frankly the thought of some human company for a change is looking more attractive all the time.' He jabbed a finger at the machine. '
The man left the module's lounge. The little drone hovered steadily in mid-air for a while. 'Oops,' it said to itself, eventually, then, with a shrug-like wobble, swooped away, fields vaguely rosy.
'Have some of this,' Za said. The car swept along the city streets beneath the erubescent skies of dusk.
Gurgeh took the flask and drank.
'Not quite
'No,' Gurgeh admitted. 'I bypassed it; wanted a clear head.'
'Aw
'Thanks.'
'That showed them. Wow, did you give them a shock.' Za shook his head in admiration; his long brown hair swung across his loose tunic top like heavy smoke. 'I had you filed as a prime-time loser, J-G, but you're some kind of showman.' He winked one bright green eye at Gurgeh, and grinned.
Gurgeh looked uncertainly at Za's beaming face for a moment, then burst out laughing. He took the flask from Za's hand and put it to his lips.
'To the showmen,' he said, and drank.
'Amen to that, my maestro.'
The Hole had been on the outskirts of the city once, but now it was just another part of one more urban district. The Hole was a set of vast artificial caverns burrowed out of the chalk centuries ago to store natural gas in; the gas had long since run out, the city ran on other forms of energy, and the set of huge, linked caves had been colonised, first by Groasnachek's poor, then (by a slow process of osmosis and displacement, as though — gas or human — nothing ever really changed) by its criminals and outlaws, and finally, though not completely, by its effectively ghettoised aliens and their supporting cast of locals.
Gurgeh and Za's car drove into what had once been a massive above-ground gas-storage cylinder; it had become the housing for a pair of spiralling ramps taking cars and other vehicles down into and up out of the Hole. In the centre of the still mostly empty, ringingly echoing cylinder, a cluster of variously sized lifts slid up and down inside ramshackle frameworks of girders, tubing and beams.
The outer and inner surfaces of the ancient gasometer sparkled slatily under rainbow lights and the flickeringly unreal, grotesquely oversize images of advertising holos. People milled about the surface level of the cavernous tower, and the air was full of shouting, screaming, haggling voices and the sound of labouring engines. Gurgeh watched the crowds and the stalls and stands slide by as the car dipped and started its long descent. A strange, half-sweet, half-acrid smell seeped through the car's conditioning, like a sweaty breath from the place.
They quit the car in a long, low, crowded tunnel where the air was heavy with fumes and shouts. The gallery was choked with multifariously shaped and sized vehicles which rumbled and hissed and edged about amongst the swarmingly varied people like massive, clumsy animals wading in an insect sea. Za took Gurgeh by the hand as their car trundled towards the ascending ramp. They went bustling through the buffeting crowds of Azadians and other humanoids towards a dimily-glowing tunnel mouth.
'What d'you think so far?' Za shouted back to Gurgeh.
'Crowded, isn't it?'
'You should see it on a holiday!'
Gurgeh looked round at the people. He felt ghostlike, invisible. Until now he'd been the centre of attention; a freak, stared and gawped and peered at, and kept entirely at arm's length. Now suddenly nobody gave a damn, hardly sparing him a second glance. They bumped into him, jostled him, shoved past him, brushed against him, all quite careless.
And so varied, even in this sickly, sea-green tunnel light. So many different types of people mixed in with the Azadians he was becoming used to seeing; a few aliens that looked vaguely familiar from his memory of pan-human types, but mostly quite wildly different; he lost count of the variations in limbs, height, bulk, physiognomy and sensory apparatus he was confronted with during that short walk.
They went down the warm tunnel and into a huge, brightly lit cavern, at least eighty metres tall and half as broad again; lengthwise, its cream-coloured walls stretched away in both directions for half a kilometre or more, ending in great side-lit arches leading to further galleries. Its flat floor was chock-a-block with shack-like buildings and tents, partitions and covered walkways, stalls and kiosks and small squares with dribbling fountains and gaily striped awnings. Lamps danced from wires strung on thin poles, and overhead brighter lights burned, high in the vaulted roof; a colour between ivory and pewter. Structures of stepped buildings and wall- or roof-hung gantries lined the sides of the gallery, and whole areas of grimy grey wall were punctured by the irregular holes of windows, balconies, terraces and doors. Lifts and pulleys creaked and rattled, taking people to higher levels, or lowering them to the bustling floor.
'This way,' Za said. They wove their way through the narrow streets of the gallery surface until they came to the far wall, climbed some broad but rickety wooden steps, and approached a heavy wooden door guarded by a metal portcullis and a pair of lumberingly large figures; one Azadian male and another whose species Gurgeh couldn't identify. Za waved and, without either guard appearing to do anything, the portcullis rose, the door swung ponderously open, and he and Za left the echoing cave behind for the relative quietness of a dim, wood-lined, heavily carpeted tunnel.
The cavern light closed off behind them; a hazy, cerise glow came through an arched ceiling of wafer-thin plaster. The polished wooden walls looked thick, were char-dark, and felt warm. Muffled music came from ahead.
Another door; a desk set into an alcove where two apices eyed them both sullenly, then consented to smile at Za, who passed over a small hide pouch to them. The door opened. He and Gurgeh went through to the light and music and noise beyond.
It was a jumble of a space; impossible to decide whether it was one confusingly subdivided, chaotically split- levelled hall, or a profusion of smaller rooms and galleries all knocked into one. The place was packed, and loud with high-pitched atonal music. It could have been on fire, judging from the thick haze of smoke filling it, but the fumes smelled sweet, almost perfumed.
Za guided Gurgeh through crowds to a wooden cupola raised a metre off a small covered walkway and looking out from the rear on to a sort of staggered stage beneath. The stage was surrounded by similar circular boxes as well as various stepped areas of seats and benches, all of which were crowded, mostly with Azadians.
On the small, roughly circular stage below, some dwarfish alien — only vaguely pan-human — was wrestling, or perhaps copulating, with an Azadian female in a quivering tub full of gently steaming red mud, all seemingly held in a low-G field. The spectators shouted and clapped and threw drinks.
'Oh good,' Za said, sitting down. 'The fun's started.'
'Are they fucking or fighting?' Gurgeh said, leaning over the rail and peering down at the struggling, heaving bodies of the alien and the female.
Za shrugged. 'Does it matter?'
A waitress, an Azadian female wearing only a little cloth around her waist, took Za's drink order. The woman's puff-balled hair appeared to be on fire, surrounded by a flickering hologram of yellow-blue flames.
Gurgeh turned away from the stage. The audience behind him yelled appreciatively as the woman threw the alien off and jumped on top of him, throwing him under the steaming mud. 'You come here often?' he asked Za.
The tall male laughed loudly. 'No.' The great green eyes flashed. 'But I leave quite a lot.'
'This where you relax?'
Za shook his head emphatically. 'Absolutely not. Common misconception that; that fun is relaxing. If it is,
