Ortega appeared beside me, at first a pale pencil sketch of a woman, all flickering lines and diffident shading. As I watched, pastel colours raced through her and her movements grew more defined. She was turning to speak to me, one hand reaching into the pocket of her jacket. I waited and the final gloss of colour popped out onto her surfaces. She produced her cigarettes.
'Smoke?'
'No thanks, I — ' Realising the futility of worrying about virtual health, I accepted the packet and shook one out. Ortega lit us both with her petrol lighter, and the first bite of smoke in my lungs was ecstasy.
I looked up at the geometric sky. 'Is this standard?'
'Pretty much.' Ortega squinted into the distance. 'Resolution looks a bit higher than usual. Think Micky's showing off.'
Kadmin scribbled into existence on the other side of the table. Before the virtual program had even coloured him in properly, he became aware of us and folded his arms across his chest. If my appearance in the cell was putting him off balance as hoped, it didn't show.
'Again, lieutenant?' he said when the programme had rendered him complete. 'There is a UN ruling on maximum virtual time for one arrest, you know.'
'That's right, and we're still a long way off it,' said Ortega. 'Why don't you sit down, Kadmin.'
'No thank you.'
'I said sit, motherfucker.' There was an abrupt undercurrent of steel in the cop's voice, and magically Kadmin blinked off and reappeared seated at the table. His face betrayed a momentary flash of rage at the displacement, but then it was gone and he unfolded his arms in an ironic gesture.
'You're right, it's so much more comfortable like this. Won't you both join me?'
We took our seats in the more conventional way, and I stared at Kadmin as we did it. It was the first time I'd seen anything quite like it.
He was the Patchwork Man.
Most virtual systems recreate you from self images held in the memory, with a common-sense sub-routine to prevent your delusions from impinging too much. I generally come out a little taller and thinner in the face than I usually am. In this case, the system seemed to have scrambled a myriad different perceptions from Kadmin's presumably long list of sleeves. I'd seen it done before, as a technique, but most of us grow rapidly attached to whatever sleeve we're living in, and that form blanks out previous incarnations. We are, after all, evolved to relate to the physical world.
The man in front of me was different. His frame was that of a Caucasian Nordic, topping mine by nearly thirty centimetres, but the face was at odds. It began African, broad and deep ebony, but the colour ended like a mask under the eyes and the lower half was divided along the line of the nose, pale copper on the left, corpse white on the right. The nose was both fleshy and aquiline and mediated well between the top and bottom halves of the face, but the mouth was a mismatch of left and right sides that left the lips peculiarly twisted. Long straight black hair was combed mane-like back from the forehead, shot through on one side with pure white. The hands, immobile on the metal table, were equipped with claws similar to the ones I'd seen on the giant freak fighter in Licktown, hut the fingers were long and sensitive. He had breasts, impossibly full on a torso so overmuscled. The eyes, set in jet skin, were a startling pale green. Kadmin had freed himself from conventional perceptions of the physical. In an earlier age, he would have been a shaman; here, the centuries of technology had made him more. An electronic demon, a malignant spirit that dwelled in altered carbon and emerged only to possess flesh and wreak havoc.
He would have made a fine Envoy.
'I take it I don't have to introduce myself,' I said quietly.
Kadmin grinned, revealing small teeth and a delicate pointed tongue. 'If you're a friend of the lieutenant, you don't have to do anything you don't want to here. Only the slobs get their virtuality edited.'
'Do you know this man, Kadmin?' asked Ortega.
'Hoping for a confession, lieutenant?' Kadmin threw back his head and laughed musically. 'Oh, the crudity! This man? This woman, maybe? Or, yes, even a dog could be trained to say as much as he has said, given the right tranquillisers of course. They do tend to go pitifully insane when you decant them if not. But yes, even a dog. We sit here, three silhouettes carved from electronic sleet in the difference storm, and you talk like a cheap period drama. Limited vision, lieutenant, limited vision. Where is the voice that said altered carbon would free us from the cells of our flesh? The vision that said we would be angels.'
'You tell me, Kadmin. You're the one with the exalted professional standing.' Ortega's tone was detached. She system-magicked a long scroll of printout into one hand and glanced idly down it. 'Pimp, triad enforcer, virtual interrogator in the corporate wars, it's all quality work. Me, I'm just some dumb cop can't see the light.'
'I'm not going to quarrel with you there, lieutenant.'
'Says here you were a wiper for MeritCon a while back, scaring archaeologue miners off their claims in Syrtis Major. Slaughtering their families by way of incentive. Nice job.' Ortega tossed the printout back into oblivion. 'We've got you cold, Kadmin. Digital footage from the hotel surveillance system, verifiable simultaneous sleeving, both stacks on ice. That's an erasure mandatory, and even if your lawyers dance it down to Compliance at Machine Error, the sun's going to be a red dwarf by the time they let you off stack.'
Kadmin smiled. 'Then what are you here for?'
'Who sent you?' I asked him softly.
'The Dog speaks!
Is it a wolf I hear,
Howling his lonely communion
With the unpiloted stars,
Or merely the self importance and servitude
In the bark of a dog?
How many millennia did it take,
Twisting and torturing
The pride from the one
To make a tool,
The other?'
I inhaled smoke and nodded. Like most Harlanites, I had Quell's Poems and Other Prevarications more or less by heart. It was taught in schools in lieu of the later and weightier political works, most of which were still deemed too radical to be put in the hands of children. This wasn't a great translation, but it captured the essence. More impressive was the fact that anyone not actually from Harlan's World could quote such an obscure volume.
I finished it for him.
'And how do we measure the distance from spirit to
spirit?
And who do we find to blame?'
'Have you come seeking blame, Mr Kovacs?'
'Among other things.'
'How disappointing.'
'You expected something else?'
'No,' said Kadmin with another smile. 'Expectation is our first mistake. I meant, how disappointing for you.'
'Maybe.'
He shook his great piebald head. 'Certainly. You will take no names from me. If you seek blame, I will have to bear it for you.'
'That's very generous, but you'll remember what Quell said about lackeys.'
'Kill them along the way, but count your bullets, for there are more worthy targets.' Kadmin chuckled deep inside himself. 'Are you threatening me in monitored police storage?'
'No. I'm just putting things into perspective.' I knocked ash off my cigarette and watched it sparkle out of existence before it reached the floor. 'Someone's pulling your strings; that's who I'm going to wipe. You're nothing. You I wouldn't waste spit on.'
Kadmin tipped his head back as a stronger tremor ran through the shifting lines in the sky, like Cubist lightning. It reflected in the dull sheen on the metal table and seemed to touch his hands for a moment. When he looked down at me again, it was with a curious light in his eyes.
'I was not asked to kill you,' he said tonelessly, 'unless your abduction proved inconvenient. But now I will.'
Ortega was on him as the last syllable left his mouth. The table blinked out of existence and she kicked him backwards off the chair with one booted foot. As he rolled back to his feet, the same boot caught him in the
mouth and floored him again. I ran my tongue round the almost healed gashes inside my own mouth, and felt a distinct lack of sympathy.
Ortega dragged Kadmin up by the hair, the cigarette in her hand replaced by a vicious-looking blackjack courtesy of the same system magic that had eliminated the table.
'I hear you right?' she hissed. 'You making threats, rackhead?'
Kadmin bared his teeth in a bloodstained grin.
'Police brutal — '
'That's right, motherfucker.' Ortega hit him across the cheek with the blackjack. The skin split. 'Police brutality in a monitored police virtuality. Sandy Kim and WorldWeb One would have a field day, wouldn't they? But you know what? I reckon your lawyers aren't going to want to run this particular tape.'
'Leave him alone, Ortega.'
She seemed to remember herself then, and stepped back.
Her face twitched and she drew a deep breath. The table blinked back and Kadmin was suddenly sitting upright again, mouth undamaged.
'You too,' he said quietly.
'Yeah, sure.' There was contempt in Ortega's voice, at least half of it directed at herself I guessed. She made a second effort to bring her breathing back under control, rearranged her clothing unnecessarily. 'Like I said, going to be a cold day in hell by the time you get the chance. Maybe I'll wait for you.'
'Whoever sent you worth this much, Kadmin?' I wondered softly. 'You going down silent out: of contractual loyalty, or are you just scared shitless?'
For answer, the composite man folded his arms across his chest and stared through me.
'You through, Kovacs?' asked Ortega.
I tried to meet Kadmin's distant gaze. 'Kadmin, the man I work for has a lot of influence. This could be your last chance to cut a deal.'
Nothing. He didn't even blink.
I shrugged. 'I'm through.'
'Good,' said Ortega grimly. 'Because sitting downwind of this piece of shit is beginning to eat away at my usually tolerant nature.' She waggled her fingers in front of his eyes. 'Be seeing you, fuckhead.'
At that, Kadmin's eyes turned up to meet hers, and a small, peculiarly unpleasant smile twisted his lips.
We left.
Back on the fourth floor, the walls of Ortega's office had reverted to a dazzling high noon over beaches of white sand. I screwed up my eyes against the glare while Ortega trawled through a desk drawer and came up with her own and a spare pair of sunglasses.
'So what did you learn from that?'
I fitted the lenses uncomfortably over the bridge of my nose. They were too small. 'Not much, except that little gem about not having orders to wipe me. Someone wanted to talk to me. I'd pretty much guessed that anyway, else he could have just blown my stack out all over the lobby of the Hendrix. Still, means someone wanted to cut a deal of their own, outside of Bancroft.'
'Or someone wanted to interrogate the guts out of you.'
I shook my head. 'About what? I'd only just arrived. Doesn't make any sense.'
'The Corps? Unfinished business?' Ortega made little flicking motions with her hand as if she were dealing me the suggestions. 'Maybe a grudge match?'
'No. We went through this one when we were yelling at each other the other night. There are people who'd like to see me wiped, but none of them live on Earth, and none of them swing the kind of influence to go interstellar. And there's nothing I know about the Corps that isn't in a low-wall datastack somewhere. And anyway, it's just too much of a fucking coincidence. No, this is about Bancroft. Someone wanted in on the program.'
'Whoever had him killed?'
I tipped my head down to look at her directly over the sun lenses. 'You believe me, then.'
'Not entirely.'
'Oh, come on.'
But Ortega wasn't listening. 'What I want to know,' she brooded, 'is why he rewrote his codes at the end. You know, we've sweated him nearly a dozen times since we downloaded him Sunday night. That's the first time he's come close to even admitting he was there.'
'Even to his lawyers?'
'We don't know what he says to them. They're big-time sharks, out of Ulan Bator and New York. That kind of money carries a scrambler into all privy virtual interviews. We get nothing on tape but static.'
I raised a mental eyebrow. On Harlan's World, all virtual custody was monitored as a matter of course. Scramblers were not permitted, no matter how much money you were worth.
'Speaking of lawyers, are Kadmin's here in Bay City?'
'Physically, you mean? Yeah, they've got a deal with a Marin County practice. One of their partners is renting a sleeve here for the duration.' Ortega's lip curled. 'Physical meetings are considered a touch of class these days. Only the cheap firms do business down the wires.'
'What's this suit's name?'
There was a brief pause while she hung onto the name. 'Kadmin's a spinning item right now. I'm not sure we go this far.'
'Ortega, we go all the way. That was the deal. Otherwise I'm back to risking Elias's fine features with some more maximal push investigation.'
She was silent for a while.
'Rutherford,' she said finally. 'You want to talk to Rutherford?'
'Right now, I want to talk to anyone. Maybe I didn't make things clear earlier. I'm working cold here. Bancroft waited a month and a half before he brought me in. Kadmin's all I've got.'
'Keith Rutherford's a handful of engine grease. You won't get any more out of him than you did Kadmin downstairs. And anyway, how the fuck am I supposed to introduce you, Kovacs? Hi, Keith, this is the ex-Envoy loose cannon your client tried to wipe on Sunday. He'd like to ask you a few questions. He'll close up faster than an unpaid hooker's hole.'
She had a point. I thought about it for a moment, staring out to sea.
'All right,' I said slowly. 'All I need is a couple of minutes' conversation. How about you tell him I'm Elias Ryker, your partner from Organic Damage? I practically am, after all.'
Ortega took off her lenses and stared at me.
'Are you trying to be funny?'
'No. I'm trying to be practical. Rutherford's sleeving in from Ulan Bator, right?'
'New York,' she said tightly.
'New York. Right. So he probably doesn't know anything about you or Ryker.'
'Probably not.'
'So what's the problem?'
'The problem is, Kovacs, that I don't like it.'
There was more silence. I dropped my gaze into my lap and let out a sigh that was only partially manufactured. Then I took off my own sunglasses and looked up at her. It was all there on plain display. The naked fear of sleeving and all that it entailed; paranoid essentialism with its back to the wall.
'Ortega,' I said gently. 'I'm not him. I'm not trying to be hi — '
'You couldn't even come close,' she snapped.
'All we're talking about is a couple of hours' make-believe.'
'Is that all?'
She said it in a voice like iron, and she put her sunglasses back on with such brusque efficiency that I didn't need to see the tears welling up in the eyes behind the mirror lenses.
'All right,' she said finally, clearing her throat. 'I'll get you in. I don't see the point, but I'll do it. Then what?'
'That's a little difficult to say. I'll have to improvise.'
'Like you did at the Wei Clinic?'
I shrugged noncommittally. 'Envoy techniques are largely reactive. I can't react to something until it happens.'
'I don't want another bloodbath, Kovacs. It looks bad on the city stats.'
'If there's violence, it won't be me that starts it.'
'That's not much of a guarantee. Haven't you got any idea what you're going to do?'
'I'm going to talk.'
'Just talk?' She looked at me disbelievingly. 'That's all?' I jammed my ill-fitting sunglasses back on my face. 'Sometimes that's all it takes.' I said.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I met my first lawyer when I was fifteen. He was a harried-looking juvenile affray expert who defended me
, not unhandily, in a minor organic damage suit involving a Newpest police officer. He bargained them down with a kind of myopic patience to Conditional Release and eleven minutes of virtual psychiatric counselling. In the hall outside the juvenile court, he looked into my probably infuriatingly smug face and nodded as if his worst fears about the meaning of his life were being confirmed. Then he turned on his heel and walked away. I forget his name.
My entry into the Newpest gang scene shortly afterwards precluded any more such legal encounters. The gangs were web-smart, wired up and already writing their own intrusion programmes or buying them from kids half their age in return for low-grade virtual porn ripped off the networks. They didn't get caught easily, and in return for this favour the Newpest heat tended to leave them alone. Inter-gang violence was largely ritualised and excluded other players most of the time. On the odd occasion that it spilled over and affected civilians, there would be a rapid and brutal series of punitive raids that left a couple of lead gang heroes in the store and the rest of us with extensive bruising. Fortunately I never worked my way up the chain of command far enough to get put away, so the next time I saw the inside of a courtroom was the Innenin inquiry.
The lawyers I saw there had about as much in common with the man who had defended me at fifteen as automated machine rifle fire has with farting. They were cold, professionally polished arid well on their way up a career ladder which would ensure that despite the uniforms they wore, they would never have to come within a thousand kilometres of a genuine firefight. The only problem they had, as they cruised sharkishly back and forth across the cool marble floor of the court, was in drawing the fine differences between war (mass murder of people wearing a uniform not your own), justifiable loss (mass murder of your own troops, but with substantial gains) and criminal negligence (mass murder of your own troops, without appreciable benefit). I sat in that courtroom for three weeks listening to them dress it like a variety of salads, and with every passing hour the distinctions, which at one point I'd been pretty clear on, grew increasingly vague. I suppose that proves how good they were.
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