Altered Carbon (29 page)

This time
Bancroft’s open-handed motion was dismissive. “A corruption charge.
Unjustified organic damage, and attempted falsification of personality detail.
I understand it wasn’t his first offence.”

“Yeah,
that’s right. In fact he was well known for it. Well known and very
unpopular, especially around places like Licktown, which is where I’ve
been the last couple of days, following the trail of your dripping dick. But
we’ll come back to that. I want to know why you did it. Why am I wearing
Ryker’s sleeve?”

Bancroft’s
eyes flared momentarily at the insult, but he really was too good a player to
rise to it. Instead, he shot his right cuff in a displacement gesture I
recognised from Diplomatic Basic, and smiled faintly.

“Really,
I had no idea it would prove inconvenient. I was looking to provide you with
suitable armour, and the sleeve carries—”

“
Why
Ryker
?”

There was a
beat of silence. Meths were not people you interrupted lightly, and Bancroft
was having a hard time dealing with the lack of respect. I thought about the
tree beyond the tennis courts. No doubt Ortega, had she been there, would have
cheered.

“A
move, Mr.Kovacs. Merely a move.”

“A
move? Against Ortega?”

“Just
so.” Bancroft settled back into his seat. “Lieutenant Ortega made
her prejudices quite clear the moment she stepped into this house. She was
unhelpful in the extreme. She lacked respect. It was something that I
remembered, an account to be adjusted. When the shortlist Oumou provided me
with included Elias Ryker’s sleeve, and listed Ortega as paying the tank
mortgage, I saw the move as almost karmic. It dictated itself.”

“A
little childish for someone your age, don’t you think?”

Bancroft
inclined his head. “Perhaps. But then, do you recall a General Maclntyre
of Envoy Command, resident of Harlan’s World, who was found gutted and
decapitated in his private jet a year after the Innenin massacre?”

“Vaguely.”
I sat, cold, remembering. But if Bancroft could play the control game, so could
I.

“Vaguely?”
Bancroft raised an eyebrow. “I’d have thought a veteran of Innenin
could scarcely fail to recall the death of the commander who presided over the
whole debacle, the man many claim was actually guilty by negligence of all
those Real Deaths.”

“Maclntyre
was exonerated of all blame by the Protectorate Court of Inquiry,” I said
quietly. “Do you have a point to make?”

Bancroft
shrugged. “Only that it seems his death was a revenge killing, despite
the verdict handed down by the court, a pointless act, in fact, since it could
not bring back those who died. Childishness is a common enough sin amongst
humans. Perhaps we should not be so quick to judge.”

“Perhaps
not.” I stood up and went to stand at the door of the conservatory,
looking out. “Well, then don’t feel that I’m sitting in
judgement, but why exactly didn’t you tell me you spent so much time in
whorehouses?”

“Ah,
the Elliott girl. Yes, Oumou has told me about this. Do you seriously think her
father had something to do with my death?”

I turned back.
“Not now, no. I seriously believe he had nothing to do with your death,
in fact. But I’ve wasted a lot of time finding that out.”

Bancroft
met my eye calmly. “I’m sorry if my briefing was inadequate,
Mr.Kovacs. It is true, I spend some of my leisure time in purchased sexual
release, both real and virtual. Or, as you so elegantly put it, whorehouses.
I’d not considered it especially important. Equally, I spend part of my
time in small-scale gambling. And occasionally null-gravity knife fighting. All
of these things could make me enemies, as indeed could most of my business
interests. I didn’t feel that your first day in a new sleeve on a new
world was the time for a line-by-line explanation of my life. Where would I
expect to begin? Instead, I told you the background of the crime and suggested
that you talk to Oumou. I didn’t expect you to take off after the first
clue like a heatseeker. Nor did I expect you to lay waste everything that got
in your way. I was told the Envoy Corps had a reputation for
subtlety
.”

Put like
that, he had a point. Virginia Vidaura would have been furious, she probably
would have been right behind Bancroft, waiting to deck me for gross lack of
finesse. But then, neither she nor Bancroft had been looking into Victor
Elliott’s face the night he told me about his family. I swallowed a sharp
retort and marshalled what I knew, trying to decide how much to let go of.

“Laurens?”

Miriam
Bancroft was standing just outside the conservatory, a towel draped around her
neck and her racket under one arm.

“Miriam.”
There was a genuine deference in Bancroft’s tone, but little else that I
could determine.

“I’m
taking Nalan and Joseph out to Hudson’s Raft for a scuba lunch.
Joseph’s never done it before, and we’ve talked him into it.”
She glanced from Bancroft to myself and back. “Will you be coming with
us?”

“Maybe
later,” said Bancroft. “Where will you be?”

Miriam
shrugged. “I hadn’t really thought about it. Somewhere on the
starboard decks. Benton’s, maybe?”

“Fine.
I’ll catch you up. Spear me a kingfish if you see one.”

“Aye
aye.” She touched the blade of one hand to the side of her head in a
ludicrous salute that made both of us smile unexpectedly. Miriam’s gaze
quivered and settled on me. “Do you like seafood, Mr.Kovacs?”

“Probably.
I’ve had very little time to exercise my tastes on Earth, Mrs.Bancroft.
So far I’ve only eaten what my hotel has to offer.”

“Well.
Once you’ve developed a taste for it,” she said significantly,
“maybe we’ll see you as well?”

“Thank
you, but I doubt it.”

“Well,”
she repeated brightly. “Try not to be too much longer, Laurens.
I’ll need
some
help keeping Marco off Nalan’s back.
He’s fuming, by the way.”

Bancroft
grunted. “The way he played today, I’m not surprised. I thought for
a while he was doing it deliberately.”

“Not
the last game,” I said, to no one in particular.

The
Bancrofts focused on me, he unreadably, she with her head tipped to one side
and a sudden wide smile that made her look unexpectedly child-like. For a
moment I met her gaze, and one hand rose to touch her hair with what seemed
like fractional uncertainty.

“Curtis
will be bringing the limousine round,” she said. “I’ll have
to go. It was a pleasure to see you again, Mr.Kovacs.”

We both
watched her stride away across the lawn, her tennis skirt tilting back and
forth. Even allowing for Bancroft’s apparent indifference to his wife as
a sexual being, Miriam’s wordplay was steering fractionally too close to
the wind for my liking. I had to plug the silence with something.

“Tell
me something, Bancroft,” I said with my eyes still on the receding
figure. “No disrespect intended, but why does someone who’s married
to her, who’s chosen to stay married, spend his time in quote purchased
sexual release?”

I turned
casually back and found him watching me without expression. He said nothing for
several seconds, and when he spoke his voice was carefully bland.

“Have
you ever come in a woman’s face, Kovacs?”

Culture
shock is something they teach you to lock down very early on in the Corps, but
just occasionally a blast gets through the armour and the reality around you
feels like a jigsaw that won’t quite fit together. I barely chopped off
my stare before it got started. This man, older than the entire human history
of my planet, was asking me this question. It was as if he’d asked me had
I ever played with water pistols.

“Uh.
Yes. It, uh, it happens if—”

“A
woman you paid?”

“Well,
sometimes. Not especially. I—” I remembered his wife’s
abandoned laughter as I exploded into and around her mouth, come trickling down
over her knuckles like foam from a popped champagne bottle. ”I
don’t really remember. It’s not a special fetish of mine,
and—

“Nor
of mine,” snapped the man in front of me, with rather too much emphasis.
“I choose it merely as an example. There are things, desires, in all of
us that are better suppressed. Or at least, that cannot be expressed in a
civilised context.”

“I’d
hardly counterpose civilisation with spilling semen.”

“You
come from another place,” said Bancroft broodingly. “A brash, young
colonial culture. You can have no concept of how the centuries of tradition
have moulded us here on earth. The young of spirit, the adventurous, all left
on the ships in droves. They were encouraged to leave. Those who stayed were
the stolid, the obedient, the limited. I watched it happen, and at the time I
was glad, because it made carving out an empire so much easier. Now, I wonder
if it was worth the price we paid. Culture fell in on itself, grappled after
norms to live by, settled for the old and familiar. Rigid morality, rigid law.
The UN declarations fossilised into global conformity, there was
a—” he gestured “—a sort of supracultural straitjacket,
and with an inherent fear of what might be borne from the colonies, the
Protectorate arose while the ships were still in flight. When the first of them
made planetfall, their stored peoples woke into a prepared tyranny.”

“You
talk as if you stood outside it. With this much vision, you still can’t
fight your way free?”

Bancroft
smiled thinly. “Culture is like a smog. To live within it, you must
breathe some of it in and, inevitably, be contaminated. And in any case, what
does free mean in this context? Free to spill semen on my wife’s face and
breasts? Free to have her masturbate in front of me, to share the use of her
flesh with other men and women. Two hundred and fifty years is a long time,
Mr.Kovacs, time enough for a very long list of dirty, degrading fantasies to
infest the mind and titillate the hormones of each fresh sleeve you wear. While
all the time your finer feelings grow purer and more rarified. Do you have any
concept of what happens to emotional bonds over such a period?”

I opened my
mouth, but he held up his hand for silence and I let him have it. It’s
not every day you get to hear the outpourings of a centuries-old soul and
Bancroft was in full flow.

“No,”
he answered his own question. “How could you? Just as your culture is too
shallow to appreciate what it is to live on Earth, your life experience cannot
possibly encompass what it is to love the same person for two hundred and fifty
years. In the end, if you endure, if you beat the traps of boredom and
complacency, in the end what you are left with is not love. It is almost
veneration. How then to match that respect, that veneration with the sordid
desires of whatever flesh you are wearing at the time? I tell you, you
cannot.”

“So
instead you vent yourself on prostitutes?”

The thin
smile returned. “I am not proud of myself, Mr.Kovacs. But you do not live
this long without accepting yourself in every facet, however distasteful. The
women are there. They satisfy a market need, and are recompensed accordingly.
And in this way I purge myself.”

“Does
your wife know this?”

“Of
course. And has done for a very considerable time. Oumou informs me that you
are already aware of the facts regarding Leila Begin. Miriam has calmed down a
lot since then. I’m sure she has adventures of her own.”

“How
sure?”

Bancroft
made an irritated gesture. “Is this relevant? I don’t have my wife
monitored, if that’s what you mean, but I know her. She has her appetites
to contend with just as I do.”

“And
this doesn’t bother you?”

“Mr.Kovacs,
I am many things, but I am not a hypocrite. It is the flesh, nothing more.
Miriam and I understand this. And now, since this line of questioning
doesn’t seem to be leading anywhere, can we please get back on track. In
the absence of any guilt on the part of Elliott, what else do you have?”

I made a
decision then that came up from levels of instinct way below conscious thought.
I shook my head. “There’s nothing yet.”

“But
there will be?”

“Yes.
You can write Ortega off to this sleeve, but there’s still Kadmin. He
wasn’t after Ryker. He knew me. Something’s going on.”

Bancroft
nodded in satisfaction. “Are you going to speak to Kadmin?”

“If
Ortega lets me.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning
the police will have run whatever satellite footage they’ve got over
Oakland this morning, which means they can probably identify me leaving the
clinic. There must have been something overhead at the time. I don’t
suppose they’ll be at their most co-operative.”

Bancroft
permitted himself another of his splintered smiles. “Very astute,
Mr.Kovacs. But you need have nothing to fear on that count. The Wei
Clinic—what little you left of it—is reluctant to either release
internal video footage or press charges against anyone. They have more to fear
in any investigation than do you. Of course, whether they choose to seek more
private reprisals is, shall we say, a more protracted question.”