Altered Carbon

by Richard Morgan

  'I'm not sure I — '

  'I should have you fucking arrested, Kovacs. I should have you fucking stacked for what you've done.'

  I started to lose my temper. 'Done what? Will you get a fucking grip, Ortega, and tell me what's going on.'

  'We accessed the Hendrix's memory today,' Ortega said coldly. 'Preliminary warrant went through at noon. Every­thing for the last week. I've been reviewing it.'

  The rapidly flaring, irritable rage shrank back to nothing inside me as the words left her mouth. It was as if she'd emptied a bucket of seawater over my head.

  'Oh.'

  'Yes, there wasn't much.' Ortega turned away, hugging her own shoulders in the kimono, and moved past me to the unexplored doorway. 'You're the only guest there at the moment. So it's just been you. And your visitors.'

  I followed her through into a second, carpeted room where two steps led down to a narrow sunken galley behind a low, wood-panelled partition at one side. The other walls held similarly covered items of furniture to the first room, except for the far corner, where the plastic sheeting had been pulled off a metre-square video screen and attendant receiver/playback modules. A single, straight-backed chair was positioned in front of the screen on which was frozen the unmistakable image of Elias Ryker's face delving between Miriam Bancroft's wide­spread thighs.

  'There's a remote on the chair,' said Ortega, herself remote. 'Why don't you watch some of it while I make you a coffee? Refresh your memory. Then you can do some explaining.'

  She disappeared into the galley without giving me the chance to reply. I advanced on the frozen video screen, feeling a small liquid slide in my guts as the image brought back memories tinged with Merge Nine. In the sleepless, chaotic whirl of the last day and a half, I had all but for­gotten Miriam Bancroft, but now she came back to me in the flesh, overpowering and intoxicating as she had been that night. I'd also forgotten Rodrigo Bautista's claim that they were almost through the legal wrangles with the Hendrix's lawyers.

  My foot knocked against something and I looked down at the carpet. There was a coffee mug on the floor next to the chair, still a third full. I wondered how much of the hotel's memory Ortega had gone through. I glanced at the image on screen. Was this as far as she'd got? What else had she seen? How to play this, then? I picked up the remote and turned it over in my hands. Ortega's co­operation had been an integral part of my planning so far. If I was going to lose her now, I was in trouble.

  Scratching around inside me was something else. An emotional upwelling that I didn't want to acknowledge, because to acknowledge it would be a clinical absurdity. A feeling that, despite my preoccupation with later factors in the hotel's memory, was tied intimately to the image cur­rently on screen.

  Embarrassment. Shame.

  Absurd. I shook my head. Fucking stupid.

  'You're not watching.'

  I turned back and saw Ortega with a steaming mug in each hand. An aroma of mingled coffee and rum wafted towards me.

  'Thanks.' I took one of the mugs from her and sipped at it, playing for time. She leaned away from me and folded her arms.

  'So. Half a hundred reasons why Miriam Bancroft doesn't fit the bill.' She jerked her head at the screen. 'How many of them is that?'

  'Ortega, this is nothing to do — '

  'I buy Miriam Bancroft as scary, you told me.' She shook her head judicially and sipped from her coffee. 'I don't know, that doesn't look like fear on your face, exactly.'

  'Ortega — '

  ' "I want you to stop," she says. She actually says it, look wind it back if you don't rememb — '

  I pulled the remote out of her reach. 'I remember what she said.'

  'Then you also remember the sweet little deal she offered you to shut down the case, the multiple — '

  'Ortega, you didn't want me on the case either, remem­ber. Open and shut suicide, you said. That doesn't mean you killed him, does — '

  'Shut up.' Ortega circled me as if we were holding knives, not coffee mugs. 'You've been covering for her. All this fucking time, you've had your nose buried in her crotch like a faithful fucking d — '

  'If you've seen the rest of it, you know that isn't true.' I tried for an even tone that Ryker's hormones would not let me have. 'I told Curtis I wasn't interested. I fucking told him that two days ago.'

  'Do you have any idea what a prosecutor will do with this footage? Miriam Bancroft trying to buy off her husband's investigator with illegal sexual favours. Oh yes, admission of multiple sleeving, even unproven, can be made to look very bad in court.'

  'She'll beat the rap. You know she will.'

  'If her Meth husband wants to weigh in on her side. Which maybe he won't when he sees this. This isn't Leila Begin again, you know. The moral boot's on the other foot this time around.'

  The allusion to morality went ripping through the outer borders of the argument, but as it passed I grasped the uncomfortable fact that actually it was central to what was going on here. I remembered Bancroft's critical assess­ment of Earth's moral culture, and wondered if he could really watch my head between his wife's thighs and not feel betrayed.

  I was still trying to work out what I felt on the same subject.

  'And while we're on the subject of prosecution, Kovacs, that severed head you brought back from the Wei Clinic isn't going to win you any remissions either. Illegal retention of a d.h. personality carries fifty to a hundred on Earth, more if we can prove you torched the head off in the first place.'

  'I was going to tell you about that.'

  'No, you fucking weren't,' Ortega snarled. 'You weren't going to fucking tell me any single thing you didn't need to.'

  'Look, the clinic won't dare prosecute anyway. They've got too much to — '

  'You arrogant motherfucker.' The coffee cup thumped dully to the carpet, and her fists clenched. Now there was real fury in her eyes. 'You're just like him, you're just fucking like him. You think we need the nicking clinic, with footage of you putting a severed head in a hotel freezer. Isn't that a crime where you come from, Kovacs? Summary decapitation — '

  'Wait a minute.' I put my own coffee down on the chair at my side. 'Just like who, who am I just like?'

  'What?'

  'You just said I'm just — '

  'Never fucking mind what I said. Do you understand what you've done here, Kovacs?'

  'The only thing I under — ' Abruptly, sound welled from the screen behind me, liquid groans and the sound of or­ganic suction. I glanced at the remote clenched in my left hand, trying to see how I'd inadvertently unfrozen the playback, and a deep, female moan sent the blood twitch­ing through my guts. Then Ortega was on me, trying to snatch the remote out of my hand.

  'Give me that, turn that fucking thing — '

  For a moment I wrestled with her and our struggling only succeeded in making the volume louder. Then, sud­denly, riding a solitary updraft of sanity, I let go and she collapsed against the chair, pressing buttons.

  ' — off.'

  There was a long silence, punctuated only by our own heavy breathing. I fixed my gaze on one of the battened-down viewports across the room, Ortega, slumped be­tween my leg and the chair, was presumably still looking at the screen. I thought that, for a moment, our breathing matched pace.

  When I turned and bent to help her up, she was already rising towards me. Our hands were on each other, I think, before either of us realised what was happening.

  It was like resolution. The circling antagonisms col­lapsed inward like orbitals crashing and burning, surren­dering to a mutual gravity that had dragged like chains while it endured but in release was a streak of fire through the nerves. We were both trying to kiss each other and laugh at the same time. Ortega made excited little panting sounds as my hands slipped inside the kimono, palms skidding over coarse nipples as broad and stiff as rope-ends and the breasts that fitted into my hands as if designed to nestle there. The kimono came off, sliding at first and then jerked insistently free of each swimmer
's shoulder in turn. I shed jacket and shirt in one, while Ortega's hands tangled frantically at my belt, opening the fly and sliding one hard, long-fingered hand into the gap. I felt the calluses at the base of each finger, rubbing.

  Somehow we got out of the room with the screen, and made it to the stern-end cabin I'd seen earlier. I followed the taut sway of Ortega's strides across the room between, the muscled lines of the long thighs, and it must have been Ryker as much as me, because I felt like a man coming home. There, in the room full of mirrors, she threw her head down on the disarrayed sheets, lifted herself up and I saw myself slide into her up to the hilt, with a gasp because now she was burning. She was burning inside, gripping me with the liquid entirety of hot bath water, and the heated globes of her buttocks branded my hips with the impact of each stroke. Ahead of me, her spine lifted and wove like a snake and her hair cascaded down from her bent head in a chaotic elegance. In the mirrors around me I saw Ryker reaching forward to cup her breasts, then the breadth of her ribs, the rounding of her shoulders, and all the while she lifted and yawed like the ocean around the ship. Ryker and Ortega, writhing against each other like the reunited lovers of a timeless epic.

  I felt the first climax go through her, but it was the sight of her looking back at me, up through tumbled hair, lips parted, that slipped the final catches on my own control and moulded me against the contours of her back and ass until my spasms were all spent inside her arid we collapsed across the bed. I felt myself slide out of her like something being born. I think she was still coming.

  Neither of us said anything for a long time. The ship ploughed on its automated way and around us the danger­ous cold of the mirrors lapped inwards like an icy tide, threatening to tinge, and then drown the intimacy. In a few moments we would be fixing our gazes carefully outwards on the images of ourselves, instead of on each other.

  I slid an arm around Ortega's flank and tilted her gently onto one side, so that we lay like spoons. In the mirror, I found her eyes.

  'Where're we going?' I asked her gently.

  A shrug, but she used it to snuggle deeper into me. 'Programmed cycle, down the coast, out to Hawaii, hook around and then back.'

  'And no one knows we're out here?'

  'Only the satellites.'

  'Nice thought. Who does it all belong to it?'

  She twisted to look at me over her shoulder. 'It's Ryker's.'

  'Ooops.' I looked elaborately away. 'Nice carpet in here.'

  Against the odds, it brought a laugh out of her. She turned fully to face me in the bed. Her hand rose to touch my face softly, as if she thought it might mark easily, or maybe disappear.

  'I told myself,' she murmured, 'it was crazy. It was just the body, you know.'

  'Most things are. Conscious thought doesn't have much to do with this stuff. Doesn't have much to do with the way we live our lives, full stop, if you believe the psychologists. A bit of rationalisation, most of it with hindsight. Put the rest down to hormonal drives, gene instinct and pheromones for the fine tuning. Sad, but true.'

  Her finger followed a line down the side of my face. 'I don't think it's sad. What we've done with the rest of ourselves, that's sad.'

  'Kristin Ortega.' I took hold of her finger and squeezed it gently. 'You are a real fucking Luddite, aren't you. How in God's name did you get into this line of work?'

  She shrugged again. 'Family of cops. Father was a cop. Grandmother was a cop. You know how it goes.'

  'Not from experience.'

  'No.' She stretched one long leg languidly up towards the mirrored ceiling. 'I guess not.'

  I reached across the plain of her belly and slid my hand along the length of thigh to the knee, levering her gently over and bringing my mouth to kiss gently at the shaved bar of pubic hair where it descended into cleft. She resisted fractionally, maybe thinking of the screen in the other room, or maybe just our mingled juices trickling from her body, then relented and spread herself under me. I shifted her other thigh up over my shoulder and lowered my face into her.

  This time, when she came, it was with escalating cries that she locked in her throat each time with powerful flexings of the muscles at the base of her stomach while her whole body eeled back and forth across the bed and her hips bucked upward, grinding the soft flesh into my mouth. At some point she had lapsed into softly uttered Spanish, whose tones stoked my own arousal, and when she finally flopped to stillness, I was able to slide up and into her directly, gathering her under the arms and sinking my tongue into her mouth in the first kiss we'd shared since reaching the bed.

  We moved slowly, trying for the rhythm of the sea outside and the laughter of our first embrace. It seemed to last a long time, time for talking, up the scale from languid murmurs to excited gabbling, for shifts in posture and soft bitings, the clasping of hands, and all the time a feeling of brimming to overflow that hurt my eyes. It was from that last, unbearable pressure as much as any that I finally let go and came into her, feeling her chase the last of my fading hardness to her own shaking finish.

  In the Envoy Corps, you take what is offered, said Virginia Vidaura, somewhere in the corridors of my memory. And that must sometimes be enough.

  As we separated for the second time, the weight of the last twenty-four hours came down on me like one of the heavy rugs in the other room and consciousness slipped gradually away from the increasing warmth beneath it. My last clear impressions were of the long body beside me rearranging itself with breasts pressed into my back, an arm draped over me and a peculiarly comfortable clasping of feet, mine in hers, like hands. My thought processes were slowing down.

  What is offered. Sometimes. Enough.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  When I awoke, she was gone.

  There was sunlight coming into the cabin from a number of unbattened viewports. The pitching of the boat had almost stopped but there was still enough roll to show me, alternately, a blue sky with horizontal scrapings of cloud and a reasonably calm sea beneath. Somewhere, someone was making coffee and frying smoked meat. I lay still for a while, picking up the scattered garments of my mind and trying to assemble some kind of reasonable out­fit from them. What to tell Ortega? How much, and weighted how? The Envoy conditioning offered itself sluggishly, like something dredged out of a swamp. I let it roll over and sink, absorbed in the dappling of sunbeams on the sheets near my head.

  The clinking of glasses from the door brought me round. Ortega was standing in the doorway wearing a NO TO RESOLUTION 653 T-shirt on which the NO had been stylistically daubed out with a red cross and overwritten with a definitive YES in the same colour. The columns of her naked legs disappeared under the T-shirt as if they might conceivably go on for ever inside. Balanced in her hands was a large tray laden with breakfast for an entire squadroom. Seeing me awake, she tossed hair out of her eyes and grinned crookedly.

  So I told her everything.

  'So what are you going to do?'

  I shrugged and stared out across the water, narrowing my eyes against the glare. The ocean seemed flatter, more ponderous than it does on Harlan's World. Up on deck, the immensity of it sank in and the yacht was suddenly a child's toy. 'I'm going to do what Kawahara wants. What Miriam Bancroft wants. What you want. What apparently everyone fucking wants. I'm going to kill the case.'

  'You think Kawahara torched Bancroft?'

  'Seems likely. Or she's shielding someone who did. Doesn't matter anymore. She's got Sarah, that's all that counts now.'

  'We could hit her with abduction charges. Retention of d.h. personality carries — '

  'Fifty to a hundred, yeah.' I smiled faintly. 'I was listening last night. But she won't be holding directly, it'll be some subsidiary.'

  'We can get warrants that — '

  'She's a fucking Meth, Kristin. She'll beat it all without raising her pulse. Anyway, that's not the issue here. As soon as I move against her, she'll slam Sarah into virtual. How long do your far-ranging warrants take to get clearance?'

 
'Couple of days, if it's UN-expedited.' The gloom crept across Ortega's face as she was saying it. She leaned on the rail and stared downwards.

  'Exactly. That's the best part of a year in virtual. Sarah isn't an Envoy, she doesn't have any kind of conditioning. What Kawahara can do to her in eight or nine virtual months would turn a normal mind into pulp. She'd be screaming insane by the time we pulled her out. If we pulled her out, and anyway I'm not going to even fucking consider putting her through a single second of — '

  'OK.' Ortega put a hand on my shoulder. 'OK. I'm sorry.'

  I shivered slightly, whether from the sea wind or the thought of Kawahara's virtual dungeons I couldn't be sure.

  'Forget it.'

  'I'm a cop. It's in my nature to look for ways to bust the bad guys. That's all.'

  I looked up and gave her a bleak smile. 'I'm an Envoy. It's in my nature to look for ways to rip Kavrahara's throat out. I've looked. There are no ways.'

  The smile she gave me back was uneasy, tinged with an ambivalence that I knew was going to get us sooner or later.

  'Look, Kristin. I've found a way to do this. To lie convincingly to Bancroft and shut the case down. It's illegal, very illegal, but no one that matters gets hurt. I don't have to tell you about it. If you don't want to know.'

  She thought about it for a while, eyes probing the water alongside the yacht, as if the answer might be swimming there, keeping pace with us. I wandered along the rail to give her time, tilting my head back to scan the blue bowl of the sky overhead and thinking about orbital surveillance systems. Out in the middle of a seemingly endless ocean, cocooned in the high-tech safety of the yacht, it was easy to believe you could hide from the Kawaharas and Bancrofts of this world, but that kind of hiding died centuries ago.

  If they want you, a youngish Quell had once written of the Harlan's World ruling elite, sooner or later they'll scoop you up off the globe, like specks of interesting dust off a Martian artefact. Cross the gulf between the stars, and they can come after you. Go into centuries of storage, and they'll be there waiting for you, clone-new, when you re-sleeve. They are what we once dreamed of as gods, mythical agents of destiny, as inescapable as Death, that poor old peasant labourer, bent over his scythe, no longer is. Poor Death, no match for the mighty altered carbon technologies of data storage and retrieval arrayed against him. Once -we lived in terror of his arrival. Now we flirt outrageously with his sombre dignity, and beings like these won't even let him in the tradesman's entrance.