Nightside CIty (13 page)

Of course, she could have been born a little
stupid, too. That can happen to naturally-bred kids no matter how
rich their parents are. And a childhood like hers didn’t exactly
force one to face the harsh realities of life.

Could she be ignoring the approach of
dawn?

That would be a hell of a good trick, with
the light glinting off the towers she just bought in the West End,
and the sky over her home turning blue, but just maybe she could do
it.

Maybe she was misjudging again, I mused, the
way she had with the psychobugs. Maybe she thought that people
would stay, that the City would be domed and carry on.

Maybe that, or maybe she had something else
in mind. Or maybe I was off on the wrong path entirely; I was
writing programs without data, after all.

I felt that I needed a little bit more,
something that would provide a tinge of evidence, one way or the
other, and it occurred to me that maybe she had said something to
somebody that would give me the clue I needed to put it all
together—not anything as obvious as explaining her plans, but just
some little indication of how her thoughts were running on the
matter of dawn. I had those gigabytes of data to search, and I knew
ways to get more.

I keyed on dawn, long-range planning, and
real estate values, and started the searchers out again.

While I was doing that, it also occurred to
me that other humans might already have the information I needed,
and be able to retrieve it for me more efficiently than the com
could. Nakada and Orchid might be doing their best to keep quiet,
but they might have slipped up in an unrecorded conversation
somewhere. People do that.

My next search was a bit illegal, therefore,
and I knew I was in serious trouble if Nakada caught me at it, but
I figured it was worth the risk. I had to go in on wire, watching
ten ways at once and with decoy programs riding beside me, but I
got into the city’s com billing records and got a list of all calls
to or from Sayuri Nakada’s home in the past ten weeks.

I’d done this sort of thing before; com
records can be amazingly useful, and the city was amazingly sloppy
about guarding them. I suppose they weren’t considered important,
since they didn’t carry any juice. Or maybe the city figured anyone
who wanted them could get them somehow, so why bother with fancy
security?

Whatever the reasons, I didn’t really have
much trouble in getting the records I wanted. I didn’t even need
all of the precautions I took; only one decoy program caught any
flak at all. It was in, out, and I had the names.

I unplugged and looked over the list.

A hell of a lot of calls were to Paulie
Orchid. That was the first thing I noticed. Others were more
interesting, though.

There were a good many to the New York, which
made sense, but a high percentage of them were to a particular
human clerk in the accounting department; I suspected that
something was going on there that great-grandfather wouldn’t have
approved of. That could well be where those megabucks spent on the
West End came from. That was interesting, but it wasn’t what I was
after at the moment.

Plenty of calls were person-to-person stuff
that looked like chitchat rather than business, and I noted down
the names on those for future follow-up.

Most interesting of all, though, were a dozen
calls to an office at the Institute for Planetological Studies of
Epimetheus, listed by room number rather than name. Half of them
were conference calls with Paulie Orchid.

That looked very much as if Nakada really did
have some scheme in mind for somehow keeping Nightside City worth
living in. Really, what else would a Nakada scion want with the
handful of biologists and planetologists at the Ipsy, as we natives
called the Institute?

I sat back and considered my next step. I
could call the Ipsy, of course, but that might not be wise. After
all, if Nakada’s scheme were all open and above-board, I wouldn’t
have hit those dead ends. The whole plan, whatever it might be, was
obviously supposed to stay secret. Letting someone know that you
know a secret you aren’t supposed to know is asking for trouble,
and I couldn’t afford trouble. Hell, I couldn’t really afford the
tea I was drinking.

Better to stick with my original intentions
and nibble at the edges a bit more, see what fell into my lap. I
put a call through to Qiu Ying Itoh, who Nakada had called three
times in a week three weeks back.

It didn’t take much to get past his guardian
software; practically all I had to do was say it was a personal
matter, human affairs, and the program patched me right
through.

Itoh was a looker, and I could guess what
Nakada had been calling him about. They’d probably had a good time
in bed for a few nights, then gone on to other things. I wished I’d
taken time to pretty myself up a little more; nothing I could
afford could make me look really hot, but I could look decent
enough when I tried. My symbiote kept my color healthy, and I had
semi-intelligent dye implants on my eyes and lips that I’d gotten
for my fifteenth birthday which were long out of style but still
functioning—but I hadn’t touched my hair since my little talk with
Mariko Cheng.

Well, I’d already decided to play it
distraught, so I just hoped he’d accept that as a sign of
distress.

I also hoped he wouldn’t take a close look at
the background; my office wasn’t exactly the Ginza. I had my
scrambler on line to block the call origination signal, as usual,
and once again I’d re-routed the call, but Nakada’s friends weren’t
likely to be calling from anywhere as run-down as that office.

“Mis’ Itoh,” I said, in as silky a voice as I
could manage, “I’m calling because I need to talk to someone about
Sayuri, and she was talking about you last time I saw her.”

“Sayuri?”

“Sayuri Nakada.”

“Oh, of course, Mis’...”

I didn’t pick up the cue, on the off chance
he’d let it drop.

He didn’t. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I don’t
know your name, and the com says you’re logged on at a public
terminal.”

“Yes, I am,” I said. “I didn’t want anyone
else at home to overhear.”

He nodded. “I still didn’t get your name,” he
said.

He wasn’t about to let it go, so I gave up
and lied. “I’m Carlie Iida,” I said. “Didn’t Sayuri ever mention
me?”

“No,” he said.

“Well, she mentioned
you
,” I said,
before he could ask for any more details. “And that’s why I’m
calling. I’m worried about her.

“You are?” he asked.

“Yes, I am, very much!” I said, rushing it
out as if I’d been holding it back for weeks, waiting until I found
a sympathetic ear like his. “She won’t talk to me, and it’s obvious
that something’s got her really worried, but I don’t know what it
is and she won’t tell me, no matter what I ask her. Can
you
tell me what it is, Mis’ Itoh?”

He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Mis’ Iida,” he
said, “but I don’t really know Mis’ Nakada very well.”

“Oh, but you
must!
” I insisted. “I
mean, I know why she saw you, and I know it wasn’t anything, you
know,
serious
, but she must have talked to you, didn’t she?
Didn’t she say anything that might give you an idea what she’s
worried about?”

He shook his head again. “She talked, but it
was just pillow talk, how we were going to screw until the sun came
up, that kind of thing. She made some joke about how if that was
what we were going to do then she wouldn’t let the sun come up, and
I said something about in that case I’d need to be cyborged so I
wouldn’t wear out, and... you know the sort of talk. She never said
anything about being worried. She didn’t seem worried; if anything,
she seemed ready to celebrate something, but I never knew what.” He
shrugged. “I’m sorry I can’t help.”

I pouted, but it was pretty clear he wasn’t
going to tell me anything more. “Well, thank you anyway, Mis’
Itoh,” I said. “You’ve been very sweet, talking to me about this.
Thanks, and I hope you have a good day.” I exited the call, and sat
there looking at the screen for a moment.

That joke about not letting the sun rise—I
didn’t like that.

I picked another of her friends from my list
of calls and started to punch in codes, but then I cancelled and
took a minute to brush out my hair and tidy up a bit.

Then
I punched in codes.

Her friends weren’t all as pleasant as Qiu
Ying Itoh. Some I never got through to, some cut me off, some
argued. I used different lies, as I judged appropriate for each
case—since I usually had nothing to go on except appearance and how
tough it was to reach each person, I probably took some wrong
approaches, but I did my best. Whatever my story, I tried to nudge
the conversation toward the impending sunrise each time—not that
hard to do, since it was always in the back of everybody’s mind
already.

I got enough evidence to satisfy myself of
what she was doing, even though I didn’t think the lot of it would
count for anything in court. Besides her pillow jokes with Itoh,
there were two other incidents that convinced me.

Nakada had gotten sloppy drunk one night and
had told a friend, among other boasts, that she was going to stop
the sunrise and send the City back where it belonged.

Another time, while she was wired with
something—I wasn’t clear on what and didn’t ask—she told her
supplier that the scientists were wrong, that Epimetheus was a lot
closer to stopping its rotation than they thought, that dawn would
never break over Nightside City. He’d just thought she was
crazy.

Those three were the clearest, but she’d made
veiled references about it to half a dozen people. Somehow or
other, Sayuri Nakada intended to stop Nightside City from crossing
the terminator.

In itself, I thought that was a great
idea.

Unfortunately, I didn’t believe she could do
it safely. Her past record wasn’t very encouraging. Botching the
job could easily be worse than not trying at all; at least the
natural sunrise would be gradual and predictable.

She’d been talking to people at the Ipsy,
which was encouraging, but she had that grithead Orchid in on it,
which wasn’t.

If she had a plan that would actually work,
that would keep me and my home town safe on the nightside, then I
was all for it, and I didn’t care if she bought the whole damn city
for ten bucks and a tube of lube. I could give the squatters back
their money, tell them it was out of my league, and stop worrying
about the fare off-planet or a future spent scraping at radioactive
rocks. I might even make a deal that I’d keep my mouth shut and
help her out in exchange for giving the squatters a break, and
giving me the price of a few good meals.

That was the best-case outcome, the absolute
optimum short of a miracle. I didn’t believe for a minute that it
would happen.

No, the way I figured it, she had some scheme
that wouldn’t work, and that might do the City a lot of damage when
it went wrong. I knew that all the sensible ideas had been tried
out in comsims, and that they either didn’t work, or cost far too
much to even consider. Somehow I didn’t think that a burn-out like
Sayuri Nakada, or a sleazy slick-hair like Paulie Orchid, had come
up with a way around that. Even buying the entire city up cheap
shouldn’t make
that
big a difference in the final line of
the spreadsheets.

Bringing the Ipsy into it, though, that made
the whole thing uncertain. My best guess—and all it was was a
guess—was that some planetologist there had a nifty idea he thought
might work, some one-in-a-million shot he knew couldn’t get
respectable backing, so he got a hustler, by the name of Orchid, to
find him a less-than-completely-respectable backer, like Sayuri
Nakada. And I’d bet everything I ever owned or hoped to own that
this theoretical son of a bitch, if he or she existed, had no
intention of being on Epimetheus when Nakada actually tried this
stunt he’d thought up.

The time had come to call the Ipsy, I
decided, and see if I could get the story on just what they were
selling Nakada. I touched keys.

The Institute’s logo appeared on the screen,
totally flat. “We’re sorry,” a synthetic voice told me, “But the
Institute for Planetological Studies is closed to the public until
further notice.”

That was a surprise; for as far back as I
could remember they’d always been eager for any attention they
could get. I’d toured the place once as a kid, and for a while they
ran a constant holo feed as an “informational service.”

If they were closed now that just made me
more suspicious than ever that something had skewed data
somewhere.

“This is a personal emergency,” I said. “I
need to speak to a human.”

There was a pause, and then a voice that was
either human or a good imitation came on the line, but the image on
the screen didn’t change.

“Who is this?” she asked.

“My name’s Qing,” I said, which was close
enough to the truth that if my identity came out I could say it was
a slip of the tongue, but which wouldn’t let them track me down
easily. “I need to talk to whoever’s been doing the work for Sayuri
Nakada. Something’s come up.”

She hesitated, then exited the call.

I hadn’t expected that. I punched the code in
again.

“We’re sorry,” the synthetic began, as the
logo reappeared.

I interrupted it. “I was cut off,” I said.
“Reconnect me to whoever I was just talking to.”

The com beeped, and the logo was replaced by
a little message—contact rejected.

Then another message came through, not
spoken, but on the screen.

“The IPSE is a private, non-profit
organization, and is not affiliated in any way with Nakada
Enterprises.”

There was a pause, and then it added, “If you
want to know anything about work done for Sayuri Nakada, ask Mis’
Nakada. We can’t tell you anything.”