Nightside CIty (12 page)

I touched keys, checked my credit balance to
make sure I could afford it, which I couldn’t really but it
wouldn’t actually put me over any limits right away, and then I
began calling up every data bank I could get at, free or charge,
and running full-scale searches for any mention of Nakada.

The stuff just poured in, gigabytes of it.
Sayuri Nakada was a big name in the economy and in the general high
life on Epimetheus, and that meant that people took an interest in
her and recorded a lot about her.

I routed it all to a sort-and-file program
that would pull up what I needed on demand, and then I just let it
all pile up.

Once I had the searches running, I took a
moment to pull some of the basic biodata onto a screen and read it
off.

Sayuri Nakada was born on Prometheus, on
October 30, 2334 by the standard Terran calendar, which made her
not quite thirty-two–younger than I was. That surprised me. I had
known she was young, of course, and that she wasn’t one of the
founders of Nakada Enterprises, just one of the horde of heirs, but
I still hadn’t realized she was
that
young. I would have
guessed that the family would have wanted someone a bit more mature
and experienced in charge of things on the nightside.

I called for selection of news stories—or
rumors—regarding her arrival in the City, and got a few dozen
entries; I picked a few and read on.

After a little of that I backtracked to
Prometheus; coverage of events there was spottier, since not
everything gets transmitted to Epimetheus, but it was still pretty
extensive.

I got interested in what I was reading—I tend
to do that. After an hour or so of tiring my eyes I plugged in, to
take it all in more quickly.

By 13:00 I thought I had a pretty good idea
of what sort of code Sayuri Nakada ran, but I still didn’t know
what she wanted with the West End. Not in any detail, anyway. I
figured it was probably some grand scheme that wouldn’t work. That
seemed to be in character.

Catch was, I didn’t know what kind of a grand
scheme.

I ran back through the relevant stuff
quickly.

She was born rich, really rich; her parents
were second cousins and both major heirs to the original Nakadas,
with dibs on something like twelve percent of Nakada Enterprises
between them. Sayuri was their only kid, and they spoiled her
rotten; human babysitters, unlimited com and credit access, implant
education, toy personas, the whole cliché.

Then they dumped her.

Oh, not without reason, and it’s not as if
she didn’t have any warning. She’d been hell since she hit puberty,
totally out of control, burning her brain out with guided current
and psychoactives of all sorts, reprogramming her personality every
few days, growing or building illegal sex partners for herself,
screwing up any family business she could get at, bringing assorted
street-sleaze into the family compound, and all the rest.
Reportedly she’d once fed an illegal intelligence into her
bloodstream and spent a week doing nothing but communing with her
own interior, and had then killed the poor thing. She’d used
synesthesia, painwiring, neural taps, everything.

Her parents had tried all the usual stuff to
level her out, but she’d refused anything more intrusive than
counseling—stood on her rights as a natural human, which was pretty
ludicrous given some of the stuff she’d done to her brain just for
entertainment. She did do sessions with a counselor; she had to put
up with that, to keep the juice flowing—but she’d com the counselor
with a genen toy between her legs, and plug straight into the
jackbox when she exited the call.

Finally, when she turned eighteen—Terran
years, not Promethean; she was six by local time—her parents told
her they’d had enough and threw her out.

Some of this had a pretty familiar ring, you
know. My parents did the dump on me, too. That sort of soured me on
ancestor worship for quite some time.

Their reasons were completely different, of
course. I was never into self-destruction; I like my mind just fine
in its natural state, and I saw enough sleaze on the streets
without bringing it home. Besides, I never had the juice for the
sort of flamboyant decadence that Sayuri Nakada went in for. In
fact, that was what got me dumped, a shortage of juice. My parents
were tired of supporting me and my sibs, and tired of Epimetheus,
with its nonexistent long-term prospects. They wanted to use their
money on something besides their three kids. So they did the dump
on us all when the oldest, my brother ‘Chan—Sebastian Hsing—hit
eighteen. I was fifteen, either Terran or Epimethean— there’s only
twelve days a year difference, and I’d just turned fifteen locally.
I hadn’t caused anyone any real trouble; I just cost money. My kid
sister Alison was twelve Terran, eleven local; she hadn’t had a
chance to cause trouble, but she cost money, too, and with a sib
over eighteen, twelve Terran is old enough. At least, that’s what
the law says on Epimetheus.

So my parents did the dump and saved up for a
couple of years, and with the juice they saved my father bought
himself a permanent dream somewhere in Trap Under, where the
sunlight will never shine no matter what happens above, and my
mother shipped out for parts unknown and hasn’t been heard from
since.

Sayuri Nakada’s parents didn’t go anywhere.
The only thing they were tired of was Sayuri. So they dumped her,
but the whole family stayed right there on Prometheus.

Of course, she was still a Nakada, and they
couldn’t cut all her connections. Legally she wasn’t their problem
anymore, but they couldn’t kick her out of the extended family
completely; she was still a Nakada, genetically and emotionally.
And despite screwing around with her life for five or six years she
still had a pretty good opinion of herself, too, which always
helps; self-assurance can be better than family or even money,
under the right circumstances. She wasn’t about to let herself rot.
She used her name to get credit at a bio outlet, cleaned up her act
in a couple of weeks, and applied to her great-grandfather, old
Yoshio Nakada himself, for a job.

The old man had an old-fashioned sense of
family, I guess. He took her on as a dickerer in the out-system
trade, and for a while she surprised everyone and did all right at
it. She kept out the gritware well enough, and kept things running
smoothly—usually. She did mess up sometimes, bought or sold things
on her own little whims, but never anything serious until she got
bored and decided to impress dear old Grandfather Nakada with how
smart she was by buying a big shipload of novelty genens that he
had already turned down. Big genens, not microbes, from the size of
your hand up to the size of a cab, but too stupid for skilled
labor; they were meant for pets, or servants, or whatever. Little
Sayuri had had a few around over the years, as I mentioned, and
maybe that’s why she went for them. She figured she knew better
than the old man did, that she’d turn a quick profit on her own and
amaze all and sundry with her brilliance.

Well, she wasn’t smarter than he was after
all; the genens didn’t sell, or died while still under warranty, or
broke things and ran up liability suits. One of the smarter ones
even got hold of some legal software and applied for citizenship,
but it failed the qualifiers and left Nakada with its bills.

Grandfather Nakada was still big on family,
though—I guess he can afford to be. Sayuri got bailed out and given
another chance.

Then a year or two later she suddenly decided
the bottom was about to drop out of the market for psychoactive
bacteria, and she refused to buy a big incoming batch of prime
stock, simply wouldn’t take them, not even at straight shipping
cost. Word got out, and the other big buyers panicked and cancelled
orders, but the street market was still just as good as ever, so
the stuff that stayed on the market went at triple price—and
everybody had it except Nakada Enterprises.

After that, the old man decided that little
Sayuri might do better elsewhere, and he sent her to Epimetheus to
oversee the all family business in Nightside City. Except that the
family business in the City consisted of the New York and a few
simple trade and supply runs, and maybe an occasional experiment,
and the New York, with Vijay Vo in charge, pretty much ran itself.
And they didn’t let her mess with anything else much, either.

It was exile, of course, but only temporary,
since everybody knew that the City was going to fry, and that she’d
get shipped back to Prometheus when the New York first saw the
light of day. I figure they thought they were giving her a chance
to calm down, settle in.

It seemed to work, too. She’d behaved herself
for a long time, doing only an occasional small-scale deal of her
own, and some of those actually made money.

It looked to me, though, as if it hadn’t
worked forever; to me this West End deal looked one hell of a lot
like one of her big, splashy, show-the-system projects, like the
genens or the psychobugs. I figured she had some scheme up her ass
that was supposed to make her rich enough that she could tell her
family to eat wire and die, something she was doing entirely on her
own so she could come home from Epimetheus a hero instead of a
penitent.

But I
still
didn’t know what the hell
the scheme really was. I’d run searches for anything any Nakada
ever said about the West End, and come up blank. I’d run searches
for anything the West End ever said about her, and got nothing that
beeped, just the ordinary gossip I’d get anywhere. I’d run searches
for a connection between the West End and genens or psychobugs, and
got nothing except cop reports on breeders, bootleggers, poachers,
and valhallas, same as you’d find anywhere in the City. I couldn’t
see anything special about the West End except the very, very
obvious—it was worthless because it was about to fry.

I got myself some paté and tea for lunch and
sat down to think about it, still jacked in so I could follow up
quickly if anything resembling an idea came to me. I was jacked in,
but I wasn’t out on wire; I was staring into my teacup.

Maybe, I thought, it
is
the obvious
that’s at work here. Maybe she’s buying the West End because it’s
cheap. Maybe she wants to buy the whole damn city, and started with
the West End because it’s what she can afford.

That was grandiose enough for her, the idea
of buying the whole city. It felt right. And maybe she was taking
the trouble to try and squeeze rent out of the squatters to help
finance buying more; her own money must be running low, and she
wouldn’t want to use too much of the family money for fear of
having her little scheme uncovered too soon.

But the city was still worthless, in the long
run, because what made it worth living in was its location on the
nightside. When it passed the terminator it would be soaked in hard
ultraviolet, which meant scorched retinas and blistering sunburns,
not to mention a dozen sorts of skin cancer, more than most
symbiotes could handle. The temperature—which was already warmer
than I liked—would start inching up toward the unlivable. Sunlight
would also let the pseudoplankton in the water supply go totally
berserk, clogging everything—and those damn things are toxic. Not
to mention that every kilometer further east took the city a
kilometer further from the rainbelt that was the only source of
safe water on the planet.

And I, for one, didn’t want to live in
perpetual blinding glare. I knew that humans are supposed to be
adapted to it, that Eta Cass seen from near-dawn Epimetheus is
nominally no worse in the visible range than Sol from Earth’s
equator, but I didn’t believe it, not really. Maybe other people
could learn to see in sunlight, but I didn’t think I could. I’d
spent my life at night; I didn’t want to try day.

Not to mention what the ultraviolet and the
solar wind might do to all the electronics. I mean, killer sunburn
and skin cancer and burned retinas and a mutation rate measured in
percent instead of per million are bad enough for humans, but I
suspected that dawn meant a nasty death for unshielded software.
Not that I actually know anything about it, but all that random
energy pouring through a system has got to do something, doesn’t
it? Don’t they keep everything shielded on planets with normal
rotation?

Domes and shields and protective suits
weren’t worth the trouble. Everyone knew that. When Nightside City
passed into full sunlight it would all be worthless, and Sayuri
Nakada knew that as well as anyone, didn’t she?

She had to know it. When the City hit the
dayside it would be worthless.

I swallowed a lump of paté, and as I did a
thought occurred to me. Maybe, I thought, she saw it a bit
differently. Her record back on Prometheus made it obvious that she
had her own ways of thinking. Maybe she didn’t think of it as “when
the City hit the dayside.”

Maybe she thought of it as “
if
the
City hit the dayside.”

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.