Suntouch House was aptly named. From Bay City we flew south down the coast for about half an hour before the change in engine pitch warned me that we were approaching our destination. By that time the light through the right-side windows was turning warm gold with the sun’s decline toward the sea. I peered out as we started to descend and saw how the waves below were molten copper and the air above pure amber. It was like landing in a jar of honey.
The transport sideslipped and banked, giving me a view of the Bancroft estate. It edged in from the sea in neatly manicured tones of green and gravel around a sprawling tile-roofed mansion big enough to house a small army. The walls were white, the roofing coral, and the army, if it existed, was out of sight. Any security systems Bancroft had installed were very low key. As we came lower I made out the discreet haze of a power fence along one border of the grounds. Barely enough to distort the view from the house. Nice.
Less than a dozen meters up over one of the immaculate lawns, the pilot kicked in the landing brake with what seemed like unnecessary violence. The transport shuddered from end to end, and we came down hard amidst flying clods of turf.
I shot Ortega a reproachful look, which she ignored. She threw open the hatch and climbed out. After a moment I joined her on the damaged lawn. Prodding at the torn grass with the toe of one shoe, I shouted over the sound of the turbines. “What was that all about? You guys pissed off with Bancroft just because he doesn’t buy his own suicide?”
“No.” Ortega surveyed the house in front of us as if she was thinking of moving in. “No, that’s not why we’re pissed off with Mr. Bancroft.”
“Care to tell me why?”
“You’re the detective.”
A young woman appeared from the side of the house, tennis racket in hand, and came across the lawn toward us. When she was about twenty meters away, she stopped, tucked the racket under her arm, and cupped her hands to her mouth.
“Are you Kovacs?”
She was beautiful in a sun, sea, and sand sort of way, and the sports shorts and leotard she was wearing displayed the fact to maximal effect. Golden hair brushed her shoulders as she moved, and the shout gave away a glimpse of milk-white teeth. She wore sweat bands at forehead and wrists, and from the dew on her brow they were not for show. There was finely toned muscle in her legs, and a substantial biceps stood out when she lifted her arms. Exuberant breasts strained the fabric of the leotard. I wondered if the body was hers.
“Yes,” I called back. “Takeshi Kovacs. I was discharged this afternoon.”
“You were supposed to be met at the storage facility.” It was like an accusation. I spread my hands.
“Well. I was.”
“Not by the police.” She stalked forward, eyes mostly for Ortega. “You. I know you.”
“Lieutenant Ortega,” Ortega said, as if she was at a garden party. “Bay City, Organic Damage Division.”
“Yes. I remember now.” The tone was distinctly hostile. “I assume it was you who arranged for our chauffeur to be pulled down on some trumped-up emissions charge.”
“No, that would be Traffic Control, ma’am,” the detective said politely. “I have no jurisdiction in that division.”
The woman in front of us sneered.
“Oh, I’m sure you haven’t, Lieutenant. And I’m sure none of your friends work there either.” The voice turned patronizing. “We’ll have him released before the sun goes down, you know.”
I glanced sideways to see Ortega’s reaction, but there was none. The hawk profile remained impassive. Most of me was preoccupied with the other woman’s sneer. It was an ugly expression, and one that belonged on an altogether older face.
Back up by the house there were two large men with automatic weapons slung over their shoulders. They had been standing under the eaves watching since we arrived, but now they ambled out of the shade and began to make their way in our direction. From the slight widening of the young woman’s eyes I guessed that she had summoned them on an internal mike. Slick. On Harlan’s World people are still a bit averse to sticking racks of hardware into themselves, but it looked as if Earth was going to be a different proposition.
“You are not welcome here, Lieutenant,” the young woman said in a freezing voice.
“Just leaving, ma’am,” Ortega said 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, pulverizing the ground beneath and ripping a furrow across the lawn as it swung west toward the ocean. We watched it out of sight.
“Charming,” the woman beside me said, 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 it was 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 0.8 of a G. 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 recognize 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 meters tall, sometimes as wide as this house at the root. You can hear them singing for kilometers. 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. Mrs. Bancroft’s breasts jiggled with her steps 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, as its name suggested, 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 favorite experia star on Harlan’s World called Alain Marriott, best known for his portrayal of a virile young Quellist philosopher who cuts a swath 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 flick. 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-gray 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,” Mrs. Bancroft said. “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 U.N. was about six or seven times what Sarah and I had expected to make on the Millsport wetware haul. U.N. dollars, the hardest currency there was, negotiable on any world in the Net.
That had to be worth keeping your temper for.
Bancroft gave his wife another casual touch, this time on her waist, pushing her away.
“Miriam, could you leave us alone for a while? I’m sure Mr. Kovacs has endless questions, and it’s likely to be boring for you.”
“Actually, I’m likely to have some questions for Mrs. Bancroft, as well.”
She was already on her way back inside, and my comment stopped her in midstride. She cocked her head at an angle and looked from me to Bancroft and back. Beside me, her husband stirred. This wasn’t what he wanted.
“Maybe I could speak to you later,” I amended. “Separately.”
“Yes, of course.” Her eyes met mine, then danced aside. “I’ll be in the chart room, Laurens. Send Mr. Kovacs along when you’ve finished.”
We both watched her leave, and when the door closed behind her Bancroft gestured me to one of the lounge chairs on the balcony. Behind them, an antique astronomical telescope stood leveled at the horizon, gathering dust. Looking down at the boards under my feet, I saw they were worn with use. The impression of age settled over me like a cloak, and I lowered myself into my chair with a tiny frisson of unease.
“Please don’t think of me as a chauvinist, Mr. Kovacs. After nearly two hundred and fifty years of marriage, my relationship with Miriam is more politeness than anything. It really would be better if you spoke to her alone.”
“I understand.” That was shaving the truth a bit, but it would do.
“Would you care for a drink? Something alcoholic?”
“No thank you. Just some fruit juice, if you have it.” The shakiness associated with downloading was beginning to assert itself, and in addition there was an unwelcome scratchiness in my feet and fingers, which I assumed was nicotine dependency. Apart from the odd cigarette bummed from Sarah, I’d been nicotine-free for the last two sleeves, and I didn’t want to have to break the habit all over again. Alcohol on top of everything would finish me.
Bancroft folded his hands in his lap. “Of course. I’ll have some brought up. Now, where would you like to begin?”
“Maybe we should start with your expectations. I don’t know what Reileen Kawahara told you, or what kind of profile the Envoy Corps has here on Earth, but don’t expect miracles from me. I’m not a sorcerer.”
“I’m aware of that. I have read the corps literature carefully. And all Reileen Kawahara told me was that you were reliable, if a trifle fastidious.”
I remembered Kawahara’s methods, and my reactions to them. Fastidious. Right.
I gave him the standard spiel anyway. It felt funny, pitching for a client who was already in. Felt funny to play down what I could do, as well. The criminal community isn’t long on modesty, and what you do to get serious backing is inflate whatever reputation you may already have. This was more like being back in the corps. Long polished conference tables and Virginia Vidaura ticking off the capabilities of her team.
“Envoy training was developed for the U.N. colonial commando units. That doesn’t mean . . .”
Doesn’t mean every Envoy is a commando. No, not exactly, but then what is a soldier anyway? How much of special-forces training is engraved on the physical body and how much in the mind? And what happens when the two are separated?
Space, to use a cliché, is big. The closest of the Settled Worlds is fifty light-years out from Earth. The most far-flung are four times that distance, and some of the colony transports are still going. If some maniac starts rattling tactical nukes, or some other biosphere-threatening toys, what are you going to do? You can transmit the information, via hyperspatial needlecast, so close to instantaneously that scientists are still arguing about the terminology, but that, to quote Quellcrist Falconer, deploys no bloody divisions. Even if you launched a troop carrier the moment the shit hit the fan, the marines would be arriving just in time to quiz the grandchildren of whoever won.
That’s no way to run a protectorate.
Okay, you can digitize and freight the minds of a crack combat team. It’s been a long time since weight of numbers counted for much in a war, and most of the military victories of the last half millennium have been won by small, mobile guerrilla forces. You can even decant your crack D.H.F. soldiers directly into sleeves with combat conditioning, jacked-up nervous systems, and steroid-built bodies. Then what do you do?
They’re in bodies they don’t know, on a world they don’t know, fighting for one bunch of total strangers against another bunch of total strangers over causes they’ve probably never even heard of and certainly don’t understand. The climate is different, the language and culture are different, the wildlife and vegetation are different, the atmosphere is different, shit, even the gravity is different. They know nothing, and even if you download them with implanted local knowledge, it’s a massive amount of information to assimilate at a time when they’re likely to be fighting for their lives within hours of sleeving.
That’s where you get the Envoy Corps.
Neurachem conditioning, cyborg interfaces, augmentation—all this stuff is physical. Most of it doesn’t even touch the pure mind, and it’s the pure mind that gets freighted. That’s where the corps started. They took psychospiritual techniques that Oriental cultures on Earth had known about for millennia and distilled them into a training system so complete that on most worlds graduates of it were instantly forbidden by law to hold any political or military office.
Not soldiers, no. Not exactly.
“I work by absorption,” I finished. “Whatever I come into contact with, I soak up, and I use that to get by.”
Bancroft shifted in his seat. He wasn’t used to being lectured. It was time to start.
“Who found your body?”
“My daughter, Naomi.”
He broke off as someone opened the door in the room below. A moment later, the maid who had attended Miriam Bancroft earlier came up the steps to the balcony bearing a tray with a visibly chilled decanter and tall glasses. Bancroft was wired with internal tannoy like everyone else at Suntouch House, it seemed.
The maid set down her tray, poured in machinelike silence, and then withdrew on a short nod from Bancroft. He stared after her blankly for a while.
Back from the dead. It’s no joke.
“Naomi,” I prompted him gently.
He blinked. “Oh. Yes. She barged in here, wanting something. Probably the keys to one of the limos. I’m an indulgent father, I suppose, and Naomi is my youngest.”
“How young?”
“Twenty-three.”
“Do you have many children?”
“Yes, I do. Very many.” Bancroft smiled faintly. “When you have leisure and wealth, bringing children into the world is a pure joy. I have twenty-seven sons and thirty-four daughters.”
“Do they live with you?”
“Naomi does, most of the time. The others come and go. Most have families of their own now.”
“How is Naomi?” I stepped my tone down a little. Finding your father without his head isn’t the best way to start the day.
“She’s in psychosurgery,” Bancroft said shortly. “But she’ll pull through. Do you need to talk to her?”
“Not at the moment.” I got up from the chair and went to the balcony door. “You say she barged in here. This is where it happened?”
“Yes.” Bancroft joined me at the door. “Someone got in here and took my head off with a particle blaster. You can see the blast mark on the wall down there. Over by the desk.”
I went inside and down the stairs. The desk was a heavy mirrorwood item; they must have freighted the gene code from Harlan’s World and cultured the tree here. That struck me as almost as extravagant as the songspire in the hall, and in slightly more questionable taste. On the World mirrorwood grows in forests on three continents, and practically every canal dive in Millsport has a bartop carved out of the stuff. I moved past it to inspect the stucco wall. The white surface was furrowed and seared black with the unmistakable signature of a beam weapon. I should know; I spent the better part of my youth making marks like that. The burn started at head height and followed a short arc downward.
Bancroft had remained on the balcony. I looked up at his silhouetted face. “This is the only sign of gunfire in the room?”
“Yes.”
“Nothing else was damaged, broken, or disturbed in any way?”
“No. Nothing.” It was clear that he wanted to say more, but he was keeping quiet until I’d finished.
“And the police found the weapon beside you?”
“Yes.”
“Do you own a weapon that would do this?”
“Yes. It was mine. I keep it in a safe under the desk. Handprint coded. They found the safe open, nothing else removed. Do you want to see inside it?”
“Not at the moment, thank you.” I knew from experience how difficult mirrorwood furniture is to shift. I turned up one corner of the woven rug under the desk. There was an almost invisible seam in the floor beneath. “Whose prints will open this?”
“Miriam’s and my own.”
There was a significant pause. Bancroft sighed, loud enough to carry across the room. “Go on, Kovacs. Say it. Everyone else has. Either I committed suicide or my wife murdered me. There’s just no other reasonable explanation. I’ve been hearing it since they pulled me out of the tank at Alcatraz.”
I looked elaborately around the room before I met his eyes.
“Well, you’ll admit it makes for easier police work,” I said. “It’s nice and neat.”
He snorted, but there was a laugh in it. I found myself beginning to like this man despite myself. I went back up, stepped out onto the balcony, and leaned on the rail. Outside, a black-clad figure prowled back and forth across the lawn below, weapon slung at port. In the distance the power fence shimmered. I stared in that direction for a while.
“It’s asking a lot to believe that someone got in here, past all the security, broke into a safe only you and your wife had access to, and murdered you, without causing any disturbance. You’re an intelligent man; you must have some reason for believing it.”
“Oh, I do. Several.”
“Reasons the police chose to ignore.”
“Yes.”
I turned to face him. “All right. Let’s hear it.”
“You’re looking at it, Mr. Kovacs.” He stood there in front of me. “I’m here. I’m back. You can’t kill me just by wiping out my cortical stack.”
“You’ve got remote storage. Obviously, or you wouldn’t be here. How regular is the update?”
Bancroft smiled. “Every forty-eight hours.” He tapped the back of his neck. “Direct needlecast from here into a shielded stack over at the PsychaSec installation at Alcatraz. I don’t even have to think about it.”
“And they keep your clones on ice there, as well.”
“Yes. Multiple units.”
Guaranteed immortality. I sat there thinking about that for a while, wondering how I’d like it. Wondering if I’d like it.
“Must be expensive,” I said at last.
“Not really. I own PsychaSec.”
“Oh.”
“So you see, Kovacs, neither I nor my wife could have pulled that trigger. We both knew it wouldn’t be enough to kill me. No matter how unlikely it seems, it had to be a stranger. Someone who didn’t know about the remote.”
I nodded. “All right, who else did know about it? Let’s narrow the field.”
“Apart from my family?” Bancroft shrugged. “My lawyer, Oumou Prescott. A couple of her legal aides. The D.H.F. director at PsychaSec. That’s about it.”
“Of course, suicide is rarely a rational act,” I said.
“Yes, that’s what the police said. They used it to explain all the other minor inconveniences in their theory, as well.”
“Which were?”
This was what Bancroft had wanted to reveal earlier. It came out in a rush. “Which were that I should choose to walk the last two kilometers home, and let myself into the grounds on foot, then apparently readjust my internal clock before I killed myself.”
I blinked. “I’m sorry?”
“The police found traces of a cruiser landing in a field two kilometers from the perimeter of Suntouch House, which conveniently enough is just outside the pickup range of the house security surveillance. Equally conveniently, there was apparently no satellite cover overhead at that precise time.”
“Did they check taxi datastacks?”
Bancroft nodded. “For what it’s worth, they did, yes. West Coast law does not require taxi companies to keep records of their fleets’ whereabouts at any given time. Some of the more reputable firms do, of course, but there are others that don’t. Some even make a selling point of it. Client confidentiality, that sort of thing.” A momentary hunted look crossed Bancroft’s face. “For some clients, in some cases, that would be a distinct advantage.”
“Have you used these firms in the past?”
“On occasion, yes.”
The logical next question hung in the air between us. I left it unasked, and waited. If Bancroft wasn’t going to share his reasons for wanting confidential transport, I wasn’t going to press him until I had a few other landmarks locked down.
Bancroft cleared his throat. “There is, in any case, some evidence to suggest that the vehicle in question might not have been a taxi. Field-effect distribution, the police say. A pattern more in keeping with a larger vehicle.”
“That depends on how hard it landed.”
“I know. In any case, my tracks lead from the landing site, and apparently the condition of my shoes, was in keeping with a two-kilometer trek across country. And then, finally, there was a call placed from this room shortly after three a.m. the night I was killed. A time check. There’s no voice on the line, only the sound of someone breathing.”
“And the police know this, too?”
“Of course they do.”
“How did they explain it?”
Bancroft smiled thinly. “They didn’t. They thought the solitary walk through the rain was very much in keeping with the act of suicide, and apparently they couldn’t see any inconsistency in a man wanting to check his internal chronochip before he blows his own head off. As you say, suicide is not a rational act. They have case histories of this sort of thing. Apparently the world is full of incompetents who kill themselves and wake up in a new sleeve the next day. I’ve had it explained to me. They forget they’re wearing a stack, or it doesn’t seem important at the moment of the act. Our beloved medical welfare system brings them right back, suicide notes and requests notwithstanding. Curious abuse of rights, that. Is it the same system on Harlan’s World?”
I shrugged. “More or less. If the request is legally witnessed, then they have to let them go. Otherwise, failure to revive is a storage offense.”
“I suppose that’s a wise precaution.”
“Yes. It stops murderers passing their work off as suicide.”
Bancroft leaned forward on the rail and locked gazes with me. “Mr. Kovacs, I am three hundred and fifty-seven years old. I have lived through a corporate war, the subsequent collapse of my industrial and trading interests, the real deaths of two of my children, at least three major economic crises, and I am still here. I am not the kind of man to take my own life, and even if I were, I would not have bungled it in this fashion. If it had been my intention to die, you would not be talking to me now. Is that clear?”
I looked back at him, back at those hard dark eyes. “Yes. Very clear.”
“That’s good.” He unpinned his stare. “Shall we continue?”
“Yes. The police. They don’t like you very much, do they?”
Bancroft smiled without much humor. “The police and I have a perspective problem.”
“Perspective?”
“That’s right.” He moved along the balcony. “Come here, I’ll show you what I mean.”
I followed him along the rail, catching the telescope with my arm as I did and knocking the barrel upright. The download shakes were beginning to demand their dues. The telescope’s positional motor whined crabbily and returned the instrument to its original shallow angle. Elevation and range focus ticked over on the ancient digital memory display. I paused to watch the thing realign itself. The finger marks on the keypad were smudged in years of dust.
Bancroft had either not noticed my ineptitude or was being polite about it.
“Yours?” I asked him, jerking a thumb at the instrument. He glanced at it absently.
“Once. It was an enthusiasm I had. Back when the stars were still something to stare at. You wouldn’t remember how that felt.” It was said without conscious pretension or arrogance, almost inconsequentially. His voice lost some of its focus, like a transmission fading out. “Last time I looked through that lens was nearly two centuries ago. A lot of the colony ships were still in flight then. We were still waiting to find out if they’d make it. Waiting for the needle beams to come back to us. Like lighthouse beacons.”
He was losing me. I brought him back to reality. “Perspective?” I reminded him gently.
“Perspective.” He nodded and swung an arm out over his property. “You see that tree. Just beyond the tennis courts.”
I could hardly miss it. A gnarled old monster taller than the house, casting shade over an area the size of a tennis court in itself. I nodded.
“That tree is over seven hundred years old. When I bought this property, I hired a design engineer and he wanted to chop it down. He was planning to build the house further up the rise, and the tree was spoiling the sea view. I sacked him.”
Bancroft turned to make sure his point was getting across.
“You see, Mr. Kovacs, that engineer was a man in his thirties, and to him the tree was just an inconvenience. It was in his way. The fact it had been part of the world for over twenty times the length of his own life didn’t seem to bother him. He had no respect.”
“So you’re the tree.”
“Just so,” Bancroft said equably. “I am the tree. The police would like to chop me down, just like that engineer. I am inconvenient to them, and they have no respect.”
I went back to my seat to chew this over. Kristin Ortega’s attitude was beginning to make some sense at last. If Bancroft thought he was outside the normal requirements of good citizenship, he wasn’t likely to make many friends in uniform. There would have been little point trying to explain to him that for Ortega there was another tree called the Law and that in her eyes he was banging a few profane nails into it himself. I’d seen this kind of thing from both sides, and there just isn’t any solution except to do what my own ancestors had done. When you don’t like the laws, you go somewhere they can’t touch you.
And then you make up some of your own.
Bancroft stayed at the rail. Perhaps he was communing with the tree. I decided to shelve this line of inquiry for a while.
“What’s the last thing you remember?”
“Tuesday, fourteenth August,” he said promptly. “Going to bed at about midnight.”
“That was the last remote update.”
“Yes, the needlecast would have gone through about four in the morning, but obviously I was asleep by then.”
“So almost a full forty-eight hours before your death.”
“I’m afraid so.”
Optimally bad. In forty-eight hours, almost anything can happen. Bancroft could have been to the moon and back in that time. I rubbed at the scar under my eye again, wondering absently how it had got there.
“And there’s nothing before that time that could suggest to you why someone might want to kill you.”
Bancroft was still leaning on the rail, looking out, but I saw how he smiled.
“Did I say something amusing?”
He had the grace to come back to his seat.
“No, Mr. Kovacs. There is nothing amusing about this situation. Someone out there wants me dead, and that’s not a comfortable feeling. But you must understand that for a man in my position, enmity and even death threats are part and parcel of everyday existence. People envy me, people hate me. It is the price of success.”
This was news to me. People hate me on a dozen different worlds, and I’ve never considered myself a successful man.
“Had any interesting ones recently? Death threats, I mean.”
He shrugged. “Perhaps. I don’t make a habit of screening them. Ms. Prescott handles that for me.”
“You don’t consider death threats worth your attention?”
“Mr. Kovacs, I am an entrepreneur. Opportunities arise, crises present themselves, and I deal with them. Life goes on. I hire managers to deal with that.”
“Very convenient for you. But in view of the circumstances, I find it hard to believe neither you nor the police have consulted Ms. Prescott’s files.”
Bancroft waved a hand. “Of course, the police conducted their own cursory inquiry. Oumou Prescott told them exactly what she had already told me. That nothing out of the ordinary had been received in the last six months. I have enough faith in her not to need to check beyond that. You’ll probably want to look at the files yourself, though.”
The thought of scrolling through hundreds of meters of incoherent vitriol from the lost and losers of this antique world was quite sufficient to uncap my weariness again. A profound lack of interest in Bancroft’s problems washed through me. I mastered it with an effort worthy of Virginia Vidaura’s approval.
“Well, I’ll certainly need to talk to Oumou Prescott, anyway.”
“I’ll make the appointment immediately.” Bancroft’s eyes took on the inward glaze of someone consulting internal hardware. “What time would suit you?”
I held up a hand. “Probably better if I do that myself. Just let her know I’ll be in touch. And I’ll need to see the resleeving facility at PsychaSec.”
“Certainly. In fact, I’ll get Prescott to take you there. She knows the director. Anything else?”
“A line of credit.”
“Of course. My bank has already allocated a DNA-coded account to you. I understand they have the same system on Harlan’s World.”
I licked my thumb and held it up queryingly. Bancroft nodded.
“Just the same here. You will find there are areas of Bay City where cash is still the only negotiable currency. Hopefully you won’t have to spend much time in those parts, but if you do, you can draw actual currency against your account at any bank outlet. Will you require a weapon?”
“Not at the moment, no.” One of Virginia Vidaura’s cardinal rules had always been find out the nature of your task before you choose your tools. That single sweep of charred stucco on Bancroft’s wall looked too elegant for this to be a shoot-’em-up carnival.
“Well.” Bancroft seemed almost perplexed by my response. He had been on the point of reaching into his shirt pocket, and now he completed the action awkwardly. He held out an inscribed card to me. “This is my gunmaker. I’ve told them to expect you.”
I took the card and looked at it. The ornate script read larkin and green—armorers since 2203. Quaint. Below was a single string of numbers. I pocketed the card.
“This might be useful later on,” I admitted. “But for the moment I want to make a soft landing. Sit back and wait for the dust to settle. I think you can appreciate the need for that.”
“Yes, of course. Whatever you think best. I trust your judgment.” Bancroft caught my gaze and held it. “You’ll bear in mind the terms of our agreement, though. I am paying for a service. I don’t react well to abuse of trust, Mr. Kovacs.”
“No, I don’t suppose you do,” I said tiredly. I remembered the way Reileen Kawahara had dealt with two unfaithful minions. The animal sounds they had made came back to me in dreams for a long time afterwards. Reileen’s argument, framed as she peeled an apple against the backdrop of those screams, was that since no one really dies anymore, punishment can come only through suffering. I felt my new face twitch, even now, with the memory.
“For what it’s worth, the line the corps fed you about me is so much shit on a prick. My word’s as good as it ever was.”
I stood up.
“Can you recommend a place to stay back in the city? Somewhere quiet, midrange.”
“Yes, there are places like that on Mission Street. I’ll have someone ferry you back there. Curtis, if he’s out of arrest by then.” Bancroft climbed to his feet, as well. “I take it you intend to interview Miriam now. She really knows more about those last forty-eight hours than I do, so you’ll want to speak to her quite closely.”
I thought about those ancient eyes in that pneumatic teenager’s body, and the idea of carrying on a conversation with Miriam Bancroft was suddenly repellent. At the same time a cold hand strummed taut chords in the pit of my stomach and the head of my penis swelled abruptly with blood. Classy.
“Oh, yes,” I said unenthusiastically. “I’d like to do that.”