Nightside CIty (2 page)

Then the com double-beeped and I knew it
wasn’t outside. I hit the pad on the desk—the place had had
pressure switches when I moved in, and I couldn’t afford to convert
to voice, so I roughed it. I guess an earlier tenant liked his
fingers better than his tongue—or maybe he was some kind of
antiquarian fetishist. It wasn’t even a codefield, but an actual
keypad. Before I took that office I’d never seen one anywhere else
except history vids, let alone used one, but I got the hang of it
after a while. It gave the place a certain charm, an air of
eccentricity that I almost liked. It was also a real pain in the
ass to use, no matter how much practice I got, but I couldn’t
afford to do anything about it.

So I roughed it, and when the com
double-beeped I hit the ACCEPT key. My background music dimmed away
and someone asked, “Carlisle Hsing?”

The voice was young and male and nobody I
knew. I could hear the wind muttering behind him, so I knew he was
outside, probably on my doorstep from the sound of it. I didn’t
bother to check the desk’s main screen yet.

“Yeah,” I said, “I’m Hsing.”

“I...uh,
we
want to hire you.”

That sounded promising. I flicked on the
screen.

He didn’t
look
promising. He was a
good three days overdue for a shave—either that, or three days into
growing a beard, with a long way to go. His hair hadn’t been washed
recently, either. He was pale and round-eyed, and wore a battered
port worksuit, one that hadn’t been much when it was new—low-grade
issue, built, not grown, and all flat gray with no shift. A cheap
com jack under his right ear looked clogged with grease, and I
wasn’t sure about the workmanship on his eyes. He wasn’t anybody
I’d seen before, not in my office or in Lui’s or on the streets,
and sure as hell not in the Trap.

Judging by the view behind him, he was indeed
on my doorstep. In my business I do get callers in person, not just
over the com.

At least, I got this one in person, and he
said he wanted to hire me, so I let his looks go for the
moment.

“For what?” I asked.

“Ah... it’s complicated. Can I come in and
explain?”

Well, I wasn’t doing much of anything. I’d
just finished off the final details on my last case, finding a
missing kid who had holed up in Trap Under for a week-long wire
binge; the fee hadn’t done much more than pay the bills. I couldn’t
afford to turn down much, so I said, “Yeah,” and buzzed the door. I
didn’t turn on the privacy, though, so it logged in his face,
voiceprint, pheromone signature, and all the rest.

Any security door will do all that, but most
people don’t much care, they just let the data slide; me, in my
line of work, I’d cleared it with the landlord and had everything
tapped straight into my personal com system. The landlord didn’t
care—as I said, I generally paid my rent—so I always knew who I had
in my office. If this guy tried anything I was pretty sure I’d be
able to find him.

A few minutes later he inched into the office
as nervous as a kid going through his first neuroscan, and tried
not to stare at me. He wasn’t that much more than a kid himself; I
guessed him at eighteen, maybe twenty, no more. Maybe twenty-one if
you want to use Terran years.

He looked okay—grubby, but not dangerous—and
none of the scanners had beeped, but just in case I had my right
hand under the desk, holding my Sony-Remington HG-2. The gun laws
on Epimetheus were written by a committee, so they’re a mess,
complicated as hell, and I never did figure out whether that gun of
mine was legal, but I liked it and kept it handy just the same. I’d
had it brought in, special, from out-system, as a favor from an old
friend—an old friend who somehow hadn’t called since I left the
Trap, but what the hell, I still had the gun.

Owning it was probably good for a fat fine,
but only if somebody made a point of it, and I wasn’t about to walk
past the port watch with it out. I’d drawn it in public a few
times, in the Trap, but casino cops don’t hassle anyone who might
be a player without a better reason than flashing an illegal
weapon. Casino cops can be very good at minding their own
business.

“Sit down,” I said, and the kid sat, very
slowly. I had three chairs and a couch; the chairs were floaters,
and he took the couch, which had legs. Cautious, very cautious. The
cushions tried to adjust for him, but he kept shifting, and one of
the warping fields had burned out long ago, leaving a band a few
centimeters wide that stayed stiff and straight as a motherboard
and screwed up the whole system.

He didn’t seem to be in any hurry to talk. He
just looked around the place, everywhere but at me. If his eyes
were natural, he wasn’t in great shape and might have something
eating at his nervous system; if they were replacements he got
rooked. The com jack under his ear had something dark and sticky in
it, and obviously hadn’t been used in weeks. His worksuit was so
worn and patched that the circuitry was showing, and I could see
some leads were cut; it was probably stolen.

I felt sorry for any poor symbiote that had
to live in the guy—assuming there was one, which I did not consider
certain.

But then, my own symbiote wasn’t exactly in
an ideal environment for the long term.

“So,” I said, “who are you?”

He gave me a sharp look.

“Why?” he asked.

This was looking worse all the time; I hit
some keys I knew he couldn’t see—with my left hand, because my
right had the gun—and started running the door data through the
city’s ID bank. “I like to know who I’m working for,” I said.

He didn’t like that. He gave me a look and a
silence.

“If you don’t tell me who you are, I don’t
work,” I said.

He hesitated, then gave in. “All right,” he
said. “My name is Wang. Joe Wang.”

I nodded and glanced down at one of the
desk’s pull-out screens. His name was Zarathustra Pickens. He was
about a month short of nineteen years old, Terran time. Born on
Prometheus, came in-system to the nightside at sixteen—probably
looking for casino work, but it didn’t say—and did a few short
pieces here and there. Last job, cleaning pseudoplankton out of the
city water filters, got laid off a week earlier when the city
brought in a machine that was supposed to do the job. Again. They’d
been trying machines on that since I was a girl, and they never
worked right—sooner or later the pseudoplankton got into the
cleaning machines, same as it got into everything else anywhere
near water, and screwed them up. Machines that didn’t screw up
would cost more than people. An organism that could deal with the
situation would probably cost even more, and might be dangerous if
it got out, since the whole planet lives and breathes off
pseudoplankton; it’s the only significant source of oxygen on
Epimetheus.

It’s also mean stuff, meaner than any
microorganism that ever evolved on Earth; building a bug that could
handle it might take one hell of a lot of doing.

I figured Zar Pickens could probably get his
job back in a couple of days, so I didn’t hold his unemployment
against him.

“All right, Mis’ Wang,” I said, “what can I
do for you?”

He got nervous again. “It’s not
me
,”
he said, “I mean, it’s not just
me
.”

I’d had about enough of his delays. I wasn’t
inclined to pry the details out one by one. “Okay,” I said, “you
tell it your way, whatever it is you have to tell, but let’s get on
it, shall we?”

He hesitated a bit, then started telling
it.

“I live out by the crater wall,” he said.
“Right out in the West End. It’s cheap, y’know?”

Cheap, hell, I guessed it was probably free;
at least a dozen big buildings out that way were already abandoned.
Even a couple on Juarez were abandoned. The owners didn’t figure it
was worth the repairs and maintenance when the sun’s on the
horizon, or maybe even already hitting the top floors, so when a
building dropped below code, or the complaints started piling up,
they would just ditch it. Good, sound business practice, at least
by Epimethean standards.

And whether Pickens had had other reasons or
not, that explained why he’d come in person; the com lines in the
West End are, shall we politely say, unreliable.

I didn’t say anything, I just nodded.

Pickens nodded back, and said, “Right, so I
don’t bother anybody. None of us do; there’s a bunch of us out that
way, living cheap, not hurting a damn thing. You understand?”

I nodded again. Squatters were nothing new.
When I was a girl they’d had to make do with doorways or alleys in
the outer burbs, or caves in the crater wall, but they’d been
moving inward for years. Especially in the west.

“Okay, fine,” Pickens said. “But then about
two weeks back some slick-hair shows up, with this big slab of
muscle backing him, and says that he works for the new owner, and
the rent’s gone up, and we pay it or we get out.”

I sat back a little and let the HG-2 drop
back in the holster; this was beginning to sound interesting.
Interesting, or maybe just dumb. It had to be a con of some kind,
but that was so obvious even squatters would see it. I put my hands
behind my head and leaned back. “New owner?” I asked.

“That’s what he said.”

I nodded. “Go on,” I said.

Pickens shrugged. “That’s about it,” he
said.

“So what do you want me to do?” I asked.

He looked baffled for a minute. “Come on,
Hsing,” he said, “what do you
think
? We want you to get rid
of the guy, of course!” His voice rose and got ugly. “I mean,
what’s this new owner crap? Who’s buying in the West End? The sun
is rising, lady! Nobody’s gonna buy land in the West End, so what’s
this new owner stuff? It’s gotta be a rook, but when we called the
city they said he was legit, so we can’t call the cops, and we
can’t just take him out ourselves, because this goddamn new owner
would send someone else. We need someone who can get it straight; I
mean, we don’t have anywhere else to go, and we can’t pay this
fucker’s rent!” He was getting pretty excited, like he was about to
jump out of the couch; I straightened up and put my hands back
down.

“Then how are you planning to pay my fee?” I
asked, and the Sony-Remington was back in my hand, but still out of
sight.

The question stopped him for a moment, even
without the gun showing. He shifted again, settling back down, and
the couch rippled as it tried to adjust.

“We took up a collection,” he said. “Did it
by shares, sort of, and we came up with some bucks. They say you
work cheap if you like the job, and I sure hope you like this one,
because we couldn’t come up with much.”

“How much?” I asked.

“Two hundred and five credits,” he said.
“Maybe a little more, but we can’t promise.”

Well, that sure as hell wasn’t much, but I
was interested anyway. As the kid said, who’s buying land in the
West End? That was just dumb. I figured, same as he did, that most
likely somebody had rigged up a little swindle with the city
management. That two hundred and five wasn’t about to pay my fare
off-planet, came the dawn, but it could pay for a dinner or two and
I thought the case might have some interesting aspects to it. For
an example, I might be able to collect a reward for turning in a
crooked city com-op, or if I decided I didn’t need a conscience I
could take a little share of whatever the op was sucking down his
chute.

“All right, Mis’ Wang,” I said, “I’ll need a
hundred credits up front, and whatever names and addresses you can
give me.”

He gawked. I mean, his mouth came open, and
he just flat-out gawked at me. “You mean you’ll
take
it?” he
said.

The kid just had no class at all. I wondered
how he’d ever managed to land
any
job, even scraping
pseudoplankton, and I was ready to bet that his symbiote had died
of neglect or embarrassment, if he’d ever had one at all. I’d had
about all I wanted of him. “Yes, Mis’ Pickens,” I said, “I’ll take
it.”

That was that. He pulled out a transfer card
and started reeling off the names and addresses of every squatter
this rent collector had gone after, and I put it all into the com.
The poor jerk never even noticed that I’d used his right name.

After I finally got Zar Pickens out of my office I
settled in to think about the kid’s story. The com brought the
music back up a little, but kept it mellow and meditative, and the
images on the big holo stayed abstract.

In my line of work I always found it helped
to cultivate a suspicious nature, so I leaned back and looked at
whether I could be getting conned or set up or otherwise dumped
on.

The whole thing looked like a glitch of some
kind. Out there at the base of the western wall, if you stood on
tiptoe you could just about see the sun—assuming you were either
wearing goggles or didn’t mind burning your retinas. In a year
nobody would live there without eyeshades and sunscreen, at the
very least; more likely no one would live there at all.

A year, hell, ten weeks would probably do it.
There were buildings where the top stories were already catching
the sun, and the terminator was moving one hundred and thirty-eight
centimeters a day. Everyone knew that.

So who’d buy property there?

Nobody. Ever since it began sinking in that
sunrise really was coming, that the city founders a hundred and
sixty years back really had been wrong about the planet already
being tidelocked, real estate prices had been dropping all over
Nightside City, and they’d gone down fastest and furthest in the
West End. I guessed that you could buy a building lot—or a
building—out there for less than a tourist would pay for a blowjob
in the Trap, but you still wouldn’t be able to collect enough in
rents to make your money back before dawn, because rents were
dropping, too, and there were plenty of other cheap places, further
east, like the one I lived in.