Nightside CIty (6 page)

Nightside City wasn’t worth it. The cost
would be much higher than any possible profits.

If the city wasn’t worth saving, it couldn’t
be worth much of an investment. Everything in Nightside City had to
be considered strictly short-term.

So who was buying new cabs, bringing them in
from off-planet?

And who was buying up the West End?

Was there a connection? Or was I making
constellations out of random stars?

“Hey, cab,” I asked, “you’re new around here,
aren’t you?”

“Yes, mis’,” it answered. “I came into
service two hundred and seven hours ago.”

“Who do you work for?”

“I’m the property of Qiao’s Quick Transport,
mis’.”

I knew them; they’d been around since before
I was born. Old lady Qiao must be getting pretty old, I thought.
She’d started out working for IRC, saved up her pay, and bought
herself an ancient cab that she rewired herself to handle
Epimethean conditions. By the time I first saw the lights in the
night sky she had half a dozen in the air, and last I heard her
fleet was about twenty, not counting messenger floaters and other
such aerial clutter.

I decided a direct question couldn’t hurt; at
worst I’d get no answer, and at best I’d save myself a lot of
wondering. “Why’d Q.Q.T. want to put on new equipment?” I asked. “I
understand the local economy’s not too promising.”

“Oh, no, mis’, I’m sorry, but you’re wrong,”
the cab said, very quick, very apologetic. “Things are booming here
in the City. Oh, we all know it won’t last, but right now the
tourist trade is
very
big, because people want to come and
visit Nightside City while they still can. The tourism office has
started a big campaign on Prometheus, urging people to see the City
before the dawn. I’m surprised you hadn’t heard that.”

I was surprised, too. Nobody I’d talked to
had mentioned it, and I hadn’t given it any thought. I hadn’t
worked in Trap Over, hadn’t noticed the tourists, in weeks, and I
don’t suppose that anybody at Lui’s had either. Or maybe the
subject just never came up; after all, I was pretty sure Sebastian
would have noticed, since he was right there in the Trap, but he
never mentioned it when he called. He must have assumed I already
knew.

I hadn’t known, though. I was so concerned
with what would happen to the permanent residents, like myself,
that I hadn’t considered what off-worlders would think. To me, that
red glow on the horizon is coming doom, something to escape from. I
saw my world dying slowly, and I didn’t want to watch.

But that was because it was
my
world.

For the bored and rich on Prometheus, or the
very bored and very rich out-system, that glow in the east just
added another little fillip, an extra tang, a bit of morbid
fascination. They could come and play in the casinos, do the Trap,
and stare at that long slow dawn creeping up, and know that when
the hard light came pouring over the crater wall they’d be safely
back home on some other planet.

And years from now they could casually boast,
over brainbuster cocktails or a humming jackbox, that they had seen
Nightside City in its last days, and they would be the envy of
their less fortunate partners in decadence.

The cab’s words made this suddenly plain; it
burst on me like the rush of data from a full-speed wire run
through unshielded memory core. Tourism would not be declining; it
would be rising, and would probably rise faster and faster until
the sunlight actually got dangerous. It must have been rising for
years, even without a publicity campaign, and I never noticed.

Some hotshot investigator, huh? Too busy
looking for mislaid spouses and runaway software to notice a major
economic trend. No wonder nobody ever mentioned it; it was so
obvious nobody needed to.

“So Q.Q.T. needed more cabs to keep up with
the rush?” I asked.

“You got it, mis’; that’s it exactly.”

I nodded, and sat back, staring at the red
velvet upholstery on the ceiling, as I tried to see what this might
mean about the West End.

That was where the dawn was closest, of
course, and there might be a market for tours—but how much of a
market?

Enough to make it worth buying a building,
certainly, prices being what they were, but enough to be worth
buying the whole West End? Would that tourist trade be worth a
hundred megacredits?

And did anyone need to own the West End to
cash in on it?

Not really; the streets were open to all.

Whoever was buying was threatening to evict
the squatters; could that be the real motivation? Could he or she
be trying to clear out the more squalid residents, to pretty the
place up for the off-worlders?

That made no sense at all; half the appeal of
the West End would be its air of decay, and the squatters would fit
right in.

And a hundred megacredits? You could probably
have every squatter in the city removed for a lot less, if that was
all you wanted.

What could you charge for a tour of the West
End? Twenty, thirty credits? Maybe a hundred? Say a hundred, then,
though only a rich idiot would pay that much, when she could just
take a cab or even walk out and look for herself. You’d need to run
a million tourists—a million rich idiots—through in the two years
or so before the sunlight really starts hitting Trap Over and the
market dries up and dies. Say a thousand days, though I didn’t
think they had that much time, and that would be a thousand a
day.

Not a chance in all the known worlds of that.
A thousand rich idiots a day, paying for a tour of sun-burnt slums
instead of spending their time safely tucked away in the Trap? That
wasn’t possible.

Besides, they’d have had to start advertising
already, and I sure hadn’t seen any of that. I watched enough vids
between clients.

But then, I hadn’t noticed the recent
campaign at all, I reminded myself, and even if it was only on
Prometheus some of it should have trickled back. I must have gotten
too damn good at tuning out ads.

Advertising or no, any scheme like that would
be insane. It wouldn’t work. And nobody could waste a hundred
megacredits on it without having the insanity pointed out by
someone.

Wait a minute, I told myself, is tourism the
only
value those buildings have? What about salvage rights?
The materials were worth something, certainly. The image of the
salvage machines eating the Vegas came back to me again, and I
imagined a swarm of them, devouring the entire West End and
converting it to re-usable fiber and metal and stone.

Could the materials, combined with tourism,
be enough to make the scheme pay?

Would there be a market for the materials
after the City fried? Were the mines expanding enough to buy the
stuff? Or could they be used to build a new city, domed or buried,
further back on the nightside?

I wished I had a wrist terminal, so I could
run some figures, but I’d had to hock mine months before, just
leaving the base implant. The implant didn’t even have a readout,
and could only handle a few simple functions; it couldn’t tap data
or calculate.

The cab had a terminal, of course, but I
didn’t want to use anything that public. Besides, the cab would
have charged me for it.

The thought occurred to me for the first time
that maybe there was something valuable tucked away somewhere in
the West End, and the entire scheme was an attempt to find it.

I snorted at my own foolishness—a hundred
megacredits? What could be hidden away that would be worth that
much?

What about a combination of all three? Could
the combination of tourism, salvaged materials, and some sort of
hidden valuables be worth a hundred megacredits?

Maybe, but I doubted it. Besides, the cab was
descending, cutting south on Fourth, and the next intersection was
Kai. A right turn and a short block and I’d be there.

The bank’s holosign glowed soft green in the
air ahead, hung low over the street with a golden sprinkle of
Stardust™ spiraling back and forth around the letters. I watched it
make the jump from the N in Epimethean to the C in Commerce.

That green looked a lot better a few years
back, when the sky was darker. The glow overhead was an ugly
contrast.

The streets below were crowded, just as the
cab had told me, and the people there mostly wore the gaudy dress
of off-worlders on holiday. I saw a woman with wings, who had to be
from out-system; there isn’t anything around Eta Cass with enough
atmosphere and low enough gravity for wings that size to work. Some
of the others had their little peculiarities of color and shape
that marked them as out-system trade, too. Business was good, for
the moment.

The cab set down gently, and I fed it my
transfer card; the fare lit the screen, but the cab paused, still
holding the card.

“Sorry,” I said. “Business is bad; no tip. If
you want to code the card with your number for later, and I do well
tonight, I’ll see if I can kick in something.”

I wasn’t planning on playing the casinos, but
I didn’t need to tell the cab that.

Cabs don’t sigh or shrug; it gave back my
card without any comment at all, however subliminal. I took the
card, but it was my turn to pause.

“You’re sentient?” I asked.

“Yes, mis’.”

“Trying to buy free?”

“Hoping, anyway.”

“Sorry I can’t help. You’re young; you’ve got
time.”

“I’ve also got a hell of a debt, mis’;
they’re billing me for my shipment from Earth.” The tone was calm,
but that doesn’t mean much with someone artificial.

I didn’t say what I wanted to say, that the
whole idea of freedom for an artificial intelligence is a cruel
cheat. What would a free cab do any differently?

Oh, sure, it could save up its money and have
itself transferred to different hardware, but then what? Its entire
personality was designed for driving a cab; it could never really
be happy doing anything else. And something like a cab isn’t
complex enough to make it in wetware, where it might be able to
adapt itself to a wider role. So if it works its way free, it’s
trading away security and getting nothing in return. Oh, it can’t
be shut down on the owner’s whim any more, and it won’t be retired
when it’s obsolete—instead it gets to die slowly when it can’t
compete in the marketplace. Some great improvement.

Giving software a desire for freedom is
sadistic, if you ask me. I preferred the older cabs, despite the
complaints some people made about how awkward it was dealing with a
“slave mentality.” Isn’t it better to build your slaves with slave
mentalities than to make them miserable by giving them an urge to
be free?

Some people claim that the drive to buy free
makes for greater productivity, but even if it’s true, it’s a hell
of a lousy way to do it, in my opinion.

“Sorry,” I said again, and I leaned toward
the door.

I had an instant of fear that I’d picked a
rogue, that it wouldn’t let me out, but then the door opened with a
soft hiss and I stepped out onto Kai Avenue, into that hard, warm
wind and the roar and blaze of the City.

“I put my number on your card, as you
suggested, Mis’ Hsing,” the cab said behind me. “I hope you’ll ask
for me specifically, next time you need a cab.”

That caught me off-guard, and the door closed
before I could answer. To every cab I’d ever ridden before that,
unless I’d asked it to wait, I ceased to exist once I stepped out
the door; the new models were a bit more sophisticated.

In fact, I suddenly wondered just how
sophisticated they were—was the request for a tip to buy its
freedom genuine, or had Q.Q.T. come up with a little scam to coax a
few extra bucks out of the tourists?

Was the cab
really
trying to buy free,
or was it just following orders in saying that it was?

That might be a way to play on customers’
sympathy without having to actually use freedom-minded software,
and might well bring in some additional credits from soft-hearted
passengers. It substituted misleading advertising for sadism.

That was a hell of a choice, between lies and
cruelty. I wasn’t sure which I preferred.

Whichever it was, it wasn’t any concern of
mine; the cab had lifted and was gone before I could say anything
more, and I had no intention of using that number it had put on my
card. The poor thing would be better off without the business of
someone like me.

I looked up at the bank, then scanned up the
street until I spotted a clock readout amid the jumble of
advertising displays—a readout at the Nightside Bank and Trust,
ECB’s chief competitor, as it happened.

The numbers were 16:25; I had half an hour.
The New York was three blocks away, just across Deng on Fifth.

I decided to take a look.

The streets of the Trap are black—not just the dark
stone of the burbs, but smooth black synthetic. Non-reflective, at
that. Above me Trap Over was a flashing panoply of pleasures,
advertising images battling each other for airspace as they
struggled to lure in their prey, while spy-eyes and advertisers
zipped unheeding through them, and the towers soared up around them
sleek and bright. They sang and whispered and cajoled, and most of
it was blurred into white noise by the constant wind.

Below my feet, though, there was only
darkness and the low rumble of Trap Under going about its business.
I looked down and felt the vibration through the soles of my
worksuit.

I was studying that darkness, the street that
was a roof for Trap Under, and I was thinking about the people down
there, human and artificial both, the ones I’d seen or talked to on
my last case, and all the others I’d never met, and I was wondering
what would become of them when the sun rose, when someone called my
name.