"And the suit?" he asked, fingering one lapel of his jacket.
"Clean," the woman said.
"So that's it?" he asked.
"That is all," she told him. The black bubble disappeared and they were sitting in a small room whose walls were lined with shelves overflowing with impenetrably technical-looking gear.
"Well, thanks."
"That will be eight hundred Tier-sintricate-hour equivalents."
"Oh, call it a round thousand."
He walked along Street Six, in the heart of Night City Tier. There were Night Cities throughout the developed galaxy; it was a kind of condominium franchise, though nobody seemed to know to whom the franchise belonged. Night Cities varied a lot from place to place. The only certain things about them was that it would always be night when you got there, and you'd have no excuse for not having fun.
Night City Tier was situated on the middle level of the world, on a small island in a shallow sea. The island was entirely covered by a shallow dome ten kilometres across and two in height. Internally, the City tended to take its cue from each year's Festival. The last time Genar-Hofoen had been here the place had taken on the appearance of a magnified oceanscape, all its buildings turned into waves between one and two hundred metres tall. The theme that year had been the Sea; Street Six had existed in the long trough between two exponentially swept surges. Ripples on the towering curves of the waves" surfaces had been balconies, burning with lights. Luminous foam at each wave's looming, overhanging crest had cast a pallid, sepulchral light over the winding street beneath. At either end of the Street the broadway had risen to meet crisscrossing wave fronts and connect — through oceanically inauthentic tunnels — with other highways.
The theme this year was the Primitive and the City had chosen to interpret this as a gigantic early electronic circuit board; the network of silvery streets formed an almost perfectly flat cityscape studded with enormous resistors, dense-looking, centipedally legged flat-topped chips, spindly diodes and huge semi-transparent valves with complicated internal structures, each standing on groups of shining metal legs embedded in the network of the printed circuit. Those were the bits that Genar-Hofoen sort of half recognised from his History of Technical Stuff course or whatever it had been called when he'd been a student; there were lots of other jagged, knobbly, smooth, brightly coloured, matt black, shiny, vaned, crinkled bits he didn't know the purpose or the name of.
Street Six this year was a fifteen-metre wide stream of quickly flowing mercury covered with etched diamond sheeting; every now and again large coherent blobs of sparkling blue-gold went speeding along the mercury stream underfoot. Apparently these were symbolised electrons or something. The original idea had been to incorporate the mercury channels into the City transport system, but this had proved impractical and so they were there just for effect; the City tube system ran deep underground as usual. Genar-Hofoen had jumped on and off a few of the underground cars on his way to the City and on and off a couple more once he'd arrived, hoping to give the slip to anybody following. Having done this and had the tracer in his ear removed, he was happy he'd done the best he could to ensure that his evening's fun would take place unobserved by SC, though he wasn't particularly bothered if they were still watching him; it was more the principle of the thing. No point getting obsessive about it.
Street Six itself was packed with people, walking, talking, staggering, strolling, rolling along within bubblespheres, riding on exotically accoutred animals, riding in small carriages drawn by ysner-mistretl pairs and floating along under small vacuum balloons or in force field harnesses. Above, in the eternal night sky beneath the City's vast dome, this part of the evening's entertainment was being provided by a city-wide hologram of an ancient bomber raid.
The sky was filled with hundreds and hundreds of winged aircraft with four or six piston engines each, many of them picked out by searchlights. Spasms of light leaving black-on-black clouds and blossoming spheres of dimming red sparks were supposed to be anti-aircraft fire, while in amongst the bombers smaller single and twin-engined aircraft whizzed; the two sorts of aircraft were shooting at each other, the large planes from turrets and the smaller ones from their wings and noses. Gently curving lines of white, yellow and red tracer moved slowly across the sky and every now and again an aircraft seemed to catch fire and start to fall out of the sky; occasionally one would explode in mid air. All the time, the dark shapes of bombs could be glimpsed, falling to explode with bright flashes and vivid gouts of flame on parts of the City seemingly always just a little way off. Genar-Hofoen thought it all looked a little contrived, and he doubted there'd ever been such a concentrated air battle, or one in which the ground fire kept up while interceptor planes did their intercepting, but as a show it was undeniably impressive.
Explosions, gunfire and sirens sounded above the chatter of people filling the street and was sporadically submerged by the music spilling from the hundreds of bars and multifarious entertainment venues lining the Street. The air was full of half-strange, half-familiar, entirely enticing smells and wild pheremonic effects understandably banned everywhere else on Tier.
Genar-Hofoen strolled down the middle of the Street, a large glass of Tier 9050 in one hand, a cloud cane in the other and a small puff-creant nestling on one shoulder of his immaculately presented ownskin jacket. The 9050 was a cocktail which notoriously involved about three hundred separate processes to make, many of them involving unlikely and even unpleasant combinations-of plants, animals and substances. The end result was an acceptable if strong-tasting drink composed largely of alcohol, no more, but you didn't really drink it for the internal effect, you drank it to show you could afford to; they put it in a special crystal field-goblet so you could show that you could. The name was meant to imply that after sinking a few you were ninety per cent certain to get laid and fifty per cent assured of ending up in legal trouble (or it may have been the other way round — Genar-Hofoen could never remember).
The cloud cane was a walking stick burning compressed pellets of a mildly and brief-acting psychotropic mixture; taking a suck on its pierced top cap was like sliding two distorting lenses in front of your eyes, sticking your head underwater and shoving a chemical factory up your nose while standing in a shifting gravity field.
The puff-creant was a small symbiont, half animal half vegetable, which you paid to squat on your shoulder and cough up your nose every time you turned your face towards it. The cough contained spores that could do any one of about thirty different and interesting things to your perceptions and moods.
Genar-Hofoen was particularly pleased with his new suit. It was made of his own skin, genetically altered in various subtle ways, specially vat-grown and carefully tailored to his exact specifications. He'd donated a few skin cells to — and left the order and payment with — a gene-tailor here on Tier two and a half years earlier when he was on his way to God'shole habitat. It had been a whim after a drinking session (as had an animated obscene tattoo he'd removed a month later). He hadn't really expected to pick the suit up for a while. Fortunately long-term fashions hadn't changed too much in the interim. The suit and its accompanying cloak looked terrific. He felt great. spa'dassins digladiate; ziffidae and xebecs contend! gol-iard dunking!
Slogans, signs, announcements, odours and personal greeters vied for attention, advertising emporia and venues. Stunning "scapes and scenes played out in sensorium bubbles bulging out into the centre of the street, putting you instantly into bedrooms, feast-halls, arenae, harems, seaships, fair rides, space battles, states of temporary ecstasy; tempting, prompting, suggesting, offering, providing entrance, stimulating appetites, prompting desires; suggesting, propositioning, pandering.