Altered Carbon

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 SLIPSLIDE—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 fa?ades, 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 fa?ade 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, motherf*cker.” 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 tilings,” 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.