Lawrence Watt-Evans

Nightside City

Chapter One

THE CITY OUTSIDE MY WINDOW WAS A CACOPHONY 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'd 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 have been 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 none of them could 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 anymore. 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 Sebastian, 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 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.