Titans of Chaos

He could probably see that my upbringing had burdened me with ideas of polite behavior andladylike refinement that, I am sure, have no place among the brash businesswomen of America.

The old man cut the price, just a bit, perhaps as a reward for the fact that I at least tried to getinto the dickering spirit.

I could not afford any cords or amplifiers; the thing was worthless without them, but I had avague notion that Victor could cobble something together.

I bought the thing anyway. The final thought that weakened my resolve to hold out for areasonable price was this: Everything we bought on the cruise ship, either Victor or Vanity hadbought (since they had been holding the envelope at that time), and I was not present during theParis shopping spree. Come to think of it, hadn't Colin picked up the tab when we ate out our lastnight ashore? And Quentin bought the coats and stuff from the Isle of Man? I had not spent asingle pound-note of the money yet.

So the bad news was that it was expensive. The good news Was that I had just enough.

It must have happened the moment he rang up the cash register and handed me the receipt.

I was riding back up to the ground-floor level on an empty escalator, the sleek black guitar in itscase in one hand, my purse in the other, into which I was still (with one or two fingers not beingused) trying to stuff the folded bills of my change while, at the same time, performing thenot-quite-topologically-impossible act of trying to stuff the slender purse into the rathervoluminous pocket of my leather jacket... when my radio phone chirruped the opening to the

"Moonlight" sonata in electronic cricket-beeps.

Okay. Enough was enough. Granted, I was in a store, and there might have been securitycameras, but, on the other hand, no one was around me at that moment. No one was looking.

I stepped "past" the surface of the escalator and found myself in a little maintenance ormachinery room in an unpainted section of the store customers are not supposed to see. Therewas a loading dock off to my left and a bare concrete corridor off to my right.

Now I reached "down" into the flat plane of three-space with a number of limbs made of motes oflight, like tendrils of music, if music were made of solid energy-forms.

One group of motes diverted the mass-relationship leading from the guitar to the center of theEarth, to make it lighter in my hand; a second group folded my stray bills and slid them "past"