Altered Carbon (15 page)

“Gone,”
said Elliott, as if he had guessed who my attention was focused on. “Four
years ago. You know what Dipping is?”

I shook my
head.
Local colour
, Virginia Vidaura said in my ear.
Soak it up
.

Elliott
looked up, for a moment I thought at the holo of Anchana Salomao, but then I
saw that his head was tilted at the sky beyond. “Up there,” he
said, and jarred to a halt the way he had when he mentioned his
daughter’s youth.

I waited.

“Up
there, you got the comsats. Raining data. You can see it on some virtual maps,
it looks like someone’s knitting the world a scarf.” He looked down
at me again, eyes shiny. “Irene said that. Knitting the world a scarf.
Some of that scarf is people. Digitised rich folks, on their way between
bodies. Skeins of memory and feeling and thought, packaged up by
numbers.”

Now I
thought I knew what was coming, but I kept quiet.

“If
you’re good, like she was, and you’ve got the equipment, you can
sample those signals. They call them mindbites. Moments in the head of a
fashion-house princess, the ideas of a particle theorist, memories from a
king’s childhood. There’s a market for this stuff. Oh, the society
magazines run edited skullwalks of these sorts of people, but it’s all
authorised, sanitised. Cut for public consumption. No unguarded moments,
nothing that could embarrass anybody or damage popularity, just great big
plastic smiles on everything. That ain’t what people really want.”

I had my
doubts about that. The skullwalk magazines were big on Harlan’s World as
well, and the only time their consumers protested was when one of the notables
they portrayed was caught in some moment of human weakness. Infidelity and
abusive language were usually the biggest generators of public outcry. It made
sense. Anyone pitiful enough to want to spend so much time outside their own
head wasn’t going to want to see the same basic human realities reflected
in the gilded skulls of those they admired.

“With
mindbites, you get everything,” said Elliott with a peculiar enthusiasm I
suspected was a graft from his wife’s opinions. “The doubt, the
muck, the humanity. People will pay a fortune for it.”

“But
it’s illegal?”

Elliott
gestured at the shopfront that bore his name. “The data market was down.
Too many brokers. Saturated. We had a clone and re-sleeving policy to pay on
both of us, plus Elizabeth. My tac pension wasn’t going to be enough.
What could we do?”

“How
long did she get?” I asked him softly.

Elliott
stared out to sea. “Thirty years.”

After a
while, stare still fixed on the horizon, he said, “I was OK for six
months, then I turn on the screen and see some corporate negotiator wearing
Irene’s body.” He half-turned towards me and coughed out something
that might have been a laugh. “Corporation bought it direct from the Bay
City storage facility. Paid five times what I could have afforded. They say the
bitch only wears it alternate months.”

“Elizabeth
know that?”

He nodded
once, like an axe coming down. “She got it out of me, one night. I was
jack-happy. Been cruising the stacks all day, looking for business. No handle
on where I was or what was going on. You want to know what she said?”

“No,”
I muttered.

He
didn’t hear me. His knuckles had whitened on the iron railing. “She
said,
Don’t worry Daddy, when I’m rich we’ll buy Mummy
back
.”

This was
getting out of hand.

“Look,
Elliott, I’m sorry about your daughter, but from what I hear she
wasn’t working the kind of places Bancroft goes. Jerry’s Closed
Quarters isn’t exactly the Houses, is it?”

The ex-tac
spun on me without warning, and there was blind murder in his eyes and his
crooked hands. I couldn’t blame him. All he could see in front of him was
Bancroft’s man.

But you
can’t
jump an Envoy—the conditioning won’t let it happen. I saw the
attack coming almost before he knew he was going to do it himself, and I had
the neurachem of my borrowed sleeve online fragments of a second later. He hit
low, driving under the guard he thought I’d put up, looking for the body
blows that would break up my ribs. The guard wasn’t there, and neither
was I. Instead, I stepped inside the hooks of his punches, took him off balance
with my weight and tangled one leg amidst his. He stumbled back against the
railing and I drove a cruel elbow uppercut into his solar plexus. His face went
grey with the shock. Leaning over, I pinned him to the rail and jammed the fork
of my thumb and fingers into his throat.

“That’s
enough,” I snapped, a little unsteadily. The sleeve’s neurachem
wiring was a rougher piece of work than the Corps systems I’d used in the
past and in overdrive the overwhelming impression was of being slung around in
a subcutaneous bag of chicken wire.

I looked
down at Elliott.

His eyes
were a hand’s breadth from mine, and despite the grip I had on his throat
they were still burning with rage. Breath whistled in his teeth as he clawed
after the strength to break my grip and damage me.

I yanked
him off the rail and propped him away from me with a cautionary arm.

“Listen,
I’m passing no judgements here. I just want to know. What makes you think
she has any connection to Bancroft?”

“Because
she
told
me, motherfucker.” The sentence hissed out of him.
“She told me what he’d done.”

“And
what was that?”

He blinked
rapidly, the undischarged rage condensing into tears. “Dirty
tilings,” he said. “She said he
needed
them. Badly enough
to come back. Badly enough to pay.”

Meal
ticket.
Don’t worry Daddy, when I’m rich we’ll buy Mummy
back
. Easy enough mistake to make when you’re young. But nothing
comes that easy.

“You
think that’s why she died?”

He turned
his head and looked at me as if I was a particularly poisonous species of
spider on his kitchen floor.

“She
didn’t
die
, mister. Someone killed her. Someone took a razor and
cut her up.”

“Trial
transcript says it was a client. Not Bancroft.”

“How
would they know?” he said dully. “They name a body, who knows
who’s inside it. Who’s paying for it all.”

“They
find him yet?”

“Biocabin
whore’s killer? What do you think? It ain’t exactly like she worked
for the Houses, right?”

“That’s
not what I meant, Elliott. You say she turned Bancroft in Jerry’s,
I’ll believe you. But you’ve got to admit it doesn’t sound
like Bancroft’s style. I’ve met the man, and slumming?” I
shook my head. “He doesn’t read that way to me.”

Elliott
turned away.

“Flesh,”
he said. “What you going to read in a Meth’s flesh?”

It was
nearly full dark. Out across the water on the sloping deck of the warship, the
performance had started. We both stared at the lights for a while, heard the
bright snatches of music, like transmissions from a world that we were forever
locked out of.

“Elizabeth’s
still on stack,” I said quietly.

“Yeah,
so what? Re-sleeving policy lapsed four years ago, when we sank all the money
we had into some lawyer said he could crack Irene’s case.” He
gestured back at the dimly lit frontage of his offices. “I look like the
kind of guy’s going to come into some money real soon?”

There was nothing to say
after that. I left him watching the lights and walked back to the car. He was
still there when I drove back past him on the way out of the little town. He
didn’t look round.

(INTRUSION CONFLICT)

I called Prescott from the car. Her face
looked mildly irritated as it scribbled into focus on the dusty little screen
set into the dashboard.

“Kovacs.
Did you find what you were looking for?”

“Still
don’t really know what I’m looking for,” I said cheerfully.
“You think Bancroft ever does the biocabins?”

She pulled
a face. “Oh, please.”

“All
right, here’s another one. Did Leila Begin ever work biocabin
joints?”

“I
really have no idea, Kovacs.”

“Well,
look it up then. I’ll hold.” My voice came out stony.
Prescott’s well-bred distaste wasn’t sitting too well beside Victor
Elliott’s anguish for his daughter.

I drummed
my fingers on the wheel while the lawyer went off-screen and found myself
muttering a Millsport fisherman’s rap to the rhythm. Outside the coast
slid by in the night, but the scents and sounds of the sea were suddenly all
wrong. Too muted, not a trace of belaweed on the wind.

“Here
we are.” Prescott settled herself back within range of the phone scanner,
looking slightly uncomfortable. “Begin’s Oakland records show two
stints in biocabins, before she got tenure in one of the San Diego Houses. She
must have had an entrée, unless it was a talent scout that spotted
her.”

Bancroft
would have been quite an entrée to anywhere. I resisted the temptation
to say it.

“You
got an image there?”

“Of
Begin?” Prescott shrugged. “Only a two-d. You want me to send
it.”

“Please.”

The ancient
earphone fizzled a bit as it adjusted to the change of incoming signal, and
then Leila Begin’s features emerged from the static. I leaned closer,
scanning them for the truth. It took a moment or two to find, but it was there.

“Right.
Now can you get me the address of that place Elizabeth Elliott worked.
Jerry’s Closed Quarters. It’s on a street called Mariposa.”

“Mariposa
and San Bruno,” Prescott’s disembodied voice came back from behind
Leila Begin’s full service pout. “Jesus, it’s right under the
old expressway. That’s
got
to be a safety violation.”

“Can
you send me a map, route marked through from the bridge?”

“You’re
going there? Tonight?”

“Prescott,
these places don’t do a lot of business during the day,” I said
patiently. “Of course I’m going there tonight.”

There was a
slight hesitation on the other end of the line.

“It’s
not a recommended area, Kovacs. You need to be careful.”

This time I
couldn’t be bothered to stifle the snort of amusement. It was like
listening to someone tell a surgeon to be careful and not get his hands bloody.
She must have heard me.

“I’m
sending the map,” she said stiffly.

Leila
Begin’s face blinked out and a tracery of grid-patterned streets inked
themselves into the place she had been. I didn’t need her any more. Her
hair had been iridescent crimson, her throat choked with a steel collar and her
eyes made up with startle lines, but it was the lines of the face below it all
that stayed with me. The same lines faintly emergent in Victor Elliott’s Kodakristal
of his daughter. The understated but undeniable similarity.

Miriam
Bancroft.

There was
rain in the air when I got back to the city, a fine drizzle sifting down from
the darkened sky. Parked across the street from Jerry’s, I watched the
blinking neon club sign through the streaks and beads of water on the
windscreen of the ground car. Somewhere in the gloom below the concrete bones
of the expressway a holo of a woman danced in a cocktail glass, but there was a
fault in the ‘caster and the image kept fizzling out.

I’d
been worried about the ground car drawing attention, but it seemed that
I’d come to the right part of town with it. Most of the vehicles around
Jerry’s were flightless; the only exceptions to the rule were the
autocabs that occasionally spiralled down to disgorge or collect passengers and
then sprang back up into the aerial traffic flow with inhuman accuracy and
speed. With their arrays of red, blue and white navigation lights they seemed
like jewelled visitors from another world, barely touching the cracked and
litter-strewn paving while their charges alighted or climbed aboard.

I watched
for an hour. The club did brisk business, varied clientele but mostly male.
They were checked at the door by a security robot that resembled nothing so
much as a concertina’d octopus strung from the lintel of the main
entrance. Some had to divest themselves of concealed items, presumably weapons,
and one or two were turned away. There were no protests—you can’t
argue with a robot. Outside, people parked, climbed in and out of cars and did
deals with merchandise too small to make out at this distance. Once, two men
started a knife fight in the shadows between two of the expressway’s
support pillars, but it didn’t come to much. One combatant limped off, clutching
a slashed arm, and the other returned to the club’s interior as if
he’d done no more than go out to relieve himself.

I climbed
out of the car, made sure it was alarmed, and wandered across the street. A
couple of the dealers were seated cross-legged on the hood of a car, shielded
from the rain by a static repulsion unit set up between their feet, and they
glanced up as I approached.