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route for the prevailing traffic conditions. Theoretically, anyhow. Some of the students think they’re programmed to maximize fares. I don’t use them anymore unless I’m lost, which I never would be if the streets made sense.
    In the cab we went by a little park in the middle of town, a war memorial built around the ruins of the Empire building. Empire State. It really looks shocking, all bare rusty skeleton. It used to be the tallest building in the world, not even a kilometer high.
    That would interest you, for your strength-of-materials. It’s easy to tell the post-Settlement buildings from the older ones, since they could only build so high without composites. And real estate is so dear the cheapest way to go is up.
    We got to the school and my luggage wasn’t there. Turns out it went to Rome, Italy, which everybody but me thought was hilarious. Mrs. Norris said I was lucky they didn’t reshuttle it and send it back to New New. It’s happened, at least to low Earth orbit.
    My medicine was in there, though, and I broke out in hives during dinner. They cleared it up in an hour or so, but it was an ugly time. Triggered my period a week early. You can imagine how that cheered me up.
    They brought my bags in after midnight, without any detectable apology. You mudballers.
    All of us newcomers got a guided tour of the city yesterday. We got practical advice as well as tourist stuff. There are places you don’t go at night and places you don’t go, period. The crime rate here isn’t much higher than in New New, per capita, but there’s a lot of capita. And the crimes tend to be dramatic. Did they have wasters and wolf-packs in London? The wasters scare me more, because the wolf-packs don’t operate downtown. They’re people who go berserk, usually in crowded places, and start killing indiscriminately. Sometimes just with knives or whatever they can pick up; sometimes with real weapons. You can imagine what a hand laser could do in a crowded store. Last year one killed almost two hundred people at a subway stop.
    (When they told us about that I remembered hearing it on the news, but it didn’t make much of an impression at the time. I guess we expect groundhogs to do crazy things. I have a lot of prejudices to work on.)
    Most of a whole street. Broadway, is nothing but a big meat market. Sex of every description, but somehow evil. Like Devon’s World turned inside out. Yet prostitution is
illegal
. The guide said they tolerate Broadway because it contains it, makes it easier to control. One of the students told me it’s been that way for more than a century, but he thought they tolerated it because it made payoffs easier, for politicians and police. It’s big business.
    The police are frightening. They’re all men, big men. They look even bigger with the body armor, and you can’t see their faces for the mirrored helmets. They’re heavily armed. But I’ve talked to a couple of them, getting directions, and they seemed friendly enough.
    So much of this place is so old (yes, I know where you went to school in Dublin was even older). The oldest thing I’d ever seen before was the sputnik in the park; maybe I’m too easily impressed. I’ve been walking around at random, usually alone, stumbling over history. I found Washington Square, where the Second Revolution started. Wall Street Tiffany’s and Macy’s.
    I made the mistake of riding the subway without a native guide. I never was good at maps, and the subway map looks like a plate of sūmen. Anyhow, I crossed overwhen I should have crossed under, so went north instead of south, and wound up getting out at 195th Street, which is one of those places you’re not supposed to go even in daytime. I didn’t go outside the station, which is above ground, but even so it was scary. Even with a pair of policemen on each side of the platform. There were strong young men loitering all around, too well-dressed, who never took their eyes off me, but otherwise