Altered Carbon

by Richard Morgan

  'I'm sorry.'

  'Don't be. You probably don't know much about what your ancestors were doing three centuries ago either.'

  I stopped. Mrs Bancroft was looking at me strangely. My own words hit me a moment later. Download dues. I was going to have to sleep soon, before I said or did something really stupid.

  'I am over three centuries old, Mr Kovacs.' There was a small smile playing around her mouth as she said it. She'd taken back the advantage as smoothly as a bottleback diving. 'Appearances are deceptive. This is my eleventh body.'

  The way she held herself said that I was supposed to take a look. I flickered my gaze across the Slavic boned cheeks, down to the décolletage and then to the tilt of her hips, the half shrouded lines of her thighs, all the time affecting a detachment that neither I nor my recently roused sleeve had any right to.

  'It's very nice. A little young for my tastes, but as I said, I'm not from here. Can we get back to your husband please. He'd been to Osaka during the day, but he came back. I assume he didn't go physically.'

  '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.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  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 t
ighter 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 facade 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?'

  I repeated my request, following the move into Amanglic.

  'Thank you, sir. We have a number of rooms, all fully cabled to the city's information and entertainment stack. Please indicate your preference for floor and size.'

  'I'd like a tower room, west facing. The biggest you've got.'

  The face recoiled into a corner inset and a three-dimensional skeleton of the hotel's room structure etched itself into place. A selector pulsed efficiently through the rooms and stopped in one corner, then blew up and rotated the room in question. A column of fine print data shuttered down on one side of the screen.

  'The Watchtower suite, three rooms, dormitory thir­teen point eight seven metres by —

  'That's fine, I'll take it.'

  The three-dimensional map disappeared like a conjur­or's trick and the woman leapt back to full screen.

  'How many nights will you be with us, sir?'

  'Indefinite.'

  'A deposit is required,' said the hotel diffidently, 'For stays of more than fourteen days the sum of six hundred dollars UN should be deposited now. In the event of departure before said fourteen days, a proportion of this deposit will be refunded.'

  'Fine.'

  'Thank you sir.' From the tone of voice, I began to suspect that paying customers were a novelty at the Hotel Hendrix. 'How will you be paying?'

  'DNA trace. First Colony Bank of California.'

  The payment details were scrolling out when I felt a cold circle of metal touch the base of my skull.

  'That's exactly what you think it is,' said a calm voice. 'You do the wrong thing, and the cops are going to be picking bits of your cortical stack out of that wall for weeks. I'm talking about real death, friend. Now, lift your hands away from your body.'

  I complied, feeling an unaccustomed chill shoot up my spine to the point the gun muzzle was touching. It was a while since I'd been threatened with real death.

  'That's good,' said the same calm voice. 'Now, my asso­ciate here is going to pat you down. You let her do that, and no sudden moves.'

  'Please key your DNA signature onto the pad beside this screen.' The hotel had accessed First Colony's data­base. I waited impassively while a slim, black-clad woman in a ski mask stepped around and ran a purring grey scan­ner over me from head to foot. The gun at my neck never wavered. It was no longer cold. My flesh had warmed it to a more intimate temperature.

  'He's clean.' Another crisp, professional voice. 'Basic neurachem, but it's inoperative. No hardware.'

  'Really? Travelling kind of light, aren't you Kovacs?'r />
  My heart dropped out of my chest and landed soggily in my guts. I'd hoped this was just local crime.

  'I don't know you,' I said cautiously, turning my head a couple of millimetres. The gun jabbed and I stopped.

  'That's right, you don't. Now, here's what's going to happen. We're going to walk outside —

  'Credit access will cease in thirty seconds,' said the hotel patiently. 'Please key in your DNA signature now.'

  'Mr Kovacs won't be needing his reservation,' said the man behind me, putting a hand on my shoulder. 'Come on, Kovacs, we're going for a ride.'

  'I cannot assume host prerogatives without payment,' said the woman on the screen.

  Something in the tone of that phrase stopped me as I was turning, and on impulse I forced out a sudden, racking cough.

  'What — '

  Bending forward with the force of the cough, I raised a hand to my mouth and licked my thumb.

  'The fuck are you playing at, Kovacs?'

  I straightened again and snapped my hand out to the keypad beside the screen. Traces of fresh spittle smeared over the matt black receiver. A split second later a calloused palm edge cracked into the left side of my skull and I collapsed to my hands and knees on the floor. A boot lashed into my face and I went the rest of the way down.

  'Thank you sir.' I heard the voice of the hotel through a roaring in my head. 'Your account is being processed.'

  I tried to get up and got a second boot in the ribs for the trouble. Blood dripped from my nose onto the carpet. The barrel of the gun ground into my neck.

  'That wasn't smart, Kovacs.' The voice was marginally less calm. 'If you think the cops are going to trace us where you're going, then the stack must have fucked your brain. Now get up!'

  He was pulling me to my feet when the thunder cut loose.

  Why someone had seen fit to equip the Hendrix's security systems with twenty-millimetre automatic cannon was beyond me, but they did the job with devastating totality. Out of the corner of one eye I glimpsed the twin-mounted autoturret come snaking down from the ceiling just a moment before it channelled a three-second burst of fire through my primary assailant. Enough firepower to bring down a small aircraft. The noise was deafening.