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sunroof panel and stood up on the seat carefully. There was nothing but an unbroken sea of rentals interspersed with a few private cars in all directions, and no sign of movement. Sam clambered down behind the wheel again and blew out a disgusted breath. "Shit."
    "It's awful, isn't it?"
    The driver in the car on her left was smiling at her sympathetically. She nodded. "It's worse than that."
    "I think we all ought to file a class-action suit against GridLid, force them to clean up their program," he went on. "Or at least provide full dataline access for the rentals. I can't get anything I want."
    "Me, neither." Sam looked at him speculatively. "Say, you wouldn't happen to follow rock-video news, would you?"
    He managed to look apologetic and bored at the same time. "Sorry. I get Casting Call and Daily Variety, and the rest of the world can go hang as far as I'm concerned." He looked around at the clog. "Right now I really wish it would. Why aren't all these people home with their families?"
    "'Scuse me? Hey, you there?" A woman about her own age was waving at her from another rental directly behind the man. " I follow rock video."
    Except for the long pink hair, she looked more like a folkie than a thrasher, but Sam wasn't feeling choosy. "I just saw this item on the dataline," she called to the woman, twisting around to lean out the window. "It said EyeTraxx had been acquired by Diversifications, Inc. You know anything about that?"
    Now the woman stared at her as if she were crazy. "God, no. That sounds like biz news to me. Snore, snore."
    "Oh. Yah," Sam said faintly, pulling her head back in. Business news. Christ, business-fucking-news, what in hell else would it have been. Feeling sheepish, she topped all the way back to the main menu and selected Busi ness News. Then she stared at the screen while it asked her which subheading she wanted, Local, Regional, National, or International? There was nothing more specific. Which figured. Hard-core biz types didn't register as a target market for GridLid; they wouldn't be in a clog like this. They'd be in their offices doing everything by net and email. Like her mother. Give up, she told herself. At least until you light somewhere with halfway decent capability.
    Fifteen minutes later traffic had moved forward a good fifty feet only to halt again, but she finally had something, a small item under Markets-at-a Glance/NYSE Most Active. The listing for Diversifications was footnoted with a comparison box, giving the trading before and after its acquisition of EyeTraxx. The date given was roughly two weeks before; nothing about a topic thread to follow.
    Frustrated, Sam sat back, stretching her arms overhead through the open sunroof. She still didn't know what it meant, if anything. If it don't mean a thing, it ain't information, as Fez would say.
    "Fez, you talk too much," she muttered. She went back to listening to excerpts from new speed-thrash releases as the sun climbed higher in the sky.
    GridLid finally saw fit to deliver a bulletin about an accident half a mile from where she was; by then traffic was advancing regularly in twenty-foot spurts. A few food vendors had materialized to work the clog until the cops appeared and chased them out. Couldn't redirect traffic fast enough to avoid a clog, Sam thought sourly, but moved at the speed of light if someone was out making a profit. Her stomach growled. The cops had jogged back from the site of the wreck just before one of the vendors would have reached her.
    She had meant to head straight for the Mimosa from the airport, but she knew if she didn't get something to eat, she was going to faint. Feeling shaky, she detoured onto Artesia and cruised until she found a quickie with fewer than five cars in the drive-thru lane. Quickies were not her cuisine of choice, but at least she'd had the luck to find one with a decent vegetarian offering.
    The big menu screen was just out of her reach, and she had to hang out the window to touch