Nightside CIty (21 page)

The mist terrified me. I didn’t mind the
rain. I never minded the rain.

I wished I could see rain again right then,
as I was staggering across the dry, barren sands where rain hadn’t
fallen in millennia, with my vision fading into blackness while the
sun still beat down on my back. I wanted to stand there with my
mouth open to the sky, laughing at the idea that anything harmful
could get at me.

I wasn’t laughing. It wasn’t raining. There
wasn’t even a cool mist, but a hot one, a mist of dust and wind and
blinding sunlight—literally blinding, bright with that ghastly
unseen ultraviolet that was stealing my vision. I couldn’t see
anything but a hot blur any more, couldn’t feel anything but the
wind ripping at my raw sunburnt skin. Someone had gotten at me.
Someone had gotten at me and sent me out into the daylight to
shrivel and die, lost and blind.

And I didn’t really even know why. I didn’t
know why I had to die rather than be allowed to find out what was
happening.

It didn’t make any sense.

I staggered on, and on, and on, always into
the wind.

I don’t remember when I finally fell and couldn’t
get up. I don’t know when it happened, or how far I’d gone. I know
I was blind by then, and that my skin had peeled off in layers
leaving me raw and red on every exposed surface, and that my feet
were numb and the slippers of my worksuit were full of blood. I
assumed that my symbiote had suppressed most of the pain for as
long as it could, but I was in agony all the same—but numb at the
same time. After a certain point, physical pain doesn’t have any
real effect anymore; the emotions overload and just tune it
out.

I don’t remember the fall, but I was face
down in that hard gray sand, and I knew that this time I wouldn’t
get up again. I was beyond trying. I couldn’t face the wind
again.

But I still couldn’t let go and die.

I tapped my wrist, wincing at the pain of my
own touch on the raw flesh, and tried to call for a cab; I don’t
know if I really thought I might be back in range, or whether I
just didn’t know what else to do.

It doesn’t matter; I couldn’t get the words
out. My throat felt choked with sand.

And after that I don’t remember anything at
all from my stay on the dayside. My next memory is of lying on my
back on something cool and slick that shaped itself to my body. I
couldn’t see anything, but my skin felt cool and moist and nothing
hurt. I heard music instead of wind. I remember lying like that for
a long moment, and then falling asleep.

When I woke up—and I don’t know if it was the
next time, or whether there had been other wakeful periods that
never made it into long-term memory—my eyes stung, and felt
curiously clean and spare, as if all the accumulated gunk had been
blasted away, leaving only the live tissue. I opened them, and
discovered that I could see as well as ever.

I was looking up at a beige ceiling. Soft
music was playing, almost subliminal.

“Whoo,” I said, not a word, just a noise. My
voice worked, though it was dry and thin.

I heard someone move, and I tried to turn my
head, and that made me woozy for a moment. When I could focus again
I saw my brother’s face.

Sebastian Hsing was looking down at me with
that same irritating perpetual calm he’d always had.

“Hello, Carlie,” he said. “What the hell did
you get yourself into this time?”

He was the one person on Epimetheus who could
still call me Carlie if he wanted, and I wouldn’t mind a bit. I
think I smiled at him, or tried to.

I swallowed some of that dryness in my throat
and raised a hand to gesture. “Nothing serious,” I said. I
swallowed again, and then added, “It’s good to see you, ‘Chan.”

He made a bark of amused annoyance. “I can
think of better places to see you,” he said.

“I suppose so,” I said. “Where am I,
anyway?”

“You’re in the hospital, stupid,” he
retorted. “Where’d you think?”

I tried to shrug, but it didn’t work very
well.

“I don’t know,” I said. I tried to change the
subject. “Heard anything from Ali lately?”

He shook his head. “Not much,” he said. “She
made it to Earth, I guess; at least, I got a datatab from her
postmarked on Earth, but it was blank. Don’t know what happened to
it; maybe it got wiped, maybe she forgot to record anything in the
first place, maybe she mailed the wrong tab.”

I didn’t know what had happened either, but
whatever it was didn’t surprise me. Our kid sister Alison was never
very good at staying in touch—but then, none of us were. At least
Ali had gotten off Epimetheus.

I hadn’t managed that, but I’d gotten off the
nightside.

“How’d you find me?” I asked.

“I didn’t,” he said. “They called me because
I’m your next of kin, but it wasn’t me who found you.”

I waited for him to go on, but he didn’t. I
pushed myself up on my elbows and demanded, “Well, then who the
hell
did
find me?”

‘Chan smiled and pointed. “Him,” he said.

I turned, and there in a doorway opposite the
foot of the bed was a huge, ugly man. For a moment I thought it was
Bobo Rigmus, that he’d had an attack of contrition or something,
but then I saw the black hair and smooth face and the three silver
antennae trailing back from his left ear.

“Who...” I began, and then something about
that face registered. “Mishima?”

He nodded. It was Big Jim Mishima, all right.
I’d seen him on the com half a dozen times, over the years we’d
both worked the detective racket in the City. We hadn’t met in
person, not even over the Starshine Palace case, but here he
was.

“Hello, Hsing,” he said. “You owe me a lot of
money. A
lot
of money. You shot my eye, and even after you
did that, out of the kindness of my heart, I brought you back to
the City. And I paid your bills here at the hospital, too.”

“What the hell did you do that for?” I
demanded.

“Because if you died, you wouldn’t pay me
back for the eye,” he said, with a big fat smile on his big fat
face.

I started to say something else, but one of
my elbows slipped and I fell back on the bed and decided against
continuing the conversation.

Nobody argued with that decision, or if they
did I was too out of things to notice.

I woke up again feeling almost intact, but
this time nobody human was in the room.

I wondered if I’d dreamed my chat with ‘Chan
and Mishima. I pushed myself up into a sitting position; the bed
came up after me, so I figured I wasn’t disobeying hospital
orders.

The room was standard issue—four walls, a
door, a nice relaxing holo of a park somewhere covering one wall,
soothing music, and an assortment of display screens and gadgetry
covering the wall at the head of the bed, all done in restful beige
and cream.

I was about to call for word on my status
when the door opened and Mishima came in.

“Hello, Hsing,” he said again.

“Hello, Mishima,” I answered.

“Before you ask,” he said, “they tell me that
you’re fit to be released, but that you should take it easy for a
while. And there’s something important you should know, before you
go anywhere.” He paused, uneasily, I thought, and then finished,
“Your symbiote’s dead.”

“It is?” I asked, startled. I hadn’t expected
that. Symbiotes are hard to kill, after all; they thrive on toxins
of every sort. That’s one reason people have them.

“So they tell me,” Mishima said. “I guess the
radiation got it.”

I put a hand up, planning to run my fingers
through my hair, but there wasn’t any hair there.

Mishima noticed the gesture. “You took a
lot
of radiation, Hsing,” he told me. “Not just the
ultraviolet or the rest of the solar spectrum, either. You walked
across some very hot ground, including the debris from your cab’s
power plant. They’ve flushed and rebuilt everything, so you’re
clean now; they regrew your skin, your bone marrow, just about
everything that was damaged. Your hair and nails will grow back,
and everything else already has, but it wasn’t cheap, and I wasn’t
going to spring for a new symbiote on top of everything else.
That’s
your
problem.”

I nodded. I could accept it. He didn’t have
to apologize for anything. Hell, the important thing was that
I
was alive; I’d never exactly been buddies with my
symbiote. I’d been glad to have it, certainly, it was comforting
knowing it was there, but it wasn’t sentient—some are, but mine
wasn’t—and I could get another. “Fair enough,” I said. “Now would
you mind explaining just how I got here, and why you’re here
talking to me?”

He pulled a chair from the wall; it shaped
itself up and he settled onto it. “I’ll tell you the whole thing,”
he said. “But I’ll want some answers in exchange.”

“What sort of answers?” I asked.

“Everything,” he said. “Everything you were
doing, how you got out on the dayside, all of it.”

I guess I should have expected that, but I
hadn’t. I had to think it over for a moment.

It didn’t take long. Whatever his reasons or
methods, Mishima had saved my life. We were stuck with each other
until that got balanced out somehow. “Tell me,” I said.

So he told me.

He’d originally had the spy-eye cruising the
Trap just in hopes of picking up something interesting. It had me
on file, just in case I showed up, as something interesting.
Mishima had put me in there long ago, right after the Starshine
Palace case, and then forgotten about it. The file told the eye to
see what I was up to, if I came by, and to let me know that Mishima
didn’t want me in the Trap. That was just as I’d figured it.

But when I actually
did
turn up in the
Trap, after so long, and then gave the eye the dodge at the
Manhattan, when he hadn’t heard of anyone hiring me for anything,
Mishima got curious about just what I was up to. He didn’t have
anything big on, and he thought I just might, so he told the eye to
stick with me and find out what I was doing, and it tried.

He got some vague idea of what I was up to
when I went out to the West End, but it wasn’t clear. He didn’t see
what sort of a case I could have that involved tracking down rent
collectors.

And then I crashed the eye, shot it for no
apparent reason except that it might find out where I was going,
and he decided that whatever I was doing had to be a hell of a lot
more interesting and important than strong-arming welshers for the
Ginza, which was his main source of income at that point.

He was out an eye, but he wasn’t about to let
that slow him down. He bought himself some tracerized
microintelligences and had a messenger dump them all over the
street in front of my office. He put another eye on me, a
top-of-the-line camouflaged high-altitude job that he had to put on
credit because he’d already blown his budget.

He didn’t see where I went after I shot the
first eye; he picked me up again when I was back at my office, when
I was giving Doc Lee his two hours—not that Mishima knew that that
was what it was. He saw two guys go into my place, then bring me
out trussed up like a defective genen. He saw the butchered cab
take off and head due east, barely clearing the crater wall.

But he lost me somewhere over the dayside.
His eye couldn’t take the UV and the wind and the heat.

The tracers should have been all over me,
though, so he hired himself a ship and went looking.

He found the cab, which still had some
tracers in it, and they’d managed to assemble into a strong enough
group for his equipment to pick up the signal, but I wasn’t
there.

The wind had blown my tracks away, so he
couldn’t follow visually, either.

He was too damn stubborn to quit, though. He
knew I’d gotten out of the cab alive, and he figured I’d head west,
since anything else would have been completely idiotic, and he
started running search patterns.

And obviously, since I’m here telling you
this, he found me.

But do you want to know what led him to me?
It wasn’t the tracers; my symbiote had decided they were benign,
but it had eaten them anyway because it needed the fuel, so they
never got a transmitter built. He didn’t find me visually, with all
that dayside glare in equipment that had been designed for the
nightside, and my heat signature got lost in the sunlight,
indistinguishable from a stray rock.

It was when I tried to call for a cab right
before I passed out. The transceiver had a safety feature I didn’t
even know about, and when I tapped and neither called nor
cancelled, it checked my pulse, and when that came up weak it
called for medical help. The only receiver in range was aboard
Mishima’s ship, and it picked up the call and told Big Jim.

He figured it had to be me. I had to be the
only person on the dayside who could be calling for help. And
besides, even if it wasn’t me, refusing to answer a medical
emergency call can get a ship’s operating license pulled.

So he found me there, unconscious,
half-buried in drifting sand, my skin in sunburnt shreds, blind,
with a bad case of radiation poisoning—besides the stuff from the
cab I’d walked right across some of the richest unmined ore on the
planet.

And he’d picked me up and brought me back to
Nightside City and registered me in the city hospital under a false
name, and he’d set up a credit account against his assets to pay my
bills, and then he’d called on ‘Chan to see if he knew what the
hell I had been doing that got me so close to getting killed.

‘Chan didn’t know anything, of course, but he
was still interested in seeing me, seeing that I was all right. We
still check on each other sometimes. Ever since Dad bought the
dream and Mama shipped out, ‘Chan and Ali and I had been all the
family any of us had. We weren’t really close—I think we’re all
afraid that if we get too close we’ll just get burned again—but we
stayed in touch, all three of us until Ali left, and then just
‘Chan and me. So he came and took a look at me and then went back
to his work. He was a croupier at the time—I’m not sure which
casino, because he moved around, but it was obviously one of the
better ones if it used human croupiers, right?