Nobody argued with that decision, or if they did, I was too out of things to notice.
I woke up again feeling almost intact, but this time nobody human was in the room.
I wondered if I'd dreamed my chat with 'Chan and Mishima. I pushed myself up into a sitting position; the bed came up after me, so I figured I wasn't disobeying hospital orders.
The room was standard issue-four walls, a door, a nice relaxing holo of a park somewhere covering one wall, soothing music, and an assortment of display screens and gadgetry covering the wall at the head of the bed, all done in restful beige and cream.
I was about to call for word on my status when the door opened and Mishima came in.
"Hello, Hsing," he said again.
"Hello, Mishima," I answered.
"Before you ask," he said, "they tell me that you're fit to be released, but that you should take it easy for a while. And there's something important you should know, before you go anywhere." He paused, uneasily, I thought, and then finished. "Your symbiote's dead."
"It is?" I asked, startled. I hadn't expected that. Symbiotes are hard to kill, after all; they thrive on toxins of every sort. That's one reason people have them.
"So they tell me," Mishima said. "I guess the radiation got it."
I put a hand up, planning to run my fingers through my hair, but there wasn't any hair there.
Mishima noticed the gesture. "You took a lot of radiation, Hsing," he told me. "Not just the ultraviolet or the rest of the solar spectrum, either. You walked across some very hot ground, including the debris from your cab's power plant. They've flushed and rebuilt everything, so you're clean now; they regrew your skin, your bone marrow, just about everything that was damaged. Your hair and nails will grow back, and everything else already has, but it wasn't cheap, and I wasn't going to spring for a new symbiote on top of everything else. That's your problem."
I nodded. I could accept it. He didn't have to apologize for anything. Hell, the important thing was that I was alive; I'd never exactly been buddies with my symbiote. I'd been glad to have it, certainly; it had been comforting knowing it was there, but it wasn't sentient-some are, but mine wasn't-and I could get another. "Fair enough," I said. "Now would you mind explaining just how I got here, and why you're here talking to me?"
He pulled a chair from the wall; it shaped itself up and he settled onto it. "I'll tell you the whole thing," he said, "but I'll want some answers in exchange."
"What sort of answers?" I asked.
"Everything," he said. "Everything you were doing, how you got out on the dayside, all of it."
I guess I should have expected that, but I hadn't. I had to think it over for a moment.
It didn't take long. Whatever his reasons or methods, Mishima had saved my life. We were stuck with each other until that got balanced out somehow. "All right," I said, "You first."
So he told me.
He'd originally had the spy-eye cruising the Trap just in hopes of picking up something interesting. It had me on file, just in case I showed up, as something interesting. Mishima had put me in there long ago, right after the Starshine Palace case, and then forgotten about it. The file told the eye to see what I was up to, if I came by, and to let me know that Mishima didn't want me in the Trap. That was just as I'd figured it.
But when I actually did turn up in the Trap after so long and then gave the eye the dodge at the Manhattan, when he hadn't heard of anyone hiring me for anything, Mishima got curious about just what I was up to. He didn't have anything big on, and he thought I just might, so he told the eye to stick with me and find out what I was doing, and it tried.
He got some vague idea of what I was up to when I went out to the West End, but it wasn't clear. He didn't see what sort of a case I could have that involved tracking down rent collectors.
And then I crashed the eye, shooting it for no apparent reason except that it might find out where I was going, and he decided that whatever I was doing had to be a hell of a lot more interesting and important than strong-arming welshers for the Ginza, which was his main source of income at that point.
He was out an eye, but he wasn't about to let that slow him down. He bought himself some tracerized microintelligences and had a messenger dump them all over the street in front of my office. He put another eye on me, a top-of-the-line camouflaged high-altitude job that he had to put on credit because he'd already blown his budget.
He didn't see where I went after I shot the first eye; he picked me up again when I was back at my office, giving Doc Lee his two hours-not that Mishima knew that that was what it was. He saw two guys go into my place, then bring me out trussed up like a defective genen. He saw the butchered cab take off and head due east, barely clearing the crater wall.
But he lost me somewhere over the dayside. His eye couldn't take the UV and the wind and the heat.
The tracers should have been all over me, though, so he hired himself a ship and went looking. He found the cab, which still had some tracers in it, and they'd managed to assemble into a strong enough group for his equipment to pick up the signal, but I wasn't there. The wind had blown my tracks away, so he couldn't follow visually, either.
He was too damn stubborn to quit, though. He knew I'd gotten out of the cab alive, and he figured I'd head west, since anything else would have been completely idiotic, and he started running search patterns.
And obviously, since I'm here telling you this, he found me.
But do you want to know what led him to me? It wasn't the tracers; my symbiote had decided they were benign, but it had eaten them anyway because it needed the fuel, so they never got a transmitter built. He didn't find me visually, with all that dayside glare in equipment that had been designed for the nightside, and my heat signature got lost in the sunlight, indistinguishable from a stray rock.
It was when I tried to call for a cab right before I passed out. The transceiver had a safety feature I didn't even know about, and when I tapped and neither called nor cancelled, it checked my pulse, and when that came up weak it called for medical help. The only receiver in range was aboard Mishima's ship, and it picked up the call and told Big Jim.
He figured it had to be me. I had to be the only person on the dayside who could be calling for help. And besides, even if it wasn't me, refusing to answer a medical emergency call can get a ship's operating license pulled.
So he found me there, unconscious, half-buried in drifting sand, my skin in sunburnt shreds, blind, with a bad case of radiation poisoning-besides the stuff from the cab I'd walked right across some of the richest unmined ore on the planet.
He'd picked me up and brought me back to Nightside City and registered me in the city hospital under a false name, and he'd set up a credit account against his assets to pay my bills; then he'd called on 'Chan to see if he knew what the hell I had been doing that got me so close to getting killed.
'Chan didn't know anything, of course, but he was still interested in seeing me, seeing that I was all right. We still check on each other sometimes. Ever since Dad bought the dream and Mama shipped out, 'Chan and Ali and I had been all the family any of us had. We weren't really close -I think we're all afraid that if we get too close we'll just get burned again-but we stayed in touch, all three of us until Ali left, and then just 'Chan and me. So he came and took a look at me and then went back to his work. He was a croupier at the time-I'm not sure which casino, because he moved around, but it was obviously one of the better ones if it used human croupiers, right?