It is a summer night and the air is warm and electric with a smell of incense, ozone, and the musky sweet rotten red smell of the fever. Jerry, Audrey, Dahlfar, Jon, Joe, and John Kelley are walking through a quarter of massage parlors, Turkish baths, sex rooms, hanging studios, cubicle restaurants, booths selling incense, aphrodisiacs and aromatic herbs. Music drifts from nightclubs, sometimes a whiff of opium smoke—the Painless Ones who run many of the concessions smoke it.
The boys pause at a booth and Audrey buys some Red Hots from a Painless One. This aphrodisiac causes an erogenous rash in the crotch, anus, and on the nipples. It acts within seconds, taken orally, or it can be injected—but this is dangerous since the pleasure is often so intense that it stops the heart. Adolescents of the city play red-hot dare games known as Hots and Pops.
The boys are dressed in red silk tunics open on their lean bodies, red silk pants, and magnetic sandals. At their belts they carry spark guns and long knives, sharp on both edges, that curl slightly at the end. Knife fights are frequent here since Red Hots can set off the raw red Killing Fever.
The virus is like a vast octopus through bodies of the city, mutating in protean forms: the Killing Fever, the Flying Fever, the Black hate Fever. In all cases the total energies of the subject are focused on one activity or objective. There is a Gambling Fever and a Money Fever which sometimes infect the Painless One—eyes glittering, they draw in the money with a terrible eagerness, trembling like hungry shrews. There is also an Activity Fever: the victims rushing about in a frenzy organizing anything, acting as agents for anything or anybody, prowling the streets desperately looking for contacts.
Red Night in Tamaghis: Dog Catchers, Spermers, Sirens, and the Special Police from the Council of the Selected who are infiltrating Tamaghis from Yass-Waddah. The Dog Catchers will seize any youths they encounter in the Fair Game areas and sell them off to hanging studios and sperm brokers. The Spermers are pirates operating from strongholds outside the city walls, attacking caravans and supply trains, tunneling under the walls to prowl in the rubbly outskirts of the city. They are outlaws who may be killed by any citizen, like cattle rustlers.
Two boys, faces blazing with alertness, slide from one red shadow pool to another. A patrol of Dog Catchers passes. The boys crouch in the darkness by a ruined wall, teeth bare, hands on their knives. The Dog Catchers are muscular youths with heavy thighs and the deep chests of runners. Naked to the waist, they carry a variety of nets and handcuffs around their shoulders, and bolos that can tangle legs at twenty yards. On leads are the hairless red sniffhounds, quivering, whimpering, sniffing, trying to fuck the Dog Catchers' legs. Audrey's lips part in a slow smile. This is one of his infiltration tactics: the dogs are trained to wrap themselves around a Dog Catcher's legs and trip him up.
Audrey and Cupid Mount Etna are in a populous area with wide stone streets, A flower float of Sirens passes. In conch shells of roses they trill: 'I'm going to
Idiot males are rushing up, jumping on the hanging float to be hanged by the Sirens, many of whom are transvestites from Yass-Waddah. The floats wind on towards the hanging Gardens where the golden youths gather with their Hanging Exempt badges. Like characters in a charade they pose and pirouette in the red glow that lights trees, pools, and diseased faces burning with the terrible lusts of the fever.
Audrey decided on a detour. Four Special Police from the Council of the Selected stand in their way. They are crew-cut men in blue suits, looking like religious FBI men with muscular Christian smiles.
'What can we do for you?'
'Drop dead.' Audrey snaps. He draws his spark gun and gives them a full blast. They fall twitching and smoking. Officially the SPs have no standing in Tamaghis, but they are bribing the local police and kidnapping boys for the transplant operation rooms of Yass-Waddah.
The boys sprint around the bodies and turn into an alley, police whistles behind them. Possession of a spark gun is a capital offense. Dodging and twisting through the maze of narrow streets, tunnels, and gangways, they lose the patrol.
They are on the outskirts now, near the walls, walking down a steep stone road. There is a road above them and a steep grassy slope leading up to it. Suddenly, a World War I ambulance truck stops on the high road and six men jump out got up as pirates with beards and earrings. They rush down the slope, eyes flashing with greed.
'Spermers!'
Audrey drops on one
