The Clantons and the Earps walk towards each other, naked except for gun belts and boots, meeting cock to cock.
“You boys have been looking for a fight…” Wyatt drawls. “Now we aim to give it to you.” He draws and gets Billy Clanton in the crotch. Billy sags but he knocks Wyatt out with a solar-plexus shot from the ground. Doc Holliday turns sideways but Ike Clanton circles and gets him right in his skinny ass. Virgil and Guy Earp are down. The Clantons have won.
The Earps and Doc Holliday are hanged simultaneously. The crowd goes hanging mad. Gunfights all up and down the street, people sniping from windows and doorways, casting from rooftops with deep-sea fishing gear and nooses, trying to snag someone off the street.
They are lined up at the gallows. Ropes are unslung and bodies thrown aside, some of them still alive, strangled by street boys or picked up by roving Buzzard Bands.
People hang from balconies, trees, and poles. Even horses are hauled into the air, kicking and farting, while boys prance around them, showing their teeth in mimicry.
The culmination of this loutish scene is now at hand as drunken cowpokes drag screaming whores out of the cathouses.
“You’ve given me your last dose, you rotten slut.”
“My God, they’re hanging women!” Audrey gasps.
“Enough to turn a man to stone,” drawls Captain Strobe. “Let’s get out of here.” Six youths in chaps bar the way.
“In a hurry, stranger?”
“Yes,” says Audrey and he kills him with a neck shot. He flops against another boy, deflecting his aim. Audrey and Pu are unbelievable with hang-guns. The boys are all down now or dead.
We walk away and leave them, fair game for any roving band of vigilantes. Before we turn a corner, they are seized by the Hanging Fathers—naked except for their clerical collars. The Hanging Fathers represent one of the sects under the control of the Council of the Selected. They are one of the most powerful organizations in Ba’dan.
We stroll along to the amusement-park section. Here are the elevators, parachute, and roller-coaster gallows and all variations of hanging roulette. “From Russia with Love” is played like Russian roulette. You stand on the trap with the rope around your neck and you get a gun with one live load. You spin the cylinder and then, instead of putting the gun to your own head, you aim at someone in the audience—if you can draw an audience or anyone within range—and if it’s the live shell, the shot springs the release. Or maybe some yokel throws a firecracker under the gallows—they’ll work up to an atom bomb eventually.
Now the wall of a building flies up and there are thirteen Commies hard at it, and we take off across the park, bullets whistling all around us. We duck behind the elevator-gallows building—ten stories, three hundred feet long.
You start at the tenth floor with a rope around your neck and drop down at express speed, and when the elevator stops a panel flips open and you get popped. And, of course, you can play roulette on the elevators, any odds you want.
Audrey is getting that weak feeling—it’s the wet dream of his adolescence, going down very fast in an elevator that suddenly stops. He didn’t know what it meant then. Now he just has to try it.
So up to the tenth floor. A red-carpeted corridor runs the length of the building. On one side a Turkish bath, on the other the elevators, green lights showing when the elevator is vacant. Youths, draped in towels or naked, come out of the showers and steam room to importune in the hall.
Audrey beckons imperiously to an attendant: “Do you have a well-equipped think room?”
“Oh yes, sir. Right this way, sir. Very sensible of you, sir, if you don’t mind my saying so, sir.”
The youths mutter angrily. “Come up here for a free feel.”
“Hombre conejo.… Fucking rabbit man.”
Inside the think room, the boys put on helmets. There are dials and screens—you can call your shots. Will it be an open elevator? The moon is full. The lights of Yass-Waddah twinkle across the bay.
Audrey could throw a potent curse. Or something with mirrors and video cameras—home movies to show his friends when he has a comfortable little bungalow in a nice residential district of Ba’dan.
Everything is permitted in a think room, so Audrey simply lets himself go. An open elevator or a mirror job? Why not both, one after the other?
POP POP POP
He is spattering death all over Yass-Waddah across the bay. Now he reaches out for the hermaphrodites and transplants of Yass-Waddah.
Two of these creatures undulate in, trilling, “You know what happens now don’t you, Audrey?”
Jerry’s head is on the body of a red-haired girl and her head is on his body, long red hair down to his nipples. Audrey gets the Gorgon Queezies at the sight of them.
“We’re going to pop you, Audrey.”
An open elevator for this one.
“Here you goooooooooo.…” Her hair blows up around her head like flames from hell.
POP
Audrey is learning to relax and throw his pops. A fire starts in a warehouse across the bay.
Now for the Big Dipper, which towers eight hundred feet into the night sky, all lit up with twinkling stars. Biggest and fastest roller coaster in the solar system. Like I say, Ba’dan breaks a lot of records.
Audrey stops in a little café he just remembers, up this little street and turn right … they sit under an arbor and order mint tea and all take a whopping dose of Itchy Tingles.
“You chaps just back up my play. Give me all your Itchy Tingle prana when I pop.”
“Sure thing, old sport.”
Audrey remembers a very exclusive little shop—you don’t get through the door or even find the door unless the proprietor likes your looks. Audrey knows him from Mexico City where Audrey was a private eye in another incarnation.
Inside the shop, he buys winged-Mercury sandals and a helmet with wings from a whooping crane. He tops off the ensemble with a silver wand.
They take a private car on the Big Dipper. Audrey stands with a silver silk noose around his neck, feet apart, knees bent, riding the dips, the wand moving in front of him. Up they go now—up up up up up—Audrey is getting a hard-on … a dizzy pause and now, the Big Dipper comes down down downdowndown and levels off. Audrey extends his arm and the wand tingles straight for the power plant of Yass-Waddah.
P O P
All the lights in Yass-Waddah go out.
A LECTURE IS BEING GIVEN
Jimmy Lee is checking dials. “We better get out of here fast before they get our range.”
We walk over to the shooting galleries and penny arcades on the edge of the plateau. A high electric fence separates Fun City from the vast slum area in Ba’dan that stretches down to the river and extends along the river’s banks.
It is 3:00 A.M., a warm electric night, violet haze in the air and the smell of sewage and Coleman lanterns. The pitchmen wear pink shirts, striped pants, and sleeve garters. They have gray night faces, cold eyes, and smooth patter.
One of the shills with a Cockney accent and a thin red acne-scarred face, standing in front of a curtained booth, makes a gesture that is unmistakably obscene and at the same time incomprehensible. Audrey is reminded of an incident from his early adolescence down on Market Street, brass knucks and crooked dice in pawnshop windows and a smooth high-yellow pitchman trying to talk him into a “museum,” as he called it.
“Shows all kind masturbation and self-abuse. Young boys need it special.”
Audrey does not exactly understand what the man is talking about. He turns and walks abruptly away. The mocking voice of the pitchman follows him.
“Hasta luego, amigo.”
We walk on and stop in an all-night restaurant where an old Chinese serves us chili and coffee. He puts a CLOSED sign on the front door and locks it.
“Out this way.…”
He shows us out the back door into a weed-grown alley by the fence. Frogs are croaking and the first light of dawn mixes with the red sky. A boy
pads up beside us silent as a cat.
“You come with me, mister. Somebody want to talk you.”
The boy has a straw-colored face dusted with orange freckles, kinky red hair, and lustrous brown eyes. He is barefooted and dressed in khaki shorts and shirt. We walk along beside the fence.
“Here.”
The boy pulls aside a piece of tar paper. A little green snake slides away. Under the paper is a rusty iron panel set in concrete. We go down a ladder and through a winding passage that smells of sewage and coal gas, out into a narrow street that looks like Algiers or Morocco.
The boy suddenly stops, sniffing like a dog. “In here, quick.”
He guides us into a doorway, up stairs and a ladder onto a roof. Looking down, we see a patrol of six soldiers with machine guns checking every doorway on the street. Audrey studies the gray faces and cold fishy eyes of the soldiers.
“Junkies.”
“Fuckin’ Heroids—” the boy spits.
The boy guides them through a maze of roofs and catwalks down a skylight, finally stopping in front of a metal door. He takes a little disk from his coat pocket. The disk bleeps faintly and the door opens.
A Chinese youth stands there. He is wearing a pistol in a holster at his belt. It is a bare room with a table, chairs, a gun rack, and a large map on one wall. A man turns from the map. It is Dimitri.
“Ah, Mr. Snide, or should I say Audrey Carsons, so glad to see you again.” We shake hands. “And your young assistant as well.” He shakes hands with Jimmy Lee. “Both somewhat altered—but none the worse for wear.”
We introduce the others.
“You are welcome, gentlemen … and now, there is much to explain.” He stands before the map with a long thin hazel stick in his hand. “We are here—” he circles the area below the plateau of Fun City down along the Ba’dan riverfront. “It is known as the Casbah. Outlaws and criminals of all times and places are to be found here. The area is heavily patrolled and the soldiers, as you have observed, are all heroin addicts. Their addiction conveys immunity to the fever and assures absolute loyalty to their masters who, of course, supply them … extra rations for arrests … rations cut for any dereliction of duty.”
“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.
Cities of the Red Night Page 23