She stepped back and lifted her hands. ‘Kovacs, you should be thanking whatever deities they’ve got on Harlan’s World that I’m not some kind of sadist. I mean, I’ve given you an either/or. We could just as easily be negotiating exactly how much agony I put Sachilowska through. I mean, I could start now. That would give you an incentive to wrap things up speedily, wouldn’t it? Ten days in most virtuals adds up to about three or four years. You were in the Wei Clinic; do you think she could stand three years of that? I think she’d probably go insane, don’t you?’
The effort it cost me to contain my hate was like a rupture down behind my eyeballs and into my chest. I forced the words out.
‘Terms. How do I know you’ll release her?’
‘Because I give you my word.’ Kawahara let her arms fall to her sides. ‘I believe you’ve had some experience of its validity in the past.’
I nodded slowly.
‘Subsequent to Bancroft’s acceptance that the case is closed, and your own disappearance from view, I will freight Sachilowska back to Harlan’s World to complete her sentence.’ Kawahara bent to pick up the holofile I’d dropped and held it up. She tipped it deftly a couple of times to flick through the pages. ‘I think you can see here that there is a reversal clause written into the contract. I will of course forfeit a large proportion of the original fee paid, but under the circumstances I’m prepared to do that.’ She smiled faintly. ‘But please bear in mind that a reversal can work in both directions. What I return, I can always buy again. So if you were considering skulking in the undergrowth for a while and then running back to Bancroft, please abandon the idea now. This is a hand that you cannot win.’
The gun barrel lifted away from my neck and Trepp stepped back. The neurachem held me upright like a paraplegic’s mobility suit. I stared numbly at Kawahara.
‘Why the fuck did you do all this?’ I whispered. ‘Why involve me at all, if you didn’t want Bancroft to find his answers?’
‘Because you are an Envoy, Kovacs.’ Kawahara spoke slowly, as if talking to a child. ‘Because if anybody can convince Laurens Bancroft that he died by his own hand, it is you. And because I knew you well enough to predict your moves. I arranged to have you brought to me almost as soon as you arrived, but the hotel intervened. And then when chance brought you to the Wei Clinic I endeavoured to bring you here once again.’
‘I bluffed my way out of the Wei Clinic.’
‘Oh, yes. Your biopirate story. You really think you sold them that second-rate experia rubbish? Be reasonable, Kovacs. You might have backed them up a couple of steps while they thought about it, but the reason, the only reason you got out of the Wei Clinic intact was because I told them to send you that way.’ She shrugged. ‘But then you insisted upon escaping. It has been a messy week, and I blame myself as much as anyone else. I feel like a behaviourist who has designed her rat’s maze poorly.’
‘All right.’ I noted vaguely that I was trembling. ‘I’ll do it.’
‘Yes. Of course you will.’
I searched for something else to say, but it felt as if I had been clinically drained of the potential for resistance. The cold of the basilica seemed to be creeping into my bones. I mastered the trembling with an effort and turned to go. Trepp moved silently forward to join me. We had gone about a dozen steps when Kawahara called out behind me.
‘Oh, Kovacs…’
I turned as if in a dream. She was smiling.
‘If you do manage to wrap it up cleanly, and very quickly, I might consider some kind of cash incentive. A bonus, so to speak. Negotiable. Trepp will give you a contact number.’
I turned away again, numb to a degree I hadn’t felt since the smoking ruins of Innenin. Vaguely, I felt Trepp clap me on the shoulder.
‘Come on,’ she said companionably. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
I followed her out under the soul-bruising architecture, beneath the sneering smiles of the hooded guardians, and I knew that from among her grey-wombed clones, Kawahara was watching me all the way with a similar smile. It seemed to take forever to leave the hall and when the huge steel portals cracked open to reveal the outside world, the light that spilled inward was an infusion of life that I grabbed at like a drowning man. All at once, the basilica was a vertical, a cold depth of ocean out of which I was reaching for the sun on the rippled surface. As we left the shadows, my body sucked up the warmth on offer as if it were a solid sustenance. Very gradually, the shivering began to leave me.
But as I walked away, beneath the brooding power of the cross, I could still feel the presence of the place like a cold hand on the nape of my neck.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
That night was a blur. Later, when I tried to get it back, even Envoy recall would only give me fragments.
Trepp wanted a night on the town. The best nightlife in Europe, she maintained, was only minutes away, and she had all the right addresses.
I wanted my thought processes stopped dead in their tracks.
We started in a hotel room on a street I could not pronounce. Some tetrameth analogue fired through the whites of our eyes by needle-spray. I sat passively in a chair by the window and let Trepp shoot me up, trying to not think about Sarah and the room in Millsport. Trying not to think at all. Two-tone holographics outside the window cast Trepp’s concentrated features in shades of red and bronze, a demon in the act of sealing the pact. I felt the insidious tilt at the corners of perception as the tetrameth went barrelling along my synapses, and when it was my turn to do Trepp I almost got lost in the geometries of her face. This was very good stuff…
There were murals of the Christian hell, flames leaping like clawed fingers over a procession of screaming, naked sinners. At one end of the room, where the figures on the walls seemed to blend with the denizens of the bar in smoke and noise, a girl danced on a rotating platform. A cupped petal of black glass scythed around with the platform and each time it passed between audience and dancer, the girl was gone and a skeleton danced grinning in her place.
‘This place is called All Flesh Will Perish,’ yelled Trepp above the noise as we forced our way in through the crowd. She pointed to the girl and then to the black glass rings on her fingers. ‘Where I got the idea for these. Great effect, isn’t it?’
I got drinks, quickly.
The human race has dreamed of heaven and hell for millennia. Pleasure or pain unending, undiminished and uncurtailed by the strictures of life or death. Thanks to virtual formatting, these fantasies can now exist. All that is needed is an industrial-capacity power generator. We have indeed made hell – and heaven – on earth.
‘Sounds a bit epic, Angin Chandra’s outward-bound valediction to the people sort of thing,’ shouted Trepp. ‘But I take your point.’
Evidently the words that had been running through my mind were also running out of my mouth. If it was a quote, I didn’t know where it was from. Certainly not a Quellism; she would have slapped anyone making that kind of speech.
‘Thing is,’ Trepp was still yelling, ‘you’ve got ten days.’
Reality tilts, flows sideways in gobs of flame-coloured light. Music. Motion and laughter. The rim of a glass under my teeth. A warm thigh pressed against my own which I think is Trepp’s, but when I turn another woman with long straight black hair and crimson lips is grinning at me. Her look of open invitation reminds me vaguely of something I’ve seen recently—