An advertisement for a blister cream appears on the ground in front of me. A woman of strangely slender proportions slinks out of a red lace robe. Suitably naked, she then applies the cream to a place on her body where no woman has ever before gotten a blister. I blush and look away in disgust because I've only ever seen one woman naked. "You'll want to forget your modesty," Harmony advises. "It'll mark you worse than your Color." "It is disgusting," I say. "It's advertising, darling," Harmony purrs condescendingly. She shares a chuckle with Dancer. An elderly Gold soars overhead, older than any human I've ever seen. We lower our heads as she passes. "Reds up here have to get paid," Dancer explains when we are alone. "Not much. But they're given money and enough treats to make them dependent. What money they have, they spend on goods they're made to think they need." "Same with all the drones," Harmony hisses. "So they're not slaves," I say. "Oh, they're slaves," Harmony says. "Enslaved by their suckling on the teats of those bastards." Dancer struggles to keep up, so I slow down as he speaks. Harmony makes an irritated noise. "Golds structure everything to make their own lives easier. They have shows produced to entertain and placate the masses. They give monies and handouts to make generations dependent on the seventh day of each new Earth month. They create goods to grant us a semblance of liberty. If violence is the Gold sport, manipulation is their art form." We pass into a lowColor district where there are no designated walking paths. The storefronts are lined with electronic Green ribbons. Some stores peddle a month of alternate reality in an hour's time for a week's wages. Two small men with quick green eyes and bald heads studded with metal spikes and tattooed with shifting digital codes suggest for me a trip to someplace called Osgiliath. Other stores offer banking services or biomodifications or simple personal hygiene products. They shout things I don't understand, speaking in numbers and acronyms. I have never seen such commotion. Brothels lined with Pink ribbon make me blush, as do the women and men in the windows. Each has a flashing price tag playfully hanging from a thread; it's a moving number that suits demand. A lusty girl calls to me as Dancer explains the idea of money. In Lykos, we traded only in goods and swill and burners and services. Some blocks of the city are reserved for the use of high colors. Access to these districts depends on badges of warrant. I cannot simply walk or ride into a Gold or Copper district. But a Copper can always slum in a Red district, frequenting a bar or brothel. Never the other way around, even in the wild, free-for-all that is the Bazaar—a riotous place of commerce and noise and air heavy with the scents of bodies and food and automobile exhaust. We walk deep into the Bazaar. I feel safer in the back alleys here than I did in the open avenues of the high-tech sectors. I do not yet like vast spaces, and seeing the stars above frightened me. The Bazaar is darker, though lights still shine and people still bustle. The buildings seem to pinch together. A hundred balconies form ribs in the alleyway's heights. Walkways crisscross above, and all around us, lights blink from devices. It is more humid here, dirty. And I see fewer Tinpots patrolling. Dancer says there are places in the Bazaar where even an Obsidian should not go.
"In the densest places of man, human- ity most easily breaks down," he says It is strange being in a crowd where no one knows your face or cares for your purpose. In Lykos, I would have been jostled by men Id grown up with, run across girls I'd chased and wrestled with as a child. Here, other Colors slam into me and offer not even a faint apol- ogy. This is a city, and I do not like it. I feel alone "This is us," Dancer says, gesturing me into a dark doorway where an elec- tronic flying dragon shimmers on the surface of the stone. A massive Brown with a modjob for a nose stops us. We wait for the metal nose to snort and sniff. He's bigger than Dancer "Dye in his hair," he growls at me, tak- ing a whiff of my hair. "A Ruster, this one be." A scorcher peeks out from his belt. He's got a shiv behind his wrist- I can tell by the way his hand moves.