“What d’you think so far?” Za shouted back to Gurgeh.
“Crowded, isn’t it?”
“You should see it on a holiday!”
Gurgeh looked round at the people. He felt ghostlike, invisible. Until now he’d been the center of attention; a freak, stared and gawped and peered at, and kept entirely at arm’s length. Now suddenly nobody gave a damn, hardly sparing him a second glance. They bumped into him, jostled him, shoved past him, brushed against him, all quite careless.
And so varied, even in this sickly, sea-green tunnel light. So many different types of people mixed in with the Azadians he was becoming used to seeing; a few aliens that looked vaguely familiar from his memory of pan-human types, but mostly quite wildly different; he lost count of the variations in limbs, height, bulk, physiognomy and sensory apparatus he was confronted with during that short walk.
They went down the warm tunnel and into a huge, brightly lit cavern, at least eighty meters tall and half as broad again; lengthwise, its cream-colored walls stretched away in both directions for half a kilometer or more, ending in great side-lit arches leading to further galleries. Its flat floor was chock-a-block with shack-like buildings and tents, partitions and covered walkways, stalls and kiosks and small squares with dribbling fountains and gaily striped awnings. Lamps danced from wires strung on thin poles, and overhead brighter lights burned, high in the vaulted roof; a color between ivory and pewter. Structures of stepped buildings and wall- or roof-hung gantries lined the sides of the gallery, and whole areas of grimy gray wall were punctured by the irregular holes of windows, balconies, terraces and doors. Lifts and pulleys creaked and rattled, taking people to higher levels, or lowering them to the bustling floor.
“This way,” Za said. They wove their way through the narrow streets of the gallery surface until they came to the far wall, climbed some broad but rickety wooden steps, and approached a heavy wooden door guarded by a metal portcullis and a pair of lumberingly large figures; one Azadian male and another whose species Gurgeh couldn’t identify. Za waved and, without either guard appearing to do anything, the portcullis rose, the door swung ponderously open, and he and Za left the echoing cave behind for the relative quietness of a dim, wood-lined, heavily carpeted tunnel.
The cavern light closed off behind them; a hazy, cerise glow came through an arched ceiling of wafer-thin plaster. The polished wooden walls looked thick, were char-dark, and felt warm. Muffled music came from ahead.
Another door; a desk set into an alcove where two apices eyed them both sullenly, then consented to smile at Za, who passed over a small hide pouch to them. The door opened. He and Gurgeh went through to the light and music and noise beyond.
It was a jumble of a space; impossible to decide whether it was one confusingly subdivided, chaotically split-leveled hall, or a profusion of smaller rooms and galleries all knocked into one. The place was packed, and loud with high-pitched atonal music. It could have been on fire, judging from the thick haze of smoke filling it, but the fumes smelled sweet, almost perfumed.
Za guided Gurgeh through crowds to a wooden cupola raised a meter off a small covered walkway and looking out from the rear onto a sort of staggered stage beneath. The stage was surrounded by similar circular boxes as well as various stepped areas of seats and benches, all of which were crowded, mostly with Azadians.
On the small, roughly circular stage below, some dwarfish alien—only vaguely pan-human—was wrestling, or perhaps copulating, with an Azadian female in a quivering tub full of gently steaming red mud, all seemingly held in a low-G field. The spectators shouted and clapped and threw drinks.
“Oh good,” Za said, sitting down. “The fun’s started.”
“Are they fucking or fighting?” Gurgeh said, leaning over the rail and peering down at the struggling, heaving bodies of the alien and the female.
Za shrugged. “Does it matter?”
A waitress, an Azadian female wearing only a little cloth around her waist, took Za’s drink order. The woman’s puff-balled hair appeared to be on fire, surrounded by a flickering hologram of yellow-blue flames.
Gurgeh turned away from the stage. The audience behind him yelled appreciatively as the woman threw the alien off and jumped on top of him, throwing him under the steaming mud. “You come here often?” he asked Za.
The tall male laughed loudly. “No.” The great green eyes flashed. “But I leave quite a lot.”
“This where you relax?”
Za shook his head emphatically. “Absolutely not. Common misconception that; that fun is relaxing. If it is, you’re not doing it right. That’s what the Hole’s for; fun. Fun and games. Cools down a bit during the day, but it can get pretty wild, too. The drink festivals are usually the worst. Shouldn’t be any trouble tonight though. Fairly quiet.”
The crowd shrieked; the woman was holding the dwarfish alien’s face under the mud; it struggled desperately.
Gurgeh turned round to watch. The alien’s movements weakened slowly as the naked, mud-slicked woman forced its head into the bubbling red liquid. Gurgeh glanced at Za. “So they were fighting.”
Za shrugged again. “We may never know.” He looked down too, as the woman forced the now limp alien’s body further into the ochre mud.
“Has she killed it?” Gurgeh asked. He had to raise his voice as the crowd screamed, stamping feet and beating fists on tables.
“Na,” Shohobohaum Za said, shaking his head. “The little guy’s a Uhnyrchal.” Za nodded down, as the woman used one hand to keep the alien’s head submerged, and raised the other in triumph in the air, glaring bright-eyed at the baying audience. “See that little black thing sticking up?”
Gurgeh looked. There was a little black bulb poking up through the surface of the red mud. “Yes.”
“That’s his dick.”
Gurgeh looked suspiciously at the other man. “How exactly is that going to help him?”
“The Uhnyrchal can breathe through their dicks,” Za said. “That guy’s fine; he’ll be fighting in another club tomorrow night; maybe even later this evening.”
Za watched the waitress place their drinks on the table. He leaned forward to whisper something to her; she nodded and walked off. “Try glanding Expand with this stuff,” Za suggested. Gurgeh nodded. They both drank.
“Wonder why the Culture’s never genofixed that,” Za said, staring into his glass.
“What?”
“Being able to breathe through your dick.”
Gurgeh thought. “Sneezing at certain moments could be messy.”
Za laughed. “There might be compensations.”
The audience behind them went “Oooo.” Za and Gurgeh turned round to see the victorious woman pulling her opponent’s body up out of the mud by its penis; the alien being’s head and feet were still under the glutinous, slowly slopping liquid. “Ouch,” Za muttered, drinking.
Somebody in the crowd tossed the woman a dagger; she caught it, stooped, and sliced off the alien genitals. She brandished the dripping flesh aloft while the crowd went wild with delight and the alien sank slowly beneath the cloying red liquid, the woman’s foot on its chest. The mud gradually turned black where the blood oozed, and a few bubbles surfaced.
Za sat back, looking mystified. “Must have been some sub-species I haven’t heard of.”
The low-G mud-tub was trundled away, the woman still shaking her trophy at the baying crowd.
Shohobohaum Za rose to greet a party of four dramatically beautiful and stunningly dressed Azadian females who were approaching the cupola. Gurgeh had glanded the body-drug Za had suggested, and was just beginning to feel the effects of both that and the liquor.
The women looked, he thought, quite the equals of any he’d seen the night of the welcoming ball, and much more friendly.
The acts went on; sex acts, mostly. Acts which, outside the Hole, Gurgeh was told by Za and two of the Azadian females (Inclate and At-sen, sitting on either side of him), would mean death for both participan
ts; death by radiation or death by chemicals.
Gurgeh didn’t pay too much attention. This was his night out and the staged obscenities were the least important part of it. He was away from the game; that was what mattered. Living by another set of rules. He knew why Za had had the women come to the table, and it amused him. He felt no particular desire for the two exquisite creatures he sat between—certainly nothing uncontrollable—but they made good company. Za was no fool, and the two charming females—Gurgeh knew they would have been males, or even apices had Za discovered Gurgeh’s preferences lay in that direction—were both intelligent and witty.
They knew a little about the Culture, had heard rumors about the sexual alterations Culture people possessed, and made discreetly roguish jokes about Gurgeh’s proclivities and abilities compared to their own, and to both the other Azadian genders. They were flattering, enticing and friendly; they drank from small glasses, they sipped smoke from tiny, slender pipes—Gurgeh had tried a pipe too, but only coughed, much to everyone’s amusement—and they both had long, sinuously curling blue-black hair, silkily membraned with near-invisibly fine platinum nets and beaded with minute, glinting AG studs, which made their hair move in slow motion and gave each graceful movement of their delicately structured heads a dizzyingly unreal quality.
Inclate’s slim dress was the ever-shifting color of oil on water, speckled with jewels which twinkled like stars; At-sen’s was a video-dress, glowing fuzzy red with its own concealed power. A choker round her neck acted as a small television monitor, displaying a hazy, distorted image of the view around her—Gurgeh to one side, the stage behind, one of Za’s ladies on the other side, the other directly across the table. Gurgeh showed her the Orbital bracelet, but she was not especially impressed.
Za, on the other side of the table, was playing small games of forfeit with his two giggling ladies, handling tiny, almost transparent slice-jewel-cards and laughing a lot. One of the ladies noted the forfeits down in a little notebook, with much giggling and feigned embarrassment.
“But Jernow!” At-sen said, from Gurgeh’s left. “You must have a scar-portrait! So that we may remember you when you have gone back to the Culture and its decadent, many-orificed ladies!” Inclate, on his right, giggled.
“Certainly not,” Gurgeh said, mock-serious. “It sounds quite barbaric.”
“Oh yes, yes, it is!” At-sen and Inclate laughed into their glasses. At-sen pulled herself together, put her hand on his wrist. “Wouldn’t you like to think there was some poor person walking around on Eä with your face on their skin?”
“Yes, but on which bit?” Gurgeh asked.
They thought this hilariously funny.
Za stood; one of his ladies packed the tiny slivers of the game-cards away in a little chain purse. “Gurgeh,” Za said, knocking back the last of his drink. “We’re off for a more private chat; you three too?” Za grinned wickedly at Inclate and At-sen, producing gales of laughter and small shrieks. At-sen dipped her fingers in her drink and flicked some liquor at Za, who dodged.
“Yes, come, Jernow,” Inclate said, taking hold of Gurgeh’s arm with both hands. “Let’s all go; the air is so stuffy here, and the noise so loud.”
Gurgeh smiled, shook his head. “No; I’d only disappoint you.”
“Oh no! No!” Slim fingers tugged at his sleeves, curled round his arms.
The politely mocking argument went on for some minutes, while Za stood, grinning, ladies draped on either side, looking on, and Inclate and At-sen tried their hardest either to physically lift Gurgeh to his feet, or, by pouting protestations, persuade him to move.
All failed. Za shrugged—his ladies imitated the alien gesture, before dissolving into laughter—and said, “Okay; just stay there, all right, game-player?”
Za looked at Inclate and At-sen, who were temporarily subdued and petulant. “You two look after him, right?” Za told them. “Don’t let him talk to any strangers.”
At-sen sniffed imperiously. “Your friend declines all; strange or familiar.”
Inclate snorted despite herself. “Or both in one,” she blurted. Whereupon she and At-sen started laughing again and reaching behind Gurgeh to slap and pinch each other’s shoulders.
Za shook his head. “Jernau; try and control those two as well as you control yourself.”
Gurgeh ducked a few flicked drops of drink while the females squealed on either side of him. “I’ll try,” he told Za.
“Well,” Za said, “I’ll try not to be too long. Sure you won’t join in? Could be quite an experience.”
“I’m sure. But I’m fine here.”
“Okay. Don’t wander. See you soon.” Za grinned at the giggling girls on either side of him, and then they turned together, walked away. “Ish!” Za shouted back over his shoulder. “Soon-ish, game-player!”
Gurgeh waved goodbye. Inclate and At-sen quietened fractionally and set about telling him what a naughty boy he was for not being more naughty. Gurgeh ordered more drinks and pipes to keep them quiet.
They showed him how to play the game of elements, chanting, “Blade cuts cloth, cloth wraps stone, stone dams water, water quenches fire, fire melts blade…” like serious school-girls, and showing him the appropriate hand-shapes, so that he could learn.
It was a truncated, two-dimensional version of the elemental die-matching from the Board of Becoming, minus Air and Life. Gurgeh found it amusing that even in the Hole he could not escape the influence of Azad. He played the simple game because the ladies wanted to, and he took care not to win too many hands… something, he realized, he had never done before in his life.
Still puzzling over this anomaly, he went to the toilets, of which there were four different types. He used the Aliens, but took some time to find the right piece of equipment. He was still chortling over this when he came out, to find Inclate standing outside the sphincter-like doorway. She looked worried; the oil-film dress rippled dully.
“What’s wrong?” he asked her.
“At-sen,” she said, kneading her little hands together. “Her ex-master came; took her away. He wants to have her again or it will be a tenth-year since they are one, and she will be free.” She looked up at Gurgeh, small face contorted, distressed. The blue-black hair washed round her face like a slow and fluid shadow. “I know Sho-Za said you must not move, but will you? This is not your concern, but she’s my friend…”
“What can I do?” Gurgeh said.
“Come; we two may distract him. I think I know where he’s taken her. I shall not endanger you, Jernow.” She took his hand.
They half walked, half ran down twisting wooden corridors, past many rooms and doors. He was lost in a maze of sensation; a welter of sounds (music, laughter, screams), sights (servants, erotic pictures, glimpsed galleries of packed, swaying bodies) and smells (food, perfume, alien sweats).
Suddenly, Inclate stopped. They were in a deep, bowled room like a theater, where a naked human male stood on stage, turning slowly, this way and that, in front of a giant screen showing a close-up of his skin. Deep, booming music played. Inclate stood looking round the packed auditorium, still holding Gurgeh’s hand.
Gurgeh glanced at the man on stage. The lights were bright, sunlight spectraed. The slightly plump, pale-skinned male had several enormous, multicolored bruises—like huge prints—on his body. Those on his back and chest were largest, and showed Azadian faces. The mixture of blacks, blues, purples, greens, yellows and reds combined to form portraits of uncanny accuracy and subtlety, which the flexings of the man’s muscles seemed to make live, exactly as though those faces took on new expressions with each moment. Gurgeh looked, and felt his breath draw in.
“There!” Inclate shouted over the pulsing music, and tugged at his hand. They set off through the crowding people, toward where At-sen stood, near the front of the stage. She was being held by an apex who was pointing at the man on the stage and shouting at her, shaking her. At-sen’s head was down, her shoulders quivered as if she was crying. The
video-dress was turned off; it hung on her, gray and drab and lifeless. The apex hit At-sen across the head (the slow black hair twisted languidly), and shouted at her again. She fell to her knees; the beaded hair followed her as if she was sinking slowly under water. Nobody around the couple took any notice. Inclate strode toward them, pulling Gurgeh after her.
The apex saw them coming, tried to drag At-sen away. Inclate started to shout at the apex; she held up Gurgeh’s hand as they pushed people aside, drew closer. The apex looked suddenly fearful; he stumbled away, dragging At-sen with him to an exit beneath the raised stage.
Inclate started forward, but her way was blocked by a cluster of large Azadian males, standing staring open-mouthed at the man on the stage. Inclate beat at their backs with her fists. Gurgeh watched At-sen disappear, dragged through the door beneath the stage. He pulled Inclate to one side and used his greater mass and strength to force a way between two of the protesting males; he and the girl ran to the swinging door.
The corridor curved sharply. They followed the sounds of screams, down some narrow stairs, over a step where the broken monitor-collar lay, snapped and dead, down to a quiet corridor where the light was jade and there were many doors. At-sen was lying on the floor, the apex above her, screaming at her. He saw Gurgeh and Inclate, shook his fist at them. Inclate screamed incoherently at him.
Gurgeh started forward; the apex took a gun from a pocket.
Gurgeh stopped. Inclate went quiet. At-sen whimpered on the floor. The apex started talking, far too fast for Gurgeh to follow; he pointed at the woman on the floor, then gestured at the ceiling. He began to cry, and the gun shook in his hand (and part of Gurgeh, sitting back calmly analyzing, thought, Am I frightened? Is this fear yet? I’m looking death in the face, staring at it through that little black hole, the little twisted tunnel in this alien’s hand [like another element the hand can show], and I’m waiting to feel fear…