Having noticed a dispenser in the station, she went back. The booth was basic, but she didn’t want anything fancy. In fact, she did not need to strip for the scan, as lightly clad as she was. When she had specified a brown calidex coverall and debited herself, the system took three minutes to prepare it and drop it out the chute. She put it on over her blouse and shorts, picked up her bag, and went forth again.
The carrier had let her off within a few blocks of her first destination. Walking up Fell Street, she saw that more of the houses that lined it had gone empty since her last visit. They stood shingled, turreted, painted, sealed and silent in their eld, museum pieces. What tenants remained were generally old, caretaking to earn a bit of extra credit. However, a number of small businesses were interspersed: personal services, entertainment, curio shops, hand-prepared food and drink, a place to linger and chat over coffee. Traffic went sparse, pedestrians, motorskaters, minicars, the occasional machine on duty at which she could only guess. Passing §teiner, she saw what was new, a quivira opposite Alamo Square. It was designed to blend in with its archaic surroundings; she would not have known its nature except for the schematic cosmos discreetly flashing above the entrance.
So people were now coming here to lie in the tanks and enjoy the dream-lives they could not find in reality? Then the neighborhood wasn’t actually dying … unless a sociotechnic computation had shown that this might restore a little vitality to it, and that that was desirable for some larger end.. , .
The Albergo Vecchio filled a building which the occupants had gotten permission to remodel. A signboard creaked in the wind, with a garish amateur painting of peasants in a harvest field passing a leather bottle around. The walls behind the door, similarly decorated, enclosed a tiny bar and several tables with red-checked cloths. Cooking odors drifted from a reconstructed primitive kitchen. Mama Lucia bustled out to cry, “Benvenuta, carissima!” and hug Aleka to her vast bosom. Nothing would do but that the guest immediately have a tumbler of wine and a slab of bread and cheese.
Upstairs in her room, which was also small and meticulously antiquated, Aleka sighed, shook her head, and smiled a bit sadly. She always stayed here when she came to San Francisco Bay Integrate. It wasn’t fake, not really; it was a family’s gallant effort to keep themselves independent, doing work they could care about. And, yes, it offered a haven from the machines. Her window overlooked a vegetable garden. As far as she knew, the plants were all traditional.
If you wanted this kind of respite, a quivira could give it in totality; but the real thing, though limited, cost rather less.
Of course, you didn’t get away from a multiceiver and an eidophone. Aleka called the Mary Carfax number. An aged female face appeared on the screen. “Buenos tardes?” it quavered.
Aleka named herself. “I’m a friend of your grand1 niece Dolores Nightborn,” she said. “She suggested I come by, since I’m in town, give you some news you may not have heard—nothing major, but nice—and see if you need anything. I’ll be glad to help wherever I can.”
“Oh, yes, yes. Dear Dolores. Gracias, mil gracias, seftorita. Can you come over pronto, for tea?”
Hard to believe that this was an electrophotonic intelligence speaking while a program modulated the transmission. Aleka held her own features stiff, her voice calm. The effort made her forget and say, “Mahah”by way of thanks, but no matter, she herself wasn’t playing identity games, not yet. “Sure, I’ll be happy to. In about half an hour, bien?”
Quickly she changed to a decorous unisuit, flipped the coverall together around it, and went back downstairs. “I’ve a lot of errands,” she told Mama. “Don’t know when I’ll be in.” Beneath the easy words, she shivered.
The display at the station directed her to a stop on Columbus Avenue. She had never seen that district before. It busied itself, but not directly with human concerns. On her right a wall rose a sheer hundred meters and ran for a kilometer or more, like a palisade, windowless, seemingly doorless. Recesses and flutings made a subtle pattern over which smoked the hues of a thousand different sunsets. Light also played, in coruscant sparkles, across a building on the other side, whose soaring intricacy suggested a fountain. Complementing it with height and grace, a metal framework reared beyond, where cables made a moving network around silvery control nodes. Aleka sometimes wished she had the brains to understand sophotectic esthetics, not simply admire it or stand bewildered.