Altered Carbon

by Richard Morgan

  'What'd she say?'

  Trepp peeled back my eyelids again, frowning with concentration.

  'Called us both beautiful. Fucking junkie, probably after a handout.'

  In a wood-panelled toilet somewhere, I stared into a fragmented mirror at the face I was wearing as if it had committed a crime against me. Or as if I was waiting for someone else to emerge from behind the seamed features. My hands were braced on the filthy metal basin below, and the epoxy strips bonding the thing to the wall emitted minute tearing sounds under my weight.

  I had no idea how long I'd been there.

  I had no idea where there was. Or how many theres we had already been through tonight.

  None of this seemed to matter because . . .

  The mirror didn't fit its frame — there were pointed jags dug into the plastic edges holding the star-shaped centre precariously in place.

  Too many edges, I muttered to myself. None of this fucking fits together.

  The words seemed significant, like an accidental rhythm and rhyme in ordinary speech. I didn't think I'd ever be able to repair this mirror. I was going to cut my fingers to shreds, just trying. Fuck that.

  I left Ryker's face in the mirror, and staggered back out to a table piled high with candles where Trepp was sipping at a long ivory pipe.

  'Micky Nozawa? Are you serious?'

  'Fuck, yes.' Trepp nodded vigorously. 'The Fist of the Fleet, right? Seen it four times at least. New York experia chains get a lot of imported colonial stuff. It's getting to be quite chic. That bit where he takes the harpoonist out with the flying kick. You feel it right down to the bone, the way he delivers that fucking kick. Beautiful. Poetry in motion. Hey, you know he did some holoporn stuff when he was younger.'

  'Bullshit. Micky Nozawa never did porn. He didn't need to.'

  'Who said anything about need. The couple of bimb-ettes he was playing around with, I would have played around with them for free.'

  'Bull. Shit.'

  'I swear to God. That sleeve with the sort of Caucasian nose and eyes, the one he wrote off in that cruiser wreck. Real early stuff.'

  There was a bar, where the walls and ceiling were hung with absurd hybrid musical instruments and the shelves behind the bar were stacked solid with antique bottles, intricately worked statuettes and other nameless junk. The noise level was comparatively low and I was drinking something that didn't taste as if it was doing my system too much immediate harm. There was a faint musk in the air and small trays of sweetmeats on the tables.

  'Why the fuck do you do it?'

  'What?' Trepp shook her head muzzily. 'Keep cats? I like ca — '

  'Work for fucking Kawahara. She's a fucking abortion of a human being, a fucked up Meth cunt not worth the slag of a stack, why do you — '

  Trepp grabbed the arm I was gesturing with, and for a moment I thought there was going to be violence. The neurachem surged soggily.

  Instead, she took the arm and draped it affectionately over her own shoulders, pulling my face closer to her own. She blinked owlishly at me.

  'Listen.'

  There was a longish pause. I listened, while Trepp frowned with concentration, took a long slug from her glass and set it down with exaggerated care. She wagged a finger at me.

  'Judge not lest ye be judged,' she slurred.

  Another street, sloping downward. Walking was suddenly easier.

  Above, the stars were out in force, clearer than I had seen them all week in Bay City. I lurched to a halt at the sight, looking for the Horned Horse.

  Something. Wrong here.

  Alien. Not a single pattern I recognised. A cold sweat broke along the insides of my arms, and suddenly the clear points of fire seemed like an armada from the Outside, massing for a planetary bombardment. The Martians re­turned. I thought I could see them moving ponderously across the narrow slice of sky above us . . .

  'Whoa.' Trepp caught me as I fell, laughing. 'What you looking for up there, grasshopper?'

  Not my sky.

  It's getting bad.

  In another toilet, painfully brightly lit, Pin trying to stuff some powder Trepp gave me up my nose. My nasal passages are already seared dry and it keeps falling back down, as if this body has definitively had enough. A cubicle flushes behind me and I glance up into the big mirror.

  Jimmy de Soto emerges from the cubicle, combat fatigues smudged with Innenin mud. In the hard bathroom light his face is looking particularly bad.

  'All right, pal?'

  'Not especially.' I scratch at the inside of my nose, which is beginning to feel inflamed. 'You?'

  He makes a mustn't-grumble gesture and moves forward in the mirror to stand beside me. Water fountains from the light-sensitive tap as he leans over the basin, and he begins to rinse his hands. Mud and gore dissolve off his skin and form a rich soup, pouring away down the tiny maelstrom of the plughole. I can sense his bulk at -my shoulder, but his one remaining eye has me pinned to the image in the mirror and I cannot, or don't want to, turn.

  'Is this a dream?'

  He shrugs and goes on scrubbing at his hands. 'It's the edge,' he says.

  'The edge of what?'

  'Everything.' His expression suggests that this much is obvious.

  'I thought you only turned up in my dreams,' I say, casually glancing at his hands. There is something wrong with them; however much filth Jimmy scrubs off, there is more underneath. The basin is splattered with the stuff.

  Well, that's one way of putting it, pal. Dreams, high stress hallucinations, or just wrecking your own head like this. It's all the edge, see. The cracks down the sides of reality. Where stupid bastards like me end up.'

  'Jimmy, you're dead. I'm getting tired of telling you that.'

  'Uhuh.' He shakes his head. 'But you got to get right down in those cracks to access me.'

  The soup of blood and soil in the basin is thinning out and I know suddenly that when it is gone, Jimmy will be too.

  'You 're saying — '

  He shakes his head sadly. 'Too flicking complicated to go through now. You think we've got the handle on reality, just 'cause we can record bits of it. More to it than that, pal. More to it than that.'

  'Jimmy,' I make a helpless gesture, 'what the fuck am I going to do?'

  He steps back from the basin and his ruined face grins garishly at me.

  'Viral Strike,' he says clearly. I go cold as I remember my own scream taken up along the beachhead. 'Recall that mother, do you?'

  And, flicking water from his hands, he vanishes like a conjuror's trick.

  'Look,' said Trepp reasonably, 'Kadmin had to check into the tank to get sleeved in an artificial. I figure that gives you the best part of a day before he even knows if he killed you or not.'

  'If he wasn't already double-sleeved again.'

  'No. Think about it. He's cut loose from Kawahara. Man, he doesn't have the resources for that kind of stuff right now. He's fucking out there on his own, and with Kawahara gunning for him, he's a strictly limited item. Kadmin's sell-by date is coming up, you'll see.'

  'Kawahara's going to keep him on tap for just as long as she needs him to drive me.'

  'Yeah, well.' Trepp looked at her drink, embarrassed. 'Maybe.'

  There was another place, called Cable or something syn­onymous, where the walls were racked with colour-coded conduits out of whose designer-cracked casings wires sprouted like stiff copper hair. At intervals along the bar were hooks draped with thin, lethal -looking cables that ended in gleaming silver minijacks. In the air above the bar, a huge holographic jack and socket flicked spasmodically to the off-beat music that filled the place like water. At times, the components seemed to change into sex organs, but that could have been tetrameth-induced hallucination on my part.

  I was sitting at the bar, something sweet smouldering in an ashtray at my elbow. From the sludgy feeling in my lungs and throat, I'd been smoking it. The bar was crowded but I suffered the strange conviction I was alone.

  On either sid
e of me, the other customers at the bar were jacked into the thin cables, eyes flickering beneath lids that seemed bruised, mouths twitched into dreamy half smiles. One of them was Trepp.

  I was alone.

  Things that might have been thoughts were tugging at the abraded underside of my mind. I picked up the cigarette and drew on it, grimly. Now was no time for thinking.

  No time for —

  Viral Strike!!!

  — thinking.

  Streets passing beneath my feet the way the rubble of Innenin passed under Jimmy's boots as he walked along beside me in my dreams. So that's how he does it.

  The crimson-lipped woman who —

  Maybe you can't —

  What? What???

  Jack and socket.

  Trying to tell you some —

  No time for —

  No time —

  No —

  And away, like water in the maelstrom, like the soup of mud and gore pouring offjimmy's hands and into the hole at the bottom of the sink . . .

  Gone again.

  But thought, like the dawn, was inevitable and it found me, with the dawn, on a set of white stone steps that led down into murky water. Grandiose architecture reared vaguely behind us and on the far side of the water I could make out trees in the rapidly greying darkness. We were in a park.

  Trepp leaned over my shoulder and offered me a lit cigarette. I took it reflexively, drew once and then let smoke dribble up through my slack lips. Trepp settled into a crouch next to me. An unfeasibly large fish flopped in the water at my feet. I was too eroded to react.

  'Mutant,' said Trepp inconsequentially.

  'Same to you.'

  The little shreds of conversation drifted away over the water.

  'Going to need painkillers?'

  'Probably.' I felt around inside my head. 'Yeah.'

  She handed me a wafer of impressively-coloured cap­sules without comment.

  'What you going to do?'

  I shrugged. 'Going to go back. Going to do what I'm told.'

  PART 4 : PERSUASION

  (VIRAL CORRUPT)

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  I changed cabs three times on the way from the airport, paying each one in currency, and then booked into an all-night flophouse in Oakland. Anyone tailing me electro­nically was going to take a little while to catch up, and I was reasonably sure that I hadn't been actually followed. It seemed a bit like paranoia — after all, I was working for the bad guys now, so they had no need to tail me. But I hadn't liked Trepp's ironic keep in touch as she saw me off from the Bay City terminal. Also, I wasn't sure exactly what I was going to do yet, and if I didn't know, I certainly didn't want anyone else knowing either.

  The flophouse room had seven hundred and eighty-six screen channels, holoporn and current affairs both adver­tised in lurid colours on the standby display, a hinged, self-cleansing double bed that stank of disinfectant and a self-contained shower stall that was beginning to list away from the wall it had once been epoxied to. I peered out of the single grimy window. It was the middle of the night in Bay City, and there was a fine, misty rain falling. My deadline with Ortega was running out.

  The window gave onto a sloping fibrecrete roof about ten metres below. The street was as far below again. Overhead, a pagoda-like upper level screened the lower roof and street under long eaves. Covered space. After a moment's debate, I pressed the last of Trepp's hangover capsules out of the foil and swallowed it, then opened the window as quietly as I could, swung out and hung by my fingers from the lower frame. Fully extended, I still had the best part of eight metres to fall.

  Go primitive. Well, you don't get much more primitive than climbing out of hotel windows in the middle of the night.

  Hoping the roof was as solid as it looked, I let go.

  I hit the sloping surface in approved fashion, rolled to one side and abruptly found my legs hanging out into space once more. The surface was firm, but as slippery as fresh belaweed and I was slithering rapidly towards the edge. I ground my elbows down for purchase, found none and just managed to grab the sharp edge of the roof in one hand as I went over.

  Ten-metres to the street. With the roof edge slicing into my palm, I dangled by one arm for a moment, trying to identify possible obstacles to my fall, like trash bins or parked vehicles, then gave up and dropped anyway. The paving beneath came up and smacked me hard, but there was nothing sharp to compound the impact and when I rolled it: was not into the feared assembly of trash bins. I got up and made for the nearest shadows.

  Ten minutes and a random sampling of streets later, I came upon a rank of idling autocabs, stepped swiftly out from my current piece of overhead cover and got into the fifth in line. I recited Ortega's discreet code as we lifted into the air.

  'Coding noted. Approximate arrival time, thirty-five minutes.'

  We headed out across the Bay, and then out to sea.

  Too many edges.

  The fragmented contents of the previous night bubbled in my brain like a carelessly made fish stew. Indigestible chunks appeared on the surface, wobbled in the currents of memory and sank again. Trepp jacked into the bar at Cable, Jimmy de Soto washing his blood-encrusted hands, Ryker's face staring back at me from the spreadeagled star of mirror. Kawahara was in there somewhere, claiming Bancroft's death as suicide but wanting an end to the investigation, just like Ortega and the Bay City police. Kawahara, who knew things about my contact with Miriam Bancroft, knew things about Laurens Bancroft, about Kadmin.

  The tail end of my hangover twitched, scorpion-like, fighting the slow-gathering weight of Trepp's painkillers. Trepp, the apologetic Zen killer whom I'd killed and who'd apparently come back with no hard feelings because she couldn't remember it; because, in her terms, it hadn't happened to her.

  If anybody can convince Laurens Bancroft that he died by his own hand, it is you.

  Trepp, jacked in at Cable.

  Viral Strike. Recall that mother, do you?

  Bancroft's eyes boring into mine on the balcony at Suntouch House. I am not the kind of man to take my own life, and even if I were, I would not have bungled it in this fashion. If it had been my intention to die, you mould not be talking to me now.

  And then, blindingly, I knew what I was going to do.

  The cab started downward.

  'Footing is unstable,' said the machine redundantly, as we touched down on a rolling deck. 'Please take care.'

  I fed currency to the slot and the hatch hinged up on Ortega's safe location. A brief expanse of gumnetal landing pad, railings of cabled steel, and the sea beyond, all shifting black shoulders of water beneath a night sky clogged with cloud and hard drizzle. I climbed out warily and clung to the nearest railing while the cab lifted away and was quickly swallowed by the drifting veils of rain. As the navigation lights faded, I turned my attention to the vessel I was standing on.

  The landing pad was situated at the stern, and from where I clung to the railing I could see the whole length of the ship laid out. She looked to be about twenty metres, something like two thirds the size of a Millsport trawler, but much leaner in the beam. The deck modules had the smooth, self-sealing configuration of storm survival de­sign, but despite the general businesslike appearance, no one would ever take this for a working vessel. Delicate telescopic masts rose to what looked like only half height at two points along the deck and there was a sharp bowsprit stabbing ahead of the slimly tapered prow. This was a yacht. A rich man's floating home.

  Light spilled out of a hatchway on the rear deck and Ortega emerged far enough to beckon me down from the landing pad. Hooking my fingers firmly on the rail, I braced myself against the pitch and sway of the vessel and picked my way down a short flight of steps at one side of the pad, then across the rear deck to the hatch. Swirls of drizzle swept across the ship, hurrying me along against my will. In the well of light from the open hatch I saw another, steeper set of steps and handed my way down the narrow companionway into the offered warmth. Over my head, t
he hatch hummed smoothly shut.

  'Where the fuck have you been?' snapped Ortega.

  I took a moment to rub some of the water out of my hair and looked around. If this was a rich man's floating home, the rich man in question hadn't been home in a while. Furniture was stowed at the sides of the room I had descended into, sheeted over in semi-opaque plastic, and the shelves of the small niche bar were empty. The hatches over the windows were all battened down. Doors at either end of the room were open onto what: seemed to be similarly mothballed spaces.

  For all that, the yacht reeked of the wealth that had spawned it. The chairs and tables beneath the plastic were darkly polished wood, as was the panelling of the bulk­heads and doors, and there were rugs on the waxed boards beneath my feet. The remainder of the decor was similarly sombre in tone, with what looked like original artwork on the bulkhead walls. One from the Empathist school, the skeletal ruins of a Martian shipyard at sunset, the other an abstract that I didn't have the cultural background to read.

  Ortega stood in the middle of it all, tousle-haired and scowling in a raw silk kimono that I assumed had come out of an onboard wardrobe.

  'It's a long story.' I moved past her to peer through the nearest door. 'I could use a coffee, if the galley's open.'

  Bedroom. A big, oval bed set amidst less than wholly tasteful mirrors, quilt tangled and thrown aside in haste. I was moving back towards the other door when she slapped me.

  I reeled sideways. It wasn't as hard a blow as I'd given Sullivan in the noodle house, but it was delivered from standing with a lot more swing and there was the tilt of the deck to contend with. The cocktail of hangover and painkillers didn't help. I didn't quite go down, but it was a near thing. Stumbling back into balance, I raised a hand to my cheek and stared at Ortega, who was glaring back at me with twin spots of colour burning high on each cheekbone.

  'Look, I'm sorry if I woke you up, but — '

  'You piece of shit,' she hissed at me. 'You lying piece of shit.'