Altered Carbon (19 page)

I made a
noise. The image she had just planted, of being the focus for a pack of bodies
like this one, all orchestrated by the same mind, tightened the last notches on
my hard-on, and her hand slid up and down its full length as if machined there.

“What
was that?” She leaned over me, brushing her nipples across my chest.

“How
long?” I managed, through the coiling and uncoiling of my stomach
muscles, through the flesh and mist tones of the Merge Nine. “Is this fun
park invitation good for?”

She grinned
then, a grin of pure lechery.

“Unlimited
rides,” she said.

“But
for a limited period only, right?”

She shook
her head. “No, you don’t understand me. This place is mine. All of
it, the island, the sea around it, everything on it. Is mine. I can keep you
there as long as you care to stay. Until you tire of it.”

“That
might take a long time.”

“No.”
There was a hint of sadness in the way she shook her head this time and her
gaze fell a little. “No it won’t.”

The
pistoning grip on my penis slackened fractionally. I groaned and grabbed at her
hand, forcing it back into motion. The move seemed to rekindle her, and she
went to work again in earnest, speeding up and slowing down, bending to feed me
her breasts or supplement her strokes with sucking and licking. My time
perception spiralled out of sight to be replaced with an endless gradient of
sensation that sloped upward, excruciatingly slowly, towards a peak I could
hear myself begging for in drugged tones somewhere far away.

As the
orgasm loomed, I was vaguely aware through the Merge Nine link that she was
sinking fingers into herself, rubbing with an uncontrolled desire completely at
odds with the calculation with which she manipulated me. Fine-tuned by the
empathin, she brought on her own peak a few seconds before mine and as I started
to come, she smeared her own juices hard over my face and thrashing body.

Whiteout.

And when I came to, much
later, with the Merge Nine crash laid across me like a lead weight, she was
gone like a fever dream.

When you have no friends, and the woman
you slept with last night has left you with a screaming head and without a
word, you have a limited number of options. When I was younger I used to go out
looking for squalid brawls in the streets of Newpest. This got a couple of
people stabbed, neither of them me, and led in turn to my apprenticeship in one
of the Harlan’s World gangs (Newpest chapter). Later on, I upgraded this
kind of retreat by joining the military; brawling with a purpose, and with more
extensive weaponry, but as it turned out, just as squalid. I don’t
suppose I should have been as surprised as I was—the only thing the
marine corps recruiters had really wanted to know was how many fights I had
won.

These days
I’ve evolved a slightly less destructive response to general chemical
malaise. When a forty-minute swim in the Hendrix’s underground pool
failed to dispel either the longing for Miriam Bancroft’s torrid company
or the Merge Nine hangover, I did the only thing I felt equipped for. I ordered
painkillers from room service, and went shopping.

Bay City
had already settled into the swing of the day by the time I finally hit the
streets, and the commercial centre was choked with pedestrians. I stood on the
edges for a couple of minutes, then dived in and began to look in windows.

A blonde
marine sergeant with the unlikely name of Serenity Carlyle taught me to shop,
back on the World. Prior to that I had always employed a technique best described
as precision purchase. You identify your target, you go in, get it and come
out. You can’t get what you want, cut your losses and get out equally
fast. Over the period that we spent together, Serenity weaned me off this
approach, and sold me her philosophy of consumer grazing.

“Look,”
she told me one day in a Millsport coffee house. “Shopping—actual,
physical shopping—could have been phased out centuries ago if
they’d wanted it that way.”

“They
who?”

“People.
Society.” She waved a hand impatiently. “Whoever. They had the
capacity back then. Mail order, virtual supermarkets, automated debiting
systems. It could have been done and it never happened. What does that tell
you?”

At
twenty-two years old, a marine corps grunt via the street gangs of Newpest, it
told me nothing. Carlyle took in my blank look and sighed.

“It
tells you that people
like
shopping. That it satisfies a basic,
acquisitive need at a genetic level. Something we inherited from our
hunter-gatherer ancestors. Oh, you’ve got automated convenience shopping
for basic household items, mechanical food distribution systems for the
marginalised poor. But you’ve also got a massive proliferation of
commercial hives and speciality markets in food and crafts which people
physically have to
go to
. Now why would they do that, if they
didn’t enjoy it?”

I probably
shrugged, maintaining my youthful cool.

“Shopping
is physical interaction, exercise of decision-making capacity, sating of the
desire to acquire, and an impulse to more acquisition, a scouting urge.
It’s so basically flicking human when you think about it. You’ve
got to learn to love it, Tak. I mean you can cross the whole archipelago on a
hover, you never even need to get wet. But that doesn’t take the basic
pleasure out of swimming, does it? Learn to shop
well
, Tak. Get
flexible. Enjoy the uncertainty.”

Enjoyment
wasn’t exactly what I was feeling at the moment, but I stuck with it and
I stayed flexible, true to Serenity Carlyle’s creed. I started out
vaguely looking for a heavy-duty waterproof jacket, but the thing that finally
pulled me into a shop was a pair of all-terrain walking boots.

The boots
were followed by loose black trousers and a crossover insulated top with enzyme
seals that ran all the way from waist to a tight crew neck. I’d seen
variations on the outfit a hundred times on the streets of Bay City so far.
Surface assimilation. It would do. After brief hungover reflection, I added a
defiant red silk bandanna across my forehead, Newpest gang style. It
wasn’t exactly assimilative, but it went with the vaguely mutinous
irritation that had been rising in me since yesterday. I dumped
Bancroft’s summer suit in a skip on the street outside and left the shoes
beside it.

Before I
left it, I searched through the jacket pockets and came up with two cards: the
doctor at Bay City Central and Bancroft’s armourer.

Larkin and
Green proved to be the names not of two gunsmiths, but of two streets that
intersected on a leafy slope called Russian Hill. The autocab had some visitors
blurb about the area, but I skipped it. Larkin & Green, Armourers since
2203 was a discreet corner façade, extending less than a half dozen
metres along each street, but bordered by blinded units that looked as if they
had probably been annexed. I pushed through well-cared-for wooden doors into
the cool, oil-smelling interior.

Inside, the
place reminded me of the chart room at Suntouch House. There was space, and
light flooding in from two storeys of tall windows. The first floor had been
removed and replaced with a wide gallery on four sides overlooking the ground
level. The walls were hung with flat display cases and the space under the
gallery overhang hosted heavy glass-topped trolleys that performed the same
function. There was the faint tang of an ambient modifier in the air, scent of
old trees under the gun oil, and the floor under my newly booted feet was
carpeted.

A black
steel face appeared over the gallery rail. Green photo-receptors burned in
place of eyes. “May I be of assistance, sir?”

“I’m
Takeshi Kovacs. I’m here from Laurens Bancroft,” I said, tipping my
head back to meet the mandroid’s gaze. “I’m looking for some
hardware.”

“Of
course, sir.” The voice was smoothly male and devoid of any sales
subsonics I could detect. “Mr.Bancroft told us to expect you. I am with a
client, but I shall be down presently. Please make yourself at home. There are
chairs to your left and a refreshments cabinet. Please help yourself.”

The head
disappeared and a murmured conversation I had vaguely registered when I came in
was resumed. I located the refreshments cabinet, found it stocked with alcohol
and cigars and closed it hurriedly. The painkillers had taken the edge off the
Merge Nine hangover, but I was in no fit state for further abuse. With a light
shock, I realised I’d gone through the day so far without a cigarette. I
wandered over to the nearest display case and looked in at a selection of
samurai swords. There were date tickets attached to the scabbards. Some of them
were older than me.

The next
case held a rack of brown and grey projectile weapons that seemed to have been
grown rather than machined. The barrels sprouted from organically curved
wrappings that flared gently back to the stock. These too were dated back into
the last century. I was trying to decipher the curled engraving on a barrel
when I heard a metallic tread on the staircase behind me.

“Has
sir found anything to his liking?”

I turned to
face the approaching mandroid. Its entire body was the same polished gunmetal,
moulded into the muscle configuration of an archetypal human male. Only the
genitals were absent. The face was long and thin, fine-featured enough to hold
attention despite its immobility. The head was carved into furrows to represent
thick backcombed hair. Stamped across the chest was the almost eroded legend
Mars
Expo 2076
.

“Just
looking.” I said and gestured back at the guns. “Are these made of
wood?”

The green
photo-receptor gaze regarded me gravely. “That is correct, sir. The
stocks are a beech hybrid. They are all handmade weapons. Kalashnikov, Purdey
and Beretta. We stock all the European houses here. Which was sir interested
in?”

I looked
back. There was a curious poetry to the forms, something slung part way between
functional bluntness and organic grace, something that cried out to be cradled.
To be used.

“They’re
a bit ornate for me. I had in mind something a little more practical.”

“Certainly,
sir. Can we assume sir is not a novice in this field?”

I grinned
at the machine. “We can assume that.”

“Then
perhaps sir would care to tell me what his preferences in the past have
been.”

“Smith
& Wesson 11mm Magnum. Ingram 40 flechette gun. Sunjet particle thrower. But
that wasn’t in this sleeve.”

The green
receptors glowed. No comment. Perhaps it hadn’t been programmed for light
conversation with Envoys.

“And
what exactly is sir looking for in this sleeve?”

I shrugged.
“Something subtle. Something not. Projectile weapons. And a blade. The
heavy one needs to be something like the Smith.”

The
mandroid became quite still. I could almost hear the whirring of data
retrieval. I wondered briefly how a machine like this had come to wind up here.
It had clearly not been designed for the job. On Harlan’s World, you
don’t see many mandroids. They’re expensive to build, compared to a
synthetic, or even a clone, and most jobs that require a human form are better
done by those organic alternatives. The truth is that a robot human is a
pointless collision of two disparate functions. Artificial intelligence, which
really works better strung out on a mainframe, and hard-wearing, hazardproof
bodywork which most cyber-engineering firms designed to spec for the task in
hand. The last robot I’d seen on the World was a gardening crab.

The
photo-receptors brightened slightly and the thing’s posture unlocked.
“If sir would care to come this way, I believe I have the right
combination.”

I followed
the machine through a door that blended so well with the décor of the
back wall that I hadn’t seen it and down a short corridor. Beyond was a
long, low room whose unpainted plaster walls were lined with raw fibre-glass
packing cases. There were a number of people working quietly at points up and
down the room. The air carried the businesslike rattle of hardware in practised
hands. The mandroid led me to a small grey-haired man dressed in grease-streaked
coveralls who was stripping down an electromag bolt-thrower as if it were a
roast chicken. He looked up as we approached.

“Chip?”
He nodded at the machine and ignored me.

“Clive,
this is Takeshi Kovacs. He’s a friend of Mr.Bancroft, looking for
equipment. I’d like you to show him the Nemex and a Philips gun, and then
pass him on to Sheila for a blade weapon.”

Clive
nodded again and set aside the electromag.

“This
way,” he said.

The
mandroid touched my arm lightly. “Should sir require anything further, I
shall be in the showroom.”

It bowed
fractionally and left. I followed Clive along the rows of packing cases to
where a variety of handguns were laid out on piles of plastic confetti. He
selected one and turned back to me with it in his hands.

“Second
series Nemesis X,” he said, holding out the gun. “The Nemex.
Manufactured under licence for Mannlicher-Schoenauer. Fires a jacketed slug
with a customised propellant called Druck 31. Very powerful, very accurate. The
magazine takes eighteen shells in a staggered clip. Bit bulky but worth it in a
firefight. Feel the weight.”