Altered Carbon (13 page)

“Full
life support suspension chambers,” said Nyman. “Essentially the
same environment as the pods. This is where all the re-sleeving is done. We
bring fresh clones through, still in the pod, and load them here. The tank
nutrients have an enzyme to break down the pod wall, so the transition is
completely trauma-free. Any clinical work is carried out by staff working in
synthetic sleeves, to avoid any risk of contamination.”

I caught
the exasperated rolling of Oumou Prescott’s eyes on the periphery of my
vision and a grin twitched at the corner of my mouth.

“Who
has access to this chamber?”

“Myself,
authorised staff under a day code. And the owners, of course.”

I wandered
down the line of cylinders, bending to examine the data displays at the foot of
each one. There was a Miriam clone in the sixth, and two of Naomi’s at
seven and eight.

“You’ve
got the daughter on ice twice?”

“Yes.”
Nyman looked puzzled, and then slightly superior. This was his chance to get
back the initiative he’d lost on the fractal patterning. “Have you
not been informed of her current condition?”

“Yeah,
she’s in psychosurgery,” I growled. “That doesn’t
explain why there’s two of her here.”

“Well.”
Nyman darted a glance back at Prescott, as if to say that the divulging of
further information involved some legal dimension. The lawyer cleared her
throat.

“PsychaSec
have instructions from Mr.Bancroft to always hold a spare clone of himself and
his immediate family ready for decanting. While Ms.Bancroft is committed to the
Vancouver psychiatric stack, both sleeves are stored here.”

“The
Bancrofts like to alternate their sleeves,” said Nyman knowledgeably.
“Many of our clients do, it saves on wear and tear. The human body is
capable of quite remarkable regeneration if stored correctly, and of course we
offer a complete package of clinical repair for more major damage. Very
reasonably priced.”

“I’m
sure it is.” I turned back from the end cylinder and grinned at him.
“Still, not much you can do for a vaporised head, is there?”

There was a
brief silence, during which Prescott looked fixedly at a corner of the ceiling
and Nyman’s lips tightened to almost anal proportions.

“I
consider that remark in very poor taste,” the director said finally.
“Do you have any more
important
questions, Mr.Kovacs?”

I paused
next to Miriam Bancroft’s cylinder and looked into it. Even through the
fogging effect of the observation plate and the gel, there was a sensual
abundance to the blurred form within.

“Just
one question. Who decides when to alternate the sleeves?”

Nyman
glanced across at Prescott as if to enlist legal support for his words.
“I am directly authorised by Mr.Bancroft to effect the transfer on every
occasion that he is digitised, unless specifically required not to. He made no
such request on this occasion.”

There was
something here, scratching at the Envoy antennae; something somewhere
fitted
.
It was too early to give it concrete form. I looked around the room.

“This
place is entry-monitored, right?”

“Naturally.”
Nyman’s tone was still chilly.

“Was
there much activity the day Bancroft went to Osaka?”

“No
more than usual. Mr.Kovacs, the police have already been through these records.
I really don’t see what value—”

“Indulge
me,” I suggested, not looking at him, and the Envoy cadences in my voice
shut him down like a circuit breaker.

Two hours
later I was staring out of the window of another autocab as it kicked off from
the Alcatraz landing quay and climbed over the Bay.

“Did
you find what you were looking for?”

I glanced
at Oumou Prescott, wondering if she could sense the frustration coming off me.
I thought I’d got most of the external giveaways on this sleeve locked down,
but I’d heard of lawyers who got empath conditioning to pick up more
subliminal clues to their witnesses’ states of mind when on the stand.
And here, on Earth, it wouldn’t surprise me if Oumou Prescott had a full
infrared subsonic body and voice scan package racked into her beautiful ebony
head.

The entry
data for the Bancroft vault, Thursday 16th August, was as free of suspicious
comings and goings as the Mishima Mall on a Tuesday afternoon. Eight a.m.,
Bancroft came in with two assistants, stripped off and climbed into the waiting
tank. The assistants left with his clothes. Fourteen hours later his alternate
clone climbed dripping out of the neighbouring tank, collected a towel from
another assistant and went to get a shower. No words exchanged beyond
pleasantries. Nothing.

I shrugged.
“I don’t know. I don’t really know what I’m looking for
yet.”

Prescott
yawned. “Total Absorb, huh?”

“Yeah,
that’s right.” I looked at her more closely. “You know much
about the Corps?”

“Bit.
I did my articles in UN litigation. You pick up the terminology. So what have
you absorbed so far?”

“Only
that there’s a lot of smoke building up around something the authorities
say isn’t burning. You ever meet the lieutenant that ran the case?”

“Kristin
Ortega. Of course. I’m not likely to forget her. We were yelling at each
other across a desk for the best part of a week.”

“Impressions?”

“Of
Ortega?” Prescott looked surprised. “Good cop, as far as I know.
Got a reputation for being very tough. The Organic Damage Division are the police
department’s hard men, so earning a reputation like that wouldn’t
have been easy. She ran the case efficiently enough—”

“Not
for Bancroft’s liking.”

Pause.
Prescott looked at me warily. “I said efficiently. I didn’t say
persistently. Ortega did her job, but—”

“But
she doesn’t like Meths, right?”

Another
pause. “You have quite an ear for the street, Mr.Kovacs.”

“You
pick up the terminology,” I said modestly. “Do you think Ortega
would have kept the case open if Bancroft hadn’t been a Meth?”

Prescott
thought about it for a while. “It’s a common enough
prejudice,” she said slowly, “But I don’t get the impression
Ortega shut us down because of it. I think she just saw a limited return on her
investment. The police department has a promotion system based at least partly
on the number of cases solved. No one saw a quick solution to this one, and
Mr.Bancroft was alive, so…”

“Better
things to do, huh?”

“Yes.
Something like that.”

I stared
out the window some more. The cab was flitting across the tops of slender multi-storey
stacks and the traffic-crammed crevices between. I could feel an old fury
building in me that had nothing to do with my current problems. Something that
had accrued through the years in the Corps and the emotional rubble you got
used to seeing, like silt on the surface of your soul.
Virginia Vidaura,
Jimmy de Soto, dying in my arms at Innenin, Sarah
… A loser’s
catalogue, any way you looked at it.

I locked it
down.

The scar
under my eye was itching, and there was the curl of the nicotine craving in my
fingertips. I rubbed at the scar. Left the cigarettes in my pocket. At some
indeterminate point this morning I’d determined to quit. A thought struck
me at random.

“Prescott,
you chose this sleeve for me, right?”

“Sorry?”
She was scanning through a subretinal projection, and it took her a moment to
refocus on me. “What did you say?”

“This
sleeve. You chose it, right?”

She
frowned. “No. As far as I know that selection was made by Mr.Bancroft. We
just provided the shortlist according to specifications.”

“No,
he told me his lawyers had handled it. Definitely.”

“Oh.”
The frown cleared away, and she smiled faintly. “Mr.Bancroft has a great
many lawyers. Probably he routed it through another office. Why?”

I grunted.
“Nothing. Whoever owned this body before was a smoker, and I’m not.
It’s a real pain in the balls.”

Prescott’s
smile gained ground. “Are you going to give up?”

“If I
can find the time. Bancroft’s deal is, I crack the case, I can be
re-sleeved no expense spared, so it doesn’t really matter long term. I
just hate waking up with a throatful of shit every morning.”

“Do
you think you can?”

“Give
up smoking?”

“No.
Crack this case.”

I looked at
her, deadpan. “I don’t really have any other option, counsellor.
Have you read the terms of my employment?”

“Yes.
I drew them up.” Prescott gave me back the deadpan look, but buried
beneath it were traces of the discomfort that I needed to see to stop me
reaching across the cab and smashing her nose bone up into her brain with one
stiffened hand.

“Well,
well,” I said, and went back to looking out of the window.

AND MY FIST
UP YOUR WIFE’S CUNT WITH YOU WATCHING YOU FUCKING METH MOTHERFUCKER YOU
CAN’T

I slipped
off the headset and blinked. The text had carried some crude but effective
virtual graphics and a subsonic that made my head buzz. Across the desk,
Prescott looked at me with knowing sympathy.

“Is
it all like this?” I asked.

“Well,
it gets less coherent.” She gestured at the holograph display floating
above the desktop, where representations of the files I was accessing tumbled
in cool shades of blue and green. “This is what we call the R&R
stack. Rabid and Rambling. Actually, these guys are mostly too far gone to be
any real threat, but it’s not nice, knowing they’re out there.”

“Ortega
bring any of them in?”

“It’s
not her department. The Transmission Felony Division catches a few every now
and then, when we squawk loudly enough about it, but dissemination technology
being the way it is, it’s like trying to throw a net over smoke. And even
when you do catch them, the worst they’ll get is a few months in storage.
It’s a waste of time. We mostly just sit on this stuff until Bancroft
says we can delete it.”

“And
nothing new in the last six months?”

Prescott
shrugged. “The religious lunatics, maybe. Some increased traffic from the
Catholics on Resolution 653. Mr.Bancroft has an undeclared influence in the UN
Court, which is more or less common knowledge. Oh, and some Martian
archaeological sect has been screaming about that Songspire he keeps in his
hall. Apparently last month was the anniversary of their founder’s
martyrdom by leaky pressure suit. But none of these people have the wherewithal
to crack the perimeter defences at Suntouch House.”

I tilted my
chair back and stared up at the ceiling. A flight of grey birds angled overhead
in a southward pointing chevron. Their voices were faintly audible, honking to
each other. Prescott’s office was environment-formatted, all six internal
surfaces projecting virtual images. Currently, her grey metal desk was incongruously
positioned halfway down a sloping meadow on which the sun was beginning to
decline, complete with a small herd of cattle in the distance and occasional
birdsong. The image resolution was some of the best I’d seen.

“Prescott,
what can you tell me about Leila Begin?”

The silence
that ensued pulled my eyes back down to ground level. Oumou Prescott was
staring off into a corner of the field.

“I
suppose Kristin Ortega gave you that name,” she said slowly.

“Yeah.”
I sat up. “She said it would give me some insight into Bancroft. In fact,
she told me to run it by you to see if you rattled.”

Prescott
swivelled to face me. “I don’t see how this can have any bearing on
the case at hand.”

“Try
me.”

“Very
well.” There was a snap in her voice as she said it, and a defiant look
on her face. “Leila Begin was a prostitute. Maybe still is. Fifty years
ago, Bancroft was one of her clients. Through a number of indiscretions, this
became known to Miriam Bancroft. The two women met at some function down in San
Diego, apparently agreed to go to the bathroom together, and Miriam Bancroft
beat the shit out of Leila Begin.”

I studied
Prescott’s face across the table, puzzled. “And that’s
it?”

“No,
that’s not it, Kovacs,” she said tiredly. “Begin was six
months pregnant at the time. She lost the child as a result of the beating. You
physically can’t fit a spinal stack into a foetus, so that made it real
death. Potential three- to five-decade sentence.”

“Was
it Bancroft’s baby?”

Prescott
shrugged. “Debatable. Begin refused to let them do a gene match on the
foetus. Said it was irrelevant who the father was. She probably figured the
uncertainty was more valuable from a press point of view than a definite
no.”

“Or
she was too distraught?”

“Come
on, Kovacs.” Prescott jerked a hand irritably at me. “This is an
Oakland whore we’re talking about.”