by Mick Farren
They seemed to be heading out of the city. After passing through the intersection with the gold statue, they took a broad avenue lined with soot-caked, leafless trees and equally dirty official-looking buildings. From the avenue, they came out onto a steel road and rail bridge across the river. This was the first that Gibson knew about Luxor having a river.
Nephredana turned on the radio and got something that sounded a lot like John Coltrane playing " My Favorite Things."
Gibson smiled. "There's a lot of jazz in this town."
Nephredana nodded. "Luxor's a good town if you like saxophones." She pointed into the rear of the car. "Your tux is back there, in the box on the seat; why don't you climb into it."
"Right now, while we're driving?"
"Don't tell me you've never changed your clothes in a moving car."
"Sure, but…"
"So get to it. You don't want to arrive with your party clothes under your arm."
Gibson clambered into the back of the car and spent the next few minutes struggling into his evening suit and remembering how the back of a moving car is always a less than ideal dressing room. Now and then he glanced up to see if Nephredana was watching him in the rearview mirror. She didn't appear to be, and he could only imagine that after eighteen thousand years she had seen enough male nudity to be no longer interested. He managed to dress himself completely with the single exception of the tie. Gibson had never learned how to tie a formal bow. Nephredana glanced back. "How are you doing?" He scrambled back into the front passenger seat."Okay, apart from the tie. I never was able to get the hang of these suckers." Nephredana looked at him as though he were an idiot. "I'll do it for you when we get there. You'd better stash that gun of yours in the glove compartment. They may have metal detectors at the entrance to this bash and it'd be embarrassing if you were caught with a piece."
Gibson's hand went unconsciously to the pistol in the waistband of his tuxedo. He had transferred it from the pocket of the look-alike's suit while he'd been changing. "How did you know I had a gun?"
"You telegraphed the fact when that pimp came at us in the bar, and I assumed that you'd keep it with you."
"No magic?"
"No magic."
"I'd be happier if I had it with me after all that's happened."
Nephredana treated him to a look that brooked no further argument. "Stash it."
Gibson caught the look and did as he was told. They were now in the suburbs of Luxor, which proved to be quite a contrast to the inner city. Neat houses sat amid well-manicured gardens with the smug assurance of the safe and affluent, and Gibson suspected that genetic defectives probably didn't last too long around these neighborhoods. Nephredana noticed him staring out of the window. "So how do you like the Kamerian dream?"
"Looks like any well-heeled suburb. Same shit that I ran away from when I was a kid wanting to be Elvis Presley."
"It's much the same as what you have back in your dimension. They're just hanging on to appearances while they slowly sink into the mire. All the real money's being spent on the cold war with the Hind-Mancu with less and less left over for education or social programs. Even their consumer society is only sustained by impossibly massive deficit financing. Behind these facades, they're up to their necks in debt and stone terrified."
"Who are the Hind-Mancu?"
Nephredana raised an eyebrow," How much did your stream-heat friends fill you in about Luxor, UKR, and this dimension in general?"
"Next to nothing, like with most everything else."
Nephredana sighed. "Seems like it might be a good idea if I ran down a little background to you before we get to this party. We can't have you looking and sounding like a complete idiot."
"I appreciate that."
Nephredana smiled. "Okay, so the first basic you have to grasp is that this dimension missed out on having World War II."
Gibson nodded. "That much they told me. Seems like it made quite a difference."
"Quite a difference is a hell of an understatement. Something like that can radically change the whole face of a twentieth-century parallel."
"It doesn't look so different to me."
"That's because the shit still has a long way to trickle; these divergences take time. You won't recognize this place in a hundred years, if indeed it survives that long. As late as 1900, your world and this one were running on pretty much the same tracks. Even the factors that brought about World War I were in place in both dimensions. Things only started to alter once the killing got started. Either they were crazier here or they had a higher threshold for exhaustion. Whichever it was, they didn't call it quits after four years. They really hung in and went on slaughtering each other until well into the twenties. And not only slaughtering each other on the battlefield, either. They started to get real sophisticated. By 1921, they'd learned how to bomb cities from the air and they'd even discovered how to set off firestorms. When they finally ran out of steam in 1926, the local equivalent of the European nations had wiped each other out, an entire generation of young men was gone and a good percentage of everyone else as well, and, if that wasn't bad enough, in the two years after the war, a series of epidemics decimated another third of the surviving population. National economies were shot to hell, and the Europe here was a thousand-mile strip of ruins, famine, and disease. No industry, no agriculture, colonial empires gone, precious little government; in fact, the very structures of whole societies and cultures had been ground down to nothing, nothing but grim, ragged-assed, exhausted anarchy."
Nephredana shifted gear and set the Hudson roaring past a slower-moving family car hogging the middle of the road. She drove with an assured contempt for other drivers that Gibson assumed was a result of having superior demon reflexes and also what had to be a superior car. When she'd completed the maneuver, she resumed her history lecture.
"With Europe effectively gone, the main centers of power became polarized between the League of Hind-Mancu, which you can think of as a combination of China and India, and the UKR, which is virtually the USA, Canada, and Mexico rolled into one. Neither of them had played more than a token role in the war and it was pretty much inevitable that these two superpowers should become natural adversaries."
"Inevitable?"
"You always find that, when a world is divided between two megastates, they have to start snarling at each other sooner or later. In this instance, the snarling went on for quite a while before they really got to it. Separated, as they were, by an ocean in one direction and the devastation of Europe in the other, overt hostilities didn't start immediately. Instead, they sank ponderously into a cold war of unbelievable rigidity and ignorance, like a pair of bull mammoths being swallowed by the muskeg, tusks locked and too stupid to disengage and scramble out. Every so often there would be an incident or proxy brush war, but the two superpowers were so cumbersome and inefficient that they tended, despite the crippling sums of money that both sides spent on weaponry, to keep it down to threats and posturing, and to avoid direct confrontation for three full decades. Then came June 5th, 1957."
"What happened on June 5th, 1957?"
"The Kamerians touched off their first A-bomb. Since then, there have been no less than five nuclear flurries. The last one was four years ago."
"How come there's any of this dimension left standing if they're so free with the nukes?"
Nephredana's expression indicated that she never ceased to marvel at the stupidity of human beings.
"Because they only invented small nuclear bombs. Just a dozen or so kilotons. They delivered them by primitive chemical-fuel rockets or turbo-prop bombers,"
There was a new tune on the radio. Whoever was playing trumpet sounded a lot like Miles Davis.
Gibson stared through the windshield, noticing that the rain appeared to be stopping. "I guess they have the consolation that they were spared Hitler."
"Actually the Hind-Mancu managed to fill that slot. They're pretty nasty today, but they went for it real good back
in the sixties under Govendar. They became highly efficient at exterminating minorities and political enemies and built camps that quite rivaled Auschwitz or anything created by the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot."
"What about this country, the UKR?"
"I guess the best thing you can say about the Kamerians is that they always stop short of going all the way. I wouldn't say that it's because they're intrinsically better people, it's more that they've got this hang-up about wanting to think of themselves as the good guys. Lancer has locked up a few million political prisoners, but they still think of him as the defender of freedom. Spying on each other and snitching to the authorities has become a way of life, and they call it patriotism. Right now they seem to be working up a full-scale hate against all the genetic freaks and mutations that have been appearing since they went nuclear."
Gibson scowled. "I already ran into some of that."
Nephredana nodded. "Oh, yeah, of course. I was forgetting, you're an albino here. Well, you can count on one thing, it'll get worse before it gets better."
A thought struck Gibson. "Did they ever invent rock 'n' roll in this dimension?"
Nephredana shook her head. "Not that I know of. Why? Are you thinking of doing it for them?"
"If I'm stranded here, I'm going to have to make a living somehow."
"So you're thinking of applying for a gig as Elvis?"
Gibson grinned. "Why not? I could use the money."
"I'm not sure the Kamerians are ready for an albino rock idol. It's a few years between Chuck Berry and Johnny Winter."
Gibson deflated. "I hadn't thought about that."
"I think you ought to."
Gibson did and realized that he didn't have a prayer with the levels of prejudice the way they were. It seemed that in this dimension he was fucked on every level. Outside the car, the overcast was breaking up into ragged cloud and the moon was showing through. The moonlight brought an intense sadness, and Gibson was stabbed by a sudden pang of desperation. He didn't want to be in this dimension, in a world of demon madness and dangerous TV sets. He wanted out of the whole freaking mess. Would he ever be home again among the safe and familiar? Even the IRS would seem comforting compared to all this.
After about forty-five minutes, they were in what appeared to be a private enclave of Luxor's most wealthy. They were driving along quiet, well-paved roads, past neat box hedges and high walls, and, at regular intervals along the road, they passed imposing gateways with high wrought-iron gates supported by granite pillars. By far the majority of these entrances were watched over at least by bulky, old-fashioned, closed-circuit TV cameras if not by actual armed, private security guards. A police Batmobile went past them going in the opposite direction, and the other cars that they saw were big and glossy. Beyond the walls and gates, Gibson was able to catch brief glimpses of solid stately mansions with grand porticos and warm lights shining out over immaculately tended grounds. If the economy of the UKR was in ruins, it didn't seem to be affecting this particular social stratum. When he mentioned this, Nephredana just shrugged.
"It's the same all over; the really rich stay rich, no matter what the situation."
"I take it that we're getting close to where we're going?"
"Pretty close."
"You think it might be an idea to fill me in on what this party's all about?"
Nephredana nodded. "It's being thrown by some local mogul. His name's Verdon Verster Raus and he's sixty-five years old and childless. He's been married seven times and his current wife of four months is a TV soap starlet called Immudia Deamorning, whose main claim to fame seems to be that she regularly drops out of her clothes on a show called The Dexters. She may not be around for too long, though. Current society gossip doesn't expect her to last out the year. This Raus is among the wealthiest and most powerful men in the UKR, and he owns a huge chunk of the country's media. According to current estimates, in addition to being the major stockholder in one of the two national TV networks, he also controls one hundred and twenty-seven newspapers and close to the same number of TV stations."
Gibson whistled softly. "You guys move in the big leagues."
Nephredana smiled wryly. "There aren't too many places where Yancey Slide can't get in."
"This Raus, what's he like? How does he use his power?"
"Raus? Oh, he's right in there pitching. When Jaim Lancer first became President, Raus was an ardent supporter. Then, four years ago, they had a falling-out."
"What happened?" . "There was something called the Gulf of Borg Incident where a Hind-Mancu naval cruiser shot down a Kamerian commercial airliner, claimed they thought it was a bomber. Lancer, with an uncharacteristic show of restraint, contented himself with tit for tat, taking out one of their aircraft carriers. It was probably the smartest thing to do under the circumstances, but Raus started screaming that Lancer was soft on the yellow devils and, since then, he's dedicated himself to doing everything he can to unseat the president."
"Raus sounds like Citizen Kane with a bad attitude."
They were approaching a pair of massive gates, and lights were visible beyond them. Nephredana began to slow the car.
"Yeah, he really fancies himself, but so far he hasn't achieved that much. Lancer is still in power, big as ever. In fact, this party is supposed to be a kind of show of strength by anti-Lancer forces. But we're there, so you'll have to figure out the rest for yourself."
Raus's mansion was by the far the most lavish of the homes that Gibson had seen on the ride out of town. The huge sprawling structure had been constructed in a bizarre cocktail of styles that was part Gone with the Wind, part Palace of Versailles, and part Castle Dracula. It seemed somehow fitting for the home of some latter-day robber baron. Sections of the building had been floodlit for the party, and these were reflected in the lake that ran along one side of the house, on which fountains played in the beams of more multicolored lights. Marquees of various sizes had been erected on the lawns in front of the main house, and the size of the crowds that were already moving among them indicated that when Veidon Raus entertained, he did it on a grandiose scale.
No less than a dozen burly men guarded the entrance to the Raus estate. Four large bouncers in shiny tuxedos checking the guests' invitations were backed up by eight uniformed security guards carrying the same kind of large-caliber weapons that were used by the police on the streets of downtown Luxor. Gibson smiled to himself. Whatever the dimension, it seemed that bouncers always looked the same.
He glanced at Nephredana. "You got the backstage passes?"
She looked at him, winked, and produced a pair of engraved invitations. "I've got everything."
She handed the invitations through me window to one of the bouncers. The invitations were checked against a list, and then the car was waved forward. As they drove down the long gravel driveway, they passed an area of less well-tended grass and scrubby bushes where, behind a deep moat and low retaining wall, a family of six gray rhinoceroses, two adults and two babies, stared balefully at the revelers. Gibson decided that a private herd of rhino, even a small one like this, had to be a pinnacle in displays of conspicuous wealth. At the head of the driveway, a carhop waved them down.
Nephredana stopped the car. She leaned over and deftly tied his bow tie. "This is it, Joe. Take a deep breath and smile nicely; we're going to mix it up with the jet set."
The White Room
DR. KOONING TOOK off her glasses, and for her it was a gesture of triumph. "So basically you wanted to sleep with Elvis Presley?"
Gibson shook his head wearily. "I never even met Elvis."
"But in your dreams you wanted him."
"I wanted to be him, I wanted to be Elvis Presley. That's a very different thing. You shrinks have sex on the brain."
Her gaze was level. "If it seems that way, it's probably just a reflection of the patients we treat."
Gibson glared. "I've really had enough of this shit."
"You seem unusually hostile today."
> "I do?"
"Yes, you do."
"Maybe that's because I don't think you understand the motivations of an artist."
"An artist?"
Gibson lost his temper. "Yes, a fucking artist."
He'd promised himself that he wouldn't do it, no matter how much Kooning tried to provoke him, but he could feel his control slipping away.
Kooning smiled her irritating smile."But you're not an artist, are you, Joe? You're only an artist in your fantasy. I think we've already established that."
Gibson silently cursed himself. He had run slap into the essential Catch-22 of his situation. He couldn't take the high ground on the strength of what he'd been because, as far as Kooning was concerned, he had never been anything.
She was leaning forward in her chair. "I think we should talk about this, don't you, Joe?"
Chapter Nine
YANCEY SLIDE WAS standing by himself at the bottom of the gentle grass slope that led down to the lake, smoking one of his thin black cheroots. But it was a somewhat different Yancey Slide from the individual that Gibson had seen in Ladbroke Grove. The gunslinger garb had been replaced by smooth, lounge-lizard evening dress, a white tuxedo jacket over black pants and a purple cummerbund, that made him look like a disreputable James Bond. Only the black sunglasses remained, concealing the frightening demon eyes. His hair was slicked back, and Gibson was amused to notice that his bow tie was undone, hanging loose. Maybe, even in eighteen thousand years, Slide hadn't learned to tie one, either. Slide also wasn't blue; like Nephredana, he had retained his white-boy demon pallor.
