Cities of the Red Night (31 page)

“It's neat,” I put in. “But couldn't they buy it somewhere else?”

“No, they could not. We control the black market. No pusher would serve them unless he is tired of living.”

“But why not? If they can get it someplace else, that breaks the monopoly.”

“We have other plans which you will learn in good time.”

*   *   *

Dimitri was giving a lecture accompanied by slides and moving films:

“Ba'dan is the oldest spaceport on planet Earth and like many port towns has accreted over the centuries the worst features of many times and places. Riffraff and misfits from every corner of the galaxy have jumped ship here or emigrated to engage in various pernicious and parasitic occupations, swelling the ranks of brothel keepers, whores, pimps, swindlers, black-market operators, go-betweens and fixers. The class and occupational structure is compartmentalized like an Arab city.”

*   *   *

Blue twilight was filling the narrow twisting alleys of the city. The stranger shivered, gathering his ragged cloak about him. Lights were going on behind latticed windows.

Here and there blue streetlights sputtered in sockets. A beggar crawled into the street, barring his way and holding forth a bowl fixed into the stump of his arm like a ladle. His legs were twisted, limp and boneless, his shaven head was fetal, his lips parted with a fetid yellow exhalation of breath. The stranger stepped by him and the beggar muttered curses in a gurgling liquid dialect that seemed to bubble up from noisome depths. The stranger felt as if he were being pelted with filth, the words sticking to the back of his cloak with a vile stench. Just ahead was a stone stairway half a house high stained with garbage and phosphorescent excrement. Beyond he could see a misty, blue-lit square. As he stepped into the square, which was littered with rubble half-buried in sand, he found himself surrounded by a gang of filthy youths about four or five feet in height, mewling and chittering and chirruping among themselves as they moved closer blocking his way and sidling in behind him. At first glance in the blue light and drifting wisps of fog the boys appeared simply as ragged hungry waifs bent on extorting what money they could from a stranger. Looking closer, he saw that they were all in some way inhuman.

Some had long red hair and sputtering green eyes and their hands were armed with needle claws dripping fluid in the blue light. They were wearing leather jockstraps and short fur cloaks that gave off a rank smell of stale sweat and half-cured skins that billowed around them as they moved. He noted that the inside of their cloaks was faintly phosphorescent and surmised that the skins had been cured by rubbing in the phosphorescent excrement that littered the streets. The boys hissed through sharp yellow teeth with snarling smiles as the hair stood up on their heads and legs, bristling like animals. Others, completely naked despite the cold, had smooth reptilian skins, crystal disk eyes and long flexible tails tipped with points of translucent pink crystal. They swung the tails up between their legs pointing at the stranger with mocking bumps and grinds as they hissed in simulated ecstasies. Other boys had crystal fingertips, which they drew out to needles, clicking them together like tuning forks in little rhythms that set his teeth on edge.

The boys drew closer.

“Why do you block my path? I am a stranger who would pass in peace.”

One boy stepped forward and bowed so that his long red hair brushed the stranger's boots in a gesture of mock servility.

“A thousand pardons, oh nobly born. But he who would pass here must pay the price of passing. This is reasonable, is it not?”

As the boy straightened up he grabbed the bottom hem of the stranger's cloak and leaping high in the air with a shrill animal cry pitched the cloak up over the stranger's head.

The other boys imitate his cry and wave their arms like the flying cloak. The stranger is now naked except for leather shorts and knee-length leather boots that cling tightly to his calves and flare up the backs of his thighs. He moves sideways, trying to keep the boys from getting behind him, and reaches for his spark gun. A boy lights on all fours like a cat, tail arched over his back. From the pointed crystal tip he quivers out a shower of red sparks that spatter the stranger's body with burning erogenous sores that twist and writhe into diseased lips whispering the sweet rotten fever words. The sparks are coming from all sides, stirring in his nipples, opening in his navel, mewling and chittering from his crotch and rectum.

Audrey woke up with a start, his phallus tight against his thermal jockstrap.

*   *   *

Dimitri's voice droned on, hypnotically lulling: “The area adjacent to the spaceport is an international and intergalactic zone known as Portland. Portland has its own administration, customs, and police. Biologic inspection and quarantine measures are enforced by the DNA police force. These are highly specialized officers all qualified in every branch of medicine, authorities on every disease and drug in the galaxy.

“They are armed with the most sophisticated weapons: Infra-Sound and DOR guns, fear probes, death guns that can be adjusted to kill, stun or disperse, and devices shooting tiny pellets of nerve gas and toxins.

“These officers are highly skilled interrogators, trained in telepathic techniques, equipped with the most advanced lie detectors, with readings taken from the sensitive reactions of living creatures: this flower droops at a lie, and this octopus turns a bright blue.

“In certain cases where the subject has been trained to circumvent telepathic probes and lie detectors, and where time is short (a nuclear device must be located and deactivated), the DNA interrogators have recourse to injections of stonefish venom. This poison produces the most intense pain known. It is like fire through the blood. Subjects roll around screaming.

“And here, in this syringe, is the antidote which brings immediate relief.”

On screen an impassive interrogator holds up a tiny syringe filled with a blue liquid.

*   *   *

A man with a wrinkled old-woman face and toothless mouth was bending over him, his head ringed by a halo of blue light.

“Well, young guy, it's a good thing I happened along.” He picked up the spark gun and hefted it. “Now this little trick could fetch a right price in the right place.…”

The stranger tried to stand up and fell backward, hitting his elbows.

“Easy does it, young feller.” The man helped him to his feet. “And right this way.”

Every step sent excruciating stabs of pain through his body. His throat ached and he was spitting blood. His legs felt numb and wooden. He had to lean heavily on the man's arm to keep from falling.

“Here we are.” The man kicked at a strange animal in the doorway, a cross between a porcupine and a possum.

“Fucking lulow!”

The lulow snarled and scrambled away. The man inserted a rod with a pattern of holes into the lock and the door opened into a dingy hallway with stairs at the end.

He guided the stranger into a room to the right of the door. The window opening on the street was high and barred and the plaster walls were painted blue. The man lit a torch in a socket: blue light, a filthy bed, a sink, table and stools.

“No place like home, what?”

He pulled a tattered coverlet of blue velvet over the grimy bedding and the stranger slumped down. The numbness in his legs was wearing off and he felt unbearable shootings and pricklings, like recovery from frostbite. He covered his face with his hands, groaning in agony.

The man held out a tiny syringe filled with blue liquid.

“Shoot your way to freedom, kid.”

The stranger held out his shaking hands.

“Roll up your sleeve. I'll hit you.”

Cool blue morning by the creek, soft remote flute calls, sad and sweet from a dying star. Phosphorescent stumps glow in the blue twilight that hangs over the streets at noon like a haze.

Red brick houses line blue canals where crocodiles play like dolphins. Lost mournful stars dim as spark boys chitter and mewl against his shoulder, a frosty luminescence off their backsides, cool remote garden, lead gutters dripping, a stone bridge where a boy stands with a sad blue monkey on his shoulder.

*   *   *

“Fun City is a segregated vice area occupying a plateau on the north side of the city. Here gambling houses and brothels of many times and places promise to satisfy any taste, but these establishments are, for the most part, tourist traps and clip joints with more shills and Murphy men than whores.”

Audrey blinks at the screen. He must have seen Fun City through fever-tinted glasses. Seen on the screen, it is a vast composite honky-tonk, temple virgins sealed while you wait, Aztec and Egyptian sets looking like 1920s movie theaters, hula girls around swimming pools with paper palms, fan-tan games with tasseled lamps and geisha girls, New Orleans whorehouses with fake Spanish moss and houseboats on filthy lakes and canals, massage parlors, Dante's Inferno with female impersonators … the whole scene made in Hollywood.

“The real action is in the Casbah, but tourists are afraid to go there, scared off by horror stories concocted by the tradespeople and the Fun City shills. Addicts are routinely burned or overcharged in Fun City, so they head for the Casbah, where any drug can be had for a price.

“The Casbah is built into the hills and bluffs that slope down to the river. This vast ghetto houses fugitives and displaced persons. Outlaws in every sense, they pay no taxes and are entitled to no municipal services. Criminals and outcasts of many times and places are found here: bravos from seventeenth-century Venice, old western shootists, Indian Thuggees, assassins from Alamut, samurai, Roman gladiators, Chinese hatchet men, pirates and
pistoleros,
Mafia hit-men, dropouts from intelligence agencies and secret police.”

Cameras pan old western sets, bits of ancient Rome, China, India, Japan, Persia, and medieval England.

“Over the centuries, the area has been mined with tunnels so that all the buildings interconnect. The tunnels also give access to a maze of natural caves and caverns.

“There are cable cars and wires with hand carriages and jump seats that run from one building to another. The Flying Squirrels, little people like Igor, hop from the highest bluffs in hang-gliders, skipping from roof to roof, carrying messages, drugs, and weapons.

“The Casbah spills into the river in a maze of piers, catwalks, moored boats and rafts. The tunnels at river level are half full of water, forming an underground Venice with gondolas and limestone palaces dripping with stalactites.

“Any services can be purchased in the Casbah—from assassination to such illegal operations as I.T.—Identity Transfer. There are whores, from the most sophisticated courtesans and Rems who offer wet dreams to order, to such mindless organisms as the Happy Cloak and the Siren Web.

“Any drug can be had in the Casbah for a price. Longevity drugs that require ever-increasing dosage, the addict crumbling to putrescent dust if the drug is withheld. Joy Juice: blackout in erotic convulsions and every shot takes years off the user's life-span. A Joy Juicer lasts two years on average and ends up a burnt-out idiot hulk. And Derm my God what a feeling … soothes your skin down to flexible marble … but if you don't get it … the irritation of the dermal nerve endings … well I've seen a kicking Dermy tear himself to pieces with his own hands. The Blue and the Gray, heavy metal drugs so habit-forming that a single shot results in lifelong addiction. Yes, every drug can be had here
for the price.
”

*   *   *

“Now you take the stonefish poison.…” He tapped the vial of milky fluid. “… Like fire through the blood; morphine won't touch it, but this Blue shit is fifty times stronger. So combine the fish poison and the Blue”—he draws the milky fluid into the syringe—“for a Fire Fix!”

The stranger was running short of credits. No money for luxuries like Hot Shots. Jay had a deal going to bring in some Gray but it was dragging out and then the panic hit.

Suddenly there was no Blue in the city. Heroin just barely took the edge off like codeine with a heroin habit. The cold fire in his bones kept him in constant agony and he was bleeding through the skin: blood-sweat, it's called.

Fortunately, he had not been on long enough for the spontaneous amputations that leave arms and legs smoldering blue stumps. With the last of his credits, he went to a clinic for a deep-freeze sleep cure.

*   *   *

“On the south side of Ba'dan, along bluffs overlooking the river, are the vast estates of the rich, guarded by their own Special Police. Recently, sons of the rich, bored with the tinsel attractions of Fun City, began frequenting the criminal ghettos. Some of these youths are addicts and drug dealers, others are purposeful agents sounding me out with offers of aid and weapons.

“The administration, courts, and police occupy a governmental area. A pass is required for entrance. The large middle class of tradesmen, artisans, and minor functionaries occupy the middle of the city, hemmed in between Portland, Fun City, the Casbah, and the governmental area.”

Camera pans a wasteland of housing projects like the drearier sections of Queens.

“Traditionally, the city of Ba'dan is ruled by a City Council in which the very wealthy hold an overwhelming majority. Now, the discontented middle class is demanding more seats in the Council. These demands are fanned by agitators under orders from the Council of the Selected with headquarters in Yass-Waddah.

“The Council of the Selected controls a number of cults that are finding adherents among the middle-class youths. These cults are basically of low-church Protestant derivation.

“Agents from the Council of the Selected are also organizing paramilitary groups and smuggling in arms. These agents operate with the connivance of the Heroid Police.

“The basic issue is a proposed Anschluss with Yass-Waddah that would leave the Council of the Selected in virtual control of both cities. This plan is supported by the middle class, who are ignorant of the intrigues of the Council to ruin Ba'dan economically and eventually to close the spaceport.