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.'
He is dozing off. Dry cold rasps his raw lungs ... putting on his clothes, shivering, dropping things, cold burn in his bowels, just made the privy, a trough of smooth red stone in the hall streaks of phosphorescent shit, a smell like rotten solder, burning shivering sick, he needs the Blue Stuff. Dry blue crystals of snow on the floor stir in an eddy of wind and a crystal spark boy takes shape, naked, radiant, his long needle fingertips dripping the deadly Joy Juice, bright red hair floating about his head, disk eyes flashing erogenous luminescence, his erect phallus smooth as seashell with a tip of pink crystal, he is like some dazzingly beautiful undersea creature dripping deadly venoms.
'Yass-Waddah, a spaceport in rivalry with Ba'dan, is a matriarchy ruled by a hereditary empress. Here men are second-class citizens who can only achieve status as courtiers, servants, shopkeepers, agents and guards.
'Those who fall into none of these categories try frantically to ingratiate themselves as informers. No city in the cosmos is so riddled with informers as Yass-Waddah. The Ba'dan word for informer is
'The inner city of Yass-Waddah is forbidden to any male being, except the Green Guards, genetic eunuchs, pot-bellied but strong. They form the shock police of Yass-Waddah.
'Latterly, Her Serene Majesty, the Empress, is being pushed upstairs into the attic as the Council of the Selected moves in, backed by the powerful countesses de Vile and de Gulpa, smarting from their defeat and narrow escape in Tamaghis. They are pushing for the Anschluss, after which the Heroids and the Green Guards will wipe out Tamaghis and block the way to Waghdas forever.
'The riots we are here to foment are simply a prelude to an all-out assault on Yass-Waddah. We are pushing for a final solution. There can be no compromise. Even the memory of Yass-Waddah must be destroyed as if Yass-Waddah had never existed.'
Afterbirth of dream
Smell of the salt marshes, slivers of ice at dawn, catwalks, towers, and wooden houses over the water where white-furred crocodiles lurk ...
There are many albinos in the city with hair white as snow and long slanting black eyes, all pupil, like black shimmering mirrors. Many of the inhabitants change color with the seasons—being white in winter and changing in summer to a mottled green-brown.
The summers are almost tropical and the marshes bloom with a rich profusion of flowering trees and shrubs along pools and canals. Here and there patches of swamp poppies with pods big as cantaloupes bursting with
