“You are not welcome here, lieutenant,” said the young woman in a freezing voice.
“Just leaving, ma’am,” said Ortega heavily. She clapped me unexpectedly on the shoulder and headed back to the transport at an easy pace. Halfway there she suddenly stopped and turned back.
“Here, Kovacs. Almost forgot. You’ll need these.”
She dug in her breast pocket and tossed me a small packet. I caught it reflexively and looked down. Cigarettes.
“Be seeing you.”
She swung herself aboard the transport and slammed the hatch. Through the glass I saw her looking at me. The transport lifted on full repulse, pulverising the ground beneath and ripping a furrow across the lawn as it swung west towards the ocean. We watched it out of sight.
“Charming,” said the woman beside me, largely to herself.
“Mrs. Bancroft?”
She swung around. From the look on her face, I wasn’t much more welcome here than Ortega had been. She had seen the lieutenant’s gesture of camaraderie and her lips twitched with disapproval.
“My husband sent a car for you, Mr. Kovacs. Why didn’t you wait for it?”
I took out Bancroft’s letter. “It says here the car would be waiting for me. It wasn’t.”
She tried to take the letter from me and I lifted it out of her reach. She stood facing me, flushed, breasts rising and falling distractingly. When they stick a body in the tank, it goes on producing hormones pretty much the way it would if you were asleep. I became abruptly aware that I was swinging a hard-on like a filled fire hose.
“You should have waited.”
Harlan’s World, I remembered from somewhere, has gravity at about o.8g. I suddenly felt unreasonably heavy again. I pushed out a compressed breath.
“Mrs. Bancroft, if I’d waited, I’d still be there now. Can we go inside?”
Her eyes widened a little, and I suddenly saw in them how old she really was. Then she lowered her gaze and summoned composure. When she spoke again, her voice had softened.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Kovacs. I’ve forgotten my manners. The police, as you see, have not been sympathetic. It’s been very upsetting, and we all still feel a little on edge. If you can imagine—”
“There’s no need to explain.”
“But I am very sorry. I’m not usually like this. None of us are.” She gestured around as if to say that the two armed guards behind her would ordinarily have been bearing garlands of flowers. “Please accept my apologies.”
“Of course.”
“My husband’s waiting for you in the seaward lounge. I’ll take you to him immediately.”
The inside of the house was light and airy. A maid met us at the veranda door and took Mrs. Bancroft’s tennis racket for her without a word. We went down a marbled hallway hung with art that, to my untutored eye, looked old. Sketches of Gagarin and Armstrong, Empathist renderings of Konrad Harlan and Angin Chandra. At the end of this gallery, set on a plinth, was something like a narrow tree made out of crumbling red stone. I paused in front of it and Mrs. Bancroft had to backtrack from the left turn she was making.
“Do you like it?” she asked.
“Very much. This is from Mars, isn’t it.”
Her face underwent a change that I caught out of the corner of my eye. She was reassessing. I turned for a closer look at her face.
“I’m impressed,” she said.
“People often are. Sometimes I do handsprings too.”
She looked at me narrowly. “Do you really know what this is?”
“Frankly, no. I used to be interested in structural art. I recognise the stone from pictures, but…”
“It’s a Songspire.” She reached past me and let her fingers trail down one of the upright branches. A faint sighing awoke from the thing and a perfume like cherries and mustard wafted into the air.
“Is it alive?”
“No one knows.” There was a sudden enthusiasm in her tone that I liked her better for. “On Mars they grow to be a hundred metres tall, sometimes as wide as this house at the root. You can hear them singing for kilometres. The perfume carries as well. From the erosion patterns, we think that most of them are at least ten thousand years old. This one might only have been around since the founding of the Roman empire.”
“Must have been expensive. To bring it back to Earth, I mean.”
“Money wasn’t an object, Mr. Kovacs.” The mask was back in place. Time to move on.
We made double time down the left-hand corridor, perhaps to make up for our unscheduled stop. With each step Mrs. Bancroft’s breasts jiggled under the thin material of the leotard and I took a morose interest in the art on the other side of the corridor. More Empathist work, Angin Chandra with her slender hand resting on a thrusting phallus of a rocket. Not much help.
The seaward lounge was built on the end of the house’s west wing. Mrs. Bancroft took me into it through an unobtrusive wooden door and the sun hit us in the eyes as soon as we entered.
“Laurens. This is Mr. Kovacs.”
I lifted a hand to shade my eyes and saw that the seaward lounge had an upper level with sliding glass doors that accessed a balcony. Leaning on the balcony was a man. He must have heard us come in; come to that, he must have heard the police cruiser arrive and known what it signified, but still he stayed where he was, staring out to sea. Coming back from the dead sometimes makes you feel that way. Or maybe it was just arrogance. Mrs. Bancroft nodded me forward and we went up a set of stairs made from the same wood as the door. For the first time I noticed that the walls of the room were shelved from top to bottom with books. The sun was laying an even coat of orange light along their spines.
As we came out onto the balcony, Bancroft turned to face us. There was a book in his hand, folded closed over his fingers.
“Mr. Kovacs.” He transferred the book so that he could shake my hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you at last. How do you find the new sleeve?”
“It’s fine. Comfortable.”
“Yes, I didn’t involve myself too much in the details, but I instructed my lawyers to find something … suitable.” He glanced back, as if looking for Ortega’s cruiser on the horizon. “I hope the police weren’t too officious.”
“Not so far.”
Bancroft looked like a Man Who Read. There’s a favourite experia star on Harlan’s World called Alain Marriott, best known for his portrayal of a virile young Quellist philosopher who cuts a swathe through the brutal tyranny of the early Settlement years. It’s questionable how accurate this portrayal of the Quellists is, but it’s a good flic. I’ve seen it twice. Bancroft looked a lot like an older version of Marriott in that role. He was slim and elegant with a full head of iron grey hair which he wore back in a ponytail, and hard black eyes. The book in his hand and the shelves around him were like an utterly natural extension of the powerhouse of a mind that looked out from those eyes.
Bancroft touched his wife on the shoulder with a dismissive casualness that in my present state made me want to weep.
“It was that woman, again,” said Mrs. Bancroft. “The lieutenant.”
Bancroft nodded. “Don’t worry about it, Miriam. They’re just sniffing around. I warned them I was going to do this, and they ignored me. Well, now Mr. Kovacs is here, and they’re finally taking me seriously.”
He turned to me. “The police have not been very helpful to me over this matter.”
“Yeah. That’s why I’m here, apparently.”
We looked at each other while I tried to decide if I was angry with this man or not. He’d dragged me halfway across the settled universe, dumped me into a new body and offered me a deal that was weighted so I couldn’t refuse. Rich people do this. They have the power and they see no reason not to use it. Men and women are just merchandise, like everything else. Store them, freight them, decant them. Sign at the bottom please.
On the other hand, no one at Suntouch House had mispronounced my name yet, and I didn’t really have a choice. And then there was the money. A hundred thousand UN was about six or seven times what Sarah and I had expected to make on the Millsport wetware haul. UN dollars, the hardest currency there was, negotiable on any world in the Protectorate.