The trees were small, gnarled, impossibly old, the result of genetic engineering and chemical manipulation. Case would have been hard pressed to distinguish a pine from an oak, but a street boy’s sense of style told him that these were too cute, too entirely and definitively treelike. Between the trees, on gentle and too cleverly irregular slopes of sweet green grass, the bright umbrellas shaded the hotel’s guests from the unfaltering radiance of the Lado-Acheson sun. A burst of French from a nearby table caught his attention: the golden children he’d seen gliding above river mist the evening before. Now he saw that their tans were uneven, a stencil effect produced by selective melanin boosting, multiple shades overlapping in rectilinear patterns, outlining and highlighting musculature; the girl’s small hard breasts, one boy’s wrist resting on the white enamel of the table. They looked to Case like machines built for racing; they deserved decals for their hairdressers, the designers of their white cotton ducks, for the artisans who’d crafted their leather sandals and simple jewelry. Beyond them, at another table, three Japanese wives in Hiroshima sackcloth awaited sarariman husbands, their oval faces covered with artificial bruises; it was, he knew, an extremely conservative style, one he’d seldom seen in Chiba.