Nightside City

The old man had an old-fashioned sense of family, I guess. He took her on as a dickerer in the out-system trade, and for a while she surprised everyone and did all right at it. She kept out the gritware well enough, and kept things ru

Well, she wasn't smarter than he was, after all; the genens didn't sell, or they died while still under warranty, or they broke things and ran up liability suits. One of the smarter ones even got hold of some legal software and applied for citizenship, but it failed the qualifiers and left Nakada with its bills.

Grandfather Nakada was still big on family, though-I guess he can afford to be. Sayuri got bailed out and given another chance.

Then a year or two later she suddenly decided the bottom was about to drop out of the market for psychoactive bacteria and she refused to buy a big incoming batch of prime stock; she simply wouldn't take them, not even at straight shipping cost. Word got out, and the other big buyers panicked and cancelled orders, but the street market was still just as good as ever, so the stuff that stayed on the market went at triple price-and everybody had it, except Nakada Enterprises.

After that, the old man decided that little Sayuri might do better elsewhere, and he sent her to Epimetheus to oversee the family business in Nightside City. Except that the family business in the city consisted of the New York and a few simple trade and supply runs, and maybe an occasional experiment, and the New York, with Vijay Vo in charge, pretty much ran itself. And they didn't let her mess with anything else much, either.

It was exile, of course, but only temporary, since everybody knew that the city was going to fry, and that she'd get shipped back to Prometheus when the New York first saw the light of day. I figure they thought they were giving her a chance to calm down, to settle in.

It seemed to work, too. She'd behaved herself for a long time, doing only an occasional small-scale deal of her own, and some of those actually made money.

It looked to me, though, as if it hadn't worked forever; to me this West End deal looked one hell of a lot like one of her big, splashy, show-the-system projects, like the genens or the psychobugs. I figured she had some scheme up her ass that was supposed to make her rich enough that she could tell her family to eat wire and die, something she was doing entirely on her own so she could come home from Epimetheus a hero instead of a penitent.

But I still didn't know what the hell the scheme really was. I'd run searches for anything any Nakada ever said about the West End-and I'd come up blank. I'd run searches for anything the West End ever said about her, and got nothing that beeped, just the ordinary gossip I'd get anywhere. I'd run searches for a co

I got myself some paté and tea for lunch and sat down to think about it, still jacked in so I could follow up quickly if anything resembling an idea came to me. I was jacked in, but I wasn't out on wire; I was staring into my teacup.

Maybe, I thought, it is the obvious that's at work here. Maybe she's buying the West End because it's cheap. Maybe she wants to buy the whole damn city and started with the West End because it's what she can afford.

That was grandiose enough for her, the idea of buying the whole city. It felt right. And maybe she was taking the trouble to try to squeeze rent out of the squatters to help finance buying more; her own money must be ru

But the city was still worthless, in the long run, because what made it worth living in was its location on the nightside. When it passed the terminator it would be soaked in hard ultraviolet, which meant scorched retinas and blistering sunburns, not to mention a dozen sorts of skin cancer, more than most symbiotes could handle. The temperature -which was already warmer than I liked-would start inching up toward the unlivable. Sunlight would also let the pseudoplankton in the water supply go totally berserk, clogging everything-and those damn things are toxic. Not to mention that every kilometer farther east took the city a kilometer farther from the rainbelt that was the only source of safe water on the planet.

And I, for one, didn't want to live in perpetual blinding glare. I knew that humans are supposed to be adapted to it, that Eta Cass seen from near-dawn Epimetheus is nominally no worse in the visible range than Sol from Earth's equator, but I didn't believe it, not really. Maybe other people could learn to see in sunlight, but I didn't think I could. I'd spent my life at night; I didn't want to try day.

Not to mention what the ultraviolet and the solar wind might do to all the electronics. I mean, killer sunburn and skin cancer and burned retinas and a mutation rate measured in percent instead of per million are bad enough for humans, but I suspected that dawn meant a nasty death for unshielded software. Not that I actually know anything about it, but all that random energy pouring through a system has got to do something, doesn't it? Don't they keep everything shielded on planets with normal rotation?

Domes and shields and protective suits weren't worth the trouble. Everyone knew that. When Nightside City passed into full sunlight it would all be worthless, and Sayuri Nakada knew that as well as anyone, didn't she?

She had to know it. When the city hit the dayside it would be worthless.

I swallowed a lump of paté and as I did a thought occurred to me. Maybe, I thought, she saw it a bit differently. Her record back on Prometheus made it obvious that she had her own ways of thinking. Maybe she didn't think of it as "when the city hit the dayside."

Maybe she thought of it as "if the city hit the dayside."