Nightside CIty

by

Lawrence Watt-Evans

copyright 1987 Lawrence Watt Evans

afterword copyright 2010 Lawrence Watt Evans

Smashwords Edition

Books by Lawrence Watt-Evans

The Annals of the Chosen:

The Wizard Lord

The Ninth Talisman

The Summer Palace

The Obsidian Chronicles:

Dragon Weather

The Dragon Society

Dragon Venom

Science Fiction from FoxAcre Press:

Nightside City

Realms of Light

Shining Steel

Among the Powers

Short story collections from FoxAcre Press:

Crosstime Traffic

Celestial Debris

Publishing History

Del Rey Edition April 1989

FoxAcre Press Print Edition May 2001, December
2010

FoxAcre Press Ebook Editions December 2010

author web page:
www.watt-evans.com

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Print ISBN 978-0-9709711-1-1

Smashwords ISBN
978-1-936771-02-8

cover art by Martina Pilcerova

www.martinaart.com

401 Ethan Allen Avenue

Takoma Park, Maryland 20912 USA

www.foxacre.com

Dedicated to

Dr. Sheridan Simon

who designed Epimetheus and the Eta Cass system

to my specifications—

and also dedicated to the memories of

Jim Morrison

and

Humphrey Bogart

The city outside my window was a cacophoty of neon
and stardust, a maze of blinding glitter and flash, and from where
I sat it was all meaningless, no discrete images at all—nothing
discrete, and certainly no discretion. I knew that the casino ads
were shimmying and singing like sirens, luring passersby onto the
rocks of the roulette wheels and randomizers, sucking them in with
erotic promises of riches, but all that reached me through the
window was a tangle of colored light and a distant hum, punctuated
every so often by the buzz and blink of a macroscopic floater
passing nearby. Even the big ships landing or lifting didn’t bother
me—the window was angled so I couldn’t see them unless they buzzed
the Trap, which would have gotten any pilot’s license erased, and
the port’s big damper fields kept the noise out of the city.

As long as I kept the window transparent I
always had the flicker and the sparkle and the hum for a
background, and the blaze of light and color was there if I
bothered to look, but I didn’t have the noise and flash grinding in
on me.

I liked it that way. There was a time when I
had an office in the Trap, as we called it—the Tourist Trap—but
that was a long time ago. When the case I’m telling you about came
up I had my little place in the burbs, on Juarez Street, and I
could see the lights of Trap Over all the more clearly for the
added distance. Instead of the overwhelming come-ons, the holos and
the shifting sculptures of stardust, all I saw was just light and
noise.

And was it ever really anything more?

Of course, I won’t lie to you—I wasn’t out in
the burbs by choice, not really. When I was young and stupid and
new at my work I fell for a sob story while I was on a casino job,
and I let a welsher take an extra day. He was off-planet within an
hour, and IRC had to shell out the bucks to put an unscheduled,
shielded call through to Prometheus and nail him there. They
weren’t happy with me, and when Interstellar Resorts Corporation
isn’t happy with you, you don’t work in the Trap. Even their
competitors don’t argue with that.

I’m just glad the bastard didn’t have enough
cash to buy his way out-system; if IRC had had to chase him to Sol
or Fomalhaut or somewhere I’d be lucky to live a week.

Of course, if he’d had out-system fare he
would have paid his tab in the first place. It wasn’t that big,
which was another reason I’m still up and running.

When you can’t work in the Trap, though,
there isn’t that much detective work left on Epimetheus, short of
security work in the mines. I wasn’t ready to fry my genes out
there in some corner of nightside hell, making sure some poor jerk
who didn’t know any better didn’t pocket a few kilocredits’ worth
of hot ore. Mine work might have had more of a future than anything
in the City, but it’s not the sort of future I’d care to look
forward to.

And I didn’t know anything but detective
work, and besides, I wasn’t going to give IRC the satisfaction of
driving me out of business.

That left the burbs, from the Trap to the
crater’s rim, so that’s where I went. It’s all still part of the
City, really—everything inside the crater wall is Nightside City,
and anything outside in the wind, or off Epimetheus, isn’t, which
keeps it simple. So I was still in the City, and I figured I could
pick up the crumbs, the jobs that the Trap detectives didn’t want,
and get by on that.

Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. I
worked cheap and I made sure everyone knew that. I got my office
out in Westside, where you could almost see the sun peeping over
the eastern rim, where the land was cheap because it would be the
first to fry as the dawn broke. I was only on Juarez, though; I
wasn’t all the way out in the West End. I stayed as close in as I
thought I could afford, to buy myself time. Eastside, in the crater
wall’s shadow, would be safe for about three years after the West
End went—not that I’d care to stay there once the port, over to the
south of the Trap, goes—and that meant it was more expensive. I
might have found more work out that way, I don’t know, but there
were too many people out east who knew what IRC thought of me.

In Westside they generally knew, but they
could none of them afford to care.

One thing about moving out of the Trap—I
moved right out of my social life, too. My friends at the casinos
somehow never found the time to call me any more. I didn’t meet any
tourists out on Juarez, either. The people I did meet—well, some of
them weren’t bad, but they weren’t exactly high society.

Besides, I had to work so hard to survive I
didn’t have time to hang out in the streets. Most of my business
dealings were with clients or with software, and socializing with
clients is always a mistake.

I don’t see anything wrong with socializing
with software, as far as it goes, but it tends to be pretty
limited. You don’t meet much software that takes the same approach
to things like sex, credit, food, or family that humans do.
Software doesn’t have family in the human sense.

Of course, I didn’t have very
much
family. All the family I had left in the City was my brother, and
he worked in the Trap; he called sometimes, stayed in touch, but he
didn’t make it a point to drop by, if you know what I mean. His
employers might not have been pleased if he had.

We hadn’t been all that close anyway. We
weren’t any closer with me out on Juarez.

I had my office, and I did any work that came
my way. I tracked down missing husbands, missing wives, missing
children, missing pets— biological, cybernetic, or whatever. I went
after missing data, and of course, missing money. Anything anyone
mislaid I went after, and more often than not I found whatever it
was.

I got a break once when I followed up a
string of complaints about a crooked operator at the Starshine
Palace and nailed a guy so dumb that he was skimming from both the
customers
and
the house, but who had a really slick way of
doing it; catching him was good work, and it got me a lot of good
publicity. It also made me an enemy, as the casino had Big Jim
Mishima on the case, and I beat him to it, and the casino kept
Jim’s fee as a result. Big Jim resented that, and I can’t blame
him, but I couldn’t see my way clear to screw up; I had a
reputation and damn little else, and I keep what I have. At least,
I do when I can.

The Palace almost considered talking to me
again after that, since I’d saved them some juice, but then IRC
reminded them of the gruesome details of my past and they decided I
still wasn’t welcome.

But I was less unwelcome at the Palace than
in any of the other casinos—like a leftover program wasting memory,
but one they might need someday, not pure gritware.

I did a few other jobs here and there,
whatever I could get. I ate dinner most days, usually lunch, too,
and I never got more than two months behind on my rent or my com
bill. Every so often I even splurged on a drink or a sandwich at
Lui’s Tavern, two blocks over on Y’barra, and watched Lui’s
holoscreen instead of my own.

Of course, in a year or so I was going to
either have to go to the mines, move east, or get off-planet if I
didn’t want terminal sunburn, and it didn’t look as if I’d have
enough saved up to get off Epimetheus. Moving east didn’t have much
appeal— it just put off the inevitable. I was beginning to
contemplate the inevitability of a career in heavy metals.

My situation was not exactly an endless
scroll of delights, and my prospects were a good bit less rosy than
the sky I saw behind the Trap. That sky looked a little brighter
every day, even when Eta Cass B was out of sight somewhere below
the horizon. Which it wasn’t, just then, when this case first came
up. It was out of sight of my window, but I knew that Eta Cass B
was high in the west, and I could see its glow reddening the dark
buildings just across the street, while its big brother reddened
the eastern horizon and washed half the stars out of the sky above
with a blue that looked paler every day.

The sky used to be black, of course, and was
still black and spattered with stars in the west, but the first
hint of dark blue was starting to creep up from the eastern rim
even before I left the Trap, and there were fewer stars to be seen
every time I bothered to look.

Every time another star vanished, so did
another chunk of the city’s population; anyone who could afford to
leave did, and those who couldn’t afford it were saving up. That
was cutting into what little business I had—I didn’t have a single
case going, and hadn’t for two days. I was sick of watching the
vids, and with no income I couldn’t afford to go out, not even to
Lui’s.

So I sat there, watching the glitter and
sparkle of the city try to drown out that insidious coming dawn,
and I wasn’t any too happy about my life. Getting out of the Trap
was probably good for my soul—I suppose my ancestors would know for
sure, but I can only guess—but it wasn’t any good for my mood or my
credit line. The distance and the window fields kept the city’s
noise down to a murmur, but I could still hear it, and I was
listening to it so hard just then that at first I thought the beep
was coming from outside.