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, running through the puddles, trying to splash them dry before they could turn green, feeling the rain in my hair and on my back and rolling down inside the collar of my coverall. I would stop and stand and look up at the sky, mouth open, feeling the rain on my face and staring in wonder at a sky without stars, without the red glow of Eta Cass B, but with a gray cap on it that reflected back the city's lights as a warm, even shimmer.
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 millennia, with my vision fading into blackness while the sun still beat down on my back. I wanted to stand there with my mouth open to the sky, laughing at the idea that anything harmful could get at me.
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.
Chapter Sixteen
I DON'T REMEMBER WHEN I FINALLY FELL AND COULDN'T get up. I don't know when it happened, or how far I'd gone. I know I was blind by then, and that my skin had peeled off in layers leaving me raw and red on every exposed surface, and that my feet were numb and the slippers of my worksuit were full of blood. I assumed that my symbiote had suppressed most of the pain for as long as it could, but I was in agony all the same-but numb at the same time. After a certain point, physical pain doesn't have any real effect anymore; the emotions overload and just tune it out.
I don't remember the fall, but I was face down in that hard gray sand, and I knew that this time I wouldn't get up again. I was beyond trying. I couldn't face the wind again.
But I still couldn't let go and die.
I tapped my wrist, wincing at the pain of my own touch on the raw flesh, and tried to call for a cab; I don't know if I really thought I might be back in range, or whether I just didn't know what else to do.
It doesn't matter; I couldn't get the word
s out. My throat felt choked with sand.
And after that I don't remember anything at all from my stay on the dayside. My next memory is of lying on my back on something cool and slick that shaped itself to my body. I couldn't see anything, but my skin felt cool and moist and nothing hurt. I heard music instead of wind. I remember lying like that for a long moment and then falling asleep.
When I woke up-and I don't know if it was the next time, or if there had been other wakeful periods that never made it into long-term memory-my eyes stung and felt curiously clean and spare, as if all the accumulated gunk had been blasted away, leaving only the live tissue. I opened them and discovered that I could see as well as ever.
I was looking up at a beige ceiling. Soft music was playing, almost subliminal.
"Whoo," I said, not a word, just a noise. My voice worked, though it was dry and thin.
I heard someone move, and I tried to turn my head, and that made me woozy for a moment. When I could focus again I saw my brother's face.
Sebastian Hsing was looking down at me with that same irritating perpetual calm he'd always had.
"Hello, Carlie," he said. "What the hell did you get yourself into this time?"
He was the one person on Epimetheus who could still call me Carlie if he wanted, and I wouldn't mind a bit. I think I smiled at him-or tried to.
I swallowed some of that dryness in my throat and raised a hand to gesture. "Nothing serious," I said. I swallowed again and then added, "It's good to see you, 'Chan."
He made a bark of amused annoyance. "I can think of better places to see you," he said.
"I suppose so," I said. "Where am I, anyway?"
"You're in the hospital, stupid," he retorted. "Where'd you think?"
I tried to shrug, but it didn't work very well.
"I don't know," I said. I tried to change the subject. "Heard anything from Ali lately?"
He shook his head. "Not much. She made it to Earth, I guess; at least, I got a datatab from her postmarked on Earth, but it was blank. Don't know what happened to it; maybe it got wiped, maybe she forgot to record anything in the first place, maybe she mailed the wrong tab."
I didn't know what had happened either, but whatever it was didn't surprise me. Our kid sister Alison was never very good at staying in touch-but then, none of us were. At least Ali had gotten off Epimetheus.
I hadn't managed that, but I'd gotten off the nightside.
"How'd you find me?" I asked.
"I didn't," he said. "They called me because I'm your next of kin, but it wasn't me who found you."
I waited for him to go on, but he didn't. I pushed myself up on my elbows and demanded, "Well, then who the hell did find me?"
'Chan smiled and pointed. "Him," he said.
I turned, and there in a doorway opposite the foot of the bed was a huge, ugly man. For a moment I thought it was Bobo Rigmus, that he'd had an attack of contrition or something, but then I saw the black hair and smooth face and the three silver antennae trailing back from his left ear.
"Who-" I began, and then something about that face registered. "Mishima?"
He nodded. It was Big Jim Mishima, all right. I'd seen him on the com half a dozen times during the years we'd both worked the detective racket in the city. We hadn't met in person, not even over the Starshine Palace case, but here he was.
"Hello, Hsing," he said. "You owe me a lot of money. A lot of money. You shot my eye, and even after you did that, out of the kindness of my heart, I brought you back to the city. And I paid your bills here at the hospital, too."
"What the hell did you do that for?" I demanded.
"Because if you died, you wouldn't pay me back for the eye," he said, with a big fat smile on his big fat face.
I started to say something else, but one of my elbows slipped, and I fell back on the bed and decided against continuing the conversation.
Nobody argued with that decision, or if they did, I was too out of things to notice.
I woke up again feeling almost intact, but this time nobody human was in the room.
I wondered if I'd dreamed my chat with 'Chan and Mishima. I pushed myself up into a sitting position; the bed came up after me, so I figured I wasn't disobeying hospital orders.
The room was standard issue-four walls, a door, a nice relaxing holo of a park somewhere covering one wall, soothing music, and an assortment of display screens and gadgetry covering the wall at the head of the bed, all done in restful beige and cream.
I was about to call for word on my status when the door opened and Mishima came in.
"Hello, Hsing," he said again.
"Hello, Mishima," I answered.
"Before you ask," he said, "they tell me that you're fit to be released, but that you should take it easy for a while. And there's something important you should know, before you go anywhere." He paused, uneasily, I thought, and then finished. "Your symbiote's dead."
"It is?" I asked, startled. I hadn't expected that. Symbiotes are hard to kill, after all; they thrive on toxins of every sort. That's one reason people have them.
"So they tell me," Mishima said. "I guess the radiation got it."
I put a hand up, planning to run my fingers through my hair, but there wasn't any hair there.
Mishima noticed the gesture. "You took a lot of radiation, Hsing," he told me. "Not just the ultraviolet or the rest of the solar spectrum, either. You walked across some very hot ground, including the debris from your cab's power plant. They've flushed and rebuilt everything, so you're clean now; they regrew your skin, your bone marrow, just about everything that was damaged. Your hair and nails will grow back, and everything else already has, but it wasn't cheap, and I wasn't going to spring for a new symbiote on top of everything else. That's your problem."
I nodded. I could accept it. He didn't have to apologize for anything. Hell, the important thing was that I was alive; I'd never exactly been buddies with my symbiote. I'd been glad to have it, certainly; it had been comforting knowing it was there, but it wasn't sentient-some are, but mine wasn't-and I could get another. "Fair enough," I said. "Now would you mind explaining just how I got here, and why you're here talking to me?"
He pulled a chair from the wall; it shaped itself up and he settled onto it. "I'll tell you the whole thing," he said, "but I'll want some answers in exchange."
"What sort of answers?" I asked.
"Everything," he said. "Everything you were doing, how you got out on the dayside, all of it."
I guess I should have expected that, but I hadn't. I had to think it over for a moment.
It didn't take long. Whatever his reasons or methods, Mishima had saved my life. We were stuck with each other until that got balanced out somehow. "All right," I said, "You first."
So he told me.
He'd originally had the spy-eye cruising the Trap just in hopes of picking up something interesting. It had me on file, just in case I showed up, as something interesting. Mishima had put me in there long ago, right after the Starshine Palace case, and then forgotten about it. The file told the eye to see what I was up to, if I came by, and to let me know that Mishima didn't want me in the Trap. That was just as I'd figured it.
But when I actually did turn up in the Trap after so long and then gave the eye the dodge at the Manhattan, when he hadn't heard of anyone hiring me for anything, Mishima got curious about just what I was up to. He didn't have anything big on, and he thought I just might, so he told the eye to stick with me and find out what I was doing, and it tried.
He got some vague idea of what I was up to when I went out to the West End, but it wasn't clear. He didn't see what sort of a case I could have that involved tracking down rent collectors.
And then I crashed the eye, shooting it for no apparent reason except that it might find out where I was going, and he decided that whatever I was doing had to be a hell of a lot more interesting and important than strong-arming welshers for the Ginza, which was his main source of income at that point.
He didn't see where I went after I shot the first eye; he picked me up again when I was back at my office, giving Doc Lee his two hours-not that Mishima knew that that was what it was. He saw two guys go into my place, then bring me out trussed up like a defective genen. He saw the butchered cab take off and head due east, barely clearing the crater wall.
But he lost me somewhere over the dayside. His eye couldn't take the UV and the wind and the heat.
The tracers should have been all over me, though, so he hired himself a ship and went looking. He found the cab, which still had some tracers in it, and they'd managed to assemble into a strong enough group for his equipment to pick up the signal, but I wasn't there. The wind had blown my tracks away, so he couldn't follow visually, either.
He was too damn stubborn to quit, though. He knew I'd gotten out of the cab alive, and he figured I'd head west, since anything else would have been completely idiotic, and he started running search patterns.
And obviously, since I'm here telling you this, he found me.
But do you want to know what led him to me? It wasn't the tracers; my symbiote had decided they were benign, but it had eaten them anyway because it needed the fuel, so they never got a transmitter built. He didn't find me visually, with all that dayside glare in equipment that had been designed for the nightside, and my heat signature got lost in the sunlight, indistinguishable from a stray rock.
It was when I tried to call for a cab right before I passed out. The transceiver had a safety feature I didn't even know about, and when I tapped and neither called nor cancelled, it checked my pulse, and when that came up weak it called for medical help. The only receiver in range was aboard Mishima's ship, and it picked up the call and told Big Jim.
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