“Smoke?”
“No thanks, I—” Realising the futility of worrying about virtual health, I accepted the packet and shook one out. Ortega lit us both with her petrol lighter, and the first bite of smoke in my lungs was ecstasy.
I looked up at the geometric sky. “Is this standard?”
“Pretty much.” Ortega squinted into the distance. “Resolution looks a bit higher than usual. Think Micky’s showing off.”
Kadmin scribbled into existence on the other side of the table. Before the virtual program had even coloured him in properly, he became aware of us and folded his arms across his chest. If my appearance in the cell was putting him off balance as hoped, it didn’t show.
“Again, lieutenant?” he said when the programme had rendered him complete. “There is a UN ruling on maximum virtual time for one arrest, you know.”
“That’s right, and we’re still a long way off it,” said Ortega. “Why don’t you sit down, Kadmin.”
“No thank you.”
“I said sit, motherfucker.” There was an abrupt undercurrent of steel in the cop’s voice, and magically Kadmin blinked off and reappeared seated at the table. His face betrayed a momentary flash of rage at the displacement, but then it was gone and he unfolded his arms in an ironic gesture.
“You’re right, it’s so much more comfortable like this. Won’t you both join me?”
We took our seats in the more conventional way, and I stared at Kadmin as we did it. It was the first time I’d seen anything quite like it.
He was the Patchwork Man.
Most virtual systems recreate you from self images held in the memory, with a common-sense sub-routine to prevent your delusions from impinging too much. I generally come out a little taller and thinner in the face than I usually am. In this case, the system seemed to have scrambled a myriad different perceptions from Kadmin’s presumably long list of sleeves. I’d seen it done before, as a technique, but most of us grow rapidly attached to whatever sleeve we’re living in, and that form blanks out previous incarnations. We are, after all, evolved to relate to the physical world.
The man in front of me was different. His frame was that of a Caucasian Nordic, topping mine by nearly thirty centimetres, but the face was at odds. It began African, broad and deep ebony, but the colour ended like a mask under the eyes and the lower half was divided along the line of the nose, pale copper on the left, corpse white on the right. The nose was both fleshy and aquiline and mediated well between the top and bottom halves of the face, but the mouth was a mismatch of left and right sides that left the lips peculiarly twisted. Long straight black hair was combed mane-like back from the forehead, shot through on one side with pure white. The hands, immobile on the metal table, were equipped with claws similar to the ones I’d seen on the giant freak fighter in Licktown, hut the fingers were long and sensitive. He had breasts, impossibly full on a torso so overmuscled. The eyes, set in jet skin, were a startling pale green. Kadmin had freed himself from conventional perceptions of the physical. In an earlier age, he would have been a shaman; here, the centuries of technology had made him more. An electronic demon, a malignant spirit that dwelled in altered carbon and emerged only to possess flesh and wreak havoc.
He would have made a fine Envoy.
“I take it I don’t have to introduce myself,” I said quietly.
Kadmin grinned, revealing small teeth and a delicate pointed tongue. “If you’re a friend of the lieutenant, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to here. Only the slobs get their virtuality edited.”
“Do you know this man, Kadmin?” asked Ortega.
“Hoping for a confession, lieutenant?” Kadmin threw back his head and laughed musically. “Oh, the crudity! This man? This woman, maybe? Or, yes, even a dog could be trained to say as much as he has said, given the right tranquillisers of course. They do tend to go pitifully insane when you decant them if not. But yes, even a dog. We sit here, three silhouettes carved from electronic sleet in the difference storm, and you talk like a cheap period drama. Limited vision, lieutenant, limited vision. Where is the voice that said altered carbon would free us from the cells of our flesh? The vision that said we would be angels.”
“You tell me, Kadmin. You’re the one with the exalted professional standing.” Ortega’s tone was detached. She system-magicked a long scroll of printout into one hand and glanced idly down it. “Pimp, triad enforcer, virtual interrogator in the corporate wars, it’s all quality work. Me, I’m just some dumb cop can’t see the light.”
“I’m not going to quarrel with you there, lieutenant.”
“Says here you were a wiper for MeritCon a while back, scaring archaeologue miners off their claims in Syrtis Major. Slaughtering their families by way of incentive. Nice job.” Ortega tossed the printout back into oblivion. “We’ve got you cold, Kadmin. Digital footage from the hotel surveillance system, verifiable simultaneous sleeving, both stacks on ice. That’s an erasure mandatory, and even if your lawyers dance it down to Compliance at Machine Error, the sun’s going to be a red dwarf by the time they let you off stack.”
Kadmin smiled. “Then what are you here for?”
“Who sent you?” I asked him softly.
“The Dog speaks!
I inhaled smoke and nodded. Like most Harlanites, I had Quell’s Poems and Other Prevarications more or less by heart. It was taught in schools in lieu of the later and weightier political works, most of which were still deemed too radical to be put in the hands of children. This wasn’t a great translation, but it captured the essence. More impressive was the fact that anyone not actually from Harlan’s World could quote such an obscure volume.
I finished it for him.
“Have you come seeking blame, Mr. Kovacs?”
“Among other things.”
“How disappointing.”
“You expected something else?”
“No,” said Kadmin with another smile. “Expectation is our first mistake. I meant, how disappointing for you.”
“Maybe.”
He shook his great piebald head. “Certainly. You will take no names from me. If you seek blame, I will have to bear it for you.”
“That’s very generous, but you’ll remember what Quell said about lackeys.”
“Kill them along the way, but count your bullets, for there are more worthy targets.” Kadmin chuckled deep inside himself. “Are you threatening me in monitored police storage?”
“No. I’m just putting things into perspective.” I knocked ash off my cigarette and watched it sparkle out of existence before it reached the floor. “Someone’s pulling your strings; that’s who I’m going to wipe. You’re nothing. You I wouldn’t waste spit on.”
Kadmin tipped his head back as a stronger tremor ran through the shifting lines in the sky, like Cubist lightning. It reflected in the dull sheen on the metal table and seemed to touch his hands for a moment. When he looked down at me again, it was with a curious light in his eyes.
“I was not asked to kill you,” he said tonelessly, “unless your abduction proved inconvenient. But now I will.”