Altered Carbon

  Prescott swiveled to face me. “I don’t see how this can have any bearing on the case at hand.”

  “Try me.”

  “Very well.” There was a snap in her voice as she said it, and a defiant look on her face.

  “Leila Begin was a prostitute. Maybe still is. Fifty years ago, Bancroft was one of her clients. Through a number of . . . indiscretions, this became known to Miriam Bancroft. The two women met at some function down in San Diego, apparently agreed to go to the bathroom together, and Miriam Bancroft beat the shit out of Leila Begin.”

  I studied Prescott’s face across the table, puzzled. “And that’s it?”

  “No, that’s not it, Kovacs,” she said tiredly. “Begin was six months pregnant at the time. She lost the child as a result of the beating. You physically can’t fit a spinal stack into a fetus, so that made it real death. Potential three-to-five-decade sentence.”

  “Was it Bancroft’s baby?”

  Prescott shrugged. “Debatable. Begin refused to let them do a gene match on the fetus. Said it was irrelevant who the father was. She probably figured the uncertainty was more valuable from a press point of view than a definite no.”

  “Or she was too distraught?”

  “Come on, Kovacs.” Prescott jerked a hand irritably at me. “This is an Oakland whore we’re talking about.”

  “Did Miriam Bancroft go into storage?”

  “No, and that’s where Ortega gets to stick her knife in. Bancroft bought off everybody. The witnesses, the press, even Begin took a payoff in the end. Settled out of court. Enough to get her a Lloyd’s cloning policy and take her out of the game. Last I heard, she was wearing out her second sleeve somewhere down in Brazil. But this is half a century ago, Kovacs.”

  “Were you around?”

  “No.” Prescott leaned across the desk. “And neither was Kristin Ortega, which makes it kind of sickening to hear her whining on about it. Oh, I had an earful of it, too, when they pulled out of the investigation last month. She never even met Begin.”

  “I think it might be a matter of principle,” I said gently. “Is Bancroft still going to prostitutes on a regular basis?”

  “That is none of my concern.”

  I stuck my finger through the holographic display and watched the colored files distort around the intrusion. “You might have to make it your concern, counselor. Sexual jealousy’s a pretty sturdy motive for murder, after all.”

  “May I remind you that Miriam Bancroft tested negative on a polygraph when asked that question,” Prescott said sharply.

  “I’m not talking about Mrs. Bancroft.” I stopped playing with the display and stared across the desk at the lawyer before me. “I’m talking about the other million available orifices out there and the even larger number of partners or blood relatives who might not relish seeing some Meth fucking them. That’s going to have to include some experts on covert penetration, no pun intended, and maybe the odd psychopath or two. In short, someone capable of getting into Bancroft’s house and torching him.”

  Off in the distance, one of the cows lowed mournfully.

  “What about it, Prescott?” I waved my hand through the holograph. “Anything in here that begins For what you did to my girl, daughter, sister, mother, delete as applicable?”

  I didn’t need her to answer me. I could see it in her face.

  With the sun painting slanting stripes across the desk and birdsong in the trees across the meadow, Oumou Prescott bent to the database keyboard and called up a new, purple oblong of holographic light on the display. I watched as it bloomed and opened like some cubist rendition of an orchid. Behind me, another cow voiced its resigned disgruntlement.

  I slipped the headset back on.

  CHAPTEr EIGHT

  The town was called Ember. I found it on the map about two hundred kilometers north of Bay City on the coast road. There was an asymmetrical yellow symbol in the sea next to it.

  “Free Trade Enforcer,” Prescott said, peering over my shoulder. “Aircraft carrier. It was the last really big warship anyone ever built. Some idiot ran it aground way back at the start of the Colony years, and the town grew up around the site to cater to the tourists.”

  “Tourists?”

  She looked at me. “It’s a big ship.”

  I rented an ancient ground car from a seedy-looking dealership two blocks down from Prescott’s office and drove north over the rust-colored suspension bridge. I needed time to think. The coastal highway was poorly maintained but almost deserted, so I stuck to the yellow line in the center of the road and barreled along at a steady hundred and fifty. The radio yielded a medley of stations whose cultural assumptions were largely above my head, but I finally found a Neo-maoist propaganda DJ memory-wired into some dissemination satellite that nobody had ever bothered to decommission. The mix of high political sentiment and saccharine karaoke numbers was irresistible. The smell of the passing sea blew in through the open window and the road unwound ahead of me, and for a while I forgot about the corps and Innenin and everything that had happened since.

  By the time I hit the long curve down into Ember, the sun was going down behind the canted angles of the Free Trade Enforcer’s launch deck, and the last of its rays were leaving almost imperceptible pink stains on the surf on either side of the wreck’s shadow. Prescott was right. It was a big ship.

  I slowed my speed in deference to the rise of buildings around me, wondering idly how anyone could have been stupid enough to steer a vessel that large so close to shore. Maybe Bancroft knew. He’d probably been around then.

  Ember’s main street ran along the seafront the entire length of the town and was separated from the beach by a line of majestic palm trees and a neo-Victorian railing in wrought iron. There were holograph ’casters fixed to the trunks of the palms, all projecting the same image of a woman’s face wreathed with the words SLIPSLIDE—ANCHANA SALOMAO & THE RIO TOTAL BODY THEATER. Small knots of people were out, rubbernecking at the images.

  I rolled the ground car along the street in low gear, scanning the facades, and finally found what I was looking for about two-thirds of the way along the front. I coasted past and parked the car quietly about fifty meters up, sat still for a few minutes to see if anything happened, and then, when it didn’t, I got out of the car and walked back along the street.

  Elliott’s Data Linkage Brokerage was a narrow facade sandwiched between an industrial chemicals outlet and a vacant lot where gulls screeched and fought over scraps among the shells of discarded hardware. The door of Elliott’s was propped open with a defunct flatscreen monitor and led directly into the operations room. I stepped inside and cast a glance up and down. There were four consoles set in back-to-back pairs, harbored behind a long molded-plastic reception counter. Beyond them, doors led to a glass-walled office. The far wall held a bank of seven monitors with incomprehensible lines of data scrolling down. A ragged gap in the line of screens marked the previous position of the doorstop. There were scars in the paintwork behind where the brackets had resisted extraction. The screen next to the gap had rolling flickers, as if whatever had killed the first one was contagious.

  “Help you?”

  A thin-faced man of indeterminate age poked his head around the corner of one of the sloping banks of console equipment. There was an unlit cigarette in his mouth and a trailing thread of cable jacked into an interface behind his right ear. His skin was unhealthily pale.

  “Yeah, I’m looking for Victor Elliott.”

  “Out front.” He gestured back the way I had come. “See the old guy on the rail? Watching the wreck? That’s him.”

  I looked out into the evening beyond the door and picked out the solitary figure at the rail.

  “He owns this place, right?”

  “Yeah. For his sins.” The datarat cracked a grin and gestured around. “Not much call for him to be in the office, business the way it is.”

  I thanked him and went back out onto the street. The light was starting to fade no
w, and Anchana Salomao’s holographic face was gaining a new dominance in the gathering gloom. Crossing beneath one of the banners, I came up next to the man on the rail and leaned my own arms on the black iron. He looked around as I joined him and gave me a nod of acknowledgment, then went back to staring at the horizon as if he was looking for a crack in the weld between sea and sky.

  “That’s a pretty grim piece of parking,” I said, gesturing out at the wreck.

  It earned me a speculative look before he answered me. “They say it was terrorists.” His voice was empty, disinterested, as if he’d once put too much effort into using it and something had broken. “Or sonar failure in a storm. Maybe both.”

  “Maybe they did it for the insurance,” I said.

  Elliott looked at me again, more sharply. “You’re not from here?” he asked, a fraction more interest edging his tone this time.

  “No. Passing through.”

  “From Rio?” He gestured up at Anchana Salomao as he said it. “You an artist?”

  “No.”

  “Oh.” He seemed to consider this for a moment. It was as if conversation was a skill he’d forgotten. “You move like an artist.”

  “Near miss. It’s military neurachem.”

  He got it then, but the shock didn’t seem to go beyond a brief flicker in his eyes. He looked me up and down slowly, then turned back to the sea.

  “You come looking for me? You from Bancroft?”

  “You might say that.”

  He moistened his lips. “Come to kill me?”

  I took the hardcopy out of my pocket and handed it across to him. “Come to ask you some questions. Did you transmit this?”

  He read it, lips moving wordlessly. Inside my head, I could hear the words he was tasting again: . . . for taking my daughter from me . . . will burn the flesh from your head . . . will never know the hour or the day . . . nowhere safe in this life . . . It wasn’t highly original, but it was heartfelt and articulate in a way that was more worrying than any of the vitriol Prescott had shown me on the Rabid and Rambling stack. It also specified exactly the death Bancroft had suffered. The particle blaster would have charred the outside of Bancroft’s skull to a crisp before exploding the superheated contents across the room.

  “Yes, that’s mine,” Elliott said quietly.

  “You’re aware that someone assassinated Laurens Bancroft last month.”

  He handed me back the paper. “That so? The way I heard it, the bastard torched his own head off.”

  “Well, that is a possibility,” I conceded, screwing up the paper and tossing it into a refuse-filled trash bin below us on the beach. “But it’s not one I’m being paid to take seriously. Unfortunately for you, the cause of death comes uncomfortably close to your prose style there.”

  “I didn’t do it,” Elliott said flatly.

  “I figured you’d say that. I might even believe you, except that whoever did kill Bancroft got through some very heavy-duty security systems, and you used to be a sergeant in the tactical marines. Now, I knew some tacs back on Harlan’s World, and a few of them were wired for covert wet work.”

  Elliott looked at me curiously. “You a grasshopper?”

  “A what?”

  “Grasshopper. Offworlder.”

  “Yeah.” If Elliott had ever been afraid of me, it was wearing off fast. I considered playing the Envoy card, but it didn’t seem worth it. The man was still talking.

  “Bancroft don’t need to bring in muscle from offworld. What’s your angle on this?”

  “Private contractor,” I said. “Find the killer.”

  Elliott snorted. “And you thought it was me.”

  I hadn’t thought that, but I let it go, because the misconception was giving him a feeling of superiority that kept the conversation rolling. Something approaching a spark appeared in his eyes.

  “You think I could have got into Bancroft’s house? I know I couldn’t, because I ran the specs. If there was any way in, I would have taken it a year ago, and you would have found little pieces of him scattered on the lawn.”

  “Because of your daughter?”

  “Yes, because of my daughter.” The anger was fueling his animation. “My daughter and all the others like her. She was only a kid.”

  He broke off and stared out to sea again. After a moment, he gestured at the Free Trade Enforcer, where I could now see small lights glimmering around what must be a stage set up on the sloping launch deck. “That was what she wanted. All she wanted. Total Body Theater. Be like Anchana Salomao and Rhian Li. She went to Bay City because she heard there was a connection there, someone who could—”

  He jarred to a halt and looked at me. The datarat had called him old, and now for the first time I saw why. In spite of his solid sergeant’s bulk and barely swelling waistline, the face was old, carved in the harsh lines of long-term pain. He was on the edge of tears.

  “She could have made it, too. She was beautiful.”

  He was fumbling for something in his pocket. I produced my cigarettes and offered him one. He took it automatically, lit it from the proffered ignition patch on the pack, but he went on fumbling in his pockets until he’d dug out a small kodakristal. I really didn’t want to see this, but he activated it before I could say anything, and a tiny cubed image sprang up in the air between us.

  He was right. Elizabeth Elliott was a beautiful girl, blonde and athletic and only a few years younger than Miriam Bancroft. Whether she had the driving determination and horselike stamina that you needed in Total Body Theater, the picture didn’t show, but she probably could have given it a shot.

  The holoshot showed her sandwiched between Elliott and another woman who was an almost perfect older edition of Elizabeth. The three of them had been taken in bright sunlight somewhere with grass, and the picture was marred by a bar of shadow falling from a tree beyond the cast of the recorder across the older woman’s face. She was frowning, as if she had noticed the flaw in the composition, but it was a small frown, a fractional chiseling of lines between her brows. A palpable shimmer of happiness overwhelmed the detail.

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

  I shook my head. Local color, 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. Digitized 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 authorized, sanitized. 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,” Elliott said 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 back at the shopfront that bore his name. “The data market was down. Too many brokers. Saturated. We had a clone and resleeving 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 okay for six months, then I turn on the screen and see some corporate negotiator wearing Irene’s body.” He half turned toward 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 Biocabins 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 on-line 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 gray with the shock. Leaning over, I pinned him to the rail and jammed the fork of my thumb and fingers into his throat.