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 back-sides, 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 trades-people 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 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. The 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.
"To distract attention from these maneuvers, agents of the Council, vociferously self-righteous, call for a cleanup of Fun City, a crackdown on the Casbah, and an end to the international status of Portland. The wealthy see the Anschluss as a danger to their position, but much more vulnerable and immediately threatened are the inhabitants of the Casbah."