As well as being the chief city of Argentina Province, Buenos Aires was a Ducal capital—the first such city Kesley remembered having entered.
He knew the names of the others: Chicago, Tunis, Johannesburg, Stockholm, Canberra, Strasbourg, Kiev, Hankow, Calcutta, Manila, Leopoldville. They were strange and alien names; to him, abstract symbols of Ducal power rather than concrete geographical localities.
Kesley had seen mutants before: mutant horses, mutant wolves, other products of ravaged genes, but he had never before been this close to a human sport, other than Miguel. Miguel was human in all physical aspects save his life span; the creature shambling toward them now could be called "human" only by the loosest of definitions.
There was one round, orange, doughy mass of a man that looked like some sort of giant fruit, except for the enlarged features and the tiny, stick-like legs and arms that projected from it; nearby, walking in confused circles, was a mutant with a pair of dissimilar writhing heads and an uncountable number of busy legs.
Lazy curlicues of smoke hung wavering in the air above the shacks. Kesley looked around.
Great God, he thought suddenly. They're people!
He rode down into the ghetto, feeling ashamed of his own bodily symmetry and genetic heritage, which seemed abnormal here.
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