“Yeah, so I hear.” Ortega shrugged. “Well, that’s his prerogative. I guess it might be difficult for a man like that to believe he’d blow his own head clean off.”
“A man like what?”
“Oh come—” She stopped herself and gave me a small smile. ”Sorry, I keep forgetting.”
“Forgetting what?”
Another pause, but this time Kristin Ortega seemed to be off balance for the first time in our brief acquaintance. There was hesitancy blurring her tone when she spoke again. “You’re not from here.”
“So?”
“So anyone from here would know what kind of man Laurens Bancroft is. That’s all.”
Fascinated at why someone would lie so ineptly to a total stranger, I tried to put her back at her ease. “A rich man,” I hazarded. “A powerful man.”
She smiled thinly. “You’ll see. Now do you want this lift or not?”
The letter in my pocket said a chauffeur would be outside the terminal to pick me up. Bancroft had made no mention of the police. I shrugged.
“I’ve never turned down a free ride yet.”
“Good. Then shall we go?”
They flanked me to the door and stepped out ahead like bodyguards, heads tilted back and lensed eyes scanning. Ortega and I stepped through the gap together and the warmth of the sunlight hit me in the face. I screwed up my new eyes against the glare and made out angular buildings behind real wire fences on the other side of a badly-kept landing lot. Sterile, and off-white, quite possibly original pre-millennial structures. Between the oddly monochrome walls, I could see sections of a grey iron bridge that came vaulting in to land somewhere hidden from view. A similarly drab collection of sky and ground cruisers sat about in not particularly neat lines. The wind gusted abruptly and I caught the faint odour of some flowering weed growing along the cracks in the landing lot. In the distance was the familiar hum of traffic, but everything else felt like a period drama set piece.
“…and I tell you there is only one judge! Do not believe the men of science when they tell you…”
The squawk of the poorly operated ampbox hit us as we went down the steps from the exit. I glanced across the landing area and saw a crowd assembled around a black-clad man on a packing crate. Holographic placards wove erratically in the air above the heads of the listeners. NO TO RESOLUTION 653!! ONLY GOD CAN RESURRECT!! D.H.F. = D.E.A.T.H. Cheers drowned out the speaker.
“What’s this?”
“Catholics,” said Ortega, lip curling. “Old-time religious sect.”
“Yeah? Never heard of them.”
“No. You wouldn’t have. They don’t believe you can digitise a human being without losing the soul.”
“Not a widespread faith then.”
“Just on Earth,” she said sourly. “I think the Vatican—that’s their central church—financed a couple of cryoships to Starfall and Latimer—”
“I’ve been to Latimer, I never ran into anything like this.”
“The ships only left at the turn of the century, Kovacs. They won’t get there for a couple more decades yet.”
We skirted the gathering, and a young woman with her hair pulled severely back thrust a leaflet at me. The gesture was so abrupt that it tripped my sleeve’s unsettled reflexes and I made a blocking motion before I got it under control. Hard-eyed, the woman stood with the leaflet out and I took it with a placating smile.
“They have no right,” the woman said.
“Oh, I agree…”
“Only the Lord our God can save your soul.”
“I—” But by this time Kristin Ortega was steering me firmly away, one hand on my arm, in a manner that suggested a lot of practice. I shook her off politely but equally firmly.
“Are we in some kind of hurry?”
“I think we both have better things to do, yes,” she said, tight lipped, looking back to where her colleagues were engaged in fending off leaflets of their own.
“I might have wanted to talk to her.”
“Yeah? Looked to me like you wanted to throat-chop her.”
“That’s just the sleeve. I think it had some neurachem conditioning way back when, and she tripped it. You know, most people lie down for a few hours after downloading. I’m a little on edge.”
I stared at the leaflet in my hands. CAN A MACHINE SAVE YOUR SOUL? it demanded of me rhetorically. The word ‘machine’ had been printed in script designed to resemble an archaic computer display. ‘Soul’ was in flowing stereographic letters that danced all over the page. I turned over for the answer.
NO!!!!!
“So cryogenic suspension is okay, but digitised human freight isn’t. Interesting.” I looked back at the glowing placards, musing. “What’s Resolution 653?”
“It’s a test case going through the UN Court,” said Ortega shortly. “Bay City public prosecutor’s office want to subpoena a Catholic who’s in storage. Pivotal witness. The Vatican say she’s already dead and in the hands of God. They’re calling it blasphemy.”
“I see. So your loyalties are pretty undivided here.”
She stopped and turned to face me.
“Kovacs, I hate these goddamn freaks. They’ve been grinding us down for the best part of two and a half thousand years. They’ve been responsible for more misery than any other organisation in history. You know they won’t even let their adherents practise birth control, for Christ’s sake, and they’ve stood against every significant medical advance of the last five centuries. Practically the only thing you can say in their favour is that this d.h.f. thing has stopped them from spreading with the rest of humanity.”
My lift turned out to be a battered but undeniably rakish-looking Lockheed-Mitoma transport decked out in what were presumably police colours. I’d flown Lock-Mits on Sharya, but they’d been a dull radar-reflective black all over. The red and white stripes on this one looked garish by comparison. A pilot in sunglasses to match the rest of Ortega’s little gang sat motionless in the cockpit. The hatch into the belly of the cruiser was already hinged up. Ortega banged on the hatch coaming as we climbed aboard and the turbines awoke with a whispery sound.
I helped one of the mohicans manhandle the hatch down, steadied myself against the lift of the cruiser and found my way to a window seat. As we spiralled up, I craned my neck to keep the crowd below in sight. The transport straightened out about a hundred metres up and dropped its nose slightly. I sank back into the arms of the automould and found Ortega watching me.
“Still curious huh?” she said.
“I feel like a tourist. Answer me a question?”
“If I can.”
“Well, if these guys don’t practise birth control, there’s got to be an awful lot of them, right. And Earth isn’t exactly a hive of activity these days, so … Why aren’t they running things?”
Ortega and her men swapped a set of unpleasant smiles. “Storage,” said the mohican on my left.
I slapped myself on the back of the neck, and then wondered if the gesture was in use here. It’s the standard site for a cortical stack, after all, but then cultural quirks don’t always work like that.
“Storage. Of course.” I looked around at their faces. “There’s no special exemption for them?”
“Nope.” For some reason, this little exchange seemed to have made us all buddies. They were relaxing. The same mohican went on to elaborate. “Ten years or three months, it’s all the same to them. A death sentence every time. They never come off stack. It’s cute, huh?”
I nodded. “Very tidy. What happens to the bodies?”
The man opposite me made a throwaway gesture. “Sold off, broken down for transplants. Depends on the family.”
I turned away and stared out of the window.
“Something the matter, Kovacs?”
I faced Ortega with a fresh smile gripping my face. It felt as if I was getting quite good at them.
“No, no. I was just thinking. It’s like a different planet.”