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-levelled 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 metre off a small covered walkway and looking out from the rear on to 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 leant 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 participants; 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 rumours 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 colour of oil on water, speckled with jewels which twinkled like stars; At-sen's was a videodress, 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.