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his chair and muttered, "One final rip! Withor, you have done it again!" He sat up, and with quick strokes, began drawing on the screen on his desk. "Let me show you the objective."
    "I can stay in the city?" I asked. "I don't want to go back to the slubs."
    Withor looked up at me. Strangely, his sour expression soon turned warm, and with a broad smile, he said, "Of course! It's quite possible you may never leave!"

CHARCOAL CHANG-P
    The twenty-three lanes of northbound traffic on i6002 was clogged as usual. Far to my left the elevated, neon pink Snuggly Train passed swiftly above, blaring the trademark Snuggly-tune from the speaker towers mounted on each car. I turned down the outside audio.
    With my left thumb, I caressed the slight dimples of the forward horn buttons. Directly ahead was one of those odd, low-slung, seven-wheel Haier-Sapporos painted in an awful purple-and-beige check, warning lights flashing. Perched atop the wide back bumper was one of those bumper buddies , as they were called-in this case a beetle-green automaton goose. The bird paced back and forth, flying up and landing back on one leg, speaking, singing, and trying to get the attention of other motorists. Pointing at me with a wing, it hopped around, bobbing its head back and forth. It seemed to be chanting something. I twisted the outside audio knob to the right, only to hear it repeating, "Chang Pee Pee! Chang Pee Pee!" ad infinitum.
    With a roll of my eyes, I spun the knob back to near zero, and settled myself in the seat. It would take at least thirty minutes to reach the Loop. I turned my mind to the events of the morning, and the strange fabric Vada had been wearing.
    The L-flax fiber and the slight corn aroma meant it must have come from slub mills. While that wasn't necessarily indicative of anything-a lot of yarn and fabric was milled in the flatlands (although I never used it)-I had a hunch that Vada had something to do with its manufacture and use. Well, Vada or her people, or her clan, or her group, or her associates-I was never comfortable with the word Toue, nor had I ever come upon a definition that accurately portrays who they are. Again, I may have been too close.
    I knew the basketweave wasn't made to wear over one's head. I could think of a half-dozen cloaking materials that would have served that purpose -the light-bending bombazine by Dunlop & Misrahi Mills, the super reflective double-weave from Lux Lux, even that refracting gauze from one of the satellite mills. That was the problem with designers. They used the wrong fabric for the wrong reason. They would turn denim inside out; they would cut super-satin the wrong way, and mix incompatible fabrics like a child mixing gouache and house paint. But the real question was: Where did the basketweave come from, and did it signify anything? And what was that touch of smoke I had detected?
    Another cute Snuggly Train shot past us at high speed as if in mockery. When a space opened in the left lane, I swerved in and was finally rid of the checked Haier-Sapporo and its obnoxious robogoose, which had just finished pretending to urinate on my hood complete with (thankfully silent) ribald commentary.
    Unfortunately, as soon as I merged, the new lane came to a stop, and I had to sit there while the others passed by. The robogoose was airborne, and as it flew by it imitated an obscene gesture with a wing tip and laughed.
    Pushing the interior volume as far as it would go, I was surrounded in an insulating hush like wind coursing through massive stone turrets, vast subterranean ocean flows, or a spiral galaxy blasting through the perfect and silent vacuum of space.
    I rubbed my eyes for a second and wondered what was beneath Vada's cloth. Was she as badly injured and disfigured as I had imagined, or was the fabric just to cloak her identity and escape? That Vada had somehow sneaked through the catacombs of the building between walls and floors, through ductwork and forgotten spaces, and then