by Mick Farren
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 retroCaptain 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.”