Nightside CIty by Lawrence Watt-Evans Read Free Book Online Page A

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, and know 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; it
burst on me like the rush of data from a full-speed wire run
through 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 sun-burnt 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, is tourism the only value those buildings have? 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 re-usable 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