“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 realized 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 gray 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 outward, slack looking.
He moaned. Gurgeh started forward and began to stoop.
“Do not touch him!”
The drone’s voice stopped Gurgeh like a brick wall. “If any of these people see your hands or face, you’re dead. You’re the wrong color, 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 favors to apices for a few minutes, or hours, or for the night. In some parts of the city, the drone said as they traveled 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 colored rubbish, state-run drug and alcohol stores, stalls selling religious statues, books, artifacts 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 afterward.
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-citizenized and sold to the apex. They watched the pathetic, bedraggled creatures trying to climb lampposts 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 colors or covered with scabs and sores. Some were stick-thin; gray 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 odors 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 organizations running soup kitchens and night shelters and firstaid 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 onto the gray 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 center 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 sort 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 colors, 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 recognized 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 vicarious 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 formseats 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 backward 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.”
Gurgeh looked up at the blank screen, eyes still wide and staring, but dry. He gazed, rocked backward and forward, and breathed deeply. There was sweat on his brow, and he shivered.
“Level Three is for the ruling elite only. Their strategic military signals are given the same encrypting status. I think you can see why.
“This is no special night, Gurgeh, no festival of sado-erotica. These things go out every evening.… There is more, but you’ve seen a representative cross-section.”
Gurgeh nodded. His mouth was dry. He swallowed with some difficulty, took a few more deep breaths, rubbed his beard. He opened his mouth to speak, but the drone spoke first.
“One other thing. Something else they kept from you. I didn’t know this myself until last night, when the ship mentioned it. Ever since you played Ram your opponents have been on various drugs as well. Cortex-keyed amphetamines at least, but they have far more sophisticated drugs which they use too. They have to inject, or ingest them; they don’t have genofixed glands to manufacture drugs in their own bodies, but they certainly use them; most of the people you’ve been playing have had far more ‘artificial’ chemicals and compounds in their bloodstream than you’ve had.”
The drone made a sighing noise. The man was still staring at the dead screen. “That’s it,” the drone said. “I’m sorry if what I’ve shown you has upset you, Jernau Gurgeh, but I didn’t want you to leave here thinking the Empire was just a few venerable game-players, some impressive architecture and a few glorified nightclubs. What you’ve seen tonight is also what it’s about. And there’s plenty in between that I can’t show you; all the frustrations that affect the poor and the relatively well-off alike, caused simply because they live in a society where one is not free to do as one chooses. There’s the journalist who can’t write what he knows is the truth, the doctor who can’t treat somebody in pain because they’re the wrong sex… a million things every day, things that aren’t as melodramatic and gross as what I’ve shown you, but which are still part of it, still some of the effects.
“The ship told you a guilty system recognizes no innocents. I’d say it does. It recognizes the innocence of a young child, for example, and you saw how they treated that. In a sense it even recognizes the ‘sanctity’ of the body… but only to violate it. Once again, Gurgeh, it all boils down to ownership, possession; about taking and having.” Flere-Imsaho paused, then floated toward Gurgeh, came very close to him. “Ah, but I’m preaching again, amn’t I? The excesses of youth. I’ve kept you up late. Maybe you’re ready for some sleep now; it’s been a long night, hasn’t it? I’ll leave you.” It turned and floated away. It stopped near the door again. “Good night,” it said.
Gurgeh cleared his throat. “Good night,” he said, looking away from the dark screen at last. The drone dipped and disappeared.
Gurgeh sat down on a formseat. He stared at his feet for a while, then got up and walked outside the module, into the roof-garden. The dawn was just coming up. The city looked washed-out somehow, and cold. The many lights burned weakly, brilliance sapped by the calm blue vastness of the sky. A guard at the stairwell entrance coughed and stamped his feet, though Gurgeh could not see him.
He went back into the module and lay down on his bed. He lay in the darkness without closing his eyes, then closed his eyes and turned over, trying to sleep. He could not, and neither could he bring himself to secrete something that would make him sleep.
At last he got up and went back to the lounge where the screen was. He had the module access the game-channels, and sat there looking at his own game with Bermoiya for a long time, without moving or speaking, and without a single molecule of glanded drug in his bloodstream.
A prison ambulance stood outside the conference-center. Gurgeh got out of the aircraft and walked straight into the game-hall. Pequil had to run to keep up with the man. The apex didn’t understand the alien; he hadn’t wanted to talk during the journey from the hotel to the conference-center, whereas usually people in such a situation couldn’t stop talking… and somehow he didn’t seem to be frightened at all, though Pequil couldn’t see how that could be. If he hadn’t known the awkward, rather innocent alien better, he’d have thought it was anger he could read on that discolored, hairy, pointed face.
Lo Prinest Bermoiya sat in a stoolseat j
ust off the Board of Origin. Gurgeh stood on the board itself. He rubbed his beard with one long finger, then moved a couple of pieces. Bermoiya made his own moves, then when the action spread—as the alien tried desperately to wriggle out of his predicament—the judge had some amateur players make most of his moves for him. The alien remained on the board, making his own moves, scurrying to and fro like a giant, dark insect.
Bermoiya couldn’t see what the alien was playing at; his play seemed to be without purpose, and he made some moves which were either stupid mistakes or pointless sacrifices. Bermoiya mopped up some of the alien’s tattered forces. After a while, he thought perhaps the male did have a plan, of sorts, but if so it must be a very obscure one. Perhaps there was some kind of odd, face-saving point the male was trying to make, while he still was a male.
Who knew what strange precepts governed an alien’s behavior at such a moment? The moves went on; inchoate, unreadable. They broke for lunch. They resumed.
Bermoiya didn’t return to the stoolseat after the break; he stood at the side of the board, trying to work out what slippery, ungraspable plan the alien might have. It was like playing a ghost, now; it was as though they were competing on separate boards. He couldn’t seem to get to grips with the male at all; his pieces kept slipping away from him, moving as though the man had anticipated his next move before he’d even thought of it.
What had happened to the alien? He’d played quite differently yesterday. Was he really receiving help from outside? Bermoiya felt himself start to sweat. There was no need for it; he was still well ahead, still poised for victory, but suddenly he began to sweat. He told himself it was nothing to worry about; a side-effect of some of the concentration boosters he’d taken over lunch.