Nightside CIty (8 page)

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 here 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 damned 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 hardcopy, 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, and 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.

I prodded a bit, and asked, “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 goodbye 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?” I asked. “The money
came through, and the transfer fees got paid?”

“Of course,” Cheng said, obviously surprised
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 now, 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.

Big Jim’s damn spy-eye was waiting outside; I don’t
know whether it had been there all along and I hadn’t noticed when
I came in with Cheng, or whether it had left and come back, but it
was there now. I did my best to ignore it.

It didn’t say anything; it just watched and
followed as I marched down the block.

I was trying to think if there was anywhere
else I should go while I was in the Trap, any business to attend to
or old friend I should look up, and by the time I reached Fourth I
had decided there wasn’t. Nobody had looked me up out on Juarez,
after all, and I do my business over the com, for the most part. I
tapped my wrist and said, “Cab, please.”

The transceiver beeped an acknowledgement.
Simple-minded gadget; I couldn’t afford a good implant. I mentioned
that, didn’t I, that I’d hocked my wrist terminal? All I had was
the implanted transceiver. I think it knew maybe twenty commands,
and it couldn’t talk at all, just beep. It had its uses,
though.

“Going somewhere?” the spy-eye asked.

“Wait and see,” I said, without looking
up.

Then I changed my mind and I did look up—not
at the spy-eye, but at the maze of advertising overhead. Directly
above me a woman was lifting her skirt enticingly while Stardust™
sparkled gold around her; I listened, and heard a throaty murmur,
but couldn’t catch the words—if there actually were any. Floaters
drifted through her thighs.

Nearby, laser lines flickered in abstract
patterns that coalesced every so often into piles of chips. Above
the New York an ancient skyline was etched in black and yellow, and
floaters cruised its miniature rooftops like tiny cabs.

A carful of tourists cruised overhead, faces
pressed against the transparent sides, and I heard the droning of
the tourguide blossom, then fade.

A diamond of four red crystal advertisers had
spotted me and was circling in, as if in a decaying orbit around my
head, waiting to see if I would give them any cue, any clue to my
intentions. A gleaming silver-blue messenger buzzed past them,
close enough to shatter their formation.

Behind it all the sky was weirdly blue, deep
blue streaked with reddish brown, and all but the brightest stars
were lost in the light.

I looked for a hint amid the lights and
images, a hint as to what anybody wanted with the West End, and how
this Orchid was involved, and how the New York tied in, but it was
all just the same old siren song. Nobody was advertising sunrise
tours or anything else that hadn’t been advertised all my life.

Of course, this one street was hardly the
entire Trap, let alone the whole City, and advertising was carried
by a hundred other media as well as the city’s skies.