Altered Carbon

Chapter ELEVEN
When you have no friends, and the woman you slept with last night has left you with a screaming head and without a word, you have a limited number of options. When I was younger I used to go out looking for squalid brawls in the streets of Newpest. This got a couple of people stabbed, neither of them me, and led in turn to my apprenticeship in one of the Harlan’s World gangs (Newpest Chapter). Later on, I upgraded this kind of retreat by joining the military; brawling with a purpose, and with more extensive weaponry, but as it turned out, just as squalid. I don’t suppose I should have been as surprised as I was—the only thing the marine corps recruiters had really wanted to know was how many fights I had won.
These days I’ve evolved a slightly less destructive response to general chemical malaise. When a forty-minute swim in the Hendrix’s underground pool failed to dispel either the longing for Miriam Bancroft’s torrid company or the Merge Nine hangover, I did the only thing I felt equipped for. I ordered painkillers from room service, and went shopping.
Bay City had already settled into the swing of the day by the time I finally hit the streets, and the commercial centre was choked with pedestrians. I stood on the edges for a couple of minutes, then dived in and began to look in windows.
A blonde marine sergeant with the unlikely name of Serenity Carlyle taught me to shop, back on the World. Prior to that I had always employed a technique best described as precision purchase. You identify your target, you go in, get it and come out. You can’t get what you want, cut your losses and get out equally fast. Over the period that we spent together, Serenity weaned me off this approach, and sold me her philosophy of consumer grazing.
“Look,” she told me one day in a Millsport coffee house. “Shopping—actual, physical shopping—could have been phased out centuries ago if they’d wanted it that way.”
“They who?”
“People. Society.” She waved a hand impatiently. “Whoever. They had the capacity back then. Mail order, virtual supermarkets, automated debiting systems. It could have been done and it never happened. What does that tell you?”
At twenty-two years old, a marine corps grunt via the street gangs of Newpest, it told me nothing. Carlyle took in my blank look and sighed.
“It tells you that people like shopping. That it satisfies a basic, acquisitive need at a genetic level. Something we inherited from our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Oh, you’ve got automated convenience shopping for basic household items, mechanical food distribution systems for the marginalised poor. But you’ve also got a massive proliferation of commercial hives and speciality markets in food and crafts which people physically have to go to. Now why would they do that, if they didn’t enjoy it?”
I probably shrugged, maintaining my youthful cool.
“Shopping is physical interaction, exercise of decision-making capacity, sating of the desire to acquire, and an impulse to more acquisition, a scouting urge. It’s so basically flicking human when you think about it. You’ve got to learn to love it, Tak. I mean you can cross the whole archipelago on a hover, you never even need to get wet. But that doesn’t take the basic pleasure out of swimming, does it? Learn to shop well, Tak. Get flexible. Enjoy the uncertainty.”
Enjoyment wasn’t exactly what I was feeling at the moment, but I stuck with it and I stayed flexible, true to Serenity Carlyle’s creed. I started out vaguely looking for a heavy-duty waterproof jacket, but the thing that finally pulled me into a shop was a pair of all-terrain walking boots.
The boots were followed by loose black trousers and a crossover insulated top with enzyme seals that ran all the way from waist to a tight crew neck. I’d seen variations on the outfit a hundred times on the streets of Bay City so far. Surface assimilation. It would do. After brief hungover reflection, I added a defiant red silk bandanna across my forehead, Newpest gang style. It wasn’t exactly assimilative, but it went with the vaguely mutinous irritation that had been rising in me since yesterday. I dumped Bancroft’s summer suit in a skip on the street outside and left the shoes beside it.
Before I left it, I searched through the jacket pockets and came up with two cards: the doctor at Bay City Central and Bancroft’s armourer.
Larkin and Green proved to be the names not of two gunsmiths, but of two streets that intersected on a leafy slope called Russian Hill. The autocab had some visitors blurb about the area, but I skipped it. Larkin & Green, Armourers since 2203 was a discreet corner fa?ade, extending less than a half dozen metres along each street, but bordered by blinded units that looked as if they had probably been annexed. I pushed through well-cared-for wooden doors into the cool, oil-smelling interior.
Inside, the place reminded me of the chart room at Suntouch House. There was space, and light flooding in from two storeys of tall windows. The first floor had been removed and replaced with a wide gallery on four sides overlooking the ground level. The walls were hung with flat display cases and the space under the gallery overhang hosted heavy glass-topped trolleys that performed the same function. There was the faint tang of an ambient modifier in the air, scent of old trees under the gun oil, and the floor under my newly booted feet was carpeted.
A black steel face appeared over the gallery rail. Green photo-receptors burned in place of eyes. “May I be of assistance, sir?”
“I’m Takeshi Kovacs. I’m here from Laurens Bancroft,” I said, tipping my head back to meet the mandroid’s gaze. “I’m looking for some hardware.”
“Of course, sir.” The voice was smoothly male and devoid of any sales subsonics I could detect. “Mr.Bancroft told us to expect you. I am with a client, but I shall be down presently. Please make yourself at home. There are chairs to your left and a refreshments cabinet. Please help yourself.”
The head disappeared and a murmured conversation I had vaguely registered when I came in was resumed. I located the refreshments cabinet, found it stocked with alcohol and cigars and closed it hurriedly. The painkillers had taken the edge off the Merge Nine hangover, but I was in no fit state for further abuse. With a light shock, I realised I’d gone through the day so far without a cigarette. I wandered over to the nearest display case and looked in at a selection of samurai swords. There were date tickets attached to the scabbards. Some of them were older than me.
The next case held a rack of brown and grey projectile weapons that seemed to have been grown rather than machined. The barrels sprouted from organically curved wrappings that flared gently back to the stock. These too were dated back into the last century. I was trying to decipher the curled engraving on a barrel when I heard a metallic tread on the staircase behind me.
“Has sir found anything to his liking?”
I turned to face the approaching mandroid. Its entire body was the same polished gunmetal, moulded into the muscle configuration of an archetypal human male. Only the genitals were absent. The face was long and thin, fine-featured enough to hold attention despite its immobility. The head was carved into furrows to represent thick backcombed hair. Stamped across the chest was the almost eroded legend Mars Expo 2076.
“Just looking.” I said and gestured back at the guns. “Are these made of wood?”
The green photo-receptor gaze regarded me gravely. “That is correct, sir. The stocks are a beech hybrid. They are all handmade weapons. Kalashnikov, Purdey and Beretta. We stock all the European houses here. Which was sir interested in?”
I looked back. There was a curious poetry to the forms, something slung part way between functional bluntness and organic grace, something that cried out to be cradled. To be used.
“They’re a bit ornate for me. I had in mind something a little more practical.”
“Certainly, sir. Can we assume sir is not a novice in this field?”
I grinned at the machine. “We can assume that.”
“Then perhaps sir would care to tell me what his preferences in the past have been.”
“Smith & Wesson 11mm Magnum. Ingram 40 flechette gun. Sunjet particle thrower. But that wasn’t in this sleeve.”
The green receptors glowed. No comment. Perhaps it hadn’t been programmed for light conversation with Envoys.
“And what exactly is sir looking for in this sleeve?”
I shrugged. “Something subtle. Something not. Projectile weapons. And a blade. The heavy one needs to be something like the Smith.”
The mandroid became quite still. I could almost hear the whirring of data retrieval. I wondered briefly how a machine like this had come to wind up here. It had clearly not been designed for the job. On Harlan’s World, you don’t see many mandroids. They’re expensive to build, compared to a synthetic, or even a clone, and most jobs that require a human form are better done by those organic alternatives. The truth is that a robot human is a pointless collision of two disparate functions. Artificial intelligence, which really works better strung out on a mainframe, and hard-wearing, hazardproof bodywork which most cyber-engineering firms designed to spec for the task in hand. The last robot I’d seen on the World was a gardening crab.
The photo-receptors brightened slightly and the thing’s posture unlocked. “If sir would care to come this way, I believe I have the right combination.”
I followed the machine through a door that blended so well with the décor of the back wall that I hadn’t seen it and down a short corridor. Beyond was a long, low room whose unpainted plaster walls were lined with raw fibre-glass packing cases. There were a number of people working quietly at points up and down the room. The air carried the businesslike rattle of hardware in practised hands. The mandroid led me to a small grey-haired man dressed in grease-streaked coveralls who was stripping down an electromag bolt-thrower as if it were a roast chicken. He looked up as we approached.
“Chip?” He nodded at the machine and ignored me.
“Clive, this is Takeshi Kovacs. He’s a friend of Mr.Bancroft, looking for equipment. I’d like you to show him the Nemex and a Philips gun, and then pass him on to Sheila for a blade weapon.”
Clive nodded again and set aside the electromag.
“This way,” he said.
The mandroid touched my arm lightly. “Should sir require anything further, I shall be in the showroom.”
It bowed fractionally and left. I followed Clive along the rows of packing cases to where a variety of handguns were laid out on piles of plastic confetti. He selected one and turned back to me with it in his hands.
“Second series Nemesis X,” he said, holding out the gun. “The Nemex. Manufactured under licence for Mannlicher-Schoenauer. Fires a jacketed slug with a customised propellant called Druck 31. Very powerful, very accurate. The magazine takes eighteen shells in a staggered clip. Bit bulky but worth it in a firefight. Feel the weight.”
I took the weapon and turned it over in my hands. It was a big, heavy-barrelled pistol, slightly longer than the Smith & Wesson but well balanced. I swapped it hand to hand for a while, getting the feel of it, squinted down the sight. Clive waited beside me patiently.
“All right.” I handed it back. “And something subtle?”
“Philips squeeze gun.” Clive reached into an open packing case and dug inside the confetti until he came up with a slim grey pistol almost half the size of the Nemex. “A solid steel load. Uses an electromagnetic accelerator. Completely silent, accurate up to about twenty metres. No recoil, and you’ve got a reverse field option on the generator that means the slugs can be retrieved from the target afterwards. Takes ten.”
“Batteries?”
“Specs are for between forty and fifty discharges. After that, you’re losing muzzle velocity with every shot. You get two replacement batteries included in the price and a recharging kit compatible with household power outlets.”
“Do you have a firing range? Somewhere I can try these out?”
“Out the back. But both these babies come with a virtual combat practice disc and that’s perfect parity between virtual and actual performance. Warranty guarantees it.”
“All right, fine.” Collecting on a guarantee like that might prove a slow process if some cowboy used the resulting unhandiness to put a bullet through your skull. No telling when you might get re-sleeved, if at all. But by now the ache in my head was beginning to get through the painkillers. Maybe target practice wasn’t the thing right at that moment. I didn’t bother asking the price either. It wasn’t my money I was spending. “Ammunition?”
“Comes in boxes of five, both guns, but you get a free clip with the Nemex. Sort of a promotion for the new line. That going to be enough?”
“Not really. Give me two five-packs for both guns.”
“Ten clips, each?” There was a dubious respect in Clive’s voice. Ten clips is a lot of ammunition for a handgun, but I’d discovered that there were times when being able to fill the air with bullets was worth a lot more than actually hitting anything. “And you wanted a blade, right?”
“That’s right.”
“Sheila!” Clive turned away down the long room and called out to a tall woman with crewcut blonde hair who was sitting cross-legged on a crate with her hands in her lap and the matte grey of a virtual set masking her face. She looked round when she heard her name, remembered the mask and tipped it off, blinking. Clive waved at her and she uncoiled herself from the crate, swaying slightly from the shift back to reality as she got up.
“Sheila, this guy’s looking for steel. You want to help him out?”
“Sure.” The woman reached out a lanky arm. “Name’s Sheila Sorenson. What kind of steel you looking for?”
I matched her grip. “Takeshi Kovacs. I need something I can throw in a hurry, but it’s got to be small. Something I can strap to a forearm.”
“All right,” she said amiably. “Want to come with me? You finished here?”
Clive nodded at me. “I’ll take this stuff out to Chip, and he’ll package it up for you. You want it for delivery or carry out?”
“Carry out.”
“Thought so.”
Sheila’s end of the business turned out to be a small rectangular room with a couple of silhouette cork targets on one wall and an array of weapons ranging from stilettos to machetes hung on the other three. She selected a flat black knife with a grey metal blade about fifteen centimetres long and took it down.
“Tebbit knife,” she said inconsequentially. “Very nasty.”
And with every appearance of casualness she turned and unleashed the weapon at the left-hand target. It skipped through the air like something alive and buried itself in the silhouette’s head. “Tantalum steel alloy blade, webbed carbon hilt. There’s a flint set in the pommel for weighting and of course you can bash them over the head with that if you don’t get them with the sharp end.”
I stepped across to the target and freed the knife. The blade was narrow and honed to a razor’s edge on each side. A shallow gutter ran down the centre, delineated with a thin red line that had tiny, intricate characters etched into it. I tilted the weapon in an attempt to read the engraving, but it was in a code I didn’t recognise. Light glinted dully off the grey metal.
“What’s this?”
“What?” Sheila moved to stand beside me. “Oh, yeah. Bioweapon coding. The runnel is coated with C-381. Produces cyanide compounds on contact with haemoglobin. Well away from the edges, so if you cut yourself there’s no problem, but if you sink it in anything with blood…”
“Charming.”
“Told you it was nasty, didn’t I.” There was pride in her voice.
“I’ll take it.”
Back out on the street, weighed down with my purchases, it occurred to me I’d need a jacket after all, if only to conceal the newly acquired arsenal. I cast a glance upward in search of an autocab and decided instead that there was enough sun in the sky to justify walking. I thought, at last, that my hangover was beginning to recede.
I was three blocks down the hill before I realised I was being tailed.
It was the Envoy conditioning, stirring sluggishly to life in the wake of the Merge Nine, that told me. Enhanced proximity sense, the faintest shiver and a figure in the corner of my eye once too often. This one was good. In a more crowded part of town I might have missed it, but here the pedestrians were too thin on the ground to provide much camouflage.
The Tebbit knife was strapped to my left forearm in a soft leather sheath with neural spring-load, but neither of the guns was accessible without making it obvious that I’d spotted my shadow. I debated trying to lose the tail, but abandoned the idea almost as soon as it occurred to me. It wasn’t my town, I felt sludgy with chemicals and anyway I was carrying too much. Let whoever it was come shopping with me. I picked up my pace a little and worked my way gradually down into the commercial centre, where I found an expensive thigh-length red and blue wool coat with Inuit-inspired totem pole figures chasing each other in lines across it. It wasn’t quite what I’d had in mind, but it was warm and had numerous capacious pockets. Paying for it at the shop’s glass front, I managed to catch a glimpse of my tail’s face. Young, Caucasian, dark hair. I didn’t know him.
The two of us crossed Union Square, pausing to take in another Resolution 653 demonstration that had stalled in a corner and was gradually wearing thin. The chants wavered, people drifted away and the metallic bark of the p.a. system was beginning to sound plaintive. There was a good chance I could have slipped away in the crowd, but by now I couldn’t be bothered. If the tail had been going to do anything other than watch, he’d had his chance back in the leafy seclusion of the hills. There was too much going on here for a hit. I steered my way through the remnants of the demonstration, brushing aside the odd leaflet, and then headed south towards Mission Street and the Hendrix.
On my way down Mission, I stepped inadvertently into the cast radius of a street seller. Instantly, my head flooded with images. I was moving along an alley full of women whose clothing was designed to display more dian they would have shown of themselves naked. Boots that turned legs into slices of consumer flesh above the knee, thighs with arrow-shaped bands pointing the way, structural support lifting and pressing breasts out for view; heavy, rounded pendants nestling glans-like in sweat-beaded cleavages. Tongues flickered out, licked across lips painted cherry red or tomb black, teeth were bared in challenge.
A tide of cool swept in across me, erasing the sweaty need and turning the posturing bodies into an abstract expression of womanhood. I found myself tracking angles and the circumferences of bulges like a machine, mapping the geometry of flesh and bone as if the women were a species of plant.
Betathanatine. The Reaper.
Final offspring of an extended chemical family engineered for near death research projects early in the millennium, betathanatine brought the human body as close to flatline status as was feasible without gross cellular damage. At the same time, control stimulants in the Reaper molecule induced a clinical functioning of intellect which had enabled researchers to go through artificially induced death experiences without the overwhelming sense of emotion and wonder that might mar their data perception. Used in smaller doses, Reaper produced a depth of cool indifference to such things as pain, arousal, joy and grief. All the detachment that men had pretended for centuries before the naked female form was there for the taking, in capsule. It was almost custom built for the male adolescent market.
It was also an ideal military drug. Riding the Reaper, a Godwin’s Dream renouncer monk could torch a village full of women and children and feel nothing but fascination for the way the flames melted flesh from bone.
The last time I’d used betathanatine had been in street battles on Sharya. A full dose, designed to bring body temperature down to room normal and slow my heart to a fractional rate. Tricks to beat the antipersonnel detectors on Sharyan spider tanks. With no register on infrared, you could get up close, scale a leg and crack the hatches with termite grenades. Concussed by the shockwave, the crew usually slaughtered as easily as newborn kittens.
“Got Stiff, man,” said a hoarse voice redundantly. I blinked away the broadcast and found myself looking at a pale Caucasian face beneath a grey cowl. The broadcast unit sat on his shoulder, tiny red active lights winking at me like bat eyes. On the World there are very tight laws regulating the use of direct-to-head dissemination, and even accidental broadcasts can generate the same kind of violence as spilling someone’s drink in a wharf-front bar. I shot out one arm and shoved the dealer hard in the chest. He staggered against a shop front.
“Hey…”
“Don’t piss in my head, friend. I don’t like it.”
I saw his hand snake down to a unit at his waist and guessed what was coming. Retargetting, I got the soft of his eyes under my stiffened fingers …
And was face to face with a hissing mound of wet membranous flesh nearly two metres tall. Tentacles writhed at me and my hand was reaching into a phlegm-streaked hollow framed with thick black cilia. My gorge rose and my throat closed up. Riding out a shudder of revulsion, I pushed into the seething cilia and felt the slimy flesh give.
“You want to go on seeing, you’ll unplug that shit,” I said tightly.
The mound of flesh vanished and I was back with the dealer, fingers still pressed hard onto the upper curves of his eyeballs.
“All right, man, all right.” He held up his hands, palms out. “You don’t want the stuff, don’t buy it. I’m just trying to make a living here.”
I stepped back and gave him the space to get off the shop front he was pinned to.
“Where I come from, you don’t go into people’s heads on the street,” I offered by way of explanation. But he’d already sensed my retreat from the confrontation and he just made a gesture with his thumb which I assumed was obscene.
“I give a f*ck where you’re from? F*cking grasshopper? Get out of my face.”
I left him there, wondering idly as I crossed the street if there was any moral difference between him and the genetic designers who had built Merge Nine into Miriam Bancroft’s sleeve.
I paused on a corner and bent my head to kindle a cigarette.
Mid afternoon. My first of the day.