Nightside City

And that idiot didn't seem to see any of this.

I wasn't sure what to make of that. Sure, she'd grown up on Prometheus, where the crust is thicker and more stable and there aren't any peculiarities to the planetary rotation, but hadn't she studied up on Epimetheus before she bought into the scheme? Even if she was too lazy to jack the data in on the conscious level, she could afford the best and fastest imprinting on the planet.

Was it just that she wanted the scheme to work, the way her ventures in genens and psychobugs hadn't? I knew she was good at ignoring unpleasant details, but could she really ignore all the dangers?

Maybe, subconsciously, she wasn't ignoring them at all. Maybe she intended to watch from orbit, so she'd live through it, and she didn't really care if it failed. She'd shown enough of a self-destructive streak before to make that believable. Maybe she wanted to gamble, and wanted to watch all the fireworks when she lost.

After all, she probably had a grudge against the entire planet. Epimetheus wasn't her home, it was her exile. Wrecking an entire planet would certainly be a grandiose enough way of expressing her a

I mean, I'm sure she wasn't thinking that consciously, or at least I hope she wasn't, but in her subconscious she must still have been the spoiled kid she'd been twenty years earlier on Prometheus. So after some thought I could maybe see how Nakada could be going ahead with this idiot scheme.

But that didn't explain what the people at the Ipsy thought they were doing.

Maybe there was more to this than I knew, I thought. Maybe I'd misunderstood the whole thing, or Nakada had misunderstood the whole thing and passed it on to me. Maybe what the Ipsy really had in mind was using a fusion charge to plow Nightside City's continental plate back onto the nightside, like an icebreaker in one of those old vids from Ember-but that could be pretty rough, too.

Maybe they had safety precautions. Maybe they had some way of dissipating the heat, or holding the crust together. Maybe they were going to get a charge down into the core somehow and do something there.

Because there was one thing more that Sayuri Nakada didn't seem to realize. If you could somehow stop Epimetheus right where it was-without breaking anything, without so much as spilling anyone's tea-you still wouldn't have saved Nightside City for good. There's a reason that the planet's rotation is screwed up. That core is still off-center, and sooner or later it's going to pull around so that the thin side of the mantle is facing directly toward Eta Cass A. If you stopped the planetary rotation where it is now, eventually it would start up again-not so much a rotation as a wobble.

Wouldn't it?

I realized that I didn't know, and that I had no way to find out while I was walking the streets of the eastern burbs.

Even if the planet did start to swing around again, how long would it take? Planets have one hell of a lot of inertia. They're slow. It might be mille

Would it?

This was all too complicated for me. I wasn't a planetologist. I wasn't a physicist. I didn't even know enough to go back and try to argue with Nakada. I had to learn more.

Well, I was a detective. I was supposed to be good at learning things and putting them together.

I had two choices, as I saw it. I could go back home and plug myself in and study up on planetology and try to figure out what the hell Nakada and the Ipsy were really up to, then maybe go back and argue about it. Or I could go to the Ipsy and ask someone.

Judging by the reception my earlier call got, I'd have to go in person if I wanted answers out of the Ipsy. They didn't want to talk to me.

Well, on the com, you don't have to talk to anyone you don't want to, but it's harder to ignore someone who's actually physically there, right in front of you. It's harder to lie, too-holos and sims take advance preparation if they're going to be convincing seen directly, but they're pretty easy to improvise over a com line.

And it's hardest of all to ignore someone when she's standing there with a gun in your face. I hoped I wouldn't have to resort to that. It had worked so far, but sooner or later somebody might call my bluff-or call the cops.

And it was a bluff, all right; I wasn't ready to shoot an unarmed human. I'd have second thoughts even about software, usually-that would depend how advanced it was, how sentient, how strong its survival urge, and so forth. I'd shot the eye, but spy-eyes aren't really sentient, aren't really alive.

At least, most of them aren't, and I sure hoped the one I shot hadn't been. It had handled my threats calmly enough.

Maybe I could shoot a machine, but shooting a human -that was a bluff.

But the people at the Ipsy wouldn't need to know I was bluffing, and a gun's a lot more intimidating in person than over a com line.

The Ipsy was located near the Gate, of course, where they could send their people and machines out of the crater easily, and where incoming miners could drop off samples or news or anything else they thought the Ipsy might be interested enough in to pay a finder's fee on. I hadn't been there in years, and I'd seen plenty of my office lately; dropping by the Institute would make for a pleasant change of scene.

Besides, it's always quicker to ask someone who knows the answer than to figure something out for yourself.

That is, it's quicker if he's willing to tell you. I just had to make the people at the Ipsy willing.

That was where bluffing with the Sony-Remington came in.

I called a cab, and when it arrived I told it to take me to the Ipsy.

Chapter Thirteen

A PINK-STRIPED MATATU JAMMED WITH DRUNKEN miners was heading out toward the Gate, back toward the mines, with people and machines hanging precariously onto the sides. Somebody clinging one-handed to the back rail waved at me with her free hand as I stepped out of the cab, and I waved back, but I didn't recognize her. I don't know a lot of miners. Maybe I'd met her at Lui's, or in the Trap back in happier times, but I didn't recall her face and I didn't worry about it.

I glanced up, looking for the spy-eye above the scattered pedestrians, and then remembered that I'd blasted it. I still felt bad about that, but I could live with it. I figured two, maybe three more unconscious glances and I'd be over it.

The cab gave my card back after only a brief pause hinting that it thought it deserved a tip. I figured it hadn't checked my balance, or it would know why I wasn't tipping. I was into negative numbers, ru

The place had seen better days. It might have seen worse, but it didn't look like it. Not that I'd ever seen it looking any different. It hadn't changed at all since my first trip there as a kid, when my parents had hopes that I'd get interested in science and maybe earn some money for them.

That thing must have been about the oldest building in the city; it was probably there before there was a city. It was all built of dark laser-cut native stone, the sort of work done by nonsentient robots working from a standard plan without intelligent direction. The windows were afterthoughts, determined by the interior plan; from the outside they looked random in size and placement.

There was no attempt whatsoever at symmetry or grace; it was big and ugly and squat, and the entire place was layered with dirt.