Altered Carbon

Chapter One

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.

“You should get as much rest as you can in the next day or so,” she recited. “There may be minor aches and pains, but this is normal. Sleep will solve the problem. If you have any recurring comp—”

“I know. I’ve done this before.”

I wasn’t feeling much like human interaction. I’d just remembered Sarah.

We stopped at a side door with the word shower stencilled on frosted glass. The doctor steered me inside and stood looking at me for a moment.

“I’ve used showers before as well,” I assured her.

She nodded. “When you’re finished, there’s an elevator at the end of the corridor. Discharge is on the next floor. The, ah, the police are waiting to talk to you.”

The manual says you’re supposed to avoid strong adrenal shocks to the newly sleeved, but then she’d probably read my file and didn’t consider meeting the police much of an event in my lifestyle. I tried to feel the same.

“What do they want?”

“They didn’t choose to share that with me.” The words showed an edge of frustration that she shouldn’t have been letting me see. “Perhaps your reputation precedes you.”

“Perhaps it does.” On an impulse, I flexed my new face into a smile. “Doctor, I’ve never been here before. To Earth, I mean. I’ve never dealt with your police before. Should I be worried?”

She looked at me, and I saw it welling up in her eyes; the mingled fear and wonder and contempt of the failed human reformer.

“With a man like you,” she managed finally, “I would have thought they would be the worried ones.”

“Yeah, right,” I said quietly.

She hesitated, then gestured. “There is a mirror in the changing room,” she said, and left. I glanced towards the room she had indicated, not sure I was ready for the mirror yet.

In the shower I whistled away my disquiet tunelessly and ran soap and hands over the new body. My sleeve was in his early forties, Protectorate standard, with a swimmer’s build and what felt like some military custom carved onto his nervous system. Neurachemical upgrade, most likely. I’d had it myself, once. There was a tightness in the lungs that suggested a nicotine habit and some gorgeous scarring on the forearm, but apart from that I couldn’t find anything worth complaining about. The little twinges and snags catch up with you later on and if you’re wise, you just live with them. Every sleeve has a history. If that kind of thing bothers you, you line up over at Syntheta’s or Fabrikon. I’ve worn my fair share of synthetic sleeves; they use them for parole hearings quite often. Cheap, but it’s too much like living alone in a draughty house, and they never seem to get the flavour circuits right. Everything you eat ends up tasting like curried sawdust.

In the changing cubicle I found a neatly folded summer suit on the bench, and the mirror set in the wall. On top of the pile of clothes was a simple steel watch, and weighted beneath the watch was a plain white envelope with my name written neatly across it. I took a deep breath and went to face the mirror.

This is always the toughest part. Nearly two decades I’ve been doing this, and it still jars me to look into the glass and see a total stranger staring back. It’s like pulling an image out of the depths of an autostereogram. For the first couple of moments all you can see is someone else looking at you through a window frame. Then, like a shift in focus, you feel yourself float rapidly up behind the mask and adhere to its inside with a shock that’s almost tactile. It’s as if someone’s cut an umbilical cord, only instead of separating the two of you, it’s the otherness that has been severed and now you’re just looking at your reflection in a mirror.

I stood there and towelled myself dry, getting used to the face. It was basically Caucasian, which was a change for me, and the overwhelming impression I got was that if there was a line of least resistance in life, this face had never been along it. Even with the characteristic pallor of a long stay in the tank, the features in the mirror managed to look weather-beaten. There were lines everywhere. The thick cropped hair was black shot through with grey. The eyes were a speculative shade of blue, and there was a faint jagged scar under the left one. I raised my left forearm and looked at the story written there, wondering if the two were connected.

The envelope beneath the watch contained a single sheet of printed paper. Hardcopy. Handwritten signature. Very quaint.

Well, you’re on Earth now. Most ancient of civilised worlds. I shrugged and scanned the letter, then got dressed and folded it away in the jacket of my new suit. With a final glance in the mirror, I strapped on the new watch and went out to meet the police.

It was four-fifteen, local time.

The doctor was waiting for me, seated behind a long curve of reception counter and filling out forms on a monitor. A thin, severe-looking man suited in black stood at her shoulder. There was no one else in the room.

I glanced around, then back at the suit.

“You the police?”

“Outside.” He gestured at the door. “This isn’t their jurisdiction. They need a special brief to get in here. We have our own security.”

“And you are?”

He looked at me with the same mixture of emotions the doctor had hit me with downstairs. “Warden Sullivan, chief executive for Bay City Central, the facility you are now leaving.”

“You don’t sound delighted to be losing me.”

Sullivan pinned me with a stare. “You’re a recidivist, Kovacs. I never saw the case for wasting good flesh and blood on people like you.”

I touched the letter in my breast pocket. “Lucky for me Mr Bancroft disagrees with you. He’s supposed to be sending a limousine for me. Is that outside as well?”

“I haven’t looked.”

Somewhere on the counter, a protocol chime sounded. The doctor had finished her inputting. She tore the curling edge of the hardcopy free, initialled it in a couple of places and passed it to Sullivan. The warden bent over the paper, scanning it with narrowed eyes before he scribbled his own signature and handed the copy to me.

“Takeshi Lev Kovacs,” he said, mispronouncing my name with the same skill as his minion in the tank room. “By the powers vested in me by the UN Justice Accord, I discharge you on lease to Laurens J. Bancroft, for a period not to exceed six weeks, at the end of which time your parole status will be reconsidered. Please sign here.”

I took the pen and wrote my name in someone else’s handwriting next to the warden’s finger. Sullivan separated the top and bottom copies, and handed me the pink one. The doctor held up a second sheet and Sullivan took it.

“This is a doctor’s statement certifying that Takeshi Kovacs (d.h.) was received intact from the Harlan’s World Justice Administration, and subsequently sleeved in this body. Witnessed by myself, and closed circuit monitor. A disc copy of the transmission details and tank data are enclosed. Please sign the declaration.”

I glanced up and searched in vain for any sign of the cameras. Not worth fighting about. I scribbled my new signature a second time.

“This is a copy of the leasing agreement by which you are bound. Please read it carefully. Failure to comply with any of its articles may result in you being returned to storage immediately to complete the full term of your sentence either here, or at another facility of the Administration’s choice. Do you understand these terms and agree to be bound by them?”

I took the paperwork and scanned rapidly through it. It was standard stuff. A modified version of the parole agreement I’d signed half a dozen times before on Harlan’s World. The language was a bit stiffer, but the content was the same. Bullshit by any other name. I signed it without a blink.

“Well then.” Sullivan seemed to have lost a bit of his iron. “You’re a lucky man, Kovacs. Don’t waste the opportunity.”

Don’t they ever get tired of saying it?

I folded up my bits of paper without speaking and stuffed them into my pocket next to the letter. I was turning to leave when the doctor stood up and held out a small white card to me.

“Mr Kovacs.”

I paused.

“There shouldn’t be any major problems with adjusting,” she said. “This is a healthy body, and you are used to this. If there is anything major. Call this number.”

I put out an arm and lifted the little rectangle of card with a machined precision that I hadn’t noticed before. The neurachem was kicking in. My hand delivered the card to the same pocket as the rest of the paperwork and I was gone, crossing the reception and pushing open the door without a word. Ungracious maybe, but I didn’t think anyone in that building had earnt my gratitude yet.

You’re a lucky man, Kovacs. Sure. A hundred and eighty light years from home, wearing another man’s body on a six-week rental agreement. Freighted in to do a job that the local police wouldn’t touch with a riot prod. Fail and go back into storage. I felt so lucky I could have burst into song as I walked out the door.

Chapter Two

The hall outside was huge, and all but deserted. It looked like nothing so much as the Millsport rail terminal back home. Beneath a tilted roof of long transparent panels, the fused glass paving of the floor shone amber in the afternoon sun. A couple of children were playing with the automatic doors at the exit, and there was a solitary cleaning robot sniffing along in the shade at one wall. Nothing else moved. Marooned in the glow on benches of old wood, a scattering of humanity waited in silence for friends or family to ride in from their altered carbon exiles.

Download Central.

These people wouldn’t recognise their loved ones in their new sleeves; recognition would be left to the homecomers, and for those who awaited them the anticipation of reunion would be tempered with a cool dread at what face and body they might have to learn to love. Or maybe they were a couple of generations down the line, waiting for relatives who were no more to them now than a vague childhood memory or a family legend. I knew one guy in the Corps, Murakami, who was waiting on the release of a great-grandfather put away over a century back. Was going up to Newpest with a litre of whisky and a pool cue for homecoming gifts. He’d been brought up on stories of his great-grandfather in the Kanagawa pool halls. The guy had been put away before Murakami was even born.

I spotted my reception committee as I went down the steps into the body of the hall. Three tall silhouettes were gathered around one of the benches, shifting restlessly in the slanting rays of sunlight and creating eddies in the dust motes that floated there. A fourth figure sat on the bench, arms folded and legs stretched out. All four of them were wearing reflective sunglasses that at a distance turned their faces into identical masks.

Already on course for the door, I made no attempt to detour in their direction and this must have occurred to them only when I was halfway across the hall. Two of them drifted over to intercept me with the easy calm of big cats that had been fed recently. Bulky and tough-looking with neatly groomed crimson mohicans, they arrived in my path a couple of metres ahead, forcing me either to stop in turn or cut an abrupt circle around them. I stopped. Newly arrived and newly sleeved is the wrong state to be in if you plan to piss off the local militia. I tried on my second smile of the day.

“Something I can do for you?”

The older of the two waved a badge negligently in my direction, then put it away as if it might tarnish in the open air.

“Bay City police. The lieutenant wants to talk to you.” The sentence sounded bitten off, as if he was resisting the urge to add some epithet to the end of it. I made an attempt to look as if I was seriously considering whether or not to go along with them, but they had me and they knew it. An hour out of the tank, you don’t know enough about your new body to be getting into brawls with it. I shut down my images of Sarah’s death and let myself be shepherded back to the seated cop.

The lieutenant was a woman in her thirties. Under the golden discs of her shades, she wore cheekbones from some Amerindian ancestor and a wide slash of a mouth that was currently set in a sardonic line. The sunglasses were jammed on a nose you could have opened cans on. Short, untidy hair framed the whole face, stuck up in spikes at the front. She had wrapped herself in an outsize combat jacket but the long, black-encased legs that protruded from its lower edge were a clear hint of the lithe body within. She looked up at me with her arms folded on her chest for nearly a minute before anyone spoke.

“It’s Kovacs, right?”

“Yes.”

“Takeshi Kovacs?” Her pronunciation was perfect. “Out of Harlan’s World? Millsport via the Kanagawa storage facility?”

“Tell you what, I’ll just stop you when you get one wrong.”

There was a long, mirror-lensed pause. The lieutenant unfolded fractionally and examined the blade of one hand.

“You got a licence for that sense of humour, Kovacs?”

“Sorry. Left it at home.”

“And what brings you to Earth?”

I gestured impatiently. “You know all this already, otherwise you wouldn’t be here. Have you got something to say to me, or did you just bring these kids along for educational purposes?”

I felt a hand fasten on my upper arm and tensed. The lieutenant made a barely perceptible motion with her head and the cop behind me let go again.

“Cool down, Kovacs. I’m just making conversation here. Yeah, I know Laurens Bancroft sprung you. Matter of fact, I’m here to offer you a lift up to the Bancroft residence.” She sat forward suddenly, and stood up. On her feet she was almost as tall as my new sleeve. “I’m Kristin Ortega, Organic Damage Division. Bancroft was my case.”

“Was?”

She nodded. “Case is closed, Kovacs.”

“Is that a warning?”

“No, it’s just the facts. Open-and-shut suicide.”

“Bancroft doesn’t seem to think so. He claims he was murdered.”

“Yeah, so I hear.” Ortega shrugged. “Well, that’s his prerogative. I guess it might be difficult for a man like that to believe he’d blow his own head clean off.”

“A man like what?”

“Oh come—” She stopped herself and gave me a small smile. “Sorry, I keep forgetting.”

“Forgetting what?”

Another pause, but this time Kristin Ortega seemed to be off balance for the first time in our brief acquaintance. There was hesitancy blurring her tone when she spoke again. “You’re not from here.”

“So?”

“So anyone from here would know what kind of man Laurens Bancroft is. That’s all.”

Fascinated at why someone would lie so ineptly to a total stranger, I tried to put her back at her ease. “A rich man,” I hazarded. “A powerful man.”

She smiled thinly. “You’ll see. Now do you want this lift or not?”

The letter in my pocket said a chauffeur would be outside the terminal to pick me up. Bancroft had made no mention of the police. I shrugged.

“I’ve never turned down a free ride yet.”

“Good. Then shall we go?”

They flanked me to the door and stepped out ahead like bodyguards, heads tilted back and lensed eyes scanning. Ortega and I stepped through the gap together and the warmth of the sunlight hit me in the face. I screwed up my new eyes against the glare and made out angular buildings behind real wire fences on the other side of a badly-kept landing lot. Sterile, and off-white, quite possibly original pre-millennial structures. Between the oddly monochrome walls, I could see sections of a grey iron bridge that came vaulting in to land somewhere hidden from view. A similarly drab collection of sky and ground cruisers sat about in not particularly neat lines. The wind gusted abruptly and I caught the faint odour of some flowering weed growing along the cracks in the landing lot. In the distance was the familiar hum of traffic, but everything else felt like a period drama set piece.

“…and I tell you there is only one judge! Do not believe the men of science when they tell you…”

The squawk of the poorly operated ampbox hit us as we went down the steps from the exit. I glanced across the landing area and saw a crowd assembled around a black-clad man on a packing crate. Holographic placards wove erratically in the air above the heads of the listeners. NO TO RESOLUTION 653!! ONLY GOD CAN RESURRECT!! D.H.F. = D.E.A.T.H. Cheers drowned out the speaker.

“What’s this?”

“Catholics,” said Ortega, lip curling. “Old-time religious sect.”

“Yeah? Never heard of them.”

“No. You wouldn’t have. They don’t believe you can digitise a human being without losing the soul.”

“Not a widespread faith then.”

“Just on Earth,” she said sourly. “I think the Vatican — that’s their central church — financed a couple of cryoships to Starfall and Latimer—”

“I’ve been to Latimer, I never ran into anything like this.”

“The ships only left at the turn of the century, Kovacs. They won’t get there for a couple more decades yet.”

We skirted the gathering, and a young woman with her hair pulled severely back thrust a leaflet at me. The gesture was so abrupt that it tripped my sleeve’s unsettled reflexes and I made a blocking motion before I got it under control. Hard-eyed, the woman stood with the leaflet out and I took it with a placating smile.

“They have no right,” the woman said.

“Oh, I agree…”

“Only the Lord our God can save your soul.”

“I—” But by this time Kristin Ortega was steering me firmly away, one hand on my arm, in a manner that suggested a lot of practice. I shook her off politely but equally firmly.

“Are we in some kind of hurry?”

“I think we both have better things to do, yes,” she said, tight lipped, looking back to where her colleagues were engaged in fending off leaflets of their own.

“I might have wanted to talk to her.”

“Yeah? Looked to me like you wanted to throat-chop her.”

“That’s just the sleeve. I think it had some neurachem conditioning way back when, and she tripped it. You know, most people lie down for a few hours after downloading. I’m a little on edge.”

I stared at the leaflet in my hands. CAN A MACHINE SAVE YOUR SOUL? it demanded of me rhetorically. The word ‘machine’ had been printed in script designed to resemble an archaic computer display. ‘Soul’ was in flowing stereographic letters that danced all over the page. I turned over for the answer.

NO!!!!!

“So cryogenic suspension is okay, but digitised human freight isn’t. Interesting.” I looked back at the glowing placards, musing. “What’s Resolution 653?”

“It’s a test case going through the UN Court,” said Ortega shortly. “Bay City public prosecutor’s office want to subpoena a Catholic who’s in storage. Pivotal witness. The Vatican say she’s already dead and in the hands of God. They’re calling it blasphemy.”

“I see. So your loyalties are pretty undivided here.”

She stopped and turned to face me.

“Kovacs, I hate these goddamn freaks. They’ve been grinding us down for the best part of two and a half thousand years. They’ve been responsible for more misery than any other organisation in history. You know they won’t even let their adherents practise birth control, for Christ’s sake, and they’ve stood against every significant medical advance of the last five centuries. Practically the only thing you can say in their favour is that this d.h.f. thing has stopped them from spreading with the rest of humanity.”

My lift turned out to be a battered but undeniably rakish-looking Lockheed-Mitoma transport decked out in what were presumably police colours. I’d flown Lock-Mits on Sharya, but they’d been a dull radar-reflective black all over. The red and white stripes on this one looked garish by comparison. A pilot in sunglasses to match the rest of Ortega’s little gang sat motionless in the cockpit. The hatch into the belly of the cruiser was already hinged up. Ortega banged on the hatch coaming as we climbed aboard and the turbines awoke with a whispery sound.

I helped one of the mohicans manhandle the hatch down, steadied myself against the lift of the cruiser and found my way to a window seat. As we spiralled up, I craned my neck to keep the crowd below in sight. The transport straightened out about a hundred metres up and dropped its nose slightly. I sank back into the arms of the automould and found Ortega watching me.

“Still curious huh?” she said.

“I feel like a tourist. Answer me a question?”

“If I can.”

“Well, if these guys don’t practise birth control, there’s got to be an awful lot of them, right. And Earth isn’t exactly a hive of activity these days, so… Why aren’t they running things?”

Ortega and her men swapped a set of unpleasant smiles. “Storage,” said the mohican on my left.

I slapped myself on the back of the neck, and then wondered if the gesture was in use here. It’s the standard site for a cortical stack, after all, but then cultural quirks don’t always work like that.

“Storage. Of course.” I looked around at their faces. “There’s no special exemption for them?”

“Nope.” For some reason, this little exchange seemed to have made us all buddies. They were relaxing. The same mohican went on to elaborate. “Ten years or three months, it’s all the same to them. A death sentence every time. They never come off stack. It’s cute, huh?”

I nodded. “Very tidy. What happens to the bodies?”

The man opposite me made a throwaway gesture. “Sold off, broken down for transplants. Depends on the family.”

I turned away and stared out of the window.

“Something the matter, Kovacs?”

I faced Ortega with a fresh smile gripping my face. It felt as if I was getting quite good at them.

“No, no. I was just thinking. It’s like a different planet.”

That cracked them up.

Chapter Three

Suntouch House was aptly named. From Bay City we flew south down the coast for about half an hour before the change in engine pitch warned me that we were approaching our destination. By that time the light through the right side windows was turning warm gold with the sun’s decline towards the sea. I peered out as we started to descend and saw how the waves below were molten copper and the air above pure amber. It was like landing in a jar of honey.

The transport sideslipped and banked, giving me a view of the Bancroft estate. It edged in from the sea in neatly manicured tones of green and gravel around a sprawling tile-roofed mansion big enough to house a small army. The walls were white, the roofing coral and the army, if it existed, was out of sight. Any security systems Bancroft had installed were very low-key. As we came lower I made out the discreet haze of a power fence along one border of the grounds. Barely enough to distort the view from the house. Nice.

Less than a dozen metres up over one of the immaculate lawns the pilot kicked in the landing brake with what seemed like unnecessary violence. The transport shuddered from end to end and we came down hard amidst flying clods of turf.

I shot Ortega a reproachful look which she ignored. She threw open the hatch and climbed out. After a moment I joined her on the damaged lawn. Prodding at the torn grass with the toe of one shoe, I shouted over the sound of the turbines. “What was that all about? You guys pissed off with Bancroft just because he doesn’t buy his own suicide?”

“No.” Ortega surveyed the house in front of us as if she was thinking of moving in. “No, that’s not why we’re pissed off with Mr Bancroft.”

“Care to tell me why?”

“You’re the detective.”

A young woman appeared from the side of the house, tennis racket in hand, and came across the lawn towards us. When she was about twenty metres away, she stopped, tucked the racket under her arm and cupped her hands to her mouth.

“Are you Kovacs?”

She was beautiful in a sun, sea and sand sort of way and the sports shorts and leotard she was wearing displayed the fact to maximal effect. Golden hair brushed her shoulders as she moved and the shout gave away a glimpse of milk white teeth. She wore sweat bands at forehead and wrists and from the dew on her brow they were not for show. There was finely toned muscle in her legs and a substantial bicep stood out when she lifted her arms. Exuberant breasts strained the fabric of the leotard. I wondered if the body was hers.

“Yes,” I called back. “Takeshi Kovacs. I was discharged this afternoon.”

“You were supposed to be met at the storage facility.” It was like an accusation. I spread my hands.

“Well. I was.”

“Not by the police.” She stalked forward, eyes mostly on Ortega. “You. I know you.”

“Lieutenant Ortega,” said Ortega, as if she was at a garden party. “Bay City, Organic Damage Division.”

“Yes. I remember now.” The tone was distinctly hostile. “I assume it was you who arranged for our chauffeur to be pulled over on some trumped-up emissions charge.”

“No, that would be Traffic Control, ma’am,” said the detective politely. “I have no jurisdiction in that division.”

The woman in front of us sneered.

“Oh, I’m sure you haven’t, lieutenant. And I’m sure none of your friends work there either.” The voice turned patronising. “We’ll have him released before the sun goes down, you know.”

I glanced sideways to see Ortega’s reaction, but there was none. The hawk profile remained impassive. Most of me was preoccupied with the other woman’s sneer. It was an ugly expression, and one that belonged on an altogether older face.

Back up by the house there were two large men with automatic weapons slung over their shoulders. They had been standing under the eaves watching since we arrived, but now they ambled out of the shade and began to make their way in our direction. From the slight widening of the young woman’s eyes I guessed that she had summoned them on an internal mike. Slick. On Harlan’s World people are still a bit averse to sticking racks of hardware into themselves, but it looked as if Earth was going to be a different proposition.

“You are not welcome here, lieutenant,” said the young woman in a freezing voice.

“Just leaving, ma’am,” said Ortega heavily. She clapped me unexpectedly on the shoulder and headed back to the transport at an easy pace. Halfway there she suddenly stopped and turned back.

“Here, Kovacs. Almost forgot. You’ll need these.”

She dug in her breast pocket and tossed me a small packet. I caught it reflexively and looked down. Cigarettes.

“Be seeing you.”

She swung herself aboard the transport and slammed the hatch. Through the glass I saw her looking at me. The transport lifted on full repulse, pulverising the ground beneath and ripping a furrow across the lawn as it swung west towards the ocean. We watched it out of sight.

“Charming,” said the woman beside me, largely to herself.

“Mrs Bancroft?”

She swung around. From the look on her face, I wasn’t much more welcome here than Ortega had been. She had seen the lieutenant’s gesture of camaraderie and her lips twitched with disapproval.

“My husband sent a car for you, Mr Kovacs. Why didn’t you wait for it?”

I took out Bancroft’s letter. “It says here the car would be waiting for me. It wasn’t.”

She tried to take the letter from me and I lifted it out of her reach. She stood facing me, flushed, breasts rising and falling distractingly. When they stick a body in the tank, it goes on producing hormones pretty much the way it would if you were asleep. I became abruptly aware that I was swinging a hard-on like a filled fire hose.

“You should have waited.”

Harlan’s World, I remembered from somewhere, has gravity at about 0.8g. I suddenly felt unreasonably heavy again. I pushed out a compressed breath.

“Mrs Bancroft, if I’d waited, I’d still be there now. Can we go inside?”

Her eyes widened a little, and I suddenly saw in them how old she really was. Then she lowered her gaze and summoned composure. When she spoke again, her voice had softened.

“I’m sorry, Mr Kovacs. I’ve forgotten my manners. The police, as you see, have not been sympathetic. It’s been very upsetting, and we all still feel a little on edge. If you can imagine—”

“There’s no need to explain.”

“But I am very sorry. I’m not usually like this. None of us are.” She gestured around as if to say that the two armed guards behind her would ordinarily have been bearing garlands of flowers. “Please accept my apologies.”

“Of course.”

“My husband’s waiting for you in the seaward lounge. I’ll take you to him immediately.”

The inside of the house was light and airy. A maid met us at the veranda door and took Mrs Bancroft’s tennis racket for her without a word. We went down a marbled hallway hung with art that, to my untutored eye, looked old. Sketches of Gagarin and Armstrong, Empathist renderings of Konrad Harlan and Angin Chandra. At the end of this gallery, set on a plinth, was something like a narrow tree made out of crumbling red stone. I paused in front of it and Mrs Bancroft had to backtrack from the left turn she was making.

“Do you like it?” she asked.

“Very much. This is from Mars, isn’t it.”

Her face underwent a change that I caught out of the corner of my eye. She was reassessing. I turned for a closer look at her face.

“I’m impressed,” she said.

“People often are. Sometimes I do handsprings too.”

She looked at me narrowly. “Do you really know what this is?”

“Frankly, no. I used to be interested in structural art. I recognise the stone from pictures, but…”

“It’s a Songspire.” She reached past me and let her fingers trail down one of the upright branches. A faint sighing awoke from the thing and a perfume like cherries and mustard wafted into the air.

“Is it alive?”

“No one knows.” There was a sudden enthusiasm in her tone that I liked her better for. “On Mars they grow to be a hundred metres tall, sometimes as wide as this house at the root. You can hear them singing for kilometres. The perfume carries as well. From the erosion patterns, we think that most of them are at least ten thousand years old. This one might only have been around since the founding of the Roman empire.”

“Must have been expensive. To bring it back to Earth, I mean.”

“Money wasn’t an object, Mr Kovacs.” The mask was back in place. Time to move on.

We made double time down the left-hand corridor, perhaps to make up for our unscheduled stop. With each step Mrs Bancroft’s breasts jiggled under the thin material of the leotard and I took a morose interest in the art on the other side of the corridor. More Empathist work, Angin Chandra with her slender hand resting on a thrusting phallus of a rocket. Not much help.

The seaward lounge was built on the end of the house’s west wing. Mrs Bancroft took me into it through an unobtrusive wooden door and the sun hit us in the eyes as soon as we entered.

“Laurens. This is Mr Kovacs.”

I lifted a hand to shade my eyes and saw that the seaward lounge had an upper level with sliding glass doors that accessed a balcony. Leaning on the balcony was a man. He must have heard us come in; come to that, he must have heard the police cruiser arrive and known what it signified, but still he stayed where he was, staring out to sea. Coming back from the dead sometimes makes you feel that way. Or maybe it was just arrogance. Mrs Bancroft nodded me forward and we went up a set of stairs made from the same wood as the door. For the first time I noticed that the walls of the room were shelved from top to bottom with books. The sun was laying an even coat of orange light along their spines.

As we came out onto the balcony, Bancroft turned to face us. There was a book in his hand, folded closed over his fingers.

“Mr Kovacs.” He transferred the book so that he could shake my hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you at last. How do you find the new sleeve?”

“It’s fine. Comfortable.”

“Yes, I didn’t involve myself too much in the details, but I instructed my lawyers to find something… suitable.” He glanced back, as if looking for Ortega’s cruiser on the horizon. “I hope the police weren’t too officious.”

“Not so far.”

Bancroft looked like a Man Who Read. There’s a favourite experia star on Harlan’s World called Alain Marriott, best known for his portrayal of a virile young Quellist philosopher who cuts a swathe through the brutal tyranny of the early Settlement years. It’s questionable how accurate this portrayal of the Quellists is, but it’s a good flic. I’ve seen it twice. Bancroft looked a lot like an older version of Marriott in that role. He was slim and elegant with a full head of iron grey hair which he wore back in a ponytail, and hard black eyes. The book in his hand and the shelves around him were like an utterly natural extension of the powerhouse of a mind that looked out from those eyes.

Bancroft touched his wife on the shoulder with a dismissive casualness that in my present state made me want to weep.

“It was that woman, again,” said Mrs Bancroft. “The lieutenant.”

Bancroft nodded. “Don’t worry about it, Miriam. They’re just sniffing around. I warned them I was going to do this, and they ignored me. Well, now Mr Kovacs is here, and they’re finally taking me seriously.”

He turned to me. “The police have not been very helpful to me over this matter.”

“Yeah. That’s why I’m here, apparently.”

We looked at each other while I tried to decide if I was angry with this man or not. He’d dragged me halfway across the settled universe, dumped me into a new body and offered me a deal that was weighted so I couldn’t refuse. Rich people do this. They have the power and they see no reason not to use it. Men and women are just merchandise, like everything else. Store them, freight them, decant them. Sign at the bottom please.

On the other hand, no one at Suntouch House had mispronounced my name yet, and I didn’t really have a choice. And then there was the money. A hundred thousand UN was about six or seven times what Sarah and I had expected to make on the Millsport wetware haul. UN dollars, the hardest currency there was, negotiable on any world in the Protectorate.

That had to be worth keeping your temper for.

Bancroft gave his wife another casual touch, this time on her waist, pushing her away.

“Miriam, could you leave us alone for a while? I’m sure Mr Kovacs has endless questions, and it’s likely to be boring for you.”

“Actually, I’m likely to have some questions for Mrs Bancroft as well.”

She was already on her way back inside, and my comment stopped her in mid-stride. She cocked her head at an angle, and looked from me to Bancroft and back. Beside me, her husband stirred. This wasn’t what he wanted.

“Maybe I could speak to you later,” I amended. “Separately.”

“Yes, of course.” Her eyes met mine, then danced aside. “I’ll be in the chart room, Laurens. Send Mr Kovacs along when you’ve finished.”

We both watched her leave, and when the door closed behind her Bancroft gestured me to one of the lounge chairs on the balcony. Behind them, an antique astronomical telescope stood levelled at the horizon, gathering dust. Looking down at the boards under my feet, I saw they were worn with use. The impression of age settled over me like a cloak, and I lowered myself into my chair with a tiny frisson of unease.

“Please don’t think of me as a chauvinist, Mr Kovacs. After nearly two hundred and fifty years of marriage, my relationship with Miriam is more politeness than anything. It really would be better if you spoke to her alone.”

“I understand.” That was shaving the truth a bit, but it would do.

“Would you care for a drink? Something alcoholic?”

“No thank you. Just some fruit juice, if you have it.” The shakiness associated with downloading was beginning to assert itself, and in addition there was an unwelcome scratchiness in my feet and fingers which I assumed was nicotine dependency. Apart from the odd cigarette bummed from Sarah, I’d been quit for the last two sleeves and I didn’t want to have to break the habit all over again. Alcohol on top of everything would finish me.

Bancroft folded his hands in his lap. “Of course. I’ll have some brought up. Now, where would you like to begin?”

“Maybe we should start with your expectations. I don’t know what Reileen Kawahara told you, or what kind of profile the Envoy Corps has here on Earth, but don’t expect miracles from me. I’m not a sorcerer.”

“I’m aware of that. I have read the Corps literature carefully. And all Reileen Kawahara told me was that you were reliable, if a trifle fastidious.”

I remembered Kawahara’s methods, and my reactions to them. Fastidious. Right.

I gave him the standard spiel anyway. It felt funny, pitching for a client who was already in. Felt funny to play down what I could do, as well. The criminal community isn’t long on modesty, and what you do to get serious backing is inflate whatever reputation you may already have. This was more like being back in the Corps. Long polished conference tables and Virginia Vidaura ticking off the capabilities of her team.

“Envoy training was developed for the UN colonial commando units. That doesn’t mean…”

Doesn’t mean every Envoy is a commando. No, not exactly, but then what is a soldier anyway? How much of special forces training is engraved on the physical body and how much in the mind? And what happens when the two are separated?

Space, to use a cliché, is big. The closest of the Settled Worlds is fifty light years out from Earth. The most far-flung four times that distance, and some of the Colony transports are still going. If some maniac starts rattling tactical nukes, or some other biosphere-threatening toys, what are you going to do? You can transmit the information, via hyperspatial needlecast, so close to instantaneously that scientists are still arguing about the terminology but that, to quote Quellcrist Falconer, deploys no bloody divisions. Even if you launched a troop carrier the moment the shit hit the fan, the marines would be arriving just in time to quiz the grandchildren of whoever won.

That’s no way to run a Protectorate.

OK, you can digitise and freight the minds of a crack combat team. It’s been a long time since weight of numbers counted for much in a war, and most of the military victories of the last half millennium have been won by small, mobile guerrilla forces. You can even decant your crack d.h.f. soldiers directly into sleeves with combat conditioning, jacked-up nervous systems and steroid built bodies. Then what do you do?

They’re in bodies they don’t know, on a world they don’t know, fighting for one bunch of total strangers against another bunch of total strangers over causes they’ve probably never even heard of and certainly don’t understand. The climate is different, the language and culture is different, the wildlife and vegetation is different, the atmosphere is different. Shit, even the gravity is different. They know nothing, and even if you download them with implanted local knowledge, it’s a massive amount of information to assimilate at a time when they’re likely to be fighting for their lives within hours of sleeving.

That’s where you get the Envoy Corps.

Neurachem conditioning, cyborg interfaces, augmentation — all this stuff is physical. Most of it doesn’t even touch the pure mind, and it’s the pure mind that gets freighted. That’s where the Corps started. They took psychospiritual techniques that oriental cultures on Earth had known about for millennia and distilled them into a training system so complete that on most worlds graduates of it were instantly forbidden by law to hold any political or military office.

Not soldiers, no. Not exactly.

“I work by absorption,” I finished. “Whatever I come into contact with, I soak up, and I use that to get by.”

Bancroft shifted in his seat. He wasn’t used to being lectured. It was time to start.

“Who found your body?”

“My daughter, Naomi.”

He broke off as someone opened the door in the room below. A moment later, the maid who had attended Miriam Bancroft earlier came up the steps to the balcony bearing a tray with a visibly chilled decanter and tall glasses. Bancroft was wired with internal tannoy, like everyone else at Suntouch House it seemed.

The maid set down her tray, poured in machine-like silence and then withdrew on a short nod from Bancroft. He stared after her blankly for a while.

Back from the dead. It’s no joke.

“Naomi,” I prompted him gently.

He blinked. “Oh. Yes. She barged in here, wanting something. Probably the keys to one of the limos. I’m an indulgent father, I suppose, and Naomi is my youngest.”

“How young?”

“Twenty-three.”

“Do you have many children?”

“Yes, I do. Very many.” Bancroft smiled faintly. “When you have leisure and wealth, bringing children into the world is a pure joy. I have twenty-seven sons and thirty-four daughters.”

“Do they live with you?”

“Naomi does, most of the time. The others come and go. Most have families of their own now.”

“How is Naomi?” I stepped my tone down a little.

Finding your father without his head isn’t the best way to start the day.

“She’s in psychosurgery,” said Bancroft shortly. “But she’ll pull through. Do you need to talk to her?”

“Not at the moment.” I got up from the chair and went to the balcony door. “You say she barged in here. This is where it happened?”

“Yes.” Bancroft joined me at the door. “Someone got in here and took my head off with a particle blaster. You can see the blast mark on the wall down there. Over by the desk.”

I went inside and down the stairs. The desk was a heavy mirrorwood item — they must have freighted the gene code from Harlan’s World and cultured the tree here. That struck me as almost as extravagant as the Songspire in the hall, and in slightly more questionable taste. On the World mirrorwood grows in forests on three continents, and practically every canal dive in Millsport has a bar top carved out of the stuff. I moved past it to inspect the stucco wall. The white surface was furrowed and seared black with the unmistakable signature of a beam weapon. The burn started at head height and followed a short arc downwards.

Bancroft had remained on the balcony. I looked up at his silhouetted face. “This is the only sign of gunfire in the room?”

“Yes.”

“Nothing else was damaged, broken or disturbed in any way?”

“No. Nothing.” It was clear that he wanted to say more, but he was keeping quiet until I’d finished.

“And the police found the weapon beside you?”

“Yes.”

“Do you own a weapon that would do this?”

“Yes. It was mine. I keep it in a safe under the desk. Handprint coded. They found the safe open, nothing else removed. Do you want to see inside it?”

“Not at the moment, thank you.” I knew from experience how difficult mirrorwood furniture is to shift. I turned up one corner of the woven rug under the desk. There was an almost invisible seam in the floor beneath. “Whose prints will open this?”

“Miriam’s and my own.”

There was a significant pause. Bancroft sighed, loud enough to carry across the room. “Go on, Kovacs. Say it. Everyone else has. Either I committed suicide or my wife murdered me. There’s just no other reasonable explanation. I’ve been hearing it since they pulled me out of the tank at Alcatraz.”

I looked elaborately round the room before I met his eyes.

“Well, you’ll admit it makes for easier police work,” I said. “It’s nice and neat.”

He snorted, but there was a laugh in it. I found myself beginning to like this man despite myself. I went back up, stepped out onto the balcony and leaned on the rail. Outside a black-clad figure prowled back and forth across the lawn below, weapon slung at port. In the distance the power fence shimmered. I stared in that direction for a while.

“It’s asking a lot to believe that someone got in here, past all the security, broke into a safe only you and your wife had access to and murdered you, without causing any disturbance. You’re an intelligent man, you must have some reason for believing it.”

“Oh, I do. Several.”

“Reasons the police chose to ignore.”

“Yes.”

I turned to face him. “All right. Let’s hear it.”

“You’re looking at it, Mr Kovacs.” He stood there in front of me. “I’m here. I’m back. You can’t kill me just by wiping out my cortical stack.”

“You’ve got remote storage. Obviously, or you wouldn’t be here. How regular is the update?”

Bancroft smiled. “Every forty-eight hours.” He tapped the back of his neck. “Direct needlecast from here into a shielded stack over at the PsychaSec installation at Alcatraz. I don’t even have to think about it.”

“And they keep your clones on ice there as well.”

“Yes. Multiple units.”

Guaranteed immortality. I sat there thinking about that for a while, wondering how I’d like it. Wondering if I’d like it.

“Must be expensive,” I said at last.

“Not really. I own PsychaSec.”

“Oh.”

“So you see, Kovacs, neither I nor my wife could have pulled that trigger. We both knew it wouldn’t be enough to kill me. No matter how unlikely it seems, it had to be a stranger. Someone who didn’t know about the remote.”

I nodded. “All right, who else did know about it? Let’s narrow the field.”

“Apart from my family?” Bancroft shrugged. “My lawyer, Oumou Prescott. A couple of her legal aides. The director at PsychaSec. That’s about it.”

“Of course,” I said, “suicide is rarely a rational act.”

“Yes, that’s what the police said. They used it to explain all the other minor inconveniences in their theory as well.”

“Which were?”

This was what Bancroft had wanted to reveal earlier. It came out in a rush. “Which were that I should choose to walk the last two kilometres home, and let myself into the grounds on foot, then apparently readjust my internal clock before I killed myself.”

I blinked. “I’m sorry?”

“The police found traces of a cruiser landing in a field two kilometres from the perimeter of Suntouch House, which conveniently enough is just outside the pick-up range of the house security surveillance. Equally conveniently, there was apparently no satellite cover overhead at that precise time.”

“Did they check taxi datastacks?”

Bancroft nodded. “For what it’s worth, they did, yes. West Coast law does not require taxi companies to keep records of their fleets’ whereabouts at any given time. Some of the more reputable firms do, of course, but there are others that don’t. Some even make a selling point of it. Client confidentiality, that sort of thing.” A momentary hunted look crossed Bancroft’s face. “For some clients, in some cases, that would be a distinct advantage.”

“Have you used these firms in the past?”

“On occasion, yes.”

The logical next question hung in the air between us. I left it unasked, and waited. If Bancroft wasn’t going to share his reasons for wanting confidential transport, I wasn’t going to press him until I had a few other landmarks locked down.

Bancroft cleared his throat. “There is, in any case, some evidence to suggest that the vehicle in question might not have been a taxi. Field effect distribution, the police say. A pattern more in keeping with a larger vehicle.”

“That depends on how hard it landed.”

“I know. In any case, my tracks lead from the landing site, and apparently the condition of my shoes was in keeping with a two-kilometre trek across country. And then, finally, there was a call placed from this room shortly after three a.m. the night I was killed. A time check. There’s no voice on the line, only the sound of someone breathing.”

“And the police know this too?”

“Of course they do.”

“How did they explain it?”

Bancroft smiled thinly. “They didn’t. They thought the solitary walk through the rain was very much in keeping with the act of suicide, and apparently they couldn’t see any inconsistency in a man wanting to check his internal chronochip before he blows his own head off. As you say, suicide is not a rational act. They have case histories of this sort of thing. Apparently, the world is full of incompetents who kill themselves and wake up in a new sleeve the next day. I’ve had it explained to me. They forget they’re wearing a stack, or it doesn’t seem important at the moment of the act. Our beloved medical welfare system brings them right back, suicide notes and requests notwithstanding. Curious abuse of rights, that. Is it the same system on Harlan’s World?”

I shrugged. “More or less. If the request is legally witnessed, then they have to let them go. Otherwise, failure to revive is a storage offence.”

“I suppose that’s a wise precaution.”

“Yes. It stops murderers passing their work off as suicide.” Bancroft leaned forward on the rail and locked gazes with me. “Mr Kovacs, I am three hundred and fifty-seven years old. I have lived through a corporate war, the subsequent collapse of my industrial and trading interests, the real deaths of two of my children, at least three major economic crises, and I am still here. I am not the kind of man to take my own life, and even if I were, I would not have bungled it in this fashion. If it had been my intention to die, you would not be talking to me now. Is that clear?”

I looked back at him, back at those hard dark eyes. “Yes. Very clear.”

“That’s good.” He unpinned his stare. “Shall we continue?”

“Yes. The police. They don’t like you very much, do they?”

Bancroft smiled without much humour. “The police and I have a perspective problem.”

“Perspective?”

“That’s right.” He moved along the balcony. “Come here, I’ll show you what I mean.”

I followed him along the rail, catching the telescope with my arm as I did and knocking the barrel upright. The download shakes were beginning to demand their dues. The telescope’s positional motor whined crabbily and returned the instrument to its original shallow angle. Elevation and range focus ticked over on the ancient digital memory display. I paused to watch the thing realign itself. The fingermarks on the keypad were smudged in years of dust.

Bancroft had either not noticed my ineptitude or was being polite about it.

“Yours?” I asked him, jerking a thumb at the instrument. He glanced at it absently.

“Once. It was an enthusiasm I had. Back when the stars were still something to stare at. You wouldn’t remember how that felt.” It was said without conscious pretension or arrogance, almost inconsequentially. His voice lost some of its focus, like a transmission fading out. “Last time I looked through that lens was nearly two centuries ago. A lot of the Colony ships were still in flight then. We were still waiting to find out if they’d make it. Waiting for the needlebeams to come back to us. Like lighthouse beacons.”

He was losing me. I brought him back to reality. “Perspective?” I reminded him gently.

“Perspective.” He nodded and swung an arm out over his property. “You see that tree. Just beyond the tennis courts.”

I could hardly miss it. A gnarled old monster taller than the house, casting shade over an area the size of a tennis court in itself. I nodded.

“That tree is over seven hundred years old. When I bought this property, I hired a design engineer and he wanted to chop it down. He was planning to build the house further up the rise and the tree was spoiling the sea view. I sacked him.”

Bancroft turned to make sure his point was getting across.

“You see, Mr Kovacs, that engineer was a man in his thirties, and to him the tree was just an inconvenience. It was in his way. The fact it had been part of the world for over twenty times the length of his own life didn’t seem to bother him. He had no respect.”

“So you’re the tree.”

“Just so,” said Bancroft equably. “I am the tree. The police would like to chop me down, just like that engineer. I am inconvenient to them, and they have no respect.”

I went back to my seat to chew this over. Kristin Ortega’s attitude was beginning to make some sense at last. If Bancroft thought he was outside the normal requirements of good citizenship, he wasn’t likely to make many friends in uniform. There would have been little point trying to explain to him that for Ortega there was another tree called the Law and that in her eyes he was banging a few profane nails into it himself. I’ve seen this kind of thing from both sides, and there just isn’t any solution except to do what my own ancestors had done. When you don’t like the laws, you go somewhere they can’t touch you.

And then you make up some of your own.

Bancroft stayed at the rail. Perhaps he was communing with the tree. I decided to shelve this line of inquiry for a while.

“What’s the last thing you remember?”

“Tuesday 14th August,” he said promptly. “Going to bed at about midnight.”

“That was the last remote update.”

“Yes, the needlecast would have gone through about four in the morning, but obviously I was asleep by then.”

“So almost a full forty-eight hours before your death.”

“I’m afraid so.”

Optimally bad. In forty-eight hours, almost anything can happen. Bancroft could have been to the moon and back in that time. I rubbed at the scar under my eye again, wondering absently how it had got there.

“And there’s nothing before that time that could suggest to you why someone might want to kill you.”

Bancroft was still leaning on the rail, looking out, but I saw how he smiled.

“Did I say something amusing?”

He had the grace to come back to his seat.

“No, Mr Kovacs. There is nothing amusing about this situation. Someone out there wants me dead, and that’s not a comfortable feeling. But you must understand that for a man in my position enmity and even death threats are part and parcel of everyday existence. People envy me, people hate me. It is the price of success.”

This was news to me. People hate me on a dozen different worlds and I’ve never considered myself a successful man.

“Had any interesting ones recently? Death threats, I mean.”

He shrugged. “Perhaps. I don’t make a habit of screening them. Ms Prescott handles that for me.”

“You don’t consider death threats worth your attention?”

“Mr Kovacs, I am an entrepreneur. Opportunities arise, crises present themselves, and I deal with them. Life goes on. I hire managers to deal with that.”

“Very convenient for you. But in view of the circumstances, I find it hard to believe neither you nor the police have consulted Ms Prescott’s files.”

Bancroft waved a hand. “Of course, the police conducted their own cursory inquiry. Oumou Prescott told them exactly what she had already told me. That nothing out of the ordinary had been received in the last six months. I have enough faith in her not to need to check beyond that. You’ll probably want to look at the files yourself, though.”

The thought of scrolling through hundreds of metres of incoherent vitriol from the lost and losers of this antique world was quite sufficient to uncap my weariness again. A profound lack of interest in Bancroft’s problems washed through me. I mastered it with an effort worthy of Virginia Vidaura’s approval.

“Well, I’ll certainly need to talk to Oumou Prescott, anyway.”

“I’ll make the appointment immediately.” Bancroft’s eyes took on the inward glaze of someone consulting internal hardware. “What time would suit you?”

I held up a hand. “Probably better if I do that myself. Just let her know I’ll be in touch. And I’ll need to see the re-sleeving facility at PsychaSec.”

“Certainly. In fact, I’ll get Prescott to take you there. She knows the director. Anything else?”

“A line of credit.”

“Of course. My bank have already allocated a DNA-coded account to you. I understand they have the same system on Harlan’s World.”

I licked my thumb and held it up queryingly. Bancroft nodded.

“Just the same here. You will find there are areas of Bay City where cash is still the only negotiable currency. Hopefully you won’t have to spend much time in those parts, but if you do you can draw actual currency against your account at any bank outlet. Will you require a weapon?”

“Not at the moment, no.” One of Virginia Vidaura’s cardinal rules had always been find out the nature of your task before you choose your tools. That single sweep of charred stucco on Bancroft’s wall looked too elegant for this to be a shoot ’em up carnival.

“Well.” Bancroft seemed almost perplexed by my response. He had been on the point of reaching into his shirt pocket, and now he completed the action, awkwardly. He held out an inscribed card to me. “This is my gunmaker. I’ve told them to expect you.”

I took the card and looked at it. The ornate script read Larkin & Green — Armourers since 2203. Quaint. Below was a single string of numbers. I pocketed the card.

“This might be useful later on,” I admitted. “But for the moment I want to make a soft landing. Sit back and wait for the dust to settle. I think you can appreciate the need for that.”

“Yes, of course. Whatever you think best. I trust your judgement.” Bancroft caught my gaze and held it. “You’ll bear in mind the terms of our agreement, though. I am paying for a service. I don’t react well to abuse of trust, Mr Kovacs.”

“No, I don’t suppose you do,” I said tiredly. I remembered the way Reileen Kawahara had dealt with two unfaithful minions. The animal sounds they had made came back to me in dreams for a long time afterwards. Reileen’s argument, framed as she peeled an apple against the backdrop of those screams, was that since no one really dies any more, punishment can only come through suffering. I felt my new face twitch, even now, with the memory. “For what it’s worth, the line the Corps fed you about me is so much shit on a prick. My word’s as good as it ever was.”

I stood up.

“Can you recommend a place to stay back in the city? Somewhere quiet, mid range.”

“Yes, there are places like that on Mission Street. I’ll have someone ferry you back there. Curtis, if he’s out of arrest by then.” Bancroft climbed to his feet as well. “I take it you intend to interview Miriam now. She really knows more about those last forty-eight hours than I do, so you’ll want to speak to her quite closely.”

I thought about those ancient eyes in that pneumatic teenager’s body and the idea of carrying on a conversation with Miriam Bancroft was suddenly repellent. At the same time a cold hand strummed taut chords in the pit of my stomach and the head of my penis swelled abruptly with blood. Classy.

“Oh, yes,” I said unenthusiastically. “I’d like to do that.”

Chapter Four

“You seem ill at ease, Mr Kovacs. Are you?”

I looked over my shoulder at the maid who had shown me in, then back at Miriam Bancroft. Their bodies were about the same age.

“No,” I said, more coarsely than I’d intended.

She briefly curved her mouth down at the corners and went back to rolling up the map she’d been studying when I arrived. Behind me the maid pulled the chart room door closed with a heavy click. Bancroft hadn’t seen fit to accompany me into the presence of his wife. Perhaps one encounter a day was as much as they allowed themselves. Instead, the maid had appeared as if by magic as we came down from the balcony in the seaward lounge. Bancroft paid her about as much attention as he had last time.

When I left, he was standing by the mirrorwood desk, staring at the blast mark on the wall.

Mrs Bancroft deftly tightened the roll on the map in her hands and began to slide it into a long protective tube.

“Well,” she said, without looking up. “Ask me your questions, then.”

“Where were you when it happened?”

“I was in bed.” She looked up at me this time. “Please don’t ask me to corroborate that; I was alone.”

The chart room was long and airy under an arched roof that someone had tiled with illuminum. The map racks were waist high, each topped with a glassed-in display and set out in rows like exhibit cases in a museum. I moved out of the centre aisle, putting one of the racks between Mrs Bancroft and myself. It felt a little like taking cover.

“Mrs Bancroft, you seem to be under some misapprehension here. I’m not the police. I’m interested in information, not guilt.”

She slid the wrapped map into its holder and leaned back against the rack with both hands behind her. She had left her fresh young sweat and tennis clothes in some elegant bathroom while I was talking to her husband. Now she was immaculately fastened up in black slacks and something born of a union between a dinner jacket and a bodice. Her sleeves were pushed casually up almost to the elbow, her wrists unadorned with jewellery.

“Do I sound guilty, Mr Kovacs?” she asked me.

“You seem overanxious to assert your fidelity to a complete stranger.”

She laughed. It was a pleasant, throaty sound and her shoulders rose and fell as she let it out. A laugh I could get to like.

“How very indirect you are.”

I looked down at the map displayed on the top of the rack in front of me. It was dated in the top left-hand corner, a year four centuries before I was born. The names marked on it were in a script I couldn’t read.

“Where I come from, directness is not considered a great virtue, Mrs Bancroft.”

“No? Then what is?”

I shrugged. “Politeness. Control. Avoidance of embarrassment for all parties.”

“Sounds boring. I think you’re going to have a few shocks here, Mr Kovacs.”

“I didn’t say I was a good citizen where I come from, Mrs Bancroft.”

“Oh.” She pushed herself off the rack and moved towards me. “Yes, Laurens told me a little about you. It seems you’re thought of as a dangerous man on Harlan’s World.”

I shrugged again.

“It’s Russian.”

“I’m sorry?”

“The script.” She came round the rack and stood beside me, looking down at the map. “This is a Russian computer-generated chart of moon landing sites. Very rare. I got it at auction. Do you like it?”

“It’s very nice. What time did you go to sleep the night your husband was shot?”

She stared at me. “Early. I told you, I was alone.” She forced the edge out of her voice and her tone became almost light again. “Oh, and if that sounds like guilt, Mr Kovacs, it’s not. It’s resignation. With a twist of bitterness.”

“You feel bitter about your husband?”

She smiled. “I thought I said resigned.”

“You said both.”

“Are you saying you think I killed my husband?”

“I don’t think anything yet. But it is a possibility.”

“Is it?”

“You had access to the safe. You were inside the house defences when it happened. And now it sounds as if you might have some emotional motives.”

Still smiling, she said, “Building a case, are we, Mr Kovacs?”

I looked back at her. “If the heart pumps. Yeah.”

“The police had a similar theory for a while. They decided the heart didn’t pump. I’d prefer it if you didn’t smoke in here.”

I looked down at my hands and found they had quite unconsciously taken out Kristin Ortega’s cigarettes. I was in the middle of tapping one out of the pack. Nerves. Feeling oddly betrayed by my new sleeve, I put the packet away.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It’s a question of climate control. A lot of the maps in here are very sensitive to pollution. You couldn’t know.”

She somehow managed to make it sound as if only a complete moron wouldn’t have realised. I could feel my grip on the interview sliding out of sight.

“What made the police—”

“Ask them.” She turned her back and walked away from me as if making a decision. “How old are you, Mr Kovacs?”

“Subjectively? Forty-one. The years on Harlan’s World are a little longer than here, but there isn’t much in it.”

“And objectively?” she asked, mocking my tone.

“I’ve had about a century in the tank. You tend to lose track.” That was a lie. I knew to the day how long each of my terms in storage had been. I’d worked it out one night and now the number wouldn’t go away. Every time I went down again, I added on.

“How alone you must be by now.”

I sighed and turned to examine the nearest map rack. Each rolled chart was labelled at the end. The notation was archaeological. Syrtis Minor; 3rd excavation, east quarter. Bradbury; aboriginal ruins. I started to tug one of the rolls free.

“Mrs Bancroft, how I feel is not at issue here. Can you think of any reason why your husband might have tried to kill himself?”

She whirled on me almost before I had finished speaking and her face was tight with anger.

“My husband did not kill himself,” she said freezingly.

“You seem very sure of that.” I looked up from the map and gave her a smile. “For someone who wasn’t awake, I mean.”

“Put that back,” she cried, starting towards me. “You have no idea how valuable—”

She stopped, brought up short as I slid the map back into the rack. She swallowed and brought the flush in her cheeks under control.

“Are you trying to make me angry, Mr Kovacs?”

“I’m just trying to get some attention.”

We looked at each other for a pair of seconds. Mrs Bancroft lowered her gaze.

“I’ve told you, I was asleep when it happened. What else can I tell you?”

“Where had your husband gone that night?”

She bit her lip. “I’m not sure. He went to Osaka that day, for a meeting.”

“Osaka is where?”

She looked at me in surprise

“I’m not from here,” I said patiently.

“Osaka’s in Japan. I thought—”

“Yeah, Harlan’s World was settled by a Japanese keiretsu using East European labour. It was a long time ago, and I wasn’t around.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. You probably don’t know much about what your ancestors were doing three centuries ago either.”

I stopped. Mrs Bancroft was looking at me strangely. My own words hit me a moment later. Download dues. I was going to have to sleep soon, before I said or did something really stupid.

“I am over three centuries old, Mr Kovacs.” There was a small smile playing around her mouth as she said it. She’d taken back the advantage as smoothly as a bottleback diving. “Appearances are deceptive. This is my eleventh body.”

The way she held herself said that I was supposed to take a look. I flickered my gaze across the Slavic boned cheeks, down to the décolletage and then to the tilt of her hips, the half shrouded lines of her thighs, all the time affecting a detachment that neither I nor my recently roused sleeve had any right to.

“It’s very nice. A little young for my tastes, but as I said, I’m not from here. Can we get back to your husband please? He’d been to Osaka during the day, but he came back. I assume he didn’t go physically.”

“No, of course not. He has a transit clone on ice there. He was due back about six that evening, but—”

“Yes?”

She shifted her posture slightly, and opened a palm at me. I got the impression she was forcibly composing herself. “Well, he was late coming back. Laurens often stays out late after closing a deal.”

“And no one has any idea where he went on this occasion? Curtis, for example?”

The strain on her face was still there, like weathered rocks under a thin mantle of snow. “He didn’t send for Curtis. I assume he took a taxi from the sleeving station. I’m not his keeper, Mr Kovacs.”

“This meeting was crucial? The one in Osaka?”

“Oh… no, I don’t think so. We’ve talked about it. Of course, he doesn’t remember, but we’ve been over the contracts and it’s something he’d had timetabled for a while. A marine development company called Pacificon, based in Japan. Leasing renewal, that kind of thing. It’s usually all taken care of here in Bay City, but there was some call for an extraordinary assessors’ meeting, and it’s always best to handle that sort of thing close to source.”

I nodded sagely, having no idea what a marine development assessor was. Noting Mrs Bancroft’s strain seemed to be receding.

“Routine stuff, huh?”

“I would think so, yes.” She gave me a weary smile. “Mr Kovacs, I’m sure the police have transcripts of this kind of information.”

“I’m sure they do as well, Mrs Bancroft. But there’s no reason why they should share them with me. I have no jurisdiction here.”

“You seemed friendly enough with them when you arrived.” There was a sudden spike of malice in her voice. I looked steadily at her until she dropped her gaze. “Anyway, I’m sure Laurens can get you anything you need.”

This was going nowhere fast. I backed up.

“Perhaps I’d better speak to him about that.” I looked around the chart room. “All these maps. How long have you been collecting?”

Mrs Bancroft must have sensed that the interview was drawing to a close, because the tension puddled out of her like oil from a cracked sump.

“Most of my life,” she said. “While Laurens was staring at the stars, some of us kept our eyes on the ground.”

For some reason I thought of the telescope abandoned on Bancroft’s sundeck. I saw it stranded in angular silhouette against the evening sky, a mute testimony to times and obsessions past and a relic no one wanted. I remembered the way it had wheezed back into alignment after I jarred it, faithful to programming maybe centuries old, briefly awakened the way Miriam Bancroft had stroked the Songspire awake in the hall.

Old.

With sudden and suffocating pressure, it was all around me, the reek of it pouring off the stones of Suntouch House like damp. Age. I even caught the waft of it from the impossibly young and beautiful woman in front of me and my throat locked up with a tiny click. Something in me wanted to run, to get out and breathe fresh, new air, to be away from these creatures whose memories stretched back beyond every historical event I had been taught in school.

“Are you all right, Mr Kovacs?”

Download dues.

I focused with an effort. “Yes, I’m fine.” I cleared my throat and looked into her eyes. “Well, I won’t keep you any longer, Mrs Bancroft. Thank you for your time.”

She moved towards me. “Would you like—”

“No, it’s quite all right. I’ll see myself out.”

The walk out of the chart room seemed to take forever, and my footsteps had developed a sudden echo inside my skull. With every step, and with every displayed map that I passed I felt those ancient eyes on my spine, watching.

I badly needed a cigarette.

Chapter Five

The sky was the texture of old silver and the lights were coming on across Bay City by the time Bancroft’s chauffeur got me back to town. We spiralled in from the sea over an ancient suspension bridge the colour of rust, and in amongst the heaped-up buildings of a peninsula hill at more than advisable speed. Curtis the chauffeur was still smarting from his summary detainment by the police. He’d only been out of arrest a couple of hours when Bancroft asked him to run me back, and he’d been sullen and uncommunicative on the journey. He was a muscular young man whose boyish good looks lent themselves well to brooding. My guess was that employees of Laurens Bancroft were unused to government minions interrupting their duties.

I didn’t complain. My own mood wasn’t far off matching the chauffeur’s. Images of Sarah’s death kept creeping into my mind. It had only happened last night. Subjectively.

We braked in the sky over a wide thoroughfare, sharply enough for someone above us to broadcast an outraged proximity squawk into the limousine’s comset. Curtis cut off the signal with a slap of one hand across the console and his face tilted up to glower dangerously through the roof window. We settled down into the flow of ground traffic with a slight bump and immediately made a left into a narrower street. I started to take an interest in what was outside.

There’s a sameness to streetlife. On every world I’ve ever been, the same underlying patterns play out, flaunt and vaunt, buy and sell, like some distilled essence of human behaviour seeping out from under whatever clanking political machine has been dropped on it from above. Bay City, Earth, most ancient of civilised worlds, had won itself no exemptions. From the massive insubstantial holofronts along the antique buildings to the street traders with their catalogue broadcast sets nestling on shoulders like clumsy mechanical hawks or outsize tumours, everyone was selling something. Cars pulled in and out from the kerbside and supple bodies braced against them, leaning in to negotiate the way they’ve probably been doing as long as there’ve been cars to do it against. Shreds of steam and smoke drifted from food barrows. The limo was sound- and broadcast-proofed, but you could sense the noises through the glass, corner-pitch sales chants and modulated music carrying consumer-urge subsonics.

In the Envoy Corps, they reverse humanity. You see the sameness first, the underlying resonance that lets you get a handle on where you are, then you build up difference from the details.

The Harlan’s World ethnic mix is primarily Slavic and Japanese, although you can get any variant tank-grown at a price. Here, every face was a different cast and colour — I saw tall, angular-boned Africans, Mongols, pasty-skinned Nordics and, once, a girl who looked like Virginia Vidaura, but I lost her in the crowd. They all slid by like natives on the banks of a river.

Clumsy.

The impression skipped and flickered across my thoughts like the girl in the crowd. I frowned and caught at it.

On Harlan’s World, streetlife has a stripped-back elegance to it, an economy of motion and gesture that feels almost like choreography if you’re not used to it. I grew up with it, so the effect doesn’t register until it’s not there any more.

I wasn’t seeing it here. The ebb and flow of human commerce beyond the limo’s windows had a quality like choppy water in the space between boats. People pushed and shoved their way along, backing up abruptly to get round tighter knots in the crowd that they apparently hadn’t noticed until it was too late to manoeuvre. Obvious tensions broke out, necks craned, muscled bodies drew themselves up. Twice I saw the makings of a fight take stumbling shape, only to be swept away on the chop. It was as if the whole place had been sprayed with some pheromonal irritant.

“Curtis.” I glanced sideways at his impassive profile. “You want to cut the broadcast block for a minute?”

He looked across at me with a slight curl of the lip. “Sure.”

I settled back in the seat and fixed my eyes on the street again. “I’m not a tourist, Curtis. This is what I do for a living.”

The street sellers’ catalogues came aboard like a swarm of delirium-induced hallucinations, slightly diffuse through lack of directed broadcast and blurring swiftly into each other as we glided along, but still an overload by any Harlanite standards. The pimps were the most obvious; a succession of oral and anal acts, digitally retouched to lend an airbrushed sheen to breasts and musculature. Each whore’s name was murmured in throaty voiceover, along with a superimposed facial: coy little girls, dominatrixes, stubbled stallions and a few from cultural stock that was completely alien to me. Weaving in between were the more subtle chemical lists and surreal scenarios of the drug and implant traders. I caught a couple of religious ’casts amidst it all, images of spiritual calm among mountains, but they were like drowning men in the sea of product.

The stumbling started to make sense.

“What does from the Houses mean?” I asked Curtis, trawling the phrase from the ’casts for the third time.

Curtis sneered. “The mark of quality. The Houses are a cartel; high-class, expensive whorehouses up and down the coast. Get you anything you want, they say. If a girl’s from the Houses, she’s been taught to do stuff most people only ever dream about.” He nodded at the street. “Don’t kid yourself, no one out there ever worked in the Houses.”

“And Stiff?”

He shrugged. “Street name. Betathanatine. Kids use it for near death experiences. Cheaper than suicide.”

“I guess.”

“You don’t get ’thanatine on Harlan’s World?”

“No.” I’d used it offworld with the Corps a couple of times, but there was a ban in fashion back home. “We got suicide, though. You want to put the screen back up.”

The soft brush of images cut out abruptly, leaving the inside of my head feeling stark, like an unfurnished room. I waited for the feeling to fade and, like most after-effects, it did.

“This is Mission Street,” said Curtis. “The next couple of blocks are all hotels. You want me to drop you here?”

“You recommend anywhere?”

“Depends what you want.”

I gave him one of his own shrugs back. “Light. Space. Room service.”

He squinted thoughtfully. “Try the Hendrix, if you like. They got a tower annexe, and the whores they use are clean.” The limousine picked up speed fractionally and we made a couple of blocks in silence. I neglected to explain I hadn’t meant that kind of room service. Let Curtis draw the conclusions he seemed to want to.

Unbidden, a freeze frame of Miriam Bancroft’s sweat-dewed cleavage bounced through my mind.

The limo coasted to a halt outside a well-lit façade in a style I didn’t recognise. I climbed out and stared up at a huge holocast black man, features screwed up presumably in ecstasy at the music he was wringing left-handed from a white guitar. The image had the slightly artificial edges of a remastered two-dimensional image, which made it old. Hoping this might indicate a tradition of service and not just decrepitude, I thanked Curtis, slammed the door and watched the limousine cruise away. It began to climb almost immediately and after a moment I lost the tail lights in the streams of airborne traffic. I turned to the mirrored glass doors behind me and they parted slightly jerkily to let me in.

If the lobby was anything to go by, the Hendrix was certainly going to satisfy the second of my requirements. Curtis could have parked three or four of Bancroft’s limos side by side in it and still have had space to wheel a cleaning robot round them. I wasn’t so sure about the first. The walls and ceiling bore an irregular spacing of illuminum tiles whose half-life was clearly almost up, and their feeble radiance had the sole effect of shovelling the gloom into the centre of the room. The street I’d just come in off was the strongest source of light in the place.

The lobby was deserted, but there was a faint blue glow coming from a counter on the far wall. I picked my way towards it, past low armchairs and shin-hungry metal-edged tables, and found a recessed monitor screen swarming with the random snow of disconnection. In one corner, a command pulsed on and off in English, Spanish and Kanji characters:

SPEAK.

I looked around and back at the screen.

No one.

I cleared my throat.

The characters blurred and shifted. SELECT LANGUAGE.

“I’m looking for a room,” I tried, in Japanese out of pure curiosity.

The screen jumped into life so dramatically that I took a step backwards. From whirling, multi-coloured fragments it rapidly assembled a tanned Asian face above a dark collar and tie. The face smiled and changed into a Caucasian female, aged fractionally, and I was facing a blonde thirty-year-old woman in a sober business suit. Having generated my interpersonal ideal, the hotel also decided that I couldn’t speak Japanese after all.

“Good day, sir. Welcome to the Hotel Hendrix, established 2087 and still here today. How may we serve you?”

I repeated my request, following the move into Amanglic.

“Thank you, sir. We have a number of rooms, all fully cabled to the city’s information and entertainment stack. Please indicate your preference for floor and size.”

“I’d like a tower room, west facing. The biggest you’ve got.”

The face recoiled into a corner inset and a three-dimensional skeleton of the hotel’s room structure etched itself into place. A selector pulsed efficiently through the rooms and stopped in one corner, then blew up and rotated the room in question. A column of fine print data shuttered down on one side of the screen.

“The Watchtower suite, three rooms, dormitory thirteen point eight seven metres by—

“That’s fine, I’ll take it.”

The three-dimensional map disappeared like a conjuror’s trick and the woman leapt back to full screen.

“How many nights will you be with us, sir?”

“Indefinite.”

“A deposit is required,” said the hotel diffidently, “For stays of more than fourteen days the sum of six hundred dollars UN should be deposited now. In the event of departure before said fourteen days, a proportion of this deposit will be refunded.”

“Fine.”

“Thank you sir.” From the tone of voice, I began to suspect that paying customers were a novelty at the Hotel Hendrix. “How will you be paying?”

“DNA trace. First Colony Bank of California.”

The payment details were scrolling out when I felt a cold circle of metal touch the base of my skull.

“That’s exactly what you think it is,” said a calm voice. “You do the wrong thing, and the cops are going to be picking bits of your cortical stack out of that wall for weeks. I’m talking about real death, friend. Now, lift your hands away from your body.”

I complied, feeling an unaccustomed chill shoot up my spine to the point the gun muzzle was touching. It was a while since I’d been threatened with real death.

“That’s good,” said the same calm voice. “Now, my associate here is going to pat you down. You let her do that, and no sudden moves.”

“Please key your DNA signature onto the pad beside this screen.” The hotel had accessed First Colony’s database. I waited impassively while a slim, black-clad woman in a ski mask stepped around and ran a purring grey scanner over me from head to foot. The gun at my neck never wavered. It was no longer cold. My flesh had warmed it to a more intimate temperature.

“He’s clean.” Another crisp, professional voice. “Basic neurachem, but it’s inoperative. No hardware.”

“Really? Travelling kind of light, aren’t you, Kovacs?”

My heart dropped out of my chest and landed soggily in my guts. I’d hoped this was just local crime.

“I don’t know you,” I said cautiously, turning my head a couple of millimetres. The gun jabbed and I stopped.

“That’s right, you don’t. Now, here’s what’s going to happen. We’re going to walk outside—

“Credit access will cease in thirty seconds,” said the hotel patiently. “Please key in your DNA signature now.”

“Mr Kovacs won’t be needing his reservation,” said the man behind me, putting a hand on my shoulder. “Come on, Kovacs, we’re going for a ride.”

“I cannot assume host prerogatives without payment,” said the woman on the screen.

Something in the tone of that phrase stopped me as I was turning, and on impulse I forced out a sudden, racking cough.

“What—”

Bending forward with the force of the cough, I raised a hand to my mouth and licked my thumb.

“The fuck are you playing at, Kovacs?”

I straightened again and snapped my hand out to the keypad beside the screen. Traces of fresh spittle smeared over the matt black receiver. A split second later a calloused palm edge cracked into the left side of my skull and I collapsed to my hands and knees on the floor. A boot lashed into my face and I went the rest of the way down.

“Thank you sir.” I heard the voice of the hotel through a roaring in my head. “Your account is being processed.”

I tried to get up and got a second boot in the ribs for the trouble. Blood dripped from my nose onto the carpet. The barrel of the gun ground into my neck.

“That wasn’t smart, Kovacs.” The voice was marginally less calm. “If you think the cops are going to trace us where you’re going, then the stack must have fucked your brain. Now get up!”

He was pulling me to my feet when the thunder cut loose.

Why someone had seen fit to equip the Hendrix’s security systems with twenty-millimetre automatic cannon was beyond me, but they did the job with devastating totality. Out of the corner of one eye I glimpsed the twin-mounted autoturret come snaking down from the ceiling just a moment before it channelled a three-second burst of fire through my primary assailant. Enough firepower to bring down a small aircraft. The noise was deafening.

The masked woman ran for the doors, and with the echoes of fire still hammering in my ears I saw the turret swivel to follow. She made about a dozen paces through the gloom before a prism of ruby laser light dappled across her back and a fresh fusillade exploded in the confines of the lobby. I clapped both hands over my ears, still on my knees, and the shells punched through her. She went over in a graceless tangle of limbs.

The firing stopped.

In the cordite reeking quiet that followed, nothing moved. The autoturret had gone dormant, barrels slanting at a downward angle, smoke coiling from the breeches. I unclasped my hands from my ears and climbed to my feet, pressing gingerly on my nose and face to ascertain the extent of the damage done. The bleeding seemed to be slowing down and though there were cuts in my mouth I couldn’t find any loosened teeth. My ribs hurt where the second kick had hit me, but it didn’t feel as if anything was broken. I glanced over at the nearest corpse, and wished I hadn’t. Someone was going to have to get a mop.

To my left an elevator door opened with a faint chime.

“Your room is ready, sir,” said the hotel.

Chapter Six

Kristin Ortega was remarkably restrained.

She came through the hotel doors with a loping stride that bounced one heavily weighted jacket pocket against her thigh, came to a halt in the centre of the lobby and surveyed the carnage with her tongue thrust into one cheek.

“You do this sort of thing a lot, Kovacs?”

“I’ve been waiting a while,” I told her mildly. “I’m not in a great mood.”

The hotel had placed a call to the Bay City police about the time the autoturret had cut loose, but it was a good half hour before the first cruisers came spiralling down out of the sky traffic. I hadn’t bothered to go to my room, since I knew they were going to drag me out of bed anyway, and once they arrived there was no question of me going anywhere until Ortega got there. A police medic gave me a cursory check, ascertained that I wasn’t suffering from concussion and left me with a retardant spray to stop the nose bleed, after which I sat in the lobby and let my new sleeve smoke some of the lieutenant’s cigarettes. I was still sitting there an hour later when she arrived.

Ortega gestured. “Yeah, well. Busy city at night.”

I offered her the packet. She looked at it as if I’d just posed a major philosophical question, then took it and shook out a cigarette. Ignoring the ignition patch on the side of the packet, she searched her pockets, produced a heavy petrol lighter and snapped it open. She seemed to be on autopilot, moving aside almost without noticing to let a forensics team bring in new equipment, then returning the lighter to a different pocket. Around us, the lobby seemed suddenly crowded with efficient people doing their jobs.

“So.” She plumed smoke into the air above her head. “You know these guys?”

“Oh, give me a fucking break!”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning, I’ve been out of storage six hours, if that.” I could hear my voice starting to rise. “Meaning, I’ve talked to precisely three people since the last time we met. Meaning, I’ve never been on Earth in my life. Meaning, you know all this. Now, are you going to ask me some intelligent questions or am I going to bed?”

“All right, keep your skull on.” Ortega looked suddenly tired. She sank into the lounger opposite mine. “You told my sergeant they were professionals.”

“They were.” I’d decided it was the one piece of information I might as well share with the police, since they’d probably find out anyway, as soon as they ran the make on the two corpses through their files.

“Did they call you by name?”

I furrowed my brow with great care. “By name?”

“Yeah.” She made an impatient gesture. “Did they call you Kovacs?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Any other names?”

I raised an eyebrow. “Such as?”

The weariness that had clouded her face retreated abruptly, and she gave me a hard look. “Forget it. We’ll run the hotel’s memory, and see.”

Oops.

“On Harlan’s World you’d have to get a warrant for that.” I made it come out lazily.

“We do here.” Ortega knocked ash off her cigarette onto the carpet. “But it won’t be a problem. Apparently this isn’t the first time the Hendrix has been up on an organic damage charge. While ago, but the archives go back.”

“So how come it wasn’t decommissioned?”

“I said up on charges, not convicted. Court threw it out. Demonstrable self defence. Course,” she nodded over at the dormant gun turret, where two members of the forensic team were running an emissions sweep, “we’re talking about covert electrocution that time. Nothing like this.”

“Yeah, I was meaning to ask. Who fits that kind of hardware in a hotel anyway?”

“What do you think I am, a search construct?” Ortega had started watching me with a speculative hostility I didn’t much like. Then, abruptly, she shrugged. “Archive précis I ran on the way over here says it got done a couple of centuries back, when the corporate wars turned nasty. Makes sense. With all that shit breaking loose, a lot of buildings were retooling to cope. Course, most of the companies went under shortly afterwards with the trading crash, so no one ever got around to passing a decommissioning bill. The Hendrix graded to artificial intelligence status instead and bought itself out.”

“Smart.”

“Yeah, from what I hear the AIs were the only ones with any kind of real handle on what was happening to the market anyway. Quite a few of them made the break about then. Lot of the hotels on this strip are AI.” She grinned at me through the smoke. “That’s why no one stays in them. Shame, really. I read somewhere they’re hardwired to want customers the way people want sex. That’s got to be frustrating, right?”

“Right.”

One of the mohicans came and hovered over us. Ortega glanced up at him with a look that said she didn’t want to be disturbed.

“We got a make on the DNA samples,” the mohican said diffidently, and handed her a videofax slate. Ortega scanned it and started.

“Well, well. You were in exalted company for a while, Kovacs.” She waved an arm in the direction of the male corpse. “Sleeve last registered to Dimitri Kadmin, otherwise known as Dimi the Twin. Professional assassin out of Vladivostock.”

“And the woman?”

Ortega and the mohican exchanged glances. “Ulan Bator registry?”

“Got it in one, chief.”

“Got the motherfucker.” Ortega bounced to her feet with renewed energy. “Let’s get their stacks excised and over to Fell Street. I want Dimi downloaded into Holding before midnight.” She looked back at me. “Kovacs, you may just have proved useful.”

The mohican reached under his double-breasted suit and produced a heavy-bladed killing knife with the nonchalance of a man getting out cigarettes. Together, they went over to the corpse and knelt beside it. Interested uniformed officers drifted across to watch. There was the wet, cracking sound of cartilage being cut open. After a moment, I got up and went to join the spectators. Nobody paid any attention to me.

It was not what you’d call refined biotech surgery. The mohican had chopped out a section of the corpse’s spine to gain access to the base of the skull, and now he was digging around with the point of the knife, trying to locate the cortical stack. Kristin Ortega was holding the head steady in both hands.

“They bury them a lot deeper in than they used to,” she was saying. “See if you can get the rest of the vertebrae out, that’s where it’ll be.”

“I’m trying,” grunted the mohican. “Some augmentation in here, I reckon. One of those antishock washers Noguchi was talking about last time he was over… Shit!! Thought I had it there.”

“No, look, you’re working at the wrong angle. Let me try.” Ortega took the knife and put one knee on the skull to steady it.

“Shit, I nearly had it, chief.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m not spending all night watching you poke around in there.” She glanced up and saw me watching her, nodded a brief acknowledgement and put the serrated point of the blade in place. Then with a sharp blow to the haft of the knife, she chopped something loose. She looked up at the mohican with a grin.

“Hear that?”

She reached down into the gore and pulled out the stack between finger and thumb. It didn’t look like much, impact-resistant casing streaked with blood and barely the size of a cigarette butt with the twisted filaments of the microjacks protruding stiffly from one end. I could see how the Catholics might not want to believe this was the receptacle of the human soul.

“Gotcha, Dimi.” Ortega held up the stack to the light, then passed it and the knife to the mohican. She wiped her fingers on the corpse’s clothing. “Right, let’s get the other one out of the woman.”

As we watched the mohican repeating the procedure on the second body, I tipped my head close enough to Ortega to mutter.

“So you know who this one is as well?”

She jerked round to look at me, whether out of surprise or dislike of my proximity I couldn’t be sure. “Yeah, this is Dimi the Twin too. Ha, pun! The sleeve’s registered out of Ulan Bator, which for your information is the black market downloading capital of Asia. See, Dimi’s not a very trusting soul. He likes to have people he can be sure of backing him up. And the circles Dimi mixes in, the only person you can really trust is you.”

“Those sound like familiar circles. Is it easy to get yourself copied on Earth?”

Ortega grimaced. “Getting easier all the time. Technology the way it is now, a state-of-the-art re-sleeving processor fits into a bathroom. Pretty soon it’s going to be an elevator. Then a suitcase.” She shrugged. “Price of progress.”

“About the only way you can get it done on Harlan’s World is to file for a stellar range ’cast, get an insurance copy held for the duration of the trip and then cancel the transmission at the last minute. Fake a transit certificate, then claim a vital interest for a temporary download from the copy. This guy’s offworld and his business is crumbling, that kind of thing. Download once from the original at the transmission station, and again through the insurance company somewhere else. Copy One walks out of the station legally. He just changed his mind about going. Lots of people do. Copy Two never reports back to the insurance company for re-storage. Costs a lot of money, though. You’ve got to bribe a lot of people, steal a lot of machine time to get away with it.”

The mohican slipped and cut his thumb on the knife. Ortega rolled her eyes and sighed in a compressed fashion. She turned back to face me.

“It’s easier here,” she said shortly.

“Yeah? How’s it work?”

“It—” She hesitated, as if trying to work out why she was talking to me. “Why do you want to know?”

I grinned at her. “Just naturally nosy, I guess.”

“OK, Kovacs.” She cupped both hands around her coffee mug. “Works like this. One day Mr Dimitri Kadmin walks into one of the big retrieval and re-sleeving insurance companies. I mean someone really respectable, like Lloyd’s or Cartwright Solar, maybe.”

“Is that here?” I gestured out at the bridge lights visible beyond the windows of my room. “In Bay City?”

The mohican had given Ortega some odd looks when she stayed behind as the police departed the Hendrix. She saw him off with another admonition to get Kadmin downloaded rapido, and then we went upstairs. She barely watched the police cruisers leave.

“Bay City, East Coast, maybe even Europe.” Ortega sipped her coffee, wincing at the overload of whisky she’d asked the Hendrix to dump in it. “Doesn’t matter. What matters is the company. Someone established. Someone who’s been underwriting since downloading happened. Mr Kadmin wants to take out an R&R policy, which, after a long discussion about premiums, he does. See, this has got to look good. It’s the long con, with the one difference that what we’re after here is more than money.”

I leaned back against my side of the window frame. The Watchtower suite had been aptly named. All three rooms looked out across the city and the water beyond, either north or westward, and the window shelf in the lounge accounted for about a fifth of the available space, layered with psychedelically coloured cushion mats. Ortega and I were seated opposite each other with a clean metre of space between us.

“OK, so that’s one copy. Then what?”

Ortega shrugged. “Fatal accident.”

“In Ulan Bator?”

“Right. Dimi runs himself into a power pylon at high speed, falls out of a hotel window, something like that. An Ulan Bator handling agent retrieves the stack, and, for a hefty bribe, makes a copy. In come Cartwright Solar, or Lloyd’s with their retrieval writ, freight Dimi (d.h.) back to their clone bank and download him into the waiting sleeve. Thank you very much, sir. Nice doing business with you.”

“Meanwhile…”

“Meanwhile the handling agent buys up a black market sleeve, probably some catatonia case from a local hospital, or a scene-of-the-crime drugs victim who’s not too physically damaged. The Ulan Bator police do a screaming trade in DOAs. The agent wipes the sleeve’s mind, downloads Dimi’s copy into it, and the sleeve just walks out of there. Suborbital to the other side of the globe and off to work in Bay City.”

“You don’t catch these guys too often.”

“Almost never. Point is, you’ve got to catch both copies cold, either dead like this or held on a UN indictable offence. Without the UN rap, you’ve got no legal right to download from a living body. And in a no-win situation, the twin just gets its cortical stack blown out through the back of its neck before we can make the bust. I’ve seen it happen.”

“That’s pretty severe. What’s the penalty for all this?”

“Erasure.”

“Erasure? You do that here?”

Ortega nodded. There was a small, grim smile playing all around her mouth, but never quite on it. “Yeah, we do that here. Shock you?”

I thought about it. Some crimes in the Corps carried the erasure penalty, principally desertion or refusal to obey a combat order, but I’d never seen it applied. It ran counter to the conditioning to cut and run. And on Harlan’s World erasure had been abolished a decade before I was born.

“It’s kind of old-fashioned, isn’t it?”

“You feel bad about what’s going to happen to Dimi?”

I ran the tip of my tongue over the cuts on the inside of my mouth. Thought about the cold circle of metal at my neck and shook my head. “No. But does it stop with people like him?”

“There are a few other capital crimes, but they mostly get commuted to a couple of centuries in storage.” The look on Ortega’s face said she didn’t think that was such a great idea.

I put my coffee down and reached for a cigarette. The motions were automatic, and I was too tired to stop them. Ortega waved away the offered pack. Touching my own cigarette to the packet’s ignition patch, I squinted at her.

“How old are you, Ortega?”

She looked back at me narrowly. “Thirty-four. Why?”

“Never been d.h.’d, hmm?”

“Yeah, I had psychosurgery a few years back, they put me under for a couple of days. Apart from that, no. I’m not a criminal, and I don’t have the money for that kind of travel.”

I let out the first breath of smoke. “Kind of touchy about it, aren’t you?”

“Like I said, I’m not a criminal.”

“No.” I thought back to the last time I had seen Virginia Vidaura. “If you were, you wouldn’t think two hundred years dislocation was such an easy rap.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t have to.” I didn’t know what had led me to forget that Ortega was the law, but something had. Something had been building in the space between the two of us, something like a static charge, something I might have been able to work out if my Envoy intuitions hadn’t been so blunted by the new sleeve. Whatever it was, it had just walked out of the room. I drew my shoulders in and pulled harder on the cigarette. I needed sleep.

“Kadmin’s expensive, right? With overheads like that, risks like that, he’s got to cost.”

“About twenty grand a hit.”

“Then Bancroft didn’t commit suicide.”

Ortega raised an eyebrow. “That’s fast work, for someone who just got here.”

“Oh, come on.” I exploded a lungful of smoke at her. “If it was suicide, who the fuck paid out the twenty to have me hit?”

“You’re well liked, are you?”

I leaned forward. “No, I’m disliked in a lot of places, but not by anyone with those kind of connections or that kind of money. I’m not classy enough to make enemies at that level. Whoever set Kadmin on me knows I’m working for Bancroft.”

Ortega grinned. “Thought you said they didn’t call you by name?”

Tired, Takeshi. I could almost see Virginia Vidaura wagging her finger at me. The Envoy Corps don’t get taken apart by local law.

I stumbled on as best I could.

“They knew who I was. Men like Kadmin don’t hang around hotels waiting to rip off the tourists. Ortega, come on.”

She let my exasperation sink into the silence before she answered me. “So Bancroft was hit as well? Maybe. So what?”

“So you’ve got to reopen the inquiry.”

“You don’t listen, Kovacs.” She bent me a smile meant for stopping armed men in their tracks. “The case is closed.”

I sagged back against the wall and watched her through the smoke for a while. Finally, I said, “You know, when your clean-up squad arrived tonight one of them showed me his badge for long enough to actually see it. Quite fancy, close up. That eagle and shield. All the lettering around it.”

She made a get-on-with-it gesture, and I took another pull on my cigarette before I sank the barb in.

“To protect and serve? I guess by the time you make lieutenant, you don’t really believe that stuff any more.”

Contact. A muscle jumped under one eye and her cheeks pulled in as if she was sucking on something bitter. She stared at me, and for that moment I thought I might have pushed too far. Then her shoulders slumped and she sighed.

“Ah, go ahead. What the fuck do you know about it anyway? Bancroft’s not people like you and me. He’s a fucking Meth.”

“A Meth?”

“Yeah. A Meth. You know, and all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years. He’s old. I mean, really old.”

“Is that a crime, lieutenant?”

“It should be,” said Ortega grimly. “You live that long, things start happening to you. You get too impressed with yourself. Ends up, you think you’re God. Suddenly the little people, thirty, maybe forty years old, well they don’t really matter any more. You’ve seen whole societies rise and fall, and you start to feel you’re standing outside it all, and none of it really matters to you. And maybe you’ll start snuffing those little people, just like picking daisies, if they get under your feet.”

I looked seriously at her. “You pin anything like that on Bancroft? Ever?”

“I’m not talking about Bancroft,” she waved the objection aside impatiently, “I’m talking about his kind. They’re like the AIs. They’re a breed apart. They’re not human, they deal with humanity the way you and I deal with insect life. Well, when you’re dealing with the Bay City police department, having that kind of attitude can sometimes back up on you.”

I thought briefly of Reileen Kawahara’s excesses, and wondered how far off the mark Ortega really was. On Harlan’s World, most people could afford to be re-sleeved at least once, but the point was that unless you were very rich you had to live out your full span each time and old age, even with antisen treatment, was a wearying business. Second time around was worse because you knew what to expect. Not many had the stamina to do it more than twice. Most people went into voluntary storage after that, with occasional temporary re-sleevings for family matters, and of course even those re-sleevings thinned out as time passed and new generations bustled in without the old ties.

It took a certain kind of person to keep going, to want to keep going, life after life, sleeve after sleeve. You had to start out different, never mind what you might become as the centuries piled up.

“So Bancroft gets short-changed because he’s a Meth. Sorry, Laurens, you’re an arrogant, long-lived bastard. The Bay City police has got better things to do with its time than take you seriously. That kind of thing.”

But Ortega wasn’t rising to the bait any more. She sipped her coffee and made a dismissive gesture. “Look, Kovacs. Bancroft is alive, and whatever the facts of the case he’s got enough security to stay that way. No one here is groaning under the burden of a miscarriage of justice. The police department is underfunded, understaffed and overworked. We don’t have the resources to chase Bancroft’s phantoms indefinitely.”

“And if they’re not phantoms?”

Ortega sighed. “Kovacs, I went over that house myself three times with the forensics team. There’s no sign of a struggle, no break in the perimeter defences and no trace of an intruder anywhere in the security net’s records. Miriam Bancroft volunteered to take every state-of-the-art polygraphic test there is and she passed them all without a tremor. She did not kill her husband, no one broke in and killed her husband. Laurens Bancroft killed himself, for reasons best known to himself, and that’s all there is to it. I’m sorry you’re supposed to prove otherwise, but wishing isn’t going to make it fucking so. It’s an open-and-shut case.”

“And the phone call? The fact Bancroft wasn’t exactly going to forget he had remote storage? The fact someone thinks I’m important enough to send Kadmin out here?”

“I’m not going to argue the toss with you on this, Kovacs. We’ll interrogate Kadmin and find out what he knows, but for the rest I’ve been over the ground before and it’s starting to bore me. There are people out there who need us a lot worse than Bancroft does. Real death victims who weren’t lucky enough to have remote storage when their stacks were blown out. Catholics getting butchered because their killers know the victims will never come out of storage to put them away.” There was a hooded tiredness building up in Ortega’s eyes as she ticked the list off on her fingers. “Organic damage cases who don’t have the money to get re-sleeved unless the state can prove some kind of liability against somebody. I wade through this stuff ten hours a day or more, and I’m sorry, I just don’t have the sympathy to spare for Mr Laurens Bancroft with his clones on ice and his magic walls of influence in high places and his fancy lawyers to put us through hoops every time some member of his family or staff wants to slide out from under.”

“That happen often, does it?”

“Often enough, but don’t look surprised.” She gave me a bleak smile. “He’s a fucking Meth. They’re all the same.”

It was a side of her I didn’t like, an argument I didn’t want to have and a view of Bancroft I didn’t need. And underneath it all, my nerves were screaming for sleep.

I stubbed out my cigarette.

“I think you’d better go, lieutenant. All this prejudice is giving me a headache.”

Something flickered in her eyes, something I couldn’t read at all. There for a second, then gone. She shrugged, put down the coffee mug and swung her legs over the side of the shelf. She stretched herself upright, arched her spine until it cracked audibly and walked to the door without looking back. I stayed where I was, watching her reflection move among the city lights in the window.

At the door, she stopped and I saw her turn her head.

“Hey, Kovacs.”

I looked over at her. “Forget something?”

She nodded her head, mouth clamped in a crooked line, as if acknowledging a point in some game we’d been playing.

“You want an insight? You want somewhere to start? Well, you gave me Kadmin, so I guess I owe you that.”

“You don’t owe me a thing, Ortega. The Hendrix did it, not me.”

“Leila Begin,” she said. “Run that by Bancroft’s fancy lawyers, see where it gets you.”

The door sliced closed and the reflected room held nothing but the lights of the city outside. I stared out at them for a while, lit a new cigarette and smoked it down to its filter.

Bancroft had not committed suicide, that much was clear. I’d been on the case less than a day and already I’d had two separate lobbies land on my back. First, Kristin Ortega’s mannered thugs at the justice facility, then the Vladivostock hitman and his spare sleeve. Not to mention Miriam Bancroft’s off-the-wall behaviour. Altogether too much muddied water for this to be what it purported to be. Ortega wanted something, whoever had paid Dimitri Kadmin wanted something, and what they wanted, it seemed, was for the Bancroft case to remain closed.

That wasn’t an option I had.

“Your guest has left the building,” said the Hendrix, jolting me out of my glazed retrospection.

“Thanks,” I said absently, stubbing out the cigarette in an ashtray. “Can you lock the door, and block the elevators from this floor?”

“Certainly. Do you wish to be advised of any entry into the hotel?”

“No.” I yawned like a snake trying to engorge an egg. “Just don’t let them up here. And no calls for the next seven-and-a-half hours.”

Abruptly it was all I could do to get out of my clothes before the waves of sleep overwhelmed me. I left Bancroft’s summer suit draped over a convenient chair and crawled into the massive crimson-sheeted bed. The surface of the bed undulated briefly, adjusting to my body weight and size, then bore me up like water. A faint odour of incense drifted from the sheets.

I made a half-hearted attempt to masturbate, mind churning damply through images of Miriam Bancroft’s voluptuous curves, but I kept seeing Sarah’s pale body turned to wreckage by the Kalashnikov fire instead.

And sleep dragged me under.

Chapter Seven

There are ruins, steeped in shadow, and a blood-red sun going down in turmoil behind distant hills. Overhead soft-bellied clouds panic towards the horizon like whales before the harpoon, and the wind runs addict’s fingers through the trees that line the street.

Innenininennininennin …

I know this place.

I pick my way between the devastated walls of ruins, trying not to brush against them because, whenever I do, they give out muted gunshots and screams, as if whatever conflict murdered this city has soaked into the remaining stonework. At the same time, I’m moving quite fast, because there is something following me, something that has no such qualms about touching the ruins. I can chart its progress quite accurately by the tide of gunfire and anguish swelling behind me. It is closing. I try to speed up but there is a tightness in my throat and chest that isn’t helping matters.

Jimmy de Soto steps out from behind the shattered stub of a tower. I’m not really surprised to see him here, but his ruined face still gives me a jolt. He grins with what’s left of his features and puts a hand on my shoulder. I try not to flinch.

“Leila Begin,” he says, and nods back to where I have come from. “Run that by Bancroft’s fancy lawyer.”

“I will,” I say, moving past him. But his hand stays on my shoulder, which must mean his arm is stretching out behind me like hot wax. I stop, guilty at the pain that must be causing him, but he’s still there at my shoulder. I start moving again.

“Going to turn and fight?” he asks conversationally, drifting along beside me without apparent effort or footing.

“With what?” I say, opening my empty hands.

“Should have armed yourself, pal. Big time.”

“Virginia told us not to fall for the weakness of weapons.”

Jimmy de Soto snorts derisively. “Yeah, and look where that stupid bitch ended up. Eighty to a hundred, no remission.”

“You can’t know that,” I say absently, more interested in the sounds of pursuit behind me. “You died years before that happened.”

“Oh, come on, who really dies these days?”

“Try telling that to a Catholic. And anyway, you did die, Jimmy. Irretrievably, as I recall.”

“What’s a Catholic?”

“Tell you later. You got any cigarettes?”

“Cigarettes? What happened to your arm?”

I break the spiral of non sequiturs and stare down at my arm. Jimmy’s got a point. The scars on my forearm have turned into a fresh wound, blood welling up and trickling down into my hand. So of course …

I reach up to my left eye and find the wetness below it. My fingers come away bloody.

“Lucky one,” says Jimmy de Soto judicially. “They missed the socket.”

He should know. His own left socket is a glutted well of gore, all that was left at Innenin when he dug the eyeball out with his fingers. No one ever found out what he was hallucinating at the time. By the time they got Jimmy and the rest of the Innenin beachhead d.h.’d for psychosurgery, the defenders’ virus had scrambled their minds beyond retrieval. The program was so virulent that at the time the clinic didn’t even dare keep what was left on stack for study. The remains of Jimmy de Soto are on a sealed disc with red DATA CONTAMINANT decals somewhere in a basement at Envoy Corps HQ.

“I’ve got to do something about this,” I say, a little desperately. The sounds awoken from the walls by my pursuer are growing dangerously close. The last of the sun is slipping behind the hills. Blood spills down my arm and face.

“Smell that?” Jimmy asks, lifting his own face to the chilly air around us. “They’re changing it.”

“What?” But even as I snap the retort, I can smell it as well. A fresh, invigorating scent, not unlike the incense back at the Hendrix, but subtly different, not quite the heady decadence of the original odour I fell asleep to only …

“Got to go,” says Jimmy, and I’m about to ask him where when I realise he means me and I’m—

Awake.

My eyes snapped open on one of the psychedelic murals of the hotel room. Slim, waif-like figures in kaftans dotted across a field of green grass and yellow and white flowers. I frowned and clutched at the hardened scar tissue on my forearm. No blood. With the realisation, I came fully awake and sat up in the big crimson bed. The shift in the smell of incense that had originally nudged me towards consciousness was fully resolved into that of coffee and fresh bread. The Hendrix’s olfactory wake-up call. Light was pouring into the dimmed room through a flaw in the polarised glass of the window.

“You have a visitor,” said the voice of the Hendrix briskly.

“What time is it?” I croaked. The back of my throat seemed to have been liberally painted with supercooled glue.

“Ten-sixteen, locally. You have slept for seven hours and forty-two minutes.”

“And my visitor?”

“Oumou Prescott,” said the hotel. “Do you require breakfast?”

I got out of bed and headed for the bathroom. “Yes. Coffee with milk, white meat, well-cooked, and fruit juice of some kind. You can send Prescott up.”

By the time the door chimed at me, I was out of the shower and padding around in an iridescent blue bathrobe trimmed with gold braid. I collected my breakfast from the service hatch and balanced the tray on one hand while I opened the door.

Oumou Prescott was a tall, impressive-looking African woman, topping my sleeve by a couple of centimetres, her hair braided back with dozens of oval glass beads in seven or eight of my favourite colours and her cheekbones lined with some sort of abstract tattooing. She stood on the threshold in a pale grey suit and a long black coat turned up at the collar, and looked at me doubtfully.

“Mr Kovacs.”

“Yes, come in. Would you like some breakfast?” I laid the tray on the unmade bed.

“No, thank you. Mr Kovacs, I am Laurens Bancroft’s principal legal representative via the firm of Prescott, Forbes and Hernandez. Mr Bancroft informed me—”

“Yes, I know.” I picked up a piece of grilled chicken from the tray.

“The point is, Mr Kovacs, we have an appointment with Dennis Nyman at PsychaSec in…” Her eyes flicked briefly upward to consult a retinal watch. “Thirty minutes.”

“I see,” I said, chewing slowly. “I didn’t know that.”

“I’ve been calling since eight this morning, but the hotel refused to put me through. I didn’t realise you would sleep so late.”

I grinned at her through a mouthful of chicken. “Faulty research, then. I was only sleeved yesterday.”

She stiffened a little at that, but then a professional calm asserted itself. She crossed the room and took a seat on the window shelf.

“We’ll be late, then,” she said. “I guess you need breakfast.”

It was cold in the middle of the Bay.

I climbed out of the autocab into watery sunshine and a buffeting wind. It had rained during the night, and there were still a few piles of grey cumulus skulking around inland, sullenly resisting the attempts of a stiff sea breeze to sweep them away. I turned up the collar of my summer suit and made a mental note to buy a coat. Nothing serious, something coming to mid thigh with a collar and pockets big enough to stuff your hands in.

Beside me, Prescott was looking unbearably snug inside her coat. She paid off the cab with a swipe of her thumb and we both stood back as it rose. A welcome rush of warm air from the lift turbines washed over my hands and face. I blinked my eyes against the small storm of grit and dust and saw how Prescott raised one slender arm to do the same. Then the cab was gone, droning away to join the beehive activity in the sky above the mainland. Prescott turned to the building behind us and gestured with one laconic thumb.

“This way.”

I pushed my hands into the inadequate pockets of my suit and followed her lead. Bent slightly into the wind, we picked our way up the long, winding steps to PsychaSec Alcatraz.

I’d expected a high-security installation, and I wasn’t disappointed. PsychaSec was laid out in a series of long, low double-storey modules with deeply recessed windows reminiscent of a military command bunker. The only break in this pattern was a single dome at the western end which I guessed had to house the satellite uplink gear. The whole complex was a pale granite grey and the windows a smoky reflectant orange. There was no holodisplay, or broadcast publicity, in fact nothing to announce we’d got the right place except a sober plaque laser-engraved into the sloping stone wall of the entrance block:

Above the plaque was a small black sentry eye flanked by heavily grilled speakers. Oumou Prescott raised her arm and waved at it.

“Welcome to PsychaSec Alcatraz,” said a construct voice briskly. “Please identify yourself within the fifteen-second security time limit.”

“Oumou Prescott and Takeshi Kovacs to see Director Nyman. We have an appointment.”

A thin, green scanning laser flickered over us both from head to foot and then a section of the wall hinged smoothly back and down forming a passage inside. Glad to get out of the wind, I stepped nimbly into the niche and followed orange runway lights down a short corridor into a reception area, leaving Prescott to bring up the rear. As soon as we stepped off the walkway and into reception, the massive door slab rumbled upright and closed again. Solid security.

Reception was a circular, warmly lit area with banks of seats and low tables set at the cardinal compass points. There were small groups of people seated north and east, conversing in low tones. In the centre was a circular desk where a receptionist sat behind a battery of secretarial equipment. No artificial constructs here; this was a real human being, a slim young man barely out of his teens who looked up with intelligent eyes as we approached.

“You can go right through, Ms Prescott. The Director’s office is up the stairs and third door on your right.”

“Thank you.” Prescott took the lead again, turning back briefly to mutter as soon as we were out of earshot of the receptionist, “Nyman’s a bit impressed with himself since this place was built, but he’s basically a good person. Try not to let him irritate you.”

“Sure.”

We followed the receptionist’s instructions until, outside the aforementioned door I had to stop and suppress a snigger. Nyman’s door, no doubt in the best possible Earth taste, was pure mirrorwood from top to bottom. After the high-profile security system and flesh and blood reception, it seemed about as subtle as the vaginal spittoons at Madame Mi’s Wharfwhore Warehouse. My amusement must have been evident because Prescott gave me a frown as she knocked on the door.

“Come.”

Sleep had done wonders for the interface between my mind and my new sleeve. Composing my rented features, I followed Prescott into the room.

Nyman was at his desk, ostensibly working at a grey and green coloured holodisplay. He was a thin, serious-looking man who affected steel-rimmed external eyelenses to go with his expensively cut black suit and short, tidy hair. His expression, behind the lenses, was slightly resentful. He’d not been happy when Prescott phoned him from the cab to say we would be delayed, but Bancroft had obviously been in touch with him because he accepted the later appointment time with the stiff acquiescence of a disciplined child.

“Since you have requested a viewing of our facilities here, Mr Kovacs, shall we start? I have cleared my agenda for the next couple of hours, but I do have clients waiting.”

Something about Nyman’s manner brought Warden Sullivan to mind, but it was an altogether smoother, less embittered Sullivan. I glanced over Nyman’s suit and face. Perhaps if the Warden had made his career in storage for the super rich instead of the criminal element he might have turned out like this.

“Fine.”

It got pretty dull after that. PsychaSec, like most d.h.f. depots, wasn’t much more than a gigantic set of air-conditioned warehouse shelves. We tramped through basement rooms cooled to the 7 to 11 degrees Celsius recommended by the makers of altered carbon, peered at racks of the big thirty-centimetre expanded format discs and admired the retrieval robots that ran on wide-gauge rails along the storage walls. “It’s a duplex system,” said Nyman proudly. “Every client is stored on two separate discs in different parts of the building. Random code distribution, only the central processor can find them both and there’s a lock on the system to prevent simultaneous access to both copies. To do any real damage, you’d have to break in and get past all the security systems twice.”

I made polite noises.

“Our satellite uplink operates through a network of no less than eighteen secure clearing orbital platforms, leased in random sequence.” Nyman was getting carried away with his own sales pitch. He seemed to have forgotten that neither Prescott nor myself were in the market for PsychaSec’s services. “No orbital is leased for more than twenty seconds at a time. Remote storage updates come in via needlecast, with no way to predict the transmission route.”

Strictly speaking, that wasn’t true. Given an artificial intelligence of sufficient size and inclination, you’d get it right sooner or later, but this was clutching at straws. The kind of enemies who used AIs to get at you didn’t need to finish you off with a particle blaster to the head. I was looking in the wrong place.

“Can I get access to Bancroft’s clones?” I asked Prescott abruptly.

“From a legal point of view?” Prescott shrugged. “Mr Bancroft’s instructions give you carte blanche as far as I know.”

Carte blanche? Prescott had been springing these on me all morning. The words almost had the taste of the heavy parchment. It was like something an Alain Marriott character would say in a Settlement years flic.

Well, you’re on Earth now. I turned to Nyman, who nodded grudgingly.

“There are some procedures,” he said.

We went back up to ground level, along corridors that forcibly reminded me of the re-sleeving facility at Bay City Central by their very dissimilarity. No rubber gurney wheel tracks here — the sleeve transporters would be air cushion vehicles — and the corridor walls were decked out in pastel shades. The windows, bunker peepholes from the outside, were framed and corniched in Gaudí-style waves on the inside. At one corner we passed a woman cleaning them by hand. I raised an eyebrow. No end to the extravagance.

Nyman caught the look. “There are some jobs that robot labour just never gets quite right,” he said.

“I’m sure.”

The clone banks appeared on our left, heavy, sealed doors in bevelled and sculpted steel counterpointing the ornate windows. We stopped at one and Nyman peered into the retina scan set beside it. The door hinged smoothly outwards, fully a metre thick in tungsten steel. Within was a four-metre-long chamber with a similar door at the far end. We stepped inside, and the outer door swung shut with a soft thud that pushed the air into my ears.

“This is an airtight chamber,” said Nyman redundantly. “We will receive a sonic cleansing to ensure that we bring no contaminants into the clone bank. No reason to be alarmed.”

A light in the ceiling pulsed on and off in shades of violet to signify that the dust-off was in progress and then the second door opened with no more sound than the first. We walked out into the Bancroft family vault.

I’d seen this sort of thing before. Reileen Kawahara had maintained a small one for her transit clones on New Beijing, and of course the Corps had them in abundance. Still, I’d never seen anything quite like this.

The space was oval, dome-ceilinged, and must have extended through both storeys of the installation. It was huge, the size of a temple back home. Lighting was low, a drowsy orange, and the temperature was blood-warm. The clone sacs were everywhere, veined translucent pods of the same orange as the light, suspended from the ceiling by cables and nutrient tubes. The clones were vaguely discernible within, foetal bundles of arms and legs, but fully grown. Or at least, most were; towards the top of the dome I could see smaller sacs where new additions to the stock were being cultured. The sacs were organic, a toughened analogue of womb lining, and they would grow with the foetus within to become like the metre and a half lozenges in the lower half of the vault. The whole crop hung there like an insane mobile, just waiting for some huge sickly breeze to stir it into motion.

Nyman cleared his throat, and both Prescott and I shook off the paralysed wonder that had gripped us on the threshold.

“This may look haphazard,” he said, “but the spacing is computer generated.”

“I know.” I nodded and went closer to one of the lower sacs. “It’s fractal-derived, right?”

“Ah, yes.” Nyman seemed almost to resent my knowledge.

I peered in at the clone. Centimetres away from my face Miriam Bancroft’s features dreamed in amniotic fluid beneath the membrane. Her arms were folded protectively across her breasts and her hands were folded lightly into fists under her chin. Her hair had been gathered into a thick, coiled snake on the top of her head and covered in some kind of web.

“The whole family’s here,” murmured Prescott at my shoulder. “Husband and wife, and all sixty-one children. Most only have one or two clones, but Bancroft and his wife run to six each. Impressive, huh?”

“Yeah.” Despite myself, I had to put out a hand and touch the membrane above Miriam Bancroft’s face. It was warm, and gave slightly under my hand. There was raised scarring around the entry points of the nutrient feeds and waste pipes, and in tiny pimples where needles had been pushed through to extract tissue samples or provide IV additives. The membrane would give in to such penetrations and heal afterwards.

I turned away from the dreaming woman and faced Nyman.

“This is all very nice, but presumably you don’t shell one of these whenever Bancroft comes in here. You must have tanks as well.”

“This way.” Nyman gestured us to follow him and went to the back of the chamber where another pressure door was set into the wall. The lowest sacs swayed eerily in the wake of our passage, and I had to duck to avoid brushing against one. Nyman’s fingers played a brief tarantella over the keypad of the pressure door and we went though into a long, low room whose clinical illumination was almost blinding after the womb light of the main vault. A row of eight metallic cylinders not unlike the one I’d woken up in yesterday were ranked along one wall, but where my birthing tube had been unpainted and scarred with the million tiny defacements of frequent use, these units carried a thick gloss of cream paint with yellow trim around the transparent observation plate and the various functional protrusions.

“Full life support suspension chambers,” said Nyman. “Essentially the same environment as the pods. This is where all the re-sleeving is done. We bring fresh clones through, still in the pod, and load them here. The tank nutrients have an enzyme to break down the pod wall, so the transition is completely trauma-free. Any clinical work is carried out by staff working in synthetic sleeves, to avoid any risk of contamination.”

I caught the exasperated rolling of Oumou Prescott’s eyes on the periphery of my vision and a grin twitched at the corner of my mouth.

“Who has access to this chamber?”

“Myself, authorised staff under a day code. And the owners, of course.”

I wandered down the line of cylinders, bending to examine the data displays at the foot of each one. There was a Miriam clone in the sixth, and two of Naomi’s at seven and eight.

“You’ve got the daughter on ice twice?”

“Yes.” Nyman looked puzzled, and then slightly superior. This was his chance to get back the initiative he’d lost on the fractal patterning. “Have you not been informed of her current condition?”

“Yeah, she’s in psychosurgery,” I growled. “That doesn’t explain why there’s two of her here.”

“Well.” Nyman darted a glance back at Prescott, as if to say that the divulging of further information involved some legal dimension. The lawyer cleared her throat.

“PsychaSec have instructions from Mr Bancroft to always hold a spare clone of himself and his immediate family ready for decanting. While Ms Bancroft is committed to the Vancouver psychiatric stack, both sleeves are stored here.”

“The Bancrofts like to alternate their sleeves,” said Nyman knowledgeably. “Many of our clients do, it saves on wear and tear. The human body is capable of quite remarkable regeneration if stored correctly, and of course we offer a complete package of clinical repair for more major damage. Very reasonably priced.”

“I’m sure it is.” I turned back from the end cylinder and grinned at him. “Still, not much you can do for a vaporised head, is there?”

There was a brief silence, during which Prescott looked fixedly at a corner of the ceiling and Nyman’s lips tightened to almost anal proportions.

“I consider that remark in very poor taste,” the director said finally. “Do you have any more important questions, Mr Kovacs?”

I paused next to Miriam Bancroft’s cylinder and looked into it. Even through the fogging effect of the observation plate and the gel, there was a sensual abundance to the blurred form within.

“Just one question. Who decides when to alternate the sleeves?”

Nyman glanced across at Prescott as if to enlist legal support for his words. “I am directly authorised by Mr Bancroft to effect the transfer on every occasion that he is digitised, unless specifically required not to. He made no such request on this occasion.”

There was something here, scratching at the Envoy antennae; something somewhere fitted. It was too early to give it concrete form. I looked around the room.

“This place is entry-monitored, right?”

“Naturally.” Nyman’s tone was still chilly.

“Was there much activity the day Bancroft went to Osaka?”

“No more than usual. Mr Kovacs, the police have already been through these records. I really don’t see what value—”

“Indulge me,” I suggested, not looking at him, and the Envoy cadences in my voice shut him down like a circuit breaker.

Two hours later I was staring out of the window of another autocab as it kicked off from the Alcatraz landing quay and climbed over the Bay.

“Did you find what you were looking for?”

I glanced at Oumou Prescott, wondering if she could sense the frustration coming off me. I thought I’d got most of the external giveaways on this sleeve locked down, but I’d heard of lawyers who got empath conditioning to pick up more subliminal clues to their witnesses’ states of mind when on the stand. And here, on Earth, it wouldn’t surprise me if Oumou Prescott had a full infrared subsonic body and voice scan package racked into her beautiful ebony head.

The entry data for the Bancroft vault, Thursday 16th August, was as free of suspicious comings and goings as the Mishima Mall on a Tuesday afternoon. Eight a.m., Bancroft came in with two assistants, stripped off and climbed into the waiting tank. The assistants left with his clothes. Fourteen hours later his alternate clone climbed dripping out of the neighbouring tank, collected a towel from another assistant and went to get a shower. No words exchanged beyond pleasantries. Nothing.

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t really know what I’m looking for yet.”

Prescott yawned. “Total Absorb, huh?”

“Yeah, that’s right.” I looked at her more closely. “You know much about the Corps?”

“Bit. I did my articles in UN litigation. You pick up the terminology. So what have you absorbed so far?”

“Only that there’s a lot of smoke building up around something the authorities say isn’t burning. You ever meet the lieutenant that ran the case?”

“Kristin Ortega. Of course. I’m not likely to forget her. We were yelling at each other across a desk for the best part of a week.”

“Impressions?”

“Of Ortega?” Prescott looked surprised. “Good cop, as far as I know. Got a reputation for being very tough. The Organic Damage Division are the police department’s hard men, so earning a reputation like that wouldn’t have been easy. She ran the case efficiently enough—”

“Not for Bancroft’s liking.”

Pause. Prescott looked at me warily. “I said efficiently. I didn’t say persistently. Ortega did her job, but—”

“But she doesn’t like Meths, right?”

Another pause. “You have quite an ear for the street, Mr Kovacs.”

“You pick up the terminology,” I said modestly. “Do you think Ortega would have kept the case open if Bancroft hadn’t been a Meth?”

Prescott thought about it for a while. “It’s a common enough prejudice,” she said slowly, “But I don’t get the impression Ortega shut us down because of it. I think she just saw a limited return on her investment. The police department has a promotion system based at least partly on the number of cases solved. No one saw a quick solution to this one, and Mr Bancroft was alive, so…”

“Better things to do, huh?”

“Yes. Something like that.”

I stared out the window some more. The cab was flitting across the tops of slender multi-storey stacks and the traffic-crammed crevices between. I could feel an old fury building in me that had nothing to do with my current problems. Something that had accrued through the years in the Corps and the emotional rubble you got used to seeing, like silt on the surface of your soul. Virginia Vidaura, Jimmy de Soto, dying in my arms at Innenin, Sarah … A loser’s catalogue, any way you looked at it.

I locked it down.

The scar under my eye was itching, and there was the curl of the nicotine craving in my fingertips. I rubbed at the scar. Left the cigarettes in my pocket. At some indeterminate point this morning I’d determined to quit. A thought struck me at random.

“Prescott, you chose this sleeve for me, right?”

“Sorry?” She was scanning through a subretinal projection, and it took her a moment to refocus on me. “What did you say?”

“This sleeve. You chose it, right?”

She frowned. “No. As far as I know that selection was made by Mr Bancroft. We just provided the shortlist according to specifications.”

“No, he told me his lawyers had handled it. Definitely.”

“Oh.” The frown cleared away, and she smiled faintly. “Mr Bancroft has a great many lawyers. Probably he routed it through another office. Why?”

I grunted. “Nothing. Whoever owned this body before was a smoker, and I’m not. It’s a real pain in the balls.”

Prescott’s smile gained ground. “Are you going to give up?”

“If I can find the time. Bancroft’s deal is, I crack the case, I can be re-sleeved no expense spared, so it doesn’t really matter long term. I just hate waking up with a throatful of shit every morning.”

“Do you think you can?”

“Give up smoking?”

“No. Crack this case.”

I looked at her, deadpan. “I don’t really have any other option, counsellor. Have you read the terms of my employment?”

“Yes. I drew them up.” Prescott gave me back the deadpan look, but buried beneath it were traces of the discomfort that I needed to see to stop me reaching across the cab and smashing her nose bone up into her brain with one stiffened hand.

“Well, well,” I said, and went back to looking out of the window.

AND MY FIST UP YOUR WIFE’S CUNT WITH YOU WATCHING YOU FUCKING METH MOTHERFUCKER YOU CAN’T

I slipped off the headset and blinked. The text had carried some crude but effective virtual graphics and a subsonic that made my head buzz. Across the desk, Prescott looked at me with knowing sympathy.

“Is it all like this?” I asked.

“Well, it gets less coherent.” She gestured at the holograph display floating above the desktop, where representations of the files I was accessing tumbled in cool shades of blue and green. “This is what we call the R&R stack. Rabid and Rambling. Actually, these guys are mostly too far gone to be any real threat, but it’s not nice, knowing they’re out there.”

“Ortega bring any of them in?”

“It’s not her department. The Transmission Felony Division catches a few every now and then, when we squawk loudly enough about it, but dissemination technology being the way it is, it’s like trying to throw a net over smoke. And even when you do catch them, the worst they’ll get is a few months in storage. It’s a waste of time. We mostly just sit on this stuff until Bancroft says we can delete it.”

“And nothing new in the last six months?”

Prescott shrugged. “The religious lunatics, maybe. Some increased traffic from the Catholics on Resolution 653. Mr Bancroft has an undeclared influence in the UN Court, which is more or less common knowledge. Oh, and some Martian archaeological sect has been screaming about that Songspire he keeps in his hall. Apparently last month was the anniversary of their founder’s martyrdom by leaky pressure suit. But none of these people have the wherewithal to crack the perimeter defences at Suntouch House.”

I tilted my chair back and stared up at the ceiling. A flight of grey birds angled overhead in a southward pointing chevron. Their voices were faintly audible, honking to each other. Prescott’s office was environment-formatted, all six internal surfaces projecting virtual images. Currently, her grey metal desk was incongruously positioned halfway down a sloping meadow on which the sun was beginning to decline, complete with a small herd of cattle in the distance and occasional birdsong. The image resolution was some of the best I’d seen.

“Prescott, what can you tell me about Leila Begin?”

The silence that ensued pulled my eyes back down to ground level. Oumou Prescott was staring off into a corner of the field.

“I suppose Kristin Ortega gave you that name,” she said slowly.

“Yeah.” I sat up. “She said it would give me some insight into Bancroft. In fact, she told me to run it by you to see if you rattled.”

Prescott swivelled 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 foetus, 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 foetus. 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 pay-off 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 coloured files distort around the intrusion. “You might have to make it your concern, counsellor. 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,” said Prescott 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 kilometres north of Bay City, on the coast road. There was an asymmetrical yellow symbol in the sea next to it.

“Free Trade Enforcer,” said Prescott, 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 for the tourists.”

“Tourists?”

She looked at me. “It’s a big ship.”

I hired an ancient ground car from a seedy-looking dealership two blocks down from Prescott’s office and drove north over the rust-coloured 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 centre of the road and barrelled 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 SLIP-SLIDE — ANCHANA SALOMAO & THE RIO TOTAL BODY THEATRE. Small knots of people were out, rubbernecking at the images.

I rolled the ground car along the street in low gear, scanning the façades, 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 metres 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 broking was a narrow façade 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, harboured behind a long moulded 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 round 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 now, 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 round as I joined him and gave me a nod of acknowledgement, 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 & 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 skip 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,” said Elliott 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 fuelling 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 Theatre. 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 packet, 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 Theatre, 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 chiselling of lines between her brows. A palpable shimmer of happiness overwhelmed the detail.

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

I shook my head. Local colour, 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. Digitised 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 authorised, sanitised. 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,” said Elliott 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 at the shopfront that bore his name. “The data market was down. Too many brokers. Saturated. We had a clone and re-sleeving 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 OK for six months, then I turn on the screen and see some corporate negotiator wearing Irene’s body.” He half-turned towards 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 Closed Quarters 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 online 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 grey with the shock. Leaning over, I pinned him to the rail and jammed the fork of my thumb and fingers into his throat.

“That’s enough,” I snapped, a little unsteadily. The sleeve’s neurachem wiring was a rougher piece of work than the Corps systems I’d used in the past and in overdrive the overwhelming impression was of being slung around in a subcutaneous bag of chicken wire.

I looked down at Elliott.

His eyes were a hand’s breadth from mine, and despite the grip I had on his throat they were still burning with rage. Breath whistled in his teeth as he clawed after the strength to break my grip and damage me.

I yanked him off the rail and propped him away from me with a cautionary arm.

“Listen, I’m passing no judgements here. I just want to know. What makes you think she has any connection to Bancroft?”

“Because she told me, motherfucker.” The sentence hissed out of him. “She told me what he’d done.”

“And what was that?”

He blinked rapidly, the undischarged rage condensing into tears. “Dirty things,” he said. “She said he needed them. Badly enough to come back. Badly enough to pay.”

Meal ticket. Don’t worry Daddy, when I’m rich we’ll buy Mummy back. Easy enough mistake to make when you’re young. But nothing comes that easy.

“You think that’s why she died?”

He turned his head and looked at me as if I was a particularly poisonous species of spider on his kitchen floor.

“She didn’t die, mister. Someone killed her. Someone took a razor and cut her up.”

“Trial transcript says it was a client. Not Bancroft.”

“How would they know?” he said dully. “They name a body, who knows who’s inside it. Who’s paying for it all.”

“They find him yet?”

“Biocabin whore’s killer? What do you think? It ain’t exactly like she worked for the Houses, right?”

“That’s not what I meant, Elliott. You say she turned Bancroft in Jerry’s, I’ll believe you. But you’ve got to admit it doesn’t sound like Bancroft’s style. I’ve met the man, and slumming?” I shook my head. “He doesn’t read that way to me.”

Elliott turned away.

“Flesh,” he said. “What you going to read in a Meth’s flesh?”

It was nearly full dark. Out across the water on the sloping deck of the warship, the performance had started. We both stared at the lights for a while, heard the bright snatches of music, like transmissions from a world that we were forever locked out of.

“Elizabeth’s still on stack,” I said quietly.

“Yeah, so what? Re-sleeving policy lapsed four years ago, when we sank all the money we had into some lawyer said he could crack Irene’s case.” He gestured back at the dimly lit frontage of his offices. “I look like the kind of guy’s going to come into some money real soon?”

There was nothing to say after that. I left him watching the lights and walked back to the car. He was still there when I drove back past him on the way out of the little town. He didn’t look round.