Realms of Light

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  “Is anything more straightforward?” He almost smiled. “And yet you did not betray our secrets in pursuit of more money. You kept your word. You live a simple life, by my standards, and you have shown yourself to be of use. I have decided to trust you.”

  “Thanks,” I said, not without a hint of sarcasm.

  “I need to trust someone,” he went on, “and I cannot trust anyone in my family, nor in all my corporation, nor anyone associated with them. I cannot trust anyone who has lived long on Prometheus, for my family and Nakada Enterprises are everywhere here. Even picking someone at random, from all those on this planet, the odds are that she would be tainted. So I have turned to you, an Epimethean and an outcast who has shown herself to be a competent investigator.”

  “Fine,” I said, “so that’s why you picked me. So what’s this problem that you can’t trust anyone with?”

  He hesitated, and then said, “Mis’ Nakada, someone is trying to kill me.”

  That was not really very startling, given his position, and I was about to say so when he added, “Someone in my own family, I think.”

  Chapter Three

  This theory was obviously supposed to be a surprise to me, but I didn’t really look at it that way.

  After all, when you get right down to it, there aren’t that many possible motives for murder. Sex, money, revenge, and defective programming are the big ones, and all four of those are likely to get tangled up with family matters, particularly when you’re talking about a very big, very rich, and very complicated family like the Nakada clan.

  If anyone was going to try to kill Grandfather Nakada, a member of his own family would have both the best reasons and the best chances. And any time anyone’s that rich, that powerful, that famous, and that old, he’s likely to be a target.

  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 ugl
y 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.

  Chapter Four

  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.

  I was on my way out the door when the com beeped. I wasn’t in that big a hurry; I turned and went back and sat down.

  “Yeah?” I said.

  “Mis’ Hsing,” said a synthetic voice. “There’s a problem.”

  “Yeah?” I said again.

  “Details cannot be given here, but you must return to American City immediately.”

  “I was planning to,” I told whatever it was. There was no visual.

  “You must go to where you spoke to the floater.”

  “Got it,” I said, and signed off.

  If whoever it was was being that mysterious, I didn’t want to ask any more questions. I didn’t need to, either. It meant th
at someone wanted to talk to me in private. Either it was the old man, or one of his flunkies, or else the whole investigation had already been blown. Whoever it was didn’t want anything important to get out on the nets.

  So it was back to the dressing room.

  And a couple of hours later, there I was at the clothier.

  “Number Four,” I said. “I’m superstitious.”

  The entry clerk said, “I hope you’ll find something you like this time, Mis’.” I ignored the sarcasm, but decided this time I’d pick up a little something—maybe a video scarf. If I was going to keep meeting here, I wanted to keep my hosts happy by buying a few things. I could even put them on the expense account with a clear conscience.

  “We’ve coded Number Four just for you,” the clerk said. “Will you be taking your floater in again?”

  I looked up, and there was the blue and silver floater, right behind me.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “I’ll tell the door,” the clerk said. “You can go right in.”

  We went. The stardust still itched. “Privacy,” I ordered when we were inside. “And kill the display, I want to think.”

  The booth obeyed. The screen over the door told me we were private. I turned to the floater. “What’s up?” I asked.

  “Mis’ Yoshio Nakada would like to propose a modification of your agreement.”

  “No,” I said.

  It fizzed, then asked, “Don’t you want to hear what he’s suggesting?”

  “No,” I said again.

  It hung silently for a moment, mulling that one over. With the privacy seal on it couldn’t ask anyone else to help it make up its mind, so it had to work the problem out for itself, and the neural net in a floater isn’t really made for that sort of decision.

  Eventually, though, it said, “I would like to ask you to reconsider.”

  “I don’t intend to modify the deal,” I told it, “but we’re here, so what the hell, give me the read-out.”

  That it could handle.

  “Mis’ Nakada would greatly prefer to pay you the five million credits now, in advance, and to bring Sebastian Hsing and Guohan Hsing from Epimetheus to Prometheus only after the investigation has been completed to Mis’ Nakada’s satisfaction.”