Nightside City

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  That seemed to be about all I could do with my eyes closed. I put my hands over them and opened them a slit.

  That wasn't too bad. If I squinted and blinked a lot, I thought I could manage. I moved my hands a little, so I could peek through my fingers.

  I was still in the cab. It wasn't moving. It was lying on the ground, cocked at an odd angle. One door was slightly sprung, which I figured would account for the wind noise. Other than that it looked pretty much as I remembered it; the access panel was still open, bare circuitry showing. The seats were inert, the screens all dark, the readouts all blank, and not even the system-failure lights were still glowing-at least, not that I could see in the glare.

  All the colors seemed wrong because of the light, but I didn't doubt for a minute that I was still in the same cab I'd passed out in.

  The entire upper bubble was transparent, though, and the scenery outside wasn't anywhere in Nightside City. It wasn't on the nightside at all. The entire sky was a blindingly bright pale blue that was almost white; I knew it wasn't really white only because it was streaked with thin, high, fast-moving clouds that were really white. That sky was terrifyingly alien, awash in more light than I had thought the universe could hold.

  The only other thing I could see, in any direction, was bare ground, and that ground was sand and rock-gray sand, black rock, mostly, with streaks of brown here and there. It stretched off to an impossibly distant horizon. I'd lived my whole life at the bottom of a crater; I'd never seen a real horizon before, except in vids, and all that openness was absolutely terrifying. Nothing stood between me and the rest of the universe but open plain.

  And light blazed off everything, intense white light, blinding light, brilliant light. It sparkled off the sands, off the rocks; it prismed rainbows off the cab's bubble.

  It was beautiful, in a painful sort of way. I'd seen light that bright, in a small area, for a moment or two, but to see an entire vast landscape, from one horizon to the other, ablaze in that glare-it was a new experience for me, and one that I couldn't help but appreciate, despite my sorry situation.

  I knew, though, that my situation was bad. The bubble might provide a little protection-though probably not, since there was no need for any such protection on the nightside-but I knew the sun's ultraviolet had probably already done a good bit of skin damage, and maybe eye damage as well. I might be dying; I might already be in desperate need of medical treatment.

  And of course, I wasn't about to get that treatment. I had no idea where the hell I was, except that it was on the dayside-since I was in the same cab, I had to assume I was still on Epimetheus. I knew I couldn't count on planetary rotation bringing me the safety of night any time soon.

  If I wanted the night, I'd have to go to it; it wouldn't come to me.

  It was pretty clear that nobody was going to come and get me, either; I'd have to get back to the nightside on my own. Nobody kept track of me. Nobody would notice I was missing until it was too late. My only family on the planet was my brother 'Chan-he called maybe once every four or five weeks, and his last call had been a week ago. I still had a few friends, but if they noticed at all, they wouldn't worry if I didn't answer calls or show up at Lui's for a few days; I'd done that before, when I was working or busy or just depressed.

  I wondered whether anybody might miss the cab and come looking for it, but then I dismissed the idea. I'd already noticed, before I passed out, that it looked like an independent, and a glance at the hardcopy license and ownership statement next to the passenger readout screen confirmed that. This cab had been as much a loner as I was, bought free from Q.Q.T. over a year ago.

  I looked up from the statement to that open access panel and all the obviously dead inboard systems, and I shuddered at the thought that I might have to get out and walk in the sunlight.

  That wasn't certain yet, though. I leaned forward and poked around a little.

  The motherboard was snapped in two, and the central processor, the brain, was crushed; the cab itself was dead, beyond any possible doubt. I prodded a few other systems. None of them were working, but most of them looked intact, and after all, the poor lobotomized thing had probably flown here under its own power. If Orchid and Rigmus-I figured Bobo had to be Bobo Rigmus, of course-had been able to make the corpse fly, I thought maybe I could, too. There had to be a patched-in slave program somewhere that had worked the drives.

  I couldn't get any current anywhere, though. Something had cut the power feed. At first I didn't think that was necessarily irreparable.

  Then I got past the firewall and got a look at the main power plant.

  They'd put some sort of timed charge on it, I guess. However they'd arranged it, one whole side was blown out.

  Fortunately for me, it was a side that faced away from the passenger compartment; otherwise I'd have been dead, which was probably what they had intended. They probably expected the whole thing to blow, which would leave me as just a little more radioactive debris. Instead, I was alive, but I'd probably caught a good dose of radiation all the same, and that side of the cab had probably left a streak of hot dust for a dozen kilometers before the poor thing hit ground.

  The power plant was just scrap now, which meant that the cab obviously wasn't going anywhere, but I'd survived. I'd bought myself a slow death instead of a quick one.

  Or had I?

  I was having trouble taking it all in-everything was so alien that I couldn't just accept it as it appeared and go on from there. I had to think it through.

  Just what had happened?

  Obviously, Paulie Orchid and Bobo Rigmus had taken me and stuck me in a sabotaged cab and sent me out onto the dayside to die. But why?

  I could make a pretty good guess. If I had turned up dead in the city, inquiries would have been made. My ITEOD records would have been pulled, and although they weren't as complete and up-to-date as I might have liked, they'd show that Sayuri Nakada and the Ipsy were up to something, and that I had been investigating that.

  Somebody would be able to put the clues together, and the whole scheme would have been crashed.

  But if I just disappeared, none of that would happen. At least, not for some time, not until somebody realized how long I had been gone. It could take weeks, maybe longer. And when it did show up, nobody would be sure I was dead; my ITEOD records would remain sealed until somebody got a court order. And nobody was likely to bother with that.

  Nobody was going to find me there on the dayside. My body would just dry up and weather away.

  And if they did find me, me and the cab, there would be no hard evidence that it was murder, that it hadn't been a bizarre and inexplicable accident or a particularly weird suicide.

  It was a pretty damn good way of disposing of me, really. It got around the ITEOD files nicely. I had to admit that. I wondered who had thought of it. I'd have picked Doc Lee if I had to guess.

  But why? Clever or not, why did they bother? Why was I so great a threat that they were ready to go to all this trouble to kill me secretly, rather that just telling me what was going on?

  I didn't know, and there in the cab I didn't see any way of finding out. All I knew was that they had sent me out here to die.

  But I had no intention of dying. Aside from all the usual reasons-and I'd say my survival instinct is as strong as anybody's-I didn't want to give them the satisfaction. I sure as hell wasn't going to give up without a fight. I tapped my wrist and said, "I need a cab, or an ambulance or patrol car; this is an emergency."

  My voice was a croak. The gag had soaked up all the moisture in my mouth, and the dry air in the cab was making it hard to recover.

  My transceiver did nothing. No beep. If it had heard my command and tried to obey, it hadn't been able to get an acknowledgment from anyone.

  I swallowed, got my mouth working a little better, and tried again.

  "I said, cab, please!" This time it came out clear and angry.

  The transceiver buzzed, an ugly, negative sound. It had t
ried. It hadn't gotten through. Nobody was in range.

  I was hot, I realized, hot and tired-my little doze on the way east hadn't really left me well rested. I was scared bad, too. My wrist was shaking as I looked at the skin covering the transceiver, and sweat shone in a thin film.

  And I hadn't done anything yet, hadn't gone anywhere. I'd only been awake for a few minutes.

  I looked up, then wished I hadn't; that blue-white sky was one huge glare.

  I looked down again and around at what I could see.

  There was nothing else in the cab I could use. The transmitters might not be smashed like the motherboard and the power plant, but I had no juice for them; I didn't have any way to rig an adapter for my body current, and that probably wouldn't have been enough anyway. It apparently wasn't enough for my wrist transceiver.

  Hell, I was probably below the broadcast horizon for the city anyway. I'd have a better chance of contacting ships in space. Except that most ships don't come over the dayside anywhere below high orbit, and they wouldn't be listening on ground-use frequencies.

  I was stranded. Barring miracles, my only way out was to walk back to the nightside.

  I wasn't too picky about just where on the nightside. Anywhere would do; most of the nightside is at least borderline habitable, and the bad spots are mostly pretty far back from the terminator. I didn't think I'd be lucky enough to hit Nightside City right off, but if I reached the twilight zone and then turned and kept walking along the terminator, I thought I ought to hit either the city or a working mine camp, and miners could get me to the city.

  First, though, I had to get to the terminator, and I had no idea how far that might be. The sun didn't seem very high in the sky, and the shadows were long-but Epimetheus is a good-sized planet, as I've said before. Great-circle circumference is 28,500 kilometers, more or less.

  With Nightside City on the terminator, that put it roughly seven thousand kilometers from the noon pole. I wasn't that far, obviously, but looking in the general direction of the sun-I couldn't look right at it, of course-I could easily have been one or two thousand kilometers east of the terminator.

  That's one hell of a long walk.

  But what choice did I have?

  Waiting wasn't going to do me any good, either. A journey of a thousand kilometers begins with a single step, right? It was time to stop dawdling and take that first step.

  With no power available I had to kick open the sprung door to get out, and the instant my foot knocked it loose the wind, which I had already thought was screaming, became an ear-wracking shriek. It filled the little cab with a whirlwind, whipping dust into rising coils; the core access panel flapped clumsily, in a broken rhythm like an old blues riff.

  I'd forgotten about that. I'd forgotten the wind.

  In Nightside City, the wind isn't that bad. It's always there, and it can eat at your nerves and snatch at your clothes and carry things away if you don't hold them down, but it's not that bad. Generally speaking, top speed is maybe sixty, seventy kilometers an hour.

  But that's because the city's in a crater, and the crater walls block the real winds. The lowest wind speed ever recorded on the surface of Epimetheus, excluding craters and the four poles, is a hundred kilometers per hour. It peaks at a hundred and fifty.

  And it never stops. Never. Never lets up at all.

  It's because of the slow rotation and the generally smooth surface. With the mantle still semiliquid, or at least pretty soft, and the continental plates as small as they are, Epimetheus doesn't have a lot of big mountains; they sink back in or get eroded away almost as fast as they form. The only reason the city's crater is stable is that it's smack in the middle for a plate, where it's balanced and doesn't tip. Whatever made the crater wasn't going fast enough to punch right through the crust. It's a fluke. It's a temporary fluke, too, because the wall is wearing away-but that takes time. It'll happen, though. All the active wind and water and even the steady spray of celestial debris help keep the surface level, wearing away any mountains or craters that do form.

  Anyway, ignoring the flukes, most of the planet's smooth and flat, with nothing to stop the wind.

  As for how the winds got started, that's where the slow rotation comes in. At the noon pole, which is over an ocean and has been for as long as humans have been on the planet, the sun heats the air, and it rises, carrying water vapor, and it blows away nightward at high altitude. The air cools along the way and drops the water as rain in the rainbelt, starting about two hundred kilometers past the terminator onto the nightside. At the midnight pole all that cool air drops down to the slushcap and blows back day-ward along the ground, back toward the noon pole.

  It's one huge convection current, that's all. One great big convection current that covers the entire planet. And in the millions of years since the planet's rotation slowed enough for there to be a noon pole and a midnight pole, it's worked up to be a pretty good speed.

  What this really means is that the entire atmosphere of Epimetheus is one big windstorm, one that's been going on for millions of years and will go on for millions more.

  That added a nice little final touch to my position; I had to walk a thousand kilometers or more head-on into that wind, that hundred-kilometer-an-hour wind.

  But I didn't have any choice, so I took a look around the cab, picked up the discarded gag, decided there wasn't anything else of any possible use, and then I slid out the door onto the hard gray sand and I started walking into that wind, head down, jacket pulled up around my neck, with the sun hot on my back and the skin on my hands already red with sunburn, almost starting to blister. I wrapped the gag, which was a strip of porous fabric I couldn't identify, across my mouth to make breathing easier.

  The wind almost lifted me from the ground with every step; it was a constant pressure fighting me. I turned first one shoulder forward, then the other, to cut into the wind, and that helped a little. If I stopped moving and stayed upright, I knew it would blow me back east like an empty wrapper down an alley, probably at twice the speed I made by walking.

  I wished I was heavier, but I wasn't, and I wasn't going to get any heavier.

  About a kilometer from the cab my grip on the gag slipped, and the wind snatched the cloth away and sent it sailing eastward. I turned for a second to watch it go, but I never considered trying to retrieve it; it was moving faster than I ever could, and in the wrong direction.

  I turned westward again and marched on, making do without it.

  At least I always knew which way to go; face to the wind, walking up my own shadow, away from the sun.

  That shadow-that was something of a new experience, too, having a shadow stretched out before me, that moved when I moved, but that always kept the same shape. I'd seen plenty of shadows and cast my share, but when I walked in front of a light in the city my shadow would shorten, then lengthen, as I walked past. Eta Cass B cast shadows, of course, but they were faint things, just darker patches in the red darkness of the city streets. Eta Cass A wasn't so gentle; that shadow before me was hard-edged and sharp, black against the glowing sands.

  The shadow was my own little piece of the night, and I admired it as I walked-when I could bear to open my eyes and look at it.

  I had hoped, when I left the cab, that the wind would be cool, but it was too hard to feel cool; it didn't soothe, it ripped and tore, and I felt my skin tightening against it. I squinted against the wind and the glare, sometimes closing my eyes entirely. I didn't need to see to keep the right direction, only to keep from stumbling over the rocks that dotted the plain.

  I hoped that my symbiote was handling the ultraviolet and the windburn, but I knew that it probably couldn't. It was meant for cuts and scrapes, the odd infection, general tissue maintenance-not for fending off the constant assault of a hurricane or hard radiation.

  The wind stole my sweat away as fast as it emerged, and I was dry and thirsty within twenty paces, and although I still didn't feel cool, I was shivering with an uncontrollabl
e chill before I'd walked the cab under the horizon.

  But I walked on. What else could I do?

  The thought that I might be on the wrong side of a sea occurred to me pretty much right at the start, too, but there wasn't anything I could do about that, either. I just walked.

  I had no choice unless I wanted to just lie down and die. I didn't. I walked.

  It was a waking nightmare. At times I felt as dead as Orchid and Rigmus surely thought I already was, but I never stopped. I'm not someone who could ever just lie down and die, not while I could still move. I had no food, no water, but with my symbiote to help, I thought I could last as much as a week-I had paid extra, back when I could afford it, to get a symbiote with a transferable energy reserve, and with the capability to digest excess tissue in a really bad emergency. Like this one. I figured that I had a week, but that at the end of that time I'd have no fat, no appendix, and maybe less tissue on several organs.

  To walk a thousand kilometers in a week I needed to cover a hundred and forty-three a day, about six every hour-no sleep at all, of course. I couldn't afford to sleep. Six kilometers an hour didn't seem that much, just a fast walk.

  A fast walk in blazing sun into a hundred-kilometer-an-hour headwind, nonstop for seven days.

  I think I knew it was hopeless right from the first.

  But I had no choice.

  I don't know how long I walked, or how far. My landmarks weren't by distance or time, since I had no way of measuring either one. My landmarks were signs of progress or impending doom.

  The signs of progress were few and feeble: losing sight of the cab, or imagining that my shadow had lengthened a bit. The signs of impending doom were another matter.

  There were the blisters that formed on the backs of my hands, and then the blisters on the back of my neck, and in time the blisters on my feet that probably weren't from the sun at all, but from walking too much.

  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.