Not now. I was too badly jarred, and not just in the seat. Already that weird ride was becoming remote and dreamlike, as Spiral memories tend to; yet I couldn’t stop turning it over and over in my head. I lingered on in the bar, though it was filling up with trade-fair types doing roaring business – literally – with the local tarts. When the gin had blunted the physical aches a bit, I hobbled off to the crowded grill room to pick at an unmemorable dinner, and sat brooding over my cardboard coffee. I needed advice, that was obvious; but the Spiral was the only place I’d find it. I might be able to reach it. Seaports, river junctions, the great historical hubs of travelling humanity, it was around places like these, with their tangled web of shadows, that the misty borderland between the Core and the Spiral was broadest and easiest to penetrate. They didn’t have to be ancient; I’d had one very strange encounter in the half-lit underpasses at Chicago O’Hare. There could easily be ways and byways here too; but I didn’t know my way around, and that was always dangerous.
