Realms of Light (4 page)

But old Yoshio thought he was surprising me,
so I just said, “What makes you think so?”

He frowned.

“Before I tell you any more,” he said, “I
must first know whether you will work for me to investigate this,
to find the assassin.”

I wished he hadn’t said that, because this
was all very interesting, even if it wasn’t exactly shocking, and
I’d wanted to hear more before I turned him down.

But I wasn’t going to get the chance.

“I’m sorry, Mis’ Nakada,” I said, “but I
don’t think so.”

He stared at me silently for a moment, and
then blinked, just once, and in a low, hard voice demanded, “Why
not?”

Good tone he used there. Gave an impression
of hidden strength, and it wasn’t a voice you’d expect from an old
man. He had to be getting on toward two hundred, but you’d never
have known it from the voice.

“Because,” I said, “it’s too damn dangerous.
I’d be out of my depth. You need a major security firm if you want
to be protected from assassins. I’m an investigator, I’m not a
bodyguard.”

“Mis’ Hsing,” he said, “I’m not looking for a
bodyguard. I
have
security people, plenty of them. I even
still trust some of them. But none of them is as likely to track
down the person—or people—behind the assassination attempt as you
are. Their software has almost certainly been corrupted.
All
the software in my entire corporation may be infected. Yours is
not. And I know that none of my major competitors, nor any of my
family, has bought your services; I cannot be sure whether anyone
else has been bought.”

I sighed. “That’s fine for why
you
want
me
,” I said, “since you can’t trust anyone local and
there aren’t many private investigators stupid enough to move into
unfamiliar territory the way I did. But there’s nothing there about
why
I
would want
you
—why I’d want this job, I
mean.”

“I will pay well, of course,” he said, waving
a hand in dismissal. “I paid you 492,500 credits for the work you
did on Epimetheus, and my life is worth far more to me than my
great-granddaughter’s reputation. Would two million credits, in
addition to expenses, be enough to convince you?”

That was tempting. Two million bucks is a lot
of juice, especially on Prometheus. I thought about it for a
moment.

“In advance?” I said. “And no limit on
expenses?”

He blinked again, slowly and deliberately.
“Mis’ Hsing,” he said, “be realistic about this. The money is not
important to me. But if I pay everything up front, you will have no
incentive to complete the job. And if I place no limit on your
expenses, that would make it even worse.”

“What did you have in mind, then?” I asked. I
might as well hear his offer, I thought.

“One million credits in advance, to be held
in escrow by a bank not affiliated with Nakada Enterprises. A
corporate expense account equivalent to that of a junior member of
the Board of Directors. Upon completion of the job to
my
satisfaction—no one else’s—an additional million credits. And I
believe I have some additional incentives to offer.”

“Go on,” I said.

“If I die, under any circumstances that could
conceivably be suspicious, before the payment of your full fee,
then your expense account will be terminated immediately, and
audited. The second million will be forfeit, and the first million
will be distributed by the escrow trustee between yourself and my
heirs in whatever fashion the trustee deems reasonable after
reading your final report.”

I nodded, and got ready to turn the whole
deal down, but Nakada wasn’t finished.

“Furthermore, I believe you have an older
brother, a croupier at the Ginza in Nightside City. Sebastian
Hsing, by name. And your father, Guohan Hsing, is currently a
permanent resident of Trap Under in Nightside City. A dreamer. A
wirehead in a Seventh Heaven dreamtank.”

My mouth closed and I listened.

“I have the names right?” he asked.

I nodded. He knew he had the names right.

“I am not threatening them, Mis’ Hsing,” he
said, raising a hand in a gesture that I suppose was intended to
calm me down. “I want you on my side, not as an enemy. But you know
what’s happening in Nightside City now.”

I didn’t bother to nod again. I knew, and he
knew it.

Nightside City was about to fry—and it was
doing the biggest business in its hundred and sixty year history as
the playground of the Eta Cassiopeia system, as all the tourists
crowded in to see the last days. Impending doom really appeals to
the thrillseekers, especially when it’s a nice, safe impending
doom, not anything that’s actually dangerous. The incredibly slow
planetary rotation that was carrying Nightside City out onto the
dayside was steady and predictable—tourists would have plenty of
time to get out.

They were pouring in like data from a
wide-open search.

That meant that the casinos and all the rest
of the Tourist Trap needed all their best employees.

That meant they weren’t letting them leave.
Round-trip tickets
to
Epimetheus were selling three for a
buck, practically—the casinos wanted customers. But tickets
off
Epimetheus—those were not to be had. At least, not if
you were worth keeping. If one of the squatters out in the West End
tapped out a ticket somewhere no one would weep, but a croupier
like ’Chan—they weren’t going to let him go, not while the
customers were still coming.

When the business finally burned out they’d
let him go—if there were still any ships running. He’d probably
wind up paying out his life’s savings for a steerage berth on an
ore freighter bound out-system. Or he’d rot in the mines out on the
nightside.

And my father, down in Trap Under, he was
already rotting, plugged into dream central. He had a lifetime
contract. Once the city went down, though, would they keep up the
maintenance on the wireheads?

I wasn’t all that fond of my old man, not
after the way he and my mother dumped ’Chan and Ali and me, but I
wasn’t real happy about the idea of him rotting away literally,
physically as well as mentally. And if the maintenance crews
checked out, that might be just what would happen.

“I can get them both off-planet, off
Epimetheus,” Nakada told me. “When I have the assassin, I’ll do
it.”

I stared at him for a moment, that ugly
wrinkled old face with the smooth white hair, white as death.

He wasn’t going to let me say no. He probably
thought he’d already told me too much to let me turn the job down
and go home. He was accustomed to getting what he wanted, and he
wanted me to take this case.

Which might get me killed. After all, anyone
who would try to take out Grandfather Nakada wouldn’t hesitate to
delete me along the way. In fact, if the would-be killer even found
out this meeting had taken place, I was probably dead.

Or old Yoshio might decide to delete me
himself, once I’d finished the job—or given up on it. If I knew too
much now, how much worse when I’d learned more?

But he had a reputation for dealing fairly
with his employees. I’d be safer doing what he asked,
much
safer, than I would be turning him down.

So I had to take it, but if I was going to do
that, I was damn well going to get everything I could out of it.
The only question was how far I could push, how much I could
demand, before he got pissed.

I looked up at the blue and silver floater,
hanging there motionless.

“It’s recording?” I asked.

Nakada nodded.

“All right, here are my terms,” I said,
leaning forward. “You put this all on record, and you back it up,
and if we make a deal you give me a certified copy. You’ll pay me
five million credits in advance—five million, not two. You’ll cover
all my travel and com and medical expenses without question, you’ll
tell me everything I ask for, you won’t hold anything back, you’ll
give me complete access to all family and corporation records,
files, software, and personnel. You’ll get my brother Sebastian and
my father out of Nightside City and safely to Prometheus
immediately. In exchange, I’ll find your assassin and everyone
connected with her. You won’t interfere with the investigation, no
matter who or what I go after. Those are my terms. Take it or leave
it.”

He sighed. “I’ll leave it, if you’re serious.
I can accept all that—if you make either the money or the rescue of
your relatives contingent upon your success.”

“The money,” I said. “The five million bucks
when I deliver, not before.”

“All of it,” he said.

“All of it,” I agreed. “You’ll pay my
expenses, though.”

“I will pay your travel expenses only within
the Eta Cass system, unless you can provide me with convincing
proof that you need to go elsewhere.”

“Done.”

“Recorded,” said the floater.

I could live with it. I’d get ’Chan and our
father out, at least. And if I actually found the would-be
killer—well, five million is a
lot
of juice.

I was going to give this an honest try,
anyway. If it didn’t run, well... I’d been broke before. And I’d
have ’Chan and my father out of Nightside City.

“All right,” I said, “Now tell me all about
it. Someone tried to kill you?”

He told me.

I had time to think it over on the ride back to
Alderstadt.

It was not going to be an easy job. Nakada
himself had already done the easy stuff, and it hadn’t worked.

The way it scrolled along was this: Someone
had turned the old man’s own personal com against him, in the
Nakada family compound itself. In his own bedroom, in fact. He had
been settling down for the night, about to jack in for a nice
little dreamscape, when he decided to double-check the program.
He’d already read out the schedule once, but on a whim, just a
lucky accident, he read it out again.

It was wrong. Instead of a sensible,
conservative dream enhancer, the com was running a euthanasia
program. If he’d jacked in it would have quietly shut down his
autonomic nervous system. And when they found him in the morning it
could have been put down to wetware systems failure—old age
affecting the brain, his body just giving out on him.

After all, he was two hundred and forty-one
years old, he said, and at that age no one was really surprised
when even healthy people didn’t happen to wake up.

He’d shut the bedroom com off from the rest
of the household net immediately, of course, and used his personal
implants to analyze the programming. It was clever—the euthanasia
program was nested inside a worm that would control the entire unit
until he was dead, and would then shut itself down, turn control
back to the original program, and set markers so that the com’s own
everyday internal monitoring would wipe out all trace of the worm
and its contents, just as if it were an ordinary bit of gritware
that slipped in over the lines. The worm was started in the first
place by his regular check of the night’s dream schedule.

If he hadn’t done the check over again after
the worm had been invoked, or if the programmer had set the worm to
hide its tracks even while it was actually running, he’d have gone
to sleep and never woken up. Sweet and simple.

And it was on his own bedroom com. That com
was not on the planetwide nets. It wasn’t even on the internal
corporate nets that Nakada Enterprises ran. It was only hooked into
the family’s household net.

So only family members could get at it—in
theory.

In practice, both the old man and I knew
better than that. The household net wasn’t totally closed off; it
had links to the top-level corporate net, and that had links to all
the rest. All those links were heavily screened and firewalled,
though. It would take phenomenal skill and planning to work into
that bedroom com from outside the household.

It wasn’t impossible, but it came close. That
meant the most likely explanation was that someone inside the
family compound—which meant either a member of the family or one of
their AIs—was responsible.

The next most likely was someone on the top
level corporate net at Nakada Enterprises.

And so on, down through all the internal
corporate nets to the intercorporate net and finally the public
net.

That was from the point of view of
opportunity; if you considered motive, then business rivals jumped
up the scale—but the family and the corporate insiders at Nakada
stayed on it, too.

And if you considered means—who knew? Someone
who knew a lot about the old man’s personal com habits had designed
that little booby-trap, but that didn’t mean much.

It could be anybody.

Anybody, Grandfather Nakada thought, except
me.

So I was going back to Alderstadt to clean
out my office—I was moving to American City for the duration of
this case. The trip would give Nakada time to start the disks
turning to get ’Chan and my father off Epimetheus. When I got back
to American City and saw some proof that they were coming, I’d
start to work.

There wasn’t really much to clean out. I
duped my office software, and left one copy in Alderstadt, took one
copy with me. I’d already had my gun with me. I didn’t own all that
much else, in the way of external hardware—mostly just a set of
teacups my mother had left behind when she headed out, and a couple
of changes of clothing. The furniture was rented; it stayed.

I hadn’t made any close meatspace friends
during my stay in Alderstadt. I’d gotten to know some of the local
software, and I said hello to some of the neighbors when I saw
them. There were a few people I chatted with over tea, and around
the corner, at Steranko’s, I called Ed the bartender by his first
name, but that was about it. No one would be heartbroken if I left.
I didn’t know if I’d be back or not, so I didn’t say any
goodbyes.