"The noble savage," Toba replied sourly. "Do you know how long it would take for you to be picked up as vagrants? You saw the guards at the Hospital. And at the Hospital, they're picked specially for their warm bedside manner. Vagrants aren't popular. No tithes to the Committee, no room in the City, as the saying goes... You'd be on a Committee-run ceiling-farm doing forced labor, or worse, before you could turn around. And then who's going to pay poor old Adda's bills?"

Dura could see there was indeed no choice. In fact, she thought, they had every reason to be grateful to this irritable little man — if he weren't offering to take them in, they could be in real difficulty. So she nodded, and tried, embarrassed, to form a phrase of thanks.

Toba said, "Oh, just get in the car."

Toba drove them through the still-crowded streets away from the Hospital. The streets — wood-lined corridors of varying widths — were a baffling maze to Dura, and after a few twists and corners her orientation was gone. Cars and people were everywhere, and more than once Toba's team of Air-pigs came into jostling contact with others, forcing Toba to haul on his reins. Speaker-amplified voices blared. Here in the City, Toba drove with the car door open. The Air in the streets was noisy, thick, hot, and laden with the stink of people and Air-pigs; beams of brightness shone through the dust and the green clouds of jetfart.

At length they left the busiest streets behind and came to an area which seemed quieter — less full of rushing cars and howling pigs. The corridor-streets here were wide and lined by rows of neat doors and windows which marked out small dwelling-places. Evidently these had been virtually identical when constructed, but now they had been made unique by their owners, with small plants confined in globe-baskets by the windows, elaborate carvings on the doorways, and other small changes. Many of the carved scenes depicted the Mantle outside the City: Dura recognized vortex lines, Crust trees, people Waving happily through clear Air. How strange that these people, still longing for the open Air, should closet themselves inside this stuffy box of wood.

Toba tugged his reins and drove the car smoothly through a wide, open portal to a place he described as a "car park." He slowed the car. "End of the line." Dura and Farr stared back at him, confused. "Go on. Out you get. You have to Wave from here, I'm afraid."

The car park was a large, dingy chamber, its walls stained by pig feces and splintered from multiple collisions. There were a half-dozen cars, hanging abandoned in the Air, and thirty or forty pigs jostled together in a large area cordoned off by a loose net. The animals seemed content enough, Dura observed; they clambered slowly over each other, munching contentedly at fragments of food floating in the Air.