In the Envoy Corps they teach you to let go before storage. Stick it in neutral and float. It's the first lesson and the trainers drill it into you from day one. Hard-eyed Virginia Vidaura, dancer's body poised inside the shapeless corps coveralls as she paced in front of us in the induction room. Don't worry about anything, she said, and you'll be ready for it. A decade later, I met her again in a holding pen at the New Kanagawa Justice Facility. She was going down for eighty to a century; excessively armed robbery and organic damage. The last thing she said to me when they walked her out of the cell was don't worry, kid, they'll store it. Then she bent her head to light a cigarette, drew the smoke hard into lungs she no longer gave a damn about, and set off down the corridor as if to a tedious briefing. From the narrow angle of vision afforded me by the cell gate, I watched the pride in that walk and I whispered the words to myself like a mantra.
Don't worry, they'll store it. It was a superbly double-edged piece of street wisdom. Bleak faith in the efficiency of the penal system, and a clue to the elusive state of mind required to steer you past the rocks of psychosis. Whatever you feel, whatever you're thinking, whatever you are when they store you, that's what you'll be when you come out. With states of high anxiety, that can be a problem. So you let go. Stick it in neutral. Disengage and float.
If you have time.
I came thrashing up out of the tank, one hand plastered across my chest searching for the wounds, the other clutching at a nonexistent weapon. The weight hit me like a hammer, and I collapsed back into the flotation gel. I flailed with my arms, caught one elbow painfully on the side of the tank and gasped. Gobbets of gel poured into my mouth and down my throat. I snapped my mouth shut and got a hold on the hatch coaming, but the stuff was everywhere. In my eyes, burning my nose and throat, and slippery under my fingers. The weight was forcing my grip on the hatch loose, sitting on my chest like a high-g maneuver, pressing me down into the gel. My body heaved violently in the confines of the tank. Flotation gel? I was drowning.
Abruptly, there was a strong grip on my arm and I was hauled coughing into an upright position. At about the same time I was working out there were no wounds in my chest someone wiped a towel roughly across my face and I could see. I decided to save that pleasure for later and concentrated on getting the contents of the tank out of my nose and throat. For about half a minute I stayed sitting, head down, coughing up the gel and trying to work out why everything weighed so much.
"So much for training." It was a hard, male voice, the sort that habitually hangs around justice facilities. "What did they teach you in the Envoys anyway, Kovacs?"
That was when I had it. On Harlan's World, Kovacs is quite a common name. Everyone knows how to pronounce it. This guy didn't. He was speaking a stretched form of the Amanglic they use on the World, but even allowing for that, he was mangling the name badly, and the ending came out with a hard k instead of the Slavic ch.
And everything was too heavy.
The realization came through my fogged perceptions like a brick through frosted plate glass.
Offworld.
Somewhere along the line, they'd taken Takeshi Kovacs (D.H.), and they'd freighted him. And since Harlan's World was the only habitable biosphere in the Glimmer system, that meant a stellar-range needlecast to-
Where?
I looked up. Harsh neon tubes set in a concrete roof. I was sitting in the opened hatch of a dull metal cylinder, looking for all the world like an ancient aviator who'd forgotten to dress before climbing aboard his biplane. The cylinder was one of a row of about twenty backed up against the wall, opposite a heavy steel door, which was closed. The was chilly and the walls unpainted. Give them their due, on Harlan's World at least the air resleeving rooms are decked out in pastel colors and the attendants are pretty. After all you're supposed to have paid your debt to society. The least they can do is give you a sunny start to your new life.
Sunny wasn't in the vocabulary of the figure before me. About two meters 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 armor, and the head above it had hair 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? Itemize 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 civilized worlds. Ta-dada-dah."
"Don't give up the day job," I told him soberly.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan Copyright © 2003 by Richard K. Morgan. Excerpted by permission.
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