Sunny wasn’t in the vocabulary of the figure before me. About two metres tall, he looked as if he’d made his living wrestling swamp panthers before the present career opportunity presented itself. Musculature bulged on his chest and arms like body armour and the head above it was cropped close to the skull, revealing a long scar like a lightning strike down to the left ear. He was dressed in a loose black garment with epaulettes and a diskette logo on the breast. His eyes matched the garment and watched me with hardened calm. Having helped me sit up, he had stepped back out of arm’s reach, as per the manual. He’d been doing this a long time.
I pressed one nostril closed and snorted tank gel out of the other.
“Want to tell me where I am? Itemise my rights, something like that?”
“Kovacs, right now you don’t have any rights.”
I looked up and saw that a grim smile had stitched itself across his face. I shrugged and snorted the other nostril clean.
“Want to tell me where I am?”
He hesitated a moment, glanced up at the neon-barred roof as if to ascertain the information for himself before he passed it on, and then mirrored my shrug.
“Sure. Why not? You’re in Bay City, pal. Bay City, Earth.” The grimace of a smile came back. “Home of the Human Race. Please enjoy your stay on this most ancient of civilised worlds. Ta-dada-DAH.”
“Don’t give up the day job,” I told him soberly.
The doctor led me down a long white corridor whose floor bore the scuff marks of rubber-wheeled gurneys. She was moving at quite a pace and I was hard pressed to keep up, wrapped as I was in nothing but a plain grey towel and still dripping tank gel. Her manner was superficially bedside, but there was a harried undercurrent to it. She had a sheaf of curling hardcopy documentation under her arm and other places to be. I wondered how many sleevings she got through in a day.
“You should get as much rest as you can in the next day or so,” she recited. “There may be minor aches and pains, but this is normal. Sleep will solve the problem. If you have any recurring comp—”
“I know. I’ve done this before.”
I wasn’t feeling much like human interaction. I’d just remembered Sarah.
We stopped at a side door with the word shower stencilled on frosted glass. The doctor steered me inside and stood looking at me for a moment.
“I’ve used showers before as well,” I assured her.
She nodded. “When you’re finished, there’s an elevator at the end of the corridor. Discharge is on the next floor. The, ah, the police are waiting to talk to you.”
The manual says you’re supposed to avoid strong adrenal shocks to the newly sleeved, but then she’d probably read my file and didn’t consider meeting the police much of an event in my lifestyle. I tried to feel the same.
“What do they want?”
“They didn’t choose to share that with me.” The words showed an edge of frustration that she shouldn’t have been letting me see. “Perhaps your reputation precedes you.”
“Perhaps it does.” On an impulse, I flexed my new face into a smile. “Doctor, I’ve never been here before. To Earth, I mean. I’ve never dealt with your police before. Should I be worried?”
She looked at me, and I saw it welling up in her eyes; the mingled fear and wonder and contempt of the failed human reformer.
“With a man like you,” she managed finally, “I would have thought they would be the worried ones.”
“Yeah, right,” I said quietly.
She hesitated, then gestured. “There is a mirror in the changing room,” she said, and left. I glanced towards the room she had indicated, not sure I was ready for the mirror yet.
In the shower I whistled away my disquiet tunelessly and ran soap and hands over the new body. My sleeve was in his early forties, Protectorate standard, with a swimmer’s build and what felt like some military custom carved onto his nervous system. Neurachemical upgrade, most likely. I’d had it myself, once. There was a tightness in the lungs that suggested a nicotine habit and some gorgeous scarring on the forearm, but apart from that I couldn’t find anything worth complaining about. The little twinges and snags catch up with you later on and if you’re wise, you just live with them. Every sleeve has a history. If that kind of thing bothers you, you line up over at Syntheta’s or Fabrikon. I’ve worn my fair share of synthetic sleeves; they use them for parole hearings quite often. Cheap, but it’s too much like living alone in a draughty house, and they never seem to get the flavour circuits right. Everything you eat ends up tasting like curried sawdust.
In the changing cubicle I found a neatly folded summer suit on the bench, and the mirror set in the wall. On top of the pile of clothes was a simple steel watch, and weighted beneath the watch was a plain white envelope with my name written neatly across it. I took a deep breath and went to face the mirror.
This is always the toughest part. Nearly two decades I’ve been doing this, and it still jars me to look into the glass and see a total stranger staring back. It’s like pulling an image out of the depths of an autostereogram. For the first couple of moments all you can see is someone else looking at you through a window frame. Then, like a shift in focus, you feel yourself float rapidly up behind the mask and adhere to its inside with a shock that’s almost tactile. It’s as if someone’s cut an umbilical cord, only instead of separating the two of you, it’s the otherness that has been severed and now you’re just looking at your reflection in a mirror.
I stood there and towelled myself dry, getting used to the face. It was basically Caucasian, which was a change for me, and the overwhelming impression I got was that if there was a line of least resistance in life, this face had never been along it. Even with the characteristic pallor of a long stay in the tank, the features in the mirror managed to look weather-beaten. There were lines everywhere. The thick cropped hair was black shot through with grey. The eyes were a speculative shade of blue, and there was a faint jagged scar under the left one. I raised my left forearm and looked at the story written there, wondering if the two were connected.
The envelope beneath the watch contained a single sheet of printed paper. Hardcopy. Handwritten signature. Very quaint.
Well, you’re on Earth now. Most ancient of civilised worlds. I shrugged and scanned the letter, then got dressed and folded it away in the jacket of my new suit. With a final glance in the mirror, I strapped on the new watch and went out to meet the police.
It was four-fifteen, local time.
The doctor was waiting for me, seated behind a long curve of reception counter and filling out forms on a monitor. A thin, severe-looking man suited in black stood at her shoulder. There was no one else in the room.
I glanced around, then back at the suit.
“You the police?”
“Outside.” He gestured at the door. “This isn’t their jurisdiction. They need a special brief to get in here. We have our own security. ”
“And you are?”
He looked at me with the same mixture of emotions the doctor had hit me with downstairs. “Warden Sullivan, chief executive for Bay City Central, the facility you are now leaving.”
“You don’t sound delighted to be losing me.”
Sullivan pinned me with a stare. “You’re a recidivist, Kovacs. I never saw the case for wasting good flesh and blood on people like you.”
I touched the letter in my breast pocket. “Lucky for me Mr. Bancroft disagrees with you. He’s supposed to be sending a limousine for me. Is that outside as well?”
“I haven’t looked.”
Somewhere on the counter, a protocol chime sounded. The doctor had finished her inputting. She tore the curling edge of the hardcopy free, initialled it in a couple of places and passed it to Sullivan. The warden bent over the paper, scanning it with narrowed eyes before he scribbled his own signature and handed the copy to me.