Lawrence Watt-Evans - Nightside City

VIP免费

2024-12-23 0 0 267.7KB 96 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

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.

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; 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.

Then the com double-beeped, and I knew it wasn't outside. I hit the pad on the

desk-the place had had pressure switches when I moved in, and I couldn't

afford to convert to voice, so I roughed it. I guess an earlier tenant liked

his fingers better than his tongue-or maybe he was some kind of antiquarian

fetishist. It wasn't even a codefield, but an actual keypad. Before I took

that office I'd never seen one anywhere else except history vids, let alone

used one, but I got the hang of it after a while. It gave the place a certain

charm, an air of eccentricity that I almost liked. It was also a real pain in

the ass to use, no matter how much practice I got, but I couldn't afford to do

anything about it.

So when the com double-beeped I hit the ACCEPT key. My background music dimmed

away and someone asked, "Carlisle Hsing?"

The voice was young and male and belonged to nobody I knew. I could hear the

wind muttering behind him, so I knew he was outside, probably on my doorstep

from the sound of it. I didn't bother to check the desk's main screen yet.

"Yeah," I said. "I'm Hsing."

"I-uh, we want to hire you."

That sounded promising. I flicked on the screen.

He didn't look promising. He was a good three days overdue for a shave-either

that, or three days into growing a beard, with a long way to go. His hair

hadn't been washed recently, either. He was pale and round-eyed and wore a

battered port worksuit, one that hadn't been much when it was new-low-grade

issue, built, not grown, and all flat gray with no shift. A cheap com jack

under his right ear looked clogged with grease, and I wasn't sure about the

workmanship on his eyes. He wasn't anybody I'd seen before, not in my office

or in Lui's or on the streets, and sure as hell not in the Trap.

Judging by the view behind him, he was indeed on my doorstep. In my business I

do get callers in person, not just over the com.

At least, I got this one in person, and he said he wanted to hire me, so I let

his looks go for the moment.

"For what?" I asked.

"Ah . . . it's complicated. Can I come in and explain?"

Well, I wasn't doing much of anything. I'd just finished off the final details

on my last case, finding a missing kid who had holed up in Trap Under for a

week-long wire binge; the fee hadn't done much more than pay the bills. I

couldn't afford to turn down much, so I said, "Yeah," and buzzed the door. I

didn't turn on the privacy, though, so it logged in his face, voiceprint,

pheromone signature, and all the rest.

Any security door will do all that, but most people don't much care, they just

let the data slide; me, in my line of work, I'd cleared it with the landlord

and had everything tapped straight into my personal com system. The landlord

didn't mind-as I said, I generally paid my rent-so I always knew who I had in

my office. If this guy tried anything, I was pretty sure I'd be able to find

him.

A few minutes later he inched into the office as nervous as a kid going

through his first neuroscan and tried not to stare at me. He wasn't that much

more than a kid himself; I guessed him at eighteen, maybe twenty, no more.

Maybe twenty-one, if you want to use Terran years.

He looked okay-grubby, but not dangerous-and none of the scanners had beeped,

but just in case I had my right hand under the desk, holding my Sony-Remington

HG-2. The gun laws on Epimetheus were written by a committee, so they're a

mess, complicated as hell, and I never did figure out whether that gun of mine

was legal, but I liked it and kept it handy just the same. I'd had it brought

in, special, from out-system, as a favor from an old friend-an old friend who

somehow hadn't called since I left the Trap, but what the hell, I still had

the gun.

Owning it was probably good for a fat fine, but only if somebody made a point

of it, and I wasn't about to walk past the port watch with it out. I'd drawn

it in public a few times, in the Trap, but casino cops don't hassle anyone who

might be a player without a better reason than flashing an illegal weapon.

Casino cops can be very good at minding their own business.

"Sit down," I said, and the kid sat, very slowly. I had three chairs and a

couch; the chairs were floaters, and he took the couch, which had legs.

Cautious, very cautious. The cushions tried to adjust for him, but he kept

shifting, and one of the warping fields had burned out long ago, leaving a

band a few centimeters wide that stayed stiff and straight as a motherboard

and screwed up the whole system.

He didn't seem to be in any hurry to talk. He just looked around the place,

everywhere but at me. If his eyes were natural, he wasn't in great shape and

might have something eating at his nervous system; if they were replacements,

he got rooked. The com jack under his ear obviously hadn't been used in weeks.

His worksuit was so worn and patched that the circuitry was showing, and I

could see that some leads were cut; it was probably stolen.

I felt sorry for any poor symbiote that had to live in the guy-assuming there

was one, which I did not consider certain.

But then, my own symbiote wasn't exactly in an ideal environment for the long

term.

"So," I said. "Who are you?"

He gave me a sharp look.

"Why?" he asked.

This was looking worse all the time; I hit some keys I knew he couldn't

see-with my left hand, because my right had the gun-and started running the

door data through the city's ID bank. "I like to know who I'm working for," I

said.

He didn't like that. He gave me a look and a silence.

"If you don't tell me who you are, I don't work," I said.

He hesitated, then gave in. "All right," he said. "My name is Wang. Joe Wang."

I nodded and glanced down at one of the desk's pull-out screens. His name was

Zarathustra Pickens. He was about a month short of nineteen years old, Terran

time. Born on Prometheus, came in-system to the nightside at sixteen- probably

looking for casino work, but it didn't say-and did a few short pieces here and

there. Last job, cleaning pseudoplankton out of the city water filters. Got

laid off a week earlier when the city brought in a machine that was supposed

to do the job. Again. They'd been trying machines on that since I was a girl,

and they never worked right-sooner or later the pseudoplankton got into the

cleaning machines, same as it got into everything else anywhere near water,

and screwed them up. Machines that didn't screw up would cost more than

people. An organism that could deal with the situation would probably cost

even more and might be dangerous if it got out, since the whole planet lives

and breathes off pseudoplankton; it's the only significant source of oxygen on

Epimetheus.

It's also mean stuff, meaner than any microorganism that ever evolved on

Earth; building a bug that could handle it might take one hell of a lot of

doing.

I figured Zar Pickens could probably get his job back in a couple of days, so

I didn't hold his unemployment against him.

"All right, Mis' Wang," I said. "What can I do for you?"

He got nervous again. "It's not me," he said. "I mean, it's not just me."

I'd had about enough of his delays. I wasn't inclined to pry the details out

one by one. "Okay," I said. "You tell it your way, whatever it is you have to

tell, but let's get on with it, shall we?"

He hesitated a bit, then started telling it.

"I live out by the crater wall," he said, "right out in the West End. It's

cheap, y'know?"

Cheap, hell, I guessed it was probably free; at least a dozen big buildings

out that way were already abandoned. Even a couple on Juarez were abandoned.

The owners didn't figure it was worth the repairs and maintenance when the

sun's on the horizon, or maybe even already hitting the top floors, so when a

building dropped below code, or the complaints started piling up, they would

just ditch it. Good, sound business practice, at least by Epimethean

standards.

And whether Pickens had had other reasons or not, that explained why he'd come

in person; the com lines in the West End are, shall we politely say,

unreliable.

I didn't say anything. I just nodded.

Pickens nodded back. "Right, so I don't bother anybody. None of us do; there's

a bunch of us out that way, living cheap, not hurting a damn thing. You

understand?"

I nodded again. Squatters were nothing new. When I was a girl they'd had to

make do with doorways or alleys in the outer burbs, or caves in the crater

wall, but they'd been moving inward for years. Especially in the west.

"Okay, fine," Pickens said. "But then about two weeks back some slick-hair

shows up, with this big slab of muscle backing him, and says that he works for

the new owner, and the rent's gone up, and we pay it or we get out."

I sat back a little and let the HG-2 drop back in the holster; this was

beginning to sound interesting. Interesting, or maybe just dumb. It had to be

a con of some kind, but that was so obvious even squatters would see it. I put

my hands behind my head and leaned back. "New owner?" I asked.

"That's what he said."

I nodded. "Go on."

Pickens shrugged. "That's about it."

"So what do you want me to do?" I asked.

He looked baffled for a minute. "Come on, Hsing," he said. "What do you think?

We want you to get rid of the guy, of course!" His voice rose and got ugly. "I

mean, what's this new owner crap? Who's buying in the West End? The sun is

rising, lady! Nobody's gonna buy land in the West End, so what's this new

owner stuff? It's gotta be a rook, but when we called the city, they said he

was legit, so we can't call the cops, and we can't just take him out

ourselves, because this goddamn new owner would send someone else. We need

someone who can get it straight; I mean, we don't have anywhere else to go,

and we can't pay this fucker's rent!" He was getting pretty excited, like he

was about to jump out of the couch; I straightened up and put my hands back

down.

"Then how are you planning to pay my fee?" I asked, and the Sony-Remington was

back in my hand but still out of sight.

The question stopped him for a moment, even without the gun showing. He

shifted again, settling back down, and the couch rippled as it tried to

adjust.

"We took up a collection," he said. "Did it by shares, sort of, and we came up

with some bucks. They say you work cheap if you like the job, and I sure hope

you like this one, because we couldn't come up with much."

"How much?" I asked.

'Two hundred and five credits," he said. "Maybe a little more, but we can't

promise."

Well, that sure as hell wasn't much, but I was interested anyway. As the kid

said, who's buying land in the West End? That was just dumb. I figured, same

as he did, that most likely somebody had rigged up a little swindle with the

city management. That two hundred and five wasn't about to pay my fare

off-planet, came the dawn, but it could pay for a dinner or two, and I thought

the case might have some interesting aspects to it. For an example, I might be

able to collect a reward for turning in a crooked city com-op, or if I decided

I didn't need a conscience, I could take a little share of whatever the op was

sucking down his chute.

"All right, Mis' Wang," I said. "I'll need a hundred credits up-front, and

whatever names and addresses you can give me."

He gawked. I mean, his mouth came open, and he just flat-out gawked at me.

"You mean you'll take it?" he said.

The kid just had no class at all. I wondered how he'd ever managed to land any

job, even scraping pseudoplankton, and I was ready to bet that his symbiote

had died of neglect or embarrassment, if he'd ever had one at all. I'd had

about all I wanted of him. "Yes, Mis' Pickens," I said. "I'll take it."

That was that. He pulled out a transfer card and started reeling off the names

and addresses of every squatter this rent collector had gone after, and I put

it all into the com. The poor jerk never even noticed that I'd used his right

name.

Chapter Two

AFTER I FINALLY GOT ZAR PlCKENS OUT OF MY OFFICE, I settled in to think about

the kid's story. The com brought the music back up a little, but kept it

mellow and meditative, and the images on the big holo stayed abstract.

In my line of work I always found it helped to cultivate a suspicious nature,

so I leaned back and looked at whether I could be getting conned or set up or

otherwise dumped on.

The whole thing looked like a glitch of some kind. Out there at the base of

the western wall, if you stood on tiptoe, you could just about see the

sun-assuming you were either wearing goggles or didn't mind burning your

retinas. In a year nobody would live there without eyeshades and sunscreen, at

the very least; more likely no one would live there at all.

A year, hell-ten weeks would probably do it. There were buildings where the

top stories were already catching the sun, and the terminator was moving one

hundred and thirty-eight centimeters a day. Everyone knew that.

So who'd buy property there?

Nobody. Ever since it began sinking in that sunrise really was coming, that

the city founders a hundred and sixty years back really had been wrong about

the planet already being tidelocked, real estate prices had been dropping all

over Nightside City, and they'd gone down fastest and furthest in the West

End. I guessed that you could buy a building lot-or a building-out there for

less than a tourist would pay for a blowjob in the Trap, but you still

wouldn't be able to collect enough in rents to make your money back before

dawn, because rents were dropping, too, and there were plenty of other cheap

places, farther east, like the one I lived in.

So nobody in his right mind would actually buy out there. Even if you got the

property free, registering the transfer of title would cost enough to make it

a bad investment; legal fees hadn't dropped any.

That left four possibilities, as I saw it.

First, someone wasn't in his right mind. You can never rule that one out

completely. The really demented are scarce these days, but there are still a

few out there. Maybe some poor aberrant had actually bought that future

wasteland.

Second, someone had figured out how to get title to the property for nothing,

not even transfer fees, and was trying to squeeze a little money out of it.

That was free enterprise in action, but it was also pretty sure to be illegal.

I might come out ahead if I could prove something.

Third, nobody had bought anything, but somebody was trying to run a scam of

some kind on the squatters, maybe just to collect those rents, maybe to get

something else out of them, and had enough pull somewhere to get away with it,

or had somehow faked the call to the city. Maybe whoever placed the call for

the squatters was getting a cut and had called somewhere else entirely. If

that was the story, and I proved it, I could count on two hundred and five

credits, but the only way I'd get more than that was if the Eastern Bunny

dropped it in my lap, or if an opportunity arose for a little creative

blackmail, mild enough that I could live with myself.

Fourth, Pickens-if that was his real name after all- was pulling a scam on me.

I couldn't rule any of those out. That fourth one was the one I liked least,

of course, and it seemed pretty goddamn unlikely, but I couldn't rule it out.

I couldn't figure any way that anyone could get anything worthwhile out of me,

with this story or any other, but I couldn't rule it out. I know there are

people out there smarter than I am, and that means there are people out there

who could fool me if they wanted to. I couldn't figure out why they'd want

to-but like I said, they're smarter than I am.

If it was a con, it was a good one. The story was bizarre enough to get my

interest, and there weren't any of the telltale signs of a con-nothing too

good to be true, no fat fee in prospect, no prepared explanation.

I decided that if it was a con, it was too damn slick for me, and I might as

well fall into it, because it would be worth it to see what the story was. So

I would assume it wasn't a con.

That left three choices, and they all hinged on whether or not someone had

actually paid for those buildings.

I couldn't find out the whole truth sitting at my desk, but I could get the

official story, anyway. I hit my keypad, punched up the Registry of Deeds and

ran down the list of addresses.

Of course, any jerk could have done that, and somebody supposedly had, because

Zar Pickens had said that someone who worked for the city said the new owner

was for real. The name the squatters had gotten was West End Properties, but

that didn't mean anything more to me than it had to them; I asked for the full

transaction records on every address where a squatter had been hassled.

Just for interest, I also tagged the command to give last-called dates for

each property file, while I was at it.

There were eleven properties involved where squatters had been asked for rent.

They were scattered in an arc along Wall Street and in a couple of blocks on

Western Avenue and Deng Boulevard.

All eleven really had been deeded over to new owners in the last six

weeks-nominally to eleven different buyers, but that didn't mean anything.

No one had called up any of the files since the transfers had been made,

except for Zar Pickens's own building; that had sold five weeks earlier, and

someone had called up the transaction record about two weeks back. That would

have been the squatters, checking up.

That transfer said West End Properties, all right.

Somebody really was buying property in the West End, or at least getting it

transferred to new ownership. That eliminated another of my options: it wasn't

just an attempt to muscle a few credits out of the squatters.

But what the hell was it? Was somebody actually paying real money for

buildings and lots that were about to turn into baked goods?

I was pretty damn curious by now, and I suddenly thought of something else I

was curious about. I punched in for all real estate transactions made in the

previous six weeks, called for a graphic display on a city map, and cursed the

idiot who had wired the system for pressure instead of voice. I almost plugged

myself in, but then decided to hold off. I don't like running on wire.

The records showed fifty or sixty recent deeds. After I dropped out a few

scattered foreclosures, gambling losses, and in-family transfers, I had about

forty left.

They were all in the West End. They covered just about all of the West End,

too.

I extended the time back another week-nothing but foreclosures and gambling

losses. An eighth week, nothing. Whatever was going on had started just about

six weeks back.

But what was going on?

If someone had figured a way to fake property transfers, why stick to the West

End? Why not take a bit here and there, maybe catch someone who could actually

pay a decent rent? As I said before, there was abandoned property as far in as

my own neighborhood, not just in the West End. The impending dawn was not

going to catch anyone by surprise, and people had been pulling out gradually

for years-half the people I grew up with, the smart ones, were off-planet, and

even some of the dumb ones were out in the mines instead of hanging around the

city. So if somebody had a way of stealing land, why go for the worst? Why the

West End and not Westside, or the Notch, or somewhere?

Maybe there really was something that made the West End valuable after all,

even with the sun coming up. I hadn't figured that in my four options.

That seemed pretty damn unlikely. Anything valuable out there should have been

stripped out long ago. Most of the utility lines had been.

Somebody was making those title transfers, though, ostensibly buying up

property. The next step seemed obvious: figure out who it was.

I had the com tally up a list of buyers, eliminating duplicates, and I got

fifteen names. West End Properties was one; Westwall Redevelopment, Nightside

Estates-there were half a dozen like that. All were meaningless corporate

labels. The rest looked like casino names; there was even the classic Bond

James Bond, with a five-digit code number behind it.

Someday I'll have to look up where that stupid name came from, and why the

high rollers keep using it. I suppose it's another weird old Earth legend,

like the Eastern Bunny, who wasn't going to be bringing me anything. Someday

I'll look that one up, too, and find out why there isn't a Western Bunny. And

just what the hell a bunny is, anyway.

I put the fifteen buyer names in permanent hold, then put them aside for a

moment and ran out the list of prices paid.

They were pitiful. The highest was for an entire city block, six residence

towers and a small park, one of the big developments from the city's prime, a

century back; that was ten megacredits. When I was still welcome in the

casinos I saw that much go on a single spin of a roulette wheel.

Somebody-assuming that all fifteen names were actually the same outfit-had

bought about two percent of Nightside City for just under a hundred

megacredits.

Of course, it was the two percent that would be first to fry, but still, I

felt like crying when I saw how cheaply my hometown was going.

And the big question remained: Why was somebody buying?

Was somebody buying, really? I still hadn't checked on the authenticity of

these deals. Just because I saw prices listed didn't mean that anyone had

actually paid those prices.

I ran out a list of the sellers and glanced down it for familiar names. There

were a few-mostly corporations that wouldn't want to talk to me. IRC had a lot

of influence.

I ran an extension on that list, asking for the names of the corporate

officers who actually signed or thumbed the deeds. I looked it over again.

It was too bad buyers didn't need to sign deeds in the City, because I thought

I might have found some interesting names that way. I ran a check, just in

case, but no, no corporate buyers had let any individual names go on record.

I went back to the sellers.

I didn't exactly have any close friends on that list, but I did find someone I

was on speaking terms with, a banker, and I decided to give her a call. I'd

met her two years earlier, when I traced a couple of kilocredits that had

somehow wound up in the wrong account; she'd been the officer authorizing the

retrieval. I'd spoken to her once or twice since, but not for months. Four

weeks ago she'd signed a deed on behalf of the Epimethean Commerce Bank, which

had sold a foreclosure on Deng to Westwall Redevelopment.

I called the bank, since it was business hours, and asked the reception

software for Mariko Cheng-and got put on hold for about half a galactic year.

I hate that. The damn program ought to be able to spare enough memory to stay

on the line and chat, but no, it put me on hold. They always do that. I just

had to sit there and wait.

When I got tired of listening to the porno ads on the hold circuit and

staring at the far wall of my office, wishing I could put something

interesting on the big holoscreen without losing my call, I started puttering

around with some of my data on the desk pull-outs, kicking around files on the

six corporations and the nine casino names, and running searches to see if any

of the fifteen had ever turned up anywhere other than on deeds to West End

property.

The six corporations all had their incorporations properly filed, but the only

officers named were software written specifically for the job-no humans, and I

knew that I wouldn't be able to get anything out of business software. All six

of them had filed five or six weeks earlier, but other than that none of the

fifteen were on public record. I wondered what was on private record;

naturally, I had ways of getting at stuff I wasn't supposed to, or I wouldn't

have stayed in business very long, but I didn't want to use anything illegal

when I was on an open channel and the bank might be listening. Besides, if I

tried to break in anywhere, I might need all my lines for a pincer attack on

somebody's security systems, and I had one tied up with my call and another

holding my search data. I couldn't do any serious hacking without plugging

myself in, and you can't talk on the phone and run on wire at the same time. I

was beginning to consider exiting the call and trying a few ideas when a

heavy-breathing pitch for the floor show at the New York cut off in mid-groan,

and Cheng asked, "What do you want?"

"Nothing much," I said. "And nothing that'll hurt. I just wanted to check up

on an outfit you did some business with, Westwall Redevelopment. I'm doing

some background on them for a client." I tabbed the main screen control and

watched her face appear.

"Oh?" she said, as the focus sharpened. Her expression was polite and blank.

"Oh," I answered her.

"So?"

"So I'd greatly appreciate it, Mis' Cheng, if you could tell me something

about them-just anything. I understand that Epimethean Commerce sold them some

property out on West Deng?"

"That's a matter of public record."

"Yes, mis', it certainly is, and that's how I came to call you. Your name was

on the deed-or at least it was on the comfax of the deed. I was hoping you

could tell me a little about Westwall, since you dealt with them." I started

to say more, to elaborate on my story, but I stopped myself. One of my rules

of business is to try not to say more than I have to. If I give myself half a

chance, I'll keep talking forever, same as I'm doing now telling you all this.

If I let my mouth run, sooner or later I'm either telling someone something

they shouldn't know-or at least not from me or not for free-or I'm making my

lies too complicated, so they'll trip me up later. The best way to lie is to

simply not tell all of the truth, and that's exactly what I was doing here; I

wasn't going to tell her that I was trying to get squatters out of paying

rent, but I'd almost gone and made up some lie about it instead.

She hesitated, then said, "Listen, Hsing, I'm working; I don't have time to

peddle gossip. If you want to talk to me on the bank's time, you'll have to

make it the bank's business."

I watched her face, and I knew what she was telling me. She didn't want to

talk about it over the com-at least, not unless I could convince her that it

would be safe and worth her while.

That made it interesting. It meant she did have something to say about

Westwall Redevelopment, but not something she wanted everyone on the nightside

to hear and have on permanent record.

What she had to say I had no idea. It might have been nothing. It might have

been anything. Maybe the transaction was a fraud.

Her reasons for wanting it private and off the record could have been anything

from a jealous lover to crime in high places-or maybe she was coming up for a

promotion and didn't want it on record that she talked to an outcast like me.

It could have been anything.

But I wasn't exactly buried in useful information, so I decided that I

definitely wanted to talk to her.

"Have it your way," I said. "I was just hoping for a favor, one human being to

another; I don't think the bank's got an interest in this one. Maybe I'll see

you around sometime."

"Maybe you will, if you're ever in the Trap." The desktop screen went blank as

she cut the connection, then lit up with the data display I'd had on before,

transferred back up from the pull-outs.

I looked at it without seeing it. If I was ever in the Trap? That meant she

wasn't about to come out to the burbs; I'd have to meet her at her home or

office. They weren't the same place-banks are old-fashioned about that in the

Eta Cass system; they don't like their human employees working at home.

I typed in an order for all available data on the person last called, scanned

through it as it came up, and froze it when I had her current addresses and

work schedule. She hadn't tagged any of them for privacy, so I didn't have to

do any prying.

She'd be working for another four hours, and her office was in the bank's

central branch, at the corner of Third and Kai. If I happened to bump into her

there we could go get a drink somewhere.

I could live with that.

Meanwhile, I had four hours-three, when you allow for travel time and the

vagaries of fate. Maybe, if I prodded the right program, I could wrap up the

whole business by then, from my desk.

I start punching buttons, as always cursing under my breath the idiot who had

put in touch instead of voice.

Chapter Three

COM SECURITY VARIES. SOME PEOPLE DON'T BOTHER with it on anything, since

everybody's known for centuries that anything one person can set up another

person can crack. Other people put their damn grocery lists under sixteen

layers of alarms and horse and counter-virus.

The people I was after seemed to all be the second kind. I ran a customized

parasite search-and-trace pyramid program that could run through all the

unshielded open-system data anywhere in Nightside City in under an hour, and

except for the official records I'd already scanned, I didn't find a single

one of the fifteen names, not once-at least, not that the program managed to

report back about before a watchdog or scrubware cut the feet out from under

that piece. Parasite programs are weak on self-defense; they have to be to run

in other people's systems uninvited. They need speed and stealth, not

strength. This one, though, had a lot of redundancy built into the pyramid

building, so I doubt I missed much.

It wasn't sentient; I don't trust sentient software to do what it's told and

never use it if I can help it, because anything complex enough to be

self-aware is complex enough to be untrustworthy. Even if it doesn't glitch or

get moody, it can be duped or sabotaged. That's why I used a pyramid instead

of a net. My pyramid wasn't even close to consciousness levels, but it was

fast and sneaky and did what I wanted.

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

ChapterOne THECITYOUTSIDEMYWINDOWWASACACOPHONYOFneonandStardust,amazeofblindingglitterandflash,andfromwhereIsatitwasallmeaningless,nodiscreteimagesatall-nothingdiscrete,andcertainlynodiscretion.Iknewthatthecasinoadswereshimmyingandsinginglikesirens,luringpassersbyontotherocksoftheroulettewheelsand...

展开>> 收起<<

Lawrence Watt-Evans - Nightside City.pdf

共96页,预览20页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Lawrence Watt-Evans - Nightside City

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: