Yarn by Jon Armstrong Page B

mean I didn't know it was cloth until I came to Seattlehama. That's why I collected yarn."
    "Then what proof have you, purported slubber prisoner!"
    Withor still had my papers! Without them I was nothing. "That's the truth," I told her. The points of her knitting needles felt like they were stabbing my sinuses.
    "Show me something!"
    "I don't have anything."
    "Nothing?" She yanked the needles from my nose. "You have nothing?"
    I rubbed my nose. I was bleeding, but not badly. "I guess not."
    She laughed at me. "Then you are nothing. You do not exist. I don't know if I should stitch you closed or toss you from these towers from the ends of my needles." When she waved the things in an angry figure eight, they swished like swords through the air.
    I thought of the one thing I did have. It didn't prove anything, and I didn't want her to take it, but I said, "I have yarn."
    She glared at me. "What yarn?"
    "I got it from my dad in the slubs. I don't even know where he got it. But it's all I have."
    "The dust and smoke of lies! Everything from you is sweaty fiction! You are no prisoner. You are no spyglass. You are a nothing. I should bind you off."
    I held up my hands. "I have it with me."
    "Show it now."
    I started to undo the closure on the front of my slacks.
    "Move with sloth!"
    The yarn I pulled from its hiding place inside the seam was thick and dark, and frayed at both ends. Holding it in my palm, I showed her.
    Kira stared at me for several moments. I thought she was angry, that she considered it a joke of some sort and might even take it and snip it into a hundred little pieces before she did the same to my throat. But with her mouth puckered into a knot, she snatched the thing from me, turned, and dropped it onto the observation tray of a large magnitron. A second later she was studying the thing as I had done several times at Withor's office when he was out.
    She muttered something that sounded like Bunny .

RYDER'S BUILDING
    I had given the parking and maintenance attendants instructions to replace the Chang-P's tires, recharge the motors, put in new parachutes, and wash and detail it inside and out. Once the work was settled upon, I jogged two blocks down to Empire Square as a few raindrops, from what seemed like just one malicious cloud, dotted the intricate white and black tiles. Circling around a row of shrubs, iron tables, and benches, a crowd clasping their coffee bags and conversation hats were beginning to scurry for cover. I ducked my head and entered the lobby of the Iron Building.
    The Iron was one of the smaller auxiliary buildings at Fashion Plaza and housed lesser mill companies, a few artisanal notions manufacturers, jobbers, and a dozen designers on the decline. Although I hadn't been inside it before, the black sand and sapwood lobby was similar to the others in the complex, if somewhat more shabby. To the left was a store that sold samples. On the right a line of hawkers, dressed in various costumes and representational fabrics, kick-started their smiles when I appeared and began their pitches, trying to press upon me their logoed trinkets and absurd promises of luxury, resiliency, economy, forecasted trends, and even minor acts of fashion sex. Ignoring them, I headed straight for the stairs.
    The hallway was dim, the dark floor tiles covered with a thick archeology of yellowed wax and hopelessness. Here and there on the wall hung faded posters of weaving machines and yarn texturizers, each machine accompanied with women in big vests, revealing oiled skin in elf bikinis, and those night hats from a dozen years ago. Most of the doors were covered with ad-heads who smiled and began to describe the services or goods within. I passed them all and came, at last, to the far end of the hallway. In wiggling red letters that spelled out Ryder-Textile Jobber, a female ad-head with livid green hair smiled forcefully. As soon as she saw me, her black eyes met mine and she began speaking with the speed of a jet