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toys, lucky charms or advice or vegetables raised in roof gardens. Sometimes poor people live there, with plastic sheeting for roofs and walls. It’s all illegal, and the scaffolding and its contents will turn into missiles in the next earthquake, but nobody in this part of the Scope of Jaspeer has cared about building codes for a very long time.
    Aiah did much of her growing up here, in public housing a few blocks away. Cooking smells hang heavy in the air, familiar Barkazil spices. Hawkers smile and offer homemade musical instruments, pigeon pies, incense, scarves, lucky charms, handbags, and watches with phony labels. No end of music, music everywhere, booming from amplifiers turned out the windows, slippery Barkazil rhythms competing with the boom of plastic sheeting in the wind. Children play football in the street. Old men drink beer on front stoops. Young men stand on street corners to protect the neighborhood from whatever they think is threatening it, presumably other young men.
    At a scaffold shop she buys a meal of hot noodles with chiles and onions and a bit of meat for seasoning. She has to put down a five-clink deposit for the cheap ceramic cup with a chip on its rim. It’s the sort of meal her grandmother was always warning her against: the meat is supposed to be chicken grown in a vat or on someone’s roof, but it might well be sewer rat.
    Aiah doesn’t care — it tastes wonderful.
    A flying billboard hawking cigarets soars overhead with a siren wail. It’s illegal for plasm displays to make that much noise, but in certain neighborhoods the noise statutes never seem to be enforced.
    Landro sees the yellow jumpsuit first, and he looks at Aiah a little warily until he recognizes her. At once he gives her an expansive hug, answers question about his girlfriend and various children, hers, his, theirs together.
    “I thought you worked in an office now,” he says.
    “I’m underground for a few weeks.”
    “Have you seen your mama?”
    Annoyance dances along Aiah’s nerves on little insect feet. “No,” she says, “I just got here, and —” Deep sigh. “Actually, I’m working.”
    Wariness enters his eyes. “What do you mean?”
    “I was hoping you could give me some answers. About diving.”
    Landro gives a look over his shoulder at the store manager frowning from behind a screen at the back of the store. “Why don’t I show you some samples?” he says, and takes her over to the paint section.
    Upper management, Aiah thinks, is everywhere.
    “I’m not looking to get anyone in trouble,” he says, and hands her a card with paint samples.
    For several years Landro was a plasm diver, feeding his discoveries into local circuits through meters he’d carefully sabotaged, supplying local adepts with the amounts of plasm necessary to keep their predictions reasonably on the mark, their love spells boiling, their curses suitably calamitous. Till the Authority creepers caught him and sent him to Chonmas for a six-month stretch.
    “I don’t want to arrest anybody,” Aiah assures, “I just want to find somebody’s source. I need to know what to look for in a meter that’s been cracked.”
    “There must be a dozen ways.”
    “Just the most common. Probably small-time stuff. Little meters, apartments, and small offices.”
    Landro licks his lips and tells her what she wants. He used little magnets to retard the dials on the continuous-flow meters, and the gear-driven ones were gimmicked with special gears of slightly different sizes than the ones called for in the specifications. Aiah nags him until he tells her just where the magnets were placed, just which gears were swapped.
    “Thank you,” she says, and kisses his cheek.
    “See your mama,” he says.
    “I’m working now,” glad for the excuse, “but I’ll see you all on Senko’s Day.”
    He looks after her doubtfully as she hoists her map case off the floor and heads out. She’d like to stay in the neighborhood a little longer, but