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methods that I'm not free to divulge.
Jack guessed,  Aroma and a brain-glimpse, and what else? Metabolic markers, or a body scan?
The robot said nothing.
 The forty-seventh floor? Jack asked.
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 Yes, sir. We have lift pads at convenient locations. But if you prefer, there are elevators along each of
the main walls.
Jack turned and found Tasha herding the boys toward him.  We've got another climb, he reported.
 Pad or elevator?
 Pad! the boys shouted.
Tasha loathed the pads. They made her uneasy for all the obvious reasons, and no statistic could slow
her pulse while she was riding one.  Thank you, she said,  but I'll take the old-fashioned route.
 Stairs? he joked.
With a thoroughly sarcastic grin, Clay asked,  What are stairs, Dad?
That earned a patient little laugh from his old man.  Come on, boys. Let's race your mom!
The closest pad resembled a disk of polished sandstone. There was room for twenty, upholstered
benches set in an outward-facing ring and looking as if nobody had ever used them. Climbing inside an
invisible scaffold, the disk lifted from the lobby floor with a smooth inevitability, not a whisper of sound
audible over the murmur of people and water. Petey was fearless, standing with his toes curled over the
edge as they soared high into the air. Clay appeared fearless, but he kept a good six inches between him
and the brink. Jack preferred to sit, unashamed by his own little case of vertigo. This technology was
proven, and he couldn't count the safety features, but still, that didn't mean he relished peering down
through hundreds of feet of open air.
From above, the lobby looked and sounded busier than ever. There had to be several thousand
conventioneers, easily. Jack found himself watching the alien costumes, instinctively checking their
accuracy. The Balla were popular. And the Wkkens. Plus several species with tortuous names that
humans had simplified into cuddly handles like Smilers and Robins and Bishop Boys. What did this say
about human beings? These preferences gave clues into his species nature; how many times had he
thought that? The Balla were easy: Their transmissions were the first detected at the Water Hole. And it
was the Smilers beacon that gave humanity its first lessons in advanced technologies. But after that,
aesthetics mattered. Despite the oddness of the bodies, despite the weird whistles and barks rising up to
them, Jack was seeing the most ordinary, human-like species. The public was aware of more than a
thousand alien civilizations, but barely thirty were represented here, proving again what Jack had known
for years: Human eyes and ears could absorb only so much strangeness before they went blind and deaf.
Walkways made of Bishop Boy plastics hung out over the atrium. Without prompting, their pad docked
in front of their suite. An elegant railing of black iron collapsed to let them pass, and then it rose up again
and froze with a soundless grace. Boys and man had to take a moment to stand at the railing, gazing
down from this high place. The hotel was a cylinder set inside a wider and much taller cylinder. In truth, it
was a tiny piece of architecture a little feature buried inside something far grander yet without anything
to compare it against, the hotel seemed huge and majestic, and memorable.
 Now, Clay signaled, and the brothers spat impressive gobs of spittle over the black railing.
 Enough, Jack rumbled, laughing under his breath.
The door to their suite stood open. Tasha stood in the middle of the main room, grinning as she
reported,  These elevators are quick.
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Their luggage had already arrived and unpacked itself.
 Nice, was Tasha's assessment of their rooms.
Jack nodded agreeably. There were no windows in the old sense, but a Smiler window had been hung
on the outer wall. Their view was being piped in through several meters of diamond composites and
dark-matter scaffolding. The hotel was twenty miles above a string of little snowy bumps: The Andes.
Jack was staring west, his eagle-sharp eyes following the perfect smooth curve of the horizon, the
blueness of the Pacific merging with a bank of blue-white clouds that were undoubtedly magnificent in
their own right. Yet the ocean and storms and mountains were tiny compared to the sky. They were
standing where the universe began, a multitude of stars and things that were not stars hanging about them,
everything moving with the easy, mindless majesty that has moved the universe since time began.
Tasha threw an arm around Jack's waist.  So what happened down there?
 That gentleman who greeted us 
 Mr. Boot-Licker?
 Years ago, he was in charge of programming at a con. We were married, so I was an established
writer. I joined the con late and asked to get to sit with a panel or two. But Mr. Boot-Licker told me that
he'd never heard of me, and I wasn't welcome, and then he turned and rolled away from me. Hearing
himself, Jack had to laugh.  Sounds awfully petty of me, doesn't it?
But his wife had a different sensibility.  What you should have done ... you should have had some fun
with him. In front of his friends, you should have 
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