I nodded.
“What’s the target?”
“Virtual whorehouse. AI-managed.”
Elliott’s new lips parted in a soundless whistle. “Liberation run?”
“No. We’re installing.”
“Installing this?” She hefted the cylinder. “So what is it?”
“Rawling 4851.”
Elliott stopped hefting abruptly. “That’s not funny.”
“Wasn’t intended to be. That’s a dormant Rawling variant. Set for rapid deployment, as you so rightly observed. The activation codes are in my pocket. We are going to plant Rawling inside an AI whorehouse database, inject the codes and then weld the lid shut on it. There’s some peripheral stuff with monitoring systems, and some tidying up, but basically that’s the run.”
She gave me a curious look. “Are you some kind of religious nut?”
“No.” I smiled faintly. “It’s nothing like that. Can you do it?”
“Depends on the AI. Do you have the specs?”
“Not here.”
Elliott handed me back the deployment jacket. “I can’t tell you, then, can I?”
“That was what I was hoping you’d say.” I stowed the cylinder, satisfied. “How’s the new sleeve?”
“It’s OK. Any reason why I couldn’t have my own body back? I’ll be a lot faster in my own—”
“I know. Unfortunately it’s out of my hands. Did they tell you how long you’ve been in the store?”
“Four years, someone said. ”
“Four and a half,” I said, glancing at the release forms I’d signed. “I’m afraid, in the meantime, someone took a shine to your sleeve and bought it.”
“Oh.” She was silent then. The shock of waking up inside someone else’s body for the first time is nothing compared to the sense of rage and betrayal you feel knowing that someone, somewhere, is walking around inside you. It’s like the discovery of infidelity, but at the intimacy range of rape. And like both those violations, there’s nothing you can do about it. You just get used to it.
When the silence stretched, I looked across at her still profile and cleared my throat.
“You sure you want to do this right now? Go home, I mean.”
She barely bothered to look at me. “Yes, I’m sure. I have a daughter and a husband that haven’t seen me in nearly five years. You think this —” she gestured down at herself “—is going to stop me?”
“Fair enough.”
The lights of Ember appeared on the darkened mass of the coastline up ahead, and the limousine began its descent. I watched Elliott out of the corner of my eye and saw the nervousness setting in. Palms rubbing together in her lap, lower lip caught in her teeth at one corner of her new mouth. She released her breath with a small but perfectly audible noise.
“They don’t know I’m coming?” she asked.
“No.” I said shortly. I didn’t want to follow this line of conversation. “The contract is between you and JacSol West. It doesn’t concern your family.”
“But you arranged for me to see them. Why?”
“I’m a sucker for family reunions.” I fixed my gaze on the darkened bulk of the wrecked aircraft carrier below, and we landed in silence. The autolimo banked round to align itself with the local traffic systems and touched down a couple of hundred metres north of Elliott’s Data Linkage. We powered smoothly along the shore road under the successive holos of Anchana Salomao and parked immaculately opposite the narrow frontage. The dead monitor doorstop had been removed and the door was closed but there were lights burning in the glass-walled office at the back.
We climbed out and crossed the street. The closed door proved to be locked as well. Irene Elliott banged impatiently at it with the flat of one copper-skinned hand and someone sat up sluggishly in the back office. After a moment, a figure identifiable as Victor Elliott came down to the transmission floor, past the reception counter and towards us. His grey hair was untidy and his face swollen with sleep. He peered out at us with a lack of focus I’d seen before on datarats when they’d been cruising the stacks for too long. Jack-happy.
“Who the hell—” He stopped as he recognised me. “What the fuck do you want, grasshopper? And who’s this?”
“Vic?” Irene Elliott’s new throat sounded nine tenths closed. “Vic, it’s me.”
For a moment, Elliott’s eyes ran a volley between my face and the delicate Asian woman beside me, then what she had said smacked into him like a truck. He flinched visibly with the impact.
“Irene?” he whispered.
“Yes, it’s me,” she husked back. There were tears leaking down her cheeks. For moments they stared at each other through the glass, then Victor Elliott was fumbling with the locking mechanism of the door, shoving at the frame to get it out of the way, and the copper-skinned woman sagged across the threshold into his arms. They locked together in an embrace that looked set to break the new sleeve’s delicate bones. I took a mild interest in street lamps up and down the promenade.
Finally, Irene Elliott remembered me. She disengaged from her husband and twisted round, smearing the tears off her face with the heel of one hand and blinking bright-eyed at me.
“Can you—”
“Sure.” I said neutrally. “I’ll wait in the limo. See you in the morning.”
I caught one confused look from Victor Elliott as his wife bustled him inside, nodded good-naturedly at him and turned away to the parked limo and the beach. The door banged shut behind me. I felt in my pockets and came up with Ortega’s crumpled packet of cigarettes. Wandering past the limo to the iron railing, I kindled one of the bent and flattened cylinders and for once felt no sense that I was betraying something as the smoke curled into my lungs. Down on the beach, the surf was up, a chorus line of ghosts along the sand. I leaned on the railing and listened to the white noise of the waves as they broke, wondering why I could feel this much at peace with so much still unresolved. Ortega had not come back. Kadmin was still out there. Sarah was still under ransom, Kawahara still had me by the balls, and I still didn’t know why Bancroft had been killed.
And despite it all, there was space for this measure of quiet.
Take what is offered and that must sometimes be enough.
My gaze slipped out past the breakers. The ocean beyond was black and secret, merging seamlessly with the night a scant distance out from the shore. Even the massive bulk of the keeled-over Free Trade Enforcer was hard to make out. I imagined Mary Lou Hinchley hurtling down to her shattering impact with the unyielding water, then slipping broken beneath the swells to be cradled in wait for the sea’s predators. How long had she been out there before the currents contrived to carry what was left of her back to her own kind? How long had the darkness held her?
My thoughts skipped aimlessly, cushioned on the vague sense of acceptance and well-being. I saw Bancroft’s antique telescope, trained on the heavens and the tiny motes of light that were Earth’s first hesitant steps beyond the limits of the solar system. Fragile arks carrying the recorded selves of a million pioneers and the deep-frozen embryo banks that might someday re-sleeve them on distant worlds, if the promise of the vaguely understood Martian astrogation charts bore fruit. If not they would drift forever, because the universe is mostly night and darkened ocean.
Raising an eyebrow at my own introspection, I heaved myself off the rail and glanced up at the holographic face above my head. Anchana Salomao had the night to herself. Her ghostly countenance gazed down at repeated intervals along the promenade, compassionate but uninvolved. Looking at the composed features, it was easy to see why Elizabeth Elliott had wanted so badly to attain those heights. I would have given a lot for that same detached composure. I shifted my attention to the windows above Elliott’s. The lights were on there, and as I watched a female form moved across one of them in naked silhouette. I sighed, spun the stub of my cigarette into the gutter and took refuge in the limo. Let Anchana keep the vigil. I called up channels at random on the entertainment deck and let the mindless barrage of images and sounds numb me into a kind of half-sleep. The night passed around the vehicle like cold mist and I suffered the vague sensation that I was drifting away from the lights of the Elliotts’ home, out to sea on snapped moorings with nothing between me and the horizon where there was a storm building …