“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. It’s a question of climate control. A lot of the maps in here are very sensitive to pollution. You couldn’t know.”
She somehow managed to make it sound as if only a complete moron wouldn’t have realised. I could feel my grip on the interview sliding out of sight.
“What made the police—”
“Ask them.” She turned her back and walked away from me as if making a decision. “How old are you, Mr Kovacs?”
“Subjectively? Forty-one. The years on Harlan’s World are a little longer than here, but there isn’t much in it.”
“And objectively?” she asked, mocking my tone.
“I’ve had about a century in the tank. You tend to lose track.” That was a lie. I knew to the day how long each of my terms in storage had been. I’d worked it out one night and now the number wouldn’t go away. Every time I went down again, I added on.
“How alone you must be by now.”
I sighed and turned to examine the nearest map rack. Each rolled chart was labelled at the end. The notation was archaeological. Syrtis Minor; 3rd excavation, east quarter. Bradbury; aboriginal ruins. I started to tug one of the rolls free.
“Mrs Bancroft, how I feel is not at issue here. Can you think of any reason why your husband might have tried to kill himself?”
She whirled on me almost before I had finished speaking and her face was tight with anger.
“My husband did not kill himself,” she said freezingly.
“You seem very sure of that.” I looked up from the map and gave her a smile. “For someone who wasn’t awake, I mean.”
“Put that back,” she cried, starting towards me. “You have no idea how valuable—”
She stopped, brought up short as I slid the map back into the rack. She swallowed and brought the flush in her cheeks under control.
“Are you trying to make me angry, Mr Kovacs?”
“I’m just trying to get some attention.”
We looked at each other for a pair of seconds. Mrs Bancroft lowered her gaze.
“I’ve told you, I was asleep when it happened. What else can I tell you?”
“Where had your husband gone that night?”
She bit her lip. “I’m not sure. He went to Osaka that day, for a meeting.”
“Osaka is where?”
She looked at me in surprise
“I’m not from here,” I said patiently.
“Osaka’s in Japan. I thought—”
“Yeah, Harlan’s World was settled by a Japanese keiretsu using East European labour. It was a long time ago, and I wasn’t around.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. You probably don’t know much about what your ancestors were doing three centuries ago either.”
I stopped. Mrs Bancroft was looking at me strangely. My own words hit me a moment later. Download dues. I was going to have to sleep soon, before I said or did something really stupid.
“I am over three centuries old, Mr Kovacs.” There was a small smile playing around her mouth as she said it. She’d taken back the advantage as smoothly as a bottleback diving. “Appearances are deceptive. This is my eleventh body.”
The way she held herself said that I was supposed to take a look. I flickered my gaze across the Slavic boned cheeks, down to the décolletage and then to the tilt of her hips, the half shrouded lines of her thighs, all the time affecting a detachment that neither I nor my recently roused sleeve had any right to.
“It’s very nice. A little young for my tastes, but as I said, I’m not from here. Can we get back to your husband please? He’d been to Osaka during the day, but he came back. I assume he didn’t go physically.”
“No, of course not. He has a transit clone on ice there. He was due back about six that evening, but—”
“Yes?”
She shifted her posture slightly, and opened a palm at me. I got the impression she was forcibly composing herself. “Well, he was late coming back. Laurens often stays out late after closing a deal.”
“And no one has any idea where he went on this occasion? Curtis, for example?”
The strain on her face was still there, like weathered rocks under a thin mantle of snow. “He didn’t send for Curtis. I assume he took a taxi from the sleeving station. I’m not his keeper, Mr Kovacs.”
“This meeting was crucial? The one in Osaka?”
“Oh… no, I don’t think so. We’ve talked about it. Of course, he doesn’t remember, but we’ve been over the contracts and it’s something he’d had timetabled for a while. A marine development company called Pacificon, based in Japan. Leasing renewal, that kind of thing. It’s usually all taken care of here in Bay City, but there was some call for an extraordinary assessors’ meeting, and it’s always best to handle that sort of thing close to source.”
I nodded sagely, having no idea what a marine development assessor was. Noting Mrs Bancroft’s strain seemed to be receding.
“Routine stuff, huh?”
“I would think so, yes.” She gave me a weary smile. “Mr Kovacs, I’m sure the police have transcripts of this kind of information.”
“I’m sure they do as well, Mrs Bancroft. But there’s no reason why they should share them with me. I have no jurisdiction here.”
“You seemed friendly enough with them when you arrived.” There was a sudden spike of malice in her voice. I looked steadily at her until she dropped her gaze. “Anyway, I’m sure Laurens can get you anything you need.”
This was going nowhere fast. I backed up.
“Perhaps I’d better speak to him about that.” I looked around the chart room. “All these maps. How long have you been collecting?”
Mrs Bancroft must have sensed that the interview was drawing to a close, because the tension puddled out of her like oil from a cracked sump.
“Most of my life,” she said. “While Laurens was staring at the stars, some of us kept our eyes on the ground.”
For some reason I thought of the telescope abandoned on Bancroft’s sundeck. I saw it stranded in angular silhouette against the evening sky, a mute testimony to times and obsessions past and a relic no one wanted. I remembered the way it had wheezed back into alignment after I jarred it, faithful to programming maybe centuries old, briefly awakened the way Miriam Bancroft had stroked the Songspire awake in the hall.
Old.
With sudden and suffocating pressure, it was all around me, the reek of it pouring off the stones of Suntouch House like damp. Age. I even caught the waft of it from the impossibly young and beautiful woman in front of me and my throat locked up with a tiny click. Something in me wanted to run, to get out and breathe fresh, new air, to be away from these creatures whose memories stretched back beyond every historical event I had been taught in school.
“Are you all right, Mr Kovacs?”
Download dues.
I focused with an effort. “Yes, I’m fine.” I cleared my throat and looked into her eyes. “Well, I won’t keep you any longer, Mrs Bancroft. Thank you for your time.”
She moved towards me. “Would you like—”
“No, it’s quite all right. I’ll see myself out.”
The walk out of the chart room seemed to take forever, and my footsteps had developed a sudden echo inside my skull. With every step, and with every displayed map that I passed I felt those ancient eyes on my spine, watching.
I badly needed a cigarette.
Chapter Five
The sky was the texture of old silver and the lights were coming on across Bay City by the time Bancroft’s chauffeur got me back to town. We spiralled in from the sea over an ancient suspension bridge the colour of rust, and in amongst the heaped-up buildings of a peninsula hill at more than advisable speed. Curtis the chauffeur was still smarting from his summary detainment by the police. He’d only been out of arrest a couple of hours when Bancroft asked him to run me back, and he’d been sullen and uncommunicative on the journey. He was a muscular young man whose boyish good looks lent themselves well to brooding. My guess was that employees of Laurens Bancroft were unused to government minions interrupting their duties.