"I wasn't thinking of our feathered friends, actually. I have not always gone to watch them when I've gone out at nights. Sometimes I went to different parts of the city; to look for whatever species of birds might be there, at first, but later because… well; because."
Gurgeh frowned. "Why do you want me to come with you?"
"Because we might be leaving here rather quickly tomorrow, and it occurred to me that you've seen very little of the city."
Gurgeh waved one hand. "Za showed me quite enough of that."
"I doubt he showed you what I'm thinking of. There are many different things to see."
"I'm not interested in seeing the sights, drone."
"The sights I'm thinking of will interest you."
"Would they now?"
"I believe so. I think I know you well enough to tell. Please come, Jernau Gurgeh. You'll be glad, I swear. Please come. You did say you wouldn't sleep, didn't you? Well then, what do you have to lose?" The drone's fields were their normal green-yellow colour, quiet and controlled. Its voice was low, serious.
The man's eyes narrowed. "What are you up to, drone?"
"Please, please come with me, Gurgeh." The drone floated off towards the nose of the module. Gurgeh stood, watching it. It stopped by the door from the lounge. "Please, Jernau Gurgeh. I swear you won't regret this."
Gurgeh shrugged. "Yeah, yeah, all right." He shook his head. "Let's go out to play," he muttered to himself.
He followed the drone as it moved towards the module nose. There was a compartment there with a couple of AG bikes, a few floater harnesses and some other pieces of equipment.
"Put on a harness, please. I won't be a moment." The drone left Gurgeh to fasten the AG harness on over his shorts and shirt. It reappeared shortly afterwards holding a long, black, hooded cloak. "Now put this on, please."
Gurgeh put the cloak on over the harness. Flere-Imsaho shoved the hood up over his head and tied it so that Gurgeh's face was hidden from the sides and in deep shadow from the front. The harness didn't show beneath the thick material. The lights in the compartment dimmed and went out, and Gurgeh heard something move overhead. He looked up to see a square of dim stars directly above him.
"I'll control your harness, if that's all right with you," the drone whispered. Gurgeh nodded.
He was lifted quickly into the darkness. He did not dip again as he'd expected, but kept going up into the fragrant warmth of the city night. The cloak fluttered quietly around him; the city was a swirl of lights, a seemingly never-ending plain of scattered radiance. The drone was a small, still shadow by his shoulder.
They set out over the city. They overflew roads and rivers and great buildings and domes, ribbons and clumps and towers of light, areas of vapour drifting over darkness and fire, rearing towers where reflections burned and lights soared, quivering stretches of dark water and broad dark parks of grass and trees. Finally they started to drop.
They landed in an area where there were relatively few lights, dropping between two darkened, windowless buildings. His feet touched down in the dirt of an alley.
"Excuse me," the drone said, and nudged its way into the hood until it was floating up-ended by Gurgeh's left ear. "Walk down here," it whispered. Gurgeh walked down the alley. He tripped over something soft, and knew before he turned it was a body. He looked closer at the bundle of rags, which moved a little. The person was curled up under tattered blankets, head on a filthy sack. He couldn't tell what sex it was; the rags offered no clue.
"Ssh," the drone said as he opened his mouth to speak. "That is just one of the loafers Pequil was talking about; somebody shifted off the land. He's been drinking; that's part of the smell. The rest is him." It was only then that Gurgeh caught the stench rising from the still sleeping male. He almost gagged.
"Leave him," Flere-Imsaho said.
They left the alley. Gurgeh had to step over another two sleeping people. The street they found themselves on was dim and stank of something Gurgeh suspected was supposed to be food. A few people were walking about. "Stoop a little," the drone said. "You'll pass for a Minan disciple dressed like this, but don't let the hood fall, and don't stand upright."
Gurgeh did as he was told.
As he walked up the street, under the dim, grainy, flickering light of sporadic, monochrome streetlamps, he passed what looked like another drunk, lying against a wall. There was blood between the apex's less, and a dark, dried stream of it leading from his head. Gurgeh stopped.
"Don't bother," came the little voice. "He's dying. Probably been in a fight. The police don't come here too often. And nobody's likely to call for medical aid; he's obviously been robbed, so they'd have to pay for the treatment themselves."
Gurgeh looked round, but there was nobody else near by. The apex's eyelids fluttered briefly, as though he was trying to open them. The fluttering stopped.
"There," Flere-Imsaho said quietly.
Gurgeh continued up the street. Screams came from high up in a grimy housing block on the far side of the street. "Just some apex beating up his woman. You know for millennia females were thought to have no effect on the heredity of the children they bore? They've known for five hundred years that they do; a viral DNA analogue which alters the genes a woman's impregnated with. Nevertheless, under the law females are simply possessions. The penalty for murdering a woman is a year's hard labour, for an apex. A female who kills an apex is tortured to death over a period of days. Death by Chemicals. Said to be one of the worst. Keep walking."
They came to an intersection with a busier street. A male stood on the corner, shouting in a dialect Gurgeh didn't understand. "He's selling tickets for an execution," the drone said. Gurgeh raised his eyebrows, turned his head fractionally. "I'm serious," Flere-Imsaho said. Gurgeh shook his head all the same.
Filling the middle of the street was a crowd of people. The traffic — only about half of it powered, the rest human-driven — was forced to mount the pavements. Gurgeh went to the back of the crowd, thinking that with his greater height he would be able to see what was happening, but he found people making way for him anyway, drawing him closer to the centre of the crowd.
Several young apices were attacking an old male lying on the ground. The apices wore some sort of strange uniform, though somehow Gurgeh knew it was not an official uniform. They kicked the old male with a sort of poised savagery, as though the attack was some kind of competitive ballet of pain, and they were being evaluated on artistic impression as well as the raw torment and physical injury inflicted.
"In case you think this is staged in any way," Flere-Imsaho whispered, "it isn't. These people aren't paying anything to watch this, either. This is simply an old guy getting beaten up, probably just for the sake of it, and these people would rather watch than do anything to stop it."
As the drone spoke, Gurgeh realised he was at the front of the crowd. Two of the young apices looked up at him.
In a detached way, Gurgeh wondered what would happen now. The two apices shouted at him, then they turned and pointed him out to the others. There were six of them. They all stood — ignoring the whimpering male on the ground behind them — and looked steadily at Gurgeh. One of them, the tallest, undid something in the tight, metallically decorated trousers he wore and hooked out the half-flaccid vagina in its turned-out position, and, with a wide smile, first held it out to Gurgeh, then turned round waving it at the others in the crowd.
Nothing more. The young, identically clad apices grinned at the people for a while, then just walked away; each stepped, as though accidentally, on the head of the crumpled old male on the ground. The crowd started to drift off. The old man lay on the roadway, covered in blood. A sliver of grey bone poked through the arm of the tattered coat he wore, and there were teeth scattered on the road surface near his head. One leg lay oddly, the foot turned outwards, slack looking.
He moaned. Gurgeh started forward and began to stoop.
"Do not touch him!"
The drone's voi
ce stopped Gurgeh like a brick wall. "If any of these people see your hands or face, you're dead. You're the wrong colour, Gurgeh. Listen; a few hundred dark-skinned babies are still born each year, as the genes work themselves out. They're supposed to be strangled and their bodies presented to the Eugenics Council for a bounty, but a few people risk death and bring them up, blanching their skins as they grow older. If anybody thought you were one, especially in a disciple's cloak, they'd skin you alive."
Gurgeh backed off, kept his head down, and stumbled off down the road.
The drone pointed out prostitutes — mostly females — who sold their sexual favours to apices for a few minutes, or hours, or for the night. In some parts of the city, the drone said as they travelled the dark streets, there were apices who had lost limbs and could not afford grafted arms and legs amputated from criminals; these apices hired their bodies to males.
Gurgeh saw many cripples. They sat on street corners, selling trinkets, playing music on scratchy, squeaky instruments, or just begging. Some were blind, some had no arms, some had no legs. Gurgeh looked at the damaged people and felt dizzy; the gritty surface of the street beneath him seemed to tip and heave. For a moment it was as though the city, the planet, the whole Empire swirled around him in a frantic spinning tangle of nightmare shapes; a constellation of suffering and anguish, an infernal dance of agony and mutilation. They passed garish shops full of brightly coloured rubbish, state-run drug and alcohol stores, stalls selling religious statues, books, artefacts and ceremonial paraphernalia, kiosks vending tickets for executions, amputations, tortures and staged rapes — mostly lost Azad body-bets — and hawkers selling lottery tickets, brothel introductions and unlicensed drugs. A groundvan passed full of police; the nightly patrol. A few of the hawkers scuttled into alleyways and a couple of kiosks slammed suddenly shut as the van drove by, but opened again immediately afterwards.
In a tiny park, they found an apex with two bedraggled males and a sick-looking female on long leads. He was making them attempt tricks, which they kept getting wrong; a crowd stood round laughing at their antics. The drone told him the trio were almost certainly mad, and had nobody to pay for their stay in mental hospital, so they'd been de-citizenised and sold to the apex. They watched the pathetic, bedraggled creatures trying to climb lamp-posts or form a pyramid for a while, then Gurgeh turned away. The drone told him one in ten of the people he passed on the street would be treated for mental illness at some point in their lives. The figure was higher for males than for apices, and higher for females than either. The same applied to the rates of suicide, which was illegal.
Flere-Imsaho directed him to a hospital. It was typical, the drone said. Like the whole area, it was about average for the greater city. The hospital was run by a charity, and many of the people working there were unpaid. The drone told him everybody would assume he was a disciple there to see one of his flock, but anyway the staff were too busy to stop and quiz everybody they saw in the place. Gurgeh walked through the hospital in a daze.
There were people with limbs missing, as he'd seen in the streets, and there were people turned odd colours or covered with scabs and sores. Some were stick-thin; grey skin stretched over bone. Others lay gasping for breath, or retching noisily behind thin screens, moaning or mumbling or screaming. He saw people still covered in blood waiting to be attended to, people doubled-up coughing blood into little bowls, and others strapped into metal cots, beating their heads on the sides, saliva frothing over their lips.
Everywhere there were people; on bed after bed and cot after cot and mattress after mattress, and everywhere, too, there were the enveloping odours of corrupting flesh, harsh disinfectant and bodily wastes.
It was an average-bad night, the drone informed him. The hospital was a little more crowded than usual because several ships of the Empire's war-wounded had come back recently from famous victories. Also, it was the night when people got paid and didn't have to work the next day, and so by tradition went out to get drunk and into fights. Then the machine started to reel off infant-mortality rates and life-expectancy figures, sex ratios, types of diseases and their prevalence in the various strata of society, average incomes, the incidence of unemployment, per capita income as a ratio of total population in given areas, birth-tax and death-tax and the penalties for abortion and illegitimate birth; it talked about laws governing types of sexual congress, about charitable payments and religious organisations running soup kitchens and night shelters and first-aid clinics; about numbers and figures and statistics and ratios all the time, and Gurgeh didn't think he picked up a word of it. He just wandered round the building for what seemed like hours, then he saw a door and left.
He was standing in a small garden, dark and dusty and deserted, at the back of the hospital, hemmed in on all sides. Yellow light from grimy windows spilled on to the grey grass and cracked paving-stones. The drone said it still had things it wanted to show him. It wanted him to see a place where down-and-outs slept; it thought it could get him into a prison as a visitor-
"I want to go back; now!" he shouted, throwing back the hood.
"All right!" the drone said, tugging the hood back up. They lifted off, going straight up for a long time before they started to head for the hotel and the module. The drone said nothing. Gurgeh was silent too, watching the great galaxy of lights that was the city as it passed beneath his feet.
They got back to the module. The roof-door opened for them as they fell, and the lights came on after it closed again. Gurgeh stood for a while as the drone took the cloak from him and unclipped the AG harness. Slipping down off his shoulders, the removal of the harness left him with an odd sensation of nakedness.
"I've one more thing I'd like to show you," the drone said. It moved down the corridor to the module lounge. Gurgeh followed it.
Flere-Imsaho floated in the centre of the room. The screen was on, showing an apex and a male copulating. Background music surged; the setting was plush with cushions and thick drapes. "This is an Imperial Select channel," the drone said. "Level One, mildly scrambled." The scene switched, then switched again, each time showing a slightly different mix of sexual activity, from solo masturbation through to groups involving all three Azadian sexes.
"This son of thing is restricted," the drone said. "Visitors aren't supposed to see it. The unscrambling apparatus is available for a price on the general market, however. Now we'll see some Level Two channels. These are restricted to the Empire's bureaucratic, military, religious and commercial upper echelons."
The screen went briefly hazy with a swirl of random colours, then cleared to show some more Azadians, mostly naked or very scantily clad. Again, the emphasis was on sexuality, but there was another, new element in what was happening; many of the people wore very strange and uncomfortable-looking clothes, and some were being tied up and beaten, or put into various absurd positions in which they were sexually used. Females dressed in uniforms ordered males and apices around. Gurgeh recognised some of the uniforms as those worn by Imperial Navy officers; others looked like exaggerations of more ordinary uniforms. Some of the apices were dressed in male clothes, some in female dress. Apices were made to eat their own or somebody else's excreta, or drink their urine. The wastes of other pan-human species seemed to be particularly prized for this practice. Mouths and anuses, animals and aliens were penetrated by males and apices; aliens and animals were persuaded to mount the various sexes, and objects — some everyday, some apparently specially made — were used as phallic substitutes. In every scene, there was an element of… Gurgeh supposed it was dominance.
He'd been only mildly surprised that the Empire wanted to hide the material shown on the first level; a people so concerned with rank and protocol and clothed dignity might well want to restrict such things, harmless though they might be. The second level was different; he thought it gave the game away a little, and he could understand them being embarrassed about it. It was clear that the delight being taken in Level Two was not the vicar
ious pleasure of watching people enjoying themselves and identifying with them, but in seeing people being humiliated while others enjoyed themselves at their expense. Level One had been about sex; this was about something the Empire obviously thought more of but could not disentangle from that act.
"Now Level Three," the drone said.
Gurgeh watched the screen.
Flere-Imsaho watched Gurgeh.
The man's eyes glittered in the screen-light, unused photons reflecting from the halo of iris. The pupils widened at first, then shrank, became pinpoints. The drone waited for the wide, staring eyes to fill with moisture, for the tiny muscles around the eyes to flinch and the eyelids to close and the man to shake his head and turn away, but nothing of the sort happened. The screen held his gaze, as though the infinitesimal pressure of light it spent upon the room had somehow reversed, and so sucked the watching man forward, to hold him, teetering before the fall, fixed and steady and pointed at the flickering surface like some long-stilled moon.
The screams echoed through the lounge, over its foamseats and couches and low tables; the screams of apices, men, women, children. Sometimes they were silenced quickly, but usually not. Each instrument, and each part of the tortured people, made its own noise; blood, knives, bones, lasers, flesh, ripsaws, chemicals, leeches, fleshworms, vibraguns, even phalluses, fingers and claws; each made or produced their own distinctive sounds, counterpoints to the theme of screams. The final scene the man watched featured a psychotic male criminal previously injected with massive doses of sex hormones and hallucinogens, a knife, and a woman described as an enemy of the state, who was pregnant, and just before term.
The eyes closed. His hands went to his ears. He looked down. "Enough," he muttered.
Flere-Imsaho switched the screen off. The man rocked backwards on his heels, as though there had indeed been some attraction, some artificial gravity from the screen, and now that it had ceased, he almost over-balanced in reaction.
"That one is live, Jernau Gurgeh. It is taking place now. It is still happening, deep in some cellar under a prison or a police barracks."
The Player of Games c-2 Page 24
