When I got home after the rain had stopped my father always shouted at me that I was a fool to behave like that; that if I kept my mouth open long enough in the rain, the pseudoplankton might just start growing in me. I laughed at him. I thought that was just silly. I knew the rain wouldn't hurt me. It was clean and cool and wonderful; it couldn't hurt me.
I think I was maybe six years old, Terran years, when it really rained for the last time. Once or twice after that a wisp of cloud drifted in from somewhere, but it brought mist, not rain. The cloud wouldn't be thick enough to break into rain; instead it would settle down into the city streets as mist, as fog, wrapping haloes around every light and hiding the edges and angles on everything.
The soft blurring frightened me, where my father's threats about pseudoplankton only amused me, and I didn't go out in the fog. If you walked in the mist, you could feel the droplets on your skin, wet and cool, but they weren't distinct impacts, each drop a unit, the way the rain had been. Instead the mist was like a soft sheet, brushing over you but never coming to rest, never staying where you could get hold of it.
I didn't like that. I liked my reality hard-edged. I didn't mind if it was messy, like the dead green scabs left by dried puddles, like the tangle of advertising and counter-advertising in Trap Over, like some of the work I had done for the casinos before they threw me out, or had done for myself since. I didn't mind if it was messy, but I wanted to see it all clearly. I wanted to know what I was feeling.
The mist terrified me. I didn't mind the rain. I never minded the rain.
I wished I could see rain again right then, as I was staggering across the dry, barren sands where rain hadn't fallen in millennia, with my vision fading into blackness while the sun still beat down on my back. I wanted to stand there with my mouth open to the sky, laughing at the idea that anything harmful could get at me.
I wasn't laughing. It wasn't raining. There wasn't even a cool mist, but a hot one, a mist of dust and wind and blinding sunlight-literally blinding, bright with that ghastly unseen ultraviolet that was stealing my vision. I couldn't see anything but a hot blur anymore, couldn't feel anything but the wind ripping at my raw sunburnt skin. Someone had gotten at me. Someone had gotten at me and sent me out into the daylight to shrivel and die, lost and blind.
And I didn't really even know why. I didn't know why I had to die rather than be allowed to find out what was happening.
It didn't make any sense.
I staggered on, and on, and on, always into the wind.
Chapter Sixteen
I DON'T REMEMBER WHEN I FINALLY FELL AND COULDN'T get up. I don't know when it happened, or how far I'd gone. I know I was blind by then, and that my skin had peeled off in layers leaving me raw and red on every exposed surface, and that my feet were numb and the slippers of my worksuit were full of blood. I assumed that my symbiote had suppressed most of the pain for as long as it could, but I was in agony all the same-but numb at the same time. After a certain point, physical pain doesn't have any real effect anymore; the emotions overload and just tune it out.
I don't remember the fall, but I was face down in that hard gray sand, and I knew that this time I wouldn't get up again. I was beyond trying. I couldn't face the wind again.
But I still couldn't let go and die.
I tapped my wrist, wincing at the pain of my own touch on the raw flesh, and tried to call for a cab; I don't know if I really thought I might be back in range, or whether I just didn't know what else to do.
It doesn't matter; I couldn't get the words out. My throat felt choked with sand.
And after that I don't remember anything at all from my stay on the dayside. My next memory is of lying on my back on something cool and slick that shaped itself to my body. I couldn't see anything, but my skin felt cool and moist and nothing hurt. I heard music instead of wind. I remember lying like that for a long moment and then falling asleep.
When I woke up-and I don't know if it was the next time, or if there had been other wakeful periods that never made it into long-term memory-my eyes stung and felt curiously clean and spare, as if all the accumulated gunk had been blasted away, leaving only the live tissue. I opened them and discovered that I could see as well as ever.
I was looking up at a beige ceiling. Soft music was playing, almost subliminal.
"Whoo," I said, not a word, just a noise. My voice worked, though it was dry and thin.
I heard someone move, and I tried to turn my head, and that made me woozy for a moment. When I could focus again I saw my brother's face.
Sebastian Hsing was looking down at me with that same irritating perpetual calm he'd always had.
"Hello, Carlie," he said. "What the hell did you get yourself into this time?"
He was the one person on Epimetheus who could still call me Carlie if he wanted, and I wouldn't mind a bit. I think I smiled at him-or tried to.
I swallowed some of that dryness in my throat and raised a hand to gesture. "Nothing serious," I said. I swallowed again and then added, "It's good to see you, 'Chan."
He made a bark of amused annoyance. "I can think of better places to see you," he said.
"I suppose so," I said. "Where am I, anyway?"
"You're in the hospital, stupid," he retorted. "Where'd you think?"
I tried to shrug, but it didn't work very well.
"I don't know," I said. I tried to change the subject. "Heard anything from Ali lately?"
He shook his head. "Not much. She made it to Earth, I guess; at least, I got a datatab from her postmarked on Earth, but it was blank. Don't know what happened to it; maybe it got wiped, maybe she forgot to record anything in the first place, maybe she mailed the wrong tab."
I didn't know what had happened either, but whatever it was didn't surprise me. Our kid sister Alison was never very good at staying in touch-but then, none of us were. At least Ali had gotten off Epimetheus.
I hadn't managed that, but I'd gotten off the nightside.
"How'd you find me?" I asked.
"I didn't," he said. "They called me because I'm your next of kin, but it wasn't me who found you."
I waited for him to go on, but he didn't. I pushed myself up on my elbows and demanded, "Well, then who the hell did find me?"
'Chan smiled and pointed. "Him," he said.
I turned, and there in a doorway opposite the foot of the bed was a huge, ugly man. For a moment I thought it was Bobo Rigmus, that he'd had an attack of contrition or something, but then I saw the black hair and smooth face and the three silver antennae trailing back from his left ear.
"Who-" I began, and then something about that face registered. "Mishima?"
He nodded. It was Big Jim Mishima, all right. I'd seen him on the com half a dozen times during the years we'd both worked the detective racket in the city. We hadn't met in person, not even over the Starshine Palace case, but here he was.
"Hello, Hsing," he said. "You owe me a lot of money. A lot of money. You shot my eye, and even after you did that, out of the kindness of my heart, I brought you back to the city. And I paid your bills here at the hospital, too."
"What the hell did you do that for?" I demanded.
"Because if you died, you wouldn't pay me back for the eye," he said, with a big fat smile on his big fat face.
I started to say something else, but one of my elbows slipped, and I fell back on the bed and decided against continuing the conversation.