And who was buying up the West End?
Was there a connection? Or was I making constellations out of random stars?
"Hey, cab," I asked. "You're new around here, aren't you?"
"Yes, mis'," it answered. "I came into service two hundred and seven hours ago."
"Who do you work for?"
"I'm the property of Qiao's Quick Transport, mis'."
I knew them; they'd been around since before I was born. Old lady Qiao must be getting pretty old, I thought. She'd started out working for IRC, saved up her pay, and bought herself an ancient cab that she rewired herself to handle Epimethean conditions. By the time I first saw the lights in the night sky she had half a dozen in the air, and last I heard her fleet was about twenty, not counting messenger floaters and other such aerial clutter.
I decided a direct question couldn't hurt; at worst I'd get no answer, and at best I'd save myself a lot of wondering. "Why'd Q.Q.T. want to put on new equipment?" I asked. "I understand the local economy's not too promising."
"Oh, no, mis', I'm sorry, but you're wrong," the cab said, very quick, very apologetic. "Things are booming here in the city. Oh, we all know it won't last, but right now the tourist trade is very big, because people want to come and visit Nightside City while they still can. The tourism office has started a big campaign on Prometheus, urging people to see the city before the dawn. I'm surprised you hadn't heard that."
I was surprised, too. Nobody I'd talked to had mentioned it, and I hadn't given it any thought. I hadn't worked in Trap Over, hadn't noticed the tourists, in weeks, and I don't suppose that anybody at Lui's had, either. Or maybe the subject just never came up; after all, I was pretty sure Sebastian would have noticed, since he was right there in the Trap, but he never mentioned it when he called. He must have assumed I already knew.
I hadn't known, though. I was so concerned with what would happen to the permanent residents, like myself, that I hadn't considered what off-worlders would think. To me, that red glow on the horizon is coming doom, something to escape from. I saw my world dying slowly, and I didn't want to watch.
But that was because it was my world.
For the bored and rich on Prometheus, or the very bored and very rich out-system, that glow in the east just added another little fillip, an extra tang, a bit of morbid fascination. They could come and play in the casinos, do the Trap, and stare at that long slow dawn creeping up, knowing that when the hard light came pouring over the crater wall they'd be safely back home on some other planet.
And years from now they could casually boast, over brainbuster cocktails or a humming jackbox, that they had seen Nightside City in its last days, and they would be the envy of their less fortunate partners in decadence.
The cab's words made this suddenly plain; the realization burst on me like the rush of data from a full-speed wire run through an unshielded memory core. Tourism would not be declining; it would be rising, and would probably rise faster and faster until the sunlight actually got dangerous. It must have been rising for years, even without a publicity campaign, and I never noticed.
Some hotshot investigator, huh? Too busy looking for mislaid spouses and runaway software to notice a major economic trend. No wonder nobody ever mentioned it; it was so obvious nobody needed to.
"So Q.Q.T. needed more cabs to keep up with the rush?" I asked.
"You got it, mis', that's it exactly."
I nodded and sat back, staring at the red velvet upholstery on the ceiling, as I tried to see what this might mean about the West End.
That was where the dawn was closest, of course, and there might be a market for tours-but how much of a market?
Enough to make it worth buying a building, certainly, prices being what they were, but enough to be worth buying the whole West End? Would that tourist trade be worth a hundred megacredits?
And did anyone need to own the West End to cash in on it?
Not really. The streets were open to all.
Whoever was buying was threatening to evict the squatters. Could that be the real motivation? Could he or she be trying to clear out the more squalid residents, to pretty the place up for the off-worlders?
That made no sense at all. Half the appeal of the West End would be its air of decay, and the squatters would fit right in.
And a hundred megacredits? You could probably have every squatter in the city removed for a lot less, if that was all you wanted.
What could you charge for a tour of the West End? Twenty, thirty credits? Maybe a hundred? Say a hundred, then, though only a rich idiot would pay that much, when she could just take a cab or even walk out and look for herself. You'd need to run a million tourists-a million rich idiots-through in the two years or so before the sunlight really starts hitting Trap Over and the market dries up and dies. Say a thousand days, though I didn't think they had that much time, and that would be a thousand a day.
Not a chance in all the known worlds of that. A thousand rich idiots a day, paying for a tour of sunburnt slums instead of spending their time safely tucked away in the Trap? That wasn't possible.
Besides, they'd have had to start advertising already, and I sure hadn't seen any of that. I watched enough vids between clients.
But then, I hadn't noticed the recent campaign at all, I reminded myself, and even if it was only on Prometheus, some of it should have trickled back. I must have gotten too damn good at tuning out ads.
Advertising or no, any scheme like that would be insane. It wouldn't work. And nobody could waste a hundred megacredits on it without having the insanity pointed out by someone.
Wait a minute, I told myself. Was tourism the only value those buildings had? What about salvage rights? The materials were worth something, certainly. The image of the salvage machines eating the Vegas came back to me again, and I imagined a swarm of them, devouring the entire West End and converting it to reusable fiber and metal and stone.
Could the materials, combined with tourism, be enough to make the scheme pay?
Would there be a market for the materials after the city fried? Were the mines expanding enough to buy the stuff? Or could they be used to build a new city, domed or buried, further back on the nightside?
I wished I had a wrist terminal, so I could run some figures, but I'd had to hock mine months before, just leaving the base implant. The implant didn't even have a readout and could only handle a few simple functions; it couldn't tap data or calculate.
The cab had a terminal, of course, but I didn't want to use anything that public. Besides, the cab would have charged me for it.
The thought occurred to me for the first time that maybe there was something valuable tucked away somewhere in the West End, and that the entire scheme was an attempt to find it.
I snorted at my own foolishness-a hundred mega-credits? What could be bidden away that would be worth that much?
What about a combination of all three? Could the combination of tourism, salvaged materials, and some sort of hidden valuables be worth a hundred megacredits?
Maybe, but I doubted it. Besides, the cab was descending, cutting south on Fourth, and the next intersection was Kai. A right turn and a short block and I'd be there.
The bank's holosign glowed soft green in the air ahead, hanging low over the street with a golden sprinkle of stardust spiralling back and forth around the letters. I watched it make the jump from the N in Epimethean to the C in Commerce.
That green had looked a lot better a few years back, when the sky was darker. The glow overhead was an ugly contrast.
The streets below were crowded, just as the cab had told me, and the people there mostly wore the gaudy dress of off-worlders on holiday. I saw a woman with wings, who had to be from out-system; there isn't anything around Eta Cass with enough atmosphere and low enough gravity for wings that size to work. Some of the others had their little peculiarities of color and shape that marked them as out-system trade, too. Business was good, for the moment.