Nightside City

I never heard that they had any co

Getting back to the casino itself: the manager's name was Vijay Vo. I'd heard of him slightly, as he was active in assorted civic groups and reputed to be a damn good businessman, but I'd never met him; not my social circle, and sure as hell not my age group. He'd been working there since the place opened in 2258, so he wasn't exactly young anymore and probably knew one hell of a lot by this time. He answered to the Nakada family, as represented on Epimetheus by Sayuri Nakada, whose name I knew from celebrity gossip on the nets. She answered to old Yoshio Nakada himself, the head of the clan back on Prometheus, who made Vo look like a begi

The property had no liens against it. New York Games had no other assets on Epimetheus, and no other tangible assets reported anywhere-but reporting requirements were light. Stock in Nakada Enterprises was not presently available to the public, so I couldn't get at any reports to stockholders or other internal records. Reported crimes in the New York included hundreds of thefts, assaults, rapes, com violations, and so forth, back over the hundred and eight years the casino had been in business, but no more than most of the other casinos. The New York had been the second casino to offer its players false-name accounts on a formal basis, following the lead of the long-defunct Las Vegas III.

The Vegas-that brought back memories. When I was five I watched the salvage machines eat away the old shell of the Vegas; those things scared the hell out of me, the way they chewed through the plastic and cultured concrete like it was tofu. I had a horrible idea that the building's internal com systems might still be conscious the whole time.

Las Vegas-that was a weird name. There's only one Vega; I've checked the star charts. The casino was the Las Vegas III, though. I don't know any more about I and II than I know why the name's plural and the article Spanish. Nobody on Epimetheus speaks Spanish. I suppose some of the big intelligences must know it, but I've never heard it spoken, and it isn't available on any of the vids.

After the casino was gone they had made the site a park, though not much of one; the imported grass had all died pretty quickly, despite the fancy lights and watering system. I think the metals in the soil and water got to it.

Nobody had wanted to build there, since everyone knew that the sun was coming up. That hadn't been news since long before I was born.

I wasn't checking on the Vegas, though. I was checking on the New York. I've always had this habit of going off on tangents like that; sometimes it's useful. It distracts people. Sometimes it gives me an interesting angle to work.

This time it didn't seem to be helping, and I didn't see anything very interesting about the New York. I cleared the screen and thought.

Nothing came. Oh, there were still approaches I could make, but I didn't feel like trying any of them just then. I had a lead to work, with Mariko Cheng, and I wanted to see where that took me before I booted up anything else.

I did know, though, that the New York had something to do with the case, and that meant I knew where I was going to take Mis' Cheng for a drink.

I still had more time than I needed, but what the hell, I could always walk the streets, which beat just sitting around the office watching vids or something, which was just about all I'd been doing lately. I threw the empty Coke bulb down the chute, punched the com to call a cab and secure the office, checked the draw and ran a circuit test on the HG-2, then I got up and headed for the door.

Chapter Four

THE AIR IN MY OFFICE WAS AS DEAD AS BEDROCK. AND the front door downstairs was as soundproof as hard vacuum, so stepping out into the street was always a shock -the wind whipped against your skin like steel Velcro, and its sound poured through you as if it were on wire. Every time I stepped out I heard the howl of the wind itself, as it wrapped the air tight around every building in the crater, and when it backed up on itself, as it did that time, it carried out the noise of the Trap, bent into a whole new shape.

It was on my right cheek, and it was blowing warm.

I hated that. When I was a kid the wind was cold. You knew it was blowing right off the slushponds at the midnight pole-you could feel it. It was still damp from the rainbelt, too.

By this time, though, the wind was warm; it was as likely to be a back-eddy from the dayside as the true winds off the pole. A few years back, people would bitch about the cold winds, but the winds weren't cold anymore. Since I'd moved out to Juarez I never heard anybody mention the wind, not at Lui's, not anywhere. It was another reminder of how close the city was to crossing the terminator, and nobody wanted reminding.

Hell, the city was actually just past the terminator; it was the shadow of the crater wall that kept us from frying, not true night.

I looked up at the pale sky ahead of me and I shivered.

Once when I was twenty or so, when I was just starting to settle down and thought I might do something clever with my life, I studied a little history of this and that on the public com and I came across some old music-really old stuff, from just a few years after sound recording was invented, before they used kunstkopf or added images or subsonics or anything. It was just sound, not even as real or as complex as you get from a cheap com speaker, but it was still music, it still had a beat and a melody and lyrics, and simple as it was, it could be pretty catchy. I don't know what the hell it was doing in open storage, but there it was, forty or fifty hours of audio, three or four hundred years old, and I listened to most of it. All from Earth, of course-I mean, some of it was prespace-travel stuff, let alone star travel!

Anyway, there were some songs in there by some minstrels, or a concert band, or whatever they were back then, called the Doors, and two of those songs stuck with me because they fit the situation there in Nightside City.

The one I thought of as I looked up at the sky there was "Waiting for the Sun." We were all of us waiting for the sun.

When people first discovered that the nightside of Epimetheus was habitable, they didn't think the planet was turning. It looked about as tidelocked as any planet ever was-which was damned strange, when a system's as young as this one is, but what the hell, it just wasn't moving, so far as they could see. When they checked closely here in the crater, they found a little movement, well under two meters a day, and they put it down to volcanic activity, or instrument error, or continental drift-a rotation that slow wasn't considered possible, since it couldn't be stable, and Epimetheus is pretty damn tectonically active, not to mention having one hell of a lot of plates sliding around, so they called it continental drift and forgot about it. The miners came in, picking up the radioactives and the heavy metals, and they built their boomtown in this big impact crater, the only crater on the planet big enough and stable enough to provide a decent shelter, near the dawn line but safely in the dark, and everything was fine until somebody noticed that the city was still moving, and always in the same direction, toward the dayside.

It wasn't supposed to keep moving, you see. Nightside City was supposed to stay in the dark forever and ever, until the heat-death of the universe or the Big Crunch or whatever.