Free Nightside CIty by Lawrence Watt-Evans Page B

called him.
    Zar Pickens had said the new rent collector
was a slick-hair, but that didn’t mean much; you’ll always find
faddies around, whatever the current bug is, and slick hair had
been hot among the City’s faddies for months. Pickens hadn’t said
anything about a wire job, but still, Orchid might be the rent
collector. If not, then maybe Westwall had a thing about slick
hair.
    My own hair’s always been strictly natural
finish, but that’s more for lack of funds than anything else. I
wondered who made the best hair slickers, and whether they had any
connection with Nakada Enterprises.
    I caught myself. That, I told myself, was
going off on a random vector. I might throw the question at the com
when I had time, but it wasn’t worth my own mental electricity.
    Something flashed white overhead; I looked
up, too late to tell if it was an exploding meteor or some sort of
floater or some idiot hot pilot buzzing the city on his way into
port. Another advertiser cruised up, saw the direction of my gaze,
and projected a little phallic imagery above the cab as an
attention-getter.
    I’d seen enough of that back at the Manhattan
Lounge; I leaned back and closed my eyes and stayed that way until
the cab announced, “Your destination, Mis’.”
    “Thanks.” I slid my card in the reader, and
when the fare registered I pulled it back out and put it away; this
cab didn’t give me any hints about tips, it just opened the door
and I stepped out into the wind, right on my doorstep.
    The door recognized me and opened, and I went
on up to my office. When I got there I saw Mishima’s spy-eye doing
a silent hover outside my window; I bared my teeth at it, gave it
the three-finger curse again, debated making a privacy complaint,
then shrugged, sat down at my desk, and looked at the screen.
    Nothing had changed. No mysterious stranger
had zipped me the fare to Prometheus. No messages had registered at
all.
    I hadn’t expected any, of course, unless
Mishima had decided to make some clever comment.
    I hadn’t expected the damn spy-eye to stick
with me, either; it had said I wasn’t welcome in the Trap, but I
wasn’t in the Trap any more, I was back in the burbs. So
what the hell was it doing hanging outside my window?
    I turned my chair to face it and said, “Hey,
you hear me?”
    “Yeah, Hsing, I hear you,” it said, over a
chat frequency that I heard by wire instead of ear—it knew my
hearing wasn’t as good as its own, and with that window between us
I needed the help. I had the standard emergency receivers in my
head, of course, even if I couldn’t afford a decent wrist unit.
    “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I
asked.
    “Just keeping an eye out,” it said.
    I said, “Spying on me, you mean.”
    “Hey, it’s my job,” it said, but the phrase
didn’t sound right in the eye’s flat machine tone. “I can’t help
it,” it said.
    “I thought you were only going to watch me
while I was in the Trap,” I argued. “Out here isn’t Big Jim’s turf,
it’s mine.”
    “I got a change of orders,” it said. “I’m
supposed to stick with you until I find out what you were doing in
the Trap in the first place.”
    “You’re breaking the privacy laws,” I pointed
out.
    “No, I’m not, because I’m not a legal person;
I have no free will. My boss is breaking the law.”
    “Well, somebody is, and we can’t have that,
can we?” I blacked the window, and turned on the full-spectrum
shielding.
    I waited a moment, then opened a
peephole.
    The spy-eye was still there, not doing
anything, just hanging there outside my window, waiting.
    Mishima owed me for this, I decided, but this
wasn’t the time to worry about it. I’d take one problem at a time,
and right now my problem was the West End.
    I typed Paul Orchid’s name into my personal
search-and-retrieval net, and got back a file headed “Paul (Paulie)
Orchid.”
    That beeped something somewhere, and I
remembered him. I never heard him called