Altered Carbon

“Perhaps not.” I stood up and went to stand at the door of the conservatory, looking out. “Well, then don’t feel that I’m sitting in judgement, but why exactly didn’t you tell me you spent so much time in whorehouses?”

“Ah, the Elliott girl. Yes, Oumou has told me about this. Do you seriously think her father had something to do with my death?”

I turned back. “Not now, no. I seriously believe he had nothing to do with your death, in fact. But I’ve wasted a lot of time finding that out.”

Bancroft met my eye calmly. “I’m sorry if my briefing was inadequate, Mr. Kovacs. It is true, I spend some of my leisure time in purchased sexual release, both real and virtual. Or, as you so elegantly put it, whorehouses. I’d not considered it especially important. Equally, I spend part of my time in small-scale gambling. And occasionally null-gravity knife fighting. All of these things could make me enemies, as indeed could most of my business interests. I didn’t feel that your first day in a new sleeve on a new world was the time for a line-by-line explanation of my life. Where would I expect to begin? Instead, I told you the background of the crime and suggested that you talk to Oumou. I didn’t expect you to take off after the first clue like a heatseeker. Nor did I expect you to lay waste everything that got in your way. I was told the Envoy Corps had a reputation for subtlety.”

Put like that, he had a point. Virginia Vidaura would have been furious, she probably would have been right behind Bancroft, waiting to deck me for gross lack of finesse. But then, neither she nor Bancroft had been looking into Victor Elliott’s face the night he told me about his family. I swallowed a sharp retort and marshalled what I knew, trying to decide how much to let go of.

“Laurens?”

Miriam Bancroft was standing just outside the conservatory, a towel draped around her neck and her racket under one arm.

“Miriam.” There was a genuine deference in Bancroft’s tone, but little else that I could determine.

“I’m taking Nalan and Joseph out to Hudson’s Raft for a scuba lunch. Joseph’s never done it before, and we’ve talked him into it.” She glanced from Bancroft to myself and back. “Will you be coming with us?”

“Maybe later,” said Bancroft. “Where will you be?”

Miriam shrugged. “I hadn’t really thought about it. Somewhere on the starboard decks. Benton’s, maybe?”

“Fine. I’ll catch you up. Spear me a kingfish if you see one.”

“Aye aye.” She touched the blade of one hand to the side of her head in a ludicrous salute that made both of us smile unexpectedly. Miriam’s gaze quivered and settled on me. “Do you like seafood, Mr. Kovacs?”

“Probably. I’ve had very little time to exercise my tastes on Earth, Mrs. Bancroft. So far I’ve only eaten what my hotel has to offer.”

“Well. Once you’ve developed a taste for it,” she said significantly, “maybe we’ll see you as well?”

“Thank you, but I doubt it.”

“Well,” she repeated brightly. “Try not to be too much longer, Laurens. I’ll need some help keeping Marco off Nalan’s back. He’s fuming, by the way.”

Bancroft grunted. “The way he played today, I’m not surprised. I thought for a while he was doing it deliberately.”

“Not the last game,” I said, to no one in particular.

The Bancrofts focused on me, he unreadably, she with her head tipped to one side and a sudden wide smile that made her look unexpectedly child-like. For a moment I met her gaze, and one hand rose to touch her hair with what seemed like fractional uncertainty.

“Curtis will be bringing the limousine round,” she said. “I’ll have to go. It was a pleasure to see you again, Mr. Kovacs.”

We both watched her stride away across the lawn, her te

“Tell me something, Bancroft,” I said with my eyes still on the receding figure. “No disrespect intended, but why does someone who’s married to her, who’s chosen to stay married, spend his time in quote purchased sexual release?”

I turned casually back and found him watching me without expression. He said nothing for several seconds, and when he spoke his voice was carefully bland.

“Have you ever come in a woman’s face, Kovacs?”

Culture shock is something they teach you to lock down very early on in the Corps, but just occasionally a blast gets through the armour and the reality around you feels like a jigsaw that won’t quite fit together. I barely chopped off my stare before it got started. This man, older than the entire human history of my planet, was asking me this question. It was as if he’d asked me had I ever played with water pistols.

“Uh. Yes. It, uh, it happens if—”

“A woman you paid?”

“Well, sometimes. Not especially. I—” I remembered his wife’s abandoned laughter as I exploded into and around her mouth, come trickling down over her knuckles like foam from a popped champagne bottle. ”I don’t really remember. It’s not a special fetish of mine, and—

“Nor of mine,” snapped the man in front of me, with rather too much emphasis. “I choose it merely as an example. There are things, desires, in all of us that are better suppressed. Or at least, that ca

“I’d hardly counterpose civilisation with spilling semen.”

“You come from another place,” said Bancroft broodingly. “A brash, young colonial culture. You can have no concept of how the centuries of tradition have moulded us here on earth. The young of spirit, the adventurous, all left on the ships in droves. They were encouraged to leave. Those who stayed were the stolid, the obedient, the limited. I watched it happen, and at the time I was glad, because it made carving out an empire so much easier. Now, I wonder if it was worth the price we paid. Culture fell in on itself, grappled after norms to live by, settled for the old and familiar. Rigid morality, rigid law. The UN declarations fossilised into global conformity, there was a—” he gestured “—a sort of supracultural straitjacket, and with an inherent fear of what might be borne from the colonies, the Protectorate arose while the ships were still in flight. When the first of them made planetfall, their stored peoples woke into a prepared tyra

“You talk as if you stood outside it. With this much vision, you still can’t fight your way free?”

Bancroft smiled thinly. “Culture is like a smog. To live within it, you must breathe some of it in and, inevitably, be contaminated. And in any case, what does free mean in this context? Free to spill semen on my wife’s face and breasts? Free to have her masturbate in front of me, to share the use of her flesh with other men and women. Two hundred and fifty years is a long time, Mr. Kovacs, time enough for a very long list of dirty, degrading fantasies to infest the mind and titillate the hormones of each fresh sleeve you wear. While all the time your finer feelings grow purer and more rarified. Do you have any concept of what happens to emotional bonds over such a period?”

I opened my mouth, but he held up his hand for silence and I let him have it. It’s not every day you get to hear the outpourings of a centuries-old soul and Bancroft was in full flow.

“No,” he answered his own question. “How could you? Just as your culture is too shallow to appreciate what it is to live on Earth, your life experience ca