Nightside City

Chapter Six

CHENG WATCHED THE SHOW WITH A SORT OF PUZZLED amusement. Blue-green light rippled across her face in time to the music.

She hadn't bothered to act surprised when I greeted her at the bank. She had said hello, and after a little chat about the weather I suggested that, as old friends bumping into each other by chance, a celebratory drink might be in order.

She agreed, and I suggested the Manhattan Lounge at the New York.

That did surprise her a little, I think, but she agreed again, and there we were. The spy-eye hadn't yet spotted me again, so far as I could see.

"Is it really worth the cost of a zero-gravity field in here just for that?" she asked, pointing at the floor show. The woman was bent almost double, the man behind her pumping away. It wasn't the same couple that had been in there when I first checked the place out, but the act was the same.

"No," I said. "It's not. I'd bet you anything you like that that's not a zero-gravity field."

She looked at me. "No? What is it, then? Or what do you think it is?"

"It's a holo," I said. "A really top-quality one, and those two lovelies are in orbit somewhere, transmitting down here on a closed-circuit beam. It's a lot cheaper than any sort of zero gravity they could make at ground level. That's why the performers always exit through the top or bottom of the field when they go to clean up, and never come out through the audience. You can tell it's not taped, because they'll react to the audience sometimes-I guess it's a two-way hook-up-but those two are in orbit. Literally."

She looked back at the cylinder of white light and stared for a moment, then flicked a hand in front of her face.

"You're right," she said. She watched for another moment. "It's a good one, though. Look, you can see every hair."

I nodded without looking, and our drinks finally arrived, delivered by floater instead of through the table. I suppose it had something to do with the "olde Earthe" motif. Maybe the slow service did, too.

I sipped mine; it was decent enough. Cheng sipped hers and glanced back at the show.

"Mis' Cheng," I said. "I was hoping you could tell me something."

"Hm?" she said, as she turned back. "Oh, yes, I'm sorry. Listen, call me Mariko." She smiled.

I smiled back. "Call me Hsing," I said.

That startled her, I think, and she looked at me a bit more closely, but didn't ask anything.

I appreciated that. I like my first name just fine, but I don't want it used lightly-and I don't much like discussing it, either. It's just a quirk of mine. I have plenty. Ask anyone at Lui's. They call me Hsing there, and we don't discuss it.

I like Lui's; they don't discuss anybody's quirks there.

"Hsing," Cheng said. "All right." Her tone might have been a shade hostile, but I still didn't want her calling me anything but Hsing.

I smiled. "I was hoping, Mariko, that you could tell me something about Westwall Redevelopment. Anything at all."

She studied my face for a moment, so I tried to look sincere and harmless-which I hope I'm not, but at times it's a good way to look. Then she glanced around at the neighboring tables.

I had picked a quiet corner; the only human within natural earshot was an old man wearing an antique videoset, and with the plugs in his ears and patches on his eyes he wasn't going to be listening to us. He was leaning back in his chair, up against a black upholstered wall, and from the look on his face he was watching himself battle monsters in some classic thriller. I could see his hands twitch.

He could have been acting, I suppose, but if so he was damn good. And of course, any number of machines or synthetics or cyborgs could have been listening, but that's true just about anywhere.

Cheng apparently decided it was private enough. She turned back and looked at my face again.

"You don't know who they are?" she asked.

"Nope," I said. "They've made a pretty good job of staying low."

She nodded. "I don't really know, either," she said. "But I handled the sale for the bank, so I talked to them. I don't suppose you've ever bought real estate, have you?"

I hadn't. My family owned a place once, just north of the Trap, and after it went for unpaid taxes the city couldn't find a buyer, so my brother still lived there when he wasn't working, and I was still nominally welcome there, but I'd never bought any myself. I shook my head.

"Well, the law says that only humans can buy land. Nothing artificial. If it's a corporation, then it's got to be a human officer that carries out the final transaction and accepts the deed. No software, no machines, no genens, no cultured biotes, nothing modified from other stock, just human. I mean, it can be cyborged or customized from here to Cass B, and we don't care if it was born or micro-assembled, but it's got to be human within the legal definition of the term."

I nodded; I knew that, of course, but I was letting her tell it her way.

"Ordinarily that's no big deal, y'know? We do all the screenwork, and then the buyer stops by the office in person to verify it and pick up the hard copy, and we get a look and see that she's human. We don't need any gene charts or blood samples or anything, we just take a look and check the door readings. It's no big deal." She paused.

I nodded again to encourage her.

"It's no big deal," she repeated, "except that for this Westwall outfit it apparently was. Their software did all the negotiations, took care of all the screenwork, but that wasn't any problem, we've done that before; we told it we couldn't close without a human principal, and it didn't miss a byte. But then, when we asked for someone to come and pick up the deed, all of a sudden you'd think we were demanding wetware rights and all progeny. 'We represent a human,' it insisted. 'Why can't we send a floater?' I finally just had to insist that it was bank policy, and if they wanted the property, a human had to come and get the deed, and if they couldn't manage that, we'd forget the whole thing. I mean, it's not like this was going to affect the bank's solvency; it wasn't a major transaction." She shook her head, remembering.

"So what happened? Did a human show up?"

"You saw the deed, didn't you? Of course a human showed up, a little wire-faced slick-hair the door identified for us as Paul Orchid. He thought he was something, I guess, but if he had the money to buy even that dump on West Deng, then he won it upstairs here-the Excelsis wouldn't have let him in, and he sure couldn't have earned that much. I figured that the real buyer sent him. Whatever, it wasn't my problem, so long as he was human and an officer of Westwall Redevelopment."

"Was he?"

"It's funny you should ask that-so did we. Ordinarily, we don't worry about it, we take the buyer's word that he's who he says he is, but this time, because of all the argument the software gave us, I had the door run a full-scale background check."

She paused, watching my eyes, and I tried to look innocently fascinated.

"Hsing," she said. "This guy Orchid is scum. He turned up on Epimetheus illegally, to begin with, after jumping bail on Prometheus on a charge that wasn't worth the trouble of extradition-some sort of minor assault charge. He was on the edge from then on, for three years-and then he disappeared from the records, went completely invisible to the public com, for about a year and a half, until a few weeks ago, when he turned up as a vice president in Westwall Redevelopment.

"And that's the damnedest part, he really was a vice president. No doubt about it, everything in order up and down the line, this little piece of organic grit was third in command at Westwall Redevelopment." She shrugged. "Can you explain that?"

"No," I said. "Can you? Did you look into it any further?"

"Hell, no!" she said, sitting up straight. Her hair caught a beam of brilliant green light. "It wasn't my business. I gave him the deed and waved good-bye and then put on file that I had a personality clash with Westwall Redevelopment and didn't want to handle them if they came back. I mean, it's pretty clear to me that there's a bug in the program somewhere, but it's not my program, and I'm no detective anyway."

"But I am, right?" I smiled and shook my head. "Sorry, Mariko, but I don't know any more about Westwall than you do-at least, not yet. I've just started on this." I leaned back. "This is a big help, though, and I appreciate it-it gives me a place to start. If you like, I can keep you posted on what I find out." I gulped liquor and then thought of something. "The payment was okay? The money came through, and the transfer fees got paid?"

"Of course," Cheng said, obviously surprised that I could even think of questioning that. So much for the idea that somebody had a way of faking title transfers. I'd narrowed my original four possibilities down to one: somebody really was buying property in the West End.

I'd originally thought that anybody doing that had to be pretty badly glitched somewhere, and I still didn't see any other explanation. I just couldn't see what was worth buying in the West End.

I wondered if the mystery buyer was this Orchid character. That bit about not wanting to come by the office sounded like something needed debugging.

"Did you ever ask him what the problem was with having a human pick up the deed?" I asked.

"Oh, yeah, certainly," Cheng said, "And he said something about how the management software thought it was inefficient. Then he made a pass at me." She grimaced.

I made a sympathetic coo. I could see why she hadn't wanted to tell me this over the com; it was gossip, really, and saying unkind things about a customer isn't good for one's career in banking. The useful parts, for me, were eliminating the possibility of faked transfers, and having a name, a real name, that I could work from.

I was eager to get back to my office, where I could get back into my com nets, but I didn't want to just walk right out-after all, I was supposed to be the hostess of this little get-together. I could plead a remembered appointment or the press of business, but the proper etiquette then would be to tab another drink or two on my card for Cheng, maybe a meal or her cab fare, as well, and I couldn't afford that. So I sat back and watched the show for a minute.

Cheng watched with me.

The couple was face-to-face, doing a slow spin, speed changing with each thrust as the center of mass shifted. Little globes of sweat were drifting away on a thousand tangents and vanishing as they reached the edges of the cylinder of light.

There was a certain fascination to it, I had to admit.

I watched, and Cheng watched, and after a moment Cheng pushed back her chair. "I think I better go," she said. "Thanks for the drink." Her voice was a little unsteady.

I nodded. "Thank you," I said. I watched her go.

I had hoped for that reaction. I knew she had a man at home, and watching people screw does tend to make people horny, particularly after a drink or two. I knew that well enough.

I finished my own drink, paid the tab, and left.