Altered Carbon (16 page)

“Sell
you a disc, man? Hot spinners out of Ulan Bator, House quality.”

I gave them
one smooth sweep, shook my head unhurriedly.

“Stiff?”

Another
shake. I reached the robot, paused as its multiple arms snaked down to frisk
me, then tried to walk over the threshold as the cheap synth voice said
‘clear’. One of the arms prodded me gently back at chest height.

“Do
you want cabins or bar?”

I
hesitated, pretending to weigh it up. “What’s the deal in the
bar?”

“Ha
ha ha.” Someone had programmed a laugh into the robot. It sounded like a
fat man drowning in syrup. It cut off abruptly. “The bar is
look
,
but don’t
touch
. No money down, no hands on. House rule. That
applies to other customers too.”

“Cabins,”
I said, anxious to get away from the mechanical barker’s software. The
street dealers on the car had been positively warm by comparison.

“Down
the stairs, to the left. Take a towel from the pile.”

I went down
the short metal-railed flight and turned left along a corridor lit from the
ceiling by rotating red lights like the ones on the autocabs outside. Incessant
junk rhythm music thrashed the air as if this was the ventricle of some massive
heart on tetrameth. As promised, there was a pile of fresh white towels in an
alcove and beyond it the doors to the cabins. I walked past the first four, two
of which were occupied, and stepped into the fifth.

The floor
was satin-sheened padding, about two metres by three. If it was stained, it
didn’t show because the only illumination came from a single rotating cherry
like the ones in the corridor. The air was warm and stale. Under the sweeping
shadows cast by the light a battered-looking credit console stood in one
corner, stalk painted matt black, red LED digital display at the top. There was
a slot for cards and cash. No pad for DNA credit. The far wall was frosted
glass.

I’d
seen this one coming and drawn a sheaf of currency through an autobank on the
way down through the city. I selected one of the large denomination plastified
notes and fed it into the slot. Punched the commence button. My credit flashed
up in LED red. The door hinged smoothly shut behind me, muffling the music, and
a body thudded against the frosted glass ahead with an abruptness that made me
twitch. The display digits flickered to life. Minimal expenditure so far. I
studied the body pressed against the glass. Heavy breasts pressed flat, a
woman’s profile and the indistinct lines of hips and thighs. Piped
moaning came softly through hidden speakers. A voice gusted.

“Do
you want to see me see me see me …?”

Cheap echo
box on the vocoder.

I pressed
the button again. The glass unfrosted and the woman on the other side became
visible. She shifted, side to side, showing herself to me, worked out body,
augmented breasts, leaned forward and licked the glass with the tip of her
tongue, breath misting it again. Her eyes locked onto mine.

“Do
you want to touch me touch me touch me …?”

Whether the
cabins used subsonics or not, I was getting a definite reaction from it all. My
penis thickened and stirred. I locked down the throbbing, forced the blood back
out and into my muscles the way a combat call would do. I needed to be limp for
this scene. I reached for the debit button again. The glass screen slid aside
and she stepped through, like someone coming out of a shower. She moved up to
me, one hand slid out, cupping.

“Tell
me what you want, honey,” she said from somewhere in the base of her
throat. The voice seemed hard edged, deprived of the vocoder effect.

I cleared
my own. “What’s your name?”

“Anenome.
Want to know why they call me that?”

Her hand
worked. Behind her, the meter was clicking over softly.

“You
remember a girl used to work here?” I asked.

She was
working on my belt now. “Honey, any girl
used
to work here
ain’t going to do for you what I am. Now, how would you—”

“She
was called Elizabeth. Her real name. Elizabeth Elliott.”

Her hands
fell abruptly away, and the mask of arousal slid off her face as if it was
greased underneath.

“What
the fuck is this? You the Sia?”

“The
what
?”

“Sia.
The heat.” Her voice was rising. She stepped away from me. “We
had
this, man—”

“No.”
I took a step towards her and she dropped into a competent-looking defensive
crouch. I backed up again, voice low. “No, I’m her mother.”

Taut
silence. She glared at me.

“Bullshit.
Lizzie’s ma’s in the store.”

“No.”
I pulled her hand back to my groin. “Feel. There’s nothing there.
They sleeved me in this, but I’m a woman. I don’t, I
couldn’t…”

She unbent
fractionally from her crouch, hands tugging down almost unwillingly.
“That looks like prime tank flesh to me,” she said untrustingly.
“You just come out of the store, how come you’re not paroled in
some bonebag junkie’s sleeve?”

“It’s
not parole.” The Corps’ deep-cover training came rocketing in
across my mind like a flight of low-level strike jets, spinning vapour-trail
lies on the edge of plausibility and half-known detail. Something inside me
tilted with the joy of mission time. “You know what I went down
for?”

“Lizzie
said mindbites, something—”

“Yeah.
Dipping. You know
who
I Dipped?”

“No.
Lizzie never talked much about—”

“Elizabeth
didn’t know. And it never came out on the wires.”

The
heavy-breasted girl put her hands on her hips. “So who—”

I skinned
her a smile. “Better you don’t know. Someone powerful. Someone with
enough pull to unstack me, and give me this.”

“Not
powerful enough to get you back in something with a pussy, though.”
Anenome’s voice was still doubtful, but the conviction was coming up
fast, like a bottleback school under reef water. She
wanted
to believe
this fairytale mother come looking for her lost daughter. “How come
you’re cross-sleeved?”

“There’s
a deal,” I told her, gliding near the truth to flesh out the story.
“This … person … gets me out, and I have to do something for
them. Something that needs a man’s body. If I do it, I get a new sleeve
for me and Elizabeth.”

“That
so? So why you here?” There was an edge of bitterness in her voice that
told me her parents would never come to this place looking for her. And that
she believed me. I laid the last pieces of the lie.

“There’s
a problem with re-sleeving Elizabeth. Someone’s blocking the procedure. I
want to know who it is, and why. You know who cut her up?”

She shook
her head, face turned down.

“A
lot of the girls get hurt,” she said quietly. “But Jerry’s
got insurance to cover that. He’s real good about it, even puts us into
store if it’s going to take a long time to heal. But whoever did Lizzie
wasn’t a regular.”

“Did
Elizabeth have regulars? Anyone important? Anyone strange?”

She looked
up at me, pity showing in the corners of her eyes. I’d played Irene
Elliott to the hilt. “Mrs.Elliott, all the people who come here are
strange. They wouldn’t be here if they weren’t.”

I made
myself wince. “Anyone Important?”

“I
don’t know. Look, Mrs.Elliott, I liked Lizzie, she was real kind to me a
coupla times when I got down, but we never got close. She was close with Chloe
and…” She paused, and added hurriedly,“Nothing like that, you
know, but her and Chloe, and Mac, they used to share things, you know, talk and
everything.”

“Can
I talk to them?”

Her eyes
flickered to the corners of the cabin, as if she had just heard an inexplicable
noise. She looked hunted.

“It’s
better if you don’t. Jerry, you know, he doesn’t like us talking to
the public. If he catches us…”

I put every
ounce of Envoy persuasiveness into stance and tone. “Well, maybe you
could ask for me…”

The hunted
look deepened, but her voice firmed up.

“Sure.
I’ll ask around. But not. Not now. You’ve got to go. Come back
tomorrow the same time. Same cabin. I’ll stay free for this time. Say you
made an appointment.”

I took her
hand in both of mine. “Thank you, Anenome.”

“My
name’s not Anenome,” she said abruptly. “I’m called
Louise. Call me Louise.”

“Thank
you, Louise.” I held on to her hand. “Thank you for doing
this—”

“Look,
I’m not promising anything,” she said with an attempt at roughness.
“Like I said, I’ll ask. That’s all. Now, you go.
Please.”

She showed
me how to cancel the remainder of my payment on the credit console, and the
door hinged immediately open. No change. I didn’t say anything else. I
didn’t try to touch her again. I walked out through the open door and
left her standing there with her arms wrapped around her chest and her head
down, staring at the satin-padded floor of the cabin as if she was seeing it
for the first time.

Lit in red.

Outside,
the street was unchanged. The two dealers were still there, deep in
negotiations with a huge Mongol who was leaning on the hood of the car, looking
at something between his hands. The octopus arched its arms to let me pass and
I stepped into the drizzle. The Mongol looked up as I passed and a flinch of
recognition passed over his face.

I stopped,
turning in mid-step, and he dropped his gaze again, muttering something to the
dealers. The neurachem came online like a shiver of cold water inside. I moved
across the space to the car, and the sparse conversation between the three men
dried up instantly. Hands slid into pouches and pockets. Something was pushing
me, something that had very little to do with the look the Mongol had given me.
Something dark that had spread its wings on the low-key misery of the cabin,
something uncontrolled that Virginia Vidaura would have bawled me out for. I
could hear Jimmy de Soto whispering in my ear.

“You
waiting for me?” I asked the Mongol’s back, and saw how the muscles
in it tensed.

Maybe one
of the dealers felt it coming. He held up his exposed hand in a placatory
gesture. “Look, man,” he began weakly.

I sliced
him a glance out of the corner of my eye and he shut up.

“I
said—”

That was
when it all came apart. The Mongol pushed himself off the car hood with a roar
and swatted at me with an arm the size of a ham. The blow never landed, but
even deflecting it, I staggered back a pace. The dealers skinned their weapons,
deadly little slabs of black and grey metal that spat and yapped in the rain. I
twisted away from the traceries of fire, using the Mongol for cover, and shot a
palm heel into his contorted face. Bone crunched and I came round him onto the
car while the dealers were still trying to work out where I was. The neurachem
made their movements into the pouring of thick honey. One gun-filled fist came
tracking towards me and I smashed the fingers around the metal with a sideflung
kick. The owner howled, and the edge of my hand cracked into the other
dealer’s temple. Both men reeled off the car, one still moaning, the
other insensible or dead. I came up into a crouch.

The Mongol
took off, running.

I vaulted
the roof of the ground car and went after him without thinking. The concrete
jarred my feet as I landed, sent splinters of pain lancing up both shins, but
the neurachem damped it down instantly and I was only a dozen metres behind. I
threw out my chest and sprinted.

Ahead of
me, the Mongol bounced around in my field of vision like a combat jet trying to
elude pursuing fire. For a man of his size, he was remarkably fast, flitting
between the marching support pillars of the expressway and into the shadows a
good twenty metres ahead now. I put on speed, wincing at the sharp pains in my
chest. Rain slapped at my face.

Fucking
cigarettes.

We came out
from under the pillars and across a deserted intersection where the traffic
lights leaned at drunken angles. One of them stirred feebly, lights changing,
as the Mongol passed it. A senile robot voice husked out at me.
Cross now.
Cross now. Cross now
. I already had. The echoes followed me beseechingly
up the street.

Past the
derelict hulks of vehicles that hadn’t moved from their kerbside resting
places in years. Barred and shuttered frontages that might or might not be
rolled up for business during daylight hours, steam rising from a grate in the
side of the street like something alive. The paving under my feet was slick
with the rain and a grey muck distilled from items of decaying garbage. The
shoes that had come with Bancroft’s summer suit were thin-soled and
devoid of useful grip. Only the perfect balance of the neurachem kept me
upright.

The Mongol
cast a glance back over his shoulder as he came level with two parked wrecks,
saw I was still there and broke left across the street as soon as he cleared
the last vehicle. I tried to adjust my trajectory and cut him off, crossing the
street at an angle before I reached the wrecked cars, but my quarry had timed
the trap too well. I was already on the first wreck, and I skidded trying to
stop in time. I bounced off the hood of the rusting vehicle into a shopfront
shutter. The metal clanged and sizzled; a low-current anti-loitering charge
stung my hands. Across the street, the Mongol stretched the distance between us
by another ten metres.