by Mick Farren
“Not often, but it happens.”
The sun was now traveling so fast that it was nothing more than a gray blur blending perfectly with an increasingly blurred landscape. The spectacle struck Jim as the visual equivalent of a deep and overwhelming depression. “Do these time fuckups always run backwards?”
“Only half the time.”
“So what happens? We stand here like idiots until we’re swallowed up by the Big Bang?”
The Mammal with No Name frowned. “I guess it would be more of an Ultimate Implosion than a Big Bang, seeing as how we’re going backwards. Usually it doesn’t get that far, though.”
“It doesn’t?”
The mammal shook his head. “Not usually. No.”
“So what does happen . . . usually?”
“Usually someone puts a stop to it.”
“Like who?”
Again the mammal shook his head, embarrassed at his lack of knowledge. “I don’t know.”
“You know how whoever it is stops it?”
“I’m afraid I don’t.”
“So what do you do when one of these happens?”
“I just keep my head down and wait.”
“I guess you don’t have any idea what causes these things.”
“Not really. I suppose I could hazard a guess.”
“Hazard away.”
The mammal avoided Jim’s eyes. “I’m not sure I like to.”
Jim was starting to lose patience. After all the mammal’s boasting about what a desperado he’d been back lifeside, his sudden passivity was decidedly irritating. Could it be a practical, small-animal caution was progressively eroding its former cowboy recklessness? “Why not?”
“You might take it personally.”
“Are you saying that I might have something to do with it?”
The mammal answered reluctantly, “It’s possible. You or the UFO. One or both of you may have caused a rupture.”
Jim started to grow angry. “I didn’t ask to come here.”
“There you go. You are taking it personally.”
Jim sighed. “No, I’m not. I’m just wondering what to do about it. Maybe if it was me that caused it, I could somehow stop it.”
“Maybe.”
“But you don’t have any suggestions?”
“Not a one.”
“Damn.”
The world was now nothing more than a gray blur with twinkles and sparkles dancing in the middle distance and a faint blue line where the horizon used to be. Clearly something had to be done, but Jim had no idea what, and the mammal was no help. Jim thought for a moment, if, indeed, moments truly existed in their current predicament, but all he could come up with was the one thing that had stood him in reasonable stead since his death. “When in doubt, do the obvious.”
The mammal looked puzzled. “Say what?”
“I said, when in doubt, do the obvious.”
“And what might that be?”
Jim couldn’t help himself. “I’d have thought it was obvious.”
The mammal looked offended. His eyes were doglike in their reproach. “Now you’re fucking with me.”
Jim felt bad. He was a sucker for reproachful eyes. “Yeah, I’m fucking with you. I shouldn’t do that. You’re not the one responsible.”
The mammal nodded forgivingly. “That’s okay.”
“Let’s try something.”
“Try what?”
“Watch and learn.”
Jim took a deep breath, inflating his lungs to their fullest. He had always managed to achieve things with his voice. He turned and faced the blue line of the horizon and bellowed with all his might, “HAVE THIS STOPPED!”
And it stopped. Time reverted to normal, leaving them in the dark of night. Stars twinkled overhead, things rustled in the reeds and tall grass; in the distance, a dinosaur was singing. The mammal looked up at Jim with undisguised admiration. “Wow.”
“Pretty neat, huh? Pretty good?”
“I have to hand it to you.”
“Except that it’s now the middle of the night, and for all I know, we could be ten thousand years in the past.”
The small mammal thought about this. “Would it really matter?”
Jim nodded. “It would matter to me.”
“It would?”
“I’d be dead before I ever got born. I’d be a walking paradox.”
The mammal’s voice took on a tone of you-think-you-got-troubles. “I’m dead before I was born and my species doesn’t have a name.”
“So you really are a walking paradox.”
“I guess I am.”
“But that doesn’t really help our current situation.”
The mammal shrugged. “I guess it doesn’t. I was just figuring, since you’d already found yourself washed up in the Jurassic, ten thousand years either way isn’t going to make all that much difference.”
Jim looked around but could see very little in the darkness. “Maybe I could work the same trick again.”
He took a second deep breath. “NOW PUT US BACK WHERE WE WERE!”
Nothing happened except the dinosaurs paused in their song. The night remained impenetrable. Jim scowled. “Shit.”
The Mammal was philosophical. “I guess you can’t win them all.”
“So it would seem.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it too much.”
“I guess we don’t get to go to the old mansion in the swamp after all.”
The mammal frowned. “Why the fuck not?”
Jim looked at the mammal. He really could be pretty obtuse at times. “Because we don’t know if it even exists in this time frame.”
Now the mammal looked at Jim as though he were the one being obtuse. “It exists.”
“It does? How do you know that?”
“You can see its lights.”
Jim peered into the black of night. “Where?”
The mammal extended a paw. “There.”
Now Jim saw it, a pinpoint of light way off in the distance. “Is that it?”
“That’s it. The lights are always on at night.”
“You’re sure?”
“Sure I’m sure.”
Jim sighed. He supposed living in the Jurassic without a name would make anyone slow. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me that before I started all that yelling?”
“You didn’t ask.”
As the parade finally arrived at the area where the detonation would take place, Semple saw that as much trouble had gone into the planning, arrangement, and construction of the viewing area and picnic site as into the procession that had brought them there. Necropolis might be sinking into ruin and decay, but when it came to one of Anubis’s pet obsessions, apparently no effort was considered excessive. Semple’s first impression was that the design of the Divine Atom Bomb Festival was a fanciful attempt to marry a medieval tournament with a hippie rock festival of the late 1960s. Long lines of covered bleachers had been erected so the rich, powerful, and well connected could idle away the event in varying degrees of luxury, sheltered from the bright, iron-gray sky and the relentless desert sun.
Each section of these bleachers came with its own attendant clustering of tents, marquees, and pavilions, where food and wine were served and musicians serenaded the drinkers and diners. Blue smoke and a variety of cooking smells rose from al fresco barbecue kitchens, where sweating chefs basted the browning flanks of whole roasting steers or labored over broiling racks of smaller delicacies. Bunting tossed and fluttered in the afternoon breeze above open-air stages on which jugglers and illusionists, fire eaters, and escapologists performed, and dancing girls and young men displayed both their moves and their bodies. Flag-draped booths hawked all manner of mementos, from commemorative plates to souvenir dark glasses, all of which bore the black and gold mushroom cloud that was the Divine Atom Bomb Festival merchandising logo. For what seemed to Semple a highly unnecessary additional diversion, wild animals were displayed in cages, human criminals had their bodie
s bent out of shape by creatively crafted sets of mobile stocks, and here and there bottom-feeding slave dealers with wheezing, vapor-leaking portable steam computers were running fast-bargain, knockdown auctions of fetch-and-carry domestics, disposable body serfs, and low-grade sex objects.
It was, however, only the rich who got the goodies. All of these treats, diversions, and spectacles were exclusively lavished on the extended court of Anubis and the invited guests from the affluent elite. The city’s rabble of poor were expected to devise their own protection from the sun and provide most of their own predetonation amusement on a large and increasingly dusty tract of open land, well in front of the facilities provided for the aristocracy. Here, despite considerable discomfort from heat and insects, the proles were hunkered down, waiting for the Holy Explosion. The lower classes had largely provided their own refreshments, although beer, soda, and junk food were being dispensed by pushcart vendors each with his own teakettle computer running the barcode scanners.
The most popular prebomb recreations for the proletariat seemed to be sex and gambling. As the procession passed through the area set aside for the poor, Semple had noticed couples unselfconsciously copulating on the open ground without any apparent shame. Men huddled around dice games, while professional card cutters spotted and isolated their marks. Larger groups gathered around pairs of fighting animals. Roosters, pit bulls, and small bipedal lizards snarled and slashed at their opponents while spectators yelled and cursed.
As Semple and a dark-complected concubine called Parsis looked down at a lizard fight just below the passing carriage, a question occurred to her. “If the barcode is the only means of exchange here, how do these people make their bets?”
Parsis looked at her as though she were the epitomic idiot outlander. “They swap markers, don’t they?”
In another part of the well deck of the royal carriage, some of the handmaidens had spotted a threesome—two men and one woman, all having sex together. The sight had inspired an outbreak of smothered girlish giggles and whispered lewdnesses. Semple looked briefly in the direction of the mini-orgy and turned back to Parsis with a frown.
“What do you mean, markers?”
“Slips of papyrus with the bets scrawled on them. When the fight’s over, they’ll all troop off to one of the pushcart vendors and he’ll settle up for them on his computer for a percentage of the action.” Parsis pointed. “Look, there go some of them now.”
A fight had just finished. One green lizard lay bloodily dead in a small temporary arena of banked dirt, and the owners of the badly mauled victor were placing it carefully in a wicker basket. A small crowd, moments earlier baying and catcalling at the combatants, were now marching as one to the nearest pushcart. The vendor was already waving away the people standing in line to buy soda and candy, anticipating his more lucrative wager settlement commission.
Semple shook her head. “I guess folks will always find a way to get a bet down.”
Parsis half smiled. “You want to see them when our lord and master falls into Caligula mode and decides to stage the Games. That’s when the plebs start getting their bets down in the worst possible way. At the end of a good long all-day session at the Games, you get nearly as many killings among the spectators as there are in the stadium.”
Something in Parsis’s tone made Semple look at her thoughtfully. Semple had already noticed that Parsis was something of a kindred spirit; she didn’t quite go with the flow inside the seraglio, tending instead to stand aloof from it, not making waves, doing what was expected of her but otherwise keeping to herself. “You don’t exactly fall down and worship our lord and master, do you?”
Parsis eyed Semple warily. “Maybe I do and maybe I don’t, but I sure as shit ain’t going to court disaster by admitting anything out loud and in public.”
Even this reply set her apart from the mainstream of the dog-god’s women. Precious few of them, even versed as they were in advanced debauchery, would casually employ a phrase like “sure as shit.” “Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?”
Parsis shrugged. “I don’t know. It’d depend on the question.”
“You weren’t custom-created for this place, were you?”
Parsis stared at Semple as though she were about to take offense. “Hell, no, girl. Do I look like one of those?”
Semple quickly tried to reassure her. “Not in the least. That’s why I was asking. I was wondering, if you’re your own person and not one of the dog-god’s fabrications, why do you continue to stay in this place?”
Parsis was still suspicious. “I could ask the same of you.”
Semple glanced around to see that none of the others, particularly Zipporah, was paying any attention to their conversation. No one was. In fact, most of the rest were hanging over the rail looking for rutting couples among the masses of the poor. “I blundered in here by mistake and only just avoided getting branded and sold on the Fat Ari show. Believe me, the moment I see an opening, I’m out of here.”
Parsis slowly nodded; for one moment, Semple wondered if she had made a terrible mistake by confiding her intentions to this woman. Parsis must have sensed this because she suddenly smiled. “Don’t worry, honey. I ain’t going to repeat what you just told me.”
“I’m grateful for that.”
“On the other hand, you’ll have to be content if I tell you that I ain’t looking for no way out just now.”
“You like it here?”
Parsis gestured around at the opulence of the carriage. “It’s easy enough.” She stared significantly at Semple. “And I ain’t his favorite, so I really don’t have to have that much to do with the dogheaded son of a bitch. Besides, you should have seen what I was lifeside.”
“What was that?”
Parsis grinned. “Baby, you really wouldn’t want to know.”
Before Semple could say anything, the carriage came to a stop with a slight lurch. Zipporah was suddenly bustling around, directing the women of the harem in the direction of the steps that were being moved alongside. “Everyone off as quickly as you can. Hurry it up. We don’t want to keep our lord waiting to make his grand entrance.”
The golden carriage had come to rest beside the royal pavilion and viewing box. In an area totally covered in lavish and exotic creations of canvas, brocade, and silk, the royal pavilion outdid all rivals by a power of ten. It consisted of a tall pyramidal structure of huge tapestry panels showing scenes from the supposed life of the god Anubis. In front of the pyramid itself was an elaborate construction of risers and platforms, made from gold-tinted Lucite and polished steel, at the apex of which stood the divine throne from which Anubis himself would watch the detonation. Its backdrop was a giant sun symbol with a mushroom cloud superimposed over it. Surrounding the dog-god’s perch were smaller thrones and couches, arranged for the accommodation of the court and Anubis’s favored guests. When they arrived, the intention was for the women to hurry off first, preceded only by the soldiers from the prow, and fan out at the base of the steps to form a human background for the ceremonial arrival of the God-King at his nuclear celebration. Things didn’t quite go according to plan, however. As the women attempted to arrange themselves decoratively, they found they were immediately brushed to one side by sweating, unshaven men in rumpled clothes, booze on their breath, laden down with multimedia equipment and aiming bulky, shoulder-mounted TV cameras or big Speedgraphics at the top of the steps where Anubis would first appear. Apparently Necropolis was possessed of its own press corps and paparazzi. Who knew?
As Anubis stepped into sight, Semple realized that, until this moment, she had never seen the dog-god in public before. While the flashbulbs popped, TV cameras zoomed in, and his image was relayed to the half dozen triangular, billboard-sized screens dotted around the festival site, Anubis posed like the god he’d made himself. He squared his perfect shoulders, turned his head, regal from snout to ear, first to the left and then to the right, offering every lens all the conceivable variatio
ns of his divine profile. He concluded the display by flexing biceps, triceps, pectorals, and deltoids like a contestant in the Mr. Universe contest. For Semple, widely recognized as his current favorite, the display was embarrassing in the extreme.
When Anubis finally decided that his subjects had been allowed their fill of his static perfection, he started down the steps in studiedly unhurried majesty. This was the cue for the cameras to pull back and the wives, concubines, and handmaidens to move into shot, to bow low in supplication and gaze adoringly on the wondrousness of his being. Anubis even paused for a calculated moment, as though weighing whether the very ground was worthy to bear his amazing grace. Having taken this one short step of faith, Anubis halted for a reprise of the Charles Atlas routine, this time with the leading lights of his harem draped about him in hypnotized devotion. Semple, as the choreography dictated, hung on an upper arm with an exaggerated expression of swooning ecstasy, all the while wondering just how long dogboy could spin out this orgy of narcissism.
Fortunately, another of Anubis’s driving passions distracted him relatively quickly. Whether it was the smell of exotic cooking coming from the elaborate field kitchens or merely the demands of his holy metabolism, his attention suddenly shifted from self-aggrandizement to food. He shook himself loose from his women and strode purposefully into the main area of the royal pavilion, directly behind the viewing boxes, where a buffet had been laid out of an extent, a sumptuousness, and a variety that verged on the insane. While chefs and courtiers alike watched anxiously, Anubis advanced along the heaped-up yardage of groaning board, sampling morsels at random, judging every bite against the high gourmet requirements of a god.
After considerable snuffling and lip smacking, the God-King finally rendered his verdict. He nodded curtly to his Lord Victualer, his High Butler, and Head Chef, and a whisper of relief spread through the pavilion. All was well, at least with the food; the culinary staff would live to slice, dice, and fricassee another day. Immediately a circulating army of waiters moved out en masse, bringing drinks and finger foods to the multitude. Anubis remained, content to feed himself directly from the buffet, beckoning to selected courtiers to join him. He started with the hooded Dream Warden and a procession of his techno-priests, subjecting each new arrival to what, from a distance, looked to be an intense and urgent interrogation.