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retreated through a floorboard, did not surprise or intrigue me as much as her choice of material.
    Traffic was still crawling. I dialed Pheff. "Put that basketweave under the magnitron and tell me if the yarn's labeled-"
    "Tailor," he cried, "you're back!"
    "I'm not even on the ramp to the Loop yet."
    "Cut it off! You're joking!"
    "City traffic is its usual dreadful." Since I figured he'd already forgotten my request I repeated it. "See if the basketweave is labeled."
    "Listen," he said, "I just got a call. The delivery vessel will be late."
    When he didn't elaborate, I asked, "When is late ?"
    "It won't be here for another hour! That means it's not going to get there on time. That means someone is going to have to apologize. That I can't do!"
    "The first week my original shop was open," I said, as I nudged the car forward, "I didn't sleep for a week. And when I delivered my first suit, my hands shook. I kept expecting the sleeves to fall off or the buttons to explode. And you know what actually happened?" He didn't respond, but I knew he was listening. "I had used an incompatible interfacing in the collar. The stuff began to combust and when the man put it on, it scorched his neck and shoulders. Had he not attacked me and broken my collar bone, he would have probably won his lawsuit, and I would not be here."
    "Cut it!" he said with a nervous laugh. "What'd you use?"
    "Fuse-i-Lok D6… industrial base." He laughed harder. "You'll be fine," I concluded. "What about the basketweave?"
    "Um… nothing. No label."
    Almost all yarn had identifying manufacturing marks. That limited this fabric's origins. "Thank you," I said. "I'll call when I'm on the Loop."
    Lost in the hypnotic crawl of the traffic, I thought back to my first days, weeks, months in Seattlehama. Back then the city was growing rapidly. New buildings were being erected every few weeks. They built them on the ground and raised them floor-by-floor.
    The whole plan for the city had been the brainchild of a textile engineer who figured out how to spin microscopic metal strands into a kind of yarn that was amazingly strong. Enormous buildings could be woven into the sky at high speed, much like a length-wise or warp-knit tricot loom.
    My lane moved forward, and I came up on robogoose again. He spied my Chang, turned and offered the single black dot of his hind end. I thought about stepping on the accelerator, bumping the Haier-Sapporo hard enough to knock the birdbot onto the pavement, but my lane was still moving, and that was what mattered.
    I passed him and had a thought: flying and landing . A chill ran down my neck, but I couldn't make the connection.
    We continued about a hundred yards ahead before coming to another stop. Foot against the brake pedal, I closed my eyes and an image came to me:
    I was looking down at the road and the tops of the cars from a hundred feet in the air, peering through the white gaze of a chiffon window. Above me, stitched to the top edge of the cloth wall, was a large, hydrogen-filled batiste balloon. I couldn't see it, except for a slight curve of its blue-gray flank, but more sensed its shape and buoyancy. Below my feet was a dark and textured fabric floor. Stooping, I touched it, and knew instantly what it was.
    I heard a voice behind me. It wasn't words or speech, but a long vocalization-a cry of pain. When I turned from the chiffon window and the view of the road and the cars below, the interior of the airship was too dark to see, but I stepped forward, my hands outstretched, and thought I felt something, but whether it was a cloth wall, a pile of fabric, or just my imagination, I couldn't tell. Beneath my bare feet, I stroked the gridlike pattern of the basketweave.
    I woke back in my car. A wagon pulled in front of me and then a long, white limo did the same. Other vehicles streamed around me. The purple-and-beige-check Haier-Sapporo was long gone and so was the robogoose. The sound I had thought was Vada's voice was actually the