"Put on a harness, please. I won't be a moment." The drone left Gurgeh to fasten the AG harness on over his shorts and shirt. It reappeared shortly afterwards holding a long, black, hooded cloak. "Now put this on, please."
Gurgeh put the cloak on over the harness. Flere-Imsaho shoved the hood up over his head and tied it so that Gurgeh's face was hidden from the sides and in deep shadow from the front. The harness didn't show beneath the thick material. The lights in the compartment dimmed and went out, and Gurgeh heard something move overhead. He looked up to see a square of dim stars directly above him.
"I'll control your harness, if that's all right with you," the drone whispered. Gurgeh nodded.
He was lifted quickly into the darkness. He did not dip again as he'd expected, but kept going up into the fragrant warmth of the city night. The cloak fluttered quietly around him; the city was a swirl of lights, a seemingly never-ending plain of scattered radiance. The drone was a small, still shadow by his shoulder.
They set out over the city. They overflew roads and rivers and great buildings and domes, ribbons and clumps and towers of light, areas of vapour drifting over darkness and fire, rearing towers where reflections burned and lights soared, quivering stretches of dark water and broad dark parks of grass and trees. Finally they started to drop.
They landed in an area where there were relatively few lights, dropping between two darkened, windowless buildings. His feet touched down in the dirt of an alley.
"Excuse me," the drone said, and nudged its way into the hood until it was floating up-ended by Gurgeh's left ear. "Walk down here," it whispered. Gurgeh walked down the alley. He tripped over something soft, and knew before he turned it was a body. He looked closer at the bundle of rags, which moved a little. The person was curled up under tattered blankets, head on a filthy sack. He couldn't tell what sex it was; the rags offered no clue.
"Ssh," the drone said as he opened his mouth to speak. "That is just one of the loafers Pequil was talking about; somebody shifted off the land. He's been drinking; that's part of the smell. The rest is him." It was only then that Gurgeh caught the stench rising from the still sleeping male. He almost gagged.
"Leave him," Flere-Imsaho said.
They left the alley. Gurgeh had to step over another two sleeping people. The street they found themselves on was dim and stank of something Gurgeh suspected was supposed to be food. A few people were walking about. "Stoop a little," the drone said. "You'll pass for a Minan disciple dressed like this, but don't let the hood fall, and don't stand upright."
Gurgeh did as he was told.
As he walked up the street, under the dim, grainy, flickering light of sporadic, monochrome streetlamps, he passed what looked like another drunk, lying against a wall. There was blood between the apex's less, and a dark, dried stream of it leading from his head. Gurgeh stopped.
"Don't bother," came the little voice. "He's dying. Probably been in a fight. The police don't come here too often. And nobody's likely to call for medical aid; he's obviously been robbed, so they'd have to pay for the treatment themselves."
Gurgeh looked round, but there was nobody else near by. The apex's eyelids fluttered briefly, as though he was trying to open them. The fluttering stopped.
"There," Flere-Imsaho said quietly.
Gurgeh continued up the street. Screams came from high up in a grimy housing block on the far side of the street. "Just some apex beating up his woman. You know for millennia females were thought to have no effect on the heredity of the children they bore? They've known for five hundred years that they do; a viral DNA analogue which alters the genes a woman's impregnated with. Nevertheless, under the law females are simply possessions. The penalty for murdering a woman is a year's hard labour, for an apex. A female who kills an apex is tortured to death over a period of days. Death by Chemicals. Said to be one of the worst. Keep walking."
They came to an intersection with a busier street. A male stood on the corner, shouting in a dialect Gurgeh didn't understand. "He's selling tickets for an execution," the drone said. Gurgeh raised his eyebrows, turned his head fractionally. "I'm serious," Flere-Imsaho said. Gurgeh shook his head all the same.
Filling the middle of the street was a crowd of people. The traffic — only about half of it powered, the rest human-driven — was forced to mount the pavements. Gurgeh went to the back of the crowd, thinking that with his greater height he would be able to see what was happening, but he found people making way for him anyway, drawing him closer to the centre of the crowd.
Several young apices were attacking an old male lying on the ground. The apices wore some sort of strange uniform, though somehow Gurgeh knew it was not an official uniform. They kicked the old male with a sort of poised savagery, as though the attack was some kind of competitive ballet of pain, and they were being evaluated on artistic impression as well as the raw torment and physical injury inflicted.
"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 realised 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 grey 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 outwards, 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 colour, 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 favours to apices for a few minutes, or hours, or for the night. In some parts of the city, the drone said as they travelled 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 coloured rubbish, state-run drug and alcohol stores, stalls selling religious statues, books, artefacts 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 afterwards.