Nightside City

There was the first time I stumbled over a rock, and the first time I stumbled and fell, and the first time I fell and couldn't get up right away.

There was the time when the grit in the wind finally ruined the seal on my jacket, so it wouldn't hold any longer.

There was the time I threw away my empty holster, to save weight, and the time not long after that when I wondered if chewing on it might have yielded a trace of moisture.

There was the time when I realized that my eyes were not just adjusting to the glare, but that my vision was fading-the ultraviolet had burned my retinas. I saw the sand as just an expanse of gray, rather than Individual grains.

In time, I no longer saw the smaller rocks, and the fine details of the sky-the high, lacy clouds blowing fiercely westward, outracing me on their way to the rainbelt-vanished into a white blur.

My mind wandered, of course. Walking across that wasteland, all of it the same, the details fading as my eyesight faded, how could I possibly keep all my attention on what I was doing?

I tried to imagine what a sea would look like if I hit one-assuming I could still see and didn't walk right into it. I'd seen holos, of course, and even direct visual feeds off wire of nightside seas, but I didn't remember a wire feed of a daytime sea, and holos don't always capture everything. That bright daylight would sparkle from the water, I knew, but I couldn't remember just what the holos had looked like, whether they had shown daylight lancing painfully, the way it glinted from some of the rocks, or whether the water muted it somehow. I thought the pseudoplankton might absorb some of the light.

I wondered if Epimethean seawater would kill me quickly, or only slowly, if I drank it. I knew that it was toxic. The seas were radioactive and rich in metal salts.

I knew that if I reached a sea, I would try to drink the water. My thirst was completely beyond rational control. The thought of drinking my own blood occurred to me, and if I'd had a good sharp blade I might have tried it, but with nothing sharp except my teeth I was able to resist.

I wondered whether my little stroll would have been better or worse if Epimetheus had native life on land, and decided that it would depend on just what kind of life, but that it would probably be worse. After all, the pseudoplankton were toxic-as toxic as the seas they lived in, maybe more so; laced with heavy metals, their whole biochemistry based on heavy metals-and any land life would have to be equally poisonous, wouldn't it?

But then, if Epimetheus had had trees, they might have cut the wind a little. I felt as if microscopic grit was being rammed into my skin with every step I took into the perpetual gale, and the idea of a drop in wind speed came pretty close to paradise just then. So maybe trees, even poisonous trees with tempting, lethal fruit, would have been an improvement.

Animals, though-animals were something I didn't want. Not that I had to worry about those, since the planet had never evolved any, even in the seas. The idea of alien, untailored organisms scampering about was unpleasant. I didn't like things that much out of control. I didn't like the idea of things that could sneak up on me, things I knew nothing about.

I knew that there were no native animals on Epimetheus, but I thought about them anyway. I thought about things prowling behind me, just out of sight, the sound of their movements lost in the wind. I began to imagine that they were really there.

The fact that I was losing my sight made those imaginings worse. I never liked things I couldn't see, and as I struggled on I could see less and less, as if that whole blazing bright world were vanishing into a hot mist.

I hated that.

When I was a girl, a very young girl, it still rained in Nightside City sometimes. The crater was already east of the rainbelt when I was born, but there were flukes, bits and pieces of clouds that dropped down out of the upper flow and were sent eastward again without ever reaching the main body of the rainbelt. Some of those happened to hit the city's crater, and if they were still high enough to clear the western wall, we got rain. I remember that rain. Fat raindrops would come splashing down from the sky, sending ripples of distortion through the advertising displays, drawing streaks on the black glass walls, forming puddles on the street that would turn slick and green with pseudoplankton in minutes. Most of my friends didn't like it and stayed inside, but I loved it. I would go out barefoot in the streets, ru

When I got home after the rain had stopped my father always shouted at me that I was a fool to behave like that; that if I kept my mouth open long enough in the rain, the pseudoplankton might just start growing in me. I laughed at him. I thought that was just silly. I knew the rain wouldn't hurt me. It was clean and cool and wonderful; it couldn't hurt me.

I think I was maybe six years old, Terran years, when it really rained for the last time. Once or twice after that a wisp of cloud drifted in from somewhere, but it brought mist, not rain. The cloud wouldn't be thick enough to break into rain; instead it would settle down into the city streets as mist, as fog, wrapping haloes around every light and hiding the edges and angles on everything.

The soft blurring frightened me, where my father's threats about pseudoplankton only amused me, and I didn't go out in the fog. If you walked in the mist, you could feel the droplets on your skin, wet and cool, but they weren't distinct impacts, each drop a unit, the way the rain had been. Instead the mist was like a soft sheet, brushing over you but never coming to rest, never staying where you could get hold of it.

I didn't like that. I liked my reality hard-edged. I didn't mind if it was messy, like the dead green scabs left by dried puddles, like the tangle of advertising and counter-advertising in Trap Over, like some of the work I had done for the casinos before they threw me out, or had done for myself since. I didn't mind if it was messy, but I wanted to see it all clearly. I wanted to know what I was feeling.

The mist terrified me. I didn't mind the rain. I never minded the rain.

I wished I could see rain again right then, as I was staggering across the dry, barren sands where rain hadn't fallen in mille

I wasn't laughing. It wasn't raining. There wasn't even a cool mist, but a hot one, a mist of dust and wind and blinding sunlight-literally blinding, bright with that ghastly unseen ultraviolet that was stealing my vision. I couldn't see anything but a hot blur anymore, couldn't feel anything but the wind ripping at my raw sunburnt skin. Someone had gotten at me. Someone had gotten at me and sent me out into the daylight to shrivel and die, lost and blind.

And I didn't really even know why. I didn't know why I had to die rather than be allowed to find out what was happening.

It didn't make any sense.

I staggered on, and on, and on, always into the wind.