Ричард Морган: The SF Collection

With the realisation came the pain. It felt as if someone had run a steel-wool pipe-cleaner briskly through my chest cavity. Almost thoughtfully, I reached up, found the hole and plugged it with my two middle fingers. The finger tips scraped over the roughness of torn bone in the wound, and I felt something membranous throb against one of them. The bullet had missed my heart. I grunted and attempted to rise, but the grunt turned into a cough and I tasted blood on my tongue.

‘Don’t you move, motherfucker.’

The yell came out of a young throat, badly distorted with shock. I hunched forward over my wound and looked back over my shoulder. Behind me in the doorway, a young man in a police uniform had both hands clasped around the pistol he had just shot me with. He was trembling visibly. I coughed again and turned back to the table.

The Smith & Wesson was at eye level, gleaming silver, still where I had left it less than two minutes before. Perhaps it was that, the scant shavings of time that had been planed off since Sarah was alive and all was well, that drove me. Less than two minutes ago I could have picked up the gun, I’d even thought about it, so why not now. I gritted my teeth, pressed my fingers harder into the hole in my chest and staggered upright. Blood spattered warmly against the back of my throat. I braced myself on the edge of the table with my free hand and looked back at the cop. I could feel my lips peeling back from the clenched teeth in something that was more a grin than a grimace.

‘Don’t make me do it, Kovacs.’

I got myself a step closer to the table and leaned against it with my thighs, breath whistling through my teeth and bubbling in my throat. The Smith & Wesson gleamed like fool’s gold on the scarred wood. Out in the Reach power lashed down from an orbital and lit the kitchen in tones of blue. I could hear the maelstrom calling.

‘I said don’t—’

I closed my eyes and clawed the gun off the table.

Coming back from the dead can be rough.

In the Envoy Corps they teach you to let go before storage. Stick it in neutral and float. It’s the first lesson and the trainers drill it into you from day one. Hard-eyed Virginia Vidaura, dancer’s body poised inside the shapeless Corps coveralls as she paced in front of us in the induction room. Don’t worry about anything, she said, and you’ll be ready for it. A decade later, I met her again, in a holding pen at the New Kanagawa justice facility. She was going down for eighty to a century; excessively armed robbery and organic damage. The last thing she said to me when they walked her out of the cell was: ‘Don’t worry kid, they’ll store it.’ Then she bent her head to light a cigarette, drew the smoke hard into lungs she no longer gave a damn about and set off down the corridor as if to a tedious briefing. From the narrow angle of vision afforded me by the cell gate, I watched the pride in that walk and I whispered the words to myself like a mantra.

Don’t worry, they’ll store it. It was a superbly double-edged piece of street wisdom. Bleak faith in the efficiency of the penal system, and a clue to the elusive state of mind required to steer you past the rocks of psychosis. Whatever you feel, whatever you’re thinking, whatever you are when they store you, that’s what you’ll be when you come out. With states of high anxiety, that can be a problem. So you let go. Stick it in neutral. Disengage and float.

If you have time.

I came thrashing up out of the tank, one hand plastered across my chest searching for the wounds, the other clutching at a non-existent weapon. The weight hit me like a hammer and I collapsed back into the floatation gel. I flailed with my arms, caught one elbow painfully on the side of the tank and gasped. Gobbets of gel poured into my mouth and down my throat. I snapped my mouth shut and got a hold on the hatch coaming, but the stuff was everywhere. In my eyes, burning my nose and throat, and slippery under my fingers. The weight was forcing my grip on the hatch loose, sitting on my chest like a high-g manoeuvre, pressing me down into the gel. My body heaved violently in the confines of the tank. Floatation gel? I was drowning.

Abruptly, there was a strong grip on my arm and I was hauled coughing into an upright position. At about the same time I was working out there were no wounds in my chest, someone wiped a towel roughly across my face and I could see. I decided to save that pleasure for later and concentrated on getting the contents of the tank out of my nose and throat. For about half a minute I stayed sitting, head down, coughing out the gel and trying to work out why everything weighed so much.

‘So much for training.’ It was a hard, male voice, the sort that habitually hangs around justice facilities. ‘What did they teach you in the Envoys anyway, Kovacs?’

That was when I had it. On Harlan’s World, Kovacs is quite a common name. Everyone knows how to pronounce it. This guy didn’t. He was speaking a stretched form of the Amanglic they use on the World, but even allowing for that he was mangling the name badly, and the ending came out with a hard ‘k’ instead of the slavic ‘ch’.

And everything was too heavy.

The realisation came through my fogged perceptions like a brick through frosted plate glass.

Offworld.

Somewhere along the line, they’d taken Takeshi Kovacs (d.h.), and they’d freighted him. And since Harlan’s World was the only habitable biosphere in the Glimmer system, that meant a stellar range needlecast to—

Where?

I looked up. Harsh neon tubes set in a concrete roof. I was sitting in the opened hatch of a dull metal cylinder, looking for all the world like an ancient aviator who’d forgotten to dress before climbing aboard his biplane. The cylinder was one of a row of about twenty backed up against the wall, opposite a heavy steel door which was closed. The air was chilly and the walls unpainted. Give them their due, on Harlan’s World at least the re-sleeving rooms are decked out in pastel colours and the attendants are pretty. After all, you’re supposed to have paid your debt to society. The least they can do is give you a sunny start to your new life.

Sunny wasn’t in the vocabulary of the figure before me. About two metres tall, he looked as if he’d made his living wrestling swamp panthers before the present career opportunity presented itself. Musculature bulged on his chest and arms like body armour and the head above it was cropped close to the skull, revealing a long scar like a lightning strike down to the left ear. He was dressed in a loose black garment with epaulettes and a diskette logo on the breast. His eyes matched the garment and watched me with hardened calm. Having helped me sit up, he had stepped back out of arm’s reach, as per the manual. He’d been doing this a long time.

I pressed one nostril closed and snorted tank gel out of the other.

‘Want to tell me where I am? Itemise my rights, something like that?’

‘Kovacs, right now you don’t have any rights.’

I looked up and saw that a grim smile had stitched itself across his face. I shrugged and snorted the other nostril clean.

‘Want to tell me where I am?’

He hesitated a moment, glanced up at the neon-barred roof as if to ascertain the information for himself before he passed it on, and then mirrored my shrug.

‘Sure. Why not? You’re in Bay City, pal. Bay City, Earth.’ The grimace of a smile came back. ‘Home of the Human Race. Please enjoy your stay on this most ancient of civilised worlds. Ta-dada-DAH. ’

‘Don’t give up the day job,’ I told him soberly.

The doctor led me down a long white corridor whose floor bore the scuff marks of rubber-wheeled gurneys. She was moving at quite a pace and I was hard pressed to keep up, wrapped as I was in nothing but a plain grey towel and still dripping tank gel. Her manner was superficially bedside, but there was a harried undercurrent to it. She had a sheaf of curling hardcopy documentation under her arm and other places to be. I wondered how many sleevings she got through in a day.