Cities of the Red Night

A boy snatches a coat and vest from a looted store. Another boy in fake beard and skullcap pops out.

'Shoot him in the pants! Shoot him in the pants! The coat and vest is mine!'

'They called in a new Commandante who accepted the conditions of the rioters. The Sirens who survived by concealing their assets someplace were confined to licensed cathouses or deported to Yass-Waddah. They had to walk it stark naked. Two hundred miles of desert, wild dogs, hyenas, and leopards out there waiting. The kids lined up and whipped them out the gates with hangman's nooses.'

The bartender goes into a song and dance as he taps glasses with a spoon, singing:

'She's too fat for me

She's too fat for me

I don't want her

You can have her

She's too fat for me.'

He wipes the bar from one end to the other. 'And the sperm dealers has left too, most of them. Can't operate under the new conditions. And good riddance to the Gombeen men.'

Marty has a good thing going. Operating with a friend in the Records Department at City Hall he is forging quitclaim deeds to properties in the burnt-out areas. When the smoke clears away he will owning a big chunk of lower Manhattan. 'The compensation and then the building contracts. The whole thing drips with goodness.'

He has troops of boys in the street to keep the home fires burning. And these riot boys will later be used to harass any wise citizens who try to reclaim their property and rebuild. The boys screaming insults at visitors. 'I catching one clap from fucky your asshole.' Swarming over the house like monkeys, leering in at windows, throwing stones at passerby from the roof, urinating and masturbating from balconies.

There are a number of these boys sleeping in the Turkish bath where we have billeted ourselves. They parade around naked doing imitations. Death throes they dig special, flopping around, screaming and groaning and jacking off while the others piss themselves with laughter.

Krup gets it together finally. Two kraut SPs at the door. 'All leaves cancelled. Report back to ship immediately.' Next stop: the future.

Tamaghis revisited

When we were first stationed in Tamaghis, it was such a frantic and dangerous place that we never got a chance to relax and look around. At that time, Tamaghis was in the hands of the women with their dogcatchers and Sirens, supported by a weak and acquiescent City Council.

Since the I.D.-card riots, the massacre of Sirens and dogcatchers, the flight of the Countesses and their retinue, and the appointment of the new Commandante from Waghdas, power had definitely shifted to the men. The new Commandante dissolved the City Council and ruled by decree.

The rioters are now the elite of the city, setting style and tone. The fashionable thing is to look for the answers or the questions behind sex and death. So the youth of Tamaghis look to the academies of Waghdas. I am speaking about ten percent of the total population. As always, the permanent parties remain: the shopkeepers, restaurant and bar owners, merchants, craftsmen and farmers.

Tamaghis is a walled city, circular in shape, with gates at the four cardinal points. The population is about twenty thousand, but the area of the city would accommodate a much larger population.

Since considerations of privacy do not apply for the emancipated youth, they live by preference in dormitories and cubicle rooms, sharing bathing and sanitary facilities. This concentration of personnel leaves room for the fishponds, farms, aviaries, and orchards within the walled area, so that the city is almost self-sufficient.

And the rich, eager to disassociate themselves from the lingering taint of the dogcatchers, Sirens, predatory Countesses, and the infamous Hanging Fathers of the erstwhile City Council, have made their estates productive. Some have thrown their houses open to youth communes. Cows' milk is brought in from a farm outside the city walls, since the new Commandante banished all cows from the city.

The mains square is a composite of the Djemalfnaa or Marrakesh and the Mercado Mayorista of Lima, surrounded by parks and trees. I am sitting in the Red Night Cafe with Dahlfar, Bluie, and Jimmy Lee drinking tea one afternoon. There is no alcohol and no tobacco in Tamaghis by order of the new Commandante.

A kid I recognize as a former outcast, barred from the Double G, is moving from table to