Jim Morrison's Adventures in the Afterlife (17 page)

The guards who had come to fetch Semple and the others from their tank had blanked all questions regarding their destination or the purpose of the excursion. They had simply summoned them to the sliding door and ordered them out. Initially, Semple had been terrified. The fear that she’d experienced in the immediate aftermath of her arrest had returned with a vengeance. The possibility of summary execution without trial and a dozen other kindred horrors and atrocities shrieked through her imagination. Then, in the moment of confusion as the women were being filtered from the tank, a whisper had gone around that they were being sent to Fat Ari.

Semple had no idea who or what Fat Ari might be, but since none of the other women had showed any marked dismay at the prospect, Semple had joined the line with only a measured trepidation. Also, every one of the women selected was both young and attractive, and that gave Semple some kind of idea about the nature of Fat Ari and why they were being brought to him. If the fate of
this batch of twelve was to be some kind of sexual exploitation, perhaps it would offer the window of opportunity for which she was so patiently waiting. Semple knew well how sexual desire, even among those in authority, could derail both sense and sensibility.

After leaving the holding tank, the twelve women had moved in single file along the punctuated corridor, with one guard leading them and a second bringing up the rear. Both were considerably thinner and more limber than the fat guard in the glass booth, and both carried a short cylinder of transparent Lucite that delivered a painful, nonlethal shock much in the manner of a cattle prod. These were the guards’ only weapon, and if the twelve women had attempted a sudden rush on their escorts, they would have had little trouble overpowering them.

No such thing happened, though, and Semple could only wonder at the docility of her fellow inmates. Without exception they passively accepted their penitent status and submitted to everything they were told without rebellion and rancor and, most surprising of all, with a minimum of complaint. Semple was starting to wonder if the prison population in Necropolis were not real criminals at all, nothing more than animated set dressing like Aimee’s cherubs and angels.

Her developing theory was that the majority of the city’s inhabitants were fabricated beings with little or no will of their own, created for the amusement of Anubis or one of his underlings. It was possible that the whole prison system, and perhaps even the oppressive police force, had been established, not in response to any real problem of crime and punishment, but simply because someone on the planning level thought a city wasn’t complete without such things, and installed them much in the same way that a small boy with an obsessive hobby might add a new section to his model train layout.

Had Semple been more diligent in keeping up with the trends in popular mortal, she would have known that the environment she now occupied was little more than a local modification to the genre of low-budget women’s prison movies with titles like
Caged Rage
and
Chained Heat
. The ever-present Egyptian motif and the heavy overlay of unworkable totalitarian baroque might have thrown her off track, but all the required details were in place, right down to the glandular guard and the coteries of butch and burly lesbians who ogled her body with a masculine candor.

Even though she’d missed the cultural origins of her situation, Semple was beginning to realize that, although Anubis may have been responsible for the overall concept of Necropolis, a lot of the details must have been delegated to subsidiary minds, allowing them to indulge their own fantasies and fixations. He had, in fact, done what Aimee was hoping to do: recruited the newly deceased to help construct his hereafter. The more she thought about it, the more she was convinced that Necropolis was a conspiracy of the deformed. Anubis might have been its guiding force, but this all must have been the produce of a legion of warped minds.

The line of twelve women and two guards had moved smoothly down the corridor until Semple had attempted to check through the gate at the first glass booth, when the fat guard had brought it to a shuffling halt. The prisoners looked on with boredom as Semple paralyzed the process with her lack of a barcode. The guard bringing up the rear was less patient. “So what’s the goddamned holdup?”

The fat guard didn’t answer, but she did seem ready to enlist some outside help. She resentfully tapped out a sequence on the oversized keyboard, and a pinched irritated face appeared on the tiny computer screen. Semple assumed it was the obese guard’s immediate superior, some harried, middle-echelon administrator. A tinny voice crackled from a speaker. “Can we make this fast? I really don’t have the time to be dealing with complications at every damned section gate.”

“I have a female unit here with no barcode.”

The man’s mouth became a small, sour line. “You bothered me with that?”

The guard didn’t seem too impressed by the man’s exasperation. “The box wouldn’t pass the paperwork. What was I supposed to do?”

“You couldn’t run up the help manual?”

“I haven’t been able to access help since before Lotus Day.”

“You called maintenance?”

“Sure I called pigging maintenance. I’m still waiting.”

The administrator frowned. “Isn’t this batch for Fat Ari?”

The guard was becoming decidedly peevish. “Of course this batch is for Fat Ari. That’s why I’ve got to have the pigging paperwork straight.”

“It could bollix up the entire term-end profit-share bonus.”

The fat guard’s peevishness sharpened. “You think I don’t know that?”

“So run it on a Gazelle/Leopard ten seventy.”

“Why didn’t you say that in first place?”

A weary scowl twisted the man’s face. “I still cling to the archaic notion that people should know how to do their own pigging jobs.”

The face vanished and the tiny screen snowed out. The guard hit more keys, the terminal wheezed, and about nine inches of punched paper tape extruded from a slot in the computer. The guard ripped off the tape and dropped it into a file basket, then glared at Semple. “Get on through, unit. You keep Fat Ari waiting and you’ll find out what pigging trouble’s really about.”

The twelve women were now on the move again. Either the fat guard or the administrator had instructed the booths ahead how to process the woman with no barcode, or maybe the guards in these booths were more on the ball than their overweight colleague. Whatever the reason, the line passed three more checkpoints without any further trouble. After the third, things began to change. The rumble of deeply buried machinery was clearly audible and a smell of ozone overwhelmed the ammonia in the air. A couple of the women looked a little anxious, but Semple had an idea what was coming next. The corridor came to an end in an open space that led in turn to a much larger circular tunnel, the floor of which was a motorized walkway, a conveyor band that could move large numbers of people at something like twice the speed of a fast walk. Anubis was just the kind for Heinlein rolling roads. They were big favorites in the environments of many a control-obsessed paranoid megalo. The herding gene turned techno. Semple had seen other examples in the tangential communication that passed for
Better Homes & Gardens
in the Afterlife.

The women prisoners were temporarily halted in the open space while their escort produced a long length of light steel chain and shackled them to it by the straps on their left wrists, spacing them at intervals of about two feet. When the string was complete, they were moved toward the walkway itself. The area where riders actually stepped onto the moving walkway was dotted with signs, presumably the kind of regulations and instructions to passengers that the managers of transit systems everywhere are unable to resist. She noticed that the hieroglyphics on the signs had been defaced by amateur and universally obscene embellishments that paid particular regard to the genitalia of the various gods, humans, animals, and birds that made up the alphabet.

Actually stepping onto the moving walkway required a certain degree of skill and judgment, but Semple, by visualizing the effects in advance, accomplished the trick with ease and grace. The woman behind her, on the other hand, misjudged the necessary matching of pace and stumbled. Semple quickly grasped her arm to prevent her from falling and bringing down the whole string. The woman nervously smiled her thanks. She glanced around to see if the guards were looking in their direction and, discovering them otherwise occupied, whispered quickly to Semple. “I guess this pretty much settles it.

Semple didn’t understand. “What settles what?”

“It’s Fat Ari’s for us.”

“Is that good or bad?”

Now the woman looked as though she didn’t understand. “It is what it is. It’s Fat Ari’s.”

“I don’t know what Fat Ari’s is. I’m an outlander.”

“You mean you’ve never seen it on the telly?”

“Never seen what on the telly?”

The other prisoner spoke as though she were stating the obvious.
“Fat Ari’s Slave Shopping Club.”

The hatch closed, the lights went out, and Jim was falling. What he thought was going to be his first alien encounter had suddenly turned into a dirty sucker punch. The rug had been literally jerked from under his feet, and someone or something was screaming at pain-threshold volume. He hoped the screaming was only the rush of air past his ears, but remembered that same extended scream a little too well, as well as falling through absolute blackness. It all said Paris, as though somehow his passing had been recorded on the magstrip of time. If he was dying all over again, it hardly seemed fair. Although he knew it was both naive and illogical, he had pretty much expected the aliens to be pleased to see him. After all the LSD he had taken during his life, all the Erich VonDaeniken books and magazine articles on the paranormal that he’d consumed, after all the times that he’d seen
The Day the Earth Stood Still
, all the episodes of Star Trek he’d soaked up in idle beer-drunk hotel afternoons, he felt he was definitely ready for the ETs, and he had imagined that, even if they didn’t greet him with open arms, they’d at least be ready for him. The
last thing he’d expected was that they’d drop him into a goddamned black hole, and maybe even kill him all over again. To go back to the pods at this juncture was a thoroughly disgusting and depressing prospect.

When he continued to fall for what felt like a major slice of time without hitting anything, Jim started to rethink his situation. Perhaps he was in free fall. Perhaps the UFO was switching him between external and internal gravity. As if as a reward, or punishment for his deduction, a searing flash of static blinded him, leaving him in a kaleidoscope of dazzling afterimages. He fell heavily, maybe a foot or more, to a metal floor. The impact was bone-jarring, but did no damage. Jim groaned and rolled over. His shoulder hurt, his elbow was throbbing, his ego was bruised, and he was angry at the inhospitable reception. Slowly he climbed to his feet, wondering what the next indignity might be.

The air was breathable and warm, although it was a little too humid and smelled of something industrial. He slowly turned, half crouching in the stance of a circling wrestler, arms slightly in front of him, ready for anything. He spoke tentatively, more to observe what might happen than to actually communicate with anyone. “You know something? This is really not my idea of being piped aboard.”

As he spoke, the lights came up and the air changed. The atmosphere turned clammy, and the unidentified industrial smell was replaced by something more like battery acid. The light was, in every sense, unearthly. The blue glow looked like the interior of a iceberg. It seemed to have no direct source but somehow suffused the entire chamber with a soft luminescence. The nature of the light made it hard to judge distances; had Jim not been well versed in hallucination, he might have thought something was wrong with his eyes.

He seemed to be standing on the curved bottom of a ribbed metal cylinder, like the inside of some large storage tank, perhaps about twelve feet in diameter. The arching ribs of the cylinder and sections of the wall plates were engraved with lines of unreadable ideograms. Aside from the extraterrestrial script, it all seemed a little mundane, but Jim reserved judgment. Although the script meant nothing to him, the individual characters bore a distinct resemblance to the crop markings he had seen on the way to the Crossroads. He shook his head. “If you want to leave us notes in the cornfields, you really ought to learn to write English. Or send us a dictionary.”