Nightside CIty (5 page)

After the casino was gone they had made the
site a park, though not much of one; the imported grass had all
died pretty quickly, despite the fancy lights and watering system.
I think the metals in the soil and water got to it.

Nobody had wanted to build there, since
everyone knew that the sun was coming up. That hadn’t been news
since long before I was born.

I wasn’t checking on the Vegas, though, I was
checking on the New York. I’ve always had this habit of going off
on tangents like that; sometimes it’s useful. It distracts people.
Sometimes it gives me an interesting angle to work.

This time it didn’t seem to be helping, and I
didn’t see anything very interesting about the New York. I cleared
the screen and thought.

Nothing came. Oh, there were still approaches
I could make, but I didn’t feel like trying any of them just then.
I had a lead to work, with Mariko Cheng, and I wanted to see where
that took me before I booted up anything else.

I did know, though, that the New York had
something to do with the case, and that meant I knew where I was
going to take Mis’ Cheng for a drink.

I still had more time than I needed, but what
the hell, I could always walk the streets, which beat just sitting
around the office watching vids or something, which was just about
all I’d been doing lately. I threw the empty Coke bulb down the
chute, punched the com to call a cab and secure the office, checked
the draw and ran a circuit test on the HG-2, and then I got up and
headed for the door.

The air in my office was as dead as bedrock, and the
front door downstairs was as soundproof as hard vacuum, so it was
always a shock stepping out into the street—the wind whipped
against your skin like steel Velcro, and its sound poured through
you as if it were on wire. Every time I stepped out I heard the
howl of the wind itself, as it wrapped the air tight around every
building in the crater, and when it backed up on itself, as it did
that time, it carried out the noise of the Trap, bent into a whole
new shape.

It was on my right cheek, and it was blowing
warm.

I hated that. When I was a kid the wind was
cold
; you
knew
it was blowing right off the
slushponds at the midnight pole, you could
feel
it. It was
still damp from the rainbelt, too.

By this time, though, the wind was warm; it
was as likely to be a back-eddy from the dayside as the true winds
off the pole. A few years back, people would bitch about the cold
winds, but they weren’t cold any more. Since I’d moved out to
Juarez I never heard anybody mention the wind, not at Lui’s, not
anywhere. It was another reminder of how close the city was to
crossing the terminator, and nobody wanted reminding.

Hell, the city was actually
just
past
the terminator; it was the shadow of the crater wall
that kept us from frying, not true night.

I looked up at the pale sky ahead of me and I
shivered.

Once when I was twenty or so, when I was just
starting to settle down and thought I might do something clever
with my life, I studied a little history of this and that on the
public com, and I came across some old music—
really
old
stuff, from just a few years after sound recording was invented,
before they used kunstkopf or added images or subsonics or
anything. It was just sound, not even as real or as complex as you
get from a cheap com speaker, but it was still music, it still had
a beat and a melody and lyrics, and simple as it was, it could be
pretty catchy. I don’t know what the hell it was doing in open
storage, but there it was, forty or fifty hours of audio, three or
four hundred years old, and I listened to most of it. All from
Earth, of course—I mean, some of this was pre-space travel stuff,
let alone star travel!

Anyway, there were some songs in there by
some minstrels, or a concert band, or whatever they were back then,
called the Doors, and two of those songs stuck with me because they
fit the situation there in Nightside City.

The one I thought of as I looked up at the
sky there was “Waiting for the Sun.” We were all of us waiting for
the sun.

When people first discovered that the
nightside of Epimetheus was habitable, they didn’t think the planet
was turning. It looked about as tidelocked as any planet ever
was—which was damned strange, when the system’s as young as this,
but what the hell, it just wasn’t moving, so far as they could see.
When they checked closely here in the crater, they found a little
movement, well under two meters a day, and they put it down to
volcanic activity, or instrument error, or continental drift—a
rotation that slow wasn’t considered possible, since it couldn’t be
stable, and Epimetheus is pretty damn tectonically active, not to
mention having one hell of a lot of plates sliding around, so they
called it continental drift and forgot about it. So the miners came
in, picking up the radioactives and the heavy metals, and they
built their boomtown in this big impact crater, the only crater on
the planet big enough and stable enough to provide a decent
shelter, near the dawn line but safely in the dark, and everything
was fine until somebody noticed that the city was still moving, and
always in the same direction, toward the dayside.

It wasn’t supposed to keep moving, you see.
Nightside City was supposed to stay in the dark forever and ever,
until the heat-death of the universe or the Big Crunch or
whatever.

The miners and the owners and the rest
panicked, and they called in the experts, and the experts figured
it out.

The planet isn’t tidelocked—yet. But it will
be soon.

Everybody
thought
that had already
happened. They were wrong.

It’s a pretty strange case, I guess.
Epimetheus is a young planet, very young, and it hasn’t got any
moons. It ought to be spinning really fast. It isn’t. It isn’t,
they figured, because the planetary core is off-center.

Nobody seems completely sure how that
happened—the usual guess is something to do with the high
concentration of heavy elements, particularly radioactives. That
resulted in a hard, heavy core that formed early, and a mantle that
stayed hotter and more liquid than usual, and somehow that let the
core get pulled to one side by Eta Cass A’s gravity—or possibly by
Eta Cass B, during a pass.

Or, just possibly, it got thrown off-center
because a comet or something hit the planet—the system has plenty
of comets.

However it happened, it happened. Epimetheus
had a normal rotation when it first coalesced, but the offset core
slowed it down in a hurry. It stopped spinning evenly, slowing down
each time the core passed the sunside, until finally it was hardly
moving at all.

But it takes
time
for something the
size of a planet to grind to a halt, even with its own core acting
as a giant brake. It takes a lot of time. It doesn’t just stop in a
few hours, or a few years, or even a few centuries. And Epimetheus
is very young.

It’s almost done rotating; the experts all
agree that it’s on its very last spin before it stops with the core
permanently offset toward the dayside. But that last turn is a
slow
one. It’s been going on for centuries, and it’ll still
be going on a thousand years from now. A thousand years is nothing
on a planetary scale.

By then it’ll be
really
slow, though,
just a few centimeters a day.

Meanwhile, Nightside City is going to swing
out onto the dayside, and it’s not going to swing back. It’ll move
out into the full sunlight, where the ultraviolet eventually kills
all unprotected, unmodified terrestrial life; it’ll swing on,
moving slower and slower, and eventually, thousands of years from
now, it will stop.

And the city will stop well beyond the
sunrise terminator, out there in the sun, far enough out that the
crater wall’s shadow won’t mean a thing. It will never get anywhere
near reaching the sunset terminator; it won’t even reach
mid-morning. When the rotation stops the planet will be tidelocked,
and the city will be on the dayside to stay.

They figured this out, way back when, and
they shrugged and forgot it; after all, it was a long way off, a
hundred years away. Nightside City grew and flourished and
everybody had a good time.

But those hundred years slipped away, like
data scrolling across a screen, and the dawn got closer and closer,
and before we knew it we were all just waiting for the sun.

And everyone in the city knew this, we had
grown up knowing it. It had all been checked and rechecked a
hundred years ago. We all knew the rate of movement, the distances
to go, everything. When I was eight my friends and I worked out the
exact dates that the sun would shine in our respective bedroom
windows—but we were eight, and it was just a game.

Looking up at that blue sky and red horizon
it wasn’t a game anymore; it was death, disaster, the end of the
world, and there was nothing I could do that would change it.

The end of the world, I said, but no, that
wasn’t what it was, not really. The nightside would still be
habitable, most of the mines that were being worked could still be
worked. People could live on the dayside in suits or domes or
underground. It wasn’t the end of the world, not even necessarily
the end of the city; it was just the end of the night.

That was the other ancient song I remembered,
“End of the Night.”

All I ever knew was the night. I had never
lived anywhere but Nightside City, never wanted to, and Nightside
City had never known anything but night.

The City’s whole economy lived on the night;
if anything did survive in the crater after the sun rose it would
need an entirely new reason for its existence. It was the night
that made unshielded life there possible. It was the night that
gave the tourists something worth visiting. Without the nightlife,
the miners would have no reason to come to the city instead of
launching cargo on-site.

But the dawn was coming, coming one hundred
and thirty-eight centimeters closer every day—every twenty-four
hours, I should say. We had always used standard Earth time, since
the Epimethean day lasted forever. And real daylight was coming.
That scared the hell out of me.

My cab was coming, too, settling to the curb
in front of me, dropping down from a flashing swarm of advertisers
and spy-eyes and messengers. Above them, like another layer of
floaters, a sudden, silent spatter of meteors drew a golden spray
across the sky—there’s still a lot of debris in the Eta Cass
system.

I looked at the red in the sky and I felt
that warm wind and I shivered, and then, because I had business, I
stepped into the cab.

The cab’s interior music was sweet and slow,
I noticed as I settled onto the seat. I liked it.

“Where to?” the cab asked.

I told it, “Third and Kai. And there’s no
hurry, so keep it smooth.”

“Got it,” it said. It lifted and cruised
toward the Trap, smooth as perfect software.

An advertiser came up to the window beside
me, purring seductively about the pleasures of a night at the
Excelsis and trying to focus a holo in front of me. Its chrome
casing glittered in moving bands of red and white sparks as it
caught the lights in passing.

“Lose it,” I told the cab. “I hate
advertising.”

The cab didn’t say anything, and I didn’t
feel anything but a slight jerk, but suddenly the advertiser was
gone. It was a slick little move, and I got curious and looked at
the cab’s identification.

It was a Hyundai, of course—I hadn’t seen any
other make in years—but the model number was one I’d never seen
before, a whole new series, and I found myself wondering what it
was doing in the City. Who was buying new cabs?

I hated myself for asking that; I wanted to
believe that somebody had enough pride in the City to buy new cabs
for the last few years. I wanted to believe it—but I couldn’t.
Nightside City was going to hell, and we all knew it.

But maybe somebody knew something I
didn’t.

All my life I’d been hearing schemes to save
the city—put up a dome, go underground, cut the crater loose and
haul it back to the other side of the planet. They all had one
thing in common—no one was willing to finance them. Nightside City
had always made money, but not
that
much money.

Besides, everybody knew it was the weird
ambience of the city that drew the tourists, the wind and the
darkness and the night sky with its meteors and a comet every year
or two and Eta Cass B lighting everything dull red. It was the
presence of a breathable atmosphere on a planet that was mostly
bare rock, still so young the ground almost glowed in spots. Put
that underground, or under a dome, and what’s to see? And on the
dayside there is no darkness; you can’t even see the stars, any of
them at all.

As for the miners, they weren’t about to come
out into the daylight for anything. If they had to go to a domed or
buried city for their sprees, they’d build their own, safe on the
nightside.

Now, cutting the entire crater loose and
hauling it back—that might work, but think of the cost! Not to
mention the legal complications, or that the whole city would
probably have to be evacuated while the job was done, or the
difficulties of figuring out where to put it, or that in cutting
under the crater you’d be awfully close to going right through the
crust and opening the largest damn volcano Epimetheus ever saw,
which might not be good for the planet’s long-term stability.
Epimetheus is delicate. The impact that made the city’s crater in
the first place didn’t punch through the crust into raw magma, but
the experts say it came close—
very
close.

All the same, the scheme got some attention
now and then, but the conclusion was always the same.