Altered Carbon

by Richard Morgan

  'Not much of a contest, is it?' I said. 'State-of-the-art neurachem against century-old Sharyan biomech.'

  Carnage grinned with his slack silicoflesh face. 'Well, that will depend on the fighters. I'm told the Khumalo system takes a bit of getting used to, and to be honest it isn't always the best sleeve that wins. It's more about psychology. Endurance, pain tolerance . . . '

  'Savagery,' added Ortega. 'Lack of empathy.'

  'Things like that,' agreed the synthetic. 'That's what makes it exciting, of course. If you'd care to come tonight, lieutenant, detective, I'm sure I can find you a couple of remaindered seats near the back.'

  'You'll be commentating,' I surmised, already hearing the specs-rich vocabulary that Carnage used come tum­bling out over the tannoy, the killing ring drenched in focused white light, the roaring, surging crowd in the darkened seating, the smell of sweat and bloodlust.

  'Of course I will.' Carnage's logo'd eyes narrowed. 'You haven't been away so long, you know.'

  'Are we going to look for these bombs?' said Ortega loudly.

  It took us over an hour to go over the hold, looking for imaginary bombs, while Carnage looked on with poorly veiled amusement. Up above, the two sleeves destined for slaughter in the arena looked clown on us from their green-lit glass-sided wombs, their presences weighing no less heavily for their closed eyes and dreaming visages.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Ortega dropped me on Mission Street as evening was falling over the city. She'd been withdrawn and mono­syllabic on the flight back from the fightdrome, and I guessed the strain of reminding herself I was not Ryker was beginning to take a toll. But when I made a production of brushing off my shoulders as I got out of the cruiser, she laughed impulsively.

  'Stick around the Hendrix tomorrow,' she said. 'There's someone I want you to talk to, but it'll take a while to set up.'

  'Fair enough.' I turned to go.

  'Kovacs.'

  I turned back. She was leaning across to look up and out of the open door at me. I put an arm on the uplifted door wing of the cruiser and looked down. There was a longish pause during which I could feel my blood beginning to adrenalise gently.

  'Yes?'

  She hesitated a moment longer, then said, 'Carnage was hiding something back there, right?'

  'From the amount he talked, I'd say yes.'

  'That's what I thought.' She prodded hurriedly at the control console and the door began to slide back down. 'See you tomorrow.'

  I watched the cruiser into the sky and sighed. I was reasonably sure that going to Ortega openly had been a good move, but I hadn't expected it to be so messy. However long she and Ryker had been together, the chemistry must have been devastating. I remembered reading somewhere how the initial pheromones of attrac­tion between bodies appeared to undergo a form of encoding the longer said bodies were in proximity, binding them increasingly close. None of the biochemists inter­viewed appeared to really understand the process, but: there had been some attempts to play with it in labs. Speeding up or interrupting the effect had met with mixed results, one of which was empathin and its derivatives.

  Chemicals. I was still reeling from the cocktail of Miriam Bancroft and I didn't need this. I told myself, in no uncertain terms, I didn 't need this.

  Up ahead, over the heads of the evening's scattered pedestrians, I saw the holographic bulk of the left-handed guitar player outside the Hendrix. I sighed again and started walking.

  Halfway up the block, a bulky automated vehicle rolled past me, hugging the kerb. It looked pretty much like the robocrawlers that cleaned the streets of Millsport, so I paid no attention to it as it drew level. Seconds later, I was drenched in the machine's image cast.

  . . .from the houses from the houses from the houses from the houses from the houses from the houses . . .

  The voices groaned and murmured, male, female, over­laid. It was like a choir in the throes of orgasm. The images were inescapable, varying across a broad spectrum of sexual preference. A whirlwind of fleeting sensory impres­sions.

  Genuine . . .

  Uncut . . .

  Full sense repro . . .

  Tailored . . .

  As if to prove this last, the random images thinned out into a stream of heterosex combinations. They must have scanned my response to the blur of options and fed directly back to the broadcast unit. Very high-tech.

  The flow ended with a phone number in glowing numerals and an erect penis in the hands of a woman with long dark hair and a crimson-lipped smile. She looked into the lens. I could feel her fingers.

  Head in the Clouds, she breathed. This is what it's like. Maybe you can't afford to come up here, but you can certainly afford this.

  Her head dipped, her lips slid down over the penis. Like it was happening to me. Then the long black hair curtained in from either side and inked the image out. I was back on the street, swaying, coated in a thin sheen of sweat. The autocaster grumbled away down the street behind me, some of the more streetwise pedestrians skipping sharply sideways out of its cast radius.

  I found I could recall the phone number with gleaming clarity.

  The sweat cooled rapidly to a shiver. I flexed my shoulders and started walking, trying not to notice the knowing looks of the people around me. I was almost into a full stride again when a gap opened in the strollers ahead and I saw the long, low limousine parked outside the Hendrix's front doors.

  Jangling nerves sent my hand leaping towards the holstered Nemex before I recognised the vehicle as Ban­croft's. Forcing out a deep breath, I circled the limousine and ascertained that the driver's compartment was empty. I was still wondering what to do when the rear compart­ment hatch cracked open and Curtis unfolded himself from the seating inside.

  'We need to talk, Kovacs,' he said in a man-to-man sort of voice that put me on the edge of a slightly hysterical giggle. 'Decision time.'

  I looked him up and down, reckoned from the tiny eddies in his stance and demeanour that he was chemically augmented at the moment, and decided to humour him.

  'Sure. In the limo?'

  ' 'S cramped in there. How about you ask me up to your room?'

  My eyes narrowed. There was an unmistakable hostility in the chauffeur's voice, and a just as unmistakable hard-on pressing at the front of his immaculate chinos. Granted, I had a similar, if detumescing, lump of my own, but I remembered distinctly that Bancroft's limo had shielding against the street 'casts. This was something else.

  I nodded at the hotel entrance.

  'OK, let's go.'

  The doors parted to let us in and the Hendrix came to life.

  'Good evening, sir. You have no visitors this evening — '

  Curtis snorted. 'Disappointed, hah, Kovacs?'

  ' — nor any calls since you left.' The hotel continued smoothly. 'Do you wish this person admitted as a guest.'

  'Yeah, sure. You got a bar we can go to?'

  'I said your room,' growled Curtis, behind me, then yelped as he barked his shin on one of the lobby's low metal-edged tables.

  'The Midnight Lamp bar is located on this floor,' said the hotel doubtfully, 'but has not been used for a consider­able time.'

  'I said — '

  'Shut up, Curtis. Didn't anyone ever tell you not to rush a first date? The Midnight Lamp is fine. Fire it up for us.'

  Across the lobby, adjacent to the check-in console, a wide section of the back wall slid grudgingly aside and lights flickered on in the space beyond. With Curtis mak­ing sneering sounds behind me, I went to the opening and peered down a short flight of steps into the Midnight Lamp bar.

  'This'll do fine. Come on.'

  Someone overliteral in imagination had done the inter­ior decoration of the Midnight Lamp bar. The walls, themselves psychedelic whirls of midnight blues and purples, were festooned with a variety of clock faces show­ing either the declared hour or a few minutes to, inter­woven with every form of lamp known to man, from clay prehistoric to enzyme decay light canisters. There was
indented bench seating along both walls, clock-face tables and in the centre of the room a circular bar in the shape of a countdown dial. A robot composed entirely of clocks and lamps waited immobile just beside the dial's twelve mark.

  It was all the more eerie for the complete absence of any other customers, and as we made our way towards the waiting robot, I could feel Curtis's earlier mood quieten a little.

  'What will it be, gentlemen?' said the machine unex­pectedly, from no apparent vocal outlet. Its face was an antique white analogue clock with spider-thin baroque hands and the hours marked off in Roman numerals. A little unnerved, I turned back to Curtis, whose face was showing signs of unwilling sobriety.

  'Vodka,' he said shortly. 'Subzero.'

  'And a whisky. Whatever it is I've been drinking out of the cabinet in my room. At room temperature, please. Both on my tab.'

  The clock face inclined slightly and one multi-jointed arm swung up to select glasses from an overhead rack. The other arm, which ended in a lamp with a forest of small spouts, trickled the requested spirits into the glasses.

  Curtis picked up his glass and threw a generous portion of the vodka down his throat. He drew breath hard through his teeth and made a satisfied growling noise. I sipped at my own glass a little more circumspectly, won­dering how long it had been since liquid last flowed through the bar's tubes and spigots. My fears proved unfounded, so I deepened the sip and let the whisky melt its way down into my stomach.

  Curtis banged down his glass.

  'Now you ready to talk?'

  'All right, Curtis,' I said slowly, looking into my drink. 'I imagine you have a message for me.'

  'Sure have.' His voice was cranked to snapping point. 'The lady says, you going to take her very generous offer, or not. Just that. I'm supposed to give you time to make up your mind, so I'll finish my drink.'

  I fixed my gaze on a Martian sand lamp hanging from the opposite wall. Curtis's mood was beginning to make some sense.

  'Muscling in on your territory, am I?'

  'Don't push your luck, Kovacs.' There was a desperate edge to the words. 'You say the wrong thing here, and I'll — '

  'You'll what?' I set my glass down and turned to face him. He was less than half my subjective age, young and muscled and chemically wound up in the illusion that he was dangerous. He reminded me so much of myself at the same age it was maddening. I wanted to shake him. 'You'll what?

  Curtis gulped. 'I was in the provincial marines.'

  'What as, a pin-up?' I went to push him in the chest with one stiffened hand, then dropped it, ashamed. I lowered my voice. 'Listen, Curtis. Don't do this to us both.'

  'You think you're pretty fucking tough, don't: you?'

  'This isn't about tough, C — urtis.' I'd almost called him kid. It seemed as if part of me wanted the fight after all. 'This is about two different species. What did they teach you in the provincial marines? Hand-to-hand combat? Twenty-seven ways to kill a man with your hands? Under­neath it all you're still a man. I'm an Envoy, Curtis. It's not the same.'

  He came for me anyway, leading with a straight jab that was supposed to distract me while the following round­house kick scythed in from the side at head height. It was a skull cracker if it landed, but it was hopelessly over-dramatic. Maybe it was the chemicals he'd dressed up in that night. No one in their right mind throws lacks above waist height in a real fight. I ducked the jab and the kick in the same movement and grabbed his fool;. A sharp twist and Curtis tipped, staggered and landed spreadeagled on the bar top. I smashed his face against the unyielding surface and held him there with my hand knotted in his hair.

  'See what I mean?'

  He made muffled noises and thrashed impotently about while the clock-faced bartender stood immobile. Blood from his broken nose was streaked across the bar's surface. I studied the patterns it had made while I brought my breathing back down. The lock I had on my conditioning was making me pant. Shifting my grip to his right arm, I jerked it up high into the small of his back. The thrashing stopped.

  'Good. Now you keep still or I'll break it. I'm not in the mood for this.' As I spoke, I was feeling rapidly through his pockets. In the inner breast pouch of his jacket I found a small plastic tube. 'Aha. So what little delights have we got tubing round your system tonight? Hormone enhancers, by the look of that hard-on.' I held the tube up to the dim light and saw thousands of tiny crystal slivers inside it. 'Military format. Where did you get this stuff, Curtis? Discharge freebie from the marines, was it?' I recom­menced my search and came up with the delivery system: a tiny skeletal gun with a sliding chamber and a mag­netic coil. Tip the crystals into the breech and close it, the magnetic field aligns them and the accelerator spits them out at penetrative speed. Not so different from Sarah's shard pistol. For battlefield medics, they were a hardy, and consequently very popular, alternative to hypo-sprays.

  I hauled Curtis to his feet and shoved him away from me. He managed to stay on his feet, clutching at his nose with one hand and glaring at me.

  'You want to tip your head back to stop that,' I told him. 'Go ahead, I'm not going to hurt you again.'

  'Botherfucker!'

  I held up the crystals and the little gun. 'Where did you get these?'

  'Suck by prick, Kovacs.' Curtis tipped his head back fractionally, despite himself, trying to keep me in view at the same time. His eyes rolled in their sockets like a panicked horse's. Tb dot tellig you a fuckig thig.'

  'Fair enough.' I put the chemicals back on the bar and regarded him gravely for a couple of seconds. 'Then let me tell you something instead. When they make an Envoy, do you want to know what they do? They burn out every evolved violence limitation instinct in the human psyche. Submission signal recognition, pecking order dynamics, pack loyalties. It all goes, tuned out a neuron at a time; and they replace it with a conscious will to harm.'

  He stared back at me in silence.

  'Do you understand me? It would have been easier to kill you just then. It would have been easier. I had to stop myself. That's what an Envoy is, Curtis. A reassembled human. An artifice.'

  The silence stretched. There was no way to know if he was taking it in or not. Thinking back to Newpest a century and a half ago, and the young Takeshi Kovacs, I doubted he was. At his age, the whole thing would have sounded like a dream of power come true.

  I shrugged. 'In case you hadn't guessed already, the answer to the lady's question is no. I'm not interested. There, that should make you happy, and it only cost you a broken nose to find out. If you hadn't dosed yourself to the eyes it might not even have cost that much. Tell her thank you very much, the offer is appreciated, but there's too much going on here to walk away from. Tell her I'm starting to enjoy it.'

  There was a slight cough from the entrance to the bar. I looked up and saw a suited, crimson-haired figure on the stairs.

  'Am I interrupting something?' The mohican enquired. The voice was slow and relaxed. Not one of the heavies from Fell Street.

  I picked up my drink from the bar. 'Not at all, officer. Come on down and join the party. What'll you have?'

  'Overproof rum,' said the cop, drifting over to us. 'If they've got it. Small glass.'

  I raised a finger at the clock face. The bartender pro­duced a square-cut glass from somewhere and filled it with a deep red liquid. The mohican ambled past Curtis, spar­ing him a curious glance on the way, and apprehended the drink with a long arm.

  'Appreciated.' He sipped at the drink and inclined his head. 'Not bad. I'd like a word with you, Kovacs. In private.'

  We both glanced at Curtis. The chauffeur glared back at me with hate-filled eyes, but the new arrival had defused the confrontation. The cop jerked his head in the direction of the exit. Curtis went, still clutching his wounded face. The cop watched him out of sight before he turned back to me.

  'You do that?' he asked casually.

  I nodded. 'Provoked. Things got a bit out of hand. He thought he was protecting someone.'

  'Well, I'
m glad he ain't protecting me.'

  'Like I said, it got a bit out of hand. I overreacted.'

  'Hell, you don't need to explain yourself to me.' The cop leaned on the bar and looked around him with frank interest. I recalled his face now. Bay City storage. The one with the quick-tarnishing badge. 'He feels aggrieved enough, he can press charges and we'll play back some more of this place's memory.'

  'Got your warrant, then?' I put the question with a lightness I didn't feel.

  'Almost. Always takes a while with the legal department. Fucking AIs. Look, I wanted to apologise for Mercer and Davidson, the way they were at the station. They act like a brace of dickheads sometimes, but they're fundamentally OK.'

  I waved my glass laterally. 'Forget it.'

  'Good. I'm Rodrigo Bautista, detective sergeant. Orte­ga's partner most of the time.' He drained his glass and grinned at me. 'Loosely attached, I should point out.'

  'Noted.' I signalled the bartender for refills. 'Tell me something. You guys all go to the same hairdresser, or is it some kind of team bonding thing?'

  'Same hairdresser.' Bautista shrugged sorrowfully. 'Old guy up on Fulton. Ex-con. Apparently mohicans were cool back when they threw him in the store. It's the only goddamn style he knows, but he's a nice old guy and he's cheap. One of us started going there a few years back, he gave us discounts. You know how it is.'

  'But not Ortega?'

  'Ortega cuts her own hair.' Bautista made a what-can-you-do gesture. 'Got a little holocast scanner, says it: improves her spatial coordination or some such shit.'

  'Different.'

  'Yeah, she is.' Bautista paused reflectively, gaze soaking up the middle distance. He sipped absently at his freshened drink. 'It's her I'm here about.'

  'Oh-oh. Is this going to be a friendly warning?'

  Bautista pulled a face. 'Well, it's going to be friendly, whatever you call it. I ain't looking for a broken nose.'