“Curtis.” I glanced sideways at his impassive profile. “You want to cut the broadcast block for a minute?”

He looked across at me with a slight curl of the lip. “Sure.”

I settled back in the seat and fixed my eyes on the street again. “I’m not a tourist, Curtis. This is what I do for a living.”

The street sellers’ catalogues came aboard like a swarm of delirium-induced hallucinations, slightly diffuse through lack of directed broadcast and blurring swiftly into each other as we glided along, but still an overload by any Harlanite standards. The pimps were the most obvious; a succession of oral and anal acts, digitally retouched to lend an airbrushed sheen to breasts and musculature. Each whore’s name was murmured in throaty voiceover, along with a superimposed facial: coy little girls, dominatrixes, stubbled stallions and a few from cultural stock that was completely alien to me. Weaving in between were the more subtle chemical lists and surreal scenarios of the drug and implant traders. I caught a couple of religious ‘casts amidst it all, images of spiritual calm among mountains, but they were like drowning men in the sea of product.

The stumbling started to make sense.

“What does from the Houses mean?” I asked Curtis, trawling the phrase from the ‘casts for the third time.

Curtis sneered. “The mark of quality. The Houses are a cartel; high-class, expensive whorehouses up and down the coast. Get you anything you want, they say. If a girl’s from the Houses, she’s been taught to do stuff most people only ever dream about.” He nodded at the street. “Don’t kid yourself, no one out there ever worked in the Houses.”

“And Stiff?”

He shrugged. “Street name. Betathanatine. Kids use it for near death experiences. Cheaper than suicide.”

“I guess.”

“You don’t get ‘thanatine on Harlan’s World?”

“No.” I’d used it offworld with the Corps a couple of times, but there was a ban in fashion back home. “We got suicide, though. You want to put the screen back up.”

The soft brush of images cut out abruptly, leaving the inside of my head feeling stark, like an unfurnished room. I waited for the feeling to fade and, like most after-effects, it did.

“This is Mission Street,” said Curtis. “The next couple of blocks are all hotels. You want me to drop you here?”

“You recommend anywhere?”

“Depends what you want.”

I gave him one of his own shrugs back. “Light. Space. Room service.”

He squinted thoughtfully. “Try the Hendrix, if you like. They got a tower annexe, and the whores they use are clean.” The limousine picked up speed fractionally and we made a couple of blocks in silence. I neglected to explain I hadn’t meant that kind of room service. Let Curtis draw the conclusions he seemed to want to.

Unbidden, a freeze frame of Miriam Bancroft’s sweat-dewed cleavage bounced through my mind.

The limo coasted to a halt outside a well-lit façade in a style I didn’t recognise. I climbed out and stared up at a huge holocast black man, features screwed up presumably in ecstasy at the music he was wringing left-handed from a white guitar. The image had the slightly artificial edges of a remastered two-dimensional image, which made it old. Hoping this might indicate a tradition of service and not just decrepitude, I thanked Curtis, slammed the door and watched the limousine cruise away. It began to climb almost immediately and after a moment I lost the tail lights in the streams of airborne traffic. I turned to the mirrored glass doors behind me and they parted slightly jerkily to let me in.

If the lobby was anything to go by, the Hendrix was certainly going to satisfy the second of my requirements. Curtis could have parked three or four of Bancroft’s limos side by side in it and still have had space to wheel a cleaning robot round them. I wasn’t so sure about the first. The walls and ceiling bore an irregular spacing of illuminum tiles whose half-life was clearly almost up, and their feeble radiance had the sole effect of shovelling the gloom into the centre of the room. The street I’d just come in off was the strongest source of light in the place.

The lobby was deserted, but there was a faint blue glow coming from a counter on the far wall. I picked my way towards it, past low armchairs and shin-hungry metal-edged tables, and found a recessed monitor screen swarming with the random snow of disconnection. In one corner, a command pulsed on and off in English, Spanish and Kanji characters:

SPEAK.

I looked around and back at the screen.

No one.

I cleared my throat.

The characters blurred and shifted: ELECT LANGUAGE.

“I’m looking for a room,” I tried, in Japanese out of pure curiosity.

The screen jumped into life so dramatically that I took a step backwards. From whirling, multi-coloured fragments it rapidly assembled a tanned Asian face above a dark collar and tie. The face smiled and changed into a Caucasian female, aged fractionally, and I was facing a blonde thirty-year-old woman in a sober business suit. Having generated my interpersonal ideal, the hotel also decided that I couldn’t speak Japanese after all.

“Good day, sir. Welcome to the Hotel Hendrix, established 2087 and still here today. How may we serve you?”

I repeated my request, following the move into Amanglic.

“Thank you, sir. We have a number of rooms, all fully cabled to the city’s information and entertainment stack. Please indicate your preference for floor and size.”

“I’d like a tower room, west facing. The biggest you’ve got.”

The face recoiled into a corner inset and a three-dimensional skeleton of the hotel’s room structure etched itself into place. A selector pulsed efficiently through the rooms and stopped in one corner, then blew up and rotated the room in question. A column of fine print data shuttered down on one side of the screen.

“The Watchtower suite, three rooms, dormitory thirteen point eight seven metres by—

“That’s fine, I’ll take it.”

The three-dimensional map disappeared like a conjuror’s trick and the woman leapt back to full screen.

“How many nights will you be with us, sir?”

“Indefinite.”

“A deposit is required,” said the hotel diffidently, “For stays of more than fourteen days the sum of six hundred dollars UN should be deposited now. In the event of departure before said fourteen days, a proportion of this deposit will be refunded.”

“Fine.”

“Thank you sir.” From the tone of voice, I began to suspect that paying customers were a novelty at the Hotel Hendrix. “How will you be paying?”

“DNA trace. First Colony Bank of California.”

The payment details were scrolling out when I felt a cold circle of metal touch the base of my skull.

“That’s exactly what you think it is,” said a calm voice. “You do the wrong thing, and the cops are going to be picking bits of your cortical stack out of that wall for weeks. I’m talking about real death, friend. Now, lift your hands away from your body.”

I complied, feeling an unaccustomed chill shoot up my spine to the point the gun muzzle was touching. It was a while since I’d been threatened with real death.

“That’s good,” said the same calm voice. “Now, my associate here is going to pat you down. You let her do that, and no sudden moves.”

“Please key your DNA signature onto the pad beside this screen.” The hotel had accessed First Colony’s database. I waited impassively while a slim, black-clad woman in a ski mask stepped around and ran a purring grey scanner over me from head to foot. The gun at my neck never wavered. It was no longer cold. My flesh had warmed it to a more intimate temperature.

“He’s clean.” Another crisp, professional voice. “Basic neurachem, but it’s inoperative. No hardware.”

“Really? Travelling kind of light, aren’t you Kovacs?”