“You want me to spell it out? All right.” He drew on the cigarette again and shrugged, not easily. “We have to decide which of us gets obliterated when this is all over. And since our individual instinct for survival is getting stronger by the minute, we need to decide soon.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. Which would you prefer to remember? Taking down Kawahara? Or going down on Miriam Bancroft?” He smiled sourly. “No competition, I suppose.”
“Hey, this isn’t just a roll on the beach you’re talking about. This is multiple copy sex. It’s about the only genuinely illicit pleasure left. Anyway, Irene Elliott said we could do a memory graft and keep both sets of experience.”
“Probably. She said we could probably do a memory graft. And that still leaves one of us to be cancelled out. It’s not a meld, it’s a graft, from one of us to the other. Editing. You want to do that to yourself? To the one that survives. We couldn’t even face editing that construct the Hendrix built. How are we going to live with this? No way, it’s got to be a clean cut. One or the other. And we’ve got to decide which.”
“Yeah.” I picked up the whisky bottle and stared gloomily at the label. “So what do we do? Gamble for it? Paper, scissors, stone, say the best of five?”
“I was thinking along slightly more rational lines. We tell each other our memories from this point on and then decide which we want to keep. Which ones are worth more.”
“How the hell are we going to measure something like that?”
“We’ll know. You know we will.”
“What if one of us lies. Embroiders the truth to make it sound like a more appealing memory. Or lies about which one they like better.”
His eyes narrowed. “Are you serious?”
“A lot can happen in a few days. Like you said, we’re both going to want to survive.”
“Ortega can polygraph us if it comes to that.”
“I think I’d rather gamble.”
“Give me that fucking bottle. If you’re not going to take this seriously, nor am I. Fuck it, you might even get torched out there and solve the problem for us.”
“Thanks.”
I passed him the bottle and watched as he decanted two careful fingers. Jimmy de Soto had always said it was sacrilege to sink more than five fingers of single malt on any one occasion. After that, he maintained, you might as well be drinking blended. I had a feeling that we were going to profane that particular article of faith tonight.
I raised my glass.
“To unity of purpose.”
“Yeah, and an end to drinking alone.”
The hangover was still with me nearly a full day later as I watched him leave on one of the hotel monitors. He stepped out onto the pavement and waited while the long, polished limousine settled to the kerb. As the kerbside door hinged up, I caught a brief glimpse of Miriam Bancroft’s profile within. Then he was climbing in and the door swung smoothly back down to cover them both. The limousine trembled along its length and lifted away.
I dry-swallowed more painkillers, gave it ten minutes and then went up to the roof to wait for Ortega.
It was cold.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Ortega had a variety of news.
Irene Elliott had called in a location and said she was willing to talk about another run. The call had come in on one of the tightest needlecasts Fell Street had ever seen and Elliott said she would only deal directly with me.
Meanwhile, the Panama Rose patch-up was holding water, and Ortega still had the Hendrix memory tapes. Kadmin’s death had rendered Fell Street’s original case pretty much an administrative formality, and no one was in any hurry to tackle it any more. An Internal Affairs inquiry into how exactly the assassin had been pulled out of holding in the first place was just getting started. In view of the assumed AI involvement, the Hendrix would come under scrutiny at some point, but it wasn’t in the pipeline yet. There were some interdepartmental procedures to be gone through and Ortega had sold Murawa a story about loose ends. The Fell Street captain gave her a couple of weeks open-ended, to tidy up; the tacit assumption was that Ortega had no liking for Internal Affairs and wasn’t going to make life easy for them.
A couple of IA detectives were sniffing around the Panama Rose, but Organic Damage had closed ranks around Ortega and Bautista like a stack shutdown. IA were getting nothing so far.
We had a couple of weeks.
Ortega flew north-east. Elliott’s instructions vectored us in on a small huddle of bubblefabs clustered around the western end of a tree-fringed lake hundreds of kilometres from anywhere. Ortega grunted in recognition as we banked above the encampment.
“You know this place?”
“Places like it. Grifter town. See that dish in the centre? They’ve got it webbed into some old geosynch weather platform, gives them free access to anything in the hemisphere. This place probably accounts for a single figure percentage of all the data crime on the West Coast.”
“They never get busted?”
“Depends.” Ortega put the cruiser down on the lake shore a short distance from the nearest bubblefabs. “The way it stands, these people keep the old orbitals ticking over. Without them, someone’d have to pay for decommissioning and that’s kind of pricey. So long as the stuff they turn over is small-scale, no one bothers. Transmission Felony Division have got bigger discs to spin, and no one else is interested. You coming?”
I climbed out and we walked along the shoreline to the encampment. From the air, the place had had a certain structural uniformity, but now I could see that the bubblefabs were all painted with brightly coloured pictures or abstract patterns. No two designs were alike, although I could discern the same artistic hand at work in several of the examples we passed. In addition, a lot of the ’fabs were fitted out with porch canopies, secondary extension bulges and in some cases even more permanent log cabin annexes. Clothing hung on lines between the buildings and small children ran about, getting cheerfully filthy.
Camp security met us inside the first ring of ’fabs. He stood over two metres tall in flat workboots and probably weighed as much as both my current selves put together. Beneath loose grey coveralls, I could see the stance of a fighter. His eyes were a startling red and short horns sprouted from his temples. Beneath the horns, his face was scarred and old. The effect was startlingly offset by the small child he was cradling in his left arm.
He nodded at me.
“You Anderson?”
“Yes. This is Kristin Ortega.” I was surprised how flat the name suddenly sounded to me. Without Ryker’s pheromonal interface, I was left with little more than a vague appreciation that the woman beside me was very attractive in a lean, self-sufficient way that recalled Virginia Vidaura.
That, and my memories.
I wondered if she was feeling the same.
“Cop, huh?” The ex-freak fighter’s tone was not overflowing with warmth, but it didn’t sound too hostile either.
“Not at the moment,” I said firmly. “Is Irene here?”
“Yeah.” He shifted the child to his other arm and pointed. “The ’fab with the stars on it. Been expecting you.”
As he spoke, Irene Elliott emerged from the structure in question. The horned man grunted and led us across, picking up a small train of additional children on the way. Elliott watched us approach with her hands in her pockets. Like the ex-fighter, she was dressed in boots and coveralls whose grey was startlingly offset by a violently-coloured rainbow headband.
“Your visitors,” said the horned man. “You OK with this?”
Elliott nodded evenly, and he hesitated a moment longer, then shrugged and wandered off with the children in tow. Elliott watched him go, then turned back to us.