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work. Why hadn’t the bank printed me, I wondered until I realized they’d had my money.
    After I’d dealt with the library, I was really hungry and so crossed Sproul Plaza, headed toward Telegraph Avenue. First thing, I ran into a bicycle-truck selling tempeh sandwiches. What the hell? I asked, “Can I see some?”
    The guy handed me a strip of tempeh. I sniffed it—smelled like paint—then looked down Telegraph and saw a Shabazz Soul Food sign. My brother Warren had told me about a Black Muslim place called the Shabazz Bakery. Shit, Black Muslim food had to be better than tempeh “Thanks,” I said to the tempeh dealer, handing him back his little strip of moldy beans.
    They can’t be racists here, I told myself. It’s California. The door didn’t look threatening—beveled glass in bluepainted wood. I looked inside, saw that I wouldn’t be the only white boy, and smelled the cornbread.
    Hope I’m not drooling. I sat down in a booth. A black woman in a long dress, head covered with a kerchief, came up and said, “Yow.”
    “I’d like pinto beans and cornbread. Glass of buttermilk if you have it.”
    “Cornbread with jalapenos, ginger, or plain.”
    “Plain cornbread.”
    “Home food?” She smiled at me.
    “Yeah, originally. I’ve been away.”
    “Glad you aren’t a Voudonist. We hate Voudonist here, especially druggy white Voudonist.” She went off to get the food while I looked further at the menu. They had tempeh here, too, and I read the fine print on the beans, no pork, flavored with beef or spices, depending on the cook’s mood.
    Funny, I could eat anything compatible to my proteins if it was labeled alien. But on Earth, I wanted familiar food. Tempeh wasn’t too different from Yauntro villig —that’s what was so bad about it.
    But I’d never seen all the variations of any planet, just city blocks and country acres here and there—and now I was being provincial about the west side of my own continent. Planets are huge, thrust into variations of space. The universe suddenly expanded exponentially around that Terran soul food restaurant, and the edges of all the variations overlapped.
    “You been thinking?” the waitress said to me as she set down my buttermilk.
    “I have,” I said in my most formal English.
    “Enjoy the food. The cook was in a good mood today, white boy.” She put the cornbread and beans down, then poured some water. “Beef in those beans.”
    I was just a tiny truculent creature moving through immense space, invisible at any reasonable scale, bitching about the food. Scale can’t be fixed; got to work on that truculence, I told myself in English, digging into the beans. Not homestyle, but good.
     
    Back at my apartment, someone knocked while I was setting up the computer system the store clerk guaranteed would be compatible with the UCal system, plugging the phone jack into the modem. I jumped, wondering if the fingerprints hadn’t worked, then heard Alex say, plaintively, “Tom.”
    I unbolted and unchained the door. His face and bald scalp across the top of his head were sweating and pale, his eyelids puffy as though rows of mites had been chewing on the eyelashes. Puffy eyelids seem to be a pan-specific sign of debauchery or viral infection. He came in and peered at the modem, breath hissing through his big teeth. “Tom you and I need to walk in Tilden Park.”
    “I’ve walked already.”
    “Now. Right now” He hulked over me in his red nylon human jacket, caught in some bleak Ahram emotion. I realized he wanted to talk where no humans could over hear us.
    “Okay, Alex.”
    “Carstairs,” he said, “works in a classified section of Lawrence Laboratory. I didn’t find out when I first met him. He doesn’t talk about that at all. Someone else let it slip.” He touched the wall and his ear. The walls might have ears.
    Shit. Smoking dope with a weapons designer. We must already be under Federal surveillance.
    Alex drove an odd car, license plate