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

listening to us . He was leaning back in his
chair, up against a black-upholstered wall, and from the look on
his face he was watching himself battle monsters in some classic
thriller. I could see his hands twitch.
    He could have been acting, I suppose, but if
so he was damned good. And of course, any number of machines or
synthetics or cyborgs could have been listening, but that’s true
just about anywhere.
    Cheng apparently decided it was private
enough. She turned back and looked at my face again.
    “You don’t know who they are?” she asked.
    “Nope,” I said. “They’ve made a pretty good
job of staying low.”
    She nodded. “I don’t really know, either,”
she said, “but I handled the sale for the bank, so I talked to
them. I don’t suppose you’ve ever bought real estate, have
you?”
    I hadn’t. My family owned a place once, just
north of the Trap, and after it went for unpaid taxes the city
couldn’t find a buyer, so my brother still lived there when he
wasn’t working, and I was still nominally welcome there, but I’d
never bought any myself. I shook my head.
    “Well, the law says that only humans can buy
land. Nothing artificial. If it’s a corporation, then it’s got to
be a human officer that carries out the final transaction and
accepts the deed. No software, no machines, no genens, no cultured
biotes, nothing modified from other stock, just human. I mean, it
can be cyborged or customized from here to Cass B, and we don’t
care if it was born or micro-assembled, but it’s got to be human
within the legal definition of the term.”
    I nodded; I knew that, of course, but I was
letting her tell it her way.
    “Ordinarily that’s no big deal, y’know? We do
all the screenwork, and then the buyer stops by the office in
person to verify it and pick up the hardcopy, and we get a look and
see that she’s human. We don’t need any gene-charts or blood
samples or anything, we just take a look and check the door
readings. It’s no big deal.”
    She paused, and I nodded again to encourage
her.
    “It’s no big deal,” she repeated. “Except
that for this Westwall outfit it apparently was. Their software did
all the negotiations, took care of all the screenwork, but that
wasn’t any problem, we’ve done that before; we told it we couldn’t
close without a human principal, and it didn’t miss a byte. But
then, when we asked for someone to come and pick up the deed, all
of a sudden you’d think we were demanding wetware rights and all
progeny. ‘We represent a human,’ it insisted. ‘Why can’t we send a
floater?’ I finally just had to insist that it was bank policy, and
if they wanted the property a human had to come and get the deed,
and if they couldn’t manage that we’d forget the whole thing. I
mean, it’s not like this was going to affect the bank’s solvency;
it wasn’t a major transaction.” She shook her head,
remembering.
    I prodded a bit, and asked, “So what
happened? Did a human show up?”
    “You saw the deed, didn’t you? Of course a
human showed up, a little wire-faced slick-hair the door identified
for us as Paul Orchid. He thought he was something, I guess, but if
he had the money to buy even that dump on West Deng, then he won it
upstairs here—the Excelsis wouldn’t have let him in, and he sure
couldn’t have earned that much. I figured that the real buyer sent
him. Whatever, it wasn’t my problem, so long as he was human and an
officer of Westwall Redevelopment.”
    “Was he?”
    “It’s funny you should ask that—so did we.
Ordinarily, we don’t worry about it, we take the buyer’s word that
he’s who he says he is, but this time, because of all the argument
the software gave us, I had the door run a full-scale background
check.”
    She paused, watching my eyes, and I tried to
look innocently fascinated.
    “Hsing,” she said, “this guy Orchid is scum.
He turned up on Epimetheus illegally, to begin with, after jumping
bail on Prometheus on