Jim Morrison’s Adventures in the Afterlife

Say what you like, aliens can be a goddamned pain in the ass.

All of Semple’s instincts told her that the jail had been deliberately designed the way it was, ludicrous inefficiencies and all, and that its creator had done his work with an abrasive attention to viciously absurdist detail. Confirmation was all around her. It was born on the tepid air, thick with the reek of ammonia and dirty plastic mattresses. It was swallowed morning and evening with the gray cardboard slop that passed as food. It came with the mass of contradictory regulations that regularly ground everything to a bureaucratic halt for hours at a time. The very walls vibrated with it, along with the waveforms of sighing misery, and the constant undertow of confined penitentiary echoes. It was even underlined by the way all color had been washed out of the equation. In many respects, the perfect summation of the entire oppressive ambience could be compacted into the form of the four-hundred-pound female guard in the reinforced glass booth who was currently staring at Semple as though she were a logical impossibility. “You have no paperwork. How can I process you through when you have no paperwork?”

Semple stared back at the guard from her side of the glass. Revulsion and slow-burning anger were a given, but she was all too well aware of the pointlessness of any demonstration. Confrontation with a system as convoluted and tangled as the Necropolis City Jail would amount to issuing an open invitation to institutional violence. Semple, once she was past the first shock of arrest and incarceration, had resolved to roll with the absurdities of the program until she had a handle on her new surroundings. After all, didn’t she preside over a place not dissimilar to this back home in her own environment? And wasn’t the primary operating rule that prisoners never be allowed to win a point?

It wasn’t as though she’d invented the concept for herself, either. She had discovered it during her mortal time on Earth. She had been arrested twice during her earthly sojourn; once in Bakersfield, California, for disturbing the peace, and once in Louisville, Kentucky, for lewd vagrancy. Each incarceration had been the unfortunate climax of a protracted debauch with the local Victrola cowboys. Whenever she managed to dislodge Aimee from the body for a few days, the sheer relief was more than enough to send her on a full-bore, gin-on-the-rocks razzle, and on this pair of occasions the razzle had waxed rowdy enough to attract the heat. The prisoner never wins, she learned that in those jails, and Semple could only conclude that all prisons operated in much the same manner on either side of the veil.

She had, however, observed that nothing operated very well in the Necropolis City Jail, and this gave her hope that she’d eventually be able to organize her way out. She had organized her way out before, in both Bakersfield and Louisville. The first time, in Bakersfield, she had initially thrown conscious control back to Aimee, but Aimee had proved totally useless. Her sibling had become so horrified by the experience of waking in a filthy drunk tank surrounded by prostitutes, shoplifters, and madwomen that she’d been effectively paralyzed. Semple had been forced to resume control and deal with it. In Kentucky, she hadn’t bothered to rouse Aimee, she’d simply gone ahead and coped. Of course, she’d had the not insubstantial cash resource of the Aimee Semple McPherson Ministry, Inc., at her disposal and found that cash made freedom reasonably accessible. All she had in Necropolis was wit, sex, and intelligence. On the other hand, in Bakersfield and Louisville she had to worry about keeping the entire incident hushed up. All she wanted here was out. They could write her up in the fucking Necropolis tabloid press and she wouldn’t care. She wouldn’t even be able to read it.

On each of the two occasions she’d been busted on Earth, she’d had the advantage of being emotionally buffered by a considerable quantity of alcohol. In Necropolis, she was without any such comfort cushion. When she was first brought in by the two helmet-head cops, she had been in a state of nervous disorientation. She had tried to calm herself, but her surroundings had rushed by her like an unreal and threatening blur, moving too fast for reflection or even a deep breath. As time passed, however, human adaptability kicked in, and when she was neither murdered nor gang-raped she began to regain her objectivity. Now, as she faced the guard behind the protective glass of the booth, she was able to look at the situation with almost dispassionate detachment.

She lifted up her cuffed wrist with the slow zombie resignation that was considered appropriate inmate behavior. A steel ID tag, stamped with a row of unreadable hieroglyphics, dangled from the narrow canvas strap that had been locked around her right wrist when she’d first been brought in. This tag was the key to her existence in the system. In many respects, it counted for more than her physical body. A second, similar band had also been locked around her left wrist, but that one carried no tag. All of the prisoners wore these wristbands. They seemed to serve a double purpose. They dog-tagged the inmates’ identity and they could be hooked together by their metal clasps, like instant manacles, whenever the guards decided that hands and arms needed to be immobilized. Right at that moment her hands were free, though, and she moved her wrist slightly so the ID tag swung like a hypnotist’s pendulum in front of the guard in the booth.

“This is all they gave me.”

The guard creaked around in her swivel chair and peered balefully at the postcard-sized monochrome screen of her pneumatic computer. “The tag has to be cross-indexed with your personal barcode before I can allow you to pass. That’s regulations.”

Semple sighed. She had been through this seemingly insurmountable paradox some six or seven times already. The jailhouse computers had no provision in their programming for an inmate with no barcode, and the human guards that tended them were apparently incapable of improvisation or intelligent flexibility. Each time the matter came up, the exchange quickly turned into a seemingly infinite loop. It would begin with Semple stating the obvious. “I already told you, I don’t have a barcode. I wouldn’t be here if I had a barcode. That was why I was arrested in the first place. Because I didn’t have a barcode.”

The guard would then take the position that the obvious was impossible. “You have to have a barcode. If your inmate ID can’t be cross-indexed with a barcode, the computer won’t issue the paperwork, and if I don’t have the paperwork, I can’t clear your transfer.”

“So don’t clear my transfer. I don’t care. Send me back to the lockup. It’s all the same to me.” Semple might have been biding her time, and handling the absurdities of the Necropolis bureaucracy with absolute passivity, but every now and then she allowed herself a slight exasperated edge. Small rebellions were vital to the retention of sanity.

The guard shook her head. “I can’t readmit you to population. Your transfer’s on the computer.”

“So what do we do? Am I supposed to stand here, holding up the line for the rest of time? Maybe you should just let me go, then I won’t be fouling up the system.”

Semple realized that this time she might have gone a little too far. The guard’s eyes narrowed dangerously, enough for hairline cracks to appear in her makeup. The woman wore the same daubed-on cosmetics as everyone else in Necropolis, except, of course, the inmates of its prisons, who were deprived of everything save the pair of wristbands and a short cotton kilt, stamped with the winged ankh symbol of Anubis. This particular guard was by far the ugliest that Semple had encountered since the start of her incarceration. Her Cleopatra paint job was so thick and clumsily applied that it turned her already near-bestial features into the face of a malignant and threatening clown. “Porcine” was not a word that Semple used too frequently, but in this woman’s case it was too apt to pass over.

The guard weighed easily four hundred pounds, and Semple judged that she couldn’t have stood more than five feet two in her sandaled feet. She had also, for some reason Semple didn’t care to imagine, completely shaved her head. The naked skull added an edge of perverse brutality to the mountainous flab, but in Semple’s estimation the most charmless features were the woman’s vast and pendulous breasts. For someone so grossly overweight, the universal Necropolis fashion of going topless was grotesquely unsuitable, and her tits hung well past the waistband of her uniform skirt. Where most of the inhabitants of Necropolis had smooth olive skin, the guard’s was pig-pink and blotchy, mottled with pimples and areas of chicken flesh. Semple could only assume that she was either some obese and unhappy construct or the result of an unfortunate misfire in the re-creation process.

The guard turned back to the computer, clearly blaming Semple for the screwup. “Wait.”

And Semple, having positively no other choice in the matter, waited, as did the eleven other women in her transfer batch. The huge guard pecked slowly at the keyboard with two uncertain index fingers. With a computer that ran on hieroglyphics, the keyboard was massive, with a hundred or more keys, like some strange, multi-tiered Johann Sebastian Bach organ.

While the guard tried to come up with a workable solution, Semple looked up and down the long corridor in which she now seemed to be trapped. The corridor was dead straight and appeared to go on forever. It was somewhat wider at the floor than at the ceiling, and its walls were constructed from huge blocks of precision-hewn sandstone. The overall impression was one of being deep in the heart of a great stone pyramid. Every fifty feet or so, the corridor was sectioned off by steel-barred gates, presumably to present an obstacle to a fermenting riot or an attempt at mass breakout. The gates, like all the other metal surfaces in the jail, were painted a dull sandy beige, the color of Rommel’s tanks in the World War II desert. The gates were also automatic, controlled by guards in glassed-in booths positioned at every third set of gates, identical to the one at which Semple was currently receiving bureaucratic grief. On either side of the corridor were lines of sliding grids, the entrances to the tanks, the big gloomy rooms, each with its two dozen triple-tiered bunk beds, that housed all of the overcapacity inmate population, except for the incorrigible in solitary, the demented in the padded rooms, and the ultraprivileged who, having fallen foul of the Code of Anubis, were rumored to be held in luxurious private detention suites somewhere on the upper levels.

The guards who had come to fetch Semple and the others from their tank had blanked all questions regarding their destination or the purpose of the excursion. They had simply summoned them to the sliding door and ordered them out. Initially, Semple had been terrified. The fear that she’d experienced in the immediate aftermath of her arrest had returned with a vengeance. The possibility of summary execution without trial and a dozen other kindred horrors and atrocities shrieked through her imagination. Then, in the moment of confusion as the women were being filtered from the tank, a whisper had gone around that they were being sent to Fat Ari.

Semple had no idea who or what Fat Ari might be, but since none of the other women had showed any marked dismay at the prospect, Semple had joined the line with only a measured trepidation. Also, every one of the women selected was both young and attractive, and that gave Semple some kind of idea about the nature of Fat Ari and why they were being brought to him. If the fate of this batch of twelve was to be some kind of sexual exploitation, perhaps it would offer the window of opportunity for which she was so patiently waiting. Semple knew well how sexual desire, even among those in authority, could derail both sense and sensibility.

After leaving the holding tank, the twelve women had moved in single file along the punctuated corridor, with one guard leading them and a second bringing up the rear. Both were considerably thinner and more limber than the fat guard in the glass booth, and both carried a short cylinder of transparent Lucite that delivered a painful, nonlethal shock much in the manner of a cattle prod. These were the guards’ only weapon, and if the twelve women had attempted a sudden rush on their escorts, they would have had little trouble overpowering them.

No such thing happened, though, and Semple could only wonder at the docility of her fellow inmates. Without exception they passively accepted their penitent status and submitted to everything they were told without rebellion and rancor and, most surprising of all, with a minimum of complaint. Semple was starting to wonder if the prison population in Necropolis were not real criminals at all, nothing more than animated set dressing like Aimee’s cherubs and angels.

Her developing theory was that the majority of the city’s inhabitants were fabricated beings with little or no will of their own, created for the amusement of Anubis or one of his underlings. It was possible that the whole prison system, and perhaps even the oppressive police force, had been established, not in response to any real problem of crime and punishment, but simply because someone on the planning level thought a city wasn’t complete without such things, and installed them much in the same way that a small boy with an obsessive hobby might add a new section to his model train layout.

Had Semple been more diligent in keeping up with the trends in popular mortal, she would have known that the environment she now occupied was little more than a local modification to the genre of low-budget women’s prison movies with titles like Caged Rage and Chained Heat. The ever-present Egyptian motif and the heavy overlay of unworkable totalitarian baroque might have thrown her off track, but all the required details were in place, right down to the glandular guard and the coteries of butch and burly lesbians who ogled her body with a masculine candor.

Even though she’d missed the cultural origins of her situation, Semple was beginning to realize that, although Anubis may have been responsible for the overall concept of Necropolis, a lot of the details must have been delegated to subsidiary minds, allowing them to indulge their own fantasies and fixations. He had, in fact, done what Aimee was hoping to do: recruited the newly deceased to help construct his hereafter. The more she thought about it, the more she was convinced that Necropolis was a conspiracy of the deformed. Anubis might have been its guiding force, but this all must have been the produce of a legion of warped minds.

The line of twelve women and two guards had moved smoothly down the corridor until Semple had attempted to check through the gate at the first glass booth, when the fat guard had brought it to a shuffling halt. The prisoners looked on with boredom as Semple paralyzed the process with her lack of a barcode. The guard bringing up the rear was less patient. “So what’s the goddamned holdup?”

The fat guard didn’t answer, but she did seem ready to enlist some outside help. She resentfully tapped out a sequence on the oversized keyboard, and a pinched irritated face appeared on the tiny computer screen. Semple assumed it was the obese guard’s immediate superior, some harried, middle-echelon administrator. A tinny voice crackled from a speaker. “Can we make this fast? I really don’t have the time to be dealing with complications at every damned section gate.”

“I have a female unit here with no barcode.”

The man’s mouth became a small, sour line. “You bothered me with that?”

The guard didn’t seem too impressed by the man’s exasperation. “The box wouldn’t pass the paperwork. What was I supposed to do?”

“You couldn’t run up the help manual?”

“I haven’t been able to access help since before Lotus Day.”

“You called maintenance?”

“Sure I called pigging maintenance. I’m still waiting.”

The administrator frowned. “Isn’t this batch for Fat Ari?”

The guard was becoming decidedly peevish. “Of course this batch is for Fat Ari. That’s why I’ve got to have the pigging paperwork straight.”

“It could bollix up the entire term-end profit-share bonus.”

The fat guard’s peevishness sharpened. “You think I don’t know that?”

“So run it on a Gazelle/Leopard ten seventy.”

“Why didn’t you say that in first place?”

A weary scowl twisted the man’s face. “I still cling to the archaic notion that people should know how to do their own pigging jobs.”

The face vanished and the tiny screen snowed out. The guard hit more keys, the terminal wheezed, and about nine inches of punched paper tape extruded from a slot in the computer. The guard ripped off the tape and dropped it into a file basket, then glared at Semple. “Get on through, unit. You keep Fat Ari waiting and you’ll find out what pigging trouble’s really about.”

The twelve women were now on the move again. Either the fat guard or the administrator had instructed the booths ahead how to process the woman with no barcode, or maybe the guards in these booths were more on the ball than their overweight colleague. Whatever the reason, the line passed three more checkpoints without any further trouble. After the third, things began to change. The rumble of deeply buried machinery was clearly audible and a smell of ozone overwhelmed the ammonia in the air. A couple of the women looked a little anxious, but Semple had an idea what was coming next. The corridor came to an end in an open space that led in turn to a much larger circular tunnel, the floor of which was a motorized walkway, a conveyor band that could move large numbers of people at something like twice the speed of a fast walk. Anubis was just the kind for Heinlein rolling roads. They were big favorites in the environments of many a control-obsessed paranoid megalo. The herding gene turned techno. Semple had seen other examples in the tangential communication that passed for Better Homes & Gardens in the Afterlife.

The women prisoners were temporarily halted in the open space while their escort produced a long length of light steel chain and shackled them to it by the straps on their left wrists, spacing them at intervals of about two feet. When the string was complete, they were moved toward the walkway itself. The area where riders actually stepped onto the moving walkway was dotted with signs, presumably the kind of regulations and instructions to passengers that the managers of transit systems everywhere are unable to resist. She noticed that the hieroglyphics on the signs had been defaced by amateur and universally obscene embellishments that paid particular regard to the genitalia of the various gods, humans, animals, and birds that made up the alphabet.

Actually stepping onto the moving walkway required a certain degree of skill and judgment, but Semple, by visualizing the effects in advance, accomplished the trick with ease and grace. The woman behind her, on the other hand, misjudged the necessary matching of pace and stumbled. Semple quickly grasped her arm to prevent her from falling and bringing down the whole string. The woman nervously smiled her thanks. She glanced around to see if the guards were looking in their direction and, discovering them otherwise occupied, whispered quickly to Semple. “I guess this pretty much settles it.

Semple didn’t understand. “What settles what?”

“It’s Fat Ari’s for us.”

“Is that good or bad?”

Now the woman looked as though she didn’t understand. “It is what it is. It’s Fat Ari’s.”

“I don’t know what Fat Ari’s is. I’m an outlander.”

“You mean you’ve never seen it on the telly?”

“Never seen what on the telly?”

The other prisoner spoke as though she were stating the obvious. “Fat Ari’s Slave Shopping Club.”

***

The hatch closed, the lights went out, and Jim was falling. What he thought was going to be his first alien encounter had suddenly turned into a dirty sucker punch. The rug had been literally jerked from under his feet, and someone or something was screaming at pain-threshold volume. He hoped the screaming was only the rush of air past his ears, but remembered that same extended scream a little too well, as well as falling through absolute blackness. It all said Paris, as though somehow his passing had been recorded on the magstrip of time. If he was dying all over again, it hardly seemed fair. Although he knew it was both naive and illogical, he had pretty much expected the aliens to be pleased to see him. After all the LSD he had taken during his life, all the Erich Von Daeniken books and magazine articles on the paranormal that he’d consumed, after all the times that he’d seen The Day the Earth Stood Still, all the episodes of Star Trek he’d soaked up in idle beer-drunk hotel afternoons, he felt he was definitely ready for the ETs, and he had imagined that, even if they didn’t greet him with open arms, they’d at least be ready for him. The last thing he’d expected was that they’d drop him into a goddamned black hole, and maybe even kill him all over again. To go back to the pods at this juncture was a thoroughly disgusting and depressing prospect.

When he continued to fall for what felt like a major slice of time without hitting anything, Jim started to rethink his situation. Perhaps he was in free fall. Perhaps the UFO was switching him between external and internal gravity. As if as a reward, or punishment for his deduction, a searing flash of static blinded him, leaving him in a kaleidoscope of dazzling afterimages. He fell heavily, maybe a foot or more, to a metal floor. The impact was bone-jarring, but did no damage. Jim groaned and rolled over. His shoulder hurt, his elbow was throbbing, his ego was bruised, and he was angry at the inhospitable reception. Slowly he climbed to his feet, wondering what the next indignity might be.

The air was breathable and warm, although it was a little too humid and smelled of something industrial. He slowly turned, half crouching in the stance of a circling wrestler, arms slightly in front of him, ready for anything. He spoke tentatively, more to observe what might happen than to actually communicate with anyone. “You know something? This is really not my idea of being piped aboard.”

As he spoke, the lights came up and the air changed. The atmosphere turned clammy, and the unidentified industrial smell was replaced by something more like battery acid. The light was, in every sense, unearthly. The blue glow looked like the interior of a iceberg. It seemed to have no direct source but somehow suffused the entire chamber with a soft luminescence. The nature of the light made it hard to judge distances; had Jim not been well versed in hallucination, he might have thought something was wrong with his eyes.

He seemed to be standing on the curved bottom of a ribbed metal cylinder, like the inside of some large storage tank, perhaps about twelve feet in diameter. The arching ribs of the cylinder and sections of the wall plates were engraved with lines of unreadable ideograms. Aside from the extraterrestrial script, it all seemed a little mundane, but Jim reserved judgment. Although the script meant nothing to him, the individual characters bore a distinct resemblance to the crop markings he had seen on the way to the Crossroads. He shook his head. “If you want to leave us notes in the cornfields, you really ought to learn to write English. Or send us a dictionary.”

Immediately the final phrase came back at him, loud and squeakily metallic, something between a mimic and an instant replay: “If you want to leave us notes in the cornfield, you really ought to learn to write English. Or leave us a dictionary.”

This mimicking voice had a Mickey Mouse pitch, like his own voice on helium. Jim blinked. A second level of alien bullshit? His mood was turning surly. He needed a drink. “What did you say?”

“What did I say?”

Jim sighed. “Don’t give me fucking Ray Charles.”

The disembodied squeak also sighed. “Fucking Ray Charles.”

Jim knew he was being mindfucked. “Yeah, I get it.”

“Yeah, you get it.”

“How long do we have to play this game?”

“Until you feel ready to step through the membrane.”

This actual reply to a question took Jim by surprise. “The membrane?”

“The membrane.”

Jim wasn’t sure if the parrot routine had started again. Without his saying a word, the voice answered him. “No, this isn’t the parrot routine. If you don’t like it where you are, pass through the membrane.”

“What membrane?”

“Look to the end of the chamber, schmuck.”

Raising an eyebrow at the jibe, Jim looked to the far end of the chamber. What could only be described as a circular translucent membrane, some four feet across, had appeared in the center of the circular end wall. Its outer surround was a beveled ring of shiny, copper-colored metal. The membrane itself was filmy and insubstantial, a pulsing, mother-of-pearl gauze. Tiny sparkles of bright energy danced up from it and vanished, like bubbles from a fresh glass of champagne; Jim couldn’t tell whether the thing was solid, liquid, a heavy vapor, or something else entirely.

“You want me to go through that?”

“Unless you intend to remain here in the lock. If you do that, you will probably become exceedingly uncomfortable. Hungry, thirsty, claustrophobic, resentful-all the things that afflict humans when they think they’re not getting enough attention.”

“Okay, okay, I get the picture.”

“Okay, okay, you get the picture.”

Jim knew he had no chance of beating the helium parrot, so, taking carefully measured steps, he gingerly crossed the chamber until he was standing in front of the membrane. He leaned forward and peered closely at it. It seemed vaguely moist. “I’m supposed to climb through this?”

“You’re supposed to climb through that.”

“It’s all a bit Freudian, isn’t it?”

“This is all a bit Freudian, isn’t it?”

Jim tried another tack. He shouted as loud as he could. “Hey, Long Time Robert, are you in there?”

The membrane vibrated and a large pair of lips, more than a foot across, appeared in three-dimensional relief on its surface. The lips formed words and shouted back at him. “Hey, Jim Morrison, are you out there?”

The air temperature was dropping, the smell of battery acid growing stronger. Jim had no choice. He wondered what the aliens might bring into play next if he continued to resist. He was feeling distinctly like a B. F. Skinner lab rat, without the benefit of any jolts to the pleasure centers. For all he knew, the next item on their menu might be direct cortical shock, or something even more unpleasant. It was becoming clear that, no matter how he might twist and turn, the ETs were going to have their way with him.

The lips of the membrane pouted sexily. “That’s right, Jimbo. We’re going to have our way with you.”

The chill in the chamber was deepening. Jim knew that aside from staying where he was and being freeze-dried, he was out of options. “Okay, you win. I’m coming through.”

The lips’ pout turned into a happy smile. “Okay, we win. You’re coming through.”

Jim hesitated. “Only. . .”

“Only what?”

“You’ll have to lose the lips.”

“You don’t like the lips.”

“I’m not climbing into a mouth. Not even the illusion of a mouth.”

“Does it make you feel too much like a human blow job?”

“You read my thoughts, damn it.”

“Of course we did.”

The lips vanished. Jim placed the palm of his hand flat against the membrane, but then quickly pulled it away as a sharp jolt of static twitched painfully up his arm. “Damn!”

The Mickey Mouse voice was back, and with a definite contempt in its tone. “You’re not going to let a little shock stop you, are you?”

Jim snapped back. “To hell with this.” He didn’t bother to feel his way. Suddenly angry, he violently punched his entire forearm clear through the membrane, and fuck the aliens if they didn’t like his attitude. The membrane resisted slightly, but he continued pushing until his arm had penetrated right up to the shoulder. At that point, the resistance seemed to reverse itself and the rest of him was jerked through by a sudden, wet kiss suction. He experienced a moment of panic as the stuff of the membrane closed around his face, but then he was through and into another moment of complete disorientation and darkness.

Jim was outraged. “Wait a fucking minute, will you?”

A bright white overhead spotlight snapped on. This light wasn’t at all diffused or hazy and its source was clear and obvious. Jim, though, didn’t have time to waste considering light sources. An alien-Jim Morrison’s very first-was standing in the exact center of the beam. Jim’s alien was barely three feet tall. Its skin was gray. Its body was slight, fragile, and resembled that of a long-armed fetus. It had only three fingers on each hand. Its head was huge, hairless, with no ears and only the slightest approximation of a mouth and nose. Its eyes, in total contrast, were huge and ancient, without iris or pupil, like the eyes of some vast, distant, super-intelligent mega-guppy. It was the classic extraterrestrial of abduction paranoia, dubious amateur video, autopsy hoaxes, and tabloid reportage, the gray alien that was the bad guy of UFO folklore. At least Jim now knew what he was dealing with. Unless, of course, the familiar form was simply a new level of deception.

The alien was holding a small vial filled with blue-green liquid in one of its three-fingered hands. “Wanna drink, pal?”

Mercifully, the alien’s voice was a far cry from the helium squeak. In fact, its tonal tailoring was coming from entirely the other end of the spectrum. The incongruity of a pint-sized alien using a voice from the staccato school of Mickey Spillane/Humphrey Bogart wasn’t lost on Jim, but he reserved comment. “Do I what?”

“I’m offering you a drink, kid. Don’t you want it? Isn’t that what’s been gnawing at your guts since you took it on the lam from Doc Holliday’s?”

“I’d say gnawing at my guts was something of an overstatement. I’d like a drink, but . . . ”

“We understood you were a world-class alkie, kid.”

Jim was starting to have trouble with this tough-guy voice coming out of the slight spindly frame. “That was then, this is now.”

“You telling me you weren’t as drunk as a skunk back at Doc Holliday’s? Or at the orgy before that?”

Jim really didn’t like the direction the conversation was taking. “What the fuck are you running here? Some interplanetary twelve-step inquisition?”

The alien’s face didn’t alter, but the voice took on an aggrieved tone. “Listen, pal, all I was trying to do was offer you a drink.” It held out the vial again. “You want it or not? It’s good stuff. I kid you not. Make you see stars.”

Jim suddenly laughed. “Ah, what the hell.” The alien was only offering him a drink. The gesture was culturally fundamental. Why not take it on face value, even if the face in question was an unreadable ovoid the color of a button mushroom, with a texture to match? He took the vial and threw the contents back in one gulp, like a lumberjack downing his first shot after a hard day’s logging. The instant the booze hit his metabolism, Jim saw not only stars but also suns and ringed planets. For a moment, it seemed as though the top of his head had lifted off of its own accord, flipping up like the lid of a pedal bin, to relieve the intolerable pressure in his brain. He doubled over, his throat burning and his stomach contemplating convulsion. As a confirmed shot-and-beer motherfucker, Jim had always found cocktails a little too Dorothy Parker. He’d been around the block enough times, however, to know that what he’d just consumed could qualify as the transcendentally perfect gin martini. The only mistake was that the stuff had the impact intensity of drag strip accelerant. When he finally straightened up again, his voice was a rasping wheeze and he had tears in his eyes. “Sweet God Almighty! That was intense.”

“Kinda strong for you?”

“Maybe the recipe needs a bit of rethinking.”

“But you feel better?”

Jim took a couple of deep breaths. The battery-acid smell seemed to have stayed on the other side of the membrane. “Yes, I definitely feel better.”

The alien nodded. “That’s good. We like to make you humans feel at home.”

Jim looked at the empty vial. “You certainly do.” The alcohol burn had given way to a warm and not unpleasant glow. “Yes, you certainly do.”

He handed the vial back to the alien, who took it and placed it in thin air beside him, as though he had set it on an invisible shelf. The vial remained standing for a few seconds and then vanished. Jim maintained his cool, refusing to look surprised. “That’s a pretty neat trick.”

“We gotta million of them.”

“So what happens next?”

“Well it’s been nice meeting you, Jimbo, but we gotta get you on to the medical examination.”

Jim’s glow crashed and burned like a vampire in the sun. “Medical examination?”

“The medical examination. Everyone gets the medical examination. I mean, we’re aliens, ain’t we? That’s part of what we do.”

Jim dug in like a recalcitrant mule. He’d heard too many anecdotal reports regarding the role of body cavities in alien medical work. “No way.”

The alien raised a hand. “Hey, pal, don’t be telling me ‘no way.’ I just do the meeting and greeting. If you got a problem, take it up with the croakers. Don’t be busting my balls, okay?”

“So where are these croakers? The sooner I put them straight, the better.”

“You want to talk to a sawbones about this?”

Jim nodded. “Yeah. That’s exactly what I want.”

No sooner had he spoken than a second alien appeared beside the first one. In every respect, the two of them were identical, and Jim looked curiously from one to the other. Finally he focused on the new arrival. “Your friend here tells me that you’re the one I need to talk to about the medical exam. If it’s all the same with you, I really think I prefer to pass, particularly as I’m already dead.”

The huge black alien eyes looked straight into Jim’s; the voice was that of a robot with just the faintest trace of an Austrian accent. “The medical examination is nonnegotiable.”

***

Semple found herself in the calm center of frenzied chaos, the eye of a uniquely disorganized show-business hurricane. Even though she had died well before television had locked its grip on planet Earth, she knew enough from her irregular observation of the lifeside to recognize that she was inside a TV studio. In addition, her intricate familiarity with human nature at its worst told her that it was controlled by a megalomaniac, some kind of panic-prone neurotic who believed that any problem could be solved by inflicting screaming, hysterical abuse on his underlings. The name Fat Ari hardly did the man justice. He was huge in every direction. He stood well over six feet tall and was twice that around. The full horror of his stacked tires of flesh was fortunately swathed in a flowing, lavishly embroidered red-and-gold caftan that could have been the bell tent of God. He even seemed exempt from the ancient Egypt look. Perhaps, as the King of the TV Slave Salesmen, he actually had the juice to override the fixations of Anubis and dress as he pleased.

Semple and the other women from the jail stood in a roped-off area to one side of the set waiting for their call. Aside from a couple of walk-through rehearsals, and then actually being paraded for sale on the show itself, their part was, by this time, all but done. Until Fat Ari’s Slave Shopping Club went on the air, their primary tasks were not to get in the way and not smudge their makeup. The latter was not, in fact, as easy as it sounded. Even standing was made difficult by the spindly five-inch clear-plastic heels on which they were forced to balance. Here was another small factor where Fat Ari seemed to feel free to buck the mandated Egyptology. Fat Ari’s merchandise all seemed to conform to a more twentieth century, Times Square hooker authenticity, screw the trappings of the nineteenth dynasty. Unfortunately, Semple was about the only one in the batch who actually knew how to walk on high heels; the rest tended to reel and teeter unless they kept perfectly still.

Since they were to appear on the show naked but for shoes, the exteriors of Semple and her companions had been layered with cosmetics from head to toe, from glitter nail varnish to a special color-blended rouge that had been liberally applied to their nipples. They could neither sit nor lean. Although crowded together, they could not touch each other, and if they so much as sweated under the studio lights, a bad-tempered makeup boy would rush to powder them down.

The boy was something of an ordeal all on his own. He had the knack of maintaining himself in a state of perpetual snit. While he powdered, he mercilessly berated the woman on whom he was working, and even those around her, in a low querulous voice. He was also armed with a flashlight-sized version of the prison guards’ Lucite shock prods, and if Semple or one of her companions especially aggravated him, he would administer a waspish, stinging jolt to a part of her anatomy where the resulting red mark would not be visible on camera. The entire production of Fat Ari’s Slave Shopping Club seemed to be run on the dynamic of intimidation and spite.

That Semple and the others were merchandise had been made abundantly clear from the moment their prison escort had accepted a receipt for them from a harried associate producer and they had become the property of Fat Ari. After being stripped of even their prison kilts, run through a fast shower and blow-dry, they lined up for a perfunctory camera test. Three times, they were made to walk past a static camera, nude and unadorned. After that, Fat Ari and his director went into a two-minute huddle over the results, looking from the screen to the real woman and back again. Finally Fat Ari made an angry, disparaging gesture and stalked toward the women as if, whatever the current problem might be, it was definitely their fault.

“For my sins, you are all going to appear on tonight’s show. Personally, I would rather have hot needles jabbed into my eyes than let a substandard collection like yourselves loose on an unsuspecting public, but since the incompetence of my staff leaves me no other alternative, there are some things you need to hear before the worst happens.”

Fat Ari turned and, with a dramatic flourish, pointed in the direction of the long catwalk that was the centerpiece of the show’s set. “Behold the runway, the place that makes or breaks you. The place where you will be sold or remain unsold. That is where the great viewing audience will decide if you are prime merchandise or merely damaged goods.”

He gave a theatrical shudder as if to say he himself would be horrified by the spectacle. “During our short time together, there’s really just one thing I expect you women to grasp. I don’t know where you came from and I don’t know by what accident of circumstance you got here. You can also rest assured that I absolutely don’t give a fuck. As far I’m concerned, you have no history, no background, and no sad stories. You are my product. That’s all you have to know.”

Fat Ari looked at the women to make sure they were paying complete attention. Not one of them, Semple included, would have had the courage to do otherwise. When satisfied, he continued, “You are merchandise. The ‘For Sale’ sign is upon you. You are stickered and listed, and my job is to sell you. It is also your job to sell yourself. You sell yourself by doing exactly what you are told, and by making the maximum possible effort when your turn on camera comes. Your goal is to persuade the great unwashed to lust after you, to persuade them that they can’t live another day without you. You have to convince them to bid their hard-earned credits like there’s no tomorrow, just to get their greasy hands on your illusionary flesh. We have no artistic standards here. Be sensual, be erotic, be downright lewd and dirty. Just be sold. There’s no second chance for unsold merchandise on Fat Ari’s Slave Shopping Club.”

If anything, Fat Ari was more Mediterranean than Egyptian. He wore his hair and beard so long and unkempt that it was hard to tell where one set of greasy ringlets stopped and the other began. It was all too possible to imagine him cheating crusaders out of their gold, somewhere in Constantinople in the twelfth century, or selling whores and hashish to GIs in the twentieth. Fat Ari was the universal merchant/pimp/hustler. As his dark, infinitely calculating eyes moved from one woman to the next, Semple decided that he’d probably been exactly the same in every life he’d ever known.

“Some people in this business will tell you that rejection is something to be faced philosophically. That rejection is something that shouldn’t be taken personally. You will not find that attitude on this show. On this show, rejection by the viewers is strictly personal, very personal. I take it personally, and I can assure you that you will do the same. Those who fail on my show, those who remain unsold, receive no condolences. They are not told, ‘Better luck next time.’ Rejection on this show is followed by recrimination, humiliation, misery, and pain. I hope that you all fully understand that.”

The women all stood transfixed, but this wasn’t the response that Fat Ari was looking for. He singled out one woman, just beside Semple, and he and his caftan bore down on her like an angry galleon in full sail. “Well? Do you understand?”

The woman’s eyes widened as though she were about to die on the spot. “Ye-yes.”

Fat Ari rolled his eyes heavenward. “I don’t know why I waste my time.” He gestured to the entourage around him. “Get this worthless trash into makeup. Tonight is going to be a disaster. I know that for a fact. We are beyond help. Just get them to makeup and pray for a miracle.”

Makeup was by far the most elaborate phase of the preparations. Out on the studio floor, the black-cowled techno-priests might sweat over the positioning of lights and struggle with their bulky cameras, but for Semple and the other women the long narrow makeup room-with its bright lights and greasepaint smells, lines of mirrors and milling bodies-was the hub of the universe. Inside that hub, they were both the core and the focus. They were greased and teased, oiled and manicured, painted, powdered, and latexed, with ultimate attention to detail, all the way to the trimming and shaping of their pubic hair. All blemishes were eradicated, anything unsightly disguised. At regular intervals Fat Ari’s immediate underlings would storm through, checking the work and demanding that some particular woman be done over.

Semple wondered if this was how it had felt to be a Las Vegas showgirl, or a top-line Paris stripper, like one of the girls at the Crazy Horse, waiting backstage to go on, anxious amid all the bustle and excitement. She found that she could almost stop thinking of herself as naked and helpless and take a weird pride in becoming an object, a product, something to be desired, to have her true worth actually measured out in hard currency.

At least in the TV studio, unlike the jail, they were allowed to talk, although it seemed as though the makeup people did most of the talking. An effeminate and motherly man called Remu even went to some pains to explain that it wouldn’t be half as bad as they imagined. “Actually a girl can do very well for herself if she puts her mind to it. Get bought by some horny old idiot and you’ll have him bent around your little finger in no time. Next thing you know, he’ll be springing for your freedom and a pardon and you can go your own sweet way.”

One of the women from the prison was less than convinced. “Yeah, but what happens if you get bought by some psycho who wants to do all kinds of terrible stuff to you?”

Remu plainly didn’t think the girl was taking a sufficiently positive attitude. “Well, my dear, accidents do happen. I mean, if you didn’t want a few problems and uncertainties, you should never have got yourself put in prison in the first place, should you? Nobody said there were any guarantees. You’re lucky this isn’t the old days, when it was really rough and ready. Back in the Dark Ages, before we even had color, the Fat One sold anything. Domestic servants, big strapping quarry slaves, huge Nubian overseers with whips, you name it and he had it up on the runway. The entire place smelled of sweat, toil, semen, and the gods only knew what else. At least, since he discovered that the big score was in sex toy auctions, most everyone who comes in here is reasonably decorative and unthreatening.” He rolled his eyes. “Unless, of course, you count the specialist oddities.”

The woman with the negative attitude, far from being reassured, was becoming increasingly agitated by what Remu was saying. “I don’t want to be a sex toy.”

Remu’s eyebrows arched. “Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it, darling.”

“But it’s all a mistake. All I did was cheat on a devotional audit.”

“With that attitude, girl, you’ll wind up not getting sold at all. And then Heaven help you. You heard Fatso’s little speech of welcome. He wasn’t flapping his gums to be nasty, you know? He gets very disappointed with the unsold.” He looked at his chronometer, which hung from a collar fob. “But I can’t stay here all day chatting. I have to go to the other side and see that they’re not making too much of a mess of the boys.”

According to the gossip in the makeup room, a dozen young men had been brought to the show at approximately the same time as the women. It may have been that the young men were being processed and prepared for sale separately, but at no time had the women been allowed to set eyes on them, any more than the men were allowed a glimpse of the women. Semple could hardly believe that, in a sink of ethical and moral degeneracy like Necropolis, slaves of different sexes were segregated, but different places did have their different quirks.

Since the makeup crew working on Semple and the others was composed almost entirely of women or gay men, the conversation frequently strayed back to the subject of what might be going on in that other makeup room. One of the women on the crew who specialized in doing eyes had winked at Semple while she was carefully tracing the contours of her right upper lid with a fine brush. “Of course, doing the boys is a lot more fun, if you know what I mean. There’s always the bit about the size of their cocks just before they go on camera.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“Keep still, dear, or you’ll fuck up all my good work.” The eye expert tilted Semple’s head back. “Fat Ari’s got this thing about how the boy merch has to be well hung. So we have this little exercise just to slightly enlarge the size. Not a full erection, you realize, nothing . . . how can I put it? Nothing overt. Just a little manual enhancement at the last moment. That’s not to say that every so often somebody doesn’t take it a tad too far, or one of the boys doesn’t get a bit overexcited, and then the obvious happens and the boss has a shit fit.”

As showtime grew closer, the level of tension escalated. For a while, as long as the merchandise kept themselves still and quiet, they were exempt from most of the last-minute yelling and vitriol. When, however, the time came for their first walk-through on the runway, they were irrevocably drawn into Fat Ari’s orbit of fury. For Semple, this fury reached its crescendo when the twelve naked but lavishly packaged ex-prisoners were paraded for final inspection. Fat Ari advanced down the line with the grim determination of Napoleon before Austerlitz. As he glared at each woman in turn, each did her best to look desirable. To Semple’s horror, Fat Ari chose to stop dead in front of her. He leaned forward and peered into her face, then he rounded angrily on his nearest assistant. “And what the holy fuck is this supposed to be?”

The assistant looked blank. “She’s number five on the roster.”

Fat Ari’s expression turned corrosive. “I can count that far on my fingers.” He seized the assistant by the back of his head and thrust his face right into Semple’s. While Semple wished that the studio floor would open up and swallow her, Fat Ari quizzed his assistant like a retarded child. “And what’s wrong with this picture?”

Semple wasn’t sure if she or the assistant was more terrified. The pitch of the assistant’s voice climbed in direct proportion to his desperation. “She doesn’t have a barcode.”

“Very good. She doesn’t have a barcode.”

“But we already knew that.”

“We did?”

“I thought we did.”

Fat Ari let go of the assistant. “It’s the first I heard about it.”

The assistant looked betrayed. “But at the meeting this morning-”

Semple would not have thought that Fat Ari’s face could grow any darker, but somehow it managed to when the assistant mentioned the meeting. Even Semple had realized by now that one would only be courting disaster by contradicting Fat Ari. His voice turned chill and absolute. “I said it’s the first I heard of it. You understand me?”

“Yes, I’m sorry.”

“So why doesn’t this bitch have a barcode ?”

“She’s an outlander. She has no barcode.”

“So why wasn’t she branded?”

“We thought she’d be exotic the way she was.”

“You thought?”

“Yes.”

“You shouldn’t think. You don’t have the capacity.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You thought it might be exotic to have this outlander running up and down without a barcode? You thought a piece of unregistered cooze would get the rubes all hot and bothered?”

“It wasn’t put quite like that, but yes, that was the general drift.”

“Then perhaps you’d like to tell me, when they reach this state of carnal dementia and want to make a purchase, what happens when they zoom in to bid on her by barcode?”

“They’ll find no barcode.”

“And what would happen then?”

The assistant knew he was cornered and his responses turned into a guilty rote. “The rubes will get confused.”

“And what happens when the rubes get confused?”

“The rubes stop bidding.”

“And if they stop bidding?”

“We stop selling.”

“And if we stop selling?”

“We die in agony.”

“Now do you see why you shouldn’t attempt to think?”

The assistant stared at his sandals. He seemed to be praying that Fat Ari had finished upbraiding him, but the gods of his choice had betrayed him. Fat Ari still glared down. Semple had noticed that all of Fat Ari’s entourage seemed to be shorter than he was. “So what are you going to do now?”

The assistant didn’t fall into this trap. “I don’t know, boss. What am I going to do now?”

“You’re going to take this piece of worthless protein up to Dr. M’s as fast as you can, and you’re going to get her branded.”

The assistant nodded eagerly. “I am. Right away.”

“Once she’s branded and she has a price tag, she can legitimately call herself merchandise and we can start all over again. By their prices shall ye know them.”

The assistant continued to nod. “I’ll have her branded right away.”

At the first use of the word “branded,” Semple’s every instinct of self-preservation jangled for her to do something. The third time it was repeated, she spoke without thinking. “I can’t be branded. I’d have to get a whole new body.”

Fat Ari didn’t even look at her. “Keep quiet.”

The assistant frowned. “Even if we get it done right now, she’ll still be groggy from the anesthetic when she hits the runway.”

“So do it without anesthetic.”

Semple’s horror couldn’t stay silent. “No!”

Fat Ari looked at her this time. “You be quiet. You have nothing to say in the matter.”

“I’m not being branded!”

Even the assistant seemed to be on her side. “That would be a punitive branding.”

Fat Ari swung back on him. “So?”

“It’s beyond the bounds of our authority.”

Fat Ari’s eyes were dangerous. “There are no bounds to my authority when it’s two hours to air.”

“She still might not be able to handle the runway.”

“She’d be conscious, wouldn’t she? Run her as a submissive in bondage.”

Unable to think of anything else but to play the hysterical slave, Semple fell to her knees, grabbed hold of Fat Ari’s robe, and began to scream. “You can’t brand me! It’s impossible! You can’t brand me like a steer!”

Fat Ari curtly shook himself loose. The act was an utter failure. “Get security. Gag her if you have to.”

“But we’d need paperwork for a punitive branding. The doctor could get difficult if we just march her in there.”

“Then you will simply remind Doc Mengele of what he owes me for the last two sets of twins.”

***

“The medical examination is nonnegotiable. It is required of all life-forms who board our vessels.”

Jim squared his shoulders and drew himself up to his full height. So far, the aliens had been having things too much their own way. The time was more than right for Jim to start asserting himself. He didn’t know if two skinny, yard-high aliens could be intimidated by his greater height and mass, but it was worth a shot and also about the only thing he had left. “I’ve learned that most things are negotiable, given sufficient motivation.”

The Bogart alien and the robot doctor alien stood in the single spotlight, making no attempt to approach or back away. Their huge, enigmatic eyes were directly on Jim, and they didn’t look intimidated in the slightest. “That is exactly the kind of remark we have come to expect from Earthlings.”

“It is?”

The Bogart alien took a drag on a cigarette that wasn’t there. “He’s right, pal, you’re a bunch of natural-born troublemakers.”

“We are?”

“Your statement had all the properties of the prelude to a threat.”

Although Jim would hardly admit it, the doctor alien was absolutely correct. He was certainly weighing the odds. The creatures looked frail and feeble, and it was hard to imagine what kind of a fight they could put up if Jim went in swinging like a barroom brawler. The UFO crash at Roswell indicated that they could be hurt. Hadn’t that left dead and broken aliens scattered all over the chaparral? A simple frontal assault, though, took no account of science fiction trickery like invisible force fields or concealed death rays. Obviously any being who could stand a glass in thin air and have it vanish at will certainly knew some more tricks. He decided to switch to another line of persuasion, putting a two-fisted John Wayne eruption on hold for a while. “Strictly speaking, I’m not actually a life-form. I’m dead, dig? More like a metaphysical entity.”

“You’re here, therefore you are. And if you are, the medical examination is mandatory.”

Jim wished that the damned aliens would blink or twitch or something. Anything but paraphrasing Descartes. He knew it was one of Doc Holliday’s favorite tricks and he wondered if they’d pulled the idea out of his own mind. He couldn’t shake the thought that, behind the blank masks, the sons of bitches were doing the telepath and having a good extraterrestrial laugh on his dime. “Yeah, that’s right, I’m here, but that still doesn’t make it right to be sticking probes in me. I mean, anything could happen.”

“That’s what makes it all the more interesting. We probe and then we see what happens. That’s the fundamental nature of a probe, now, isn’t it?”

“I suppose so, except . . . ”

“Except what?”

Jim was wondering if the UFO and it occupants were strictly a part of the Afterlife, or if they’d invaded this space with the same lack of by-your-leave as they did Earth. Jim decided he might as well ask. “I guess you guys are dead too, right?”

Jim couldn’t read any expression in either of their faces, but something told him that the creatures weren’t impressed. “No, we are not dead.”

The Bogart alien added its confirmation. “You better believe it, Jim. Alive and ready to probe ass.”

Jim could have sworn that the doctor alien’s face registered a twinge. “So to speak.”

“So what are you doing running around in our human Afterlife?”

“Our mission is the seek out new life-forms and new civilizations.”

“Don’t try and con me. That’s fucking Star Trek.”

“You noticed?”

“I’m no idiot.”

The doctor alien spread its hands as though it had long ago given up on humans. “It’s hard to tell. Sometimes your kind can be so fiendishly clever; on other occasions, you’re mind-boggling in your stupidity.”

Jim frowned. “Is that why you never just set down one of your ships on the White House lawn and said, Take us to your leader?”

Bogart leaned into the exchange. “Listen, buster, that wasn’t our idea. All the lies and deception came strictly from your end. You think we wanted to be dismissed as marsh gas, flocks of birds, and weather balloons? We were quite ready to go live on Ed Sullivan or Face the Nation and reveal ourselves to the world. We even had a guy at William Morris, but Hoover had a shitfit and Truman vetoed it. It was those sons of bitches that wanted us to do the whole Area Fifty-one covert ops bit, in and out of the back doors of the Pentagon all the time, the interplanetary fifth column selling ray guns to the natives. They claimed that irrefutable proof of life elsewhere in the universe would freak the living shit out of the Arabs, the Bible Betters, and the Hasidic Jews; for all they knew, the Pope might resign unless he could come up with a good reason God had never warned him we were out there. Kennedy was okay with it, but look what happened to him. You know some of them even tried to blame us for that shit in Dealey Plaza?”

Jim held up a hand. “Hold it a minute. Are you seriously telling me that the William Morris Agency knew all about you?” Bogart nodded. “At least a month before the FBI.”

“You were going to go on Ed Sullivan?”

“It worked for Elvis and the Beatles.”

Jim shook his head ruefully. “It never worked for me.”

The doctor alien made a dismissive gesture. “That’s because you had to be the petulant rebel and keep in the drug reference. I mean, they warned you, didn’t they?”

Jim saw he was making no headway. “I’m not one of your abductees, you know?”

“We are well aware of that. You came aboard uninvited and of your own free will.”

“So just drop me off at the nearest accessible spot and we’ll forget the whole thing.”

The alien doctor shook his head. “I’m afraid it’s a little too late for that.”

“I could incapacitate your warp drive with ectoplasm.”

Although the doctor alien had no mouth, Jim could have sworn that he sneered. “We don’t have a warp drive. That’s also Star Trek. Now who’s conning whom?”

Because they had no iris or pupils, it was impossible for Jim to tell exactly where the big alien eyes were looking, but he had the distinct impression that they had left his face and were now staring past him into the darkness. A moment later, as if in confirmation, he heard the patter of tiny feet coming toward him, the patter of dozens of tiny feet.

***

Semple was more helpless than she could ever remember. The chair in which she sat could have been in any dentist’s office except for the padded restraints; no dentist would have secured her body with a tightly cinched belt around her waist and an equally tight crisscross of webbing across her chest that kept her from moving her shoulders and upper body. No dentist would have fastened her ankles to the footrest of the chair to prevent her from kicking out, or locked her skull in a steel clamp, or placed a rubber gag in her mouth so she was unable to utter a sound. Semple’s fear was off the scale. The outward trappings of this were definitely medical. The small lab was bright and scrupulously clear, all white surfaces, gleaming stainless steel, and glass cabinets. The individual in charge was even referred to as the doctor, though the intention of the operation that this so-called doctor was about to perform was nothing but gratuitous and agonizing torture.

Had Semple been a different person, had she retained some of Aimee’s guilt when the siblings split, she might have made use of the time while she waited for the worst to happen regretting all the pain that she had just as gratuitously inflicted on others. In some ways, her own torturings were less morally excusable than that which she was about to receive. At least Necropolis had a system, no matter how diseased; Fat Ari was just trying to make the equivalent of a buck. The suffering she had inflicted on the unfortunate angels, cherubs, and wandering spirits who had fallen into her clutches had been strictly for her own bored and private amusement. In that, she was equally as culpable as Mengele, maybe more so.

Semple, however, was made of sterner and much less repentant stuff. Even with no gag in her mouth, she would never have considered making any promises of atonement. Her only words would have been vitriolic, obscene, and abusive, directed at the doctor and his assistant, at Fat Ari, at the cops who had arrested her and all the others who had conspired to bring her to this place of degradation and promised pain. Helpless as she was, Semple still flexed her muscles against the restraints and bit down angrily into the hard rubber of the gag, determined that, when the awful moment came, she would give no one the satisfaction of seeing her cower.

The awful moment turned out to be a long time coming. Soon even the doctor began to grow impatient. He frowned vexedly at his assistant, who was bent over a wheezing computer that leaked wisps of vapor from bad seals in its microplumbing. “What the hell is the problem? This is a straightforward branding. It’s not supposed to take all day.”

“It’s the morons at Public Records. They’re making a whole performance about assigning me a number blank.”

“Fat Ari wants this unit back before his ridiculous show goes on the air.”

The assistant hit a sequence of keys. “Believe me, I’m well aware of that.”

“And we have a cheek-and-jowl job booked in twenty minutes.”

“I’m aware of that too, Doctor.”

“Then damn well get on with it.”

Semple swiveled her eyes and tried to turn her head to see exactly what was happening, but the steel plates clamping her skull made movement impossible. The eternally springing hope of the condemned suggested that maybe, if the delay was long enough, Fat Ari would give up on her and the branding would be canceled. She was enough of a realist, though, to know in her heart that this would never happen. If she missed the show, they’d brand her out of pure spite and hold her for the next one. On the way in, she had taken a good long look at this character everyone called the doctor and recognized on sight that his personal glacier of sadism ran cold and deep. He did even the most rudimentary things with a precise, perfectionist attention to detail, and Semple suspected that he had enjoyed maybe more than one lifetime honing his sinister act.

She had also observed that the doctor, like Fat Afi, was not required to dress up for a night on the Nile. His white lab coat covered and protected the neatly creased pants and fully buttoned vest of a trim, ultraconservative, 1930s-style three-piece pinstripe suit. His hair was pomaded and brushed straight back, his fingernails immaculately manicured, his black oxfords buffed to a mirrored sheen, and his wing collar rigidly starched. The doctor’s dapper and almost obsessive cleanliness made the horror of her situation somehow worse, even if Semple couldn’t pinpoint exactly why.

After a further five minutes, the assistant turned from the computer in discreetly weary triumph. “I have a number, Doctor.”

“And about time. Is the matrix heated?”

The assistant nodded. “It’s white-hot.”

“Then conform the bars and let’s get this nonsense over with.”

Semple could smell hot metal, and her stomach convulsed against the webbing. Despite her try for iron control, she was going to throw up.

“The brand is ready, Doctor. I’m removing it from the heater.”

The doctor entered Semple’s limited area of vision. He leaned over her, exuding a ghost-odor of cologne and breath mints. He lightly pinched the skin of Semple’s forehead between a pale, antiseptic thumb and index finger, and when he spoke, Semple knew he wasn’t talking to her. “It should take a good impression. I foresee no problems here.”

No sooner had he spoken than the computer on which the assistant had previously been laboring hissed, belched, then let out a mechanical Klaxon howl. Semple couldn’t see the assistant, but his voice sounded awed. “That’s the call of the Lord Anubis himself.”

The doctor was merely irritated. “It’s been a while since the Fiihrer saw fit to interrupt me.”

Now the assistant sounded frightened. “Please, Doctor, we could all be in trouble if you were heard calling him that.”

But the doctor cut him off. “Don’t worry. There are no listening devices here. I made sure of that when I allowed the dog-headed simpleton to set me up in his ridiculous city. I also have the place swept regularly for bugs. And not only for ones installed by him. I also have to be watchful for those who would steal my research.” The doctor moved quickly to the computer and hit a key. His voice took on a jovial respect. “My Lord Anubis. How nice. It’s been a long time since we spoke.”

The voice of Anubis was both huge and unreal. It gave the claustrophobic impression that it was not only filling the entire room, but using up all the air. “Has the outlander been branded yet?”

Semple swallowed hard. Now Anubis himself was getting in on her humiliation. The doctor replied briskly, “Not yet, my Lord. We have had some trouble with the records office. I’ll be through very shortly.”

The voice of Anubis again boomed around the surgery. “Don’t do it.”

The doctor blinked. “Don’t do it?”

“That’s what I said. Do we have a bad connection? Am I failing to make myself clear?”

“No, my Lord. You are abundantly clear.”

Semple couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She was off the hook by a miracle. Never again would she ignore the eternally springing hope of the condemned.

“I want the outlander brought to me.”

The doctor sounded almost disappointed. “Unmarked?”

“Unmarked and unbranded.”

“I’ll have it done immediately.”

“Do that.”

“It’s been wonderful talking to you, my Lord. You must come here sometimes and inspect my work.”

But Anubis was already gone. Seemingly, Semple would soon be confronting him. Was this a rescue or merely a stay of execution reserving her for a worse horror in the future? She knew her wisest option would be to take refuge in the moment, and not even think about what the future might hold. Just rejoice that hot metal wasn’t at that moment searing her brow. Unfortunately, the dog god was all too central to the thematic operation of the city and she couldn’t help but speculate about him. Until now, she’d only seen pictures and statues of this figure who had taken the image and personality of the jackal-headed Egyptian god. Now she had heard his voice for the first time. Did the man always talk like that? Even when you were in the same room with him? Semple could only think that the voice was some kind of audio construct, like Tarzan’s bellow in the old Johnny Weissmuller movies. The Tarzan cry was reputed to have been a primitive overdubbing of an African bull elephant, a roaring lion, and a well-known yodeling cowboy. Working on the same principle, the voice of Anubis could have been digitally sampled from equal parts of Benito Mussolini, James Earl Jones, and late Elvis Presley at the full-stretch crescendo of “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”

The assistant was unstrapping Semple from the chair. After Anubis terminated the conversation, the doctor had stalked out of the room, plainly livid at the snub and miffed at the lost opportunity to inflict pain. As the assistant worked, he glanced around the room, as if unconvinced by the doctor’s assurances that no listening devices were planted in the surgery. He removed the gag and smiled a patently phony smile. “It’s a great honor to be summoned to Anubis.”

Semple massaged her jaw. She was in no mood for small talk. “Kissing up to the Big Boss, just to be on the safe side?”

The assistant looked at her plaintively. “Do be careful. They listen in much more than anyone thinks.”

Semple was in no mood for conversation. “Screw you, boy. You were just going to brand me.”

“I was only doing my job. It was nothing personal.”

“That’s what your kind all say. And don’t start telling me your fucking troubles, okay? Right now, I don’t give a fuck who’s listening. I was almost branded with a hot iron on my forehead. What the fuck else can they do to me?”

Despite her show of bravado, Semple was actually asking herself the same question. What the fuck else could they do to her? So far, this adventure had amounted to an unpalatable cocktail of Voltaire and De Sade. She knew what Anubis looked and sounded like, and she had seen some of the worst that the city he created had to offer. All inputs indicated that here was some mess of deep insecurities, overcompensating on a monumental scale. It did not bode well for their coming encounter.

As she finally stood up from the chair, Mengele returned to the surgery. He scowled at her. The doctor was also a bad loser. “So you’ve managed to elude my clutches?”

Semple flashed him a dazzling smile. “Better luck next time, Doc.”

The doctor didn’t smile back. His eyes hardened. It was as though a window had opened in some Arctic fortress of solitude. “Oh, there’ll be a next time. You can count on that.”

***

The lights dimmed to the blue glow, and Jim found himself surrounded by twelve or fifteen little gray aliens, two and a half feet tall, shorter than the doctor and the alien with the Bogart voice. They teemed around his legs like a bunch of eager, friendly children, as his mind was being inundated with cloyingly good vibes. Some were trying to take hold of his arms, others were feeling the rough texture of his cotton shirt, and running their little gray three-fingered hands over his leather jeans. Jim tried to move them back, shooing them away from him. “Hey, careful of the jeans, they’ve come so far with me they’re a symbol of my character.”

The little aliens refused to be shooed and didn’t appear to care about symbols of Jim’s character. They just twittered and chattered happily, making a sound between the wuffle of puppies and cheeping of baby birds, and the good vibes became even more saccharine. They treated everything he did as part of a marvelous children’s game. Jim found, however, that they were slowly and subtly propelling him in the direction that they wanted him to go. He was also aware that something else, something different, was in the room, along with him and the little aliens, something much bigger, cold, old, and malign, that observed without apparently wanting to be seen. Each time he tried to look directly at it, the little aliens ran interference, and the something-else moved out of sight, making use of the hallucinatory, inexact quality of the blue light to conceal itself. Jim’s only impression was of an elongated, equine, nonhuman head, long angular arms, and sinister arachnid motion. The word “mantis” came into his mind, but he didn’t know quite why, although the right side of his brain was definitely getting nervous. “Don’t trust these things. I’m telling you. You can’t trust them. Just think about it. If you were some ugly, unscrupulous space thing with tentacles and a see-through brain, and you wanted to create a false sense of security in another species, what would you do?”

The left brain considered this. “I’d disguise myself.”

“And how would you disguise yourself?”

Again the left brain considered. “I’d take on all the attributes of the young of the species I had targeted to screw over.”

The right brain was positively congratulatory. “Exactly, the big eyes, the frail bodies, the overlarge heads. They’re all calculated to make you feel protective and unthreatened. They’re all fetal decoys.”

The left brain had a question. “And what about the mantis thing?”

The right brain didn’t like the answer it was giving. “I fear that thing may be the real deal.”

The two halves of Jim’s brain reconnected, agreeing that he would no longer be buying the alien bullshit. Unfortunately, all the bicameral brainwork quickly proved wasted as Jim saw the table. It wasn’t like any operating table he’d ever seen, but there was no mistaking its purpose. The table was white and circular and had weird side trays holding laid-out instruments. Odd cantilevered devices were poised over it, ready to be swung into use like miniature cranes. The tools of the ET croakers were all fashioned from a highly polished, sapphire-blue metal, with odd, fluid configurations like some Henry Moore nightmare, but no mistake could be made about their function. Down to the smallest clamp, they were designed for probing, penetrating, and implanting-the whole abductee workup. He’d been taken for a sucker. He stopped in his tracks.

“Okay, this is where I get off.”

He looked around for the Bogart alien but saw no sign of it. The nearest of the small ones took hold of his hand, but Jim slapped it away. “Listen, you little fuckers. My name is James Douglas Morrison and the shit stops here. No way are you getting me on that table. The closest I like to be to the medical profession is on the receiving end of a prescription for narcotics. Take my word for it, kids. Mr. Mojo’s rising.”

The little aliens started to back away. So far, hostility seemed to be having the required effect. Then he spotted one of the taller ones, and it wasn’t backing away. It was coming toward him, holding what looked uncomfortably like a weapon, pointed directly at him. When it spoke, he knew it was Bogart. “I don’t feel good about doing this, sweetheart, but you asked for it. You could have just rolled over and made it easy on yourself, but it seems we have to do it the hard way.”

***

Shortly after she had split with her sibling, Semple had developed the unconscious and annoying habit of compulsively judging her actions against those of the characters in old Joan Collins movies. Obviously she was looking for a way to distinguish herself as the antithesis of Aimee’s milksop blond purity. The problem stemmed from the time, before the split, when she was still working on her new physical persona. In the course of building her image, she had done an extensive study of Collins, starting with Dynasty and working backward all the way to the actress’s low-budget, British errant-teen roles in movies like The Good Die Young. Right after the split, her studies had meshed with the insecurity of being on her own for the first time, and she found herself hardly able to make a move unless she could relate it to a Joan Collins movie. It was almost as though she were using the actress as a sibling surrogate or an invisible friend. Semple had, of course, rigorously trained herself out of the habit, and kept the lapse a close secret ever after. When it suddenly resumed its grip on her as she entered the Throne Room of Anubis, she half concluded that it was due to the stress to which she had been subjected since her arrival in Necropolis. Whatever the reason, from the moment she entered the Throne Room, she couldn’t help but think of herself as being on the Cinemascope set of Land of the Pharaohs.

The rest of Necropolis may have been threadbare and stain-encrusted, but the Palace of Anubis verged on the preposterous in its ancient Egyptian splendor. The color scheme in the Throne Room was turquoise and gold, and the spatial proportions were indisputably epic. As far as Semple could tell, the Throne Room was used by Anubis only for the receiving and overwhelming of guests and deputations from his subject population, but it was the size of at least two basketball courts, divided by twin rows of massive fluted pillars that held up a forty-foot-high ceiling. The walls were decorated with towering murals of gods and demons, all clearly designed to demonstrate Anubis’s dominant role, mentally, physically, and sexually, in the pantheon.

Semple had been instructed to enter the Throne Room through the massive gold double doors that stood at the opposite end of the vast space from the throne itself. As a new arrival, she would come out onto a raised platform and walk down a wide flight of stairs to the main floor. She had been told to wait on the platform, and not descend until Anubis indicated that he wished her to approach. When the signal came, she should go down the stairs and commence the trek of fifty yards or more to the throne. Had Semple not long since convinced herself of her own fabulousness, she might have been overawed by it all.

The preparation for her encounter with Anubis had been even more elaborate than her trials on the Fat Ari show. Under different circumstances, she might have been exhausted by such pampering twice in one day, but the perfection of the finished product made it tolerable if not actually enjoyable. The jackal head might have the direst plans for her, but at least they would be executed in luxury. By this point, Semple was also feeling lucky. Anubis might be steamrollering the Afterlife in the trappings of the god, but she knew that, somewhere, buried deep within him, lurked a stunted and highly insecure human male. For Semple, the manipulation of human males had never presented a problem. Given time, she would have him doing exactly what she wanted.

The prepping for the audience had started with a second full-body scrub and cosmetic makeover. Apparently what had been good enough for Fat Ari’s camera’s hardly made it at the court of the god-king. It wouldn’t have been fair to describe the handmaidens who performed the task as more skilled than Fat Ari’s crew. It was like the difference between Belgian lacemakers and New York garment workers. The handmaidens of Anubis worked in total reverent silence, as though they were embroidering the Bayeaux Tapestry or illuminating holy manuscripts. Given a choice, she would rather have had the constant coarse and caustic dialogue at Fat Ari’s, but she had no complaints with the work of the handmaidens. Fat Ari’s crew had made her lewd and salable, but the handmaidens were making her exquisite.

The makeup artists were followed by the dressers. The costume chosen for Semple was hardly elaborate, a very up-market variation on the standard wraparound skirt, though it came with a highly Egyptienne hawk-wing cape, with wide, built-up shoulders and a pinion motif. It was the precision of its tailoring and the quality of the fabric that truly impressed her. The metallic red, green, and gold shot-silk mixture shimmered and undulated as she moved, like the hot skin of some fantastic molten reptile.

Before she was let loose on Anubis, Zipporah, the primary concubine, a midperiod Catherine Deneuve who ruled the god-king’s seraglio with the iron will of an Afterlife Margaret Thatcher, had instructed her in the correct manner in which to approach their glorious leader for the first time. The short lecture was delivered as a formal, almost theological speech, which seemed only fitting if dealing with a god. At the end, however, as the woman put particular emphasis on how Semple should never, under any circumstances, contradict or disagree with their lord, Semple made a mental note that, as soon as she resolved the questions of her own status and survival, she’d find a way to cut this fool deity down to size.

The gold doors that led to the Throne Room were flanked by a pair of muscular and heavily oiled Nubian guards. Semple had been escorted that far by a retinue of handmaidens, but as they approached the guarded doors the handmaidens halted and Semple was allowed to go on alone. The guards were identical in every respect, as though they had been assembled on the same production line. They stood over seven feet tall, with shaved and shined heads, clad in brief military kilts that left nothing to the imagination. Armed with long gold scimitars, they stared straight ahead, unwavering and not acknowledging Semple in any way as she walked toward them. Zipporah had said nothing about the guards, but Semple, although sorely tempted, refrained from ogling them. Without so much as a lingering sideways glance, she walked through the gold doors and out onto the platform at the head of the stairs, and was treated to her first glimpse of Anubis.

What confronted her, in fact, was not one but two versions of the god, Anubis in the flesh and also a giant sculpted likeness. Anubis himself sat in the Mighty Throne of the God, and the Mighty Throne of the God stood on an elevated dais between the massive feet of a ceiling-high statue of himself hewn from polished black volcanic rock and highlighted with flourishes of gold and precious stones. Lit from below by recessed banks of constantly moving spotlights, the glowering statue sat four-square and formal in its own sculpted throne, arms crossed across its chest, stone hands gripping the traditional power symbols of the reaping hook and flail. In total contrast, the real Anubis sprawled in his throne, studiedly decadent, with one long bronzed leg cocked over the armrest. Like the statue above him, the live Anubis was arrayed in gold. A short gold kilt was wrapped around his hips; a massive, beaten-gold collar was draped around his neck and extended clear to his navel.

To say that Anubis was well built was an almost ridiculous understatement. The human body of Anubis was the buffed peak of iron-pumping perfection, although Semple seriously doubted that the god ever did anything as gauche as actually pump iron. Even seen from a distance, his divine muscle definition was clear beneath a skin that was the color of oil-dark antique leather. Semple couldn’t exactly estimate his height while he sat, but she imagined that, like his Nubians, he was well in excess of seven feet tall. What surprised Semple, even as accustomed as she was to bizarre Afterlife fantasy fulfillments, was the way his jackal head was married to the human body. The only slightly ambiguous feature was the god’s rather odd conical neck, but his advanced physique seemed more than adequate to support it.

As Semple might have expected, the god was not alone in his Throne Room. Two more Nubian guards stood on either side of him with grim expressions and scimitars across their chests. Three near-naked handmaidens sat at his feet, pouring his wine, caressing his legs, and offering him gold platters of exotic finger foods. The guards and the girls conformed exactly to formula. The final figure in the tableau at the far end of the Throne Room was a lot less predictable. It looked like a Carthusian monk in its full-length robe. The cowl was pulled forward so the face was hidden, and the figure filled Semple with a sudden unease. The shadowy being remained out of the halo of light around Anubis, keeping him- or herself half in the shadows behind the throne. Semple could only assume that this was the classic gray eminence, the all-powerful, whispering advisor who had the ear of the despot, and the capacity to make or break rivals and lesser mortals. Semple knew from both experience and history that such individuals could be deeply and fundamentally dangerous.

Even as these thoughts were going through her mind, the figure in gray leaned forward and spoke into the god’s ear. Anubis’s head turned sharply and he looked in Semple’s direction with the suddenness of a predatory bird. As the self-created god stared at her, a spring of healthy subversion bubbled up inside her, in the form of an urgent and almost overwhelming need to giggle. Something about Anubis had suggested the kind of absurdist, devastatingly funny idea that comes with prolonged anxiety and fear. From certain angles, Anubis, with his pointed, erect ears, looked like Batman with a grafted-on canine muzzle. Semple had suddenly seen Anubis as nothing more than a composite of the Caped Crusader and a cartoon dog. Then Anubis gestured in her direction, and the comic vision fled. The voice was, if anything, even more overpowering in the flesh than it had been when she had heard it over the speakers of the computer in the doctor’s office. “Semple McPherson, you will now approach us.”

Semple took a deep breath, straightened her back, and started down the steps, doing her best to look as impressive and dignified as possible. Joan Collins would have been proud of her. It was only as she was halfway across the vast expanse of pristine marble that she remembered how, in Land of the Pharaohs, Joan Collins had been tied to a pillar and flogged-then buried alive at the end of the movie.

***

Without thinking, Jim grabbed the arm of the nearest little creature and swung it as hard as he could at the Bogart alien. From that first moment of action everything seemed to run in slow motion. Jim was amazed at how light the alien was. He was able to pick it up as easily as a Styrofoam doll, something he would never have been able to do with a human child of comparable size. “That’s right, you little gray sons of bitches! Run away! Get the hell away, you big-eyed cock-suckers! You’ve got a fighting-mad human on your hands now. I’m not one of your shell-shocked abductees! I’m a real representative specimen. One of the badass monkey tribe. All we had to do was invent fire and the fulcrum and there was no holding us. We pretty much fucked up our entire planet, so it shouldn’t be so hard to fuck up a few of you!”

Jim turned. What he needed was a weapon. All rational moderation had left him. He didn’t care that he’d come aboard the spacecraft of his own accord. He didn’t see how that gave the aliens any reason to assume they could interfere with him in any way they wanted. The fact that doing random damage in a UFO in flight might have been a suicidal act also didn’t bother him. Hadn’t he, when drunk, bored, and self-destructive, tried to open the emergency door of a Pan Am DC9 somewhere over the Rockies, in flight between Los Angeles and Chicago? For the satisfaction he’d gain from devastating the saucer, he was, at that moment, quite prepared to go back to the pods of the Great Double Helix.

The Bogart alien was down, pinned under the arms and legs of the creature that Jim had used as a missile. Jim started toward the operating table. Somewhere amid the trays of surgical instruments, he ought to be able to find a decent weapon. He spotted an object about ten inches long that looked like a bone saw, seized it, and turned, ready to fight to the finish. The bad news was that, as far as Jim was concerned, the finish had come. Bogart had disentangled himself from the other two and was crouched on his knees, holding the strange cylindrical weapon in a very businesslike, two-handed grip.

Only rage prevented Jim from realizing that he didn’t have a chance. If he’d had any sense he would have dropped the saw and given up. Instead, he rushed straight at the alien with the weapon. The flash of its discharge totally blinded him. He could feel nothing, so he didn’t know if he was still on his feet or not. All he could see was an unrelieved vibrant blue, and that was all Jim Morrison wrote.

***

The purple tongue of Anubis darted out and licked surplus horseradish dip from his dog muzzle. The tongue was long and spatulate and reached all the way to his dog whiskers. With the sole exception of his larynx and voice box, the workings of the head of the god-king of Necropolis were so entirely canine that Semple wondered if his tongue tended to loll in hot weather. She actually found it hard to gauge where man ended and dog started. Some other more intimate questions regarding the purple tongue of Anubis also posed themselves at the periphery of her curiosity, but, as Anubis was in the process of subjecting her to an intense visual scrutiny and seemed about to speak, she put all speculation on hold.

Looking her up and down, Anubis portentously cleared his throat. “If you’re considering lying to us or weaving some long and fanciful story to explain your arrival in our reality, I really wouldn’t bother. We know all about you, Semple McPherson.”

Leaning forward in his throne, he picked a strip of raw sirloin from the silver platter. It was hard to tell if Anubis ate all the time, or whether he was using this initial encounter between them as an excuse for a protracted snack. The platter of sirloin treats was supported by one of the handmaidens, acting as a human side table. The young woman was all but naked, wearing only body paint, thonged sandals, a gold and turquoise necklace, and a matching gold chain around her waist. Anubis dipped the sliver of meat into a bowl containing a mixture of mayonnaise, sweet mustard, and creamed horseradish proffered by a second handmaiden in a blue silk turban, a giant opal in her navel. Having liberally coated the morsel with dip, the god-King raised it above his black button nose, lifted his head slightly, and dropped it into his mouth. He closed his eyes and stared to chew, relishing the experience with a gratuitous and noisy display of enjoyment that Semple considered indecent. When he had finally finished and run his tongue around his mouth for a second time, he returned to his inspection of Semple.

“We also know all about your sister Aimee and her quest for the perfect Heaven.”

Semple, who had not spoken up to this point, decided that it was worth risking a comment. “You appear to be remarkably well informed, my Lord.”

Anubis’s eyes narrowed slightly. “Of course we’re well informed. We’re a god, aren’t we?”

Semple looked down at the floor in what she hoped was a suitably demure indication of submission to the creature’s divinity. It was too soon even to try exerting her own will; for the moment, she might as well play along with the charade of his omnipotence. She would really have liked to look at the figure in the shadows in the gray robe. Like Fat Ari and Dr. Mengele, the figure in the robe clearly had enough clout to maintain its own, thematically incorrect fantasy image, but this was hardly the time to be caught staring.

“You arrived here uninvited.”

“I’m sorry, my lord. I was unaware there were protocols governing such things.”

“It would appear that there is much of which you’re unaware. For one who previously commanded a modest domain of her own, you seem uncommonly ignorant.”

It had been a long time since anyone had called Semple ignorant and biting back her anger took an effort. She knew her safest course was to go with the flow and ladle on the fawning diplomacy, but it wasn’t easy. Anubis raised her hackles. “My journey to your domain was made in all innocence, my lord. I had heard great things about the wonders of your city and merely wanted to see its glory for myself.”

Semple thought that she’d done tolerably well until a growl rumbled in Anubis’s throat. “We warned you not to lie to us, Semple McPherson.”

Semple raised her head and looked Anubis straight in the eye. “I assure you that I’m not lying to you, my lord.”

“You’re hardly telling us the whole unvarnished truth.”

“My lord?”

“We can appreciate that you might want to see the glories of our realm, but we’re also aware that you’re engaged in a poaching mission on behalf of your sister. Do you deny that you came here looking to recruit a fantasy artist to assist her in enlarging and improving her wretched little Heaven?”

After he delivered this bombshell, Anubis’s eyes remained locked on Semple’s for a four- or five-second eternity before he looked away and reached for another piece of sirloin. Semple had to use unnatural restraint not to let the shock register in her face. How the hell did this megalomaniac know so much about her and Aimee’s plans? Was it possible that he actually had informers inside Aimee’s Heaven? Or, worse still, inside her own Hell? Someone or something had to be feeding him information. She had seriously underestimated the dog-headed boy. He probably had an evil network of out-of-control intelligence agencies tearing all over the Afterlife and getting into everybody’s business, doubtless manned by a deranged cadre of misfits, sadists, and malcontents eager to spend their hereafter playing James Bond or J. Edgar Hoover. But hindsight was of little use to Semple now. “I can only repeat, my lord, that I came here in all innocence. I admit that I had agreed to assist my sister in finding a suitable individual to work with her on her expansion plans, but-”

Anubis abruptly stopped relishing the latest beef morsel and cut her off. “Let’s just suppose for a moment that you’d actually come here with an open invitation and all of the correct documentation and diplomatic credentials. The matter of your attempting to coerce one of our subjects-a subject that we own and hold in thrall-to come back with you to the realm of your sister would pose a serious problem within itself.”

Semple wasn’t sure where he was going with all this, so she decided to play dumb. “I don’t understand, my lord.”

“If you recruited your fantasy artist here in Necropolis, you would be effectively depriving us of a piece of our personal property. You would be nothing more than a thief.”

Semple immediately adopted an attitude of injured outrage. “My lord, I am not a thief.”

“No? Everything and everyone in the city of Necropolis and the surrounding territories and protectorates constitutes our personal and inalienable property. How could the removal of an individual be anything but theft against our person?”

“That was not my intention, my lord.”

“Didn’t they used to say that the road to Hell was paved with good intentions? As one who has attempted to organize her very own minor Hell, you are probably well aware of the axiom.”

At this point, Semple could do nothing to stop her control from slipping. How dare this mutation-mutt cast aspersions on her creation? “My Hell is more than minor, my lord.”

Anubis’s stare turned decidedly walleyed. “Is it?”

Semple was reminded how Zipporah the primary concubine had warned her not to argue or contradict Anubis. Anubis’s remark about her “very minor Hell” had driven the instruction clear out of her mind. Anubis repeated the question, his voice a threatening snarl. “Is it?”

Semple quickly backpedaled. “The word might be `modest,’ my lord. Or perhaps ‘boutique’?”

Anubis snapped back impatiently. “Minor? Modest? Boutique? Does it really matter? Is it anything like Necropolis?”

Now Semple could answer with heartfelt truthfulness. “No, my lord. That is very true. It’s absolutely nothing like Necropolis.”

“In its size?”

“No, my lord.”

“In its grandeur?”

“No, my lord.”

“In the complexity of its design?”

“No, my lord.”

“Then it hardly really matters, does it? It’s an inferior construct and we have no reason to discuss it any further.”

Semple was sorely tempted to snap back that Necropolis was also the worst totalitarian mess since Albania gave up communism, but she restrained herself and spread her hands in courtly surrender.

“A poor thing but mine own, my lord.”

Anubis looked as though he were about to respond unfavorably even to this conciliatory gesture, but right then the figure in the robe slid briefly forward, out from the shadows, and whispered something to its lord and master. Anubis beamed and nodded. “Very good point. In fact, an excellent point.”

The figure in the robe faded back to the shadows, leaving Semple none the wiser about who or what it might be. She had momentarily glimpsed a pair of glinting eyes, but all else remained concealed beneath the cowl. Anubis looked sideways at Semple. “Our dream warden points out that, even leaving aside your intended theft of our property, the fact that your sister intends to expand her environment may in itself create a problem.”

Now Semple really was at a loss, and had in no way to act to seem dumb. For a start, what the hell was a dream warden? “A problem, my lord?”

“Our dream warden suggests that this expansion may be a prelude to your sister’s attempting to achieve some manner of godhead. As all thinking entities should be well aware, we are the only accredited god in this quadrant of the Afterlife.”

Semple straightened her back. It was time to stand up to this pompous lunatic and his goddamned dream warden. She adopted the demented formality that seemed to be the only way to deal with Anubis. “I believe, my lord, being much more fully acquainted with my sister and her intentions than your dream warden, I am in a far better position to assure you that nothing could be further from her mind. She simply maintains an environment for the comfort and protection of those from the lifeside who arrive here seeking a traditionally fundamental Christian heaven. Of course, if my word is insufficient, you can always take the matter up with my sister.”

Semple felt quite pleased with herself. She had refuted the dream warden without being directly confrontational and argumentative. Better still, Anubis seemed to be buying it. He was at least chowing down on yet another wafer of sirloin and thinking about it. Unfortunately, the dream warden moved forward for another shot. After more whispering, Anubis smiled again. “Our dream warden now points out that these discussions regarding the aspirations or otherwise of your sister in the matter of deification are largely academic. You’re unlikely to be seeing your sister at any time in the predictable future.”

Semple didn’t like the sound of this. She also didn’t like the way Anubis was smiling. “Why should that be, my lord?”

“Because, our dream warden quite rightly informs us you yourself are now also a piece of our property.”

Semple’s confidence plummeted. “How does your Dream Warden deduce that, my lord?”

Anubis made a gesture indicating the answer was simplicity itself. “You came to our realm uninvited and without any prior understanding as to your status during the duration of your visit. You requested no letters of transit or any other kind of contractual preliminaries. You requested no audience and presented no credentials. You didn’t even come to us craving right of sanctuary or metaphysical asylum. Had you done any of these things, the situation might have been different. As it is-”

Semple clutched at any passing straw. “Suppose I were to petition for sanctuary right now?”

Anubis frowned and glanced at the Dream Warden. The cowl moved slightly as the Dream Warden shook his or her hidden head. Anubis turned back to Semple. “No, we are advised that you’ve been here far too long. The petition could not be made with acceptable sincerity. Maybe if you’d come to us immediately on your arrival something might have been worked out; instead, you chose to haunt low bars and get yourself arrested and nearly sold into slavery. It’s much too late now, Semple McPherson. You’re here and you’re ours.”

He paused as though considering some new point that he had only just thought of, but then shook his head as though dismissing it. “The only question that remains is, what do we do with you?”

***

Jim floated in an ocean of blue electricity. His body lay limp. He checked all of his available senses, and the consensus appeared to be that he was floating. He wasn’t going anywhere. He simply was and that was about it, in a blue limbo surrounded by crackling static. The situation bothered him. The thing about limbo was you never knew how long you were going to be there. Jim did realize, however, that he had engaged in violent confrontation with a bunch of aliens on their own turf, and that he had been shot with a ray gun for his pains. “I guess I should have taken the medical exam. I probably would have been better off in the long run.”

Thinking out loud at least reassured him that some kind of external universe existed in this new fine mess in which he found himself. He hadn’t become a prisoner of his own mind; the flashing static wasn’t merely the firing of his own synapses. Thinking out loud also got him an immediate answer.

“You should have taken the medical exam, shouldn’t you?” The voice was greatly blue-muffled, but he thought it might have been the voice of the doctor alien. It definitely wasn’t Bogart.

“So how long are you going to keep me here?”

Jim was suddenly on a soft padded floor, with a crisscross, nonslip texture. He was starting to realize that if you asked the UFO a question, you had a good chance of receiving an answer, even if it was nothing like the one you were expecting. After checking that he was still intact after the scuffle, that no parts of his body or mind were missing or mysteriously changed, he sat up very carefully, watchful for any fresh surprises. He was sure the extraterrestrials had by no means finished with him yet.

The interior of the chamber in which he found himself was a creation of irregular ovoids. Jim seemed to be in a domed half-ovoid blister or bubble, like an egg cut lengthwise and placed down on the flat cut, creating an ovoid floor about twenty-five feet across at its widest point. Two flat ovoid slabs of some plastic or rubberlike substance were apparently supposed to serve as benches. A much larger slab of the same stuff seemed to be an approximation of a bed. High in the upper dome, a collection of small ovoids floated in eccentric orbit around each other, not unlike the mobiles that had enjoyed a brief vogue on lifeside Earth, except that, where Earth mobiles had used wires and balance beams, this decorative arrangement had no visible means of support.

Even the door or entry port was yet another ovoid, conforming to the curve of the wall at the narrow end of the chamber, though it came with no visible handle, lock, or other external means of operation. Jim got to his feet and decided to conduct an experiment. He walked to the door, placed his hands flat against it, and pushed, gently at first and then applying increasing pressure. No matter how hard he pushed, it neither yielded nor budged. Maybe it wasn’t a door at all, just a decorative panel set in the wall. If that was the case, though, how did anyone get in and out?

Jim didn’t want to entertain the thought that he was actually sealed in this place, walled up like some futurist heretic. Instead, he took a step back and spoke to what he still thought of as the door. “Open, please?”

Nothing. He tried once more, instructing rather than asking. “Open the door, please.”

Again the result was negative, but Jim couldn’t help smiling at what he was doing. “Open the pod bay door, please, HAL.”

He didn’t really expect a result, and the door didn’t disappoint him. Jim turned away from it and sat down on the ovoid bed to take stock of this new situation. The flat surface yielded just the way a mattress would; at least some consideration had been given to the most basic of his creature comforts. Then again, he was still lacking an ovoid minibar or cocktail cabinet. Creature comfort had its limits.

“Could I get another martini in here?” No dice.

Jim was so focused on wondering what the next alien move might be that the true nature of the room escaped him for quite some time. When it did, though, realization dropped on him like a load of futuristic glass bricks. “Jesus H. Christ, it’s the fucking Jetsons.”

The aliens had locked him up in a Cadillac construct of 1950s science fiction. What he was coming to think of as his prison was nothing more than a set from one of the better, big-budget, atomic baroque space operas: Forbidden Planet or This Island Earth. It had to be either a created illusion or a controlled hallucination. He could scarcely believe that actual aliens would subscribe to some retro Captain Video school of interior design. The obvious scenario was that it had been custom-tailored for him, based on information gleaned directly from his own mind; either he was on the receiving end of another variation of alien rat-maze behaviorist testing, or they were dementedly attempting to put him at his ease.

“I wish this place had a goddamned window.”

Jim all but jumped out of his skin when a large section of wall simply melted away to reveal the black grandeur of the interplanetary starfields in all their celestial glory, with the planet Saturn and its rings dominating the foreground.

“Damn!”

The vision was so extraordinary that a moment of fear stunned him. The flying saucer was disintegrating. It had been struck by a meteor, blown up by a photon torpedo. Then he realized that he was viewing the raw vacuum of space through a clear viewing port, oval, but as large as the picture window in a suburban split-level.

“Sweet Mary Mother of God.”

Jim’s first glimpse of space from space filled him with a holy awe so total that it rivaled even his earliest acid trips. Tears came to his eyes. It was terrible in its magnificence. The sky was a deeper black than he had ever experienced or imagined. With no atmosphere to act as a distorting filter, the constellations blazed in unwinking brilliance. One of the Saturn’s moons-maybe Titan, Jim didn’t know for sure-was breaking across the giant ringed planet’s horizon. He didn’t care if the whole thing was real or illusion, and he didn’t care what the aliens had in store for him. Whatever they might do, it would be worth it to have seen this.

“Fucking unbelievable.”

All through his life on Earth he had harbored three great irrational regrets. He’d never seen the young Elvis Presley performing live, he was unable to fly like Superman, and he’d never looked into the deep vastness of space. One down and two impossibilities to go. If he hadn’t already been dead, he would probably have been able to die happy. Jim was so transfixed by the infinite beyond the port that he totally failed to hear the ovoid door slide open.

“Hello, Jim.” The first voice was blond, breathless, and afraid of its own power.

“Good evening, Jim.” The second voice was cool, lazily aloof, with a hint of contempt.

Jim quickly turned and was confronted by a spectacle in its own way as wondrous as the view beyond the ovoid picture window.

“I am Epiphany.”

“And I am Devora.”

“Were you admiring the stars, Jim?”

“Now it’s time for you to admire us.”

Jim knew this couldn’t be anything but an elaborate illusion, but in that first moment, he really didn’t care. The 50s sci-fi tableau was now complete. The two women were Wally Wood creations straight from the cover of an EC space comic. Each was at least as tall as he was, perhaps taller, statuesque, each a warrior showgirl in a formfitting fantasy space suit and transparent bubble helmet with articulated hose running to a tiny finned air tank on her back. Epiphany was as blond as she sounded, and her suit was silver accented by a pale shade of the same blue as the room. Devora was a brunette with honey high-yellow skin, her suit was midnight metalflake with crimson pinstriping. Jim was almost as impressed with the suits as he was with the women. They were fetish feats of bizarre body-shop engineering. The women’s torsos were clad in what looked to be highly polished plastic or fiberglass, with the kind of multicoat, hand-rubbed finish usually saved for top-of-the-line hot rods. Rigidly molded and contoured to the bodies beneath, the detailing went right down to loving re-creations of navels and nipples. Epiphany’s and Devora’s Las Vegas legs were encased in long thigh-length boots with absurdly high heels, their arms sheathed in long evening gloves that came to well above their elbows. Both gloves and boots matched the color of the body units. Their thighs and upper arms, on the other hand, were quite bare, something that, in any real exposure to the vacuum of space, would immediately cause explosive decompression.

Jim knew, however, that these outfits would never be exposed to anything beyond him and this egg-shaped blue room. They had been crafted for his seduction and his seduction alone. He also knew that Epiphany and Devora, these equal and opposite Queens of the Galaxy, nasty and nice, good and evil, were the gift wrapping on some chill alien agenda that, if it had to be so seriously camouflaged, probably would have repulsed him if he’d been forced to witness its unvarnished reality. On the other hand, if the aliens had the decency to run an erotic con on him, he might as well go along with the gag, as long as the gift wrapping held up. He certainly had very little to lose. And so, when Epiphany moved toward him with a demure yet lascivious smile, Devora just one step behind her, Jim returned the smile. When their smiles broadened and their hands went to the throat fastenings of their bubble helmets, he stood his ground. It was only then that he noticed how, although Epiphany was unarmed, Devora wore an unusually phallic art deco ray gun in a low-slung, tied-down, speed-draw gunfighter holster.

***

“Do the handmaidens have to stay?”

Anubis turned. He’d been absorbed in picking at a tray of crackers and tiny chips of dried fish. It seemed that Anubis did eat constantly. Maybe it was the dog in him, or perhaps the parents of the mortal child had done something really terrible to him like repeatedly locking him in closets without supper, lunch, or breakfast. As in the Throne Room, a pair of near-naked handmaidens carried the trays of goodies, following the God-King as he moved from one part of the bedroom to another, while two more stood flanking the silk acreage of the dog-god’s bed, waiting on his pleasure.

Anubis regarded Semple disdainfully. “Of course they have to stay; we don’t know when we might require them.”

“And the guards, too?”

“The guards always stay. For all we know, you might be planning an attempt on our life.”

Semple observed that, even in the semi-privacy of his bedroom, Anubis continued to use the royal “We.” The son of a bitch must have been a seriously abused child. Why else would he require such constant reinforcement of his self-esteem? Semple knew that she and Aimee had their problems, but not even the sum of their collective hang-ups could approach Anubis and his monstrous dysfunction.

“As this is our first time together, I might respond better to you if we had a little more privacy?”

The fingers that held the latest cracker halted halfway to the dog-god’s mouth. “Our intention is to fuck you, you stupid woman, not consummate some passionate romance. You will respond just as we want you to respond or you’ll find this interlude will have a very unpleasant aftermath. Besides, we might decide to have one of the handmaidens join us at some point in the proceedings if we’re so inclined.”

Semple caught the two handmaidens beside the bed exchanging weary glances behind Anubis’s back. It was good to see some spark of resistance surviving in this absurd autocracy. She wished she could slip them some sign of sisterly solidarity, but Anubis was looking straight at her. Anubis’s decision of what to do with Semple couldn’t have been more predictable if he’d been wholly dog instead of just dog from the neck up. After an unpleasantly rambling debate with himself regarding Semple’s ultimate fate, complete with a couple of lengthy and loathsomely perverse digressions, Anubis had suddenly declared that he was bored and wished to leave the Throne Room and retire to his private suite. He had risen petulantly and the Nubian guards had fallen in, swiftly and silently, on either side of him. With a curt gesture that Semple should follow, he had walked quickly to a concealed door behind the right leg of the giant statue. The Dream Warden had attempted to tag along, but Anubis had turned in the doorway and shaken his head. “We won’t be needing you right now. We suggest you busy yourself with that matter we discussed earlier.”

The Dream Warden seemed about to protest, but at a sign from Anubis, the Nubians closed the door on him. Anubis had glanced at Semple and smiled nastily. “The Dream Warden is not happy. We had halfway promised you to him, but then we changed our mind and decided, for the moment, to keep you for ourself. You should feel honored. Our whims are not always so charitable.”

“I am honored, my lord.”

Anubis’s eyes flashed with amusement. “Learning submission, are you, Semple McPherson?”

No, dogbreath, I’m just a poor girl doing her level best to survive in an untenable situation.

“I’m attempting to please, my lord.”

“You wouldn’t have preferred the Dream Warden?”

She smiled nicely. “How could anything be preferable to being noticed by you, my lord?”

Anubis had then switched position like a spoiled child. “Are you saying that you have something against our Dream Warden? That you’re maybe too good for him?”

Semple sighed inwardly. Don’t you ever give it a rest, Benji? “How can I say, my lord? All I’ve seen is a figure in a robe.”

“And you don’t want to see what’s beneath that robe, believe us. It’s disgusting.”

Semple couldn’t let this pass. She decided the highest level of reproach that she could risk would be to pout prettily. “And you were going to give me to him, my lord?”

“But we didn’t, did we? If we were you, we’d be thinking about original ways in which we could express our gratitude.”

Anubis’s private suite ran to some twenty rooms, each of which apparently came with its own complement of handmaidens and Nubian guards. Anubis, however, showed no inclination to treat Semple to a tour of his private turf. Instead he marched straight for what turned out to be the master bedroom, although the very word “bedroom” was hardly adequate. The place was the size of a small ballroom and the bed could have accommodated ten or more, and probably had. The color scheme was a bruised midnight purple that Anubis probably thought was decadent and erotic, but struck Semple as simply nightshade poisonous. Multiple mirrors were arranged in such a way that, from almost any point in the room, it was possible to see infinitely repeating images of oneself. A flickering, flashing, almost psychedelic lighting pattern confused and flattered these reflections, created moving pools of deep shadow and complex refraction patterns, while industrial-strength incense censers belched clouds of perfumed smoke. The mirrors had momentarily taken Semple by surprise. She hadn’t thought of Anubis as so overtly narcissistic, but it made sense. The dog-god’s boudoir was a place of smoke and mirrors, darkness and deception, and pretty much what she’d expected of her host and putative owner.

A large pyramid-shaped television set was placed so it could be easily observed from the bed. Anubis’s first move on entering the bedroom was to go straight to it and turn it on. Semple moved slightly so she could see the triangular picture. On the screen, a parade of naked women with fixed smiles desperately swayed and jiggled down a narrow catwalk. It had to be Fat Ari’s Slave Shopping Club-unless, of course, Fat Afi had competition. Before Semple could observe any more of the show, Anubis switched the channel. The screen now showed the God-King himself engaged in athletic, canine-style coitus with a moaning blonde, while a second, red-haired woman with a freckled back lay beside them, assisting him and his primary companion in any way she could. Was Anubis so far gone that he had to have sex to the accompaniment of a visual record of a previous triumph?

Anubis waved his hand abstractedly in Semple’s direction. “Remove your garments.”

Yeah, and peel me a grape, you son of a bitch. You could at least look interested. Hiding her contempt, she engaged a neutral smile. “Anything you say, my lord.”

Stripping in a place where the bulk of the population went topless was hardly a big thing. She certainly didn’t feel like treating Anubis to any kind of bump-and-grind routine and, anyway, he seemed more interested in his homemade porno tapes. On the triangular screen, the moaning blonde was either enjoying the orgasm of her life or creating an Oscar-winning simulation. Her piece de resistance was to run up a near-perfect vocal scale in high C, only to blow the effect by going flat on the highest top note. With all the aloof elegance she could muster, Semple sighed discreetly to regain the dog-god’s attention and let the hawk-wing cape drop from her shoulders. A single tug loosened the wraparound skirt and it joined the cape on the floor at her feet.

“My lord?”

Anubis inspected her nudity and nodded with what she interpreted as grudging approval. At the same time he let his own kilt fall to the floor and Semple could hardly believe what she was seeing. It reminded her of the ancient adage of a baby’s arm holding an apple in its fist, except it was a deep mahogany, gnarled like the trunk of a vine, with long twisting veins standing out in clear relief. At first she thought that it must have been a put-on, an elaborate showboat codpiece, a strapped-on construct of wishful thinking. Only when it started to move did she realized that this was wishful thinking made fantasy flesh. Anubis again eyeballed her nudity, then looked down at himself and grinned like a proud Doberman. “Does it frighten you?”

Had Semple been terrified out of her mind, she would never have admitted it. Since he so plainly intended to fuck her, she did have a certain trepidation about being able to accommodate the thing without too much physical modification to her own body, but she had quickly buried that, approaching the experience with a kind of academic curiosity. Conducting herself as a connoisseur of the extremes in experience was infinitely better than tearing her hair and rolling her eyes like a degraded slave.

She deliberately arched an eyebrow. “Your . . . manhood is truly magnificent, my lord. I have never seen anything like it.”

Anubis smiled smugly. “I very much doubt that you have.”

Anubis beckoned to her, and Semple steeled herself with deliberately dark thoughts. Hold on, Fido. Semple McPherson’s day will come. She was now bent on not only escaping from Necropolis, but also putting the hurt on Anubis before she went. She didn’t particularly care how she hurt him-physically, emotionally, materially, spiritually, it was neither here nor there. She just wanted to hurt him where it hurt.

The desire intensified as the dog-god crooked an imperious finger. “Come here and kneel in front of me.”

She had assumed that he’d be content to simply stick it in her and have done with it. She now realized she was expected to fondle and play with the monstrosity. It was becoming clearer and clearer that, in Necropolis, on all levels, absolutely nothing came easy.

***

Jim groaned and closed his eyes. He didn’t want it ever to stop. He didn’t care that it was all alien illusion. He didn’t care what the aliens might be doing to him in reality. Reality had never been this good to him. He could cruise all the way to infinity locked in this custom fantasy. Epiphany’s thighs gripped him, encircled him, held him fast, while a hundred hands with a thousand fingers seemed to move over his body, and even caress his very nervous system.

“Epiphany, don’t stop.”

Her voice breathed inside his head. “Don’t worry, baby. I won’t stop until you beg me.”

It was only moments earlier that Epiphany’s hands, the same hands that were now driving Jim to the edge of insanity, had gone seductively to the silver ring fastening of her bubble space helmet.

“I’m going to have fun with you, Jim Morrison.”

One turn had detached the helmet, a second turn had caused the hard shell torso section simply to disappear. Jim didn’t know how she pulled the trick of the disappearing space suit, and she didn’t give him any time to puzzle over it. She was standing in front of him in long boots, long gloves, and nothing else, demanding and getting his total attention. Slowly and suggestively she pulled off the gloves. “Oh yes, I’m going to have a great deal of fun with you, Jim Morrison. Do you think you can handle all the fun I’m going to have with you?”

It scarcely worried him when he noticed that Devora had made no attempt to divest herself of any part of her suit. Jim was now beyond caring. So Devora wanted to play the voyeur? So what? Wasn’t Epiphany promising him the stars?

“Stars like you never imagined, baby.”

Together they had sunk down onto the surface of the blue Jetson ovoid, and sensual delirium had immediately overtaken Jim. It was only as he went down for the last time that he saw that Devora had unholstered the phallic art deco ray gun and was applying a clear lubricant gel to the barrel. By then, it was far too late to do anything about it.

***

Semple groaned and closed her eyes. She wanted it to stop. She’d had it with the infinite reflections of herself, spread-eagled under the weight of the dog-headed god. She’d had enough of Anubis slamming into her with his absurd oversized penis. She was tired of his lapping her breasts with his rough dog tongue, and worst of all, she was tired of being expected to moan appreciative cliches to make the idiot feel omnipotent. “Oh my lord, it’s so big, it hurts, it hurts so much, please, it feels like it’s going to split me in half. Oh, my lord! It’s hurting me, but don’t stop, please don’t stop . . . ”

At first she had managed to hold gagging revulsion at bay by disengaging from her physicality, distancing herself first from what she was expected to do and then, as things progressed, from what was being done to her. From this point of view the cavernous purple bedroom with its drifting layers of scented smoke, the picture of the powerful and rapacious dog-headed creature crouched over the prone white body, positioning and repositioning it as it gasped and groaned beneath him, had a certain Pre-Raphaelite pornographic charm. Her undoing came when, in that state of detachment, she had perversely started to enjoy herself. The moment she gave in, she was reminded what a sick piece of slime Anubis really was; repulsion had elbowed its way in, detachment had taken a cab.

But then, just as she started to reached the limits of her tolerance, something new began to happen.

***

Something new began to happen. Jim’s senses were already in serious disarray. Epiphany was somehow simultaneously all around him, under him, above him, and front of him, a Mobius continuation, the galaxy made rhythmic flesh. The blue ovoid room came and went. Forward and back, the two of them in sync to the erotic pulse-of-the-spheres. One moment the room, the next a state of free fall above the methane and ammonia atmosphere of Saturn. The rings arched over them and left them gasping in the vacuum, reality capriciously disengaged. The only constants were that Devora, still in her midnight-blue space suit, was always behind him, at the periphery of his distorted vision, and that some foreign object had penetrated his body. And yet, the intrusion in no way bothered him. Quite the contrary, it only added to the mind-thrashing fun he was already having with Epiphany. If his unexpected paramour’s companion wanted to bugger him with the lubricated chrome of her ray gun, who was he to complain?

When the flash came from out of nowhere and almost blinded him, Jim was concerned that Devora, in some moment of cold alien excitation, had inadvertently-or maybe even deliberately (a little mantis in everyone)-pulled the trigger on the ray gun. He was still conscious enough to know that could mean trouble. Jim felt as if his spine were going to snap, his brain boil out through his eyes. He was hard-pressed to tell agony from ecstasy. Then, suddenly, he was in another place.

***

Semple felt as though her spine were going to snap, her brain boil out through her eyes. She was hard-pressed to tell agony from ecstasy. Then, suddenly, she was in another place, with another person, a man, indistinct but definitely a man. His hair was shoulder-length and dark, but his features kept shifting, like the indefinable face in an elusive dream. And they were together, with a power passing between them though neither of them knew why.

***

Jim was in the arms of the Queen of the Nile, black ringleted hair billowing around him, kohl-rimmed eyes gazed into his. She gripped him with a terrible urgency, as though she knew they had encountered each other in a transitory place that could only be the result of a glitch in the cosmic flow; in a nanosecond, he knew they would be parted. She pressed her mouth against his in simultaneous welcome and farewell. Then Jim was falling. Multiple orgasms of a kind that he had never experienced before were ripping through him. And he was once again falling.

***

Semple was screaming. Multiple orgasms were ripping through her. And he was screaming. And she was screaming.