Altered Carbon (71 page)

She looked
sideways at me, then looked away. “I didn’t know that,” she
said quietly.

“Yeah,
well.” I shrugged. “The telescope gave me half of it. Your husband
aboard Head in the Clouds just before he killed himself. So then I started
thinking about all the unpleasant stuff Kawahara had to play with up there, and
I wondered if your husband could have been induced to kill himself. Chemically,
or through some kind of virtual programme. I’ve seen it done before.”

“Yes.
I’m sure you have.” She sounded tired now, drifting away. “So
why look for it at PsychaSec and not Head in the Clouds?”

“I’m
not sure. Intuition, like I said. Maybe because chemical mugging aboard an
aerial whorehouse just didn’t seem like Kawahara’s style. Too
headlong, too crude. She’s a chess player, not a brawler. Was. Or maybe
just because I had no way to get into the Head in the Clouds surveillance stack
the way I could with PsychaSec, and I wanted to do something immediate. In any
case, I told the Hendrix to go in and survey standard medical procedures for
the clones, then backtrack for any irregularities. That gave me Sheryl
Bostock.”

“How
very astute.” She turned to look at me. “And what now, Mr.Kovacs?
More justice? More crucifixion of the Meths?”

I tossed
the disc onto the table.

“I
had the Hendrix go in and erase the injection footage from PsychaSec’s
files. Like I said, they’ll probably assume your husband was dosed aboard
Head in the Clouds. The expedient solution. Oh, and we erased the
Hendrix’s memory of your visit to my room too, just in case someone
wanted to make something of what you said about buying me off. One way and
another, I’d say you owe the Hendrix a couple of big favours. It said a
few guests every now and then would do. Shouldn’t cost much, relatively
speaking. I sort of promised on your behalf.”

I
didn’t tell her about Ortega’s sight of the bedroom scene, or how
long it had taken to talk the policewoman round. I still wasn’t sure why
she’d agreed myself. Instead I watched the wonder on Miriam
Bancroft’s face for the full half minute it took her to reach out and
close her hand around the disc. She looked up at me over her clenched fingers
as she took it.

“Why?”

“I
don’t know,” I said morosely. “Who knows, maybe you and
Laurens deserve each other. Maybe you deserve to go on loving a faithless
sexual maladjust who can’t deal with respect and appetite in the same
relationship. Maybe he deserves to go on not knowing whether he murdered
Rentang unprovoked or not. Maybe you’re just like Reileen, both of you.
Maybe all you Meths deserve is each other. All I know is, the rest of us
don’t deserve you.”

I got up to
go.

“Thanks
for the drink.”

I got as
far as the door—”

“Takeshi.”

“—and
turned back, unwillingly, to face her.

“That
isn’t it,” she said with certainty. “Maybe you believe all
those things, but that isn’t it. Is it?”

I shook my
head. “No, that isn’t it,” I agreed.

“Then
why?”

“Like
I said, I don’t know why.” I stared at her, wondering if I was glad
I couldn’t remember or not. My voice softened. “But he asked me to
do it, if I won. It was part of the deal. He didn’t tell me why.”

I left her sitting alone
amidst the martyrweed.

The tide was out at Ember, leaving a wet
expanse of sand that stretched almost to the listing wreck of the
Free
Trade Enforcer
. The rocks that the carrier had gashed herself on were
exposed, gathered in shallow water at the bow like a fossilised outpouring of
the ship’s guts. Seabirds were perched there, screaming shrilly at each
other. A thin wind came in across the sand and made minute ripples in the
puddles left by our footprints. Up on the promenade, Anchana Salomao’s
face had been taken down, intensifying the bleak emptiness of the street.

“I
thought you’d have gone,” said Irene Elliott beside me.

“It’s
in the pipe. Harlan’s World are dragging out the needlecast
authorisation. They really don’t want me back.”

“And
no one wants you here.”

I shrugged.
“It’s not a new situation for me.”

We walked
on in silence for a while. It was a peculiar feeling, talking to Irene Elliott
in her own body. In the days leading up to the Head in the Clouds gig,
I’d become accustomed to looking down to her face, but this big-boned
blonde sleeve was almost as tall as me, and there was an aura of gaunt
competence about her that had only come through faintly in her mannerisms in
the other body.

“I’ve
been offered a job,” she said at length. “Security consulting for
Mainline d.h.f. You heard of them?”

I shook my
head.

“Quite
high profile on the East Coast. They must have their headhunters on the inquiry
board or something. Soon as the UN cleared me, they were knocking on the door.
Exploding offer, five grand if I signed there and then.”

“Yeah,
standard practice. Congratulations. You moving east, or are they going to wire
the job through to you here?”

“Probably
do it here, at least for a while. We’ve got Elizabeth in a virtual condo
down in Bay City, and it’s a lot cheaper to wire in locally. The start-up
cost us most of that five grand, and we figure it’ll be a few years
before we can afford to re-sleeve her.” She turned a shy smile towards
me. “We spend most of our time there at the moment. That’s where
Victor went today.”

“You
don’t need to make excuses for him,” I said gently. “I
didn’t figure he’d want to talk to me anyway.”

She looked
away. “It’s, you know, he was always so proud and—”

“Forget
it. Someone walked all over my feelings the way I did over his, I
wouldn’t feel like talking to them either.” I stopped and reached
in my pocket. “Reminds me. I brought something for you.”

She looked
down at the anonymous grey credit chip in my hand.

“What’s
this?”

“About
eighty thousand,” I said. “I figure with that you can afford
something custom-grown for Elizabeth. If she chooses quick, you could have her
sleeved before the end of the year.”

“What?”
She stared at me with a smile slipping off and on her face, like someone who
has been told a joke she’s not sure she understands. “You’re
giving us—Why? Why are you doing this?”

This time I
had an answer. I’d been thinking about it all the way up from Bay City
that morning. I took Irene Elliott’s hand and pressed the chip into it.

“Because
I want there to be something clean at the end of all this,” I said
quietly. “Something I can feel good about.”

For a
moment she went on staring at me. Then she closed the small gap between us and
flung her arms around me with a cry that sent the nearest gulls wheeling up off
the sand in alarm. I felt a trickle of tears smeared onto the side of my face,
but she was laughing at the same time. I folded my arms round her in return and
held her.

And for the
moments that the embrace lasted, and a little while after, I felt as clean as
the breeze coming in off the sea.

You
take what is offered
, said Virginia
Vidaura, somewhere.
And that must sometimes be enough
.

It took
them another eleven days to authorise the needlecast returning me to
Harlan’s World, most of which I spent hanging around the Hendrix watching
the news and feeling oddly guilty about my impending checkout. There were very
few actual facts publicly available about the demise of Reileen Kawahara, so
the resulting coverage was lurid, sensational and largely inaccurate. The UN
Special Inquiry remained veiled in secrecy, and when the rumours about the
forthcoming adoption of Resolution 653 finally broke there was little to
connect them to what had gone before. Bancroft’s name never appeared, and
nor did mine.

I never
spoke to Bancroft again. The needlecast authorisation and re-sleeving bond for
Harlan’s World were delivered to me by Oumou Prescott who, though she was
pleasant enough and assured me that the terms of my contract would be honoured
to the letter, also conveyed a smoothly menacing message that I was not to
attempt any further communication with any member of the Bancroft family ever
again. The reason cited by Prescott was my deceit over the Jack It Up story,
the breach of my much-vaunted word, but I knew better. I’d seen it in
Bancroft’s face across the inquiry chamber when the facts about
Miriam’s whereabouts and activities during the assault on Head in the
Clouds came out. Despite all his urbane Meth bullshit, the old bastard was
stabbed through with jealousy. I wondered what he would have done if he’d
had to sit through the deleted Hendrix bedroom files.

Ortega rode
with me to Bay City Central the day of the needlecast, the same day that Mary
Lou Hinchley was downloaded into a witness stand synthetic for the opening
hearing on Head in the Clouds. There were chanting crowds on the steps up to
the entrance hall, faced off against a line of grim-looking black-uniformed UN
Public Order police. The same crude holographic placards that I remembered from
my arrival on Earth bobbed about over our heads as we forced our way through
the press. The sky above was an ominous grey.

“Fucking
clowns,” growled Ortega, elbowing the last of the demonstrators out of
her way. “If they provoke the Pubs, they’ll be sorry. I’ve
seen these boys in action before and it isn’t pretty.”

I ducked
around a shaven-headed young man who was punching violently at the sky with one
fist and holding one of the placard generators with the other. His voice was
hoarse and he appeared to be working himself into a frenzied trance. I joined
Ortega at the upper fringe of the crowd, a little out of breath.

“There
isn’t enough organisation here to be a real threat,” I said,
raising my voice to compete with the crowd. “They’re just making a
noise.”

“Yeah,
well that never stopped the Pubs before. They’re likely to break a few
skulls just on general principles. What a fucking mess.”

“Price
of progress, Kristin. You wanted Resolution 653.” I gestured at the sea
of angry faces below. “Now you’ve got it.”

One of the
masked and padded men above us broke ranks and came down the steps, riot prod
fractionally lifted at his side. His jacket bore a sergeant’s crimson
slash at the shoulder. Ortega flipped her badge at him and after a brief,
shouted conversation, we were allowed up. The line parted for us and then the
double doors into the hall beyond. It was hard to tell which was the most
smoothly mechanical, the doors or the black-clad faceless figures that stood
guard over them.

Inside, it
was quiet and gloomy with the storm light coming through the roof panels. I
looked around at the deserted benches and sighed. Whatever world it is,
whatever you’ve done there for better or worse, you always leave the same
way.

Alone.

“You
need a minute?”

I shook my
head. “Need a lifetime, Kristin. Maybe then some.”

“Stay
out of trouble, maybe you’ll get it.” There was an attempt at
humour floating in her voice, rather like a corpse in a swimming pool, and she
must have realised how it sounded because the sentence was bitten off. An
awkwardness was growing between us, something that had started as soon as they
re-sleeved me in Ryker’s body for the real-time committee hearings.
During the inquiry we’d been kept too busy to see much of each other and
when the proceedings finally closed and we all went home, the pattern had
endured. There’d been a few gusty if only superficially satisfying
couplings, but even these had stopped once it became clear that Ryker would be
cleared and released. Whatever shared warmth we’d been gathered in to was
out of control now, unsafe, like the flames from a smashed storm lantern, and
trying to hold onto it was only getting us both painfully scorched.

I turned
and gave her a faint smile. “Stay out of trouble, huh? That what you told
Trepp?”

It was an
unkind blow, and I knew it. Against all the odds, it seemed Kawahara had missed
Trepp with everything but the edge of the stun beam. The shard gun, I
remembered when they told me, had been dialled down to minimum dispersal just
before I went in to face Kawahara. Sheer luck I’d left it that way. By the
time the rapidly summoned UN forensics team arrived on Head in the Clouds to
take evidence under Ortega’s direction, Trepp had vanished, as had my
grav harness from the atmosphere sampling turret where I’d come aboard. I
didn’t know whether Ortega and Bautista had seen fit to let the mercenary
go in view of the testimony she could give concerning the
Panama Rose
,
or if Trepp had simply staggered off stage before the police got there. Ortega
had volunteered no information and there wasn’t enough left of our
previous intimacy for me to ask her outright. This was the first time
we’d discussed it openly.

Ortega
scowled at me. “You asking me to equate the two of you?”

“Not
asking you to do anything, Kristin.” I shrugged. “But for what
it’s worth, I don’t see a lot of ground between her and me.”