Altered Carbon(10)

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 o.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.”