Cities of the Red Night

The proprietor has it all crated up. We pay him and tell him to send it to the mail room on The Billy Celeste.

I stop at a bookstall by a canal to pick up some light reading for the trip to Ba'dan. From an old Frenchman smoking a Gitane I buy An Outcast of the Islands by Conrad, Maiden Voyage by Denton Welch and Brac the Barbarian by John Jakes.

We walk through the flower markets, florist shops and greenhouses. Sex nettles for fraternity initiations. It's more fun than paddles. Orchids that grow into your flesh, tendrils stirring vegetable lusts. And here is a humanoid mandrake six feet in height.

'Is it a screamer?' Audrey asks.

'It sure is, son. And when he screams it will bring off every living creature for a twenty-yard radius. And the beauty of it is, he lives on your shit ... saves you installing a toilet.'

'What makes him scream?'

'You fuck him, son. Or jack him off or suck him off and he screams like a major.'

'What happens if we hang its green ass, roots and all?' Jimmy asked.

'Son, you'd be doing what mankind has always trembled to do. You'd be upsetting the balance between the animal and the vegetable kingdom. He'd scream the planet apart. It would be the last scream.'

'He certainly has potential as a weapon,' Audrey mused. 'That is, if he weren't so bulky.'

There are bits and pieces of many cities in Tamaghis. We are walking down a street of worn blue cobblestones rather like the outskirts of Edinburgh when a little boy falls in beside us. About four years old, I think at first. He has a rolling walk like a sailor. He is dressed in shorts with a white sailor shirt and white tennis shoes. I put my hand on his shoulder and he snaps at it with sharp little teeth.

'Keep your hands off me, you bastard.'

And I see that he is a miniature youth of eighteen.

When we make it back to the ship with the kid, who has pulled a sailor cap out of his pocket, and get to our cabin there are two more krauts in it. Krup is making room for the cargo. I hope he can get it off the ground. He does. Next stop: Ba'dan.

Where naked troubadours

shoot snotty baboons

Boys in codpieces and leather jerkins carrying musical instruments from the Middle Ages invade American Express. The clerk glares and beckons to a security man. A boy with long blond hair steps to a window.

'Can I help you with something?'

'We wish to travel.'

'Travel? Where exactly?'

The boys strip off their clothes: 'Where naked troubadours shoot snotty baboons.'

They open up with Venus 22 machine guns, a sound like farting metal. Staff and customers like dead.

Travelogue voices through the loudspeakers: They are a happy simple people / She wears the traditional Athrump / Many moons ago they say / He offered me a cup of Smuun, a mixture of black rum and the blood of menstruating seal / Now they would show me the Sacred Uncle ceremony / Mixta demonstrates how the poi mansu us prepared / We stop to observe the traditional Ullshit that must be observed before this young peasant can Bulunkmash his fiancee / The old Ungling is sick / Can nothing be done? / Sanfraz the sorcerer has been consulted / Every foot of arable land is treasured / All refuse must go into the Ungern or fertilizer ditch / The Phren crop is good and there is much rejoicing / Youths scream muku muku fucky fucky over their thumous / How long can the old ways withstand the onslaught of modern technology? / He say long long ago many thousand moons a red light appeared in the northern sky / This light inflamed men to madness and many fell sick with a terrible plague / All that remains of the ancient city of Ba'dan: mud walls in a waste of sand / If these walls could speak what tales they could tell /