Nightside City

Chapter Ten

I SIPPED TEA AND THOUGHT ABOUT IT. GOING BY HER earlier life, Nakada had a way of not seeing what she didn't want to see, and seeing things she needed even if they weren't there. She certainly still had the knack of ignoring things she didn't like, judging by my attempts to call her.

I wondered about just what long-term effects her misspent youth might have had on her. The official story is that any decent symbiote will prevent drugs or current or psychobugs or practically anything else from doing permanent damage, and of course Nakada would have had the best symbiotes and implants that money could buy, but I still wondered if her brain might have had a few circuits shorted-subtle little things that scans and symbiotes could miss, but with a cumulative effect of making her a little stupid, a little bit out of touch with reality.

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'd 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 the names on those for future follow-up.

Most interesting of all, though, were a dozen calls to an office at the Institute of 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 aboveboard, 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, then see what fell into my lap. I put a call through to Qiu Ying Itoh, whom 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-they 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 rerouted the call, but Nakada's friends weren't likely to be calling from anywhere as rundown 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.

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 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, among other boasts, had told a friend 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, and 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 hometown 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 burnout like Sayuri Nakada, or a sleazy slick-hair like Paulie Orchid, had come up with a way around that. Even buying the entire city cheap shouldn't make that big a difference in the final line of the spreadsheets.

Bringing the Ipsy into it, though, 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 had run 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; 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, nonprofit 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.

So they weren't talking, either. Nakada and Orchid had bounced me, and now the Ipsy, too.

And from their reaction, I didn't think that my best-case scenario was going to come true.

I didn't like this at all. Nakada and the people at the Ipsy might just figure that since Nightside City was doomed anyway, it didn't matter if they risked wrecking it in trying to save it.

They might even have had a point, really. So what if it was a gamble? What did they have to lose?

I didn't know what they had to lose, but I didn't like the idea that they were gambling with my home. I didn't like it, and I intended to find out just what the wager actually was.

I had to get somebody to talk to me, but I didn't know who to approach at the Ipsy, and I figured Orchid was probably just a flunky or a go-between, and besides, he was repulsive. I knew I could get him to talk to me if I had to, but I didn't want to, not yet.

That left Sayuri Nakada herself, and I decided it was time we had a little chat-in person, without a lot of intrusive software, or any worries about other people tapping into the com.

I got my gun and called a cab.