by Mick Farren
Nephredana turned and beckoned to Slide, who was still talking to me individual with the dueling scars. "You better hear this."
Slide detached himself from the conversation and came over to where they were standing. "Interesting guy, that. He's the Hind-Mancu ambassador. Made his name during the suppression of the Viet Minn back in the sixties."
Nephredana quickly interrupted him. "Gibson thinks he saw Sebastian Rampton in the group around Raus."
Yancey Slide adjusted his sunglasses. "No shit." He peered at Gibson. "Are you sure it was him and not a parallel from this dimension?"
For the life of him, Gibson didn't know why he'd blurted it out to Nephredana in the first place. Had she seen his reaction to seeing the man who looked like Rampton and hit him with some sort of influence? It was too late now, though; the damage was done and he could only go along. "I really can't be sure. I only had a fleeting glimpse but it certainly looked like him. Could the streamheat have maybe brought him here?"
Slide shrugged. "It's possible. You can expect virtually anything from a people that had nuclear weapons in the early seventeenth century."
This last remark took Gibson completely by surprise. "Say what?"
Now Slide was looking surprised. "Nobody told you the history of your traveling companions?"
Gibson was right off balance again. "It seems that nobody tells me anything if they can possibly help it."
Slide was thoughtful. "Even if this Rampton you saw was a parallel from here, I still don't like the fact that he's so close to Raus. Anyone with his makeup is going to be up to no good,"
"You know Rampton?"
Slide nodded. "Oh, yes, I know Rampton." He turned to Nephredana. "Listen, I think I'm going to talk to Raus and see what all this is about."
"What do you want me to do?"
"Stay with Gibson. You might fill him in about the streamheat. Let him know what kind of people he's been fucking with."
Slide walked quickly away and disappeared into the crowd. Gibson looked expectantly at Nephredana.
She took a deep breath. "Let's go and get a drink. I see I'm going to have to continue your education."
They made their way to the nearest bar, and when they both had drinks in front of them, Nephredana started into the story.
"The people you call the streamheat come from a dimension where South and Central America, and not Europe, made the great leap forward. Up until the end of the fourteenth century, their history was running pretty much parallel to that of both your dimension and this one, but, from that point on, events began deviating fast. It all started in 1427 with the Emperor Izcoatl in Mexico. Izcoatl was something of a degenerate, even by the standards of Aztec royalty, but he had this thing about science, and driven by his relentless goading-and, believe me, Izcoatl could goad-his people not only managed to discover the wheel, but really went the distance in thinking through its possible applications. Just three years later, they stumbled across gunpowder and after that, they were off and running. During the next ten years, Izcoatl pushed his empire as far as Texas in the north and Rio de Janeiro in the south. Selective breeding of the northern bison gave him an effective substitute for the horse and, when iron-ore deposits were found in the equivalent of southeastern Brazil, and the Aztecs learned the trick of smelting, there was no stopping them. Izcoatl and his heirs were well on their way to becoming masters of all the Americas."
Gibson was intrigued by the way Nephredana managed to make six-hundred-year-old events sound like they had happened just yesterday.
"Around 1500, the Europeans started showing up, but Montezuma, who was emperor by then, was ready for them, and they were never able to establish a beachhead on the continent. The threat from across the Atlantic, however, really galvanized Aztec science. In less than seventy years, they had electricity, the internal-combustion engine, and powered flight and were taking their first shots at splitting the atom."
Gibson whistled. "You're putting me on?"
Nephredana shook her head. "Not a bit of it, You can't imag-ine what can be achieved in a state run by an absolute, life-and-death autocrat when the motivation's there. And remember something else: All this time they were still practicing the same sun-worshiping, human-sacrificing religion that they'd had when they were living in mud huts, only it had now grown to truly epic proportions. You should have seen the Great Solstice Festival of 1577. They snuffed a quarter of a million people at that four-day bash. Now that's what you call motivation."
"You make it sound like you were there."
Nephredana sighed, "I was. I was having an affair with a fighter pilot from Tenochtitlan at the time, but after that slayfest I had to dump him. Too much blood even for me."
"So what happened next?"
"They let off their first experimental bomb in 1605 and then spent the next ten years perfecting a method for delivering a nuclear holocaust. The means wasn't all that spectacular-a big, clumsy, prop-driven bomber, all fuel and bombload-but it could make it across the Atlantic and that was all that mattered. The Aztecs weren't all that bothered about getting their aircrews home again."
"Extra sacrifices?"
"Exactly."
" So what did they want to do? Nuke Europe back to the stone age?"
"Precisely that. They knew that the Eurotrash in their sailing ships would keep on coming, and, more to the point, they would inevitably pilfer bits and pieces of Aztec advanced technology, upgrade their armaments, and begin posing a real threat. According to Aztec thinking, a preemptory strike was the only answer, and, as an added plus, it would be one fuck of a bonanza of souls for the Sun God. By 1615, the Aztec military industrial complex was in high gear, turning out an armada of planes for the raid on Northern Europe."
"What stopped them?"
"Nothing stopped them."
"I don't understand,"
"That's because you're still thinking in terms of your own dimension. Just because you've still got Europe intact, you assume that everyone else has."
Gibson blinked. "You mean they did it?"
"Damn right they did it. July 4, 1618, the Night of the Many Suns. They laid a strip of bombs from Lisbon to Warsaw, as far north as London and as far south as Naples. No more Europe in the streamheat dimension. Of course, all the dust and fallout and the rest of the crap went straight around the world. Russia and China took a beating and then it blew right across the Pacific and over the Aztec Empire, swamping them with cancer, birth defects, and sterility. Unfortunately it didn't kill them outright."
"Did it make them stronger?"
Nephredana nodded. "Stronger, meaner, and crazier. They now ruled the planet in their dimension, as much of it as they hadn't turned into an atomic wasteland, and it was a grim, nasty place."
"They still went on with the human sacrifices?"
"Oh, yes, in fact they turned it into a science. They made inroads into death-moment energy physics that no normal culture would have imagined possible."
"Death-moment energy physics?"
"You wouldn't want to know about it, except that's how they first got started in the interdimensional transit business."
"When did they start that?"
"They discovered the trick of dimension transfer about a hundred years ago, but even before that they had already left their impression on other dimensions. The attack on Europe produced massive print-throughs."
"What are print-throughs?"
"When something as catastrophic as a nuclear attack occurs in one dimension, it can produce secondary effects in others nearby. In your dimension, the Night of the Many Suns and its aftermath was reflected as the Thirty Years' War and the plague. Eight million died in Germany alone."
"Does it have to be a nuclear attack?"
"No, but they do produce the most noticeable effects. When they dropped the A-bombs on Osaka and Nagasaki in your dimension, a giant reptile thawed out of the Arctic ice and went on a rampage through a parallel Tokyo."
Gibson was having a degree of tro
uble with some of this. "What about volcanos and natural explosions, do they cause print-through?"
Nephredana shook her head. "No, no, you're missing the point. It's not the crude energy release of the explosion that causes print-through, it's the cumulative effect of all the simultaneous death. When an entity dies there's a brief but massive release of psychic power and weird shit happens. Image that multiplied hundreds of thousands of times."
Despite the booze, Gibson felt a chill clutch at his chest. "Death-moment energy physics."
Nephredana raised her glass to him, "Now you're getting it, kid."
"I'm not sure I want it. Let's get back to the streamheat; when did they start operating?"
Nephredana was looking around at the parade of passing guests, and she seemed to be getting bored with the lecture. "It's like I said, they made the breakthrough a hundred years ago, and by the late 1920s they'd started running all over, trying to reshape the whole fucking multidimensional universe in their own image. They apparently arrived in your dimension too late for the Russian revolution but in plenty of time for Hitler. Tried to get in with Mao Tse-tung as well, but Chairman Mao wasn't buying, and he had a bunch of them shot. He was smart enough to realize that the streamheat image was truly nasty. They called themselves the TSD at first, Time Stream Directorate, but it didn't catch on, they got the name streamheat from-well talk of the devil!"
Gibson stiffened. "What?"
Nephredana pointed across the grand hall. "Isn't that the bitch that brought you here?"
Gibson peered in the direction she was indicating, and there was Smith, wearing a severely cut, off-the-shoulder evening dress, in conversation with two men in dinner jackets. As far as Gibson could see, she hadn't spotted him, but he turned to Nephredana with a good deal of alarm. "You think she's looking for me?"
Nephredana shook her head. "Don't flatter yourself. This party is exactly the kind of environment in which the stieamheat like to wheel and deal, but let's get out of here anyway. I don't think it'd be a good idea if she spotted you."
"So where to?"
"Let's go to the pistol gallery. I feel like shooting something."
"Pistol gallery?"
"Raus has a pistol gallery in a specially soundproofed corridor on the second floor. Raus has a lot of soundproofed areas in his mansion."
Gibson wasn't sure about the idea of pistol shooting. "I could use another drink after the history lesson."
Nephredana dismissed the implied objection. "We'll get one along the way."
"You've been here before?"
"Oh, yes."
She walked him in the direction of the postmodern staircase. The security men immediately lifted the ropes aside when they saw her coming. She didn't even have to say anything, and Gibson wondered if they knew her from previous experience or if they just recognized the look. Nephredana had a look and an attitude that could take her just about anywhere.
Beyond the red velvet ropes the party shifted into a whole other gear. They moved through a number of rooms, each of which had its own special attraction. In one, a dozen men and women were playing what looked like a version of high-stakes baccarat. A guest bedroom had been turned into an impromptu opium den where young men and women were, by turns, making themselves blissfully comatose by sucking on the multiple hoses of water pipe. The entertainment in some of the rooms was a little more perverse. In one that they passed through, couples sat round the shadowy walls, sipping cognac from balloon snifters as they watched a woman in a red leather cat suit administering electric shocks to a naked and kneeling young man. The large orchid house, which was an extension of the second floor under its own double-glazed dome, had been converted into a jungle room complete with parrots, Afro/Luxor drummers, highlife dancers, and a bar serving sticky cocktails with plastic snakes for swizzle sticks. Nephredana perversely decided that this would make an ideal pit stop. Gibson took one of the plastic-snake cocktails, wishing that he had a way to get some more of Raus's private stock, while Nephredana engaged the bartender-a muscular young man in a loincloth whose deep-blue skin had been oiled for the occasion-in lengthy conversation, obviously giving him the recipe for some fresh cocktail from hell.
When they finally reached the pistol gallery, a solitary woman in a purple sheath dress was shooting at targets with a tiny pearl-handled automatic. As Gibson and Nephredana came through the door, she smiled politely, daintily blew the smoke from the barrel of the gun, slipped it into her vanity bag, and left.
A well-stocked, glass-fronted gun cabinet ran along the back wall of the long narrow room. Gibson would have assumed that it would be kept locked, particularly during a party, but Nephredana went straight to it and opened one of the doors.
"What kind of piece do you want, Joe?"
"I'm not sure I really want to shoot; I'm on the way to being drunk, and I've gotten into trouble mixing guns and booze before now."
Nephredana smiled wickedly. "No roadies to shoot here, Joe."
Gibson caved in. "I don't know, I'm in your hands. What do you suggest?"
Nephredana grinned. "Take a big one, they're more satisfying."
"Okay, so give me the biggest motherfucker you can find, a damn, great, Clint Eastwood special."
Nephredana ran her eye along the racks of pistols like a browser selecting a book in the library. "Here we go, a Zeck amp; Dorf.45 Pacifier. Try this for size."
The forty-five was about the biggest revolver that Gibson had ever seen, with a seven-inch barrel, finished in burned chrome with ebony grips and a strip of fancy reinforcement running back from the front sight. As Nephredana handed it to him, she ran her forefinger sexily down the barrel. More than the gun itself, the gesture threw Gibson for a momentary loop. It wasn't that he didn't think of Nephredana as sexy; indeed, she surrounded herself with an air of sexuality that traveled with her like a purple cloud. It was just that he hadn't expected it ever to be focused on him. He'd assumed that they were on opposite sides of an alien gulf, beyond all possibility of coupling, and he'd never so much as fantasized about any carnal happening. Now that she was apparently bridging that gap, he had to take a couple of steps back and regroup. He doubted that Nephredana had missed his flash of confusion, but he covered himself by spinning the pistol on his index finger if for no other reason than that he felt it was probably expected of him.
"This is serious cannon."
Nephredana selected a piece for herself. It was an automatic, smaller than the forty-five but black and deadly. "You mind if I shoot first?"
Gibson bowed. "Go right ahead."
She loaded the automatic from a supply of ammunition on a shelf in the gun case and moved over to a control panel on the wall. "I'll set the targets."
She hit a number of switches on the wall panel. The target that the lady in purple had been shooting at flipped up into the ceiling. An electric sign came on.
READY.
Nephredana assumed the classic knees-bent, arms-extended firing position. A cutout figure flipped out from the wall. Nephredana fired, hitting the target squarely between the eyes. She was clearly no stranger to firearms. The first target withdrew and a second flipped up in a different position. She fired again. This target took it in the outlined heart. She shot four more targets before she paused. Every one of the cutouts was a photograph of the president, Jaim Lancer.
Nephredana noticed how Gibson was looking at them. "Raus's little joke." She took out two more targets and then stepped back. "It's your rum."
Gibson positioned himself. A target flipped out. He squeezed the trigger. The best he could do was to clip the shoulder of the presidential cutout. Nephredana looked him up and down.
"You're not exactly Wyatt Earp, are you?"
"I've only had TV sets to practice on."
He fired again. This time, he hit Lancer in the throat. As the echoes of the shot died away, he looked sideways at Nephredana. "I've been meaning to ask you, did you and Slide send that thing out of the TV set for me?"
Nephre
dana shook her head. "Not guilty, judge."
"But you knew about it?"
"Sure, we've been keeping an eye on you ever since you left the streamheat base. How do think I knew to find you in that bar?"
"You didn't know what happened inside the apartment, though?"
"What did happen in the apartment?"
"Some kind of humanoid electronic thing came crawling out of the TV. I think it was trying to kill me. When I blew away the TV, it vanished."
"That showed unusual presence of mind."
"And you've no idea who might have been behind it?"
Nephredana shook her head. "No idea at all; maybe the streamheat were trying to spook you."
"Maybe."
Gibson fired three more shots in quick succession. One missed; the other two hit the president in the chest. He shot once more, the last round in the gun, and blew away a section of head above the right ear.
Just as Gibson was shaking the empty shell casings out of the cylinder prior to reloading, the gallery door unexpectedly opened and a man with a bulky, old-fashioned press camera stepped into the pistol gallery. As Gibson and Nephredana turned, a flashbulb popped. Gibson lunged after the photographer but he was already out of the door and gone.
"Come back here, you!"
He dragged the heavy soundproofed door open, but there was no sign of either man or camera. He went back to Nephredana. "I lost him."
She didn't seem particularly concerned.
"I wouldn't worry about it. What's a picture one way or the other?"
"I hate fucking paparazzi."
Nephredana took him by the arm again. "I think you need a drink."
"Not in the jungle room, though, hey? I feel like a real drink."
She smiled. "Anything you say, Joe Gibson. Anything you say." And as though to emphasize the word "anything," she put a hand on the back of his neck and stroked his hair. "And after we've had a couple of drinks, we'll go and take a look at something that may well blow your mind."
Gibson had closed his eyes at the touch of her hand. It was very cold but not in the least unpleasant. Gibson smiled. He was starting to enjoy the sensation and wondering where it might lead. "It takes a lot to blow my mind."