The complex's holographic envelope was that of a cliff-dweller's adobe village, complete with dwellers, dinner fires, ladders, and all. Great job. Could hardly tell it wasn't real.

Don't know why they named it the Central Park Complex, though. No park here. Except for moss, wasn't much of anything green left at groundlevel in the whole megalops — only on the rooftop gardens. Maybe there'd been a park here once. Gone now. And who cared anyway?

Don't know why I bother myself with these questions.

As we’d agreed, the clone was waiting at the ground level entrance on Fifth. I was dodging puddles on my way across the mossy street when I spotted her squatting beside a little boy who couldn't have been older than two or three. She was holding the kid's hand, smiling and talking to him. Her face was very animated and the kid must have thought she was funny because he was laughing like she was the best thing since Joey Jose.

Knew the kid wouldn't be alone. Looked around for his guards and found them — three ten-year-olds standing off to the side, eying the passers-by. The urchingangs liked to use the little ones for begging. Guess it was a kind of symbiosis. Illegal live births — those over and above the self-replacement quota — get left in the undergrounds. The urchingangs take them in, raise them, teach them begging, and train them in the care of the next infants to come along. A self-perpetuating cycle.