She looked round from the rack I’d indicated.
‘Miller’s head isn’t in here. I put it next door.’
Her mouth tightened a little. ‘I know where you put Miller’s head,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t looking for it.’
A couple of minutes later, seated on the window shelf with the hardcopy unfolding away to the floor, I heard the low tones of Ortega conversing with the Hendrix. There was some banging about, more muted conversation, and then the sound of oil frying gently. I fought off the urge for a cigarette and bent my head to the hardcopy.
I was looking for something that I’d seen every day of my young life in Newpest; the places I’d spent my teenage years, the narrow accessways of tiny properties sporting cheap holos that promised things like Better than the Real Thing, Wide Range of Scenarios and Dreams Come True. It didn’t take much to set up a virtual brothel. You just needed frontage and space for the client coffins stacked upright. The software varied in price, depending on how elaborate and original it was, but the machines to run it could usually be bought out of military surplus at basement rates.
If Bancroft could spend time and money in Jerry’s biocabins, he’d be at home in one of these.
I was two thirds of my way through the list, more and more of my attention sifting away to the aromas issuing from the kitchen, when my eyes fell on a familiar entry and I grew abruptly still.
I saw a woman with long, straight black hair and crimson lips
I heard Trepp’s voice
… head in the clouds. I want to be there before midnight.
And the bar-coded chauffeur
No problem. Coastal’s running light tonight.
And the crimson-lipped woman
Head in the clouds. This is what it’s like. Maybe you can’t afford to come up here.
A choir in climax
from the Houses, from the Houses, from the Houses…
And the businesslike printout in my hands
Head in the Clouds: accredited West Coast House, real and virtual product, mobile aerial site outside coastal limit…
I scanned through the notes, head ringing as if it were crystal that had been delicately struck with a hammer.
Navigational beams and beaconing system locked to Bay City and Seattle. Discreet membership coding. Routine searches, NR. No convictions. Operated under licence from Third Eye Holdings Inc.
I sat still, thinking.
There were pieces missing. It was like the mirror, wedged into place on jagged edges, enough to hold an image, but not the whole. I was peering hard at the irregular limits of what I had, trying to see round the edges, to get the backdrop. Trepp had been taking me to see Ray – Reileen – at Head in the Clouds. Not Europe, Europe was a blind, the sombre weight of the basilica designed to numb me to what should have been obvious. If Kawahara was involved in this thing, she wouldn’t be overseeing it from half a globe away. Kawahara was on Head in the Clouds, and…
And what?
Envoy intuition was a form of subliminal recognition, an enhanced awareness of pattern that the real world too often abraded with its demand for detailed focus. Given enough traces of continuity, you could make a leap that enabled you to see the whole as a kind of premonition of real knowledge. Working from that model, you could fill in the bits later. But there was a certain minimum you needed to get airborne. Like old-style linear prop aircraft, you needed a run up, and I didn’t have it. I could feel myself bumping along the ground, clawing at the air and falling back. Not enough.
‘Kovacs?’
I glanced up, and saw it. Like a head-up display coming on line, like airlock bolts slamming back in my head.
Ortega stood before me, a stirring implement in one hand, hair gathered back in a loose knot. Her T-shirt blazoned at me.
RESOLUTION 653. Yes or No, depending.
Oumou Prescott
Mr Bancroft has an undeclared influence in the UN Court.
Jerry Sedaka
Old Anenome’s Catholic… We take on a lot like that. Real convenient sometimes.
My thoughts ran like a combustion fuse, flaming up the line of association.
Tennis court
Nalan Ertekin, Chief Justice of the UN Supreme Court
Joseph Phiri, the Commission of Human Rights
My own words
You’re here to discuss Resolution 653, I imagine.
An undeclared influence…
Miriam Bancroft
I’ll need some help keeping Marco off Nalan’s back. He’s fuming, by the way.
And Bancroft
The way he played today, I’m not surprised.
Resolution 653. Catholics.
My mind spewed the data back at me like a demented file search, scrolling down.
Sedaka, gloating
Sworn affidavit on disc, full Vow of Abstention filed with the Vatican.
Real convenient sometimes.
Ortega
Barred by Reasons of Conscience decals.
Mary Lou Hinchley.
Last year the Coastals fished some kid out of the ocean.
Not much left of the body, but they got the stack.
Barred by Reasons of Conscience.
Out of the ocean.
Coastals.
Mobile aerial site outside coastal limit…
Head in the Clouds.
It was a process that could not be braked, a kind of mental avalanche. Chunks of reality splintering away and tumbling downward, except that instead of chaos they were falling into something that had form, a kind of restructured whole whose final shape I still couldn’t make out.
Beaconing system locked to Bay City -
- and Seattle
Bautista.
See, it all went down in a black clinic up in Seattle.
The intacts ditched in the Pacific.
Ortega’s theory was that Ryker was set up.
‘What’re you looking at?’
The words hung in the air for a moment like a hinge in time, and suddenly time hinged back and in the doorway behind, Sarah was just waking up in the Millsport hotel bed, with the rolling thunder of an orbital discharge rattling the loose windows in their frames and behind that, rotorblades against the night, and our own deaths waiting just up around the bend.
‘What’re you looking at?’
I blinked and I was still staring at Ortega’s T-shirt, at the soft mounds she made in it and the legend printed across the chest. There was a slight smile on her face, but it was beginning to bleach out with concern.
‘Kovacs?’
I blinked again and tried to reel in the metres of mental spillage that the T-shirt had set off. The looming truth of Head in the Clouds.
‘Are you OK?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Want to eat?’
‘Ortega, what if—’ I found I had to clear my throat, swallow and start again. I didn’t want to say this, my body didn’t want me to say it. ‘What if I can get Ryker off the stack? Permanently, I mean. Clear him of the charges, prove Seattle was a set-up. What’s that worth to you?’
For a moment, she looked at me as if I was speaking a language she didn’t understand. Then she moved to the window shelf and seated herself carefully on the edge, facing me. She was silent for a while, but I had already seen the answer in her eyes.
‘Are you feeling guilty?’ she asked me finally.
‘About?’
‘About us.’
I nearly laughed out loud, but there was just enough underlying pain to stop the reflex in my throat. The urge to touch her had not stopped. Over the last day it had ebbed and flowed in waves, but it had never wholly gone. When I looked at the curve of her hips and thighs on the window shelf, I could feel the way she had writhed back against me so clearly it was almost virtual. My palm recalled the weight and shape of her breast as if holding it had been this sleeve’s life’s work. As I looked at her, my fingers wanted to trace the geometry of her face. There was no room in me for guilt, no room for anything but this feeling.