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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, you're not doing it right. That's what the
Hole's for;
fun. Fun and games. Cools down a bit during the day, but it can get pretty
wild, too. The drink festivals are usually the worst. Shouldn't be any
trouble tonight though. Fairly quiet.'
The crowd shrieked; the woman was holding the dwarfish alien's face under the
mud; it struggled desperately.
Gurgeh turned round to watch. The alien's movements weakened slowly as the
naked, mud-slicked woman forced its head into the bubbling red liquid. Gurgeh
glanced at Za. 'So they were fighting.'
Za shrugged again. 'We may never know.' He looked down too, as the woman
forced the now limp alien's body further into the ochre mud.
'Has she killed it?' Gurgeh asked. He had to raise his voice as the crowd
screamed, stamping feet and beating fists on tables.
'Na,' Shohobohaum Za said, shaking his head. 'The little guy's a Uhnyrchal.'
Za nodded down, as the woman used one hand to keep the alien's head submerged,
and raised the other in triumph in the air, glaring bright-eyed at the baying
audience. 'See that little black thing sticking up?'
Gurgeh looked. There was a little black bulb poking up through the surface of
the red mud. 'Yes.'
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'That's his dick.'
Gurgeh looked suspiciously at the other man. 'How exactly is that going to
help him?'
'The Uhnyrchal can breathe through their dicks,' Za said. 'That guy's fine;
he'll be fighting in another club tomorrow night; maybe even later this
evening.'
Za watched the waitress place their drinks on the table. He leant forward to
whisper something to her; she nodded and walked off. 'Try glanding
Expand with this stuff,' Za suggested. Gurgeh nodded. They both drank.
'Wonder why the Culture's never genofixed that,' Za said, staring into his
glass.
'What?'
'Being able to breathe through your dick.'
Gurgeh thought. 'Sneezing at certain moments could be messy.'
Za laughed. 'There might be compensations.'
The audience behind them went 'Oooo'. Za and Gurgeh turned round to see the
victorious woman pulling her opponent's body up out of the mud by its penis;
the alien being's head and feet were still under the glutinous, slowly
slopping liquid. 'Ouch,' Za muttered, drinking.
Somebody in the crowd tossed the woman a dagger; she caught it, stooped, and
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sliced off the alien genitals. She brandished the dripping flesh aloft while
the crowd went wild with delight and the alien sank slowly beneath the cloying
red liquid, the woman's foot on its chest. The mud gradually turned black
where the blood oozed, and a few bubbles surfaced.
Za sat back, looking mystified. 'Must have been some sub-species I haven't
heard of.'
The low-G mud-tub was trundled away, the woman still shaking her trophy at the
baying crowd.
Shohobohaum Za rose to greet a party of four dramatically beautiful and
stunningly dressed Azadian females who were approaching the cupola. Gurgeh
had glanded the body-drug Za had suggested, and was just beginning to feel the
effects of both
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Iain M. Banks - The Player of Games (1988) v1.0 : Scanned by HugHug that and
the liquor.
The women looked, he thought, quite the equals of any he'd seen the night of
the welcoming ball, and much more friendly.
The acts went on; sex acts, mostly. Acts which, outside the Hole, Gurgeh was
told by Za and two of the Azadian females (Inclate and At-sen, sitting on
either side of him), would mean death for both participants; death by
radiation or death by chemicals.
Gurgeh didn't pay too much attention. This was his night out and the staged
obscenities were the least important part of it. He was away from the game;
that was what mattered. Living by another set of rules. He knew why Za had
had the women come to the table, and it amused him. He felt no particular
desire for the two exquisite creatures he sat between - certainly nothing
uncontrollable - but they made good company. Za was no fool, and the two
charming females Gurgeh knew they would have been males, or even apices had Za
discovered Gurgeh's preferences lay in that direction - were both intelligent
and witty.
They knew a little about the Culture, had heard rumours about the sexual
alterations Culture people possessed, and made discreetly roguish jokes about
Gurgeh's proclivities and abilities compared to their own, and to both the
other
Azadian genders. They were flattering, enticing and friendly; they drank from
small glasses, they sipped smoke from tiny, slender pipes - Gurgeh had tried a
pipe too, but only coughed, much to everyone's amusement - and they both had
long, sinuously curling blue-black hair, silkily membraned with near-invisibly
fine platinum nets and beaded with minute, glinting AG studs, which made their
hair move in slow motion and gave each graceful movement of their delicately
structured heads a dizzyingly unreal quality.
Inclate's slim dress was the ever-shifting colour of oil on water, speckled
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