Perry had meant to phone in a car reservation at O'Hare, but the extra search had eaten up the time he'd allocated for it, and now all the rental counters were sold out. Reluctantly, he got into a taxi and asked the driver to take him to the office of the lawyers that Tjan had hired. The cabbie was a young African kid with a shaved head. He had a dent in one temple and more dents in one of his wrists, visible as he let his long hands drape over the steering wheel. "I know where it is," he said when Perry gave him the address. "That lawyer, she is very good. She helped me with the Homeland Security." The kid was young, 21 or 22, with a studious air, despite his old injuries. He reminded Perry of the shantytowners, people who didn't always get medical attention for their ailments, people who were often missing a tooth or two, who had mysterious lumps from badly-set bones or scars or funny eyebrows like his. The midwesterners on the plane had been flawless as action-figures, but Perry's friends and this African kid looked like something carved out of coal and chalk. Perry was one big jitter from the trip and the coffee and the pills for his arm, but he found himself drawn into conversation as they whizzed past the fields and malls, the factories and office-parks. "I'm from Gulu, in Uganda. There has been civil war there for thirty five years. I studied chemical engineering through the African Virtual University wiki-program, and qualified for a Chavez scholarship here in Madison." His accent was light but exotic, the African rolling of the Rs, the British-sounding vowel-shifts. "But the Homeland Security didn't want to renew my visa last year. They said I had financial irregularities. I was paypalling to a friend in Kampala who withdrew it in shillings and sent it to my family in giros. Homeland Security said that I was *money laundering*. I thought I'd be sent away or put in prison, but Ms Candice wrote them a letter and they vanished." He snapped his long, knuckly fingers for emphasis. "Jesus. Well, that's good. She's going to help me get my girlfriend out of jail." Perry realized he'd just called Hilda his girlfriend, which would be news to her, but there it was. "You don't need to worry. She'll get your friend free." Perry nodded and tried to close his eyes and relax. He couldn't. What the hell had happened to the world. It had seemed so exciting when his father was bringing home new shapes he'd spun off his CAD/CAM rig. When Perry had started to trade designs with people, to effortlessly find people on the net who wanted to collaborate with him and vice-versa. When Perry had started a business making cool art out of free junk and selling it off an Internet connection that was likewise free.