Al Capone dressed as Al Capone had always dressed. with style.  He wore a double-breasted blue serge suit, a paisley pattern silk tie, black patent leather shoes, and a pearl-grey fedora, rakishly aslant.  Gold rings set with a rainbow array of deep precious stones glinted on every finger, a duck-egg diamond on his pinkie.

It hadn't taken him long to decide that the people in this future world didn't have much in the way of fashion sense.  The suits he could see all followed the same loose silk design, although their colourful slimline patterns made them appear more like flappy Japanese pyjamas.  Those not in suits wore variants on vests and sports shirts.  Tight-fitting, too, at least for people under thirty-five.  Al had stared at the dolls to start with, convinced they were all hookers.  What kind of decent gal would dress like that, with so much showing?  Skirts which almost didn't cover their ###, shorts that weren't much better.  But no.  They were just ordinary, smiling, happy, everyday girls.  The people living in this city weren't so strung up on morality and decency.  What would have given a Catholic priest apoplexy back home didn't raise an eyebrow here.

"I think I' m gonna like this life," Al declared.

Strange life that it was.  He seemed to have been reincarnated as a magician: a real magician, not like the fancy tricksters he'd booked for his clubs back in Chicago.  Here, whatever he wanted appeared out of nowhere.

That had taken a long while to get used to.  Think and... pow.  There it was, everything from a working Thompson to a silver dollar glinting in the hot sun.  ####### useful for clothes, though.  Brad Lovegrove had worn overalls os shiny dark red fabric like some kind of pissant garbage collector.

Al could hear Lovegrove whimpering away inside him, like having a leprechaun nesting at the centre of his brain.  He was bawling like a complete bozo, and making about as much sense.  But there was some gold among the dross, twenty-four-karat nuggets.  Like - when he first got his marbles together Al had thought this world was maybe Mars or Venus.  Not so.  New California didn't even orbit the same sun as Earth.  And it wasn't the twentieth century no more.

Je-zus, but a guy needed a drink to help keep that from blowing his head apart.

And where to get a drink?  Al imagined the little leprechaun being squeezed, as if his brain were one giant muscle.  Slowly contracting.

A macromall on the intersection between Longwalk and Sunrise, Lovegrove squealed silently.  There's a specialist store there with liquor from every Confederation planet, probably even got Earth bourbon.

Drinks from clear across the galaxy!  How about that?

So Al started walking.  It was a lovely day.

The sidewalk was so wide it was more like a boulevard in itself; there were no paving slabs, instead the whole strip had been made from a seamless sheet, a material which was a cross between marble and concrete.  Luxuriant trees sprouted up through craters in the surface every forty yards or so, their two-foot sprays of floppy oval flowers an impossible shade of metallic purple.

He spotted a few trashcan-sized trucks trundling sedately among the walkers enjoying the late-morning sunshine, machinery smoother than Henry Ford had ever dreamed of.  Utility mechanoids, Lovegrove told him, cleaning the sidewalk, picking up litter and fallen leaves.

The base of each skyscraper was given over to classy delis and bars and restaurants and coffee shops; tables spilled out onto the sidewalk, just like a European city.  Arcades pierced deep into the buildings.

From what Al could see, it was the same kind of rich man's playground setup on the other side of the street, maybe a hundred and fifty yards away.  Not that you could walk over to be sure, there was no way past the eight-foot-high glass and metal barrier which lined the road.