“Oh.”
“Yes, there wasn’t much.” Ortega turned away, hugging her own shoulders in the kimono, and moved past me to the unexplored doorway. “You’re the only guest there at the moment. So it’s just been you. And your visitors.”
I followed her through into a second, carpeted room where two steps led down to a narrow sunken galley behind a low, wood-panelled partition at one side. The other walls held similarly covered items of furniture to the first room, except for the far corner, where the plastic sheeting had been pulled off a metre-square video screen and attendant receiver/playback modules. A single, straight-backed chair was positioned in front of the screen on which was frozen the unmistakable image of Elias Ryker’s face delving between Miriam Bancroft’s widespread thighs.
“There’s a remote on the chair,” said Ortega, herself remote. “Why don’t you watch some of it while I make you a coffee? Refresh your memory. Then you can do some explaining.”
She disappeared into the galley without giving me the chance to reply. I advanced on the frozen video screen, feeling a small liquid slide in my guts as the image brought back memories tinged with Merge Nine. In the sleepless, chaotic whirl of the last day and a half, I had all but forgotten Miriam Bancroft, but now she came back to me in the flesh, overpowering and intoxicating as she had been that night. I’d also forgotten Rodrigo Bautista’s claim that they were almost through the legal wrangles with the Hendrix’s lawyers.
My foot knocked against something and I looked down at the carpet. There was a coffee mug on the floor next to the chair, still a third full. I wondered how much of the hotel’s memory Ortega had gone through. I glanced at the image on screen. Was this as far as she’d got? What else had she seen? How to play this, then? I picked up the remote and turned it over in my hands. Ortega’s cooperation had been an integral part of my planning so far. If I was going to lose her now, I was in trouble.
Scratching around inside me was something else. An emotional upwelling that I didn’t want to acknowledge, because to acknowledge it would be a clinical absurdity. A feeling that, despite my preoccupation with later factors in the hotel’s memory, was tied intimately to the image currently on screen.
Embarrassment. Shame.
Absurd. I shook my head. Fucking stupid.
“You’re not watching.”
I turned back and saw Ortega with a steaming mug in each hand. An aroma of mingled coffee and rum wafted towards me.
“Thanks.” I took one of the mugs from her and sipped at it, playing for time. She leaned away from me and folded her arms.
“So. Half a hundred reasons why Miriam Bancroft doesn’t fit the bill.” She jerked her head at the screen. “How many of them is that?”
“Ortega, this is nothing to do—”
“I buy Miriam Bancroft as scary, you told me.” She shook her head judicially and sipped from her coffee. “I don’t know, that doesn’t look like fear on your face, exactly.”
“Ortega—”
“‘I want you to stop,’ she says. She actually says it, look wind it back if you don’t rememb—”
I pulled the remote out of her reach. “I remember what she said.”
“Then you also remember the sweet little deal she offered you to shut down the case, the multiple—”
“Ortega, you didn’t want me on the case either, remember. Open and shut suicide, you said. That doesn’t mean you killed him, does—”
“Shut up.” Ortega circled me as if we were holding knives, not coffee mugs. “You’ve been covering for her. All this fucking time, you’ve had your nose buried in her crotch like a faithful fucking d—”
“If you’ve seen the rest of it, you know that isn’t true.” I tried for an even tone that Ryker’s hormones would not let me have. “I told Curtis I wasn’t interested. I fucking told him that two days ago.”
“Do you have any idea what a prosecutor will do with this footage? Miriam Bancroft trying to buy off her husband’s investigator with illegal sexual favours. Oh yes, admission of multiple sleeving, even unproven, can be made to look very bad in court.”
“She’ll beat the rap. You know she will.”
“If her Meth husband wants to weigh in on her side. Which maybe he won’t when he sees this. This isn’t Leila Begin again, you know. The moral boot’s on the other foot this time around.”
The allusion to morality went ripping through the outer borders of the argument, but as it passed I grasped the uncomfortable fact that actually it was central to what was going on here. I remembered Bancroft’s critical assessment of Earth’s moral culture, and wondered if he could really watch my head between his wife’s thighs and not feel betrayed.
I was still trying to work out what I felt on the same subject.
“And while we’re on the subject of prosecution, Kovacs, that severed head you brought back from the Wei Clinic isn’t going to win you any remissions either. Illegal retention of a d.h. personality carries fifty to a hundred on Earth, more if we can prove you torched the head off in the first place.”
“I was going to tell you about that.”
“No, you fucking weren’t,” Ortega snarled. “You weren’t going to fucking tell me any single thing you didn’t need to.”
“Look, the clinic won’t dare prosecute anyway. They’ve got too much to—”
“You arrogant motherfucker.” The coffee cup thumped dully to the carpet, and her fists clenched. Now there was real fury in her eyes. “You’re just like him, you’re just fucking like him. You think we need the fucking clinic, with footage of you putting a severed head in a hotel freezer. Isn’t that a crime where you come from, Kovacs? Summary decapitation—”
“Wait a minute.” I put my own coffee down on the chair at my side. “Just like who, who am I just like?”
“What?”
“You just said I’m just—”
“Never fucking mind what I said. Do you understand what you’ve done here, Kovacs?”
“The only thing I under—” Abruptly, sound welled from the screen behind me, liquid groans and the sound of organic suction. I glanced at the remote clenched in my left hand, trying to see how I’d inadvertently unfrozen the playback, and a deep, female moan sent the blood twitching through my guts. Then Ortega was on me, trying to snatch the remote out of my hand.
“Give me that, turn that fucking thing—”
For a moment I wrestled with her and our struggling only succeeded in making the volume louder. Then, suddenly, riding a solitary updraft of sanity, I let go and she collapsed against the chair, pressing buttons.
“—off.”
There was a long silence, punctuated only by our own heavy breathing. I fixed my gaze on one of the battened-down viewports across the room, Ortega, slumped between my leg and the chair, was presumably still looking at the screen. I thought that, for a moment, our breathing matched pace.
When I turned and bent to help her up, she was already rising towards me. Our hands were on each other, I think, before either of us realised what was happening.
It was like resolution. The circling antagonisms collapsed inward like orbitals crashing and burning, surrendering to a mutual gravity that had dragged like chains while it endured but in release was a streak of fire through the nerves. We were both trying to kiss each other and laugh at the same time. Ortega made excited little panting sounds as my hands slipped inside the kimono, palms skidding over coarse nipples as broad and stiff as rope-ends and the breasts that fitted into my hands as if designed to nestle there. The kimono came off, sliding at first and then jerked insistently free of each swimmer’s shoulder in turn. I shed jacket and shirt in one, while Ortega’s hands tangled frantically at my belt, opening the fly and sliding one hard, long-fingered hand into the gap. I felt the calluses at the base of each finger, rubbing.