Richard Morgan - Altered Carbon

“The same.” I looked down at myself, at Ryker’s sleeve. “Well, there wasn’t much left of the other sleeve when they fished me out of the sea. This was the only option. And the UN investigators point-blank refused to allow another double sleeving. Don’t blame them, really. It’s going to be hard enough to justify the one we did as it is.”

“But how did you—”

“Decide?” I smiled without much enthusiasm. “Shall we go inside and talk about this?”

I let her lead me back up to the conservatory, where someone had set out a jug and tall-stemmed glasses on the ornamental table beneath the martyrweed stands. The jug was filled with a liquid the colour of sunsets. We took seats opposite each other without exchanging words or glances. She poured herself a glass without offering me one, a tiny casualness that spoke volumes about what had happened between Miriam Bancroft and my other self.

“I’m afraid I don’t have much time,” she said absently. “As I told you on the phone, Laurens has asked me to come to New York immediately. I was actually on my way out when you called.”

I said nothing, waiting, and when she had finished pouring I got my own glass. The move felt bone-deep wrong, and my awkwardness must have shown. She started with realisation.

“Oh, I—”

“Forget it.” I settled back into my seat and sipped at the drink. It had a faint bite beneath the mellowness. “You wanted to know how we decided? We gambled. Paper, scissors, stone. Of course, we talked around it for hours first. They had us in a virtual forum over in New York, very high ratio, discretion-shielded while we made up our minds. No expense spared for the heroes of the hour.”

I found an edge of bitterness creeping into my voice, and I had to stop to dump it. I took a longer pull at my drink.

“Like I said, we talked. A lot. We thought of a lot of different ways to decide, some of them were maybe even viable, but in the end we kept coming back to it. Scissors, paper, stone. Best of five. Why not?”

I shrugged, but it was not the casual gesture I hoped it would appear. I was still trying to shake off the cold that crept through me whenever I thought about that game, trying to second-guess myself with my own existence at stake. The best of five, and it had gone to two all. My heart was beating like the junk rhythm in Jerry’s Closed Quarters, and I was dizzy with adrenalin. Even facing Kawahara hadn’t been this hard.

When he lost the last round—stone to my paper—we both stared at our two extended hands for what seemed like a long time. Then, he’d got up with a faint smile and cocked his thumb and forefinger at his own head, somewhere midway between a salute and a burlesque of suicide.

“Anything I should tell Jimmy when I see him?”

I shook my head wordlessly.

“Well, have a nice life,” he said, and left the sunlit room, closing the door gently behind him. Part of me was still screaming inside that he had somehow thrown the last game.

They re-sleeved me the next day.

I looked up again. “Now I guess you’re wondering why I bothered coming here.”

“Yes, I am.”

“It concerns Sheryl Bostock,” I said.

“Who?”

I sighed. “Miriam, please. Don’t make this any tougher than it already is. Sheryl Bostock is shit-scared you’re going to have her torched because of what she knows. I’ve come here to have you convince me she’s wrong, because that’s what I promised her.”

Miriam Bancroft looked at me for a moment, eyes widening, and then, convulsively, she threw her drink in my face.

“You arrogant little man,” she hissed. “How dare you? How dare you ?”

I wiped drink out of my eyes and stared at her. I’d expected a reaction but it wasn’t this. I raked surplus cocktail from my hair.

“Excuse me?”

“How dare you walk in here, telling me this is difficult for you? Do you have any idea what my husband is going through at this moment?”

“Well, let’s see.” I wiped my hands clean on my shirt, frowning. “Right now he’s the five-star guest of a UN Special Inquiry in New York. What do you reckon, the marital separation’s getting to him? Can’t be that hard to find a whorehouse in New York.”

Miriam Bancroft’s jaw clenched.

“You are cruel,” she whispered.

“And you’re dangerous.” I felt a little steam wisping off the surface of my own control. “I’m not the one who kicked an unborn child to death in San Diego. I’m not the one who dosed her own husband’s clone with synamorphesterone while he was away in Osaka, knowing full well what he’d do to the first woman he fucked in that state. Knowing that woman wouldn’t be you, of course. It’s no wonder Sheryl Bostock’s terrified. Just looking at you, I’m wondering whether I’ll live past the front gates.”

“Stop it.” She drew a deep, shuddering breath. “Stop it. Please.”

I stopped. We both sat in silence, she with her head bowed.

“Tell me what happened,” I said finally. “I got most of it from Kawahara. I know why Laurens torched himself—”

“Do you?” Her voice was quiet now, but there were still traces of her previous venom in the question. “Tell me, what do you know? That he killed himself to escape blackmail. That’s what they’re saying in New York, isn’t it?”

“It’s a reasonable assumption, Miriam,” I said quietly. “Kawahara had him in a lock. Vote down Resolution 653 or face exposure as a murderer. Killing himself before the needlecast went through to PsychaSec was the only way out of it. If he hadn’t been so bloody-minded about the suicide verdict, he might have got away with it.”

“Yes. If you hadn’t come.”

I made a gesture that felt unfairly defensive. “It wasn’t my idea.”

“And what about guilt ?” she said into the quiet. “Did you stop to consider that? Did you stop to think how Laurens must have felt when he realised what he’d done, when they told him that girl Rentang was a Catholic, a girl who could never have her life back, even if Resolution 653 did force her back into temporary existence to testify against him? Don’t you think when he put the gun against his own throat and pulled the trigger, that he was punishing himself for what he’d done? Did you ever consider that maybe he was not trying to get away with it , as you put it?”

I thought about Bancroft, turning the idea over in my mind, and it wasn’t entirely difficult to say what Miriam Bancroft wanted to hear.

“It’s a possibility,” I said.

She choked a laugh. “It’s more than a possibility, Mr. Kovacs. You forget, I was here that night. I watched him from the stairs when he came in. I saw his face. I saw the pain on his face. He paid for what he’d done. He judged and executed himself for it. He paid, he destroyed the man who committed the crime, and now a man who has no memory of that crime, a man who did not commit that crime, is living with the guilt again. Are you satisfied, Mr. Kovacs?”

The bitter echoes of her voice were leached out of the room by the martyrweed. The silence thickened.

“Why’d you do it?” I asked, when she showed no sign of speaking again. “Why did Maria Rentang have to pay for your husband’s infidelities?”

She looked at me as if I had asked her for some major spiritual truth and shook her head helplessly.

“It was the only way I could think of to hurt him,” she murmured.

No different to Kawahara in the end, I thought: with carefully manufactured savagery. Just another Meth, moving the little people around like pieces in a puzzle.

“Did you know Curtis was working for Kawahara?” I asked tonelessly.

“I guessed. Afterwards.” She lifted a hand. “But I had no way of proving it. How did you work it out?”