Richard Morgan - Altered Carbon

“Retrospectively. He took me to the Hendrix, recommended it to me. Kadmin turned up five minutes after I went in, on Kawahara’s orders. That’s too close for a coincidence.”

“Yes,” she said distantly. “It fits.”

“Curtis got the synamorphesterone for you?”

She nodded.

“Through Kawahara, I imagine. A liberal supply as well. He was dosed to the eyes the night you sent him to see me. Did he suggest spiking the clone before the Osaka trip?”

“No. That was Kawahara.” Miriam Bancroft cleared her throat. “We had an unusually candid conversation a few days before. Looking back, she must have been engineering the whole thing around Osaka.”

“Yeah, Reileen’s pretty thorough. Was pretty thorough. She would have known there was an even chance Laurens would refuse to back her. So you bribed Sheryl Bostock with a visit to the island funhouse, just like me. Only instead of getting to play with the glorious Miriam Bancroft body like me, she got to wear it. A handful of cash, and the promise she could come back and play again some day. Poor cow, she was in paradise for thirty-six hours and now she’s like a junkie in withdrawal. Were you ever going to take her back there?”

“I am a woman of my word.”

“Yeah? Well, as a favour to me, do it soon.”

“And the rest? You have evidence? You intend to tell Laurens about my part in this?”

I reached into my pocket and produced a matt black disc. “Footage of the injection,” I said, holding it up. “Composite footage of Sheryl Bostock leaving PsychaSec and flying to a meeting with your limousine, which subsequently heads out to sea. Without this, there’s nothing to say your husband didn’t kill Maria Rentang chemically unassisted, but they’re probably going to assume Kawahara dosed him aboard Head in the Clouds. There’s no evidence, but it’s expedient.”

“How did you know?” She was looking into a corner of the conservatory, voice small and distant. “How did you get to Bostock?”

“Intuition, mostly. You saw me looking through the telescope?”

She nodded and cleared her throat. “I thought you were playing with me. I thought you’d told him.”

“No.” I felt a faint stab of anger. “Kawahara was still holding my friend in virtual. And threatening to torture her into insanity.”

She looked sideways at me, then looked away. “I didn’t know that,” she said quietly.

“Yeah, well.” I shrugged. “The telescope gave me half of it. Your husband aboard Head in the Clouds just before he killed himself. So then I started thinking about all the unpleasant stuff Kawahara had to play with up there, and I wondered if your husband could have been induced to kill himself. Chemically, or through some kind of virtual programme. I’ve seen it done before.”

“Yes. I’m sure you have.” She sounded tired now, drifting away. “So why look for it at PsychaSec and not Head in the Clouds?”

“I’m not sure. Intuition, like I said. Maybe because chemical mugging aboard an aerial whorehouse just didn’t seem like Kawahara’s style. Too headlong, too crude. She’s a chess player, not a brawler. Was. Or maybe just because I had no way to get into the Head in the Clouds surveillance stack the way I could with PsychaSec, and I wanted to do something immediate. In any case, I told the Hendrix to go in and survey standard medical procedures for the clones, then backtrack for any irregularities. That gave me Sheryl Bostock.”

“How very astute.” She turned to look at me. “And what now, Mr. Kovacs? More justice? More crucifixion of the Meths?”

I tossed the disc onto the table.

“I had the Hendrix go in and erase the injection footage from PsychaSec’s files. Like I said, they’ll probably assume your husband was dosed aboard Head in the Clouds. The expedient solution. Oh, and we erased the Hendrix’s memory of your visit to my room too, just in case someone wanted to make something of what you said about buying me off. One way and another, I’d say you owe the Hendrix a couple of big favours. It said a few guests every now and then would do. Shouldn’t cost much, relatively speaking. I sort of promised on your behalf.”

I didn’t tell her about Ortega’s sight of the bedroom scene, or how long it had taken to talk the policewoman round. I still wasn’t sure why she’d agreed myself. Instead I watched the wonder on Miriam Bancroft’s face for the full half minute it took her to reach out and close her hand around the disc. She looked up at me over her clenched fingers as she took it.

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” I said morosely. “Who knows, maybe you and Laurens deserve each other. Maybe you deserve to go on loving a faithless sexual maladjust who can’t deal with respect and appetite in the same relationship. Maybe he deserves to go on not knowing whether he murdered Rentang unprovoked or not. Maybe you’re just like Reileen, both of you. Maybe all you Meths deserve is each other. All I know is, the rest of us don’t deserve you.”

I got up to go.

“Thanks for the drink.”

I got as far as the door—”

“Takeshi.”

“—and turned back, unwillingly, to face her.

“That isn’t it,” she said with certainty. “Maybe you believe all those things, but that isn’t it. Is it?”

I shook my head. “No, that isn’t it,” I agreed.

“Then why?”

“Like I said, I don’t know why.” I stared at her, wondering if I was glad I couldn’t remember or not. My voice softened. “But he asked me to do it, if I won. It was part of the deal. He didn’t tell me why.”

I left her sitting alone amidst the martyrweed.

The tide was out at Ember, leaving a wet expanse of sand that stretched almost to the listing wreck of the Free Trade Enforcer . The rocks that the carrier had gashed herself on were exposed, gathered in shallow water at the bow like a fossilised outpouring of the ship’s guts. Seabirds were perched there, screaming shrilly at each other. A thin wind came in across the sand and made minute ripples in the puddles left by our footprints. Up on the promenade, Anchana Salomao’s face had been taken down, intensifying the bleak emptiness of the street.

“I thought you’d have gone,” said Irene Elliott beside me.

“It’s in the pipe. Harlan’s World are dragging out the needlecast authorisation. They really don’t want me back.”

“And no one wants you here.”

I shrugged. “It’s not a new situation for me.”

We walked on in silence for a while. It was a peculiar feeling, talking to Irene Elliott in her own body. In the days leading up to the Head in the Clouds gig, I’d become accustomed to looking down to her face, but this big-boned blonde sleeve was almost as tall as me, and there was an aura of gaunt competence about her that had only come through faintly in her mannerisms in the other body.

“I’ve been offered a job,” she said at length. “Security consulting for Mainline d.h.f. You heard of them?”

I shook my head.

“Quite high profile on the East Coast. They must have their headhunters on the inquiry board or something. Soon as the UN cleared me, they were knocking on the door. Exploding offer, five grand if I signed there and then.”

“Yeah, standard practice. Congratulations. You moving east, or are they going to wire the job through to you here?”

“Probably do it here, at least for a while. We’ve got Elizabeth in a virtual condo down in Bay City, and it’s a lot cheaper to wire in locally. The start-up cost us most of that five grand, and we figure it’ll be a few years before we can afford to re-sleeve her.” She turned a shy smile towards me. “We spend most of our time there at the moment. That’s where Victor went today.”