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iris muttering in their all-but-incomprehensible dialect of City-ese and making all-too-comprehensible nona dolorosas with their fingers.
    Sleep denied, wakefulness impossible, Courtney Hall found her mind escaping into a third state, a hallucinatory half-awareness where she remained conscious that her body was cocooned in the sleep-pod, while at the same time she hovered over the rooftops and streets like the omnipresent spirit of some Celestial. And from this altered state she passed onward into a kind of dreaming unlike any she had ever before known, in which she was utterly certain of her own self-awareness, so that everything that happened in this was, in a real and personal sense, actual, true.
    In this dream she dreamed the sixteen-o’clock dream once more, but in this heightened state of awareness all those images and symbols that had so far evaded her now came flocking to her fingers like singing birds, and they lifted her, by her fingertips, and she flew with them.
    In the sixteen-o’clock dream it was an impossible mongrel of bicycle and ornithopter, but it flew, oh, yes, it flew, banking and swooping between the thunderous gray monoliths of the arcologies and co-habs; oh, it flew. Huge, slow-beating wings feathered the air as she looked down into the rain-washed streets aswarm with faces. And in the sixteen-o’clock dream the faces looked up as she bicycled overhead, looked up from their rained-on lives to say, look, oh look, look at her, isn’t it wonderful, magical, marvelous, and as she flashed blue-silver over the sea of upturned faces she would wave a leather-gauntleted hand to all the rained-on lives, and then, flash! she would be gone, a streak of blue-silver splashing across the forty-story face of the TAOS girl, pedaling hard up the big, big gravity hill, steel wings laboring, silver pinions clawing handfuls of air, gray tears of warm monsoon rain streaming down her leather flying-helmet, down her goggles, but the white silk scarf streamed and snapped out behind her like purity. Striving, straining for the clouds, she could hear the voices in the manswarm below shouting, “Never do it, never make it, too far, too high, too much,” and she shouted down to them, “Of course I can, of course I will, watch me, watch me!” and up she went, up she went, straining, striving, yearning, up we go, up we go, into the clouds, the soft, wet, gray clouds, silver wings shredding the soft, wet grayness, swallowed, swaddled, smothered in softness, grayness, wetness, but still straining, striving, yearning, leaning on those pedals, up we go, up we go, up we go, until she burst from the stifling, swallowing clouds in a shout, an ecstasy, of wings, beating blue-silver in the sun as she skimmed the white cloud-tops, banking slowly, lazily, between the cloud-piercing summits of the arcologies, her wings angel-bright in the light of the naked sun. She flew up and up and up and up until even the clouds were reduced to a vague silver carpet some unfathomable distance beneath her, up and up and up and up into a realm of ion-blue where planes of light and shafts of luminescence shifted in and out of being and the tintinnabula of the angels chimed.
    (Deep down under the rain and the clouds, down in the sleep-pod in the heart of the great city of Yu, Courtney Hall felt two large salt tears trace down her face.)
    On she flew, through the place of the spirit powers, which, in their wisdom or their folly, had stooped low to touch the earth and bring the Compassionate Society out of the chaos of the Break. And then she saw it, glimpsed through the flickerings and phasings of the Celestials, something so remote that she knew it must be of stupendous size to be visible from the edge of heaven. A line of black that reached out seemingly to infinity, yet which closed behind her, a border of black circling the world. The edge. On she flew, and drawing closer, she saw that the line of black reached both outward and upward; high, she