Jim Morrison's Adventures in the Afterlife (12 page)

Hypodermic and Tonnerre had also mounted the steps, but instead of going straight inside, the two of them stopped and turned. They treated Jim to a long look before continuing into the cantina, and in the core of Jim’s soul, the ice water rushed back with a vengeance.

As her sister glowed briefly, distorted, and vanished, Aimee McPherson felt a sudden wave of weariness and misgiving sweep over her. Semple was gone and there was no knowing when she might return and with what. She had asked her sister to seek out a poet, a creative force to help her expand and complete her Heaven, but it was anyone’s guess what adaptations Semple might make along the way, what complications she might add to the basic plan. A degree of malicious intent had to be figured into any equation of which Semple was a part, and possibly a measure of capricious improvisation.
Aimee also felt suddenly very lonely. Semple might be difficult, even dangerous, but she had always been there, all through their life on Earth and clear into this very unsatisfactory Afterlife. She truly wondered how, now that Semple was no longer close at hand, she would fare without her. She knew all the stories about twins, Siamese or otherwise, and how, following the death or removal of one, the other would also terminally languish. She and Semple weren’t exactly twins. In fact, they were closer than that. They were two separated halves of a single whole, and that posed a different set of problems.

She looked around Golgotha. Sweet Jesus, how she hated it. If it was at all possible, she never wanted to set foot in the Place of Skulls again. She turned to the entourage of nuns with a sigh. “Let’s get out of here and go about our righteous business.”

Semple McPherson arrived in Necropolis as a beam-me-down shimmer of transitional atoms, bounced across the curve by the collective telekinesis of Aimee and her nuns. As Semple emerged into comparative real-space, she discovered that she had arrived in an exact volumetric area already being occupied by an itinerant street boy, a cut-price, bicameral James Dean wearing two-tone eye makeup and metallic faux Egyptian clothing. Under other circumstances, the collision might have produced a serious conflict, perhaps even a low-yield plasmic detonation. The boy, however, who could have set new records in contrived vacancy, was absolutely no match for Semple’s honed steel will and the collective energy still flowing through her. Her mind swarmed his, stunning all functions and rolling it helplessly over. At the same time, her molecules made an end run around his material structure and collapsed its base integrity, swiftly forcing him out toward Limbo.

“Back to the pod, kid. That’ll teach you to get in my way.”

She felt little more than a faint protesting whisper of his departing presence as she displaced him. The whisper, however, was enough to communicate the boy’s gender, and for a single nanosecond she was tempted by the idea that it might be fun to retain it. She might enjoy being a boy, but she immediately rejected the thought as wild but impractical. She was on a mission in strange and maybe dangerous territory, and the novelty of being male might
offer fatal distractions. The mere thought proved enough to raise a splinter on the banister of smooth transition, and Semple found herself snagged by a shard of the previous occupant.

The boy’s soul may have gone easily, but the glitched body was harder to lose. Her momentary lapse had turned her into a burly hermaphrodite with full female breasts, both a vagina and a penis, a dishwater-blond pompadour and sideburns, and a bad case of acne. Worst of all, she also discovered that there was a great yawning divide between the two halves of his/her brain. Only a final and supreme effort of will restored the familiarity and comfort of her accustomed form, erased the superfluous male organs, and returned functional synchromesh to her frontal cortex. Even when all that had been achieved, though, she realized that her troubles had only just started.

Her body might be back, but she was now dressed in inherited clothing, albeit mercifully gender-corrected. In some respects, this was just as well. The scarlet Dynasty outfit would have been hideously out of place in this environment. On the other hand, the new costume that clung to her now presented its own challenge. She looked down at herself and saw that, apart from a wide collar of gilt and lapis that concealed nothing but part of her shoulders and her collarbone, she was naked from the waist up. The only consolation was that she was not the only woman so exposed. Toplessness, it seemed, was high fashion in the city of Necropolis.

Further observation quickly revealed that the creator of Necropolis was obsessed by the question of what ancient Egypt might have been like had its religion, aesthetics, and culture survived all the way to the end of the twentieth century. The creator, presumably the individual now posing as the god Anubis, had incorporated many of the fanciful projections of this obsession into the design of his postmortem world. One of these was that the women of Necropolis went around bare-breasted in public, much in the style of the thirteenth century
B.C
. Semple had never been anyplace where convention dictated naked breasts, and the experience took a little getting used to. It wasn’t that Semple was a prude, or had any philosophical objection to flaunting her tits. When she and Aimee had divided, she had made sure that all of those inhibitions and hang-ups had been deposited with her sister. As if to prove her cultural flexibility, she swiftly reshaped herself so that the now-exposed and unsupported parts of her body showed themselves to their best advantage.

She then took stock of the rest of the ensemble that she would apparently be expected to wear for the duration of her visit. It consisted of a wraparound skirt with a long, narrow, decorative apron that extended from her waist to below her knees. Primary accessories proved to be the aforementioned gilt collar and a narrow cobra chaplet, also gilt, that circled her head, holding her now exceedingly curly black hair in place. On her feet, she discovered a pair of gold open-work thong sandals. Though she had no mirror, she suspected that, had she been able to see herself, her makeup would have been very like that of Elizabeth Taylor in
Cleopatra
. All in all, the effect was a futuristic version of a fresco from the era of Ramses II. She wasn’t sure if she liked it, but it had a definite coherence. For something that had been quite literally thrust on her, the new look could have been a great deal worse.

Her next move was to take stock of the place where she found herself. She appeared to have materialized in a public plaza or atrium that ran the length of a huge, tunnellike structure of glass and cast iron that greatly resembled a Victorian railroad terminal from the golden age of steam, although, of course, it came without trains or tracks. The edges of this paved pedestrian area were lined with merchant stalls and booths, while its center was taken up by a long avenue of geometrically planted palm trees and massive marble statues of the gods of ancient Egypt. The tallest of these reared to a height of forty or fifty feet, almost to the curved glass roof of the structure. The place seemed reasonably busy. All around her, citizens, looking a lot like her, hurried and bustled about their business. Indeed, business appeared to be the key in this world. She had entered Necropolis in the middle of some mercantile center. As Semple absorbed all this, she scowled and took a deep breath. “I appear to have landed topless in a mall.”

Shopping malls had, of course, developed well after Semple’s and Aimee’s death, but she had made an ample study of them during her investigation of Californian Valley girl culture. This example in Necropolis appeared to be a mall in decline. The overall look was one of dirt and neglect. The air was rank and polluted, and Semple’s eyes were soon watering. Depressing gray light filtered through the filthy panes of the once-magnificent roof, more directly where they were actually missing. The precise lines of palms were either dead or dying; some had gone altogether, their planters standing empty like the sockets of decayed teeth. Drifts of ignored and uncollected
garbage were heaped up in nooks and corners. Unhealthy, malformed pigeons flapped, fluttered, and scuttled between the feet of pedestrians, and Semple thought she saw rats moving among the piles of garbage.

As if in harmony with the dirt and decay, the people of Necropolis looked worried and stressed, as though the burdens of Afterlife lay heavy on them. Semple wondered how many of them had come there of their own accord, and how many were, like Aimee’s angels, created by Anubis for his own amusement and gratification. They showed a distinct uniformity. They all wore the same clothes and similar makeup. They were all dark-haired and dark-skinned, and approximately the same height. No children were in evidence. All this led Semple to believe that the majority were created creatures of Anubis rather than formerly mortal souls. One sign of uniformity gravely disturbed Semple. As far as she could see, each and every one of the population had a computer barcode, black, rectilinear, and slightly larger than a postage stamp, printed squarely in the middle of his or her forehead, about three-quarters of an inch above the bridge of the nose, like a high-tech version of a Hindu caste mark.

Semple’s immediate conclusion was that coming to Necropolis had been nothing less than a terrible mistake. No way was she going to find the poet of Aimee’s schemes and dreams in this place. Poets couldn’t flourish among a people so locked down that they let themselves be computer coded. The manner of her arrival had also left a lot to be desired, and looked to have all the makings of embarrassment, or worse. Her brief but furious struggle to achieve a suitable bodily form had been observed by a large number of passersby, many of whom had stopped to stare as the body of the street boy had dissolved into a vague column of shapeless ectoplasm and then reconfigured itself, first as the grotesque hermaphrodite and then as a tall, good-looking woman. Obviously this was no regular occurrence, and gawkers continued to gawk for some time after the fact, making it hard for her to blend with the surroundings.

As Aimee had predicted, Necropolis looked to be an iron-grip police state. From where she stood, Semple could see no less than three pairs of heavily armed and armored men, with the unmistakable arrogant amble of law enforcement on patrol. In Necropolis, the faces of the cops were grimly anonymous, fully hidden behind the full-face visors of sinister egg-shaped helmets, wholly smooth
apart from a decorative pair of stylized vestigial wings where the ears should have been. The officers’ bulky, dark blue body armor gave them a weight of bully-boy power that caused the rest of the populace to allow them the widest possible berth. The armor was constructed from flat flexible bricks of Kevlar, arranged in the manner of an insect carapace, perhaps as some kind of scarab homage. The complex large-bore weapon that each officer carried in the crook of his arm was the ultimate demonstration of potential force. Semple had never seen guns like these before, but she could guess at their destructive power.

Semple’s first impression, that coming to Necropolis had been a fundamental error, was now being confirmed by every fresh detail. She decided that her only chance was to get away from this too-public area. She needed to hole up in some secluded place and think through her next move. Without a team circle like Aimee’s nuns to provide her with the necessary telekinetic energy boost, she couldn’t simply vibe out the way she’d come, wind walking to the great wide open. She would have to blow town under her own power, but without the slightest knowledge of the geography or relative dimensions of the place, she knew this might require a modicum of planning.

Even in finding temporary refuge, Semple was beset by obstacles. The first rank of merchants and vendors along the edge of the plaza were just casual traders with small removable stalls. Behind them was a line of permanent structures that Semple had to assume were the Necropolis equivalent of stores and cafés. The problem was that all the signs were written in the hieroglyphics of the nineteenth dynasty and Semple was totally unable to read them. She could, of course, follow her nose. She had been around the block enough times to be confident that she could locate a bar or even a coffee shop by sense of smell. What worried her more was that she knew nothing of the manners and protocols of the city. What, for instance, was the status of women? Could a woman just walk into a bar and order a drink, or was that some kind of social taboo? And how would she pay for it? Did they have currency in this place? She remembered from her time on Earth that in certain bars ladies drank for free. If such a place existed here, how would she know? Damned hieroglyphics.