by Mick Farren
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 sli
ghtly 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 t
o 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.”