take forever, and my footsteps had developed a
sudden echo inside my skull. With every step, and with every displayed map that
I passed I felt those ancient eyes on my spine, watching.

I badly needed a cigarette.

The sky was the texture of old silver
and the lights were coming on across Bay City by the time Bancroft’s
chauffeur got me back to town. We spiralled in from the sea over an ancient
suspension bridge the colour of rust, and in amongst the heaped-up buildings of
a peninsula hill at more than advisable speed. Curtis the chauffeur was still
smarting from his summary detainment by the police. He’d only been out of
arrest a couple of hours when Bancroft asked him to run me back, and he’d
been sullen and uncommunicative on the journey. He was a muscular young man
whose boyish good looks lent themselves well to brooding. My guess was that
employees of Laurens Bancroft were unused to government minions interrupting
their duties.

I
didn’t complain. My own mood wasn’t far off matching the
chauffeur’s. Images of Sarah’s death kept creeping into my mind. It
had only happened last night. Subjectively.

We braked
in the sky over a wide thoroughfare, sharply enough for someone above us to
broadcast an outraged proximity squawk into the limousine’s comset.
Curtis cut off the signal with a slap of one hand across the console and his
face tilted up to glower dangerously through the roof window. We settled down
into the flow of ground traffic with a slight bump and immediately made a left
into a narrower street. I started to take an interest in what was outside.

There’s
a sameness to streetlife. On every world I’ve ever been, the same
underlying patterns play out, flaunt and vaunt, buy and sell, like some
distilled essence of human behaviour seeping out from under whatever clanking
political machine has been dropped on it from above. Bay City, Earth, most
ancient of civilised worlds, had won itself no exemptions. From the massive
insubstantial holofronts along the antique buildings to the street traders with
their catalogue broadcast sets nestling on shoulders like clumsy mechanical
hawks or outsize tumours, everyone was selling something. Cars pulled in and
out from the kerbside and supple bodies braced against them, leaning in to
negotiate the way they’ve probably been doing as long as there’ve
been cars to do it against. Shreds of steam and smoke drifted from food
barrows. The limo was sound- and broadcast-proofed, but you could sense the
noises through the glass, corner-pitch sales chants and modulated music
carrying consumer-urge subsonics.

In the
Envoy Corps, they reverse humanity. You see the sameness first, the underlying
resonance that lets you get a handle on where you are, then you build up
difference from the details.

The
Harlan’s World ethnic mix is primarily Slavic and Japanese, although you
can get any variant tank-grown at a price. Here, every face was a different
cast and colour—I saw tall, angular-boned Africans, Mongols, pasty-skinned
Nordics and, once, a girl that looked like Virginia Vidaura, but I lost her in
the crowd. They all slid by like natives on the banks of a river.

Clumsy
.

The
impression skipped and flickered across my thoughts like the girl in the crowd.
I frowned and caught at it.

On
Harlan’s World, streetlife has a stripped-back elegance to it, an economy
of motion and gesture that feels almost like choreography if you’re not
used to it. I grew up with it, so the effect doesn’t register until
it’s not there any more.

I
wasn’t seeing it here. The ebb and flow of human commerce beyond the
limo’s windows had a quality like choppy water in the space between
boats. People pushed and shoved their way along, backing up abruptly to get
round tighter knots in the crowd that they apparently hadn’t noticed
until it was too late to manoeuvre. Obvious tensions broke out, necks craned,
muscled bodies drew themselves up. Twice I saw the makings of a fight take
stumbling shape, only to be swept away on the chop. It was as if the whole place
had been sprayed with some pheromonal irritant.

“Curtis.”
I glanced sideways at his impassive profile. “You want to cut the
broadcast block for a minute?”

He looked
across at me with a slight curl of the lip. “Sure.”

I settled
back in the seat and fixed my eyes on the street again. “I’m not a
tourist, Curtis. This is what I do for a living.”

The street
sellers’ catalogues came aboard like a swarm of delirium-induced
hallucinations, slightly diffuse through lack of directed broadcast and
blurring swiftly into each other as we glided along, but still an overload by
any Harlanite standards. The pimps were the most obvious; a succession of oral
and anal acts, digitally retouched to lend an airbrushed sheen to breasts and
musculature. Each whore’s name was murmured in throaty voiceover, along
with a superimposed facial: coy little girls, dominatrixes, stubbled stallions
and a few from cultural stock that was completely alien to me. Weaving in
between were the more subtle chemical lists and surreal scenarios of the drug
and implant traders. I caught a couple of religious ‘casts amidst it all,
images of spiritual calm among mountains, but they were like drowning men in
the sea of product.

The
stumbling started to make sense.

“What
does
from the Houses
mean?” I asked Curtis, trawling the phrase
from the ‘casts for the third time.

Curtis
sneered. “The mark of quality. The Houses are a cartel; high-class,
expensive whorehouses up and down the coast. Get you anything you want, they
say. If a girl’s from the Houses, she’s been taught to do stuff
most people only ever dream about.” He nodded at the street.
“Don’t kid yourself, no one out there ever worked in the
Houses.”

“And
Stiff
?”

He
shrugged. “Street name. Betathanatine. Kids use it for near death
experiences. Cheaper than suicide.”

“I
guess.”

“You
don’t get ‘thanatine on Harlan’s World?”

“No.”
I’d used it offworld with the Corps a couple of times, but there was a
ban in fashion back home. “We got suicide, though. You want to put the
screen back up.”

The soft
brush of images cut out abruptly, leaving the inside of my head feeling stark,
like an unfurnished room. I waited for the feeling to fade and, like most
after-effects, it did.

“This
is Mission Street,” said Curtis. “The next couple of blocks are all
hotels. You want me to drop you here?”

“You
recommend anywhere?”

“Depends
what you want.”

I gave him
one of his own shrugs back. “Light. Space. Room service.”

He squinted
thoughtfully. “Try the Hendrix, if you like. They got a tower annexe, and
the whores they use are clean.” The limousine picked up speed
fractionally and we made a couple of blocks in silence. I neglected to explain
I hadn’t meant that kind of room service. Let Curtis draw the conclusions
he seemed to want to.

Unbidden, a
freeze frame of Miriam Bancroft’s sweat-dewed cleavage bounced through my
mind.

The limo
coasted to a halt outside a well-lit façade in a style I didn’t
recognise. I climbed out and stared up at a huge holocast black man, features
screwed up presumably in ecstasy at the music he was wringing left-handed from
a white guitar. The image had the slightly artificial edges of a remastered
two-dimensional image, which made it old. Hoping this might indicate a
tradition of service and not just decrepitude, I thanked Curtis, slammed the
door and watched the limousine cruise away. It began to climb almost
immediately and after a moment I lost the tail lights in the streams of
airborne traffic. I turned to the mirrored glass doors behind me and they
parted slightly jerkily to let me in.

If the
lobby was anything to go by, the Hendrix was certainly going to satisfy the
second of my requirements. Curtis could have parked three or four of
Bancroft’s limos side by side in it and still have had space to wheel a
cleaning robot round them. I wasn’t so sure about the first. The walls
and ceiling bore an irregular spacing of illuminum tiles whose half-life was
clearly almost up, and their feeble radiance had the sole effect of shovelling
the gloom into the centre of the room. The street I’d just come in off was
the strongest source of light in the place.

The lobby
was deserted, but there was a faint blue glow coming from a counter on the far
wall. I picked my way towards it, past low armchairs and shin-hungry
metal-edged tables, and found a recessed monitor screen swarming with the
random snow of disconnection. In one corner, a command pulsed on and off in
English, Spanish and Kanji characters:

SPEAK.

I looked
around and back at the screen.

No one.

I cleared
my throat.

The
characters blurred and shifted: ELECT LANGUAGE.

“I’m
looking for a room,” I tried, in Japanese out of pure curiosity.

The screen
jumped into life so dramatically that I took a step backwards. From whirling,
multi-coloured fragments it rapidly assembled a tanned Asian face above a dark
collar and tie. The face smiled and changed into a Caucasian female, aged
fractionally, and I was facing a blonde thirty-year-old woman in a sober
business suit. Having generated my interpersonal ideal, the hotel also decided
that I couldn’t speak Japanese after all.

“Good
day, sir. Welcome to the Hotel Hendrix, established 2087 and still here today.
How may we serve you?”