“The whole family’s here,” murmured Prescott at my shoulder. “Husband and wife, and all sixty-one children. Most only have one or two clones, but Bancroft and his wife run to six each. Impressive, huh?”
“Yeah.” Despite myself, I had to put out a hand and touch the membrane above Miriam Bancroft’s face. It was warm, and gave slightly under my hand. There was raised scarring around the entry points of the nutrient feeds and waste pipes, and in tiny pimples where needles had been pushed through to extract tissue samples or provide IV additives. The membrane would give in to such penetrations and heal afterwards.
I turned away from the dreaming woman and faced Nyman.
“This is all very nice, but presumably you don’t shell one of these whenever Bancroft comes in here. You must have tanks as well.”
“This way.” Nyman gestured us to follow him and went to the back of the chamber where another pressure door was set into the wall. The lowest sacs swayed eerily in the wake of our passage, and I had to duck to avoid brushing against one. Nyman’s fingers played a brief tarantella over the keypad of the pressure door and we went though into a long, low room whose clinical illumination was almost blinding after the womb light of the main vault. A row of eight metallic cylinders not unlike the one I’d woken up in yesterday were ranked along one wall, but where my birthing tube had been unpainted and scarred with the million tiny defacements of frequent use, these units carried a thick gloss of cream paint with yellow trim around the transparent observation plate and the various functional protrusions.
“Full life support suspension chambers,” said Nyman. “Essentially the same environment as the pods. This is where all the re-sleeving is done. We bring fresh clones through, still in the pod, and load them here. The tank nutrients have an enzyme to break down the pod wall, so the transition is completely trauma-free. Any clinical work is carried out by staff working in synthetic sleeves, to avoid any risk of contamination.”
I caught the exasperated rolling of Oumou Prescott’s eyes on the periphery of my vision and a grin twitched at the corner of my mouth.
“Who has access to this chamber?”
“Myself, authorised staff under a day code. And the owners, of course.”
I wandered down the line of cylinders, bending to examine the data displays at the foot of each one. There was a Miriam clone in the sixth, and two of Naomi’s at seven and eight.
“You’ve got the daughter on ice twice?”
“Yes.” Nyman looked puzzled, and then slightly superior. This was his chance to get back the initiative he’d lost on the fractal patterning. “Have you not been informed of her current condition?”
“Yeah, she’s in psychosurgery,” I growled. “That doesn’t explain why there’s two of her here.”
“Well.” Nyman darted a glance back at Prescott, as if to say that the divulging of further information involved some legal dimension. The lawyer cleared her throat.
“PsychaSec have instructions from Mr. Bancroft to always hold a spare clone of himself and his immediate family ready for decanting. While Ms. Bancroft is committed to the Vancouver psychiatric stack, both sleeves are stored here.”
“The Bancrofts like to alternate their sleeves,” said Nyman knowledgeably. “Many of our clients do, it saves on wear and tear. The human body is capable of quite remarkable regeneration if stored correctly, and of course we offer a complete package of clinical repair for more major damage. Very reasonably priced.”
“I’m sure it is.” I turned back from the end cylinder and grinned at him. “Still, not much you can do for a vaporised head, is there?”
There was a brief silence, during which Prescott looked fixedly at a corner of the ceiling and Nyman’s lips tightened to almost anal proportions.
“I consider that remark in very poor taste,” the director said finally. “Do you have any more important questions, Mr. Kovacs?”
I paused next to Miriam Bancroft’s cylinder and looked into it. Even through the fogging effect of the observation plate and the gel, there was a sensual abundance to the blurred form within.
“Just one question. Who decides when to alternate the sleeves?”
Nyman glanced across at Prescott as if to enlist legal support for his words. “I am directly authorised by Mr. Bancroft to effect the transfer on every occasion that he is digitised, unless specifically required not to. He made no such request on this occasion.”
There was something here, scratching at the Envoy antennae; something somewhere fitted. It was too early to give it concrete form. I looked around the room.
“This place is entry-monitored, right?”
“Naturally.” Nyman’s tone was still chilly.
“Was there much activity the day Bancroft went to Osaka?”
“No more than usual. Mr. Kovacs, the police have already been through these records. I really don’t see what value—”
“Indulge me,” I suggested, not looking at him, and the Envoy cadences in my voice shut him down like a circuit breaker.
Two hours later I was staring out of the window of another autocab as it kicked off from the Alcatraz landing quay and climbed over the Bay.
“Did you find what you were looking for?”
I glanced at Oumou Prescott, wondering if she could sense the frustration coming off me. I thought I’d got most of the external giveaways on this sleeve locked down, but I’d heard of lawyers who got empath conditioning to pick up more subliminal clues to their witnesses’ states of mind when on the stand. And here, on Earth, it wouldn’t surprise me if Oumou Prescott had a full infrared subsonic body and voice scan package racked into her beautiful ebony head.
The entry data for the Bancroft vault, Thursday 16th August, was as free of suspicious comings and goings as the Mishima Mall on a Tuesday afternoon. Eight a.m., Bancroft came in with two assistants, stripped off and climbed into the waiting tank. The assistants left with his clothes. Fourteen hours later his alternate clone climbed dripping out of the neighbouring tank, collected a towel from another assistant and went to get a shower. No words exchanged beyond pleasantries. Nothing.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t really know what I’m looking for yet.”
Prescott yawned. “Total Absorb, huh?”
“Yeah, that’s right.” I looked at her more closely. “You know much about the Corps?”
“Bit. I did my articles in UN litigation. You pick up the terminology. So what have you absorbed so far?”
“Only that there’s a lot of smoke building up around something the authorities say isn’t burning. You ever meet the lieutenant that ran the case?”
“Kristin Ortega. Of course. I’m not likely to forget her. We were yelling at each other across a desk for the best part of a week.”
“Impressions?”
“Of Ortega?” Prescott looked surprised. “Good cop, as far as I know. Got a reputation for being very tough. The Organic Damage Division are the police department’s hard men, so earning a reputation like that wouldn’t have been easy. She ran the case efficiently enough—”
“Not for Bancroft’s liking.”
Pause. Prescott looked at me warily. “I said efficiently. I didn’t say persistently. Ortega did her job, but—”
“But she doesn’t like Meths, right?”
Another pause. “You have quite an ear for the street, Mr. Kovacs.”
“You pick up the terminology,” I said modestly. “Do you think Ortega would have kept the case open if Bancroft hadn’t been a Meth?”
Prescott thought about it for a while. “It’s a common enough prejudice,” she said slowly, “But I don’t get the impression Ortega shut us down because of it. I think she just saw a limited return on her investment. The police department has a promotion system based at least partly on the number of cases solved. No one saw a quick solution to this one, and Mr. Bancroft was alive, so…”