"Hey, partner," I said. "Wasn't that a sweet thing to do! Hey, what rare trust between partners we have here!"
"Come on, Hsing," he said. "You were busy. We're partners. You owe me. I just saved us some time and argument."
"I'll tell you, Mishima," I said. "I don't think the team of Mishima and Hsing is going to make it. Sorry about that."
"Oh, come on," he said. "Give me a break!"
"I will," I said. "Don't worry. I know what I owe you. I just don't think that this partnership will run. I'm not going to screw you over if I can help it, Mishima, but I don't think I can work with you, either. I'm telling you that right now, up front."
"Hell," he said. "Just forget the partnership, then. I don't need you. But you owe me, Hsing, so tell me what you got from Nakada."
"I did tell you," I said. "Hey, how is it you didn't manage to listen in at the breakfast bar? Then we wouldn't be arguing about it."
I was being sarcastic, but Mishima took me seriously. "Nakada had privacy fields up," he said. "Those floaters of hers were loaded. I couldn't get anything through. And those three gritheads I loaned you didn't bother to try and hear; they figured I'd get it all from the machines. Even Jerzy."
"That the one with the chrome face?" I asked.
He nodded.
"You know," I said, "maybe they heard and just didn't want to tell you, figured it wasn't your business."
He spat, offscreen. "Don't give me that," he said. "Of course it's my business, and those three work for me. They didn't hear. You did."
"Right," I said. "And I told you what I got."
"So tell me again, and maybe add a few details," he said.
I nodded. "I'll do that," I said. "First off, you started off well with your little guessing game. I did tell Nakada the scheme was a fake. But you got her reaction wrong. She didn't believe me. Didn't believe a word, thought that I was the one running a con on her, trying to cut her out of the deal. They've got her clipped down tight."
"Oh, come on," he said. "Don't give me that shit."
"True," I said. "I swear it. Put it on wire, on oath, on stress-triggered plague test, I tell you she did not believe me."
"Hsing, nobody is that dumb!" he insisted.
"You ever met Nakada?" I asked. "She isn't exactly dumb, but she only believes what suits her. Stopping the sunrise suits her right down the line, and she wasn't taking any argument, so I didn't argue."
"That's crazy," he insisted.
I just shrugged.
It wasn't all that crazy, but he couldn't see it. He was Epimethean, like me-except maybe without as much imagination. I could dream about stopping the dawn, but to him, the sunrise was inevitable. He'd lived with it all his life. The idea of stopping it was just gibberish, like turning off gravity. He didn't realize that Nakada looked at it differently. To her, cities were permanent things, and the idea that this one was going to fold up and die, and that there was no way to stop it, was anathema.
The truth lay somewhere in between, I was pretty sure. With time and money and competent people, Nightside City could probably be saved-but it wasn't worth what it would cost. It would be one of the biggest engineering projects of all time, up there with the terraforming of Venus, but with only a city for payoff instead of an entire planet. A bad investment-but not unthinkable.
"You believe what you want," I said, "but Nakada doesn't think it's a scam. She still doesn't want the word spread, though, so we drew up a little agreement-I keep quiet, and she leaves the squatters alone. That's all. That's all I asked for."
He went back to that disbelieving stare.
"Hsing," he said, "I think I believe you. But if it's true, I've got to ask what the hell is wrong with you, passing up a chance like that!"
"I don't work that way." Then I exited the call.
I half expected him to call back, but he didn't, so I didn't have to explain it any further.
It was all clear to me, plain and simple. I'm a detective. I was then; I am now. I find things out. I sell people information. I keep quiet when I'm paid to.
But I'm not a blackmailer. Nakada hadn't hired me to find out anything, so she couldn't pay me to keep it quiet.
I'd stolen that information from her, because I needed it for my client. Information isn't like most property-you can steal it from someone without them ever knowing it's gone, and without depriving them of it. There's no law of conservation of information. You can multiply it from nothing to infinity.
But it was still Nakada's information. I had no right to spread it any further than I had to. If I took money from her to shut me up, I'd be stealing it.
And yeah, this is all hypocritical as hell. I did blackmail her, when I made her leave the squatters there. I'm not above selling information that isn't mine. I'm not above a little quiet blackmail. I do what I need to survive.
But I try and keep my self-respect. I try to stay inside my own limits. They aren't the limits the law sets, but they're limits. Sayuri Nakada had enough problems, what with her blind belief in the gritware Orchid and Lee were peddling her. I couldn't see taking her for all she could afford; that was too cold, too sharp for me.
Nakada hadn't done anything to me.
And there's another, more pragmatic point. Blackmailers tend to have a short life expectancy. What I'd taken, she could afford. It was no problem. We could draw up a nice, clear, binding contract without ever saying what I was selling her, and she could be pretty sure that I wouldn't come back for more.
But if I'd gone for money, how could she know that? What good would a contract be? People get illogical when money comes into the picture. She might worry about whether I'd come back for more, whether people might trace my money back to her and wonder what I'd done for it-any number of things, until one day I was back on the dayside, or maybe in a ditch somewhere with pseudoplankton growing on my tongue.
And she hadn't done anything to me.
If it had been Orchid or Lee or Rigmus, if they had Nakada's sort of money, things might have been different. They owed me, just as I still owed Mishima. But I knew how much they had tucked away, and it wasn't enough to tempt me yet. I knew that if I took all of it, they'd find a way to get me-they'd be cornered, and cornered vermin aren't reasonable about these things. If I left enough for them, there wouldn't be enough to be worth the trouble.
I don't know, maybe there would. If I took a piece off the top of all eight shares, I could put together my fare off-planet-but I'd have eight bitter enemies, all of them also bound for Prometheus.
I don't know. I didn't sit down and work out all the ups and downs. I went by instinct, same as I usually do, and I didn't blackmail anyone.
But I didn't know how to explain that to Mishima.
He didn't call back. I didn't have to explain anything.
I did have something to do, though. I'd done my job; it was time to get paid. Zar Pickens owed me a hundred and five credits.
Reaching him by com was clearly hopeless. I called a cab.
Chapter Twenty
The West End stank. I hadn't really noticed it before, but it stank-an ugly, organic smell, a composite of a hundred different things.
Sunlight sparked from the tops of the towers, brighter than ever, and I winced at the sight of it.
I reached the address Pickens had given me; the signaller was out, so I knocked on the wall and shrieked, "Anyone home?"
An overweight woman leaned out a window. "Whad-daya want?" she shouted back.
"I'm looking for Zar Pickens," I said.
"Well, you won't find him here," she said. "He moved back east about two days ago, after he got his job back. Those machines they got to replace him couldn't take the work and all broke down. What did you want him for?"