If you have time.
I came thrashing up out of the tank, one hand plastered across my chest searching for the wounds, the other clutching at a non-existent weapon. The weight hit me like a hammer and I collapsed back into the floatation gel. I flailed with my arms, caught one elbow painfully on the side of the tank and gasped. Gobbets of gel poured into my mouth and down my throat. I snapped my mouth shut and got a hold on the hatch coaming, but the stuff was everywhere. In my eyes, burning my nose and throat, and slippery under my fingers. The weight was forcing my grip on the hatch loose, sitting on my chest like a high-g manoeuvre, pressing me down into the gel. My body heaved violently in the confines of the tank. Floatation gel? I was drowning.
Abruptly, there was a strong grip on my arm and I was hauled coughing into an upright position. At about the same time I was working out there were no wounds in my chest, someone wiped a towel roughly across my face and I could see. I decided to save that pleasure for later and concentrated on getting the contents of the tank out of my nose and throat. For about half a minute I stayed sitting, head down, coughing out the gel and trying to work out why everything weighed so much.
'So much for training.' It was a hard, male voice, the sort that habitually hangs around justice facilities. 'What did they teach you in the Envoys anyway, Kovacs?'
That was when I had it. On Harlan's World, Kovacs is quite a common name. Everyone knows how to pronounce it. This guy didn't. He was speaking a stretched form of the Amanglic they use on the World, but even allowing for that he was mangling the name badly, and the ending came out with a hard 'k' instead of the slavic 'ch'.
And everything was too heavy.
The realisation came through my fogged perceptions like a brick through frosted plate glass.
Offworld.
Somewhere along the line, they'd taken Takeshi Kovacs (d.h.), and they'd freighted him. And since Harlan's World was the only habitable biosphere in the Glimmer system, that meant a stellar range needlecast to —
Where?
I looked up. Harsh neon tubes set in a concrete roof. I was sitting in the opened hatch of a dull metal cylinder, looking for all the world like an ancient aviator who'd forgotten to dress before climbing aboard his biplane. The cylinder was one of a row of about twenty backed up against the wall, opposite a heavy steel door which was closed. The air was chilly and the walls unpainted. Give them their due, on Marian's World at least the re-sleeving rooms are decked out in pastel colours and the attendants are pretty. After all, you're supposed to have paid your debt to society. The least they can do is give you a sunny start to your new life.
Sunny wasn't in the vocabulary of the figure before me. About two metres tall, he looked as if he'd made his living wrestling swamp panthers before the present career opportunity presented itself. Musculature bulged on his chest and arms like body armour and the head above it was cropped close to the skull, revealing a long scar like a lightning strike down to the left ear. He was dressed in a loose black garment with epaulettes and a diskette logo on the breast. His eyes matched the garment and watched me with hardened calm. Having helped me sit up, he had stepped back out of arm's reach, as per the manual. He'd been doing this a long time.
I pressed one nostril closed and snorted tank gel out of the other.
'Want to tell me where I am? Itemise my rights, something like that?'
'Kovacs, right now you don't have any rights.'
I looked up and saw that a grim smile had stitched itself across his face. I shrugged and snorted the other nostril clean.
'Want to tell me where I am?'
He hesitated a moment, glanced up at the neon-barred roof as if to ascertain the information for himself before he passed it on, and then mirrored my shrug.
'Sure. Why not? You're in Bay City, pal. Bay City, Earth.' The grimace of a smile came back. 'Home of the Human Race. Please enjoy your stay on this most ancient of civilised worlds. Ta-dada-DAH.'
'Don't give up the day job,' I told him soberly.
The doctor led me down a long white corridor whose floor bore the scuff marks of rubber-wheeled gurneys. She was moving at quite a pace and I was hard pressed to keep up, wrapped as I was in nothing but a plain grey towel and still dripping tank gel. Her manner was superficially bedside, but there was a harried undercurrent to it. She had a sheaf of curling hardcopy documentation under her arm and other places to be. I wondered how many sleevings she got through in a day.
'You should get as much rest as you can in the next day or so,' she recited. 'There may be minor aches and pains, but this is normal. Sleep will solve the problem. If you have any recurring comp — '
'I know. I've done this before.'
I wasn't feeling much like human interaction. I'd just remembered Sarah.
We stopped at a side door with the word shower stencilled on frosted glass. The doctor steered me inside and stood looking at me for a moment.
'I've used showers before as well,' I assured her.
She nodded. 'When you're finished, there's an elevator at the end of the corridor. Discharge is on the next floor. The, ah, the police are waiting to talk to you.'
The manual says you're supposed to avoid strong adrenal shocks to the newly sleeved, but then she'd probably read my file and didn't consider meeting the police much of an event in my lifestyle. I tried to feel the same.
'What do they want?'
'They didn't choose to share that with me.' The words showed an edge of frustration that she shouldn't have been letting me see. 'Perhaps your reputation precedes you.'
'Perhaps it does.' On an impulse, I flexed my new face into a smile. 'Doctor, I've never been here before. To Earth, I mean. I've never dealt with your police before. Should I be worried?'
She looked at me, and I saw it welling up in her eyes; the mingled fear and wonder and contempt of the failed human reformer.
'With a man like you,' she managed finally, 'I would have thought they would be the worried ones.'
'Yeah, right,' I said quietly.
She hesitated, then gestured. 'There is a mirror in the changing room,' she said, and left. I glanced towards the room she had indicated, not sure I was ready for the mirror yet.
In the shower I whistled away my disquiet tunelessly and ran soap and hands over the new body. My sleeve was in his early forties, Protectorate standard, with a swimmer's build and what felt like some military custom carved onto his nervous system. Neurachemical upgrade, most likely. I'd had it myself, once. There was a tightness in the lungs that suggested a nicotine habit and some gorgeous scarring on the forearm, but apart from that I couldn't find anything worth complaining about. The little twinges and snags catch up with you later on and if you're wise, you just live with them. Every sleeve has a history. If that kind of thing bothers you, you line up over at Syntheta's or Fabrikon. I've worn my fair share of synthetic sleeves; they use them for parole hearings quite often. Cheap, but it's too much like living alone in a draughty house, and they never seem to get the flavour circuits right. Everything you eat ends up tasting like curried sawdust.
In the changing cubicle I found a neatly folded summer suit on the bench, and the mirror set in the wall. On top of the pile of clothes was a simple steel watch, and weighted beneath the watch was a plain white envelope with my name written neatly across it. I took a deep breath and went to face the mirror.
This is always the toughest part. Nearly two decades I've been doing this, and it still jars me to look into the glass and see a total stranger staring back. It's like pulling an image out of the depths of an autostereograrn. For the first couple of moments all you can see is someone else looking at you through a window frame. Then, like a shift in focus, you feel yourself float rapidly up behind the mask and adhere to its inside with a shock that's almost tactile. It's as if someone's cut an umbilical cord, only instead of separating the two of you, it's the otherness that has been severed and now you're just looking at your reflection in a mirror.
I
stood there and towelled myself dry, getting used to the face. It was basically Caucasian, which was a change for me, and the overwhelming impression I got was that if there was a line of least resistance in life, this face had never been along it. Even with the characteristic pallor of a long stay in the tank, the features in the mirror managed to look weather-beaten. There were lines everywhere. The thick cropped hair was black shot through with grey. The eyes were a speculative shade of blue, and there was a faint jagged scar under the left one. I raised my left forearm and looked at the story written there, wondering if the two were connected.
The envelope beneath the watch contained a single sheet of printed paper. Hardcopy. Handwritten signature. Very quaint.
Well, you're on Earth now. Most ancient of civilised worlds. I shrugged and scanned the letter, then got dressed and folded it away in the jacket of my new suit. With a final glance in the mirror, I strapped on the new watch and went out to meet the police.
It was four-fifteen, local time.
The doctor was waiting for me, seated behind a long curve of reception counter and filling out forms on a monitor. A thin, severe-looking man suited in black stood at her shoulder. There was no one else in the room.
I glanced around, then back at the suit.
'You the police?'
'Outside.' He gestured at the door. 'This isn't their jurisdiction. They need a special brief to get in here. We have our own security.'
'And you are?'
He looked at me with the same mixture of emotions the doctor had hit me with downstairs. 'Warden Sullivan, chief executive for Bay City Central, the facility you are now leaving.'
'You don't sound delighted to be losing me.'
Sullivan pinned me with a stare. 'You're a recidivist, Kovacs. I never saw the case for wasting good flesh and blood on people like you.'
I touched the letter in my breast pocket. 'Lucky for me Mr Bancroft disagrees with you. He's supposed to be sending a limousine for me. Is that outside as well?'
'I haven't looked.'
Somewhere on the counter, a protocol chime sounded. The doctor had finished her inputting. She tore the curling edge of the hardcopy free, initialled it in a couple of places and passed it to Sullivan. The warden bent over the paper, scanning it with narrowed eyes before he scribbled his own signature and handed the copy to me.
'Takeshi Lev Kovacs,' he said, mispronouncing my name with the same skill as his minion in the tank room. 'By the powers vested in me by the UN Justice Accord, I discharge you on lease to Laurens J. Bancroft, for a period not to exceed six weeks, at the end of which time your parole status will be reconsidered. Please sign here.'
I took the pen and wrote my name in someone else's handwriting next to the warden's finger. Sullivan separated the top and bottom copies, and handed me the pink one. The doctor held up a second sheet and Sullivan took it.
'This is a doctor's statement certifying that Takeshi Kovacs (d.h.) was received intact from the Harlan's World Justice Administration, and subsequently sleeved in this body. Witnessed by myself, and closed circuit monitor. A disc copy of the transmission details and tank data are enclosed. Please sign the declaration.'
I glanced up and searched in vain for any sign of the cameras. Not worth fighting about. I scribbled my new signature a second time.
'This is a copy of the leasing agreement by which you are bound. Please read it carefully. Failure to comply with any of its articles may result in you being returned to storage immediately to complete the full term of your sentence either here, or at another facility of the Administration's choice. Do you understand these terms and agree to be bound by them?'
I took the paperwork and scanned rapidly through it. It was standard stuff. A modified version of the parole agreement I'd signed half a dozen times before on Harlan's World. The language was a bit stiffer, but the content was the same. Bullshit by any other name. I signed it without a blink.
'Well then.' Sullivan seemed to have lost a bit of his iron. 'You're a lucky man, Kovacs. Don't waste the opportunity.'
Don't they ever get tired of saying it?
I folded up my bits of paper without speaking and stuffed them into my pocket next to the letter. I was turning to leave when the doctor stood up and held out a small white card to me.
'Mr Kovacs.'
I paused.
'There shouldn't be any major problems with adjusting,' she said. 'This is a healthy body, and you are used to this. If there is anything major. Call this number.'
I put out an arm and lifted the little rectangle of card with a machined precision that I hadn't noticed before. The neurachem was kicking in. My hand delivered the card to the same pocket as the rest of the paperwork and T was gone, crossing the reception and pushing open the door without a word. Ungracious maybe, but I didn't think anyone in that building had earnt my gratitude yet.
You're a lucky man, Kovacs. Sure. A hundred and eighty light years from home, wearing another man's body on a six-week rental agreement. Freighted in to do a job that the local police wouldn't touch with a riot prod. Fail and go back into storage. I felt so lucky I could have burst into song as I walked out the door.
CHAPTER TWO
The hall outside was huge, and all but deserted. It looked like nothing so much as the Millsport rail terminal back home. Beneath a tilted roof of long transparent panels, the fused glass paving of the floor shone amber in the afternoon sun. A couple of children were playing with the automatic doors at the exit, and there was a solitary cleaning robot sniffing along in the shade at one wall. Nothing else moved. Marooned in the glow on benches of old wood, a scattering of humanity waited in silence for friends or family to ride in from their altered carbon exiles.
Download Central.
These people wouldn't recognise their loved ones in their new sleeves; recognition would be left to the home-comers, and for those who awaited them the anticipation of reunion would be tempered with a cool dread at what face and body they might have to learn to love. Or maybe they were a couple of generations down the line, waiting for relatives who were no more to them now than a vague childhood memory or a family legend. I knew one guy in the Corps, Murakami, who was waiting on the release of a great-grandfather put away over a century back. Was going up to Newpest with a litre of whisky and a pool cue for homecoming gifts. He'd been brought up on stories of his great-grandfather in the Kanagawa pool halls. The guy had been put away before Murakami was even born.
I spotted my reception committee as I went down the steps into the body of the hall. Three tall silhouettes were gathered around one of the benches, shifting restlessly in the slanting rays of sunlight and creating eddies in the dust motes that floated there. A fourth figure sat on the bench, arms folded and legs stretched out. All four of them were wearing reflective sunglasses that at a distance turned their faces into identical masks.
Already on course for the door, I made no attempt to detour in their direction and this must have occurred to them only when I was halfway across the hall. Two of them drifted over to intercept me with the easy calm of big cats that had been fed recently. Bulky and tough-looking with neatly groomed crimson mohicans, they arrived in my path a couple of metres ahead, forcing me either to stop in turn or cut an abrupt circle around them. I stopped. Newly arrived and newly sleeved is the wrong state to be in if you plan to piss off the local militia. I tried on my second smile of the day.
'Something I can do for you?'
The older of the two waved a badge negligently in my direction, then put it away as if it might tarnish in the open air.
'Bay City police. The lieutenant wants to talk to you.' The sentence sounded bitten off, as if he was resisting the urge to add some epithet to the end of it. I made an attempt to look as if I was seriously considering whether or not to go along with them, but they had me and they knew it. An hour out of the tank, you don't know enough about your new body to be getting into brawls with it. I shut down my images of Sarah's death and let myself be shephe
rded back to the seated cop.
The lieutenant was a woman in her thirties. Under the golden discs of her shades, she wore cheekbones from some Amerindian ancestor and a wide slash of a mouth that was currently set in a sardonic line. The sunglasses were jammed on a nose you could have opened cans on. Short, untidy hair framed the whole face, stuck up in spikes at the front. She had wrapped herself in an outsize combat jacket but the long, black-encased legs that protruded from its lower edge were a clear hint of the lithe body within. She looked up at me with her arms folded on her chest for nearly a minute before anyone spoke.
'It's Kovacs, right?'
'Yes.'
'Takeshi Kovacs?' Her pronunciation was perfect. 'Out of Harlan's World? Millsport via the Kanagawa storage facility?'
'Tell you what, I'll just stop you when you get one wrong.'
There was a long, mirror-lensed pause. The lieutenant unfolded fractionally and examined the blade of one hand.
'You got a licence for that sense of humour, Kovacs?'
'Sorry. Left it at home.'
'And what brings you to Earth?'
I gestured impatiently. 'You know all this already, otherwise you wouldn't be here. Have you got something to say to me, or did you just bring these kids along for educational purposes?'
I felt a hand fasten on my upper arm and tensed. The lieutenant made a barely perceptible motion with her head and the cop behind me let go again.
'Cool down, Kovacs. I'm just making conversation here. Yeah, I know Laurens Bancroft sprung you. Matter of fact, I'm here to offer you a lift up to the Bancroft residence.' She sat forward suddenly, and stood up. On her feet she was almost as tall as my new sleeve. 'I'm Kristin Ortega, Organic Damage Division. Bancroft was my case.'
'Was?'
She nodded. 'Case is closed, Kovacs.'
'Is that a warning?'
'No, it's just the facts. Open-and-shut suicide.'
'Bancroft doesn't seem to think so. He claims he was murdered.'
'Yeah, so I hear.' Ortega shrugged. 'Well, that's his prerogative. I guess it might be difficult for a man like that to believe he'd blow his own head clean off.'
Altered Carbon Page 2