Time to lay in supplies: replenish the stock in the pill case, treat myself to a few luxury caps and tabs, pay off a couple of debts, buy a little food. The rest would go in the bank. I have a tendency to fritter away money if it sits around too long in my pocket. Better to salt it away, turn it into electronic credit. I don’t allow myself to carry a credit charge-card — that way I can’t bankrupt myself some night when I’m too loaded to know what I’m doing. I spend cash, or I don’t spend at all. You can’t fritter bytes, not without a card.

I turned toward the eastern gate when I got to the Street. The nearer I came to the wall the more people I saw — my neighbors going out into the city like me, tourists coming into the Budayeen during the slack time. The outsiders were just fooling themselves. They could get into just as much trouble in broad daylight.

There was a little barricade set up at the corner of Fourth Street, where the city was doing some street repair. I leaned against the posts to overhear the conversations of a couple of hustlers out for the early trade — or, if they hadn’t yet made enough money to go home, it might still be last night for them. I’d listened to this stuff a million times before, but James Bond had got me pondering moddies, and so these negotiations took on a slightly new meaning today.

“Hello,” said this short, thin mark. He was wearing European clothing, and he spoke Arabic like someone who had studied the language for three months in a school where no one, neither teacher nor pupils, had ever come within five thousand miles of a date palm.

The bint was taller than he by about a foot and a half, but give some of that to the black spike-heeled boots. She probably wasn’t a real woman, but a change or a pre-op deb; but the guy didn’t know or care. She was impressive. Hustlers in the Budayeen have to be impressive, just to be noticed. We don’t have a lot of plain, mousy housewives living on the Street.