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of the Mall. Once you knew where to look, Yu was full of little nests and hideaways where the Scorpio young spent their time out in the city. She’d been in need of background material for a time-travel fantasy sequence that wafted Wee Wendy Waif to the mid-twenty-first century Gregorian when society finally, and relievedly, fell apart in the upheavals of the Break. Such information could only be accessed through application to the Ministry of Pain Prehistoric Records Division, but as usual, her deadline had come and gone for the third, fourth, fifth time, so she was forced to employ less orthodox tactics. It had taken twelve seconds for the Scorpio’s brain lynked into the city-wide datanet to pull her fish out of the ocean of tellix codes, accesses, files, Lares and Penates nets, and the lofty, luminous ziggurats of the Polytheon. Now, almost three seasons later, the Cap’n’s preparations to return to Chapter and Keep were complete. Still he seemed glad to be performing one final service for Courtney Hall before turning the cocoon’s units over to his successor.
    “So, whazzit dis time, cizzen? More old movies?” As a caste, Scorpios possessed remarkable memories, even without the assistance of the memory chips they wore braided into their dreadlocks.
    “Something different this time. Something a little more … challenging.”
    “Say what?” A true craftsman, Cap’n Black Lightnin’ performed his services for love of his skill, a sentiment with which Courtney Hall could sympathize.
    “I’d like you to locate the access codes to the Armitage-Weir compositing system”—he was grinning already—“and slip this in, in place of the regular Wee Wendy Waif cartoon.”
    “Cizzen, you make my twilight days bright.” Lean bone fingers flexed and cracked to address themselves to the quest. Cap’n Black Lightnin’, digital wizard, summoned his holographic familiars and was taken up in the cybertrance that wheeled his consciousness out along each of the million billion axons of Yu’s nervous system.
    They say the whole city is alive, aware, at a level of consciousness totally alien to any we can know, Courtney Hall mused. Spooky.
    Cap’n Black Lightnin’ gave a shuddering sigh, dismissed his communicants with a wave of his ectomorphic arms. “Got it.” The cybertrance had lasted forty-four seconds. He ran the cartoon through the scanner. “Neh, what is it about this cartoon’s special, neh? Art?” Courtney Hall felt deeply disappointed. Most Scorpios were functional illiterates but that was no excuse. Some of her biggest fans had been Scorpios. He returned the scanned cartoon, already worming its way through the Armitage-Weir computer system toward the laser printers of tomorrow’s newsstands. “There you go, cizzen. Many thankings.”
    Back into the manswarm again.
    The door startled her. It startled her because it was her door, 33/Red/16 Kilimanjaro West arcology. Damned absentmindedness and old engrained habit. Wonder what it’s like, have they started work yet, go on, one teeny tiny peek.
    Rain and rust and ruin. Carpetgrass dead slime. That made her very sad. Maybe it hadn’t matched Marcus Forde’s, but she had loved her carpetgrass. So had Dario; then; once. Walls still frozen in dull, dumb buff. Dripping concrete, corroded tear-tracks where acid rain had cried down exposed metal. The stench from Benji Dog’s decomposing biocircuitry was really rather sad.
    If she had had a new famulus, or even this poor old smashed famulus, or any famulus at all, she might have never done what she had just done. She could not decide whether that was a good or bad thing.
    She spent that night out on the Nightwalk, down on street zero with the wet, monsoon-bedraggled zooks and zillies, splashing through the neon puddles to the hot, smoking lure of the next Salsa Salon or Jazz-Hot Klub, down along the Marilenastrasse where the paper lanterns swayed in the warm wind and on every street corner and in every window