Nightside CIty (16 page)

I nodded again. I had to get out of there.
“Mis’ Nakada,” I said, “you’ve been very kind, and I just have one
more favor to ask. As soon as you have a definite date, could you
let me know? Please? Just call my com and leave a message; it’ll
get to me.”

She smiled and gave me her best
condescending-to-peasants look. “Of course,” she said. “I’d be glad
to.”

“Ah... I know how busy you must be,” I said.
“Could you put that in your tickler file now, while you’re thinking
of it?”

The look wasn’t quite as friendly now. “Of
course,” she said again. “It’s done.”

“Thank you,” I said.

Then I left. I had to get out of there fast,
before I lost control and shot her.

Depending on what you know about Epimetheus and
planetology in general, you may be wondering either why I wanted to
shoot her, or, if you’re a little more up on the subject, why I
didn’t
shoot her. I’ll take the second question first.

I didn’t shoot her because I knew that if I
did, I would never make it out of the City alive. I probably
wouldn’t make it out of the
house
alive. And the idiots at
the Ipsy might just be dumb enough to go on without her. I needed a
less direct approach.

As for why she deserved to be shot, just
think about it for a minute.

Epimetheus is about 9,056 kilometers in
diameter, with a density of seven grams per cubic centimeter. A
rough calculation on a unit in my head gave me a figure of 26 times
ten to the twentieth tons for the total mass, but I probably messed
that up somewhere. In any case, we’re talking about trillions of
tons of mass. We’re talking about a very thin crust that’s rotating
at a hundred and thirty-eight centimeters a day at the City’s
latitude.

Now, I admit, that’s not very fast. If you
were in a cab moving that fast, and it hit a stone wall and stopped
instantly, you could probably just step out unhurt. The cab would
probably be unhurt. But a cab is a solid piece of fibers and
ceramics, designed to take a lot of stress and with a mass of maybe
half a ton. A planet’s a dynamic system, and there’s just so
much
of it.

Let’s suppose that they set off a charge
designed to exactly counter the momentum of the planet’s
rotation—exactly the right amount of energy. Where are they setting
this charge off?

On the surface, presumably, or just
below.

You think it’s going to stop the core? Or the
mantle, which isn’t even completely solid to begin with?

Hell, no; the crust is going to rip itself
loose from the mantle and probably come apart completely. The crust
is
already
pretty thin and delicate on Epimetheus, with
volcanoes scattered all along a million fault lines; where most
planets have maybe a couple of dozen continental plates,
Epimetheus, because of its hot interior, has thousands.

If you wanted to stop the planet from
rotating, first you’d have to fasten it all together with something
a bit stronger than the hot rock and gravity it has naturally. As
it is, a big shaped fusion charge is just going to ram one or two
plates back against the others and tear a big hole in the crust—if
you’re lucky.

More likely it would just vaporize a piece of
crust. I’ve never heard that shaped fusion charges are all that
reliable to begin with.

And then there’s the meltdown factor.

Let’s consider that charge again. It’s
putting out one hell of a lot of energy, very quickly.
Theoretically, most of that’s going to be kinetic energy, directed
against the planetary rotation. Some of it is going to be light and
heat, though; a lot of heat.

And that kinetic energy is bumping right up
against the kinetic energy the planet’s already got. When you run
those together, they don’t cancel out; there’s this little detail
called the law of conservation of energy, which I know doesn’t
always apply, but it’s still a good rule of thumb when you’re
working with large-scale, low-energy, normal-space systems like
planetary surfaces. If the two kinetic energies are perfectly
matched, the two moving masses do stop, all right, but the energy
doesn’t disappear. It just changes form. In this particular
example, it mostly changes to heat.

So you’ve just added who knows how much heat
energy to Epimetheus, which is already a very young, hot, and
radioactive planet, which is why the nightside is habitable.

Epimetheus is Eta Cass A III. Ever hear of
Eta Cass A II? They never agreed on a name for it, because the
obvious one, Vulcan, was taken. I grew up calling it Cass II.

It’s molten. And that’s not because of its
proximity to the sun, either. It’s a fucking runaway fission
reactor. While it was still liquid, still forming, enough of the
radioactives settled down to the core to reach critical
concentration. It wasn’t enough to go bang, but the chain reactions
are still going strong, and that whole planet’s going to stay
molten for a long, long time yet. Not to mention all those
unhealthy fission products—though I suppose most of them never
reach the surface.

You add enough heat to Epimetheus, and it
might melt down, too. Hell, the planet’s laced with uranium and
thorium and other radioactives—that’s why they mine it. A little
added heat and motion would stir those radioactives up; because
they’re heavy, they’re already settling down through the mantle
toward the core and collecting there. Add heat, and you’ll speed
that up, at the very least. You’ll be adding energy to an unstable
system, and you might just be accumulating critical mass in the
core, and the whole damn thing could wind up as radioactive
slag.

Now, I don’t know that Nakada’s one big
charge would do that, would trigger a meltdown, but I sure as hell
didn’t want to find out by experiment. Quakes and volcanoes were
the
least
we could expect.

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? She could afford the best and fastest imprinting
on the planet, if she was too lazy to jack the data in on the
conscious level.

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 annoyance at being exiled.

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 ago 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 millennia before
the City started moving again. In fact, the more I thought about
it, the more likely that seemed, so that renewed rotation wouldn’t
really be a problem after all.

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
and figure out what the hell Nakada and the Ipsy were really up to,
and 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.

At least, 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.

A pink-striped matatu jammed with drunken miners was
heading out toward the Gate, back toward the mines, with people and
machines hanging precariously on 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, didn’t think I’d ever actually seen her before. 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 recognize her and I didn’t
worry about it.

When I was upright 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, running on credit that I had no way to
pay for; I had about three days, I figured, before my bank caught
on and cut me off—less, if I bought anything expensive enough to
attract attention. I pocketed the card and looked at the Ipsy.

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 non-sentient robots working from a standard plan
without intelligent direction. The windows were afterthoughts,
determined by the interior plan, and from the outside they looked
random in size and placement.