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bodies, this way and behind, and saw open doors far beyond. Perhaps the girl -- it must have been the girl -- had gone into one of those.
    He walked past the rows. The air smelled like cut grass and broken reed stems, with sap leaking. Now and then it smelled like fresh slaughtered meat, or like oil and metal.
    Something made a noise. He stopped. One of the racks. He walked slowly down one aisle, looking carefully, seeing nothing but stillness, hearing only the pumping of fluids in thin pipes and the clicks of small valves. Perhaps the girl was pretending to be a cyborg. He mouthed the word over again.
    Cyborg. He knew it from his schooling. The cities themselves were cybernetic organisms.
    He heard someone running away from him, slap of bare feet on floor. He paced evenly past the rows, looking down each aisle, nothing, nothing, stillness, there! The girl was at the opposite end, laughing at him. An arm waved. Then she vanished.
    He decided it was wise not to chase anyone who knew the city better than he did. Best to let her come to him. He left the room through an open door.
    A gallery outside adjoined a smaller shaft. This one was red and only fifty or sixty feet in diameter. Rectangular doors opened off the galleries, closed but unlocked. He tested the three doors on his level, opening them one at a time with a push. Each room held much the same thing -- a closet filled with dust, rotting and collapsed furniture, emptiness and the smell of old tombs. Dust drifted into his nostrils, and he sneezed. He went back to the gallery and the hexagonal door. Looking down, he swayed and felt sweat start. The view was dizzying and claustrophobic.
    A singing voice came down to him from above. It was feminine, sweet and young, a song in words he did not completely catch. They resembled Thinner's chaser dialect, but echoes broke the meaning. He leaned out over the railing as far as he dared and looked up. It was definitely the girl -- five, six, seven levels up. The voice sounded almost childish. Some of the words reached him clearly with a puff of direct breeze:
    "Dis em, in solit lib, dis em ... Clo'ed in clo'es ob dead..."
    The red shaft vanished to a point without skylight. The unfamiliar glare hurt his eyes. He shaded them to see more clearly. The girl backed away from the railing and stopped singing.
    He knew by rights he should be angry, that he was being teased. But he wasn't. Instead he felt a loneliness too sharp to sustain. He turned away from the shaft and looked back at the door to the room of cyborgs.
    Thinner stared back at him, grinning crookedly. "Didn't have chance to welcome," he said in Hebrew. His head was mounted on a metal snake two feet long; his body was a rolling green car with three wheels, a yard long and half a yard wide. It moved silently. "Have any difficulty?"
    Jeshua looked him over slowly, then grinned. "It doesn't suit you," he said. "Are you the same Thinner?"
    "Doesn't matter, but yes, to make you comfortable."
    "If it doesn't matter, then who am I talking to? The city computers?"
    "No, no. They can't talk. Too concerned with maintaining. You're talking with what's left of the architect."
    Jeshua nodded slowly, though he didn't understand.
    "It's a bit complicated," Thinner said. "Go into it with you later. You saw the girl, and she ran away from you."
    "I must be pretty frightening. How long has she been here?"
    "A year."
    "How old is she?"
    "Don't know for sure. Have you eaten for a while?"
    "No. How did she get in?"
    "Not out of innocence, if that's what you're thinking. She was already married before she came here. The chasers encourage marriage early."
    "Then I'm not here out of innocence, either."
    "No."
    "You never saw me naked," Jeshua said. "How did you know what was wrong with me?"
    'I'm not limited to human senses, though El knows what I do have are bad enough. Follow me, and I'll find suitable quarters for you."
    "I may not want to stay."
    "As I understand it, you've come here to be made