Realms of Light (2 page)

I put notes out on the net, looking for work,
of course; I billed myself as an expert consultant on my home world
of Epimetheus as well as pitching the investigative work. I talked
to some of the software in city hall—this was in Alderstadt, near
the north end of Terpsichore in the Nine Islands, which was where
my flight in had landed—and tried to learn the circuits.

Strange set-up they had there. The policy
software wasn’t permanent; every few years they ran a sort of
popularity poll called an election, and whoever won got to plug her
own software in until the next election. It was something like a
referendum, except instead of asking a question they asked you to
pick a
person
. And chances were the only names on the ballot
were people you didn’t even know. Seemed like a stupid system to
me, but the people I asked about it argued that it acted as a sort
of automatic debugging.

Nightside City always did fine with
traditional debugging—you catch a mistake, you rewrite it. You
don’t pull the whole system off-line and put in a new program.

This election thing confused me. What was the
point in learning my way around the master program when in a year
or two it might get pulled and replaced? It took away some of my
incentive, and I didn’t really get the hang of Alderstadt city
services beyond the basics.

Banks and corporate data and nets are pretty
much the same everywhere, though. So are people. I figured I could
function, even in Alderstadt.

Then I got my first case, tracking down a
data pirate for an off-planet shipping line that picked me because
they were in a hurry and my name came up first in a random search.
I pulled it off—not as easily as I could have back in Nightside
City, but well enough. This artist in margin retailing had figured
that knowing what cargos went in and out would give her an edge in
pricing, and I found her for the shippers.

When I gave them her name and com code I’d
suggested that they just make a deal with her and split her take,
but they were having none of it. I got the impression they didn’t
think much of my morals. Anyway, they got all flashed and turned
her in to the Procops, and the whole thing got out on the net.

I figured that wouldn’t hurt me any, though
it didn’t do the margin artist any good and she only missed
reconstruction by about half a stop-bit. Yeah, my name hit the
net—and it was big enough news that IRC caught it.

The Interstellar Resorts Corporation has been
pissed at me for years, ever since I let a welsher skip out, and
they put the word out on the net that I was still on their
gritlist. IRC isn’t as big on Prometheus as they were back home,
where the casinos owned about half the planet, but they’re big
enough that people don’t like to annoy them. I’d thought I’d got
away from them when I left Epimetheus, but now it looked as if I
hadn’t.

I was back in the detective business, but I
wasn’t exactly top of the market. Just like old times.

I got work, though. Sometimes I got people
who figured that if IRC was warning them away from me, then that
was a point in my favor. I kept eating, and a lot better than I did
back in Nightside City, thanks to the lower prices, and I did it
without even bleeding my savings, such as they were.

I’d been in Alderstadt for almost a year,
gotten myself settled in pretty well, gotten to know the locals,
made a few friends, when I got this call. I was there and awake and
not doing much of anything, so my software put it through.

“Carlisle Hsing?” a voice asked, and I knew
from the sound it was synthesized, which meant I was dealing with
software or with someone who wasn’t interested in being
recognized—and in either case they didn’t mind if I knew it. You
can synthesize undetectably if you want to pay for it.

“Yeah?” I said, leaning back in my chair—a
floater, a nice one. Came with the office. Beat the hell out of the
place I’d had back home on Juarez Street.

“I represent someone who wishes to hire your
services. Would it suit you to be in the lobby of the Sakai
building on First Street in American City at 22:00 tomorrow? Your
expenses will be reimbursed.”

I reminded myself where in the cycle we were
and where on the planet American City was, and figured that 22:00
would be comfortably dark, not to mention well after business
hours.

That part sounded all right.

“Do I get a name?” I asked.

“No,” it said.

“Then I’ll need an advance,” I told it.
“Buzzfare to American City’s gotta be four hundred credits, easy.”
I was guessing, but since American City wasn’t on Terpsichore but
on one of the little collateral islands out to the south, it was an
easy guess.

“One kilocredit will be posted to your
account immediately,” it said, without missing a tick.

I smiled. I liked that. I never got this sort
of thing back home, and although I’d had a couple of respectable
clients in Alderstadt, I wasn’t really used to it.

A kilobuck wasn’t exactly going to let me
retire, or even take a vacation, but it
would
cover
round-trip fare to American City, I was pretty sure.

“Any conditions?” I asked.

“You must come alone,” it told me. “It would
be appreciated if you would allow the installation of a watchdog
program in your office com, but this is not an absolute
requirement. You must be punctual and discreet.”

“No watchdog,” I said, and my smile wasn’t
there any more. This was beginning to sound dangerous. “I’ll be
there.”

“Alone,” it reminded me.

“Alone,” I agreed.

I meant it, too, if you only counted humans,
but I wasn’t going to walk into a completely unknown set-up without
a little back-up. I intended to have plenty of hardware on me, and
of course I carry a symbiote, like everybody else, but mine’s a
good one, with optional intelligence, and I figured I’d wake it up
and have it on the lookout while I was there.

I’d had another symbiote back on Epimetheus,
a dumb one. It saved my life and died in the process, so when I got
to Prometheus I’d spent a good piece of my savings on getting a
better one to replace it.

That was something else that cost about half
what it would have on Epimetheus. There were serious advantages to
being on a primary colony instead of a secondary one.

“You will be met,” the voice said, and then
the connection broke.

I sat and I considered that.

Somebody was going to a lot of trouble to
deal with me. Somebody in American City, presumably—but I’d never
been in American City, never met anyone there, knew nothing about
the place beyond the standard stuff in the Prometheography
programming I’d jacked in aboard ship.

Why would anybody want me to come to American
City?

When somebody wanted to meet me somewhere, it
was usually because she wanted privacy—unless it’s a closed system,
totally closed, anything you do over the com can be tapped, and
anyone with any sense knows that. But even so, most people came to
my office in that case.

When somebody wanted to meet me somewhere
else, it was usually because he was seriously worried or scared,
afraid that he’s being followed or that
I’m
being
watched—and what the hell, maybe I
was
being watched. I
wouldn’t have put it past IRC to have had an eye on my office, a
high-altitude one I couldn’t spot, or maybe a bunch of
microintelligences reporting back. Or if not IRC, which after all
has bigger programs to run, then maybe one of IRC’s competitors or
subcontractors, trying to figure an angle.

And when somebody insisted on complete
anonymity and insisted on meeting me not just outside my office,
but in another city a thousand kilometers south of Alderstadt, at
the other end of the archipelago, then we’re talking about someone
who was downright paranoid—or else, just possibly, somebody who was
concerned with something other than privacy.

For example, getting me out by myself, alone
and relatively defenseless.

Now, I didn’t
know
that there was
anybody out there who wanted me dead just then, though there had
been a few people who might hold grudges. IRC held a grudge, but
what I’d done to them wasn’t any big spike, really, just a bit of
grit.

And there was a fellow back on Epimetheus by
the name of Big Jim Mishima who might not be very fond of me—but
the exact details got wiped, so he wouldn’t know why.

There was that margin player who’d missed
reconstruction, but I wouldn’t expect her to have the nerve to try
anything after a close cut like that.

There were a few people I thought had gone in
for reconstruction who might be after me if they hadn’t—but I was
sure
that most of them had gone in, and after reconstruction
they weren’t going to be bothering me, not unless the job had been
botched.

There was Sayuri Nakada, a spoiled rich brat
I’d crossed up; I didn’t know where the hell she was or what she
was doing, and she had the juice to be anywhere in human space. I’d
probably done her a favor, whether she knew it or not, but she was
crazy enough that I had no idea what she thought of me.

So I had potential enemies out there, but I
couldn’t see that any of them would have been behind this. Mishima
was still back on Epimetheus, as far as I knew, and even if he’d
gotten off he wasn’t the type to come after me without knowing more
than he did.

Nakada was petty and vicious enough, but it
didn’t seem like her style, and besides, she was dependent on the
rest of her family, and they wouldn’t have allowed it.

If they knew about it.

The thought of the Nakada family beeped
somewhere in the back of my brain. I leaned forward and gestured at
the com.

The first screen told me that yes, a kilobuck
had been credited to my account, from a numbered account at a
brokerage house. I could probably trace it back if I had to, but it
wouldn’t be easy.

The second screen told me that American City
was just about where I thought it was, and that Sayuri Nakada no
longer had any significant interests there.

But Yoshio Nakada, her great-grandfather,
head of the Nakada clan and chief stockholder in Nakada
Enterprises, was based there.

Grandfather Nakada knew who I was, all right.
He’d paid my way off Epimetheus in return for what I’d learned
about a little scam that was being run on great-granddaughter
Sayuri. As far as I knew, he had nothing against me, and Sayuri
couldn’t push him around.

So maybe it wasn’t a trap. Maybe Grandfather
Nakada wanted to talk to me about something. Certainly he was rich
enough to throw kilobucks around like that, and I could see why
someone like him wouldn’t want to be seen coming to Alderstadt to
consult me.

Or maybe it was someone else, lower down in
the hierarchy, who had been impressed with my deal with old Yoshio
and needed a detective.

Whatever it was, I’d find out soon enough.
I’d be there, in the Sakai building at 22:00. I’d be alone—with my
Sony-Remington HG-2 loaded and active, with my symbiote on alert,
and with every scanner and guard system I could get into my
worksuit up and running.

Just in case.

I buzzed into American City around 18:00, to give
myself a little time to look around.

Strange place. Lots of pink glass, detached
homes, two- or three-level malls. Bigger than Alderstadt, much
bigger; bigger than Nightside City ever was, even before the dawn
got too close for comfort.

In Nightside City the Tourist Trap, the
central business district, was always ablaze with light, the
streets awash in advertising, holos and neon and stardust. It was a
constant barrage of color and motion. The streets were always full
of people and floaters, despite the wind. The outer parts of the
city were darker and quieter, but the Trap never was.

In Alderstadt, the whole city was dark and
quiet—at least at night. People stayed inside, maybe because of the
cold; floaters were heavily regulated, and nobody advertised more
than two stories above street level. Biggest ad I ever saw there
wasn’t much more than three meters high, a display out front of an
exotics restaurant.

I’d gotten used to the low-key approach; my
last few years in Nightside I was out in the burbs, and then I’d
been in Alderstadt ever since.

American City was the Trap turned inside out.
The streets and shells and burbs were blank and silent, but to get
anywhere or do anything you had to use the malls, and inside the
malls the electronic circus was at full output. The air buzzed with
floaters, stardust bloomed above every doorway, holos beckoned on
every side, and the walkways were jammed.

Made me feel homesick.

Not that Nightside City ever went in so
heavily for pink. That was American City’s favorite color, no doubt
about it. And of course there wasn’t any wind in the malls.

At least the malls were warm.

First Street was malled. I strolled down the
right-hand traffic lane watching the displays, admiring the way the
floaters picked out the best-dressed people in the crowd for their
pitches. That made it pretty clear why some of the really rich
people I’d met didn’t show it.

The floaters ignored me—I couldn’t afford to
dress well, and probably wouldn’t have bothered to anyway. I got
the lightshows, though, and the directional pitches, and the scent
traps. There was one place almost lured me in, a neurochemical
joint—it wasn’t that their own pitch was so great, though the odors
were just fine, but I was distracted by a beefcake show across the
corner and wasn’t paying attention to where I was going. They
probably had some sort of subliminals going; I was right at the
door when I realized I didn’t want to go in.

After that I picked up the pace, and got to
the Sakai building around 19:30.