Altered Carbon (36 page)

Chemicals.
I was still reeling from the cocktail of Miriam Bancroft and I didn’t
need this. I told myself, in no uncertain terms,
I didn’t need this
.

Up ahead,
over the heads of the evening’s scattered pedestrians, I saw the
holographic bulk of the left-handed guitar player outside the Hendrix. I sighed
again and started walking.

Halfway up
the block, a bulky automated vehicle rolled past me, hugging the kerb. It
looked pretty much like the robocrawlers that cleaned the streets of Millsport,
so I paid no attention to it as it drew level. Seconds later, I was drenched in
the machine’s image cast.

…
from
the houses from the houses from the houses from the houses from the houses from
the houses
…

The voices
groaned and murmured, male, female, overlaid. It was like a choir in the throes
of orgasm. The images were inescapable, varying across a broad spectrum of
sexual preference. A whirlwind of fleeting sensory impressions.

Genuine
…

Uncut
…

Full
sense repro
…

Tailored
…

As if to
prove this last, the random images thinned out into a stream of heterosex
combinations. They must have scanned my response to the blur of options and fed
directly back to the broadcast unit. Very high-tech.

Theflowendedwithaphone
numberinglowing numerals and an erect penis in the hands of a woman with long
dark hair and a crimson-lipped smile. She looked into the lens. I could feel
her fingers.

Head in
the Clouds
, she breathed.
This
is what it’s like. Maybe you can’t afford to come up here, but you
can certainly afford this
.

Her head
dipped, her lips slid down over the penis. Like it was happening to me. Then
the long black hair curtained in from either side and inked the image out. I
was back on the street, swaying, coated in a thin sheen of sweat. The
autocaster grumbled away down the street behind me, some of the more streetwise
pedestrians skipping sharply sideways out of its cast radius.

I found I
could recall the phone number with gleaming clarity.

The sweat
cooled rapidly to a shiver. I flexed my shoulders and started walking, trying
not to notice the knowing looks of the people around me. I was almost into a
full stride again when a gap opened in the strollers ahead and I saw the long,
low limousine parked outside the Hendrix’s front doors.

Jangling
nerves sent my hand leaping towards the holstered Nemex before I recognised the
vehicle as Bancroft’s. Forcing out a deep breath, I circled the limousine
and ascertained that the driver’s compartment was empty. I was still
wondering what to do when the rear compartment hatch cracked open and Curtis
unfolded himself from the seating inside.

“We
need to talk, Kovacs,” he said in a man-to-man sort of voice that put me
on the edge of a slightly hysterical giggle. “Decision time.”

I looked
him up and down, reckoned from the tiny eddies in his stance and demeanour that
he was chemically augmented at the moment, and decided to humour him.

“Sure.
In the limo?”

“S
cramped in there. How about you ask me up to your room?”

My eyes
narrowed. There was an unmistakable hostility in the chauffeur’s voice,
and a just as unmistakable hard-on pressing at the front of his immaculate
chinos. Granted, I had a similar, if detumescing, lump of my own, but I
remembered distinctly that Bancroft’s limo had shielding against the
street ‘casts. This was something else.

I nodded at
the hotel entrance.

“OK,
let’s go.”

The doors
parted to let us in and the Hendrix came to life.

“Good
evening, sir. You have no visitors this evening—”

Curtis
snorted. “Disappointed, hah, Kovacs?”

“—nor
any calls since you left.” The hotel continued smoothly. “Do you
wish this person admitted as a guest.”

“Yeah,
sure. You got a bar we can go to?”

“I
said
your
room
,” growled Curtis, behind me, then yelped as he barked
his shin on one of the lobby’s low metal-edged tables.

“The
Midnight Lamp bar is located on this floor,” said the hotel doubtfully,
“but has not been used for a considerable time.”

“I
said—”

“Shut
up, Curtis. Didn’t anyone ever tell you not to rush a first date? The
Midnight Lamp is fine. Fire it up for us.”

Across the
lobby, adjacent to the check-in console, a wide section of the back wall slid
grudgingly aside and lights flickered on in the space beyond. With Curtis
making sneering sounds behind me, I went to the opening and peered down a short
flight of steps into the Midnight Lamp bar.

“This’ll
do fine. Come on.”

Someone
overliteral in imagination had done the interior decoration of the Midnight
Lamp bar. The walls, themselves psychedelic whirls of midnight blues and
purples, were festooned with a variety of clock faces showing either the
declared hour or a few minutes to, interwoven with every form of lamp known to
man, from clay prehistoric to enzyme decay light canisters. There was indented
bench seating along both walls, clock-face tables and in the centre of the room
a circular bar in the shape of a countdown dial. A robot composed entirely of
clocks and lamps waited immobile just beside the dial’s twelve mark.

It was all
the more eerie for the complete absence of any other customers, and as we made
our way towards the waiting robot, I could feel Curtis’s earlier mood
quieten a little.

“What
will it be, gentlemen?” said the machine unexpectedly, from no apparent
vocal outlet. Its face was an antique white analogue clock with spider-thin
baroque hands and the hours marked off in Roman numerals. A little unnerved, I
turned back to Curtis, whose face was showing signs of unwilling sobriety.

“Vodka,”
he said shortly. “Subzero.”

“And
a whisky. Whatever it is I’ve been drinking out of the cabinet in my
room. At room temperature, please. Both on my tab.”

The clock
face inclined slightly and one multi-jointed arm swung up to select glasses
from an overhead rack. The other arm, which ended in a lamp with a forest of
small spouts, trickled the requested spirits into the glasses.

Curtis picked
up his glass and threw a generous portion of the vodka down his throat. He drew
breath hard through his teeth and made a satisfied growling noise. I sipped at
my own glass a little more circumspectly, wondering how long it had been since
liquid last flowed through the bar’s tubes and spigots. My fears proved
unfounded, so I deepened the sip and let the whisky melt its way down into my
stomach.

Curtis
banged down his glass.

“
Now
you ready to talk?”

“All
right, Curtis,” I said slowly, looking into my drink. “I imagine
you have a message for me.”

“Sure
have.” His voice was cranked to snapping point. “The lady says, you
going to take her very generous offer, or not. Just that. I’m supposed to
give you time to make up your mind, so I’ll finish my drink.”

I fixed my
gaze on a Martian sand lamp hanging from the opposite wall. Curtis’s mood
was beginning to make some sense.

“Muscling
in on your territory, am I?”

“Don’t
push your luck, Kovacs.” There was a desperate edge to the words.
“You say the wrong thing here, and I’ll—”

“You’ll
what?” I set my glass down and turned to face him. He was less than half
my subjective age, young and muscled and chemically wound up in the illusion
that he was dangerous. He reminded me so much of myself at the same age it was
maddening. I wanted to shake him. “You’ll
what
?

Curtis
gulped. “I was in the provincial marines.”

“What
as, a pin-up?” I went to push him in the chest with one stiffened hand,
then dropped it, ashamed. I lowered my voice. “Listen, Curtis. Don’t
do this to us both.”

“You
think you’re pretty fucking tough, don’t you?”

“This
isn’t about tough, C—urtis.” I’d almost called him kid.
It seemed as if part of me wanted the fight after all. “This is about two
different species. What did they teach you in the provincial marines?
Hand-to-hand combat? Twenty-seven ways to kill a man with your hands?
Underneath it all you’re still a man. I’m an Envoy, Curtis.
It’s not the same.”

He came for
me anyway, leading with a straight jab that was supposed to distract me while
the following roundhouse kick scythed in from the side at head height. It was a
skull cracker if it landed, but it was hopelessly over-dramatic. Maybe it was
the chemicals he’d dressed up in that night. No one in their right mind
throws lacks above waist height in a real fight. I ducked the jab and the kick
in the same movement and grabbed his fool;. A sharp twist and Curtis tipped,
staggered and landed spreadeagled on the bar top. I smashed his face against
the unyielding surface and held him there with my hand knotted in his hair.

“See
what I mean?”

He made
muffled noises and thrashed impotently about while the clock-faced bartender
stood immobile. Blood from his broken nose was streaked across the bar’s
surface. I studied the patterns it had made while I brought my breathing back
down. The lock I had on my conditioning was making me pant. Shifting my grip to
his right arm, I jerked it up high into the small of his back. The thrashing
stopped.

“Good.
Now you keep still or I’ll break it. I’m not in the mood for
this.” As I spoke, I was feeling rapidly through his pockets. In the
inner breast pouch of his jacket I found a small plastic tube. “Aha. So
what little delights have we got tubing round your system tonight? Hormone
enhancers, by the look of that hard-on.” I held the tube up to the dim
light and saw thousands of tiny crystal slivers inside it. “Military
format. Where did you get this stuff, Curtis? Discharge freebie from the
marines, was it?” I recommenced my search and came up with the delivery
system: a tiny skeletal gun with a sliding chamber and a magnetic coil. Tip the
crystals into the breech and close it, the magnetic field aligns them and the
accelerator spits them out at penetrative speed. Not so different from
Sarah’s shard pistol. For battlefield medics, they were a hardy, and
consequently very popular, alternative to hypo-sprays.

I hauled
Curtis to his feet and shoved him away from me. He managed to stay on his feet,
clutching at his nose with one hand and glaring at me.

“You
want to tip your head back to stop that,” I told him. “Go ahead,
I’m not going to hurt you again.”

“Botherfucker!”

I held up
the crystals and the little gun. “Where did you get these?”

“Suck
by prick, Kovacs.” Curtis tipped his head back fractionally, despite himself,
trying to keep me in view at the same time. His eyes rolled in their sockets
like a panicked horse’s. “Ib dot tellig you a fuckig thig.”

“Fair
enough.” I put the chemicals back on the bar and regarded him gravely for
a couple of seconds. “Then let me tell you something instead. When they
make an Envoy, do you want to know what they do? They burn out every evolved
violence limitation instinct in the human psyche. Submission signal
recognition, pecking order dynamics, pack loyalties. It all goes, tuned out a
neuron at a time; and they replace it with a conscious will to harm.”

He stared
back at me in silence.

“Do
you understand me? It would have been easier to kill you just then. It would
have been easier. I had to stop myself. That’s what an Envoy is, Curtis.
A reassembled human. An artifice.”

The silence
stretched. There was no way to know if he was taking it in or not. Thinking
back to Newpest a century and a half ago, and the young Takeshi Kovacs, I
doubted he was. At his age, the whole thing would have sounded like a dream of
power come true.

I shrugged.
“In case you hadn’t guessed already, the answer to the lady’s
question is no. I’m not interested. There, that should make you happy,
and it only cost you a broken nose to find out. If you hadn’t dosed
yourself to the eyes it might not even have cost that much. Tell her thank you
very much, the offer is appreciated, but there’s too much going on here
to walk away from. Tell her I’m starting to enjoy it.”

There was a
slight cough from the entrance to the bar. I looked up and saw a suited,
crimson-haired figure on the stairs.

“Am I
interrupting something?” The mohican enquired. The voice was slow and
relaxed. Not one of the heavies from Fell Street.

I picked up
my drink from the bar. “Not at all, officer. Come on down and join the
party. What’ll you have?”

“Overproof
rum,” said the cop, drifting over to us. “If they’ve got it.
Small glass.”

I raised a
finger at the clock face. The bartender produced a square-cut glass from
somewhere and filled it with a deep red liquid. The mohican ambled past Curtis,
sparing him a curious glance on the way, and apprehended the drink with a long
arm.