“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 toward 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 swiveled the chair around 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 whiskey 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 catlike 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 been in the tech ninja sleeve only 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 whiskey 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 U.N. 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 have only about seven or eight hours of separate perceptions. Can’t have made much of a dent yet, can’t 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 toward 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 Brancroft. 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 externalize 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 pipehouse 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?”
“Okay, maybe it was pimps we spent fifteen years killing. Users. Maybe that’s what we were paying back.”
“He never pimped Mom 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 whiskey, “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 disk 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 anymore.” 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 anymore.”
“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 anymore.”
I reached for something to say, and abruptly found nothing. We sat in silence, studying the amber depths of our glasses. The suddenly discovered difference sat between us like a third, unwanted occupant of the room.
The Ryker copy dug into his pockets and came up with Ortega’s cigarettes. The pack was crushed almost flat. He extracted a cigarette, looked ruefully at it, and fitted it into his mouth. I tried not to look disapproving.
“Last one,” he said, touching the ignition patch to it.
“The hotel probably has more.”
“Yeah.” He plumed out smoke, and I found myself almost envying him the addiction. “You know, there is one thing we should be discussing right now.”
“What’s that?”
But I knew already. We both knew.
“You want me to spell it out? All right.” He drew on the cigarette again and shrugged, not easily. “We have to decide which of us gets obliterated when this is all over. And since our individual instinct for survival is getting stronger by the minute, we need to decide soon.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. Which would you prefer to remember? Taking down Kawahara. Or going down on Miriam Bancroft?” He smiled sourly. “No competition, I suppose.”
“Hey, this isn’t just a roll on the beach you’re talking about. This is multiple-copy sex. It’s about the only genuinely illicit pleasure left. Anyway, Irene Elliott said we could do a memory graft and keep both sets of experience.”
“Probably. She said we could probably do a memory graft. And that still leaves one of us to be canceled out. It’s not a meld, it’s a graft, from one of us to the other. Editing. You want to do that to yourself? To the one that survives. We couldn’t even face editing that construct the Hendrix built. How are we going to live with this? No way, it’s got to be a clean cut. One or the other. And we’ve got to decide which.”
“Yeah.” I picked up the whiskey bottle and stared gloomily at the label. “So what do we do? Gamble for it? Paper, scissors, stone, say the best of five?”
“I was thinking along slightly more rational lines. We tell each other our memories from this point on and then decide which we want to keep. Which ones are worth more.”
“How the hell are we going to measure something like that?”
“We’ll know. You know we will.”
“What if one of us lies? Embroiders the truth to make it sound like a more appealing memory. Or lies about which one they like better.”
His eyes narrowed. “Are you serious?”
“A lot can happen in a few days. Like you said, we’re both going to want to survive.”
“Ortega can polygraph us if it comes to that.”
“I think I’d rather gamble.”
“Give me that fucking bottle. If you’re not going to take this seriously, neither am I. Fuck it, you might even get torched out there and solve the problem for us.”
“Thanks.”
I passed him the bottle and watched as he decanted two careful fingers. Jimmy de Soto had always said it was sacrilege to sink more than five fingers of single malt on any one occasion. After that, he maintained, you might as well be drinking blended. I had a feeling that we were going to profane that particular article of faith tonight.
I raised my glass.
“To unity of purpose.”
“Yeah, and an end to drinking alone.”
The hangover was still with me nearly a full day later as I watched him leave on one of the hotel monitors. He stepped out onto the pavement and waited while the long, polished limousine settled to the curb. As the curbside door hinged up, I caught a brief glimpse of Miriam Bancroft’s profile within. Then he was climbing in, and the door swung smoothly back down to cover them both. The limousine trembled along its length and lifted away.
I dry-swallowed more painkillers, gave it ten minutes, and then went up to the roof to wait for Ortega.
It was cold.
CHAPTEr THIrTY–NINE
Ortega had a variety of news.
Irene Elliott had called in a location and said she was willing to talk about another run. The call had come in on one of the tightest needlecasts Fell Street had ever seen, and Elliott said she would only deal directly with me.
Meanwhile the Panama Rose patch-up was holding water, and Ortega still had the Hendrix memory tapes. Kadmin’s death had rendered Fell Street’s original case pretty much an administrative formality, and no one was in any hurry to tackle it anymore. An Internal Affairs inquiry into how exactly the assassin had been pulled out of holding in the first place was just getting started. In view of the assumed A.I. involvement, the Hendrix would come under scrutiny at some point, but it wasn’t in the pipeline yet. There were some interdepartmental procedures to be gone through, and Ortega had sold Murawa a story about loose ends. The Fell Street captain gave her a couple of weeks open-ended, to tidy up; the tacit assumption was that Ortega had no liking for Internal Affairs and wasn’t going to make life easy for them.
A couple of I.A.D. detectives were sniffing around the Panama Rose, but Organic Damage had closed ranks around Ortega and Bautista like a stack shutdown. I.A.D. was getting nothing so far.
We had a couple of w
eeks.
Ortega flew northeast. Elliott’s instructions vectored us in on a small huddle of bubblefabs clustered around the western end of a tree-fringed lake hundreds of kilometers from anywhere. Ortega grunted in recognition as we banked above the encampment.
“You know this place?”
“Places like it. Grifter town. See that dish in the center? They’ve got it webbed into some old geosynch weather platform, gives them free access to anything in the hemisphere. This place probably accounts for a single-figure percentage of all the data crime on the West Coast.”
“They never get busted?”
“Depends.” Ortega put the cruiser down on the lake shore a short distance from the nearest bubblefabs. “The way it stands, these people keep the old orbitals ticking over. Without them, someone’d have to pay for decommissioning and that’s kind of pricey. So long as the stuff they turn over is small scale, no one bothers. Transmission Felony Division has got bigger disks to spin, and no one else is interested. You coming?”
I climbed out, and we walked along the shoreline to the encampment. From the air, the place had had a certain structural uniformity, but now I could see that the bubblefabs were all painted with brightly colored pictures or abstract patterns. No two designs were alike, although I could discern the same artistic hand at work in several of the examples we passed. In addition, a lot of the ’fabs were fitted out with porch canopies, secondary extension bulges, and in some cases even more permanent log cabin annexes. Clothing hung on lines between the buildings, and small children ran about, getting cheerfully filthy.
Camp security met us inside the first ring of ’fabs. He stood over two meters tall in flat workboots and probably weighed as much as both my current selves put together. Beneath his loose gray coveralls, I could see the stance of a fighter. His eyes were a startling red, and short horns sprouted from his temples. Beneath the horns, his face was scarred and old. The effect was startlingly offset by the small child he was cradling in his left arm.
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