Nightside CIty (20 page)

But that’s because the city’s in a crater,
and the crater walls block the
real
winds. The
lowest
windspeed ever recorded on the surface of Epimetheus, excluding
craters and the four poles, is a hundred kilometers per hour. It
peaks at a hundred and fifty.

And it never stops. Never. Never lets up at
all.

It’s because of the slow rotation, and the
generally smooth surface. With the mantle still semi-liquid, or at
least pretty soft, and the continental plates as small as they are,
Epimetheus doesn’t have a lot of big mountains; they sink back in
or get eroded away almost as fast as they form. The only reason the
City’s crater is stable is that it’s smack in the middle of a
plate, where it’s balanced and doesn’t tip. Whatever made the
crater wasn’t going fast enough to punch right through the crust.
It’s a fluke. It’s a temporary fluke, too, because the wall is
wearing away—but that takes time. It’ll happen, though. All the
active wind and water and even the steady spray of celestial debris
help keep the surface level, wearing away any mountains or craters
that do form.

Anyway, ignoring the flukes, most of the
planet’s smooth and flat, with nothing to stop the wind.

As for how the winds got started, that’s
where the slow rotation comes in. At the noon pole, which is over
an ocean and has been for as long as humans have been on the
planet, the sun heats the air, and it rises, carrying water vapor,
and it blows away nightward at high altitude. The air cools along
the way, and drops the water as rain in the rainbelt, starting
about two hundred kilometers past the terminator onto the
nightside. At the midnight pole all that cool air drops, down to
the slushcap, and blows back dayward along the ground, back toward
the noon pole.

It’s one huge convection current, that’s all.
One great big convection current that covers the entire planet. And
in the millions of years since the planet’s rotation slowed enough
for there to
be
a noon pole and a midnight pole, it’s worked
up to a pretty good speed.

What this really means is that the entire
atmosphere of Epimetheus is one big windstorm, one that’s been
going on for millions of years and will go on for millions
more.

That added a nice little final touch to my
position; I had to walk a thousand kilometers or more head-on into
that wind, that hundred-kilometer-an-hour wind.

But I didn’t have any choice, so I took a
look around the cab, picked up the discarded gag, decided there
wasn’t anything else of any possible use, and then I slid out the
door onto the hard gray sand and I started walking into that wind,
head down, jacket pulled up around my neck, with the sun hot on my
back and the skin on my hands already red with sunburn, almost
starting to blister. I wrapped the gag, which was a strip of porous
fabric I couldn’t identify, across my mouth to make breathing
easier.

The wind almost lifted me from the ground
with every step; it was a constant pressure fighting me. I turned
first one shoulder forward, then the other, to cut into the wind,
and that helped a little. If I stopped moving and stayed upright, I
knew it would blow me back east like an empty wrapper down an
alley, probably at twice the speed I made by walking.

I wished I was heavier, but I wasn’t, and I
wasn’t going to get any heavier.

About a kilometer from the cab my grip on the
gag slipped, and the wind snatched the cloth away and sent it
sailing eastward. I turned for a second to watch it go, but I never
considered trying to retrieve it; it was moving faster than I ever
could, and in the wrong direction.

I turned westward again and marched on,
making do without it.

At least I always knew which way to go; face
to the wind, walking up my own shadow, away from the sun.

That shadow— that was something of a new
experience, too, having a shadow stretched out before me, that
moved when I moved, but that always kept the same shape. I’d seen
plenty of shadows, and cast my share, but when I walked in front of
a light in the city my shadow would shorten, then lengthen, as I
walked past. Eta Cass B cast shadows, of course, but they were
faint things, just darker patches in the red darkness of the city
streets. Eta Cass A wasn’t so gentle; that shadow before me was
hard-edged and sharp, black against the glowing sands.

It was my own little piece of the night, and
I admired it as I walked—when I could bear to open my eyes and look
at it.

I had hoped, when I left the cab, that the
wind would be cool, but it was too hard to feel cool; it didn’t
soothe, it ripped and tore, and I felt my skin tightening against
it. I squinted against the wind and the glare, and sometimes closed
my eyes entirely. I didn’t need to see to keep the right direction,
only to keep from stumbling over the rocks that dotted the
plain.

I hoped that my symbiote was handling the
ultraviolet, and the windburn, but I knew that it probably
couldn’t. It was meant for cuts and scrapes, the odd infection,
general tissue maintenance—not fending off the constant assault of
a hurricane, or hard radiation.

The wind stole my sweat away as fast as it
emerged, and I was dry and thirsty within twenty paces, and
although I still didn’t feel cool, I was shivering with an
uncontrollable chill before I’d walked the cab under the
horizon.

But I walked on. What else could I do?

The thought that I might be on the wrong side
of a sea occurred to me pretty much right at the start, too, but
there wasn’t anything I could do about that, either. I just
walked.

I had no choice unless I wanted to just lie
down and die. I didn’t. I walked.

It was a waking nightmare. At times I felt as
dead as Orchid and Rigmus surely thought I already was, but I never
stopped. I’m not someone who could ever just lie down and die, not
while I could still move. I had no food, no water, but with my
symbiote to help, I thought I could last as much as a week—I had
paid extra, back when I could afford it, to get a symbiote with a
transferable energy reserve, and with the capability to digest
excess tissue in a really bad emergency. Like this one. I figured
that I had a week, but that at the end of that time I’d have no
fat, no appendix, maybe less tissue on several organs.

To walk a thousand kilometers in a week I
needed to cover a hundred and forty-three a day, about six every
hour—no sleep at all, of course, I couldn’t sleep. Six kilometers
an hour didn’t seem that much, just a fast walk.

A fast walk in blazing sun into a
hundred-kilometer-an-hour headwind, nonstop for seven days.

I think I knew it was hopeless right from the
first.

But I had no choice.

I don’t know how long I walked, or how far.
My landmarks weren’t by distance or time, since I had no way of
measuring either one. My landmarks were signs of progress or
impending doom.

The signs of progress were few and
feeble—losing sight of the cab, or imagining that my shadow had
lengthened a bit. The signs of impending doom were another
matter.

There were the blisters that formed on the
backs of my hands, and then the blisters on the back of my neck,
and in time the blisters on my feet that probably weren’t from the
sun at all, but from walking too much.

There was the first time I stumbled over a
rock, and the first time I stumbled and fell, and the first time I
fell and couldn’t get up right away.

There was the time when the grit in the wind
finally ruined the seal on my jacket, so it wouldn’t hold any
longer.

There was the time I threw away my empty
holster, to save weight, and the time not long after that when I
wondered if chewing on it might have yielded a trace of
moisture.

There was the time when I realized that my
eyes were
not
just adjusting to the glare, but that my
vision was fading—the ultraviolet had burned my retinas. I saw the
sand as just an expanse of gray, rather than individual grains.

In time, I no longer saw the smaller rocks,
and the fine details of the sky—the high, lacy clouds blowing
fiercely westward, outracing me on their way to the
rainbelt—vanished into a white blur.

My mind wandered, of course. Walking across
that wasteland, all of it the same, the details fading as my
eyesight faded, how could I possibly keep all my attention on what
I was doing?

I tried to imagine what a sea would look like
if I hit one—assuming I could still see, and didn’t walk right into
it. I’d seen holos, of course, and even direct visual feeds off
wire of nightside seas, but I didn’t remember a wire feed of a
daytime sea, and holos don’t always capture everything. That bright
daylight would sparkle from the water, I knew that, but I couldn’t
remember just what the holos had looked like, whether they had
shown daylight lancing painfully, the way it glinted from some of
the rocks, or whether the water muted it somehow. I thought the
pseudoplankton might absorb some of the light.

I wondered if Epimethean sea water would kill
me quickly, or only slowly, if I drank it. I knew that it was
toxic. The seas were radioactive and rich in metal salts.

I knew that if I reached a sea, I would try
to drink the water. My thirst was completely beyond rational
control. The thought of drinking my own blood occurred to me, and
if I’d had a good sharp blade I might have tried it, but with
nothing sharp except my teeth I was able to resist.

I wondered whether my little stroll would
have been better or worse if Epimetheus had native life on land,
and decided that it would depend on just what kind of life, but
that it would probably be worse. After all, the pseudoplankton were
toxic, as toxic as the seas they lived in, maybe more so, laced
with heavy metals, their whole biochemistry based on heavy metals,
and any land life would have to be equally poisonous, wouldn’t
it?

But then, if Epimetheus had trees, they might
cut the wind a little. I felt as if microscopic grit was being
rammed into my skin with every step I took into the perpetual gale,
and the idea of a drop in wind speed came pretty close to paradise
just then. So maybe trees, even poisonous trees with tempting,
lethal fruit, would have been an improvement.

Animals, though, animals were something I
didn’t want. Not that I had to worry about those, since the planet
had never evolved any, even in the seas. The idea of alien,
untailored organisms scampering about was unpleasant. I didn’t like
things that much out of control. I didn’t like the idea of things
that could sneak up on me, things I knew nothing about.

I knew that there were no native animals on
Epimetheus, but I thought about them anyway. I thought about things
prowling behind me, just out of sight, the sound of their movements
lost in the wind. I began to imagine that they were really
there.

The fact that I was losing my sight made
those imaginings worse. I never liked things I couldn’t see, and as
I struggled on I could see less and less, as if that whole blazing
bright world were vanishing into a hot mist.

I hated that.

When I was a girl, a very young girl, it
still rained in Nightside City sometimes. The crater was already
east of the rainbelt when I was born, but there were flukes, bits
and pieces of clouds that dropped down out of the upper flow and
were sent eastward again without ever reaching the main body of the
rainbelt. Some of those happened to hit the city’s crater, and if
they were still high enough to clear the western wall, we got rain.
I remember that rain. Fat raindrops would come splashing down from
the sky, sending ripples of distortion through the advertising
displays, drawing streaks on the black glass walls, forming puddles
on the streets that would turn slick and green with pseudoplankton
in minutes. Most of my friends didn’t like it, and stayed inside,
but I loved it. I would go out barefoot in the streets, running
through the puddles, trying to splash them dry before they could
turn green, feeling the rain in my hair and on my back, rolling
down inside the collar of my coverall. I would stop and stand and
look up at the sky, mouth open, feeling the rain on my face and
staring in wonder at a sky without stars, without the red glow of
Eta Cass B, but with a gray cap on it that reflected back the
city’s lights as a warm, even shimmer.

When I got home after the rain had stopped my
father always shouted at me that I was a fool, to behave like that;
that if I kept my mouth open long enough in the rain, the
pseudoplankton might just start growing in
me
. I laughed at
him. I thought that was just silly. I knew the rain wouldn’t hurt
me. It was clean and cool and wonderful; it couldn’t hurt me.

I think I was maybe six years old, Terran
years, when it really rained for the last time. Once or twice after
that a wisp of cloud drifted in from somewhere, but it brought
mist, not rain. The cloud wouldn’t be thick enough to break into
rain; instead it would settle down into the city streets as mist,
as fog, wrapping haloes around every light, hiding the edges and
angles on everything.

The soft blurring frightened me, where my
father’s threats about pseudoplankton only amused me, and I didn’t
go out in the fog. If you walked in the mist you could feel the
droplets on your skin, wet and cool, but they weren’t distinct
impacts, each drop a unit, the way the rain had been. Instead the
mist was like a soft sheet, brushing over you but never coming to
rest, never staying where you could get hold of it.

I didn’t like that. I liked my reality
hard-edged. I didn’t mind if it was messy, like the dead green
scabs left by dried puddles, like the tangle of advertising and
counter-advertising in Trap Over, like some of the work I did for
the casinos before they threw me out, or did for myself since. I
didn’t mind if it was messy, but I wanted to see it all clearly. I
wanted to know what I was feeling.