We crossed the Ravine. My silence was fulminating; I don’t know what hers was. She drove quickly through the hollow-hearted warehouses, briskly past the copper-roofed riverbank palace and surrounding defensible wasteland of the Whitney-Celestin families. Pedestrians and bicyclists kept out of her way, except for once, when someone belatedly driving a pair of goats toward the mall market claimed right-of-way. Her Creole was idiomatic, at least on the obscenities. I felt the back end buck and slide on the gravel as she braked. Something flickered on the surface of a gauge in front of her. “Oh, shut up,” she said, and whacked a button with her index finger.

The trike was, by its nature, intensely valuable; but it wasn’t beautiful. There was a wealth of dust and dirt under the weather shell, and cracked rubber and scarred paint, but that was all. Everything in my field of vision had been repaired at least once, with varying degrees of success and duct tape. I let my head rest on the seat back and closed my eyes. The pain behind my eyebrows was dissolving my muscles.

“Do you plan to tell me where I’m going?” came the honed and honeyed voice from the front. “Or do we drift like the Ancient Mariner? You don’t look like an albatross.”

“Well, you haven’t shot me,” I said, alarming myself. “Yet, anyway.” I opened my eyes and saw through the roof window the hard, hot sky and the ruined exterior of the Washington Hotel. “Go past the last gerbil tube and turn left.”

“I beg your pardon?” she said with delight.

“The pedestrian walkways over the streets. Gerbil tubes.”

She gave a shout of laughter. “Christ, they still call ’em that. I haven’t—” She shifted down, and the trike whined like an eager dog. “Here?”

“Yeah.” I had a moment of disorientation, watching the immense wet smile of the billboard boy on the front of the Power Authority Building sail by over my head. Conserve, by all that’s holy. You damn betcha.

“So, what do you think of the quality of life here? Are all the women strong and all the men good-looking?”

Ignoring the unnerving mixture of good humor and ferocity in her voice, I said, “I take it you’re new in town.”

“You can damn well give it back, then. I grew up here. But I’ve been gone ten thousand miles or seven long years, whichever comes first. Give or take what you will.”

For the first time it occurred to me that my chauffeur might not have all her outlets grounded. “I see. Stop when you get to the fence.”

“I’d be a fool not to,” she said, and I realized she’d downshifted as I spoke. “Unless I wanted to end up coarse-ground.” I leaned forward for a view out the windshield, and found the red-rust chainlink edge of the Night Fair before us. Quiet now, it waited for sunset. “What is that?” she asked, nodding at the fence.

I chose understatement. “A market. I can get out here.”